Archive for the 'Politics' category

Rob Portman’s (Opportunistic?) Reversal on Gay Marriage

Mar 15 2013 Published by under Candidates, Conservatism, Elections, Politics, Polls, Republicans

So many people are chattering wildly about Rob Portman’s conversion to a pro-same sex marriage (SSM) position.  ”Game changer” and “this changes everything” are just two of the Facebook updates I have seen on this.  While I appreciate him coming around, I just can’t get all that excited about the news.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the sands are shifting (and that is a very, very good thing) to a place where SSM is starting to be seen as a winning issue for GOP candidates, rather than an unquestionably losing one. Portman, however, seems to be someone who is opportunistically exploiting that.

In 2004 Portman supported a Constitutional ban on SSM; not just a ban against it. He wanted it enshrined in the Constitution.  He has defended DOMA. In 2009, he opposed a law that would have allowed gay couples in DC the right to adopt.  He has actively opposed gay rights for a decade at least.  But then there is this:

“[W]hat happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.”

Huh?  You were that active in voting on an issue you really hadn’t thought a lot about? So your default position on issues you don’t think about is to deny people rights?  Really?

Reconciling his past opposition to SSM and his current conversion is almost impossible. His explanation is that his son Will came out two years ago and that profoundly changed his mind.

But less than two years ago, at a speech to the University of Michigan law school, a full third of the school got up and walked out of his speech in protest of his positions on gay rights.  That was, if his timeframe is to be accepted, after his son came out.

Granted I am a reliable cynic, but it seems to me that Portman, who is bandied about as a potential POTUS contender in 2016, is seeing the writing on the wall.

A poll out last week notes that Republicans oppose gay marriage 69-23.  There is a relatively small wing of the GOP that will support candidates who are openly in favor of SSM.  However, if properly aligned, that small minority could be enough to win a fractured primary field.  Getting a base of 23%, and being able to cobble together enough support among the remaining 77% to provide a winning coalition – especially in a field of 6-10 candidates – could be winning math.

Portman’s dramatic reversal may be real.  I sincerely hope it is. Even if it’s not, it is certainly cause for those in the GOP that think like me to be happy. The party is, slowly but surely, being dragged toward its stated position of personal freedom on this issue.

But I have seen enough in politics to be more than a tad jaded.  I suspect that Portman may be looking at electoral calculations, more than personal or moral ones, in announcing this dramatic reversal at the beginning of a Presidential cycle.

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Open-Source vs. For-Profit Tech and Activism

Feb 19 2013 Published by under Apple, Politics, Technology

So last wek I made a point in my Spectator piece that the GOP has a tech problem, but it’s a tech problem that can be addressed through a significant investment in money and culture.  As I argued, you can address a lot of tech shortcomings if you invest in being better, smarter, and bringing people to the table that have the skills and letting them run with those skills.

My former colleague Patrick Ruffini, on Sunday, seemed to take issue with at least part of that when he chided Stuart Stevens – Romney’s brain trust – for suggesting that money can solve our tech problems.

What really troubles me about Stevens’s comments is his dismissive statement that “technology is something to a large degree you can go out and purchase.” No, it’s not. Technology is not about the tools. It is about people. It’s about creating a culture that drives metrics over hunches and BS “message of the day” fire drills.

Stevens will be the last general strategist of his kind not because he didn’t tweet, but because he thought of technology and data as some cool toy you could buy, not as the very foundation of a strong organization.

I would actually challenge Ruffini on that to a degree.  If poor tech is the problem, you can, in fact, invest in better tools.  But part of the GOP’s problem is it has not recently invested heavily in tools.  The period when it did (roughly 1996 through 2006) was marked by a significant improvement in tools.  The RNC database that eventually led to Voter Vault and microtargeting, and scared the Democrats into stepping up their game, was a result of that investment.  The GOP Team Leader program, the Bush re-elect effort, and many, many wins at the state and federal level were all a result of that investment – better data, better tools, better ideas.

Like the hare that naps and lets the tortoise win the race, however, the GOP got complacent.  It seemed to believe the headlines after 2004 that said the Dems may never be able to catch up with our data and microtargeting supremacy.  Those same headlines are being written now about the Dems, and I find them absurd. No party has a lock on tech, ideas, or success. Tech, especially, is a fickle beast and steer erratically between the latest good idea.  The GOP began to learn that when the 2008 Obama campaign took what the right had done and built on it.

So do I agree with Stevens that we can simply spend our way to competitiveness?  The answer to that requires a bit more framing.

We need to think of our problem differently. In politics, like technology, there are two camps. One, we’ll call it the open-source approach, creates a larger more vibrant community (of either activists or technologists).  The other, for-profit model is still perfectly legitimate, but doesn’t invite as many to participate and becomes much more expensive to maintain.

Think of the left’s activism as Linux, MySQL, and Drupal and the right’s as Microsoft or Oracle.  One innovates faster and has a larger community, one is limited in functionality to what they’re willing to invest in, rather than what the crowd can come up with.

There is nothing that says the right cannot compete with a Microsoft model.  They can, quite reasonably, invest huge sums of money in closed platforms, and be competitive.  That was Stuart’s point, and I agree that it is a viable – though certainly not the best - option.

One way or another – whether we follow the Stevens model, or something much more open and inclusive – the right must undergo a major attitudinal change.

If we want to follow Stevens model and closely guard the source code and hardware for GOP 16, then the donor culture on the right still needs to stop thinking in two-year cycles of TV ads and invest heavily in organizations that will be continually innovating, continually coming up with new, but still largely proprietary products.

What you cannot do, in Stevens model, is what the GOP has done for the last six years. You cannot release Windows Vista and expect it to keep you viable for a decade.

We would need to follow something more closely resembling the Apple model – a locked down platform that meets the needs of 90% of consumer (jailbreakers excluded), but one that still guards the source.  Voter Vault, in many ways, originally took that approach.  It protected the kernel while still meeting the needs of the users.  The problem is the GOP didn’t innovate when the needs of the users began to change.  Rather than enabling Voter Vault to be integrated with state, county, local, and issue advocacy campaigns through tools that would connect to the data, and share the benefit of all that data collection – Voter Vault became the iPhone without the ability to add apps.

Would it be possible to succeed with a tool that is still a walled garden, but one that meets the needs of its users?  Just ask Facebook.  They have made a huge business from that model.

So while I respect Patrick’s view, and agree with him that a more open model would be better, I disagree that there is absolutely no other option.  The Stevens approach could be successful, but it would still require a major cultural shift, and would be less likely to produce good outcomes.

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So Here’s The Thing About The Postal Service Retirement Funding…

Feb 10 2013 Published by under Congress, Craziness, Government, Politics

My lefty friends and those I follow keep regurgitating this ridiculous left-wing talking point about the reason the Postal Service is scrapping Saturday delivery.  The gist of it is this:

Republicans in Congress passed a bill that requires the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of health benefits for every employee, and even for employees that don’t yet exist.  They were given 10 years to do this. It is causing massive cash problems for the Postal Service and that’s why they have to cancel service. It’s all Republicans faults and it’s just because postal workers are unionized.

There’s a whole lot of BS in that, so let’s unpack it slowly lest the sticky goo get all over us.

First, it is true that Congress passed a law requiring full funding of the Postal Service health benefit program for every employee until they die.  It was NOT, however, Republicans in Congress that agreed to give them that benefit. The Postal Service made a concession to unions to pay for full health care benefits for employees until they died.  That was a collective bargaining concession that a lot of dumb companies have agreed to, and many of them have been brought down by it.  Case in point, General (now Government) Motors or GM.  In the mid 200os, Warren Buffett was asked by Charlie Rose if he was interested in buying GM.  Buffett’s response, in short, was no. GM, he explained, used to be a car company, but had become a pension and benefit operation with a small car unit attached.  There was no way to save GM without serious concessions from the Unions.

He clearly didn’t know about Barack Obama back then.

Flash forward to the Postal Service and you have the same issue – free health care, and pension benefits, until you die.

That is a serious problem when health care costs rise exponentially each year, and people stop sending mail.

So Congress says, “Hey, who will get stuck with the bill if the Postal Service collapses and can’t keep paying those costs out of current revenue?”  Yup, you guessed it, the taxpayer.

They pass a law that says USPS must put cash aside from current revenue to cover that expense in the event of a USPS failure.  They gave them ten years to fund the pot because they had no idea if the USPS would last for twenty.

So the USPS keeps putting cash aside and all is going fine – except for the fact that costs keep rising (yes, despite ObamaCare, costs keep going up and are expected to for the foreseeable future) and the USPS keeps losing business and has to put less in than planned because they’re broke.  Discovering that their “free health care for all forever” plan is eating them alive, they recently announced a reduction in Saturday service to cut costs.

To be clear, if Congress had made Enron or any other big company fully fund pension plans, the left would be cheering.  If a company had to keep a big pile of money on hand so every employee would be taken care of in case of a bankruptcy, the left would be jumping up and down.

