February 2020 Archives

We citizens obviously want law enforcement agencies to have a strong incentive to catch criminals, and we shouldn't expect them to balance that incentive against our needs for privacy. We citizens and our elected representatives need to be the ones doing the balancing, knowing that we'll sometimes have to push back against the very people who work to protect us. The final paragraph in this article about a data breach of Clearview's facial recognition software highlights the tension.

Facial-recognition technology--which matches photos of unidentified victims or suspects against enormous databases of photos--has long drawn intense criticism from privacy advocates. They argue it could essentially mean the end of personal privacy, especially given the proliferation of security cameras in public places. Some law-enforcement officials, meanwhile, see it as a tool with enormous potential value.

They're both right. How to balance privacy against crime risk is a political question, not a law enforcement question.

California's homeless problem is almost over thanks to creative thinking by Governor Gavin Newsom.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave his State of the State address on Wednesday to a joint session of the California Legislature and told the predominantly controlled by Democrats body that of a new proposal that would allow doctors to write out prescriptions for housing as part of a five-point plan to combat California's homelessness situation.

Newsom proposed a "once-in-a-generation" Medi-Cal reform, which includes a $695 million budget request, according to Newsom's speech and the Sacramento Bee.

"Health care and housing can no longer be divorced. After all, what's more fundamental to a person's well-being than a roof over their head?" Newsom said during his speech. "Doctors should be able to write prescriptions for housing the same way they do for insulin or antibiotics."

I medically require a beachfront house in Malibu. Cleaning and maintenance work are harmful to my mental health, so I also need some servants.

The New York Times nails the subtext of my earlier post about the Iowa Democrat Caucuses: without secret ballots, have the caucuses been a fraud this whole time?

An hour after the caucuses began, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, huddled in another room with other officials, none of them with a clear strategy to manage the unfolding chaos or answers to share with increasingly exasperated presidential campaigns. A conference call with the campaigns ended with Mr. Price hanging up on them, amid accusations that caucus results in Iowa may have been incorrectly reported for decades.

As disastrous as the 2020 Iowa caucuses have appeared to the public, the failure runs deeper and wider than has previously been known, according to dozens of interviews with those involved. It was a total system breakdown that casts doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years. ...

"You always had to calculate these numbers, all we're asking is that you report them for the first time," Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders's closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. "If you haven't been calculating these numbers all along, it's been a fraud for 100 years."

Mr. Price ended the call.

It's time to end the caucuses. They aren't democratic, and it seems likely that they've been fraudulent since their inception. The new reporting rules simply revealed the errors that have been there all along.

The Republicans are going to get a lot of mileage out of Pelosi ripping up Trump's state-of-the-union speech. Here's a video of her ripping interspersed with clips of the outstanding American's that Trump recognized during his speech.

One of America's last surviving Tuskegee Airmen.

Scholarships for quality education.

Young leaders.

Comfort for mourning Americans.

A soldier's reunion with his family.

"I tore it up. I was trying to find one page with truth on it. I couldn't." - Speaker Pelosi pic.twitter.com/gRummbjsBq

— Senate Republicans (@SenateGOP) February 5, 2020

(HT: Powerline Blog)

Yes, the Iowa Caucuses were a disaster for the Democrats last night. But even aside from the execution problems they experienced this year, it's important to point out the biggest flaw of the caucus process itself: the lack of a secret ballot. Caucuses are explicitly designed to put social pressure on people's vote.

The Kremers plan to start caucusing for Pete Buttigieg. They say they like that he's intelligent and stands for what they believe. But what they like the most is that he can be a "healer."

"The world needs healing," Bonnie said.

They don't agree on their second choices: Jack said he prefers Amy Klobuchar. And when Bonnie said her second choice was Elizabeth Warren, Jack replied: "Don't forget you need a ride home."

The couple laughed and said they drove two hours from Fort Myers Beach.

Sure, it's a funny joke between a husband and wife, but there's absolutely no doubt that social pressure drives caucus behavior. It's undemocratic and should be eliminated.