fling93 loves fishies

The titles are links to the post's excerpt within this category archive page. The dates are links to the post's excerpt within its monthly archive page.

On Finding Better Candidates

I generally don’t have much to say about the Alito hearings, as I don’t have a strong stake in the outcome. As a libertarian conservative, I don’t view a conservative court as a bad thing per se, especially since it seems to me that the big mistakes the Supreme Court court made recently — Raich and Kelo — have been largely due to the liberals.

But I do have a few things to say about the whole nomination process.

The real lesson from Miers (and Katrina)

My DSL has been down, and I’ve just gone through a hellish week, but I just thought I’d say one quick thing over lunch about Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

It’s one thing for conservatives to complain about Harriet Miers not being conservative enough. They’ve been waiting a long time for this opportunity, and so it’s hardly surprising that reality fail to live up to their expectations. But when conservatives are screaming about Bush’s cronyism, well, that’s pretty amazing (see Stephen Bainbridge here and here, Randy Barnett here and here, Right Wing News, Jim Lindgren, Greg Djerejian, Powerline, and Michelle Malkin).

Of course, it’s not hard to see why. Katrina exposed former FEMA head Mike Brown as an obvious crony (I say obvious because, despite all the accusations of cronyism, I have yet to hear an explanation of why Bush thought Brown’s background actually qualified him for the job). Indeed, cronyism within FEMA seemed to extend much further than Brown. Which raises valid questions about the qualifications of Bush’s other appointees (like cockroaches or baseball players on steroids, if you see just one crony, you probably actually have a whole bunch).

Congressional Over-Raich

By now, you’ve heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in the medical marijuana case, Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich). They ruled that Congress had the power to ban the use of medical marijuana even in states that had voted to allow it. Now, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t play one on TV, and regularly reading The Volokh Conspiracy doesn’t imbue me with magical lawyer-like powers. So I’ll point you to this summary of the opinions from Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy and this very extensive but readily understandable analysis by Larry Solum of the Legal Theory Blog. But since those are long and most of you won’t bother clicking on them anyway, let me try and explain how I see it in my own uniquely flingalicious way.

The Factors Behind a Country's Choice of a Multi-Party or Two-Party System

This is a term paper I wrote for my Political Science night class in Comparative Governments (which was a big reason I haven’t been blogging). My wife thought this was extreme overkill for an undergraduate course at a community college (and yes, I got an A), but I was really interested in the topic, and this was the first academic paper I’ve written in a long, long time. Although note, I’ve since made some minor changes from the original paper to make it a bit more accessible and thus less academic.

There are a multitude of factors that affect whether a country becomes a multi-party democracy or a two-party democracy. They include the level of institutionalization of a country’s existing political parties, whether the government is a presidential system or a parliamentary system, the level of diversity in the country’s electorate, and the type of electoral system chosen. Comparing the importance of these factors is beyond the scope of this paper, although it appears that the last one is the most significant factor. It is, however, worth noting that the choice of electoral system itself is affected by several factors, including some of the ones already listed above.

Lovable Libertarian Losers?

Randy Barnett of The Volokh Conspiracy hits the nail on the head:

…I think that the…Libertarian Party has been very detrimental to the political influence of libertarians. Some voters…have been drained from both political parties, rendering both parties less libertarian at the margin.

Indeed, this is a point that I made earlier in Third Party Handicaps. Of course, unlike me, Barnett has readership, and so his post attracted a great deal of attention. So much that Barnett followed it up with another one that makes an excellent analogy:

Americans view political parties as they do their sports teams. Even Independents tend to root for one party over the other. Libertarians have defined themselves as a different team that loses pitifully — and Americans do not like losers. And when you say “libertarian” to them, they think you are referring to the Libertarian team. I think this is why many libertarian-inclined citizens deny they libertarians. That is not their team.

In addition, another point I made in Third Party Handicaps is that another side effect of the plurality electoral system is to push third parties to the fringes of the electorate. Which means Americans associate “libertarian,” not just with losing, but with barking moonbats who lose because they are raving lunatics.

