Not a Potted Plant

I thought Obama “won” and not by a little.

He managed to both (a) soak up more time while (b) looking good doing it. I went back and watched the VP debate and thought that Biden came across as particularly obnoxious. Romney less than Biden, but Obama better than Romney. Romney looked worse trying and failing to get more time than Obama did getting more time.

I believe that conservative complaints about the selection of undecideds are valid. I don’t smell a conspiracy, just that New York was a particularly bad place for this particular debate. Romney agreed to this, however.

Romney flubbed the Libya questioning in more ways than one (and Obama handled himself well). First, he got specific and was wrong on the specifics. Second, for all the grief Crowley is taking, it was apparent that she was trying to say that his criticism was valid but he was busy talking over her and floundering.

Romney gave some good answers, I thought (even if I wasn’t entirely agreeing), but when he did, Obama would give an even better response. That must have been immensely frustrating.

The post-polls show a closer divide than I would have guessed. However, they seemed to skew a bit Republican in the response. CNN had equal amounts of Republican and Democrat and Obama came out +7. The problem is that Republicans and Democrats are not even. But it’s noteworthy, or seems so, if they are among poll-viewers. CBS showed a similar lead with many more saying it was a tie (37/30/33).

What does this mean for the election? Not sure. Before the last debate, I put Obama’s odds at winning at roughly 80% and thought it was the same after the debate, but the polling fallout brought that number down to 60%. After this, I want to move it back up a bit – to 70% – but I’m going to wait a few days before doing that.

I think what it comes down to is… where did the Romney surge come from. Did it come from Romney doing well and establishing credibility (in which case, I don’t think his performance hurt him because he didn’t do poorly)? Did it come from Obama doing poorly (in which case he should get a bounce)? Or was it not actually the debate at all?

For my own part, the debate actually moved my personal vote slightly towards Romney. As did the previous debate. Odds are still better than even that I will be voting for Johnson. Partially because I live in a secured Romney state and so my vote doesn’t matter as it pertains to the outcome. Also, the third debate is still to come and I suspect that Romney will have less to say to my liking in that one.

Why I bothered to watch I don’t know. I filled out my absentee ballot and mailed it in yesterday. But I resolved to offer ten points for discussion, and here they are. Continue Reading →

I consider Obama’s presidency to be a mixed bag. There are things he has done that I support (Ending DADT, credit card reform, others I’m not thinking of) and things that I oppose (PPACA, Cash For Clunkers, GM Bailout, increasing CAFE Standards, offshore drilling moratorium). A lot of the things that really inflame fellow Leaguers (drone attacks) don’t particularly inflame me. There is at least one thing he has done that has sent me through the roof, however. Not because it’s of tantamount importance in the greater scheme of things, but because of how unnecessary it was and how I simply cannot put a positive spin on it.

I speak of the Administration going from “As a general matter, [we] should not focus federal resources individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” and “We limit our enforcement efforts to those individuals, organizations that are acting out of conformity…with state laws.” to “The intertwined subjects of medical marijuana, Montana law and medical necessity have no relevance to determining whether the government has proven the crimes charged in the indictment … Marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law … and can’t be dispensed under a prescription.”

I don’t expect much from Democrats when it comes to pot legalization. I expect less from Republicans not named Gary Johnson. The most that can be said is that McCain would have raided more dispensaries than Obama did. Yet, even if this is true, it’s not the raids themselves that have me up in arms about this. It’s the announcement that encouraged the businesses to form in the first place only to have the founders arrested later on. Enforce the law (which is legally right) or don’t enforce the law (which is morally right), but it’s very important that everybody is clear on which route you’re going to go.

If there is any confusion as to the relationship between the Ogden Memo, which suggested that enforcement would not occur, and the proliferation of the dispensaries that garnered exceptional legal liability, this is from the Great Falls Tribune:

Many people in the medical marijuana community believed the Ogden memo demonstrated that President Barack Obama had fulfilled his 2007 campaign promise to “not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users.” {…}

In the span of just two years, the number of medical marijuana patients skyrocketed from 3,921 in September 2009 to more than 28,000 by the time the Legislature convened in January 2011. During that same period, the number of Montana caregivers authorized to grow marijuana for patients jumped from 1,403 to 4,833.

The problems that were occurring under Montana’s Medical Marijuana law shouldn’t be understated. They were significant and well known throughout the Mountain West region. So much so that the debate within Montana – a state in which MedMar passed a public vote by a substantial margin – was whether it should be mended or ended. The raids occurred while this debate was happening – literally, while a state senate panel was voting, the DEA was arming up.

Montana’s first registered dispenser died in prison about six weeks ago. His son is serving a five year sentence, his wife is serving two (for bookkeeping).

Being the federalist that I am, my view is that even if Montana law was spinning out of control it should have been allowed to remain a Montana issue. If the federal government was unwilling to allow it to continue, however, I would have understood that to if an announcement had been made to that effect. But whatever should have happened, this should not have happened. Maybe we should have a completely black and white view of the law and if it’s illegal it should be illegal. Maybe there’s room for gray. But the rules, official or unofficial, should not be changed after legitimate business licenses are allowed to be issued.

Marc Ambinder thinks that the era of affirmative action may be coming to an end.

[Justice Anthony Kennedy] endorses the idea that affirmative action can be used to achieve a diverse student body, so long as race is considered as one part among many others, and so long as applicants are considered individually. It is hard to imagine him not finding fault with the racially conscious 15 percent admissions process. For Kennedy, race-conscious policies are permissible (barely) if (and only if) diversity cannot be achieved any other way. Plainly, the University of Texas has found a way to achieve some measure of diversity without affirmative action before it takes race into account.

Perhaps Kennedy will try to salvage affirmative action, but it is hard to see the court’s conservatives allowing him to do so. They have their chance to end it, not mend it. Though John Roberts has said (and told Congress during his confirmation hearings) that he values precedent and wants the court’s decisions to be incremental rather than sweeping, it will be hard to resist the temptation to sweep away racial preferences.

It seems to me that he actually put his finger on why affirmative action won’t be banned wholesale. If Kennedy wants to preserve affirmative action, but can’t justify it in Texas, he can merely write an opinion stating that affirmative action is not permissible where the aims are being met by other means. That would abolish affirmative action in Texas, while continuing to allow sympathetic jurisdictions an opportunity to keep with the policy. To universalize from Texas’ experience, Kennedy must be judicially confident that any state could achieve the manner of diversity through a Top 10% policy like Texas has. This may be true, but it’s far from certain for a whole host of reasons.

It seems to me that Kennedy remains relatively sympathetic to affirmative action. If I’m wrong on that, then maybe it is dead in the water. But if I’m right, he can either uphold it in Texas (by declaring that the existing racial diversity is insufficient) or uphold it everywhere else (with the above argument).

The current national average price for 87-octane unleaded gasoline is $3.81 a gallon. In California, it’s $4.65 a gallon.  In my particular neck of the woods, the cheapest I’ve seen it is ten cents a gallon higher than that. It seems like just last week I was paying only a little bit over $4.00 a gallon.

WTF?

I’ll be honest. I played Fallout: New Vegas through the entire debate tonight. Had a lot of fun. I felt my time was better spent hunting mutants in the Mojave wasteland. Bill, can you explain to the group why I might do such a thing?

Thanks, that’s it exactly. See, both Biden and Ryan are clearly capable of the ordinary sorts of duties of a Vice-President. Help out as needed, chat up some Senators or go to a funeral overseas or do a meet and greet with the Chacalawa Lake Chamber of Commerce delegation. Stuff like that.

See, I don’t particularly want to see another Dick Cheney. I want POTUS to be able to remove anyone subordinate to him if need be. The VP is the only person in an Administration who can’t be treated that way, so I don’t want the VP to hold a lot of meaningful power unless the Senate deadlocks at 50-50. I’ve been happy enough with Biden being mostly blended into the background and I’d expect that’s where Obama would keep him in a second term. And it would really be up to President Romney to define a role for VP Ryan, and at this point Romney is not in a good position to have given that a whole lot of thought in the first place. He has other things on his mind right now.

Biden and Ryan need only demonstrate sufficient ability to hold down the fort should they have to actually step up to the top spot for some reason which of course we all hope would never happen. Both pass this, the only meaningful threshold for a Vice-President. The rest is empty rhetoric, could only have been.

I’ll watch Obama and Romney again next week. They matter.

In the meantime, a night of cheesy country music juxtaposed over video game gunfights with silly bad guys was just fine. And I’m starting to get the hang of playing caravan.

In response to the subject of a post-consumerist society, NewDealer writes:

What is an economy that is not built on consumerism? What is the alternative?

This is a serious question. I am not saying that being a consumer all the time is good but critics of consumerism have yet to come up with an alternative model that I consider to be sustainable and/or pleasant.

Most critics of consumerism seem to be filled with Freshman 101 sort of rebellion. As I once joked about on facebook but got a lot of likes, one day these people “will want nice things to”. In other words, most of them will end up just as middle class as the backgrounds they came from and are currently rebelling against.

The modern notion of a vast middle class is more or less based on consumerism and is a continuation of the Victorian Industrial Revolution’s ability to take former luxury items and make them affordable for the masses. Now we do it with clothing, electronics and vacations and restaurants instead of chocolate, candles, and soap though.

I was listening to NPR’s Planet Money once and they were interviewing a very thrifty woman who basically urged everyone to stop buying anything new (furniture, books, clothing, electronics, etc) and also to stop going to restaurants. If everyone took her advice, the economy would collapse and we would all be more miserable. Plus life would be really boring without restaurants.

That being said, I agree we should think more in terms of sustainability over growth, growth, growth that creates boom and bust cycles. But I will still take post-consumerist talk more seriously when I hear a serious proposal about how to do so in a nation of 300 plus million people. It is not sustainable to imagine every American becoming a hippie on a commune and that is what many anti-Consumerists [seem to] want.

