Issue of the Week: Issue 1
Issue 1 is a call for an Ohio Constitutional Convention. It is mandated by a constitutional amendment made to the Ohio Constitution about 80 years ago. You can find more about arguments for and against it on the SmartVoter site.
Given the current influence of money in our political life, this one seems like a no-brainer. If we hold a constitutional convention in today's political climate, our democracy may drown in a sea of money.
Vote No on 1.
Given the current influence of money in our political life, this one seems like a no-brainer. If we hold a constitutional convention in today's political climate, our democracy may drown in a sea of money.
Vote No on 1.
Genetically Modified Foods, Monsanto and the Law of Code
There was quite a bit of news last week about a study that purported to show tumor growth in rats who were fed a diet of genetically modified corn, specifically Monsanto's Roundup-Ready variety. This corn has had a gene from a bacteria added to the corn's genome so it's tolerant of the Roundup herbicide.
Neurodojo has a great summary of the conflicts of interest that the people running the study failed to disclose, and others have criticized the methodology and results.
There is little doubt that this particular variety of GM corn is safe to eat. We've been eating it here in the USA for years. There is little question that GM crops need extensive safety testing before they can be fielded.
But there's a larger question about *how* Monsanto uses GM technology. They're locking farmers into an all-Monsanto system of seed, pesticides, etc. using GM crops as the keystone. It's like Microsoft locking people into their tools via proprietary web technologies built into Internet Explorer, but with food. Or Google being able to decide which videos to censor. Or MERS, the consortium of home title and mortgage processors, deciding what foreclosure rules are.
There's a saying that Larry Lessig coined for situations like this: code is law. Monsanto makes genetic code into law, using it to create a classic network-effect lock-in, turning small farmers into techno-sharecroppers. It short-circuits the democratic process we've put together to regulate intellectual property and commerce.
GM will feed the world, I have no doubt. But, like all technologies, it needs a heavy dose of democracy if we're going to have the kind of world we want.
Bad science will not help us make the decisions we need to make where technology, markets and hunger intersect.
Neurodojo has a great summary of the conflicts of interest that the people running the study failed to disclose, and others have criticized the methodology and results.
There is little doubt that this particular variety of GM corn is safe to eat. We've been eating it here in the USA for years. There is little question that GM crops need extensive safety testing before they can be fielded.
But there's a larger question about *how* Monsanto uses GM technology. They're locking farmers into an all-Monsanto system of seed, pesticides, etc. using GM crops as the keystone. It's like Microsoft locking people into their tools via proprietary web technologies built into Internet Explorer, but with food. Or Google being able to decide which videos to censor. Or MERS, the consortium of home title and mortgage processors, deciding what foreclosure rules are.
There's a saying that Larry Lessig coined for situations like this: code is law. Monsanto makes genetic code into law, using it to create a classic network-effect lock-in, turning small farmers into techno-sharecroppers. It short-circuits the democratic process we've put together to regulate intellectual property and commerce.
GM will feed the world, I have no doubt. But, like all technologies, it needs a heavy dose of democracy if we're going to have the kind of world we want.
Bad science will not help us make the decisions we need to make where technology, markets and hunger intersect.
Polls Which Will Change Polling
In a post tonight in FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver points out that Obama's relection chances improve dramatically if only polls which include mobile phones are counted.
In this universe, Mr. Obama seems poised for victory. The model forecasts him for a 4.1 percentage points win in the national popular vote. That compares with 2.9 percentage points in the regular FiveThirtyEight forecast, which includes polls both with and without cellphones.Mr. Obama's advantage is also clearer in the swing states. The cellphone-inclusive polls give him an 80 percent chance to win Virginia, a 79 percent chance in Ohio, and a 68 percent chance to win Florida, all considerably higher than in the official FiveThirtyEight forecast.Overall, this version of the model gives Mr. Obama an 83 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, a full 10 percentage points higher than the 73 percent chance that the official FiveThirtyEight forecast gave him as of Monday night. So the methodological differences are showing up in a big way this year.
