A legal standard for the word "news"?

Fake news is all over the real news. There's fake news that's completely fabricated, and there's fake news that's opinion claiming to be news, and there's fake news that publishes the lies of others without contradicting them. These things almost certainly turned the 2016 election, and probably affected several before that.

The government can't stop people from saying whatever they want, and rightly so. But could the government put legal limits on the use of the term "news"? We do that in all sorts of other arenas. You can sell all the partially hydrogenated palm oil you want, but you don't get to call it "chocolate"  unless it has at least some minimum cocoa content.

What would those limits look like?

News has to be accurate, at least to some reasonable degree. Outright fabrications must not be allowed, and mistakes must be corrected rapidly, preferably in the same size and context in which they were made.

Opinions are also not news. Opinion discussion should never get the label "news", or at least it should be less than some small defined fraction of the content published under "news" and clearly marked as such.

Quoting or airing the statements of others is also not "news" unless it's fact-checked. If Donald Trump is on CNN telling lies for an hour, it's little different to the public than if Wolf Blitzer was saying the same things. CNN is still putting their name on the content and calling it "news".

Or perhaps we should even include funding sources. Any organization whose funding is directly proportional to the number of subscribers or viewers it has, has a clear motivation to lie to you to keep you interested. Unfortunately that eliminates 95% of news sources. Or is that unfortunate?

Any organization or outlet violating these rules would still be able to publish. They just wouldn't be able to call themselves "news", because they wouldn't be. We would have the "Fox Political Commentary Channel".  Basically, truth in advertising.

Is there some reason this is a bad idea?

Presidential elections with proportional allocation

The electoral college is getting a lot of flack lately for being why Trump won the election. It occurred to me that the EC, as it is popularly understood, has two effects. One weights smaller states more than larger ones, which was just a pragmatic political compromise from the 1780s. But the other is winner-take-all, which is a choice the state governments make. They could give their electoral votes literally any way they want, including rolling a D20 and picking people out of the jury pool.

I decided to strip out the winner-take-all and see what would have happened if all the states used proportional allocation while retaining the constitutional weighting process. The results for the last seven elections:

Clinton: 236

Bush: 197

Perot: 105

Clinton: 267

Dole: 224

Perot: 46

Nader: 1 (California)

Bush: 263

Gore: 262

Nader: 13

Bush: 280

Kerry: 258

Obama: 289

McCain: 248

Nader: 1 (California)

Obama: 276

Romney: 261

Johnson: 1 (California)

Trump: 262
Hillary: 260
Johnson: 14
Stein: 1 (California)
McMullin: 1 (Utah)

Interestingly, four of the seven end up without a majority winner, and the others ('04, '08, '12) have very close margins. This shows that the winner-take-all effect is just as important as the constitutionally-mandated weighting effect.

In 2016, Trump still comes out on top due to the weighting, but with proportional allocation it's almost a tie, and nobody has a majority with 270. The numbers are strikingly close to 2000, actually, the last time there was a popular/electoral split.

Normally that would mean the election goes to the House, but I don't think that's what actually happens in these scenarios. The third-party electors, knowing their candidates can't possibly win, would likely throw their votes to either of the leading candidates. This would likely happen after extracting concessions of some kind, like promises of legislative priorities, or even a different VP. We could end up with a Hillary/Johnson administration, or a Kaine/Pence, or literally anything the electors could compromise on. It looks very much like a parliamentary system.

Suddenly third party votes are something besides a not-vote!

At a glance, I rather like the shape of this system. I've got no problem with weighting rural areas more than urban areas. I just have a problem with making votes not matter at all. And that's not the result of electoral college as a concept, it's entirely a state-level choice.

[Also, side note, Maine and Nebraska use some bizarre hybrid system. Two EVs to the state winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district. So you could imagine proportional for the entire state, or just proportional for the at-large votes.

In 2016, Maine went 3:1 Hillary, but goes 2:2 under either proportional plan. Nebraska went 5:0 Trump, but goes 4:1 under proportional at-large, and 3:2 under straight proportional. So the gerrymandering of the districts to favor Republicans in Nebraska keeps having an effect if we still go by congressional districts. Screw gerrymandering.]

In summary, the problems with the electoral college aren't with the electoral college. Your beef is with your state legislature, as it often is.

Open letter to the Tennessee Republican Party

Put aside the details of the candidates for a moment; the primary elections have a serious structural problem that needs to be fixed before 2020. If the Republican convention were held today, the leading candidate would have received only 34% of the votes. Put another way, two thirds of Republican voters would have voted for someone other than the winner. How can this result possibly unite any party?

This comes from a basic flaw in the most common voting system we use: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter picks exactly one. Essentially, the voter says “yes” to one candidate, and “no” to every other. This system only works if there are exactly two candidates. Otherwise you get vote splitting and division, exactly like the Republican party is seeing now. This is fundamentally why we have two parties and primaries to start with. But now the primaries themselves are seeing vote splitting.

It would be vastly better for the party to use approval voting: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter marks as many as they find acceptable. Put another way, your vote is a “yes” or a “no” on each candidate. It’s easy to understand, all voting machines already support this process, and few if any laws need to be changed. The party could have had a much more unifying and successful primary season with this approach. I hope that by 2020 the Tennessee Republican Party will adopt approval voting.

Bet you don't understand socialism

I've seen a large number of posts about Bernie Sanders, most of which show a distressing lack of understanding. I'm not some hardcore Bernie fan, I just hate misinformation. I'm writing this to respond to all of these mistaken posts at once, in order to help mitigate the damage being caused. Unknowingly repeating a lie does just as much damage as lying on purpose. If you spread misinformation, you have a moral obligation to stop. So please, if you see any of the same lies I have, don't share them. Shut them down. Now, on to the corrections:

Socialism is not communism. Communism advocates the elimination of money, property, and government. Socialism was originally conceived as an intermediate step towards communism, but it's never actually been practiced as that. There are a huge number of variants of socialism, and treating them all as if they're the same as each other and the same as theoretical communism is lazy and dishonest.

