What the Amanda Knox case reveals

Bigotry is part of every culture--America of course, and, as the Amanda Knox case confirms, Italy. Along with the way in which power corrupts, sexism, the human failing of confirmation bias, and the way in which institutions formed to serve noble goals gradually morph into self-serving institutions.

It's not just that Amanda Knox is innocent. It's that she should never have been accused, much less tried, much less convicted, much less imprisoned for four years. The murderer was Rudy Guede, an African-Italian drifter. He cut a deal with the Italian prosecutor to get his sentence reduced from 30 years to 16 in exchange for fingering Knox and her boyfriend.

This benefited the prosecutor, giving him the fame that a simple murder by a rapist from Africa wouldn't have given him. The prosecutor got to exploit anti-American sentiment, as well as Italian madonna/whore misogyny, combining to let him exploit the prurient vilifying of an American woman having sex with an Italian man outside the sacred circle of marriage.

American prosecutors in the 1980s did the same thing with all those satanic child rape & murder cults using daycare centers as a front, sending dozens of men and women to prison for decades--and every single one of which turned out to be, like Amanda Knox's case, not just false but heinous abuses of power by the State, in the form of prosecutors looking for re-election as being tough on crime + as a stepping-stone to higher office.

American prosecutors have almost unanimously fought DNA testing for inmates they'd prosecuted. And in Amanda Knox's case, the prosecutor is of course not admitting his perversions of justice, but is instead appealing Knox's reversal of conviction to Italy's supreme court.

And if I'd written this in Italy, he would almost certainly prosecute me for the felony of defaming his character--law in many countries (and routinely used in putative democracies like Turkey to suppress criticism of government).

Meanwhile the Kerchner family (parents/siblings of the murder victim) continue to imply that Knox done it--and continue to not revile the Italian prosecutor for cutting Kerchner's murderer's sentence almost in half, instead of demanding that Guede be tried now for perjury. They should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with the Knox family as soon as the DNA research (done at the instigation of the Knox family, not the Italians) made it clear that Knox couldn't have done it, despite her coerced confession.

But here we have confirmation bias at work, in which you magnify everything that supports your foregone conclusion, while minifying/dismissing anything that contradicts it. Of course it's not just the Kerchners. It's also how eye witnesses so frequently finger the wrong person; why doctors misdiagnose patients; why cops jump to conclusions and then ignore everyone/everything else.

Finally, confirmation bias colludes with another human foible--self-confidence that vastly exceeds the certainly that the real evidence allows us to have, because we like to be certain and we like to be right.

Italy has a long way to go to redeem itself. Firing this prosecutor for incompetence would be a start.

What do you think are the odds?

How to tell how decisive a leader any American president is

American presidents are, legally, America's COO (Chief Operating Officer). That is, someone empowered with carrying out the laws--particularly on spending--enacted by Congress. He can't even put legislation in front of Congress--a Congressman has to do that. He can veto legislation, but it can be overcome by a supemajority of Congressmen.

And the rules of Congress are designed currently so that a minority of the Senate can block legislation and nominations, and even a majority of Senators could easily represent a minority of Americans.

Thus the Republicans' 109th Congress (2005-2007) had a Senate Republican majority of 55%, yet it represented only around 48% of Americans--a minority majority, due to the Republicans' domination of the more backward, small, rural states.

So it's hard to judge the leadership of an American president by his domestic accomplishments, while his more unfettered international scope shows us what he could do domestically under a parliamentary system--the form of government of all the countries with a AAA rating from all three American economic rating agencies.

Even when a president has majorities in both houses of Congress, he can still be hamstrung by an obstructionist minority in the Senate--something that doesn't happen in countries with parliamentary systems, where the head of government is by definition the head of whatever party dominates the legislature, and our quaint rules don't apply. There they need 51% of the votes. Here we need at least 61%--nearly impossible to achieve in a country as evenly divided as we are, and only approachable when one party's gross malfeasance comes to light and is rejected.

And in foreign policy President Obama has been surehanded and decisive--and a coalition-builder instead of a cowboy. The killing of Al-Aliki in Yemen today is just the latest example.

It costs more to have private sector employees do government work--even though they make less

Federal employees make an average of 20% more than comparable private sector employees. Yet it costs more to have those private sector employees do work for the government. The reason: the government hires those lower-wage workers via middlemen--contractors--and when you add in the middleman's cut, it's almost always a lot more expensive.

