Politics, Government & Public Policy: October 2003 Archives

I recently wrote, "We love the truth because our parents' generation is perpetually obsessed with style over substance, and most of the time they tell us that there is no real truth." Here's a perfect example.

WASHINGTON — A new left-wing think tank — the Center for American Progress (search) — unveiled itself Tuesday as the Democratic vaccine to what center supporters say is a plague of conservatism now dominating America.

"We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country," center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News. ...

"The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public," he added. ...

Podesta insists that conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation don't have better ideas, but are merely better at marketing. He said he is confident his center can take over the marketplace of ideas with notable innovations such as a big media staff that will push the center's thoughts onto the Internet, television and radio.

I think his perception of reality is incorrect, and many people seem to agree with me. The difficulty they're facing isn't that people don't know the their ideas, it's that people don't like their ideas. The Democrats tried this spin in 2000, 2002, and 2003, all to no avail.

Many Americans say they believe the media are already skewing left of center, and Washington doesn't suffer a shortage of liberal-leaning thinkers perched inside established halls of research.

The real challenge for liberals and Democrats, then, may not be getting their voices heard, but getting control of the White House and Congress, which most frequently frame the discussions.

As long as Republicans control both, Democrats say, few places exist in Washington for their ideas or marketing strategy to take hold.

Yeah. Al Gore's new cable news channel is built around the same theory, and I think both of these ideas will fizzle because of their shaky foundation.

Update:
Eugene Volokh has more along the same lines with regard to a proposed liberal radio show hoping to compete against Rush and Sean Hannity.

Nice framing: It's not that lots of American people choose to listen to conservative talk show hosts -- it's that the conservative message is being jammed down their throats. Vivid metaphor; too bad it doesn't quite match the reality.

Of course, "jammed down their throats" is a metaphor. But metaphors are used for a reason; while the speaker expects that readers realize the statement is figurative, the speaker's hope is that the reader accepts the underlying premise behind the figure of speech. When we say someone is a wolf in sheep's clothing, we don't literally mean that he's a large land mammal related to a dog, wearing wool. But we do mean that he's a figurative wolf (i.e., someone dangerous) wearing the clothes of a figurative sheep (i.e., someone unthreatening). "Jammed down their throats" figuratively means "forced onto people who aren't really willing to hear it." And that is nearly the opposite of how radio actually works -- people who really believe that this is how right-wing talk show hosts have gotten their influence are just deluding themselves.

It's not a surprise to me, based on my experience with high school kids, but apparently college students are becoming more conservative. Despite the fact that the vast majority of college professors are registered Democrats (cache), this new survey reveals that:

Perhaps surprisingly, 31 percent of college students identify themselves as Republicans, while 27 percent call themselves Democrats and 38 percent independent or unaffiliated.

"College campuses aren't a hotbed of liberalism anymore," Glickman said. "It's a different world."

The general population is significantly more Democratic -- about 36 percent of Americans consider themselves Democrats, 27 percent Republicans, 20 percent independents or third-party loyalists, and the rest have no preference, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. ...

Sixty-one percent of students approve of Bush's performance on the job -- higher than the president's overall national approval ratings, which have dipped in recent months and now stand at 50 percent in a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

I'm going to ask one of my high school-age friends at church to write a little bit about the political views of his peers; we've discussed the topic, and he might be interested in putting his thoughts down on uh... paper.

Meanwhile, as has been mentioned before, abortion is losing acceptance among women. Demographics seem to be turning against the so-called "liberal" Democrats, and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out. Most likely, the Democratic party will pull righward to track the population, but we'll see.

Tyler Cowen -- who drew my attention to this survey -- links to the survey itself.

Partial-birth abortions will be illegal, as soon as Bush signs the bill that the Senate passed 64-34 yesterday (the House passed it a month ago). In theory, this law will prevent up to 5,000 abortions of convenience each year (since, as Bill Hobbs notes, the AMA says the procedure is almost never medically necessary; Donald Sensing says that physicians have testified for years that the procedure is never medically necessary).

Considering that I view abortions of convenience as murder, I would have preferred if the federal government had stayed out of it and left it to the states (which generally prosecute murderers), but my affection for federalism is outweighed by the thousands of lives that will potentially be saved. Furthermore, many similar state laws have been struck down:

The measure is similar to, but somewhat more detailed than, a Nebraska state law that the Supreme Court struck down by a 5-4 vote three years ago. That ruling had the practical effect of nullifying 30 state laws. Up to that time, Congress had been trying unsuccessfully for five years to enact a similar proposal at the federal level.

My lamentable Senator, Barbara Boxer, has this to say:

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who helped lead opposition to the bill, called it "a very sad day for the women of America."

But, of course, she's only considering women who are already out of the womb, and has little concern for the women who will now not have their brains sucked out by vacuums and their bodies dismembered.

