Let the mud-throwing begin

After months of cordial relations, Hillary and Obama have started throwing mud in earnest. In a recent debate Hillary accused Obama of working for a slum-lord and being a closet Reagan-lover. Obama hit back by reminding people that Hillary was on the Walmart board of directors.

All of these attacks are unfounded. Obama praised Reagan's ability to reshape American politics, not his policies. Both Bill and Hillary have given Reagan stronger praise. When Hillary was on the Walmart board they hated her for her social conscience. Obama had little personal contact with the slum lord and Hillary has closer contacts with more disreputable characters.

This week Obama suggested that Hillary votes with the Republicans too often to be trustworthy. This is a badly thought out attack for several reasons:

• His book decries exactly this sort of attack. Hillary already released a statement pointing this out.
• Hillary has already pointed out his long record of ducking controversial votes. She can point out that at least she is on the record on these issues while he is not. THis puts him back on the defensive.
• It gives Republicans some strong ammunition to use if Obama gets the nomination. While Obama is identifying particular issues, his attack can be taken as an attack on Republicans and compromise in general. Obama has been running on a platform of hope and bipartisanship. This indicates that his idea of bipartisanship is for the other side to vote his way. Where Bill Clinton claimed to see all sides of an issue, Obama regularly insists that he has the only valid side. Contrast this with McCain who regularly votes with Democrats.

Obama started the campaign with a handicap. He talked a lot about rising above the bickering and personal attacks that have typified modern politics. Hillary embodies these traits. Obama either has to sink to her level which diminishes his appeal or he has to constantly stay on the defensive. Like G. W. Bush in debates, Hillary benefits from low expectations. She campaigns like a Clinton. We don't expect anything better from her.

The Field Narrows

So far it has only the third-tier candidates who dropped out of the presidential race - people who never stood a chance and whose runs bordered on an exercise in vanity. Today the race lost its two second-tier candidates - people who seemed to stand a chance but were not winning primaries. I'll miss both of them but for different reasons.

I will miss Edwards for purely partisan reasons. The longer it takes for a party to establish a clear front-runner the worse it does in the November election. The shortened primary cycle was mainly designed to allow Hillary to wrap up the nomination quickly and get on with organizing her national campaign. As soon as she or Obama gets enough delegates to clinch the nomination the primary race is essentially over. The candidate can start solidifying support and move to the center. Edwards wasn't winning but he was taking delegates which slowed the eventual winner's progress.

It is no mystery why Edwards never got any traction. He came in a poor second to Kerry in 2004. At the time he seemed fresh and his "two Americas" theme resonated with many Democrats. Four years later he is no longer fresh. He has a new message but could not articulate it as well. Plus he has been tarnished by his association with Kerry. He would probably have done better to turn Kerry down in 2004.

On the other side, I will miss Rudy Giuliani. He had a lot of strengths as a candidate. He is a moderate, possibly even liberal, on some social issues but he has solid credentials as an administrator (New York City is larger than 41 states) and as a tax cutter. In 2006 Democrats ran as solid fiscal managers. He could have taken that issue back from them. He also ran well in traditional Democrat strongholds. He had a lot of personal baggage but, unlike Hillary, he didn't have his biggest piece of baggage campaigning for him.

Six months ago Rudy was the front-runner but that seems to have been largely based on name recognition. I saw one analysis that pointed out that the more voters saw of him the less they liked him. I suspect that most people find New Yorkers slightly grating and that this did him as much harm as anything. I wonder if Mayor Bloomberg has figured this out yet?

So where does that leave us? I suspect that Hillary's insider connections will eventually get her the nomination. Obama supporters will be outraged and stay home in November.

McCain seems to be on a roll. With Hillary (and Obama) so far to the left, he has the middle all to himself in a general election. I worry that he will move too far to the left. He has always been unpredictable. Given the choice, I prefer Romney although neither would be my first pick. Both should prove themselves electable in a general election against Hillary. Obama, on the other hand, has youth and charisma. With the newest set of endorsements he is evoking a president who was killed the year before Obama was born.

Defending Republicans

A list of "Things you have to believe to be a Republican" has been around for some time but Dennis Prager just wrote a column rebutting it. It got me to thinking. This is my version of a rebuttal.

Here's the list.

1. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.
   
   
2. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
   
   
3. Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.
   
   
4. “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.
   
   
5. A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
   
   
6. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
   
   
7. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.
   
   
8. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.
   
   
9. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.
   
   
10. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
    
    
11. HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.
    
    
12. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
    
    
13. Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
    
    
14. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.
    
    
15. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
    
    
16. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
    
    
17. The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.
    
    
18. You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.
    
    
19. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.
    
    
20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

The first point says more about the left than the right. Rush became accidentally addicted to a prescription painkiller that was not supposed to be addictive. Comparing that with recreational drug use is unfair.

Several of these points try to lump all conservative together. This is unfair. Just because someone on the far right believes something does not mean that all conservatives to. This is equivalent to attributing Cindy Sheehan's anti-American statements to Hillary. Numbers 2 and 6 are examples of this.

Numbers 3 and 5 are pairs of non sequiturs. Pro-business (and pro-employment) policies have nothing to do with drug or abortion policy. Also, no Republican has ever proposed removing all restraints on business.

No conservative has ever said number 4 although conservatives have pointed out that outsourcing tends to result in higher employment in the US.

Number 7 is another one that says a lot about the left. They characterize the troops as victims and/or killers then accuse the right of not supporting them.

Number 8 is a swipe at Governor Schwarzenegger's conduct in the early 1970s. This is a common trait among the left. Republicans who sinned decades ago are ever forgiven while Democrats who sinned in office are.

Number 9 is a legitimate point. Conservatives believe that high school kids are too young for sex and should not be encouraged. Liberals think that kids as young as 14 are old enough to have sex and should be given protection and encouragement.

An interesting thing about number 10 - the countries in question (France and Germany) both elected governments that are much more pro-America since this list was written.

For number 11, I've been watching the British government's recent cut-backs on medical coverage. They make HMOs seem warm and friendly.

Speaking of which, number 12 is fiction.

Number 13 is so wrong I could do a post on it all by itself. No Republican questions the link between tobacco and health hazards (although the link between second-hand smoke and health problems is questionable). Many Republicans do doubt that human-induced global warming requires gutting civilization. A completely different group of people believes in creationism. Many of this group are conservatives and many also doubt global warming but creationism is not part of the Republican platform.

Iraq and Iran have both been problems. The US has aided each against the other at different points depending on which country was the bigger menace at the time. With the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam took the prize as the most destabilizing element.

Number 15 has been repeated endlessly. Republicans believe that perjury, a felony, is impeachable. Republicans also believe that President Bush acted in good faith based on the intelligence estimates available. If Bush lied about Saddam having WMDs then President Clinton did, also.

Number 16 is a strange mish-mash. Republicans believe that the courts should not issue decisions that effectively amend the Constitution. That includes judges legalizing gay marriage in an end run around the legislatures. As for censoring the Internet - Democrats have been leaders in that as well as censoring video games (I'm thinking of Hillary here).

Number 17 tries to equate the likelihood that the Clinton's accepted a political payoff and used Hillary's one-time commodity trading to launder it with Bush's drunken driving record from the early 1970s. The first involves the possible cover-up of a crime. The second is a conviction record. Why would Democrats think that these are the same thing?

Number 18 concerns the differences between the Bush administration and other conservatives. While conservatives in general and Republicans specifically support Bush, they don't agree with everything his administration has done. Many libertarians support states rights to decriminalize Marijuana. The Bush administration disagreed with this. Different people, different opinions.

I'm not sure what number 19 is referring to. Maybe it is unproven accusations of Bush using cocaine and Clinton trying marijuana but not inhaling. The only people to accuse Bush of drug use are people with a political axe to grind. Clinton's drug use came up after a Bush nominee for the Supreme Court has to withdraw because he had tried marijuana in college. The two subjects have nothing to do with each other.

For number 20, I could point out that China and Viet Nam have changed governments and instituted reforms while Cuba has not. I could also point out that Clinton did not open trade with Cuba either. While these are true, the biggest reason that we have not opened trade with Cuba is that neither party wants to anger Florida's Cuban population.

Maybe I will write a set of things that Democrats believe. The problem is that my sense of fairness would keep me from writing such a one-sided, slanderous list so it would never become as widely-read as this list.

Voting Machine Follies

Ohio's Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, made national news after releasing a report in mid-December listing vulnerabilities in the voting machines that Ohio uses and recomending a complete overhaul of Ohio's voting process. Several other states are using Brunner's report as justification for getting rid of their own voting machines.

