Xblog

People online are apparently averaging 77.6%, which forces one to the conclusion that people who take random quizzes on the Internet are actually way smarter than the average American. I took the quiz myself (without using Google or Wikipedia) in an effort to gauge if the test was unfair or difficult and I did manage to bugger up two of the questions, both of which struck me as having answers which missed the mark, though most of the questions and answers didn’t strike me as being at all ambiguous (but in all honesty I should have been able to get them right). A number of the questions did appear to play upon popular misconceptions, but a lot of them were straight up questions had laughably wrong alternate answers that only a White House Press Secretary could get wrong. I think my favourite was the one asking what “business profit is”, with possible choices including “cost minus revenue” and “earnings minus assets”. Bottom line: this was NOT a hard quiz. I’d say the 77.6% that online quiz takers were averaging ought to be about what an average American can achieve, and elected officials ought to do much better than that (if they are Federal or State elected officials they ought to get near perfect).

Interestingly, the authors of the study are pushing for better civics in college, but to my way of thinking all of these questions should be covered in a high school curriculum (sure students may not absorb all of it, but hopefully subsequent life experience would reinforce this learning). Why should one have to go to college to become an informed citizen?

Honestly, I’m of two minds on this. I kind of think the recording industry (I’ll be damned if I’m going to call them the music industry) deserves what will come their way if this bill doesn’t pass. On the other hand, I really like and support what the Pandora guys have done. I’d feel better if I could actually find the text. Could someone less lazy than me find a pointer?

• The pundits did get one thing right: Obama clearly had the better footing on the economic discussion while McCain clearly had the better footing on the foreign policy discussion.
• I use the term “foreign policy discussion” loosely, because it was mostly about confronting our enemies. Partly this was a function of the abbreviated nature of said portion of the debate (due to the economic elephant in the room), but frankly I think it is a sign of just how f’d up things have become. When what you think about first is your enemies, you’re in “circle the wagons” mode, and this is not the kind of outlook that promotes progress or the better world we all want (please tell me we all want it). When all you see is your enemies, it’s hard for your friends to work with you.
• For all the talk about oil and energy independence and the economy, McCain failed to bring up free trade. It just so happens that the two biggest oil suppliers to the US are not enemies, but rather NAFTA trading partners. NAFTA actually provides certain guarantees about access to their oil, and Obama has talked about trying to renegotiate NAFTA. This is a dangerous line of thinking, particularly given how much both of those countries would like to renegotiate NAFTA to improve the terms for themselves. I’d have thought McCain would have jumped all over that. Maybe he’s saving this for the real economics debate.
• Obama made some dangerous word choices. When he was talking about the economy, he started using “I” a lot, as opposed to “my plan” or “we”. This does make him seem more forceful and aggressive, which he needs to do, but he said something sure to cause a shiver down the spine of conservatives and independents: I pay for every dime of it.. I’m outright shocked that McCain didn’t immediately interrupt him and say, “No! The tax payers would pay for every dime of it.” and then grin that scary smile of his so wide that the top of his head threatened to fall off.
• Obama had one weakness on the economy discussion: his response on the ear marks. He had an excellent point about McCain’s targeted tax cuts being the moral equivalent of ear marks, and much worse due to their largesse. I’m sure people caught the difference in the numbers, but I think he didn’t make the case well enough for how they are equivalent to ear marks. Obama needs a better story on this in general. His candidacy is all about foresight, principles, doing things a different way, and going after ear marks for a while and canceling them later is… weak.
• I was just tremendously disappointed with Obama when it came to the foreign policy debate, mostly because I know he’d been preparing for this for a while, and because this was the only night to debate the issue. When McCain went after him about confusing tactics vs. strategy and about how the surge worked in Iraq and will be how we’ll win in Afghanistan, Obama should have hit back hard with “this demonstrates your failure to see the larger strategic failure: the story about the surge should already be about our success in Afghanistan, not about how we’ll employ it there in the future”. When McCain made a reference about learning a lesson from when the US pulled out of Afghanistan after fighting off the Soviets, the obvious response was, “but you supported doing it again, pulling support from Afghanistan in order to serve our interests elsewhere… Afghans and our NATO allies there have every reason to lose confidence in our ability to focus and follow through in our support for them.”
• Obama also tip toed around the whole Georgian issue, not pointing out clearly enough that the Georgians had done some sabre rattling of their own, and the whole mess was the kind of thing that a President and our State Department should and could forsee and prevent.
• Worst case of the pot calling the lid on the kettle black: “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain chastising Obama for saying publicly that the US should take out Al Qaeda and Taliban forces if Pakistan couldn’t, even when they were in Pakistan. I’m glad Obama didn’t let him get away with that one.
• How does McCain get to say that the US forces aren’t capable of being peacemakers in Somolia and at the same time tout his support for the surge (whose entire point was to make peace in Iraq?!). Forget about Obama letting him get away with that one, how come Lehrer didn’t follow up with a question on that point?
• If we spend one more minute in one more debate talking about whether Presidents vs. Secretaries of State ought to meet with or without pre-conditions, I’m going to write a letter to the Attorney General demanding the moderator be arrested on charges of treason. For goodness sakes man! We’ve invaded two countries, people literally might not get paid on Tuesday, the world has lost confidence in us politically, economically, scientifically, diplomatically and even to some extent militarily, and this is the most important thing you could come up with as a discussion point?! (Oh, and for the record, Kissinger was undoubtedly deliberately vague in his statement but obviously supports McCain, and visits are not preconditions, and you both know that, so stop with the trying to score cheap political points?)
• McCain owned the floor when it came to talking about Russia. I think, for a moment there, he actually seemed not just older, wiser and more confident, but maybe even smarter than Obama. Better watch that stuff John, or you are going to lose the anti-elite vote.
• Trying to pretend that your opponent is against storing and disposing of nuclear waste is just silly. If anybody believes that drivel, you already had their vote anyway.
• At the end of the debate both candidates seemed to be a bit off their game. McCain’s mumbling about SDI not being proven back in Reagan’s day (why is it that every time he goes back to talking about Reagan’s “foresight” he seems a bit lost?) and what came after seemed like a series of disconnected stump speech ramblings from a guy whose brain was on auto pilot… without a good compass. Obama’s response also shockingly lacked polish. Rather than chart a clear vision through the challenges the country faces, it seemed more like he was meandering from one problem to another. At one point he almost seemed to be lost in it all without a clear direction, and I’m sure a good chunk of the audience was. His transitions from one topic to another just weren’t clean enough. It seemed like he was off script. Again, given all the focus and preparation for this debate, I’d have though that the closing statement at least would have been stronger.
• While you can’t blame McCain for trying to bring up his war record at every opportunity, I thought it was a bit weak to end his debate touting the work he did to resolve the POW-MIA issue. The man keeps touting all his years in the Senate, surely there is something he did there in the last two decades that was worthy of being his closing note.

