Nothin' matters and what if it did?

02:28 pm - John Edwards case

I'll admit ignorance about the fine grained details of campaign finance law and I'll further acknowledge that so far as I can see under current law the case against John Edwards is a tough one to prove. But perhaps exactly because of that it reveals a certain kind of wrongheadedness about campaign finance and what we're doing when we attempt to prevent its abuses. 

Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not campaign contribution is or should be protected by the constitution and/or whether that protection extends to corporations. We might further disagree about whether or not campaign financing has a corrupting influence when campaigners use it to create negative ads, etc. But surely we can all agree that the most corrupting kind of contribution is the sort that is spent on hiding or changing information and isn't that exactly what Edwards was doing? I'll consider the argument that preventing spending on, say, campaign advertising, may constitute a free speech violation, but suppose someone wrote a law asserting that campaign money could not be spend on say paying out hush money? Whatever one thinks about campaign finance, can't we all agree that hush money isn't a form of constitutionally protected speech? That's not to say that Edwards clearly did violate the law as written, and it's not to say that Edwards moral shortcomings as a husband show that he'd have been a lousy president, but it's just to remember that the main thing we should worry about as voters is cutting through the bullshit and whatever campaign finance laws were designed to do, using contributions to hide facts from voters most certainly is obviously, in my opinion, a far greater impediment to our ultimate goal in this regard.

11:27 am

Anyone else read that story about the Reagan foundation freaking out because someone is trying to sell a vial of Reagan's blood? (link: "it’s a craven act and we will use every legal means to stop its sale or purchase"). So, subjecting a vial of some dead guy's blood to the whims of the free market is a moral atrocity that must be prevented. Good to know that conservatives don't think *everything* should be subjected to the free market, but I'd like to hear the story about why it is okay in the case of the health care of American residents?

10:31 am - Reich's "Beyond Outrage"

My review of Robert Reich's "Beyond Outrage" as posted at barnesandnobles.com: (I gave it 3 out of 5 stars).

04:53 pm - Obama and gay marriage

When Obama made his announcement in support of gay marriage, I commented that I was impressed. It's not, to my mind, a stand that does him any favours politically. Most everyone who supports gay marriage was already planning to vote for him and I suspected it would hurt him more than it would help him amongst undecideds. Several people argued otherwise, though, that Obama was simply pandering for votes. But I think the data are now suggesting that if he was actually pandering, it was pretty crappy pandering.

A poll shows that 60 percent of Americans won't be any more or less likely to vote for him because of this but 26% will now be less likely and only 13% more likely, that's a net loss of 13%. That's significant in what's shaping up to be a pretty tight election, with the jobs reports looking as bleak as they have been. Conservative analysts note that this will help to fire up the Conservative base and may suddenly throw a number of states into play. But doesn't it fire up Obama's base too? Well, some of it -- it fires up gay rights advocates, but they were pretty much onside already with his moves on DADT and his refusal to enforce DOMA, but a significant portion of his key base, the black church, is extremely upset with Obama for his endorsement. (video)

So, in the end, I'm giving Obama full marks on this one. I think it was a bold move motivated by what he thinks is right rather than strictly political considerations. I agree that he could have done more, e.g., push for federal legislation rather than just leaving it up to the States. But, nonetheless, kudos to him for what he did do.

x-posted to blogspot

11:54 am

Bristol Palin, not sure why we care what she says, but she's fairly representative, claims: "We know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home." But, we *know* no such thing, it's hard to find evidence that kids being raised in mother/father homes "do better" than kids raised in mother/mother or father/father homes. (In fact, there's even some evidence suggesting that kids do better in mother/mother or father/father homes.) Here's a good literature review:  link. 

10:59 am - On same sex marriage reductios

One often hears/reads reductio ad ridiculum/slippery slope responses to proposals to legalize same-sex marriage. These arguments take the form of "if we allow same sex marriage, the next thing you know, people will be marrying their dogs or inanimate objects and the like" or "why stop at couples, if we're going to open the door to same sex marriage, why not let triads or quartets or even larger groups marry". This argument contends that unless we enforce the "male-female pairing" nature of marriage, we render the notion of marriage baseless and untenably vague.