Along the same lines,

But an abortion rights supporter said the ban "will bring an end to providing the best and safest health care for women."

It will bring an end to the mass-murder of thousands of children. Physicians all seem to agree that this procedure was never medically necessary, so it certainly can't be required for the best and safest health care for anyone. Congress concurs:

In drafting the new national measure that has now passed, Congress wrote lengthy findings that contradict the Supreme Court's conclusion that abortions using the procedure banned by the bill are sometimes medically necessary to protect a woman's health. "Congress finds that partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother," the bill's preamble says.

The problem is that the abortion-rights people don't seem to understand that they're arguing a different point than most people are conerned with.

"This dangerous ban prevents women, in consultation with their families and trusted doctors, from making decisions about their own health," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Most Americans don't see abortion as a private issue that only affects the mother, no matter how much abortion-rights advocates want to spin it that way. They purposefully misstate the pro-life position, which is that an unborn baby is a human being, and that as such the medical privacy concerns of the mother are inconsequential compared to the right of that other human being to live. As I wrote in that earlier post:

2. Michelman states that the position of pro-life advocates is that the government should be involved in people's private medical decisions, when that isn't the crux of the matter at all. To an opponent of abortion, the critical issue is that a fetus is a human being, and as such should not be killed without a cause more substantial than mere convenience. It has nothing to do with a lack of respect for the privacy of the mother, or with a desire to interfere with her private medical decisions. To a pro-lifer, the decision to have an abortion isn't private, because it necessarily involves another person: the unborn baby.

For a really excellent scientific explanation of why unborn babies (from conception) are alive, and are "real" human beings (without any reference to religion), I highly recommend "Life: Defining the Beginning from the End".

And finally, "Who, after all, could consider a fetus as life unworthy of living, once they've held its hand?", asks Sydney Smith, a family physician, and author of MedPundit.

Best of the Web has a piece about anti-semitic Democrats that supports my earlier argument that Senator Lieberman will not be able to win the Democrat nomination because he is Jewish.

Update:
Fixed the BotW link.

An interesting knight ridder piece from a couple of days ago here with a choice quote at the beginning:

WASHINGTON - Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush - living up to his recent declaration that he's in charge - told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.

News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

This article may be complete fluff, I don't know - I'm sure every pundit with an agenda in there will either call it baseless and ridiculous, or use it as more "proof" we don't know what we're doing. While I personally think things in Iraq and Afghanistan could be worse (it could be raining), the political infighting about it and other things seems to be gathering steam. Another choice quote:

At one point, the senior official said, Bush himself asked how bad it was.

"This isn't as bad as (George) Shultz vs. (Caspar) Weinberger, is it?" he asked, referring to a legendary Reagan administration rivalry between the heads, respectively, of the State and Defense departments. One top official nodded in reply and said it was "way worse."

Again, not necessarily meaningful or true, but an interesting comparison. Of course, Reagan is god or something last I checked, so thats maybe a good thing to be compared to.

I'm a big fan of the federal reserve, and the fiat monetary system that we have in place, regardless of how I sound in some of my other posts. Regardless, the fed, more than anything in this country other than the Kennedy assasination, is the focus of a large amont of consipracy theories. Here is a page typical of the federal reserve conspiracy myths - I'm not going to debunk them now, though I will say that fact #1 is my favorite.

I bring this up because, unlike most conspiracy theories, I don't feel I have an answer to a lot of these questions or points. The main reason I like The Fed is that here, unlike in most south american contries, we don't end up with the government overtly printing more money as a nice little substitute for taxation. It's tough to be fully behind a system that even Allan Greenspan isn't actually for; he seems to be in favor of a return to the gold standard, but perhaps that's changed in recent years. Regardless, the whole situation is fascinating to me due to how complex it is, and how difficult it is to really say who is in control of the fed, and what kind of long term effects on wealth in this and other counties the fiat system has. Maybe I'm just a little drunk. Hey, at least I posted something on my weekend.

Oh, another good site, here . Short and sweet and much less crazy than normal. I'll post later on why I disagree with any of this, but I think anyone who lives in this country should understand the arguments against the fed.

I've seen a lot of statistics recently about how no one knows who any of the democratic candidates are, or that the democrats are floundering, or the democratic party will be dead soon. I find it kind of funny, because it reminds me of the way things were when I first started following politics seriously. I was fifteen, a rabid republican, but I did have some idea about one of the democratic nominees, someone named Paul Tsongas. Of course he didn't end up being nominated, that Bill Clinton guy did. He was going to get waxed anyway.

But in the end, he didn't. Now everyone and their mom has been talking about similarities between this upcoming election and the 1992 one, because of the Father-Son issue. But I think the state of the democratic party, and its nominees, is just as similar, and just as important. Really, selling the democrats short before they even nominate someone, no matter how ridiculous any or all of their candidates seem, would be a mistake.