While I echo Barnett’s calls for libertarians to join the Republican Party (I myself have been a registered Republican since college), I don’t see this as a satisfactory solution. First of all, libertarians disagree as much (if not more) about political strategy as ideology, and there will always be libertarians who value social liberty more than economic liberty, and vice versa. The split is there for a reason. Secondly, coalitions in the U.S. are too stagnant for the smaller partners to have that much clout. As Barnett says:

Rumsfeld, Iraq, and Troop Levels

Back on my snarky comment post touching upon Rumsfeld and troop levels, Donna from Pajama Pundits posted an excellent comment several weeks ago. I apologize for the incredible lateness of this response. I started writing it up, and then got caught up in other things, and then this started growing into a project all of its own. Hopefully this was worth the wait — not that I actually think anybody was holding their breath for this post, or anything.

Recap

For a quick recap, Gregory Djerejian wrote a post (one of many) criticizing Rumsfeld, specifically on how he refuses to increase the number of troops in Iraq to the necessary level to ensure security and provide the best hope for a successful occupation. One of the commenters on that post kept asking what possible reason could Rumsfeld have for not increasing troop levels if it’s such a no-brainer.

Those of you familiar with my Case Against Bush post already know that my response was that Rumsfeld and Bush simply don’t care all that much what actually happens in Iraq. After all, it matches the pattern of other policies, and as I responded to him, the most striking example is the tax cut:

Recall [Bush] proposed [the tax cut] during an economic boom, using supply-side arguments to counter critics warning about it being inflationary. And indeed, it’s designed as a supply-side tax cut, focusing on the higher tax brackets who are more likely to invest the savings to spur production. When the recession hit, he marketed the same tax cut as a Keynesian recession-fighter — yet spurring supply is counter-productive when you have a CapEx recession due to excess inventories. A clear case where Bush obviously didn’t really care about the actual real-world consequences of the policy. He merely picked whatever theory was convenient at the time to sell the policy that he wanted (and there are huge parallels to how he used intelligence to sell the war rather than to determine if war was the right decision).

Indeed, I have yet to hear a better explanation of why Bush would pass a supply-side tax cut to fight a CapEx recession. And in addition to explaining that case, it also explains many Bush administration policies like the steel tariffs, subsidy-laden farm bill, and Medicare reform. It also would explain the low troop levels — as well as the reason why Rumsfeld still has his job despite Abu Ghraib.

One obvious reason Bush and Rumsfeld might not want to increase troop levels is cost. Outside of a draft (and Thorley Winston has an excellent comment at Winds of Change explaining why a draft is a ridiculous idea), increasing the size of a volunteer army requires increasing the incentives to volunteer, which means an increase in pay, not just to new recruits, but to everybody already enlisted. Such a cost would probably require drastic measures, such as rolling back Bush’s tax cuts or Medicare reform. But these policies were prioritized higher than success in Iraq — just like Iraq was prioritized higher than dealing (militarily or otherwise) with more immediate and graver threats, like North Korea, Iran, and Al Qaeda.

And this is where Donna came in. She made a number of points, so I’ll address them individually, not necessarily in the order she made them.

South Park Nails the News Media

Wow, that was one of the best South Park episodes ever, “Quest for Ratings,” where the kids run a news show and are getting clobbered by Craig’s “Close Ups of Animals with a Wide-Angle Lens.” Parker and Stone have totally nailed exactly what’s happened to our media. It’s why I don’t bother getting my news from television anymore, since, as I’ve previously mentioned:

I think television is a truly horrible way to get your news. For one, it is incredibly time-inefficient. Not only can you read much faster than you can listen, you can also pick and choose what topics to read about, whereas a news broadcast walks you through a bunch of topics chosen by somebody else. Also, the amount of time spent wading past advertisements seems higher for television than for newspapers or web browsing…

Not to mention that it is a lot harder to speak about a subject objectively than it is to write about it objectively for the simple reason that it’s much easier to remove emotion and bias from a piece of writing than it is from a human voice or face…. Plus, images tend to be much more emotionally loaded than words and can probably distort your memory of what actually happened.

