Here's a letter I sent to several reporters at the Washington Post about the, um, "struggles" of the Trump administration to tell the truth. Curious when or if anyone will respond...
Dear Messrs. Rucker, Hudson, Harris and Dawsey:
I am writing about a line from an article of yours from last Tuesday’s paper which i find deeply troubling, which is "The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public.”
Your colleague Margaret Sullivan, whom I am cc’ing, writes frequently about the media’s need to do a better job covering the Trump administration, and this sentence is a poster child for falling short of the mark.
I understand the constraints journalists operate under. I know, as an example, that there are strong legal reasons to use the words “alleged killer” prior to the plea or guilty verdict. Even when it’s obvious.
But I do not believe that the circumlocution you used in last Tuesday’s article fits under any of those constraints. You’ve all spent three years documenting the constant lies put out by the Trump administration. The Post’s fact checker has documented over 15,000 lies. It stated on the first day of the administration with the press conference about the crowd size, and continues day in and day out.
If your sports department is struggling to get a late-ending game score into the first edition, it means The Post is covering the game and writing an article on a tight deadline. If any of you are said on a given day to be struggling to get to a meeting on a bad day for the Red Line, it means you’re on the way to the meeting and not sitting at home. One could say that Margaret Sullivan is struggling to get the media to cover the Trump administration more firmly; see today’s column. I need to first submit a book by a client in order for it to be said that I am struggling to sell it. One can simply not say in any factual way within the customary meaning of English idiom that the Trump administration struggles to put out factual information. I believe “not consistently communicated factual information to the public” might have been consistent with the actual facts and still have struck me as being mild, but the phraseology you chose is inaccurate and wrong.
Here’s hoping that your response isn’t to disclaim responsibility by each of you saying you hardly knew the other guys in the by-line, the fact that you just shared a by-line and work at the same paper and probably have been photographed together on multiple occasions to the contrary.
Sincerely,
Joshua Bilmes,
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Weekend at Bernie's
My nephew tweeted a link to a New York Magazine article explaining why Bernie Sanders is a Bad Thing. The very liberal NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has a column with similar arguments in the Jan 18 New York Times. And on one level, I agree with both. Sanders is too bombastically left wing to have any chance of winning.
There is just one problem.
Hillary's problem putting Bernie away is indicative of the essential problem with Hillary. She will lose to any Republican who runs, because the closer we get to an actual election the more there will be way too may people who decide they just don't want to have Hillary and all the Clinton baggage in the White House, just like people are doing in the early primary states. I fear the people complaining about Bernie Sanders don't understand that the alternative is as unelectable, in part because they are part of the establishment, like Hillary has been part of the establishment, and they just don't understand how little appeal Hillary has to anyone who wants the country to take a different direction. Hillary won't lead the country Bernie's way, she won't lead it the Republican way, she'll just be another same-old same-old when we need something different.
Suggested reading: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen rates Hillary's comments on the Flint, MI water crisis. She sent an aide, she put out a statement, she went on TV. Something that should be red meat for a Democrat to chew on, and she can't do it.
Of course Bernie Sanders is right about single payer health care. However long and potholed and rutted the way might be, if rather take my chances with a candidate who is willing to fight for what we need and compromise from there rather than pre-compromise. Because the Republicans don't do much of that any more. Whatever their promises, they want something and they just keep going for it. The Republican governor in North Carolina who wouldn't add abortion restrictions and is adding them. The Republican governor in Wisconsin who was only after the public employee unions and is now after all of them. The Republican governor in Kansas who is leading a failed experiment in supply side economics and is happy to keep leading it, leading it, leading it some more and was re-elected. I might not agree with any of these people,but I have the utmost respect for them. They have power. They use it. They lead unapologetically. That doesn't describe Hillary. If she has a point of view, no one would know what it is.
You spend a week in my office, you'll have an idea what I stand for and care about, what JABberwocky stands for and cares about. Spend thirty years with Hillary, and you end up with her caring less about Flint, MI than Rachel Maddow.
There is just one problem.
Hillary's problem putting Bernie away is indicative of the essential problem with Hillary. She will lose to any Republican who runs, because the closer we get to an actual election the more there will be way too may people who decide they just don't want to have Hillary and all the Clinton baggage in the White House, just like people are doing in the early primary states. I fear the people complaining about Bernie Sanders don't understand that the alternative is as unelectable, in part because they are part of the establishment, like Hillary has been part of the establishment, and they just don't understand how little appeal Hillary has to anyone who wants the country to take a different direction. Hillary won't lead the country Bernie's way, she won't lead it the Republican way, she'll just be another same-old same-old when we need something different.
Suggested reading: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen rates Hillary's comments on the Flint, MI water crisis. She sent an aide, she put out a statement, she went on TV. Something that should be red meat for a Democrat to chew on, and she can't do it.
Of course Bernie Sanders is right about single payer health care. However long and potholed and rutted the way might be, if rather take my chances with a candidate who is willing to fight for what we need and compromise from there rather than pre-compromise. Because the Republicans don't do much of that any more. Whatever their promises, they want something and they just keep going for it. The Republican governor in North Carolina who wouldn't add abortion restrictions and is adding them. The Republican governor in Wisconsin who was only after the public employee unions and is now after all of them. The Republican governor in Kansas who is leading a failed experiment in supply side economics and is happy to keep leading it, leading it, leading it some more and was re-elected. I might not agree with any of these people,but I have the utmost respect for them. They have power. They use it. They lead unapologetically. That doesn't describe Hillary. If she has a point of view, no one would know what it is.
You spend a week in my office, you'll have an idea what I stand for and care about, what JABberwocky stands for and cares about. Spend thirty years with Hillary, and you end up with her caring less about Flint, MI than Rachel Maddow.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Politics!
One of the things I hate about politics, politicians, and the people who support them is the complete inconsistency of their morality -- i.e., things that are 100% acceptable and which should, must, have to be totally overlooked when your guy does it are 100% wrong and heinous and awful when the other guy does it.
A quick example of this: Could you imagine how the right wing propaganda machine would be humming if a major Democratic figure had been caught outright lying about the funding of their campaign, if some sob story about sacrificing all to run for office turned out to be "Goldman Sachs gave me a loan, and after I knew I'd be getting the loan, I put all my own money into the campaign."
That's what Ted Cruz did, and the story's gotten surprisingly little traction.
And much as I don't like Ted Cruz, I think everyone should consider him a natural-born citizen eligible to be President of the United State.
But at the same time, much as I don't like Donald Trump, I'll give him points for questioning Cruz's citizenship. Because it at least demonstrates a moral consistency, being willing to go after a Republican the same way he went after Obama on the same issue.
That's a lot better than the professional politician who happily changes his mind every time the party in the Oval Office changes hands. Confirming justices is good or bad, depending. Using executive orders is good or bad, depending. Well - no. You can disagree on the particular executive order all you want, or the particular judge or justice. But your entire world view on the legitimacy of the tactics used in pursuit of political power shouldn't change based on the identity of the person or party exercising that power.
A quick example of this: Could you imagine how the right wing propaganda machine would be humming if a major Democratic figure had been caught outright lying about the funding of their campaign, if some sob story about sacrificing all to run for office turned out to be "Goldman Sachs gave me a loan, and after I knew I'd be getting the loan, I put all my own money into the campaign."
That's what Ted Cruz did, and the story's gotten surprisingly little traction.
And much as I don't like Ted Cruz, I think everyone should consider him a natural-born citizen eligible to be President of the United State.
But at the same time, much as I don't like Donald Trump, I'll give him points for questioning Cruz's citizenship. Because it at least demonstrates a moral consistency, being willing to go after a Republican the same way he went after Obama on the same issue.
That's a lot better than the professional politician who happily changes his mind every time the party in the Oval Office changes hands. Confirming justices is good or bad, depending. Using executive orders is good or bad, depending. Well - no. You can disagree on the particular executive order all you want, or the particular judge or justice. But your entire world view on the legitimacy of the tactics used in pursuit of political power shouldn't change based on the identity of the person or party exercising that power.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Securely Ranting -- For the World to See
Just to get on my high horse again about the ludicrousness of our allowing our government to waste so much money spying on us, bringing it back a little to the business of JABberwocky...
We at JABberwocky believe in information. We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail.
Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point. Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up. The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover. The paperback and e-book will flow upward. They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sales for your book, and from there to your series, and from there to your work with a particular publisher and then a particular territory. We do that in all major territories for your work, we try and have basic information in smaller territories in spreadsheets. If your career takes off after your fifth book, or Hollywood decides to take an option on your eighth book and some hotshot writer needs information on your sales to help get financing for the movie, we have your global sales information ready at hand. If we need to gather that information after your eighth book is published when that call from Hollywood calls, it is a lot harder to gather all the information retrospectively.
Sounds great, doesn't it!
Who wouldn't want the government to do just that, so if in two years or four years some evildoer is involved in some terrorist plot, we've got all the data to find him, and find his co-conspirators, and save us all!!
However, we face real world constraints which apparently our government doesn't feel it needs to confront on our behalf.
Simply put, as our business grows and we have more clients selling more books in more places in more formats, the information we have to process keeps growing and growing.
We must make compromises.
We sold 200 books to Audible last year and are starting to get audio royalty statements for some of those. Some of those books are titles that haven't been in print since ten years ago or more. Suffice to say the spreadsheets we put together for those titles cannot and should not be as detailed as when we had only 30 books with Audible to keep track of.
As more information floods in, we have a harder time prioritizing it. Do we do the big pile of Audible statements first because those still come in on paper and make a visible dent on the desk, while we delay processing Random House royalty statements for major agency clients like Peter Brett and Elizabeth Moon that have come in as PDFs? Well, it is tempting to deal with the visible pile of paper first.
We also have a harder time doing all of it correctly. Who is going to look over the person who does the basic entry work as we have more and more clients taking up more and more of our time? Two years ago I could do that and it wasn't too big a hassle, but now it's kind of impossible for me to give the same quality time to absolutely everything.
