Political Rantings
Voting made easy…
Monday, August 6th, 2007Check out this site (hat tip: Willow Gross), which asks you for your position on 25 issues and their relative importance to you, and comes back with who you should vote for in 2008.
All the data is from a site called 2decide.com which, at first glance, seems like a gross overesimplification of the issues. I gotta say, though, the results are pretty consistent with how I’d have ranked the candidates if I was asked to do so by “gut feel.” Here’s my list. What’s yours?
| Candidate | Party | Support (+/-) |
| Giuliani | (R) | +31 |
| Biden | (D) | +23 |
| Dodd | (D) | +22 |
| McCain | (R) | +20 |
| Edwards | (D) | +20 |
| Clinton | (D) | +20 |
| Obama | (D) | +17 |
| Thompson | (R) | +17 |
| Kucinich | (D) | +12 |
| Richardson | (D) | +10 |
| Romney | (R) | +5 |
| Gravel | (D) | 0 |
| Hunter | (R) | -3 |
| Brownback | (R) | -7 |
| Huckabee | (R) | -10 |
| Cox | (R) | -14 |
| Paul | (R) | -16 |
| Tancredo | (R) | -24 |
Categories: Political Rantings | 5 Comments »
Objections to Wiretapping Mysteriously Vanish
Monday, August 6th, 2007In December, 2005, there was much ado made about the National Security Agency’s secret program to wiretap phone calls to/from known terrorist phone numbers (e.g., cell phones captured in the war zone) and phones in the United States. Critics interpreted the program as an opportunity for the NSA to listen in on calls made by innocent American citizens, without the need for a search warrant or even a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. There was much discussion on the legality of this program, particularly during the run-up to the 2006 congressional midterm elections.
Fast forward to August 3, 2007, the summer in an off-election year, when far fewer people are watching or listening to what Congress has to say. On that day, the Senate passed a bill that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make everything the original NSA program did legal, plus more (16 Democrats voted for the bill). Here’s what the New York Times had to say:
Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.
They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.
“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.
But wait, it gets better. The article goes on to lay out this chain of events:
1) January – under pressure from the major telecommunication companies and members of Congress, the White House places the NSA program under the auspices of the FISA court.
2) The change suddenly swamps the FISA court with an enormous volume of search warrant applications, leading the administration to seek the new legislation.
3) The legislation is drafted and passed just before Congress adjourns for it’s summer holiday.
4) The law contains language that allows the government to force telecommunication companies to comply with spying operations. Telecom companies are now threatening to challenge the law in court.
So, it seems, what started as moral outrage just before the elections turned into a logistical nightmare, which led to the passage of legislation directly opposed to the original moral outrage, and is now headed for a court challenge. Round and round we go.
No wonder no one trusts the federal government.
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4th of July Newsflash – America Ain’t So Bad
Thursday, July 5th, 2007Waking up on July 5th and perusing the news, I came across two articles that strike me as encouraging and, sadly, ironic.
The first is from the New York Times and entitled Surge Seen in Applications for Citizenship:
The number of legal immigrants seeking to become United States citizens is surging, officials say, prompted by imminent increases in fees to process naturalization applications, citizenship drives across the country and new feelings of insecurity among immigrants.
The citizenship campaigns have tapped into the uneasiness that legal immigrants, especially Hispanics, say is a result of months of debate over an immigration bill that failed last week in the Senate. Although illegal immigrants were the center of attention in the debate, it prompted many legal immigrants who have put down roots here to seek the security of citizenship, as well as its voting power, immigrants’ advocates said.
One radio listener was Angel Ivan Alvarez, 24, a legal immigrant from Mexico who said he had never thought of becoming a citizen until last week when the Senate bill failed. “I realized that I want to be able to vote and speak up for my people, because they are not getting enough support,” Mr. Alvarez said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I want everybody to be able to come out of the shadows.”
