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Solidifying the Second

Friday, May 9, 2008

Via Connecticut Local Politics, the Cook Report confirms what we’ve known for a long time, the Second is no longer in play:

The Cook Political Report has changed its rating for Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District from “Likely Democratic” to “Solid Democratic.” This is stunning, considering that this district saw the closest congressional race in the entire country in 2006.

Not really, all things considered. Joe Courtney foreclosed the only line of attack when he secured funding for the submarines, and the final nail was driven in the GOP coffin when Sean Sullivan was unable to raise any money.

My wife has often remarked how weird this election year will be in this corner of Connecticut. In 2006 we had a Republican Congressman, a Republican State Senator, and a Republican (in our district) state representative. (I moved here in 1976 and I don’t think that state rep seat has been held by a Democrat since then.) We worked our butts off to get Democrats into those positions, and we succeeded. This year two of them have no opponents (so far) and it’s beginning to look like Joe Courtney will face only token opposition. That’s a huge turnaround, leaving us in the position of having very little to do come November. People are enthusiastic, though, and I’m sure there will be lots of people turning out to elect Joe Courtney and Barack Obama in the fall.

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Sound business plan

Friday, May 9, 2008

This is in the beating a dead horse category, but even I am stunned by the monumental stupidity of the folks at General Motors. At least they’re consistent. They just couldn’t see the gas crunch coming, so they just built more and more SUVs. And who would ever have thought that they could go wrong diversifying into a business with this business plan:

That business was residential mortgages, and G.M. went into it in a big way. It bought one of the more aggressive lenders around, Ditech, and came to specialize in the kind of innovative mortgages that flourished in recent years.

By early 2006, most of the mortgage loans that it issued required that borrowers pay only the interest — no principal at all in early years — or allowed them to pay even less than that. Ditech was a pioneer in offering 125 percent loans, in which the borrower could get more than the property was worth. It specialized in low-documentation mortgages, which became known as “liars’ loans” because many borrowers falsified their income.

What could go wrong? Throughout history lending to people who were unable to repay has been a sure fire way to success, hasn’t it? Particularly when you take collateral worth less than the loan amount. And yet, mysteriously, something did go wrong:

The result has been a wave of defaults and foreclosures, bringing on big losses for both the company and for those who bought securities backed by those mortgages.

I am experiencing schadenfreude overload here, particularly because the good folks at Cerberus Partners are majority shareholders in Ditech (GM has a mere 49% stake). This all couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people.

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McCain’s other pastor

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Among other things, a Through-the-Looking-Glass history lesson. But of course, when it’s a right wing cleric that just makes things up it gets no attention.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXZbIGJrDkg[/youtube]

Not scary because not black. Not offensive because he backs McCain.

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Yet another modest proposal

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Hillary is pointing out that, while Obama is winning elections, he has to make do with fewer white votes than she is getting. This is a common complaint of many politicians and pundits, who often point out that an election would have turned out quite differently but not for the fact that black voters have this pesky tendency to vote in their own best interests. In fact, to the dismay of Republicans particularly, they often seem to have a better idea of where their interests lie than white voters, who tend to worry about things like flag pins. This is not good in a country that counts on delusional voters to keep the entrenched entrenched.

Still, as a white person, I can’t help feeling some sympathy for Hillary and the position she is espousing. What were they thinking when they let a black vote (assuming the black person in question was allowed to vote) count as much as a white vote? Surely there is a better way.

In fact there is. Why not follow the lead of the exalted Founding Fathers? We needn’t deprive black people of the vote altogether, though certainly there’s merit in that suggestion. We should simply count their vote as worth three-fifths of a white vote, just as the Founders would have done, had they let them vote at all. The Democrats should lead on this, and make the rule retroactive for this primary season, so Hillary can get the nomination to which she is surely entitled.

Some might argue that this solution is not so simple as it might seem. How, for instance, do we count the vote of a person who has, for instance, a white mother and a black father? Someone like Obama, for example. Not to put too fine a point on it, how much black blood qualifies a person for three-fifths status? Again, let’s look to the Founders, original intent and American custom for the answer: One drop will do.

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Hiatus

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

This blog probably goes silent tomorrow. I have to go to New Jersey for work related reasons, and I don’t expect to get back until late tomorrow night.

In the meantime, a few predictions: tomorrow we will learn from the Clintonites that North Carolina doesn’t count, since it is a red state, unlike Indiana which is a …ummm.. well, a red state, but a red state that matters because Hillary won it. We will also hear from almost no one in the mainstream media that today’s results make it almost mathematically impossible for Hillary to win the nomination. They want this horse race to continue, and they refuse to euthanize the filly.

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Talking about comments at the Day

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

I spent this afternoon at the New London Day. Greg Stone invited me to participate in a roundtable discussion. The subject was comments on articles on newspaper websites. Apparently, they can get wild and wooly sometimes, and issues arise about the extent to which the papers should reject offensive comments. For legal reasons they can either publish them in full or not publish them at all, so editing is not an option, which it shouldn’t be, in my opinion.

I have to confess that I felt like a bit of an imposter, in that I know almost nothing about the subject. I read the comments on this blog, since it’s my job, and I do appreciate the people who comment here. However, as anyone who spends much time here knows, it doesn’t take a lot of my time and in the more than three years I’ve been doing this, I’ve gotten maybe two posts that might have been considered offensive to some people. (I’m not counting those critical of me, all of which I find deeply offensive, but being a good liberal, I let that pass). Most of my comment related activity consists of rejecting spam comments.

I read the comments on some blogs, where the level of discourse is particularly good, but generally I don’t, primarily because I just don’t have the time. My own opinion is that, aside from overtly racist, sexist or obscene comments, anything goes. To be honest, I’m not even sure I would screen that stuff out. My own opinion is that people who spew that stuff are merely exposing their ideas for what they are. I think most people are capable of critical reading, and will automatically reject or ignore a comment from someone who expresses their ideas in crude, rude or nasty language.

That being said, it also seems that for a newspaper, there are times when you shouldn’t allow comments at all. Apparently there are folks who take delight in posting rude comments on wedding announcements and obituaries. Better to allow no comments than to expose people to gratuitous insults to no purpose.

The entire thing will be on Comcast (I don’t know when) and possibly on Thames Valley. It was actually pretty interesting. I give the Day credit for trying to grapple with this issue.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

On to Iran, helped once again by the New York Times

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

This is something I feel the need to pass on. The New York Times was instrumental in the run up to the Iraq war. It served as a both a conduit and a legitimizer of the war. The administration would feed information to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, who would dutifully print it, and then would cite the Times to support their assertions.

It’s happening again, sans Miller. Gordon is going it alone. This morning he served up a dish of uncorroborated talking points designed to spur a war with Iran. According to the Bushies, the Iranians are training Iraqi Shiite militias. But as Kevin Drum points out, they get a bit vague about precisely which militias the Iranians are training:

However, Laura Rozen points out something that also tickled my brain cells when I first read Gordon’s article. Picking up on a comment at Abu Muqawama, she notes that “the Gordon piece strikingly doesn’t tell us WHICH militia the captured Shiite militants who had trained in Iran belonged to.” That’s true. Here are the descriptions scattered throughout Gordon’s piece:

Iraqi militia fighters….four Shiite militia members….Iraqi militia fighters….Iranian assistance to the militias….militia groups….Iraqi militias….small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants….other groups of Iraqi militants….Shiite militias.

That’s nine separate references, all of them purposefully vague. We’re obviously meant to believe that Iran is exclusively training and supplying Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, not the Badr militia associated with the Iraqi government, but if that’s the case then why not just say so? There hardly seems to be any reason to leave this detail out unless it’s not actually true.

You see, the Iranians have maintained relations with all the Shiite militia, but they appear to be leaning toward Maliki’s militia. That means there is a good possibility that they are training the militia aligned with the government that we are supporting.

Imagine being an American soldier in the midst of this mess, required to prop up a government that is propping up a militia that is being propped up by Iran, a country that is supposedly a member of the Axis of Evil, determined to destroy the United States and all that is good and true.

It looks like Bush is determined to manufacture a pretext for war in time for the election. It would be in the interest of either Bush or Clinton to call them out early and often on this, because only be warning against it can they stop it. The odds are not good that either of them will do so.

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There is some justice

Monday, May 5, 2008

In the world:

The 2008 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, the governing body of Southern Methodist University, today voted to reject SMU’s bid to host the George W. Bush Presidential Library. And the vote tally?

844-20.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

That’s really too much. Out of 864 voters, only 20 — that’s 2.3%, if you’re into that sort of thing — supported the idea of having SMU host the Library.

Among other things, it seems the Methodists aren’t too keen on providing Karl Rove with a base of operations, or of the torture friendly policy of the Bush crime gang.

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Counting crimes

Monday, May 5, 2008

The Washington Post reports that fiscal restraints may be leading some states to reverse the trend toward ever higher rates of incarceration. What logic and proportion cannot do, the lack of money can sometimes accomplish. It seems that it is very expensive to incarcerate people, and there does come a point at which even politicians eager to appear tough on crime have to accept the fiscal facts of life.

Matthew Yglesias, at the Atlantic, had this to say:

We do over-imprison people in the United States, so from a humanitarian point of view this is nice to see. On the other hand, it’s also true that the crime rate in the United States remains at what I’d consider an unacceptably high level and there are some indications that it’s on the rise again.

Measuring crime, and computing crime rates, appears to be a tricky business, and I wonder whether we can draw many meaningful conclusions from crime rates. In a recent post I complained about the “home invasion” scare, and the seeming exaggeration of one “home invasion” in the New Haven Independent. I made the point that we already have laws on the book that cover the subject, and we don’t need another one. One commenter pointed out that the one person arrested immediately after that incident was charged with:

# First-degree kidnapping
# First-degree burglary
# First-degree robbery
# First-degree larceny
# First-degree unlawful restraint
# First-degree reckless endangerment
# Second-degree conspiracy to commit assault
# First-degree conspiracy to commit kidnapping
# First-degree conspiracy to commit unlawful restraint

That’s 8 crimes for a single incident. If we pass a law against “home invasion” that would make nine in similar circumstances. When the crime rate is computed, is this one incident counted as one crime or eight? To the victim it certainly must have felt like a single incident. The Wikipedia article to which I’ve linked above notes:

The calculation of crime rates uses data that is obtained either from criminal justice systems or from public surveys. Comparisons between the two types of data are problematic, and so are comparisons using the same type of data between different jurisdictions. The United Nations publishes international reports of both Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice, and Crime Victim Surveys

The reported rate of crime here in the states is, I believe, higher than in other countries, but it seems to me that one would have to be very careful before concluding that the actual crime rate is much different. One would have to control for variables such as multiple charges. Another factor, of course, is the number of crimes. We here in the states seem to feel that we should criminalize everything we don’t like. Some countries are more rational. In addition, at least by some measures a crime doesn’t occur until there is an arrest. If you start arresting for crimes to which you once turned a blind eye, then the crime rate goes up, though behavior hasn’t changed. If other countries in the Western World are more tolerant of victimless crimes then their crime rates will be lower.

I can’t prove any of this, of course. Nonetheless I do suspect that crime rates fluctuate not only because of a real rise in the number of crimes, or in rates of incarceration, but in response to political events or changes in attitudes. We have more people in jail in this country not, necessarily, because we have more criminals, but because it has suited the interests of politicians to put them there. We may very well have a higher crime rate for the same reason. Fear appears to sell in this country. Before there was terrorism there was crime in the streets, and it’s still a useful political diversion. Just ask Jodi Rell.

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Deliver us from (NY Times sanctioned) Experts

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Today the New York Times celebrates the anniversary of Mission Accomplished by asking nine “experts” how we should proceed in Iraq.

Among those experts: Frederick Kagan, L. Paul Bremer, Kenneth M. Pollack and Richard Perle, each of whom has been consistently and disastrously wrong about Iraq from the very start. They are joined by Anne Marie Slaughter, of whom I’ve never heard before, but, through Google, I learn was also a supporter of the war There is not a single article by anyone who opposed the war from the start. One (Anthony Cordesman) warned of potential problems, but does not appear to have actively opposed the war.

We lawyers use experts in court cases. We tend to avoid experts who would fall apart under skillful cross examination. That possibility is, of course, enhanced if the expert in question can be proven to have been consistently wrong in the past.

The Times might consider taking a page from us lawyers. We look for experts who will support our position (which I assume the Times would deny it is doing), but we try to avoid people with a demonstrated record of incompetence. The Times might consider asking someone who has been consistently right about the war to appear in its pages as an expert.

Update: I note from Digby that I missed one. Danielle Pletka, of whom I have apparently been blissfully ignorant, is also a wrong-from-the-starter. I forgot to Google her.

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