TV VP

Jay Cost argues that television has made the Vice-Presidency important, and that the manner in which Vice-Presidential nominees are selected is profoundly undemocratic and antiquated in the modern era.

But as I wrote yesterday evening, the way Presidential nominees are selected to run is less democratic than might appear at first glance; for both major parties, partisan insiders, fundraisers, and other elected officials overtly control somewhere between a fifth to a quarter of the votes to pick nominees, and informally control more than that, and probably a majority. It's not like primary elections count for nothing, but there is a lot more control by political elites than our national republican and egalitarian impulses would prefer.

Still, it makes you wonder, if Reagan had picked someone other than Bush the Elder to be his running mate (John Connally, perhaps, or Howard Baker) twenty-seven years ago, how different would history be today?

Victory is Ours?

Senator Jon Tester wants to proclaim victory in Iraq as a precedent to a withdrawal of our troops. "Victory" being defined, I suspect, as displacing Saddam Hussein's government and replacing it with a representative government that operates on democratic principles. That this government may quickly descends into a civil war is, Senator Tester says (or rather implies), not our problem. We gave them a shot and helped them stand up; whether they stay standing or not is up to them. I don't know about that. I would have included capturing Iraq into the long-term economic and strategic orbit of the United States are a condition of victory, too.

Primaries

In preparing for a project for Oval Office 2008, I've been looking not only at the schedule of primary elections but also the way that the primaries are set up. It's quite messy.

Lots of states still have caucuses, where people declare their preference for one candidate or another, and then they get appointed as local delegates to county conventions, and then some of those delegates are picked to go to regional conventions, and then the regional conventions pick people go be delgates to the state convention, and the state convention picks who the delegates are.

The Democrats have lots of "superdelegates," it looks like about 850 this cycle, who are prominent officehlders themselves, or people who are responsible for moving big party machinery. The Republicans have nothing quite like the "superdelegates," but they do allocate delegates who can be named by prominent officeholders, and party apparatchiks get to be delegates themselves.

Some of the states that pick delegates directly by primary elections have staggered systems -- a portion of the delegates are awarded to the at-large winner and a portion to winners of various districts (often, but not always Congressional districts) and there seems to be a trend in both parties for giving extra seats to those states, and those districts within the states, that have provided support for the party in the past. This is the case for both the Democrat-style proportional primaries and for the Republican-style winner-take-all primaries -- "winner-take-all" is broken down by district and not all the state's at-large delegate seats are up for grabs for the plurality winner.

Both parties have lots of reserves on their delegate columns for party bosses to either hold themselves or to pass out to minions.

This all suggests to me that not only are the delegates activists, they are also skewed away from the political center. Not all, of course, but the rules suggest that the popular, trustworthy, and ideologically reliable sorts make the best delegates. Which sort of makes sense when you think about it. Is this the way it should be? Hard to say -- but it does suggest that the days of the smoke-filled room where deals are cut are actually not as far away as we might think. This will become obvious if the Republican convention is brokered (as looks more and more likely) but of course we can only wait and see.

Lest We Forget

Something I Had To Remember Today

Wisdom from the Buddha: "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

Retail Politics

This morning, I got to thinking about the kind of week I'm going to have. I figured, what with the Fourth of July falling on a highly inconvenient Wednesday, it's pretty much just a day off in the middle of the week. But I also figured I'd have a little fun and wear my American flag necktie.

Only I couldn't find it. I have this great tie rack that The Wife bought for me to hang all of my ties, and I could have sworn that I put it in there, because I like to wear that tie on days when there is a significant civic or patriotic event -- like Election Day, Flag Day, or in this case, Independence Day. I was quite displeased to not be able to find the tie despite a lot of looking around, not in the least because the tie was a gift and it would have felt like kind of an insult to the people who gave it to me to lose the tie.

But, after some searching, I had to admit that it just wasn't there, and most likely had been lost in last year's move from Knoxville to Palmdale. So it would need to be replaced. I arranged with The Wife for us to go grab a bite to eat at the mall because I figured a flag tie would be available in one of the department stores.

