The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

It's the day before the California recall election and I want to take this opportunity to lambaste the whole enterprise.

I preface my criticism with my thoughts on Gray Davis: Davis rarely misses an opportunity to disappoint me. He has a lot of milquetoasty policies, and I was seriously disappointed with the comments he made after the "under God" part of the pledge was correctly ruled an unconstitutional government imposition on religious freedom. (I forget exactly what he said, but he suddenly showed signs of being a typical Republican demagogue which is not something I want from my political officials nor expect from a Democrat.)

But my opinion of Davis was improved when I watched a Frontline special on the California energy crisis. True, Davis made some bad deals. But at the time, I'm not sure he had much choice and had Enron not collapsed, they might have seemed like good deals on hindsight. California was being held over a barrel in no way due to Davis, and he did what he could to extricate it from a situation that came up only due to legacy policies from a previous administration.

The bigger problem is that he's a man with absolutely no political preservation instincts. This generally wouldn't bother me and I might be inclined to construe it as an asset, in that he'd seem to be free to govern as he thinks best one issue at a time. On the other hand, his middleground reasonableness has become a liability as he's been perceived as a weak leader. The perception eventually becomes the truth and he has difficulty in leading his own party's platform despite controlling both the governor's office and the legislature.

This is probably why Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have appeal. If there's one thing he should be good at it's charismatic leadership. Unfortunately that appear to be the ONLY thing he's good at and as such he is attrociously unqualified to lead, as Orrin Hatch reminded the National Press Club today, the fifth largest economy in the world. When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals initially enjoined the election, Schwarzenegger's ignorant comments on the matter showed absolutely no understanding of the legal system, nor any intellectual curiosity to explore whether there was any merit in anything he didn't understand.

The most egregious aspect about the whole nonsense, though, is that it stinks of an undemocratic power grab. The Republicans had their chance to win the governorship quite recently. But instead of nominating Richard Riordan, a moderate who would have appealed to many of Davis's disenchanted masses, they put forth Bill Simon, a demagogue unpalatable to most reasonable people. Now the Republicans want a second bite at the apple and the wrangling of the financially powerful has allowed them to get it. Recall elections have their purpose, but such purpose would be to derail a criminally irresponsible, inept, or corrupted public official from wreaking actual damage. To use it as a power grab would be the antithetical embodiment of any good such a measure might be able to bring.

Great. Just great. When I moved to France a few years ago they impeached the President. Then when I moved from California I was hardly gone more than 2 months when they recalled the governor (and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger?!?!? Oy gevalt...).

It just goes to show that if you turn your back on democracy, all hell breaks loose...

I've developed a really silly habit. I keep running off to see Huey Lewis and the News concerts. By last August I'd seen ten since the year began. The tally is now up to 18, having seen two more in Mississippi over fall break in October, a few in Tahoe right after New Year's, and three over Presidents' Day weekend in Atlantic City. I say it's silly because it sounds silly, but in reality I think it's anything but. The concerts are consistently enjoyable, a reliable comfort to me as the rest of my life is turned upside down during this Great Change, and they've presented marvellous excuses to travel, particularly to places I might not have had the opportunity to visit. I am, to borrow a word I read in a Michael Palin book, a dromomaniac - a person with an intense enthusiasm for travel. I'm good at it too*, knowing how to squeeze novelty and adventure from even the shortest of journeys.

(*In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should acknowledge a slight snafu with my luggage during my last adventure. I did remember to load my suitcase into my car, but unfortunately not until AFTER I had already driven 7.5 hours. Of course, to be fair, I've travelled for years and years, miles and miles, traversing continents without incident. It was only a three-day weekend roadtrip after writing a moot court brief that finally became my undoing.)

My trip to Mississippi, for example, was far more memorable than it was short. I took barely more than a weekend to fly to the Gulf Coast, a place I'd never been to before. I got to see New Orleans for the first time, taking a peaceful walk along the banks of the Mississippi. I'd never seen the river up close before, not even last summer when I drove across it over some bridge near the quad cities. Walking along a quiet riverbank of romantic American lore in the misty rain I could finally see what all the fuss had been about.

For a short trip there was a lot to get out of it, even when it was almost over. On the flight returning to Boston the person across the aisle from me and I struck up a conversation that lasted the entire flight and the T ride back into the city. What was it that was so engaging a subject for two heretofor complete strangers? Constitutional interpretation, of course.

He (to oversimplify) is a libertarian. I myself am not. Although I'm wary of tyrranical aspects of government (e.g., Patriot Act) I tend to believe that government can be an efficient way for society to organize itself to achieve common goals (e.g., roads). But it became apparent during the course of the conversation that despite our different attitudes toward the process of government, we were both decent people who wanted decent things for ourselves and our neighbors. We simply had different opinions on how best to achieve them.

I was reminded of the conversation the other day at school. Two professors gave a talk on the state of judicial nominations. Are the filibusters preventing votes on their confirmation constitutional? Just? Reasonable? Wise? What about the recess appointments? One of the speakers was a visiting professor who used to work in the Clinton administration. The other, my property professor, is a libertarian founder of the Federalist Society and a former clerk to Antonin Scalia. His particular viewpoints rarely appear during his lectures on property law, but this forum presented the opportunity for them to emerge. After the presentation ended I hung around while he answered questions and then related my conversation from the flight back from Mississippi.

I was curious to know how libertarians see the world, I said, even if I don't necessarily agree with major tenets to their viewpoint. To be honest, I admitted, I probably bought into (nearly) everything that the other professor and the Clinton Administration had advocated. I have little problem with government being potent enough to achieve good ends in society that I doubt could be achieved without it. Of course, there's no point in plying society with short term benefits if the governmental process of achieving them isn't sustainable. This is not to say that left to their own devices a suite of liberal policies would bring down the Nation, but rather that due dilligence requires listening to different voices who also care about the governing process. If the goal is to have government be a positive agent in and of society then it's integral to recognize that others may have insight about how best that can be achieved. For it's one thing if we all believe in good ends for ourselves and our neighbors and merely disagree about the best process for attaining them. It's another when we disagree about the desired ends and then use the process as a weapon for getting only those we want.

This past spring I watched my friend graduate from San Francisco State. The whole university graduated together, with one large convocation in a stadium. They invited various famous speakers to address the assembled crowd, including the guy who founded eLoan. Somewhere in the middle of his talk he veered off on a tangent. He had been talking about how, even working in business, you could still have a social conscience, and his remarks made reference to the influence of Ralph Nader. But as soon as he mentioned his name, he immediately digressed from his prepared notes. That Nader used to be cool, he said, "but now he's a dick."

It's very sad that Nader's ethos as a crusading cowboy for the common man has become so tarnished to those who would otherwise have welcomed him as an ally. Liberals have been rushing to excoriate him, while Republicans have suddenly signed up to be his best friends, just because of the perceived impact he may have on the ballot this election day.

I tend to think that this criticism is undeserved. Nader has a point: there should be more than two choices for president. Perhaps if there ordinarily were, we wouldn't keep having elections where the choice feels like one between the lesser of two evils. Consolidating political power in two parties is not healthy for governance. Whoever wants to be on the ballot should be able to run, and it's noble for him to want to change the political landscape so that 3rd party and independent candidates will be able to have more viable candidacies.

The problem is that he is personally blamed for the debacle of the last election, which inserted Bush into the White House. His presence on the ballot is widely thought to have diluted the liberal vote, which, had it not been, would presumably have consolidated into enough support for Gore to claim the victory. I feel, though, that criticizing him for this outcome is unfair.

For one, it is not at all certain that everyone who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore instead (they might have just stayed home if he hadn't been on the ballot), or that if they had all voted for Gore the electoral votes would have necessarily changed to Gore's advantage. Secondly, one can easily argue that Gore did in fact win the election, and that political maneuvering and horrendous Constitutional Law (Bush v. Gore) is what actually robbed him of his rightful victory. None of that is Nader's fault.

The real problem, and one that persists in this upcoming election, is that Bush is seen as a palatable candidate to so many. Blaming Nader is misplaced: the lost Gore votes that should be mourned are not the ones lost to Nader but the ones lost to Bush.