This is a perfect example of how pols can lie with the truth--by omitting the context that proves the opposite.

At the same time this isn't a justification for government workers making more than private sector workers. In fact they should make less, to compensate for their higher security. Except now with rampant government worker layoffs mandated by Republinomics, the old "less pay for more security" equation is breaking down.

So if we do bring government worker compensation down we have to restore public sector job security--which makes sense to me. Both parts.

Meanwhile at the state and local level, the pension time bombs tick away, threatening to bankrupt cities and counties. It's a pity the GOP has a valid issue here--and that their real reason for pursuing this is to kill off a prime source of Democratic party funding-- but nobody should ever have believed that all goodness (or badness) reposes on either side of the fence.

How to hide big government spending

Both parties--but especially the Republicans--have discovered a surefire way to hide humongous amounts of taxing and spending (if they're Democrats) or borrowing and spending (if they're Republicans): use contractors; and make it Secret.

Private contractors cost taxpayers 2 to 3 times as much as government employees doing the same thing, and once the ball's rolling, the private contractors can and will lure away the government employees who are left doing what they do, then flood Congress with lobbyists to divert even more tax dollars away from cheap public employees to expensive private ones.

Which is fine if all public employees are slackers and all private employees are hardworking and talented and devoted to doing a good job.You've always gotten great products and services from for-profit companies...right?

Plus if the work is classified secret, who's to know whether the contractors (and subcontractors and sub-subcontracotrs) are doing a good job? In which case the proper profit motive is served by getting as much for as little as possible (once you've made sure oversight is either suborned or missing).

Because the profit motive is amoral--something a lot of Bible-thumping Republicans seem to have forgotten. Not immoral, as some Leftists believe. Just amoral. Meaning that without effective oversight, capitalism naturally morphs into crony capitalism. Just as unchecked socialism morphs into...well, pretty much the same thing, doesn't it?

Liars

The cleverest liars tell the truth--they just tell it in such as way as to get listeners to believe the lie they want you to believe.


This gives them "plausible deniability."

They do it by
1. removing context--omitting other truths--facts, reason--that would lead listeners to a different conclusion
2. trying to trigger powerful tribal fears and anger that lead listeners to an embattled "circle the wagons" mentality
3. exploiting people's inability to understand statistics (also known as innumeracy)


Examples are innumerable. A good way to find them is by going to factcheck.org or politifact.com and see where the liar didn't so much lie as pull the shenanigans I've described here.

You can't stop with simply checking the factuality of what is said. That the bottom line. You also have to make sure that the facts being cited are true in context, and aren't coupled with emotionally compelling narratives that lead listeners down the rabbit hole.

"Context disambiguates."

EDIT:
Perfect example this week. FOX TV saturated its coverage this week with a clip of President Obama saying "If you love me, pass this bill."

Well. What an egomaniac, huh?

Only problem is all those Fox viewers didn't get the context: Obama was giving an unscripted answer to someone in the town hall audience he was addressing, who shouted out "I love you!"

See? Without context: egomaniac; with context: clever off-the-cuff answer.

It's all about context. And the fact that clever propagandists don't hesistate to lie with the truth.

Debt and infrastructure

It's conservative to avoid debt and to pay any debts you do have. It's liberal to finance one's goals with debt. And it's foolish to finance optional luxuries with debt. Maybe.

Of course if this is true, every family that purchased a home with a mortgage is liberal. If they were truly conservative they'd save until they had the cash for the price.

Precious few do, making them conservatives when it suits them, but not conservative as a hard and fast principle.

Likewise, the average corporate CEO is aggressively conservative. Yet what large, successful business hasn't financed growth with debt? What do you think stocks and bonds are? What do you think the Wall Street Stock Exchange is?

What I observed over 20 years of reporting on Silicon Valley companies is that the successful startups didn't use their venture capital borrowing to pay for fabulous offices, cars and perks for the management suite. They used that debt to buy company infrastructure, marketing, R&D.

But even when it comes to luxuries, suppose you discover your spouse has an incurable, mortal illness but is currently well enough to travel. Would you take out a second mortgage to take your spouse on his or her dream vacation? Or would you refuse, proudly citing conservative principles?

And how do you know your spouse doesn't have an undiagnosed cancer that, when you discover it, it will be too late for that vacation? This actually happened to our next door neighbors, such that their lifetime of scrimping and saving for world-traveling retirement years came to nothing. The husband spent the last year of his life in a hospital bed, waiting for a heart transplant that never came.