Turns out, no! Sears, JC Penny, Gottschalks, and Mervyn's all had no American-flag patterned neckties. Gottschalks had a red, white, and blue patterned Jerry Garcia tie. There were no kiosks in the mall selling ties at all. Reluctantly, we tried Wal-Mart and Target, too. Everywhere we went, we struck out on American flag ties. Granted, Gottschalks is about as high-end as retail stores get up here in the Antelope Valley, but as you'll read in a moment, I rather doubt I would have had any success at Bloomingdale's or Macy's, either.

Round about the time we were leaving Target, I got to thinking -- perhaps this is not just an annoyance. If there were ever a time retailers would want to sell ties with the American flag on them, it would be two days before Independence Day, to mooks like me who want to wear a special tie for the holiday. Demand for such a thing is at its peak, right now. But such a tie is nowhere to be found in any of these national retail outlets. That means that the buyers for these stores must think that these ties just aren't going to sell. Why is that?

The conclusion I came to, with some sadness, is that the American flag is not a popular emblem right now, even among Americans. We aren't so proud to be Americans these days as we have been in the past. Our patriotism is not at a high ebb, because... Because of a lot of things. You can view that "why" question through your own political lens; but for whatever reason, we aren't putting an image of the flag up in our store windows anymore like we did after 9/11. We aren't buying and posting so many patriotic bumper stickers. We are all talking about ending the war in Iraq in terms of "when" and "how" rather than "if" and our dreams of a Middle Eastern Marshall Plan have vanished like the smoke from yesterday's cigarettes -- nothing left of that noble idea but a faintly acrid and unpleasant smell and a nearly indetectable stain on the ceiling. We're not a proud nation and we aren't wearing our patriotism on our sleeves very much.

Well, not me. It's an imperfect country, and we're an imperfect people. We've made some geoopolitical mistakes and we don't know how to make good on them, it's all true. But it's also true that we're still a strong, generous, morally upright nation. It's also true that we still do much, much more good than harm in the world. It's also true that we are still a constitutional democratic republic; we are the greatest political, legal, and economic success of the modern world; we are the most inclusive and diverse nation on the planet and that inclusiveness is one of our great strengths; if we are an imperial power, we are surely the most benevolent empire the world has yet seen. Our Constitution remains a work of staggering genius despite whatever imperfections one might identify in it, and it is copied by developing nations across the world to the exclusion of all other competitors. We are a nation ruled by laws, and our laws are created by our people with the intent, and generally the effect, of doing good. I'm proud to be American, to participate in a country like this one. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's still pretty damn good.

And since The Wife found my tie after we got home, right where it should have been all along, I'm going to wear my American flag tie proudly tomorrow, too.

Punishing Scooter

It's not as though the President pardoned I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. He commuted Libby's sentence to eliminate the jail time. The conviction remains on Libby's criminal record -- he will never overtly work in politics again -- and he must pay a quarter-million dollar fine. So I think the headline on CNN ("Scooter Skates") is not quite accurate.

More to the point, the central tenet, the unifying theme, indeed sometimes it seems the raison d'etre, of this Administration can be summed up in a single word: "loyalty." You get into the Administration by being loyal to the people above you; you get ahead by making them look good. For the most part, loyalty flows in one direction -- upward -- but in Libby's case, there has to be some give-back. After all, it seems that everything Libby did, was done at the at-least tacit instigation of the Vice President.

So this seems like about the only move possible for Bush. He can't pardon Libby completely, because then it just looks like he's providing cover for his cronies. But he can't let the man rot, either, because then Scooter will start singing a song that will damage an already-weak Presidency. So, keep the guy out of prison, and leave some measure of criminal punishment in place.

Prison isn't going to do much for Libby anyway. Do we send people to prison to a) rehabilitate them and make them better people; b) get them off the streets so they can't commit any more crimes; c) serve as an example for others so they won't commit similar crimes, or d) wreak the vengeance of society upon them for their transgressions? None of "a" through "d" really apply to Scooter or someone in his position. And as I suggested with Mike Nifong, the combination of public humiliation, permanent deprivation of one's livelihood, and significant monetary liability is a pretty substantial punishment for one's misdeeds without throwing imprisonment into the mix. (UPDATE: I was just reminded that Scooter is also an attorney, and he will likely be disbarred for his perjury conviction, too.)