I think we're on the brink of a revolution in polling. Back in 1936, the well-respected magazine The Literary Digest ran a poll of its ten million readers that ran into the millions of responses. The results were overwhelming: a landslide for...Alf Landon.
In actuality, it was, as the link describes, the poll that changed polling. The audience of the The Literary Digest was as skewed Republican as we're likely to find those who have landlines are.
Where I try to make political sense of Romney's speech, and then give up and just call him an asshole
As a follow-up to jk's earlier post today, I've thought about this I guess from more of a political point of view. Initially I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt - politicians tend to play to their crowds at fundraisers like this, mostly because they've paid a ton of money to share the room with them. And, generally speaking, those crowds lean farther from center than the average voter.
But man, after taking a couple days to think it over, I'm with everyone that thought it was a calamitous mistake. Because it not only showed the contempt he has for the average American. But it also showed just how horrible he is at crisis management - some might even call it the 3 a.m. call test.
Think back to the late Monday press conference, where he only took two questions, and pretty much hemmed and hawed through a feeble attempt to defend his speech. Then the awkward attempt to try and blame Obama for making it about class, the refusal to provide any specifics on how his plan would help the 47% he just trashed, the inability to get any prominent republican to give a full-throated defense of his remarks...it's been a total tire fire.
Contrast this with Obama's handling of the Jeremiah Wright videos four years ago. It took a few days, but when it was really about to hit the fan, Obama Went out and delivered an amazing speech on the role of race in modern American society, a speech that is on the short list of events that sewed up the nomination, and eventually the presidency, for him.
All the politics aside, however, I think what's going to resonate here is the absolutely insensitivity of these remarks, which, combined with his reprehensible attempts to attack Obama for "sympathizing with terrorists" last week, really play into the one, five word, theme that I've hoped all along would prevent Romney from getting elected:
Mitt Romney is an asshole. A giant, major league asshole. He's not a Bobby Knight asshole, where he screams and yells at you and makes your life generally miserable, but at the end of the day he gets results, and in a drill seargant way you actually respect him at the end. No, he's a Francis from Pee Wee's Big Adventure type of asshole. He's a smug, undeserving, entitled prick whose daddy made a ton of cash, and so he decided he could use that money to buy and do whatever he wanted. Like G.W. Bush, he was born on third and thought he hit a triple, but with the added dickish-ness of sneering at anyone he deems unworthy that has the audacity of even stepping up to the plate.
In his world, the John Galt-ian titans of business are to be revered and worshipped at every opportunity, because they got there through sheer hard work, grit, and determination, and the peasants should be grateful they allow them to work for them. Those that disagree with his viewpoint are shiftless, unmotivated moochers. They are losers unworthy of his sympathy or assistance, because they just suffer from a victim mentality, and so they deserve their lot in life, because they refuse to take personal responsibility for their own financial failures. If only they have the drive and desire that he does, they wouldn't be where they are.
In a sane world, this should be the end of Romney's candidacy. Here's hoping we live in a sane world.
But man, after taking a couple days to think it over, I'm with everyone that thought it was a calamitous mistake. Because it not only showed the contempt he has for the average American. But it also showed just how horrible he is at crisis management - some might even call it the 3 a.m. call test.
Think back to the late Monday press conference, where he only took two questions, and pretty much hemmed and hawed through a feeble attempt to defend his speech. Then the awkward attempt to try and blame Obama for making it about class, the refusal to provide any specifics on how his plan would help the 47% he just trashed, the inability to get any prominent republican to give a full-throated defense of his remarks...it's been a total tire fire.
Contrast this with Obama's handling of the Jeremiah Wright videos four years ago. It took a few days, but when it was really about to hit the fan, Obama Went out and delivered an amazing speech on the role of race in modern American society, a speech that is on the short list of events that sewed up the nomination, and eventually the presidency, for him.