And that South Park episode shows another obvious reason that I overlooked. Television news is way too sensitive to the number of eyeballs watching any given episode. If there’s a slow news day, they get clobbered. There’s tremendous pressure to just make stuff up or stretch the truth ridiculously, just like the kids ended up doing to try and compete.

Indeed, just as CBS did.

Tabarrok on Social Security Reform

Still in the midst of NaNoWriMo, but more on that later (so far, so good). Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent in November, although I do have some thoughts on the election I’d like to share in the next week or so. In the meantime, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution says a few things about Social Security that I’ve long held. Namely that it’s a pretty sweet deal for past and current retirees. However…

…It’s today’s workers and children for whom social security is a raw deal. Even if the system does not go bankrupt, current workers will receive a very poor return on their “investment.”

In refusing to cut benefits to current and soon-to-be retirees the costs of any reform are forced onto those people for whom the system is already a poor return. It would be fairer to spread the costs to all recipients especially to those who have benefited from social security the most.

Emphasis mine. Perhaps stating the obvious, but it needs to be said. Reforming the system will inevitably involve pain, and we should strive to spread that pain around as broadly as possible instead of just sticking it to the younger generation.

In a similar vein, his co-blogger, Tyler Cowen (who, despite my vote did not win the election and thus I can no longer refer to him as our next president, <sniff>), is also guest-blogging at WSJ.com in a discussion with John Irons of Argmax.com, and they also discuss Social Security. Cowen is actually not fond of privatization and would prefer to make Social Security less like a pension system and more like “a system of welfare for the elderly.”

I’d be perfectly fine completely phasing it out of existence and letting welfare take care of welfare, but that’s a post for another time. Although personally, I myself never liked the term “privatization” for this situation, preferring “individualization” instead. But that probably has a lesser chance of catching on than “tax shift.”

Update 11/15/04

Updated to use a permalink to the WSJ debate. Also, Tyler Cowen elaborates on his opposition to forced savings.

I Voted For...

As some of you know, my final decision came down to, in alphabetical order:

• Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate and a barking moonbat.
• Tyler Cowen, a GMU economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution and The Volokh Conspiracy.
• Giblets. Giblets is… uh… well, Giblets is a very demanding Giblets, to say the least.
• John Kerry. Uh, I assume you know who he is.
• John McCain. You should know this guy by now, too.

And here’s my long-winded reason why I oppose Bush.

In case anybody was wondering about my final decision, I voted for Tyler Cowen, and here’s a little background as to why.

And you can see my support of Tyler Cowen on Technorati’s Bloggers’ Votes.

Random Election Tidbits to Tide You Till December

NaNoWriMo is upon me, and so I am unlikely to be posting much more until December. And given that I am increasingly convinced that the novel is going to be a worthless piece of crap (hopefully that’s just the perfectionist in me), I probably won’t post excerpts of it here (maybe in my currently unused LiveJournal, but no promises).

I still have a long to-blog queue, so rest assured I’ll be a-blogging a-plenty again in December, so check back then. But before I take my leave, let me say one last word on the election (who am I kidding, a helluva bunch of words). Let me first clarify my stance. Despite my Case Against Bush post, I do live in California, which is not a swing state, and unless the polls get really close here, I am most likely to vote for Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik (although I might still write in Tyler Cowen — or John McCain, as fellow SFBayBlogger and NaNo’er Rich Thomas is planning to do), not John Kerry. So I guess you could consider me in the “Anybody But Bush” camp. So I would vote for Kerry if I lived in a swing state.

Also let me further clarify my case by reprinting a part of one of my comments from Winds of Change:

Electoral Reform, Part II: IRV, an Improvement

In Part I: The Problem with Plurality, I illustrated the serious issues with our current voting system, plurality. If you haven’t already read it and are not familiar with Duverger’s Law, I recommend you read it first before continuing.

Here, I’ll discuss one of the better-known alternatives to plurality, Instant Runoff Voting, or IRV. One of its bigger attractions is that it’s relatively simple. There are only two things you have to understand: runoffs and ranked ballots. I’ll start with the latter.