In this case, however, the howls can be heard in China.  The right, they wail, is trying to kill off unions and shutter government (never mind that they’re also the first to point out that USPS isn’t actually government to begin with).

The reality is Congress (perhaps for the first time ever) was actually trying to keep the taxpayer from getting screwed if the Postal Service went belly up.  The postal employees would have been left with nothing or the US taxpaying population would be asked to cover an employee benefit liability currently estimated at about $100 billion.

For once, they did the right thing.

All of that said, let’s now address the “75 years” and “employees who aren’t born yet” nonsense.

The funding requires enough money to pay these benefits until an employee is dead.  In the case of the US, life expectancy is around 79 years. So an entry level employee at 18 or 19 years old would need to be covered for almost 60 years – not 75.  Again, that’s the deal the USPS made with them.  Don’t blame Congress for them taking that on.

As for the “employees not yet born” issue, those are not funds paid in.  Funds are only paid in on the actual employees.  However, for business planning purposes, the USPS has to estimate how much an employee will cost them to do business now and in the future.  For that reason, they have to assume that the person working for the postal service 20 years from now will need to be covered, even if they’re not yet born.

They plug that estimate into a formula that tells them what future costs might look like.  It’s really no different than weather forecasting, climate modeling or any long range estimation.  You make assumptions based on current data.  What you don’t do, and what the postal service does not have to do, is make payments on someone who isn’t a human yet.  It’s not happening, so stop repeating that.

Hope that clears some of this up.  If you really want to dive into it, here is the Congressional Research Service take on it from 2011.

 

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A Mass Murderer’s Suggestion for Curbing Violence

Jan 16 2013 Published by under Crime, Gaming, Government, Music, News Media, Politics, Society

I am a mass murderer.  At least that’s what the media would have you believe.

I play violent video games. I watch violent movies. I have read tales of fantasy, violence and destruction most of my life.  I also listen to rock music – the harder the better – and have for most of my life.

Various media outlets and commentators have identified all of these things as contributing factors in the violent outbursts of the unhinged.  Given that I participate in not one, but ALL of them; given that I have participated in them for thirty years; and given that I am a guy who spends much of his day in front of computer and TV screens, I should be a powder keg just looking for a spark.

But despite all of that, I have not once opened fire in a shopping center, taken up arms against an employer, or gone on a school rampage.

I do own guns. I hunt with them. That’s it.

I work, a lot.  When I have time, I play video games…. with friends… and with my kids…  None of them have opened fire at a mall.

So it amazes me to see so many people blaming the games, the movies and the music for the acts that horrify us on our TV screen.  They call for video game content restrictions, or labels on moves, music and games.  And yet the senseless tragedies continue because all of our handwringing is applied to the wrong question.

Rather than ask “what outside influences caused that guy to be violent” we should be asking the question “why does one person exposed to that level of violent content show no tendency toward actual violence while another does.

That variable – for all the talk of guns, and high capacity magazines, and violent games/movies/ music – is what we must endeavor to identify and address.

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The Problem With No More Solyndras

Sep 14 2012 Published by under Congress, Craziness, Government, Politics, Waste

So the House has now passed the exceptionally poorly named “No More Solyndras Act“.  I say poorly named because it doesn’t actually prevent more Solyndras.  As Taxpayers for Common Sense has noted, they should have called the bill the Even More Solyndras Act.

“This measure would still put taxpayers on the hook to loan out billions of dollars more to at least 50 additional shady alternative energy schemes that were submitted before January 1,” Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, said on the House floor Thursday, adding that the bill should be renamed “The 50 More Solyndras and Then We’ll Stop Wasting Your Money — Really — We Promise Act.”

The bill grandfathers in 50 existing applications totaling nearly $90 BILLION dollars. For those keeping score, that is roughly 180 times as much money as Solyndra lost.  The bill is meant to be a political winner for the GOP, but actually exposes the party to huge liabilities.

Let’s assume that one of these fifty companies collapses (which is quite likely).  Now the GOP owns the failure, not Obama and the Democrats.  You see the Democrats actually pushed for an amendment that would have ended the program outright.  They argued that if the program is so bad that it needs to be ended, we should not gamble another dollar.

By letting these 50 applications proceed, the GOP is essentially gambling that none of them will fail.  Mark my words, when they do, the Democrats will trot out statement after statement that says, “See, this is why we wanted to end it all.”  The GOP, on the other hand, will be left flat footed trying to explain how “No More Solyndras” produced more failed companies and more lost taxpayer dollars.

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