Socialism is not inherently totalitarian. The Soviet Union was a socialist dictatorship. Europe is a socialist democracy. This is why Bernie Sanders is called a democratic socialist. This is completely distinct from being a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or any other unpleasant-ist.

Democratic socialism, by definition, does not eliminate individual freedom. By every measure taken by every group, Europe is at least as free as the United States, if not more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Justice_Project#WJP_Rule_of_Law_Index_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Socialism is not a fundamental rewriting of the structure of the United States. Everything we do is socialist. Don't believe me? Suppose I told you you were required to pay taxes to fund your protection against calamity. You don't get to opt out and trust to your youth or wealth to save you; everyone is required to pay, and everyone is protected. Does this description of socialized medicine make you angry? Sound un-American? Well, I'm not talking about medicine; I'm describing fire departments. And police forces. And jails, and courts, and elections, and schools, and emergency relief, and the military... where's the difference? What some call socialized medicine is just an extension of the fundamental concept of every government, including ours: taxes suck, but they're often better than the alternative. That transactional balance is where the discussion has to be. Are you getting what you're paying for? If the discussion is about having taxes at all, you're really contemplating whether you want to have a civilization in the first place. That's not a discussion I care to have. If you think having no government would be great, move to Somalia. You'll find it more to your liking.

We have had socialized health care for decades, just an extremely bad version of it. Federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat people regardless of ability to pay. Who do you think pays the ER bills of those who can't pay for themselves? All the patients who can pay, obviously. We're already not free-market by shifting costs away from point of consumption. Wouldn't it make more sense to shift the costs to some place consciously chosen to do the least damage, instead of forcing them onto those barely able to pay, ruining additional lives and creating more medical bankruptcies? What outcome can there possibly be from that, except the creation of more poor who can't pay? If you want free-market health care, you have to be in favor of letting ERs throw out people who can't pay. Horrified by that? Good, you're a decent human being. But you're also one flavor of socialist. Get over it. Personally, I think that if we're going to have socialized medicine, we should have a variety that doesn't suck.

Some forms of socialism work better than our present systems. Europe has been more socialist than we are, and getting better results. Anybody who tells you we have the best health care on earth is lying to you. Look at the survival rates of serious medical conditions; many European countries are comparable to the US, and for some diseases we're way behind. Our infant mortality rate is triple what it could be. That's 17,000 babies per year dying unnecessarily. We're 40th in life expectancy. And we're paying vastly more for this substandard system.

This country was not founded in opposition to socialism. We were founded in response to a failure of representative democracy. It would be no less of a failure to tell the people of this country that they can't have socialized medicine, if that's what they choose to have.

If I see any more lies I need to respond to, I'll update this post.

Sanders vs. Tocqueville, Round One: FIGHT!

This is an expansion of my response to this article in a discussion with a friend.

Looking through Sanders’ speech, one can’t help but think he believes that the vast majority of America’s economic problems will disappear if more people have more stuff.

Uh... yeah. That's kind of a tautology. If your problem is lots of poor people, then those people having more stuff gets rid of that problem. Redefining the problem to be a spiritual one, wherein we just ignore the fact that we are starving, is a delaying tactic. It by no means prevents the inevitable social instability that comes from millions of people being unable to feed their children.

This article is just so much noise, ignoring the fundamental reality: the programs Sanders proposes have a decades long track record of providing better measurable outcomes in every way. Ignoring the measurable well being of actual people in the name of abstract philosophical goals is just another from of despotism.

The American experiment is that people rule themselves, by a government of their choosing. It has nothing at all to do with a rejection of socialism. If the people want socialized medicine, it would be unamerican to tell them they can't have it because a man two centuries dead said so.

Every law trades the freedom of some people for the security of some people. This is the fundamental concept of government. Laws creating police and courts and jails to protect us from robbers require us all to pay taxes; we don't get to opt out and just take our chances getting robbed. Laws creating militaries to protect us from invasion are identical. There is no conceptual difference between those scenarios and laws protecting us from catastrophic medical expenditure, or environmental destruction, or joblessness.

The only question is which trades are good. How much freedom (typically in taxation) do we sacrifice, and how much do we gain by doing so? Each trade should be analyzed for its own merits. To claim that the trades that were good 200 years ago will remain the only good trades for the rest of time is not an position that can be rationally derived from any set of premises. It is an axiom in itself, a religious belief, and its implementation leads, as I say, to despotism. 

As Jefferson said, the Earth belongs to the living.

2016 Presidential Candidates: Republicans, Part 2

Rick Perry
Rick Perry is presently the governor of Texas. Much of the below is about his record in that position, as well as statements he made during is 2012 Presidential campaign. As a point of interest, the majority of his state does not support him running for President.