The Case Against Bush

Update 12/10/04: You might be looking for Ron Suskind’s New York Times piece on Bush vs. “the reality-based community.” I wrote this independently of his piece, and while it’s somewhat similar, I don’t agree faith is as central as he thinks. Also, Glen Wishard comments at Winds of Change that the Union of Concerned Scientists is not a nonpartisan group, so I’m removing them as one of my examples. And the rest of the discussion over there is also worth checking out. Also added a tidbit on Larry Lindsey.

I know this is a really long post, so I’ve broken it down into smaller chunks, and I’ve included links to the different sections that you can use to navigate and/or bookmark for later (and I finally also added permalinks next to the headers within the post itself):

• Flip-flopper?
• Cognitive bias
• Blind stubbornness is not resolve
• Ignoring your own people
• Hearing only what you want to hear
• Opportunity cost and threat prioritization
• The Duelfer Report — no WMDs
• The 9/11 Commission report — no ties with Al Qaeda
• The real reason for the war?
• Contrast with other leaders
• What’s a conservative to do?

Anyway, I try to stay as nonpartisan as possible on this blog, and it’s generally not too hard, as I strongly dislike our plurality two-party system, partially because I’m a moderate libertarian who’s roughly equidistant from both parties ideologically. So I’m not really joking when I say that I plan to vote for Tyler Cowen, even though he’s not actually running (indeed, I did). But that’s mostly because California is not a swing state. If I did live in a swing state, I wouldn’t vote for a third party candidate. Unlike 2000, it’s already clear that John Kerry and George W. Bush are very, very far apart, and I think it’s pretty clear which one is better qualified to lead.

Unlike Dan Drezner or Armed Liberal (who have now both come off the fence), I won’t try to keep anybody in suspense. I’d vote for Kerry. And this is because I think there’s a very strong case against the way Bush governs. I think we are better served with a pragmatic leader who will listen to and respond to new information rather than “stay the course” no matter what.

Quick Thoughts on the First Debate

Just some of my quick thoughts on the debate. I already know I’m voting for Tyler Cowen, but I wanted to watch to see if anything interesting happened. Per Dan Drezner, The Washington Post has a full transcript.

I think it was a clear win for Kerry, both on substance and on style, albeit a bigger edge on style. It’s unfortunate that image and style will probably make the bigger difference, but as that was supposed to be an advantage for Dubya, this is a very surprising turn. But Dubya just took way long to think, seemed to be on the defensive, and did not look poised, once having a complete deer in headlights look after Kerry talked of the President’s plan merely being “more of the same.” He was also very, very repetitive (the wife remarks it’d be a good drinking game to do a shot every time he said “hard work”). He also looked a little too disturbed in the reaction shots to Kerry’s points, and seemed like he was often trying to interrupt Kerry, which gave the impression that he was worried about the damage being done (kinda like in A Few Good Men when Demi Moore idiotically says, “I strenuously object!”).

Cato... for Kerry?!?

Just a short tidbit today. Via Dan Drezner and The Shrill Blog (which, by the way, was co-founded by a former SFBayBlogger, Faisal Jawdat), Clay Risen of The New Republic writes on how the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian think tank, hates what Dubya has done to the country (subscription required):

Cato is on the outs with the administration. From its deficit spending to its regulatory record to the Iraq war, the Institute charges that the administration has betrayed conservative values, bankrupted the government, expanded federal programs, and made the world less safe. … In fact, Cato staffers and scholars are so fed up with Bush that many say they will sit out the election — or even vote for John Kerry. “Most people at the Institute have no plans to vote for the president this time,” said one member of the Cato policy staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There will be some votes for Kerry inside the Cato Institute this year.”

…its antipathy is indicative of a growing belief among the GOP’s fiscally conservative constituencies — not just libertarian ideologues, but big-business executives, small-business owners, virtually any voting bloc concerned with fiscal restraint — that Bush has been an abject failure. And, in a close election, that could make a difference.

I actually predicted this. Well, somewhat.

Show Me the Money!

