Stupid but well meaning slogans

I was driving into St. Louis yesterday and one of those lighted construction signs flashed the following message at me:

Buckle Up

Arrive Alive

The problem is that I actually thought about what the sign said instead of focusing on, and associating, the words “Buckle” and “Alive.” Silly me.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I fully support seat-belting and believe that the car should not move unless everyone is buckled-in, even if all you are doing is changing parking spaces in a lot. So I’m absolutely pro the intent of the sign. It is the expression that is ill conceived.

Think about it for a minute. If you are buckled-in and, God forbid, need to have been buckle in, then you are likely not going to be arriving at your destination anytime soon (unless you just happened to be headed for the hospital). Buckling-in does NOTHING with regards to arrival anywhere, and, in fact, if you do happen to arrive on time, you probably avoided mishap and being buckled-in mattered not an iota. It is the association of arrival with buckling that causes the dissonance, because those two are not related. It would have made much better sense to say:

Buckle up

Stay Alive

Or

Buckle up

Arrive or Alive

Or something along those lines; not to implicitly associate seat belts with arrival. Putting the way I saw it on the sign means that anyone who thinks about what was said will realize there is a certain disconnect there. That makes the person who authored the message less intelligent and by implication, less authoritative. And that devalues the entire message which is… tragic.

Here come the ads...

On day after Florida and six days before Illinois and Missouri vote and I saw my second ad now third ad of the season. (#3 came on while I was typing this).

Ad 2: Hillary (as her sign says in big letters; apparently Clinton is something she wants to forget). The ad had Hillary giving a speech that amounted to saying she can't get what she wants instantly, but she tries every day to do something nice for someone. In other words, we should vote for her because she is a good person. No issues. No nothing except she is a good person.

Ad 3: Obama. Didn't get a good look, but the gist seems to be that he can get Republicans and Democrats to work together. At least that matters.

What McCane wishes he could say...

There is a Republican debate tonight and, over lunch, NPR was talking with a GOP strategist who said that if Romney doesn’t act swiftly, soon McCane will have overwhelming momentum. One thing the strategist expected Romney would do tonight is to hit McCane on the question of Immigration. He expected to hear Romney say “amnesty” a lot. The host commented that even if Romney did not say it, Rush Limbaugh probably would.

It occurred to me that there is a response that McCane could make, but won’t because it’s so un-politic that it would cost him votes, or at least he would be afraid it would. (Have you ever noticed that although the voters tell you they want honesty and forthrightness from their politicians, they tend to reward it by voting for the other guy? There’s what monkey says and what monkey does. One gets you elected. Which do you think politicians pay attention to?) So, I’m going to reply to the question on Senator. McCane’s behalf and say what I think he wishes he could say. Mind you he has not been consulted in this nor has he endorsed this answer.

Q: Do you think we should give illegal immigrants amnesty at some point?

A: Before I respond to that on a policy level, I want to respond to that on a strategic level. No matter what we do, amnesty or not, some of those immigrants will eventually become legal immigrants or have families who are legal immigrants, and some of them will become citizens. At some point, most of us, had an ancestor who was not born in this county but came here from abroad, so you all know how that works. Now, you all know that citizens vote. If we deport their Maria or expel their Johann, they will remember it when they vote. If we become the anti-immigrant party, then all the newly minted citizens will vote for the other team because they will believe that those people are their friends. All those new voters, all voting Democrat, not because they agree with the Democrats on policy issues, but because they think we are their enemy. That is how you go the way of the Whigs and the Tories. We cannot afford to have the legal immigrants see us as the anti-immigration party. Whatever policy we state on immigration, including this issue of amnesty, must be sellable to new citizens who have family still living abroad. So before you decide how you feel about the rest of my answer, you need to realize I’m a damn sight better for you, long term, than taking a position that puts a Democrat in the White House.

With that said, I can answer your specific policy question….

This is why Evil will win; because Democracy is dumb.

Florida has voted and I take back every nice thing I said about them yesterday.

Florida's election proves that the pundits who said, "You must do well in the early small states." are right. Small, early state victories, combined with Media coverage of "The Frontrunners" (said with a sort of a breathy lust) triumphs. Floridians shouldn't care what has happened in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, or Nevada. Obviously, they just want to follow the pack.

I renew my call for a national Primary/Caucus date so that all states vote at the same time. I further call on the Press to restrain itself until all polls close as part of its civic duty to the democracy.

However, I expect the establishment to have too much of a vested interest in the status quo to even entertain these suggestions. Candidate can save $ by only having to campaign in a few states and the Media makes oodles of $ by having prolonged election coverage. What power does fairness or even common sense have against dollars?

Sad, but off base

Apparently a boy in Lee's Summit (the Kansas City side of Missouri) killed himself because he was being teased at school. This is sad, regretful, and I feel awful saying what I am about to say, but it needs to be said.

Like the 13 year-old girl locally who committed suicide because people made mean remarks to her via her MySpace page, we now have the boy who killed himself because the other kids at school were mean to him. Of course, his mother plans to sue the school. (Mind you if the public decides this is a silly suit, the lawyers will get blamed, not the member of the general public.)

Kids are vicious; anyone who survived grade school and high school can tell you that. Most of us get through it without suicide. Everyone should get through without feeling the need to kill themselves. We can feel sad when a child dies for any reason, especially when it is suicide related, but this cannot blind us to the fact that the child in this case died merely because someone was too mean to him. In life, people will be mean to you. It happens and people need to be able to deal with it.

In blaming the "them," (whether "them" is the evil, demon-possessed, other kids who did the "being mean" or the "teasing;" or whether "them" is the school which allegedly should have seen this coming and stopped it somehow, probably by creating the Biblical scale miracle of having kinds not torment the weaker, less popular, other kid); we allow ourselves to ignore any fault on the part of the child who is dead. After all, it seems cruel to us to blame the dead, especially when the dead is a child. Likewise, it seems cruel to blame the parents who we know must be mourning for the child. So we look elsewhere, because a tragedy like this makes us want to blame someone. Yet, logically if, as the parents are quoted on CNN, the school should have seen the problem and read the warning signs (and I'm certainly not saying the school is innocent), how much more true must this be of the parents? If the child had problems at home, how is this something that can be laid at the feet of the school? The school does not replace the parents and in the end, the buck stops with the parents. Of course, the parents can't emotionally admit fault and so, they blame the school. Human nature.

The bottom line is that no one should take their own life just because someone else was mean to them. The person who made the conscious choice, however young they may be, is the one who could have stopped the incident from happening, should have stopped it from happening. That person ALONE is most at fault for the (usually) fundamentally selfish act of suicide, and therein, however tragic, lies the blame.

My final thought is this. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and let the person who never tormented anyone, was never mean to another kid, who never made another miserable during their entire K-12 experience be the one to cast this first stone. Before you blame the school or the mean other kids, look in the mirror. Take a long, hard, look. How many can say it was never I?

The role of the 26 year-old man in society

NPR ran a piece yesterday about how the lifestyle of the late college male is changing. The officious expert on the show referred to them as Boy-Men because they were in a sort of second adolescents. There was an air of condemnation in her attitude. This made me think and I got back to Milton; hence the previous post.

On January term about 1992 or 1993 I took a “Male Studies” class with Professor Paul. Generally it was an interesting class as we examined gender roles for men and other related topics. The relevant portion here is the observation that several scholars had made that while the 1960’s on feminist movement had redefined the role of gender women in America, it had largely ignored how this might change the gender role of men. For example, while in 1990 most people, if asked, would have expressed the idea that a woman could be just as good a business manager as a man, but would still pick a woman child care provider over a man because the woman seemed safer. Inherent in this is a notion that for a man to want to be a day care worker, something must be wrong with him (more prone to being a pervert). If challenged though the person would have backed up the “safer” assertion by pointing out that most sexual predation is, in fact, committed by men.

