politics – Page 17

Tag: politics (page 17 of 23)

An innocent question

Here’s a quote from today’s Wall Street Journal:

There is nothing more dangerous to entrenched Washington power than a populist conservative who looks unlikely to buy into Washington’s creature comforts. Take a close look at Governor Palin’s record on ethics and energy in Alaska, and it becomes clear what this Beltway outburst is actually about. The irony is that while Senator Obama is running on change, his acceptance speech made explicit that he’s promising only more power and money for Washington. Sarah Palin’s history of taking on the career politicians of a corrupt Alaskan GOP machine — her own party — shows that she’s the more authentic change agent.

Does anyone really believe that the agents of entrenched Washington power and the corrupt GOP machine would be so ardently defending Sarah Palin if they believed what they were saying to be true?

Sarah Palin, book banner

September 2, 2008 / Rafe / 9 Comments

Time magazine reports on Sarah Palin’s tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

On Sarah Palin and everything else

August 31, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I just posted this on Twitter, but I may as well post it here as well:

Be skeptical when people try to explain why something that doesn’t appeal to them will appeal to other people they don’t really understand.

The Presidential campaign this year has me thinking about the topic of experience. The Democrats have nominated the relatively inexperienced Barack Obama for President, and now John McCain has selected the even more inexperienced Sarah Palin as his running mate. It has me thinking about how I evaluate experience.

The approach is the same regardless of whether I’m deciding who to vote for in an election or which programmers to bring in for interviews based on their responses to a Craigslist ad. I see experience as a relatively primitive criteria for making decisions.

If I am looking at two programmers, and the only thing I know about them is that one has ten years of experience and the other has only one year of experience, my initial assumption will be that the more experienced programmer will be more capable when they start the job. Nobody competent would stop their evaluation at that point. Generally speaking, I read the résumés, Google them to see if they blog and to see what kind of things they’ve posted to online forums, and if they seem promising, bring them in for an interview.

What I really want to see in a programmer is desire, curiosity, intelligence, talent, and knowledge, probably in that order. Experience doesn’t tell me a whole lot about any of those qualities, what it mainly demonstrates is that they haven’t given up.

The nice things about political campaigns is that the media exposure given to candidates enables us to judge them by criteria beyond their level of experience. We learn how they’ve used their time in office, what they did before they entered politics, how they respond to the pressure of the campaign, and their knowledge and insights into the issues of the day. (Or at least what their political sense tells them to say they think about the issues of the day.)

Right now people are talking about Sarah Palin’s level of experience because we don’t know a whole lot more about her. But by November 4, we’ll have seen enough of her to be able to make judgements based on other, better criteria. Sadly we’ll have to listen to people on all sides prattle on about experience as though it’s highly indicative of something the whole time.

Red light cameras

August 25, 2008 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Bruce Schneier flags a post about the ineffectiveness of red light cameras. Unfortunately, because cities find the cameras to be a useful source of revenue, I doubt we’ll be seeing them disappear anytime soon. I’ve seriously considered running for city council or county commissioner on the sole issue of getting rid of them.

Not only do I hate the general level of anxiety they cause for drivers at the intersections where they’re posted, but I also hate that they condition people to accept being constantly, passively observed for potential violations of the law.

Big companies and the government both suck, particularly when they work together. The insurance companies are evil:

The IIHS, funded by automobile insurance companies, is the leading advocate for red-light cameras since insurance companies can profit from red-light cameras by way of higher premiums due to increased crashes and citations.

And so are city governments:

In fact, six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the yellow light cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. Those local governments have completely ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

More people will die thanks to red light cameras, but surely that’s justified by increasing government revenue without “raising taxes” and more profit for the auto insurance industry.

Here are more details on the six cities that have been caught shortening yellow lights to raise red light camera revenue.

The state of play

August 21, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

I have been watching the Presidential campaign far too closely for months now, and I just wanted to call for a bit of a time out (not that anyone involved will heed it). People are obsessing over the daily polls, the content of ads, and which candidate seems to have the upper hand on a day to day basis.

This is fueled mainly by the maddening commentary from people whose paychecks depend on an audience obsessively checking their blogs, reading their columns, or watching their shows on a day to day basis. They depend on getting people’s emotions ratcheted up about the Presidential election, and they’re good at playing on those emotions.

At this point, either you have faith that your preferred candidate has a plan for victory that will work and that they’re smart enough to adapt that plan to changing circumstances, or you don’t. If you don’t, you may as well tune out for the next couple of months and then go vote when you get your turn.

What I don’t care for is the avalanche of recommended political messaging, proposed lines of attack, and the insistence that the campaigns somehow need to change their tenor. The thing is, the campaigns don’t care what I think, they don’t care what you think, and if I had to guess, I’d say they don’t care what Josh Marshall thinks, either.

I can’t help but think that all of the armchair quarterbacking is really just a way for pundits to give themselves the chance to say “I told you so” later on, and I’ve pretty much lost patience with it.

As an interested citizen, it’s not my job to guess at winning campaign strategies. If I care enough, I can give money, I can try to convince people to vote for my preferred candidate, or I can volunteer and make calls, knock on doors, and register voters. Or I can stand around and argue with people who are already going to vote for the same guy I’m going to vote for about why he’s going to lose if he doesn’t agree with me on the best way to get elected President.

The ultimate test for any candidate is whether or not they can devise a strategy that will lead them to victory. In November, we’ll see which of the two passes that test.

John McCain and Rick Warren, distilled

August 17, 2008 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Unlike me, you probably didn’t sit through John McCain’s hour with Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum last night. Here’s their conversation, distilled.

Pastor Rick Warren: Who are three wisest people you’d rely on for advice if you are elected?