Monopolies are bad! This is what I've learned my whole life. The Trustbusters are heros! Anti-Trust legislation protects us from evil monopolists, who are the antithesis of capitalisim, and singlehandedly destroy market efficieny. Good thing we have the government, as they protect us from them.

These are all things I believed, at least until I was 16 or so. But now I've realized that plenty of Monopolies are government created. Copyrights and patents, as we've talked about, are government created monopolies. But my new favorite government monopoly is the monopoly on printing money.

The gold standard is long dead, and currently the whole world works on a fiat monetary system. By some appearances this has had a lot of benefits - the buisness cycle has been more stable, and we haven't seen depression-type collapses (which had happened somewhat regularly before that, if at a lesser scale than the 30's). But there are other structural changes, such as to the banking system itself, that can probably carry as much credit as any fiat system. But the fiat system does guarantee governments a monopoly on money, one they admittedly had before that but not for the whole history of the country.

The fiat system, while working semi-acceptably here, do not serve the people, they serve the governments. Especially when the government has control over the printing of new money. Got debt? Print more cash. Oh, I'm sorry, "increase the money supply". It's free taxation. More money in circulation, everyone elses devalues. You're the government, you put the new money in your pocket. Its like you just taxed the people the difference between the old and new values of their money. Sound impossible? Look at South America.

I'm not going to propose any kinds of solutions to this here, or even say for sure it's a problem. There is still competition in money; China is causing problems because they refuse to change their exchange rate. But its all between governments, and is monopolistic per state.

Basically, the message I've gotten from the government is Monopolies are bad unless they don't understand it (Microsoft), control it themselves (money), or grant it (copyrights). The government is not, unfortunately, any kind of friend of capitalisim or the free market. While this is not the best example of their anti-market practices, I believe it counts as at least one. I can list off piles of them later.

My East Coast Connection tells me that Los Angeles transit workers are striking again, and this time it mechanical. So now we can't buy food or ride the bus. Whatever. The transit folks striked in 2000, and no one cared; I doubt this time will be any different.

Very few people ride mass transit in Los Angeles, when compared to cities like New York and... uh, other mass transit cities. Almost everyone drives cars, and luckily freeways can't go on strike (although they can get clogged with traffic).

I'm 100% in favor of workers being able to strike, and I'm also 100% in favor of companies being able to fire striking workers if they think that's the most profitable way to go. Workers who are truly underpaid and getting a raw deal shouldn't have any problem wringing concessions from their employers, because their employers will be forced to hire other people at market price to do the same work. If, however, employers are able to fire the strikers and replace them with cheaper labor, then the strikers were in fact overpaid -- just let the market handle it.

Of course, MTA (Metro Transit Authority) workers are nearly as well protected as direct government employees; they can strike forever with very little chance of being fired. That protection distorts the market, and it means that they will likely end up getting paid more than they're worth. But only if anyone notices they've stopped coming to work.

As I've written before, mass transit in Los Angeles is a joke (specifically light rail, but similar arguments can be made for other forms as well, to lesser degrees).

Bureaucracy -- the word sounds French because it comes from the French word bureaucratie. Donald Sensing has a great description of the problems currently facing France, and most of them are due to the strangling grip on power that the French government officials wield , and exercise with near autonomy. Rather than serving the people, the French bureaucracy exists to serve itself and the state.

He quotes Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffman, who is generally optimistic about France's future (more-so than I):

There are, of course, huge problems still. There is nothing scandalous about the attachment of the French to the thick social safety net built after World War II by an extraordinary coalition of Gaullists, Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats. But its financing, in a country whose population is aging, will require either higher taxes — bad for business and unpopular with all — or serious cuts — opposed by almost everyone.

The biggest issue is the reform of the state. It remains a formidable bureaucratic tangle of regulations, led by a very narrow élite educated in a small number of monopolistic grandes écoles. It is true that society has emancipated itself in considerable measure from that spider's web, that the state provides public services of great quality (such as a splendid public transportation system) [surely a great overstatement of social services’ quality in light of 15,000 dead in France from last summer’s heat wave - DS], and that the efforts of the European Commission in Brussels to introduce some competition into national public service are beginning to bear fruit. Nevertheless, the size and habits of the French bureaucracy pose two huge problems. The system of higher education is in many ways perverse (separation between the élitist grandes écoles and overcrowded universities; separation of teaching and research). The other problem is what makes a drastic reform of this system almost impossible: the state is, in fact, colonized by its employees and their unions, who resist change fiercely. A government that confronts them head-on is sure to fail, a government that tries to co-opt them will not get far. Change, here, will come — but slowly.

In America, we still view our nation as an amalgamation of individuals -- America has no meaning or existence apart from you and me. Bu Donald notes that in France, the state is an entity unto itself with its own interests to serve, which may or may not coincide with what the population wants. Rather, the government elite sees its role as forcing what is best onto the populace, who are too base and common to recognize it for themselves.