Is all of this (or any of it) justified? Not on the basis of Brunner's report. While I am not implying that there was any attempt to deceive on the part of the people who did the assessment, the report itself is highly misleading, mainly because of major omissions. One of the biggest omissions of the report is its failure to point out its own shortcomings. While everything about the methodology is documented, you have to dig to put the pieces together.

To examine this more closely:

The first problem is that the report is being treated as a general assessment on voting machines (called DREs in the report). It was not. It was an assessment of what vulnerabilities could be found in the machines using in Ohio when given total access. The difference is subtle but vital. By only focusing on DREs used in Ohio, the report gives the impression that there are no problems with any other forms of voting. In fact there are tremendous problems. In the 2000 election it became general knowledge that the punch card machines most often used rejected up to 10% of votes. The switch to DREs was a response to this. When the switch was made, it was felt that DREs were the method of voting most likely to capture all available votes.

The issue of total access vs realistic conditions is possibly the most misleading issue. The people doing the evaluations were given a voting machine to experiment with in an empty room. They not only checked for software vulnerabilities, they also evaluated physical security. To illustrate the difference, the report noted that all of the machines used standard locks and could be picked with lock picks.  While this is undoubtedly true, I doubt that anyone could pick the lock of a DRE and open it up in the middle of an election. Either voters or election officials would stop anyone from trying this.

The report found that it is possible to change the stored totals on some machines. This does not change the printed record. If an audit comparing the printed record and the totals came up with a discrepancy the resulting uproar would send an untold number of people to jail. It would be too risky to contemplate. The only way around this would be to infect the machines with specialized software that would display the vote one way but record it in both the totals and on the paper record differently. Even that would be risky since the paper record can be read by the voter. The evaluators did not address this possibility at all. Conspiracy mongers insist that this come built-in as an option that only Republicans and Hillary supporters know how to use.

Another lapse in the report is any suggestions for mitigating the vulnerabilities outside of keeping anti-virus software updated. This is a curious lapse. Security reports normally list vulnerabilities, how difficult they are to exploit in the real world, and ways that potential damage can be minimized.

The report then moves on to its recommendations. These include centralizing polling places, extending the polling period from a single Tuesday to a fifteen day period, and using optical mark cards that would be read at a central location. There is no discussion of the drawbacks of doing this. They present their own problems.

One problem is security. While I do not think that anyone would have enough access to pick the lock of a DRE during a crowded single-day election, there would be a lot more chances in a 15-day election. This includes questions about security at night. Someone who can pick locks could gain access to the optical mark cards and substitute different ones.

When assessing the current optical mark machines, the report mentions that there is no control to prevent extra cards from being fed into the machines. The recommendation is to use the same machines but the option for counting the cards on-site turned off. That would still allow extra votes to be cast.

Brunner's plan guarantees an undervote problem. The report calls for optical mark cards to be filled out and fed into a reader. The reader would show the recorded vote and reject over-votes. If the voter agreed that the card registered correctly then it would be put in a locked container and transported to the centralized vote. Since two different machines will be used, I can guarantee that not all cards will be counted the same. Worse, a high-speed machine will mangle some cards. We will be back to the issue of lost votes which the DREs was supposed to resolve. Several voting rights organizations have noticed this issue and filed complaints with Brunner. This surprised her since these came from left-leaning organizations.

The final problem is that the report recommended switching to machines that have not been tested for security problems of their own. The report even notes that only one machine has been certified that can do a central count with others coming. How can anyone seriously justify switching voting methods based on a security report that has not evaluated the alternatives.

Between the omissions and the unacknowledged problems with Brunner's alternative, it would appear that the proposal was prepared separately and the two documents joined.

Considering what is at stake - throwing out $100,000,000 in new equipment and buying $32,000,000 in new equipment, a closer look needs to be given to all alternatives. In the meantime, Brunner has shaken the nation's faith in the honesty of its elections. She has made public statements advising that she does not trust voting machines and will use a paper ballot herself. On what is fast becoming a partisan issue, she is making things much worse.

Obama and Reagan

A few days ago Obama Barack said some good things about President Reagan during a radio interview. Hillary attacked him over this during their next debate. This was unjustified but understandable.

What Obama did was to point out that Reagan was a transformative president in a way that few presidents have been. Bill Clinton was included in the group of non-transformative presidents.

He was absolutely right. Reagan left office 20 years ago but the part is still fighting over who can claim his heritage. Most of the presidential candidates are trying to run as the next Reagan. No one is running as the next Bush (although Huckabee qualifies by virtue of being a caring conservative). No one is running as the next Ford, Nixon, or Eisenhower, either.

On the other side, no one, not even Hillary, is running as the next Bill Clinton. Hillary talks about fiscal responsibility (while promising $150 billion is hand-outs) but she is running far to the left of her husband. None of the candidates are invoking Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, or Truman, either. The big question among Democrats is who can create a coalition to replace FDR's. FDR was the Democrats' last transformative president.

We expect presidential candidates to aspire to be a Reagan or Roosevelt. It's hard to win when you are promising to be mediocre. Hillary should understand this and not take it personally. After all, she is against NAFTA, one of her husband's major accomplishments.

Obama has also suggested that he will take up the mantle of Martin Luther King. Can he do this?

No. Obama is neither Reagan nor King. Reagan worked for years reshaping the party starting as governor of California. He embodied new economic principles and the radical idea that the government was not good at doing some things. Obama has nothing new to offer. He just packages a conventional Democratic platform. You could switch his platform with Hillary's or Edwards's and no one would notice.

The comparisons with King are even more of a stretch. King led a cause. Obama may have spent some time working as an activist but he wasn't a leader. At most he is the beneficiary of King's legacy.

It's Cold Out

Most of the US is suffering the coldest January in years. It snowed in Baghdad last week for the first time in living memory. The rest of the Middle-East is having unusual cold with frost threatening crops in Jordan. Even Egypt is running colder than normal. China is having problems after unusually heavy snowfall. Greenland is having the sort of winter they used to have decades ago. All of the Arctic ice that was reported melted last Summer is back again.

So, what does this mean about global warming? Nothing. It's all within normal climate variations.

But - if this had been a warm year like last year then we would be hearing a constant stream of stories about global warming.

This is a big problem with the news media. Long-term climate changes are not noticeable but they are convinced that global warming is a big story. Big stories need to be constantly fed. The reporters need to see effects of global warming right now in terms that anyone would recognize. So, anytime there is a weather event of any kind, they hunt up an expert who assures them that it is caused by global warming.

I'm sure that somewhere out there a climatologist is insisting that the current cold winter is caused by global warming.

What if a Democrat Wins?

It's the accepted wisdom that a Democrat will take the White House. The reasoning is that Democrats are united in their hatred of Bush and the Republicans, independents have turned on Republicans over the war, and the Reagan coalition has fractured.

So what if Hillary or Obama (or Edwards) wins?

Some sort of Health Care initiative will be introduced. It may or may not pass. After all, it seemed like health care's time had come when Bill and Hillary proposed it back in 1993.

After that... it's hard to say. There will certainly be some sort of attack on free trade and NAFTA. The Kyoto treaty will be sent to the Senate where it may or may not pass.

Then there's the war.

I predicted months ago that the Democrats would not actually vote to end the war. They want it as an issue. This backfired on them since the Surge is working. A Democratic president will have to explain why he is abandoning a winning strategy in favor of surrender and defeat.

The final thing that happens is that the current Democratic alliance will splinter. There are already signs of this happening. The net roots are really upset with the Democrats' performance in Congress. By now the war was supposed to have ended and Bush should have been impeached, thrown out of office, and be facing charges of treason (seriously, just look at Cindy Sheehan's public statements).

With Democrats controlling two of three branches of power, the net root will expect their progressive agenda to be implemented. It will not happen. Let's start with the war. Obama is promising to have everyone out within a year. This would be something between a retreat and a route. Assuming that Bush hasn't already signed a long-term commitment to protect Iraq, the next president will still find a military united against a fast pull-out. At various time, Hillary has talked about keeping up to 80,000 troops in Iraq long-term.

The rank and file will not accept it if we still have troops in Iraq January 1, 2009.

The candidates have been too loose in promises about trade, also. The unions will have a it over this one.

Then there's the environment. It's inevitable that some meaningless reforms will be enacted. These may not hae any real effect on CO2 emissions but they will still be painful. $3/gallon gas has hurt the economy. What will $5/gallon gas do? Or higher heating bills? Or rolling blackouts?

Regardless, there is no way to balance what is politically possible and what groups like Greenpeace are demanding.

Clinton managed to push the nation to the right within his first two years. He survived politically by moving to the right of his party. The net roots never forgave him for that but they weren't organized the way that they are now. The next Democrat president will not be able to triangulate. Four years from now we will find a Democratic party far more fractured than the Republicans are now.

Unless the Republicans win. Then we will find the Democrats biting off their own legs in frustration. But at least they will be united.

Race, Gender and the Election

Writing in the Huffington Post, Sally Kohn takes issue with Gloria Steinem about the election. Steinem is urging people to vote for Hillary because of her gender. She points out that if Obama was a woman he probably would not be where he is today. Kohn responds by pointing out that if Hillary was black then she probably wold not be a front-runner either.

What neither writer has noticed is that neither one would be there if he/she was a white man. In Hillary's case she achieved national prominence by being married to a president. She may be a competent senator but her real claim to fame and is her husband. A good bit of her campaign is based on her experience, meaning the time she spent at Bill's side while he did things. The husband of a female president could never run on such a platform (and a gay male president with a husband just will not happen in the foreseeable future).

Obama originally attracted national attention as an articulate black candidate who was comfortable talking about religion. His color gave him a pass on his religion, a subject the last several Democratic candidates for president were very uncomfortable with. While it is true that he is a good public speaker, that isn't enough to get a first-term senator taken seriously. John Edwards run in 2004 was as much as Obama could hope for - respectable enough to earn a place on the ticket but never a real threat to the front-runners.

The bottom line is that both candidates come from oppressed groups but neither can lay much claim to personal discrimination in this election.

Voter Confidence

There are two major issues affecting the public's confidence in modern elections. Republicans and Democrats are split on these issues.

The first is voting machines. After the problems with punch-card ballots in Florida's recount politicians promised to upgrade so that this would never happen again. Things get complicated from there.

In the run-up to the 2004 election the president of Diebold expressed support for reelecting President Bush. Unfortunately he used the phrase "do whatever it takes". He meant financial support but liberals were convinced that he was announcing voting machine fraud. When Kerry lost after an early lead in exit polls, many in the left were convinced that it was because of voting machine fraud. This leaked over from far-left blogs to (sort-of) mainstream news when Keith Olberman started reporting on it. This distrust continues. When Hillary unexpectedly won New Hampshire the immediate reaction from the far left was that voting machine fraud must be involved. Dennis Kucinich has asked for a recount because of this.

Because of these allegations, requirements for voting machines keep changing. Purchase of new machines was put on hold for a time until paper audit trails could be added. Now these are being rejected because potentially a machine could be programmed to record a vote to one candidate while printing a different name. Ohio's Secretary of State proposed junking the State's brand new touch screen voting machines. Instead she wants voters to fill out optical mark cards. These would be read at the precinct and verified then sent to a central location for the official count. Details are not clear but the verification process might involve abandoning the secret ballot. As I wrote in my last couple of entries, this would help the Democrats. Many people are closet Republicans who vote Democrat if their vote was public.

Even with the touch screen machines, secret ballots are no longer secret in precincts with a single voting machine. All you have to do is match the order that people voted against the paper audit trail.

Despite all of the allegations, there are no proven cases of voter machine fraud. While it is possible to hack a voting machine, it is also possible to alter optical mark ballots. The solution is to establish controls so that no one has sufficient access to alter the vote.

The other big issue is voter identification. This time the right is sure that unauthorized people are being allowed to vote. Their solution is to demand identification. The left is having a fit over this, insisting that the ID requirement is nothing but an attempt to keep poor and elderly from voting. The fee for a state id card is characterized as a poll tax. Here is an example.

The left points out that there are very few documented cases of voter fraud. The right counters with the fact that no one is actively looking for it. Reports of a van full of people going from precinct to precinct where the occupants register and vote are never investigated. There is very little to keep illegal immigrants from voting and some activists insist that they should be allowed to.

Ironically, the star witness for the left turned into exhibit number one for the right. Faye Buis-Ewing was initially refused the right to vote in Indiana because her only picture ID was a Florida driver's license. She testified that it took her four hours to get an acceptable ID. The trouble is that she was not entitled to vote. She registered to vote in Florida when she got her driver's license which disqualified her from voting in Indiana.

While activists on both sides claim to take the moral high ground, there is some cynical calculation going on, also. For decades Democrats have figured that the way to win elections was to get as many non-voters to the polls as possible. While some Democrats believe in expanding democracy, most are more concerned with winning elections. Republicans worry about Democratic voter fraud of decades ago and see this push as a possible continuation of the same thing. They also wonder how anyone can legally exist in modern society without a picture ID.

I side with the Republicans on both issues. I have not heard any evidence of voting machine fraud. To the contrary, none of the claims are remotely credible. At the same time, it seems reasonable to be as diligent about identifying registered voters as for giving someone a library card (Ohio has similar requirements).

Bradley Effect?

In my last post talked about why the pollsters got New Hampshire wrong. There have been several columns written about this subject since then. Most referred to the "Bradley Effect". Named after an LA mayoral candidate who polled much higher than he scored in the election, this is a variation of what I was talking about. Depending on who you ask, the Bradley Effect is either caused by a voter hiding his racism by lying to pollsters or trying to prevent being perceived as a racist by the pollster by lying. This is an important distinction, one that escapes many liberals.

If you vote against Obama because he is black then you are racist (or prejudiced, a more accurate word which has fallen out of usage). If you voted against Obama because you thought Hillary would do a better job then you are blameless. Regardless of the reason for your vote, many people only look at the result - a black man not getting the vote - and assume prejudice. As this column points out, the New Hampshire primary was the perfect place for the Bradley Effect to happen. Obama was clearly the candidate that Democrats were supposed to prefer so a significant number said what they thought the pollsters wanted to hear.

My earlier point is that this does not just happen when minorities are on the ballot. It is human nature to want people to think well of oneself, even when it only involves an autonomous poll-taker on the phone. Accordingly, some voters give the answers that they think will make them look better. This is more pronounced when a minority member is on the ballot but it happens other times. In 2004, Democrats were beside themselves in hatred for President Bush. I worried a bit about putting a Bush yard sign up for fear of inviting vandalism (with some reason since my sign was stolen). If an exit pollster had approached me on election day I was not going to announce my vote. A lot of others felt the same way. No minorities were involved but it still threw off the polls.

So, tell the pollsters what ever you want and vote your heart. That's why we have a secret ballot. (More on that later.)

Hillary and New Hampshire

This time yesterday I figured that Hillary was finished. Polls showed her way behind Obama. Instead she won by a few percent. What does this mean?

This is really bad news for Obama. He got a lot of momentum after Iowa. For the last few days he seemed like the unstoppable candidate for change. Now, he's been slowed. At least a few more people in New Hampshire prefer Hillary.

How did this happen and can Hillary count on it happening again? There are a few possibilities. One is her little break-down Monday. She came close to crying in front of national TV. I'm not thrilled with a president who cries when things get tough but it was the most authentic moment in her 16 years of national attention. That may have won some voters.

The Democratic Underground has a different theory. They are sure that the evil Republicans used their diabolical Diebold voting machines to throw the election to Hillary. There are several links here. The proof? The election results were different than polls and Hillary is more likely the establishment candidate. Besides, the Republican vote turned out pretty close to the polls so something must have happened to the Democrat count. The obvious problems (why would the Republicans only change the Democratic count, etc.) don't even register. Jonah Goldberg predicted that Obama's supporters could become easily unhinged if he lost. He was immediately branded a racist (on the assumption that he was only talking about Obama's black supporters) but this vindicates him.

So, what's the real reason that Hillary did better than the polls? My theory is that she got the same boost that Republicans get from a secret ballot. When a pollster calls, many people are ashamed to give their real preference. Bill Clinton never did as well in the election as in the polls. Reagan always did better than the polls showed. In this case, Hillary may be the beneficiary of the closet voter. If so then she will continue to do better in the actual primaries than the polls indicate. This will drive the Democratic Underground nuts. It will also hurt her in the general election. A lot of people will lie to pollsters rather than admit that they will vote against a Democrat who is also the first woman candidate. The same thing will happen if Obama gets the nomination.

The way to tell how big a factor this will be is to compare polls done by live people versus ones done by machine. People are more honest with a machine which will not judge them. If there is a big difference then
discount the polls by live callers. In 2004 the polls with live callers predicted a very close election, possible putting Kerry ahead. The machine-generated polls were much closer to the actual vote.

Iowa

There's no doubt who the big loser was in the Iowa caucus - Hillary. Given three candidates with interchangeable platforms, the voters went for the freshest face with Ms Experience coming in 3rd. Obama came out of it a winner, having established that he can win a contested race in a very white state. Edwards proved that he can still place second, something he did four years ago. This time it may not be enough to get him the #2 slot on the ballot.

It's a lot harder to say what it means for the Republicans. Iowa's Republicans are Huckabee's most sympathetic voters. A big percentage of them are evangelicals. Huckabee doesn't have much money and there is no time to raise more before the next round of primaries.

Also, the biggest dog in the fight wasn't there. Rudy gave Iowa a pass, preferring to concentrate on bigger states. This has never worked before but the rules have changed significantly. Everything is bunched up now. The old strategy was that the winner of the first couple of minor races could use his momentum to raise enough money to compete in the later, larger primaries. With a big cluster of primaries coming up in the next month, there isn't enough time to properly campaign in all of these states to say nothing of fund raising.

Also, Rudy's campaign has pointed out that voting in Florida has already begun. Many states now allow up to ten days for voting. A candidate who waits until just before the polls close will miss a lot of voters who already cast their ballots. Rudy is the only one going after the early voters.

Had Rudy shown up in Iowa he would likely have done poorly (slick New Yorker among the hicks and all that) and the pundits would be pronouncing his candidacy in as much trouble as Hillary's . By skipping Iowa, Rudy relieved himself of that headache. Instead of saying that he is in trouble, the pundits are wondering if his strategy will work. His strategy is risky but probably the soundest given the new realities of this year's primary schedule.

Who to vote against?

Sometimes you have a candidate who you dislike so much that your support goes to "anyone but...". For 2004, many Democrats supported "ABB" (Anyone But Bush). As they approached the primaries four years ago there was a strong Anyone But Dean movement.

As far as I'm concerned, there are several candidates on both sides who could qualify for this. And that's not counting people like Ron Paul who have no chance.

I don't like any of the three Democrat front-runners. They all made a giant step to the left and I think that they would hurt the country in several ways.

For much of the election Obama was my anyone but candidate. Every time he makes a statement on foreign policy it causes an international incident. The most recent one was when he implied that he would ban the import of toys from China. Both China and the toy manufacturers (it would take them years to move production elsewhere and they would be bankrupt before then) objected and Obama had to retract his statement.

Recently, Edwards started making a special effort. If you are a believer in economics then you have to view his entire campaign as a run against American prosperity. Thirty years ago economists thought that it was impossible to keep unemployment and inflation below 5% but it has been like that most of the last decade. A lot of this comes from foreign trade and American exports are rising fast - over 15% annually. Edwards would like to kick off a new round of trade wars. While he's at it, he wants to punish anyone (except trial lawyers) who have high earnings. All of this sounds great to unions but will hurt the rest of us.

On top of that, today he started a bidding war on how many troops he would withdraw from Iraq and how fast. His newest bid is that he would pull everyone except an embassy guard. He doesn't even want to continue training Iraqi troops.(His wife added that he might be willing to have them trained in some other country.)

Over on the Republican side, I'm torn between McCain and Huckabee. McCain scares me. He is on record as saying that campaign finance reform is more important than free speech and has tried to implement the Kyoto treaty unilaterally several times.

On the other hand, the more I see of Huckabee the less I like him. He is a compassionate conservative which is pretty close to a big-government Democrat who is anti-abortion. His main appeal is that he is a better Christian than Romney. I hate having a religious test for candidates. This will doom Republicans to permanent minority status.

Plus, Huckabee is outright mean. His ads are mean. He made a big deal of pulling his newest, meanest ads from TV but he still showed them to reporters while surrounded by anti-Romney posters.

I've seen some complaints from social conservatives saying that they are tired of waiting their turn. This puzzles me since Bush's credentials as a social conservative still seem to be in order. He certainly wasn't a fiscal conservative.

I'm sure that as the campaign progresses other candidates will give me reason to vote against them but that's the pair at the top of my list right now.

Global Warming 2008-style

Right now it is 16 degrees outside in Central Ohio. That's 40-50 degrees colder than last year. Many cities across the country got more snow in December than in all of last year. Some places set new records. That's how weather works. Sometimes its above average, other times its below.

But, last year some columnists were convinced that the warm spell was because of global warming and was how things would be from now on. Thomas Friedman quoted his wife as saying that she needed a global warming wardrobe - winter colors in spring weight fabric. I wonder how she's doing with that this year?

The trouble is that people (especially reporters) don't really understand what global warming means.  The world has warmed something like a degree in the last century. That's too small to notice. You have to look at the records to see it.

But global warming is a big story. Reporters want to be part of it. They want to be able to point at something and say that it is part of global warming. So they attribute anything unusual to global warming.

It's warm in December and January. The arctic has record low ice. Glaciers have retreated. It must all be due to global warming. Don't even look for other explanations. If someone suggests that there is an El Nino, that an ocean current periodically reverses and that this causes arctic melting or that glaciers have been retreating since the 18th century they are ignored since this message doesn't sell global warming.

Prophets of doom such as Al Gore are only too happy to encourage bad science reporting. They realized years ago that the reality of global warming wasn't very scary and that exaggeration was the only way to sell the public on extreme measure.

All of this becomes part of an information cascade. Global warming has become the accepted paradigm. Any warm weather is attributed to global warming while cold spells are just that.

Keep this in mind when you hear the weather forecast.

The Democrat's Bad Year

A year ago Democrats were congratulating themselves on retaking Congress. They made a lot of promises. They were going to clean up government corruption, force a new direction in Iraq, and investigate numerous improprieties by the Bush administration.  While Congressional leaders warned against vendetta, the rank and file rubbed their hands and waited. It was only a matter time until either Karl Rove or Dick Cheney was "frogmarched" out of the White House and off to jail. Many of the faithful expected impeachment proceedings to begin by mid-Summer.

None of it came to pass. Corruption as defined by earmarks are worse than ever. The investigation over the leak of Valerie Plame's name came up empty. Cheney's chief of staff was only convicted of hindering the investigation and had his sentence commuted. The new direction in Iraq turned out to be sending in more troops instead of withdrawing them. Congress's desire to force withdrawal of the troops became less likely when the surge paid off and people started talking about winning Iraq again.

About the only meaningful thing that Congress accomplished was raising minimum wage. They also passed some mandates for fuel economy and light bulbs for a decade in the future.

In just about every major fight with the President, Congress lost.

The question for 2008 is whether their losses will drive the faithful to the polls, giving them a stronger majority, or if the faithful will be disgusted with the Democrats and stay home. The name on the top of the ticket may have a lot to do with this, also.

This cuts both ways. None of the Republican candidates satisfy everyone. Social conservatives are demanding a strong anti-abortion candidate (Huckabee) while fiscal conservatives are appalled by the religious test being given to the candidates.

Bush finished the year a winner. His approval ratings, while still terrible, are a good bit better than Congress's and he managed not to make any major mistakes this year. After winning several fights with Congress he appears a stronger President than he did in 2006.

Of course, any good news for Bush is bad news for the Democrats which makes their year that much worse.

Hillary's Experience Problem

Hillary is basing a lot of her campaign on her "experience" in the White House. This is giving Bill problems. The way a president is supposed to make decisions is to take input from several sources then made the final determination on his own. This doesn't help Hillary much. At best she is an input rather than a decision-maker. On the other hand, if Bill says that she actually made decisions in his administration then he is undercutting his own legacy. Right now they are trying for both - Hillary implies that she was making  decisions and Bill refers to her as a sounding board.

And neither is giving specifics. The one thing that we know that Hillary was heavily involved in, health care, is a liability so she is blaming Bill for that one. The records are closed by Bill's orders. He says that he will authorize opening the records but nothing has happened yet. When they are finally opened it will probably turn out that Hillary had very little input on policy.

The Left and The Unreformed Scrooge

I was thinking of writing about which side Santa Claus takes - is he liberal (progressive) or conservative but that subject gets written about pretty often. Here's one example pushing a conservative Santa. Instead I thought I would write about Scrooge and which side of him reflects which end of the political spectrum.

At the beginning Scrooge is cheap. He denies his clerk additional coal. He objects to Cratchit, the clerk taking Christmas off. When asked to give to a charity to help the poor he says that the poor should be taken care of by the state. He even makes a comment about them dying and reducing the surplus population.

After his conversion Scrooge is a believer in direct action. He gives a large donation to charity and a huge turkey to the Cratchit family. He personally assures that Tiny Tim's health improves. It was said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well.

Of course, Dickens was a social reformer who meant the book as a morality play. The reader was supposed to be transformed along with Scrooge.

Before I begin matching things up I will admit that conditions in the mid-19th century were a far cry from today and that many institutions are not equivalent. Never the less.. I believe that Scrooge before his conversion most closely matches todays progressives and his improved version comes closer to today's conservatives. Here's my reasoning.

Scrooge hated to light extra lights or burn extra coal. Compare this with today's anti-global warming sentiments. Al Gore would applaud Scrooge (but not live like him).

Scrooge does not want to give his employee time off for Christmas. Many liberals, lead by the ACLU, want Christmas to be a private affair, celebrated within the family but not recognized in public.

Scrooge does not believe in (presumably faith-based) charities. Charities including faith-based ones provide a number of services for the poor. Progressives believe that this represents a failure and want the government to assume all responsibility for the poor.

Scrooge suggests that it would be good to get rid of the surplus population. Progressives and environmentalists have said similar things for decades. The main difference is that they are more extreme than Scrooge. Where Scrooge only suggests that the poor who refuse government aid (poor houses) should die, the left wants a significant portion of the population to die off. An Australian minister recently suggested taxing children to discourage population growth. An English couple had an abortion and sterilization so that they could continue flying on vacation, secure in the knowledge that, by relieving the earth of their offspring, they were living a carbon neutral lifestyle.

After the ghosts visit Scrooge, he is suddenly a believer in private charity and conspicuous consumption. He starts taking personal responsibility for the people around him instead of deferring responsibility to the government. He also has a lot more fun.

Light Bulbs

Congress is outlawing incandescent light bulbs over the next several years. Manufacturers assure that they will have alternatives. This is a "yes, but..." situation. I've been using compact fluorescents, halogen work lights, and LED flashlights for some time including LED Christmas light so I know the technologies fairly well. There are drawbacks to all of them. Here's a list:

Compact Fluorescents (CFLs):

• Most of them give off an unpleasant blue-white light. I find them mainly suitable when used with a yellowish lamp shade to give it a more natural light.
• They are not suitable for decorative lights.
• They are larger. Many spaces designed for incandescents cannot take a CFL.
  
• They cannot be used with a dimmer.
• Sometimes they only last a few months making them much more expensive than incandescent bulbs.
• They create toxic waste.
• They don't give off as much light as promised. When I replace an incandescent with a CFL I almost always have to go up one level. I've seen some speculation that CFLs take a while to warm up and reach full strength. This could be an illusion caused by the eye adjusting. My guess is that the strength of CFLs is calculated based on the light the tubing gives off per inch of length. Since the tube is coiled, some of that light is lost.
  

Halogen bulbs:

• They burn very hot making them a potential fire hazard.
• They are sensitive to any sort of handling.
• They are not suitable for decorative bulbs.

LEDs:

• All of them give off an unpleasant bluish light.
• LED light bulb replacements are clusters of individual LEDs. These are ugly and hard on the eye.

Incandescents (advantages):

• Give off a pleasant, natural color light.
• Make excellent decorative lights.
• Easily fit into odd spaces (ex. refrigerators, garage door openers).
• Cheap
• Non-toxic waste.

Around 1990 Congress mandated that toilets use smaller tanks. The result was toilets that often need to be flushed twice for a net increase in water use. The object was not so much saving water as it was being seen to do something about a problem.

Starting this year the starting and ending dates for Daylight Savings Time were moved. No study was done to see if it would save energy nor will the legislation be changed if it turns out that no energy was saved or that more is used. Again it is more important to be seen doing something than to accomplish anything.

The light bulb legislation is the same thing. It will affect everyone in the country and, as people adjust, they will think to themselves, "Congress is doing something to save us from global warming."


The next question - will US automakers be put out of business by the new fuel economy standards?

Romney's Religion

I've only known one Mormon couple well. They were a lovely couple and part of our wedding party. Their religion was part of their character and it had a positive affect on them.

There are some strange things in the Mormon religion. Members are supposed to refrain from smoking or drinking and they are supposed to keep several weeks worth of supplies on hand at all times. They bought their food in bulk and every meal had leftovers that were served later.

A friend who converted to Mormonism for a while complained that they never quite trust coverts since since so many drift away. In his case, they were right. By the time I knew him he had sworn off religion.

About a mile from my office is a Mormon temple. It was the first one built between Washington DC and Salt Lake City. As I understand it, at some point, married Mormons are supposed to confirm their vows at a temple and the church started making it easier for them.

None of this has anything to do with someone's qualifications to be President. All religions have points that sound strange to outsiders. It is unfair of Huckabee to run as a "Christian leader". As far as I'm concerned, this should disqualify Huckabee from the race.

Not that I'm thrilled with Romney. The insurance plan Massachusetts passed when he was governor has become the basis for Hillary Care II. That disqualifies him, not the faith he was raised to.

NBC and the Thanking the Troops Ads

Last week NBC made the news by refusing to run a pair of ads that thank the troops for keeping us safe. Their reason? The ads ended with a web address and NBC found the web site too radical. I've looked at the web site. You have to look under "issues" to find anything and even that is pretty mild. Either NBC feels that policies supported by several Republican candidates are too radical or they were looking for an excuse to keep from running anything that looked pro-troop. Neither reflects well on NBC.

The whole thing backfired. The rejection got out which informed a lot more people about the ads than simply running them would have done. Freedoms Watch got more than its money's worth and NBC looks bad.

What about the ads themselves? I found them touching. This is what "supporting the troops" means.

Not so Huffington Poster, Michael Shaw. Where you or I might just see someone standing with a skyline at his back, he sees hidden messages.

About two-thirds of the way through, there is a cozy scene of the Manhattan skyline at sunset, this "thank you" offered by a man in a dark blue scarf. In the scene, the man's right shoulder angles down but his left shoulder, which is more straight, serves to highlight where the Trade Towers used to stand. In the center of the screen, moving left to right, is a jetliner flying away from the area. After a "Thank you" is uttered by an actor in the preceding segment, blue scarf guy finishes off the phrase with the words: "for keeping us safe...." With the plane flying past the scene of the attack, the implication is that the actions of U.S. soldiers have somehow made it possible for planes (as well as the rest of us) to successfully "get past" Ground Zero.

How clever - the man's posture was chosen specially to point to something that isn't there. Worse - there is an airplane visible in the background!!! That could never happen in the skies over New York!

And the implication that the military somehow keeps us safe? How dastardly!

Someone needs to "get past" Ground Zero and it isn't Freedoms Watch.

It is too bad that the left is so polarized and anti-military that a straightforward thank you to the troops is dissected like this.

When all you have is a hammer

There is an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The trouble is that a hammer is a poor tool for driving in a screw and it doesn't work at all for tightening a nut.

Similarly, when your climate model begins and ends with greenhouse effect then it limits your vision. I've seen the people at RealClimate try to explain ice ages with no other mechanisms than CO2 emissions.

Here's an example of this taken to the extreme - using the greenhouse effect to explain Venus.

... But this was not always so, says Hakan Svedhem, an ESA scientist and lead author of one of eight studies published on Wednesday in the British journal Nature.

Venus, he believes, was partially covered with water before it became doomed by global warming.

"Probably because Venus was closer to the Sun, the atmosphere was a little bit warmer and you got more water very high up," he told AFP.

As water vapour is a greenhouse gas, this further trapped solar heat, causing the planet to heat up even more. So more surface water evaporated, and eventually dissipated into space.

It was a "positive feedback" -- a vicious circle of self-reinforcing warming which slowly dessicated the planet.

"Eventually the oceans begin to boil," said Grinspoon. "We believe this is what happened on Venus."
Even today, Earth and Venus have roughly the same amount of CO2. But whereas most of Earth's store remains locked up in the soil, rocks and oceans, on Venus the extreme heat pushed the gas into the air.

"You wound up with what we call a runaway greenhouse effect," Svedhem told AFP in an interview. "(It) reminds us of pressing problems caused by similar physics on Earth."

According to this theory, there were originally no significant differences between the Earth and Venus. This is no isolated article. Al Gore has said the same thing.

This overlooks a lot of things. Because of the inverse square law, Venus's closer orbit gives it twice the solar heat that the Earth gets. Venus does not have our moon which may have stripped some of the heavier gases from our atmosphere. And Venus does not have a magnetic field. As this article makes clear, the lack of a magnetic field allows the solar winds to change Venus's atmosphere.

“The solar wind interaction is important because it defines the conditions at the boundary of the atmosphere with space and it is a very active boundary,” says Stanislav Barabash at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna, Sweden.

In particular, the interaction causes Venus’s atmosphere to lose its gases in the form of ionized particles. The Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms (ASPERA) on Venus Express has been studying this interaction and has revealed, for the first time, the composition of the escaping particles. They are predominantly hydrogen, oxygen and helium ions.

The hammer-only people miss a lot of important cosmology. This invalidates their model of the evolution of Venus and, by implication, Earth.

Since the hammer-only people only have one tool, CO2-based climate forcing, they over-estimate the influence that this has on the climate. This in turn causes them to see looming disaster. As the people who are yelling the loudest, they get the most attention - more than they deserve.

Temperature Sensors, Heat Islands, and Global Warming

There is a volunteer project to check the placement of US temperature monitoring stations. This has found a number of stations that are improperly placed. NOAA guidelines call for the stations to be on grass, at least 100 feet from potential heat sources including pavement. Many of these stations are on pavement or gravel and some are near heat sources.

Al Gore's friends at RealClimate have an answer for this. Let's examine the issue.

First a note - I'm not positive that the RealClimate page I'm linking to was meant by them to be an answer to the problems with the monitoring stations but it was given as such in the comments section for my first link. Also, the first sentence at RealClimate refers to an assault on the measuring stations.

Before I begin I would like to point out that the problem with the stations is not the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect. RealClimate's first two points are spent "proving" that UHIs are taken into account. An UHI is caused by the accumulation of heat-absorbing surfaces found in urban areas. Parking lots and roofs absorb and radiate more heat than trees and grass.

All of that is irrelevant to the monitoring stations. A properly situated station will show warmer data than a rural one and that can be adjusted for (1) however a monitoring station that is located in a site warmer than the surrounding area will give false readings. A station placed in a field will show some warming from the surrounding area but one placed in the middle of a parking lot will be overwhelmed by the specific effects of the parking lot. This is also true of rural stations. If you place a station in the warmest spot within 1/4 mile then it will give false readings.

Yes, adjustments are made to urban readings to allow for the UHI effect but these adjustments are based on the the average of the UHI. If the station site is warmer than that then the adjustments will be insufficient.

RealClimate's 3rd poinis irrelevant. They point out that very little time is spent gathering the data so there is no time to validate the stations. This doesn't help their case.

Point #4 basically says that temperature measurement is really complicated so don't question it. This is refuted with the old acronym GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). It doesn't matter how much you massage the inputs if the figures are wrong.

Now we get to the interesting part. Point number 5 points out that the glabal warming models are not connected to actual temperature measures so adjusting the measurements will not affect them at all. While this true, it will make it a lot harder to validate the models. If models do not reflect current temperature trends then why would we accept them in predicting the future. Not enough time is spent validating the models, anyway.

Their final point - that if only enough station data is thrown out then global warming will vanish has problems. Again, they fall back on the "it's really complicated" defense. They point out that only 60 well-placed stations would be enough but then they admit that the existing stations are not well-placed. They don't give any indication that the right 60 stations are being used. If a significant number of the existing stations are giving incorrect data then the redundancy in the system works against it. As a final "proof" they fall back on anecdotal evidence - receding glaciers, melting arctic waters, etc. This is a very poor defense since glaciers started melting before the CO2 build-up, antarctic ice is increasing, etc. Amazingly, while they admit to UHIs in their first point they never even consider its effect on early spring.

In short, RealClimate's defense amounts to saying that they know that global warming is real and there is nothing that you can do to shake their faith,

(1) Earlier this year it was discovered that the adjustments for UHI had not been made since 2000. That is why the temperature record was adjusted down for the last several years. This was discovered when one of the skeptics downloaded the raw figures in order to figure out exactly how these adjustments are made in the first place.

Culture Wars 2008

With the unnameable holiday approaching, it's time for one of my regular rants about the war on Christmas.

First - is there a war on Thanksgiving? No. While the theory has always been that people should be taking off the day to thank God, this particular holiday has revolved around food for at least 200 years. The Pilgrims were added to it later. The account of the "first Thanksgiving" where the Pilgrims and the Indians gathered together was part of a propaganda booklet put together to encourage more colonists. Rather than talk about the months of short rations, it talked about the three days the y gorged themselves on migratory waterfowl.

As for Christmas, I don't care for a lot of ways that the holiday has evolved.

As recently as the early 1970s the holiday season didn't start until the day after Thanksgiving (which had not yet been named Black Friday). It was considered gauche to put up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving and even the people who put them up in late November were considered to be rushing things.

Most stores added Christmas displays in early November with more being added in early December.

Of course, catalogs with Christmas decorations started arriving in October but that was understandable. Back then, the average delivery time for mail order was 6 weeks. If you didn't have it ordered by Thanksgiving then it wasn't going to arrive on time.

Christmas trees went up late. Most people still used natural trees and they dry up and shed their needles after a couple of weeks so there was a strong incentive to put the tree up close to Christmas and take it down promptly.

Currently the Christmas season starts in stores the week following the last weekend in October (when most Halloween parties are held.
 Thanksgiving is no longer in the equation. People start putting up their Christmas trees and decorations in mid-November although, thankfully, some people still wait until December.

There is a line in the movie The Incredibles, "When everyone is super then no one is." The same holds true for Christmas. When Christmas season goes on for two months and decorations are up for three then it is no longer a special time. What with people being slow to take down their decorations, the Christmas season is as long as Winter, just shifted over a couple of months.

At the same time, there is increasing public pressure to make Christmas a private holiday - something that you might celebrate with family and close friends but you are not public about. People wish "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" in case someone might be offended at hearing the C-word.

A couple of years ago Lowes got some bad publicity for a sign announcing their "holiday tree" selection. Somehow the internal memo was misunderstood. This year they announced their "family trees". They immediately apologized for using such a stupid term but even their revised catalog manages to hide behind manufacturer's terms. They only time they actually use the C-word is when it is part of the product name.

So we are expected to keep the economy going by spending ever increasing amounts of money for a holiday that we can't name for fear of offending someone.

Does something seem out-of-whack here?

Running out the clock?

I was going to wrote something about the Democratic Congress's latest attempt at losing the war in Iraq but there isn't much left to say. Instead I'm going to talk about Harry Reid's use of the term "Running out the clock". He has used this term more than once recently. Here's a quote from September 13, 2007

Tonight President Bush announced his plan to keep at least 130,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, demonstrating that he is trying to run out the clock on his failed strategy and leave the hard decisions to the next president.

What bothers me is that this is a sports analogy. While some sports analogies can also apply to war, this one doesn't fit. Running out the clock is what a team does when it is ahead. Rather than take risks, the team will hold onto the ball until the clock runs out and the game ends.

There is no clock in Iraq but there is a game going on in Washington. Reid doesn't even seem to care much about the war. He is more worried about playing political games. As Reid seems to have defined the game, Bush wins if troops are still in Iraq when the next president is sworn in in January, 2009. The Democrats win if they force Bush to remove the troops by December, 2008.

For the troops and the Iraqis, this is life and death but Reid doesn't seem to care about that as long as he wins in Washington.

And none of the Democratic candidates for President have disputed this.

Social Security - Myth or Crisis

After Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton referred to changes being needed to keep Social Security solvent, the left went into spin control. This example from the Huffington Post is pretty typical of what the left has been saying for years about Social Security.

Back in 1983, when Social Security really was running out of money, with just a few months of payments on hand, Congress raised the payroll tax substantially. This was done deliberately in order to pile up a surplus to finance the baby boomers' retirement. And so it did: that accumulated surplus stands at more than two trillion dollars today, and is increasing at a rate of $190 billion annually.

As a result of this surplus, all the baby boomers' will have retired before Social Security runs into a projected shortfall in 2041 . That is according to the Social Security's (mostly Republican-appointed) Trustees. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Social Security can pay all promised benefits even longer, until 2046. By either date, most baby boomers will be dead, and almost all of the rest retired, before there is a problem.

Of course, there are some who maintain that the surplus "has been spent," that the Social Security Trust Fund "doesn't exist," and so on. These stories should be given all the credibility of reports about "Bat Boy" sightings in the Weekly World News. But unfortunately they are often taken seriously in the major media.

To say that Social Security's surplus "has been spent," is like saying that when you buy a U.S. government bond, your money "has been spent." Whatever has been done with the money, you are still holding a bond, and you will get your interest and principal so long as there is a U.S. government. If there is no U.S. government when you retire, well then you will have other things to worry about besides Social Security, including your private savings.

It's hard to tell if these people actually understand what they are talking about. In case you are not aware of the problem, this is it in a nutshell - every surplus dollar that goes to Social Security is immediately "invested" in a bond which the government issues to itself. The money is then transferred to the general fund and spent. Instead of a surplus, we have a pile of bonds. This is comparable to withdrawing your savings, writing yourself an IOU, then spending all of your money. You can say that you are good for your debt to yourself but you don't actually have the money.

When Social Security needs to cash these bonds the government will have to raise the cash somehow. There are several ways that this can be done but, given the enormous amounts required, none of these will be pleasant. Some of the options include:

Raising the retirement age. This will force millions to work longer. Some percentage will die first. If the government figures it right, enough will die to solve the problem.

Raising the SSN taxes. This will be tough as the percentage of workers to retirees declines.

Reducing benefits. At minimum the formula for figuring inflation is likely to be adjusted. If that is done soon then it will be fairly painless. If we wait then we will actually have to cut benefits to people already retired which will be painful.

Refinance the debt. We could convert the internal bonds to regular bonds and sell them off. This assumes that there is enough investment money out there to cover it and would obligate payments in the future.

Or we could ask Bat Boy for a loan.

Update - I really have a hard time understanding why the left is so defensive about Social Security. The math is pretty simple. Once the outlay is greater than the income then the money will have to be raised from somewhere. This will place a huge strain on the general fund which will hurt all liberal causes.

For years liberals have accused Bush of running up a big deficit so that in the future the government will be devoting so much money to paying off the national debt that nothing is left for social programs. Why then are they trying to do the same thing by denying problems with Social Security?

Veteran or Victim?

The headlines read: Veterans are more likely to be homeless. Vets make up a quarter of the homeless but are only 11% of the general population.

This is part of a general movement to identify soldiers and veterans as victims. It began with John Kerry's Winter Soldier movement. They distributed fliers to parents claiming that being drafted would turn their innocent sons into drug-addicted murderers. This has evolved. Now veterans will spend a lifetime trying unsuccessfully to adjust to civilian life. This ties in with the liberal assertion that the only people who join the military are poor minorities who have no other choice. Micheal Moore made this a major point of Fahrenheit 9-11. Kerry was referring to this when he told a group of college students that if they dropped out they would get "stuck in Iraq" (he tried to claim that he was referring to President Bush who has a Harvard MBA).

How seriously should we take this new study? The details are not available yet but I can see one immediate flaw. They compared the proportion of homeless veterans to the proportion of veterans in the general population. This is guaranteed to inflate the proportion of homeless veterans. Why? Because most homeless and men and most veterans are men. By comparing two groups that are mainly men to the general population you throw the proportions off.

According to the article, veterans are 11% of the population. Assuming that 10% of veterans are women (I will admit up front that this is a guess) and assuming that half the population if men (it's actually lower than 50%) then veterans make up 20% of the male population. If 20% of the population makes up 25% of the homeless then the numbers no longer seem seem so alarming. For a real apples to apples comparison I would have to know the proportion of the homeless who are women but you get the idea.

Buried deep in the article and glossed over is an important point - there are 50,000 fewer homeless veterans now than 20 years ago.

2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.

That seems like good news.

Something else that is never stated - most of these veterans never saw combat. Between Viet Nam and Iraq we only had a few major combat operations. Only one a few involved ground fighting, mainly the Gulf War and Somalia and that was limited. That's what made me question these figures in the first place. I work with a lot of veterans. None of them seem damaged by their military service. In fact, that's where they received the technical expertise that qualified them for their current job.

When I was growing up and most veterans were from WWII the feeling was that having served made you a better man. That was back when we had respect for the military.

Is Hillary Inevitable?

A year from now we will have our new president (baring a recount and court battle). Will we be inaugurating President Hillary? Her supporters think so. Here is a list of reasons that they have for believing this and problems with their beliefs.

Bill. Hillary is running as part 2 of the Clinton Administration. She talks about the accomplishments of "the Clinton administration" and promises to repeat them. The trouble is that she is not her husband. We don't know how much of a hand she had in running the country. She was publicly given credit for the health care proposal. Now she says that she didn't like it but she took her direction from the President. I can see why she would want to distance herself from this. Not only was it a political disaster but it gives her Republican opponent something concrete to run against. Her name was linked with the travel office firings, several political errors and the hiring of Janet Reno. Neither she nor Bill has come forward and identified something positive that she did. Relevant records such as her calendar have been sealed by Bill.

The South. The theory is that Bill won a couple of southern states so Hillary can, too. But Bill ran as a moderate southern governor. Hillary is running as a progressive northern senator. Will the South vote for her because she lived there 16 years ago? Doubtful.

The War. Voters are supposed to go with the Democrats because of Iraq. Of the Democrats running for President, Hillary has the most nuanced record on the war.  Hillary has resisted apologizing for her war vote and she has been less strident in demanding an end to the war. At one point she allowed that she would leave 80,000 troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future. She has also called for a timetable for withdrawing the troops. If the war is going well in a year then she will be able to blame some of her actions on Bush's mistakes in the occupation. If it is going poorly then she will still be in a stronger position than the Republican (assuming that Ron Paul isn't on the ballot).

As Kerry proved, a nuanced approach that covers all bases is easily portrayed as flip-flopping. Voters like to know where a candidate stands on an issue. Hillary refuses to take strong stands on anything and is getting in trouble for it.

In 1992 Bill did the same thing. The best-remembered example was his promise to gays to allow them into the military - a promise he did not intend to keep. The result was the "don't ask, don't tell" policy which still has gays upset. Bill got away with it by claiming that his superior intelligence and empathy allowed him to see all sides of an issue and people often interpreted his understanding for a promise. Hillary is cold where Bill was warm. He made his conflicting statements in private gatherings while she makes hers on the national stage.

If the war is going badly then Hillary may gain more than she looses.

Bush. The President's approval rating is around 30%. Democrats interpret that to mean that 70% if the country is livid with rage against the president and his party. The problem for Hillary is that Congress's approval rating is around 10% and she is running from Congress. This leads to the next point.

The Net Roots. Of all the candidates, Hillary has the least to fear from the Net Roots. She managed to get her people in charge of several offshoots of MoveOn funded by George Soros. Several of these have folded since 2004 but she has a good shot at recreating them.

On the down-side, Hillary does not influence the non-Soros folks. Many of them are furious at the Democratic congress. By now they expected the war to have been ended and at least one person impeached. They have Hillary in a bind. If she courts them she will lose a lot of mainstream support but these are the people who raised millions and went door-to-door to try to elect Kerry. They may well stay at home for next year's election.

Campaign experience. This is one clear-cut advantage that Hillary has. She has been through two national campaigns and has a lot of experienced staffers. This is a clear advantage over the Republicans.

What do geeks think of Gore?

Last week ZDNews published a defense of Al Gore.

But at what point does the growing body of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature on the subject trump the snarky put-downs? The latest report to examine the causes and potential effects of climate change was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study. Check it out in your spare time. It makes for sober reading.

The interesting thing is the comments section. Like me, these people don't just hate Gore, they have facts and figures to back it up. The best of them quotes this site which documents 35 errors in GOre's movie. Very few people came to Gore's defense.

The same thing happened a few months ago when the British computer industry journal The Register had a story on global warming. Apparently there are lots of skeptics out there and a lot of them are computer geeks and well-informed.

NBC goes green II

Yesterday I complained about NBC only giving part of the story in order to slant their green coverage. On Monday's segment they moved on to outright misinformation.

The segment was on a science station in the Antarctic. Near the end they said that the scientists there were monitoring the "hole" in the ozone and that it is shrinking. This was given as proof that international cutbacks on CO2 are working.

The problem here is that, despite Kyoto, no one has cut back on CO2. What was cut back was chlorofluorocarbons, specifically the refrigerant known as freon.

When they get such a basic fact wrong then you have to question everything else they say.

NBC goes green

NBC is doing "green" segments all week. The first one to air was a piece on the poles aired at the end of the nightly news. Their claims:

1) The polar ice cap is the smallest on record.
2) Polar bears are endangered by shrinking ice caps.
3) The west coast of the Antarctic is also warming.

What they didn't tell you:

1) The records mentioned are satellite records going back to 1979. Other records show similar loss of polar ice in the 1940s and around a century ago. While the ice at the Arctic is the smallest on record, Antarctic ice growth is the fastest on record.

2) Polar bears evolved around 40,000 years ago and survived at least on period of geological warming in which there was no Arctic ice. Of the existing bear heard, the ones in warmer areas seems to be healthier.

3) Only one small part of the Antarctic showed warming. There is no sign of melting except on the Antarctic Peninsula which is a tiny portion of the continent.

This amounts to lies by omission. This matters because it is being used to sell us on the idea that global warming is already affecting the earth and that we have to take immediate action. Already decisions are being made that will affect us for decades to come. Specifically, planned power plants are not being built with will lead to power shortages in a few years.

Reporters feel that they have to be advocates for change on global warming. The issue is too important to tell the full story because a reasonable person might conclude that global warming is not really a problem.

We will see what the have to say tonight.

Problems on the Fringes

Both the Republicans and the Democrats are having real problems with their fringe elements.

With the Republicans it is the Religious Right. After a decade of being courted by Karl Rove, these people feel that they own the Republican party. They have some justification since Rove was willing to jettison fiscal conservatives and Libertarians. The problem that the Republicans face is that the Religious Right considers abortion to be the primary issue. They want the Republicans to be in the same lock-step mode on abortion that the Democrats are, just on the opposite side. They have suggested that they will form a third party if they don't like the Republican candidate.

