Current Events – Page 25

Elizabeth Warren And The Roads

Elizabeth Warren has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet lately, inspiring progressives and infuriating libertarians with things she said in her appearance on Jon Stewart last week. I watched these three videos to try to get a sense of what was going on before realizing that the first one was from a Daily Show appearance in January 2010, not January 2012. But it doesn’t matter; it was all pretty much the same thing.

First let me say that Warren is a very smart and articulate person (she is a professor, after all), and I can see why liberals are falling in love with her (just listen to the cheers from the audience). She is very good at presenting her understanding of the problems with today’s system and her vision for fixing it, which is much different from, say, simply demagoguing your political opponents as corrupt. And since she is elevating the discourse to a level of political philosophy, and there seems a good possibility that she will continue to increase her attention at the national level (she is running for Senator of Massachusetts), I think it is worthwhile to express my severe disagreements with her philosophy.

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The 2012 South Carolina Primary

With all but a handful of precincts reporting, South Carolina’s GOP primary last Saturday (January 21, 2012) looked like this:

Newt Gingrich 243153 (40.45%)
Mitt Romney 167280 (27.83%)
Rick Santorum 102057 (16.98%)
Ron Paul 77993 (12.97%)

How does this compare to the primary four years ago? (January 19, 2008)

John McCain 147733 (33.15%)
Mike Huckabee 132990 (29.84%)
Fred Thompson 69681 (15.63%)
Mitt Romney 68177 (15.3%)
Ron Paul 16155 (3.62%)
Rudy Giuliani 9575 (2.15%)

1. The pundits don’t know anything. After Romney won New Hampshire with 40% two weeks ago, the commentariat was pontificating about how Romney was cementing his inevitable path to the nomination. Now that Gingrich surged in the final days of South Carolina and won it with 40%, the commentariat is pontificating about how Romney is so not inevitable now. Which reminds me: I don’t like the commentariat, and I try really hard not to be part of it.

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Money and Politics: The Proof Is In The Sopa?

Buddy Roemer, outcast candidate for the Republican nomination, rails against the way money buys power in politics on a daily basis. It’s easy to make such claims, but I’ve always wondered how much stock to put in them. I’ve heard people say the data doesn’t show such a strong correlation between money and election winners. And there were some wide disparities in the “money per vote” average of the results of the Iowa caucus.

Sometimes, however, things happen that just seem, well, pretty convenient. A couple weeks ago I read about millionaires pouring money into a pro-Gingrich PAC. Now Newt is surging in South Carolina polls (the primary is tomorrow). Could these events be related?

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The 2012 New Hampshire Primary

Last week I wrote about the Republican results in the Iowa caucuses, so here are my thoughts on the New Hampshire primary. First, the results, with about 95% reporting:

Mitt Romney 95669 (39.4%)
Ron Paul 55455 (22.8%)
Jon Huntsman 40903 (16.8%)
Newt Gingrich 22921 (9.4%)
Rick Santorum 22708 (9.3%)
Rick Perry 1709 (0.7%)
Buddy Roemer 919 (0.4%)

1. The polls mostly got this one right. They suggested that Romney would win with between 33-42% of the vote. They suggested that Paul and Huntsman would fight for 2nd with about 20% of the vote; the thing the polls were most wrong about was that it was never very close. The polls suggested Gingrich and Santorum would struggle for 4th around 9-11%; Gingrich was mostly ahead by 200 votes or less as the results came in, although Santorum briefly caught him for a little while, and it’s still feasible that the last 5% could push him ahead again. Finally, the polls suggested Perry and Roemer would battle for 6th place with about 1%; they were mostly right again, except that neither of him hit the 1% threshold and Perry was healthily ahead of Roemer all night.

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Current Level of Defense Measured in What?

I got a kind card in the mail yesterday from my House Representative Todd Akin, summarizing what he and Congress accomplished last year and asking me to fill out a brief questionnaire to record my opinions on a few political topics. I think it’s great that Akin wants to solicit the opinions of his constituents, even if he is in a reliably conservative district (Missouri #2) that votes him in with like 80% support every two years.

Of course, the questions are loaded to the point of hilarity. I felt like I was taking a Republican quiz. When asking “what steps should Congress take to improve and reduce unemployment,” the available answers were:

A. Spend more taxpayer money in another “stimulus” bill….. [ ] YES [ ] NO

B. Empower the private sector by cutting taxes & reducing government spending….. [ ] YES [ ] NO

The word “stimulus” is in quotes, suggesting that it’s not really stimulus, so obviously the correct answer to A is NO! And line B contains nice buzzphrases like “Empower the private sector”… obviously the answer is YES. I’m not really opposed to these opinions, but couldn’t he have just asked two simple questions like “Should Congress increase spending?” and “Should Congress cut taxes?” I guess that might make it harder to guess the, ahem, right answer.