• Is presently facing charges for abusing power
• Is owned by AT&T
• Much like our local rep Marsha Blackburn
• Collected $90,000 a year in retirement benefits while still working
• So we should cut government spending everywhere except on Rick Perry
• Rejected free federal money to expand Texas' Medicaid program, meaning over 300,000 Texans (including 40,000 veterans) have been without insurance so Perry could make a political point
• But it's okay, Perry thinks everyone prefers going to the ER for all their medical needs
• ...because he thinks Texas has the best health care system in the country!
• Passed a bill requiring women to have ultrasounds before having an abortion
• And then passed another one effectively shutting down almost every abortion clinic in Texas
• Regardless of your moral position on abortion (which I hold to be tragic and in many cases a moral wrong), I don't hold that it's therefore morally correct to torment women who choose to have one; nor do I hold it to be correct for Perry to pass laws that are unconstitutional. If his religious beliefs contradict the laws of the United States, he should resign, not violate his oath.
• Gutted funding for child services when 24% of children in his state live in poverty
• So make sure they're born, but after that? Screw 'em. They should get a job. A little consistency, please?
• Tried to keep a bill making homosexuality a crime on the books
• Again, it is in no way the job of a Christian to punish other people for not following our specific religious beliefs. Getting away from that crap is entirely why the original colonists came here in the first place! But Perry apparently thinks that is his job as a Christian, even if it contradicts his oath of office and the teachings of Christ. 
• ...because Satan
• Opposed the federal government bailout of state governments, then claimed credit for using that money to balance the Texas budget one year
• To counter the deficit he created, I might add, with the typical cut-taxes-to-increase-revenue lies that do not work
• More than doubled the debt owed by the state of Texas
• Why do we think he would do better as President? Not really clear
• Wants to send troops back to Iraq even though Iraq as a sovereign nation kicked us out; new decade, new invasion of Iraq!
• Dramatically cut funding to Texas firefighters, then asked for federal funds when wildfires broke out and his people couldn't handle it
• Dramatically cut funding to schools, resulting in (gasp) a failing educational system
• Has overseen huge numbers of executions, including one confirmed wrongful one, which he's specifically said doesn't bother him at all
• And yet prefers to err on the side of life...
• Blatantly lied about the number of homicides committed by illegal immigrants
• And about terrorists captured trying to cross the Mexican border
• Censored an environmental report he didn't like
• Supports decriminalization of marijuana

Marco Rubio

• Handles his personal finances terribly
• Doesn't think we can ever know the age of the earth 
• Supports the NSA spying on every American without cause
• Wants to make that spying permanent
• Doesn't understand Iran's relationship to ISIS, despite being on the Senate foreign relations committee
• Thinks gay marriage is a threat to the survival of Christianity
• How weak do these people think Christ is?
• Denies human contribution to climate change
• Thinks atheists are unamerican 
• Claims Obama is nicer to Iran than to Israel
• Missed nearly 10% of votes held during his time in office
• Thinks it should be legal to fire people for being gay
• Opposes reestablishing diplomatic ties with Cuba for reasons which make no sense
• Says the Bush administration did a 'fantastic job'
• And that the decision to invade Iraq was based on bad intelligence, when it was based on no intelligence at all
• Pledges to reopen Gitmo if it's closed 
• Supported the government shutdown over the Republicans' inability to win enough elections to repeal the ACA
• Blamed the housing crisis and recession on government regulation, rather than the more factual lack-thereof

Donald Trump

• Calls for violent revolution when his side loses an election
• Claims vaccines cause autism
• A position that has caused nine thousand deaths in the last eight years
• Tried to steal a woman's home using eminent domain
• Called for Edward Snowden to be executed
• Claims to have a plan to defeat ISIS, but won't tell anyone what it is
• Has talked about Barack Obama's birth certificate for several years, claiming a document with no legal significance should be released to prove his citizenship
• But won't release his own birth certificate! 
• Honestly, if the President is required to be a citizen by birth, he should be required to prove that. That's reasonable. Obama did, in 2008. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.
• Told a huge number of lies during his announcement speech
• Inherited most of his fortune and has repeatedly declared bankruptcy
• Many of his businesses fail
• Said this
• And all of these things
• Wanted to leave doctors treating ebola in Africa
• And says he doesn't trust the CDC! Great property to have in a President...
• Thinks we should annex Iraqi oil fields permanently
• And yet this is somehow not theft...?
• Complains about China taking American manufacturing jobs, while selling merchandise made in China

Bobby Jindal

• His state is running tremendous deficits 
• After taking Louisiana from a $1 billion surplus to a $1.6 billion deficit, he still refuses to raise taxes in any way
• Wants to eliminate Louisiana's income tax, making the problem even worse
• Wanted to severely cut taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor and middle classes 
• Demolished Louisiana's education budget to make up for the budget deficits he created
• Eliminated hospice care for Medicaid patients
• Blocked lawsuits against oil and gas companies that devastated the Louisiana coastline
• Believes that religious freedom means the right to enforce your beliefs on others
• Thinks it's okay to teach creationism as science
• Thinks there are areas of European countries subject to sharia law 
• What is with this sharia paranoia? It's bizarre.

Chris Christie

• Abuses government resources for personal purposes 
• But paid for it after he got caught!
• Failed to report income for tax purposes
• Has been investigated for numerous potential crimes
• Much of his senior staff ordered a bridge closed as political retribution; either Christie was in on it, or he doesn't know what his staff is doing. Which is worse?
• Will try to override state laws legalizing marijuana
• So much for states' rights...
• But he also mandated treatment for drug users instead of jail time 
• Banned gay conversion therapy
• Opposes armed guards in schools
• Doesn't attack Obama at every turn 
• Isn't it sad that that's a distinguishing qualifier?
• Accepted Medicaid expansion in New Jersey
• But also wants to slash Medicaid by lowering the eligibility limit dramatically
• Endorsed the Patriot Act
• Thinks W Bush was a good President
• Cut taxes, cut social programs, and thinks cutting taxes on the rich more will fix the resulting deficit
• Doesn't support the minimum wage 
• Vetoed a small increase in the minimum wage of New Jersey
• Doesn't think income inequality is a problem, and argues this point with absurd false dichotomies 
• Thinks he knows more about ebola than the CDC
• Ruined his state's credit rating
• Handed Exxon $8 billion dollars of taxpayer money in exchange for political donations

Scott Walker

• Cut taxes, sending Wisconsin into tremendous deficits
• While simultaneously cutting funding to higher education
• Said dealing with massive protests against him prepares him to deal with ISIS
• Spent much of his political career lengthening prison sentences
• Then advocating for more private prisons to deal with the resulting overcrowding
• While taking huge contributions from the private prison industry
• Wants to functionally eliminate unions nationwide
• Wants to implement drug testing for food stamps and other programs
• Passed a law making it unconstitutionally difficult to obtain an abortion in Wisconsin
• Would attempt to unilaterally cancel the new nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran
• Opposes increasing the minimum wage on false premises

Patriotism

I found myself listening to cable news today. I appreciated the music, and people telling what they loved about America. I appreciated that there were many tributes to the armed forces, as there should be. But it's important to remember that ISIS and Iran and North Korea are not threats to our freedom. Al Qaeda and Iraq and Afghanistan were never threats to our freedom. Vietnam and Panama and Germany and Japan were never threats to our freedom. We've been attacked by outside forces, and Americans have been killed. American soldiers have died by the hundreds of thousands to bring freedom to others. But not since 1814 has American freedom been threatened from outside.

Our freedom is threatened from within, by those that divide us, and try to use fear and anger and lies to manipulate us.

Our freedom is threatened by a government that operates in the shadows, ignoring the will of the people and the rule of law and the rights of man.

Our freedom is threatened by those who deny the rights and humanity and American-ness of their neighbors, and who try to use force of law to punish those who do not share their personal beliefs.

Our freedom is threatened every time someone tries to shout down a dissenting opinion, instead of discussing it, and every time someone rejects a fact that doesn't fit their partisan narrative.

Our freedom is threatened by government dysfunction, by elected representatives more committed to beating the other side than to finding solutions that work, and by elections whose outcomes do not reflect the will of the people.

Our freedom is threatened by a false definition of patriotism, one that says it's unpatriotic to recognize problems and try to fix them.

Our freedom is contingent on the idea that we are, as individuals and as a country, imperfect. The framers created a more perfect union, leaving to us the job of making it more perfect still. If we reject that charge, if we decide we are good enough and that no further improvement is possible, then we surrender our freedom to those in power. Because why should we strive to be better if we're good enough already?

If you call yourself a patriot, then you must ask yourself: how can America be better for all Americans, not just the ones I happen to agree with? And how can I help make that happen?

Happy Independence Day!

2016 Presidential Candidates: Republicans, Part 1

The way our system is set up, electoral votes in most states are winner-take-all. That essentially disenfranchises most voters in the general election; most states' outcome is a foregone conclusion, meaning your vote doesn't matter. Tennessee's electoral votes will all go to the Republican candidate, so why bother voting for President?

The primaries are a different issue. Your vote there matters much more. The problem, of course, is that there are just so many candidates to get familiar with. The below is my attempt to summarize major public statements and headlines regarding the various declared candidates, with links to relevant news articles. Each name links to the Politifact fact-check of that candidate, and their overall record for truth or lies.

We'll start with the Republicans, because they're just so much more interesting lately. There are so many I'm going to have to break them up into multiple posts. I'm going to do the declared candidates first, in alphabetical order by last name, then cover the likely prospective candidates. I am not covering Jack Fellure or Mark Everson. There's virtually zero information about them.

Note that many of these points may seem like negatives, against the candidates. That is not by design. It is likely a consequence of most headlines about candidates in general being negative. I have, however, injected some commentary. I try to roast all candidates equally. Also note that some candidates have many more points than others. This is also not by design; some simply have fewer headlines about them to choose from.


Jeb Bush
Former governor of Florida, brother of W Bush, son of HW Bush.

• Wants to eliminate the minimum wage
• Opposes net neutrality
• Uses the man who started the Iraq War, killing thousands of Americans for no reason at all, as one of his top foreign policy advisers
• ...and has over twenty other advisers who helped craft that epic disaster
•  Claimed that al Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist when Obama took office
• Note that it most definitely did, but also most definitely did not exist when W Bush took office...
• Claimed that the Iraq War was started based on faulty intelligence, when it was not
• Supports the Patriot Act, citing non-existent evidence that it has kept us safe
• Wants to privatize Social Security
• Someone care to explain to me how that's any different than shutting it down? I've never understood that

Ben Carson

• Rejects the theory of evolution, based on the entirely false premise that evolution is opposed to Christianity
• Also thinks that Christians are persecuted in America, because America is like Nazi Germany
• Supports a flat tax that he doesn't even understand the consequences of
• Shills for companies making fraudulent medical claims
• And yet is in favor of mandatory vaccinations
• Wants to eliminate judicial review, functionally neutering the entire concept of checks and balances
• Said Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery
• Thinks Obama may call off the 2016 election
• Just like he did the 2012 election...?

Ted Cruz

• Opposes net neutrality while loudly demonstrating his ignorance on what it actually is, calling it "Obamacare for the internet"
• "It would put the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service and what types of products and services can be delivered, leading to fewer choices, fewer opportunities and higher prices." Everything about that sentence is wrong!
• Claims global warming isn't happening
• Thinks emergency care is cheaper than preventive care
• Missed 10% of votes the Senate held during his time in office
• Opposes disaster aid from federal government to the states... except his own
• Supports unlimited campaign contributions
•  Because it would make things more fair, you see!
• Shut down the government because his party lost an election, and doesn't regret it
• Oh, and led protests of the government shutdown 
• Said that the recent court decisions on gay marriage and Obamacare are "some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation's history"
•  Aside from, you know, literally thousands of others... get some perspective, man
• Wants to subject the Supreme Court to retention elections because he doesn't like their decisions 
• Don't like the way the system works? Break the system.
• Completely fails to understand how Christians can be opposed to actions of the state of Israel
• And while it's not about Cruz personally, his father has some very strange pseudo-Christian views of his son being a fulfillment of some made-up end-times prophecy...