This is bad for the Republicans on several fronts. It fractures the Reagan coalition which controlled the White House for 20 of the last 28 years and gave the Republicans control of Congress for 12 of those years. It also puts the Republicans in a bad position for the future. Most young voters are far more liberal on abortion and gay rights than the Religious Right. This may change as they grow older or it may alienate them from the Republican party. In fact, the majority of the country reflects Rudy's position - it is a terrible thing but abortion should not be outlawed.

If the Religious Right follows through on their threat they will assure the election of a pro-abortion Democrat. The Democrats took this route in 2000 with Nader running as a 3rd party candidate in order to move the party to the left. It may have worked but very few Democrats are happy about it.

In the meantime, the Democrats have their own problems. For years the "net-roots" (aka the nut-roots) have operated echo-chamber web sites like the DailyKOS and MoveON.org. This has given rise to a group of far-left activists who are furious with the Democrats. No matter how far the presidential candidates move to the left, it will never be enough for these activists. Recently they have taken to heckling prominent Democrats. Code Pink has held protests in Democratic headquarters. The "Don't tas me bro" guy is convinced that Bush stole both elections and wanted to know why Kerry hadn't impeached Bush already. A different heckler demanded that Bill Clinton admit the 9/11 was a fraud.

In many ways this is a bigger problem for the Democrats than the Religious Right is for the Republicans. The nut-roots represents a lot of money. They spent more on Kerry's behalf in 2004 than he spent directly. Just as the Religious Right represents a position that may be unacceptable to the majority of America, the nut-roots insist on a whole platform that is to the left of FDR and LBJ.

In both cases, the problem is one of the party's own making. I already mentioned Karl Rove and the Religious Right. Hillary and Kerry both have ties with MoveON and other George Soros-funded groups. Many of MoveON's 2004 spin-offs had Clinton people in charge.

The way that the front-runners have reacted to these groups is interesting. Hillary dodges and  weaves, refusing to let anyone pin her down on specifics(1). Rudy admits his differences with the fringes and points out that at least they know where he stands on the issues and that he is not pandering to them.

(1) I've read several accounts of what Hillary said about giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. She never seems to have given a straight answer.

Warming and Wildfires

Last week major fires swept across California. This lead to the inevitable question - did global warming cause the fires? Radio Show host Glen Beck said no, pointing to the revised figures for the warmest year on record. The progressive group Media Matters took issue with this, pointing out that the incorrect figures were for the US, not the world. Actually, both are wrong although Beck is closer to the truth.

Media Matters was correct that the temperature records that were corrected a few weeks ago were for the US, not the world. They are also correct that it seems to have been a mistake rather than a malicious action.

On the other hand, NASA went to lengths to prevent the person who found the error from having access to the raw data so they are not totally blameless.

More important, global warming is meaningless when talking about local wildfires. The only thing that matters is local weather. The figures that Beck was quoting are more relevant to California than world figures.

Actually, the real culprit in the wildfires is not heat. It is land use. As this article from the New York Times points out, the Baja Peninsula has many small fires while California has fewer but larger fires. California policies forbid controlled burns and call for putting out natural fires whenever possible. That means that fuel builds up for years. When a fire finally reaches it, there is too much fuel and the fire cannot be stopped.

In addition, people continue to build in danger zones. The number of threatened houses doubled since 1980. The tiny bit of warming that has happened in the US in the last few decades is nothing compared to the other factors.

The 2008 Election

The smart money says that the election will be over as soon as Hillary or Obama wins the nomination. The combination of an unpopular president and an unpopular war will cause a repeat of the election of 2006 on a larger scale. The thing is, the smart money isn't always that smart. Here's why:

Bush's approval rating maybe terrible but it looks pretty good compared with Congressional Democrats. Their approval rating is approaching the margin of error (the last I heard it was at 11% and still dropping). If the Republican candidate (I'll assume Rudy for the sake of argument) is weighed down by Bush, how much more will a senator be weighed down by Congress?

The war may not be as big a factor as strategists think. While liberals hate Iraq and moderates are sick of it, nearly everyone hated Viet Nam. Regardless, Humphrey nearly won in 1968 and Nixon won by a huge margin in 1972. What's more, things in Iraq are looking pretty good right now. Everyone expected that if the terrorists and the insurgents kept pushing the US would leave. Instead we came back stronger. We seem to be wearing them down even as the insurgents realize that AQ in Iraq is not really their ally. Hillary has been advocating surrender. Obama is even stronger against it. If things are still going well in a year then they are going to look pretty bad.

Did the election of 2006 indicate that the country has swung to the left? No. Republican losses were typical for a president's 6th year. Reagan had similar losses yet his vice president went on to win in 1988.

In the meantime, Democrats, convinced that the 2006 election was a trend have moved quite a ways to the left. No one is running as a moderate. They are disowning Carter and Clinton, two southern governors who ran as moderates. Instead we will have a senator running as a progressive on a platform of socialized medicine and trade restrictions.

The Democrats have an additional factor working against them - lack of passion. Hillary is a cold candidate. While I have seen Rudy described as a "dark" candidate, he is an inspiring speaker who talks about America in ways reminiscent of Reagan. In 2004 the Democrats were passionate in their hatred of Bush. I doubt that they can muster that level of commitment against Rudy or any of his rivals. With an uninspiring candidate at the top of their ticket and an opponent they don't despise, they will not put forth the same level of effort. Besides, why bother when they already know that they will win regardless?

The wild card is Republican passion. The religious right is likely to sit out this election. The people against illegal immigration and the NRA have their own quarrels with Rudy. Will they let Hillary win in order to teach the Republicans a lesson in the future? That's what the Democrats did in 2000. It worked to the extent that it moved the party to the left but it also gave the country eight years of Bush. I doubt that many Democrats would make that choice again. It may have also moved the party too far to the left.

Will the Republicans learn from the Democrats' mistake in 2000? In 2004 the Democrats united behind a candidate who didn't excite them against a president they hated. Will Republicans unite against Hillary the same way?

The final factor is the "new face". Typically at this point the vice president would be running as a continuation of the president's policies. More often than not the public is sick of the current administration. This time none of the Republicans have ties to Bush. On the other hand, Hillary is still married to Bill. Rudy is a lot fresher than Hillary. Her current status as front-runner amplifies this. People may be sick of her by election day.

Of course, this is all speculation. At this point four years ago Howard Dean was getting fitted for his inauguration tux.

Kids, birth control, and the schools

A few middle schools are now dispensing birth control pills to students without parent's explicit consent. Personally, I am appalled.

The arguments for this are:

Kids are entering puberty earlier and having sex anyway so they should be able to get birth control. Besides, the parents have to sign a consent form for the kids to use the clinic.

My answer to this:

The kids are too young. We are talking about 11-14 year olds. Their bodies might be maturing earlier but their emotions are not. This is the ultimate extension of the "hooking up" craze where two people get together for no-strings-attached sex. When I was that age the hippies said, "If it feels good, do it," but I think that even they would have drawn the line at sex with an 11 year old.

The fact that kids are already having sex can be taken both ways. It can be a call for accepting something you can't change or it can be a call for more and better education and supervision. Just because they are having sex doesn't mean that they should.

Another aspect of the "they are doing it anyway" argument is that making birth control available will probably increase the number of kids doing it. It takes away the fear of pregnancy. Also, by involving non-judgmental adults, it gives the sense that what the kids are doing is ok and it is the parents who are out of step.

This is another example of liberals in general and schools specifically driving a wedge between parents and their children and is closely related to the controversy about parental notification when a child has an abortion.

As for parental consent, from the little that has been presented about this it appears that the parent has to choose between no medical help in case of emergencies and a blanket permission that includes birth control.

Going beyond that, there are darker aspects. Birth control will help conceal an unhealthy relationship with someone older. Even a relationship between an 11 year old and a 14 year old is a felony in most states.

The AP just broke a story about how wide-spread child abuse by teachers is and how it is usually covered up. This will only make the abuse easier.

Then there is the issue of STDs. Many adults are confused about contraceptives not protecting against STDs. Children will assume that the pills the school clinic gives them are all they need.

A couple of weeks ago Boston Legal had an episode where a girl contracted HIV and sued the school system for telling her that condoms are ineffective. James Spader's character was in high dungeon over a comparison between condoms and Russian Roulette. In fact, among "normal use" adults using condoms, 14% conceive each year. The odds in Russian Roulette are 18% which makes it a valid comparison. I wonder if Spader's fictional law firm would sue a school for issuing birth control pills without including a pack of condoms with the pills?