Category Archives: Arsenal Analysis

Colorado: The return of Ken Buck

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Hey, will you look at that: Failed 2010 Republican Senate nominee for Colorado, Ken Buck, is back again to seek the state’s other seat in 2014. He’s off to a very strong start with a puzzling (yet, predictably offensive) comparison between a woman’s pregnancy and his experience battling cancer, as a way to express his opposition to a woman having a say in her personal health.

Yes, I am pro-life. While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body — it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body — there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child.

 
This dismissive attitude toward women’s decision-making abilities is absolutely in line with his past views from the 2010 cycle. It also reminds us of his “prosecutor’s discretion” decision not to charge a rapist on the horrid “grounds” that the survivor, who had been asleep, must have just made a bad call and regretted it, even though the rapist also admitted lack of consent. (More on that here.)

That all added up to Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund dropping over $800k in Colorado to run this ad in October 2010…

If Ken Buck wins the GOP nomination in Colorado, that’s probably for the best from a Democratic perspective, given that anti-woman comments like this latest cancer comparison were what helped him lose an easy race to an unelected no-name appointee. Here’s the text from my 11/3/10 post at Starboard Broadside:

Against the odds, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Col., appointed 2009) has pulled off an upset to win his bid for a six-year term against DA Ken Buck, the tea-party favorite who had led the former Denver Public Schools superintendent for months in the polling. The Associated Press has called the race for Bennet with 97.2% of the vote reported, as Bennet leads by 15,444 votes. Buck has not conceded yet.

Bennet began pulling even in recent weeks as more revelations about Buck’s views on rape, abortion, and women came to light. Bennet’s hard-hitting response combined with independent expenditures against Buck by women’s groups helped derail Buck’s campaign. This was a critical hold for Democrats, as in nearby Nevada, where Harry Reid also won a major upset to retain his seat. On a night where the Democrats lost Obama’s old seat in Illinois, it would have been yet another embarrassment for the President to lose Colorado, since Bennet only occupies the seat because President Obama appointed Sen. Ken Salazar (D) to serve as Interior Secretary in his administration.

 

This time, if nominated again, Buck would be up against an elected incumbent with very high name recognition — Senator Mark Udall.

Oh, and I haven’t even gotten into Ken Buck’s views on education. But I guess I have to end this post somewhere before it just becomes an exercise in telling someone about that nightmare you had last night.

Replacing the War Powers Act

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Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and John McCain (R-AZ) want to get rid of the War Powers Act — slogan: “Consistently Ignored by Presidents Since 1973!” — and replace it with something that might actually work and better reflect realities of U.S. military operations today. Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the existing law, which officially is called the “War Powers Resolution of 1973“:

The War Powers Resolution requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30 day withdrawal period, without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war. The resolution was passed by two-thirds of Congress, overriding a presidential veto.

 
The failed presidential veto was by Richard Nixon, the year before his resignation, but Congress was responding to significant public outrage about the secret, unauthorized bombings in Cambodia during the Vietnam War — which, while authorized by Congress, had also never been declared. (In fact, the last formal Declaration of War was part of World War II.)

Although it’s no surprise that Nixon rejected the legitimacy of the law — given his unusually heightened aversion to the legitimacy of applying any law to the U.S. Presidency — every president since then (except for possibly one incident in 1975 under President Ford, who had fairly recently been elevated directly from and by the legislative branch to the White House via the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon) has also officially refused to acknowledge its constitutionality as a general principle.

Even so, to be on the safe side, presidents have generally unofficially adhered to it by providing the proper notice to Congress more or less as a “courtesy” without acknowledging the resolution as the reason. A few instances are disputed as to whether this notice was provided. Congress has never been able to successfully enforce the resolution or end any conflicts with it, and the Supreme Court won’t get into the middle of that inter-branch fight.

Tim Kaine essentially feels this situation is absurd, as well as out of date, and he wants a compromise that preserves the ability of the executive to act quickly when necessary but also preserves the rights of Congress to have a say and maintain accountability. From the ThinkProgress article (linked above):

Rather than only having to notify Congress after launching military action, Kaine and McCain want the force presidents to consult with legislators prior to sending U.S. soldiers, sailors, and pilots into harm’s way.

Under current law, the president has to notify Congress whenever placing forces in areas where “imminent” hostilities are likely, and is given a sixty-day window to conduct the operation absent Congressional approval and another thirty-days allotted towards withdrawal. The new proposal would reduce that autonomy, requiring the Executive Branch to “consult with Congress before ordering deployment into a ‘significant armed conflict,’ or, combat operations lasting, or expected to last, more than seven days.”

