Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Continuing on the discussion of politics and primaries: I went to the Republican caucus yesterday as a mild mannered Indian dude, and walked out as a Precinct Committee Officer and a Delegate to the county convention.

Before going into the details, I found the results of the Saturday’s primaries and caucuses pretty interesting. Obama’s strong performance was not surprising, I continue to expect to see him and Hillary stay neck and neck in the race. The Republican events showed that the party really dislikes McCain. Huckabee dominated Kansas, won Louisiana, and may win Washington once the votes are counted. Based on what I saw at the Washington convention, I don’t think most people voted for Huckabee, just against McCain.

Despite what the media is saying, McCain doesn’t have this wrapped up. He needs to get 42% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination and today he got 42%, 26%, and 24% in the three states. Not at all on the pace he needs to be.

The Washington caucus was really interesting. My first impression is that the caucus system is completely broken and full of opportunities to game the system. While I still don’t understand how the whole system works, here’s what I think happens. First at the general precinct level caucus we elect delegates to represent the precinct at the country level. At the county level, we pick and elect delegates to the state convention. And at the state convention you elect national delegates. Those delegates go to the national convention to vote on who will be the party’s candidate. At all the levels it seems like a lot of the delegates are appointed by party officials. They can, of course, pick whoever they want and will usually support the establishment candidate.

So we aren’t actually voting on candidates, we’re voting for representatives. These representatives, in theory, can vote for whoever they would like. That’s why all the media outlets have different delegate counts, no delegate has actually voted yet. They are just bound to candidates. And in most cases there’s nothing completely “binding”. Plus, once we get the national convention, the delegates can do whatever they want if the first ballot doesn’t have a winner with at least 50% of the votes.

The first thing that was interesting about the caucus was the huge attendance. I think there were probably 400 people, while the organizers were expecting at most half of that. The make up of the attendees was old, retired people (including many veterans), party officials, and lots of young people. In fact, I think young people may have made up 50% of the attendees.

Also, there weren’t many minorities, aside from me and maybe two other people, every else was white. I’m curious what the make up of the Democratic convention was, but I imagine in this area most of the minorities are on visas, so they can’t vote anyway.

The Ron Paul campaign clearly instructed supporters not to identify themselves as Ron Paul supporters. There has been a lot of disenfranchisement reported in the caucuses and primaries so far. Around the country, there have been lots of reports of people showing up with a Ron Paul shirt and being forced to use a “provisional ballot” since the officials “couldn’t find” their registration. So, the campaign told supporters to write “undecided” in their presidential preference when signing in, and then, if possible, update their preference when leaving. Based on my experience, most of the “Uncommitted” vote in Washington is really Ron Paul supporters.

Thankfully, I didn’t see that many shenanigans. When everyone was finally checked in, the large group had to elect a “Presiding Officer”. The temporary facilitator opted to do a vote count (”aye”) and despite the two choices getting equal votes, he quickly declared, “The chair is not in doubt…” and claiming victory for a party official. Which was weird, but the Officer didn’t really do anything as far I as could tell.

Then we broke into districts to elect delegates and vote on the party platform. Districts are roughly the size of city blocks. As luck would have it, my district is basically a little more than our apartment complex and I was the only one that showed up from it. So, unsurprisingly, I was nominated for Precinct Committee Officer and won one of the delegate spots for the precinct. Additionally, I got permission from the party officials and approval from my precinct to nominate my wife to be the other delegate from our district. So Crissy is a delegate too.

I filled out the paperwork and the platform questionnaire and was chatting with some people when a guy from KIRO showed up and asked us for opinions. I said something along the lines of, “We have a recession and the economy will only be getting worse. This is due to our foreign policy and runaway spending in Washington. Only one candidate in both parties is addressing these things in an intelligent and logical way, so I’m a Ron Paul guy.” The sound guy didn’t seem too happy with the answer and asked the next guy. He said (roughly), “I came here supporting Huckabee, but after talking to this guy [me], I’m thinking of Paul.” The next two guys said “Ron Paul” as well.

Finally the KIRO guy found a Huckabee supporter and said, “What do you think about all these Paul supporters?” The Huckabee guy looked confused, shrugged, and said “I don’t know. It’s a big tent.”

I chatted with a few more people. It seemed like anyone under 50 was a Paul supporter, new to the party, and this group made up around 40% of the crowd. There were a number of Huckabee guys, but most of them were really “Anyone but McCain”. Lastly, the McCain support was party officials and some veterans who only knew that McCain fought in Vietnam and not much about his platform.