This morning, I was listening to Forum with Michael Krasny on KQED discussing the issue of campaign finance reform. This was brought up by the controversy surrounding Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which I’m not too familiar with (although I was glad to see him endorse a voter-verifiable paper trail). But as you might have guessed, campaign finance reform is one of my biggest issues.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to cover the entire issue in my usual level of detail right now, so this is not as well-researched as many of my other posts, and I’m not going to be able to address some of the key points, like the free speech implications and the blind trust idea. But I wanted to cover some of the bases and announce a couple of events this week that you can attend if you’re in California, so bear with me.

Lobbying hinders libertarianism

Campaign finance is a pet issue of mine partly because of obvious results of lobbying that have resulted in outcomes that were not in the best interests of the American people, like sprawl, copyright law, tariffs, tax deductions, and subsidies. But more importantly, I see it as one of the two main obstacles to libertarianism (the other one being the plurality electoral system which discourages and marginalizes third parties). Yet most libertarians dismiss attempts at campaign finance reform. A common sound-byte I hear is that, “you can’t take money out of politics, so take politics out of money instead,” implying that people and corporations wouldn’t bother lobbying the government if it didn’t intervene so much in the economy.

Suburban Nation

It was actually sometime last year that I read Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. I was just browsing through City Lights, and it caught my eye, so I leafed through it. I don’t really know why (aside from the fact that it was prominently displayed). Sprawl has never really been an issue I cared about, since I had always assumed it was an issue for extreme environmentalists who want us all to live in sustainable communes, or rabid liberals who hate Wal-Mart and Starbucks.

But this book, which I very highly recommend, was very non-political and pragmatic in explaining why suburbia is simply not laid out in a way that’s very convenient or healthy for people. And it depicted sprawl, not as an issue of fighting growth (which is inevitable), or moving everybody back into the cities (which is unrealistic — people fled them for a reason), but more of a problem of how to design neighborhoods (in both urban and suburban settings) in an efficient and scaleable manner.

You Should Vote for...

Update 10/21/04: Okay, I’m seeing a lot of Google hits from people searching on “you should vote for.” If you want a serious answer, I have a much more substantive post here. This post itself is somewhat of a joke. For those of you looking for an answer of why you should vote, maybe I’ll write up something later (I figured the answer is obvious, but I guess not), but a short snarky answer is so that you can then have the right to complain about whomever wins. And complaining about politics is fun.

Well, not to disclose too much, but at this particular event, I did… um… mix my poisons, which led my mind on some rather strange paths (when I wasn’t busy dancing to the cool music and tripping out to all the visuals). One of the unexpected effects was that my sense of self-importance was greatly inflated (especially when I got my cute fishy balloon hat).

I think I’ll save the details for later (or maybe just for myself), but for one, I thought everyone there would see the hat and then go find my blog the next morning, because I was Neo, the chosen one. And thus I’d have the power to influence everybody to vote for the candidate of my choosing in November (somehow ignoring the tiny little detail that I’m in California, which is not exactly a swing state).

And furthermore, due to my blogging about the flaws of e-voting and the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail, I could now pick anybody I wanted as a write-in candidate — because you can write on paper (somehow ignoring, among many other things, the fact that H.R.2239 and S.1980 have not yet passed). So all I had to do was choose the right person for the job…

This Land Was Made for You to Sue

Well, you have to be living in a cave if you haven’t seen this yet, and if you’re living in a cave, you’re probably not going to be reading this site. Nevertheless, just in case you’re the last souls in the country to miss this, you definitely have to check out JibJab’s absolutely hilarious parody of Dubya and Kerry to the tune of the late Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” If you haven’t seen it, check it out. You’ll enjoy it no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.

Of course, this being America, the copyright owner of “This Land Is Your Land” (The Richmond Organization) is suing JibJab, and according to Eugene Volokh, they have a strong case.

Third Party Handicaps

Kevin Drum links to a R. W. Bradford article on the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate this year, Michael Badnarik, who has some very unorthodox views that seem rather paranoid. For example, he refuses to get a driver’s license because he doesn’t want to provide his fingerprints or Social Security number, and he also eschews postal ZIP codes. Kevin’s reaction?

Man, that’s some crazy stuff. He refuses to use ZIP codes?

Read the whole story when you have a few spare minutes and need a laugh. And a note to libertarians: this is why everyone thinks you’re a bunch of loons. What else would you expect them to think?

Well, I won’t try and defend Badnarik on this. Not to imply his behavior is indefensible, but the real point Kevin is making is that this stuff is so way out of the mainstream. And he’s right.

The spoiler effect moves third parties to the margins (link)

But this is exactly because of the two-party system. I blogged earlier about the spoiler (splitting the vote) effect inherent in our plurality electoral system. Look at all the grief Nader’s getting from liberals who accuse him of trying to hand the election to Dubya by splitting the liberal vote. This is an obstacle that any third-party candidate has to face. Even if a potential voter likes you, they know that you really don’t have a chance to win, and furthermore, that voting for you is likely to hurt their second choice.

So if the voter cares at all about the eventual winner, they won’t vote for you. This means that the only way a third-party candidate can attract any sort of attention at all is to be out on the fringes of the electorate, close to voters who are so far out of the mainstream that they hate both major candidates and don’t really care which one of them wins (note that Nader’s views are similarly way out of the mainstream, and that he is similarly being mocked).

Great Courses: Power Over People

Well, I finally completed the Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory on audio CD, part of the Great Courses from the Teaching Company that I blogged about earlier. I thought it was very enlightening and worthwhile, and I found Professor Dalton to be an excellent lecturer (although sometimes when his voice dipped, it was kinda hard to hear him when I was on the freeway, but note that ‘93 Saturns weren’t exactly known for their quiet ride).

I have to say the subject matter it covered wasn’t quite what I expected. I guess I didn’t really know anything about political science. I thought it would talk more about politics and forms of government, but I guess that’d be more civics than political theory. Instead, this course covered various theories exploring human nature to determine what kind of society would be ideal for humans. So there was quite a bit of overlap with philosophy, which surprised me. While I fully expected to see the lectures about Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hitler, and Gandhi, there were also ones on Thoreau, Freud, and “The Hindu Vision of Life.”

Political Weakness or Ideology?

There’s quite an interesting debate going on. Virginia Postrel is chastising other libertarian conservatives like Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner for leaning towards Kerry just to be fashionable. Levy goes on to explain why he’s leaning Kerry instead of Libertarian Party candidate Badnarik and also responds to Postrel. Julian Sanchez also highlights a few amusing responses.

I’ve been working for a while on a rather lengthy post on Dubya, so I have no intention of spoiling it by jumping into the Dubya vs. Kerry debate quite just yet (and besides, the longer you wait to make up your mind, the more receptive you’ll be to information). I will mention that I pointed out Dubya’s support for the FMA was throwing a political bone to the wrong conservatives — he doesn’t really need to worry about the social conservatives, but the libertarian and fiscal conservatives, since those are the ones he ticked off. So Postrel should not be surprised at the libertarian reaction.

But Drezner says something I do want to respond to:

Tyler Cowen supplies a counterargument. Some of it is compelling, but this part baffles me:

I look less at what politicians say, and more at what kind of coalition they would have to build to rule. The high domestic spending of Bush I take as a sign of perceived political weakness (“we need to buy more allies”), rather than a reflection of Bush’s ideology.

Huh? This is an administration that controlled all three branches of government for a majority of the first term — and they felt confident enough in their political position to piss off Jim Jeffords less than three months into office. Compared to most post-war governments, the Bush administration had fewer constraints on its governing coalition.

I’m a much bigger fan of Tyler Cowen than Dan Drezner (and not just cuz I’m a big fan of Fight Club and think it’s cool that the name Tyler Cowen looks a lot like Tyler Durden, only with a Cow instead of a Durd — um, that didn’t come out the way I thought it would). But I think Cowen misstated his point.

One for the Gipper

I’m not sure how much I can add to what’s already been said about Reagan, especially since I didn’t really follow politics that much back when he was in office. Plus, I’ve already written a good deal of what I thought of him in my reaction to the whole Reagan dime proposal and in my lengthy discussion of supply-side economics. But as you might expect, this won’t stop me from writing a lot more. In short, I think he was a very good, but not great president. Someone who was a lot more important to the Republican party than he was to the country (and even in that respect, I think Barry Goldwater doesn’t get his fair share of the credit). But Reagan was still clearly much better than any of his successors thus far.

Economic Record

Still, for those partisan Republicans who like to point to how much the economy improved, my reaction would pretty much mirror that of conservative blogger, Jane Galt:

I saw some Republican… saying that Reagan was great because when he took office, unemployment was 10% and interest rates were sky-high, and when he left office everything was boom-a-riffic. This is every bit as fine a bit of data mining as Democrats who make similar claims for Clinton — the economy sucked when he took office, and was booming when he left. When Clinton took office, the economy was already recovering from a recession; when he left, it was sliding into another one. That’s luck, not talent. … Similarly, high unemployment and interest rates under Reagan were not because Democrats Had Been Driving the Economy Into the Ground Until the Grownups Took Over. High inflation was the result of a dozen years of bad fiscal and monetary policy under two Republicans — Nixon and Ford — and two Democrats — Johnson and Carter — that was brought under control only when Paul Volcker, the Carter-appointed head of the Federal Reserve, jammed interest rates up to national-heart-attack levels and left them there until inflationary expectations were well and truly tamed. Reagan had nothing to do with unemployment and interest rates falling; that was the invevitable [sic] result of a drastic monetary tightening finally working its way through the economy.

Discouraging College Students from Voting

No, we didn’t do any traveling this Memorial Day weekend. But no, it’s not because I’m addicted to blogging, but because my wife, Erika, graduated from San Jose State University with a double major in Anthropology and Behavioral Sciences, plus a minor in Women’s Studies. I am so very proud of her! And a little jealous, since she got so much more out of her college experience than I did. Instead of diving into schoolwork (like I did) or just partying and cruising by, Erika got involved. And I mean involved! She has blossomed into an impressive leader, serving in a variety of student groups1.

She also served on student government while fighting passionately against the rampant corruption perpetrated by many Greek fraternities and sororities who leverage their powerful networks to land cushy high-paying jobs for themselves and their friends (apparently, a phenomenon that’s pretty common across the country). Arguably, not a far cry from what actually happens in our “real” elections.

Indeed, my wife, ever the activist, forwarded an e-mail to me revealing yet another example of the kind of corrupt politics from which the above Greeks probably learned their craft. The e-mail highlighted a Rolling Stone piece by Damien Cave, Mock the Vote, which details cases of many local officials discouraging students from voting in local and national elections. Sometimes they even use illegal tactics, like requiring students to vote where their parents live despite the fact that “[f]ederal and state courts have clearly established that students have the right to vote where they go to school, even if they live in a dorm.”

Electoral Reform, Part I: The Problem with Plurality

Update 10/23/04: Tweaked the images, plus I’ve finally finished Part II.

I’ve been carping about our two-party plurality electoral system for so long now that many of you are probably wondering what I would replace it with. This will take quite a bit of explaining and illustrating, so I’ll break it down into several pieces. The first step is to illustrate the problem. In Part II, I’ll start discussing some of the alternatives to plurality.

For those of you who browse with images turned off, now would be a good time to turn them on. Don’t worry, these are small GIF files, so this won’t be bandwidth-intensive. If the images are too small, you can click on them to get a closer look.

Okay, this is a representation of the electorate, from liberal to conservative, where each ‘X’ is a voter. I know there’s more than one dimension of political thought (the whole Political Compass thing), but what I’m trying to show would still hold true for two and three dimensions, which I’ll illustrate in a later post. I’ll stick to the one dimension for now, for the sake of space and simplicity. Note that there are more moderates than extremists.

With me so far?

March for Women's Lives

On April 25th (3 weeks from today), seven women’s advocacy groups will be marching on Washington D.C. in the March for Women’s Lives. I’m sorry I didn’t mention this earlier, as I had planned, but there’s still time to arrange to go if you are interested.

The march’s purpose is, according to their website, to uphold choice, justice, access, health, abortion, and global and family planning. Note, the march was previously called the “March for Choice”, but the name and cause was broadened to help bring several other groups on board. However, the focal point remains abortion rights.