That provision would exclude humanitarian missions and covert operations, and the initial consultation could be deferred in time of emergency, but must take place within three days after. The legislation would also raise a new joint committee composed of the heads of the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Intelligence, and Appropriations in both Houses of Congress “to ensure there is a timely exchange of views between the legislative and executive branches, not just notification by the executive.”

Finally, the law, if passed and signed, would require a vote in Congress in support of or against any military operation within 30 days.

 
Now is a relatively good time to try to introduce such a revision, not too long after an angry Congress (and a well-timed revolt in the UK parliament) managed to talk down the Obama Administration from launching a major air campaign in Syria, proving that Congress still had at least a shred of influence on U.S. military actions after more than two decades of rubber-stamping.

But, in 2008, the Obama Campaign more or less signaled their opposition to a similar proposal. While unfortunate, this is not a huge surprise. Most presidents (or presidential hopefuls) reject out of hand any legal limitations on their powers as “commander-in-chief,” even despite the Constitution’s specific and intentional provision reserving the power to declare wars to Congress (a power typically previously wielded only by the monarch heads of state in the Europe of the day against which the Framers were comparing their system). President Obama doesn’t want to limit his own power (or that of his successors) to act decisively and quickly in the face of the “unknown unknowns,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called them.

Virginia forges ahead on settling East Asia dispute

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I’m still not sure what or who brought it up in the first place, but, having apparently solved all other pressing policy matters in the state, Virginia’s elected officials have in recent years begun debating whether or not public school textbooks in the state should refer to the body of water between Japan and the Korean Peninsula as the “Sea of Japan” or the “East Sea” or both.

Below is the CIA World Factbook map of the area, which represents the official label of the United States government and military:
japan-map

The South Korean government believes the name “Sea of Japan” is an offensive remnant of Japanese imperialism, including the period in which they brutally occupied the Korean peninsula (thus holding the territory on both sides of the sea). They want people to call it “East Sea” (their northern counterparts say “East Sea of Korea” but no one listens to them), though they are willing to compromise and call it both.

And for some reason, a lot of state officials in Virginia seem quite persuaded that this South Korean view is the right position. This is happening, despite, as far as I can tell, it having nothing to do with anything, from Virginia’s standpoint.

So Virginia would be going against the view of the U.S. government (rather inexplicably) and against the recently renewed directives of the International Hydrographic Organization, the official international body that decides what to name bodies of water — though, to be fair, the latter was originally set when Korea was occupied and could not challenge it.

Not only have their been multiple bills proposed on the issue over the past few years, but after a single-issue pressure group was formed in early 2013, the candidates for governor last year had to address the issue on the campaign trail. Here’s an example of the coverage this got in Korean media:

“The body of water known, alternately, as the East Sea or the Sea of Japan, should be properly labeled with both names,” McAuliffe told reporters after a meeting with the Voice of Korean Americans (VoKA). VoKA was launched in January to promote the use of “the East Sea.”

[…]
McAuliffe’s Republican rival, Ken Cuccinelli, also sent a letter to the VoKA last month.

“I give my full support to the use of the dual name of the East Sea/Sea of Japan in Virginia’s school test books,” said the attorney general of the state. “I understand the concerns of our Korean American community and the importance of this issue.”

 

Yes, that’s right, both candidates took the time to endorse a position (the same one, even!) in this issue, which has no substantive impact on anything in Virginia.

With McAuliffe now in office — though it would not, I guess, have made any difference on this particular issue — the very-non-Korean legislators are forging ahead on their proposed law for using both names in the textbooks. This in turn has brought upset Japanese government lobbyists down from Washington D.C. to Richmond to advocate against the change (without much success so far).

Here’s a legislative update from South Korean-based Arirang TV:

To my mind, Virginia’s obsession with this “issue” defies virtually every “law” of American political science.

It doesn’t affect voters, there’s probably not a lot to be gained from it, and it wouldn’t seem like something either voters or legislators would care about — yet somehow they keep bringing it up in session and on the campaign trail.

Where will it end? Is it just a weirdly minute way to stick it to the United States government and assert Tenth Amendment rights? Interestingly, the naval base in Virginia would, of course, still be using the U.S. military’s labeling, even as schoolchildren learned a different labeling.

In any case, I don’t really have an opinion on this issue one way or the other. I just find the fixation in Virginia a bit intriguing and odd.

North Carolina: Go rich or go anywhere else

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North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s campaign to drive out the poor seems to be continuing full speed ahead. In addition to cutting and phasing out the Earned Income Tax Credit, Think Progress observes that,

…low-income North Carolinians will be paying higher taxes in order to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the state. Republicans moved from a two-tiered, progressive income tax system to a flat tax rate of 5.8 percent. A person who earns a million dollars per year will get a roughly $10,000 tax cut thanks to that move, but the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution will see their taxes rise. That means that four out of five taxpayers in the state were going to pay more next year even before the EITC repeal.

The combined effects of those tax changes give poor North Carolinians some incentive to move out of the state, a population shift Gov. Pat McCrory (R) hopes to encourage.

 
It’s a flat-tax miracle, y’all!

Just last June, the state became the first in the nation to provide zero unemployment benefits. When the Federal government shut down in October, North Carolina immediately suspended WIC vouchers — literally taking food from the mouths of babes — as every other state used emergency/contingency funds.

This is all in line with Gov. McCrory’s views that North Carolina is too generous to low-income and unemployed people and that those undesirables must be just absolutely flocking to the state’s inner cities from the Dickensian hellscape that he apparently believes is the rest of America right now. That view in turn is just the tip of the McCrory/NC Republican iceberg of destruction, which has included trying to vaporize abortion rights and making it very difficult for some people to vote.

His deeply regressive policy agenda, shared by Republican state legislators in the majority there, has been called by The New York Times, “The Decline of North Carolina” and by me “North Carolina: Not Checking Itself, Before Wrecking Itself, Since 2010.”

Oddly, the former seemingly-moderate Charlotte mayor, seems to be extremely (and oddly publicly) thin-skinned for a high-profile politician and has not been taking the criticism well at all, as explored in a prominent column in the Charlotte Observer this past December:

…my interview with him last week and a breakfast with him a couple weeks earlier make clear he hasn’t changed a bit in one respect: This is a man obsessed with his image and how he’s portrayed. It’s clear he doesn’t go a day without being deeply frustrated by what he sees as unfair attacks on his good name.

My hour-and-40-minute one-on-one with the governor began with him complaining about an editorial cartoon and ended with a complaint about how Art Pope, one of his chief advisers, is depicted. In between, McCrory repeatedly sprinkled asides and bromides about how the media are out to get him and his administration. When I sat next to him at a recent breakfast, he tugged on my sleeve every couple of minutes, leaned over and murmured his displeasure with this cartoon or that editorial or a news story from six months ago.

[…]
Most of McCrory’s troubles stem, in his mind, not from his support of policies that a majority of North Carolinians disagree with but from a media that, through bias or incompetency, just can’t understand his greatness.

 

Huzzah. That’s leadership you can depend on.

Study: Rich pretty sure they’re inherently awesome

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This is one of those studies with results that more or less obvious to those who aren’t the ones being studied, but Matthew Huston’s Slate analysis of it is still an interesting read. Excerpt:

In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.

[…]

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

 

I also, in particular, recommend checking out the second page of the article, where Huston gets into assessing the practical ramifications of these findings.

Understanding the psychology of both the wealthy and the reasonably comfortable economic strata will give us a better idea of which rhetoric by supporters of various social justice agendas (and justice system reform agendas) is effective or ineffective, in terms of selling the agenda to the unconverted. That kind of thing — figuring out whether rhetorical appeals are landing or missing the mark within people’s existing worldviews — is right in my area of interest.

There’s also reason to be very concerned about the high levels of wealth in Congress here in America (as well as in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, according to Huston) in terms of what legislative actions they might take to reinforce existing inequality. It’s one thing to casually neglect a population because you’re just wildly out of touch with the plight of the impoverished. It’s an entirely other and even more pernicious thing to intentionally start rolling back prior efforts to help the poor or propose expanding harsh sentencing targeted at low-income populations and (poorer than the average) minority racial populations because you think they somehow “deserve” their condition and should be kept away from the superior humans. In recent decades, that agenda is exactly what we’ve seen a lot of.

If we don’t figure out the political communication pathway to appeal to the middle classes effectively and convince them that this worldview isn’t true, we’re in for a big resurgence of open social Darwinism.

Global Warming, Snow, and Arctic Chills

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Whenever there’s a severe winter whether event, the conservative cranks start crowing about how this means there’s no such thing as global warming. This view starts from a pretty silly baseline — obviously there will always continue to be outlier events in either direction because that’s what outliers are and weather is not exactly the same as climate — and ignores the other obvious point that winter is typically associated with cooler temperatures than the rest of the year in higher latitudes (nearer the poles than the equator), even if the annual average is rising.

But then there’s just the relatively simple science that explains not only why global warming can exist simultaneously with severe winter weather but how it can cause it to be even more frequent and more severe. This post will explain the basics of two types of events, in the context of global warming.

1. Heavier snow storms
During the course of a year, global warming is evaporating moisture from drier climates. (Right now, for example, we’re seeing record droughts in California instead of winter rainfall to replenish water tables.) During the summer months at each pole, the warming trends are also evaporating meltwater from the ice sheets. This means that, overall, there’s more moisture going into the atmosphere — and it’s going into an atmosphere which is warmer than in the past. The warmer the air (relative to normal temperatures at that time), the more capacity it has to hold moisture.

When the capacity is reached or if the temperature of the air drops suddenly (which reduces capacity), precipitation occurs. In warmer regions or during the non-winter months, this occurs in the form of rainfall. This is why severe rainstorms and flooding have occurred all over the world, even as water shortages are happening right nearby. The moisture is sucked up into the atmosphere on one side of a geographic zone (or not dropped in the first place due to higher carrying capacity) and then dumped out very quickly on the other (usually colder) side, often on opposite sides of a mountain range.

During the winter, in high latitude places, we’re seeing warmer winter months interrupted periodically by very severe snowstorms. During the warm weeks, the atmosphere is collecting a higher than usual amount of moisture. When the temperature finally does dip suddenly, this moisture is released in the form of heavy snowfall (i.e. the much colder version of the heavy rainstorms in the rest of the year). And that’s how we can get an increase of severe snowstorms in some regions during winter, because of (not despite) global warming.

2. Deep freezes
arcticThis past week, the continental United States experienced a very deep and widespread freezing, even stretching sub-freezing temperatures as far down the latitudes as the deep American South. The more northern, higher latitudes had (depending on one’s location) windchills ranging from 15-50 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero. In some places, exposed skin froze within a minute. Very dangerous, very cold weather.

The American media didn’t do a great job explaining how this was happening, in terms of meteorological process, let alone why it was happening (i.e. that it can be linked to global warming). This left the conservatives to snark once again that this was somehow proof that global warming is a myth. But there’s a concise explanation from the blogs of Scientific American.

Essentially, melting Arctic ice in summer, due to global warming, evaporates meltwater into the (warmer than usual) atmosphere. This weakens and disrupts polar wind patterns — known as the polar vortex — that normally “lock” the cold air into the Arctic Circle (or close to it) during winter. Once released, this cold air then pushes southward, way past where it usually is found during these months.

 
Unfortunately, both of these types events will become more frequent in the near-term due to global warming, as long as there’s still ice to melt up there during the rest of the year and as long as the temperatures are still sometimes getting cold anywhere during the winter.

Individual episodes of these weather events can’t always be tied specifically to global warming. But as a whole, in terms of trendlines, we can correlate them statistically to rising average global temperatures. And by understanding weather science, we can see how there’s also a plausible causal link. So the parallelism of the trends isn’t coincidental. And the near-universal view of the professional climatology community is that global warming is increasing and results directly from human activities such as industrialization of production and agriculture.

 
Note: This analysis is intended to help lay readers understand the general concepts involved. It is not intended to be a 100% technically rigorous article. Some shortcuts and elisions in the science have been made for ease of mass communication.

2022: Slavery World Cup

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2022-world-cup-logoAs ethically bad as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia are going to be, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar is going to be worse. Several years ago, that Persian Gulf absolute monarchy, a country the size of Connecticut, won its bid to hose the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament for the summer of 2022.

Most criticism at the time focused more on the superficial (though valid) points about how hot the desert country would be in the middle of the summer and how that might affect the tournament. There was also consternation over the government’s human rights laws (the lack of them) and some allegations of possible bribery in the bid. But more recently, concerns over labor conditions in the World Cup preparation stage have pushed to the fore.

Current estimates say hundreds of marginally compensated foreign laborers preparing for the tournament have already died during construction and as many as 4,000 may be dead by the time construction ends. Some workers haven’t been paid at all in the past year and a half and all live in dangerous, packed tenements. 

This is, to be clear, not a problem solely restricted to the World Cup, though that’s the angle with the most global ramifications. The overall foreign worker population in Qatar is more than six times the size of the ruling Qatari population, at about 1.65 million to 250,000. The foreign population has grown very sharply in the past few years so the numbers are a bit hard to track.

Due to oil wealth and concentrating it in native hands, Qatari citizens are among the world’s wealthiest populations. But they’ve also preserved their wealth by chronically underpaying (even enslaving) the huge migrant worker population. According to IMF data, even if the national wealth were distributed annually over the whole population, including non-citizens, everyone would still be making well over $100k a year, even adjusted for purchasing power.

Instead, through pure avarice, the kingdom is determined to keep its foreign workers — who make the country function daily — in horrid conditions.

If Qatar doesn’t make a big change soon, there’s going to be an awful lot of blood on the hands of the world through the World Cup’s presence there. And sadly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.