The fact is that reasonable people--and corporations--see debt as a tool that can be used or misused. Not as something that's automatically bad or good.

And one form of debt businesses and government incur that's not so obvious is infrastructure maintenance and repair.

In general this is a form of debt that can be hidden--yet failure to deal with it on a timely basis creates a balloon payment at the end.

Maintenance deferred is debt compounded.

For example, suppose a condo complex doesn['t meet current earthquake retrofit standards--it's built over garages and needs reinforcing that will cost $9,000 per unit. If this isn't done, after a significant earthquake doing the repairs at that point will cost six times as much--possible a lot more--perhaps accompanied by loss of life and irreplaceable possessions that can't be priced.

Our nation's infrastructure has maintenance needs that have been sacrificed for decades to the insistence on low taxes and the ballooning outlays for public employee pension plans that were implemented without being funded.

So that unmaintained bridge collapses in rush hour traffic, killing half a dozen people and maiming others, and must be rebuilt from scratch instead of being repaired. The dam fails. The potholed streets and freeways damage car and truck undercarriages and/or just wears them out prematurely, which individuals and companies have to pay for, thus passing the expense of those saved taxes to consumers and businesses on the downlow.

 It's called being penny wise and pount foolish.

So when the President calls on the legislature to fund infrastructure maintenance, he's not calling to increase our debt--he's calling on us to pay debts we incurred when we built that infrastructure--and he's calling on the legislature to pay that debt with borrowing and/or taxing instead of incurring vastly higher debt by waiting for damaging deterioration and collapse to take place.

It is conservative to pay what you owe. And unless we're willing to do without those roads and bridges and dams and more, we owe the nation the maintenance of its infrastructure.

Why both the Left and Right are Wrong about Obama--and in the same Way

Opinion polls for President Obama are down--down enough to make his re-election seem unlikely.

But when the polls just ask whether people are satisfied with his actions, they conflate people who are dissatisfied because he's a Socialist with people who are dissatisfied because he's a Corporatist.

That is, the Left in general are unhappy because he isn't opposing the Republican Party enough,
while the Right is unhappy because he isn't surrendering to the Republican Party totally.

Lumping those two kind of unhappiness together leads to a severe misunderstanding of what the polls point towards in the next election, and to what the electorate is thinking now.

And the unhappiness with President Obama from both Left and Right stems--at least in part--from the unconscious belief that President = Ruler.

And though he has the bully pulpit to be sure, but in terms of actual power he's more like the chief administrator of the country. He can't pass legislation. He can't even initiate legislation. He can't overrule judges. And in our particular country, even if all congressional Democrats always do everything he asks of them, Senate rules in particular make it possible for a Republican minority there to make the Federal government incapable of sending any legislation to President Obama's desk, and incapable of confirming any presidential appointees, producing a hogtied government that lives down to Republican claims that government can't do anything.

An American president only wields the kind of power people think he had when his party isn't just in a majority in both houses, but which has 61 votes in the Senate that can always be relied on (difficult to maintain with senators in battleground states whose seats are vulnerable), and which has a Supreme Court majority that can generally be relied on. Bush II pretty much had that for most of his disastrous reign. Obama never did, and even during the four months he had a nominally filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, he was being forced to deal with the economic crisis the Republicans handed him (and then tried to blame him for), and with the fact that they proved willing to cripple the country through routine obstructionism for political gain.

It was like seeing two boxers fighting but each under different rules, one willing to hit below the belt and bite and kick, the other not.

These are all process observations which you can evaluate regardless of the actual policies involved.

The bottom line is that ideologues don't think about policy, they think about personality. Right wing ideologues call Obama a Socialist, which is beyond ridiculous, but they don't really mean they think he really wants a Soviet States of America. They clearly don't understand what the word means, or that every single person in America who does say he's a Socialist also says Obama is not remotely one of them. Mainly they use the word because they associate it with opprobrium, making it more like a junior high school schoolyard taunt than a serious political statement.

And left wing ideologues call him a Corporatist because, just like their right wing brothers in thought, they see things in black & white. So for them centrists like Obama are seen either as one thing or another, or as confused.

They're shades of gray-blind.

How is India a more advanced nation than America?

India is busily implementing a biometric universal ID, and we aren't even thinking about it.