The current liberal hatred against Nader is grounded in the theory that his appearance on the ballot will again rob the Democrats of those they need to unseat Bush. But the rush to marginalize him may be detrimental to their own political objective. Had Nader been invited to the debates this time around and been able to add to the political dialog, his participation could have helped Kerry poke holes in Bush's facade, thus reducing his appeal to those for whom it still holds.

On the other hand, Nader may only have himself to blame for his loss of reputation, even though that loss may be undeserved. He is a man who is both right and wrong at the same time. His insistence on running in this election may have been a bridge too far, one too many battles, which, though worthy on its own, may have undermined the others he also wished to fight. Nader has many people working hard in his non-profits, trying to affect positive policy changes. (I should know: in the interest of full disclosure, I worked for one of them this summer.) These dedicated people keep pressing for important changes that this administration refuses to adopt. They need an alternative one in order to get their job done. Nader knows he isn't going to win this election, but if he even slightly (and however inadvertently) contributes to the re-election of the current administration, it will be extremely counter-productive to his other causes.

I don't really think, however, like many other liberals apparently do, that he really would be responsible for a possible Bush victory this time around, even if he did appear on the ballot in all 50 states. All the factors affecting the results of the 2000 election are still in play in 2004, and should Bush win again it will be for the same reasons. But the shame of it is that Nader's mortgaged his credibility in order to take on this fight. Even being undeserving of the criticism, because it is so widely accepted, whether in the big picture he is right or wrong or whether his critics are right or wrong doesn't really matter because he's alienated himself from his allies, and that is really too bad.

If I had his ear (I don't - I never met him) I would have counseled him not to pursue this election because of these pragmatic concerns. It will likely be a close election, and even if his impact in it is minimal, perhaps that will still be too much. Plus laying everything on the line to participate in this election, despite the storm of criticism, compromises his chances to run again at a time when he would seem to be more a legitimate candidate and could really help change the political landscape. But I wouldn't force him to make this decision, and I refuse to join the chorus of liberals who are so frightened of a Bush re-election (though rightfully so) that they prefer gang up on him in a smear campaign and ignore the valid principles motivating him. The zeal with which he has been turned into a liberal pariah is disturbing, and ill-befitting of a party who purports to value open-mindedness.

That said, I'm voting for Kerry.

Date changed because I couldn't get online until 11/1. Edited slightly 11/24, 11/30, and 3/1/08.

I actually wish that Huey Lewis had done more to lobby for Kerry. He'd already suffered the negative consequences of having made the public endorsement, but arguably he didn't reap the full benefit he might have been able to achieve.

I wouldn't suggest that people vote based only on a celebrity endorsement, no matter how much they admire the celebrity. But as an opinion of someone whom you respect, I think it's worth considering. When certain fans said that Huey had no business endorsing a politician because he was "just a singer" I think they demeaned their own appreciation of him, robbing him of the esteem that might justify their own (sometimes tremendous) interest in his career. (In other words, what does it say about you if you spend all this emotional energy following someone too vapid to have intelligent opinions about important things?)

But the main reason I think Huey should have done more is the same reason I think everyone should have done more. Sitting on the sidelines when something of this importance is at stake is not good. This election is about a presidency that has defied the principles of freedom establishing it, that has thumbed its nose at the very premise of international cooperation, that has further subordinated the interests of individual citizens to those few who own corporations. The very future of America is at stake, and all who have a vested interest in it are entitled to, and should be, involved in shaping it.

Edited 11/6.

An Afterthought

Whether it's Huey Lewis or Bruce Springsteen, the hostility directed towards musicians who endorse or even actively lobby for candidates is misplaced.

First of all, only those who seem to promote liberal politics seem to be so excoriated. Country music has been full of conservative, pro-Bush propaganda and it gets away with it all the time, completely unchallenged.

Secondly, and disturbingly, one of the criticisms against these musician endorsements has been that these people "are just singers," and somehow therefore not entitled to have an opinion. But this view raises the question: are there any other professions where having an opinion should be so verboten? Should plumbers need to keep quiet? Surely not, so why so musicians?

The soundest argument against musician endorsements seems to be rooted in the notion that the celebrity they now leverage to make their opinions widely known was created and bestowed upon them by ordinary people, the fans, under the implicit condition that the fame be only applied to the musical space. Some of the negativity towards these musicians seems to reflect a sense of betrayal, as if being able to make political statements wasn't part of the deal when the fans made the musicians rich and famous enough to be able to command attention to their political preferences.

But this viewpoint trivializes appreciation of their talent. Why appreciate the music in the first place? Is it just that it sounds nice, or is it that there's a reason the music sounds nice? Isn't it reasonable to expect that people with the talent to create fine music might also have the intellectual power to contemplate issues beyond their professional sphere? Particularly those musicians who are known for creative autonomy, whose work represents their own artistic expression - these people may in fact be among the most capable citizens in our population.

And who better to hold a mirror up to us, to make us look hard at the issues affecting our lives but the artists? This is their job! When we instead treat them like circus acts, requiring them to perform only for our iterant amusement, we cheapen their craft and denigrate their talent. We reduce their music to a mere commercial product and deprive ourselves of anything meaningful their musical art could offer us. No wonder we don't want to let them express a broader opinion. Our resentment of them doing so suggests a problem more fundamental, that popular music has become detached from artistic expression. That unfortunate rift may well be the real issue at hand.

Edited 11/6 and slightly more 11/19.

Part IV

Since Johnny Colla made the post last year on his website concerning the Iraq war, he's subsequently made a few others, including one more directly condemning Bush and imploring everyone to vote. And Huey Lewis has also joined him in making a public endorsement of Kerry on a website devoted to the band. It was fairly mild and reasonable:

Folks-

I have never before endorsed a Presidential candidate publicly, nor do I think it's a generally good idea for celebrities to do so, but I'm endorsing John Kerry for President. I think the war in Iraq was ill conceived, has been proven to be a big mistake, and it's time for a new team to try to internationalize the fight against terrorism, and restore respect for the United States. It's so sad to remember that after 9/11 the whole world empathized with us. I don't believe Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld are malicious, but I believe they got it wrong in Iraq, and it's time for a change.

But it unleashed a hornets nest. Whereas I took the presidential endorsements as a huge validation of my own sense of citizenship, others took it as a threat. They wanted the band, it seemed, to occupy a separate space in their lives, far away from mundane political realities.

I could understand a negative reaction by the people who supported Bush (at least the reasonable people – the right wing zealots who essentially damned Huey in immediate response get little sympathy from me) because it's sort of hard to admire someone who seems to be so flawed. Surely he must be flawed if THIS is whom he prefers for President, they must have thought. This isn't a small matter of subjective taste where a difference in opinion is of little consequence. This is an opinion on something much more profound and important. These fans may very well have had the exact opposite reaction I did, but for the very same reasons: while for me the opinion validated his thoughtfulness as an individual, and consequently validated mine, for the Bush supporters it presented a conflict. Either Huey or the Bush-supporting fan, one of them had to have been wrong.

What particularly bothered me, though, in the resulting firestorm on the fan website, were the people who agreed with the choice of candidates but still took umbrage with the public endorsement. Huey had some gall, it seemed, to get involved in something political. He should have known his place and stayed in it, deferentially silent. There were many negative comments in this vein. How dare he do this. "Shut up and sing, Huey," they demanded. They can't have their favorite musicians getting all uppity and having opinions, now, can they...

I suspect, though, that what many of them feared was not the political preference itself but that they were being challenged, by the very focus of their attention no less, to pay attention to something more important than him. Pop culture swallows up an inordinate amount of resources and attention in this country, far more than more crucial things like civic involvement often do. It has its place, but we'd all be better off if the amount of resources devoted to celebrity worship was instead directed to something more meaningful. Perhaps this perceived challenge is what made those fans so defensive, because it caused them to question, whether they were ready to or not, what it meant to them to be a fan and possibly re-evaluate its place if it had consumed more of their life than it should have.

Edited 11/6 and slightly more 11/19.

Part III

Last year I posted a link to the website of Johnny Colla, a musician in Huey Lewis and the News, where he had posted a negative opinion about Bush connected to the recently-begun war in Iraq. I was so taken by it, partly because I strongly agreed with his conclusion, and partly because I was so pleasantly surprised to see him take a political stand publicly. I've followed the News a long time and their public career has generally occupied a space separate from, well, lower-case news. I guess I always assumed they'd remain separate, so I found it incredibly refreshing when he broke down the wall between them.

I think part of my reaction may stem from the validation his comments ended up making on the emotional investment I've made being a fan, or as I'd prefer to put it, an admirer. My problem with the term fan is that it often connotes a superficial, emotionally-driven and irrational attraction to the object of your attention, which has little bearing on anything of substance. Though I still use the term "fan" for shorthand, I'm not comfortable with being one by that definition because it implies a certain cognitive vacancy, a need for someone else's essence to fulfill my life, which must somehow be lacking. A fan who is an admirer, by contrast, can still appreciate the achievements of another but without such appreciation being at the expense of one's own sense of self. For me the equation is that if I'm the intelligent person I aspire to be, I can only justify my interest in someone else's work, and in the person behind it, if they are all intelligent as well.

So when he articulated thoughtful opinions about the world beyond his own career, he demonstrated his own intelligence in a way that made me feel quite proud to have enjoyed his music. I always knew he was talented, but I felt I could be more honest about my appreciation of the music because I could also more appreciate the musician.

Of course, by this reasoning he could have posted anything intelligent for me to feel this way. And it's not like I thought him a dullard before. But there was something about him making the political statement that really appealed to me in a very deep way.

A few years ago I had an epiphany, that the world wouldn't run itself and people who cared about it needed to get more directly involved. I decided to be one of these people (this is the thinking that motivated me to go to law school). But I am no superhero, and I can't make the world better on my own. Other people need to speak up and take a stand as well. When he posted his thoughts, I suddenly felt much less alone in this fight. There are surprisingly few people these days with the courage to stand up for what they believe in. I'm happy he's one of them. (I wish there were more.)

His comments also helped reconcile what I sometimes feared was a conflict: I still like his music, a lot, and I've seen a lot of News concerts lately, particularly since I've begun law school. They are my favorite outlet, some respite from the buffeting and bullying of my legal education. But I am in school for a reason, to make the world a better place. I don't want to be a fan if it interferes with that sense of purpose. When he mixed politics in with his musician persona, it reassured me it didn't have to.

Edited 11/6, and slightly more on various occasions 11/9 - 11/26, 12/19 and 1/22.

Part II

I talk a lot about making a difference. This election day I really tried to.

Electionprotection.org was asking for volunteers, particularly lawyers and law students, to monitor the polls. I decided to go down to Florida to help out.

I flew down on Sunday to the Fort Lauderdale/Miami area. I met my cousin for dinner in Little Havana, where there was a raucous pro-Bush demonstration outside the restaurant (and, being Halloween, a diner dressed as Fred Flinstone on the inside). A few Kerry supporters were on the other side of the street but the Bush crowd was louder. My cousin explained that the Cuban community historically has supported Republicans, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

I had a training for the poll monitoring on Monday evening, but, not knowing they could have used volunteers earlier in the day I instead volunteered with MoveOn.org to help get out the Democratic vote. I went to the Fort Lauderdale office, which was a bustling place. Volunteers from all over the country had convened to help out with the campaign. Many of us were tasked with canvassing neighborhoods to remind previous Democratic voters to come out to the election. Others were on the phones trying to organize still more volunteers. In the morning I was given the task of rearranging the dozens of Ethernet and phone cables running all over the office. I ran new ones to reach a farther room and taped them down so people wouldn't trip. It was the kind of job where if no one noticed it meant I was successful. Not glamorous, but important nonetheless. In the afternoon I did the same kind of canvassing as the other volunteers, except it was over the phone. I generally don't like doing telephone solicitation but as I learned to hone my pitch, I got used to it. Of the people that were home, nearly all of them were friendly on the phone, and many expressed excited commitment to go out and vote for Kerry. But there were a few tough moments. One woman complained she had not received her absentee ballot, despite having made lots and lots of calls. "I'm just sick about it," she said. She didn't think she would be able to make it to the polls the next day due to a painful disability. (It turns out that disabled voters were usually able to have a poll worker bring out a ballot machine to their car, but I didn't know that yet to be able to advise her.) The other hard moment came when I asked to speak with one voter, and was told by the voice on the other end, "My father just passed away a few minutes ago." I blurted out, "I'm so sorry to hear that!" and I'm really glad that's what I said. Particularly because the first (thankfully unvoiced) thought to pop into my head was, "Had he already voted?"

I opted to do the canvassing in Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County, because I'd volunteered to do the poll monitoring in Miami-Dade county, and I didn't want to do something partisan (the canvassing) in the same county where I would be doing something non-partisan (poll monitoring). The next day I was paired up with a retired law professor to circulate among various polling places south of Miami. The idea was that there would be poll monitors stationed at every precinct (or at least every one where minority disenfranchisement was particularly feared) and the legal teams would go between them to offer particular expertise. In practice however it took a while to put all the monitoring teams into place, so early in the morning before the polls opened we went to one at a high school and settled in as the monitors themselves.

Even at that early hour it was a busy place. At 7 am there were easily 150-200 people queued up to vote. There were a lot of other people there as well, but here terminology is important. There were poll workers, who were the people who ran the polling places. There were poll watchers, who were attorneys sanctioned to be inside the precinct to watch what was going on. (These would be the people to mount the challenges if they objected to some voter, and it was feared that there would be many of these. But as I understand it the challenging didn't widely occur. At our initial polling place there was a lawyer from the Democratic Party and another from the Republican. They seemed to cancel each other out. The Republican one may not have put up much of a fuss, but the few times he came out of the polling place he demonstrated himself to be quite the asshole. It was as if he felt that he should live up to the worst liberals' stereotype of a Republican lawyer.)

Also in attendance were two other attorneys from a liberal cause to handle any disenfranchisement issues, a Republican picketer, various Democratic picketers and representatives from other liberal groups, and people handing out fliers for the local candidates in the election. There were also "good-will ambassadors" from the county, poll counters, and others who did exit polls on the voting experience. And then we were there, poll monitors from Election Protection, with our distinctive black t-shirts with bold white writing loudly informing people that they had the right to vote.

As we were monitoring we didn't really encounter any significant problems, but we suspect just being there kept the funny business to a minimum. We heard from some monitors at another precinct that earlier there had been a man from some official sounding group telling people (falsely) that if they didn't speak English they couldn't vote. But once the monitors arrived, people like that scurried away. Although we were accused of being a liberal group, and it's true the liberal causes were particularly concerned about the franchisement issues, we were really non-partisan and I was proud of that. Protecting the process was a noble cause, and one I was happy to keep separate from the politicking. It's one thing for the majority of people to choose the candidate I don't want. It's another thing for them not to choose him but get stuck with him anyway. The latter problem is much worse.

By mid-morning we had left our original polling place and gone by several more to check in on them. At all of them the turnout was huge. Up until about 10:30 lines were very long, and I imagine they grew again later in the day. The biggest problem we encountered was that people would go to the wrong polling place and not find this out until they had already waited potentially over an hour on line. Some polling places tried to minimize this problem by checking for eligibility as soon as the voter got there. Another group of polls, supervised by a Frank Hinton (whose name I want to mention because I think he should be commended), gave voters who discovered, once reaching the registration tables, that they were at the wrong place, a pass that would let them go to the head of the line at the correct place, as long as it was a polling place supervised by Hinton, who could require that his other polls recognize the passes. Most poll workers we found were serious about facilitating the vote, although some were more informed about the particulars than others. Some gave incorrect advice, for example, about using provisional ballots that we had to correct.

But even though there was no defining moment, with some great conflict that was disarmed solely because of us, there were a lot of small things we were able to do to ensure the right to vote, one voter at a time.

I had to leave by 2 to catch my flight home so the professor I was with took me back to the starting point and picked up, ironically, another law student named Cathy. He also nicely helped me change the tire on my rental car, which was completely flat. On my way to the airport I stopped to get dinner and chatted with the clerk about the election. She planned to vote when she got off work, the first time ever for her. She was nervous, but I encouraged her. I told her she had the right to vote, and as long as she was on line before the polls closed at 7 she could vote, no matter what anyone told her. I told her to bring her registration card if she had it, and if not, an ID and proof of residency. She thanked me for making it seem less daunting, and we talked about how exciting it was to be able to participate in something so important and historic.

I was a little worried, with my trip to Florida, that Floridians might resent the influx of out-of-state volunteers. I thought they might feel a bit manhandled. But people seemed happy to see us. Wearing my poll monitoring t-shirt I was thanked by more than one person for being there and for making sure their right to vote was recognized. The election didn't turn out the way I had hoped, but I know I did what I could to help it along. Next time I will do even more.

Backdated to 11/3.

The original post(s)

In the waning hours of election night a fan went onto the Huey Lewis and the News message board and posted what could basically be described as abject cheers for Bush. It was distinctive to notice, and I don't think it was just because I was in the doldrums over the apparent outcome. Her posts read as if her favorite team had just won a championship. And therein lies the problem, the problem with political discourse in general and the resulting problem when musicians enter the fray.

Our political culture seems to be very much like a sports culture, one where there are winners and losers. Every year someone wins the Super Bowl. Half the fans get to swell with enormous, pseudo-patriotic pride for being on the side of the victor, and half the fans walk away with nothing. Sure, there's some element of merit involved: the team with the most talent will likely win. But it's just a victory in a sporting match, a match that will be replayed the following year like it has for years and years before. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter who wins the game. The world will be exactly the same no matter how well anyone played. But in politics the same cannot be said: winning an election, particularly for U.S. president, is a much more substantive contest, bestowing the victor with the power, responsibility, and expectation to change the world.

So reacting to an election such as this as though it were a sporting contest completely ignores what's at stake. But that's what many people were doing. Either the winner was from their team - their guy - or it wasn't. Voters were behaving like mere fans, fans by the worst definition (with a superficial, emotionally-driven and irrational attraction to the object of attention, with little bearing on anything of substance), of the candidate as if he were their favorite sports team's star player. Their respective satisfaction in the election's outcome came more from that sense of being connected to the winner and not so much from the issues that were in play. (Nominally I think people did consider the issues, but often from a knee-jerk "Well MY GUY said this..." standpoint and less on the basis of the issues' individual merits.)

This dynamic may be another reason underlying why musician endorsements in politics can be problematic. In a political world where there are two oppositional teams an endorsement of one team's candidate is going to be seen as a slap in the face of the other and its "fans." I'm sure there are musicians for whom their endorsements should be seen that way, as little more than cheerleading for a particular political camp. I'm hardly advocating for more of this, and I certainly wouldn't so lightly suggest that musicians risk alienating their own fans just to perpetuate this kind of superficial entrenchment. On the contrary, in the examples I've referred to, of Johnny Colla and Huey Lewis and even Bruce Springsteen, the endorsements are something else, something much more valuable. More than base political cheerleading, they are rather invitations for serious policy contemplation.

If these endorsements were recognized for what they are, politically-neutral policy arguments, the risks of fan betrayal and alienation would be greatly minimized. It may be hard to see them as neutral because they resulted in a specific endorsement, but because each of the endorsements was accompanied by a thoughtful, rational explanation, I think it's these explanations themselves that are really the focal points. The resulting conclusions about whom to endorse are almost superfluous. I don't think Huey or Johnny recommended Kerry because they really, really like the guy personally. Or because they are such dyed-in-the-wool Democrats for whom party victory was the tantamount goal. I think, based on what they wrote, that they were mostly concerned about areas of public policy for whom the sitting president would not be the best choice. And I think that kind of opinion is perfectly legitimate, egalitarian, and unthreatening to any political camp. More than that, this kind of articulated statement is what our society could use more of. We need more people to talk about the issues underlying the politics without feeling so beholden to particular political camps. We need to get politics out of the realm of the sports idiom and back into the realm of citizenship.

Edited 11/19, 12/3, and 1/22.

My blog is my soapbox for the things I'd like to say. But every so often I find something someone else has said that seems to echo my own thoughts better than I could have expressed them. This is one such example, a post by Publius on Bush's foreign policy. I found it incredibly apt in expressing so many of my frustrations with his policies and supporters, and I feel I should share it even though I have little to add to the discussion right now.

From the NY Times:

"An ebullient Condoleezza Rice began her first day as secretary of state this morning with a pledge to help America's diplomats promote President Bush's 'bold agenda' for advancing liberty throughout the world."

A "bold agenda" is no basis for a foreign policy. Foreign policy requires tact, subtlty, cooperation, a recognition of mutual interests... A foreign policy with a bold agenda is the kind that results in annexing Czechloslovakia and invading Poland.

Of course, for Bush, a "bold agenda" would be four years of *not* attacking anyone.

I first began to think well of Howard Dean after being hit in the head with a "Dean for President" tortilla.

It was the 2003 Bay to Breakers, and it's traditional to have a tortilla toss as the runners all queue up at the start. (Flour tortillas are fine, but the corn ones kind of hurt when they land.) Dean campaigners were well-represented at the event, and one way they made their presence known was by tossing tortillas that had been painted with the Dean campaign logo.

I found myself admiring the unorthodoxy of his campaigners, and as I came to know more about him was impressed by his unorthodoxy as well. He wasn't about politics as usual. He seemed to be about effective politics, connecting people and taking positions that made sense on their face, without so much regard for the complicated web of powerful political interests that so typically set politcal agendas. (For example, I appreciated how he understood the power and promise of technology as a social medium, and took stands on regulatory issues that demonstrated this enlightenment.)

This willingness to buck convention I think will serve him well as the new DNC chair and be just what the party needs. As it was a very typical Democrat could not win the last election. If the party is to survive it's going to need to find new ways of making its politics relevant to more people. I think he's just the guy to lead the way, someone unafraid to try the new things necessary to do it.

Great minds think alike... I'm not the only one to notice that Americans treat their politics like they do their sports. Today Professor Barnett on the Volokh Conspiracy raised the comparison in a discussion on libertarians and whether it made sense to form their own party:

"Americans view political parties as they do their sports teams. Even Independents tend to root for one party over the other. Libertarians have defined themselves as a different team that looses pitifully--and Americans do not like losers. And when you say 'libertarian' to them, they think you are referring to the Libertarian team. I think this is why many libertarian-inclined citizens deny they libertarians. That is not their team."

A few weeks ago I saw another blogger, Deb, make a similar sports comparison in context of attending a protest at the recent presidential inauguration:

"What I gathered from this exchange was that these students, and maybe a lot more believe that if you lose, you lose. My 'team' didn't win, so I should just get over it and be silent for four years."

I think it's fair to say that the analogy is sound. But it's also unfortunate. Politics should not be a winner-take-all situation. Second-place (and third, and fourth, etc.) still matters.

Certain people (and I'm looking at you, Todd Zywicki, although not only you...) have been arguing that there is a lamentable lack of diversity in academia, because when you lay all the professors end to end, most of them are registered Democrats.

On the surface there seems to be something to the concern. Very little knowledge exists in absolute terms. Its instruction always comes couched in some perspective. Diversity in academia is important in order to make sure that students can learn information from a variety of viewpoints. Without it students are susceptible to learning dogma in place of insight. With a diversity of viewpoints, however, students can figure out which parts of the package are subjective and which are objective (to the extent that anything is) and be exposed to more knowledge than a single worldview would be able to impart. Moreover, being exposed to different ways of thinking will result in their own becoming all the more sophisticated.

There is more than can be said in support of academic diversity, but the problem addressed here is that political diversity does not map to academic diversity. The subtext to the argument that there should be more Republican professors is that the world can be cleanly divided into these two viewpoints, and therefore the academic positions should be doled out equitably between them. Such a belief is a fallacy.

For one thing, it presumes that Democrats and Republicans are opposite sides of the same coin. They're not. They are really apples and oranges. They are not two antithetical viewpoints on the same subject, where one wants black and the other white. In reality, one wants black and the other wants doorknob. Politically, the doorknob faction may express the preference by advocating for white, but what it really wants is something entirely different. It's just that the polical forum reduces its expression to a specific manifestation of preference, but one that may have little to do with what it actually wants in the picture.

