A fast look at the Voting Rights ruling

While Congress is stalled (for the foreseeable future), the Supreme Court chugs on through its roster of important cases. It's probably good that two branches of government can still function. However, I don't think I'll be giving out accolades to the justices.

Yesterday, in a 5-4 vote along party lines (which weren't supposed to exist in the judiciary), the Supreme Court removed a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required Department of Justice review and approval of changes to voter law in areas with pervasive voter discrimination 50 years ago. It's easy to imagine that the law is outdated, and these places have taken the lesson to heart, changed their ways, and don't need the supervision anymore... after nearly 50 years of it.

Maybe these places, mostly in the South, have accepted the lesson that voting should be equally accessible to all citizen. However, looking at the whole country, the actual circumstances are different. Republican legislatures all over the country are trying to make it harder to access voting. They pretend that voter fraud is rampant, and that's their excuse for passing ID laws that they hope, secretly in their hearts, will reduce voting among minority, poor [i.e. Democratic] voters. They don't actually take measure to prevent the only pervasive form of voter fraud, which is the pooling of absentee ballots in the hands of professional vote wranglers.

The hope that political groups won't tamper with voting to suppress certain folks hasn't been fulfilled yet. For that reason, the ruling of the Supreme Court is premature, even after 50 years of oversight.

Luckily, we will still have citizen and media oversight. Suppression efforts are occurring, and will continue to occur, and will hopefully backfire as they did in 2012. Keep watching, keep reporting, keep embarrassing the schemers, the hacks, the operatives, the spin-shysters. All the tools to do that and to disseminate the information are available, thank God and the internet.

If I can repeat my motto for this year: Whatever you try to hide, it ain't going to stay hidden. Everybody, please make it so.

Fraud, or fair exercise?

Image: mfs-theothernews.com

Extra. I considered the possibility that monitoring isn't necessary anymore, but the posts about this ruling didn't support that: Pro-ruling, current tricks, even an enumerated list (probably incomplete).

Sigh--I voted for the hack

Yesterday was the special election to fill the senate seat left vacant when John Kerry became Secretary of State. I voted for the hackish Democrat, Edward Markey, who is too old and too doctrinaire liberal. How does it get to this point?

First, too few Democrats ran for this plum seat. This is a change from 2009, when lots of Dems ran for the seat that the Republican Scott Brown ultimately won. Most of them looked like hacks--very typical lock-step liberals. Michael Capuano seemed different. He proudly supported some of the compromises he made--and I love a good pragmatist. However, it seems that Capuano didn't even want to run this time, and cleared the way for his fellow (though lesser) House colleague, Markey.

Markey, as I said above, is a liberal hack, but a reliable one. I wanted to like his opponent, Steven Lynch, but the guy, also a House member, doesn't know what he's doing. During one debate, Lynch accused Markey of "knowing policy, but not people" [paraphrase, exact quote not located]. Horrors-- Markey voted against some verbal declaration on yada yada, but that's terrible. In Lynch's mind, it's worse than voting against the bank bailout that salvaged the economy, as Lynch had done.

I generally want to vote for the more moderate candidate, but that doesn't extend to stupid.

It's a bit harder for me to vote for a Republican right now. We need them to prevent the Dems from going whole hog, but they'd do a lot of damage if they achieved the major share of power in federal government. They might send shocks into the fragile recovery with large budget cuts, they'd do away with the best chance for the uninsured to get medical coverage, they'd enact all kinds of harmful social measures about marriage and abortion...

I'll only vote for a Republican who'll vote against these bad GOP ideas. Gomez claims to be "a new kind of Republican" but he's not for healthcare for everyone. He wants states to figure it out on their own. What a fucking lame excuse. He'll flush away the only decent health plan to pass in the past 30 years on that basis, not offering an alternative, and seemingly not caring about the problem enough to dig into it. There's no way I'll support another Senate vote to repeal Obamacare without a decent replacement in the works.

So I'm stuck with the hack Markey.

Markey, barely changed from 1976

Image: wikipedia.org + Paint

Security or freedom from surveillance

The exposure of NSA programs (the extent of which is not known) has chased the picayune scandals from most news pages. I don't know if blowhards on the right rue this or not, but I'm happy. Finally, a scandal that isn't primarily about scoring points, but has a very serious question at its core.

The big question, as I see it, is whether we in the US should allow wholesale collection of data by the US government. There are many issues to consider. Is the practice unconstitutional under the fourth amendment? (Probably, but open to interpretation. Here's a reminder of the fourth amendment.)

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Does the practice give the government the machinery to be totalitarian if it chooses to go that direction? (I'd bet money on that.) Does the practice help the government foil terrorist plots? (The director of the NSA says yes, about 50 of them.)

Oh drat--good arguments on both sides. How the hell can I decide whether constitutional rights protecting against warrantless searches are more important than stopping 9/11-like events?

You know, I really don't want more events like 9/11. I want potential terrorists to know that there's a high likelihood they'll be discovered if they try to plot something. If the government collects mountains of data to do that, it's a bit scary. But guess what? My grocery store chain already collects data on me (because I want those discounts, dammit!!!) and so does Google, which keeps offering me stuff I've already bought. The government isn't doing squat with my data that I can tell, probably because I don't trip any alarms with too many visits to jihadi sites coupled with airline tickets to Pakistan.

I am worried that I'm choosing comfort over principle. But maybe I'm choosing survival for thousands of my countrymen, which isn't the same as comfort. Maybe I'm letting my government fulfill its mission to protect  the security of the country, another highly important constitutional duty. 

Frankly, I suspect I can't reason my way through this issue. I might just be gathering data and arguments that support the conclusion I already have. That's a problem many people will have with this issue. 

NSA... No, NASA

Image: blogs.loc.gov

Extras. Overview of massive data collection.

My failed thought experiment: Massive data collection is like watching a school of fish. You don't really see the individuals and you don't know anything about an individual. However, you can pinpoint the one that breaks the pattern. But the analogy breaks down when it comes to telephone usage patterns and internet usage patterns because there must be millions of different patterns.So the government can't be looking for everything that deviates from "the pattern" because there are so many deviations. Probably, they filter for specific behaviors. It's only when there is suspicious behavior that the government wants to determine the individual involved. That might pass a fourth amendment test--maybe.

So the government doesn't have a dossier on each person, or even close to that. But do they still have too much information? Yes, if you don't want the government to have the ability to track you. But it's necessary if you want the government to have the ability to track potential terrorists. Not an easy choice.

Short: Funny Farm bill

So the Senate passed a farm bill 66-27. But the House, riven by excessive partisanship, couldn't pass the bill supported by the not-all-powerful leadership. Nothing surprising or particularly interesting there.

However, I noticed this comment:

Why do they call this the "farm bill?" It is mainly SNAP funding these days, and nominally related to crop payments. Sure, the Ag department administers it, but it is really a welfare bill.

Is this a fake talking point, or the truth? Well, I looked it up, and it's true--67% of the farm bill is for food stamps. Wow.

Not that I'm totally surprised. I've noted the increase in food stamp expenditures before, and I've heard first hand of recipients selling the excess food stamps for cash. It sounds to me like a program that should be trimmed. But I'm still surprised that the food stamp give-aways outstrip the farm subsidies give-aways.

I use the pejorative term "give-aways" ironically, but that's how many see one or both programs. For my part, I want a strong agricultural sector in this country. Farmers deserve extra cushioning because we depend on them for our food, and they depend on fickle weather. I would support my doctor if she had a bad year with everyone healthy and no one visiting her (which doesn't happen) because I want her around rain or shine. I feel the same way about farmers.

The welfare program that supplies food stamps (now called SNAP for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is quite a different issue. It should be separated from the agriculture bills. But there's probably an "I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine" aspect to the bundling. Pols with a rural constituency team up with pols with a poor, urban constituency to make sure they both get their subsidies. Now that's a win-win proposition!

Image: snaptohealth.org

Obama cleans out his closet

A few weeks ago, I took note of an interesting fact--Lois Lerner, an official at the IRS, solicited the question that started the whole IRS story. She called a journalist and arranged for her to ask the question. That's interesting, but it doesn't mean Lois Lerner is a whistleblower. The Inspector General's report on this IRS faux pas was due to be released, so she was perhaps trying to get ahead of it. Maybe she was launching the news of a Friday afternoon in hopes that it gets lost amid the weekend vacation luggage.

But another curious thought wandered through my gray matter. Perhaps Obama is doing some significant cleaning. He's trying to take care of some messes well before the 2016 election and even before the 2014 midterms. And it seems like there are plenty of messes that need sorting. Closing Guantanamo was one he could announce without shame, but it seems that there are plenty of others. So the story about the AP subpoena is out, the same about a Fox reporter (for records and a leak back in 2009), and now another leak about electronic communication tracking. 

I wonder what other misbehavior will surface in the next 5 months. If there are more IRS peccadilloes, and Obama's staff knows about them, they should be coming out. There are probably more surveillance surprises (or non-surprises). Libertarians are going to have a lot of grist to grind. Maybe this is also a safer way to start a national conversation about how much to roll back surveillance without election year grandstanding. Obama gets cover if he reduces surveillance, but if the reaction is heavily pro-surveillance, he's covered for the status quo. 

For people who think that the Obama administration is getting blasted right and left, consider my interpretation--that the Obama administration is quietly revealing its dirty secrets so it can be renewed and clean for its Redemption Tour in 2014. It's also setting the stage for the next Democratic president. 

The history of the administration is one without a large number of embarrassing leaks (except for the paranormal phenomenon of Wikileaks). The most well known leaks, about the drone program, have burnished Obama's stature as a tough Commander-in-Chief. My impression is that the Obama administration has been tighter and more honest that other administrations. Leaks have been surprisingly tightly controlled. Where they weren't beneficial (perhaps encouraged), the leakers were prosecuted harshly.

********************************************************

That's what I wrote last week before the leaker (about the data mining capabilities of the NSA's formerly secret program called PRISM) declared his identity. I wasn't surprised about this exposure. It doesn't seem that anyone was surprised.