Whether you're inclined politically left or right, you're probably thinking that that's just the sort of thing we see here in America, but to a lesser degree (vastly less, in my opinion, but still there). When you give power to the government, it starts to take on a life of its own. Because of this tendency, I believe two things are critically important for a successful nation: government must be kept as small as possible, and must remain responsive to the people it serves.

As for the first, I'm a Republican because I think that party is the most inclined towards small government. President Bush isn't exactly an exemplary model, but I'm willing to let some of his more ostentatious spending slide due to the rather precarious nature of the world at this moment. A non sequitur? Perhaps, but there are more important things at the moment than fighting against his ridiculous prescription drug plan. Government should be small, and that means taxes should be low. The less money government has to spend, the less power it has; I'm not about Laffer-optimal taxation, because I don't want to maximize government revenue, I want to minimize it.

Secondly, both parties need to be more responsive to the people. The recent recall in California should stand as a stark reminder to our political class that, no matter how many years you've lived off the public dole, you can be taken down in an instant if you displease us. We can't recall you from every position, but you'd better remember who you're working for. I've been harping on gerrymandering a lot this week, and I think such corrupt districting is currently one of the biggest obstacles to responsive government.

The other major obstacle is our own bureaucracy. It's not as bad as France's disgusting, bloated, job-for-life debacle, but sometimes I'm afraid we're approaching that. Just consider the DMV; the last time I went in there, the lady behind the desk acted like she was doing me a favor for deigning to renew my license. In some sense, it's important for our bureaucracy to be apolitical, but it shouldn't be so independent that our workers are totally unaccountable to the people we elect to represented us. We all know that there's a huge amount of waste in our government structure, and our leaders should have the power to clean house when they need to. I'm convinced that we could eliminate 50%-75% of federal jobs without suffering any reduction of service.

I don't think that America is anywhere near the situation France is in, but I do think we need to be careful. As the French and other Europeans are so eager to remind us, we should be willing to learn from them -- we should learn what not to do. Big, powerful government doesn't work. It looks alluring on paper; many of the "liberals" in this country present some truly appealing ideas, but most of them can never work. Many of the "liberals" in this country know that their overt plans are doomed to fail, but that's fine with them because their real plan is to simply accumulate and wield power. Look to France for the ultimate end of that road -- you've been warned.

Eliminating the gerrymandering of representative districts is no easy matter, but the guy who initiated the recall movement in California, Ted Costa, is spearheading a (state) constitutional amendment that will attempt to mitigate the more egregious instances.

"People are hurting in California, not just because of Gray Davis, but because of the partisan gerrymandering and lack of leadership at the top," said Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who's heading up the effort with Mr. Costa.

The proposal would allow state legislators to submit redistricting maps for review by a court or nonpartisan panel. The panel would be required to choose the plan that keeps cities, counties and communities together with the fewest fragments.

Critics complained that the 2000 redistricting process saw the approval of a map where communities were splintered in the name of protecting incumbents. Only one of the state's 53 congressional seats was seriously contested in the 2002 election, according to the 2004 Almanac of American Politics.

"Right now, we have a bipartisan gerrymander in California," said Mr. Costa, chief executive officer of the People's Advocate, the Sacramento-based conservative anti-tax group founded by the late Paul Gann.

"Under our plan, both parties, instead of being all lovey-dovey, will have a chance to put their platforms before the voters, and you'll have a real election with real issues," he said.

I don't know how keen I am on having retired judges involved in districting, but I don't have an immediately better alternative. The results of such a plan certainly couldn't be worse than the partisan hack job most states end up with under current methods, and if the measure is successful in California it may spread elsewhere.

Note: Republicans hold a majority of state legislature seats now -- for the first time in decades -- so my objection to gerrymandering isn't based on my loathing for the Democrats who dominate California's Assembly and Senate.

A few weeks ago I was talking to Michael about intellectual property (specifically, patents and copyrights) and proposed that these things are artificial and probably completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, when challenged at the time I was unable to formulate any kind of an argument, other than, in effect, "just because something seems to have always been a certian way, or because you can't really concieve of how else it would work, doesn't mean it's correct or even necessary." Pretty weak, and not at all descriptive of how we would expect things like "innovation" or actual investment in new technologies to happen without patents, or for art and other activities, copyrights.

I've thought about the issue quite a bit more, and have not come up with any definitive answers. I have, however, put together some points of focus, questions that need to be asked, etc - organizing the problem and, I think, making the solution to the problem of "no IP" a bit easier to eventually get to.

