The road to hell…

Remember the old adage that ”the road to hell is paved with good intentions”? American democracy is in terrible shape right now, riven by unremitting partisanship, and it is mostly due to things people naively thought were good ideas.

Item: In the “good old days” members of Congress lived pretty much full time in Washington, because travelling back to their home districts was expensive and time consuming for all but the few from nearby East Coast towns and cities. So they lived most of the time in Washington, often were neighbors, attended the same Washington parties, and socialized together and became friends, whatever their political party. In the 1940s and 1950s, after a vigorous debate in the Senate, many members of both parties would gather in Senate majority leader Sam Rayburn’s office to drink Bourbon together. (When my grandfather, a Republican in politics, died most of the local Democratic Party turned out for his funeral – they were all good friends of his).

With the advent of fast and cheap air travel, many – perhaps most – members of Congress no longer live and socialize in Washington. They now travel back to their home districts on Thursday, returning on Monday. That means they are more available to their constituents on the weekends, which many thought would be a good thing.  But it also means they now socialize less, if at all, with other members of Congress, and in particular, with those of the opposite party. So there are no longer those bonds of friendship to foster respect and bipartisan comity.  

Item: In the “good old days” members of Congress would retire behind closed doors (those “smoke-filled rooms” that political activists decried as so evil) and negotiate compromises to their differences. Then along came the movement for “open democracy” – let’s get those sneaky deals out of the smoke-filled rooms and into the public light. Sounds like a reasonable idea, doesn’t it?

But what is the result? Members of Congress now have to negotiate in public, and any sign of compromise on either side promptly brings a flood of emails (orchestrated by whatever pressure groups opposes it) from constituents. Result? Compromise is out the window and we get today’s partisan stalemates.  The essence of politics IS compromise – is finding a middle ground that gives all sides something. So cutting off compromise cuts off effective politics, which is where we are now.

Item: In the “good old days” candidates for office were usually selected by local party leaders, who usually, among other things, looked for suitable “electable” candidates. It was a system that was certainly open to abuses, but by and large it worked.  Then along came the movement for direct democracy and open primaries, which certainly on the face of it sounds like a good idea. But in fact far fewer people vote in primaries than vote in general elections, and those that do tend to be those that care most – the most partisan, the most extreme.  The result: we now get far more extreme right or extreme left candidates than we used to, feeding the increasing partisan divide in politics.

More than that, the extremes on both sides can now impose single-issue “purity tests” on primary candidates.  That got us the unruly Tea Party on the right, and fear of primary defeats seems to be driving many of the Democrats in Congress to equally extreme positions, like this really dumb filibuster threat against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

Item: In “the good old days” most Congressional districts contained a mix of voters – different parties, different races, different economic classes, etc, etc. That meant candidates had to have broad appeal, and pay attention to the concern of all the groups.  Then politicians began to gerrymander districts to “increase minority participation”.  The theory was that if one gerrymandered a district with, say, a majority of Hispanics or blacks, that would increase the chances a Hispanic or black would get elected and therefore increase Hispanic or black leverage in the political process. Of course gerrymandering wasn’t new; it had been around since the early 1800s. But this argument gave it a liberal moral justification.

The result? Both parties have now gerrymandered so many Congressional districts that most House seats are a safe seat for one party or the other, and the office holders don’t have to pay much attention to any but the dominate political voices in their district. As of this year, about 205 Republican and 173 Democratic seats in the House are considered “safe”.  And of course the economic and political segregation of the nation – with liberals in the costal big cities and conservatives in rural and small towns in mid-America, has exacerbated the problem. All this also feeds the growing partisan divider in the nation.

All four of these changes were made for the most part with the best of intentions (though politicians certainly saw other advantages to gerrymandering). Yet all four have contributed significantly to bringing us to today’s dismal political state. “The road to hell…..”

Talk about hypocracy....

As I mentioned before, I'm not particularly happy with the Trump administration, but I must say that the Democrats – politicians and media alike – have reached a new high in hypocrisy this week.

