Archive for the ‘2008 Elections’ tag
With the Clintons it is never boring
Politic, mostly when the Clintons involved, will always surprise me. Did they really think that the story will surface, mostly after using Penn as scape goat?
On Sunday evening, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, resigned from his post after it was revealed he was working (on the side) for the passage of a Colombia Free Trade Agreement that his candidate opposed.
But within the Clinton campaign, Penn is not the highest-ranking adviser with financial ties to groups and individuals supporting the passage of the measure.
Former President Bill Clinton has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking on behalf of a Colombia-based group pushing the trade pact, and representatives of that organization tell The Huffington Post that the former president shared their sentiment.
In June 2005, Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches throughout Latin America. The organization is, ostensibly, a development group tasked with bringing investment to the country and educating world leaders about the Colombia’s business opportunities.
It is interesting how the ethics of making a decision about trade agreement will be when it effect the President spouse bank account directly will be. It is sure a lucrative business to be in the business of selling access…
Another candidate I’ll not support
If Bob Barr will be the Libertarian nominee I would be denied the option of symbolic support to the Libertarian candidate.
The Libertarian party isn’t going to win the 2008 elections, and it shouldn’t nominate a social conservative candidate with the illusion of having the disappointed conservatives vote for the LP - it is not going to happen and it is not good for Libertarianism.
From here and from there - 19
A should be simple upgrade of the blog’s platform become a rather hectic mess today, but with the assistant of my hosting service everything seems to be in order now. In the meantime here are some links I collected today:
A new research that checked people cooperations in different cultures had rather interesting finding:
Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.
[...]
When players had the option to punish, the groups tended to display more cooperation, which is consistent with past research showing that the ability to punish can help foster cooperative behaviour. However, in some countries, ’selfish’ players also punished cooperative players, perhaps as a means of revenge for punishments they had suffered, or maybe as a way of punishing do-gooders for showing them up. The researchers called this ‘anti-social punishment’, and the groups where this occurred tended to cooperate less.
Anti-social punishment occurred more in those countries, including Belarus and Saudi Arabia, shown by surveys to have less faith in the rule of law and less belief in civic cooperation. In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. "The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect," he wrote.
I saw two interesting stories related to Clinton’s campaign today. The first, how ironic, discuss the fact that Clinton’s campaign is failing to pay its share in its employees healthcare insurance:
Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.
Clinton, who is being pressured to end her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda.
[...]
But the unpaid bills to Aetna were at least two months old, according to FEC filings.
They show the campaign ended last year owing Aetna more than $213,000 for “employee benefits.”
During the first two months of the year, the campaign did not pay down any of that debt. In fact, it accrued another $16,000 in unpaid bills last month, and it finished the month owing Aetna $229,000.
The second story is about Clinton’s campaign manager involvement with the same sub-prime mortgages Clinton now attacking so fiercely:
WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, earned about $200,000 on the board of a Long Island subprime lender that charged prepayment penalties - a practice that Clinton, a critic of the subprime industry, now seeks to eliminate.
Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.
[...]
Williams, 53, isn’t the only Clinton insider who made money from an industry the candidate has demonized. A month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton ally and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros grossed more than $5 million in stock sales and board compensation from Countrywide Financial, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders.
The truth is that both stories aren’t, in by themselves, important at all. The importance of these stories, for me, is to demonstrate how during political campaign we are being distracted by flood of unimportant information that aim in creating images that have very little with the reality. We are being told that Clinton is amazing executive, which she might or might not be - her struggling campaign isn’t the best demonstration of high quality management. And we are being bombarded with guilt by association which is many times completely irrelevant.
One comment about the sub-prime mortgage is due here. The fact that Clinton, and many other politician, choose to attack the practices of lending for minorities is noting but typical hypocrisy. Well into the crisis, lender were encouraged to use easier criteria when lending to minorities and poor families, a practice that is now being called predatory and irresponsible. I’m not arguing that those lenders aren’t guilty of being horrible bankers, but the involvement of other , political, motivations played major role in the creation of those lending practices - as we can see from the occupations of those Clinton’s aides.
When discussing political campaign, and campaign rhetoric - I find this story, which I scanned from William F. Buckley book - The Unmaking of a Mayor
Paternalistic Tyranny is still Tyranny
Who in his or her right mind would choose to elect a tyrant that, when in office, will start dictating things like:
…government programs to help people “quit smoking, to get more exercise, to eat right, to take their vitamins.”
The only parental tyranny acceptable is my mother’s, and even she knew at some point to lay off and let me make my own decision. The believe that the government’s proper role is to be a Paternal Tyrant combined with well documented approach of “The goal justifies the means” should be a major factor in a decision not to vote for such candidate.