John McCain: David Petraeus, who is the greatest American in history besides me, John Lewis, and Meg Whitman.

RW: What’s your greatest moral failure and America’s greatest moral failure?

JM: The end of my first marriage. For America, the fact that not everyone enlists in the military.

RW: Give me an example of a time when you put your country ahead of your party and yourself, politically?

JM: I believe some people may not have heard my old “never been elected Miss Congeniality in the Senate” joke. Also, I love Ronald Reagan.

RW: What’s the most significant thing you’ve changed your mind about in the past ten years?

JM: We need to start drilling for oil right here, right now.

RW: What’s the most gut wrenching decision you ever had to make, and what was your process?

JM: I was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

RW: What does your Christianity mean to you on a daily basis?

JM: I was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

RW: At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?

JM: You evangelicals can count on me to try to outlaw abortion.

RW: Define marriage.

JM: No gays allowed.

RW: Do you support Prop 8 in California?

JM: Of course. That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?

RW: Are you against embryonic stem cell research?

JM: I’m for embryonic stem cell research, but hopefully science will get me off the hook on this one.

RW: What do we do about evil?

JM: Evil = al Qaeda = Iraq = we’re winning the war and we can’t quit now.

RW: Which of the current Supreme Court justices would you not have nominated?

JM: Breyer. Souter. Stevens. Ginsberg. The evil ones.

RW: Should it be OK for faith based organizations to accept federal money and then use it to hire only people who share their religious beliefs?

JM: Of course.

RW: Should there be a merit pay system for teachers?

JM: Only until we privatize all their jobs.

RW: Define rich.

JM: Rich as in money or rich as in spirit? I hate taxes.

RW: What’s more important, individual privacy or national security?

JM: We need to all work together to agree that it’s OK for the government to spy on Americans constantly.

RW: What is worth Americans dying for?

JM: I’m proud to be an American.

RW: What are the criteria for the US committing troops?

JM: If I gave an honest answer to this question, you guys would totally freak out.

RW: What’s happening in Georgia right now?

JM: The new cold war is on like Donkey Kong. All my friends are calling Russia the Russian empire now.

RW: What would you do to stop religious persecution of all kinds?

JM: Ronald Reagan was awesome.

RW: I feel sorry for orphans. Would you support spending money to subsidize the adoption of more of the world’s orphans?

JM: My wife once adopted a child without telling me.

RW: Why do you want to be President?

JM: Don’t you watch my TV ads?

The complete transcript is here.

The candidates on evil

August 17, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Last night I took the opportunity to watch Barack Obama and John McCain each spend an hour being interviewed by megachurch pastor Rick Warren. Overall, I thought Warren did a good job of asking interesting and fair questions, and I thought both candidates acquitted themselves well, although I thought it was clear that McCain was mainly interested in segueing from Warren’s questions to his own talking points, whereas Obama seemed more interested in giving thoughtful answers to the questions that were asked.

Warren asked both candidates the same set of questions — Obama went first but McCain didn’t get to hear Obama’s answers before he had his turn. If I had to pick one question that pretty directly illustrates the differences between these two candidates, it was Warren’s audience-submitted question on evil.

Here’s McCain:

Q: How about the issue of evil? I asked this of your rival in the previous thing. Does evil exist, and if so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it or defeat it?

A: Defeat it. Couple points, one, if I’m President of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of Hell, I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. I will do that and I know how to do that. I will get that done. No one should be allowed to take thousands of American — innocent American lives. Of course evil must be defeated. My friends, we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century, radical Islamic extremists. Not long ago in Baghdad, Al-Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace and by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn’t evil, you have to tell me what is and we’re going to defeat this evil and the central battleground according to David Petraeus and Osama bin Laden is the battles — is Baghdad, Mosul, and Iraq and we are winning and we are succeeding and our troops will come home with honor and victory and not in defeat and that’s what’s happening. We have — and we face this threat throughout the world. It’s not just in Afghanistan. Our intelligence people tell us Al-Qaeda continues to try to establish cells here in the United States of America. My friends, we must face this challenge. We can face this challenge and we must totally defeat it and we’re in a long struggle, but when I’m around the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform, I have no doubt, none.

And here’s Obama:

Q: Okay we’ve got one last time — I’ve got a bunch more but let me ask you one on evil. Does evil exist, and if it does do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?

A: Evil does exist. I mean, we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil sadly on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who have viciously abused their children and I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely and one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process and we can confront it when we see it.

Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, but you know a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.

Q: In the name of good?

A: In the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that, you know, just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.

Dog whistle politics

August 14, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Fred Clark lays out a compelling argument that the most recent John McCain “just for fun” Web ad is intended to suggest to premillenial dispensationalists (adherents to a radical interpretation of Christian end times theology) that Barack Obama is the antichrist.

Why are good people involved in politics?

August 11, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

A couple of quotes that should deter any sane person from becoming involved in politics. First, Rany Jazayerli defending his friend Mazen Asbahi, who recently stepped down as Islamic coordinator for the Obama campaign:

I suppose I should credit the Obama campaign for having the courage to appoint a Muslim coordinator in the first place. In which case I have to ask, how stupid were they to not expect this kind of attack in the first place? The first thing I said to Mazen after he was hired – after “congratulations” – was “you know they’re going to come after you now, right?” He nodded, and we both knew who “they” were.

Or how about this bit of political analysis. Hawaiian vacation? Too foreign.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he’s taking a vacation, he says, because it’s good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It’s a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he’s feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

As far as the Jazayerli piece goes, I think that when we’re confronted with outright character assassination, it’s important to disseminate the context and defense as widely as possible. Most Americans know nothing about Mazen Asbahi other than that he was recently accused of being a Muslim terrorist sympathizer. Having read the truth, I want to do my part to publicize it.

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