Honestly, I can’t believe that we’re talking about a state where you might expect law enforcement to request your papers.

I did have a few questions, including what exactly does the law require?  And how will it be enforced?  In a nutshell, the law:

Requires officials and agencies to reasonably attempt to determine the immigration status of a person involved in a lawful contact where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.

Okay, so, how does one form a reasonable suspicion?  Well, good for Arizona, the law further:

Stipulates that a law enforcement official or agency cannot solely consider race, color or national origin when implementing these provisions, except as permitted by the U.S. or Arizona Constitution.

So, I don’t know what is permitted by the Arizona Constitution, maybe all of those forms of profiling, maybe none.  But one final question, given that the mayor of Phoenix doesn’t support the law, how do you guarantee that it gets enforce?  Well, a citizen can sue if there’s a policy that doesn’t support enforcement:

Allows a person who is a legal resident of this state to bring an action in superior court to challenge officials and agencies of the state, counties, cities, towns or other political subdivisions that adopt or implement a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.

Requires the court to order any that a violating entity pays a civil penalty of at least $1,000 and not to exceed $5,000 for each day that the policy has remained in effect after it has been found to be violating these provisions.

A few thoughts:

1. It’s not clear to me how one forms a reasonable suspicion about the immigration status of the person, except given their ethnic background
2. It’s not clear to me that ethnic background is even restricted as a category for consideration in the law, based on Latinos being Caucasian and questions about what is permitted under Arizona’s constitution
3. Given #1 and #2 above, I don’t think people realize how ineffective ethnicity is in determining legal status

Fortunately, statistics gives us a good answer to #3.  For the following, let’s consider that L indicates Latino, and I represents illegal.

Bayes rule tells us that the probability of being illegal given that you are Latino [ Pr(I | L) ] is the probability of being illegal (the prior, Pr(I)) times the probability of being Latino given that you are Illegal (likelihood, Pr(L|I)) divided by the evidence or the probability of being illegal given Latino and given not Latino [Pr(L|I)*P(I) + Pr(L| not I)*Pr(not I)]

so, Pr(I|L) = Pr(L|I) * Pr(I) / (Pr(I|L) + Pr(I| not L))

We can quantify this somewhat, from StateMaster

The population of AZ = 5,939,292

Legal Hispanic/Latino population of AZ = 1,803,377

Estimated number of illegals in AZ = 283,000

If we assume that all illegals are Hispanic, then:

P(I) = 283,000 / 5,939,292 = .04765

P(L|I) = 1.0

P(L| not I) = 1,803,377 / 5,939,292 = .30364

So, the probability of being illegal given that you are Latino is:   .14147 or ~14%.  Which in my mind is no reason to form a suspicion.  Hell, more that 14% of the population are pot smokers, you wouldn’t want to give the police authority to stop and arrest everyone to find that subset who are.

CAVEATS AND NOTES

• The data above are from 2000 and may not be current; however, illegal immigration shows a strong economic correlation and the economy is down compared to the boom year of 2000, so the numbers are probably in the right ballpark
• I don’t believe that Pr(L  | I) = 1.0.  This says that all illegals are Latinos.  That’s bull.  There are plenty of Asian and European illegals.  Adjusting this probability down will significantly decrease Pr(I | L).  For example, assuming P(L|I) = 0.8 results in P(I|L) = ~.116.
• The above analysis assumes that Bayes’ law is true, but if it isn’t then we’re all seriously screwed.
• Finally, I would be uncomfortable with racial profiling even if Pr(I|L) > 0.5.  It’s just not America when the cops stop and ask you for your citizenship papers.  I can think of a few places where that did occur, but won’t risk the Godwin retraction by invoking them.

So, what to do?  I was challenged a few years ago as to my solution to the illegal immigrant “problem.”  My first response is that you are assuming it’s a problem.  After all, studies have shown that low-wage legal and illegal immigrants actually grow an economy.  Moreover, since many pay into Social Security and Medicare, without receiving benefits, that helps those programs.  OTOH, it’s not fair to have them pay in without receiving services; moreover, the social safety net should be expanded to help all those in our community.  So, in that sense illegal immigration is a problem.   However, the solution is straight forward.  Enforce current laws restricting a business’s ability to hire illegals.  Illegals come here due to the draw of jobs.  Businesses love ‘em because they often work below minimum wage, and don’t complain about things like OSHA requirements.  Fine – regulate the businesses better and we’ll have fewer illegal immigrants.

Since then, President Obama has gotten more involved, and Nancy Pelosi (who love her or hate her will go down in history as one of the most effective Speakers of the House in recent memory) started working on her colleagues and the odds went up significantly.  In the past week, it looked almost certain that the House would pass the Senate’s bill and then fix the worst budgetary issues in reconciliation.  It was looking so certain, that the ignorant cretins in the teaparty were out in force, spitting and hurling racist and homophobic comments at legislators.

In spite of all that happened, last night the House did vote to pass the Senate bill.  Then came a Republican motion to recommit the reconciliation bill in an effort to spike the whole thing by driving a wedge between the pro-choice and anti-abortion wedges of the Democratic party.  That failed after Bart Stupak gave an impassioned speech saying that he believed that the current senate language plus the president’s executive order did uphold the Hyde amendment and that the bill was pro-life.  In his words, the bill was pro-life because it not only protected children before they were born, but it helped to ensure that their mothers received pre- and post-natal care, that the children would have insurance and that we know that children and families with insurance are healthier than those without.

Over the past few months, I’ve called Stupak a wanker on more than one occasion, but last night he stepped up and helped to pass health care reform for everyone.  After the vote to recommit, I went to bed (it was after 11pm and I was a bit tired), but the reconciliation bill was voted upon and also passed!

What’s next?  Well, the senate will probably pass the reconciliation bill today.  That will clean up the crap that they had to stick into the bill in order to overcome a republican filibuster.  The President will sign the bill Tuesday.  Then we’ll start seeing some changes.  The bill was begin to close the doughnut hole for drug coverage that the Republicans put into Medicare Part D.  It will begin to limit the insurance companies’ ability to shaft policy holders.  And by 2014, we’ll see the mandate that everyone must have insurance coverage, even if it is subsidized for the poor. Sometime between now and 2014, Democrats will hopefully start to improve the bill.  We still may not get to single payer any time soon, but we might get a public option.