In one way this fits the pattern I had noticed. On the other hand, this leak seems to have been initiated by a 29-year-old computer whiz working on his own timetable, so not a "scheduled" leak to help clear out the closet. However, the subject is one of the skeletons in the closet that Obama would like to bring into the open, but is most likely incidental to the leaker himself. Nonetheless, I'm not ready to let go of my hypothesis--that Obama will be cleaning the skeletons out of the presidential closet. (This may be bias on my part toward thinking my theories are brilliant.)

I expect that the cleaning will continue, with a peak sometime during the summer and tailing off well before Thanksgiving. If this is planned cleaning up of secrets/scandals, the new disclosures shouldn't last beyond Thanksgiving since Obama would want the whole of 2014 to be as clean as possible for the midterm elections. He needs to avoid being pulverized (or shellacked) as he was in 2010.

I will know that my hypothesis is wrong if the leaks continue past Thanksgiving, if the scandals reported are more serious in the fall than those leaked in the summer, or if top advisers and cabinets members start leaving in droves. Those are signs of uncontrolled releases of information, not the controlled releases I postulate.

Image: placeofmine.com

Also interesting: Less mining than you think, says Google among others.

Short: Lots of Republicans are derpy

Josh Barro, an admitted recent deserter from the conservative fold, is my new favorite blogger. We seem to share a lot of the same opinions and the same lack of patience for lies and stupidity. His lack of patience also means that he gets to the point fast. As a lazy reader, I love that. I don't have to hack through the verbiage, so I can still catch up on his posts when it's past bedtime, or when I'm hung over (actually, I'll find that out this weekend).

In this refreshing post, he perfectly describes the kind of person who repeats their talking points endlessly, and won't stop no matter how much evidence has piled up refuting their belief. People like this are derps. However, even though the GOP has way too many derps, Barro will stick with being a Republican. Fun reading at anytime, day or night.

And remember, don't be a derp.

(No image. "Derp" is not only stupid, it's apparently very ugly too.)

Strange trip into the arcane world of Dark Enlightenment

Just in case this political movement goes anywhere, I want to document for posterity (OK, for my small readership) the existence of a strange subculture in conservatism. Here's how it started: I followed up on the usage of the term "the Cathedral" in a comment from a hopeless conservative troll on Bernstein's blog.

The inventor of the term is an off-putting, wordy blogger, Moldbug. (I'm not sure what to make of that name.) The Cathedral is a term of derision for a bureaucracy that is greedy for control over ever larger portions of people's lives. It's coined by an atheist who hates both Church and modern liberal State.

The term strikes me as an apt comparison, so it's not a surprise that other people have taken it up. The points of similarity include propaganda, collecting tithes or taxes to support a large clerical class, complex tenets, censorship of ideas not conforming to those tenets, control of large academic and educational arms, and probably some I've missed. The term "Cathedral" refers specifically to the nexus of academia, the elite press, policy think tanks, and their influence/control over education, voting blocks, the legislative agenda, and public opinion.

Derbyshire, (yes, him) applauds the Moldbug concept of the world. It turns out that he is an adherent of a peculiar strain of political thought called dark enlightenment. Here is just a taste of their tenets:

- A realization that liberty is incompatible with democracy, and that democracy leads to mediocrity.

- A concern with bio-politics, oriented to a particular people’s biological and demographic imperatives.

- A rejection of egalitarianism.

With tenets like that, this political group has limited growth possibilities. It seems to me to be an offshoot of conservativism that has gone extreme--to a complete black/white, good/evil view of politics. And in the good/evil balance, democracy is evil. Also evil: the American revolutionaries, the Declaration of Independence, our separation from Great Britain, the acceptance of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, and the acceptance of human equality.

The thesis is a marvel of logic and logical jumps. I've only skimmed much of it, but I've noted a few flaws:

• Toryism is good, and Whigs (the democratic impulse) is bad. 
• Toryism leads to order, which is preferable to chaos, which is the outcome from democracy. 
• Problem: Does Toryism always lead to order? Does democracy always lead to chaos? 
• Problem: Is something good always 100% good? Not in my experience. 
• Problem: Can anything good come from something labeled evil? Strangely (or not), yes.

The author seems aware of the possibility of faulty reasoning, so he states that his assignment of 'order' as 'good' is a preference. However, he seems unaware of the problems of black/white reasoning. Nonetheless, his discussion of the influence of academia and the other side of the American revolution are definitely worth reading, or at least skimming. And luckily, it is not dry droning. Metaphors are taken from Star Trek and The Matrix movie. Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?

As I said before, I see no way that these ideas will catch on in a big way. I've seen the term 'Cathedral' used several times, so do look for it. It will be extremely ironic if 'Cathedral' catches on considering the other baggage the term carries. If I ever hear Sarah Palin use it, or a member of Congress, I'll have a special private chuckle.

Next time you vote, savor it. Moldbug and Derbyshire (and this teacher) don't believe you should vote unless you're white, Anglo-Saxon, and own an estate.

The T-shirts for the good side are ready

Image: zazzle.com

Extras. Moldbug's manifesto is in four parts that are poorly linked. Use Google to find all four. Finally, some fun. A list of terms that they make fun of.