UPDATE: Newsweek was kind enough to publish Factcheck.org’s analysis of the debate. I know Factcheck.org has their own site, but I figured they probably actually get some revenue from Newsweek’s site.

There are simply too many checks and balances in place for such a huge and complex system (it probably worked well when California was a relatively small, fast growing state). The default action is to do nothing, and the only way to overcome the default action is to get pretty much every stakeholder to agree with your plan: in other words you have to please everyone or get nothing doing, which means you accomplish nothing. A functional government is one that ticks off a subset of its population with most everything it does, but hopefully across all of its actions spreads the love around enough that few can make a credible case that they are being singled out. We’ve got to make some serious changes here.

Propositions I’d vote for if they existed on the next ballot:

1. A proposition revoking all propositions enacted in the last 15 years.
2. A proposition revoking all propositions that lock down a portion of the general fund.
3. A proposition recognizing the sanity of only requiring a 2/3rds majority for a budget if the governor vetoes it.
4. A proposition ending term limits, but forcing the entire state legislature to resign and barring them from running in the next election if they don’t get a budget completed on time.
5. In the event that #4 was deemed too harsh, I’d support a proposition requiring the legislature to come to work nude every day the budget was past its due date (yeah, we’d probably not want to look, but that’s not the point now is it?).
6. Any credible anti-gerrymandering proposition.
7. A proposition requiring propositions get support from at least 1/4 of the legislature before making it on to the ballot.
8. A proposition requiring voters be able to name one unique fact (that isn’t printed on the ballot) about any of the slate of judges being considered for election before being eligible to vote for them, and if at any time 50% of them can’t, judges become appointed by the governor.
9. A proposition requiring the attorney general to prosecute for fraud any politician who claims taxes aren’t raised in a budget where expenditures go up, with sentencing guidelines having as a mandatory minimum of having their mouth taped shut for the remainder of their term.
10. A proposition requiring that after a budget is signed off on, it must be read by ten randomly selected CPA’s who are kept in isolation . If any one of them breaks out in uncontrollable laughter or pounds their fist in to the wall, the budget is considered null and void and the governor and the leaders of the legislature prosecuted for accounting fraud.