It's worth spelling out explicitly why or whether such concerns are ill founded because they continue to doggedly persist. Marriage doesn't have to be either a committed male-female pairing or a meaningless notion that can be applied to any sort of n-ary relation. The essential components of marriage, I'd contend, is that it be an agreement to enter into an intimate lifelong relationship and that the agreement be freely made. Such relationships recognized by the state in order to provide and support a framework of stability within which the participants might then contribute to society. As such, it's fairly clear why same sex marriage doesn't open the door to "man on dog" marriage as dogs lack the wherewithal to enter into anything like a contractual situation as they lack the capacity to give their assent to a lifelong commitment. But what of n-ary relationships, where n>2? I think it's fairly clear that it is possible for people to freely enter into a commitment to maintain such a relationship. There we'd need to consider the "framework of stability" consideration. If as a matter of empirical fact, people can and do enter into three way relationships that flourish and provide a stable environment from within which the participants can raise children and participate in society, then perhaps that is a good argument for recognizing triadic marriages. If, as a matter of fact, such relationships tend to devolve quickly and/or cause extraordinary difficulty when it comes to determining child custody and support and such things, then recognizing such relationships as marriages might be imprudent. But the point is that there are principles, the very traditional principles that motivated the institution of marriage in the first place, not arbitrary physiological features that we can use when considering who should participate in marriage.

x-posted to blogspot

12:11 pm - Dan Savage

I got into a discussion this weekend on FB about an incident in which Dan Savage said, "We can learn to ignore the bullhit in the Bible about gay people." and then derided as "pansied-ass" some people who walked out after the comments. (video of the remarks here). 

Here's how one conservative paper described the incident: link. It makes no effort to spell out the argument that Savage made focusing instead on the fact that he used the word "bullshit" and "pansy-assed" (I didn't notice him calling the students pansies in the video as the article claimed but I may have missed it) A friend on FB posted the link to the Examiner article and insisted that Savage be fired. I noted in response, that although the article describes Savage as Obama's anti-bullying czar, I don't know of his serving in any official position for the White House, so it's not clear what exactly he should be fired from. The response from a couple of people was that because people in the Obama WH, including Obama himself, had created "It Gets Better" videos they were now obligated to denounce what he had said at this meeting. I contended that this was an odd obligation to place on the WH - that surely their participation in an excellent grassroots campaign didn't obligate them to pass judgement on all of Savage's future work just because Savage happened to have kicked off the campaign. Then things got weird, with someone arguing that Obama hates Christianity and that the participation in the campaign was a violation of separation of church and state. I asked for some clarification of how they arrived at this conclusion but none was forthcoming.

In any event, I found this incident exceedingly illuminating and troubling. One might think that Christians would be at the forefront of something like an anti-bullying campaign, what clearer violation of Christ's commandments to love could there be then the sort of bullying that occurs in schools. But instead of joining forces with Savage on what should be obvious common ground, (some) Christians rush to find reasons to be offended and deride an excellent campaign going so far as to call this incident bullying and thereby trying to equate it with the sort of thing that the "it gets better" campaign is try to eliminate. 

03:12 pm - A proposal to save the NHL regular season from irrelevance

11:14 am - Alberta, what just happened?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a situation in which the polls got things as wrong as they did in the Alberta election this year. So, what happened? Were people were turned off by the bigotry and changed their minds about the Wildrose at the last minute? Did strategic voters, aided perhaps by the "viral" video that was circulated, move to the PCs to help them take back the province?  Pollsters did a lousy job and/or there were statistical anomalies, the alleged Wildrose lead never really existed.

Update: Warren Kinsella wasn't surprised, he predicted the extremism could hurt them (and he's taking numbers on those who scoffed at him.)

x-posted to canpolitik

02:05 pm

Wow, I haven't really been paying close attention to Alberta but heard rumblings recently that the PCs there were falling on hard times. I was tickled and surprised. but now I learn that it's only because some even nuttier right wing nut jobs have distracted Albertans. I knew it was too good to be true.