Month: October 2015

Election Day, Canadian style

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It’s election day north of the border, and the campaign has been an interesting one. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party, has been in office nine years and hopes to add a few more. The Liberals are challenging him, led by Justin Trudeau, the charismatic but relatively unaccomplished son of former Prime Minister Paul Trudeau (see, they have dynastic politics, too!) The New Democratic Party, farther out on the left, currently holds the second-most seats in Parliament, but looks to shrink to third as the Liberals challenge them for the lion’s share of the left vote. There are also a few minor parties, and Quebec is its own thing, but that’s the gist of it.

The election campaign has been every bit as ugly an petty as our own (this morning the National Post called it the Worst Election Ever). Take a look at that piece if you ever have that absurd impulse of the American left to imagine that Canada is some sort of utopia and that America alone is trashy and lame.

Let me tell you: everybody’s trashy.

Remember Rob Ford, Toronto’s crack-smoking, hard-drinking mayor? He’s back on the scene, and still fairly popular. And has American politics ever featured a Congressional candidate dropped by his party because he was caught urinating in someone’s kitchen? We’ve had some odd stuff, but I don’t recall that one.

None of this is to say we’re superior to Canada, but rather to point out how similar we are. Elections bring out a lot of fervor and weird behavior on both sides of the border. But it’s more fun to watch from a safe distance, knowing that none of these folks will ever be in charge of your country.

Blue on blue

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Saturday Night Live’s send up of the Democratic debate wasn’t half bad. Larry David appearing as Bernie Sanders fulfilled the wishes more viewers than anything since Tina Fey played Sarah Palin.

But my favorite moment was Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton answering the question about her refusal to obey the law on classified information while Secretary of State: “I welcome this question because I rehearsed this one the longest.” 

Nailed it.

Who Lost Appalachia?

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There was a lot of talk during the Democratic debate this week about Jim Webb, and his place in the Democratic party. Was he too conservative? Too martial? Too old-fashioned?

The real problem with Webb for Democrats is not what ideas he represents, but what geographic region he represents: Appalachia. Once the stronghold of FDR’s Democratic coalition, this region has been abandoned by Roosevelt’s successors. And the change is happening quickly. Look at this chart of the decrease in Democratic vote in Kentucky, and note that the mountainous counties have been in much steeper decline:

Appalachia Democrats

If we take the date back to 2004, the shift is even more pronounced:

Appalachia Democrats 2

Democrats in Appalachia are abandoning their party in droves, and they’re not coming back. Democrats at the national level claim to be the party that supports the poor, but when it comes to America’s poorest region, they seem to be going out of their way to alienate their erstwhile supporters. (For more on that, check out Kevin Williamson’s 2014 article on Appalachia here.) On guns, on religion, and on individualism, the party promotes everything Appalachians are against, and tries to make up for it with more welfare spending.

The people Jim Webb represents don’t want handouts, they want jobs. The Democratic establishment responds by fighting the coal industry, historically the biggest employer in Appalachia. Every step the Democrats take pushes them farther away from these historic stalwarts of the party. Webb is the last Democratic leader to care about them. With his inevitable defeat, Democrats will close the book on the region as they’ve closed their hearts to its people long ago.

Voting in Washington

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I originally published this post at a former group blog, The Closet Moderate, in 2013.

I’ve been thinking about Washington, D.C. and its unusual quasi-colonial status.

People in what became the District of Columbia had voting rights as citizens of Maryland and Virginia until 1801, when the District was incorporated.  In 1847, the federal government retroceded the Virginia portion of the District to that Commonwealth, so the voters their got back their rights as citizens of Virginia.  Citizens of what remained of the federal district did not.  In 1961, the states approved the Twenty-Third Amendment, which granted the citizens of Washington three electoral votes for President and Vice President.  By that time, Congress had also given the District home rule, which guaranteed them some of the control over local affairs that a state has, though not all of it, and not in any way that couldn’t be rescinded by Congress.

L'Enfant_plan

That still left Congressional representation.  Although Washington elects a delegate to the House of Representatives, she has no vote.  In 1978, Congress sought to remedy this problem by passing another amendment to the Constitution that would have treated the District as a state for purposes of representation in Congress.  It went over like a lead balloon, with only sixteen of the necessary thirty-eight states approving the amendment before time expired in 1985.

Since then, several bills have been introduced in Congress that would admit Washington as a state, but none have come close to passage, and there is some doubt about whether it would even be constitutional without Maryland’s permission.

Several other options have been proposed.  Retroceding the remaining District to Maryland is one solution  and Representative Regula of Ohio regularly proposed bills to that effect, but none were successful.  There was also some question as to whether Maryland would want it back.  Further, the Twenty-Third Amendment would be nonsensical without a federal district, and would need to be repealed.

So as long as a Constitutional amendment is required, here’s my solution: let the people of Washington vote as though they were Marylanders in federal elections, but not in state elections. That sounds like it violates all sorts of constitutional provisions, but it’s an amendment, so we can mostly do whatever we want. I even wrote a draft of the text, if you’re into that sort of thing:

AMENDMENT XXVIII

§1. For the purpose of election of the President, Vice President, Senators, and Representatives, and for the purpose of apportionment of Representatives, the residents of the District constituting the seat of the government of the United States shall be treated as residents of the State from which that District shall have been ceded.
§2. The Twenty-Third Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
§3.  This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States within seven years from the date of submission.

This gives everybody something.  To those who think the District shouldn’t be a state: it still isn’t.  For those Washingtonians who want voting representatives in both Houses of Congress: you got it.  For Democratic officeholders in Maryland: your re-election just got easier.  Democrats in Congress: you just got a new House member.  Republicans in Congress: yeah, they got an extra member, but you didn’t give up any Senate seats, and Maryland’s Senate seats have both been held by Democrats for the last twenty-six years, anyway.  Republicans in Maryland state government: yeah, you guys would kinda get screwed.  Sorry.

Vegas, the morning after

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The story of the night at the Democrats’ Las Vegas Debate was that Hillary 6.0 was ClintonCo’s most bug-free release since 2009. She made no obvious errors, and her anger subroutine was almost as good as real live angry man Bernie Sanders. Her logic programming was still flawed, as shown in the discussion of whether she was progressive or moderate, but flawed logic may be a feature, not a bug, with the Democratic electorate. All in all, though, I think she calmed the Democratic Establishment’s nerves, and may have helped to stave off the Draft Biden movement. There will be more stumbles–Hillary is still a deeply flawed candidate–but this competent performance may stop the slide, for now.

Sanders’s performance was also strong. He came off at times as a crazy, partially deaf old man, and at one point he definitely wasn’t paying attention, but he, too, made no obvious errors. Sanders projected his weird vision of bourgeois socialism as effectively as his followers could have hoped, and recovered from his earlier struggles with black Democrats by showing that he had been adequately reeducated in the new dogma (which he likely believed all along, but lacked the adequate buzz words to convey).

As to the rest: O’Malley sleepwalked through most of the debate, but showed some flashes of fire at the end when discussing green energy, an issue no one cares about. Webb spent half his time complaining that he wasn’t given enough time, and the other half demonstrating that there’s no place for men like him in the Democratic party. I’d love to see him on stage at the next Republican debate. And Chafee. Even though he’s had months to prepare, his answers sounded like what you’d hear if you broke into his house in the middle of the night, woke him up, shined a flashlight in his eyes, and demanded he explain his PATRIOT Act vote. I don’t think he or Lessig have much of a shot, but I know who would’ve added more serious content to the debate.

On a lighter note, here are some of the best debate tweets of the night:

Mutants:

On guns:

Simpsons quote:


Dodging the question:

Webb:

 

Chafee:

InfoSec:

The PATRIOT Act:

Biden?

And my favorite, on legalizing marijuana:

Vegas!

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There’s not much that can be said about tonight’s Democratic debate that hasn’t been said elsewhere. My thoughts, briefly, are that for the lesser-known candidates (Webb, O’Malley, and Chaffee) the debate represents their first chance to talk to the nationwide Democratic primary electorate. If they don’t make a splash, they will never get more than a few hardcore supporters to vote for them.

For Clinton, expectations are set pretty low. All she has to do is show she’s not robotic or unpleasant and avoid making any obvious mistakes. I don’t think she has it in her to be exciting, but she might manage to look interesting and competent. If she fails at that, we will hear a lot more about Biden in the coming days.

The biggest test, I think, is for Sanders. He’s amassed legions of hardcore fans, but he has to look like a serious alternative to Clinton if he’s ever to attract anyone besides the white socialists who currently support him. He’s unlikely to do anything to lose the support of those people, but coming off as a wild-eyed lunatic could foreclose his chance of winning over any of the party’s remaining moderates.

Here’s a few articles that might interest you:

Utley

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Chase Utley belongs in the Hall of Fame.chase_Utley

After the incident on the basepaths this weekend, that may seem a controversial statement, but I’m not saying he belongs in Cooperstown because of his continuing torment of the Mets. No, it’s simply because Utley is one of the greatest second basemen ever to play the game.

Six-time All Star. Four-time Silver Slugger. The stats don’t lie. And Utley was at the heart of the Phillies teams that won five straight National League East crowns, including one memorable World Series victory in 2008. He is the epitome of the old-time ballplayer, one who did whatever he had to to make get on base, move the runner, turn the double play, or make the leaping grab.

But a lot of that is emotional, the sort of thing you’d expect from a Phillies fan. So let’s look at the numbers. According to Baseball Reference, only one player has more Wins Above Replacement (WAR) than Utley in Phillies history: Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. In Defensive WAR, Utley is narrowly edged by Schmidt, and his single-season defensive performance in 2008 was the best in team history.

But comparing him to other Phillies is limited. How does Utley stack up against the great players of baseball history? Looking at Baseball Reference’s similarity scores, a statistical analysis of all players in MLB history, the man most similar to Utley is Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Gordon. Using the JAWS analysis of potential Hall of Famers, we see Utley ranked 12th among all second basemen, just above Roberto Alomar, Craig Biggio, and Gordon, Hall of Famers all. The only non-Cooperstown inductees above Utley on the list is Tigers’ second baseman Lou Whitaker, who deserves a second look by the Veterans Committee, and Orioles/Angels second basemen Bobby Grich who, like Utley, had the consistently great, but not flashy, stats that makes him easy to overlook as a great ballplayer.

All of which is to say: Utley’s hardnosed style of play may have earned him a few new enemies in New York (those who weren’t already aggrieved by his constant offensive dominance of that franchise,) but it should not cause us to overlook the truly excellent career of the best second baseman in Phillies history.

Digital ownership

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When digital music and movies gained popularity, I remember being relieved that I would no longer have to re-purchase upgraded forms of the albums I liked. After records, tapes, and CDs, finally I’d have my music preserved in a form that required no upgrading, forever.

This Atlantic article addresses the main problem with the new paradigm of digital ownership: namely, that you don’t really own it. Our ownership of CDs, VHS tapes, and books was always limited. These things were copyrighted by their creators, so we couldn’t just photocopy The Pelican Brief and sell it on the subway. That money belonged to John Grisham! But we could at least lend the book to a friend, or sell it to a used book store, or give it away to anyone who wanted it (this is known as the first sale doctrine). Not so with our digital properties, as Adrienne LaFrance writes (quoting Dan Hunter of Swinburne Law School):

These days we live in a world where we generally license copyright content, like games and music. This means you’re given a limited right to do things with the content—generally this is limited to playing it on a small number of devices—and you definitely can’t resell the content or even give it away. You haven’t really bought the song, you’ve bought a contract to play the thing for a while.

LaFrance does a good job of defining the problem: you don’t really own your digital stuff, and if the company you lease it from disappears, your stuff might well disappear with it. But what’s the solution?

This is a problem created by laws, and it can be solved by laws. Just as Congress created our copyright statute, so can they modify it to extend the first sale doctrine to digital properties. This might have been difficult in the early days of MP3s and eBooks, but we now have the technology to make it work. Public libraries lend out eBooks all the time, then wipe them from your computer when the lending period is up. Surely some similar system could be used to imbue each copy of a digital property with a unique identifier, which could then be transferred as easily as a Bitcoin to another consumer.

A bill first proposed in Congress in 2003 by Zoe Lofgren of California addressed this and other problems, but it has never found support, likely, I think, because it attacked too many of the digital publishers’ privileges at once. (For a more detailed discussion of digital first use rights, see this student note from the Northwestern University Law Review.) A more narrowly tailored bill on just this issue might find favor with a wider swath of Congressmen. What could be more conservative than reaffirming a right first codified in 1909, a right that gives people clearer ownership of property they legally purchased? The technology is possible, and the change would be popular, if any politician has the skill and judgment to get Congress to approve of it.

 

A Weary Colossus

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This Politico article and the video that goes with it are heartbreaking. After talking tough and acting brave a year ago, the Obama administration has conveniently forgotten about its pledge to help the Yazidi escape extermination by ISIS.

As Politico’s Eliza Collins writes:

In an emotional, at times tearful, on-stage interview at POLITICO’s “Women Rule” event Wednesday morning in Washington, Dakhil described a full-blown humanitarian crisis — 420,000 Yazidis living in refugee camps in tents with mud floors, women and girls continuing to be kidnapped, 2,200 girls in captivity as sexual slaves, and survivors returning from the horror of ISIL captivity with no resources for psychological support. Thousands of orphans have no homes.

How far have we fallen from our old ideal of offering refuge to the oppressed people of the world. People like the Yazidi, the religious minorities of the Near East, will never find safety where they live. ISIS will be defeated, either (hopefully) by us or (more likely) by Russia, but the idea of religious persecution and genocide are harder to stamp out. There may come a day when that region is free of those ideas, but I doubt we will see it in our lifetime. And how many will die before that day of enlightenment arrives?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Our nation is vast and wealthy. We could rescue every Christian, Druze, and Yazidi in Syria and hardly break a sweat. I know Emma Lazarus’s poem is not a part of the Constitution or the United States Code, but her words embody a part of America’s character that centuries of nativists have not managed to stamp out. In times like these, with the wold in turmoil and a people driven to slavery and death, we should remember them.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”