All the politics aside, however, I think what's going to resonate here is the absolutely insensitivity of these remarks, which, combined with his reprehensible attempts to attack Obama for "sympathizing with terrorists" last week, really play into the one, five word, theme that I've hoped all along would prevent Romney from getting elected:
Mitt Romney is an asshole. A giant, major league asshole. He's not a Bobby Knight asshole, where he screams and yells at you and makes your life generally miserable, but at the end of the day he gets results, and in a drill seargant way you actually respect him at the end. No, he's a Francis from Pee Wee's Big Adventure type of asshole. He's a smug, undeserving, entitled prick whose daddy made a ton of cash, and so he decided he could use that money to buy and do whatever he wanted. Like G.W. Bush, he was born on third and thought he hit a triple, but with the added dickish-ness of sneering at anyone he deems unworthy that has the audacity of even stepping up to the plate.
In his world, the John Galt-ian titans of business are to be revered and worshipped at every opportunity, because they got there through sheer hard work, grit, and determination, and the peasants should be grateful they allow them to work for them. Those that disagree with his viewpoint are shiftless, unmotivated moochers. They are losers unworthy of his sympathy or assistance, because they just suffer from a victim mentality, and so they deserve their lot in life, because they refuse to take personal responsibility for their own financial failures. If only they have the drive and desire that he does, they wouldn't be where they are.
In a sane world, this should be the end of Romney's candidacy. Here's hoping we live in a sane world.
The Romney Gaffe
When AnotherDem and I were first married, and both in the military, we bought our first house on the east side of Dayton. We paid $27,000 for it. It was in a neighborhood barely hanging on from the deindustrialization of the Miami Valley. The day we moved in, the charming old lady in the house on one side brought us a pie she had baked herself, along with some baby clothes for our newborn. About two years later, she sold her house to a guy who sold drugs and who we nicknamed "vroom vroom" for his habit of revving his motorcycle every morning at 5AM before he disappeared for parts unknown. Neighborhoods change.
[1] It was a big porch. We still miss that porch.
We had more consistent luck with neighbor on the other side. They had two kids, one about the same age as ours. We became friends due to proximity and similarity of family situation, as any new parent can understand. We watched each others kids. We didn't have money to go out to dinner or movies. We spent our time playing board games late into weekend nights on my grandfathers's old kitchen table we kept on our front porch.[1] We kept baby monitors on the table, along with a six pack or bottle of wine. A cheap double date with Trivial Pursuit.
She was a German immigrant who worked part-time at the video store up the street. He was an Army veteran who was now a journeyman machinist. He worked of the many small machine shops that sprang up around the area after NCR laid off most of their machinists in the conversion from mechanical cash registers.
He and I did not see eye-to-eye politically. He was rabidly anti-union, defending his boss's right to shut down his dozen-person shop should he be targeted for unionization. My neighbor worked for minimum wage at skilled job, with no benefits. (He talked about this with pride.) I'm pretty certain he received the Earned-Income Tax Credit, based on that. [2]
My neighbor, even though he probably never paid Federal income tax, would never have thought Romney was talking about him. He would have thought that Romney was talking about someone else, someone who didn't work for a living. Probably someone with a different skin tone than his. My neighbor would probably have thought his EIC was his "refund", rather than a benefit. (I never understood how a machinist could not be good at arithmetic, but I had to help him out with numbers constantly.)
My neighbor said he was independent, but I'm pretty sure he never voted anything but Republican.
That's why this Romney tape doesn't mean much to that "independent" base, or even the Republican base. The low-income, problem-with-Kansas voter will not get angry about it because they don't think Romney is talking about them.
It's more important for the Democratic base. We know who Romney was talking about. He was talking about anyone who's ever had to rely on the government to get us out of a tight spot, for no matter how small a time. Anyone who's ever been helped by a government program.
He and Ryan want to take that away. Forever.
[2] Minimum wage was $3.15. Assuming, generously, that he worked 40 hours a week and 20 hours overtime, for 50 weeks a year, his income would've been $11, 575, smack dab in the middle of the EIC range in the late 80's, the time period I'm referring to in this post.
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