Federico Gutierrez, 53, a longtime legal resident of Chicago who was born in Mexico, said large protests in March 2006 in support of an immigration overhaul made him decide that it was time to engage in American politics. He prepared his application and brushed up on his English and American history in classes offered by the New Americans Initiative, a citizenship campaign financed by Illinois. He became a citizen in May. “Now if I don’t like the way things are going, I can let the government know my opinion,” Mr. Gutierrez said in a telephone interview.
Maybe it’s just me, but this strikes me as our government getting something positive done in spite of itself. After months of debate that resulted in no new laws being passed, it’s easy to think that the whole thing was a waste of time. But here we see law-abiding people, unsatisfied with the status quo, addressing their concerns through the established immigration channels, becoming more engaged in the policy debates, and seeking to affect change by exercising their right to vote.
We’ve seen people with similar concerns, in places like Iraq or the West Bank, addressing those concerns by blowing something up. We’ve also seen people with similar concerns in this country marching down major thoroughfares with signs and/or effigies referring to our leaders as evil, criminal, or worse.
I’ve heard it said recently that we’ll win the hearts and minds of the world by setting an example of how free people behave, rather than exporting our freedom on the backs of soldiers with bombs. If that’s true, then the hundreds of thousands of people (including 4,000 who were sworn in yesterday) who are going through this process are our ambassadors. Thank you and welcome aboard!
The other article I saw was in USA Today, entitled Guard passes goal for recruits:
New recruiting techniques and appeals to patriotism have helped the National Guard achieve its highest level of troops since 2001.
Through May, the Guard had 351,400 troops, the most since November 2001, according to data provided by the National Guard Bureau. It’s also the first time the Guard has exceeded its target of 350,000 troops for three consecutive months since May 2002.
In the three years the Guard fell short of its manpower target it also saw its largest deployments, peaking at 98,493 in 2005. That year Guard membership bottomed out at 333,177 members. This year 44,723 members have been deployed.
With idle talk circulating about the low morale of our troops (refuted daily by those actually in the military) it’s good to see some quantitative data about the country’s support for our military (the article also mentions that the army is meeting its recruiting goals as well). Also, when talk of troop deployment levels is focused almost exclusively on the “surge,” it’s a pleasant surprise to hear that we’re leaning on the National Guard less than we were a couple of years ago.
Yesterday marked our sixth Independence Day in a row with troops in harm’s way, so none of this is cause for celebration. But it’s reassuring to know that those patriots we speak so blithely of while the fireworks light up our skies are still out there, and that there’s more where they came from to boot.
God Bless ’em all & God Bless America. Happy 231! You don’t look a day over 206…
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
Before He Gets Started…
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Michael Moore’s newest documentary hype-machine, Sicko premieres this Friday. In the movie, Mr. Moore is going to tell us, through rather dramatic footage and hand-picked testimony from industry whistle-blowers that insurance companies are evil and exist only to screw over the American people. He was on The Daily Show tonight and told Jon Stewart that insurance companies are profit making businesses, and that the only way they can make a profit is by charging huge premiums and then not paying claims.
Well, before this turns into a “story with legs” and it becomes impossible to say anything about insurance that contradicts the movie, please allow me to share some of what I learned from five years of working in the insurance industry:
1) Insurance Companies Rarely Make Money Selling Insurance
Most of the time, insurance companies pay out slightly more in claims and operating expenses than they take in from premiums. Here are some facts:
The Insurance Information Institute:
Combined Ratio is the ratio of losses and associated expenses to premiums, reflecting the overall underwriting profitability of the company. If it’s below 100 (i.e., losses + expenses < premiums), then the company is making money from its insurance policies. If it’s more than 100 (losses + expenses > premiums), they’re losing money. You’ll note above that as of 2004, the industry average had remained above 100 since the 1970’s.
More sources:
The Motley Fool:
The industry’s average combined ratio in 2005 was 106.2%.
ISO:
In 1995, the industry average combined ratio of 106.3% was the “best combined ratio in seven years.”