From my standpoint, not too much will change.  I’ll continue to receive insurance through my company.  The congressional budget office (CBO) projects that my company’s costs for insurance will go down about 3%.  Best of all, I stop having to worry about losing insurance if I lose my job or decide to change jobs.  Hell, this even gives me some freedom to consider starting my own business without worrying as much about how to afford health insurance.  All in all, passing HCR was an amazing effort and I’m proud to have watched it happen.

[1] FWIW, this is why I still consider myself to be an Independent, even though I almost always vote Democratic – the Democrats are just too fearful of the political consequences of their own popular platform planks?!  Personally, I prefer a much more muscular liberal set of policies than the Democrats are usually willing to consider… even if they agree that those policies would be better for the country.

1. One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on voodoo tinkle on trickle down economics?  Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use.  Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe.  Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots.  Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill.  What about Madison?  The dude practically wrote the Constitution.  Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
2. And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity.  Sure, I was bussed in elementary school.  It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school.  Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students.  That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

<sigh> Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances.  They seem to capture the mood.

Now, in fairness, the sheriff claims that the program is not a militia, but:

will provide for self-sufficiency in the event of a manmade or natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Exodus will take local volunteers, train them and use them in response to a catastrophic disaster in the area. These volunteers will work in conjunction with the Bossier Sheriff’s Office to secure and protect viable resources in such an event.

For the record, this is B.S.  The sheriff wants the operation to sound like an adult version of the Boy Scouts where his parish will “always be prepared.”  But I was a cub scout, I’m pretty certain that I would have stayed on for the Boy Scouts if we were going to have access to “the war wagon”  with a .50 caliber  machine gun mounted on top.

Apparently, the militia concerned citizens are mostly past middle age [no!] white [really?!] men [shocked!!].  Women will be given the support roles and apparently, the five black members of the militia operation will be in charge of stepping and fetching [okay, i made that last one up].

The sad part is that things seem worse in Louisiana than they were 16+ years ago when I left.  But maybe I just hear the worst of it from here.  Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the social and political environment until after I left.  That last option has a lot of support: hell, I voted for Ross Perot in ’92

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow.  FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected.  The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town.  So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

A quick note on the bill.  Put me in the camp with folks who wanted something better, but regard the senate bill as a significant step forward.  Specifically, I would love to see something like a single payer system.  People seem pretty happy with Medicare (wasn’t a common teabagger cry: “keep the government out of my Medicare!”?), so gradually expanding Medicare eligibility to younger people, eventually allowing a person of any age to buy into Medicare seems like a good idea.   We would still need to fix the republican Medicare Part D prohibition on negotiation with drug companies, but that’s minor.

Failing single payer, what I really would like to see are controls on how hard the insurance companies can screw you (currently hard enough to make you want to scream “green balloons“), and then provide subsidies to allow more people to buy insurance.  Well, that’s what we got.  Sure, there’s a purchasing mandate – you must buy insurance, but that’s pretty reasonable.

So, it’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good start and will help literally millions of people and will literally save tens of thousands of lives each year.  That’s a good first step.  There’s nothing that says that we can’t improve the bill over the next decade.  That’s what has happened with every other expansion of the social safety net for the past 60+ years, from social security to medicare.  There is no progressive rapture.  We won’t pass a bill and then be taken up to liberal heaven or achieve social nirvana.  There aren’t 72 hippie virgins waiting for us at the signing of any piece of legislation.  And neither mankind nor its societies are perfectible.  But both mankind and society is subject to continuous improvement.  We can make things better and this bill is another step in that process.

Wow!  How do the republicans manage to achieve such amazing results?  Simple, what they lack in sense, they make up for in strict adherence to ideology.  Free market principles baby.  Do they regulate insurance companies regarding rescission?  Nope, instead they would create the same sort of race to the bottom that we have for credit cards.  Ever wondered why most credit card companies are based in either Delaware or South Dakota?  Simple, those states have passed laws that screw consumers.  Since the credit card market is deregulated, Delaware and South Dakota can screw the whole country and not just their own citizens.  Under the republican plan, you would be looking at the same thing for health insurance.

Awesome!

[1] In the 80s, lots of things were “awesome” to me, and I was very serious about it.  Sometime in the past decade, I’ve taken to using the word again, but with 100% more sarcasm.  Things are now “awesome” in the same sense as 80s hair metal bands are awesome: think Winger.

One thing that I have noticed in working with the others on the non-profit is that learning styles and communication styles seem to be closely related.  You can divide learning styles (among other ways) into verbal vs visual learners.  Verbal learners prefer to hear things explained to them.  whereas visual learners prefer things to be written down.  Based on some of our recent experiences, I think that this plays into communication styles.  And it’s communication styles which are (occasionally) biting us.

We’ve got two people (including me) who have a strong visual preference – we like email for communication.  We have one person who exhibits a strong verbal preference (prefers the phone or in-person communication) and one who has no strong preference either way.  On a couple of recent occasions, we’ve had some missed communication.  Our verbal communicator will say something or mention a project or deadline and expect that the rest of us have kept up.  Our email/visual communicators don’t catch these verbal references and do the same thing with respect to email.

I was talking to our verbal communicator (by phone, of course! – she called me after I emailed her) about this and mentioned that I don’t ever catch the details when she’s talking.  At the last board meeting, she had mentioned a project and I *assumed* that if there were deadlines, they would be sent out in email.  In fact, I don’t ever consider anything to be real until I see it written down.  It’s just how I think.  People might *talk* about a lot of things, but until I see them commit some details to something written (email, memo, etc.), I don’t think they mean it.  After I described this to our verbal communicator, she confessed that she often never reads the details of the email that our visual communicators send.  In other words, in the same way that I don’t give enough consideration to non-visual communication, she doesn’t give enough consideration to non-verbal communication.

All in all, this isn’t the worst problem that a group of people can have.  I think the most important thing is to recognize these differences and to know that if you want to be certain that your message is received, you have to consider the expected medium for your audience.  (shock!)

Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 9-2 decision that restores a great portion of the 4th Amendment’s right to protection against unreasonable search and seizure in an electronic context.