From Wikipedia:

"Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique number which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will issue for all residents in India. The number will be stored in a centralized database and linked to the basic demographics and biometric information – photograph, ten fingerprints and iris – of each individual.It is easily verifiable in an online, cost-effective way. So also, it is unique and robust enough to eliminate the large number of duplicate and fake identities in government and private databases The random number generated will be devoid of any classification based on caste, creed, religion and geography."

Upon completion it will cost, by varying estimates, $6-34B.

We need this even more than India. But it's being blocked by both leftists and rightists, who are certain that a universal ID will be immediately followed by the black UN helicopters swooping down to castrate our men and impregnate our wimmen.

It's ironic, really. The exact same people who claim that illegal immigration is a huge, huge problem are the ones who oppose a universal biometric ID the most.

10 years after 9/11

On 9/11 the NYPD and Fire Dept couldn't communicate with each other. Today, all over America, we still don't have full communications interoperability at federal/state/local levels. The Republican Congress handed out the 9/11 largesse to the states with no strings attached, as a tribute to states' rights. So a dirty nuke in a van goes off in Washington  DC and affects five states--and we'll get the same lack of coordination.

So they made sure the Federal Gummint stayed out of the way. And it's still out of the way. Why do people think this is a good thing?

Who loves overpopulation? Liberals...and Conservatives.

Here's a summary of both sides' discussion of overpopulation in the last 10 or so national elections:

....

So it's not a problem, right? There's plenty of room for everyone! Come on down!

After all, if you fly over America, you see gobs of open space. Food is plentiful and relatively cheap, ditto water. What's the problem?

The alternative explanation is that it is a problem but it's not one that can be exploited for partisan advantage, because both sides have so much to lose from admitting what a problem it is.

Liberals used to say overpopulation was a big problem, but in the 1970s racialists told liberals they were racists if they complained about overpopulation, so that was the end of liberal opposition to overpopulation..

Moreover, a growing population is good for business--for union members in the building trades especially.

And Catholics and members of most other religions (regardless of party affiliation) believe in placing no restrictions on population growth. Hence the constant complaints by the American government--regardless of which party's in power--to China about its One Child policy.

Which leads to conservative opposition to even admitting that any country anywhere has an overpopulation problem.

First, it's religious. Second, it's business. The developers those union tradesmen work for love more population. And if anyone who opposes conservatives raises the issue, they love to brand that person a racist, since it gives cover to the racism that persists in the hearts of so many conservatives.

Recently the economic conservative publication The Economist editorialized in favor of population growth at a means of coping with the graying of advanced nation populations--without even considering the cataststrophic consequences of human overpopulation.

Overpopulation denial isn't just a national policy problem. Here in California the state legislature is firmly in the New Urbanist camp. New Urbanism is a movement that ostensibly seeks to remediate urban sprawl and energy-intensive long commutes by building up housing in urban areas and guaranteeing low income housing by requiring developers to include same in their projects as an unfunded mandate.

And the New Urbanism takes rapid, continual, unlimited population growth not just as a given, but as a Good Thing, since it adds jobs for unskilled laborers.

Consequently my state's legislature has created a regional organization called ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) dedicated to achieving the goals of New Urbanism.

It has found the college town I live in guilty of providing too many jobs--a terrible crime in the New Urbanism bible, apparently, because we provide more jobs than housing. So we're being required to cram more and more housing into the town, mainly through eliminated the kind of retail and office space that provided those extra jobs in the first place, and replacing them with high density housing, which then loads our streets with more traffic than they were designed for, and can't be widened, because the town it totally built up already.

It's also loading up our schools with more kids than they can accommodate, and our sewer systems, and power systems, and overburdening road repair schedules.

Plus our town, like most American cities, is having to pay out more and more money for lavish city worker pensions, causing it to skimp on infrastructure maintenance, even though that greatly increases the cost of maintenance when it's finally done.

All because no one in either party will even say the "O" word, much less admit the drastic steps that should be taken to deal with it.

Here, instead of adding housing, we should impose a moratorium on additional housing by denying water permits for it.

Nothing in the Constitution mandates accommodating limitless population growth by states, counties, or cities.

But the real problem is that dealing with overpopulation realistically goes against our instincts, which formed when the human race numbered a few thousand people, and the urge to procreate needed to be overwhelming. And we also have an instinct to trust our other instincts--that is, to be uncritical about them and highly suspicious of anyone who says things that go against them.