Carinsurance.com (speaking about all Property/Casualty insurance, not just car insurance):
The 93.2% estimate for 2006, if accurate, would represent the industry’s best underwriting performance since the 93.3% combined ratio recorded 70 years earlier in 1936 [and only the second underwriting profit since 1978].
[UPDATE, as of 9/5/2015:
Categories: Money Talk, Movie Talk, Political Rantings | 6 Comments »
Bulletin: Dick Cheney is actually *NOT* Dick Cheney…
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007OK, so Dick Cheney’s assertion that he’s not in the executive branch will rightly receive a ton of airplay over the next few weeks and months (years?), possibly replacing the “shot a guy in the face” line as the most popular disparaging remark about the Vice President. What can I say – he made his own bed on this one…
Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, on the other hand, points out the funniest thing about the whole affair by far:
IMPEACH CHENEY IF YOU WANT, but do bear in mind that he’ll preside over his own impeachment trial.
No, really. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” That’s because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there’s no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached.
(Hat tip: Scalzi)
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Bush Haters Take Note: Something I Can Get Behind…
Thursday, May 31st, 2007Two weeks ago, I flew from Charlotte, NC to Newark, NJ while torrential thunderstorms covered most of the northeast. As a result, my 3:20 flight was delayed six hours, leaving at 9:30pm, and ultimately getting me home well after midnight.
Well, yesterday, I was on the 7:30 flight out of Charlotte. The weather was beautiful in both cities. The planes were where they were supposed to be. The crews were available and ready to take off. All the stars had aligned. So?
A 90 minute delay.
It seems Air Force One was on a runway in Newark airport, causing Newark to issue a full ground stop (as is normal procedure for Air Force One) until President Bush departed. Now, to be fair, I got on standby for the 6:30 flight, and made it home at around the expected time, but still – we were so close to an on-time departure!
That settles it – I’m definitely not voting for that guy again…
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Some more politics
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007The psychological need to blog about politics seems to be a cyclical thing. Here, I scratch that itch one more time:
FEMA MAKES MIRACULOUS RECOVERY
On April 15, 2007, a huge nor’easter swept through northern New Jersey, leaving many homeless and causing $180 million in damage. Here’s the (completely unpublicized) response, as per The Star Ledger, a local paper here in New Jersey:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved nearly $7.6 million in disaster assistance for individuals and businesses affected by the April 15 nor’easter, officials said yesterday. As of Monday evening [May 7, 2007], FEMA registered 9,333 applications for assistance in New Jersey, said spokeswoman Barbara Lynch. Some 8,387 homes have been inspected by FEMA and some $6.9 million has already been dispersed through the agency’s housing program alone, Lynch said.
FEMA is currently operating 12 walk-in disaster-recovery assistance centers in 11 counties. To date, FEMA has recorded some 1,500 personal visits to the centers. The center at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bound Brook, in Somerset County, leads the pack in visits, with 510 visits, Lynch said. Bound Brook is also home to the state’s last shelter for families evacuated from their homes due to the flooding.
At the height of the disaster, the American Red Cross operated 23 shelters housing 2,425 people throughout the state, said spokesman Dan Iradi. As of yesterday, the Presbyterian Church in Bound Brook was the only shelter still operating with some 93 people.
Volunteers from the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and various Christian organizations are providing assistance for flood victims struggling with the cleanup of their homes and businesses. The elderly or overwhelmed are encouraged to dial 211 — an emergency number set up by the state.
The federal Small Business Administration is working with FEMA to offer low-interest loans to affected individuals and businesses. Spokeswoman Bonny Thompson Wright stressed that individuals should not be deterred from applying, noting that historically, 80 percent of SBA loans go to homeowners and renters.
