Yada Yada Yalta

This is a follow up on Josh Marshall's and David Greenberg's thoughts on Bush's criticism of the Yalta agreement. Not only is it ridiculous for him to be criticizing FDR and Churchill's negotiations at the end of WWII as handing Eastern Europe over to the Soviets, but he of all people should know about the strange bedfellows of international relations. How many nations with questionable commitments to freedom do we support because of our needs in the war on terrorism and other geopolitical concerns?

While he's silent on Russia's continuing war in Chechnya and turns to jelly when he comes to face to face with Putin instead of standing behind his rhetoric about freedom and liberty (as Putin continues his crackdown on the press and free enterprise in Russia), Bush seems to think that the US and UK should have driven Russia back out of Poland in 1945 and continued to fight them until Russia was ready to negotiate again. And with Stalin, who knows how long that would have taken?

Medal Devaluation

Yesterday, Bush awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in this country, to Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer and George Tenet for their roles as architects of the Iraq war and reconstruction. There's a few things wrong with this, the least of which is, why is General Tommy Franks being given a civilian honor for fighting a war, especially for an award that is for distinguished civilian service in peacetime? For that matter, why are any of them getting it for service in a decidedly non-peacetime capacity?

More to the point, as a general policy, isn't it a little early to be honoring the people who crafted a war that's not even two years old yet, with an outcome still uncertain? This is the shortest time period between the awarding of this medal and the events cited for the awarding.

But most importantly, Iraq is hardly a success at this point, and certainly not anything that deserves the highest honor awarded to civilians.

Now Bush may just be deluded about reality, but this smacks to me of either an attempt to reinforce the administration's line on Iraq (it being just peachy that is), or it's another example of Bush loyalists getting rewarded, this time quite literally (and none of those three possibilites is very fantastic).

I guess the (circular) logic goes... if the architects of the Iraq policy are awarded the Medal of Freedom, the war must have been a success! So let's award them!

Here's the story.

Another reason not to eat there...

Republican members of the House and Senate also have blocked Democratic legislation to raise the minimum wage by as much as $1.85 to $7, a move that might hurt restaurant owners and retailers.

Those companies include Tampa, Florida-based Outback Steakhouse Inc., which gave 96 percent of its $401,500 in PAC donations to Republicans this year, and Orlando, Florida-based Darden Restaurants Inc., the owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster franchises, which gave 90 percent of its $198,084 in candidate donations to Republicans.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting - apparently, the companies that gave lots of money to the GOP did really well in the stock market over the past 4 years, while companies that supported the Dems didn't do so great.

Just a Quick Question

I haven't examined the new intelligence bill very closely, but let me ask this: how is creating a "national" intelligence director going to be an improvement on a "central" intelligence director? I thought the Director of the CIA was supposed to be the guy that informed the President on the country's intelligence. Perhaps that role has changed? So change it back. I think adding another level of bureaucracy isn't going to solve the problem.

Everything's Great in Afghanistan

I feel that these two paragraphs paint a nice picture of the fallacy our leaders are trying to project (from this article):

"We gather to mark a historic moment in the life of the nation and in the history of human freedom," Cheney said at a news conference with Karzai beforehand on the grounds of the presidential palace, a turreted stone structure set against distant, snow-dusted mountains. "Now the tyranny is gone, the terrorist enemy is scattered and the people of Afghanistan are free."

Security for the inauguration was heavy even by the standards of this dust-caked, militarized city. Major roads were closed, U.S.-led multinational troops patrolled on foot and in armored vehicles, and sharpshooters with telescopic sights manned rooftops while helicopters whirred overhead. There are 16,000 U.S. combat troops in the country, according to the Pentagon. NATO oversees 8,500 multinational troops providing security.

As significant as it is that they pulled off an election, the country is hardly free. From what I've read, the Taliban has essentially taken over the countryside, leaving Karzai to be mayor of Kabul. We should have directed all our energies to Afghanistan from the time we invaded, instead of the Iraq fiasco. Now, we're stuck in a halfway hell in both countries.

Nature vs Nurture

Over at Marginal Revolution, (which is a great blog for the libertarian/lassez faire economic school,) there's discussion of a new paper which explores the effect of adoption on one's earnings potential. The results are certainly worthy of discussion:

One could argue, as some do, that this graph is finally "proof" that nature triumphs over nuture - despite growing up in the same exact household, under the exact same conditions, adoptees just weren't affected by that environment to the same extent as their non-adopted siblings.

The unstated implication that many have taken from this chart is that the adopted sample earned less money than their non-adopted siblings. Let's be clear before we continue - this is not at all the case. All this chart shows is that there's no correlation between adoptees' incomes and that of their parents. They might all have been self-made millionaires, all paupers, but most likely, were just all over the map.

Now then, on to the study itself. The biggest flaw I see here is the fealty a biological parent shows towards a biological over an adopted child. By definition, this study compares adoptees to the biological children of their "parents." It's genetic - it's in our nature - to promote our own DNA, our progeny, at the expense of others. No matter how much a parent loves their adopted child, I'd suspect that more often than not it's the biological offspring who are groomed for the family business. Again, this isn't saying that the adopted children were cast aside - rather, they may well have been encouraged to go off to college and find a profession that would make them wildly more successful than their siblings. They could become doctors, lawyers, bankers, whatever. They're just plain not as likely to inherit the family store.

No single study is ever going to resolve the nature vs nurture debate. Primarily, this is because there is no answer. Concepts such as intelligence and earnings potential are affected by both nature and nurture. Are some people naturally "smarter" than others? You bet. Is "intelligence" dependent on whether you were encouraged and challenged as a child? Absolutely. Is one of these factors more influential on a specific person's ultimate intelligence? I'm sure of it. Is either nature or nurture more influential on a population's intelligence as a whole? Nope. Sorry. There are just too many variables to ever resolve this case on a universal level. Books like The Bell Curve which try to suggest an answer to the nature vs nurture question are filled with flawed studies and questionable data. We can just add this paper to the growing list.

Social science, an oxymoron if ever there was one, attempts to use scientific methodology to resolve questions which cannot be fit into a logical, black and white construct. Studies like this only exacerbate the problem - humanity and society are far too complex to be studied mathematically. It's impossible to control for every variable, so any study is, by definition, corrupted. The further we delve into the nature vs nurture debate, the more factors we discover that play a part in things like intelligence or earnings potential, two terms that are ill-defined at best. Ultimately, it's these variables themselves, not nature or nurture, that define our intelligence. Solving the nature vs nurture debate is as futile as it is difficult.

Diamond In The Rough

This is how the internet was supposed to work. Blue Nile, the world's largest online retailer of diamonds, has managed to significantly reduce profit margins in the retail diamond industry, creating a cheaper product for consumers while becoming very profitable at the same time. While I doubt diamonds are going to become commoditized any time soon, (for one thing, the second-hand diamond market is utterly dismal and probably manipulated,) this appears to be the first big step towards opening up a secretive and monopolistic industry.

No Brainer

The IRS is one of the few federal agencies that can make money back on its funding. As this article mentions, last year they were allocated about $10.2 billion in enforcement funding, and brought in $43.1 billion in tax revenues as a result. So when the commissioner asks for $500 million more, it seems pretty easy to figure out that this will bring in even more lost revenue.

And remember, this isn't "new" taxation, it's just money that should have been paid but wasn't, possibly (and probably, in the cases they pursue) because the party in question intended to avoid paying them. Any honest American should be in favor of the IRS pursuing those who aren't paying their fair share. Besides the fact that its ethically dubious for people not to pay into the system that they benefit from, it also makes everyone else have to pay a bigger piece in the long run.

Undecided

The New Republic's Christopher Hayes looks at the undecided voter: Decision Makers

My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them--just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.

Branding

David Neiwert wrote an excellent article about the need for liberals to get aggressive in controlling how we use rhetoric to frame news and policy: Healing the heartland

Frontline looks at how Republicans have been successful at political branding in The Persuaders (Segment 5, "Give Us What We Want") and in an interview with Frank Luntz.

Falling Dollar

There is no question right now that the US dollar is falling relative to foreign currencies. The important issue is what effect the falling dollar will have. The New York Times suggests three possible scenarios:

1. The US can continue to borrow indefinitely because today's financial markets have created a virtually unlimited source of capital.

2. The dollar will be propped up by Asian countries; a strong dollar benefits their labor and export markets

3. The dollar will collapse, leading to unemployment, inflation, and overall nastiness in the US economy.

I personally believe in choice 4: none of the above. My suspicion is that, as the dollar becomes weaker and weaker, the ability of Asian governments to maintain a high dollar will be tested. In particular, China, which currently pegs its yuan to the dollar, will find it untenable to maintain current exchange rates. While China would not want to harm its nascent economy by lowering the yuan peg, its ruling body would find the idea of black markets for currency or for valuable imported goods. I suspect China would be forced into devaluing the yuan, yet keeping it pegged to the dollar. This might cause some temporary choppiness in the global economy, but not the stagflation of the 1970's. Interest rates would probably rise a few percentage points, unemployment would creep higher, and imported goods would cost more. Still, there are too many interested parties concerned with keeping the US dollar relatively high. It would take a significantly larger shock to the global economy to cause significant stress on the dollar to create a tailspin scenario. The most likely stress of this magnitude would be if Asian borrowers decided not to repurchase US dollar denominated debt. This is not very likely - the US Treasury is universally considered the world's safest investment. Asian investors have stuck by while plummeting interest rates plus a falling dollar have shrank returns on US bonds to near nothing. Now that rates are rising again, pulling out of the US is far less likely.

Election Fraud?

One of the rumors floating around the internets is that widespread electronic voting fraud caused discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies-- in other words exit polls more accurately predicted the actual outcome of the election in counties which used optical scan, punch card or lever voting machines than in counties which used direct recording electronic voting machines.

There is enough evidence to demonstrate that some elctronic voting machines generated inaccurate vote counts and that electronic voting machines without voter verified paper trails are difficult to audit. But there is currently not enough evidence to prove anything beyond some irregularities, much less widespread fraud.

Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project: Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush Vote

Salon: Was the election stolen?

There's little question that the American election process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny.

Brian Lehrer Show: Claims and Counter Claims

Because the source code to these direct recording e-voting machines is proprietary to the vendors, there is no way to independently verify that the election results are accurate without an independent paper trail or some alternative independent audit mechanism.

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (HR 2239) introduced by Rush Holt (D-NJ) will require all voting systems to generate voter-verified permanent records. Maybe it will be passed by the next presidential election.

Representatives John Conyers, Jerold Nadler and Robert Wexler are seeking an investigation of the efficacy of voting systems from the GAO.

Building that bridge to the 19th century

Bill Clinton talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Here in the 21st century, George W. Bush is working to build a bridge back to the 19th century.

Paul Krugman notes that Bush is not a conservative but a radical: "[Bush is] the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare." No Surrender

But, the Bush coalition seeks not only to roll back the achievements of Franklin Roosevelt, but the progressive era reforms of Theodore Roosevelt and return to unregulated robber baron capitalism. Some of TR's biggest achievements were in creating the national parks and protecting the environment. Then, conservation was conservative. Today, Bush cronies seek to loot the national park system for private gain and roll back clean air regulations.

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki discusses how this shifts risk allocation from a collective risk-spreading approach back to rugged individualism: The Risk Society

Why Join the Red States?

The Democrats' defeat in the recent election has inspired many to say that the Democrats need to change and join the larger culture of America, which would mean that of the red states. But besides the differences in matters like religion and attitudes towards homosexuality, there are plenty of reasons why blue states should keep on doing what they've been doing.

Why live in a red state? I mean, there are plenty of beautiful areas in those regions, but every statistical ranking I've seen puts most states whose electoral vote went to Bush towards the bottom half. For example...

Crime

Health

Per capita income

Education levels

This all shows that people in the red states end up voting against their own economic, safety and health interests. My larger point, however, is to ask why the Democrats should try to adapt their party to the culture of the red states? The obvious reason is "to win," but it seems to me that, much like the election, Democrats are on the right side of things. I don't think trying to change to please the Bush voters is the way to go, since it will compromise our principles and probably won't even work anyway. What we have to do is change the issues to the ones that will make these people vote for us.

Mapping the Election

Since we still have one vote per person rather than one vote per acre in the US (for now), maps which attempt to explain the link between voting trends and democracy are somewhat deceptive, because some areas of the country are sparsely populated.

Three professors at the University of Michigan present some of the alternative wasy to map the election results. The most useful image is this snazzy cartograph, which shows the election results on a county-by-county basis, with each county scaled for population and shaded based on the strength of support for Bush or Kerry: