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Global Denying Chamber is on the Defensive

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

It is often the case that there are underlying trends that are at odds with what we see on the surface. For at least 20 year, for instance, the right wing fundamentalists dominated the legislative debate about homosexual rights, and yet somehow, below the surface, gay marriage (of all things) picked up an almost unstoppable momentum. What seemed unthinkable now seems inevitable.

The Congress is about to take up climate change legislation, and the odds are that any bill it produces will be inadequate for the job. In the meantime, there may be a sea change going on in the nation at large, as more and more people whose salaries to not depend upon misunderstanding global warming start to step forward and say that enough is enough.

The Chamber of Commerce has, for reasons that defy logic, been a global warming denier for years. It is an issue upon which one would assume it should be agnostic, since it supposedly represents the interests of all businesses, many of whom would make piles of money should we effectively address this issue. After all, if it will indeed be an expensive problem to address (which is probably not the case) that money has to fill someone’s pockets.

But the good news is that the Chamber is now playing defense on this issue. Major corporations are leaving the organization. True, at the moment, they are corporations led by people whose salaries very much depend on them believing in global warming, but now Nike, which has no direct financial interest in the issue, is half joining them, by resigning from the Board of Directors. Just as in the past, the forces of ignorance may get all the surface attention, but the forces of reason may be winning below.

Unfortunately, the world could wait for acceptance of gay marriage. It’s not at all clear that it can wait long enough for the good guys to prevail on this one. Still, it’s good news to see that the Chamber is now denying its denials.


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Dodd to be in Colchester on Saturday

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

A Colchester resident passes on the news that Senator Dodd will be at the Polish Club in Colchester for a pancake breakfast at 9:00 AM on Saturday. Apparently, he’s robo-calling local Democrats to invite them to join him.

The club is located at 395 South Main Street. We’ve gone to events there in the past, but we’ll miss this one, since we’re heading up to the great state of Maine this weekend


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A Brilliant Young Journalist

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

A clip from The Young Turks, interviewing a journalist who shares my last name, and bears the burden of half my DNA.

We only find out about these things from our Google alert, since he would never tell us about it. It’s a strange world when a multi-billion dollar corporation sends you emails to let you know what your kid is doing.

Anyway, this being my blog and all, I figure I have every right to show him off a bit. The interview makes reference to an article he wrote for the Globe about the fact that Congress can’t manage to get anything else done while Max Baucus is destroying any chance we have to reform health care.


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Senator Dodd to do live video blog tomorrow

Monday, September 28, 2009

This received via email from ctblogger:

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that Senator Dodd will be
doing a live video blog on MLN tomorrow at 5PM.

As like last time, Dodd will be answering questions from the MLN
community so PLEASE leave a question for the senator in the comments
section of announcement post (at the following link).

http://tinyurl.com/yelj6md

For those who might now know, “MLN” stands for My Left Nutmeg.

Senator Dodd held a conference with some bloggers this past Saturday. I couldn’t attend for a variety of reasons, not least of them being my reluctance to traverse 91 South with the Baldwin Bridge being restricted to one lane. My particular ring of hell will consist of a highway full of cars, creeping along forever at 3 miles an hour.


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Fuzzy math, indeed

Monday, September 28, 2009

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver has kicked up a bit of controversy over polling done by Strategic Visions. He makes a compelling case here that there is something very suspect about their results. He makes an even more compelling case here that at least one of their polls has results that are patently absurd. In the first instance, he makes his point mathematically, in the second by I guess what you would call induction, or is it deduction?

Meanwhile one of his co-bloggers has piled on a different polling company, Prince & Associates, a company that polls rich people.

The patently absurd poll struck me as fairly obviously made up. It purports to show that Oklahoma high school students are abysmally ignorant about basic civics questions (e.g., what is the basic law of the land; what are the names of the two major political parties). While I’m quite willing to believe many Oklahomans are dumb (after all, both their senators are very dumb), I, like Nate, and unwilling to believe that they are that dumb (only 23% know George Washington was the first president?) and that (according to the poll) none of them are well informed enough to answer eight out of 10 basic questions.

The larger point is that these polls are often taken for legal tender, no questions asked, by those that purvey the results to the public. In the case of Prince & Associates, the Wall Street Journal uses their results. Strategic Visions spreads its product all over the country, like manure on a farmer’s field. It’s hard to fault the press for assuming that these people are not just making things up, but these articles show that in order to do its job, the press must not just pass on the numbers, but must have some sort of peer review process to make sure that bogus numbers don’t enter the discourse. At the very least, any pollster that refuses to be transparent regarding its polling methodologies and raw data should be ignored.

These folks (and, of course, they appear to have a rightward slant) are in one sense merely misrepresenting reality. In another sense, they are shaping it. If, for instance, George Will likes what Strategic Visions has to say, he will repeat it, and it will become conventional wisdom, against which no mere fact can stand.


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Norwich girl makes not so good

Sunday, September 27, 2009

We don’t seem to make piracy pay. I’m sure I don’t know why, but we don’t.
Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance
Norwich has some dubious distinctions. It is the hometown of Benedict Arnold, who took the Norwich-New London rivalry to what some would consider an extreme, by burning New London. It now watches with fascination as one of its native daughters distinguishes herself as one of the most bizarre criminals of all time.

One Heather Brown has (allegedly) committed six bank robberies in six days. In the old days, this would have been impossible, but banks are now open on Saturdays, and I suppose even on Sunday, so if she is making an assault on the Guinness Book of World Records, the sky’s the limit.

The article to which I’ve linked is much abbreviated from the more richly detailed print edition, in which we learn that this particular Bonnie lost her Clyde early on, when they decided to adopt a rather novel getaway method:

Westerly police believe Brown is responsible for robbing a Washington Trust branch on Franklin Street on Tuesday, where she and a man entered the bank and said they had explosive devices. The pair fled in a tax, but only the male suspect, Ronald Hayes, was inside the cab when Stonington police stopped it.

That’s right, a taxi, and the taxi driver was not in on the plot. Still, give Heather credit for making her escape, enabling her to rob another day, and apparently pick up another Clyde, who helped her out on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, it looks to me like she’s barely turning a profit on her endeavors. Like the Pirates of Penzance, she can’t seem to make criminality pay. She may be looking for a record for consecutive days committing a bank heist, but she’s hardly looking for a record in the loot department. She’s not particularly greedy at all, in fact.

Monday, she robbed a Citizens Bank and asked for only $600.00. By Friday, she had upped her demand to $1,000.00. In the meantime the cops had already seized a van that “they believe is connected to the string of robberies”. Advantage cops, at least money wise. At her present rate, it seems to me she’ll be robbing her way into bankruptcy court. I mean, if you’re going to rob a bank, why ask for a paltry $600? With all that bailout money floating around, any bank worth its salt could easily come up with far more than that.

I blame it on the Norwich Educational system. Even here in Groton our school kids are aware that there is money in banks, and that these days $600 is only just enough for a couple of weeks groceries. Done right, one decent bank job ought to net more than Heather has managed to get in a week. As it is, she’s working hard, doesn’t even get a day off, and has lost her minivan.

C’mon Heather, you can do better. When they make the movie, do you want it to be an action flick, or an updated version of Take the Money and Run?


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Beatle Remasters

Saturday, September 26, 2009

So, I was at Best Buy helping a neighbor buy a computer (a PC, mores the pity) and I saw the new Beatles remastered CDs. At first I was a bit shocked at the price, $30.00 per, but then realized that was for the records with the toy inside. If you just go for the CD, it’s $13.99, outrageous, but that’s life in the 21st century.

Anyway, I bought three, With the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper (that’s practically obligatory) and Abbey Road. I’m now listening to With the Beatles, and I must say the remastered stereo sounds suspiciously like the silly stereo from the old days. If memory serves, Rubber Soul was the first Beatles record in stereo. The voices were on one side, and the instruments were mostly on the other. With the Beatles sounds pretty much like that. It’s better than the old mono, but it doesn’t really sound realistic.

Caveat: My perspective might be slightly skewed by the fact that I just returned from a wine tasting party (for charity, of course). I doubt it though. There’s Paul, John and George over there to the right, and all the instruments on the left. Still, the music is great. Right now, I’m listening to them sing Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got a Hold on Me. Great stuff.

We really did have the best music ever.


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Amazing

Saturday, September 26, 2009

At Political Wire they write that this video suggests that the White House sent a cardboard cut-out to the UN. Alternatively, you can argue that if something works, you keep doing it. Personally, as someone who cracks camera lenses, I’m impressed that Obama can do this.


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Legalized bribery

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Isn’t America a great country? Who needs an income when you can own your own Leadership PAC.

And we’re worrying about whether Chris Dodd got a sweetheart mortgage?

It looks, by the way, that Chris has backed away from the bi-partisan Leadership PAC game.


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Some good news

Saturday, September 26, 2009

The forces of reason are proposing a

ballot initiative

that will, one would hope, eventually bring an end to ballot initiatives in California:

In the coming weeks, the coalition Repair California will begin the official process of calling a state constitutional convention, submitting ballot-initiative language to Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office. Repair California proposes to restructure government through a state constitutional convention.

California desperately needs repair.
These are dangerous times in which to call for a Constitutional Convention. One shudders to think of the coming attempts by the right wing there to introduce intolerance into the warp and woof of the new document. But that, unfortunately, is a risk they have to take, since as a result of that very right wing the state has become a disaster zone, as John Grubb, of Repair California states:

California has become the laughingstock of the nation and, to some extent, the world, because of how dysfunctional our government is. But it’s not a laughing matter for the people who live here, and we, in a couple of short decades, descended from having the best education system in the country to having one of the worst. We have the worst traffic in the country. We have a water crisis, a prison crisis, a budget crisis. Pretty much everywhere you look at state government, we have a crisis. And so it’s time for a big fix. And it’s time to fix the system itself. And the way to do that is through a constitutional convention.

As the article points out, it is not hard to fix the moment at which the crisis was conceived.

California’s governance problems, however, reach back decades; ever since 1978, Proposition 13 has capped property taxes. The fiscal situation is made even more dysfunctional by the requirement that two-thirds of the state Legislature approve any budget, giving the Republican minority disproportionate power.

In a word, California got fucked by the right wing in 1978 (and several more times in subsequent years) and the offspring of that union has turned out to be a monster.

This movement appears to have a reasonably good chance to succeed, although it will be opposed by the usual right wing suspects. Grover Norquist famously said that After all, California has come the closest in the country (excluding some Southern states, which don’t count) to draining down Grover Norquist’s bathtub, and they will certainly not want to give up when the goal of total destruction of the state is so close. But societies sometimes pull themselves from the brink, and we can only hope that California does so.

It’s a given that the new constitution, to succeed, must abolish the current system of referenda and initiative, which have made the state ungovernable. What will be interesting is whether California will take this opportunity to redefine what should be considered basic human rights in the 21st century. A lot as changed since 1789. Will California take this opportunity to explicitly protect privacy rights, for instance. We’ll see.


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