Furthermore it's not clear exactly what the party preference serves as a proxy for. It supposes too much to presume that all Democrats are Democrats for the same reason, or that all Republicans are in firm agreement about what it means to be Republicans. As varying ideology get distilled into political pragmatism, you may often get strange bedfellows. Afterall, in the US there are really only two choices. It's therefore unsound to believe that isn't a tremendous variance among people who might happen to identify politically under the same label.

But to the extent that Democrats differ from Republicans - that liberals differ from conservatives - I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing to have more liberals. They aren't equal viewpoints. Conservatives, by definition, generally tend to see the world very precisely. They have it all worked out, and don't like it when people vary. Liberalism, on the other hand, by *its* very definition implies openmindedness. There's room in liberal ideology for conservative preferences, but it's not preclusive of other ones. I don't think, however, that the same can be said in the reverse.

For an excellent essay addressing the futility of the Conservatives' argument, I recommend Aaron Swartz's "Intellectual Diversity at Stanford." For the humor-impaired (judging by the comments on his site there are clearly quite a few out there) his piece is satire, of the Jonathon Swift tradition.

It's time to take a star off the flag and recall the state quarter. Florida is no longer a separate state.

The onslaught against Florida's autonomy began in 2000, with the absurd ruling that is Bush v. Gore, when the US Supreme Court decided, against all Constitutional text and precedent, that the federal courts were in better position to interpret Florida law than Florida's own courts.

And now, once again, the federal government has decided that its organs are better equipped to interpret Florida law than Florida itself. Cases such as Terri Schiavo's are normally left to the states to adjudicate under their own laws, with their own judiciaries. And adjudicate the Florida courts did. Thoroughly. And repeatedly, each time reaching the same result.

Regardless of what you may think about right-to-die cases in general, or this case in particular, the move by the United States Congress should shock Americans everywhere. Congress has broken out of its Constitutionally prescribed boundaries and reached into the domain of powers left to the states.

As the nation has developed there has sometimes been tension between the powers left to the states and those that the Federal government would prefer to wield. But this case, and this legislation, defies any legitimate rationale for federal involvement and constitutes an enormous power grab by the Federal legislature, claiming power over individual citizens that it has no Constitutional right to.

It violates the bargain that was struck when the Constitution was passed, when there was suspicion by the individual sovereign states about having their autonomy usurped by a centralized overarching government. Florida bought into that bargain in 1845 when it became a state. But now, in 2005, Florida's privilege and power of statehood have apparently been revoked.

A recent conversation turned to Tom DeLay and his apparent political misstep in thinking that Americans would largely support governmental intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. He probably presupposed that the wider discomfort for abortion rights would be easily applicable to this case here. He seems to have been wrong.

When I thought about why, and what occurred to me is an important difference between the abortion and right-to-die issues: with abortion, it's an issue that fewer people will ever have to confront. It's therefore much easier to rationalize government intervention because it's not likely to be your body that will be regulated. It only affects women (at least in so far as pregnancy being a condition that only affects women's bodies), and only some of them at that. Also unwanted pregnancies are conditions often suffered in shamed, isolating silence, thus further stoking the perception that abortion bans would affect only a few, wayward people. Consequently it requires a tremendous amount of empathy, which often seems lacking, to recognize that even though it's not your body being regulated, it's someone else's - someone with the same interest you might have in being free from governmental control.

On the other hand, everybody dies. Everybody knows someone who dies. There are relatively few people lonely and isolated enough to never have to consider end-of-life issues for a loved one, or themselves. Quality of life and right-to-die issues therefore are not abstract concepts that only affect a few strangers; people can recognize their own self-interest at stake much more easily, and so government regulation appears much more obviously to be a gross imposition on their physical autonomy.

Edited 7/10/05

How can an intelligent design produce people this stupid?

The Kansas Board of "Education" has decided to intellectually handicap all of its students by teaching them intelligent design theory as an equal alternative to science.

Let's ignore, for the moment, the separation of church and state problem this action raises (as Intelligent Design is really - despite protestations to the contrary - just a watered-down version of "God made the universe, just like it says in Genesis.").

And let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that an intelligent designer DID create the universe.

The problem is, intelligent design theory does not enable people to split the atom, map the genome, build rockets to the moon, cure disease, predict the weather, or make any other sort of innovative discovery.

Even if the very tenets underlying science were all completely wrong and misunderstood, decades, centuries, even millennia's worth of scientific progress is all connected by these premises. And they work together in a systematic, demonstrable, reproducible and extensible way.

Science isn't something you can negotiate. You can discover new things and re-evaluate conclusions, but the basic physics and biology and other scientific building blocks upon which all innovation and discovery rests remain absolute. And it is not likely we have been very wrong about them, as they have facilitated all sorts of other innovation, like splitting the atom, mapping the genome, building rockets to the moon, curing disease, predicting the weather, and making an infinite number of other discoveries.

Teaching an unprovable, speculative belief as an equivalent to science is as futile as trying to negate gravity simply by refusing to believe in it. No amount of faith will release you from the Earth's gravitational pull, no matter how authoritative the textbooks may be in suggesting it. Gravity is a permanent, scientifically-measurable force, and it would serve us well to learn to deal with it as well as the other undeniable scientific constants underpinning our universe.

Particularly if we would like our children to be able to grow up to do things like splitting the atom, mapping the genome, building rockets to the moon, curing disease, predicting the weather, or making any other innovative discoveries. If we want them to do these things, we will need to equip them with the knowledge to do it.

Teaching intelligent design, however, will not give them that knowledge. Instead other countries' children, those who have not been taught that scientific reality is but a political concoction, will be the ones to split the atom, map the genome, build rockets to the moon, cure disease, predict the weather, and make any other sort of innovative discovery. Because ours will be too busy waiting around for God to do it.

I wrote the praise that I did because I like the United Airlines as a customer. But I should mention that I am, or at least was, a shareholder. I once (back when I had money) bought $2000 worth of shares. (This was a mistake: I meant to buy $200 worth… Oops.)

Anyway, it's unclear whether I own anything now that the bankruptcy proceedings are proceeding. When I got home from Germany I had two rather cryptic letters regarding the proposed bankruptcy settlement.

I can't make out a word of them.

This is really sad. I'm a law student with 2.5 years under my belt, and yet I can't parse the language. But what's sad is not that I can't do it, but that I don't think anyone can do it. The legalese is so thick that only someone with particular training in this kind of thing will be able to make it out.

This is a shame. No one should need to have gone to law school in order to understand important documentation affecting the disposition of their property. I certainly didn't need a law degree to buy it (apparently I didn't even need very much in the way of any sort of competence to buy it…), so I shouldn't need one to understand whether or not my interests will be protected as part of the settlement either, let alone have any idea about what steps I would need to take to protect them.

This kind of thing is a big reason why I'm skeptical about any statements to the effect that the stock market will take care of everything. Should we regulate companies? Nah, just let the market decide. The market the market the market... This rhetoric works as long as people cling to the myth that the market is made up of ordinary citizen investors, as if we can all equally vote with our investment dollars. But this is not the situation. Not only are we not all equally present in the market financially, but the market itself is not even at all geared for ordinary investors. Rather, it's geared for institutional or professional ones, the kind of people with the resources to be able to afford the investment in the specific training necessary to understand this kind of dense terminology. It's not your Average Joe, and we should stop pretending that it is and building policy around this fiction. If instead we were to regard the market as the rarified financial playground it actually is we may very well choose to regulate it in a much different way that we do. I think it's time that we did.

It's the annual UVA law school softball tournament, so today I flew down to Virginia. I landed at Dulles and then waded through the traffic until I got to Charlottesville. On the way I listened to the radio. For a while I listened to an NPR station out of DC. The two main news stories today were the reports that Libby was told by President Bush to make the leak, and that the immigration bill stalled in the Senate.

