Category Archives: Politics

Frustrations

Tonight, Bill Moyers is redoing the journal on the press’ role in the lead-up to the invasion. Ink quantity, pressure, passivity, information suppression. It’s very frustrating to hear the excuses. The doubters were placed on the back page. Those who had all he opportunity could have made the calls.

I feel now as I did then: it should have been easy to say no.

Brain Drain

Spazeboy comments on a proposal by Rep Tim O’Brien that would hope to keep graduates in the state by offering them “savings” incentive:

While I think this plan will do a lot to keep young college graduates in the state, I also think it will make it easier for more adults to go back to college. Surely they are planning to stay in the state, but may not be able to afford college along with all the other expenses of running a household–especially earning wages at a job that doesn’t require a degree. It sounds to me like O’Brien’s proposal would allow for CT residents to go to college and get better jobs, regardless whether the fickle youngsters decide to stay in the state.

There are a few problems I have with this. The first goes to the reason why graduates leave the state in the first place: it’s not because of the costs of an education, but because staying hurts more than leaving. How will the incentive address the question of in-state innovation at the environmental, cultural, social, and economic level? People would stay in CT if they had the opportunity, wouldn’t they, or if “place” convinced them to: re the cool factor?

Secondly, the incentive is weak in that it removes choice and “punishes” people for what may be a necessity. What if the field calls me to Arizona? If I leave the state, I’m pretty much in the same boat as now, having to pay my college costs, but if I stay, I may or may not be able to work at a particular level of income and impact. India may call anyway.

Thanks, Beau, for the heads up.

Politics and Journalism

This article by Peter Wallsten from the Los Angeles Times and printed in The Hartford Courant is typical of what I would call “political or horse-race reporting.” It’s also reflective of news programming that concentrates of political strategy and campaign instruction, which may be a new idiom of the art.

Here are some features that describe the idiom:

1. Content is typically inconsistent with the headline
2. Content reflects party activity as the subject of the report
3. Quotes are reported as if they “were” the news

Let’s look at this a little more closely. The headline reads: “Democrats Get Tougher On Illegal Immigrants.” The first paragraph reads:

Top Democratic elected officials and strategists are engaged in an internal debate over toughening the party’s image on illegal immigration, with some worried that Democrats’ relatively welcoming stance makes them vulnerable to GOP attacks in the 2008 election.

While the headline suggests actual changes in policy positions by the Democrats, the first paragraph focuses on “the party’s image.” The debate is not about actual policy, but about a “toughening of the party’s image on illegal immigration” or what Wallsten refers to as “calibration.” The problem for this shift in “image-but-not-actual-policy” comes from “election results”:

Advocates of the change cite local and state election results last week in Virginia and New York, where Democrats used sharper language and get-tough proposals to stave off Republican efforts to paint the party as weak on the issue.

In Virginia, for instance, where Democrats took control of the state Senate, one high-profile victory came in the Washington suburbs, where the winner distributed mailings in the campaign’s closing days proclaiming his opposition to in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

In the article, Wallsten does call up one example of actual policy change that shows evidence that more than image politics is at play. He writes:

In Congress, a group of conservative Democrats, led by freshman Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, introduced legislation last week calling for more Border Patrol agents and a requirement that employers verify the legal status of workers. The proposal does not include measures to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal workers, which in the past have been supported by Democrats nationally.

Significant here is the item left off the agenda which meets the theme of recalibration within the horse-race narrative: the “path to citizenship.” There is a missing context here though as to why the legislation is a “toughening” move and not “good or bad policy” when measured or evaluated against a list of standards: more agents (there are not enough) and “verification requirement” (verify how?). It would seem that this paragraph should form the bulk of the report if indeed the article were “about” the headline.

But then we bleed back into the “narrative”:

With polls showing broad discontent with the government’s handling of immigration, some Democrats are arguing that there are areas in which the party can toughen its image without moving too far away from its traditionally pro-immigration leanings – such as supporting heightened security at the Mexico border, opposing benefits for illegal immigrants and pushing for harsher penalties against businesses that hire illegal workers. (bolds mine)

I don’t understand the concluding list and why these “positions” constitute “pro-immigration leanings.”