Now, Bound Brook is no New Orleans. We’re talking about just over 10,000 people here, as opposed to 1.3 million. That said, it’s not all that different either: According to Wikipedia, Bound Brook has a median household income of just under $48,000, with roughly 11% of the population living below the poverty line. In Greater New Orleans (circa 2000, or pre-Katrina), the median household income was just over $27,000 and roughly 24% of the families lived below the poverty line.
Note, though, how the coordinated response from local, state and federal agencies (including FEMA), as well as non-government agencies like the Red Cross and faith-based organizations have all but put Bound Brook back on its feet in relatively short order. New Orleans, who’s local and state agencies all but abandoned the people at their time of greatest need, complicating an already complex situation which resulted in FEMA’s total ineffectiveness, is still a mess two years after the fact. Many will ignore examples of success, though, and continue to believe that all of this is because George Bush hates New Orleans residents more than he hates those in Bound Brook…
This from CNN:
Three retired generals challenged a dozen members of Congress in a new ad campaign Wednesday, saying the politicians can’t support President Bush’s policies in Iraq and still expect to win re-election. Other veterans promoted the campaign at a news conference in Manchester, the start of a six-state publicity tour targeting Sens. John Sununu of New Hampshire, Susan Collins of Maine, Norm Coleman of Minnesota and John Warner of Virginia, plus nine House members. All are Republicans.
This cannot be found on CNN:
A petition signed by 2,700 current and former service members in support of continuing U.S. combat operations in Iraq will be turned over to two Republican lawmakers tomorrow in a ceremony at the headquarters of the nation’s largest group of combat veterans. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House Republican leader, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will receive the petition, and use the event as another opportunity to criticize Democrats who control the House and Senate for trying to impose a withdrawal timetable on Iraq combat operations.
About 60 percent of the 2,700 signatures on the Appeal For Courage petition come from service members who are serving or have served in Iraq, with about two-thirds enlisted members and one-third officers. The signatures were gathered over about a month. The petition states:
“As an American currently serving my nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to fully support our mission in Iraq and halt any calls for retreat. I also respectfully urge my political leaders to actively oppose media efforts which embolden my enemy while demoralizing American support at home. The War in Iraq is a necessary and just effort to bring freedom to the Middle East and protect America from further attack.”
Regardless of what you think of the war, doesn’t it seem like CNN can’t honestly report on one of these stories without mentioning the other? They happened within two days of each other, and clearly show a wide variety of opinions across the military on our current war strategy.
GEORGE TENET – OVER-HYPED (LACK OF) CRITICISM
I’d heard about George Tenet’s new “tell all” book, in which he reportedly slams the Bush administration for lying about the intelligence his CIA gave them leading up to the war in Iraq. I haven’t read the book, nor do I intend to.
It would be great, just once, to hear a former Bush administration official criticize the administration when he hasn’t received a multi-million dollar advance to promote a book, or has at least offered to donate his personal profits from such “introspective confessions” to help families who have experienced loss or injury due to the war. Until that happens, I consider all of these “shocking revelations” as suspect, and I’ll stay away from the books, thank you very much.
All of that said, I did see Tenet on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show (the news source of choice for discriminating viewers) and I read the above story by Fred Thompson, both of which point to the same thing: Tenet really isn’t slamming the Bush Administration for much at all. He’s telling everyone that the CIA proved a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, but not between Saddam and the 9/11 plot. He also said that the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda was sporadic and ancillary, and that at the time, they really didn’t know how connected the two groups were. He also said that he personally believed that Saddam had WMD when the war began, as did many other intelligence sources (“everybody got it wrong”), suggesting that no one was lying about it, as much as everyone was duped by the Iraqi (mis)information machine.
But this simply won’t do. You can’t sell a “tell all” book if the book suggests that the administration had the best interests of the country at heart, made the best decisions they could given the facts they had, and things just went extremely badly from there. Stewart showed clips of various interviewers lambasting Tenet (sometimes even screaming at him) about what they seem to have pre-determined to be his role in a massive cover-up that led us to war. Many demanded to know why he didn’t resign in the face of such immoral and dishonest behavior by the Bush administration.