NPR characterized the leak story by describing the questioning of White House press secretary Scott McClellan: what was he asked, what did he say, what did he not say. For the immigration bill, it had some political correspondents give their views of what happened. They essentially said that it had been filibustered by both sides - by Republicans who thought the bill translated into large scale amnesty and are against that in principle, and by Democrats who were of one of three basic motivations: those reflecting the concern expressed by organized labor that the bill might result in depressed wages, those who thought that the bill would end up gutted in the House and didn't want to get stuck with such a version, and those who just didn't want Republicans to get any political capital out of the bill.

Contrast that coverage to the news report I heard on a country music station out of the Richmond area. On the leak story, they began by characterizing Scott McClellen as "refusing to debate" allegations about the leak. But they didn't mean it as him avoiding the questioning; they meant it in the sense of him refusing to dignify this apparent attempt to smear the President. Meanwhile on the immigration bill story, they simply stated that Democrats had killed the bill.

I suddenly understood why Democrats have such terrible traction in rural red states. If the country music station's report is emblematic of the "news" they get, no wonder no one votes for them. Rather than in any way explain the substance of the issues, the report was nothing but political rhetoric designed to marginalize Democrats.

Now I can see, particularly when pitted against the country station's report, that the NPR report was at the more liberal end of the spectrum. The country music station's, on the other hand, was clearly on the conservative one. But political persuasion ultimately has nothing to do with the quality of a news report - a report that similarly advanced the Democratic party by demonizing the Republicans would be just as bad. Nor is underlying bias necessarily the issue either. Though NPR might have had its biases, they did not interfere with the quality of its reporting. The report still held both parties accountable and focused substantively on the issues and related political perspectives. While it did take the view that the allegations of the White House were very serious, by any objective measure, they are serious. Their truth and, if true, their implications, should be the subject of more inquiry and debate. But NPR didn't have to skew anything in order to describe the current state of that inquiry and debate.

The real problem is what happens to inquiry and debate when the "news" is of the kind proffered by the country music station. For one thing, people are left without quality information to understand and draw informed opinions about matters. Even if it were perhaps true that the White House is being unfairly attacked, the country music station listeners cannot themselves know that since they've not been provided with any information about the underlying substance in order to be able to make that evaluation - never mind being able to react in an informed way if these "attacks" turn out not to not be unfounded after all.

Also, and perhaps worse, there is a particular harm to inquiry and debate that results from painting political opposition as the enemy. First of all, it's questionable whether doing so really advances one's own political preferences. By putting forth a report that in essence is nothing more than, "Republicans, yay! Democrats, boo!" there's no chance to evaluate whether the Republican team is truly advancing those political preferences.

Moreover, by characterizing political opposition as anathema to the interests of America, by making political discussion a matter of, "Either you're with us or against us," it robs discourse of any wisdom that opposing viewpoints could provide. Plus it divides America. Rather than us feeling unified, with a sense of "We're all in this together," politics becomes a confrontational war of "us" and "them," where victory is measured in terms of political power taken from the other, and not in terms of public policy problems solved.

Posted 4/10.

Word travels fast (even to China)... Apparently Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary for his senate seat.

WT at Expressio Unius thinks this may bode poorly for the Democrats:

So you've remade the party -- now the Democrats fear stepping out of line and making nice with Republicans ever -- but at the cost of cutting away at your party. Congratulations, you now have one less Democratic Senator who engages in bipartisanship and compromise. Because you have one less Senator period. Everything in life is tradeoffs.

I disagreed. I commented:

But with Lieberman there's long been a "with friends like these..." problem. And, yeah, maybe *technically* he was part of the Democrat club, but he obviously was of his own mind and not particularly beholden to the Democratic platform. Which I guess is ok, I wouldn't want senators to be automatons, but since his expression of independent political thinking so often included supporting Bush in ways that were so untenable to Democrats, if the seat really does end up lost to a Republican it might not be such a big loss. Yes, a Republican may be more likely to follow more of the Republican platform, but I'm inclined to think that any Republican Connecticut might produce would be fairly moderate and not go along with the full Republican party line themselves. (For instance, more like a Christine Whitman than a Trent Lott. Or a Lieberman in a Republican's clothing for a change.)

And I think that's just part of why this result may not be so bad. The Democrats have been getting into trouble nationally as being too moderate, as the party that stands for nothing and just bitches and moans and then rolls over for Bush. It's not that ultimately being moderate is a bad thing, but Democrats need to be seen to stand for something, and in this political climate, that something may need to be a strong opposition to the Republican agenda. Not only will that help capture disaffected Democrats, but it can also provide an alternative for disenchanted Republicans. With Lieberman so entrenched as the Democratic representative of Connecticut local Democrats simply could shrug and just put up with it. Or not turn up at the polls and let a Republican challenger sneak in. Knocking him out - or at least severing their support for him - at least sends the message that voters want more. WT wonders what kind of harbinger this might be for the Democrats; I think it might be a good one.

Furthermore, while WT thinks the close margin of victory suggests that Lieberman still has a lot of support, I think it suggests not so much lukewarm support for Lamont but how weak Lieberman is. Surely many people who voted for Lieberman were political pragmatists voting in trepidation of the strategy of undermining the incumbent. Many of these voters will likely vote for Lamont, and Lamont may also pick up independents and Republicans unhappy with the status quo. But had Lieberman squeaked through by the same margin I don't think the Democratic prognosis would have been nearly so rosy as it would have pointed out his obvious weakness, and then the Republicans could have steered some extra money to Connecticut to try to capitalize on his disaffected base and finally seize the seat for themselves. I suppose if Lieberman does run as an independent it could pull some people from Lamont, but it could just as easily pull some people from the unknown Republican challenger, which WT also notes.

I should also mention that personally I'm happy to see Lieberman unseated. Not only did I disagree with his position on the war - although I grant that it was at least a principled position - but I found on several other domestic civil liberties-type issues Lieberman's position disconcerting. I'd long since gotten the impression that Lieberman thought that if the US became a theocracy, Jews would get a seat at the table. I disagree that such an outcome would be likely, but in any case, this is not the America I want to live in, where I need to hope that my brand of Jewishness is religious enough to guarantee my full civic participation. I want to live in an America where it doesn't matter at all.

All the people who live on houseboats where I do were sent to Marin City to vote, which was kind of interesting because it's a low-income area full of the people who normally get disenfranchised. As far as I could tell, though, no overt disenfranchisement occurred.

The ballot system was one I'd never seen before. You marked your votes in bubbles on a giant piece of cardstock with a black felt-tip pen. (I had unpleasant flashbacks to the MBE, but persevered and kept voting anyway...) Then you placed the ballot in a "secrecy folder" to obscure your selections as the ballot was fed into this large machine about the size of a small refrigerator.

In theory, this was a good system: the large refrigerator thing was clearly scanning the ballots, so there would be the instantaneous results afforded by electronic voting, with the added safety of the paper trail left by the original ballots. On the other hand, I have concerns about the bubble-filling, as people without fine motor control might not be able to make them sufficiently clearly. I'm not sure how this system handles ballots it can't easily read - do they get counted by hand later? And if so, according to Bush v. Gore, is that legal? (One of the perplexing results of that case was the apparent rule that votes could not be counted differently than other votes. Exactly what that might mean in the context of any other election remains to be litigated.)

Still, this system was easier to use than the butterfly ballots, and blurry ballots may be no more problematic than hanging chads were. Of course what I really miss are those great big black voting booths. I remember being a very little girl (maybe three?) and walking up the street with my parents to the elementary school I could only aspire to one day attending and helping them pull the levers. It was fun, at least up until you pressed the red lever to pull open the curtain and reset all the levers when you were ready to leave. I found it kind of loud and scary, although not nearly as scary as not having people's votes counted...

For the most part I voted for what Bitch, PhD recommended on her blog, and for the reasons she recommended them. I toyed with throwing a few Republicans in the mix if I felt they were reasonable, qualified choices, but in the end I couldn't. One where I almost did was for Secretary of State, because I have a general bias against people who use lots of caps and italics in their campaign blurbs in the voting guides, and he seemed like a quite reasonable candidate who hadn't. But I just can't trust a Republican to be in charge of the voting. Given that they are (for the moment) the party in charge, if they are maintaining their grip on power through unsavory manipulations of the election system, it seems too much to be letting the fox guard the hen house to let a Republican be in charge of it, no matter how personally honorable he might be. Besides, Deborah Bowen only came off as a little shrill with her use of italics, and like her Republican opposition is in favor of a proper polling system.

I did have some mixed feelings about voting for voting for Jerry Brown for attorney general. I don't mind him as a politician, but I'm not sure what I like about him as a politician will translate into him being a good attorney general. On the other hand, I didn't like his competition. Insurance commissioner was also a lackluster choice. In fact, there were a lot of positions where I was happy with the incumbents, but the incumbents were all running for some other job they might not have been as good for. Is this because of term limits? Because if so it would go on the long list of problems with them. I think it would be much better if people could remain in public service where they have the most competency, if they wanted.

There were also a few local offices that I was poorly qualified to vote for. I read all the position statements in the voter guide and the recommendations of the Marin Independent Journal, but in the end it all seems like a crapshoot. And speaking of crapshoots, then there were the ballot initiatives...

There are some weird dynamics to California law. One of which is how things are funded. I can't even begin to explain how it works because I only barely have any idea, but from what I gather the legislature has to float certain taxes past the public through referendums (ballot measures/propositions). Maybe that's ok, in a way, because if there is, as is the case now, criticism that there are too many bonds and that the legislature should be funding things through regular tax revenues, this gives the public a chance to say so, albeit in a rather inarticulate way. I'd never really thought about the bond problem before, but this year it really struck me as an issue, so I ended up voting against things I'd really like to have just because I felt bonds were an inappropriate funding structure to achieve them. Like Prop 1C, for instance, which is for a housing and emergency shelter trust fund. Absolutely this should be funded, but not with bonds. I said ok to using bonds for roads, transit, seismic school repairs - major capital improvements whose benefit would last into the repayment period. But not other things I think should be a regular part of the tax budget.

The other weird thing about California law is that people can place initiatives on the ballots without going through the legislature. While in theory this means that people have more direct, democratic access to their government's law-making ability, in practice you can end up with all sorts of crap on the ballot that's never gone through any sort of hearings or legislative vetting, but simply gets on the ballot because well-funded advocates can get enough signatures together (unfraudulently, if we're lucky) to place it there and then try to get it passed with tons of campaign spending in support. Meanwhile anyone who might oppose it for whatever potentially good reason is left to scramble to organize resources to try to defeat it. It's really a crummy way to legislate, because tiny yet well-heeled minorities can drastically change the legislative landscape nearly single-handedly, which ultimately is about as un-democratic as you can get. (This is how California ended up with a different guy for governor all of a sudden.) And it's often very difficult for the public to understand these propositions well enough, even if they do take the hours to pore over the legislative analyses included in the voter's guide, to begin to make informed decisions about whether they are a good idea or not.

For example, there were two flood-related measures on the ballot this time, one placed there by the legislature and one by public signatures. I'm totally in favor of what they both hope to achieve. But it is unclear whether they are complementary, redundant, or what. So I voted for the one put on there by the legislature since I figured they'd actually paid some attention to how it would fit in with California law generally, and against the other one. If we need more flood laws, then let's get the legislature to write more. Even if that second one would be a great law that's still really needed, it just seems like a "too many cooks in the kitchen" thing to have both proposals become law all at once.

Meanwhile some of these proposals are horrifically bad ideas. The sex offender registry proposal (Prop 83), for instance. I tend to think there are significant concerns with respect to the general fairness and constitutionality of sex offender registries generally, but all that aside, even some of their regular advocates were recommending against this law, fearing that it was so incredibly heavy-handed that it would just drive sex offenders underground and negate any purpose these registries are supposed to have. Also example of a bad proposition is the purported "anti-Kelo" measure, Prop 90, which seems, at best, like a solution in need of a problem. Sometimes the government really does need to make takings, and this proposition if made law would make it very difficult to do so, with no real benefit in exchange. And as for Proposition 85, I couldn't possibly vote to require pregnant teens to tell their parents before having an abortion. We may want that all parents and teens have such relationships where the kids can talk to their parents about everything, but for the state to insist upon it is an intrusive use of state power. (This proposal is even worse than that, but I'll leave it to others to dissect it for now. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be a non-issue anyway.)

I did, however, vote for some of these initiatives. I voted for Prop 86, which raises the sin tax on cigarettes to fund various public health issues. I used to like taxes like this much more, but I do worry that cigarettes are becoming so expensive as to start driving underground economies in them, with the associated unlawfulness that other underground economies (e.g., drugs) often have. Still, in the hope that cigarettes could be so hideously expensive as to dissuade kids from starting smoking, I voted for it. Though I suspect this may be the last time I vote for such a tax for the reasons mentioned above.

I also voted for Propositions 87, an alternative energy law, and Proposition 89, a public campaign financing scheme. I don't know if either are quite fully-baked as proposals, but I liked what they were trying to do (and the Clinton/Gore endorsements for 87 were meaningful to me). So I decided to vote yes, with the hope that any wrinkles can get ironed out through subsequent litigation or legislation.

Similarly, I voted for Marin County Measure R. Measure R funds a train line and construction of a complementary bike trail. Marin definitely needs both. However, there are concerns that the specific language of Measure R may not achieve either as well as they should. Which is concerning, and there may be a lot of people who will vote no, not because they don't like the proposal in principle but just because they want better language to provide for it. Again, I decided to vote yes and hope that the details can still get sorted out subsequently. I was afraid that if I voted no the details might never get sorted out ever at all.

And not just for the House races, which generally went pretty well from my view. I'm talking about the local results.

In terms of propositions, a few that I voted for lost, but I had mixed feelings about them anyway. In fact, I feel a bit stupid given that 75% of voters in some cases had voted the other way... (What did they know that I didn't?) So no tobacco tax, no weird parcel tax that apparently even its supporters didn't bother to campaign for, no public campaign financing, and no alternative energy program. (Actually, that may be too bad because it's a worthy goal, but it's also possible that the proposition wasn't very good. I'm not sure.) Conversely certain measures that I'd voted against won, and I'm ok with that too. (E.g., emergency shelter funding and the second flood proposition.)

Of course there were some things that came out just as I wanted them to, like the passage of many bond proposals and the rejection of the parental notification law for teens seeking abortions. There were, however, some things where I'm not pleased with the outcome. One is the draconian sex offender registry requirements. See, this is why certain laws should not be put directly to the electorate. It's really hard to get people not to vote for things that will make sex offenders more miserable. I think the interests of justice require a measured, thoughtful approach to the appropriate punishment for their crimes, but people will of course have the natural reflex to just want to string 'em all up and vote yes for any measure that seems to allow them to do that. So I wait to see if this law passes constitutional muster (Edit: it may not), and if it is allowed to stand, whether it doesn't end up making things worse in the long run.

The other measure I'm sorry to see pass is 1A. A few years ago, before I'd gone off to law school, there had been a ballot measure requiring that auto-related taxes only be spent on auto-related expenses. That sounds good, until you realize that it completely constrains the legislature from being able to spend its revenues in any sort of flexible way that may be necessary. If money is needed for, say, schools, and there's extra money raised from gas taxes, the schools will be out of luck. California will have pristine roads, but lousy schools. (Actually, that may well be the case already...) What appears to have happened is that the legislature found a loophole so that funds could be reallocated. This proposition, at least as far as I can tell, seems to close that loophole.

Even more locally, Measure R, the Marin train measure, seems to be failing but the final result may not be out yet. It has a majority, but it needs 2/3, and that's going to be a struggle to get.