The report is about demagoguery not about policy.

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Science Questions

Chris Mooney asks some good questions

As a prerequisite, the next president must grasp how science flows into a democracy at all levels. Whoever wins the election—man or woman, Democrat or Republican—will face profound science-based challenges and questions. Will space become militarized, or remain a neutral zone of unfettered international access? Will we successfully protect our populations and cities from the threats of nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as from emerging pandemics? Can we bring the AIDS crisis in Africa under control? How can we foster continuing biomedical advancement without crossing moral lines?

Will there be enough jobs available to employ the nation’s scientists? If foreign researchers are better qualified for those jobs, will they receive visas so that US companies can benefit from their skills? And what of research in areas of pure science? As Europe’s Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva—the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—heads toward a slated May 2008 startup, will the US revisit the idea of building its own collider, and willingly take on that next phase of research into the very nature of matter? More important, will the next president understand the significance of such scientific questing? And if so, will he or she also know how to tell that story to the public?

Numbers Game

Much of the talk at Congress over the past couple of days has been about numbers and, I must contend, vague expression about this or that strategy. Some argue that al-Maliki has to do honest business with Sunni Arabs and that Saudi Arabia must keep speaking to Iran and vice versa, another Sunni/Shiite issue (to generalize).

But what I take from the Petraeus transcript is a disarticulation of relationship between the “administration” and life on the ground, both for the soldiers and Iraqis. Troop reduction means what to them? How can normality be defined and by whom?

On the Subject of Reality

Since we’re on the subject of reality, here’s a way of putting it together. From Juan Cole:

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn’t actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.

The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn’t paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

There are numerous important links at the source. He has an important factual repeat:

Repeat: US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and that is not a reason to support the troop escalation. And, violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the surge. Violence is way up this year.

Immigration and Hypertextuality

My thoughts on borders come from my experience growing up in the US/Mexico region. The facts are that neither Ciudad Juarez nor El Paso could flourish without each other; they’re linked territory where the idea of “country” and “state” has always been blurred. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t aware of difference, boundary, and color. On the border, color and difference can be striking. When push comes to shove, however, most people realize that tensions are real but that symbiosis is also a reality.

The nearest city to El Paso is Juarez, Mexico and most people that I know in El Paso have a pretty wide territory that circles into New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico, a very different regional sense than in New England. This spatial sense makes immigration policy difficult normalize. We shouldn’t come at international relations from a “policy” perspective. We should, indeed, avoid policy altogether.

Protect (Fool) America Act

The title of this writing is the alternative title of the recent FISA update, which redraws the terms of surveillance to fit the needs of the curent “administration.” Definitions, rather than logic, form the bricks of rhetoric. Logic isn’t necessarily required to convince a reader or listener that an action is or is not sound, but both logic and definitions can be manipulated to convince. or persuade. Congress can certainly bound the definition of or supply example of actions that must not be construed as illegal surveillance. S.1927 puts it this way:

`Sec. 105A. Nothing in the definition of electronic surveillance under section 101(f) shall be construed to encompass surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.

101(f) of the US Code defines electronic surveillance like this:

(f) “Electronic surveillance” means—
(1) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes;
(2) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the United States, without the consent of any party thereto, if such acquisition occurs in the United States, but does not include the acquisition of those communications of computer trespassers that would be permissible under section 2511 (2)(i) of title 18;
(3) the intentional acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes, and if both the sender and all intended recipients are located within the United States; or
(4) the installation or use of an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.

Real back-door stuff because it introduces ways of circumventing the older definition (how does the definition of “reasonable expectation of privacy” change now if the receiver or sender is outside the US). Communication in this sense is between networked people. We now live in a world of government controlled listening and we can’t even build schools. We already know that the neighbors are watching. (Seen the commercials?)

All this is too much like Babylon 5’s Earth Watch.

In the context of government rigged congressional performances, such as those put on by Joe Lieberman, the new wildlands of bill writing is bad news for all of us.