Copyrights and patents are not that old. I believe the first patent law wasn't enacted until 1623, and the Statute of Anne was enacted in 1710. To say there was no innovation, or investment, or creation of works that would today be worth copyrighting before 1623 or 1710 seems to be incorrect. These facts don't really make any statement about the validity of copyrights or patents; You could just call them "advances in business technology" or something similar if you wanted, but I think it does demonstrate that the advance of technology does not grind to a halt without these concepts in place.

In effect, copyrights and patents are a state-created monopoly for a set period of time. But the necessity of this action has yet to be proved in any way. No one seems to think monopolies are good, so why would ones created by the state be different? Companies that create original products or works still have a period of monopoly - however long it takes for someone else to copy everything about it. In some cases, they are uncopyable - you can distribute all the CDs you want of a band, but you'd be hard pressed to form your own band, performing the songs off the CD, and draw the same crowd to your concert. For businesses, your monopoly would last as long as you could keep your invention secret, through obsfucation or trade secrets or anything other than government coercion. While I don't think that would last very long for most things, that doesn't mean that there would be no profit to be made, even after someone tried to copy you. Plenty of companys continue to compete in businesses where nothing they produce or do is covered by any IP laws, but they still find a way to profit.

I think a good (or at least popular) example of what may happen in the modern age without patents would be the software industry. Software patents are a very recent invention, and have been fraught with problems since their inception. Before their conception (at least in the US), we didn't have a shortage of creativity, new algorithims, etc, and the industry flourished. Perhaps it was just a young industry that, once it "matured" needed stronger IP laws. And of course they still benefited from copyrights if not from patents. But there is still no evidence that these things are needed. You do not need a copyright to sell people support for the software you make, nor do you need a patent on one-clicking or something equally ridiculous to compete in the marketplace. These are small examples and there may be a flood of instances where nothing would have been done without strong patent or copyright law, but I haven't heard of it.

Patents and Copyrights are, (unfortunately?) not universally recognized. The US has worked hard to push our IP laws on other countries, but it is far from complete. One statement Michael made was that places like China, who have weak to nonexistant copyright laws and patent laws, don't create anything. In regards to art, or other copyrightable material, that seems wrong. But most asian artists are forced to make their money through tours, personal appearances, and corporate sponsorship as opposed to CD sales. I cannot say if this is "good" or "bad", but I do not see a lack of innovation. With patents in china, while it is obvious they are behind technologically, I do not think it is fair to blame a lack of patent IP when looking at a huge, largely rural still communist contry in comparison to the western world. Historically, china produced a ridiculous amount of important technology, well before patents were in place. 40 years of communism, not patents, seems a much easier target for any blame on Chinas technological development.

The point of all this is really just an intellectual exercise, of course - plenty of people have said the same things I say here better. But they need to be said, and said again. Intellectual property is completely artificial, a relatively new concept, and, I'd say, unproven in its merits. The experiment to prove its merits is beyond me at this moment, but suffice to say development and creativity happened on a large scale before copyrights and patents, and I'd be hard pressed to believe it would cease if they went away tomorrow.

Although the methodology looks questionable to me, Harris Interactive conducted an "online" survey of teens and asked them what they thought about file sharing.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Results of a new Harris Interactive® survey show that two-thirds (66%) of American teenagers (13-18 years old) oppose fining individuals who offer copyrighted music online for other people to download while about one in ten teens (13%) believe that people who offer copyrighted music on their computers for others to download should be fined. Half of teens (52%) strongly oppose such fines and two in ten teens (21%) neither support nor oppose the fines. ...

In addition, the poll found that most teens believe that sharing and downloading of copyrighted music should be legal. Three quarters (78%) of them feel that sharing (letting other people download music from them) should be legal. Additionally, 74% of teens said that downloading copyrighted music files from the Internet without paying for it should be legal.

Why am I skeptical of the results? Well, online surveys tend to be bogus, since the respondents are self-selected (only people who are interested tend to answer polls they come across online), but near the end of the article it says:

This Harris Interactive survey was conducted online within the United States between September 17 and 22, 2003 among a nationwide cross section of 642 respondents aged 13-18 years old. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, urbanicity and region were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population.

I don't know what this means; if the sample isn't self-selected, and the survey just happened to be done online with an actual random sampling of teenagers, then maybe the results are ok. It's not clear, however.

But, if the results are meaningful, then the modern concept of copyright is doomed, because these kids will be making policy in 20 years. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it seems inevitable to me.

(Thanks MD.)

SDB gives a great description of gerrymandering, and I'd like to draw attention to my earlier post on the topic, and my observation that the 17th Amendment -- together with modern gerrymandering -- has nearly reversed the roles of the House and Senate.

Consider that before the 17th Amendment, state legislatures selected Senators for their state; members of the House of Representatives were elected directly by the people, but Senators were not. However, with the 17th Amendment and the current state of gerrymandering, the situation has almost reversed itself. State borders cannot be modified, and so Senators are elected directly by the people they represent, while the state legislature fiddles with the Congressional districts and in effect selects the party of the Representative that holds each seat.