So was this the right decision for President Bush to make with regards to Scooter Libby? Well, no, but it was probably the least bad decision he could have made. He probably should have done it Friday afternoon, though, so that the story would have hit the weekend news cycles after a holiday, instead of doing it now on a Monday while people are still paying attention. That's just another example of how the Bush Administration is not performing at an optimal level of competence.

Good Times

Good food and good wine, shared with good friends, is what it's all about. We got some of that last night in Valencia with our friends from the Valley; we're looking forward to more of the same with some friends from Beverly Hills next week. Not much to report, really, just good times.

The Difficulty of Avoiding Tennessee Traffic Tickets

I got a couple of tickets when I lived in Knoxville, but I never had to do what this woman did to get out of them. And good thing, too, because as it turns out, it didn't work.

Maybe she qualifies for traffic school.

I Will Not Vote For Mitt Romney

Not after reading this. You don't do that sort of thing to a dog. Period.

Numbers Don't Lie But Graphs Do

Truth is properly defined in objective, not subjective, terms. I define a "subjective truth" here as "something that I agree with." You might not agree with me, which makes your opinion wrong. For example, "Most country music is tedious, repetitious, uninteresting, and unappealing." That statement could not be more true for me. It truly bores me and I truly find it disagreeable. But perhaps you, Loyal Reader, really like country music and disagree with my "truth." An objective truth, however, is something that is equally true for everyone, and one's opinion on the subject is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much I think Iran ought to be a secular democracy -- it is not a secular democracy, and no amount of normative thought on my part will change that. Rather than being an opinion, it is simply a reality that the country is ruled by a self-appointed council of mullahs who are above the rule of, and ultimately control, the civil government there.*

Much of the problems with our public discourse lies in people confusing their subjective opinions with objective reality, since both can be defined as "truth." I saw this graph a while back on the cover of the California Bar Journal. It was the banner article, decrying the lack of gender and racial diversity on the California bench:



In case the picture compression loses some detail, it notes that the bench consists of 72.9% men and only 27.1% women; and that while whites are only 43.8% of the general population, 70% of California's judges are white. (Which is not surprising, since 84.4% of California's lawyers are white, providing ammunition for an argument that whites are underrepresented on the bench, but that's an issue for another day.)

But this afternoon, I looked at the graphs again and thought to myself, "Self, that doesn't look right." And that's when I realized that the pie charts used to illustrate the demographic composition of the judiciary aren't even remotely right. On top, the complaint is that women hold just over one-quarter of the seats on the bench. But the chart shows a slice of the pie that looks more like one-sixth. On the bottom, the complaint is that 70% of the judges in this state are white, but that slice of the pie is visibly more than 75% (three-quarters) of the whole. The real graphs should look like this:



Now, I know as well as any lawyer how to lie with statistics. And you can even make graphs convey a favorable, or rather less disfavorable, impression than might initially seem possible with a little thought. One might arrange how the slices of the pie are set up; if I was faced with having to apologize for an overwhelmingly large slice of a pie, I might break that slice down into sub-groups, for instance. But I'd never be so brazen as to simply misdraw a graph like that. One-sixth is substantialy less than one-quarter. Seventy percent is less than three quarters. There's no getting around that.

Also not that, at least as to the general population, the bar's numbers are simply wrong. The U.S. Census reports that the plurality racial group in California is Latino (aka "Hispanic"), not white, and that women are about 51% of the population and men 49%. This data, of course, highlights the argument that whites and men are overrepresented within the judiciary. But if you're going to look at these kinds of numbers and draw these kinds of conclusions, the first step should be getting good information to base them on.

Diversity on the bench is an issue worth considering. When I took my training to be a pro tem judge, I learned that minority groups can, and often do, feel as though they do not get a fair shake in the courts. African-Americans (aka "Blacks") in particular report that they believe that the justice system is weighted against them and they are not treated fairly by the courts. This is also true, with moderately lesser intensity, by Latinos (aka "Hispanics"). So if there are judges who look like the people who are coming to court to receive justice, this may well improve their receptivity to the results that they get.

At the same time, of course, it's critical that the judges are qualified for the job and that they be of appropriate temprament and demeanor. We need smart, fair, and most importantly, trustworthy people on the bench. These are not aspects of a person that can be quantified very easily, and the system of hand-picking the judges through political appointment and election is certainly not without its failures in the arenas of intellectual qualification and temprament. But not matter how we pick our judges, these things have to take a front seat to demographic concerns.

So I'm not convinced that a demographic imbalance on the bench is such a critical issue to begin with. But I do know that that imbalance is not as dramatic the bar journal's graphic artist has depicted it. At best, this was a mistake; at worst, it is an attempt to advance an agenda through deceptive means -- and the substantial likelihood is that it is somewhere in between; the artist has an opinion on the issue and because of that opinion, he did not look critically at his own work to see if it was accurate, since it left an impression of "truth" in his mind.

* You know, if the mullahs in Iran were taken out of the picture (that's a big "if"), it seems to me that the civil government that would be left over would probably be sufficiently democratic that we would have to accept it as legitimate. We don't always like the results of democracy in other countries, as in Hamas' electoral victory in the Palestinian Authority, but it's a whole different story if we think another nation voted the wrong way, as with the Palestinians, as opposed to seeing that the election was not really meaningful in the first place, as in Iran.

Entrepreneurship At Its Finest

This moneymaking plan is amoral, illegal, risky, and elegant.  What more could a college student want?  Step 1:  Hire and have sex with a prostitute fronting as a masseuse, thereby inducing her to commit a crime.  Step 2:  Complain that the quality of her “services” were not worth the money and demand a refund; when prostitute refuses to refund money, blackmail her for three hundred times her fee to not report her as a prostitute to the police.  Step 3:  Profit.  The problem here, of course, is that the guy got hung up on Step 4:  Wash-rinse-repeat as necessary, and did not remember Step 5:  Quit while you’re ahead.

Clear Thinking

Something is not good because it is “natural.”  But calling something “natural” can produce startling feats of cognitive dissonance.

Good Luck, Tony

Tony Blair resigned as the PM of England today. It's been a long time coming, so the Beeb is more interested in what the new PM, Gordon Brown, is going to do. But it's interesting to see that Blair has been named as a special envoy to work towards peace in the Middle East. I don't know if he's the ideal choice, but he's also far from the worst. And he deserves better than the British public have been giving him. He's done right by his country; the British economy has been strong enough that the Pound remains the strongest currency on the planet and more recently, he found a way to get Her Majesty's sailors back from the clutches of Iran without expanding the war. So, good show, Tony, and good luck. This American thinks you've done a right honorable job.

Chef Sues Sous Chef

It's not my own headline, but I couldn't possibly have improved on it. And it's 100% accurate. Seems that a sous chef for a high-end seafood restaurant in New York copied, ingredient for ingredient and technique for technique, all of the significant recipes of the restaurant that he worked out, and used them in his own place.

"The stakes are so high," said an intellectual property lawyer asked to comment on the situation, and I agree. But the thing is -- what was the theory used by chef claiming that the other chef stole her work? It probably isn't a trade secret -- most restaurants do not make their workers sign non-disclosure agreements, even though a secret recipe is a classic example of the kind of information that is protected by trade secret law. And this most closely resembles a trade secret claim.
Maybe it's copyright. Of course, that would require that a) the chef who made the recipe had written it down somewhere, and then that b) the sous chef copied that writing (rather than, say, being told what went into the dish and reconstructing it from memory), and c) that the now-former sous chef copy and exploit the recipe.

An interesting story to follow. I hope that there is follow-up on it.

Bleg for Gift Ideas

Wife’s birthday.  I want something better than a gift certificate for yet more stamping equipment for her.

 

Parents’ anniversary.  I want something more interesting for them than a couple bottles of wine.

 

Any thoughts, inspirations, or ideas would be appreciated.

Hoping For A Footnote's Fate

I wrote in December that the Supreme Court had some really interesting cases on its docket this year.  Following up on the lead story from back then, I note that today, a badly-fractured decision upheld the ability of a high school to punish a student for an inanely offensive banner at an off-campus event.  The most bizarre opinion was Alito’s; Justice Alito concerned himself with whether the content of the banner was political or social commentary which the student testified it was not; he did it as a joke.  But since when are jokes, even somewhat incoherently formulated, nonsensical jokes like this one, entitled to less free speech protection than political commentary?  I hope that Justice Thomas’ understanding of the holding as very narrow in scope prevails and this case becomes a curious footnote in the arena of free speech jurisprudence.