So it's easy for demagogues to use our instincts to further their goals, even though many of our instincts don't match our current circumstances.

Try bringing up overpopulation with people you know, and you'll see how their Procreate! Procreate! instincts kick in the moment you bring up the issue. 

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Why are people so scientifically illiterate?

We may be so scientifically illiterate in part because we're not as smart as we used to be.

I read an article recently--in Scientific American I think--summarizing paleontology research that discovered that our brain size has actually shrunk since we adopted agriculture around 10,000 years ago.

No one knows why exactly but my hypothesis is that we needed to be smarter as hunters & gatherers than we needed to be as farmers, and our large brain size kills women, so it's actually advantageous to have our brains as small as possible (and yet maintain the advantages a human brain confers).

It kills women because if it were any larger women wouldn't be able to walk using inverse brachiation (the way gibbons swing through trees, only upside down), but it can't be any smaller without losing brain capacity, since it has to be developed in utero (which is, incidentially, why marsupials are, as a group, as dumb as a box o' rocks).

Also, since the invention of birth control and women's rights (not really possible until we developed the technology needed to let them have fewer kids and not die in childbirth when they did), the smarter the parents, the fewer the children overall.

For one case in point, look at people's frequently simple-minded reactions to America's current economic situation.

It's not their fault, however. We didn't evolve to deal with such numerically complex problems, and a number of brain heuristics (detailed in several books by cognitive psychologists) actively skew our understanding, just to make things even worse.

For one example, take Baye's Law (named after the Reverend Bayes who first formulated it), whose mathematics I certainly don't understand, except that it lets scientists and engineers evaluate probability when two different probabilities apply. Instead of merging the probabilities proportionately, most people just throw one out, in a form of target fixation.

To really understand current economics and how national policy has to juggle issues like debt, unemployment, immigration, public health, city planning, military spending/technology/deployment, fisheries management, agricultural subsidies and more, most people go into what programmers might call a stack overflow condition. So they just focus on one or two things.

Currently the Republican mantra is debt--as if that's the most important problem we face (it's not, huge as it is--unemployment is bigger, and overpopulation/permanent natural resource degradation even worse). It's easy to describe in bumper sticker slogans, and it helps with the real agenda of the GOP's paymasters: to stop government regulation in every way possible, thus by focusing exclusively on debt/spending, they can defund government agencies that try to limit corporate rapacity. But that's not what's said. What's said tries to pretend that the federal government of the biggest economy in the history of the planet can be governed by the same principles and platitudes used by individual familes.

This really reflects not just the scientific illiteracy of the citizenry, but the inability of most citizens to admit that they don't understand it. Instead they turn to bumper sticker slogans used like tribal chants (and I have seen the Democrats go tribal on us as well--particularly with illegal immigration), because it's emasculating to admit that you don't, can't, and never will understand how the U.S. federal government manages its spending and priorities.

And the unwillingness to admit one is over one's head leads to mental shortcuts and not doing the hard work needed to get anything like a handle on the situation. It also leads to anti-intellectualism, since intellectuals/scientists keep saying complicated things. Better to deny such people's worth than to accept their conclusions, which are so unpalatable, and getting moreso every day.

Cassandra was cursed by a god to always predict correctly--and never to be believed.

Scientists can relate.

For example, I live in a condo complex with most buildings built over garages. It doesn't meet modern earthquake retrofit standards. Yet we just lost a vote to spend about $9K a unit to apply a proper retrofit.

The retrofit was opposed fiercely by a group of Russian immigrant families who believed it was all a scam--that our Board was in cahoots with the engineering firm. Some of them are even engineers (though not in structural engineering or earthquake retrofits). But they still opposed it. We're 10 miles from the Hayward Fault, which has generated a 6.8+ earthquake every 140 years or so for many thousands of years. It's now been 143 years since the last one.

And they voted in a bloc against the retrofit, and went door to door around the complex lobbying people, telling their conspiracy theories and being 100% certain that their layman's understanding of the probabilities and dangers was far more valid than a bunch structural engineers with decades of experience in earthquake retrofits.

So we're not just up against scientific illiteracy. We're up against the average person's belief that their know better than the experts.

Same goes for the insanity of parents preventing their kids from being vaccinated, even though the claim that it leads to autism is complete nonsense. And these parents--some with liberal arts BAs--will sit there and say, smugly, "I know what I know."

Only they don't. And they can't learn what they don't know because they deny that they don't know it.