Exhibit A: Democratic outrage at the possibility (now almost certainty) that the Republicans will invoke  the “nuclear option” and change the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, even though it was the Democrats themselves, under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who on Nov 21, 2013 used the very same nuclear option against the Republicans, and it was Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine who  boasted on TV on Oct 28, 2016 that the Democrats would use it when Hillary was elected to get their candidate approved.

Exhibit B: The liberal media’s public outrage at Trump’s claim that the Obama administration used the intelligence agencies as political weapons against his campaign, followed in the past few days by the sudden media silence and downplaying of the whole issue now that it has been revealed that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security advisor, asked for access to the names of Trump’s campaign team (normally, pursuant to US law, US citizens names are masked or "blacked out" in any reports circulated)  that showed up in intelligence reports, and then made that information available to the press in leaks..

I certainly understand that the liberals are upset that they lost the election (though it was their own fault for backing such a flawed candidate), and politics has always been a dirty business, but I must say that this unremitting liberal Democratic attack on the Trump administration, including even the suborning of the intelligence community, is more vicious and dirtier than even the obstructionism of the Republicans against Obama’s policies, and that was pretty bad.

More on climate change

Scott Adams has an interesting breakdown here of his view on climate change policy. Fundamentally he notes that to believe we need to disrupt economies and put people out of work to restrain CO₂ production one has to believe a chain of things:

1.      That we have the chemistry and physics right

2.      That we are measuring things (like CO₂ and temperature) right

3.      That the climate models we build are right

4.      That the economic models we build on the basis of the climate model predictions are right.

His assessment of the credibility of each step, which more or less agrees with mine is as follows:

1.      That we have the chemistry and physics right – 100%. We almost certainly have the basic science right.

2.      That we are measuring things (like CO₂ and temperature) right – 85%.  That seems in the right range to me. Measuring global temperature is hard – some places are cooling, some are warming, there is lots of day-to-day and year-to-year and place-to-place variability.  My posting some weeks ago showed how the New York Times claim that 2016 was hotter than the previous year was suspect, since the measured difference was far less than the error of measurement.

3.      That the climate models we build are right – Adams gives that 10% confidence and I would tend to agree.  As I mentioned before, even with our supercomputers and satellite weather systems and closely-spaced ground weather stations we still can’t predict the local weather in our own city more than a few days ahead, or the path of a hurricane more than a few days ahead. So how much confidence can we have in models of the entire global climate years in advance?  The climate models have lots of adjustable parameters embodying various assumptions about how the climate works, and the models that are still around have been carefully “tuned” (by adjusting those knobs) to “predict” the past – which says nothing about how accurate they are about the future. With enough adjustable parameters one can match just about any history, but that doesn't mean the assumptions are correct.

The key issue here is how much effect does CO₂ actually have on climate change – how sensitive is global temperature to CO₂ levels?  How much is the heating from higher CO₂ levels offset by increased cloud formation? How much is it reduced by increased plant growth.? How much of the excess CO₂ is absorbed in the ocean? Etc, etc, etc. We have lots of theories – but only theories. And the theories from respectable climate scientists are all over the place.

4.      That the economic models we build on the basis of the climate model predictions are right – Adams gives that 0% confidence, on the basis that thus far most economic models have been miserably inaccurate, if not completely wrong (like the rosy OMB ObamaCare predictions of how insurance premiums would fall substantially for all of us !!!).

So yes, I am in the end highly skeptical on the evidence available to date that it is imperative that we disrupt the world economy and put hundreds of thousands or millions of people out of work.  Certainly the global climate seems to be warming, and it seems plausible, if not entirely certain, that human activity is at least partly the cause. But the step from there to a belief that CO₂ is the primary cause of climate change, that economic incentives can cause nations to sharply reduce CO₂, and that sharply reducing human CO₂ production will be effective, seems to me tenuous at best.

The Republican Health Care failure

Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi (D, California) are ecstatic that the Republicans failed to replace Obamacare yesterday. It seems to me their joy is a little premature, since all that will happen now is that ObamaCare will continue in its death spiral, with premiums rising (average rise in 2017 across all plans is projected to be about 22%), more insurance companies pulling out because they are losing money (Humana is the latest), and the few remaining state insurance coops failing.(as of July last year only 7 of the original 23 are still operating, and most of those are expected to fail this year, at a taxpayer loss of more than $1.7 billion).

What that means is that it will be plain for all to see over the next year or two how poorly the Democratic ObamaCare bill works, and that anger will no doubt fall primarily on Democratic candidates.  The Republican bill was far from perfect, but if it had passed it would be the Republican candidates taking the heat for the inevitable health care problems, rather than the Democrats.

By the way, the only reason ObamaCare got more people insured is that it essentially subsidized a lot of people’s insurance.  Just under 90% of people newly insured under ObamaCare are subsidized by taxpayers. That means Obama could just as well have directly subsidized them in the first place and avoided the whole expensive mess that lost so much money in the failed state cooperatives and expensive ObamaCare bureaucracy, and let us keep our original health care plans and doctors as he promised.

I think the Democrats will come to rue the fact that Republicans didn’t kill ObamaCare and thereby inevitably inherit the public anger about health care.

And finally......

Just to complicate things yet more, the latest release of secret CIA documents from Wikileaks includes detailed discussions of how the CIA copies the “fingerprints” of Russian and Chinese hackers and uses them in their own hacking to cover their trail. Which means, in essence, that all the claims the government has been making over the past few years about Russians or Chinese being responsible for this or that hacking - including the hacking of the Democratic campaign – are highly suspect.  If the CIA can leave misleading “fingerprints”, one assumes the Russians and the Chinese can too, since they seem to be better at this that the US is.  But in fact, it apparently could even have been the CIA itself doing the hacking, or just about any other government or group.

Of course it is obvious that the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the Israelis, a few of the wealthier criminal groups, and not a few bored teenagers in their bedrooms have been hacking US government sites, just as the CIA and NSA and the FBI and the Army and…and… and … are doing their best to hack into foreign sites, including even those of our own allies. This whole “hacking” issue is a distraction – yes, of course it goes on; we do it and they do it. Get real!!  Congressional outrage over hacking is just useless political posturing.

Obama had eight years to get something effective done about this problem, and to get the government to protect its secrets better.  But even his Secretary of State (Hillary) was using an unsecured server for classified material – hardly a good model for the rest of the government. Maybe Trump will do better. I notice that he is smart enough NOT to use electronic messaging or email – except for Twitter when he wants to make something public.

There is more…….

So now the word circulating in Washington is that the Obama administration did indeed request a wiretap warrant for Trump’s phones from the secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) Court, and was refused the first time, but reapplied to another FISA judge and it was approved. It is not clear if Obama knew about this, but his attorney general, Loretta Lynch certainly knew because she signed off on all such applications.

Both Obama and General Clapper have issued “non-denial denials”, meaning they have issued very carefully worded statements that leave open the possibility that someone else in the administration ordered the wiretaps, while at the same time claiming they knew nothing about it. If such wiretaps were approved it is almost inconceivable that both Clapper and Obama would have not known about it, but they were probably insulated enough from it that they can plausibly deny knowing and no one can prove otherwise.

It is still too early to know if these claims are accurate or just more “fake news”, but I notice the more liberal journalists are giving this story as low-key exposure as they can, which suggests they are worried that the Democrats may have a big scandal waiting to burst on them.

Meanwhile the House Intelligence Committee has asked the Justice Department for FISA records on wiretap requests. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  

Wait a minute.....

Trump claims the government wiretapped his campaign, presumably on the orders of someone high in the administration (Obama?).  Obama denies it, as does Gen James Clapper, who was Director of National Intelligence under the Obama administration. Clearly this is another of Trump's paranoid claims........or is it?

Mike Flynn was ousted from his position as National Security Advisor in the Trump administration when the intelligence community (illegally) leaked phone conversations they had recorded between him and the Russian ambassador. And where was Flynn when he had these conversations?  In Trump Tower! So in fact conversations from Trump Tower, from Trump's campaign headquarters, WERE being wiretapped!

Looks like perhaps Trump isn't paranoid.......