Ignorance

Americans know very little have surprising gaps in their knowledge about themselves, and know even less about the world around them.  These kinds of polls and “man on the street” interviews, showing shocking ignorance of even basic facts about the world (“Can you name the Vice President?”  “What is the capital of France?”  “Where is the Panama Canal located?”), are at once saddening and the source of some Schadenfreude.  One of the more popular shows on TV popular game shows on TV deliberately plays on the ignorance of Americans about such matters.  But more seriously, one of the books that I’m reading at the moment suggests that this ignorance is the result of disinterest – and that this disinterest is a very dangerous sign of national decline.  We cannot hope to engage the world around us without at least trying to understand it first.

Death Sentence

This morning, I heard on the radio that “Chemical” Ali Hassan, the former Saddam Hussein’s cousin who ordered chemical weapons attacks that have killed as many as 180,000 Kurds, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to die by hanging by an Iraqi court.  The radio news played the reading of the sentence:

 

“You are guilty of crimes, ah, crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and you will be punished by being hanged to death.”

 

Well, maybe it lost something in the translation from Arabic, but it just didn’t have the emotional punch one would have expected for a death sentence being handed down for a heinous crime.  The seventeenth-century British Piracy Court got it right – a judge in that court would have said something like this:

 

“William Kidd, you are found guilty of piracy, murder, rapacious theft, and offenses against the Crown and People of Great Britain.  You are to be taken to Southwark and there hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, DEAD!  Your head shall be placed upon a pike at Portsmouth, as an example of His Majesty’s justice.  May God have mercy on your soul.”

Republican Morning

Yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Antelope Valley Bar Association to hear a presentation from an attorney who got to visit London for several weeks and see how law is practiced in the U.K.  Very interesting indeed, and the kind of vacation I would like to take one day, too.  (Apparently, the spouses got a lot of cool things to do, too.)  While I was there, I forget my document portfolio under the banquet table.  I only realized this in the morning as I was going to court for a routine and brief appearance.  So this morning as I was leaving court, I was thinking that I’d just take a minute or two and drive up to the place where the meeting was held and retrieve my portfolio.

 

As I’m walking out of court and going to my car, I noted that someone had parked a beat-up old pickup truck next to the Ninja, and taped to the tailgate were a bunch of handmade signs.  They read “Bush Is Right”, ”Bomb Iran and N. Korea”, “Fight Win & Stay In Iraq” and “Protect Our Borders”.  I took a picture with my cell phone, amused because most of my urban-dwelling friends and Loyal Readers probably are used to hand-made bumper stickers with messages pointing in the opposite direction than this.  For some reason the picture got lost, so I don’t have it to post here.  A little bit of the visual impact is lost, unfortunately – the truck was at least twenty-five years old and partially rusted out (it takes a long time for vehicles to rust up here in the desert), had obviously not been washed in a long time, and the signs were made with magic marker on construction paper and taped to the truck with duct tape.  Suggests a very heartfelt and strong belief in the positions he was advocating.  By the way, I agree with one-half of his signs, although what he means by them and what I mean would probably look very different at the policy-making and implementation levels.

 

So I went along to run my errand.  At the venue where the bar association meeting had taken place yesterday, the Antelope Valley Lincoln Club had just met.  I had some words with the Executive Director and was at my smooth, political best.  But after I looked at the literature, I’m not so sure I want to get involved.  Some of the local political movers and shakers are running the show here, and one of them is an attorney, so all of the business opportunities that this would generate would go his way.  Another attorney I’ve been adverse to in Santa Clarita, and who I found to be distant and unlikeable, is running the show down there.  To top it all off, a guy who filed a (quickly-dismissed) bar grievance against me in the past, is on the county-wide board of directors of this group.  And there seems to be some pro-tort reform sentiments going on even from some of the folks involved that I could otherwise feel comfortable with politically.  So it seems to me that I would not be a good fit for this organization.