Another example from one of our texts: The author noted that when he was a boy, his father had rather roughly explained on the way to church one morning that gentlemen walked behind the ladies when going down the sidewalk. Thus, the author was amused in a faculty cocktail party to hear one of his female colleagues explain how it was so sexist in Japan where they made the women walk behind the men.

Also commented on in the texts was the idea of the Super-Mom. We’ve all seen her in the advertisements. She comes breezing home from her office, changes the oil in her car, fixes little Betty’s sled, makes dinner, and works around the obstacle presented by her well-meaning but inept man, all with hyper-competence. She is, of course, married to the guy who can’t work the toaster, who does not understand basic home products, or whose idea of “making dinner” is screwing it up and then secretly ordering out. In other words, this is a woman who has successfully “invaded” the traditional provinces of the male counter-pointed with a male who is completely inept at anything resembling the traditional provinces of the female. (Once someone points it out and you start looking for it, you see it everywhere too. Pet peeve here.) Think about the message that conveys for a minute. Think about what that tells young men about who or what they are supposed to be.

Why is this relevant?

The liberation of women allowed them to move into the work place. Being less focused on raising a family, women were marrying less and at older ages; something remarked upon by many Hollywood types recently as they discussed trying to balance career with their desire to have children. Consider that, largely, if the young women are not getting married and having children, then their male peers probably are not either. Society is not, however, suggesting to these young men that they need to go out and vigorously pursue a career to prove that they can, nor is society really offering these young men alternate gender roles. They are, largely, adrift.

So they fill their time playing xbox and PS3 and watching “guy movies.” It seems kind of disingenuous to praise young women for being liberated, yet look scornfully at the result this creates in their male counterparts.

MyPetPeeves

Pet Peeve time. I hate iX and MyX. In grade school, I learned that we should embrace our differences, our diversity, our uniqueness. It almost came to the point that we were taught that conformity was bad and being different was good. Maybe when dealing with the pack mentality of adolescents, you have to do that; I dunno. However, as an adult, I can observe that damn few societies function without a degree of conformity. On same days, I worry that we have come so far in promoting the virtue of tolerance that we have passed the point of virtue and moved into the twin vices of self-absorption and selfishness.

This brings me to the pet peeve and today’s example, computer software. We have MyDocuments, MyDownloads, MyMusic, MyPictures, etc. Mac’s have ichat, imusic, iphoto, imovie, itunes, etc. It’s all my my my, me me me, i i i. (To be fair, the original itunes may have been a reference to internet tunes.) In our drive for uniqueness, we have marketed self-identity and in so doing, I’m not sure we have done ourselves any favors. Where is OurPictures or FamilyDocuments or Everyone’s tunes? Are we losing the other and becoming absorbed in the I?

Clinton, Obama, and the legacy of Jessie Jackson

Many of you probably know that there is “increasing acrimony” between the Obama and Clinton camps, going back to the New Hampshire primary and the utterly stupid race/gender speculations about the candidates. You might also know that Billy-boy (aka Slick Willy in southern Missouri), has become his wife’s “attack dog.” Apparently Bill has been stumping around doing his wife’s dirty work, coverage of which threatens to overshadow his wife’s campaigning if NPR is to be believe. This conduct is pissing off many Democracts according to the Press who believe ex-Presidents should be quiet elder statesmen. (See Jimmy Carter.) Here’s what I don’t get:

Why does this seem to surprise anyone? Clinton’s term in office made it clear that he is a total opportunist with little of a moral compass to guide him. If the advantage lies in having him run around attacking Obama so his wife can pretend she isn’t an opportunist, he’ll do it. When confronted with statements he’s made about wanting to see the first African-American President, his responses was that he still believed that, but not this election. That made more people mad. Again why are they surprised? Clinton could have simply said he’s married to one of the candidates and was voting that way. I can’t even fault him for that.

In law school, I had a professor, African American ex-marine guy, who noted that Clinton talked the talk, but rarely walked the walk when it came to African Americans. He said pro-African-American things and appointed a handful to positions in his administration. BUT, not the important posts and not in his “inner circle.” My professor professed amazement that so many of his peers saw Clinton as their boy, when his actions failed to fulfill the promise his rhetoric made.

In a reaction to Obama winning South Carolina, Billy shot off that even Jessie Jackson had won some states when he ran for office. This has apparently outraged several people although it proves that in adversity is the best time for a tiger to show its stripes. Bill hasn’t changed his.

Florida got it right

I heard something good about Florida. This is a state where I root against all their football teams, roll my eyes at their politics, and figure the folks who live there, deserve it. Florida however, apparently requires people to be registered members of a political party to vote in that PARTY’S Primary. Go Florida!

Milton is the biggest genius ever!

According to my sister, who is usually right about stuff like this, Milton posits in Paradise Lost that the Devil can “physically” leave Hell whenever he wants to. The problem is that damnation goes with him wherever he goes, turning it into Hell. As an observation and a metaphor, that is… incredibly astute; people, Devil or not cannot escape the damnation they bring with them when it is an essential part of who they are.

When Becky mentioned it, I believe it was in the context of all the folks who were exiting California and moving to Montana to “get away” from the noise, the congestion, the crabby people, etc. They got to Montana and discovered a land where the grocery store closed at 7:00 and Starbucks was only a stock ticker. Despairing that they had come to such a wasteland, soon their conveniences followed them on a wave of entrepreneurial spirit and malls, 24 hour groceries, coffee shops, and all the other amenities sprang up. Then. Lo, they looked forth one day and realized the place they had come to was every bit as noisy, congested, and unfriendly as the place they had come from. Puzzled at this strange fact, they moved again, to get away fro it all, only to discover yet another barren heathen wasteland. No worries soon conveniences would follow.

Milton’s model can be applied to almost every aspect of modern life. Cell phones, politics, economics, all of it. People always bring their own hells with them and then wonder how it is they can never seem to “get away.”

Clinton & Education

Chelsea Clinton was apparently in St. Louis yesterday stumping for Mom. She took questions at SLU and apparently got one from someone about how Clinton would help students. (Note the inherent idea that we should elect politicians so they should give us something; i.e. elect the one who gives you the most.) Her response was… well she said that her Mom’s proposal was to allow people in public sector jobs to count time on the job as loan repayment. She specifically cited teachers and nurses and….

BUZZ TILT

Say what?

Okay, aside from any difficulty administering this or persuading lenders to lend money that people can repay them by going to work, how the hell does she define “public sector” jobs here. Teachers, I don’t have so much problem with, but nurses? All nurses? Private nurses? What about doctors? I know they are seen as helping people in spite of having some of the most money grubbing individuals in their camp. (Don’t believe me? Look at all the non-malpractice lawsuits involving doctors, groups of doctor investors, tax evasion, marriage dissolutions, etc.) Anyway, doctors, pulling down six figures, do they get to count time in the office as loan repayment? What about the guy who paves the street? Does it matter if he works for the City or a contractor? What about the library clerks? What about lawyers? Or do we call Prosecutors/State’s Attorneys/District Attorneys and Public Defenders all public sector, but not the guy who does grandma’s will for her? What about the clerk in Wal-Mart who stocks the shelves? Think she’s not in the public sector then contemplate what would happen to the public if all the stocking clerks stopped working.

I hope the students as SLU are smart enough to see this mental placebo for what it is.

Election ads, or the lack thereof

Today is Monday and I’m feeling lethargic.

It’s a week and a day away from primary elections here and, I believe, across the river in Missouri. To date I have seen one and only one campaign add. I should probably count my blessings.

I would think that Illinois would be a prize that the candidate would find worth fighting for, but for all I know, poll numbers indicate the results are already set. The other possibility is that while Illinois is worthwhile, maybe Missouri is not. I live in the St. Louis media market, and that may be why silence pervades.

In any case, the sole ad I’ve seen is for Obama, and honestly I found it unpersuasive. Obama’s message is that “Washington is broken.” Implicitly, electing Obama would change that somehow, because, like, you know, Obama is not a politician. Or maybe he thinks the candidate who preaches such a populist sermon would be able to avoid partisanship? Maybe he thinks the lobbyists (which should not ALWAYS be a bad word) will pack up and go home? Maybe his election means that Congress would stop putting pork in its bills. Maybe the Obama Presidency will be the point where the elected stop worrying about being re-elected when making their decisions?

Maybe Obama is full of shit.

He could just figure the electorate is dumb or at least the electorate he’s targeting. That would be odd considering his intellectually liberal reputation and his alumnus. From my studies back in college, I know that the last Outsider candidate elected to the Presidency was Jimmy Carter. We all know how well he did; his inability or unwillingness to work the system meant he was always fighting it and that got nothing done.

Odd legacy to chase, isn’t it?

Comic Relief

The Munchkin put me on to this site. I can't really describe it; you sorta just have to go there.

Justice for all.

Something that came over a legal listserv I belong to.

The State of Missouri charged a Kentucky resident with a crime. The Kentucky resident filed a request for representation by the Public Defender and it was accepted, meaning the guy is poor and the State agreed he was poor. The trial is, of course, in Missouri and the Defendant has to commute, stay in a hotel, eat out, and all the other fun costs associated with travel. These come from his own pocket. His friends in Kentucky, sympathetic to these costs, pool some money in a "Defense Fund" for his benefit. Many of them specify that if the money is not all used up, they want their share of the remainder returned to them. The Fund is turned over to a friend of the Defendant's in Missouri who puts the money in a bank account in the friend, not the Defendant's, name.

The case goes to trial and the Defendant is acquitted, but during the trial the court learns of the existence of the Fund. After the conclusion of the trial and the rendering of the verdict, the Court orders the Defendant to turn over to the Public Defender the entire amount remaining in the Fund for legal fees. The problems I have with this are as follows:

• This seems like some sort of an implied trust and I am not sure the Court can order the Defendant, as only the beneficiary of the trust, to turn over the corpus.
• The Trustee is not a party before the Court and has never been served with process. I am not sure the court has jurisdiction to order the Trustee to do anything when he is not properly before the Court.
• This seems unjust when the Defendant won the lawsuit. While I acknowledge that in the American system a criminal defendant with assets pays their legal fees regardless of the outcome (the high cost of innocence at times), when the State has charged him with a crime and he is found not guilty, how is it just to then require him to pay the State for defense against the very charge the State itself brought. If the State failed to make its case, there is at least a colorable position that the case should not have been brought to begin with, which means that the Defendant's costs should not have been incurred. That being the case, it seems disingenuous for the State to collect additional fees that the State caused. This smacks vaguely of the idea that this Defendant "got off" in spite of the fact he must have been guilty or he would not have been arrested and charged. Last time I checked, guilt did not follow arrest or even poverty in our legal system.

I should probably also note that to stop this Order would probably require a lawsuit, probably a Writ of Prohibition. The cost of getting and winning that suit would most likely vastly exceed the amount of funds in the Fund. It won't be worth the money to fight the system so this poor guy will probably have to roll over for the State of Missouri and get buggered. As a non-resident, he can't even vote the next time that judge comes up for retention.

What do you think?

Obviously the European Central Bank needs to impose more regulations.

I don’t recall if I blogged about this news story I heard the other day that struck me as pretty stupid or not, but I’m going to encapsulate it here so that neither you nor I have to go digging back through archives. Apparently, this week, the head of the European Central Bank, publicly stated that the growing European financial crisis is the fault of the Bush Administration because the latter failed to regulate the U.S. mortgage and housing markets enough. Implicit in this comment is the implication that sufficient regulation prevents problems, which is not surprising considering the source. European Central Banks are among the most regulated of all industries after all; when the various European governments say “jump,” the Central Banks says, “How high?” They are institutionally pre-disposed to be pro-regulation.

So, you can imagine how interesting I found it this morning when I heard of the lastest scandal in one of France’s big banks. Apparently, a rogue employee used his knowledge of the system to direct the investment of quite a bit of money resulting in the loss of something like seven billion dollars to the bank. Imagine, in this highly regulated bank, that such a travesty could occur! It leads to one of two possible conclusions:

• Either more regulation should have been in place (the conclusion reached by the bank); or

• God forbid, perhaps sometimes all the regulation in the world can’t prevent the occasional crisis.

Day is gone....

Day is gone. Gone the sun. But I have heat in my house, so all is not lost, just 4 hours and $600.00.

So while driving to and from the house to meet the heating/cooling repair guy, I got to listen to NPR. Some little gems I heard out of context:

Black men had the right to vote 40 years before women did. This was mentioned in the context of discussing Obama and Clinton. Go fig. In the same paragraph they mentioned Gloria Steinem. I didn’t catch the intro, so I can’t be sure what they are talking about, but if someone was arguing that people should vote for Clinton because women were more victimized longer than black men, that has to be one of the most stupid arguments I’ve heard in a long time. Well, maybe not that long.

What is wrong with this picture? Why is Obama’s black-ness or Clinton’s feminine-ness even a topic of conversation here? Do we think that someone will be a better President because they are black or female? That’s as silly as thinking the opposite. This is such a non-issue! Further, pandering to voters to vote for you because you are black, female, or an aardvark is politically irresponsible and candidate who pitch based on such bullshit reasons should lose ground, not gain it. Imagine the candidate who campaigned based on a pitch that: “Hi, I’m a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man and you are a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man so obviously I understand you better. You should vote for me because of it.” Where does that even begin to connect with policy, leadership, decision making, or any thing that matters in a President?

If only I ran the world.

All Primaries and Caucuses would happen at the same time and no one would hear a peep about who own until the results were in.

No one would vote for a candidate based on their race, gender, or religion.

No one would vote for a candidate based upon their stand on only a single issue.

Reporters and editors who cannot help but print stories about candidates race, creed, or religion would be subject to electroshock.

People in the left lane would not linger at the same speed as the car to their right when passing.

I could eat all the free chocolate cake I want without adverse consequence as a rward for winning a lebenty-leben-gigagillion in the lottery without having to buy a ticket. (This is fantasyland after all.)

Stupid furnace

Don't worry lots of things to post about have happened, the role of ex=President Bill Clinton as "attack dog" or consideration of the greatest threat to our security. But my over-riding concern over the last 24 hours, on these 12 degree (F not C) nights has been the fact my furnace kicked the bucket. Maybe on death's door is a better description.

When it runs, it sounds like a buzzsaw. Actually, my miter saw is quieter.
After about an hour it starts kicking on for 10 seconds; off for 15 seconds, Repeat.
After a bit of that it just locks up, smells like a hot electric motor crossed with burning hair, and makes a weak imitation of its previous nigh-deafening noise.

The repair man is suppose to be here late morning.

News tidbits

And here I was afraid I did not have much to blog about today. Silly boy!

NPR was talking about last night's South Caroline Democratic debate and the acrimonious exchanges between Clinton and Obama. The ones they highlighted had to do with these two candidates charging each other with liking Reagan's ideas, which, apparently if you are a Democrat, amounts heresy or at least an insult. Personally, not all of Reagan's ideas were bad and to carte blanc toss out the baby with the bathwater is the sort of oversimplified campaign rhetoric I would expect from candidates of this caliber. Anyway, NPR then put on an expert from the Annenberg Center for Checking Politician's Claims or some such. Apparently Clinton "grossly exaggerated" what Obama said and took it completely out of context. Obama, while he implied much by pointing out that Ms. Big Corporate Lawyer Clinton was on the board of Wal-Mart, did not technically fib because she was.

Switching topics, one politician noted that, in regard to these economic stimulus packages everyone is suddenly proposing, he didn't see how they would do anything other than stimulate the Chinese economy. He has a sort of point, although in a larger sense anything that moves money is good. Even if we sell a Chinese radio in Wal-Mart, Americans had jobs in a store to sell it, sales tax was paid, and governmental employees had to work to process that. Maybe even accountants and lawyers benefited.

One of Tom Clancy's great observations which may or may not be his originally is that The Market, meaning the NYSE, is as much about confidence and perception and self-fulfilling prophecy as anything. If people think they are in a depression/recession then they will change the way they act (meaning how they use their money) and that change, in the form of caution, when applied over a broad enough swath of the population create a recession. Similarly if enough people sell a stock because they are afraid the price will drop, guess what? The price starts dropping. Go fig. The Market is all about perceptions. And as everyone knows, currently, the herd is thundering mindlessly along following the current, panicked, perceptions, pulling itself with it past any semblance of reason. At the present course, all the lemmings will soon dash off the cliff, not knowing that they might have had a choice. It would be so easy to blame the Press for its constantly negative reporting as it tosses out phrases like "the R-word" which it immediately explains means "recession" like we were a bunch of third graders sharing naughty words in the back corner of the playground. And to some extent, the Press is at fault, but to say this is all their fault is simplistic. After all, even the Press is entitled to act as if the average might grow a brain sometime soon and actually think about events. Can we really blame the Press if our societal appetite is for candy journalism and mental pablum? Can we blame them if they give us what we seem to want, easy solutions, simplified problems, and emotionally evocative sensationalist reporting?

Sometimes it seems like the best argument against democracy is the people in them.

Happy Birthday Wolfgang!!!

My friends in Cincinnati, Jim and Trisha, apparently had their baby last week, a strapping young lad they named Wolfgang Orion.

Congrats to your both and happy birthday Wolfgang!

Burke is a boob

For those of you who don't know who Archbishop Burke is, he is the Roman Catholic bishop in St. Louis, personally appointed by the Pope, etc. He's done more for protestantism around here than anyone since Johann Tetzel. (Tetzel was the guy whose antics prompted Martin Luther to post his 95 thesis and institute a break with the Roman Catholic church.) Burke is the guy who announced that no good Catholic could vote for John Kerry four years ago, and he's at it again. It seems a St. Louis University coach attended a Clinton rally and verbally indicated support for her and for stem cell research. Burke has now announced that it is unacceptable for the coach to say that.

News flash Mr. Archbishop Burke, in this country it is unacceptable for you to tell people they cannot express their opinions on political, religious, or ethical matters.

For more Catholic silliness try the Catholic Online site (look up St. Callistus). Or check out this gem. I should note that actually have nothing against Catholics; I have a great respect for their schools. I would mock any other church (or lack there of) or person exactly the same if I thought they were being a bit on the dumb side.

I should also, in fairness to Archbishop Burke, admit that while the First Amendment allows the coach to say whatever he wants to say, if his masters in the church don't like it, they also have an absolute right to fire him. Burke is not saying the coach can't say it, he's saying the coach can't keep representing SLU if he's saying it. The PR fallout of that decision is its own affair, and it may be in that aspect that Burke's action belongs in this blog.

Geico is dumb

So, while I was out and about over lunch trying to get parts to solve my Mac problems (see previous post), I got to hear an add for Geico. Lest you think I only call stupid on politicians and their ilk, here is the substance of the Geico advertisement:

Their cockney speaking spokeslizard (apparently Gecko and Geico are similar enough that someone thought it would be cute to have a spokeslizard) is apparently visiting an automobile repair shop. The advertisement begins with the lizard talking to the mechanic and it quickly becomes apparent that the lizard knows nothing about cars. Then the lizard tells the mechanic all about the wonderful money saving pot-o'-gold that is a Geico insurance policy. The add ends with the mechanic asking the lizard to hand him a Phillip's head to which the lizard responds by asking what Phillip did to the mechanic. The mechanic explains that a Phillip's head is a type of screwdriver to which explanation the lizard remains skeptical.

Humor has a place in advertising without a doubt; it often adds the spark to the advertisement which is the difference between memorable and forgotten. Superbowl advertisements would not be the same without it. Yet, it is a delicate tool and ought to be applied with a little foresight; something which this Geico advertisement's creators failed to realize.

Consider that at both the beginning and the end of the advertisement, we have the lizard, call him Larry from here on, exhibiting for all the world his lack of knowledge and possilbly his general stupidity. Moreover, Larry tries to overcome his lack of knowledge by talking knowingly about the same subject and thus displaying his ignorance to the audience all of whom know Larry is talking shit. My father has an expression which, over the years, he has often used in my direction: It is better to be silent and thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it. By the first third of the Geico advertisement we have established that Larry knows little, at least about things related to automobiles and, more importantly, that Larry will try to talk knowledgeably about things about which he is clueless. We've all met people like that and we all know that the more clueless they are, the more assertive they talk. We also know not to take their word for anything. Having established that Larry doesn't know dick no matter how authoritative he sounds, the commercial then has Larry launch into his sale pitch where he tells us all about the wonders of Geico and why we would want them to be our insurer.

Query: Why would we even consider listening to Larry who has already been shown to be a bullshitter and fool?

As if that is not enough, the advertisement closes on the same theme as it began with Larry once more attempting to prove himself knowledgable and falling on his face because he doesn't know a Phillip's head is a type of screw. Of course this only reinforces the message that Larry's pro-Geico message is probably ill considered and rendered without understanding.

Other than the fact that I will remember this message because it was so bloody stupid, I can't see one reason why anyone would put it on the air. Every time it plays, the only thing you are communicating is that Larry is stupid, people who take Larry's advice are stupider, and the people who chose this message for Larry to deliver are the stupidest gits of all.

It reminds of the several months circa 2000 when you would see truck driving up and down the highway, proudly emblazoned with their corporate names followed by, "An FedEx company" showing that a certain package company had hired the folks who write stereo instructions to label their fleet. But, I digress....

Imac woes

Some of you, actually ALL of the people I know actually ready this blog, know that we recently purchased an imac. Partly this is because I was fed up with Windows, partly this was because I read some pretty persuasive statistics on the overall cost of ownership of a Mac vs a PC, partly this was a fear of Vista, and partly, if not largely, this was because with a 12 year-old who knows she knows everything and thus won’t download malicious software, I wanted the most malicious software resistant machine I could get. Up until now the machine has been VERY impressive and easy to use. However….

Over the weekend, I took the fairly innocuous step of trying to install a four year old laser printer. Silly me. I checked and HP had a Mac OS X driver for the printer, a Laserjet 1300. I down loaded the driver and plugged in the printer. I had a USB to Parallel cord because I did not realize that the Printer had a USB in connection; I had been using it parallel. I ran the install, the instructions for which were archaic. I say that because they told me how to create a Print queue using a utility that does not even seem to be in Leopard. However, Leopard automatically made the queue for me so that was no problem. So far, so good… I think.

I opened the TextView program which is the default program for txt files. After all, it doesn’t get any simpler than a txt file right? I loaded in a short txt file (one of my email sig files) and hit print. And waited. And waited some more. And hit the button on the printer to generate a test page which immediately printed. And opened the queue to see my document sitting there, in the que. And theorized that maybe the problem was that, for some reason, it didn’t like the USB to parallel conversion. Resolved to get a USB-USB cord today and try that. Went to bed after the Packers lost.