People love science and scientists until they hear things they don't want to hear. Then we get self-confident dim bulbs like Governor Perry ascribing the 98% agreement of climate scientists on human-caused global warming to a vast international conspiracy of those scientists to get grant money.

And a majority of Americans appear to believe Perry...

How are Tea Party types like the Japanese military in WWII??

I've been reading comment threads on op-ed pieces in the Washington Post. Many comments, coming from  the far right wing of the right wing, remind me of something I read in John Toland's "The Rising Sun," the definitive account of the Japanese in WWII.

After Hiroshima got nuked, a majority of the high command rationalized it away and refused to surrender. And then, even after Nagasaki got nuked as well, when they realized the jig was up, not only did many stiff oppose surrendering--a group of junior officers led a coup attempt to prevent the Emperor's surrender message from being broadcast.

All of these people considered themselves the truest of the true patriots....people who loved their country and their Emperor more than life itself (when the coup failed, a number of them committed hara-kiri).

Yet this group of people betrayed Japan when they led it down the warpath, betrayed it when they attacked America, betrayed it when they tried to prevent Japan from surrendering--and came horrifyingly close to preventing Japan from surrendering (i.e. compromising in any way), even after Nagasaki.

Nations can be betrayed by intentional traitors, selling our their country for money or an ideology that leads them to hate their own country. I have known left wingers like that, to be honest.

But nations can also be betrayed by people who would never dream of intentionally betraying their country...who see themselves as patriotic to their bones...and who see all who disagree with them as traitors.

And one of the great ironies of history is how often such people have brought their nations to ruin.

During the Vietnam war, there were Americans who watched and read the forced confessions of POWs and told the North Vietnamese when the POWs included coded messages Americans would recognize but North Vietnamese would not.

Those were intentional traitors, and they were responsible for suffering and even deaths of Americans.

Then you have JFK, Johnson, Nixon and McNamara--patriots all. Yet in the scathing military analysis of the Vietnam war conducted at the behest of the American College of War by Col. Harry G. Summers, "On Strategy," Summers shows how profoundly those patriotic leaders harmed America--and killed vastly more Americans--than the handful of intentional leftist traitors accomplished.

So yes, there are leftists who really, truly hate America, and who do what they can to harm it. There are also people who may or may not hate America, but who certainly place their ethnic group's advancement far over that of our nation.

But when it comes to harming America, they're pikers compared to today's equivalent of Johnson/Nixon/McNamara; namely Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.

The judgment of history is already coming in. America's hundreds of presidential historians are polled every few years on how they'd rank America's presidents. The last one, conducted in 2010, ranked Bush II 6th from the bottom (Obama ranked 15, well below Eisenhower & FDR, but 2 up from Reagan).

[fill in name of Democratic president/candidate] is weak, indecisive, phony

The Washington Post's "Right Turn" columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote an entry comparing President Obama invidiously with Steve Jobs. I wrote this:


Assume, for the sake of argument, that Jennifer Rubin's regurgitation of Republican National Committee talking points is entirely correct. And that, with the benefit of the RNC's hindsight, we got to vote in the 2008 presidential election again.

I'd still have voted for Barack Obama.

Because in an American presidential election, you aren't voting for or against someone. You're choosing between 2 pairs of people.

And that choice was & still is far from difficult, since 1 of 1 of the pairs was Sarah Palin, AKA Governor Quitter--since, to be fair, I'd have hindsight about all 4 of them, right? To have 1 of the oldest presidents in American history with Palin a heartbeat away dwarfs the RNC/Rubin's talking points.

You don't have to a liberal to reach that conclusion. Palin is, was, & always will be, intellectually, temperamentally, and experientially unqualified to be President. Biden is. Obama is. And McCain was, I thought, until he chose Palin as his running mate.

American presidential historians--100s of them, both liberal & conservative--are polled periodically on how they'd rank the presidents. Last time was last year, & in it President Obama ranked 15, Reagan 17, & Bush II was 6th from the bottom. There were both Republican & Democratic presidents who ranked higher than Obama & lower than Bush II.

And if the historians were the cabal of Libruls that the Republicans would have us believe, Obama would have ranked higher & Reagan lower.

What this article shows is yet another example of how Republicans respect leaders with self confidence--as Bush II, McCain, Palin & current lead contender Rick Perry all have in spades.

But I thought it was Republicans who decried the Self Esteem movement--who said self esteem should be the product of achievement, not esteem for its own sake.