Also of interest, every Ron Paul supporter I talked to said, “I’m never voting for the lesser of two evils again. I’m voting my conscience from now on.” For me, when it comes to voting, I firmly believe that “the lesser of two evils” is still evil.

I just noticed the Washington results; though it has been over a day, only 87% of the precincts have reported and the party declared McCain the winner. But there is only a 242 vote difference between him and Huckabee. And Paul is just 427 votes behind. Definitely seems a little sketchy.

While discussing the primaries, I mentioned that it’s unlikely that things will be decided before the national conventions and it’s likely we’ll have brokered conventions for both parties.

On the Democratic side, unless something big happens, I expect to see Obama and Hillary both stay around 50% through the primary season. When a very divided party meets at the convention, they will need to compromise. Neither Hillary or Obama will want to be VP for the other. So what will the party do? They will bring in the one person that unite the whole party, energize the base, and bring back all the people that have been disenfranchised with the party: Al Gore.

Gore keeps saying he’s not interested, but with the Republican party falling apart and a strong 3rd party offering, he can win easily (more discussion below). I’m not sure who he would take as a VP though. Probably a moderate governor who until then had been out of the spotlight.

On the Republican side, I was pretty sure we would see a brokered convention a couple days ago. And with Mitt Romney “suspending” his campaign, I’m actually more convinced that this will happen. I think this is a really smart play for Mitt. If McCain does “wrap” things up and the party picks him, Romney sets himself up as a clear VP choice. He is in 2nd place so far and was willing to put aside his ambitions for “the good of the party”. Plus, McCain is likely a one term president. So Romney, in this case, is the clear nominee in 2012.

On the other hand, if we go to a brokered convention because the Republican base won’t accept McCain, Romney is in position to be a compromise candidate.

Mostly likely, Ron Paul will form a new party or coalition and run as a 3rd party with a slate of Congressional candidates aligned with him. If McCain is the Republican candidate, look for the all fiscal conservatives to vote for Paul or stay home. As the economy goes further into recession, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Perot type numbers for Paul.

If Gore is the Democratic candidate, billionaire Bloomberg is unlikely to run as a 3rd party. It would be hard to pull the big government vote from Gore. If somehow Obama or Hillary gets the nomination, expect to see Bloomberg run and pull around 5 to 10% of the vote.

A four way race could be cool: McCain or Romney for the Republicans, Hillary or Obama for the Democrats, Bloomberg as the big government candidate, and Paul as the fiscal conservative. Add the recession and it could actually be a very good thing for America.

The two party system has polarized the country into a simple black and white world where thoughtful and thorough analysis is a liability. Having the major parties vulnerable on both flanks from legitimate candidates could shake up American politics for decades to come.

How sure am I about this? As I think about it, I’m getting more convinced that Gore will be appointed if the Hillary / Obama deadlock continues to the convention.

And I’m confident that Ron Paul will create a coalition of independents with the endorsement of a few 3rd parties, and a small slate of congressional candidates. Given the trouble the economy is in, I can see Paul carrying 10% of the popular vote.

Are all elections this interesting? Or is it just due to the unprecedented access to news and opinion due the Internet and the chatterbox?

Update: I just realized that I may have used the wrong terminology. On the Republican side, I don’t expect a “brokered convention”, rather I expect that enough “McCain” delegates will not support him on the first ballot, so he won’t win that first round. Then it’s completely wide open. I’m not sure what that situation is called.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, this will be a another rant about stupid government. And if you read closely, hopefully you’ll be tickled by my clever use of the word “tackle” in the title. :-)

A quick summary in case you weren’t paying attention to thePatriots cheating scandal and associated drama that’s sweeping through the NFL:

• In September, the Patriots were discovered breaking NFL rules regarding filming an opponents sideline during a game.
• Then, the league commissioner slapped the team and coach with one of the larger fines in league history.
• The Patriots responded with an insincere apology.
• The commissioner went on national TV basically accusing the team of dragging its feet in handing over evidence and threatening them with even more fines.
• A few days later, the NFL announced it had destroyed all evidence and refused to say what the evidence contained.

Basically since then, the league won’t answer anymore questions. It seems likely that the cheating was much worse than originally thought and the league decided that the PR cost of stonewalling is less than the PR cost of coming clean.

Which means to someone like me, I want to know what happened! Especially since I don’t like the Patriots due to their lack of sportsmanship. All season long they would run up the score after the game had been decided, by keeping their starters in and trying to get more and more points. It’s just shameful.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Congress is now threatening to get involved similar to the Congressional Hearing about steroid use in baseball. And that raises the questions of “Why should Congress get involved?” and “Don’t they have anything better to do?”

Let’s start with “Don’t they have anything better to do?”. Well, yes. But politicians would rather do easy things that generate headlines than actual useful work like balance the budget or end the war. It’s sad, but true.

The next question, “Why should Congress get involved?”. I’m assuming that the justification is that NFL is a government created and allowed monopoly and is heavily subsidized (stadiums, broadcasts, etc). Even though strictly speaking no laws were broken, just NFL rules, the broadcast license stipulates that anything presented as live competition can’t have any “pre-arrangement” or “cheating”. In other words it can’t be fake.

And of course, the kicker, “Why is the federal government granting monopoly license to entertainment?” It’s not really sanctioned by the constitution unless you have a liberal reading of the interstate commerce clause. It probably comes down to the same reason a lot of things happen in the government, rich owners (team owners) needs something and the bribe Congress (”lobby”) to make it happen.

So sad. On the upside, maybe the investigation will show that the Patriots are really bad cheaters and they will “lose” some of their Super Bowl wins. Bad sportsmanship and cheating should never be rewarded.

This whole primary and caucus system is really complicated and silly. Take Washington State, we have a primary and a caucus. Which one counts towards delegates? Well, for the Democrats, the primary vote doesn’t affect the delegate allocation. The caucus decides all of them. And since the primary is after the caucus, the primary is completely meaningless.

So for the Democrats, they aren’t being democratic at all. The primary, where real people vote, counts for nothing. Everything is decided by the few party insiders that know about the caucus and can “qualify” (pass all the red tape) to participate.

The Republicans, on the other hand, at least pretend to care about what the people want. 51% of their delegates are determined by the caucus and 49% of their delegates are determined by the primary. But still half of the delegates are awarded by the party insiders.

On top of that, you can see all sorts of wheeling and dealing during these caucuses. Take the West Virginia convention today, after the first round, Romney was beating Huckabee, with McCain and Paul far behind. Since no candidate had the majority, everyone needed to vote again, this time without the lowest placing candidate.

Now, the McCain people realized that they weren’t going to win, so they decided that all that mattered was that Romney didn’t win. So the McCain voters decided to go to Huckabee. The Paul folks also went to Huckabee as they negotiated 3 of the 18 total delegates in exchange.

It was a win-win-win, Huckabee got the win, McCain prevented Romney from winning, and Paul got 3 delegates as opposed to 0. So technically, Paul took second in West Virginia. Poor Romney got outmaneuvered.

The way things are going neither party nomination will be decided before the conventions. So we’ll go to a brokered convention and see all sorts of wheeling and dealing like this.

So this post is a long time coming… Sunday is an exciting day for me, because I’ve been closely watching and researching how Web 2.0 is altering politics (by the way, I hate the term “Web 2.0″, but more on that later). One of the web’s main disruptive forces is its ability to level the playing field. As long as the government isn’t censoring things (like in China), everyone and anyone has an equal voice online. And their popularity and ability to spread their ideas is suddenly a function of the quality of their message.

In the past, if you wanted to get a message out, you needed to have access to the mainstream media (the TV networks, the newspapers, etc.). That was, of course, nearly impossible for the ordinary person for a couple of reasons. First, the editorial boards decided what was important, and second, put simply, money talks. If you don’t have it, or have a way to make it, they aren’t interested. Yes, it’s a sad statement, but why are almost all the major political candidates either extremely rich or connected to the rich?

The Internet however, is less interested in who’s rich. For the most part, it’s democratic. If you have page views (e.g. votes), you are important. Traffic is king. And traffic comes from content.

Content is important, so if you have it, you get massive support online. Mainstream politics is all about the sound bite: that five second clip for the TV news and that 10 word quote for the papers. On the Internet though, that isn’t enough; who’s going to care about a page that just has a five second video clip or 10 words?

Suddenly now you have to explain your arguments and since your audience has vast amounts of information at their fingertips, you better have put some thought into it. After all, any idiot with a blog can point out the flaws of poorly construed ideas pretty quickly.

Now along comes a little known Congressman from Texas: Ron Paul. I first heard of Dr. Paul in college. As I became involved in numerous political organizations in college, I got frustrated that all most of us knew were the usual soundbites. But what was missing was the depth of analysis; a lot of things sound great in a 15 second proposal. But they sound stupid once you start asking the right questions.

Ron Paul, though, in all his speeches and writing demonstrated an deep understanding of the topic and always gave a clear answer on why he was doing something. He voted against the Patriot Act, against the Iraqi War, and gave strong impassioned speeches against them. He’s never voted for a unbalanced budget and is known as “Dr. No” for voting against so many things in Congress.

When I saw the announcement that Ron Paul was running for president, I thought to myself, “Finally a candidate I can vote for in the primaries.” But I didn’t expect him to do that well, and figured that at least a few people would hear his strong defense of liberty and the world would be a slightly better place for it.

But, I’m amazed at the extent that this message of liberty has spread. The grassroots support has been unprecedented and Ron Paul has embraced it as any free market supporter has: just let the people do what they want.

As a result, his supporters have, among lots of other things:

• Launched a blimp (at a cost of over $250K)
• Arranged numerous airplane banner ads over major sporting events
• Self organized to an extent never seen before (nearly 88,000 Meetup volunteers, compared to 5,600 for Obama).
• Organized a campaign to send a handwritten letter to every voter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And they are almost done.
• Minted gold coins with Ron Paul likeness. And when the Fed raided and shut down the place, they created chocolate coins.
• Taken out full page ads in the USA Today

And, remember how money talks? Ron Paul supporters have organized fundraising campaigns completely independently of the official campaign. The November 5th “Money Bomb” was independently organized and raised $4.2 million in one day. And so far this quarter, Ron Paul has raised over $12 million, which is more than any Republican raised in all Q3.

The money is coming from ordinary people, not fatcats and lobbyists like the Hillarys of the world. According to RonPaulGraphs, his $12.1 million raised (so far) came from 140,000 people. This means that average donation was $86.

So normal people are the ones that are supporting this message and more and more people are trying to learn more about him. Check out this graph of people searching for Ron Paul on Google compared to the other candidates. The same forces that govern popularity online are translating into “the real world”: ordinary people can make a difference.

History has a handful of inflection points where something big happens, everyone stops takes notice, and the course of history changes. I think Sunday may be one of those days. Ron Paul supporters are using the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party to launch another 24 hour money bomb. I think that the millions that will be raised, the rallies held all over the nation, and the expression of the will of the people will surprise people. And they will take notice. And the world may change.

And just in case, if this is one of those important days in history, remember where you are on Sunday. One day your grandkids may ask you, “Where were you during the Tea Party of ‘07?”

Social security taxes are one of those great stealth taxes. Most people know that you pay 6.2% of your wages into the Social Security Trust, but most don’t know that your employer also pays 6.2%.  So you really pay 12.4% (which is indeed what self-employed people have to pay).

Social security taxes only apply up till a certain amount of your income. For 2007, it applied towards your first $97,500 of income. Next year it goes up to $102,000. You can see all the details here. So if you’re fortunate enough to make that much money, you’ll pay $558 more (or 4.62% more) for a total of $12,468.

I guess this adjustment comes every year, seems weird that you can just change payroll taxes without a vote. Maybe it was in some large budget bill or something.

It’s the “eleventh day of the eleventh month”, when we mark Armistice Day, the day hostilities on the Western Front of WWI ceased. Today is celebrated all over the world. If you see people wearing poppies around this time of year, it’s in reference to the poem “In Flanders Fields“.

We celebrated Armistice Day here in the US, until we changed it to be “Veterans Day” during the height of the Cold War. The reasons in the resolution was to honor the veterans of all wars, not just WWI.

But there’s a strange subtle shift here, when it was Armistice Day, we were celebrating peace, with the hope that war is just an aberration to the norm. Then we shifted from celebrating peace to celebrating the soldiers. It’s definitely good to celebrate the sacrifices of soldiers, but it seems like peace should have its day too.

Remember, there’s a lot in a name. We used to have a “Department of War”, then it was briefly called the “National Military Establishment”, before it became the “Department of Defense”. Noodle on that for a while. ;-)

Continuing on the topic of stupid politicians, I read that Hillary Clinton is supporting giving a $5,000 savings bond to each baby born in America:

I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home.

Now, Hillary is a really smart person, so this stupid proposal must just be pandering to stupid voters. This idea is so wrong on so many levels it’s maddening. Let’s first start with the obvious: Where’s the money going to come from?

So the government buys a US T-Bond at $5,000 for each kid. Assuming it grows at 4%, but the time the kid is 18, it’s worth about $10,000. Keep in mind, since the government bought the bond from themselves and consistently runs a deficit, the money isn’t in an separate account just hanging around collecting interest. So when the kid turns 18, the government has to come up with the $10,000.

We now know that 4 million kids are born each year. So this program will cost $40 billion a year. And since we run a deficit, this money will come from inflationary or deficit spending! Woohoo!

And when that kid takes their $10,000 and go to buy their first house, they will be competing with other buyers that also just got $10,000. And what will happen? Well, most likely the price will go up roughly $10,000.

Same thing with the college kids. Armed with an extra $10,000 to pay for college, you can bet that tuition is going to go up. It’s the same thing that happened when all the college loans became so easy to get: price goes up.

Another nice tidbit from the article:

Clinton said such an account program would help Americans get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, and has become harder to accomplish in the face of rising college and housing costs.

Yup, there’s nothing that will get us back to the tradition of savings then giving people lots of money. That’s why rich, spoiled kids like Paris Hilton have no sense of entitlement. Sheesh.

And if you want more evidence for the stupid politician theory, here’s some insight from Rep. Stubbs from Ohio:

I think it’s a wonderful idea. Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until their 18?

That should say, “Every kid will owe $27,000, why not make it $37,000?” But, of course, it’s too much to expect our representatives to understand basic economics.

After reading a couple of recent Presidential Debate transcripts lately, I decided I would propose a new format: Kick the candidates out after they say something that is indisputably false. Then, the winner can be the last one standing. I estimate we’ll have a winner in about 10 minutes.

Even with Hanlon’s razor (”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”), I can’t figure out if these politicians are really stupid, or lying because they think we’re really stupid. Unfortunately, it is probably the case that we’re all really stupid; but that’s too depressing of a thought for a sunny Friday afternoon. :-)

Despite your political views, I think you’ll find these examples to just be incredible. First, from the Democratic debate, responding to a question about the legal drinking age, Senator Biden said,

The cost of alcoholism in America, the cost of accidents that flow from drunkenness, are astronomical. There are 300,000 babies born deformed every year in this country because of women who are alcoholics while they’re carrying those children to term.

That number just doesn’t pass the sniff test: 300,000 deformed babies a year due to alcoholism? Let’s check it out, the US birth rate is 14.14 births per 1000 people per year. This means with a population of just about 300 million, there are 4.2 million births a year. This means according to Biden’s number, 7% of all babies are born with deformities due to alcoholism.

Seems pretty unlikely. In fact, the Center for Disease Control says that between 1,000 and 6,000 babies are born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. So Biden only inflated his number by about a factor of 100.

And from the Republican debate, Senator Brownback says, “We declared war [on Iraq].” This most certainly isn’t the case, the US hasn’t declared a war since WWII. Granted, Congress did authorize the conflict, but it never formally made a declaration. While you could argue it’s a minor distinction, it is a distinction that US Senator should be able to make.

So under my proposed format, both of these Senators would be kicked out for lying. But, it may be more fun if let the audience throw tomatoes at the politicians when they lie. Then at the end, the cleanest one would be the winner. :-)

This headline from the Register-Guard paper in Oregon has been making rounds on the internet as a humorous example of government waste. And if you know me, you know that I found it quite funny. :-)

But if you know me, you know that I had to look into it some more. First (using my favorite search engine) I found the actual article. After reading the first sentence, it’s obvious that the headline is misleading. The county government actually just approved spending “up to $250,000″.

Also, according to the article, $200,000 of the total would be “contributed” from the budgets of other departments at the discretion of the department’s supervisor. What government bureaucrat would actually give money to another department?

Lane County has a population of just under 340,000 people, which means the advertising allocation is roughly 75 cents a person. That doesn’t cover all that much.

The Lane County annual budget is slightly more than $500 million. This makes the advertising allocation just 0.05% of the budget. To put that in perspective, a small business should generally spend 5% of the previous year’s gross on marketing.

Despite this, it’s still pretty wasteful. At a basic level, if the county can’t convince people it needs more money without marketing, it probably doesn’t need it.

Keep in mind, marketing is the art of making someone want something they don’t need. So if your government is advertising… well you can figure the rest out. :-)