This morning I came down to find the txt file had printed sometime since I had surrendered the computer to my fiancée to watch the Giants-Packers game. Odd. I booted Word and printed a document which came out immediately. I booted Firefox and tried to print my homepage. Nothing. I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee, and by the time I came down, voila the web page had printed. I booted TextView and tried to print the sig file again. Nothing. At this point I don’t know if I have a conversion issue, a driver issue, a Leopard issue, or what. Arrrgh!

Then there is the OTHER problem and it is definitely Leopard’s problem. Starting about the time I installed the printer driver, the computer stopped coming out of sleep mode. It goes into sleep automatically just fine. It used to come out when you hit a key. It’s supposed to come out if you hit a key or the power button. Now though, once it goes to sleep it stays there, period. It will not respond to the keyboard or the on/off button AT ALL; it just sits there dark. At first I thought it was a faulty on/off switch. You have to cut the power to shut it off and re-boot before it will come up again. Now I’m used to PC’s failing to come out of sleep, but with them you can hold down the power button to force a power off. Not so with a Mac. It is a VERY annoying problem and at this point, I have turned off its sleep function. This is not an ideal solution. Arrrgh again!

Martin Luther King Day

Today, as many of you will realize is Martin Luther King Day, when governmental employees and bankers get to laugh at all of us. I got to thinking though, it seems kind of disingenuous to name today after a single civil rights leader, even one who gave his life for his cause. It also seems a bit, well, ethnocentric too. Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with everything that Dr. King worked for to call today Civil Right Day and celebrate the civil rights of all people of all races in this country?

Education policy

My fiancée and I take the occasional lunch together since we work only 8 blocks apart, and over the course of one recent lunch, she and I discussed my views on education policy. These views are quite controversial and, in places sound vaguely Orwellian. I am primarily going to deal with post-secondary education, but will touch on primary and secondary education.

Let me begin by saying that education is one of the places I am, philosophically, willing to see the Government (capitalization intended) spend public money. This is because I believe than a proper investment in education benefits society as a whole and thus is in keeping with the object of having governance in the first place. (The role of government and why we have one is an entirely different philosophical can of worms than I want to really get into here though.) The important thing to realize is that I see the reason for governmental expenditure on education is because it benefits society overall. Thus, that which maximizes the benefit per dollar spent is to be favored over that which does not.

However, I think we need to rethink the philosophy behind who we educate in what way and when.

PREMISE: The government should fund the basic education of its citizens so that they have the ability to function in society. Thus, we teach the three R’s: reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic. Additionally (pun intended), in a modern world we need to impart some computer literacy. We also need to instill certain values, societal concepts, and basic information in our citizens. I don’t mean brainwashing; I mean more like no stealing, no hitting, no gender discrimination, what a democracy is, basic historical knowledge of the country, etc. This is why we have free public education; because everyone in our society needs to know those things. And these are appropriately what we teach in primary and, to some extent, secondary schools. Anyone graduating from a secondary school should have the skills necessary for a basic job.

However, beyond the basic, necessary, education, a lot changes because we are no longer dealing with things everyone needs to know. I hate hearing that “You go to college so you can get a good job.” That is not what college is and not what it is for. Going to college because of a belief that it will get you a better (more highly compensated?) job treats college like some sort of vocational training ground. This is in error.

Vocational training is important, absolutely, and arguably it should be part of a person’s basic publicly provided education even if I do not personally think so. (I tend to think that if a person wishes to seek a line of employment that requires additional training, it should be on their shoulders and/or be provided by the companies that need people trained in that way.) However, much of college learning is not related to preparing a person for a vocation and therefore irrelevant to those who seek a college degree as a means to pursue a specific vocation. This is, of course, the criticism of many with their college experience.

How did we come to treat college as vocational training then? I think you have to go back to WWII and the original G.I. Bill. All the exiting service men and women had an ability to go to college in a volume previously unknown in the higher education system, and they exercised that ability. College and University enrollment soared and vast numbers of graduates began entering the job market with fancy letters after their name. Facing this glut, companies began to use the college degree, however meaningless it might be for the position they were hiring for, as a selection criteria under the theory that a candidate who had one was preferable to one who did not. With the weight of jobs going to college graduates, the self-fulfilling prophecy that you needed a college degree to get a good job started to come true. Now, for example, to sit in the juvenile detention center in Franklin County, Missouri and watch the residents, you have to have a college degree as a State requirement. It doesn’t matter what degree mind you, you just have to have one. Ergo, the requirement is pointless. Worse, now in many industries you have to have a Masters simply because you need to distinguish yourself from all the people holding mere college degrees. In other words, this is an escalating cycle.

What then is the point of college? At risk of being extremely philosophical, higher education is to fulfill the participants as individuals. It also exists to impart a broader education (as opposed to simple training) both generally and also because practitioners in certain fields (doctors, scientists, etc.) require it. The difference between “simple training” and training of the type that requires higher education is that those highly specialized fields require a much broader general knowledge before the specific training can begin. Otherwise, college is for those who want it, not for job advancement, but for personal fulfillment. This encouragement of the cream of our minds to attend college is especially important considering the challenges that loom before us in the 21^st Century, most of which, if they are to be solved, require highly technical and scientific solutions.

What then is the role of Government in paying for the high costs of higher education? It’s very simple: Government should unequivocally support and invest in higher education… for those who merit it. I would completely and utterly do away with “need-based” financial aid and replace it entirely with “merit-based” financial aid. Remember what I said about why the government should support education; because it benefits society? I posit that society is best served by providing higher education to exactly those individuals who demonstrate that they will gain the most advantage from it and thus, can do the most with it to benefit that same society. Having established that college education should not be necessary to become employed, this is not an issue of a civil right or lack of entitlement. I have never seen any evidence and do not believe that providing financial aid to an impoverished dunce simply because of financial status benefits society equally or more than providing the same aid to a wealthy genius. Quite the opposite. In fact, if you think in terms of group projects and joint achievement, then having meritorious people around you in college only enhances the effectiveness of college.

I’m not saying to ignore the people who simply want vocational knowledge. They should be entitled to government aided loans and the like, but even there, I would select and reward merit and achievement. Also realize that I am not de-selecting any individual from enrollment in college based on lack of merit; I would not aid them financially. If they want to save up and go to college, they should be welcomed to do so (and should not feel pressured to have to do so just to get a good job).

Unfortunately, the only way to achieve this is through some fairly draconian changes. Since a glut of college educated workers caused the problem, you need to either create a shortage of such workers or convince business to stop requiring useless degrees (or both). Thus, you need to immediately switch to merit based financial aid for colleges and universities while increasing the aid for purely vocational programs. This should shift people from colleges to vocational schools. Simultaneously, you need to offer incentives to businesses to induce them to hire the vocational graduates for positions which do not really require a college education. I think everyone will be surprised at how many “college degree required” positions that currently is. This will mean that, with fewer college graduates available, the need for the degree will lessen except in the positions that really do need a person so educated. In essence, we will separate the wheat from the chaff in the job market. Anyone else who simply wants a college education for personal fulfillment can still get one, and should have no illusions about why they are getting one.

Thus, my policy towards education would be two-fold:

1) Change all financial aid to purely merit based aid.

2) Create an environment which reduces the need for a college degree to obtain a job which provides income above the poverty line.

It won’t be easy, this policy of mine, but I believe it is the only way to stop the progression. Otherwise, by the end of my life time, I believe we will be on the cusp of needing a Master’s degree to get a good job.