Then in terms of elected officials, things seem to have gone ok. I think only two of my choices for major offices didn't win: Cruz Bustamente for insurance commissioner (probably because of the incessant ads accusing him of taking money from people he shouldn't have) and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I find his political fortunes so baffling. I really can't stand him. His ascension to office in the first place seemed so illegitimate, his association to Bush so unfortunate, his arrogance so insufferable... I couldn't imagine that the people wouldn't kick him out at the first opportunity. And for a while polls suggested that they would. But then the Democrats engaged in a vicious primary, where the candidate left standing was already politically damaged. And the guy they picked was Phil Angelides, who is probably a very nice guy and potentially a great public administrator, but a very limp personality. Or at least compared to Arnold, who is bigger than life. That perception of their respective personalities I'm sure was a major factor in the election. I met someone a few weeks ago, who generally shared my political leanings, who said he'd still vote for Schwarzenegger for governor. "But WHY?" I asked him. And then he threw out some statistic about how much California rice China is now buying from the US, and how that increase has all happened under Schwarzenegger's watch. I wanted to shout that it's a coincidence of history - China's imports have grown dramatically in all quarters in the last few years. But as far as he was concerned, it was all because all the Chinese leaders wanted to meet this American movie star and were so star-struck that they agreed to all these deals. Under his theories, Angelides couldn't sell the rice; only Arnold could.

This I doubt, but I think it's this general sense of wanting the head of state to be more than a just a public official but rather an actual figurehead that appealed to voters. Which I can definitely see the merits of but I don't think trumps bad politics.

There's a thread on global warming on the Huey Lewis and the News fan board. Yes, you read that right. And I'd accidentally started it, when I posted a link I'd found to an anti-global warming advocacy page where Huey had weighed in in support of the fight against it.

There was a quote from him:

Global Warming is our most important environmental issue. Because it's gradual, it's easy to procrastinate. Don't.

OK, fine, sounds reasonable. And it's interesting to see Huey take a stand on public issues because it doesn't happen often. Although it has happened once before, and the exact same reaction happened this time. In the following post, out of the blue, someone wrote:

What does Huey know about global warming? He sings for a living.

I've discussed before how ridiculous it is to deny celebrities any ethos on matters of public importance simply because they are celebrities. All that still applies here. But something else stands out from this conversation: the inability for people to share in any sort of public consensus about the severity of the situation.

Admittedly, science is still probably on a steep learning curve. We are still gathering data and learning how to best model what it tells us. But plausible, reasonable, measurable, and repeatable research is strongly indicating that the climate variations the earth is coming to experience are not part of its natural cycles as much as they are man-induced.

And yet, as you can see from the discussion thread, many people resist that information, easily discounting it without concern for the severity of its consequence if true. I responded to this tendency with a meme that I suspect I will return to, because I think it's quite apropos this and other situations:

When I was about 8 years old some neighbors who worked for a Big Bank took me to the circus at Madison Square Garden and we got to sit in one of the skyboxes. It was really neat, because we got a great eye-level view of the high wire acts and all the Coca-Cola we could drink. The way the circus was lit, though, all I could see was the inside of the box and the circus itself. The rest of the crowd was completely shrouded in the dark, a long way down from where we were perched. I couldn't see them at all.

But it dawned on me that just because I couldn't see them didn't mean my empty coke cans wouldn't land on their heads if I dropped them.

The things we do have an effect, even if we can't perfectly see what that effect would be. Since things like gas-guzzling SUVs don't naturally occur driving themselves around in nature, we have to presume that our doing so leaves some sort of footprint. To ignore that possibility is otherwise as rational as hurling coke cans into a darkened arena and expecting no one to get hit.

And yet there are many people who would prefer to keep throwing their coke cans. Since you can't definitely prove to them that it's causing problems, they will act as though there is no problem at all.

It's a bit of a fluke that this conversation ended up on a Huey Lewis and the News fanboard, but I think it's a telling snapshot of what's going on in wider public discourse, and one that is concerning.

I spent some time today writing most of a very long blog entry, which I thought was worth doing since the subject of it had been on my mind, and when very-bloggable thoughts come to mind I find I need to write them down in order to unblock my brain before I can really contemplate anything else. So I wrote most of it, but shortly thereafter I ended up faced with some new information that kind of pulled the rug out from under it. I'm obviously being cryptic, but only because it's not really important and I may never end up blogging about it, so why get everyone all excited with anticipation for something that may never happen. I just felt like saying something about the absence of a fresh post because it sucked up all my blogging time today for naught, and I hate having long gaps between posts. So please believe me - I tried to post, I really did!

And not only am I now postless, but I'm left with some new thoughts to distract me. Including what the impact is, vis a vis my Musicians for Kerry posts, when the person in question instead holds politically unpalatable views. True, it was pretty easy to write that post about admiring what Huey Lewis had to say politically since I agreed with what he had to say. But I just found myself on the opposite side of the political coin regarding another entertainer, somewhat unexpectedly, and I'm trying to figure out how to react to it.

I think what's frustrating is that I don't completely disagree with what he had to say. The only famous entertainers I pay any attention to are those with obvious intellects, so I'm inclined to generally respect some of his perceptions. The frustration generally comes in because I feel like some of his views involve him having made some really insightful observations, and then veering off to much more extreme conclusions than I think they warrant.

But that's the entertainer. The rest of the my frustration stems from having inadvertently listened to a conservative talk radio show and the resulting headache that comes from having spent most of it banging my head against the wall. It was just so reactionary, so disrespectful, so incomplete in its opinions. It's so "us versus them," and it's just so sad. Of course there are nitwits on the left. There are even bright people on the left who advocate for things that I think are, while perhaps well-intentioned, ultimately inadvisable. But true political progress requires a debate on the substance of the issues, so we can figure out what truly would be the best way to proceed. Knee-jerk reactions are completely unhelpful, and counterproductive. As I listened to these show hosts reflexively mock ideas that are actually consistent with their own stated interests merely because Someone On The Left had proposed them I shook my head. I thought to myself, practically out loud, "Engage brains, please!!" Please demonstrate some critical thinking skills. The hosts had personality and the capability of being witty and articulate, but their inclination to proverbially stick their heads in the sand and mock easy targets without any sort of inquiry into whether the positions were reasonable sold out their own intelligence. For example, they could be right - maybe Nancy Pelosi doesn't really need a big plane. But a coherent argument could be put forth for why that's the case; simply mocking the request because a "San Francisco liberal" had asked for it, without any further inquiry into the circumstances surrounding that inquiry or its possible reasonableness (e.g., her home state is twice as far from Washington as her predecessor's was) - is not an effective way to advocate for her not to get the plane if such refusal would truly be the best policy.

Or maybe it is effective, and people really are so attuned to identifying which side of the "left" v. "right" divide they're on that they'll accept any view that seems to come from their side no matter what.

I passed a sign in a London store window advertising for a position in its Knightbridge shop. The last line of it gave me pause, something along the lines of, "English speakers only need apply." It struck me as needlessly hostile - much as I love the English language I can't see support for monolingualism to be anything more than thinly-veiled xenophobia - as well as completely pointless, as only English speakers would have been able to read the help-wanted sign in the first place. I tried to placate my indignation by reasoning that the people targeted by the hostility wouldn't have been able to able to understand it and would have been thus spared its offense. But I was offended, on their behalf as well as my own. I would much rather live in a pluralistic world of speakers of all languages than a homogeneous one full of such condescending English-only sign-posting jerks.

Unrelatedly, although I describe it here because it was another language issue I encountered on my recent trip to England, I saw a news retrospective on stories from 2007. An aide to Tony Blair was interviewed and asked whether, knowing what we know now, Blair's confidence in invading Iraq now seems misplaced. The aide largely circumvented the question by recounting what Blair himself had said at the time, something along the times that you always needed to be prepared to commit yourself fully to doing what you think is right.

I apologize for any slight mistranscription, as I'm not able to find the original comment on the web to copy the exact language from. But I'm not misrepresenting it as the kind of statement that sounded very principled and high-minded. No matter how hard it may be, the thought goes, you always must do what you think is right.

And that idea sounds good, doesn't it? Until you start taking it to its logical conclusion. Because on its own it would justify completely moronic ideas. Just because you think it's the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do? That's just nonsense. You may truly believe that cutting your arm off is the right thing to do. But the strength of your conviction hardly redeems it as a worthwhile plan. Somewhere some sort of rationality needs to be employed before evaluating the merits of an action. Pure idealistic conviction is not enough to justify something so otherwise unfounded and foolish, and it's itself unfounded and foolish to pretend otherwise.