I am running a business. I have to justify expenses. I can't just hire more and more and more people to deal with every last bit of data that can theoretically be processed.
Maybe you can see where this is going.
The NSA isn't worried about money. It isn't worried about cost-benefit analysis. Its budget is secret. We don't debate it. If we did, we'd be told that we should never for a moment think that our security can be valued that way.
Which is balderdash.
The NSA is no different from JABberwocky. The more information it decides it must have, the less good it can be at dealing with all of that information, even with the ability to hire infinitely, and build office space and server farms and everything else infinitely. And when it makes mistakes, those have serious consequences, way more than if JABberwocky screws something up.
It's not just wrong constitutionally and morally for the government to collect all of this information on us, but it's a bad investment for our country.
And just to make clear:
Yes, your information is being collected.
If you write "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an email and the government is interested in Bad Guy X, it will start digging deeper in what you say and do just because you put the words "Bad Guy X" into your e-mail.
Oh, sure, there are procedures in place to be sure that they don't go too far, that they dig just deep enough to determine that you are a US citizen, or that you didn't actually conspire with Bad Guy X but really did just say "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an innocent way in an e-mail.
But of course those procedures don't work perfectly. The government admits to thousands of times when its procedures don't work.
No, thank you! I'd rather you not be spending my money on this.
We at JABberwocky believe in information. We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail.
Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point. Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up. The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover. The paperback and e-book will flow upward. They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sales for your book, and from there to your series, and from there to your work with a particular publisher and then a particular territory. We do that in all major territories for your work, we try and have basic information in smaller territories in spreadsheets. If your career takes off after your fifth book, or Hollywood decides to take an option on your eighth book and some hotshot writer needs information on your sales to help get financing for the movie, we have your global sales information ready at hand. If we need to gather that information after your eighth book is published when that call from Hollywood calls, it is a lot harder to gather all the information retrospectively.
Sounds great, doesn't it!
Who wouldn't want the government to do just that, so if in two years or four years some evildoer is involved in some terrorist plot, we've got all the data to find him, and find his co-conspirators, and save us all!!
However, we face real world constraints which apparently our government doesn't feel it needs to confront on our behalf.
Simply put, as our business grows and we have more clients selling more books in more places in more formats, the information we have to process keeps growing and growing.
We must make compromises.
We sold 200 books to Audible last year and are starting to get audio royalty statements for some of those. Some of those books are titles that haven't been in print since ten years ago or more. Suffice to say the spreadsheets we put together for those titles cannot and should not be as detailed as when we had only 30 books with Audible to keep track of.
As more information floods in, we have a harder time prioritizing it. Do we do the big pile of Audible statements first because those still come in on paper and make a visible dent on the desk, while we delay processing Random House royalty statements for major agency clients like Peter Brett and Elizabeth Moon that have come in as PDFs? Well, it is tempting to deal with the visible pile of paper first.
We also have a harder time doing all of it correctly. Who is going to look over the person who does the basic entry work as we have more and more clients taking up more and more of our time? Two years ago I could do that and it wasn't too big a hassle, but now it's kind of impossible for me to give the same quality time to absolutely everything.
I am running a business. I have to justify expenses. I can't just hire more and more and more people to deal with every last bit of data that can theoretically be processed.
Maybe you can see where this is going.
The NSA isn't worried about money. It isn't worried about cost-benefit analysis. Its budget is secret. We don't debate it. If we did, we'd be told that we should never for a moment think that our security can be valued that way.
Which is balderdash.
The NSA is no different from JABberwocky. The more information it decides it must have, the less good it can be at dealing with all of that information, even with the ability to hire infinitely, and build office space and server farms and everything else infinitely. And when it makes mistakes, those have serious consequences, way more than if JABberwocky screws something up.
It's not just wrong constitutionally and morally for the government to collect all of this information on us, but it's a bad investment for our country.
And just to make clear:
Yes, your information is being collected.
If you write "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an email and the government is interested in Bad Guy X, it will start digging deeper in what you say and do just because you put the words "Bad Guy X" into your e-mail.
Oh, sure, there are procedures in place to be sure that they don't go too far, that they dig just deep enough to determine that you are a US citizen, or that you didn't actually conspire with Bad Guy X but really did just say "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an innocent way in an e-mail.
But of course those procedures don't work perfectly. The government admits to thousands of times when its procedures don't work.
No, thank you! I'd rather you not be spending my money on this.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Your Opinion is Important to Us
Since I still have a land line it is susceptible to getting calls from polling companies.
I kind of like this. It is occasionally interesting because you can tell who's paying for the poll by the kinds of questions being asked and the way they are being phrased. And who doesn't want to be asked their opinion.
But I've got to take a few minutes to complain in public about a call I got yesterday.
I was sitting around watching tennis from Roland Garros, so I figured I could watch tennis and be polled at the same time. And the person taking the poll assures me it's just a few questions and won't go on for very long at all.
It turns out to be a poll on the NYC mayor's race. I'm asked multiple times to choose whom I would vote for today, which I refuse to do. There are two or three candidates I am strongly considering and a few I am strongly not, and I don't want to pick a side now when there haven't been any debates and the contest not yet fully in swing. I'm read biographical descriptions of each candidate, all of them very much like what the candidates themselves would write. Then there are questionable actions about each candidate that are read off, and I'm asked to say if these things give me super strong doubts or tiny doubts or no doubts.
I admire the even-handedness of the poll. The biographies aren't suspiciously shady, and the doubt raising questions are all legitimate. This one did block paid sick leave legislation, that one did have shady fund-raisers, another did travel through the revolving door.
However, the poll just goes on and on and on and on. It takes a long time to read several candidate biographies and several more critical statements, and to repeat every time the "doubt" scale. And I admit, I took up a few minutes pointing out that the quick poll was at ten minutes, and soon approaching twenty. And then at around 18 minutes I explained that while I was sorry to have wasted everyone's time, I was hanging up. Because I sure as heck wasn't giving more than twenty minutes of my life to participating in this poll.
And that's the thing I don't get. How do you expect anyone to participate in a poll that's going to take a half hour out of their lives? Anyone? How can you have an accurate poll when the only people you'll get to take it are people with nothing better to do for an entire half hour.
Can Nate Silver explain this to me?
I kind of like this. It is occasionally interesting because you can tell who's paying for the poll by the kinds of questions being asked and the way they are being phrased. And who doesn't want to be asked their opinion.
But I've got to take a few minutes to complain in public about a call I got yesterday.
I was sitting around watching tennis from Roland Garros, so I figured I could watch tennis and be polled at the same time. And the person taking the poll assures me it's just a few questions and won't go on for very long at all.
It turns out to be a poll on the NYC mayor's race. I'm asked multiple times to choose whom I would vote for today, which I refuse to do. There are two or three candidates I am strongly considering and a few I am strongly not, and I don't want to pick a side now when there haven't been any debates and the contest not yet fully in swing. I'm read biographical descriptions of each candidate, all of them very much like what the candidates themselves would write. Then there are questionable actions about each candidate that are read off, and I'm asked to say if these things give me super strong doubts or tiny doubts or no doubts.
I admire the even-handedness of the poll. The biographies aren't suspiciously shady, and the doubt raising questions are all legitimate. This one did block paid sick leave legislation, that one did have shady fund-raisers, another did travel through the revolving door.
However, the poll just goes on and on and on and on. It takes a long time to read several candidate biographies and several more critical statements, and to repeat every time the "doubt" scale. And I admit, I took up a few minutes pointing out that the quick poll was at ten minutes, and soon approaching twenty. And then at around 18 minutes I explained that while I was sorry to have wasted everyone's time, I was hanging up. Because I sure as heck wasn't giving more than twenty minutes of my life to participating in this poll.
And that's the thing I don't get. How do you expect anyone to participate in a poll that's going to take a half hour out of their lives? Anyone? How can you have an accurate poll when the only people you'll get to take it are people with nothing better to do for an entire half hour.
Can Nate Silver explain this to me?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
A quick rant
I don't agree with Rand Paul on much, but I'd be remiss not to thank him for doing a little battle against the never-ending war against "Al Qaeda" we are fighting with drones. I put "Al Qaeda" in quotes because it deserves to be. The entity that attacked us on 9/11 is pretty much out of business. The other organizations that call themselves Al Qaeda this or that are not Al Qaeda, no more than someone else can call themselves a Bilmes or a Joshua or a Joshua Bilmes and not be me. And even though I am not in favor of any of these organizations attacking us or for that matter attacking other people, including other Muslims, which they do as or more often as attacking us, I am in favor of the rule of law. Targeted assassinations against targets determined behind closed doors under a program with no oversight, no accountability, no nothing, with the administration not even willing to entirely preclude carrying out attacks like this as opposed to arrest and trial even when they can do so -- those aren't the rule of law. And as people who read this blog know, I wish that libertarians and especially gun nut libertarians would stop fixating all their attention on the 2nd amendment when we are doing far worse violence against multiple other amendments that are as or more important in the name of some undefinable never-ending impossible-to-ever-have-an-ending war on terrorism that has been going strong for almost 11.5 years.
So, yes, please, let's get on John Brennan and Eric Holder and the Obama administration just a wee bit on all of this.
So, yes, please, let's get on John Brennan and Eric Holder and the Obama administration just a wee bit on all of this.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Idle Musings
I just feel like ranting about a thing or two today:
The Keystone Pipeline. I'm a leftie, you read the blog and you know that, I believe in climate change, I believe in not running the AC 24/7 during the summer or leaving store doors open to hot streets while running the AC at 72 degrees in the summer, I believe in rapid transit over cars. But I'm not a crazy leftie, I do all those wonderful things and then like to fly in business class to London Book Fair so I can have a good healthy carbon footprint just like everyone else. The environmentalists shouldn't be fighting the Keystone Pipeline like it is the end of the planet. Yes, the arguments in favor of the pipeline are almost certainly a lot of hooey with regard to the jobs created. But stopping the pipeline isn't going to stop anything else. The oil locked in the Canadian tar sands is coming out no matter what, it is getting to market one way or the other, it's happening. Did you ever see the movie Silver Streak, and the train's roaring along at the end of the movie. That train is the tar sands. Now, if Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor had decided to take away the train track, the train was still going to keep coming, maybe crashed or derailed and made a mess of things. If you wanted to stop the train, you had to get into the engine. The opposition to Keystone isn't taking control of the engine, it isn't stopping the train, the best you can say is that it might lead to a tidier crash, but the people who are opposing Keystone can't say that for sure, their crash may be worse.