It is comparatively easy to be against consumerism, at least in the abstract. When we’re not careful, we typically mean the poor consumption decisions of others. I mean, I don’t think of myself as particularly consumerist, but I have a whole boatload of electronics that would beg to differ. I love electronics. I don’t know that they make me happier than I would be if they did not exist, but given that they exist I would rather have them than not have them. Is this worthy of criticism? I’m not sure. But I doubt it’s going away.

Of course, the real enemy is status consumption, as far as that goes. This is an area where I do reasonably well. In a way, though, it’s at least sometimes a form of image-making in and of itself. It was hard for me to mentally go from that guy who owns an aging Ford to that guy who has a relatively new Subaru. I bought the latter out of utility, and with more than a little bit of discomfort. That tells me that my previous consumption habits were at least a little bit about self-image. Not all self-image consumption is created equal. Even conspicuously opting out of a material arms race has pluses, and maybe minuses, compared to the waste created by an unwillingness to make do.

The arms race, though, itself has material repercussions. This is where any sort of post-consumerism is going to get really difficult. Our houses don’t need to be as big as they are in the absolute sense. There is utility in having large houses, as well as costs, but one of the driving factors isn’t about absolute size, but relative size. Big houses don’t just give you more space, but they price undesirables out. The comparative importance of this, for a very large section of the population, can scarcely be overstated. There is the natural desire to live amongst one’s peers. There are concerns about crime. There are lifestyle clashes that occur across economic lines. There are schools to consider if there are children involved.

The notion that large numbers of people might opt out of this strikes me as extremely unlikely. The collective action problem here is immeasurable. The most that could be hoped for is to change the parameters. That involves, among other things, having less to spend money on. Or, alternately, having less money to spend. The end result, though, is not a significantly less consumerist mindset, though the end result could be less waste and more “sustainability.” The hard part would be accomplishing this without adversely materially affecting the bottom. I have enormous difficulty figuring out how you accomplish that. I have a lot of difficulty envisioning it.

I turned in a pretty lackluster day today substitute teaching. The class itself wasn’t the issue. They weren’t perfect – what second grade class has perfection – but on the whole they were better than expected as students of the school in question and given a gender imbalance (2/3 boy) that always makes me nervous.

But I was exhausted. I have been for several days now. I’ve been getting less than six hours of sleep a night for almost a week not. My days over the last couple have included some exhausting chores (driving a lot of miles in uncomfortable conditions). It was hard to keep moving around the room (and second grade demands it). I had a lot of difficulty retaining any sort of focus.

On the drive home, I was reminded of the things that my wife, and doctors like her, are expected to do on a lot less cumulative rest than I’ve had.

It’s a rather good thing that she is taking the maternity leave she is in light of the newborn coming our way later this month. I hear newborns sometimes cut down on quality rest.

When Clancy was working in the interior southwest, the largely immigrant population had its plusses and minuses from a doctor’s perspective. On the plus side, they were actually among the best behaved of the patient populations she had. They had low rates of drug use, almost always showed up for appointments that were made, and in the overall had healthier habits than most of the other groups she had worked with up until her current job. On the downside, they were bad about establishing and seeking prenatal care, there were language barriers, and some non-progressive attitudes towards gender preference.

They wanted sons, not daughters. They also tended to be much more fixated on this than virtually any other group. With nearly every visit, there would be questions about gender, when they could find out the gender, and so on. It drove Clancy absolutely nuts. They’d sometimes ask if the gender was known before Clancy had the chance to tell them that the baby was healthy.

She was disinclined to know the gender of her child prior to this experience, but it actually reinforced it. She’s 38 weeks pregnant, and we still don’t know one way or the other. My personal preference was that I didn’t want to know until or unless the doctors knew (which they would find out) but I’d want to know at that point. However, she’s the one carrying the baby around in her belly and the extra five pounds (which, okay, isn’t a lot but it’s somehow a very solid give points), has dealt with the morning sickness, and so on. She doesn’t want to know, then I don’t want us to know.

The interesting thing about this is how common it appears to be in the medical professional or at least the obstetrical profession. While almost everybody outside of the hospital I know already knew the baby’s gender by the time the baby arrived, three-quarters of her colleagues said that they, too, didn’t want to know.

I don’t know if it has much to do with Clancy’s history of parents obsessed with the matter. Or, having dealt with such a wide variety of prenatal health that there eye is on that more important ball, but it does seem to be a thing. I also wonder if maybe, when you deliver babies, there are so many fewer mysteries that you kind of hold on to the one you have.

Not knowing the gender is tough, in some respects. My friend’s wife is kind of mad at us for not knowing because she doesn’t know whether to make bows for the baby or not. People who want to buy us stuff don’t know whether they should do so in pink or blue. The vast majority of baby stuff comes in one or the other. Oh, and we have no gender-neutral pronoun. We refuse to call him or her “it.”

We’ve become fans of the color green.