Category Archives: Politics

We’re Winning (Not)

From Steven Thomma

A majority of Americans think the United States isn’t winning the war on terrorism, a perception that could undermine a key Republican strength just as John McCain and Barack Obama head into their first debate Friday night, a clash over foreign policy and national security. A new Ipsos/McClatchy online poll finds a solid majority of 57 percent thinking that the country can win the war on terrorism but a similar majority of 54 percent saying that the country is NOT winning it.

Well, we’re no doing well on a couple of other fronts: stupidity and speculation, either. The fault here is not with strategy but with language. There is and has been no “war on terrorism” because such a grammatical object is false. You cannot fight metaphor. Such thinking can only be reactionary as the war would be lost with a single person’s act in some small out of the way place.

Still in bizarro world.

Subtlety

Here’s a trick.

First you propose a plan that you don’t want. Get lots of talk going about it, find grudging support, then slowly ease in another idea that makes those who supported the first plan look like idiots and regulators. Those who supply the second option look like cooler, more rational heads, and provide a hole for the mavericks who opposed the first outright.

Bad Ideas

I’m no economist, but I have comment on a couple of things:

1. Leveraging is a really bad way to do things
2. Fannie May should be a public company
3. The new bailout scenario should have some outcome assessment
4. The burden of cost should lay on financial institutions (yeah, I know, good luck)
5. The fed should share some percentage of equity. This makes sense, doesn’t it?
6. We need some way of defining risk and rocking on it
7. We’ve learned a lot about wealth generation in the last few weeks; a lot of wealth just doesn’t really exist
8. Overpricing is a reality; I think there’s a deeper problem than greed here. I think what we’re seeing is a fundamental problem with contemporary markets. They grow and we have to cheat to keep up. It’s a simple syllogism: profit requires more and more growth. Thus the bubble metaphor.
8. Smart regulation by smart government is a good thing

I also find these ideas from Brad Delong interesting. Should we all own the financial markets? Hm, interesting.

Bailout Proposal

I don’t know why the New York Times has the text for a draft proposal, but here’s a neat bit of English:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Sounds like the logic of past actions of this government, filled to the sky with geniuses.

Politics and Lying

I disapprove of the current flavor of language (maybe we should call it a semantical ecology) that calls lying misrepresentation. Most “misrepresentation” is a form of cynical slanting, where a speaker or writer claims one thing knowing well enough that he or she is slanting. Dean Baker catches this:

Senator McCain claimed that Obama’s proposal would force people into a health care plan run by government bureaucrats. This is not true. Senator Obama’s plan would give people the option of buying into a publicly run Medicare-type plan, but this would only be an option. Under Senator Obama’s plan, no one would be forced to join the public plan, they would be free to stay with their current plan if they chose.

McCain knows that what he’s saying is a lie. The better thing to do would be to outline the real sense of Obama’s plan and then to present rational disagreement or objections to it, point by point. Speakers don’t have to live and breath by formats.

Of course, lying is a political habit now. Even Obama does it.

Fact Checking

From FactCheck:

Of course, we can’t say what Palin considers “major.” But if Palin’s own ethics reforms in Alaska were important enough to highlight in her convention address, then it’s only fair to credit Obama’s efforts on that topic. In 1998 in the Illinois Senate, Obama cosponsored an ethics overhaul that bars elected officials from using their campaign funds for personal use and and was called the the first major overhaul of Illinois campaign and ethics laws in 25 years. It also bans fundraisers in the state Capitol during legislative sessions. Obama’s Republican cosponsor Kirk Dillard even appeared in an Obama ad last summer describing Obama’s skills working with members of both parties to get legislation passed.

In Washington, Obama was instrumental in helping to craft the 2007 ethics reform law that ended gifts and meals from lobbyists, cut off subsidized jet travel for members of Congress, required lobbyists to disclose contributions they “bundle” to candidates, and put the brakes on other, similar common practices.

In addition, we already noted in a recent article Obama’s efforts with Republican senators to help detect and secure weapons of mass destruction and to destroy conventional weapons stockpiles around the world, and to create a publicly searchable database on federal spending.

Links in original.

Craziness

When Obama gets into office I hope he scraps this kind of crazy idea. The Feds can confiscate “information”? While interesting, I find the basis for the reversal opinion garbled behind weird and complex analogies.

The basic question holds: what constitutes reasonable search at the airport?

Ugliness

Dean Baker writes

There is something a bit obscene about billions of taxpayer dollars going to the country’s richest people, when average workers can’t afford health care for their kids.

Doninger, Free Speech, and Borders

Reportage from the Second Curcuit Court of Appeals is coming in on the Avery Doninger case, an item often in the post space here. This case is about relationships. These relationships should not be overcomplicated.

It calls for a rethinking by school administrators of their role in public discourse. It’s not about whether a student can or cannot call their school principles names on a weblog. If a student does call their teacher or principle an asshole, then this provides an opportunity for the teacher or the principle to engage: “Why are you calling me an asshole?” That’s a starting point. On Twitter, I asked a question about Facebook semiotics. This was a serious question. On Facebook, I have students in my course who have added me as a friend, a term that has numerous meanings. These students have made the choice to add me to their lists. I typically accept their call. But this is potentially dangerous for them. Soon, they may want to retract because part of my role as instructor is to evaluate their performance.

But the student may also evaluate mine. Is it proper for a student on Facebook or in their own weblog to call me an asshole? Sure. Would my feelings be hurt? Sure. Honestly, who “wants” to be called an asshole without compensation? But it would provide me an opportunity. “Why are you calling me an asshole when I basically performed my function: which was to evaluate your performance? This is a function the student has agreed to in their role as someone who’s basically asked and paid for it. The opportunity comes with the response: “Why did you claim that I used too many generalizations or did not back up my conclusions about Romanticism with evidence from the texts” or “I thought I had supplied sufficient logic yet you claimed that paragraph 3 needed development.” These questions I can deal with, in private or in public.

People generally know that what they say on Facebook is public within the Facebook context. Same goes for the weblog.

The Doninger case is a waste of litigation space: can we not engage each other in real disputation? Again, I make a call. Administrators should not be out to enforce boundaries. They should have engaged the student in her comment space. They should have made their case in public using their own fingers. That’s what keyboards are for. For practicing classical speech! This is what I mean:

The school officials’ attorney, Thomas R. Gerarde, argued that the Internet has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate, allowing them to reach hundreds of people at a time. If a student leader makes offensive comments about the school on the Internet, the school should have the right to act, said Gerarde, who represents Mills Principal Karissa Niehoff and former Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz. “We shouldn’t be required to just swallow it,” he said.

I disagree that the internet “has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate.” The same cause and effect relationship could have resulted from a slip of paper passed around in the cafeteria. Should the school have the right to act? Please: why is this not fallacious in that Gerarde’s assertion assumed a narrow definition of “act.” It did have the right to act in all kinds of ways. Officials have the right to comment on a student’s weblog now, at this moment, to ask simple questions: “Yes, we did make the decision to ‘Cancel’ (record correction provided by Andy Thibault [thanks, Andy]) Jamfest. Why does this make us douchbags?

P.S.: Correction added.