The sequester. As some background, I've been ambivalent about the sequester. The big reason for me is that it's so hard to get any defense cuts through normal budget processes, and the sequester doesn't spare the defense department. We spend more money on defense than the next eight or ten countries combined. You just can't tell me that with all that money we're spending we can't find ways to spend less and still defend the country. As an example, why don't we keep one or two bases in Germany or someplace like that to have a nice military hospital and an airfield to help as staging for far away conflicts, and otherwise remove troops from Europe seventy years after World War II and 25 years after the end of the cold war? I've gotten really super tired of having the SecDef going before Congress to bemoan the sequester and all the harm it's doing and wish Obama, who is after all the boss of things, had told SecDef to shut the f*ck up instead of carrying water for Lockheed. My opposition to the sequester might be as quixotic or foolish as Bill McKibben's to the Keystone Pipeline because over time, the Lockheed lobbyists will have a lot more money to spend getting their money back from DoD than the advocates for needy people who are losing things in the sequester as well, but it is what it is.
But certainly, if you want to replace the sequester that you helped create, the way to do it isn't by having this constant parade of chicken little forecasts not just about DoD but about everything else. Because ultimately, a lot of these cuts will take place over time in such a way that they are not discernable to the average person. Or the departments will find some way to move fungible money around or move job titles around where the craziest cuts don't materialize. What the average person will see is that we've had the sequester, in spite of chicken little's visit the world hasn't come to an end, and that we can cut the budget. And they will go from there to deciding that we can in fact run the government without raising taxes or cutting tax expenditures (a.ka. eliminating tax loopholes) or doing anything on the revenue side. In essence all of Obama's complaining isn't going to help him on the revenue front, it's going to hurt him, he should have just kept his yap shot and his SecDef's mouth shut and everyone else's mouth shut.
But as we've seen time and again, President Obama is not a good negotiator.
I did a tweet about this next subject. In the good old days, people sent manuscripts and there were rules to follow. Some of those rules aren't relevant any more. It doesn't matter if your electronic manuscript is double-spaced, because so much stuff is now being done electronically. Your editor reading on a Kindle doesn't care what font or size or line spacing you had going in. If the copy-editor does actually need to look at the manuscript, it's a minute to change the format on a global basis for the file. But there's one rule that needs to be followed and which many people don't. You still need a title page with your contact details at the front of your manuscript. For the exact same reason you needed your address in the old days, only more so. In the old days, maybe your query got separated from the SASE or your manuscript got separated from your cover letter. Now, it is 100% sure that they will be. I will take your attached manuscript, I will put it on my iPad, I will often reformat it into ePub for that purpose to read in iBooks, and there it will sit on my iPad. Your email? It will be somewhere in the cloud. Maybe your e-mail address will be stored as a sent-to address or maybe not or stored under your email address instead of your name. Maybe I'll want to call you instead of e-mailing you. Think how much nicer it is for me to go to the front of your manuscript and find all your details there and waiting, vs. having to go and seek out an email from three weeks or three months ago when the submission arrived, only to find that even then, I may want to call you to give the wonderful news that I want to represent your fine first novel, and you've sent me an email that doesn't even have a signature block on it.
We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for listening to me rant.
The Keystone Pipeline. I'm a leftie, you read the blog and you know that, I believe in climate change, I believe in not running the AC 24/7 during the summer or leaving store doors open to hot streets while running the AC at 72 degrees in the summer, I believe in rapid transit over cars. But I'm not a crazy leftie, I do all those wonderful things and then like to fly in business class to London Book Fair so I can have a good healthy carbon footprint just like everyone else. The environmentalists shouldn't be fighting the Keystone Pipeline like it is the end of the planet. Yes, the arguments in favor of the pipeline are almost certainly a lot of hooey with regard to the jobs created. But stopping the pipeline isn't going to stop anything else. The oil locked in the Canadian tar sands is coming out no matter what, it is getting to market one way or the other, it's happening. Did you ever see the movie Silver Streak, and the train's roaring along at the end of the movie. That train is the tar sands. Now, if Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor had decided to take away the train track, the train was still going to keep coming, maybe crashed or derailed and made a mess of things. If you wanted to stop the train, you had to get into the engine. The opposition to Keystone isn't taking control of the engine, it isn't stopping the train, the best you can say is that it might lead to a tidier crash, but the people who are opposing Keystone can't say that for sure, their crash may be worse.
The sequester. As some background, I've been ambivalent about the sequester. The big reason for me is that it's so hard to get any defense cuts through normal budget processes, and the sequester doesn't spare the defense department. We spend more money on defense than the next eight or ten countries combined. You just can't tell me that with all that money we're spending we can't find ways to spend less and still defend the country. As an example, why don't we keep one or two bases in Germany or someplace like that to have a nice military hospital and an airfield to help as staging for far away conflicts, and otherwise remove troops from Europe seventy years after World War II and 25 years after the end of the cold war? I've gotten really super tired of having the SecDef going before Congress to bemoan the sequester and all the harm it's doing and wish Obama, who is after all the boss of things, had told SecDef to shut the f*ck up instead of carrying water for Lockheed. My opposition to the sequester might be as quixotic or foolish as Bill McKibben's to the Keystone Pipeline because over time, the Lockheed lobbyists will have a lot more money to spend getting their money back from DoD than the advocates for needy people who are losing things in the sequester as well, but it is what it is.
But certainly, if you want to replace the sequester that you helped create, the way to do it isn't by having this constant parade of chicken little forecasts not just about DoD but about everything else. Because ultimately, a lot of these cuts will take place over time in such a way that they are not discernable to the average person. Or the departments will find some way to move fungible money around or move job titles around where the craziest cuts don't materialize. What the average person will see is that we've had the sequester, in spite of chicken little's visit the world hasn't come to an end, and that we can cut the budget. And they will go from there to deciding that we can in fact run the government without raising taxes or cutting tax expenditures (a.ka. eliminating tax loopholes) or doing anything on the revenue side. In essence all of Obama's complaining isn't going to help him on the revenue front, it's going to hurt him, he should have just kept his yap shot and his SecDef's mouth shut and everyone else's mouth shut.
But as we've seen time and again, President Obama is not a good negotiator.
I did a tweet about this next subject. In the good old days, people sent manuscripts and there were rules to follow. Some of those rules aren't relevant any more. It doesn't matter if your electronic manuscript is double-spaced, because so much stuff is now being done electronically. Your editor reading on a Kindle doesn't care what font or size or line spacing you had going in. If the copy-editor does actually need to look at the manuscript, it's a minute to change the format on a global basis for the file. But there's one rule that needs to be followed and which many people don't. You still need a title page with your contact details at the front of your manuscript. For the exact same reason you needed your address in the old days, only more so. In the old days, maybe your query got separated from the SASE or your manuscript got separated from your cover letter. Now, it is 100% sure that they will be. I will take your attached manuscript, I will put it on my iPad, I will often reformat it into ePub for that purpose to read in iBooks, and there it will sit on my iPad. Your email? It will be somewhere in the cloud. Maybe your e-mail address will be stored as a sent-to address or maybe not or stored under your email address instead of your name. Maybe I'll want to call you instead of e-mailing you. Think how much nicer it is for me to go to the front of your manuscript and find all your details there and waiting, vs. having to go and seek out an email from three weeks or three months ago when the submission arrived, only to find that even then, I may want to call you to give the wonderful news that I want to represent your fine first novel, and you've sent me an email that doesn't even have a signature block on it.
We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for listening to me rant.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Election Quickies
The world is way too full of post-election pontification as well as pre-election and any other kind of election pontification, I'll add only a few quick thoughts.
The Tea Party: So, yes, the Tea Party did help the Republican wave in the US House and in local legislatures. The Tea Party also kept Harry Reid in his job by putting some "winning" candidates on the ballot for US Senate. Without the Tea Party, odds are very good the Republicans would have had both houses of congress in 2010, and likely still today. The people who think Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't more like all those losing hardcore conservative senate candidates need to think on this.
And just to say, more people voted for Democrats for the House than for Republicans, but I don't think we can make a big deal here. I'm a guy who told people to stop complaining about 2000 because (a) the election was for practical purposes a tie (b) the guy who controlled the tiebreakers won. We let political parties control redistricting. And in the UK, the electoral system is skewed against the Tory party all the time, while here we can switch state-by-state every ten years who gets to make the rules.
Marijuana: Yay!! I have "under-tried" marijuana, which is one of my regrets in life. So I can't comment from personal experience on an OpEd article in the NY Times on Friday that says liberals (me, most of the time) shouldn't be in favor of this. But really. I had an employee who was addicted to cigarettes, who spent his spare cash buying cigs, who lost hours of his life to ciggy breaks puffing away in the cold and the hot and the whatever (this was a good thing for the business because at conventions, it was a networking opportunity with the other addicts), who lost a lot of time from work with various health issues some of which were no doubt exacerbated by the cigarette addiction. And do we want to talk about how helpful alcohol is to everyone ?? I'm sure that people can be addicted to marijuana in bad ways just like alcohol and cigarettes, but on balance you can't come up with a convincing harm analysis to say in more dangerous ways. Or, to put it differently, if marijuana was the legal drug and alcohol the illegal one, in ways where if you switched everything around you couldn't come up with the same arguments to say that alcohol should or shouldn't join marijuana in the legal drug pantheon.
Furthermore, the legalization of marijuana has to be viewed in the context of the overall War on Drugs. Which we've been waging for decades, and which hasn't accomplished anything. The real cost of all the drugs we're waging war on hasn't increased. Some drugs are harder to find, others have become easier to find (once upon a time it was crack, which we don't worry about anymore, yay, we won the war on crack, only when we were waging the war on crack had anyone had crystal meth on their worry radar?), but all in all we're sinking huge societal resources into an unwinnable battle that we are not winning, jailing so many people that we have the highest incarceration rates in the western world with a huge investment in a prison industrial complex. So if the trend toward legalizing marijuana means that some small piece of the war on drug resources will actually be reallocated toward things that are better for society instead of just into other fronts in the war on drugs, it is a good thing.
I'm not the marrying type, but I am happy to see gay marriage making inroads. In the early 1990s I wasn't sure this was the thing to focus on, it seemed to me you could have the civil union thing going and be just fine, but over the past two decades I have become convinced that this is an important battle for basic equality.
Most western civilizations do not have two-year election cycles, they have two months. Can we find some of that for ourselves?
Can we ban polling for even a week before the election? For four days? At all? Please??
The next time you are convinced your guy is going to win against all the polling (which it would be nice not to have so much of, but we do), remember that four or eight years ago it was the other guy who was running around the week before the election looking at the bigger crowds, the greater enthusiasm, the momentum. Because it happens every four years. It's like that line in The Shining, it isn't really Danny. So we can't go looking strange at all the wrong Romney prognostications this year, because it wasn't all that long ago that Kerry was pulling it our, and that Gore was pulling it out.
But that said, if we could ban some of the polling, we could at least more happily sustain ourselves in the belief that behind the black curtain our guy had the Big Mo, and it would force some of the election coverage either to disappear or to refocus on things other than the horse race.
And my final rant: the margin of error doesn't mean that every election is closer than it seems, sometimes it means that the election is looking much closer than it is. Yet we will never read an article that says "the poll has this guy up by five points, which means he's really up by ten points." Nope, it's always, "up by five, within the margin of error" with the implication being that it's really a tie. Yes, sometimes that is what it means. And sometimes, it means it's really just shy of a landslide.
The Tea Party: So, yes, the Tea Party did help the Republican wave in the US House and in local legislatures. The Tea Party also kept Harry Reid in his job by putting some "winning" candidates on the ballot for US Senate. Without the Tea Party, odds are very good the Republicans would have had both houses of congress in 2010, and likely still today. The people who think Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't more like all those losing hardcore conservative senate candidates need to think on this.
And just to say, more people voted for Democrats for the House than for Republicans, but I don't think we can make a big deal here. I'm a guy who told people to stop complaining about 2000 because (a) the election was for practical purposes a tie (b) the guy who controlled the tiebreakers won. We let political parties control redistricting. And in the UK, the electoral system is skewed against the Tory party all the time, while here we can switch state-by-state every ten years who gets to make the rules.
Marijuana: Yay!! I have "under-tried" marijuana, which is one of my regrets in life. So I can't comment from personal experience on an OpEd article in the NY Times on Friday that says liberals (me, most of the time) shouldn't be in favor of this. But really. I had an employee who was addicted to cigarettes, who spent his spare cash buying cigs, who lost hours of his life to ciggy breaks puffing away in the cold and the hot and the whatever (this was a good thing for the business because at conventions, it was a networking opportunity with the other addicts), who lost a lot of time from work with various health issues some of which were no doubt exacerbated by the cigarette addiction. And do we want to talk about how helpful alcohol is to everyone ?? I'm sure that people can be addicted to marijuana in bad ways just like alcohol and cigarettes, but on balance you can't come up with a convincing harm analysis to say in more dangerous ways. Or, to put it differently, if marijuana was the legal drug and alcohol the illegal one, in ways where if you switched everything around you couldn't come up with the same arguments to say that alcohol should or shouldn't join marijuana in the legal drug pantheon.
Furthermore, the legalization of marijuana has to be viewed in the context of the overall War on Drugs. Which we've been waging for decades, and which hasn't accomplished anything. The real cost of all the drugs we're waging war on hasn't increased. Some drugs are harder to find, others have become easier to find (once upon a time it was crack, which we don't worry about anymore, yay, we won the war on crack, only when we were waging the war on crack had anyone had crystal meth on their worry radar?), but all in all we're sinking huge societal resources into an unwinnable battle that we are not winning, jailing so many people that we have the highest incarceration rates in the western world with a huge investment in a prison industrial complex. So if the trend toward legalizing marijuana means that some small piece of the war on drug resources will actually be reallocated toward things that are better for society instead of just into other fronts in the war on drugs, it is a good thing.
I'm not the marrying type, but I am happy to see gay marriage making inroads. In the early 1990s I wasn't sure this was the thing to focus on, it seemed to me you could have the civil union thing going and be just fine, but over the past two decades I have become convinced that this is an important battle for basic equality.
Most western civilizations do not have two-year election cycles, they have two months. Can we find some of that for ourselves?
Can we ban polling for even a week before the election? For four days? At all? Please??
The next time you are convinced your guy is going to win against all the polling (which it would be nice not to have so much of, but we do), remember that four or eight years ago it was the other guy who was running around the week before the election looking at the bigger crowds, the greater enthusiasm, the momentum. Because it happens every four years. It's like that line in The Shining, it isn't really Danny. So we can't go looking strange at all the wrong Romney prognostications this year, because it wasn't all that long ago that Kerry was pulling it our, and that Gore was pulling it out.
But that said, if we could ban some of the polling, we could at least more happily sustain ourselves in the belief that behind the black curtain our guy had the Big Mo, and it would force some of the election coverage either to disappear or to refocus on things other than the horse race.
And my final rant: the margin of error doesn't mean that every election is closer than it seems, sometimes it means that the election is looking much closer than it is. Yet we will never read an article that says "the poll has this guy up by five points, which means he's really up by ten points." Nope, it's always, "up by five, within the margin of error" with the implication being that it's really a tie. Yes, sometimes that is what it means. And sometimes, it means it's really just shy of a landslide.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The After Sandy
So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Redistribution
I didn't watch the debate because I was watching Indians, but if I understand this part of it correctly...
Mitt Romney said he doesn't have plans for a $5 Trillion tax cut because he intends to find that amount of money elsewhere in the budget so it doesn't raise the deficit, and this cannot be considered a tax cut.
He intends to have the government take five trillion dollars from some people to give five trillion dollars to other people
Isn't that redistribution??
Yes, Redistribution
R
E
D
I
S
T
R
I
B
U
T
I
O
N
Now, from a Republicsn standpoint maybe not because money people don't pay in taxes is always your money that you get to keep so how can it be redistribution to just let you keep your five trillion dollars.
But, if you are one of the people who will lose a tax loophole and pay more of your money in taxes than you are now, won't that look like the government took Five Trillion to redistribute it elsewhere?
If you benefit from a government program whether it is having a job with Amtrak or on Sesame Street that will no longer exist, won't it look like redistribution.
If Governor Romeny's plan isn't an outright tax cut, it has to be a Five Trillion Dollar redistribution. Wouldn't you like him to let you know, now, if some of that five trillion he intends to redistribute is yours?
Mitt Romney said he doesn't have plans for a $5 Trillion tax cut because he intends to find that amount of money elsewhere in the budget so it doesn't raise the deficit, and this cannot be considered a tax cut.
He intends to have the government take five trillion dollars from some people to give five trillion dollars to other people
Isn't that redistribution??
Yes, Redistribution
R
E
D
I
S
T
R
I
B
U
T
I
O
N
Now, from a Republicsn standpoint maybe not because money people don't pay in taxes is always your money that you get to keep so how can it be redistribution to just let you keep your five trillion dollars.
But, if you are one of the people who will lose a tax loophole and pay more of your money in taxes than you are now, won't that look like the government took Five Trillion to redistribute it elsewhere?
If you benefit from a government program whether it is having a job with Amtrak or on Sesame Street that will no longer exist, won't it look like redistribution.
If Governor Romeny's plan isn't an outright tax cut, it has to be a Five Trillion Dollar redistribution. Wouldn't you like him to let you know, now, if some of that five trillion he intends to redistribute is yours?
Monday, October 1, 2012
Messaging & Politics
So it's That Time of the Year, that biennial season when you can turn to CSPAN at off-hours or streaming on their website with oodles and oodles of political debates.
And it's that time when I am perennially reminded how good the Republican Party is. Not on ideas or policies, there are very few of those that I agree with, but their messaging is always so much better and so much more consistent. You watch a handful of debates, you'll see the Republicans trotting out their well-tested talking points. And you'll see the Democrats -- well, you never know what you'll see the Democrats doing. Do Democratic strategists watch debates? Can't they figure out after the first few what the Republican message is and start to get some counterpoints out by the time debate season is into its third or fourth weeks? Will Democrats ever realize that you can get only so far trying to distance yourself from your party or your President, that one of the great Republican successes of the past four years is their unity, the single-minded purpose of their opposition to the President, their ability to get everyone to switch gears and oppose things they favored two days ago? Why do I want to trust the Democrats to do anything when they go years and decades not getting their political messaging together?
Several election cycles back, it was clear that the Democrats were doomed when they couldn't seem to figure out any way to sell the estate tax, when week after week in debate after debate they were utterly flummoxed by the Republican message on repealing the death tax.
So of course, it's pointless to look at debates and try and figure out the main message the Democrats are trying to get across, but we can see some of the main Republican themes.
I'm seeing a lot of focus on entitlement programs this year.
Argument #1 is a very nice line, that we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare, and if younger people like myself or my employees will just realize that something needs to be done, if we're willing to recognize that these programs will have to look different in the future than they do today, that we can leave things the way they are for our grandparents. This is a very powerful argument, and the mainstream media isn't picking up on it or talking about it very much. It's an argument that is directly contrary to a shibboleth in the commentariat that nobody asks for sacrifice from the American people. Well, stop, look, what's that sound, one of the main Republican talking points this year is a direct appeal to sacrifice. This is politics, the argument isn't being made in detailed specifis on the sacrifices that will be needed, but the idea that one generation can make things right for another with a little bit of sacrifice is being made very clearly.
Argument #2 is related, that we need to "fix" Social Security and Medicare.
Now, if I'm a a Democratic political strategist, I'd have a little bit of a hard time finding the right counter to Argument #1. But what about Argument #2? There's no Democratic strategist who can get the candidates saying "yeah, haven't we all seen the movie where the bad guy says 'I need to you to fix this for me,' and we all know even though it's never said what the fix is supposed to be?
Also on the messaging front, the 47% remark Mitt Romney made does seem to have done a lot more severe damage to his presidential hopes than the "legitimate rape" comment to Todd Akin's Senate race in Missouri. Why do some Republicans think, and maybe correctly, that Akin could still win with the right support, while Romney's remarks have clearly hurt not just his campaign but had some downwind effect on Senate races as well ??
Agree or disagree with the statements, or with the positions they lead to, Akin's actual position isn't really different from the Republican party's platform. He takes a different approach than others might to get to that position, but when you get down to it, his comment will cost him votes mostly from people who disagree with his reasoning. If you disagree with the position itself, you probably weren't voting for him anyway. Since his position is reflective of the party platform, he has a valid argument now when he campaigns against the political bosses who are running from him. Which helps to limit losses from that group of "position yes, reasoning no" people.
The problem with Romney's remark about the 47% is that he doesn't seem to realize that a lot of the wonderful political messaging the Republican party has, see Argument #1 and Argument #2 above, see turning the estate tax into a death tax, is designed to get votes from the 47%. From seniors on Social Security who don't pay income tax, and might be willing to have Social Security and Medicare fixed or saved so long as it's more the other guy's burden than theirs. So leave aside all of the agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, it costs votes from people on his side.
That's when the gaffe can become a really huge problem, when it will cost you votes among people who were planning to vote for you on a position basis, not because they already disagreed with the position, or who wish you wouldn't say things like that in public, but with people who were on your side of the ledger and now wonder if/why they should be.
And downwind, it's a lot harder for the Republican candidates for the House and Senate to disavow Romney's positions. If there are people on the Republican side of the ledger who start to question if that's the side to be on, you can't do what you just did with Todd Akin and kind of disavow the person while keeping with the policy.
Personal preference aside, Bob Kerrey doesn't deserve to win his Senate race in Nebraska. He was saying yes, we need to fix or repair or mend Social Security or Medicare, only with less passion and less articulately than his opponent, Deb Fischer. Who clearly considers these to be winning issues for her. So if both candidates support the same policy, you've got to vote for the better advocate. Isn't there a Democratic strategist somewhere who can supply Kerrey with words that he can say with enthusiasm and passion that don't try quite so hard to cede the main issue in the campaign to his opponent.
Agree or disagree with the statements, or with the positions they lead to, Akin's actual position isn't really different from the Republican party's platform. He takes a different approach than others might to get to that position, but when you get down to it, his comment will cost him votes mostly from people who disagree with his reasoning. If you disagree with the position itself, you probably weren't voting for him anyway. Since his position is reflective of the party platform, he has a valid argument now when he campaigns against the political bosses who are running from him. Which helps to limit losses from that group of "position yes, reasoning no" people.
The problem with Romney's remark about the 47% is that he doesn't seem to realize that a lot of the wonderful political messaging the Republican party has, see Argument #1 and Argument #2 above, see turning the estate tax into a death tax, is designed to get votes from the 47%. From seniors on Social Security who don't pay income tax, and might be willing to have Social Security and Medicare fixed or saved so long as it's more the other guy's burden than theirs. So leave aside all of the agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, it costs votes from people on his side.
That's when the gaffe can become a really huge problem, when it will cost you votes among people who were planning to vote for you on a position basis, not because they already disagreed with the position, or who wish you wouldn't say things like that in public, but with people who were on your side of the ledger and now wonder if/why they should be.
And downwind, it's a lot harder for the Republican candidates for the House and Senate to disavow Romney's positions. If there are people on the Republican side of the ledger who start to question if that's the side to be on, you can't do what you just did with Todd Akin and kind of disavow the person while keeping with the policy.
Personal preference aside, Bob Kerrey doesn't deserve to win his Senate race in Nebraska. He was saying yes, we need to fix or repair or mend Social Security or Medicare, only with less passion and less articulately than his opponent, Deb Fischer. Who clearly considers these to be winning issues for her. So if both candidates support the same policy, you've got to vote for the better advocate. Isn't there a Democratic strategist somewhere who can supply Kerrey with words that he can say with enthusiasm and passion that don't try quite so hard to cede the main issue in the campaign to his opponent.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Margin of Error
I thought I'd share with the world an e-mail I sent to the Public Advocate at the NY Times regarding margins of error in polling...
Dear Mr. Brisbane:
I am getting really tired of articles, like ones earlier this week with a paragraphs pasted below my signature block, that consistently mis-represent the meaning of the margin of error in polling. Every single time a poll shows candidates apart, even in the mid to high single digits, the articles imply that the race is tied, within the margin of error. But that's only half true. The margin of error can just as easily go the other way. Scott Walker could be five points either ahead or behind Tom Barrett in Wisconsin. He could have been tied with Kathleen Falk or could actually have had a landslide twelve point lead over Kathleen Falk. In Virginia, President Obama could be in a very close dead heat with Governor Romney because he has a seven point lead in a poll with a four percent margin of error or he could be ahead of Governor Romney by almost fifteen points.
I'm not taking sides to say in any of these cases which way the margin of error wind is actually blowing, what I am saying is that the NY Times is distorting the meaning of the term when it implies in every single instance when it uses a margin of error in polling that the margin will always and only serve only to narrow the gap between two candidates or two sides in an opinion poll and will never extend it. I realize that the approach the Times is taking is the best "cover your ass" approach, there will be a lot more complaints about the inaccuracy of polling if you say someone is up by six points and ends up winning or losing by one point than if they ended up winning by twelve, but it's not the right way to give the public a clear and proper understanding of how to evaluate polling for themselves. And more to the point, it's just not true.
Joshua Bilmes
That advantage, however, was less apparent in a poll conducted last month by Marquette University Law School that showed Mr. Walker and Mr. Barrett essentially tied in a general election matchup. Mr. Walker led Ms. Falk 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, a six-point advantage that is within the poll’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points on each candidate.
---------------------
Barack Obama won Virginia four years ago, the first time a Democrat had won the state in more than 40 years. This year, it looks like Mr. Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, may have a competitive contest for the state’s 13 electoral votes.
Mr. Obama is backed by 51 percent of voters surveyed by The Washington Post from Saturday to Wednesday, and Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is the choice of 44 percent. Mr. Obama’s seven percentage-point advantage is within the poll’s four percentage-point margin of sampling error for each candidate.
Dear Mr. Brisbane:
I am getting really tired of articles, like ones earlier this week with a paragraphs pasted below my signature block, that consistently mis-represent the meaning of the margin of error in polling. Every single time a poll shows candidates apart, even in the mid to high single digits, the articles imply that the race is tied, within the margin of error. But that's only half true. The margin of error can just as easily go the other way. Scott Walker could be five points either ahead or behind Tom Barrett in Wisconsin. He could have been tied with Kathleen Falk or could actually have had a landslide twelve point lead over Kathleen Falk. In Virginia, President Obama could be in a very close dead heat with Governor Romney because he has a seven point lead in a poll with a four percent margin of error or he could be ahead of Governor Romney by almost fifteen points.
I'm not taking sides to say in any of these cases which way the margin of error wind is actually blowing, what I am saying is that the NY Times is distorting the meaning of the term when it implies in every single instance when it uses a margin of error in polling that the margin will always and only serve only to narrow the gap between two candidates or two sides in an opinion poll and will never extend it. I realize that the approach the Times is taking is the best "cover your ass" approach, there will be a lot more complaints about the inaccuracy of polling if you say someone is up by six points and ends up winning or losing by one point than if they ended up winning by twelve, but it's not the right way to give the public a clear and proper understanding of how to evaluate polling for themselves. And more to the point, it's just not true.
Joshua Bilmes
That advantage, however, was less apparent in a poll conducted last month by Marquette University Law School that showed Mr. Walker and Mr. Barrett essentially tied in a general election matchup. Mr. Walker led Ms. Falk 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, a six-point advantage that is within the poll’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points on each candidate.
---------------------
Barack Obama won Virginia four years ago, the first time a Democrat had won the state in more than 40 years. This year, it looks like Mr. Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, may have a competitive contest for the state’s 13 electoral votes.
Mr. Obama is backed by 51 percent of voters surveyed by The Washington Post from Saturday to Wednesday, and Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is the choice of 44 percent. Mr. Obama’s seven percentage-point advantage is within the poll’s four percentage-point margin of sampling error for each candidate.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Flat Tax
So here's the thing with a flat tax, it doesn't actually make filing taxes all that much simpler.
Most people already have a pretty simply tax situation. They earn money from their job, which gets reported to the IRS. In fact, for a lot of people, your state and the IRS could just send you a bill based on the information that's given to them on your W2 and 1099 forms. Some states have even tried doing this. Of course, companies like H&R Block spend considerable lobbying dollars to stop this from happening broadly.
The complexity in the tax code, lots of it is someplace where it can't be so easily eliminated, which is in defining what income actually is for businesses or for people with more investments and wrinkles in their earning picture.
I have a relatively simple business to keep track of, I take money, I send most of it on to clients, but then there are still a lot of rules and will always be a lot of rules for just what amount of the rest of it is an expense. As an example, the government has decided that entertainment costs are only 50% deductible so that there is a disincentive to business owners to have the government subsidizing those famous three martinis at a three martini lunch. Health insurance is a fully deductible business expense, some people think it shouldn't be. If you spend a gazillion dollars buying assets that will last a gazillion years we have depreciation schedules and exceptions thereto. There isn't a great way for flat tax to just do away with all of these rules that we use to determine what the word "profit" means. For a lot of my clients, who are self-employed writers, a flat tax isn't going to be an easier tax, there will still need to be some form of Schedule C, you'll still need to save those receipts, deal with a home office deduction, maybe. And very few people who benefit from various of those things like a home office deduction will be eager to see those things eliminated in the interest of simplicity. Even if you might end up with less tax being paid in the end, all you'll see is that your little special deduction is going away, and you'll be opposed.
The first Sookie Stackhouse novel DEAD UNTIL DARK was published in 2001. The cover price was, I think $5.99 or $6.50. It's currently $7.99. Let us say hypothetically that Barnes & Noble ordered 2000 copies of the book in 2001, and that over the ten years since B&N has never had fewer than 500 copies sittling on its shelf. So which 500 copies are sitting on the shelf? Copies that were ordered in 2001 at $6.50, or copies ordered in 2011 at $7.99?
That's a complication in the tax code. If B&N can say for tax purposes that it has always had 500 copies purchased ten years ago for $6.50 sitting on its shelves, which is known as "last-in first-out" or "lifo" inventory, it gets to reduce its profit for tax purposes, because its cost for the books that are selling is based on a $7.99 price instead of a $6.50 price. That's approximately $.75 for each of those 500 books, or around $350, that B&N has made in the real world (there are not many or any first printing copies of Dead Until Dark sitting on bookstore shelves) that it hasn't made for tax purposes.
Tax complexity! Can you use "lifo," or do you use "fifo" where the goods you sell are always the goods purchased or made first, or do you use "dollar cost averaging" where you use the average price?
There are all kinds of decisions that businesses have to make that are like this, where you can do or say one thing or another and end up with a different tax bill.
The $375 profit B&N might be deferring on Dead Until Dark doesn't seem like much, but pretend you are an oil company with big tank farms that can hold huge amounts of gas, and you can say those are filled with old gas that you purchased for $23 a barrel or new gas that you purchased for $86 a barrel. I have no idea how big a huge gas tank in a tank farm is, but if you're talking 100,000 barrels with a $63 price difference, that's an awful lot of swing to your taxable income.
This is where the loopholes lurk in the tax code, where the unfairness comes in, not in the fact that it's too darned complicated to figure out how much tax you owe because you're paying 15% on the first few thousand dollars in income and 28% on the last few thousand.
Favor a flat tax, don't favor it, just don't do either because you think it's going to make the tax system simpler. A simpler tax system wouldn't come about from a flat tax, it would come about from the wholesale closing of tax loopholes. And if you like your mortgage interest deduction or college tuition credit, are you any more eager to give up that credit, than Exxon would be to give up the ability to let it decide that all the gas sitting in all its gas tanks today is gas it obtained for $23 a barrel at some point in the past?
Most people already have a pretty simply tax situation. They earn money from their job, which gets reported to the IRS. In fact, for a lot of people, your state and the IRS could just send you a bill based on the information that's given to them on your W2 and 1099 forms. Some states have even tried doing this. Of course, companies like H&R Block spend considerable lobbying dollars to stop this from happening broadly.
The complexity in the tax code, lots of it is someplace where it can't be so easily eliminated, which is in defining what income actually is for businesses or for people with more investments and wrinkles in their earning picture.
I have a relatively simple business to keep track of, I take money, I send most of it on to clients, but then there are still a lot of rules and will always be a lot of rules for just what amount of the rest of it is an expense. As an example, the government has decided that entertainment costs are only 50% deductible so that there is a disincentive to business owners to have the government subsidizing those famous three martinis at a three martini lunch. Health insurance is a fully deductible business expense, some people think it shouldn't be. If you spend a gazillion dollars buying assets that will last a gazillion years we have depreciation schedules and exceptions thereto. There isn't a great way for flat tax to just do away with all of these rules that we use to determine what the word "profit" means. For a lot of my clients, who are self-employed writers, a flat tax isn't going to be an easier tax, there will still need to be some form of Schedule C, you'll still need to save those receipts, deal with a home office deduction, maybe. And very few people who benefit from various of those things like a home office deduction will be eager to see those things eliminated in the interest of simplicity. Even if you might end up with less tax being paid in the end, all you'll see is that your little special deduction is going away, and you'll be opposed.
The first Sookie Stackhouse novel DEAD UNTIL DARK was published in 2001. The cover price was, I think $5.99 or $6.50. It's currently $7.99. Let us say hypothetically that Barnes & Noble ordered 2000 copies of the book in 2001, and that over the ten years since B&N has never had fewer than 500 copies sittling on its shelf. So which 500 copies are sitting on the shelf? Copies that were ordered in 2001 at $6.50, or copies ordered in 2011 at $7.99?
That's a complication in the tax code. If B&N can say for tax purposes that it has always had 500 copies purchased ten years ago for $6.50 sitting on its shelves, which is known as "last-in first-out" or "lifo" inventory, it gets to reduce its profit for tax purposes, because its cost for the books that are selling is based on a $7.99 price instead of a $6.50 price. That's approximately $.75 for each of those 500 books, or around $350, that B&N has made in the real world (there are not many or any first printing copies of Dead Until Dark sitting on bookstore shelves) that it hasn't made for tax purposes.
Tax complexity! Can you use "lifo," or do you use "fifo" where the goods you sell are always the goods purchased or made first, or do you use "dollar cost averaging" where you use the average price?
There are all kinds of decisions that businesses have to make that are like this, where you can do or say one thing or another and end up with a different tax bill.
The $375 profit B&N might be deferring on Dead Until Dark doesn't seem like much, but pretend you are an oil company with big tank farms that can hold huge amounts of gas, and you can say those are filled with old gas that you purchased for $23 a barrel or new gas that you purchased for $86 a barrel. I have no idea how big a huge gas tank in a tank farm is, but if you're talking 100,000 barrels with a $63 price difference, that's an awful lot of swing to your taxable income.
This is where the loopholes lurk in the tax code, where the unfairness comes in, not in the fact that it's too darned complicated to figure out how much tax you owe because you're paying 15% on the first few thousand dollars in income and 28% on the last few thousand.
Favor a flat tax, don't favor it, just don't do either because you think it's going to make the tax system simpler. A simpler tax system wouldn't come about from a flat tax, it would come about from the wholesale closing of tax loopholes. And if you like your mortgage interest deduction or college tuition credit, are you any more eager to give up that credit, than Exxon would be to give up the ability to let it decide that all the gas sitting in all its gas tanks today is gas it obtained for $23 a barrel at some point in the past?
Sunday, December 12, 2010
risk vs. reward
Here's a Washington Post article from this Saturday where Attorney General Eric Holder is defending the legality of sting operations that are finding terrorist plots emanating from radicalized Muslims in the United States.
It's a difficult question. My client Tobias Buckell mentioned another Washington Post article describing how one informant the FBI was using so upset a lot of the people in a mosque that they called the FBI to report him. You read enough of these stories, and it's very clear that the people the FBI is arresting are radicalized, do have intentions on harming us. And at the same time, a lot of their particular plots might not have advanced if the FBI didn't find and encourage and help them. From the legal definition of entrapment, I don't think the entrapment defense works because the intention is there with or without the FBI.
At the same time, I don't know if we're doing ourselves a service by having the FBI informers essentially run the bad guys in their missions. Another approach is to try and surveil and monitor the suspects and see whom they might come across if we let them play out the string a little bit. Now, there's a real risk to this. The guy in Portland, maybe he'd have ended up with real explosives in his car instead of fake explosives supplied by the FBI. But there's a gain to this as well. Two, actually. From the FBI perspective, there's less room for debate. And at least for some people, maybe we're better off if it doesn't keep looking like the FBI is arresting people for plots that, entrapment or not, wouldn't look like they exist only because the FBI was enabling. Bigger gain, if the plot advances with somebody else's help, maybe we're going to end up catching a bigger fish, kind of like the same thing where you have to try and balance jailing the foot soldiers in the drug war against jailing the kingpins.
Alas, our government has no interest in trying to talk us through real risk scenarios. Our government prefers for us all to pretend that there's no airplane security risk because we all get body scans and patdowns. Better that we give up our 4th amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. So that's not a government that's going to take any risk that they'd let some plot advance too far before making the arrests, because it would require having an adult discussion about the risk/reward of the chosen course if things go wrong.
In law enforcement and in life, like with your IRA, there's always that balance between risk and reward.
It's a difficult question. My client Tobias Buckell mentioned another Washington Post article describing how one informant the FBI was using so upset a lot of the people in a mosque that they called the FBI to report him. You read enough of these stories, and it's very clear that the people the FBI is arresting are radicalized, do have intentions on harming us. And at the same time, a lot of their particular plots might not have advanced if the FBI didn't find and encourage and help them. From the legal definition of entrapment, I don't think the entrapment defense works because the intention is there with or without the FBI.
At the same time, I don't know if we're doing ourselves a service by having the FBI informers essentially run the bad guys in their missions. Another approach is to try and surveil and monitor the suspects and see whom they might come across if we let them play out the string a little bit. Now, there's a real risk to this. The guy in Portland, maybe he'd have ended up with real explosives in his car instead of fake explosives supplied by the FBI. But there's a gain to this as well. Two, actually. From the FBI perspective, there's less room for debate. And at least for some people, maybe we're better off if it doesn't keep looking like the FBI is arresting people for plots that, entrapment or not, wouldn't look like they exist only because the FBI was enabling. Bigger gain, if the plot advances with somebody else's help, maybe we're going to end up catching a bigger fish, kind of like the same thing where you have to try and balance jailing the foot soldiers in the drug war against jailing the kingpins.
Alas, our government has no interest in trying to talk us through real risk scenarios. Our government prefers for us all to pretend that there's no airplane security risk because we all get body scans and patdowns. Better that we give up our 4th amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. So that's not a government that's going to take any risk that they'd let some plot advance too far before making the arrests, because it would require having an adult discussion about the risk/reward of the chosen course if things go wrong.
In law enforcement and in life, like with your IRA, there's always that balance between risk and reward.
Friday, December 10, 2010
coulda woulda shoulda
I'll let the Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein have the last word on the deal President Obama cut with Republican leaders on taxes. His column explains much better than I what Obama maybe shoulda done, why the Democrats in Congress have to take a big hit on blame themselves, and why maybe though I'd wish it weren't so the deal isn't as bad as we professional lefties would like to think.
And in his subsequent column which you can find here, Pearlstein goes after one of my favorite targets, the Democratic Senator from Montana Max Baucus. He was one of the only Democrats to support the Bush tax legislation in 2001 (believe you me, I don't need Steven Pearlstein to remind me of that!), and helped stall the health care bill this year with months of pointless negotiations. Now, somebody should have reined him in during that time (Reid, Obama, someone), but he's a poster child for the kind of off-rez stupid behavior that Democrats seem to put up with way too often and much more so than their counterparts on the Republican side of the aisle.
And in his subsequent column which you can find here, Pearlstein goes after one of my favorite targets, the Democratic Senator from Montana Max Baucus. He was one of the only Democrats to support the Bush tax legislation in 2001 (believe you me, I don't need Steven Pearlstein to remind me of that!), and helped stall the health care bill this year with months of pointless negotiations. Now, somebody should have reined him in during that time (Reid, Obama, someone), but he's a poster child for the kind of off-rez stupid behavior that Democrats seem to put up with way too often and much more so than their counterparts on the Republican side of the aisle.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Hostage Negotiation
"And I’m confident that as we make tough choices about bringing our deficit down, as I engage in a conversation with the American people about the hard choices we’re going to have to make to secure our future and our children’s future and our grandchildren’s future, it will become apparent that we cannot afford to extend those tax cuts any longer."
That's a quote from President Obama's statement on Dec. 6 about his deal with Republican legislative leaders to undo The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011.
Wow!
And then in his press conference on Dec. 7 to defend the deal, he says (and I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think misquoting) "no I don't think extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the American people think it's a bad idea, but since I haven't been able to persuade Mitch McConnell and John Boehner that it's a bad idea, I have to deal with that reality."
Wow, wow wow.
The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011 was agreed to in 2001. Barack Obama has had his entire two year term to prepare the American people for it, or to eliminate the possibility of this Increase on his terms. Is there anyone in the world other than Barack Obama who believes he's going to start educating the American people on the benefits and drawbacks of the The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011, when he hasn't done anything to do so in his first two years? If you need to prepare people for making difficult decisions, like let's say if I think I have a client who may be in need of a pseudonym, or even a good hard decision like needing to be sure a client has spine for getting a really great deal that can be theirs if they'll let it, I try my best to prepare for those things in advance.
"The hostage here was the American people, and I wasn't prepared to see them be harmed."
"The polls are on our side of this, the problem is the Republicans think this is the single most important thing that they have to fight for as a party."
So after the President has already caved, he has this nice news conference to finally start to educate people.
Maybe there is a big picture here, a longer view. Maybe by presenting himself as the voice of moderation now he can get the good will of the American people on other battles that will need to be fought. He did get some good things for everyone in the deal, including the extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday. He did push through health care. But there as here, he tends to wait too long to show leadership, too long to frame the debate, too long to set a bottom line. And that's just not the way you negotiate. You need to be ahead of the curve and proactive and educating on a constant ongoing basis. I often disagreed with President Bush 2, but you had to respect his adamant ongoing refusal to negotiate with himself when it came to negotiating with congress.
So having the President actively defend today the tax policies that he's been AWOL defending for two years after he's caved on it -- it's not an inspiration. Lot's of things he could have done over those two years. Tried to do an Estate Tax deal more on his terms, tried to suggest his opposition was willing to take the American people as hostages. I'm sure people can find video here or there where he mentioned these things, but can anyone say he was in front of this parade? Can anyone really say that?
That's a quote from President Obama's statement on Dec. 6 about his deal with Republican legislative leaders to undo The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011.
Wow!
And then in his press conference on Dec. 7 to defend the deal, he says (and I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think misquoting) "no I don't think extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the American people think it's a bad idea, but since I haven't been able to persuade Mitch McConnell and John Boehner that it's a bad idea, I have to deal with that reality."
Wow, wow wow.
The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011 was agreed to in 2001. Barack Obama has had his entire two year term to prepare the American people for it, or to eliminate the possibility of this Increase on his terms. Is there anyone in the world other than Barack Obama who believes he's going to start educating the American people on the benefits and drawbacks of the The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011, when he hasn't done anything to do so in his first two years? If you need to prepare people for making difficult decisions, like let's say if I think I have a client who may be in need of a pseudonym, or even a good hard decision like needing to be sure a client has spine for getting a really great deal that can be theirs if they'll let it, I try my best to prepare for those things in advance.
"The hostage here was the American people, and I wasn't prepared to see them be harmed."
"The polls are on our side of this, the problem is the Republicans think this is the single most important thing that they have to fight for as a party."
So after the President has already caved, he has this nice news conference to finally start to educate people.
Maybe there is a big picture here, a longer view. Maybe by presenting himself as the voice of moderation now he can get the good will of the American people on other battles that will need to be fought. He did get some good things for everyone in the deal, including the extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday. He did push through health care. But there as here, he tends to wait too long to show leadership, too long to frame the debate, too long to set a bottom line. And that's just not the way you negotiate. You need to be ahead of the curve and proactive and educating on a constant ongoing basis. I often disagreed with President Bush 2, but you had to respect his adamant ongoing refusal to negotiate with himself when it came to negotiating with congress.
So having the President actively defend today the tax policies that he's been AWOL defending for two years after he's caved on it -- it's not an inspiration. Lot's of things he could have done over those two years. Tried to do an Estate Tax deal more on his terms, tried to suggest his opposition was willing to take the American people as hostages. I'm sure people can find video here or there where he mentioned these things, but can anyone say he was in front of this parade? Can anyone really say that?
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Links, no sausage
Updated twice, final 4:07 EST.
The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny.
In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here.
Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and sing songs together and join a book group together and make a perfect world as the company starts to realize sales first of the Nook Color itself and then from all of the ebooks that people will buy for their Nook Color. As initial evidence that this will indeed come to pass, they say after-quarter-end sales for the Fri/Sat/Sun after Thanksgiving doubled at bn.com and increased by an impressive 17.2% at stores.
Two articles I really enjoyed in the weekend newspapers.
The first is an article from the Sunday NY Times Business section about an etailer who thinks the more you can get your customers to complain about you, the more you can attract the love of the Google search algorithms.
And the second is from the A section of Sunday's Washington Post, which describes the efforts made to treat patients wounded in Afghanistan as they are moved from the front to Germany.
And also in the Sunday Times, Ariel Kaminer subjected herself to multiple patdowns over the course of her day. Her conclusion: "It’s amazing how quickly the pat-down evolves from shocking indignity to banal hassle, just like padding around barefoot while your pants fall down and your toothpaste tube gets the third degree, something airline travelers have been experiencing for years now. The inconvenience is worth it, of course, if it works — if it uncovers potential dangers before they board a plane. That’s what a spokesman for the T.S.A. informed me, afterward, the officers’ job was: to assess whether I posed a threat to aviation. He would not comment on whether that should have included checking out the objects hidden in my pocket. All I know is I went through the line eight times, and not a single inspector noticed them."
And last but certainly not least, The Washington Post has an ode to The Settlers of Catan, which is one of those board games I really would like to have somebody to play with someday. Boskone? Next Balticon??
The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny.
In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here.
Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and sing songs together and join a book group together and make a perfect world as the company starts to realize sales first of the Nook Color itself and then from all of the ebooks that people will buy for their Nook Color. As initial evidence that this will indeed come to pass, they say after-quarter-end sales for the Fri/Sat/Sun after Thanksgiving doubled at bn.com and increased by an impressive 17.2% at stores.
Two articles I really enjoyed in the weekend newspapers.
The first is an article from the Sunday NY Times Business section about an etailer who thinks the more you can get your customers to complain about you, the more you can attract the love of the Google search algorithms.
And the second is from the A section of Sunday's Washington Post, which describes the efforts made to treat patients wounded in Afghanistan as they are moved from the front to Germany.
And also in the Sunday Times, Ariel Kaminer subjected herself to multiple patdowns over the course of her day. Her conclusion: "It’s amazing how quickly the pat-down evolves from shocking indignity to banal hassle, just like padding around barefoot while your pants fall down and your toothpaste tube gets the third degree, something airline travelers have been experiencing for years now. The inconvenience is worth it, of course, if it works — if it uncovers potential dangers before they board a plane. That’s what a spokesman for the T.S.A. informed me, afterward, the officers’ job was: to assess whether I posed a threat to aviation. He would not comment on whether that should have included checking out the objects hidden in my pocket. All I know is I went through the line eight times, and not a single inspector noticed them."
And last but certainly not least, The Washington Post has an ode to The Settlers of Catan, which is one of those board games I really would like to have somebody to play with someday. Boskone? Next Balticon??
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011
Fact: George W. Bush signed and enthusiastically supported a bill to raise all of our taxes in 2011. Living people, dead people, working people, unemployed people, rich people, poor people. And this bill was supported by, like, every Republican in the US Congress at the time.
So why can't the Democrats just start talking about how "my opponent voted for/supported/supports the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. I voted against/was opposed to the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. And in fact, I support the legislation President Obama has introduced to stop the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 and to give every American a tax cut. My opponent doesn't support this bill, he's trying to stop it."
If a Democrat is asked about the "Bush tax cuts," why can't he respond "yes, you're asking about the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. My opponent voted for/supported..."
Everything I've stated here is true. Even the richest people in the world benefit when the taxes on the first $x of their income are reduced. Obviously, it's not the whole entire truth because the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 did contain some tax reductions, which were in effect for several years before 2011. Some people who are opposed to Obama's legislation to stop the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 support alternate legislation. But it's true. This is the kind of rhetorical device that's used in politics all the time, and far less truthfully true assertions are put forth in the political arena all the time. Sometimes, even, outright lies. It's true, and it forces the Republican candidates to make the long-winded explanations and arguments in rebuttal.
But it seems to be the Democratic way to aways want to bring knives -- no, not knives, sporks -- to gun battles. The fact that they haven't been out there framing the debate in this way for the past six weeks or six months is kind of sad, kind of pathetic, and you kind of deserve to lose when you're so incompetent and inept at the basic tasks of your job.
Feel free to share this post with anyone in any position to persuade the democrats to start a serious framing exercise. For once. I will be proud and honored when John Boehner has to point to my blog to justify his support of the Republican Tax Increase of 2011.
So why can't the Democrats just start talking about how "my opponent voted for/supported/supports the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. I voted against/was opposed to the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. And in fact, I support the legislation President Obama has introduced to stop the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 and to give every American a tax cut. My opponent doesn't support this bill, he's trying to stop it."
If a Democrat is asked about the "Bush tax cuts," why can't he respond "yes, you're asking about the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. My opponent voted for/supported..."
Everything I've stated here is true. Even the richest people in the world benefit when the taxes on the first $x of their income are reduced. Obviously, it's not the whole entire truth because the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 did contain some tax reductions, which were in effect for several years before 2011. Some people who are opposed to Obama's legislation to stop the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 support alternate legislation. But it's true. This is the kind of rhetorical device that's used in politics all the time, and far less truthfully true assertions are put forth in the political arena all the time. Sometimes, even, outright lies. It's true, and it forces the Republican candidates to make the long-winded explanations and arguments in rebuttal.
But it seems to be the Democratic way to aways want to bring knives -- no, not knives, sporks -- to gun battles. The fact that they haven't been out there framing the debate in this way for the past six weeks or six months is kind of sad, kind of pathetic, and you kind of deserve to lose when you're so incompetent and inept at the basic tasks of your job.
Feel free to share this post with anyone in any position to persuade the democrats to start a serious framing exercise. For once. I will be proud and honored when John Boehner has to point to my blog to justify his support of the Republican Tax Increase of 2011.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
lost liberty
The NY Times reports in an article by Nina Bernstein that the federal government is now asking people for their papers on the Lake Shore Limited, an Amtrak train that doesn't actually cross or really go particularly near the Canadian border. The questioning is strictly "voluntary" because the government doesn't actually have the right to ask an entire trainful of people for their papers. Though of course not many people are going to refuse to answer questions from an ICE/border patrol officer shining a flashlight in their face, and the officers don't tell you that you've no obligation to answer. The officers doing this are assigned to a customs station originally set up to handle a ferry across Lake Ontario that hasn't run for some time, yet the station just kept growing and growing. Such authority to do this as can be mustered comes from rules that allow the US to enforce immigration rules within a "reasonable distance" of the border, which is set at 100 miles.
I started asking myself as I read along "now isn't the entire coastline of the US an international border?". And the article then gets around to this very point. The answer is yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Under the authority the government is claiming here, the vast majority of people in the United States, anyone standing within 100 miles of the Atlantic or Pacific or Gulf coasts, in all of Florida or Alaska or Hawaii, could have a border patrol officer ask "voluntarily" about their citizenship.
And all you need to do is plant your feet within 100 miles of our borders. You think this doesn't effect you because you're from Kansas? Guess again. If you visit the Space Needle or the Liberty Bell, you too can be "voluntarily" questioned.
You go to Times Square on New Year's Eve, the NYPD carefully pens everyone in for crowd control, and then as you leave your pen at 12:15 AM, you are asked whether or not you happen to be an American citizen. Can you prove it? Do you have your papers? Do you want to leave the pen where the government is holding you? Do you ever want to see your family or friends again? How "voluntary" does that feel to you??
When I grew up we were fighting a war, a long cold war, against a tyrannical enemy. And one of the things that enemy did, the Reds, the Communists, that were the bane of our existence and our mortal enemy for 40 years, one of the things we were supposed to abhor, was it made people keep their papers with them at all times. Not the USA. Not Americans. We were free. We had the right to go and do as we pleased.
If we become more and more like the Soviet Union, surround ourselves with an Iron Curtain of fear, we have much bigger problems than Mexican illegals cleaning our hotel rooms or even -- or even -- a terrorist successfully bombing Times Square or the subway system.
When I left my apartment on September 12, 2001 to walk into a very empty and very shaken Manhattan with literally and sadly an odor of death wafting over, for a memorial service at my synagogue, I did so in part because I needed to go into Manhattan that evening, to show that I could and that we were going to outlast the enemies that had attacked the day before.
And now, in order to defeat our enemies we allow ourselves bit-by-bit and step-by-step to become what we once struggled to defeat.
I feel less secure reading an article like this one in the NY Times than I did journeying into Manhattan on 9/12.
I started asking myself as I read along "now isn't the entire coastline of the US an international border?". And the article then gets around to this very point. The answer is yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Under the authority the government is claiming here, the vast majority of people in the United States, anyone standing within 100 miles of the Atlantic or Pacific or Gulf coasts, in all of Florida or Alaska or Hawaii, could have a border patrol officer ask "voluntarily" about their citizenship.
And all you need to do is plant your feet within 100 miles of our borders. You think this doesn't effect you because you're from Kansas? Guess again. If you visit the Space Needle or the Liberty Bell, you too can be "voluntarily" questioned.
You go to Times Square on New Year's Eve, the NYPD carefully pens everyone in for crowd control, and then as you leave your pen at 12:15 AM, you are asked whether or not you happen to be an American citizen. Can you prove it? Do you have your papers? Do you want to leave the pen where the government is holding you? Do you ever want to see your family or friends again? How "voluntary" does that feel to you??
When I grew up we were fighting a war, a long cold war, against a tyrannical enemy. And one of the things that enemy did, the Reds, the Communists, that were the bane of our existence and our mortal enemy for 40 years, one of the things we were supposed to abhor, was it made people keep their papers with them at all times. Not the USA. Not Americans. We were free. We had the right to go and do as we pleased.
If we become more and more like the Soviet Union, surround ourselves with an Iron Curtain of fear, we have much bigger problems than Mexican illegals cleaning our hotel rooms or even -- or even -- a terrorist successfully bombing Times Square or the subway system.
When I left my apartment on September 12, 2001 to walk into a very empty and very shaken Manhattan with literally and sadly an odor of death wafting over, for a memorial service at my synagogue, I did so in part because I needed to go into Manhattan that evening, to show that I could and that we were going to outlast the enemies that had attacked the day before.
And now, in order to defeat our enemies we allow ourselves bit-by-bit and step-by-step to become what we once struggled to defeat.
I feel less secure reading an article like this one in the NY Times than I did journeying into Manhattan on 9/12.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Another rant on homeland "security"
Sadly two Hungarian touriststs died in a duck tour accident in Philadelphia this week. That is two more people than have died from succesful islamic terrorism attacks in the in the US in the past 8 years. Yet we live our lives under constant assault from the security state that has developed in the US. I can enter a major league baseball stadium with a factory-sealed water bottle but not with the same bottle in its entirely empty state. I must wait on line and present photo ID to enter midtown office buildings filled with people and companies nobody in the world cares about. Airport security theatre.. Bag checks for the Bryant Park FIlm Festival. I'm not linking to all of my earlier posts, click the Homeland "security" tag to find more.
And as it turns out, going on a duck tour in Philadelphia is more dangerous.
OK, I'm being a little tiny bit flip here. If or even when there's a successful suicide bomb attack in the NYC subways, that will be a very bad thing on a level of awfulness far beyond two Hungarian tourists dying in the Delaware. And in fact, I think the random bag checks the NYPD does in the NYC subways are some of the few instances in which there's a balance struck between privacy issues, a tax on time and resources that hurts our economy and ourselves in many subtle ways, and the need to keep the western world functioning without choking on security bullshit.
But will the country ever wake up and realize that our civil liberties aren't just what the NRA decides is meant by the Second Amendment. That there is something very wrong when we go around passing laws that make it easier for all of us to have guns but make it a sin to bring in a factory-sealed 16oz bottle of Diet Coke to a Mets game vs. a factory-sealed water bottle? When I have to carry my papers to visit my accountant in his office building.
And what scares me even more is that there's a generation of people, as it's nine years now after 9/11, that's growing up to consider all of this bullshit normal. I remember when we didn't have to do these things, and I'd like for the government to say that our goal is to stop doing things like this, and not to stop when our war on terrorism is over. Because that war is never going to end, and the new normal isn't something we should be willing to accept. Where is the Tea Party to rebel against government control when it comes to the "security" policies of Major League Baseball.
And as it turns out, going on a duck tour in Philadelphia is more dangerous.
OK, I'm being a little tiny bit flip here. If or even when there's a successful suicide bomb attack in the NYC subways, that will be a very bad thing on a level of awfulness far beyond two Hungarian tourists dying in the Delaware. And in fact, I think the random bag checks the NYPD does in the NYC subways are some of the few instances in which there's a balance struck between privacy issues, a tax on time and resources that hurts our economy and ourselves in many subtle ways, and the need to keep the western world functioning without choking on security bullshit.
But will the country ever wake up and realize that our civil liberties aren't just what the NRA decides is meant by the Second Amendment. That there is something very wrong when we go around passing laws that make it easier for all of us to have guns but make it a sin to bring in a factory-sealed 16oz bottle of Diet Coke to a Mets game vs. a factory-sealed water bottle? When I have to carry my papers to visit my accountant in his office building.
And what scares me even more is that there's a generation of people, as it's nine years now after 9/11, that's growing up to consider all of this bullshit normal. I remember when we didn't have to do these things, and I'd like for the government to say that our goal is to stop doing things like this, and not to stop when our war on terrorism is over. Because that war is never going to end, and the new normal isn't something we should be willing to accept. Where is the Tea Party to rebel against government control when it comes to the "security" policies of Major League Baseball.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)