Centerfield

10 Days of Substance

"Ten days of substance. That's all we ask."

So writes Jamison Foser in his Open Letter to the "Gang of 500". Ignore for a moment the left-wing nature of the source, because it's a damn good read for anyone who cares.

No, the American people know what is important. Iraq is important. Capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is important. Keeping America safe, securing our ports, and preventing future attacks are important. The growing gap between rich and poor is important; the fact that millions of Americans lack health care is important.

The American people know these things are important -- and they tell you that every time you ask. You pick the poll, any poll you want: We guarantee you the poll shows that people think these things are important.

You won't find much evidence that the pressing questions on their minds have anything to do with Hillary's hair, or whether Pelosi's "San Francisco looks" turn them off, or whether the latest political ad "goes too far."

Party Discipline

Arizona has a large and growing number of independant votes. They're even worthy of a recent NYT article. You could, therefore, comfortably assume that fact would "encourage" party leaders to "give a bit" at the edges in the hopes of pulling in the independant voters to your candidates come election time.

With that in mind, I find this recent action on the part of the AZ Republican Party a little baffling. As outlined in a recent Arizona Republic article

GOP leaders from Legislative District 4 on Friday called for the resignations of three West Valley mayors, all registered Republicans, because of their endorsement of Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat.

A little background: Napolitano, a moderate Democrat, after a successful and popular first term, is seeking re-election. Potential, well known Republican candidates (i.e. conservative Rep. J.D. Hayworth, moderate former Attorney Aeneral Grant Woods) opted not to run due to the Governor's high approval ratings. The state party chair, Matt Salmon, a conservative Republican not known for his "big tent" viewpoint, lost to Napolitano in the last election. The present Republican candidate, Len Munsil, made his name as a conservative Christian/cultural warrior. Everyone assumed he'd appeal to that wing of the party but have little chance of appealing to the broader, more moderate Arizona electorate. So far the polls bear out that wisdom.

Friday's move by GOP activists underscores deep fissures in the Republican Party, political observers said. Conservative members hope to pressure those holding more moderate views to remain silent in deference to Len Munsil, Napolitano's Republican challenger. City council, school board and other local elected offices traditionally are nonpartisan. But District 4 party leaders said they followed orders from Arizona Republican Party Chairman Matt Salmon in demanding the resignation of any GOP elected official who endorsed a candidate from another party. On Friday, District 4 GOP leaders hand-delivered letters to the offices of Mayors Elaine Scruggs of Glendale, Joan Shafer of Surprise and Ron Badowski of Wickenburg, demanding that they step down for publicly supporting Napolitano

What does party discipline mean in a ever more independant electorate? To use an analogy from a previous post, are the present homeowners better off enforcing the strict rules of the group or are they better off playing a little loose with the association rules in the hopes of attracting an ever wider number of members?

UPDATE It just go nastier.

Standing Up Against The Man

Georgia resident Roy Johnson is fighting his subdivision for the right to keep a 20-foot flagpole with Old Glory on his front lawn. From today's front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Americans love the flag, but few show their love as passionately as Roy Johnson of Newnan.a Coweta County subdivision..."I've got flags everywhere," boasts the 37-year-old truck driver.

Including one on a 20-foot pole a few steps from the front door of his home in a Coweta County subdivision.

The flagpole violates the subdivision's policy on exterior structures — and must come down.

"It's kind of a cut-and-dry case," said Stephen A. Winter, an attorney for the Avery Park Community Association. "The association said, 'No, we don't allow flagpoles.'"

The association has threatened to fine Johnson $25 a day, hire someone to take down the flagpole or sue him.

...

Johnson, though, is ready to defend his flagpole.

"If I have to go to the Supreme Court, that's where it's going," he said. "Because I'm not backing down. And I'm not taking down that flag."

Observations:

1. This is page one above-the-fold news? What a rag.

2. According to the article, Johnson claims The Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 protects his right to the flagpole. The law states that homeowner associations can't outlaw flag displays but can impose "any reasonable restriction pertaining to the time, place or manner of displaying the flag of the United States necessary to protect a substantial interest" of the association.

Granted, this is not the most important use of Congressional time and attention, but it's better than nothing.

3. Are his neighbors mindless jerks, or what? My old condo association once sent me a letter for violating the rules about window screens. The President admitted no one had complained, but that he lacked the discretion to not enforce the covenant. I utterly disagreed. When I became condo president (my punishment for going half-drunk to the annual meeting), my policy was to send a violation notice only if a neighbor complained.

If I lived in Johnson's neighborhood, I'd immediately start a petition drive to change the Assocation rules to permit flagpoles with American flags.

And I hope he keeps fighting and wins.

Creepy Romanticism About Rightist Militias

Here's a piece that seems overromantic about rightist militias. Few (including the ones in Latin America he's so rosy about) show a record of warring on behalf of civil society. In fact, their record, captured in numerous articles, books, and movies I'm at a loss to see how he missed them, is utterly awful. It's about equal to leftie or religious militias.

Highlight: o They do tend to kill the opposition killers, which is a plus, but they also:

Lowlights o Kill moderates, and just about any other non-member when they get bored. Or members, during power struggles.
o Form roadblocks, preventing travel and commerce.
o For entertainment, kill, mutilate, rape, burn, torture, and just about anything else nasty they can think of.
o They especially love to kill learned people like the author of the essay, just for the sense of power (e.g., he'd be first against the wall).

A choice quote:

But death squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident. That period was a bit further back in the past for the French, the English, and the Americans. But no nation can be shown to have reached the rule of democratic law without it. The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization. That crime is indeed a crime, and its perpetrators must stand trial for it, whether before God or some human tribunal. But it is possible that true civil self-government can only be established with its aid.

"...kill some local dissident." He sounds a little unclear on how this democracy thing works. The key to civil society is not violence, but the establishment of nonviolent systems of competition and conflict resolution. E.g., courts, commercial competition, etc..

If death squads are so absolutely necessary, why can't he give even one specific example? As, for example, English subjects being given first court systems where the accused have basic rights, and England establishing a decent trade-based economy, both before going democratic. As in Athens.

Chester read it rather uncritically, I fear.

It's almost as if the US and Iraqi governments read Turner's article as a script:

Tank cannons boomed out over the city five times in rapid succession Wednesday, and U.S. F-16 jet fighters screamed low overhead as the conflict in Sadr City continued into the day.

There's a huge difference between a death squad and our army. With certain notable exceptions, that get addressed rather publicly, our army enforces civil rule. The militia just gets violent.

It's Friday

Look! An open thread!

Choosing Words Carefully

Talk show host Melanie Morgan appeared on Hardball last week with this gem:

MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…

MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?

MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…

The word "blitz" has many harmless meanings (football blitz, media blitz), but as a war tactic, Morgan is referring to the Nazi blitzkrieg and the Nazi bombing campaign against the citzens of London. Her prescription for military tactics is debatable. Her choice of words is revolting.

To his credit, Matthews did not respond with "get off my show, you Nazi-loving bitch." Instead he exposed her nonsense for what it is:

MATTHEWS: Wasn’t the problem…I don’t know about that….wasn’t the problem that the army that was supposed to face us in the field sort of melted back into the cities? Took off their uniforms and disappeared. So who would we have fought? I remember—we all remember—those first couple of weeks, it was relatively calm, the statues were coming down. I thought then I was wrong all along, the president was right. For a couple of weeks, I thought “God, he was right. It is going to be easy; they do want us to come in as liberators,” and then it began to slowly creep back. All the people in the military on the other side, with their uniforms gone, start building IEDs.

Here's my question: Why did Morgan choose the word "blitz"?

(A) She's a Nazi-loving bitch.

(B) She believes that using a thinly veiled Nazi reference is exactly the sort of colorful, entertaining, bat-shit craziness that wins her notoriety and gets her invited on television.

(C) She is not aware of the Nazi connotations of the term.

(D) I'm reading way too much into this.

I guess "B" with a tiny little helping of "A"(changed my mind after posting).

Bonus question: what size balls does it take to get on t.v. and proclaim "We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII"?

Lancet / Burnham,Lafta,Doocy,Roberts Article Thread

Lancet / Burnham et al Article Thread

Thread Lancetabout Lancet studies.

My opinion is complicated.

I don't believe the overall death projections. It's too far at variance with with other surveys, like UNDP and Iraqi Body Count.

Clusters are intrinsically vulnerable to sampling error, especially for guessing levels of quantities that vary by orders of magnitude across the survey. Note that in the first one, they threw a cluster because it was so high. And they did understand the problem, because they put the data through rather alot of stages to try and deal with it. But since the result is quite far from others, I feel they probably failed.

They had a sample population of roughly 12,000 out of the total population of 27,139,584. Suppose (to oversimply drastically) there were 2,000 total deaths in a couple of neighborhoods in Fallujah, of which, say, 90 were seen by the survey. Say 10 deaths were seen elsewhere in Iraq, representing 10 * (27,139,584/12,000) = 23,000 deaths spread uniformly over Iraq.

The death rate would then be (deaths seen / total study pop) = (100 / 12000) = 0.8% death rate. There'd then be 0.8 * 27,139,584 = 230,000 projected deaths, all but 25,000 of which are really phantom, resulting from the 90 deaths seen of the mere 2,000 deaths in the hard 'hoods in Fallujah.

Of course, there are really several such high-death spots, not just one in Fallujah, or the study probably wouldn't've seen them. The key here is that high-mortality regions are probably highly concentrated, just like in NYC or LA in the 70s. And many observers on the ground do tend to talk in terms of smallish high-risk areas.

Also, I think we have to be skeptical about the death cause stats, since unlike deaths, the word of the surveyed was taken for that, and plenty of the enemy must be included in the sample.

On the other hand, there is enough evidence here to support an assertion I've read plenty, but never before seen backed up numerically: things are getting worse in some parts of Iraq, e.g., in those bad areas. Notice that, according to the paper, Iraq Body Count's and MNC's numbers also show increasing death rates. Is ethnic cleansing from militias getting worse?

Some interesting responses here and here, and here

Missouri Voter Fraud

As usual, rampant. But it's getting dirtier than usual sooner than usual.

ACORN Accused of Bogus Forms in Mo.

Hundreds of fraudulent voter address changes have been submitted to St. Louis County election officials by ACORN, the activist group that has been criticized for its voter sign-up work elsewhere in the nation....

....ACORN has registered hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters across the country, paying workers about $8 an hour in some cases. The group's leaders don't set quotas for the workers, but some may have turned in phony cards to make it look like they were working, ACORN's national spokesman Kevin Whelan said.

Well, actually, ACORN has the habit of not bothering to pay its workers...and of turning in false registrations.

BUMPED UP WITH AN UPDATE, with links to previous ACORN problems in Missouri:

MIA

Michael Moore seems awfully quiet this election cycle. Anyone know why?

October surprise

Link.

TRENTON, New Jersey (AP) -- New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights as heterosexual couples.

But the court left it to the Legislature to determine whether the state will honor gay marriage or some other form of civil union.

Karl Rove's dream just came true.

A Mistake Worth Trying to Fix?

Much has been made by Bush critics of various misteps by the admin in approaches to the war on terror in general as well as the war in Iraq specifically. No need for another lap on these particular arguments and the attendant merits of hindsight.

Hindsight at the very least helps us to avoid making the same mistakes over and over, at least ideally, right? So consider this story on Muqtada al-Sadr:

The place was empty when U.S. soldiers burst in, raiding a house in Baghdad's violent Washash neighborhood in the hopes of finding killers involved in sectarian murders. By the look of things, no one had been there for some time, even though neighbors in the area reported seeing people dragged inside in recent weeks. But apparently someone involved in the area's sectarian violence had been there recently: left behind was a leather-bound day planner that gave a disturbing picture of the systematic nature of Baghdad's bloodshed.

Though the book was largely blank, inside were several sheets of loose paper covered in Arabic writing. Back at Camp Taji, a massive U.S. Army base north of Baghdad, translators sifted through the papers and found evidence backing up what some U.S.troops who patrol Washash have come to suspect — that Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army are conducting what amounts to an ethnic cleansing campaign in Washash, a predominantly Shi'ite area with pockets of Sunni residents.

Sadr's militia, the document suggests, are systematically driving Sunni families from their homes around Washash, which some U.S. troops who patrol there have taken to calling Little Sadr City. Among the papers found in the raid is a list of 65 houses around Washash where Shi'ite families have replaced Sunni families. On other pages were drafts of threat letters clearly intended for delivery to Sunni homes. And there was a roster of "virtuous families" in the Washash area with house numbers written next to their names, so the militia relocation agents could keep track of people deemed fit to stay.

Not the first time we've heard of this guy, right? Cast our memories back and we recall when he was a much smaller fry, and we tried to involve him in the political process, yadda, yadda, yadda, right?

OK, hindsight shows us that didn't work. A plausible approach was crafted back then, an arguably defensible choice was made from a limited menu of flawed options, and the result was a fricken' disaster. So now that we've got some evidence that MAS is an enemy of the Iraqi people as a whole, let's catch him and fry him as a tri-partisan effort between Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds.

THAT'S how to use hindsight, to do better the next time, not to keep the political scoreboard fueled. Of course, if we can't get a council of Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds to agree that MAS has to be detained and tried as an enemy of the state, there's not much reason to think that Iraqis understand and want a civil democracy, a nation of laws that tries to protect all the people. Even from the whims of unscrupulous strongmen, even if the strongman is skilled in hiding behind his Koran. Sooner or later, Iraq needs a leader or group of leaders with the trust and credibility to convince the people that such cowardly folk as MAS only disgrace the Koran when they try to hide behind it.

Stay The Course RIP

The familiar slogan the Bush admin has used to brand its approach to the Iraq War has been relegated to the dustbin.

President Bush is expected to make a "substantial" statement about Iraq in a White House news conference this morning, a senior administration official said.

Wednesday's news conference comes after the Bush administration announced this week it is tossing out its "stay the course" mantra on the Iraq war.

Read the whole thing to see the insider politics. It's mostly about rhetoric, as all signs indicate that what's happening here is a re-branding of the approach that the admin has insisted upon, which is that our actions and tactics are are driven by what the admin (and many others) views as a crucial foreign policy goal: democratizing Iraq. But hey, rhetoric can matter, especially if you are not a wonky insider. Expect that whatever re-branding occurs will make it harder for Bush's critics to gain traction with the claim that Bush is inflexible and unwilling to adapt to evolving circumstances. The point they are going to try to make is that the goal (or destination) is very important, but that the path to that goal is not. Any path will do.

So I expect the re-branding to attempt to re-focus people upon a goal-centric vision and away from a play-by-play path-centric vision. Only time will tell if such a view garners converts or reinvigorates the ranks of the wavering. As someone who has always understood that "stay the course" was shorthand for insisting upon reaching the goal deemed crucial, I view it as a clarification. The article I link to above suggests this is what's going on.

Though the White House said it has abandoned the stay-the-course message, its strategy remains the same. Snow said that there will be no dramatic shifts in policy on Iraq.

I hope I don't have to update this when the actual statement is released. I'm predicting "whatever it takes to get to a democratic Iraq" with an emphasis on joint ventures with the American and newly trained Iraqi forces and an ongoing transition to the Iraqi forces being in charge. It's not really a change in strategy, it's just a change in what the admin is choosing to stress in response to simple reflexive criticism.

Some of Bush's critics are already screaming that this is just more of the same. IMO they ought to tread lightly lest they appear to want us to lose. Americans don't like losing, and they know that bailing on Iraq will make us look weak internationally, with future consequences. The amusing thing about the CNN article is that the quoted critics do not appear to agree on whether this is change, they just agree it's bad. Call this one Nancy Drew and the Case of the Dueling Spins by American Enterprise Institute Scholars

Fred Kagan: "This is the same strategy that has produced so much failure so far."

Norm Ornstein: "It's a nondenial denial. It's clear that they're sending a signal that they're changing the course now, not staying the course."

OK, just so we're clear....regardless of whether it's a change in Iraq war strategy, we know it's bad. Thank God we have resident scholars to help us understand these complex issues....LOL.

UPDATE: The story i linked to has been substantively revised to the point where the quotes I've excerpted are, at a quick scan, gone. Glad I quoted the good bits! At least the revised story was, as expected, an attempt to focus attention goal-centrifically.

American Geopolitical Relations Blog

Our relationship with the rest of the world is that we're a benevolent neoliberal hegemony. This is deeply unclear to most people, so I thought I'd blog about it.

So what does this mean? Well, the "hegemony" part means we have a more powerful military than anybody else, and tend to use it to keep the playing field the way we and our allies llke it. The "neoliberal" bit means that these days, we allow conquered countries to stay independent, (albeit with democracy at the point of a gun) and have policies of encouraging peace, safety of transit, and global prosperity and economic development.

The inspiration for this post was a paragraph on hegemonic arrogance from this long and thoughful article about British East India.

So how can you tell the difference between an empire and a neoliberal power? Well, it all comes down to how conquered countries choose their leaders and expectations on them. Let's take a look at a couple of occupation forces, in Germany and Japan (yep, still there). But Germany and Japan choose their own leaders, and Germany just refused a request for help in Iraq.

If we were an Empire, Germany would be ruled by somebody helpful to Bush in the last election, who might or might not have visited once, (early US governors of Puerto Rico were chosen that way), who would've raised troops (by draft?) just as Puerto Rican troops were raised for WWI. If Bush was really a Hitler, we can be sure a German governor's refusal to help would've been greeted with torture and death.

Puerto Rico hasn't been a colony since a global mass decolonization that followed WWII. The island elects its own leaders. It periodically holds referenda to decide if it wants to change status and either go independent or pursue U.S. statehood (so far, the choice has been no change). Like D.C., it only has a nonvoting Congressional xrepresentative, but residents only pay Puerto Rican taxes, not Federal - no taxation without representation there, unlike DC. Like other US citizens, Puerto Ricans currently choose whether to volunteer for the Armed Forces (and many do).

A related factor to look at is protectorates. Until very recently, a protectorate was virtually always a political sock puppet for the occupying force. Things have changed a bit since trustworthy democracies have become powerful. For a few years, Germany and Japan were effectively protectorates, since they weren't allowed to have significant armies. Now they do have enough troops for self-protection, but their armed forces are still significantly weaker than the US armed forces stationed there.

So what makes me think we're benevolent? Well, the fact that the other democratic, industrial countries have low defense budgets, and are pretty lazy about assembling defense alliances against us. If they didn't trust us, they certainly would take action, and the defense gaps would close pretty quickly. If the EU Army ever gets as strong as ours, that's a bad sign.

Arrogance is a big weakness of ours. Too many of us equate hegemony with superiority as a people, but it's not true. We're just luckier, because we took over the best bits of a continent while such conduct was still acceptable, and thus became the most numerous and powerful democracy. We and have all the same weaknesses as other people. I don't believe our culture is significantly better than other long-standing democracies', like the UK's or France's or Germany's. I think it's remarkably similar. Arrogance could easily lead to situations where other democracies stop cooperating with us (note, Iraq isn't such a case).

With Centrists on the rise why is it so quiet at Centerfield?

Maybe its just me but it seems this blog has lost some steam lately. That's bit confusing given the slow rise (from my viewpoint) of centrism in America. What's up? Are we simply experiencing the natural evolution (read decline) in any specific blog or is it only a periodic low?

The rise of the Religious Left?

Here's a nice summary (from the Religion News Service) of the Democratic Party's effort to "get religion". The article features key movers and shakers in the party. One of them, Shaun Casey

urged House Democrats to visit faith communities, talk to religious opinion makers and subvert the stereotype that the party is hostile to religion.

I think this is good for the Democratic Party and for religion in America.

Leave it to a "tried and true" Religious Right figure, Ralph Reed, to alwasy bring things back to abortion.

"It's not like the Republican Party started getting the votes of people of faith because they started nominating evangelicals or teaching them how to quote the Bible," Reed said. "Republicans got the votes of people of faith when Republicans became a pro-life party."

That logic certainly explains the overwhelming support black church-goers give to the Republican Party.

Here We Go Again

The conservative columnist Michael Barone just wrote a column on the elections that fails to resonate with me.

Now it appears that voters are willing to turn over Congress to a party most of whose representatives voted against allowing the National Security Agency to surveil without a court order al-Qaida suspects when they place calls to persons in the United States and against allowing terrorist interrogations under rules supported by John McCain.

We are weary, it seems, and ready to go back on holiday. Some things -- a nuclear attack on the United States, the successful release of a disease pathogen that could kill millions -- are just too horrifying to think about.

So such straw here. The "court order" Ds wanted for Al-Qaida wiretaps was a FISA warrant (not hard to get, and secret), strictly for domestic conversations (surely a minority of Al'Qaeda traffic given their nature). SCOTUS has already decided warrantless foreign wiretaps are constitutional.

And I sure didn't see any interrogations "supported by John McCain," except to the degree that the President had no choice within the law. In fact, the President was much more of an opponent of McCain's bill than Democrats were (centrist Ds were for it), and once the bill passed, Bush issued a famously less-than-cooperative-sounding signing statement on the subject.

We voters clearly don't deserve our rights, since we want evidence and coherent explanations and thought and regular updates from our leaders about giving them up. You'd think we were living in a free society or something.

Yes, Democrats clearly are against security, because we're all extremists with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Never mind that the two most-promising Presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are for both Iraq and Afghanistan (Clinton voted for the Patriot Act, and authorization for both Afghanistan and Iraq, and has shown no signs of regret on her Iraq vote). In fact, Clinton favors too damned many of these rights-limiting measures. If Barone actually supports McCain's torture position, I'd say Clinton's closer to him on the WoT issues than Bush is (hee, hee).

Getting ready for the takeover: Health Care

The NYT this week reports on the Democratic plans for health care reform if they gain control of one or both Houses. I'm glad they're talking about an issue that is high on Americans' list of concerns.

Here are a few tidbits that catch my eye.

Democrats in the House and the Senate say they want federal officials to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to obtain lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries. The 2003 Medicare law explicitly prohibits such negotiations.

Low hanging fruit.

Mr. Waxman said, he concluded that “the health care system can be fundamentally changed only when there’s strong public support for a specific proposal.”

That's why he gets paid the big bucks. But then again...

Democrats will use the next two years to build such support before the 2008 presidential election

Good!

Democrats do not say exactly how they would pay for their proposals, but they have said they would consider tax increases.

But I'm sure they'll call it "revenue enhancement".

Democrats have a long list of federal agencies, programs and industries they want to investigate. Many are eager to look into drug prices and marketing practices.

Please not more hearings. That will only harden battle lines.

And finally

Embryonic stem cell research has been a defining issue in Senate races in Arizona, Maryland and Minnesota.

Huh? I haven't heard that as the defining issue in the Kyl/Pederson race; its been immigration, security and "insider" politics.

Anyway, I'm glad for any possibility of a public discussion on health care.

Spot the Contradiction

Sometimes I listen to local wing-nut Denny Schaefer on AM radio when I drive to work. (Titania hates for me to listen. She's fears I'll get contaminated.) Yesterday, Denny talked about a terrible crime that happened near Atlanta:

A 16-year-old girl accused of killing a mother of three in a Roswell Road crash two weeks ago was using her family's 2003 Mercedes as an instrument of suicide, never letting off the accelerator as she slammed into the oncoming car, authorities said Thursday.

The teen, Louise Egan Brunstad, survived the crash with minor injuries but on Thursday was charged with felony murder. Prosecutors intend to try her as an adult, and she faces an automatic life sentence if convicted.

Denny had two main points about the story, in addition the usual bashing of liberals:

1. 16-year-olds like Louise are too young to drive any car, let alone a Mercedes.

2. Prosecutors are right to try Louise as an adult.

I was tempted to call in and tell Denny that he can't have it both ways.

Low Point

As the 2006 Congressional election draws near, I pose the following: what was the low point for each party in the 109th Congress?

In my opinion, the Republicans cratered with the Terri Schiavo debacle. They put aside all of the critical issues facing the nation and inserted themselves into the unfortunate fate of one vegetative woman, despite repeated decisions by state and federal courts according to the law and her husband's wishes -- and the Republicans in Congress got it all completely wrong.

True conservative, Christian, free-marketer Dick Armey said it best:

Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There’s not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to [Focus on the Family President] James Dobson. That’s all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election.

From Dr. Bill Frist's long-distance diagnosis to President Bush cutting short his vacation (!) to sign the Schiavo bill, the whole sorry show epitomized the worst instincts of our representatives. Maybe the military commissions bill was utterly wrong, but at least it wasn't a pointless waste of time.

That's the Republican side. Thoughts? Proposals for the low point on the Democratic side of Congress?

Open Thread and Spam Update

Open Thread and Spam Update

After seeing how annoying some of the spam limitations were in practice, I've tried weakening the spam filters some more to let through more things we actually talk about. Of course, certain things people want, like handbags (maybe the most common substring in the old spam list!), will always be hard....

Election prediction thread

My guesses:

* The Democrats take back the House by the narrowest of margins (219-216).
* The Republicans keep the Senate, 51-49.
* Katherine Harris loses.

Remember .333 is a good average in baseball.

Parking Spaces and Accessibility

I've wanted to grumble about downtown parking spaces in Austin for a long time. That's maybe the one aspect of life that's really gotten alot worse, though decreased traffic throughput through downtown is another.

When I moved here, you could park for free in many places, all over downtown, and get most places downtown in 20-25 minutes. Neither is true any more. The slowdown to get places is mostly due to a deliberate slowing of about half of downtown.

This is bad for Austin and downtown in particular because now you have to add $5-$8 to the cost of doing anything downtown. That's, in effect, a high tax on low-end businesses, along with the inevitable high real estate prices. Except that high real estate prices used be avoidable by opening stores at the edge of successful regions, and this is a problem for all of downtown. The entire town used to party together evenings when I got here. You'd see people from all walks of life downtown. Now it's mostly upper middle class and tourists.

The low-end businesses are finding it harder and harder. And, surprise, surprise, they've mostly had to move. Downtown Austin is weakening, distributing out to various areas of interest. Of course, there are even more better places to go and things to do, and many of the best Austin places have helpfully engaged in imperialism to allow many more of us to enjoy Amy's Ice Cream, for example.

What were our leaders thinking? That people would spend 50 minutes each way on a bus to get there? That cars are so unsightly? (never mind that there is no downtown without them).

Both Republicans and Democrats are Socialists

The fact is that both Republicans and Democrats are pinko socialists. Both parties think the Federal Government should perform sizeable, capital-intensive tasks. In fact, we're even mostly in agreement over what those tasks should be. The entire scope of difference comes in where we want to increase spending, and how much of the tab we wanna pay upfront (Ds all upfront, Rs like to run up a smallish %deficit).

A Partial List:
: Foreign Policy Support, Defense, Intelligence Gathering, Economic Rule-Setting and Maintenance, Law Enforcement, Low-End Retirement, Unemployment and Disability Insurance, Research Funding, Defense-Related Research, Energy Management, Standards Support, Immigration Control, Medical Insurance for the Elderly and Unfortunate, Transport Infrastructure, Mail Delivery.

Controversial Items
: Note: these are all small in %scope, few want them big:
Arts Funding, AFDC, Torture Funding.

Roughly speaking, Rs are likelier to get their patronage from the defense sectors, Ds from the social sectors. It's just a pattern, though, and not even close to being a rule. That's part of why the differences in emphasis. Also, Ds are likelier to worry about people whom are unlucky in our society and Rs are likelier to worry about defense. But both worry about both sets of problems, and repeatedly pass spending bills that support all those roles and plenty of others I didn't take the time to think of.

The extreme left wants the Feds to do more social things and nationalize an industry or three. The extreme right wants the Feds to do fewer social things, more torture, and pay more for enforcing more rules. But neither end has the votes to make these happen, and that's not likely to change much soon.

This post in response to the (true) accusation of Democratic socialism in this post.

The Real Reason I Love Elections

The most fun to thing to do during election season:

1. Find someone who really cares about politics. During election season, those people usually find you. A volunteer campaign worker is the ideal target.

2. Say to the target, "I'm not going to vote because my vote doesn't matter."

3. Watch the target's head spin around and/or explode.

Nine times out of ten, the target responds with: "But if everyone said that..."

In fact, I am going to vote. But not because my vote matters. My vote will not change the outcome.* I vote because I care and because it's my civic duty.

* True story: my mother was on the local school board for two terms. In her race for a third term, she lost by just 10 votes. Which only proves my vote does not matter: if I had voted for my mother, she still would have lost.

Centerfield Standards

In comments to a previous post, I found this from another Centerfield author:

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Oberon, this post of yours that you placed up while comments were dead?

Calculated Risk notes that the public debt rose a just a tad last year: about $574.3 billion (after subtracting surpluses in social security and other trust funds).

You're lying. Calculated Risk did not make any such misstatement of fact, you did that on your own. The figure you cite includes ALL government "trust fund" surpluses including SS surpluses, as anyone who can read the linked Treasury figures could figure out in about 3 seconds.

I take an accusation of lying extremely seriously. As an anonymous author who took Shakespeare's "Lord of the Fairies" for a screen name, I don't have much credibility to start with, so I've taken the liberty of putting this front and center.

Here's the exact quote from CR: "The Treasury Department reported today that the National Debt increased $574.3 Billion in Fiscal 2006..."

Perhaps the term "National Debt" and my term "public debt" mean different things.

Or perhaps my phrase "surpluses in social security and other trust funds" is different from the phrase "ALL government 'trust fund' surpluses".

If I made a mistake -- which I do quite often -- I apologize. But at worst I made an honest mistake. My only purpose was to remind people that we have a very large budget deficit and very large debt, even though the budget deficit has improved since 2004.

I've made more than my share of intemperate remarks in comments, and I regret it. I value Centerfield for its standards of civil discourse, and I ask that we all keep those standards in mind.

Hypocrites and hypocrites who write about them

Frank Rich in the New York Times today (warning: subscribers only) decries the Republican "pathology" of demonizing gays despite a number of openly and not-so-openly gay members of the Republican elite.

I note this paragraph:

The moment Mr. Foley’s e-mails became known, we saw that brand of fearmongering and bigotry at full tilt: Bush administration allies exploited the former Congressman’s predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It’s the kind of blood libel that in another era was spread about Jews.

Okay, now this later passage:

The only way that comic setup could be topped was by the news that Mr. Foley was chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. It beggars the imagination that he wasn’t also entrusted with No Child Left Behind.

So Mr. Frank Rich says it’s a grotesque canard to link homosexuality to pedophilia, but he can’t quite resist spreading it himself.

New Spam Blacklist

The troublesome high CPU consumption may come from our having accumulated over the years a big blacklist, 1,982 entries. I've made an effort to consolidate down to more like 250 entries by finding common substrings within the long list.

So, I've tried installing the new list. Hopefully, it should still catch 90+% of the spam, but it'll take some tuning to get the rest, since I'm only human and have probably missed some things, and been too lenient in some spots.

In exchange for a good hope of serious CPU time reduction, we're likely to see more spam get through as we put in those things I missed. Hopefully that should go down as we adjust the list.

The new blacklist is also effectively rather noticeably stricter about what it allows. Discussion about sex and gambling, for example, will be harder without some getting around the blacklist. You can see the blacklist's new contents here. Let me know if you have trouble or comments.

News Snark

It’s Official: To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered

Gee, pretty much every married man in America already knew that.... ;-)

Just so you know...

The spambots are relentless. We're on somebody's list as a spam haven, so we're still seeing a fair amount even in recent threads. To prevent a recurrence of the shut down, and to save me work (I am NOT in charge, I'm just doing some routine housekeeping as a favor for you guys), if I see spam in a thread more than a day old, I'm both deleting the spam and closing the post to further comments. Authors, if you don't want your thread closed that fast, you need to keep a close eye on your threads and delete any spam before I see it. Comments are closed on all threads, spammed or not, after 5 days.

Non-Triskaidekaphobic Open Thread

You can look it up.

A Controversial Proposal

Putting a tax on oil imports seems like a good idea.

In order to generate a better comment-thread, perhaps I should propose that we tax oil imports and use the revenue to fund coercive military interrogations at Guantanamo. And abortions for teen-agers.

Warner Out

Governor Mark Warner will not be a candidate for President in 2008. This is pretty shocking. With his Forward Together PAC and his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, I thought Warner was in for sure.

I was proud to have Mark Warner as my Governor for two years. He is an incredibly talented politician, a solid human being, and a centrist to the core. I have doubts given the Connecticut Senate primary that his party would have awarded him the nomination, but he would have made an excellent President. Other than possibly Barack Obama, if he runs, and Hillary, if she makes the right moves, the Democrats may have lost their best chance to beat either Giuliani or McCain.

Texas Governors' Debate

I watched the Governors' debate last Friday, and was pretty unhappy. They all suck! Well, OK, Strayhorn only sucked mildly, but she got a little lazy with handling her deGOPifaction, and I don't know whom she expects to convince she's an outsider.

It was an embarassing night to be a Democrat. Chris Bell seems to think he deserves to win simply for being a Democrat and not being Perry. Otherwise I'm at a loss to understand why he thought he could get away with being as rude as Kinky and as unfunny. Nor why he thinks showing even a minimal amount of leadership is optional to win a leadership post. We've found out the (D) base %age - low 20s, nothing like enough to win.

I wish maybe Strayhorn had swapped back to the (D) side and hided Bell's rear instead of going it alone. Not sure the timing worked, though.

Current polls.

Disappointing news

Story.

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Democrat Mark R. Warner, the former governor of Virginia, has decided not to run for president in 2008, Democratic officials said Thursday.

I suspect I am not alone among the folks around here in being disappointed in this development.

Getting our punditary juices going again

How about one of my my standard "Look at the rising cost of healthcare costs" posts to get the collective ball rolling again. Per a recent report "2006 Employer Health Benefits Survey" by the Kaiser Health Foundation, employer-sponsored health care cost rose 7.7 percent in 2006.
The GOOD NEWS: that's the lowest increase since 2000.
The BAD NEWS: That's double the average increase in worker's wages (3.8).

Family health coverage now costs an average $11,480 annually, with workers paying an average of $2,973 toward those premiums, about $1,354 more than in 2000.

Not only is this an ever-increasing burden on working families but this will lead to more folks going without health insurance. (Direct correlation between cost of healthcare and number of uninsured in the US)

And this is the key reason why we all should be talking about a disgraced representative and his instant messages!

Comments are back up

Ok, everybody, comments are back up now. Have at it.

If they go down again, it'll be because the evil spambots have taken over the world.

New UN Sec'y General

Oh, and according The Spine,

Ban Ki-moon, the South Korean foreign minister, will be approved on Monday as the United Nations secretary-general.

If Peretz is right, what he says about the choice (though I think he's being silly to think conditions today are worse than in the Cold War).

I can't help wondering if he was chosen because people wanted to annoy Bolton. Annan was the US choice originally, and we got him (at the time he seemed like a reformer). Rather a contrast.

Site Update

Just to let everybody know what's going on, here's all I know about the site problems:

Rick is aware of the problem and has contacted the hosting site support staff. According to them, we started getting so many spam comments that we were using too much server processing power, so they disabled the comments. Rick's working with them to resolve the problem, but no word yet on how long that may take.

In the meantime, Stubborn Facts is hosting a second open thread for Centerfield refugees. Come on by and chat a spell!

The Spine

I like Marty Peretz' blog, The Spine. It's well-named.

Its major subjects so far seem to be events abroad and being a voice of liberal conscience.

UPDATE: Sigh. I say a good thing about a site, and what happens? Peretz goes and compliments MEMRI. MEMRI has a real point - Arab media are widely encouraged to print inflammatory stuff about Jews, the West, etc.. But it presents a limited set of quotes. It's like choosing extremist columns from our media - you'd be astonished on the one hand that Iran and Syria haven't been invaded yet, and on the other that no coup has forced out the Bush Administration.

Headers

Best blogpost title of the day:

Dropping the F-Bomb on the NORKS at ArmsControlWonk.

Media Bias, part 1.6 million

I'm not one to get wrapped up in Liberal-Media-Conspiracy or Conservative-Media-Conspiracy theories, but sometimes a bias is so blatant you can't help but wonder the heck is wrong with a journalist and his or her editor.

In an interview with Chris Wallace in Sunday's New York Times, the first question from Deborah Solomon was:

Q: As the host of “Fox News Sunday,” you recently became a news item yourself by seeming to cause President Clinton to have on on-air meltdown. Do you think it was fair for you to mention that his administration had failed to capture Osama bin Laden?

Calling Clinton's performance an "on-air meltdown" reveals the interviewer's own feelings. We all tend to interpret new information in accordance with our existing opinions. Pro-Clinton viewers thought he kicked ass; anti-Clinton thought he had a meltdown. Still, I'll give Solomon leeway on that point because she's conducting an interview.

But look at the second sentence: how could anyone see the interview and conclude that Clinton went off because Wallace merely mentioned that Clinton did not capture bin Laden? Clinton's kicking of ass / meltdown occurred after Wallace accused him of not trying to get Osama bin Laden asked Clinton, at the behest of Fox viewers, why he didn't do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaida out of business (debatable, and a fair issue for an interview), and cited a book for the proposition that "there was no response" to various Al Qaida attacks. Solomon surely watched the infamous interview before speaking to Wallace. So why pretend that Clinton blew his stack at the mere mention of not capturing bin Laden?

UPDATE: post revised because Wallace questions and statements were not necessarily an accusation.

Refugee Open Thread

A Refugee Thread for Centerfielders has been established over at Stubborn Facts. It will remain open until comment functionality here reappears.

Basic rules are play nice, no ad hominem and no obscenity. Other than that, have at.

You can also use it as you would any open thread, within those same rules.

Friday open thread

What is on your mind?

UPDATE: I can't seem to access the comments. I keep getting an "Internal Service Error" message both in IE and Firefox. I assume everyone is having the same problem. Hopefully, the problem will be resolved shortly.

Happy New Year

The government's fiscal year ended on September 29. Calculated Risk notes that the public debt rose a just a tad last year: about $574.3 billion (after subtracting surpluses in social security and other trust funds).

But hey, 2006 could have been worse. The government suspended all Medicare payments for the last nine days, pushing all those payments off until FY 2007.

Random Open Thread

You knew it was coming. But you didn't know when.

Baseball open thread

Because I can't wait until Friday to brag about the Twins.

Simple Answers To Complex Problems, part 1

We could cut illegal immigation by 50% without spending a taxpayer's dime.

As 11 million or so illegal aliens flood the country, politicians wrangle about "border security first" versus "border security plus". Congress is finally taking some action before the election, as a new $34.9 billion appropriations bill allocates $1.2 billion towards building a 700-mile security fence.

Although I expect the fence will significantly reduce the flow of illegal immigrants, there are some obvious issues: how much will it cost? How long will it take? Do we really want to fence in the 11 million illegals that are already here?

If politicians wanted to take effective action instead of posturing for constituents, they would crack down on the employers. Instead of hiring thousands more border guards, we should hire thousands more workplace inspectors. We should have swift and significant fines on employers who hire illegals. (I wouldn't rule out jail time, either.) Cut number of jobs for illegals by three million, and voila! three million illegals go home. And the program would pay for itself.

Of course, my plan is a fantasy. The corporate powers are far too strong. Politicians who enacted such a plan would never see another dime from the manufacturers, the developers and builders, the restaurants, the farmers, the Wal-Mart...gee, pretty much everybody would oppose this plan except the citizens.