Frankly, I'd rather have a weak leader who understands the job than a bold, decisive halfwit. Naming no names...

BTW have you noticed that the Republicans ALWAYS describe every Democratic presidential candidate as weak & indecisive? And then they trot out their Man on a Horse, Perry being the latest--a man with the rugged good looks & breadth of intellect of Warren G. Harding.

Obama the weak & indecisive...the only president to achieve any kind of healthcare reform, no matter how mild, in 100 years. The man on whose watch we nailed the guy Bush II lets slip through his fingers. The guy who authorized the Navy to take out the trio of Somali pirates who were holding an American ship captain hostage. The man who has authorized vastly more UAV attacks--& successful ones--on our enemies than Bush dreamed of. The man who deported far more illegals than Bush did. And who helped take down Qaddafi without any American casualties.

The Left's main complaint is that he's too conservative. Takes chutzpah for Rubin to diss that.

He's not the best prez I could imagine. Just head and shoulders above his Republican alternatives, past and present. 

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I should add that he showed effective leadership in the Libyan actions, which no Republican pol will give him credit for.

You can't prove humans change climate if you can't measure it

One prong of the Republican war on science was the Bush administration drastically reducing the budget for Earth-watching satellites. The ones up now are living on borrowed time and not being replaced, except for a minimal complement, which won't be watching climate change--just here-and-now weather.

So even if we put up new ones, say, a decade from now, the continuity of observation will be broken.

It may happen that the late 20th century was in some ways the pinnacle of human scientific observation.

Think about this the next time you hear the science deniers ranting.

Evolution

December 2010 Gallup poll, accurate to plus/minus 4%:

God created humans in present form             40%
Humans evolved with God guiding                  38%
     subtotal: 78%
Humans evolved, no involvement by God   16%
     subtotal going the other way: 54%

This came up yesterday after leading GOP presidential contender Rick Perry told Christian Fundamentalists he was one of them, using the coded language fundamentalists employ to communicate in public without everyone else quite realizing what's going on.

President Bush II did the same thing BTW. The difference being that Bush II probably didn't mean it as sincerely as Governor Perry does.

 Egypt's nascent democracy is threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood. Our established democracy is threatened by people who are working just as hard here to turn back the clock.

But the use of coded language gives the fundamentalist politicians "plausible deniability." So we have to hope reporters nail down Governor Perry and don't let him get away with communicating in code.

Here the code is saying that "evolution has problems" and is "just a theory" and Creationism is another theory, so both should be taught in science classes, enabling students to think for themselves.

Exactly as modern astronomy is just a theory, and the terracentric universe with Ptolomeian epicycles should be taught alongside it.

Obama has failed!....Really?

One Republican leitmotif, hammered on day in, day out, is that President Obama's policies have failed.

This ploy uses the assumed comparison.

That is, "failed" compared to what? Compared to the boom years of the Roaring 90s, sure, OK.

But that wasn't a possibility. The fact is that unless you state what you think a politician has failed compared to, you're blowin' smoke.

It's possible that Obama has failed to make America an economic paradise. However, it's also possible that despite our persistent unemployment, America is doing vastly better than it would have otherwise. What critiques of Obama's handling of the economy never prove is just what the alternative that he's being compared to, and how it would have been better.

Here's one way of looking at it: what is considered the safest place to put your cash today, worldwide?

US. Treasury bonds, that's what. S&P notwithstanding.

But also, it's not like Obama is our reigning monarch, or even prime minister. Even when he presided over a Democratic House and Senate, he still couldn't get his way without severe compromises, because Senate rules let a tiny minority stop everything unless your side can muster not a majority but a supermajority, and even if you have a nominal supermajority, one or two defections of senators in opposite-color states may well vote to save their hides instead of supporting their side.

And if Obama doesn't have full control of the levers of American government, he has even less control over the world economy we're inextricably bound to. So economic tumult abroad--such as the Arab spring sending gas prices soaring, sending ripples through the American economy every whichway--is entirely out of the American president's control.

This is why NYtimes columnist Tom Friendman is now arguing for a prime minister form of government for America--because ruthless exploitation of our system of checks and balances, starting with exquisite gerrymandering of congressional districts, has meant that neither party can be held fully responsible for what happens on its watch. It can always claim obstructionism by the other side, and it's often right. Both ways.

In a PM system one side can take us down the wrong direction rapidly, but at least you will know who did it--there's no evading the buck when it stops at the PM's desk. And if we don't like it we voters can then throw the bums out,.

Now both sides always have plausible deniability.

Just as the Second Amendment made sense for muskets but not for shoulder-mounted stingers and AK-47s, it may be that the beautiful mechanisms the Founding Fathers constructed don't work as intended any more, and will have to be drastically modified.

The irony is that it's the people who claim to be following the Founding Fathers' words and intentions most strictly who have brought us to this pass--who have done the most to break the very system they say they revere, not by the specifics of the policies they advocate, but by their unrestrained exploitation of every trick in the rulebook to effectively overturn the results of the last election.

And the measure of a democracy is what the side that loses the election  does after that loss. Obama is the president, not Grover Norquist. Not until 2012 at least.

Let's get immigrants who actually like this country. Just a thought.

[based on reportage in the LA times]

...and then there's the June soccer match at the Rose Bowl, between the US and Mexico. Both teams played with good sportsmanship. But the 80% Mexican (many with American citizenship, surely) spectators loudly booed the playing of the American national anthem, loudly booed the American team whenever it had the ball, and chanted obscenities at the American point guard. And then the award ceremony--at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena--was conducted in Spanish, just to complete the picture.

This was no fluke. A large Mexican crowd was even more boorish at the 2005 World Cup qualifier with America. In fact, there they even threw containers filled with urine at the American players.

I just wish all the enthusiastic advocates for illegal immigration had been there. Though no doubt they'd have figured out a way to blame America and Americans for it, now that I think about it.

It's hard to imagine how American attendees at these matches would have left with more warmth in their hearts for our southern neighbors. 

Jobs and immigration

Right now at least 14 million Americans are out of work, and at least half of them have been looking for over a year without landing anything. Countless more are underemployed--working below their training or at part time jobs when they want full time ones.

So in this environment, why are we allowing any immigration at all, except in job categories where we can't find enough Americans--mostly in areas requiring high levels of training/talent? I can see allowing such people to immigrate, and bring with them spouses and children they're willing to support. But why are we allowing any other kind of immigration until those 14 million Americans are employed (minus the ones who are total loo-hoosers)?

Can he get reelected?

President Obama's like the guy who goes camping in Alaska with another guy, and one night a grizzly bear sticks his head in the tent, roaring, and Obama starts putting on his tennies, and the other say sez "Why are you putting your shoes on? You can't outrun a grizzly." And Obama replies "I don't have to outrun the grizzly..."

In polls, Obama loses to a generic Republican opponent. But he wins compared to every actual candidate.

And remember the propensity of Americans who are independent (36& of the electorate) to vote for a candidate of the opposite party to whichever one controls the legislature.

Honestly, at this point none of President Obama's initiatives matter, because we all know the Republicans will nix every single one of them. All he can do is stop the Republicans from handing us the fiscal and national disaster that they inflicted on us last time around.

So what matters is his veto pen. And even if he wields that half-heartedly, it will beat a GOP president's rubber stamp of anything a GOP legislature does.

And the president during the next term will almost certainly be nominating one or more Supreme Court justices, replacing one of the remaining aging liberals. The conservatives are mostly younger and healthier.
And given the one-sidedly corporatist tilt of the court, that will matter to independents.

Lastly, the association of American presidential scholars rated Obama #15 of all presidents--below Republicans like Eisenhower, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, but vastly above Bush II (6th from the absolute bottom) and slightly above Reagan (#17). So we could do a lot worse--like Governor Perry, whose handsome, presidential facade and interaural vacuum remind one of Warren G. Harding...or Governor Romney, who never met a principle he wouldn't abandon for electoral advantage....

Why no bankers in jail?

In the savings & loan industry crisis there were around 1,000 felony convictions. In the mortgage/banking meltdown--40 times the size of the S&L crisis--there have been 10 felony convictions.

After 9/11, much of the FBI was diverted into terrorist pursuit--but the white collar crime resources weren't replaced, gutting the agency's white collar crime enforcement.

And then the Republicans replaced the staff of the regulatory agencies with antiregulation people.

Apparently they're still there.

--William Black, associate professor of law, Kansas U. or some such.


Bank robbers like business certainty--the certainty that no cops will be around to bother them as they're robbing banks. And when the bank robbers are the banks' executives? They crave the certainty of knowing no pesky regulators will be coming after them.

Might makes right (wing).