Category: Politics

Center-Right

I keep seeing that this is a “center right” country, but the election results we’re seeing make me question this analysis. I see ‘center right’ as an average without a standard deviation. If it’s 70 degrees every day, the average temp is 70. If it’s 100 degrees half of the year and 40 the other half, the average temp both places is moderate; but that average hides the two different realities. It’s the standard deviation that shows you how representative an average *is*.
 
If there were a low standard deviation on center-right, then the Democratic party’s would make sense — you’re pretty close to their moderate position, so earning your vote is possible. If there’s a high standard deviation, there’s no appealing to “the other side” — you’re task is to energize people on “your side”, get them enthusiastic about voting, get them engaged in getting their friends out voting.

Bloomberg’s Millions

I wonder if the lesson from Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 election investments might be “dumping money into advertisements has limited benefit”. A hundred million dollars to fund groups driving people to polls. Or free public transport rides on election day. Or groups helping people navigate voter registration (possibly including fees and transportation to where-ever non-driver photo IDs are issued). Maybe those would have been more productive ways to blow a hundred mil.

Pre-Hatched Ideas

I’ve got two working story-lines to end the reality-TV-presidency. Trump steps down next week, Barr pushes through a bunch of cases against him and he’s found innocent (or guilty and Pence pardons him). Lacks pizazz. Also doesn’t sort the state charges — my memory is that SCOTUS has held there’s no double jeopardy because you’ve violated the federal law *and* the completely separate (even if it’s the same thing) state law.
 
The one I like better – Trump kicks off a I didn’t really lose tour / airing of grievances across the country, culminating in oversea visits to the troops. While visiting Incirlik, he defects and stays in Turkey. Plot twist — all of the QAnon folks follow him and shore up Erdoğan’s support in the 2023 election. But the same QAnon folks get Trump into the National Assembly, and he wins the 2028 general election to replace Erdoğan.

Campaigning Without Ads

I’ve seen some stats on what’s been spent on political campaigning this year — and it made me wonder what if they didn’t put so much money into advertising and cross-country tours. What if each party selected something from their platform and put the money into “fixing” the problem. Maybe the Republicans could take three billion dollars and build a private organization that patrols the border. The Democrats could take five billion dollars and create a non-profit that pays for medical procedures. It would certainly be reported by the news — you’d hear about who was doing it and what they were doing. And, instead of ClearChannel and whomever making a load of money selling airtime … the campaigning would actually accomplish something the party thinks needs to get done.

Drop Box — Medina County Board of Elections

The Medina County Board of Elections is located down the road to the North of the Hobby Lobby / Walmart plaza (Stonegate Drive). It’s on the south side of Stonegate Drive, in a little strip-mall looking plaza.

The mail-in ballot drop-box is located to the right of their door. There are two envelopes you need to use. One that you sign & put personal info on — that needs to go into the outer mailing envelope (aka privacy envelope) even if you’re not actually mailing the ballot. You can drop off your ballots any time — slide the envelope into the slot, so you don’t have to touch anything except your ballot.

On Originalism

Originalism can roll back a frightening amount of legislation — New Deal, civil rights, food safety, etc. There’s even a school of thought that says the 14th amendment doesn’t mean stuff like the bill of rights doesn’t limit state government. Just Congress. Which would mean a *state* is free to enact limits that abrogate our federally ensured rights. The illogic of the argument is, I assume, why originalists inconsistently apply their beliefs rulings. Think of the 11th Amendment interpretation that “by Citizens of another State” includes ‘citizens of *that* state’, for instance. Or the purported Second Amendment right to weaponry that hadn’t been imagined in the late 1700’s. Originalists make decisions contrary to the founders’ understanding of what they wrote.
 
And originalism seems to invalidate itself — was the understanding at the time the Constitution was adopted that most legislation requires a Constitutional amendment?

Dueling Town Halls

It struck me, while watching the dueling town hall events, how normalized it has become that the national news talks about the president every.single.day. I get that it’s news because he’s the president … but, for most of American history, the president did his thing. Some people didn’t agree with his choices, some did. But it wasn’t so outrageous as to warrant being broadcast to the entire country on the national news. I don’t mean the cable-news plenty-of-time-to-fill stations — I mean the half hour daily news on the national networks.

On Patriotic History

History is written by the victor. They can tell us how nice they were (or at least how necessary their not-niceness was). But the fact those who win get to write history in their favor doesn’t negate the value of ensuring people have a more robust view of what actually transpired. The good and the bad. Which makes Trump’s idea of a more patriotic history quite frightening.
 
In software development, we have “retrospectives” — a meeting where everyone chats about how the last project went. What worked well. What didn’t work well. It’s not meant to be subversive, negative, or blamey — it’s meant to get people thinking about how we could improve the things that didn’t work well. And to feel proud about the things that did go well. I’d love to see this approach taken to teaching history.
 
By focusing only on the good aspects, you lose important information. A tangentially related example: my daughter’s social studies book attempts to cover the concept of savings and loans. They talked about saving money to buy something bigger later and about the bank giving you money to buy something bigger *now* and you you give the money back later. And omitted the entire concept of interest. Elementary schools are telling kids that the bank will give you a couple hundred k to buy a house, you pay them back over time, and it’s all beautiful. I pulled up my credit card statement and showed her how the grand we spent last month could be paid back immediately — the bank gave me a grand, I paid them a grand back, and they gave me 30$ in bonus cash back for using their service — but that’s not a sustainable business model. How does the bank pay for the building downtown? The people who work there? The advertising? The computer systems? I showed her the “if you pay the minimum” and “if you pay more than the minimum, look how much you ‘save'” box where that grand could cost me three grand. Or I could ‘save’ 1500 by paying more than the minimum due.