It’s like they’re mad at him for not telling the same story they’ve now settled on. The fact that he’s a principal in the story and they’re just reporting on it doesn’t seem to matter in the least. In fact, it seems the order of descending credibility goes: 1) The media’s take on what happened, 2) the marketing spin designed to sell the book, and 3) what George Tenet is actually saying.
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
Where’s the Civil Rights Discussion?
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007Yesterday, we learned about two violations of our civil liberties, the latest evidence of a much publicized trend that has earned the Bush administration their reputation as constitution shredders. Ironically, these particular offenses seem to have gone largely unnoticed.
The first involved a group of six friends, including three brothers who owned a simple roofing business, a Philadelphia taxi driver, and a convenience store clerk. The brothers are illegal aliens, two others are here on green cards, and the taxi driver is a U.S. citizen. In January of 2006, one of these men brought a video cassette into a local video store and asked to have it copied onto DVD. The video happened to be footage of arabic men shooting assault rifles and yelling “Allah-o-Akbar” and “Jihad!” and the customer happened to be of muslim descent. Based on this purely circumstantial evidence, the FBI infiltrated this group of friends and tracked them for sixteen months, including putting them under video surveillance during trips they took to the Pocono mountains.
We only learned about it yesterday when this came to light:
The suspects conducted surveillance of Fort Dix and other U.S. military installations in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, plotting attacks inspired by an international call for holy war against the West, officials said.
“My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of American soldiers, light up four or five Humvees full of soldiers,” [a U.S. attorney] quoted one of the suspects as saying.
They also discussed attacking two U.S. warships when they docked in Philadelphia and staging an attack on the annual Army-Navy college football game, prosecutors said.
[The FBI] obtained computer files [including] the wills of at least two of the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks [and] images of Osama bin Laden urging viewers to join their movement.
Fascinating that no one is complaining about the FBI’s egregious actions in this case.
The other event we learned about yesterday involves the data mining of U.S. citizens to determine what news articles they are reading, in order to “determine hidden patterns of uses.” You’ll recall the public outcry over this kind of analysis by the TSA for no-fly lists, by the federal government over Microsoft & Yahoo’s search results to prosecute online pornography, and by the NSA for obtaining phone records of known terrorists. Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize in December, 2005 for their investigative reporting on the subject.
But this time, the New York Times is silent on the issue. Why? Because it’s The New York Times that’s doing the data mining. Janet Robinson, the Times’ president and CEO calls the R&D department, who came up with the idea, “a concept unique in the industry.”
Jeff Porten and I had several long debates on the subject back in May of 2006. His argument at the time was that searching the entire population for patterns is invasive because it gives them the ability to search for a particular individual. Specifically in the search engine case, the concern was not so much about the Yahoo checking up on what I was searching for, but about the government one day requiring that data via subpeona to make a case against an individual. Surely the same concern applies here, no?
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
A Congent, Balanced Argument Against “The Surge”
Friday, April 6th, 2007This guy seems to have it just right:
I do not want–as I believe most Americans do not want–to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong…
I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered…
Isn’t this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time–at every crisis–we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before…
Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have…
But the costs of the war’s present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the [civilians]. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop…
Amazing, isn’t it? A critique of the war in Iraq that doesn’t refer to the President as an incompetent, moronic criminal. A rational argument that acknowledges the complexity of the situation, the brutality of the enemy, and the difficulty of ending the war after having fought it for so long. Why, it’s almost like the speaker is from an entirely different era, when politics was more about making your case than destroying the credibility of the other side.
Oh, who was the speaker? Sorry, forgot that detail – it was Robert F. Kennedy, circa 1968, speaking about the Vietnam war. As Glenn likes to say, read the whole thing.
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A Little Something for Everyone…
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Another one of those MadTV spoofs on Steve Jobs:
Watch it all the way to the end. Trust me…
Categories: Political Rantings, Tech Talk, The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »