Month: October 2003

Jay Nordlinger gets it:

Many years ago Chris Matthews–now famous on TV–hit on an interesting formulation: He said the Democrats were the “mommy party” and the Republicans the “daddy party.” That is, the Democrats were “nurturers,” concerned with health policy and day care. The Republicans were “protectors,” taking care of national security and other manly matters. This notion is obviously galling to some. But Mr. Matthews was on to something, and we now find ourselves in a “daddy party” time.

Arnie and Bush are both manly men. Dean, Kucinich, Clark, Kerry, Edwards, Sharpton, and Gray Davis are not.

UPDATE: Honest Democrats recognize their party has a “wuss” issue:

Florida Sen. Bob Graham hired David “Mudcat” Saunders, a Roanoke, Va., political consultant who has declared that most white Southern men regard Democrats as “wusses,” to advise him on reaching these voters. The Graham campaign sponsored a NASCAR racing truck, a Ford F-150 that won its debut race in July at Kansas Speedway.

I ain’t making this up, boys and girls. Smart Democrats vote Republican, too. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, formerly the smartest man in that state’s legislature and inside track holder for the gubernatorial nomination in 2006, admits to voting for Arnie:

“It was the first time I ever voted for a Republican in my life,” Lockyer said during a speech at an election post-mortem at the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “What Arnold Schwarzenegger represented for me was hope, optimism and change, and I want that.”

Take this as the opening salvo of the 2006 Democratic Primary.

How the Los Angeles Times Really Decided to Publish its Accounts of Women Who Said They Were Groped ~ Issue Oct 14, 03

“I would like to echo Jill Stewart’s concern regarding the L.A. Times’ selective reporting. Clearly, one can argue that the public had a right to know the sexual allegations directed at Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, the suspect timing of the publication of the articles coupled with the apparent inordinate manpower (possibly 24 reporters), at best raises eyebrows, and at worst smacks of an obsessive vendetta. Was the Times so anti-Schwarzenegger or so pro-Davis that it lost a sense of objectivity? It would appear so. How else does one explain the Times’ decision not to inform the public about Davis’ alleged physical attacks upon female workers?

Amazing.

(note: this entry WiFi blogged from an open AP.)

Today I learned some cool stuff from my buddy Mitch Ratcliffe:

…the California state budget is larger than the combined budgets of other states, as it is the eighth largest economy in the world.

This explains a lot. California has roughly 15% of the American population, and according to Mitch, its state government spends more than all other states combined, or roughly four times as much per capita. No wonder those folks are in trouble.

BTW, that economy is around 5 or 6 in the world, depending on stuff.

The “we’re too smart to vote for a movie star” meme has entered a new phase, wherein Frisco Area residents proclaim their superior education as the reason for their voting to retain the Davis status quo. (See: Mark Simon via Dr. Frank).

Once again, let’s look at how education interacts with voting preferences. From the VNS Exit Polls in the 2000 Presidential Election, we have a handy chart:

As you see, Democratic Party voters tend to be concentrated in two educational groups, high-school dropouts and holders of advanced degrees. Most advanced degrees are Masters’, held by union-member school teachers, and most Ph. D.’s work for universities or government-supported institutions. So we have a simple matter of people voting their interests: the welfare class and union members vote for the party of big government, and non-union working people with high-school and college degrees vote Republican.

(The same pattern held in California on the Recall: people at all educational levels from high school grad to college degree voted for Arnie, but people with advanced degrees went for Bustamante. High school dropouts were not reported. Is anyone surprised that the teachers’ union supported Davis and Bustamante?)

The Bay Area has a lot of people with advanced degrees, a lot of immigrants, and a lot of people who haven’t thought about politics since college. All of these groups are conservative, in the sense of endorsing the status quo, which happens to be the Democratic Party around there:

“A lot of people have been brought up in a political culture that is very left,” said Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political communication and mass media at Stanford University. “They really live in a cocoon.”

It has become a form of conservatism to be a liberal, Starr said.

“Today, outside the box is the box,” he said. “Who would be outside the box in San Francisco? A thoughtful conservative.”

So Bay Areans vote liberal because they’re conformist and conservative in their life styles and values, and because they’re sucking the government teat.

Not too complicated.

Emergent Democracy advocate Mitch Ratcliffe explains his objection to the Davis recall in an effort to deal with my claim that the recall was in fact a model of democratic action:

There’s nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they militate with political groups to elect someone who reads scripts but doesn’t speak extemporaneously, they leave something to be desired.

So Arnie is another moron, like that Bush fellow who stole the 2000 election from that smart Gore fellow, and the voters are uninformed owing to our paucity of news sources, which today include just about every news outlet on the planet, and the blogs, etc. Fine. Now what would we ignorant citizens know if we were as well-informed as the Emergent Davis boosters? This:

…the budget crisis is the result of Pete Wilson’s misguided energy deregulation policies and collusion by the Bush Administration with the energy industy, not to mention the Bush Administration’s general failure in domestic policy leading to the bankrupting of the states

Now to Ratcliffe’s credit, he didn’t make this up; rather, he’s citing a well-traveled meme that you can find on any number of far-left blogs, news organs, and talk radio shows. The only trouble with it is that it’s complete crap. The State of California did sign $8B in long-term electricity contracts after Davis finally stepped in and tried to deal with the rolling blackouts of 2001. But these contracts were financed by bonds to be paid off my utility rate-payers. So when the legislature dealt with a $38B budget deficit, these bonds weren’t part of it – they’re off the books.

So yeah, if Ratcliffe were “informed” he probably wouldn’t have voted for Davis as he did, and if everyone were informed, it would have passed by acclamation.

On his other point, I haven’t noticed any states going bankrupt. California’s budget deficit exceeded the total deficits of all other states, and you clearly can’t blame that on Bush. Unless you’re “uninformed”, of course.

Last August, I joined Watchblog, a group blog put together by left-winger Cameron Barrett that was supposed to represent the two major points of view on the 2004 election, and put out a call for other moderates and conservatives to join up. I was warned that Barrett’s politics are pretty extreme, but I decided “hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” and did it anyway. So I’ve just found out what can happen.

Barrett morphed the blog into a tri-partisan effort and then ran off to join the Wesley Clark campaign as captive blogger (no doubt thanks to his freshly-minted political credentials) and left the keys to the Watchblog in the hands of fairly loopy Green Party weirdo named David Remer. Remer promptly kicked one of the regular Republicans off the blog, and when the other two complained about it, he kicked us off too. That left him with no Republican voices so he started a stealth campaign to back-fill the blog, making no public announcement of the massacre. My posts are still up on the blog, and you would get the impression that I’m still posting there and that I endorse it.

Well, I’m not and I don’t. I’ve asked for my posts to be removed, and I want to encourage Republicans to boycott Watchblog. The basic setup is to give two-thirds of the space to a group of Republican-haters who post as both Democrats and Third Party (that means “Green Party” really) members, so they can drown out the Republicans with the same stuff. This is no way to run a group blog, a political blog, or any other kind of blog that claims to offer a fair and balanced perspective.

Friends don’t let friends support Watchblog.

BTW, it’s kind of interesting in a coincidental way that the Clark campaign has fallen prey to the same kind of heavy-handedness that’s destroyed Watchblog. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Dan Gillmor offers a few suggestions for California’s next governor:

* Schwarzenegger should ask the Legislature to take all of the fiscally relevant propositions of the past several decades…and put every one on the table for an overall reform.

* Make California the showcase for wide-open, taxpayer-friendly e-government.

* Reform the state’s utility regulation.

* Make data privacy a centerpiece.

* Schwarzenegger should also call his pal in the White House on several matters of interest to Californians (and everyone else).

These are generally sound recommendations, but I do have some quibbles (hey, this is a blog, after all). California is the national leader in e-government, and has been for several years – all the bills are on-line, and many committee hearings are broadcast on cable TV and on the Internet in Real Audio. The legislature offers a service that automatically sends you e-mails when the status of bills changes, and most of the legislators publish e-mail addresses. So we’re actually in good shape on this front.

Arnie is already making strides on utility de-regulation, although I’m not sure Dan is going to like them. Dan wants a competitive market for telecom, but not for electricity, and I suspect Arnie wants to see more competition on both areas.

The fiscal area is probably the most interesting, and I don’t expect Arnie to go after Prop. 13. It gets a bad rap, as does Prop. 98, but these are things the voters are very proud of, and they’re not going to change in any meaningful way. Nor should they, as they place limits on government spending that are important in a state whose legislature is far to the left of the citizenry.

Recommendations to the Governor is an interesting exercise, though. Got any?

You know how the left wants to ban guns, right? I’ve got something I want to ban, and I think the benefit to society would be greater: the use of statistics by lawyers. Lawyering isn’t a science that seeks truth, it’s a form of advocacy that seeks victory at any price, so when lawyers are given a pile of numbers they invariably sift through them in order to find the ones that bolster their case, at the expense of truth, objectivity, and anything else that gets in the way, like the rest of the numbers.

We had a good object lesson in this tendency in the arguments put by Tribe and Rosenbaum to the Ninth Circuit on voting machines, and in the amici by Rick Hasen, the textbook author who never fails to mention his book titles in the briefs he files.

The ink isn’t dry in the California Recall and these masters of obfuscation are already jumping up and down screaming that the election was flawed by punch-card voting systems. The evidence: fewer votes were cast on question 1, the go/no go on Davis, than in question 2, the 135 possible replacements.

Excuse me, but this argument is ridiculous on its face. If there was something defective about the system, question two should have had fewer votes cast than question 1, since it was much harder to find your candidate among the six pages and much easier to over-punch. Question 1 was right at the top, with “Yes” and “No” plainly marked.

The way they get themselves into this tizzy is remarkable. See Mickey?Kaus:

The Brady Hunch: Punch-card foe Henry Brady of Berkeley now claims that 176,000 votes were lost in the recall election due to punch-card balloting systems.

Or Michael McDonald:

… touchscreen voters had smaller undervote rates than the punchcard and optical scan voters, and also had a rate smaller than the exit poll indicated.

Or Steven Hertzberg:

Our preliminary calculations show that Question #1 was either not marked by the voter or recorded by the equipment in 7.7% of the ballots cast on these machines. The average “not counted/marked” rate for the remaining voting systems is 2.3%, with the next highest rate being the Optech optical scanner at 4.35%.

Or Textbook Hasen:

Mickey Kaus comes down hard here on Henry Brady’s most recent statistics regarding the extent of unintentional undervotes caused by punch cards, but other preliminary analyses have reached the same conclusion:

Of course, it’s not too surprising that multiple advocates using the same flawed method would reach the same conclusion. In this case, the advocates, all predisposed to believe that The Man uses punch cards to deprive minorities of their voting rights, all compared the “undervote” on question 1 with a statewide exit poll, and found that the voters in punchcard counties recorded fewer votes than the statewide exit poll predicted they should.

Duh. Voters in punch card counties voted against the recall and for Bustamante more than the statewide exit poll predicts they should, but I don’t see anybody complaining about that. Why is that?

One form of polling — such as an exit poll — is only useful as a calibration on another form of polling — the election — if it’s more accurate. Certainly, a statewide poll doesn’t tell us anything about the propensity of voters in particular areas to vote one way or another. A county-by-county exit poll would be more useful, but none of the critics offers one. Instead, we get an analysis that lumps all counties with similar voting systems together:

Percentages	Punch card	Touch Screen	Optical scan
a) Actual missing votes	6.3%	1.5%	2.7%
b) Intended non-votes (exit poll)	2.9%	1.4%	2.5%
Estimate of “missing vote” (a minus b)	3.4%	0.1%	0.2%

Blumenthal, according Hasen, reasons that punch card voting system denied 160,000 people of their voting right on recall question 1.

I think this is erroneous. According the exit poll, 57% of the voters intended to vote Yes on the recall, and 43% No. But the statewide totals, according to the Sec’y of State, are 55.3% Yes, and 44.7% No.

Now I’d be willing to bet that the election results are more accurate overall than the exit polls, given the methods and all that. Exit polls are face-to-face, and people in that situation are inclined to say what they’re supposed to say, not what they really did.

On a statewide basis, if we’re to take the exit poll as god, then the voting equipment must have had a pro-Davis bias built into it across the state, and if there really was an anti-Davis bias built into the punch card systems, that would simply help to balance the whole system out overall. But nobody claims that.

So don’t believe any analysis of the election results that doesn’t do these things:

1) Discuss the inaccuracy of exit polling.
2) Make a county-by-county comparison of exit polls and actual polls.
3) Compare voting rates on question 1 with question 2.
4) Fully disclose the author’s bias.
5) Discuss the county demographics and party registration.

If they’re not all there, you were swindled.

A good analysis would go county-by-county comparing exit polls with actual polls, with correction for the bias in exit polls. It’s not that hard to do this kind of an analysis, but I’m willing to bet that Brady, Hasen, Blumenthal, et. al., won’t do it; they’ll be too busy screaming “Bias!” to get to the point of proving any.

Lawyers and numbers; they don’t mix.

(By the way, I voted for the recall and for Arnie.)

UPDATE: Hasen’s article on the recall in Findlaw is pretty light on specifics, and long on exaggeration (“Issa poured millions into the recall”). The one specific claim he makes about voting equipment is wrong:

…Los Angeles and Alameda counties are fairly comparable counties in terms of political leanings and ethnic makeup, yet nearly 9 percent of voters in Los Angeles did not cast a recordable vote on the first part of the recall, compared to less than one percent of voters in Alameda, which used an electronic touch screen system.

In LA County, 49.1% voted for the recall, vs. 30% in Alameda county. These two counties are clearly not comparable in any meaningful way.

SOME MORE UPDATES: Neither Calblog nor xrlq is very impressed with Prof. Hasen’s analysis of the recall election.

One of the most egregious acts Governor Gray Davis committed in California was to veto a bill that would have allowed men wrongly identified as fathers escape the obligation to support other people’s children and girlfriends. He did this for the children. The Harvard Crimson Online :: Opinion ran a good op-ed piece on this problem back in May:

According to U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, as many as 30 percent of “fathers” paying child support nationwide may not be the actual fathers. Often, child-support agencies bamboozle them into signing paternity declarations, or the mother fraudulently names a father to qualify for welfare assistance. In some cases, judges are prohibited from overturning default rulings despite clear DNA evidence. The problem is so out of hand that in 1998 the California Court of Appeals had to rebuke overzealous L.A. officials for having “lost sight of the paramount duty to seek justice” in child-support cases.

This is why Sheila Kuehl was so upset about the recall — she urged Davis to veto the bill. Apparently “ignorance” is OK when, as in her case, it’s willful.

BTW, it’s interesting that the loudest opposition to Gov. Arnie in the legislature, from Kuehl, Mark Leno, and John Vasconcellos, comes from gay legislators. I don’t know why that should be. Leno is the guy who wrote the Anti-Cross-Dresser Discrimination Act, for which he argued for a genetic requirement for certain men to wear women’s clothing. Vasco is still in the closet after 30 years in Sacramento, but everybody under the dome knows he’s gay so my outing him here is no big shock. Since he’s the big self-esteem guy, certainly he should realize that his hateful remarks about Arnie have to hurt the governor-elect’s self-esteem and therefore hurt the whole state.

It’s probably just hypocrisy, not really a big gay thing. What’s more remarkable is the increasing use of the argument that “the voters are too stupid to decide elections” from the left. I’ve thought for a long time that Democrats are generally anti-democratic, and it’s getting pretty hard to hide from that fact any more.