Carly Fiorina

• Completely failed to run HP
• Opposes net neutrality
• Lies about corporate tax rates
• US corporate tax rates are nominally high, but the actual collection rate (i.e. the number that matters) are quite low because of so many loopholes

Lindsey Graham

• Is willing to raise taxes under some circumstances
• Of course, his idea of raising taxes is very limited, but it's better than the usual "revenue isn't the problem" lie
• Seems to have at least some support for environmental issues, if only to bow to political reality and not because he actually believes in them
• Wants to eliminate habeas corpus, doesn't think imprisoned people should need to be proven guilty
• Also supports suspending civil rights of domestic terror suspects...
• ...and pretty much everyone else...
• Rejects his own party's multiple reports on the Benghazi attacks
• Naturally, we need to keep running investigations until one gives the results he wants
• He said that Obama is not a Socialist, he's a good man!
• Of course, he also says he's extremely liberal, which you can only say if you have no idea what extreme liberals would actually do...
• Says you can't govern based on anger, wants to govern based on realism instead
• Has a completely awful record on foreign policy matters

Mike Huckabee

This guy was governor of Arkansas, ran for President, and now has a Fox News show. He has basically made a living speaking in public for most of my life, so he has more positions than I can possibly cover here. I summarize him thus: America is, was, and should become a Christian nation, wherein his particular version of Christian beliefs are given force of law. This version of Christian beliefs include:

• Christian education in public schools, including young-earth creationism
• Support of Israel removing Palestinians from Palestine
• Banning all non-thereputic abortions, including pregnancies from rape
• Banning gay marriage or adoption
• Amending the Constitution to these ends

He's surprisingly sane on some other issues, and kinda nuts on others. Here's a survey of some things that caught my attention, but like all the candidates, I hope you'll read more:

• Says school shootings happen because God has been removed from schools
• ...despite the fact that church shootings are far more common...
• ...and which god is he worshiping, that can be removed from schools? 'Cause mine can't be...
• Thinks only women who can't control their libido need birth control
• Thinks we're moving towards the criminalization of Christianity
• Called the Obama administration "openly hostile toward the Christian faith"
• Arranged parole for a rapist who raped and murdered again
• Also granted clemency to a man after a claimed religious conversion, who then murdered four police officers
• Rejects the principle of judicial review
• Supports a 30% federal sales tax
• Cut taxes on the rich, raise taxes on the poor...
• Says that vaccines don't cause autism! Yay reality!
• Isn't it sad that I have to point out that he's sane about this?
• Doesn't understand how the ACA handles pre-existing conditions
• Wants to vastly increase the size of the American military
• How is this to be funded? Unclear.
• But he supports peaceful options with Iran
• Told people to not enlist in the military until an overtly Christianity-enforcing President is in place
• Never mind that the last time we had one of those, our military ended up with thousands of dead and tens of thousands of wounded...

George Pataki

And here we find the opposite of Huckabee. For a man who's been in the public spotlight for nearly twenty years, he has relatively few headline-making position statements on major national issues, and most of them are over a decade old. He talks the usual small-government talk, but he's at least somewhat out of step with the typical Republican positions on abortion, the environment, and gun control, which gives me hope he can think independently. I have no reason to think this man is either incompetent or insane.

• Worked to repeal the ACA
• Opposes a national sales tax (as of 2000)

Rand Paul

• Fillibuster'd the renewal of the Patriot Act
• Pledged to end the NSA's bulk surveillance of Americans
• Wants to demilitarize the police
• Recognizes injustice and problems caused by the war on drugs
• Supports medical marijuana
• Wants to end mandatory minimum sentencing
• Wants a flatter income tax
• Most plans like this are just raising taxes on the poor and cutting them on the rich; his apparently doesn't raise taxes on the poor (assuming the details he's not specifying yet don't change anything), so good on him. But there's still something like $200 billion a year in spending cuts that he's not specifying, on top of any others he might make to cover the existing deficits. Any other Republican I'd assume it's social services, but this guy is less predictable.
• Remember that tax cuts for the rich do not generally create jobs, or the first decade of this century would have gone much better economically after the Bush cuts.
• Proposed a bill to punish congresspeople who become lobbyists
• Wants to force Congress to live by its own laws
• Is fighting extrajudicial drone strikes
• Criticizes science he doesn't understand
• Occasionally spews demonstrably false GOP talking points
• Mindless lies kinda piss me off, if you haven't guessed
• Claims that vaccines can cause mental disorders
• "Parents own their children"? Nobody owns children! Children are not property, they are individuals with rights!
• Recognizes that Jesus probably wouldn't launch a preemptive war, and opposes the neocons who have been pushing for war after war for the last decade
• Opposes net neutrality
• And opposes expanding the public domain, which means even longer copyright terms
• Proposed a law ending civil forfeiture
• Tried to outlaw abortions
• By adding a rider to an irrelevant bill
• Wants to eliminate corporate welfare
• Is apparently hated by Fox News
• We report (on what we feel like), you decide (among the choices we present you)

Fraternal Order of Police Candidate Survey

Earlier this year I considered running for Nashville Metro Council. I took out the signature forms, but concluded I couldn't commit the time to do the job effectively, so I won't be turning them back in.

However, I have been put on all sorts of interesting mailing lists. I thought I'd share the results with you. This one is from the Fraternal Order of Police, Andrew Jackson Lodge No. 5.

• Would you support the pay study plan and increase Metro Nashville Police Officers pay above mid range?
• Would you support current employees keeping their earned pensions?
• Would you support the current pension plan and allow this plant to remain in effect for current officers?
• Would you support additional ZONE officers?
• What is your position regarding body cameras for police officers? What are your recommendations for funding such a program? How would you rationalize rules for their use, keeping in mind Tennessee privacy laws, children and use inside of homes?
• Do you support the relocation of the Police headquarters? The Metro Police Academy is in need of an indoor firing range and repairs made to the running track and runway due to multiple pot holes. Do you support allocating money for the Metro Police Academy?
• What is your assessment on the current police administration?
• Would you support a police chief being promoted from within the department?
• Would you support an ordinance changing the civil service rules to include a Police Officers' Bill of Rights?
• Will you promise not to make pledges or commitments that will limit Metro's ability to meet obligations to employees?
• Will meet with the FOP board members on a regular basis?
• Have you or will you sign a no tax pledge?

A lot of these questions make sense. They're concerned about officers' pay, pensions, and resources. I am interested in what their "right" answers are regarding body cameras, and what would be included in a Police Officers' Bill of Rights. I'm assuming it's similar to this, which all sounds perfectly reasonable. Would that civilians had some of those rights!

Now, what's the deal with a no-tax pledge? That seems to have zero to do with police work, except insofar as it makes it impossible to run a functional government, in many cases. In theory, that should mean they're against a no-tax pledge. But the Republican Party has often convinced people to vote against their own best interests; has that happened here? I can't tell.

Republican Congressional District Census

I just got a survey form in the mail from the Republican Party. Some of these questions are impressively leading. They're clearly asking questions so they can phrase the results the way they want for a sound bite, not so they can actually make policy decisions. And the questions are clearly worded to provoke anger and get the answer they want.

1) Do you generally identify yourself as:

• Conservative Republican
• Moderate Republican
• Liberal Republican
• Independent Voter who leans Republican
• Tea Party Member
• Libertarian
• Other________

 ["Stephen"]

3) If you plan on voting in the 2016 Presidential elections, do you plan on voting for:

• the Republican Nominee
• the Democrat Nominee
• Undecided

[Or, you know, the other dozen candidates...]

10) Do you believe the Republican Party should continue to embrace social issues or are these too divisive when it comes to winning elections?

• Embrace
• Too Divisive
• No Opinion

[I'd rather the Republican Party not embrace social issues because their positions are often ignorant, unchristian, and stupid. It has nothing to do with being too divisive.]

1) Do you think things in our country are continuing to go in the wrong direction, or do you feel things are going in the right direction?

• Wrong direction
• Right direction
• Unsure

[Things? There are many things! Some things are going right, some things are going wrong, and many, many things are going nowhere.]

3) Do you think our Republican leaders in Congress should be aggressive in forcing the Obama White House to work with them to create jobs, cut taxes and regulations, end economic uncertainty, and make America more competitive?

[Some of those things are contradictory...]

5) Do you favor a major overhaul of the current Federal Tax Code - currently thousands of pages long - that would replace today's burdensome tax system with one that is simpler and fairer?

[Well, yes. Of course, the Republican idea of doing that is typically "raise taxes on the poor so you can cut them on the rich." Obama's proposal to do literally exactly what this question asks, closing loopholes and simplifying deductions while remaining revenue neutral, was shot down immediately. Keep in mind, I don't like Obama; if anyone else was putting the lie to what these people claim to be their goals, I'd use them as an example instead.]

10) With revelations of "Fast and Furious", IRS abuses, the Benghazi cover-up, and other major scandals in recent years, do you feel Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have the right to hold government bureaucrats' feet to the fire and demand more transparency from the Obama administration?

[Do a bunch of manufactured, minor, or non-existent scandals justify demands for transparency? No. Demands for transparency shouldn't need to be justified. And I love how they're still referring to the Benghazi cover-up when their own repeated investigations concluded there was no cover-up.]

11) Do you believe more federal laws that impede individuals' Second Amendment rights are the proper response to recent gun violence in our nation?

[No, gun control isn't going to help much. But... did someone propose gun control laws while I wasn't looking? I'm really asking, here. Because after all the Republican talk of Obama coming to take all our guns six years ago, I haven't seen him make move one in that direction.]

12) Do you support Republican efforts to defer fully implementing ObamaCare and replacing it with something that will address the high cost of health care while maintaining the quality of care?

[The grammar here is weird. "...to defer implementing and replacing it..."? Anyway, I'd be open to the idea if the Republicans would make a specific proposal. I haven't heard anything with any details, except very rarely, and those details were nonsense upon examination. Probably because ObamaCare is the Republican plan. Was when Gingrich proposed it, was when Romney implemented it. They can't come up with better ideas because all of them have already been used.]

14) Do you favor Republican efforts in Congress to better strengthen our borders and fight President Obama's unconstitutional, unilateral decrees in writing new immigration policies?

[I don't think I could write a more leading question if I tried.]

1) Are Republicans in Congress right to fight back against the Obama Administration's efforts to severely cut America's military power?

[What efforts are these, then? Did I miss where we'd cut the number of carrier battle groups we maintain? Are we not still the core of the expanding NATO alliance? I'm pretty sure we've got a couple hundred thousand troops available now that weren't at the beginning of the Obama administration...]

3) Should America take military action if necessary to keep Iran and North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons?

[Little late on NK obtaining nuclear weapons. If the US should have taken action to prevent that, you should have told Bush.]

6) Should the US take a more muscular attitude toward Russia as it moves toward re-establishing itself as a military and economic superpower?

[What does it mean for a country to take a muscular attitude towards another country? Obviously, the bigger intent of the question is to imply that our present attitude is insufficiently muscular. Under any circumstances, utterly crippling their economy is as muscular as I care to get. What, do you want a nuclear war? Don't answer that.]

Robin Hood conversation

A Facebook friend posted a link to this article. I found the following conversation interesting, so I've recorded it here.

Me: False dichotomy. Robin Hood both robbed an overreaching government, and stole from the rich to give to the poor. In his case they happened to be the same. The ultimate lesson doesn't change either way: allow wealth to become concentrated to the point that most people have difficulty making ends meet, and law and order breaks down. Surely nobody can believe that if everyone was starving, but it was because all the wealth had been acquired by legal monopolies, Robin would have just been fine with that situation.

(How bad do things have to be for a criminal to be the hero of the story? I could think of a few names in the last few years one could say that about, actually...)

Complete equality of outcome is idiocy, but government can remove all reward for hard work just as thoroughly by allowing unchecked concentration of wealth as by preventing it entirely. If you want a functioning market system, and more fundamentally a stable law abiding society, government is required, and must take a path between the two absurd extremes typically presented by neoconservative commentators.

Beware those who present you with such false dichotomies. They're trying to shut down your reasoning process. Just like sound bite politics.

Friend:  I understand your point. However, in the stories, he didn't steal from rich individual citizens. He stole from a wealthy government (King) or Church which came into its wealth by immoral means (robbing from poor families, unfairly taxing, requiring tithes)

Me: My point was that difference does not change the applicability of the story, nor would that difference have changed Robin Hood's actions. My greater point is that arguing over Robin Hood is a cheap distraction from the fact that the American lower and middle classes have been taking a beating for thirty-five years, while the rich get richer and leave the rest of us with no hope of bettering our situation.

Friend: I think the two are mutually exclusive. This position assumes all wealthy individuals achieved this wealth through illegal means, or immoral means. That simply is not true. 

Me: I make no such assumption. I do assume that having a stable society is preferable to having an unstable one, and that having a large number of desperately poor people and a few very rich ones leads to an unstable society. How those rich people got there is beside the point. You can argue over a standard of morality all you want, but at the end of the day you have robbery and food riots either way.

Ultimately, we're arguing over a marketing slogan, rather than discussing the actual issues that desperately need to be addressed.  

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Jobs

Over the last fifteen years the American middle class has been gutted. Unemployment, while dropping slowly, is still high. Underemployment is worse; maybe more people have full-time jobs, but at reduced wages. This is the fundamental economic problem we face. It directly affects the lives of millions of Americans, and is the cause of much of our budget deficit. (Government tax receipts dropped like a stone when all those people lost their jobs, not to mention all the welfare they suddenly needed.)

I think the government could do more to help people find work. We've talked about building huge things, like power grids and aqueducts, which provide direct employment. But what about helping people find existing jobs? Or incentivizing the creation of better ones?

As an added bonus for the deficit hawks out there, or perhaps those who think government should be run like a business, consider this: if the government spends $1k helping me get a better job, how long before the government gets that $1k back in the taxes I pay and the welfare I no longer need? From a strictly financial perspective, spending money helping people get jobs is one of the best investments our government can make.

So suppose you're looking for a job, and can't find one. What can stop you?

Information 
You can't get a job you don't know exists. The government could create a central jobs bank, a single location where employers across the country could post job openings. And when I say employers across the country, I mean all of them. Pay employers to post job openings, and you'll have a database of every job everywhere quite rapidly. Figure there are ten million job openings in the country at any time. At $100 per opening posted, that's $1b. Chump change on the scale of the projects we're talking about.

Naturally, no matter what system you set up, someone will try to game it. We'd need to pay employers, not just for submitting an opening, but only if the job is filled by someone, and you can confirm who that someone is. That should take care of most cases of fraud. You'd also need to put limits on how often you could hire for the same position, or the same person, and promotions from within couldn't count. There will still be flaws, but for the most part it's workable. You don't shut down a functional project because of 1% waste.

The other downside is that this could completely destroy every other online jobs site. Who could survive against a negative-profit competitor? But consider, the government has a terrible track record lately with building complex websites. So perhaps a better idea is to contract the service out to existing job sites. Have a central database, but give easy hooks for Monster and Dice and whoever else to mine the data and list the results. Leverage the market, instead of trying to replace it.

Education
So now we have a giant list of every job in the country. For many, that means you can now be absolutely certain that you'll never make more than you're making now unless you retrain. So we link the jobs listings with data on training programs; each listing says "here are the qualifications, and here's how you get the qualifications if you don't have them." Link directly to a list of relevant educational programs, and all available financial assistance for each. As a bonus, this gives the government more data to target educational assistance.

Experience
Now you've found a job, and you have the paper qualifications. But you can't get any of them; they all say 3-5 years experience required! (Particularly funny when they want ten years experience programming in a language that hasn't existed that long...) How do you get experience when all the job openings require you to have experience? Chicken, egg.

Decades ago, companies had apprenticeship programs. They would actively train replacements for older employees, taking someone with no experience and turning them into whatever they needed. These programs are mostly gone. Companies don't plan decades in advance now; they're focused entirely on maximizing immediate profit. This is leading many industries into a disaster: as older employees retire, there's literally nobody with their skillset to replace them!

The government could incentivize apprenticeship programs. For a rough estimate, say the program is two years long, and that the government paid the entire compensation of the apprentice. For $10b, we could easily fund a hundred thousand apprenticeships, and probably more. We end up with a more skilled, more employable workforce, and those more skilled employees will almost certainly pay for themselves: the more money they make, the more taxes the government receives. Again, if you're the sort to say that government should be run like a business, I'd call that a good investment.

Competition
American companies often complain that they can't find skilled workers in the United States, and push for H-1B visas. We need to import workers, they say, to fill this skills gap. But there is no skills gap! There are plenty of American workers able to do the jobs in question. The inability to hire a $25/hr worker at $10/hr is not a skills gap. I'm all for immigration, but we don't need to be purposefully importing low-cost workers to compete with Americans for jobs.

Also, failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. If these companies hadn't dismantled their apprenticeship programs, they'd be in a better position. I'm not inclined to screw American worker to make up for a corporate lack of foresight.

Location
Okay, say you've found a job you're qualified for, but it's too far away. You need to move, but you need a moving truck, and gas, and a place to live, and a deposit, at a minimum, not to mention lost wages in between jobs. You may also need temporary housing while you look for a permanent place. Moving's expensive, especially over a long distance. For people barely making ends meet, it may just not be an option.

Let's take the naive approach first and throw money at the problem, just to get a sense of the scale of things. Assume we have a million people moving across the country every year for work. If you just handed each one $5000 in moving assistance, that's $5b a year. Easily affordable, especially when you consider that putting someone to work in a better job gets the government tax income it didn't have before. That $5000 should come back easily within two years in most cases.

One specific expense the government could subsidize is real-estate agents. Many people moving a long distance for work wouldn't spend the extra money for a professional to help them find a place to live. But that kind of local professional is exactly what you need in that situation: you need someone who knows the local market and can find you what you're looking for quickly and efficiently.

Transportation
You've found a job, you're qualified for it, and it's in your city. But you can't afford a car, and you can't afford to move close enough to the job for walking or biking to be viable. What do you do?

