Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

What Took Him So Long?

30 Comments

Arlen Specter is finally coming out of the closet:

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and announced today that he will run in 2010 as a Democrat, according to a statement he released this morning.

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next Senator from Minnesota. (Former Sen. Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

I wonder if Reid had to offer the turncoat much in the way of chairmanships, or if he’s just doing it to avoid a primary defeat?

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh.

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat.

[Early evening update]

Man weasely politicians like Benedict Arlen must really hate the web and Google. Here’s what the hypocritical snake said when Jim Jeffords pulled the same stunt:

I take second place to no one on independence voting. But, it is my view that the organizational vote belongs to the party which supported the election of a particular Senator. I believe that is the expectation. And certainly it has been a very abrupt party change, although they have occurred in the past with only minor ripples, none have caused the major dislocation which this one has.

When I first ran in 1980, Congressman Bud Shuster sponsored a fundraiser for me in Altoona where Congressman Jack Kemp was the principal speaker. When some questions were raised as to my political philosophy, Congressman Shuster said my most important vote would be the organizational vote. From that day to this, I have believed that the organizational vote belonged to the party which supported my election.

When the Democrats urged me to switch parties some time ago, I gave them a flat “no.” I have been asked in the last several days if I intended to switch parties. I have said absolutely not.

Senator PHIL GRAMM faced this issue when he decided to switch parties. He resigned his seat, which he had won as a Democrat, and ran for reelection as a Republican. As he told me, his last vote in January 1983 was for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he voted for Tip O’Neill with the view that he was elected as a Democrat and should vote that way on organizational control. Even though, he intended to become a Republican and would have preferred another person to be Speaker.

To repeat, I intend to propose a Senate rule which would preclude a change in control of the Senate when a Senator decides to vote with the opposing party for organizational purposes.

Sauce is only for the goose, I guess.

[Evening update]

A good point:

When Jeffords switched parties, it meant that Arlen Specter was going from the majority party to the minority, which meant that he lost power. This time, Arlen Specter is going from minority to majority, so he will be gaining power. Night and day, man.

Well, it’s not like he’s ever had anything regarding political principles. I really find him more loathsome than more long-time Democrats, and always have, because at least they pretend to have principles.

Economics, General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Swarm Savvy

14 Comments

This article about how bees and ants make collective decisions reminds me of my emergent stupidity theory:

So clearly it’s not enough to just put a bunch of dumb things together — how they are put together matters as well. But it at least offers the possibility that if you had a large enough bagful of Michael Moores (admittedly, it would require all of the burlap that the world will produce for the next century or so), you might have a chance of getting something intelligent as a result.

But to get back to my NASA example, I have a theory that the converse is true as well. You can aggregate a bunch of really smart things (like rocket engineers) and come up with something really, really dumb — an entity that would make decisions that no single individual among them would ever make, sans psychotropic drugs. Call it, if you like, the “committee effect.”

I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I suspect that it’s kind of like the rule for determining the resistance of a parallel network of resistors.

[Danger Will Robinson! MATH ahead!!]

If resistors are in series, that is, connected end to end in a long row of them, it’s easy to determine the total resistance — just add them up. So two resistors of ten ohms each become one resistor of twenty ohms when one end of one is connected to one end of the other, and the resistance is measured across the two free ends.

Parallel resistors, in which both ends of the resistors are connected to each other, so that the current flows through them all simultaneously, instead of first one and then the next and so on, has a different rule to compute the net resistance.

It’s: Total Resistance = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+…+(1/Rn))

where the “R”s represent the individual resistances, and there are n resistors. In words, it’s the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the individual resistances.

For the example given above, it would be one over the sum of one-tenth plus one-tenth, or one over two-tenths, or one over one-fifth, or five ohms. So instead of doubling the resistance, as in the series case, we’ve halved it.

It can be shown (exercise left for the algebra student) that if all of the resistors are of equal value, the formula simplifies to the original resistance divided by the total number of resistors.

[End MATH]

Which is a frightening thought, if the same rule applies to my “emergent stupidity” theory. Assuming for simplicity that everyone in a government bureaucracy has the same I.Q. (it doesn’t change the answer that much if you allow variation, but assuming that they’re equal makes the calculation much simpler, as one can see from the formulas above), that means that the net I.Q. will be that I.Q. divided by the number of agency employees.

If you add the number of lobbyists and interest groups to the mix, you can drive it down another order of magnitude in value, to the point that it has the intelligence of a lobotomized fern (only slightly smarter than Joe Biden).

And my theory would seem to be borne out by the quality of decisions coming from, for example, the U.S. Agriculture Department, or the INS, or the State Department.

All of this, of course, is a long way of saying that I’m not encouraged by the prospects of merging several federal agencies and departments into a much larger (and probably dumber) one called the Department of Homeland Security, and then actually entrusting it with homeland security…

Just for those morons in comments who imagine that I was ever in favor of the DHS. I think the theory goes a long way toward explaining the hundred days, hundred f-ups that we’ve been seeing since the end of January as well.

Political Commentary

Missing Dick Cheney

6 Comments

This is kind of amazing, considering that it’s Hillary supporters:

Cheney never needed to be babysat. Whenever he said strange things on television, there was clearly an alternative motive at work. Most of his oddball appearances on the Sunday morning shows were so ballsy that even though they often made steam shoot out of our ears at the time, we laughed at how utterly brazen and in your face they were. Cheney was the master of the F-U, in a way we doubt we’ll ever see in politics again. When one reporter, in March of last year, told Cheney that 3/5 of Americans thought the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, Cheney said, “So?”.

Great Merciful Zeus, that’s ballsy. Refreshingly so.

Joe Biden would have said something memorably ridiculous in response to the same question, but more likely than not he would have made up crazy nonsensical things, and contradicted himself as he stumbled and rambled his way to commercial.

We don’t know what Joe Biden does all day, but the amount of breakfasts he is required to have with Hillary Clinton each month seem to indicate Biden needs to be babysat by grown-ups. On days Clinton’s not watching him, we’re not sure who has that duty, but “breakfast with the Vice President” sure seems like “it’s your turn to keep him from embarrassing himself for part of the day”.

The contrast between Cheney and Biden is pretty amazing.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Workers Take Over The Means Of Production

17 Comments

At Chrysler:

The agreement with the union essentially relieves Chrysler of a portion of the $10 billion it owes to the union’s retiree health fund. In exchange for giving up its claims to some of that $10 billion, the union is getting the significant equity stake in the company.

Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said that if the union winds up with a majority stake in its employer, that “puts the UAW in a strange position.”

“If it takes company stock as a part owner in the company, it would be bargaining against itself,” he said. “It can never act as adversarial in that relationship. Also it’s in a position that to make the company more stable, it has to reduce health-care benefits of its own retirees.”

“A strange position.” No kidding.

What I don’t understand is why Fiat would want a 35% stake in a company that is owned by the UAW.

[Update a few minutes later]

It seems to me that shareholders of GM, Chrysler, Bank of America and many other companies that have been screwed over by the government have massive grounds for lawsuits. The tricky part, of course, and particularly with this particular government, is getting permission from it to sue it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Politics Of Amnesia

4 Comments

Put her under oath:

Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn’t remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. “For more than an hour,” the Washington Post reported in 2007, “the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

“Among the techniques described,” the story continued, “was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder.”

Or maybe the speaker never heard what some of her Democratic colleagues were saying about legal niceties getting in the way of an effective counterterrorism strategy.

“Unfortunately, we are not living in times in which lawyers can say no to an operation just to play it safe,” said Democrat Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the 2002 confirmation hearing of Scott Muller to be the CIA’s general counsel. “We need excellent, aggressive lawyers who give sound, accurate legal advice, not lawyers who say no to an otherwise legal opinion just because it is easier to put on the brakes.”