Caveat lector, I am not a lawyer and I’ve never played one on TV.  Moreover, I haven’t finished reading the dissenting opinions and I’m almost certainly missing some of the nuances here.  In a nutshell, the government had evidence, sufficient to obtain a warrant, about 10 players and steroid use.  Based on this evidence and the warrant, the prosecutors were able to search BALCO for information about those 10 players.  BALCO maintains all records on their computers, of course.

Now, I’ve had experience with these types of searches.  The government never takes what’s just in their warrant.  The defined search *process* always allows them to take the whole computer or the whole hard drive, or more often than not, an image of the whole hard drive.  The reasoning is that information pertaining to the search could be hidden, or their could be some form of booby trap or the data could be encrypted or …

So, the prosecutor in the steroids case took the whole directory in which there was a file containing drug tests of MLB players.  The file itself contained information about far more than the 10 players named in the warrant.  So, rather than taking the 10 rows of the spreadsheet, rather than taking just the one file, the prosecutor took a directory containing the results of thousands of drug tests.

The prosecutor then (as I understand it) went jurisdiction shopping until he found a judge willing to grant a new warrant for information about 104 players, based on the information found in the spreadsheet.  The argument being that once they had access to the spreadsheet, or the directory, or even the computer, the additional information was in plain sight.  Several judges believed that the prosecutor intentionally wrote the process for executing the search warrant in such a way that he could *expand* the scope of the investigation by introducing evidence based on this plain sight doctrine in order to find new players to prosecute.

What’s interesting is that this seems fairly normal to many of us.  Of course the prosecutor will search your whole hard drive, of course they will bring new charges, etc.  The problem is that a) BALCO itself was not the subject of the prosecution, and b) this IS NOT the way things work in the tangible world.  Prosecutors are exploiting the new(ish) electronic domain to gain access to information they wouldn’t have if files were stored on paper.

Apparently (I need to look into this), the relevant doctrine in the physical world is the United States vs Tamura, 1982.  In this case, the object of a search was stored in a file cabinet.  It was not feasible to search that file cabinet in the office, so the prosecutors obtained access to it, with the requirement that they only pull information relevant to their warrant – even if they stumbled across additional criminal information.

The majority in the 9th Circuit decision believe that a sensible application of Tamura to an electronic domain means that information/documents stored in proximity to the information sought in the warrant is *not* in plain view.  And they are correct.  If information in adjacent files in a file cabinet are not in plain view, then neither is information stored electronically in adjacent files, folders or computers.

Explicitly, the justices stated:

In general, we adopt Tamura’s solution to the problem of necessary over-seizing of evidence: When the government wishes to obtain a warrant to examine a computer hard drive or electronic storage medium in searching for certain incriminating files, or when a search for evidence could result in the seizure of a computer, see, e.g., United States v. Giberson, 527 F.3d 882 (9th Cir. 2008), magistrate judges must be vigilant in observing the guidance we have set out throughout our opinion, which can be summed up as follows:

1. Magistrates should insist that the government waive reliance upon the plain view doctrine in digital evidence cases. See p. 11876 supra.

2. Segregation and redaction must be either done by specialized personnel or an independent third party. See pp. 11880-81 supra. If the segregation is to be done by government computer personnel, it must agree in the warrant application that the computer personnel will not disclose to the investigators any information other than that which is the target of the warrant.

3. Warrants and subpoenas must disclose the actual risks of destruction of information as well as prior efforts to seize that information in other judicial fora. See pp. 11877-78, 11886-87 supra.

4. The government’s search protocol must be designed to uncover only the information for which it has probable cause, and only that information may be examined by the case agents. See pp. 11878, 11880-81 supra.

5. The government must destroy or, if the recipient may lawfully possess it, return non-responsive data, keeping the issuing magistrate informed about when it has done so and what it has kept. See p. 11881-82 supra.

As someone who has participated in prosecutorial searches, these strike me as eminently sensible guidelines.  The first states that there’s no such thing as plain view in computer cases – each piece of information is in its own separate space.  To consider otherwise is to allow every piece of electronic equipment in the world to be searched since they are all connected via the Internet.  The second states that the prosecutor shouldn’t be the one doing the search, b/c the searching personnel *will* wind up seeing information that isn’t related to the warrant.  The problem is that since nothing is in plain view (can you tell what does a hard drive contain by looking at the physical device?), an in-depth search is required to fulfill the warrant, but that search will violate the terms of the warrant if all of the information is shared with the prosecutor.  The third states that prosecutors can’t *overestimate* the risk of booby traps, deadfalls, etc. that would destroy data.  There was no reason to think there were such in the BALCO computers and therefore, a full copy of their hard drives was not required.  The fourth is pretty plain – the process/protocol must be restricted to what the government is allowed to find.  And the fifth says that the prosecutor can’t keep things that it found that it wasn’t supposed to have.

All in all, a very reasonable balance of 4th Amendment rights in a digital context – no matter what Orin Kerr might say. Good news on the electronic privacy front… for once.

There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme.  The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service.  But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request.  Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down.  The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies.  The zombies win.

What makes the DDoS attack so difficult to defend against is that each and every request coming in, looks like a legitimate request.  The problems are: a) the core of the request is a lie (at the direction of the attacker, the zombie has forged the network traffic), and b) the sheer quantity of bogus requests – one or two could be handled easily, 10s of thousands not so much.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing the exact same thing when it comes to creating good policies in the U.S.: a distributed denial of service attack.

The creation of good policies requires discussion.  Ideally, arguments will be presented, the merits debated and evaluated with respect to a set of shared norms, and these discussions will shape the eventually enacted policy.  But on every important issue, this is not occurring.  Instead, we have a group of reactionaries (they’ll call themselves conservatives) who try to prevent the important discussions from ever occurring. Take two issues, global warming and health insurance.

On global warming, we could have a fairly important discussion about the expected costs of global warming, the probabilities of certain events occurring, the expected costs of limiting CO2 in order to limit the effects.  We could discuss the moral issues involved, from the increased rates of disease due to higher temperatures, the possibility of spending more money now on certain social problems, and the moral worth of species that will go extinct because of a changing climate.  There are even scientific questions that remain unresolved.  But instead of having any of those discussions, conservatives persist in lying.  Those lies are then redistributed on Fox News and in conservative publications.  The purpose of the lies isn’t to have a real discussion with respect to a valid scientific point.  The purpose is to attack the very idea that there can be a discussion.  The purpose is to make people believe that instead of global warming being a policy issue, it’s a political one.