Obviously, someone's going to have to drive you. If there are bus routes or trains already, great! But if you live or work outside a high-density area, that's not going to help you. You're going to need something more point-to-point. The government paying to facilitate that transportation could make all the difference between employment and unemployment.

Assume a 20-mile commute, which is pretty common these days. We could pay for a taxi, but that could cost $450/wk. We could rent a car for under $200/wk, plus $35 in gas, which sounds better. Assuming the standard 56 cents per mile, we're not going to do any better than $115/wk for a single-passenger vehicle; if that vehicle comes with a driver, they'll probably make enough per week for their time that we're back up to rental car levels. For single-passenger, a rental car may be the best we can reasonably do. So that comes to over $10k/year, which most people aren't going to pay in taxes with a better job. If you're getting someone off other forms of welfare, though, it may pay for itself.

Now, if neither home nor work is completely isolated from other travelers, we can reduce cost further with multiple passengers. So we're back to what I've proposed before: incentiveized carpooling. Pay people to carpool, set up a system to make it easy (or leverage an existing system like Uber or Lyft with modifications for multiple riders). The cost of helping this one carless person get to work could easily be cut in half, or better. Plus there will be fewer cars on the road, which is good for everyone.

Unpredictability
So you've found a job, you can get there, but they keep changing your hours. You work two hours this week, fourteen next week, you have no regular schedule, and you'd better be available 24-7 in case they call you in. And if you show up for a scheduled shift, you might be sent straight home. Don't like it? Too bad, you're replaceable.

This is what's wrong with a completely unregulated labor market: there are vastly more suppliers (workers) than there are consumers (employers). Without regulation, market forces dictate exactly what we see: wages go to nothing, and quality of life for the workers drops to nothing. Remember, the market is a tool for telling us what will happen. Like all science, it says nothing about what should happen, any more than observing nature tells us we should be eaten by predators because we can't fight back.

This means some form of government regulations are the only solution; by nature, market forces don't result in the outcomes we as a society prefer. We want people to have decent lives, and to be able to make a living working. So we're working counter to market forces, and that's okay, so long as we do it well.

If you're scheduled to work a shift 48 hours before shift start, you should be paid for that shift, even if the manager screwed up and scheduled too many people. If you're on-call, you should be paid like you're on-call. If you have a work schedule that works for you, you should be able to keep that schedule without arbitrary changes. In other words, you should be able to have a job.

Why the votes for Charlie Brown must have been random

I wrote previously, suggesting that Charlie Brown won his primary due to people who voted for the first name on the ballot. Another writer responded in the Tennessean, suggesting that he instead won due to informed voters. I would like to explain how I concluded this was unlikely.

94,000 people voted for Brown. If 94,000 informed voters chose him, there have to be a number of similarly informed people who either didn't vote, or voted for someone else. We can reasonably say that at least 200,000 people have to have been informed about Brown's positions before the election.

So how did these people get that information? Remember, I'm not the only one wondering who this man is; he's a cypher to the newspapers too! He has no internet presence, nor any other mass media campaign. Perhaps he mailed fliers? But if he had a massive snail-mail campaign that reached a couple hundred thousand voters, he'd need to spend at least $20k. His campaign reports having no money at all.

Perhaps Brown has a couple dozen volunteers going door to door twelve hours a day for six months. But other than that, I'm just not seeing a way that most votes for Brown could possibly be informed votes. Perhaps someone who knew Brown's positions before the election, and chose to vote for him based on them, can write and tell us how? And also why out of his 94,000 informed supporters, only a hundred have joined his facebook group?

Open Letter: Tennessee Democratic Party

Right now Tennessee is a single-party state. Republicans hold both US Senate seats, the Governorship, seven of nine US House seats, and over 70% of the General Assembly. This election looks unlikely to change any of that. The Democratic party is completely shut out of power, making it almost impossible for them to get donations. Who would donate to a party who can't do anything for them in return?

So what's your party to do? You keep running joke candidates, because you can't get any viable ones to take you seriously. Candidates can't get money without the hope of winning, and in our system you can't get political power without money. You have to break that cycle. You have to appeal to someone with lots of money, and appeal to the voters in a new way as well.

There's one issue that can do that: getting money out of politics.

There are two major PACs right now dedicated to ending the influence of money in politics. Mayday PAC is raising money to unseat incumbents opposing campaign finance reform. I think there are plenty of those in our state! This PAC has eight million dollars in its pocket, plus matching donations. Clearly this is an issue that there's (ironically) some money behind. If the Democratic Party wants to regain seats in the US House, this is a great place to start.

Second, Wolf PAC is pushing for states to call a constitutional convention, to propose an amendment outlawing campaign donations. If your state-level candidates were advocating this issue, Wolf PAC could make a significant difference in whether they win or lose.

If the Democratic party wants to come back in this state, you're going to have to focus on this one issue. It's the one thing that will set you apart from Republicans, there's a lot of money behind it, and it puts you on the side the huge majority of the nation agrees with.

Oh, and it's the right thing to do.

August 7 2014 Election: Judicial Retention and Local Offices

So I've covered the legislative races, but there are others. Right now there's a heavily-politicized retention election for judges. A bi-partisan commission says all the judges are doing a good job. I plan to vote for retention on all judges, to avoid politicizing the judiciary.

There are also elections for several local positions, a few of which are even competitive! Frankly, I don't know enough about any of those elections, so I plan to abstain. If you have opinions on any of these races, please share!

Now, there's one thing I will comment on. Frankly, I think this school board has done a terrible job by allowing standards to fall as low as they have. When students can't be given a grade less than 50, we're not teaching any more, we're babysitting. My gut response is to thrown out the entire board and try again. But anyone with even the slightest bit of information should ignore that and act on actual data. And please share that data!

Oh, and Bob Schwartz is running for Republican Executive Committee, Senate District 20. When I met him during the 2010 campaign, he was a reasonable and thoughtful individual, not one of the usual Fox News crowd. I plan to vote for him.