Also, Scooter Pelosi. The thought of this incompetent hack and liar being third in line for the presidency would be more frightening if the imbecilic Joe Biden weren’t number two. How did we end up with such a government?

[Update late morning]

The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Busted

The country’s in the very best of hands:

The cavalier use of brute government force has become routine, but the emerging story of how Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke forced CEO Ken Lewis to blow up Bank of America is still shocking. It’s a case study in the ways that panicky regulators have so often botched the bailout and made the financial crisis worse.

In the name of containing “systemic risk,” our regulators spread it. In order to keep Mr. Lewis quiet, they all but ordered him to deceive his own shareholders. And in the name of restoring financial confidence, they have so mistreated Bank of America that bank executives everywhere have concluded that neither Treasury nor the Federal Reserve can be trusted.

Boy, that’s not a very flattering picture of Hank Paulson. Looks like Darth Vader without the mask.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

There’s Something Missing

25 Comments

So the president made (or is making) a speech before the NAS today in which he proposes to increase spending for “science,” and R&D (I wonder if he understands that these are different things?).

Well, no surprise there. Increasing spending is his first resort to every conceivable problem (except when it comes to defending the nation). But do you not see what I don’t see?

Obama said he plans to double the budget of key science agencies over a decade, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.

He also announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. It is a new Department of Energy organization modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that led in development of the Internet, stealth aircraft and other technological breakthroughs.

Look, Ma, no space agency! No mention of NASA at all. This, combined with the continuing absence of an administrator or White House direction, makes me wonder just where space falls in the priorities of this administration.

But actually, what I find much more disturbing is this:

“I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development,” Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.

Let’s leave aside the arbitrariness of setting a percentage goal at all (why 3%? Why not 2.5% or 5%?). Let us also ignore the fact that at the rate things are going, there’s not going to be much of a GDP to have a percentage of, and that the $420B number makes some optimistic estimates.

Why set the goal as a percentage of GDP? Why not as a percentage of the federal budget, something over which a president and a government has at least theoretical control? The implication is that he doesn’t just preside over the government and its spending priorities, but that he commands the entire national economy, and can, should and does dictate how others are to spend their own money, which apparently is no longer their own money. It implies a conceit of omniscience on the part of him and his advisors about how much we should be spending on R&D as a function of domestic product, and how we should be spending it, when he has no useful control over what non-governmental entities are spending.

Or does he? Just what does he have in mind?

Oh, and note the latest gratuitous slap at the previous administration, without which, apparently, no Obama speech is complete:

In recent years, he said, “scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas.”

He then drew chuckles, commenting: “I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around,” Obama said.

Yes, there will be no predetermined ideological agendas in an Obama administration.

Right.

Oh, one other thing. I don’t have the time to run the numbers right now, and it obviously depends on how you categorize things, but I’d wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t already spend more than 3% of the GDP on R&D. It’s just not being spent the way The One wants it to be spent.

[Update a few minutes later]

This brings to mind some thoughts that I had last summer on the ability to command and control R&D, with bad Apollo analogies.

[Late afternoon update]

One of Clark Lindsey’s readers makes a good point about the non-mention of NASA:

Perhaps, as the reader suggests, if NASA had not dropped most of its R&D in favor of funding a handful of giant development projects like Ares I, it would get more backing for such activity.

Of course, Ares 1 is R&D, technically speaking. But almost all other, more diverse and certainly more useful R&D has been sacrificed to fund it. But somehow, I actually doubt that this is the reason for the apparent oversight. It think it’s just an oversight.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, NASA didn’t go entirely unmentioned. He did repeat the flawed Apollo analogy again (it’s one of his favorites), and then said this:

My budget includes $150 billion over ten years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency; it supports efforts at NASA, recommended as a priority by the National Research Council, to develop new space-based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate.

That little whirring windy sound you hear is my upright forefinger twirling around and around.

Whoopee.