The "statewide voter roll" implemented under Majority Leader LIBERMAN's "Help America Vote Act" is a good example of moving TIA into deeper cover.

This "goo-goo" sounding measure is, in fact, a data-mining facility now shrouded in proprietary restrictions and state secrecy. It is optimized for bill and debt collection, -- timely, considering the "sub-prime mortgage crisis", -- and more useful for vote-suppression than for non-discriminatory ballot-access.

Of course, Speaker HOYER is on board with all of it.

Posted at July 8, 2008 11:53 AM in response to Today's Must Read

Look at the Hungary angle.

When this all sorts down, I think you will find it was a Likud Party fund-raising scam that was orchestrated in Washington.

Posted at June 23, 2008 2:10 PM in response to Waxman Says U.S. Embassy in Albania Concealed Info About Arms Shipment

Ad hominem and name-calling

Andrew, there is a problem of both fairness and efficiency in proscribing these two uglies utterly. It goes to an old problem: using terms like "forum" and "community", not to mention yelling "fire" with terms like "freedom-of-speech" while seldom following long-standing conventions of parliamentary custom, usage, and law.

For instance, name calling is allowed when it is "gentlemanly", albeit obtusely and humorously belittling.

And, ad hominem is allowable in refutation if and only if responding to a predicate where some or all of (i) undisclosed conflicts of interest, (ii) arguments from presumed but no recognized authority, or (iii) just sycophancy comprise most of the initial point that stands otherwise.

This is a real problem in the designation and conduct of "credentialed" state blogs at the Democratic National Convention where the state parties in questions are, often, self-perpetuating patronage-chains, comprised mostly of sycophants operating from behind a perpetual cloud of "permanent campaign" spin.

That certainly includes the notoriously chaotic conventions and unproductive committees where there is mostly covert negotiation and overt bargaining but little, if any, deliberation, hence flimsy compromises or even corrupt deals where decision and resolution should be.

Parliamentary authorities correctly note than all forms of digital communication fall short of the requirements of an open assembly or fair hearing.

There are theorectical but not any commonplace digital tools I know of for blogs and such that can complement live events by providing elements of notice, disclosure, submission of evidence, circulation and mark-up of drafts, additions and corrections to agenda or minutes, and, of course, recording and archiving of non-secret votes.

An obviously large and immediate contribution to the practical art of efficient deliberation -- the whole purpose of Henry Martyn Robert's work on rules of order would be issuance and authentication of credentials.

Here I think "the community" has a root problem: allowing anonymity and spoofing but whining about the discourteous and irresponsible discourse that follows.

But, I would add that application of the Seven Laws of Identity to the problem of credentialing members of a community might mitigate all the, so far, irremediable problems that ponderous "terms and conditions" of usage and treacly "netiquette" sermons have not in about twenty years now.

HINT in cyberspace I am often thought to be a "pedantic prick". That is rude terminology, but true enough. So, how does one deal with a medium that does not rise to the level of of proficient deliberation and debate, but descends regularly into something like grafitti, implying the practical absence of the sort of discourse usually though necessary for a republican democracy.

Posted at May 22, 2008 2:15 PM in response to How Do You Argue?

Actually, the "Concert of Democracies" as LIND describes it, operationally sounds like a ring of extreme debtor countries ruled by post-Cold War plutocrats with little national loyalty, hence, a rather superficial and opportunistic sort of internationalism.

I do not associate that with either Plan A or Plan B of the Roosevelt/Truman era. It is more like Reagan/Bush or even Clinton/Bush.

In any case, plutocrats and chicken-hawks are not likely to fare well in any actual war/ They do very well with defense budgets and the arms trade. And, they recently began began demostrating a good deal of resourcefulness with other peoples' money, or if they do not have any, credit in solving liquidity crises that they and their cronies created and might have otherwise paid a price for.

So, the chicken-hawk syndrome really works even in high finance as well as at the high table in academia.

Posted at May 7, 2008 6:31 PM in response to The Radical Princeton Project

Strengthen Fragile Democracies Aboad? What About Here?

The UNO, the Marshal Plan, and NATO, but, next, the DoD, the CIA, and the Treaty of Miami were not a nice stew of "liberal internationalism" then, of Anglo-American hegemony at the time, or of anything but chaos today.

Each was hasty and ad hoc. All were soon a near-total break-down of the New Deal/WWII order and what proved to be an easily subverted dream of liberal internationalism.

"Freedom of the skies" was killed right off. Will Clayton and J. M. Keynes retreated to Bretton Woods and played no part in the international order anybody but a few bankers were aware of and Robert Roosa soon trashed for his own account. G. F. Kennan joined Einstein at Princeton. It was sad.

And, it was Edward Teller, Douglas McArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Joe McCarthy, Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush, Ayn Rand, Wm. F. Buckley, and so on ... who became the darlings of Anglo-America as right-wing, neo-isolationist reaction set-in big-time.

In the UK, the reaction was isolationist and left-wing.

I get the time-lines a bit mixed up, but, hey, it is just a blog post, OK, not an excerpt from a real journal article.

Nostalgia for all of that seems like a bad idea today, just a pretext for adhering to domestic support for and financial legacies of the Cold War model of domestic US institutions: Let's see that would be The Pentagon Parody of Horse Guards Parade, The Admiralty, Whitehall, The Circus, Fleet Street, and so on.

Oh, and recently there has been the back-stairs military and intelligence cooperation of Bush and Blair, kinda like Churchill and Roosevelt, as well as, now, a Washington-London Working Group on Capital Markets where Bretton Woods used to be but Basle, Frankfurt, and Paris wish they had never heard of.

This is not "rule-driven" it is ad hoc clap-trap, self-serving, self-dealing and deeply subversive of any international order, liberal or otherwise. Oh, it is wildly unpopular all across the spectrum of ordinary opinion.

Only Darbyites, Trotskyites, and Thatcherites could love this, and ... they do!

But, hey, it is elite and glamorous, so they love it in Princeton, too, even if such ad hoc clap-trap is neither republican nor parliamentary democracy, just legalistic, pseudo-aristocratic, and chicken-hawk humbug.

So, let me know when they hang a bond-lawyer, merchant-banker, or defense contractor from a yard-arm in the Washington or Portsmouth Navy Yard. Oh, and can we put some Anglo-American war criminals in Spandau? Maybe Spandau could be a debt-ridden public/private partnership between the Four Powers and KBR!

How's that for your rule-driven, meaning lawyer-ridden, liberal internationalism?

Then, I might be more impressed with the Princeton Project or the Party of Davos or the WTO or any other attempt by the crony and mafiya capitalists to restore and project their latest version of the real old Cordon Sanitaire, not the merely old containment. Otherwise, all I see is hokey reaction complete with just a hint of Edwardian navalism and Victorian evangelism for a little pomp and circumstance. All I hear is lawyer-blabber about "networks" with no clue as to the "Seven Laws of Identity" or "IPv6" or admiralty law as it applies to cyberspace and other important actually newfangled aspects of oldfangled liberal internationalism.

Posted at May 7, 2008 10:07 AM in response to Burn the Straw Men

The Universalized Cold War Model

That is, of course, the nub of it:

The UCWM has been "berry, berry good" to the "Anglo-American Overclass" -- another fine LINDism. Our moral and intellectual superiors today are sort of like the last Tsar's or the last Kaisers' "nobility" with their academic, burueaucratic, or just purchased titles of nobility, and, now, Imperialism for Dummies in Mesopotamia.

But, the Great, World, and Cold wars never actually involved anything other than the threat (and risk) of direct, nuclear or large-scale conventional warfare with the USSR or Red China.

Patton was never actually "unleashed" on the Communists in Russia, nor McArthur and LeMay on the ones in China.

And, Bush/Chamberlain or Reagan/Thatcher rule did entail appeasing Hitler, propping up all sorts of petty Hitlers, and contracting the murder of liberals in, say, Iran or constitutionalists in Chile, if there were arms barter or extractive resource concession to be gained.

Is the Anglo-American overclass actually any good at more than just pretending to be Edwardian navalists or Victorian colonialists? Can they actually build a "light cruiser" -- now called a Littoral Combat Ship System? Have they done any better than Disraeli or even Gladstone in "The Sudan" or "Mesopotamia", and so on?

In any case, is the Pentagon Parody of Horse Guards Parade, The Admiralty, Whitehall, The Circus, Law Lords, and so on, really the way to run a republican democracy or market economy with even a vestige of (a) the original, semi-successful Federalist/Republican compromise constitution or (b) the subsequent patch of constitutional doctrine effected with difficulty by Lincoln/Grant or with not a little cunning by the two Roosevelts?

My problem with the UCWM is that it seems very wasteful and dangerous relative to modest and traditional alternatives such as, say, George F. Kennan's approach to liberal internationalism based on a middle-class republican democracy at home rather than the pretensions of a merely rich or expensively educated class. These people seem to think they are some sort of late nineteenth-century military-costumed aristocracy with their Georgian, Wilhelmine, or Hapsburg titles of nobility but little actual military skill and even less moral standing with their less privileged subjects in, actually, either of the big-name political parties.

Posted at May 6, 2008 9:06 AM in response to Which Internationalism?

Sorry, but it is Speaker HOYER and Majority Leader LIEBERMAN. They are calling the shots on election law, logistics, and technology. It is true that the GOP uses this stuff to suppress voting. But, the cheap-seat, majority-minority Democratic office-squatters, the "targeted-campaign", "swing voter", "segmented-marketing" consultants are fine with it, too.

And, of course, there are a ton of minor Democratic officials on the bottome of the "elections" profession, trades, buraucracies, and so on... They are fine with anything to "Help America Vote", even if it does not work, especially if it does not work, because then they might all lose their Blazing Saddlesl jobs.

Posted at May 2, 2008 6:53 PM in response to Congress, Right the Vote

So, Senator LEVIN has closed how many DoD installations in CT? Again, the very essence of "transactional" politics is providing small- change "protection" for "consumers" while whoring for the credit care issuers and their lobbyists -- the whole basis for the DSCC/DCCC.

Again, who is harmed to the tune of, actually, the term now is "trillions", in exchange for the "billions" or "millions" at stake in the Senator's 100 k$ pool of large donors?

This is pseudo-progressive window-dressing for the DSCC/DCCC.

Trust me populist Democrats a century ago would have seen throught this trivia.

Posted at April 17, 2008 1:33 PM in response to Testifying on Abuses by Credit Card Companies

Sadly, there are no actual political, economic, or technical principles involved here on the Democratic side of this fake-debate other than, of course, "Hold Harmless!".

Democrats -- now "in control" of Congress and riding on a tide of new hires on K-Street -- just love to "Hold Harmless!" and "Jes' He'p Ever'body!", especially their crazy heirarchy of corruption and seniority.

The Democratic Leadership, that would be Majority Leader Joe Lieberman and Speaker Steney Hoyer, harvest campaign contributions by threatening monopolies with regulations which would cost a lot to implement but which, for a fee, Democratic legislators are willing to water-down, modify, or just waive altogether.

So, by the time these negotiations end, "all the parties agree!", complex, meaning flimsy and ineffectual, excuse me, "voluntary", statutes (about 10 k$/page) written by revolving-door staff and lobbyists pass out of commttee that cost the monopolies a litte but actually increase the monopoly rent collected by them, as the chosen instruments of our ruling elite, as government concession-holders and concession-tenders, to use technical language.

Of course, the monopoly rent is shared with the political extortionists like the DSCC/DCCC. It is what they do.

The GOP is somewhat different, doing something of the same at the wholesale level in return for shifting taxes (indirect taxes) onto the middle class. This is ideology-driven, bigger, and more damaging. But, of course, the Democrats do not so much oppose this as just whine about it for, in effect, the GOP submits a corrupt, but low, bid for lobby support.

Remember that when the Democrats took over in 2007, the lobby grew and, since then, not even the most criminal or improvident of "financial institutions" have gone to jail or out of business. That is how the Democrats and the GOP collaborate to redistribute money from ordinary tax- and rate-payers to the Democrats patrons and pimps.

The principle which should be involved, of course, is the extinguishing of monopoly rent through a mix of government and monopoly regulation. Government regulation would (a) increase market entry while upholding technical standards and reliable business practices, while market regulation would (b) extinguish the corrupt or incompetent firms.

Of course, it is the corrupt and competent firms that Senator Levin seeks to protect, since ...

To quote "Lamar" in The Big Easy, ...

"Mah deah, Lamah only defends sleazebags, since sleazebags deserve the best repreeesentation money can by!"

Posted at April 17, 2008 1:09 PM in response to Testifying on Abuses by Credit Card Companies

Is This Not A "Gaffe"?

Actually, the people being discussed by the political elite in both camps -- I being one of those in the Obama camp -- probably do not follow this third normal form meta-politics very closely, certainly not from the Pasadena Gun Show, where I hang out -- being a politically connected formerly young, over-educated, urban professional, heir but not "trust-fund babie", and actual "preppie" but, also, loyal Democrat, son of the Confederacy, and ... crack shot.

The interesting point is that while the alienated living-off-Social-Security-and-military-or-police-pensions sellers at the gun show are -- sagely in my opinion -- disgusted with both parties, the buyers are of mixed race and very open to Obama.

I think that the same could be said of floor-pass holders at computer, home, auto, and livestock shows.

My problem is that the washed-up "politicos" -- wannabe lobbyists and under-employed lawyers mostly -- who run the Democratic Party as a smug and complacent patronage-chain. They would rather lose in November than lose control of the party. They are in full agreement with the GOP: They would rather politics were an auction. Only, gee, Obama is trashing them with his retail fund-raising.

Way to go Barack! Keep it up!

::JRBehrman

Posted at April 13, 2008 10:04 AM in response to Politics of Demagoguery