Category: Politics

I had promised myself I wouldn’t post anything about Obamacare simply because evaluating healthcare policy is outside my wheelhouse. That said, the software portion of it is something I find myself interested in. Particularly the aspects related to the design.

With that, obviously the rollout has been less impressive than expected. This article says the President blames high traffic:

President Barack Obama is encouraging consumers not to give up enrolling for insurance under the new health care law.

He says sign-up problems have been caused by a website overwhelmed by high traffic. The president says officials are working “around the clock” to reduce waiting times.

Also, Ezra Klein is saying similar things and is not pleased. He does offer a silver lining regarding the overwhelmed servers:

The good news for Obamacare is that lots of people want to sign up. Lots and lots of people. Many more, in fact, than anyone expected. The bad news is that the Obama administration’s online insurance marketplace — which serves 34 states — can’t handle the success.

“The amount of demand is really driving the issues,” a senior administration official told me. “But we’re adding capacity every hour.”

Megan McArdle is a little more circumspect on the high demand theory.

I don’t know anything about the software or design of the system. Never the less, I have several questions related to the high demand problem. First, what kind of load was the system designed to handle? Do we know anything about the designers and their experience with such systems? I’ve seen the claim that the government is adding “capacity by the hour.” The government is in shutdown, so who is doing that? I assume they are considered “essential personnel”? How are they adding capacity by the hour? Are they throwing more servers at it? Better connectivity? In McArdle’s articles, she hints that the servers are getting millions of visitors. For a sense of scale, Google gets roughly 5 million search requests per day. It was claimed there are 47 million uninsured in the US, what percentage of those were estimated to enroll? What kind of equipment is being used and what’s the server platform?

Instapundit has a link worth reading. It also gives rise to other questions. Like, how capable is this system of withstanding various known cyber attacks like denial of service attacks? How tested is the system against garbage input? My understanding is a fair amount of personal information is requested during the signup. How secure is all that information?

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame points out this article on speaking in tongues and opines:

Hard to believe The New York Times ran this piece of claptrap on their op-ed page. “We” don’t speak in tongues; religious nutjobs do, and they do it because they believe in superstitious nonsense. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that there is a high correlation between tongue-speakers and climate change deniers and creationist “science” school curriculum pushers — people who are doing real and genuine harm to our society and the planet.

Sometime after this, he added the following update:

UPDATE: As a perusal of my (and @daringfireball’s) Twitter replies will show, this post was, I suppose unsurprisingly, controversial. One word I’ve seen from those whom I presume to be Pentecostals or other evangelical Christians is “hate” — examples here, here, here, here, here, here. A lack of respect is not hatred; I do not respect superstitious nonsense. But this framing — equating lack of respect with hatred — is what keeps many from criticizing nonsensical religious views.

I haven’t bothered to copy over the links in the original update. See Gruber’s original post if interested. I’d recommend reading the original NYT article at the link above, if for no other reason than to contrast it with Gruber’s disrespect.

Gruber, I think, hangs himself pretty well in the update:

… A lack of respect is not hatred; …

No, I suppose it isn’t. But it’s not much of an improvement either, especially for someone who likes to consider himself so enlightened. Politically, speaking, Gruber is a liberal and one of the most oft repeated charges liberals bring against conservatives is the latter’s lack of respect for other cultures and many things liberals hold dear. Similarly, conservatives charge liberals with lacking respect for certain traditions and institutions that conservatives tend to hold dear. Last I checked this “lack of respect” wasn’t exactly resulting in a great deal of comity between liberals and conservatives. So the fact that Gruber is trying to draw a distinction between “hate” and “lack of respect” in his defense is pretty thin. Fine, his commenters in this case accuse him of “hate” and he’s playing a silly game of “Gotcha” pointing out he doesn’t “hate.” Roger that. He just totally doesn’t respect them. I’m sure they are assuaged.

I also note this line:

… “We” don’t speak in tongues; religious nutjobs do, …

Here, Gruber has setup the oft used “other” construct. But it’s more than that. By labeling one group as “religious nutjobs,” he’s implying that the other group, which Gruber is clearly a member of, is the normal, enlightened group. While I think that’s perfectly consistent with “lack of respect,” it’s hardly consistent with being tolerant, a typical source of pride for the enlightened.

Having read the original article, I’d personally go with labelling tongue speakers as “different” and leave it at that. No, I’m not about to start speaking in tongues, but that doesn’t automatically make me better than those that do. If I had a friend who spoke in tongues, it would certainly be a sort of curiosity to me. I might even think it weird; but, I wouldn’t lose respect for someone who believes in something like speaking in tongues. I find it hard to believe Gruber could make the same statement. Then again, perhaps some of Gruber’s best friends are tongue speakers…

Finally, as a form of justification, Gruber says:

I’ll bet my bottom dollar that there is a high correlation between tongue-speakers and … — people who are doing real and genuine harm to our society and the planet.

I suppose I should note that the “people doing harm” that Gruber specifically names are climate-change deniers and creationists. More of the “other” construct, along with some helpful labels! Gruber offers no support for his “enlightened” hunch- I’d take his bet.

As to the charge of “doing real and genuine harm to our society”, again I find that pretty thin. Gruber is a speaker all over the world. I’d refer him to this article about the actual real damage he’s doing flying all over the world, as opposed to the supposed damage his “other” is doing. No doubt, he’ll say how he doesn’t fly “that” much as his defense. That or I’m sure he gets the “Enlightened Group Discount” on damage.

So, enlightened people damage the planet as well. As for society? Gruber voted for President Obama, I’d bet my bottom dollar. I’ve got two words: “surveillance state”. Here’s two more: ’nuff said.

Consider this a shining example of “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”- shoot, spoke in tongues there.

From a broad perspective, Gruber thinks himself as a “non-bullshitter.” A straight talker that tells it like he sees it based on available evidence. When it comes to computers and technology, he’s often quite good at the schtick. But in this case, he’s confused his strong opinion about how he thinks the world works for “truth,” a common mistake for the “enlightened.” Ultimately, in this instance, he’s not a straight-talker, just another disrespectful jerk.

First, some quick throat clearing. This post is a bit outside my wheelhouse- I don’t typically try to call people out. That said, after reading this article and a bit of my own internal debate, I decided I could keep this pretty narrowly focused and still make my point, all without getting personal and calling people names.

So here goes.

At Outside the Beltway, a political blog one of the author’s has written an brief article related to race. Doug Mataconis analyzes an essay by Victor Davis Hanson and all but concludes Hanson is a racist. First, here’s the excerpt from Hanson’s article (the accused) that Mr. Mataconis highlights:

First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.

I think that experience — and others — is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.

It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.

Here’s the relevant part of Mr. Mataconis’ analysis:

So, because Hanson’s parents had one bad experience with young black males in San Francisco and he had another in East Palo Alto some years later, he’s decided that it makes sense to teach his children to inherently distrust every young black male that they encounter. But, of course, he’s not being racist.

Here’s the problem, Mr. Hanson didn’t decided to teach his children to “inherently distrust every young black male that they encounter.” At least, not based on what he’s written in the article. Also, Mr. Hanson didn’t have one bad experience in Palo Alto, he claims to have had 5. He cites two explicitly and then goes on to state that he could cite 3 more. Those are in the third paragraph of the excerpt from Mr. Hanson’s article.

As to the other accusation, Mr. Hanson implies something much more narrow than what Mr. Mataconis accuses him of. Mr. Hanson implies, he does not provide a quote of the actual lecture to his sons, that he advised his sons to “be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” That’s quite clearly not “every young black male they encounter.” I’ve highlighted the source quotes above.

Mr. Mataconis goes on to make some reasonable and well-worn points about race and so forth. While I generally agree with those points, his stepping off point and analysis is, I think to any rational evaluation, hyperbolic at best. If he wants to argue that Mr. Hanson shouldn’t be giving his sons advice based on Mr. Hanson’s own personal experiences in this instance, then he needs to go a lot further than he went here. If he wants to argue that Mr. Hanson is a racist, again, he needs to go a lot further than he went here. Dictionary.com defines racism as follows:

a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

Mr. Hanson pretty clearly has not gone to that length here. Frankly, I don’t see how one gets there from here without a lot of sketchy supposition.

Reading this piece by Brian Beutler, I have a couple of thoughts.

One, modern day politics is a game of one-upsmanship. Both political parties believe absolutely that their preferred policies are synonymous with what’s best for the country. The result is a never-ending series of contests whereby each side is worried more about how they are perceived. What we end up with is one penny-ante, well, billion-ante, tactic after another. They disseminate their talking points through their minions and try to position themselves as the one that “care.”

Two, what they care about is power. Both the pols doing their tactical dances and their pundit minions that hang on their every move. Both sides agreed to the sequester, now neither side wants to own it. All they care about is how it’s execution affects the balance of power.

In the meantime, the rest of us are forever being jerked around by all their caring.

My brother asked me what I thought about the recent rumblings from the BSA. Even with my involvement in Scouting for now, I really hadn’t thought much about it. When I did, it seemed obvious that it’s the right thing to do and there wasn’t much more to it.

Then I figured, eh, why not write something up and put it here for all to see. To quickly summarize, I think the reasons to exclude gays are thin, and the reason for inclusion have mostly upside.

To start, one of the core values for Cub Scouts is respect, which has as one of its meanings “deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or someone or something considered to have certain rights or privileges; proper acceptance or courtesy; acknowledgment.” For that matter, the BSA’s own site reads “showing regard for the worth of something or someone.” It’s hard to square this core value with the current policy.

Shifting gears a bit, the fear that’s brought up by defenders of the status quo is the possibility of pedophilia and child molestation. But studies and time have revealed that both are a separate and unrelated thing from homosexuality. Thus, this reason has faded to the point of oblivion- if the fear still exists, it exists out of ignorance.

If looking for arguments for the change, I’d say look no further than a story like this. A Boy Scout, denied the rank of Eagle he had earned for the sole reason that he was gay, received his Eagle pin from another Eagle Scout who came out as gay when he heard of the boy’s plight. Now, some might miss the forest for the trees and focus on the “dishonesty” of the older Scout never having revealed he was gay and earning something he “didn’t deserve.”

And that would be a great shame. The fact is these two men had done everything required of them by Scouting to attain that rank. That means they had proven themselves “morally straight.” Are we really supposed to believe that by announcing a truth about themselves, they suddenly were not? By what reasoning could that possibly be true?

I’d say there are also pragmatic reasons. There are areas of the country where the current policy likely works to depress membership. I had one parent explain to me that she almost kept her son out of Cub Scouts because of disagreement with the policy. Ultimately, she stuck with it because of her son’s friendships within the Pack and that it didn’t make sense to punish him for something he knew nothing about. If she was thinking like that, how many other parents use similar lines of thought and keep prevent their sons from getting involved? The Constitution certainly protects the rights of the BSA to run the organization as they see fit, but they can’t protect it from the consequences of those decisions.

Another pragmatic aspect to consider is one of leadership. In this area, Scouting hangs on by the skin of its teeth. Part of the reason is it takes a lot of effort and time to organize all the different activities and meetings involved. The idea of casting good people away simply because of sexual orientation seems like a bad way to address that problem. While I know Scouting is robust in other areas of the country, I’m sure there are other locations where it’s similar to here. The bottom line here is that help is needed and tossing it aside because of sexuality is self-defeating.

The bottom line is Scouting is a worthwhile endeavor for young boys. It promotes all of the sorts of qualities that we might want in our kids: resourcefulness, independence, grace under fire and a willingness to lead and be responsible. There is no reason those qualities can’t apply to gay Scouts and there is no reason gay men can’t help to foster those qualities in Scouts they lead.

This is probably the single best thing I’ve read about guns, gun control and useful policies going forward (via Instapundit). I’ll admit that my own conclusions went in this general direction including his opinion on concealed carry, so it could be a matter of confirmation bias on my part. Still, he takes on all forms of argument about gun control and throws in a number of surprises that I was unaware of in response to the usual arguments for gun control.

For instance, gun control proponents like to hold up Australia as a shining example of a success story. Why? Because in direct response to a mass shooting they banned guns and instituted a buy-back program. Since there have been no mass shootings. Sounds great, but, it turns out, the devil is in the details. Turns out there is little evidence that the new gun controls have had much effect on crime and violent crime in general.

There are other interesting tidbits throughout the article. Go give it a read.

I think Megan McArdle hits the nail on the head:

It is tempting to blame the candidates, but ultimately, I blame the situation. The candidates do not have a big program, because there is no money to pay for big programs. Whoever spends the next four years is going to have to do some unpleasant things to taxes and spending. No one wants to hear about those things, and they certainly don’t want to tell us about them. And so we have piddling personal attacks, half-hearted promises, and vapid reaffirmations that America is so great because it’s exceptional, and exceptional because it’s America.

I also liked this paragraph:

The true object of these debates is to say as little as possible about anything of substance. Mitt Romney promises to be Obama Lite, with one third less social democracy than regular Barack Obama- but fortified with a full day’s RDA of social conservatism! Barack Obama claims that Mitt Romney only wants to be president so that he can invest the Social Security trust fund in companies that will ship all our jobs to China- jobs that under Barack Obama would be done by hard-working American robots. It is a carnival of claptrap, a festival of flapdoodle.

Of course, read the whole thing.

For as long as I’ve been paying attention to politics, the game has been about what a candidate is going to give their constituents, be it tax cuts, some kind of money for health care, retirement income, legislation that kills competition, some kind of government contract to make something or research something, or money for education. No one that I can remember has stated “I’m going to take something away.”

I understand the reasons. We all want someone to give us things because, deep down, we know that we deserve it. We worked hard all our lives and it’s about time we collected our just rewards. So when James Q. Politician comes along with his legion of “expert” enablers and says he’s got a plan, we uncritically swallow it because we want to believe and, after all, we’ll only be around for so long anyway. Might as well get ours along the way.

Short of guaranteeing that everyone will get a job, though, it’s hard to imagine what else can be promised at this point. Even if something more could be promised, where’s the money going to come from to provide it?

In my humble opinion, the math of the federal budget doesn’t add up for either of these guys. We can’t tax our way back to a balanced budget, and we can’t cut enough programs because too many people are dependent on those programs. Politicians have, over the years, systematically over-promised to the American people and the result is a government that wants to legislate away risk, at the expense of one citizen for another.

The day is coming where we will discuss who’s going to get screwed and how; what promises the government has made but can’t be keep. But today is not that day. Today, we get flapdoodle.

Since the first debate, the most dominant theme has been how Romney’s performance completely changed the race and the polls have been swinging strongly in his favor ever since. As such, I’m sure the next round of polls to come out will also get a lot of attention, mainly, to see if President Obama was able to stop that apparent momentum with his performance.

Via Glenn Reynolds, the latest Rasmussen tracking poll shows Romney continuing to press his advantage. Some caveats apply, like the majority of the data was from interviews prior to the previous debate. So we have a couple more days before any real firm interpretations can be made.

But I’d like to point out this, which points out that Romney was actually moving back to parity with President Obama prior to the debate.

There’s been a lot of talk about the polls and whether they’ve been biased in the Presidents favor. That is, up until they weren’t showing the President with a lead. I’m going to propose a simple reason for Romney’s swing in the polls: bad data.

Now, this doesn’t mean that polling outfits were cooking their results. All it means is that prior to late September, all of the polls were worthless because they were not getting an accurate sampling of the electorate. Then, somewhere in late September, that started to change. This comports with the what seems to be conventional wisdom that most Americans don’t start paying attention to political races until Election Day is close at hand. Most Americans are busy earning a living in a field that doesn’t involve paying attention to politics every single day. Further, my guess is many are jaded to the point that they don’t care about the vast majority of the stuff that gets political pundits excited.

Based on this theory, I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a clear picture of what the electorate is thinking before hand. Thus, pollsters do their thing, but they get hangups or people don’t even bother to answer or participate. (Count me among those- I don’t ever participate.) So whatever data they get is unreliable. It was recently reported that participation in these surveys is down to 9%- meaning 1 in 10 people participate in the polls. It used to be closer to 25%. I think this has to have an effect on polling reliability.

Once that corner is turned in late September; however, the sampling data improves because now more people are engaged and now pollsters are able to get a more accurate sampling (i.e.: better data) of the electorate.

Note that this theory does not predict that we’ll always see a big change in the polls come late September, early October. It merely means that the odds of it happening aren’t as unlikely as some may like to think, especially if, on balance, their preferred candidate has a lot of other problems. It also means that the polls aren’t necessarily as event driven as pundits like to think. Note in my second linked piece, the author is at loss for a reason for the move back to Romney, since nothing noteworthy was going on in the time frame he noted. I think this supports my theory and gives us a period of time where the sampling data began improving.

Also note that this theory does not predict who benefits. It could just have easily been President Obama. Thus, I think it blunts the effect of the first debate. My guess is that debate helped Romney to some degree, but did not have the huge effect most pundits are attributing.

A more interesting scenario would have been if Romney’s performance had been less notable. In this case, my theory means we still would have seen a move towards Romney because that’s where the electorate was already leaning. This might seem odd, but remember, I’m talking solely about the data and its reflection of reality.

One thing I do think it means is that, in this case, President Obama has been operating under a false assumption: that he’s had a solid lead. It would appear that, in fact, he really should have been trying to overcome a deficit.

Obviously, I follow politics to some degree. I don’t blog about it much, if at all, because it doesn’t have anything to do with my being an SAHD. Also, there’s plenty of others taking care of that front and I don’t have the time or patience to follow it and argue about politics here on the blog.

But, as I said, I do pay attention. And the following is the sort of stuff that drives me crazy. Who do you believe? This guy, who claims no Ryan bounce, or this guy, who claims there is a Ryan bounce. Both use Gallup polling data to arrive at completely different conclusions.

In general, the coverage of this election from either side of the aisle is bipolar- from one side Romney is running a smart campaign as the President and Vice President stumble and bumble their way along, or from the other side Romney is an evil, lying, shit-slinger at the poor President and Vice President whom are doing their level best to govern in tough times.

It’s hard to know what to make of any of it. And people wonder why we fall back to ideology.

This chorus is getting almost deafening on the political blogs. Dare I say the conventional wisdom is for him to release them.

Meh.

Frankly, Romney chose a position and he should stick with it. Changing course due to pressure from the political hacks of the world would only serve to diminish him, as far as I’m concerned.

Further, we all know that the President and his flunkies will dishonestly represent whatever is revealed in the tax returns. Romney would be opening the door even more to being defined by his opponents. I wonder if any of these goofballs “demanding” Romney release his tax returns honestly believes they’d reveal anything about his fitness to be President. Do they expect something illegal to be there? It’s not like the IRS is beating down his door for them. How do I know? Because the political world would be bleating it from the mountain tops.

What I’d really like to see, though, is for him to go on the offensive on this issue in some way. For instance, he could demand that the President release all information related to Fast and Furious. Or he could demand that the President come clean on some other sensitive political issue. Or he could demand the President don a clown suit for a week. I’d like to see him flip the script, turn the whole tactic around on the President.

Similarly, Romney should be more assertive regarding the current stupidity about his Bain retirement. For instance, he could reply “What does a community organizer know about running a business?” or “I can understand why the President is confused about my leaving Bain, since he clearly never had any similar experience.” It’s not like the President is some untouchable being on anything.

Via Ann Althouse, Bank of America is forgiving mortgages for certain “qualified” borrowers. The program, or whatever, is the result of a settlement over abuses in dealing with foreclosures. There isn’t a whole heckuva lot of detail at the source article either.

I’ll admit my initial reaction was outrage. Another round of helping out people who got in over their heads making people like myself and the Wife sucker’s. But then, after seeing that it’s a settlement, I started wondering if there isn’t some angle that BoA is playing here that makes this much less than it appears. For instance, perhaps not that many people will ultimately qualify. Or perhaps those that qualify are also likely to end up losing the deal because they can’t meet some other conditions. I’m not a banker, so I can’t imagine all the ways this could be to a bank’s advantage.

On the flip side, there will undoubtedly be some people who make out, getting tens-of-thousands of dollars forgiven from their debt load. Having their bad behavior rewarded.

Seems hard to escape the fact that, no matter what side you choose, those of us who pay our debts get screwed. We pay the bank so they can go and abuse trust. And we also foot the bill for the delinquents.

The kids lament their lot in life as being unfair. Wait until they’re old enough to grasp this idea.