A year ago, I was at a family reunion and sat down with my father and uncle who hold advanced degrees in physical sciences (masters and phd respectively).  The topic came around to global warming – perhaps one of them made a derisive comment about it, I don’t recall.  The next thing I knew, these two very intelligent men turned into DDoS zombies.  They brought up a number of talking points that they had heard, but hadn’t actually verified:

• “Ice cores have shown that temperature rises before CO2 levels.” Historically true, but completely irrelevant.  We know of the causal reason that an increase in CO2 will increase temperature.  A doubling of CO2 will raise the temperature by roughly 3 degrees Celsius.  However, no one has said that the only reason that the temperature can rise is due to CO2 – there are certainly other reasons.  Why temperature rose in those cases is a legitimate scientific question, but rather than discussing that issue, the right uses a misinterpretation of the idea to attack the possibility of global warming.
• “CO2 only contributes 3% of the effects of greenhouse gases.” Alternatively, you’ll hear that water vapor is 97% or 98% of the total effect.  Nope.  This is a pure, flat out lie.  I spent a few hours trying to track down the source.  It turns out that it’s not a scientific result.  3% never appeared in a peer-reviewed paper.  Instead, someone reviewing one of the IPCC reports decided that the report said 3% (it didn’t) and ever since, right-wing news has thrown around that number to dispute the very possibility that rising levels of CO2 could contribute to global warming.

There were a few other talking points they had and there are dozens more to be found online.  My favorites often come from a site called Watt’s Up With That.  Favorites because they completely demonstrate that people are *actively* constructing lies to deceive the public on global warming.  You read a post there and you go to the original sources that they cite and sure enough, they’ve either taken it out of context or they’ll take the worse of all possible predictions.  My favorite is when the push what amount to linear rather than the actual (exponential) projections of climate change and then argue that because the actual temperatures don’t fall into their bogus projections, climate change is false.

The point is that none of those talking points are serious attempts to debate the science.  They are merely an attempt to overwhelm the dialog with incorrect information in order to delay or kill good policy.  Hell, they aren’t even arguments, at best they are arglets. Fragments of an argument with no real merit.

The arglets against health care reform are even worse.  A handful of people literally make things up and rather than having a discussion about the very real ways our health care system is falling apart, the news media (Fox and others) goes off on these tangents for days.  Consider:

• “death panels” What a load of crap.  There’s no such thing in the health care bill.  Which is of course, not to say that these things don’t exist.  Every insurance company has a death panel.  Or more accurately, insurance companies consider the amount of rescission activity when evaluating employees, i.e., you’ve paid your premiums for years and when you try to use the policy and the company drops your coverage.
• “in <scary socialist country of your choice> people have to wait <some large number> weeks for <some medical procedure>.” We hear that one a lot.  Usually, the country is England or Canada, the time is 6+ weeks and it’s a hip replacement.  Of course, this arglet is also untrue, but is interesting in being untrue on multiple levels.  First of course, is the basic lie – delays for surgery. A small nugget of truth – this was a small problem pre-2000, before the British started increasing the amount of money for the NHS.  Then the larger lie – the implication that it’s better here in the U.S. under your insurance.  Then finally, the mother of all lies – that anyone’s even proposing a single payer system like the NHS anyway.  “Oh my god, some other system that no one here is seriously considering has wait times that are as bad as some of ours with insurance, but not nearly as bad as if you have no insurance and have to wait until you’re on medicare to obtain the surgery.”  To borrow a line from a glibertarian idiot – give me a break.
• Perhaps my favorite recent arglet: “Stephen Hawking never would have survived to be a brilliant physicist under the British system.” Given that he is a British citizen and has always received his health care via the NHS, this is completely crazy, literally divorced from reality, batshit insane.

I could go on and on.  For any topic you can name, there are people promoting lies in order to prevent good policies from being enacted.

Now here’s the part where I tell you the good news based on my DDoS analogy.  Tough – there isn’t any.  There are a few approaches to dealing with a computer DDoS:

1. Ignore it.  Build capacity so that all requests, legitimate and bogus can be serviced.  This is unlikely to work.  The media has a short attention span, hell they’ve got ADHD.  While the majority of arglets are debunked within minutes of their creation, they continue to live on in the right-wing zombies and the media is incapable of ignoring that.
2. Identify the source of the arglets and take ‘em out.  In computer terms, this often means tracking down the source of the DDoS commands and arresting them.  For dialog, this means identifying the source of the arglets and ignoring them and their zombies.  But then we’re back to solution 1 and the media’s inability to call bullshit.
3. Ensure that all potential zombie computers are patched, i.e, ensure that potential zombies are innoculated/education against the lies.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in a computer context – too many lazy people with computers that they don’t want to take care of.  And it’s unlikely to work in a political context – too many lazy people who can’t be bothered to conduct basic fact check (or even sanity checking) before propagating a lie.

In short, there’s no way for the current political process to work properly while the right wing and various corporate interests are conducting a denial of service attack.  Unfortunately, the only real solution is to circumvent the dialog and pass good legislation regardless of what’s in the press.  For 16+ years, Bill Kristol has advised the right to prevent such a thing.  “Don’t allow good legislation on health care.”  People would like good legislation and would realize that the republicans were a bunch of lying con men who wanted to shovel government money (aka public funds,  aka your money and mine) to corporate interests.  The republicans have gotten good at this and now the only way to pass decent legislation is to ignore them, which is easier and easier given that they’ve flat out stated that they won’t vote for their own compromises.  Screw ‘em.  Health care is too important.  Pass it, pass it now.  If you won’t support a single payer option, then at least allow people the choice of a having either their current insurance or a public option that’ll be better, cheaper and more efficient than what we’ve got now.

In celebration of all you crazy right wing nuts out there, I threw my own tea party tonight:

From left to right, Blue wants to restore the gold standard.  Java (the cat) is upset that, while he only earns the median income of $35,000 or so right now, he might have to pay an extra $0.04 for every dollar he earns over $250,000… assuming he ever earns that much.  And Mr. Bun-bun?  Well, he doesn’t really have a grievance.  He’s just here for the tea-bagging.  Note the carrot and apparent oral fixation.  Now there’s a true republican for you!

Dealing specifically with Gerson’s opinion piece, the facts are that he’s just wrong.  He notes that Christopher Ruhm, a researcher at UNC-G, found that, while mental health problems increased (yay?), physical health improved during recessions.  Of course, that’s not exactly a majority opinion in public health.  Other researchers have noted that as many people start eating fast food as start cooking healthfully at home.  Moreover, gym memberships decline and cheap vices increase.  Health care is often pushed aside and in the U.S., those who lose their jobs often lose their insurance and therefore much of their preventative care.  None of this suggests improved health.  Moreover, Ruhm’s study was not longitudinal – he didn’t study people before and after suffering the effects of a recession.

Gerson also claims that it is a paradox even though crime is correlated to poverty, the Great Depression was a time of lower crime rates:

There is a parallel debate about the influence of economic hard times on the nation’s moral health. Without question, the most acute social problems — crime, illegitimacy, etc. — are concentrated in areas of highest poverty. But sociologists and criminologists have long pondered an apparent paradox. During the Great Depression — with about a quarter of Americans out of work — crime and divorce declined. During the relative prosperity of the 1960s and 1970s, crime rates shot up and families broke down.

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. “One reasonable hypothesis,” argues James Q. Wilson, “is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.” Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes — and that have decayed in our own. The Depression generation controlled the things it could control — including its own consumption and character.

But aparently, it’s not that great of a paradox.  Social science researchers have demonstrated that the Roosevelt administration’s relief efforts, which were intended in part to reduce crime, did have that effect. The researcher’s “estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in per capita relief spending lowered crime rates by roughly 5.6 to 10 percent at the margin.”  In other words, while families may have pulled together during the Great Depression, the social spending that allowed people to feed their families was demonstrably useful in lowering the crime rate.  The republican govenors should consider that before turning down extended unemployment benefits for their states.

So, what about savings?  People definitely need to save more.  So, why aren’t we?  For a while, the U.S. had a savings rate close to 0%, sometimes it was even negative.  Over the past couple of years, the savings rate has increased, and is now around 3%.  But wait, during a recession, we need to increase spending, that’s part of the purpose of a stimulus bill.  And given that personal spending drives the U.S. economy (roughly 65-70% of all spending), will increased savings doom us to a poor economy?  Will we all just have to get used to less?  Should we learn to enjoy the current economic levels, because that’s where we’ll always be?  Nope.  Or more accurately, hopefully no.

A part of the problem is that over the past thirty years, *real* median income for men has been roughly flat.  It’s been a little better for women, but that’s mostly because of a reduction in wage descrimination.  Household income has increased, but that’s because there are more two income households.  For thirty years, households have been improving their standard of living, first by having multiple earners, then in the nineties by investing in the stock market, then by borrowing from their homes during the real estate bubble.  Savings were certainly eaten into over that period of time.  So, the way to actually increase savings would be to allow people to improve their standard of living without borrowing – i.e., if wage gains rose at the levels of productivity gains, the median wage would be probably 50% higher.  That would allow people the ability to improve their standard of living while still saving.  Instead, we’ve seen companies hoard more cash, spend less and keep the benefits of productivity gains for the CEOs.  In part, you can see this in the weakness of the last recovery.  The recovery was weak, and took quite a long time, in part because companies refused to spend.  Consumer spending had to pull us out of the recession, and it took borrowing to do so.

So what about the last idea, that the recession will help us to live a simpler and more enjoyable life?  Unfortunately, it’s not true.  More to the point, the amount of spending is not necessarily correlated to “simpleness.”  You can have a robust economy wherein people are spending money on things that matter to them.  For example, K and I don’t go to movies and we seldom eat out.  However, we probably spend more each year on books than most people do on movies.  We don’t eat out, but we do eat well.  Other people I know whose lives I admire make an effort to eat at locally owned restaurants or spend money at the farmer’s markets or on their hobbies.  All of these people are making a useful economic contribution while still living an enjoyable and “simple” life.

On the flip side, just because you have less to spend doesn’t mean that you will magically start saving more and leading a simpler life.  Sure, there’s less money available, but that could just as easily mean that you stop visiting local restaurants and start eating fast food.  It could mean that instead of telecommuting, you have to work multiple jobs at different locations around town in order to make ends meet.  Simplicity is a lifestyle choice and is not well correlated with financial situation.

Everyone has to live within their means, but as a society, our goal should be to increase those means.  We shouldn’t have a country where 20% of the benefits of society go to the top 1%.  We should work to ensure that all people have better access to the benefits of society.  We shouldn’t be “rooting” for a recession to teach us moral values.  If people choose to live a simple life and to save more, great.  If not, that’s their choice too, regardless, a recession is good for no one.

I have no problems listening to republicans.  Hell, if I want moral advice, who better to turn to than a bunch of public bathroom sex soliciting, diaper wearing, drug using pedophiles?  At the very least, it’s good for a laugh.  But policy?  Why the hell would I listen to them about policy?  “OMG, John McCain has said he opposes the stimulus plan.”  Really?!  Why do I care?  He ran on a platform oppossing the types of stimulus being proposed.  It would have been shocking if he didn’t oppose it – the mother of all flip-flops if you will.

At the end of the day, Obama won the election in large part by proposing to do exactly what he’s doing.  Provide a massive stimulus plan to get the economy out of the mess that it’s in.  Voters expected that the plan would be based in a reality (which means that the magical tax cutting fairy isn’t going to somehow increase government revenues).  So what do we have?  We’ve got a plan that emphasizes infrastructure building, money for states and extended unemployment benefits.  Hrm, I wonder how that stacks up against tax cuts as a way of stimulating the economy?

Well, as it so happens, we have a way of measuring these things.  Mark Zandi at Moody’s Economy.com recently evaluated a number of different stimulus measures and determined their effectiveness in stimulating the economy per dollar spent.  The EPI put this into a wonderful graph:

What we see here is that the tax cuts most favored by republicans are also the least effective.  There are some forms of tax cuts that provide moderate stimulus (i.e., greater than $1 of stimulus for each $1 spent), but that the best ways to stimulate the economy are food stamps, unemployment benefits, infrastructure spending and aid to states.  Not surprisingly, these are the forms of stimulus that are most likely to be spent.  If you gave me $500 in tax cuts, I’ll save it; net stimulus: $0.  If you ensure that a family can eat by providing an additional $500 in food stamp aid, I guarantee that it will be spent at a grocery store and provide more economic stimulus than the original $500 expenditure.

All of which is a long winded way of telling the republicans to please shut up and let sane people clean up the mess they’ve made of the country.

Okay, it is true that as a country, we were essentially borrowing money from overseas in order to buy overseas products.  Essentially, borrowing from the Chinese in order to buy their stuff.  The mechanisms were somewhat complicated, home owners typically were borrowing from their homes.  As home prices rose, due to low rates and bubble psychology, people found that they could refinance their homes or take out home equity lines of credit that could then be used, not for home improvements, but for general lifestyle expenses.  Since median incomes have not risen in a decade, this isn’t too surprising.  (As an aside, I was in a conversation last week with someone who claimed that the whole recession could be over if the news would act as a good propaganda arm and declare that it was.  People would start spending and the economy would get moving.  I pointed out that he was wrong because most of the capital financing the economy was borrowed from homes, etc., and that wages hadn’t increased.  In other words, the consumer has no money to restart the economy.  He had to agree that was true.)

So, I agree that China (and other foreign countries) were necessary to the bubble, but does that mean that their “excess” savings caused it as the article implies?  No, there are more than a handful of things wrong with the article:

1. It takes an uncritical look at the idea there is a savings glut.  I didn’t note any refutations of Bernanke’s thesis.
2. The article’s URL ends in “26addiction.html” and in a single word, it sums up much of the article.  But this is a sad sort of exculpation for the U.S.  Sticking with the same metaphor, it’s arguing that the a drug dealer is responsible for all of the actions of a junkie and the junkie bears no responsibility.
3. Switching from the “addiction” metaphor, it’s bad supply-side theory applied to credit.  Okay, it’s true that lower rates will attract more demand from the pool of potential borrowers.  And I’ll buy that having more creditors will drive down rates.  But that’s not what happened here.  In this case, Greenspan artificially held down lending rates through the Federal Reserve.  In other words, it wasn’t a supply-side rate cut driving up demand, it was an artificial rate cut that drove up demand and the Chinese stepped in to meet that demand.
4. Probably more than anything else, I find the idea that there is a savings “glut” in the rest of the world (particularly China) particularly annoying.  It completely disregards recent history.  Savings imbalance, I’ll believe.  But to suggest that the Chinese are saving too much is completely loony.  At the same time Bernanke was saying that others were saving too much, the U.S. savings rate fell to 0%.  If there’s an imbalance, it’s more likely that the U.S. was to blame for increasing its borrowing.
5. Finally, there are all sorts of little oddities in the facts and nuance of the article.  For example, there’s a general feel of “red-baiting” to the article. Or that the article notes that the Chinese now hold $2 trillion in U.S. debt, out of the, what, $11 trillion in debt we’re in now?

I do agree with the article that it would be good if China stopped pegging their currency to the dollar.  But I’m not certain how much it would help the problem being discussed here.  It might make us less likely to borrow from the Chinese, but at the same time, I don’t think it would have decreased overall U.S. borrowing.

Dear Editors,

I have read with some alarm your recent stories describing a dramatic change to our way of life.  Specifically, I refer to those stories of our poor benighted multi-millionaires and billionaires who are having to downgrade their lifestyle in response to the crash of the financial markets and the banking industry.

As we all know, what has made America great over the past 30 years is the increasing increasing income inequality whereby those at the top of the income ladder make an ever increasing amount of money while the median income has stagnated.  Without these top income earners, all motivation and striving goes out of our populous; leaving us a nation of whiners.  And yet, every day, we hear stories of high powered financiers, who had been making millions each year, now contemplating the need to sell that third vacation home in order to make ends meet.

While I salute the republican administration’s efforts to save the wealth of the top 1/10th of a percent through the preservation of the salaries, benefits and bonuses of financial executives while beggaring retired auto workers, I believe that this effort has not been bold enough and that the situation calls for direct action.

Toward this end, I propose that the country establish a registry of multi-millionaires and billionaires in need.  Those making less than $100,000 a year should then be encouraged (by force if need be!) to contribute 10% of their gross earning to support these beleaguered souls who are the backbone of our economy.  This Adopt-a-Billionaire program would have the effect of immediately raising the standard of living for these poor souls, while reducing the incomes of more than 80% of Americans; thus ensuring that the salary inequities which have made this country great will remain in place for the benefit of the next generation.

Respectfully,

…

Supporters of Proposition 8 claim that the act was necessary to help defend the traditional institution of marriage.  Specifically, they looked to the Bible and its condemnation of homosexuality.  They claimed that recognizing homosexual marriage undermined the biblical concept of marriage.

Now, I’ve read a good chunk of the Bible over the years, and I’m pretty certain that what’s represented therein is not really what Prop 8 supporters had in mind.  Unless of course, they want to see the reinstatement of polygamy, at least for those that can afford it (hey, I could support two wives and it is traditional!), after all, Solomon had 700 wives and another 300 concubines.  As a side note, I can just imagine how that conversation would go with K:  honey, I think we can afford a concubine – how about it?  <smack>

So if Prop 8 doesn’t really do anything to promote the Biblical understanding of marriage, what about protecting heterosexual marriages?  I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve been married for over fifteen years now and I can’t see any way that the possibility of gay people, some of them friends, most of them that I’ve never met could possibly threaten my marriage.  I can’t even see how the possibility of gay marriage could threaten potential marriages (i.e., the institution of marriage).  What, Bristol Palin was going to get married to her baby’s father, but now because gay couples in Connecticut can get married, she won’t?

Marriage in the U.S. is essentially a legal contract between two consenting people.  That contract can optionally be sanctified (made holy) when blessed in a religious ceremony.  But the religious ceremony itself is truely optional.  It doesn’t matter which religion has sanctified your marriage, you can opt not to have it sanctified at all by having the contract witnessed and signed by a justice of the peace.  In our case, K and I were married by my grandfather, a (Lutheran?) minister, in a non-denominational church.  The wedding ceremony itself can be important in that it publicly recognizes the marriage and encourages the observers to assist the newlyweds as they start their lives together.  That community support can be important when trying to adjust to married life.

Again, none of this is threatened by gay marriage.  If anything, the institution of marriage is stronger for being more inclusive.

But here’s the thing.  We did just witness one new threat to the institution of marriage – Proposition 8 itself.  To my knowledge, this is the first time that marriages recognized by a state have been annulled by the state [1].  18,000 couples had legal marriage contracts, signed and recognized by the state of California.  Those 18,000 couples have now been unmarried. This establishes a precedent that should worry anyone who is married.

Imagine that we took the Bible’s admonishments about divorce or adultery seriously.  The Bible traditionally doesn’t recognize divorce (which leads to the Catholic church’s crazy annulment system) and calls for the stoning of adulterers.  What if those traditional concepts became enshrined in law or the California constitution?  Malachi 2:16 – “I hate divorce, says the Lord God of Israel.”  Matthew 19:6, “So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

Under the marriage threatening precedent of Prop 8, it would be entirely reasonable to further defend marriage by excluding anyone who had previously been divorced from remarrying.  Moreover, we could go further and say that marriage is between one man and one woman, neither of whom has been previously married.  All of the sudden, several million marriages could be dissolved.

I suspect that such an amendment/law is unlikely, after all, there is a bigger constituency of divorced people than gay people.  But on the merits, a no-divorcee amendment isn’t any crazier than Prop 8 and should serve as a reminder for why religious views of marriage should not impinge upon the legal contract that is a marriage.

……………………………………….

[1] The closest comparison I can come to would be the anti-polygamy laws aimed at the Mormon Church in the 19th century, but even there, I don’t think that the original polygamous marriages had been recognized by the states before the laws’ passage explicitly stated that they wouldn’t be recognized.  The comparison is also ironic in that it was the Mormon church that largely bankrolled the Yes on Prop 8 movement.

Still not official from the Election Board, but the AP has canvased all of the counties and found that there aren’t enough provisional ballots for McCain to overcome Obama’s 13000+ vote lead.

Amazing

At a certain point, the first parent-teacher conferences occur and my mother goes in expecting to meet someone just like her: a blonde haired, blue eyed woman in her late twenties or early thirties.  So it’s a bit of a surprise when Mrs. Smith is a 50-ish black woman.

There are two morals to the story:

1. I’m definitely a Myers-Briggs intuitive (N) type as opposed to sensing (S). 
2. As a child, race didn’t even enter my mind.  A person’s race was so completely irrelevant that it’s not clear that I even noticed it.

Over the years, I’ve tried to live up to the example set by my five year old self.  I haven’t always succeeded, but I’ve always tried.

In spite of that, I never did expect that the U.S. would elect a black president – at least not this soon.  I didn’t think that we would be able to look past race until, at least, the baby boomer generation died off.  Not that the baby boomers are racists, they made enormous strides toward equality.  But at the same time, they grew up in a world where there were segregated lunch counters, segregated water fountains, segregated bathrooms and schools.  They grew up in a world where the lynching of a black man was considered acceptable to many people.  That’s a kind of ingrained experience that’s hard to grow out of.

But yet, Obama did win.  Sure, he didn’t win the majority of white voters, but he won more of them than did John Kerry four years ago.  The electorate looked past Obama’s race and voted for the man they thought would take the country in the right direction.

My inner five year old wouldn’t have thought a black president was that surprising, but with thirty-plus years of experience, I’m amazed and thrilled that there might be some part of that five year old in everyone.

• It’s raining, but the fall colors are wonderful.
• There were a fair number of cars parked at the polling place.  I took one of only about 4 or 5 free spots
• The Obama people were prepared for the rain – they had decent sized open sided tents set up to stand under while handing out literature and talking to voters
• There were about 10-15 people voting when I arrived
• The elections officials were prepared for crowds.  Instead of the usual split of the alphabet into 3 or 4 lines, I think there were 6.  They also seemed to have extra help on hand, including some high school students.
• The folks handing out the ballots mentioned that polling had been steady so far.
• When I left around 8:45/8:50, I was only the 161st voter

I suspect that across NC, things will be similar.  We had such a huge number of people cast ballots early (some 35-40% of all registered voters) that I would imagine we won’t have too many problems with lines, etc.

Here’s hoping.

The irritating thing is that the political attacks on Obama, from both McCain’s campaign and conservatives in general, are constantly shifting.  First you hear, “Obama’s a Muslim.”  That gets debunked.  Then it’s “Obama’s preacher is a radical Christian.”  Again, someone takes the time to put things into context and debunk the lies and the topic changes again.  “Obama’s is a celebrity.”  Er, never mind that this is based on the number of people that want to hear him speak on policy issues and not, say, on his television or movie career (try comparing the IMDB entries for McCain and Obama sometime).  Turn around and then it’s – “well, no one goes to an Obama speech for anything but the rock concerts.”?!  No, wait, we’re back to “celebrity.”  Then he’s “inexperienced” except when compared to Palin.  etc., etc.

It’s like the Obama attackers have the attention spans of squirrels on meth.  For gods’ sake, pick an attack and stick with it.

Of course, you see this in other contexts too.  Perhaps my (least?) favorite is climate change.  “No, global warming is not real.”  “Okay, maybe global warming is happening, but it’s not caused by people.”  “Okay, it is caused by people, but isn’t anything we can stop.”  Oh wait, then we turn back to, “98% of the green house effect is due to water vapor.”  No it isn’t.  “CO2 lags temperature in ice cores!”  True, but irrelevant.  It’s almost impossible for the lay person to debate the contrarians since they keep shifting their line of attack.  It’s all still wrong, but unless you’re carrying an encyclopedia of climate change, you just aren’t going to be able to counter the crazy.  It’s whack-a-mole with arguments.  The sad part is that the skeptics aren’t stupid.  Many are very intelligent people whose politics (for some reason) cause them to be intellectually lazy about this issue.  Arguments that they wouldn’t accept from a high school student are suddenly too obvious to dispute.

I’ve even heard from a few skeptics in scientific fields and they seem to assume that either a) climate science isn’t a real science, or b) climate scientists just aren’t as smart as the political talking heads you see on the television, or c) climate scientists are all in on a giant conspiracy to keep getting funded and so they are lying about the true state of the world.   Just bizarre.

Bringing it back to politics, you see the same things in McCain’s actual campaign.  He keeps changing his proposals.  Let’s see, during last week’s debate, we heard about a new $300b bailout to help home owners.  Then it turned out that the bulk of the money was yet another bad bank bailout plan (the govt would be buying the loans from the banks).  That got dropped.  Then this weekend, we heard that McCain was going to have a new policy proposal geared toward the middle class.  It was going to include tax cuts on dividends and capital gains.  Huh?!  Now, I consider myself and K to be upper middle class, but I guarantee you that cutting taxes on capital gains and dividends will not help us to any significant degree.  Then on Sunday night, the McCain campaign announced that it wasn’t going to announce any new policy proposals this week.  But now today we learn that McCain is proposing a new plan that features those exact same tax cuts that we part of the non-plan from this weekend.

Seriously.

McCain’s campaign is acting much in the same way I would in a boxing match.  They are doing the political equivalent of screaming like a child and running around the ring, hoping that the punches will land where they were and not where they’ve currently shifted.  It’s pathetic.

All of this makes me wonder what kind of brain rot has infected the republican party.  Did it start with the appeals to anti-intellectualism and rot it’s way up to the policies?  Did it start with crazy policies which attracted anti-intellectuals?  David Brooks seems to think that the republicans just drove away all of their intellectuals and this is what’s left.  I suppose I can buy that.

Anyway, I think it’s time to make some red zinger and see if I can get that 3d fractal screensaver working.

I spend the last week extremely pissed off about the bailout. Here were a bunch of idiots absurdly inflating the price of housing, with other idiots actually loaning them money to do so, more idiots treating the bad loans as assets and still more idiots insuring them against loss under ridiculous assumptions. It’s not really a surprise that the whole thing blew up. The only surprise is that it took as long as it did. Hell – 5 years ago in late 2003 when K and I bought our current place, we were worried that there was a housing bubble inflating prices beyond what the properties were really worth. And this was in North Carolina which didn’t have the hottest housing market.

But here we are, we’ve got banks going defunct left and right and we’ve got republicans arguing that they really, really have always supported more federal regulation. The latter is one of the signs of the apocalypse for those keeping score at home. So along comes Paulson saying that he needs $700 billion to keep this from truly going in the crapper. The reason I’m so pissed off is that I agree.

Let’s put it this way – the U.S. economy (GDP) is on the order of $14 trillion. In other words, the bailout proposal was 5% of GDP. Now in real terms $700 billion or 5% of GDP are insanely huge amounts of money. Something like $7,000 per household. But if the economy collapses or if we go into a deeper recession than we otherwise would have, 5% of GDP is chump change. The economy could easily slow 5% in a year (or 2.5% each over two years, etc.). In other words, the proposed cure is cost effective compared to letting the disease run its course without intervention.

Given that we need some form of intervention to prevent a complete meltdown, there are a few questions that have to be addressed:

1. What is the proper size of the intervention?  How much do we need to spend?
2. How will the plan work?  How will assets be valued?  Who has oversight?  etc.
3. Who pays for it?

In all of these, the original (3 page) Paulson plan was completely inadequate.  Paulson picked the $700 billion number out of thin air.  Hell, for all I know he thought it should be 5% GDP and backed out the $700b from there.  The original plan said nothing about how the assets would be valued – essentially, the govt would likely pay the original value of the assets regardless of their actual worth.  Paulson was to have no oversight and all decisions were to be final with no appeal to judicial recourse.  Finally, for the plan to have worked, taxpayers would have to lose money which means that the benefits would primarily go to those of us with money in the stock market (401k retirement funds, etc.) or to the financial institutions themselves and the burden would fall on our standard tax system which places only a slightly higher burden on the rich than it does the rest of us.

So that plan won’t/shouldn’t fly.

What about the new plan?  On Sunday, the congress and the whitehouse finalized a new proposal.  Caveat lector – I haven’t read it yet, I’ve only looked at excerpts.  But from what I’ve seen, it is better in almost every way to the original Paulson plan.

The new bill grants the Treasury $350b up front and the rest isn’t guaranteed.  Congress will have significant oversight.  There are two ways that Paulson can buy assets: 1) conducting a reverse auction to find the true worth of the assets; or 2) essentially buy equity in the company equal to the amount of money received for taking the assets.  The former is likely to generate smaller amounts of money for the companies, but does allow them to get the bad assets off of their books.  The latter may be useful for companies in worse financial shape.  In either case, the govt is essentially getting something of value for the money it’s spending.  Oh – and companies that participate in the bailout have to agree to reductions in executive compensation which is a good thing.  I still wish they were required to participate in credit counseling – along the lines of that required for consumers under the 2005 bankruptcy law, but I might just be thinking punitively.

So, what’s not to like?  Probably quite a bit – like I said, I haven’t had a chance to read the 110 page draft.  One thing that’s probably not to like is that the bill allows the SEC to temporarily suspend Mark-to-Market accounting.  This is just dumb.  It would allow the SEC to look the other way while companies pretend that they are worth more than they really are.  It’s a way to allow the companies to claim that their assets are worth more than the market would pay for them, allowing the companies to appear healthier than they really are.  That’s not really helpful.

So, I’ll probably read through the full bill tonight, but for the most part I think I support it.  It’s not perfect, but it seems to be both necessary and significantly better than the original Paulson bill (oh, and much better than the silly House Republican proposal, but we won’t get into that).

thank you and good night

July 4th, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favourite holidays.  That may surprise some folks.  It’s not like the house is decorated in red, white and blue.  I’m not wearing a flag pin, the Pledge of Allegiance makes me uncomfortable and I’m not that into fireworks.  But external trappings aside, I consider myself to be a very patriotic person.  I just don’t define patriotism as being synonymous with “flag waving.”

Patriotism to me is not about loving your flag, or thinking that your country can do no wrong.  To me, patriotism is the love of the ideals that founded the country.  Thinking that your country can do no wrong or that you should love the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance is no more than nationalism.  If you had been born in any other country, you would be equally “patriotic” to that nation.  The United States was not born from such nationalism, instead we were founded with a belief in 18th century enlightenment values.  The first paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are filled with such ideals:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

As a country, we have not always lived up to these ideals, but it is the ideals themselves and not the trappings that are important.  This is the reason that the president is subject to the rule of law.  This is the reason that criticism of the government is a patriotic act and that refraining from such criticism when justified is an act of cowardice.  It is only when citizens criticize and elected officials act on such criticisms that the country can improve and come closer to the ideals that we were founded upon.

Have a happy 4th of July.