Letter to my Congressman about an idea I had

Dear Sir:

I was listening to National Public Radio today for part of the Diane Rehm Show and they were discussing the possible one-time tax rebate that is being considered to try to stimulate the economy. One of the problems they were foreseeing is that for this to work, people need to take their rebate money and spend it on goods or services. However, apparently only about 1/3 of people will do this. The remaining 2/3 of us will either save it or pay off existing debt with the money. I had suggestion for this problem:

What if the IRS sent the rebate in the form of a pre-paid credit card? Many merchants offer similar cards so they cannot be that expensive and the systems for processing them are already in place. Further, the money would remain in the Treasury until actually spent, meaning the government would get the interest on it during that time. Finally, while it is conceivable that a person might spend the money from the card and then save or pay off debt with an equal amount of money from another source, I believe it would be less likely. More often, the citizen would use the pre-paid card as a credit card which means they would purchase something with it, and that would increase the amount of benefit from the rebate.

About the only problem I see is that this solution might create more "unclaimed property" held by the Treasury. However, I believe the IRS probably already has that issue with some of the tax refund checks it issues, so I hope it would not overburden the system.

I hope that whatever staffer reads this letter for you forwards the idea to you and that you can forward it on to someone on the appropriate committee. I think the idea has merit.

Sincerely,

Obama

Obama:

I heard Obama on a short interview on NPR last night. He said something that impressed me, although the veracity of it is suspect. First, let me admit to a certain bias:

I don't like Illinois politicians and, given the number of governors recently who were indited (or should have been), I don't trust Illinois politicians. This is doubly true for the ones from Chicago. Obama is both.

Apparently, the candidates were asked what was their biggest weakness. Obama said he is not the most organized person and his desk is perpetually messy and, thus, he needed good staff to keep him organized. Clinton said her biggest weakness was her impatience to get America back on track. Edwards said his biggest weakness was his zest to improve the lot of America’s working class. NPR asked Obama if he wanted a redo on that question and he said, as best I can recall, that he did not. He felt he had answered the question that was asked honestly (as he had made a point of doing during this campaign) rather than trying to twist it by taking a laudable sounding strength and disguise it as a weakness.

Now I don’t agree with a lot of Obama’s politics or positions on issues.

He also made the point that, in the last ten years or so, the average family’s income has not kept up with the rising cost of living, especially when they have to pay for healthcare and so forth. In this I think he is correct, sort of. If you take out some of the big ticket items like health insurance costs, and look at just consumer goods, and compare the cost of those goods in terms of percent of earnings in 1988 vs 2008, I think you would find that the prices have not significantly increased; in fact many of them may have dropped, especially for computer related electronic products or long distance communication. But when you add in the cost of healthcare or retirement savings, more of which is being laid on the average family, then before, Obama may be correct. Further, gasoline prices have come up sharply and that affects the price of everything. So, he may have a point here, although not as simplistic a point as he pretends it to be.

He also tried to differentiate his proposal for Healthcare from “Hillarycare” though he wasn’t too clear on the distinction. He seemed to feel that his proposal would be more targeted at the “lower income families who need it.” That phrase make me nervous because it boarders on a god-term/devil-term concept.

Since, I believe the race for the White House will be resolved with the Democratic Convention, these issues will be important. Likewise, even though I really probably want Guiliani to win, just because I would support almost ANY moderate Republican over someone supported by the religious right, I don’t see that happening. And if the GOP takes the shellacking this Autumn that I think it will, I don’t want the religious right to be able to hide behind the excuse that it was because the GOP did not offer a sufficiently God-oriented candidate. They got the GOP into this and they need to suffer the consequences. Not that it will crack their delusions.

At this point, Obama is my favorite viable Presidential candidate and I really cannot believe I’m saying that.

Bondage gear and legal advertising

I almost didn’t dignify this with a post, but I am trying to be more light hearted in here. The article speaks for itself.

As a practical matter, I’m not sure what I think of it. We’re supposed to be an ancient and honorable profession. I think that advertisements like this detract from respect for the profession. In undergrad at Gustavus, I was in a group that did a research on legal advertising. Our group concluded that while none of our focus group participants thought that any lawyer advertisements we showed them (a random sampling of a weeks worth of mid-day legal advertisements mostly of the “Have you been hurt in an accident?” variety) were unethical, they almost uniformly thought the advertisements made them think less of lawyers. This seems to fit that pattern.

My problem with these advertisements, to the extent I have a problem, stems not so much from their content as their message. Honestly, I could care less if what’s-her-name appeared buck naked, full-frontal, etc. As far as advertisement goes, it doesn’t matter if these are really her or some model she hired to be on her billboard. The troubling part is the self-gratification based attack on an institution that arguably forms a fundamental part of our societal structure. While I don’t see myself as particularly pro-marriage (mostly, I suspect, as a political matter), I don’t think an attorney, a member of a theoretically dignified profession, should attack it either.

On the other hand, these advertisements are without a doubt provocative and memorable, all the more so for the incidental press they receive. One cannot put a roof over their head with, pay off student loans with, or eat the dignity of the profession. As much as the bar does not want to admit it, we are a business. Businesses succeed when they sell their product, which means people buy their product, which means people come through the door, which means people remember the advertisements in the first place. These advertisements will do that, although I suspect they will drive quite a few customers too. I also suspect that the Cook County judges have to constantly remind themselves that, whatever they may thing of Ms. Billboard, her clients may have perfectly valid reasons for their divorces and they should not be punished for their lawyer’s actions.

The opposite of Common Sense is emotion

Last Tuesday, Cinda and I were driving to have dinner with my parents, as we do almost every Tuesday. And she asked me what I thought about the new computer law “they” wanted to make that she had heard about on NPR. Apparently, NPR was not terribly clear about who they were or at what governmental level they wanted to make a law, but conceptually Cinda and I understand what sort of law was being proposed. I should note that when I say “proposed” I do not mean in a specific sort of way; I have seen no proposed language for any statute. The proposal is more in the nature of a general suggestion at this point. Because I do not have the who and the what specifically, I am going to use the ubiquitous law and they in my post. What can I say; sloppiness is contagious. I would also note that Cinda had some rather strong feelings about the proposal which I invite her to post in a comment.

To understand the proposal, you have to know about a local news story. It seems that some teenager lived in the St. Louis metro area and like many teenagers, she was emotionally fragile and technologically competent. (By the latter term I mean she could surf the web, chat with her friends, send e-mail, and participate in social networking sites.) It seems she had a MySpace page or some other similar web presence. It seems that someone else, a neighbor I believe, found her page and pretending to be someone else (a boy she liked at school, I think), sent her “mean” messages. Distraught, the teen committed suicide. Obviously this is a sad and tragic occurrence, and quite emotionally charged. The police even apologized because they could not arrest and charge the neighbor who had, in fact, violated no laws.

Community groups have formed and reacted demanding that they pass a law to prevent things like this from happening again. Depending on who you listen to, they want to make it illegal to either send mean messages, illegal to pretend to be someone else on 1) the internet; 2) MySpace; or 3) when sending messages to a minor, required for parents to monitor their children’s MySpace pages.

WARNING: I’m about to be unkind and politically incorrect or at least uncharitable to the late young lady.

It seems to me that, these people are casting about for someone or something, anyone or anything even, to blame for what happened except the primary cause. A young teenager chose to take her life because someone said something that upset her. Tragic? Absolutely. But let me rephrase it in a much more unfeeling way. An emotionally unstable teenager selfishly chose to end her obviously angst-ridden life just because of something someone else said. Is that a logical choice? Of course not. It indicates that this teen had a lot more problems, emotional, mental, or whatever, than just the fact that someone left her messages that upset her. The messages, may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, but the person to blame for the decision of how she would react is the deceased. It seems unkind, uncharitable, and maybe even unjust, to blame this poor girl though; after all she’s dead and to most of us it seems unjust to heap any more on her. So, in the same sense that corporations hide behind what the computer will not let them do, it becomes easiest to blame the computer for this. After all, computers don’t have feelings and don’t care if they are blamed. It seems easier, more charitable even, to blame the inanimate machinery than to say its this girls own fault she’s dead. And if it’s the computer’s fault/problem, then you obviously, and logically, solve the problem by fixing the computer. (Plus, no one has to feel guilty for blaming the poor dead girl or her parents who have obviously been through enough.) Shazam, we can now fix emotionally misguided teenagers by regulating their computers. Bullshit.

Consider, how differently we would be looking at this if instead of getting fake messages through her MySpace page, she got fake notes stuffed in her locker at school. You know, pages of college ruled notebook paper alleged written and signed by who ever this was that said “mean” things to her. Or what if one of her “friends” told her a lie about what this guy said about her over the lunch room table? Would we be clamoring to legislate regarding what could be written in a notebook or discussed at lunch? If this message had been sent in the U.S. Mail or delivered over a telephone, would we be looking to regulate those devices? Somehow, I doubt it.

Anyway, back to the topic I began with: The above example illustrates and emotional reaction to an event. And that emotional reaction leads people to want to Do Something™ to prevent the event which caused their emotion. Because the public is in an emotional frenzy, the legislators, ever conscious of the winds of the mob opinion tend to scurry around so their voters can see them Doing Something™, even if the legislator knows the resulting law is ill thought out or unconstitutional. They will rely on the Courts to overturn it or make it work because that way they won’t have to be the bad guy in the eyes of the voters. Pure pettifoggery.

You don’t have to look very far to see bad laws passed as the result of mass public emotional reactions. After September 11, 2001, we passed the Patriot Act because suddenly it seemed alright to cast aside basic freedoms on a wave of emotion. Before that, concern about Internet porn lead to the Communications Decency Act. Hitler swept into power riding a wave of emotion. And so forth. The proof is copious; strong emotion usually makes bad law and bad decisions, and when the public is most emotional, especially when it is fearful or angry, is when it should most avoid making any laws. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true.

Somewhere buried in either The Prince or The Discourses (neither one of which I have in front of me), Machiavelli makes a point that usually when the public says it wants freedom what it really wants is security. The obvious follow up is that a public, scared for its security, will offer up its freedoms to get that security back. Since an emotional public is not a long-term thinking public, this is most likely to happen when the public is emotional. The problem is that once a freedom is given up, sometimes, it will not be recovered quite so easily. (See previous references to Nazis.) Modern day Russia provides an good example. Putin is undoubtedly less democratic and less tolerant than Yeltsin was. However, the Russian economy is better now than it was and its people feel more secure. Thus they like Putin and give him the power to go ahead with his undemocratic actions because of it. Come the day when or if they change their minds, I suspect they will discover that Putin will not be so charitable in returning the power and by then it may be too late for them to do anything about it.

Common sense, the most uncommon of things, goes completely out the window in the grips of emotion. So, in response to the death of this teen, I’m calling on “They” to take a moment of pause and to let their emotions cool before Doing Something™ that might be regretted later. I call upon the public to give Them the chance and the opportunity to pause and reflect, instead of demanding that They take instant action. I believe we will all be better for it.

Another Article from Mr. Dobbs

Here is another article from the CNN commentator Dobbs. I think it worth the reading though, I am not sure I agree with his attack on free trade policies (or any of his other specific positions on any issues). I do agree with him on his conception of the politicians in this race and how they go about appealing to the American voters.

Now for something serious

So many of my posts are about serious subjects, that I figured I'd toss out a couple links to some seriously silly subjects as a change up.

First item

Second item

You know, some of these people are a bit weird, what?

Some of the People, All of the Time

This morning, NPR talked about a small town in Vermont that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border and how the Department of Homeland Security is changing the border security there. The locals are unhappy that they, who cross the border frequently, cannot do so easily any longer. They need passports and are subject to lengthy searches… every time they enter the U.S.

I feel their pain; I really do. I hate every time the government big brother interferes with my life. But, in this case, I’m not so sure that the government is wrong or that the common folk are right.

Consider that it does not take all that many terrorists and only one WMD (which doesn’t have to be all that big) to kill a whole lot of people in this country. Consider also that terrorist notoriously work the soft targets meaning they attack points of vulnerability in our defenses. That includes choosing where to “attack” the U.S. border. If there is a point, perhaps a quaint Vermont farming town of infinitesimal population, where border security consists of a wave, eventually the terrorists will locate it. Once they do, then how hard is it to send two guys in a Buick with a WMD in the trunk across the border at that point. Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and many of our other major metropolises stand nearby. You do the math.

Do I like having vice-like security at borders and airports? Of course not; I hate it. But I am afraid it may be necessary.

Huckabee is the anti-me

Over lunch, NPR interviewed a journalist who has spent a lot of time traveling with the “evangelical” politicians over the last several years and has written and reported about them extensively. In other words, he was being treated as an expert on even gelical thought and politicians. (And here I thought the experts on evangelical thought were called psychiatrists.) They were talking about Huckabee and the way he is creating a rift in the evangelical “wing” of the Republican party.

The opinion of the expert was that the reason the evangelicals do not stand uniformly behind one candidate as they have in the past was because no clear heir exists. Huckabee, the only evangelical in the Republican race, “himself a Baptist minister,” divides the evangelicals because he only endorses a part of their traditional “values.” Specifically, per the expert, evangelicals believed in anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and similar social policies combined with conservative fiscal policies and a generally anti-Federalist outlook. Huckabee however, our expert tells us, combines the standard social outlooks of classical evangelicals (anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, etc.) with a populist platform. Accordingly, he is taking his message directly to the evangelical voters rather than working through their traditional leaders. He also argues for his views on non-traditional grounds, because he speaks of human dignity and the value of life in all stages of life.

While I completely approve of marginalizing the influence of the likes of Pat Robertson, Huckabee, as described by today’s expert, combines the worst of both worlds. I can’t help but think of him in terms of his opposite, someone who would be for conservative fiscal policies, small government, and broadly interpreted civil liberties; someone like the other gentleman from Arizona.

Where have all our Goldwater’s gone?

Diane Rehm Show

Frequently, I listen to the Diane Rehm Show on NPR. Today I felt compelled to send them this letter.

***

Diane and staff,

Unfortunately, I was in the car and meetings this morning and could not write this until now. I wanted to express how disappointed I am with the first segment of your show this morning, and for what two reasons I feel this way.

I am used to mostly quality coverage of Presidential elections from the Diane Rehm Show. You tend to have the candidates on the show and talk to them about their views on issues which is what should matter to the electorate. Your show usually offers an opportunity to get a feel for a candidate that is rare in the election cycle and which cannot be obtained from any advertisement or debate. But today, in the preview of your show, you talked about the way the New Hampshire results defied the "pollsters, pundits, and politicians" predictions and then asked what role race and gender played in the surprise. You ended by questioning whether or not America was ready for an African American or a woman President which implies that these things were the reason why the results surprised so many folks.

First, the choice of topic was abysmal because it dignified a question that should have no bearing on someone's choice of candidate. Anyone who votes for or against a candidate because of ethnicity is a fool. Anyone who votes for or against a candidate because of gender is a fool. While, unfortunately, in our country fools vote along with the rest of us, discussing their possible reasons for their choice is silly. Further, raising the question only cheapens whatever victory Obama or Clinton might achieve in this race. For example, if Obama wins, now we must wonder if he did not really win so much as Clinton lost because of a foolish reason. If Clinton wins, you would have us wonder the opposite. Wondering won't change the outcome and probably won't change any fools' minds though. It will simply cast a doubt over the entire process.

Second, far too much of the reporting is about who is currently winning (either in states or the polls) and what strategies the candidates will be employing to try to advance their causes. In this, the press is treating the election like it is a game and I see a lot of parallel between the talk about this game and the current NFL playoffs. Extending the analgoy is easy. In an NFL game, during the game the announcers talk about the results of the plays in terms of whether or not the team gets a First Down or scores. Similarly in this election, the Press spends most of its time discussing who is leading the polls and whether or not the candidates are succeeding or failing in advancing their numbers. During a football game, especially at halftime, the commentators usually discuss the game in terms of whether an overall strategy is working for a team and what adjustments they need to make strategically to pull off a win. The election coverage also mimics this by having exactly the same discussion about the campaigns. For example, the discussion that a candidate might choose to concentrate on certain states and why. In an NFL game, we see little discussion of the individual plays or why the coach thinks they will work; any discussion of the plays is usually in terms of broad strategy or whether the play advances the ball. Likewise, in the election, we see little discussion about the way candidates fall on certain issues. When we do get issue discussion it is usually in terms of brief, out-of-context, soundbites used to illustrate a piece on broader strategy or how a candidate's poll numbers have changed. While normally your show does a much better job of coving things that matter about candidates, today you fell back into the pack of mediocre journalism and reported on the game of politics and not the substance that drive political opinions. You talked about polls, standing, and performance in a given election instead of an issue. Unless you believe that Americans should vote for someone because that person's poll numbers are good/bad or because "everyone else" is or isn't, your topic had no place on the radio.

Today's program left me disappointed in the Diane Rehm Show.

Which News should be the News?

Driving around getting lunch today, I got to hear more NPR on my radio. They were talking yet again about the '08 Primaries (kind of like yours truly), and something struck me as I listened to them go on.

All they were either:

• Talking about who was winning each party's primaries and/or polls; or
  
• Talking about their talk about who was winning each party's primaries and/or polls

They were not talking about the issues or the candidates views on the issues. Being honest, I have to admit I heard some conversation about the issues, mostly about Giuliani having the balls to be pro-choice. Ever since the Iowa Caucuses (or slightly before), that type of report dropped off sharply in favor of the more sports-like who is currently winning the competition reports. I'm sure that there is still a bit of issue reporting going on, but the dominant weight is on the current standings. I guess that's just more exciting.

Still, I have to stop and wonder which type of story better serves the public good: reporting that informs voters about the candidates or their views/policies or reporting that informs the public which candidates the Press's pollsters believe is currently most favored.

Japan and Iran

This is, I think, the first time that I’ve made three posts to my blog in one day. I just keep reading things that I want to remark on so I type them up here where I can delude myself that someone will read them.

So, after wading through the Election ‘08 news and the President-is-going-to-the-Middle-(Muddle?)-East-to-pretend-he’s-done-something-there news, you might have gotten to the news about the confrontation between three U.S. Navy warships and five Iranian speedboats. It seems our ships were trolling along in what most of the world thinks is international waters when several speedboats came zooming up and radioed that they were going to explode our ships or something. We got it on tape even. We believe that since the boats came from the direction of Iran, they were Iranian.

Iran says the tape is a fabrication and denies the entire incident. No surprise there. Personally, I don’t see how they think this sort of brinksmanship behavior benefits them. Really what does it get them? Shake your fist at the big kid in the playground and then run away claiming it never happened?

Anyway, I got to thinking for some reason of December 7, 1941, a different armed attack on the U.S. Navy (and others). There are plenty of things surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack to criticize the Japanese about if you have a mind to do so. However, at least the nation that perpetrated that action had the balls not to deny having done it. Had the current Iranian government been in power in Tokyo in 1941, after Pearl Harbor got bombed, they would have denied it happened, denied that the U.S. ever had those ships, claimed the pictures were fabrications, and probably argued that Pearl Harbor had strayed into their territorial waters.

Somehow, I don’t think I’d believe them then either.

Speaking of the stupidity of the Media...

Take a look at this column from CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/08/Dobbs.January8/index.html#cnnSTCText

I don't agree with the author's populist views, but I share his glee.

New Hampshire results and Misc thoughts on some candidates

So New Hampshire is over and the media is buzzing with the fact that they were…

Wait for it…

WRONG. That’s right, Clinton defied their austere pollsters and experts and pulled out a win over Obama. Maybe Iowa didn’t decide everything after all. Maybe they now look kinda dumb for what they have been saying the preceding four days.

McCane won. No surprise there; he won there last time. Didn’t help him over all though, did it. The press is trying to make it a story though by talking about how this will make it a real race for the nomination now. Query: If THIS is what will make it a real race, why was the press reporting on the Republican race so much for, oh, the last six months?

Clinton won. No real surprise there; she is, after all, the OTHER front-runner in her party. And this Primary was back East in a state adjacent to the state she represents in the Senate.

The radio treated me to excerpts from the comments of several candidates this morning. Obama was talking about getting the country behind his progressive agenda. By the way, for the uninitiated, “progressive” is how you spell “liberal” these days. They like the former word better because it sounds so good; after all, who can be against progress? Of course when you and the other guy are trying to go in opposite directions, one person’s progress is the other’s backslide. Maybe we should stop using liberal and conservative. We could call them the Progressive Left and the Progressive Right or maybe, instead of Democrat and Republican we could have the Progressives and the Family Value-ists? Either way, see yesterdays rant, I mean blog, about bi-partisanship.

I ripped on Obama a bit above so it’s only fair I rip on Clinton a bit too. Have you noticed that she wants us to se her first name? Obama is Obama, but Clinton is Hillary. I see it as sort of like Madonna or Cher. She must think it makes her more personable or something. Maybe she wants to try to separate herself from Bill a bit? I suppose she could go the Jennifer Lopez/Lindsey Lohan route. They became JLo and LiLo didn’t they? She could become… oh never mind; it doesn’t work. But I digress. While I don’t particularly like or agree with Obama Barack, he at least seems honest about what he wants to do and where he comes from. Hillary, on the other hand…. Hillary is an opportunist. I cannot respect a person who, having been the wife of the governor of Arkansas and helped him win the election as the boy from Hope, decided that it was more opportune to her political ambition to move to New York so she could run for office there. I cannot help but think she did so because she believe the people of Arkansas knew her too well. I don’t know what Hillary believes in. I know that Hillary seems to be quite adept at saying whatever her audience and public opinion want to hear in order to buy the most votes.

NPR interviewed one young lady, a New Hampshire independent, who attended Clinton’s rally last night and who had voted for her in the primary. The reason she voted for her you ask? You wouldn’t guess in a hundred years and even then you’d have to give up. She voted for “Hillary” because Clinton “broke down” and got choked up at one of her rallies. A definite issues voter there, what? Whether Clinton was acting or genuine, that’s a terrible reason to vote for a candidate.

EDIT: When I went to edit, the font got all weird. Odd.

So last night after I wrote this, I drove somewhere again which means, more likely than not I was listening to NPR. They were blathering on about Hillary's turn around and how her getting all emotional and saying how she had "found her voice" somehow made the "normal people" feel she empathized with them. The commentator had noted that many people had thought she was arrogant and acted like she knew the "Clinton Dynasty" (Which apparently means her) was "destined" to win, and thus were rooting for her to fail. Which was the real Hillary, I wonder? I tend to believe the arrogant, opportunistic represents her true colors. Aren't focus groups a wonderful thing? "Hey Boss, people think your arrogant and acting better then everyone else. You need to be more emotional so they see you as a human being. Survey says we'd pick up 15 points that way."

And what the heck is this "Clinton dynasty" thing? For a President the only dynasties I see are from families Adams and Bush. Maybe Roosevelt too (FDR was practically his own dynasty). In Ohio, Taft is a dynasty. In Missouri, Blunt might be. But Clinton? Give me a break.