Those annoying facts
When the “National Security and Foreign Affairs expert” candidate is not so expert, how worry should we be?
Mr. McCain said several times in his visit to Jordan — in a news conference and in a radio interview — that he was concerned that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training and financing Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, which is a Sunni insurgent group.
Mr. McCain said at a news conference in Amman that he continued to be concerned about Iranians “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.” Asked about that statement, Mr. McCain said: “Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”
It was not until he got a quiet word of correction in his ear from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain as part of a Congressional delegation on a nearly weeklong trip, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.
Obviously doesn’t need to be an expert on every detail around the globe, however it seems logical that the experienced candidate will have the basic understanding of the regions he is committing his army for a 100 years of colonialism. On the other hand details are often just annoying and disturbing when a President is busy dreaming about “national greatness” so it is much simpler to ignore them…
Like a Greek tragedy
The only surprising part of this report on the unavoidable failing of the surge in Iraq is the fact that the Washington Post decided to burry it in page 10:
BAGHDAD, March 13 — Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.
Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.
The general’s comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis’ failure to achieve political reconciliation. In February, following the passage of laws on the budget, provincial elections and an amnesty for certain detainees, Petraeus was more encouraging. "The passage of the three laws today showed that the Iraqi leaders are now taking advantage of the opportunity that coalition and Iraqi troopers fought so hard to provide," he said at the time.
The surge didn’t fail because of military incompetence, it failed because the army was asked to provide something it is incapable to provide - a political solution. It is often easy to mistake the ability of an army to use violence effectively with the effectiveness of such means to deliver political outcomes. Armies are in fact a very limited organizations that can, at best, be used to capture area, defend it and damage enemy forces. Using the military forces to achieve more than that is more often than not end up as failure.
And despite the facts, and long history to learn from, the temptation to use the army for exactly the wrong mission is still very strong. Don’t let the facts, and the simple realization that the surge is failing to achieve its strategic gaol, it will be used by McCain to attack his democratic rivals…
Talking about the election season
I like watching David Mamet’s movies and I would have gone to see his new play November, which has also wonderful cast, anyway. But his essay in the village voice make me looking forward watching the play even more:
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.
"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
[...]
White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I’ve ever read about the presidency. It’s called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.
White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "
Fully vetted?
Since Clinton’s main claims to the throne are her readiness to handle foreign affairs crisis and that she is fully vetted we shouldn’t be surprise that some might take her to the task. And the Chicago Tribune did exactly that:
But her involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process was primarily to encourage activism among women’s groups there, a contribution that the lead U.S. negotiator described as "helpful" but that an Irish historian who has written extensively about the conflict dismissed as "ancillary" to the peace process.
The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders. And her mission to Bosnia was a one-day visit in which she was accompanied by performers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, as well as her daughter, Chelsea, according to the commanding general who hosted her.
Whatever her private conversations with the president may have been, key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration’s policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign.
One have to wonder why isn’t she emphasizing her role in the Rwanda crisis, she isn’t hiding something is she?
What constitute public?
Recently McCain is trying to outmaneuver Obama to pledge to use public funding in his Presidential campaign. The tactical reason is obvious - McCain failed to attract the good will of the public to actively support his Presidential bid and he is willing to use the coercion force of the government to substitute real support with forced one. The only problem with this his notion of entitlement to use other peoples hard earn money to support his ambitions, is that receiving these funds contain set of restrictions on total spending (including money that was donated to the campaign) . Since those restrictions are a major disadvantage when your rival doesn’t need to abide to the same set of restrictions, mainly because he didn’t need to use guns to earn support, McCain is trying to make the pledge to used taxpayer money a virtue.
This is somewhat ironic that the “conservative” candidate is advocating for the use of government’s entitlement. But irony aside, Obama’s answer should be very clear - He is using public funding - more than a million people donating their hard earned money is no less public, he just not using robbed money.
Are million people considered public?
See who is talking
It is interesting to note Clinton’s criticism on Obama naiveté, particularly when it comes to special interests. After all Clinton know very well about special interests, her ties to some of them are well documented…
As a side note I have to say that the repeat mention of limiting access of special interest to decision making every election season is more than annoying. We build a government that is over involved and with extreme ability to influence almost every aspect of our life, but we want to somehow protect its innocence by limiting the freedom of speech of interested parties? It is rather peculiar that the limits are mostly set on those who might petition the government instead of the politicians. One damn good solution is to limits the areas which the government, and politicians, can award favors. But this is much to much to ask, mostly during election.