In the 2000 election, 392 of 399 House incumbents won reelection (98%), but only 23 of 29 incumbent Senators retained their seats (79%). No single election is definitively representative, of course, but I believe these numbers are pretty standard.

This isn't going to work, I don't think. Looking around my apartment, I can't even keep this place vaguely decent, so I definitely don't have time to be updating a blog. But now that I've had a bit to drink I guess it's time to sit down and try. With Ahnold now The Gubernator, I think about how he potentially could be, for me, the closest thing to a perfect candidate I've seen in any election for a while, as he appears fiscally "conservative" and socially "liberal" (I'll explain the quotes in a later entry; suffice to say I find both titles ridiculous). His stances (or lack thereof) in this campaign made me think a bit about why I do not identify with either the Democratic or Republican party, even though I imagine most people I know would peg me as a Democrat - to me, both partys are trying to control our lives in unacceptable ways.

The Democrats want to control how we deal with each other. Political correctness, legislated charity (welfare, etc), some of which may have an arguably useful social purpose, but all of which has a political purpose. They try to form their utopian society through the engineering of society on a whole.

The Republicans want to control how we live our private lives. Now-defunct sodomy laws, the war on drugs, prayer in schools. I'll put in things like video game and television violence and/or sex here too, even though people now associate that with Joe Lieberman - trust me, he may be a democrat, but he's not a "liberal".

Interestingly, both partys for the most part (or maybe just in my mind) have developed a reputation of trying to fight, or at least lessen, the control the opponents have on their chosen aspect of society. But it seems, at least in this obviously Beamtenherrschaft age, that were sliding slowly into more and more state control, regardless of any recent changes or setbacks. The state will always strive for more control, and has not, in my opinion, come close to representing the will of the people in a couple hundred years. Not that thats a bad thing.

Continuing the series, Strategy Page has a post up about the "feminization" of the military (no permalinks).

October 5, 2003: There is a growing feeling among U.S. generals and admirals that the "feminization of the military" which took place during the 1990s has done serious and long lasting damage. This has expressed itself in many ways. The marines, which successfully resisted the worst aspects of feminization (training male and female recruits together in boot camp, lowering standards to accommodate women's different physical and psychological capabilities, forcing NCOs and officers to insure that women succeeded whether the women were capable of some jobs or not) are seen as the one service that successfully integrated more women into its ranks. But the marines took a lot of political heat for doing things their way, particularly when Bill Clinton was president. ...

Perhaps the most galling sign of a growing problem appeared when the Air Force recently ran an opinion survey among cadets at the Air Force Academy. Some 40 percent of the cadets, both male and female, felt that the physical and psychological differences between the sexes made complete acceptance of women in the military unlikely, ever. Among male cadets, twenty percent felt that women don't belong at the academy at all. The survey showed that the longer cadets were at the academy, the more cynical they became about all the rules and regulations in place to make sure women are "treated equally."

Bill Clinton has been raising funds and making campaign appearances for a lot of Democrats, but I'm not really sure why they're always so excited to have him come aboard. Here are a few pictures I collected off the web of Bill Clinton campaigning with various people who then went on to lose -- often spectacularly and surprisingly -- possibly due to the Clinton Kiss of Death.

Bill Clinton campaigns with doomed California Governor Grey Davis, 2003.

Bill Clinton campaigns with Vice President Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election.

Here's Bill Clinton with Walter Mondale, who spectacularly lost Paul Wellstone's Senate seat in 2002.

Bill Clinton in Florida with Democrat gubernatorial cadidate Bill McBride, who beat out former Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno [corrected] for the nomination, but then lost the election to Jeb Bush in 2002.

Bill Clinton campaigns with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as she runs for governor of Maryland, a heavily Democrat state, but she ends up losing the election to Republican Bob Ehrlich [corrected].

Bill Clinton and terrorist Yasser Arafat share a special moment. Ok, so Arafat hasn't lost any elections (you have to hold elections before you can lose them), but he sure has come down in the world over the past few years. He's now holed up in a mostly-destroyed office building, waiting to be exiled or assassinated. Update: Arafat has stomach cancer, so apparently Bill Clinton did have a positive effect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after all.

Well, the recall is over, so let's see how my predictions panned out. My last minute "out on a limb" guess was:

- Recall Grey Davis: 70% yes, 30% no.
- Arnold, Bustamante, McClintock: 50%, 28%, 20%.

According to the Secretary of State (ha, what does he know?!) my guess for the first part was way off, but for the second I was pretty close -- most significantly, Arnold almost did get a majority, and he got more votes than Davis did (via those voting "no" on the recall itself)!

Shall GRAY DAVIS be recalled (removed) from the office of Governor?
Votes Percent

Yes 4,337,066 55.2
No 3,531,967 44.8

Leading Candidates to succeed GRAY DAVIS as Governor if he is recalled:
Candidate Party Votes Percent

Arnold Schwarzenegger Rep 3,677,005 48.5
Cruz M. Bustamante Dem 2,415,693 31.9
Tom McClintock Rep 1,010,469 13.4
Peter Miguel Camejo Grn 211,038 2.8
Arianna Huffington Ind 42,404 0.6
Peter V. Ueberroth Rep 21,913 0.3
Larry Flynt Dem 15,305 0.3
Gary Coleman Ind 12,614 0.2
George B. Schwartzman Ind 10,856 0.2
Mary Cook Ind 9,974 0.2

Grey Davis is out, Arnold is in. Bob Mulholland, Democrat political operative, says that any governor in office would have been recalled, but he's insane -- Arnold and McClintock, the two conservatives, combined for almost 60% of the replacement votes. Mr. Mulholland says that President Bush should be worried, but it's hard for me to fathom why a Republican president should be scared when a heavily Democrat state overwhelmingly throws out a Democrat governor and a majority of voters vote for a Republican candidate.

The Democrats are threatening to sue already, citing complaints about finding polling locations and that sort of nonsense. Woopie.

From what I'm seeing, Prop. 54 -- which would have prevented the state from collecting most racial information -- has failed, but no hard numbers yet. That's too bad, but maybe the preliminary prediction will turn out to be wrong.

There's lots more news elsewhere, and I'm sure you don't need me to tell you where to go!

Yes, I have a huge grin on my face. I love California, and I'm really enthused. I know dozens of people who have left the state over the past few years because of the economy and everything else, and I really think this may be our chance to turn things around. It'll take a while to fix the state, but hopefully we can get on the right track now.

Update:
Cruz Bustamante concedes defeat, but says "we'll have more to say about the recall soon enough." I presume he means lawsuits, but uh, maybe he means he's just going to keep talking about it.

He's spinning the election as a victory because Proposition 54 was defeated, claiming that a law which would prohibit the government from knowing your race would somehow be discriminatory. Only in Democrat bizarro world.

And now Mr. Bustamante is naming a bunch of Indian tribes and leaders to whom he is thankful for their support. No, I don't think those are slot machines in the background.

What a sad, delusional concession speech.

Update 2:
Grey Davis is giving a much more gracious and relevant concession speech than Cruz Bustamante did. I'm so glad to see his backside, but it's hard to not feel sorry for him.

I've written about women at war previously; as I've said before, I don't think there are any good reasons for allowing women to serve in combat positions, and there are plenty of very compelling reasons not to.

I came across a post on a site called Equity Feminism that notes that when women recruits are held to the same physical requirements as men are, their injury rate increases by more than 100%.

Great Britain used to train men and women separately, with different requirements, but many women soldiers finished basic training without the abilities needed to perform their jobs. In 1998, the army began holding women to the same standards as men, and this change in policy resulted in the discharge rate due to training injury for women to rise from 4.5% to 11%, a jump of almost 150%. [Update: medical discharges for men were below 1.5%, according to the source BBC article.]

Regardless of anyone's opinions on the matter, women simply cannot attain and maintain the same physical abilities than men can, and as such they make inferior combatants. As I've written, in some circumstances (such as in Israel) every fighter is necessary -- perhaps because the population is small, or the war is particularly large. America is not in such a situation, and we have the luxury of keeping women out of combat roles in our armed forces. This policy improves the quality of our military in numerous ways (as I've outlined in my previous postings), and also serves a valuable social function.

Bill O'Reilly has quite a few interesting stories up on his site now, including an interview with Condoleezza Rice, and a piece about Mel Gibson's upcoming movie, The Passion. Plus, an interview with Arnold.

Now it's only fair for Mr. O'Reilly to have me on his show. Or at least link to me!

Don't believe the LA Times staff writers when they claim that the last minute, anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct by Arnold are just the result of the paper giving every candidate the "scrutiny they deserve"? And hey, those reports that Arnold admired Hitler? That's just standard operating procedure! Do you really think the LA Times is objective, or do they have an agenda of their own?

Times Editor John S. Carroll rejected the argument that the newspaper has an agenda against Schwarzenegger, noting that the paper had written comprehensive articles that detailed the arguments for recalling Davis, the large contributions received by Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante from Indian tribes and the minimal income tax payments made by former candidate Arianna Huffington.

"We have treated all the candidates with the scrutiny that they deserve, including Schwarzenegger," Carroll said.

"I expected criticism," he added, "but I'd rather have criticism for publishing it than the personal guilt of withholding it from the voters. We're in the business of publishing news, not sweeping it under the rug."