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The 2012 Iowa Caucuses

Well, Ron Paul didn’t win Iowa, so I guess the caucuses are still allowed to matter to the media. But what a wild ride it was. The final results, via fivethirtyeight:

Romney	30,015	24.6%
Santorum	30,007	24.5
Paul	26,219	21.4
Gingrich	16,251	13.3
Perry	12,604	10.3
Bachmann	6,073	5.0
Huntsman	745	0.6
No Preference	135	0.1
Other	117	0.1
Cain	58	0.1
Roemer	31	0.0

Early results looked like a three-way tie, and then Romney and Santorum began to pull slightly away from Paul. They remained neck-and-neck for the remainder of the evening, with Romney ahead by 13, then down by 79, and so on. When I went to bed 96% of precincts were in and Santorum was up by just over 100 votes. I woke up to learn that Santorum was up by four little votes before the report of the very last precinct, which put Romney over the edge by a mere eight votes out of over 120,000 cast.

From a nerdy statistics standpoint, this was the type of astonishingly close nail-biter that makes for good Hollywood. The irony of it all is that the closeness of this race was inversely proportional to its importance – in my opinion – even though it’s going to be used as evidence of the “importance of every vote” for quite awhile. The media is full of the sort of vacuous commentary which annoys me by presenting silly speculations about who has momentum and who’s going to do what next instead of giving us useful information about the things that have been happening. All I need to know is that Huccabee won Iowa in 2008 and that meant basically nothing about a month later. So instead of pretending I can predict what last night’s results mean, I’m just going to write about the things that happened which I thought were the most interesting…

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The Right To Use A Cell Phone And Drive

On December 13, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended “a nationwide ban on the use of cell phones and text messaging devices while driving.” The recommendation comes after a high-profile incident in my own state of Missouri where texting led to a crash that involved a tractor trailer and two buses. Now it’s not unusual for the government to want to increase regulation when something big and terrible happens; people generally expect their government to prevent big and terrible things from happening. But does this justify a nationwide cell phone ban? Let’s consider.

First, there is a valid case for such regulation. Some libertarians might bash the NTSB’s call for a ban as regular old government power-grabbing, but there is a legitimate negative externality here. You could be driving down the road, minding your own business and following all traffic laws, and a distracted cell-phone-wielding driver could plow right into you. Few people seem to have issues with drunk driving laws; why wouldn’t you want to be protected from the negative externality of someone crashing into you?

Well, when we discuss whether or not the government should get involved in trying to prevent a negative externality, there are two things we should consider. Is the negative externality big enough to worry about, and is the government likely to make it better? I believe the answer to both questions is NO with about a 90% certainty.

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Getting Pummeled By The War On Drugs, The War on Terrorism, and The War on Piracy

For a time I thought the national debt was the most pressing political issue for the United States of America. It is rapidly expanding by record amounts, and the political leaders seem to have a compete unwillingness to make hard choices instead of just kicking things down the road a little more. I know Keynesians like Krugman keep saying that we should borrow even more because interest rates on Treasuries are so low right now, but Europe is daily proving that interest rates can suddenly rise much quicker than your ability to pay them back. I fear we are setting ourselves up for enormous problems in the future.

But the financial Armageddon has not happened yet, despite the regularly dire predictions of doomsdayers since 2008. It still seems to be somewhere in the distant future. I am still very concerned about it, but there is another important political issue that is beginning to cast much larger and more frightening shadows on my presently unfolding life.

It is the issue of civil liberties.

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SOPA: Delayed But Not Defeated

Good news – somewhat. The extremely dangerous SOPA bill has been delayed. The Judiciary Committee began hearings on the bill on Thursday, but the outnumbered opponents of the bill prolonged the process as much as possible, forcing the entire text to be read out loud and bringing up amendment after amendment. The hearing continued on Friday where it was abruptly ended. Initial reports suggested that the bill had been delayed until at least January, but apparently they are going to try to have another meeting this coming Wednesday – apparently the issue of piracy is so important that it cannot wait until after Christmas. (Word on the Internet is that the lobbyists just want to sneak the bill through while no one’s paying attention, just like they did with the Federal Reserve act back in 1913 or something.)

So the fight will continue but at least it’s dragging out longer than expected, giving the entire Internet more time to mobilize defense against it. Also, Lamar Smith – the bill’s uncompromising leader – apparently seems open to letting actual technology experts talk about the potential consequences of the bill.

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Category: Current Events