Xblog: Category Politics

Save The World

Christopher Smith — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:45:00 +0000

As long as we’re looking at house resolutions, you should probably look at this one (am I the only one a little disturbed to know that our congress is building its drafts on the “O” drive and appears to still be conforming to DOS 8.3 style filenames?!). I mean it just involves more of your money than you’ve probably spent on your mortgage/rent lately, and it may be the only hope you have of keeping said roof over your head… or it could just be an unmitigated disaster.

Save The Pandora

Christopher Smith — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:33:00 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, Pandora is a nice little Internet radio business that is on the brink of going out of business, effectively by federal law. They’re asking us to call our Senator’s to get support for H.R. 7084 (yes, apparently the Senate is actually voting on a House bill).

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?

Debate Redux

Christopher Smith — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:22:00 +0000

In case you missed the debate, I found the transcript here. I’m not sure if I would call it hugely substantive -a lot of it was filled with lines from stump speeches, but nobody made me bury my head and think “…and this one could be President…”. Anyway, I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw in a few observations:

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.

10 Propositions I'd Like to See On the Ballot This November

Christopher Smith — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:32:00 +0000

[Blogger’s note: I apologize for not posting more regularly to my blog. I’ve had a lot of time pressures of late, but also I’ve gotten in to a habit of posting on my Google Reader feed which is a bad idea on several levels, not the least of which being I get zero ad revenue for it and Google Reader appears to periodically misplace my comments and shared articles. I kind friend suggested that this commentary was far too good to leave in Google Reader, so I’ve reproduced it here on my blog.]

Last night, as I was stuck in LA’s glorious traffic, I heard Larry Mantle interview the author of this excellent piece of analysis in the Sacramento Bee and he seemed 100% completely on the money (and interestingly, the governor seems to agree with him as well, having gone much further than a simple veto of the budget). I have to admit that when first coming to California, the system seemed so odd. I was overwhelmed enough I felt like I didn’t grok it, but it is increasingly clear to me that in fact I did grok it and my initial observation was correct: it is just a mess.

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:

A proposition revoking all propositions enacted in the last 15 years.
A proposition revoking all propositions that lock down a portion of the general fund.
A proposition recognizing the sanity of only requiring a 2/3rds majority for a budget if the governor vetoes it.
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.
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?).
Any credible anti-gerrymandering proposition.
A proposition requiring propositions get support from at least 1/4 of the legislature before making it on to the ballot.
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.
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.
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.

FIRE on fire

Christopher Smith — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:49:00 +0000

There is, understandably, a lot of discussion about the economy right now. Eric Janszen’s article in Harpers strikes me as one of the better articles I’ve read on the subject. I find it interesting that he thinks the money is shifting in to alternative energy. It makes sense as a hedge bet, but is so capital intensive I can’t imagine it holds up for long.

UPDATE: Looks like the feds have made their next move. Hold on to your seat belts tax payers! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Enjoy Your Canada Day in Obscurity

Christopher Smith — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:07:00 +0000

Happy Canada Day!

I was listening to Morning Edition on KPCC this morning, hearing an interview with Le Vent Du Nord. The article opens talking about how in the US we’re anticipating the 4th of July, while many of “our neighbors (sic) to the north” are all getting excited about Quebec’s 400th anniversary. It somehow failed to mention that pretty much all of “our neighbours to the north” are celebrating Canada Day today. That’s right, on Canada Day, they did a story about founding celebrations in Canada, and managed to find a way to make the 4th of July relevant, but they didn’t so much as mention Canada Day, the one such celebration occurring that day which is actually celebrated by everyone to the north.

Be careful about dissing Canada. If you really tick them off the Jay’s will win the World Series a few more times as punishment.

UPDATE: Apparently there is another noteworthy celebration going on today. It feels like there is some kind of significance to SOS being adopted on Canada Day, but what that significance is seems rather open to interpretation. ;-)

Was That George and Charlie, or Was That Barbara Wawa?

Christopher Smith — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:24:00 +0000

What can I say that Michael Grunwald hasn’t said? I think the silver lining on all this is that someone may lose their job, or at least their journalistic credibility over this. Sad yes, but perhaps that’ll start to shift where this boat is heading (and let’s face it, the American public has had a huge hand in steering it that way). Maybe, just for once, we’ll take our responsibilities seriously.

Nah... America isn't sexually repressed/obsessed.

Christopher Smith — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:09:00 +0000

You know you have problems when any part of Dick Cheney can be mistaken for a naked woman, even if distorted by a reflection in his sunglasses.

Two Speeches

Christopher Smith — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:33:00 +0000

It’s a black and white difference that you can see with your eyes closed.

Two Links

Christopher Smith — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:03:00 +0000

Upon reflection, I don’t think this was a particularly amazing or eloquent speech. In a lot of ways, it was very calculated and a repetition of campaign speeches going back as much as a year (and in some ways even echoing Obama’s 2004 Convention speech). It still brought a tear to my eye. Why? Because this is the kind of response I’ve been hungering for in reaction to the usual “gotcha journalism”, holier than though punditry, politics of division, reducing lifetimes to one unfortunate sound bite or image, focus on the horse race not the challenges, political ADD, and dammit-we-won’t-stop-this-insanity-until-someone’s-career-is-over, campaign against some talking head rather than your opponent, yellow journalism masquerading as political correctness, idiocy that has plagued us for so long, and has basically owned the 2008 presidential campaign process almost before it started.

Seriously, I’d only have been prouder if he’d just walked up to the podium with a sign behind him saying something along the lines of, “A Message For Those Concerned By Ferraro, Wright, etc.”, waited for silence, and then with both hands, emphatically performed the Trudeau salute, then silently stepped down from the podium. Unfortunately, that path leads to the PMO in Ottawa rather than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C.

…plus, this was a bit more uplifting.