Interesting! And yet, when former LA Times reporter Jill Stewart wanted to run stories about Governor Davis' violent temper and multiple instances of physical abuse that sent at least one staffer to the hospital, well, those just weren't newsworthy. (Unfortunately, the LA New Times is now defunct, thanks to yet another LA Times hatchet job, so this link goes to a reproduction of Ms. Stewart's article on Free Republic.)

Long protected by the news media, the baby-faced Davis has been allowed to move higher and higher in public office despite his history of physical violence, unhinged hysteria, and gross profanity.

Perhaps you are among the millions never told of Lieutenant Governor Davis's widely known penchant for physically attacking his own staff throughout his career, from his days as chief of staff to ex-Gov. Jerry Brown to his long stint as state controller to his current job.

Davis's hurling of phones and ashtrays at quaking government employees and his incidents of personally shoving and shaking horrified workers -- "usually while screaming the f-word with more venom than Nixon," as one former staffer reminds me -- bespeak a man who cannot be trusted with power. Since his attacks on subordinates aren't "domestic violence," I need a lexicon that is more Dilbertesque. I propose "office batterer" for your consideration as you observe Davis in his race for the top job. ...

"I guess Gray's biggest lie," says his former staffer, "is pretending that he operates within the bounds of normalcy, which is not true. This is not a normal person. I will never forget the day he physically attacked me, because even though I knew he had done it before to many others, you always want to assume that Gray would never do it to you, or that he has finally gotten help."

On the day in question, in the mid-1990s, the staffer was explaining to Davis that his quest for an ever-larger campaign chest (an obsession that, employees say, led Davis to routinely break fundraising rules by using state government personnel and other resources to arrange political fundraisers and identify sources of money) had run into a snafu: a major funding source had dried up. Recalls the former staffer, "He just went into one of his rants of, 'Fuck the fucking fuck, fuck, fuck!' I can still hear it ringing in my ears. When I stood up to insist that he not talk to me that way, he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, 'Good God, Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing! Think what you are doing to me!' And he just could not stop."

Perhaps the worst incident was Davis's attack four years ago on a woman we'll call K., his loyal executive secretary in Los Angeles who acted as chief apologist for his violent "incidents."

K. refuses to discuss the assault on her with the media but has relayed much of the story to me through a series of interviews with a close friend. On the day in question, state Controller Davis was in a purple rage because an employee had rearranged framed bond-sale notices on his office walls. When K. entered his office, he shouted, "Fucking pictures!" and violently shoved her out of his way, according to employees who were present. K. ran out, broke down in sobs, and was briefly hospitalized at Cedars Sinai for a severe, stress-related dermatologic reaction.

According to one close friend, though K. suffered an emotional breakdown, she refused to sue Davis, despite the advice of several friends, after a prominent L.A. attorney told her Davis could ruin her. According to one state official, K., protected by civil service, was allowed to continue working under Davis from her home for three months "because she refused to work in Davis's presence." (Checchi's campaign needs a copy of the tape recording Davis left on K.'s home telephone, in which he offers no apology but requests that she return to work, saying, "You know how I am.")

There's more, go read the article. The LA Times didn't think any of that was important enough to report -- maybe because it didn't happen in 1975, but in the mid 1990s.

When Arnold is accused of "groping" by some anonymous women, why, that's front page news! But in 1999 when former campaign worker Juanita Broaddrick accused sitting President Bill Clinton of rape, the LA Times ran the story on page 16 and led with a denial by Clinton's lawyers.

Get a clue, LA Times; this is why you'll never be counted with the NY Times or the Washington Post. Those papers are liberal, but they're not completely disconnected from reality.

With all the carping Democrats do about Bush over the popular and necessary actions he has taken with regards to prosecuting the War on Terror, it's a shame that they miss some some of his truly offensive actions. The Bush Administration is refusing to take a position on illegal aliens obtaining US identification. This is a real security issue, as well as an economic issue, but the Democrats don't want to take advantage of it, so Bush gets away scott-free.

Bush administration officials yesterday angered lawmakers by refusing to take a position on illegal aliens obtaining U.S. driver's licenses and avoiding questions about its decision to recognize Mexican identification cards. ...

Critics say the cards issued by the Mexican Embassy are easily falsified and used by illegal aliens to establish residency.

Stewart Verdery, Homeland Security assistant secretary, was asked directly whether states should issue identification cards to people who are in the United States illegally.

"I am not aware that the department or administration has taken a position on that," Mr. Verdery said.

A frustrated Rep. John Shadegg, Arizona Republican, responded: "It seems to me the administration had better get a policy, pretty quick."

Mr. Verdery told the panel yesterday the card can be "reliable in some cases," which committee Chairman Christopher Cox, California Republican, called a conflicting statement and a "problem."

"I can't imagine anything more unclear than for Homeland Security to say it may be good sometimes," Mr. Cox said.

Hopefully Republicans won't by shy about criticizing this kind of absurdity; if Gore were in office, mainstream Republicans would be all over him.