New AFA.NET Poll

Remember the American Family Association Online’s attempt to gather a poll indicating opposition to gay marriage so that they could forward it to Congress?

There’s a recap of it at Alas, a Blog to jog your memory, but basically the results went 2-1 in the opposite direction that they had hoped, so they predictably decided not to forward the poll to Congress after all.

Well, they’re at it again, sending out e-mails to alert their members about their new poll on “Whom do you favor for the next President of the United States?”, offering Kerry, Bush, and Nader as choices. Unfortunately, my choice, the Libertarian Party candidate (it was Harry Browne in 2000) wasn’t listed, so I decided to pick Kerry just to piss them off.

As of right now, here are the results so far:

That’s right. Nader is ahead of Bush.

Of course, the last poll garnered well over 500,000 votes, so who knows? But clearly, somebody with a little lower-than-average computer literacy didn’t think to send the e-mails notifying people about this new poll to just the people who voted against gay marriage in the last poll (which was clearly their intent). I myself of course support gay marriage on libertarian principles, and yet received this e-mail.

Oops.

If you want to vote, click here (e-mail address required).

FMA a Political Mistake?

It’s interesting to see the different reactions of Dubya’s announced support of the FMA (constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriages, for those of you living in a cave). I’m not talking about the whole gay marriage debate, which has been going on for some time (and I weighed in here), but purely how people think of Dubya’s move in political terms. Specifically, whether it was politically motivated, and whether it will help or hurt him.

Because it’s an election year, most seem to consider it a calculated move designed to placate Dubya’s conservative base, which has been getting restless as of late. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post take that angle, and both generally seem to think it was a good move. The Economist thinks it’s too drastic a move for politics to explain it, which means Dubya is probably doing it for ideological reasons.

Me, I actually don’t see it as a politically savvy move, so I’m inclined to believe the latter.

Richard Perle Resigns

Hmm, nobody else seems to have picked up on this yet, but Richard Perle has resigned:

Richard Perle, a prominent adviser to the Bush administration known for his hawkish views on Iraq and other national security matters, has resigned from the Defense Policy Board, saying he wanted to avoid being a lightning rod for criticism of the administration during a presidential election year.

Perle submitted his resignation from the board — a bipartisan advisory group with no decision-making power — in a Feb. 18 letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated,” Perle wrote. “I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the president at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign.”

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed the resignation and said Rumsfeld has accepted it, thanking Perle for his long service on the board, which spanned 17 years. The resignation was first reported late yesterday by Knight Ridder.

The full text of his resignation letter is available here:

No Deficit Trap, Just Two-Party Politics

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (via Praktike from American Footprint, temporarily on hiatus), mentions the trap:

Some say that Bush created the huge deficits to squeeze government, to force cuts in public investments and social programs. Democrats who focus excessively on deficit reduction are falling precisely into the trap, especially when political timidity impedes reversing the tax cuts.

This is the whole “starving the beast” scenario. I typically hear this argument from conservative supply-side proponents (which Praktike and Stiglitz are most definitely not) after I’ve explained the Laffer curve to them (it’s amazing how many supply-side proponents don’t even know why it’s called “supply-side” and not “demand-side”). They typically retreat to say that at least the tax cut will constrain government spending.

Well, if that were true, why didn’t “starving the beast” work in the Reagan era, where tax cuts were accompanied by huge spending increases?

I think I know why…

American Presidential Candidate Selector

Well, I usually try to avoid memes, since I figure you can find those everywhere, but in this case, some of you are probably curious about where I end up (plus most of the other topics in my to-blog queue involve a good deal of work).

So I took SelectSmart.com’s 2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector quiz, and here are my results…

An Unforgettable Super Bowl XXXVIII

I think that Super Bowl commercial from H & R Block with the Willie Nelson advice doll was a lot like the Super Bowl itself. It started out boring enough, but had an ending that made it special (if you missed the ad, you can watch it here. You had to have seen last year’s ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox to get the last reference, but it’s hilarious).

And I have my usual rambling reactions. I’ll try to organize them as best I can…