Quotulatiousness

August 18, 2015

Donald Trump’s immigration “policy” proposals

Filed under: Americas, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Megan McArdle found herself coming back to the phrase “bag o’ crazy” when she tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals:

To be fair, he does have some practical positions. Some of them will be controversial, like criminal penalties for people who overstay temporary visas. Some of them are theoretically feasible, but wildly expensive, such as tripling the size of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff, and stepping up detentions and deportations.

Then there are the less practical ideas, which are — well, there’s a reason I got stuck on “bag o’ crazy.”

Most notably, Trump is promising to end birthright citizenship and get Mexico to pay for building a giant wall across our nearly 2,000-mile border. He also adds bizarre promises like a temporary halt on issuing any green cards at all until the domestic labor market recovers and a “refugee program for American children” aimed at getting foster kids into better homes.

This is not a serious policy document. Ending birthright citizenship would require a Constitutional amendment, which would never pass Congress, much less the three-quarters of the state legislatures required to ratify it. The difficulty of this task is exceeded only in the difficulty of getting Mexico to pay for a 2,000-mile wall that Mexicans have no interest in.

But critiquing Trump on the basis of his policy fantasies sort of misses the point. The precise reason that people like him is that his campaign is completely unmoored from underlying realities.

Every election season, candidates release white papers outlining what they will do when they take office. Those policy papers inevitably have a bunch of magic asterisks where the candidate has substituted heroic assumption for plausible numbers. These heroic assumptions do the bold and necessary work of hiding the costs of their rosy promises from voters. For example, Obama’s promise that his health care plan would save the average family a bunch of money, and also, never include a legal mandate forcing them to buy health insurance.

While those policy documents always have a certain … let’s call it a “muscular optimism” — they’re ultimately at least weakly tethered to the plausible. Viable Republican presidential candidates do not promise that on their first day in office, they will repeal Roe v. Wade. Democrats do not claim that they will provide universal preschool education for a net cost of $5. That’s just unrealistic.

But a broad swath of American voters are hungry for those sweet little lies. Or big lies. These voters don’t want some guy who crafts a policy agenda that could actually be enacted, some triangulated plan that could get past the American system’s checks and balances. In Dave Weigel’s terrific piece on a Trump rally in Flint, Michigan, two quotes, from two different people, stand out:

    “Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask. I think he’d just do it.”

And:

    “I compare Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. He lets people know what he’s going to do, not what to ask for.”

This is, of course, a completely inaccurate picture of how government works. But they’re sick of how the government works.

August 13, 2015

The unlikely appeal of Donald Trump

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

What is the explanation for the meteoric rise of Donald Trump’s fortunes in the Republican race? It’s certainly not his hardcore conservative beliefs, for he clearly doesn’t have too many of those. It’s not his “everyman” story, because he’s far from having experienced anything like an actual “everyman” life. What could possibly account for his current popularity? (I mean, aside from being pretty much antithetical to the “establishment GOP” … that’d be crazy talk.) In The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead takes a swing at defining what it is that Trump appears to be offering to the disaffected plurality (majority?) of would-be Republican voters:

Is The Donald a populist candidate? Our friend Glenn Reynolds argued in Sunday’s USA Today that the rise of Donald Trump is best understood as a populist event — “an indictment of the GOP establishment and, for that matter, of the American political establishment in general” and “a sign that large numbers of voters don’t feel represented by more mainstream politicians.”

Over at the Washington Post, Daniel Drezner, another friend, disputes Reynolds’ interpretation of Trump, arguing that though “there’s definitely something to this”, “on closer inspection this isn’t really a straightforward populist story, for two reasons.” The first is that “the policy preferences that Trump is pushing aren’t all that popular.” The second is that Trump, rather than emphasizing his solidarity with ordinary people, makes a point of flaunting his tremendous wealth and privilege at every possible opportunity in outrageous ways.

But Reynolds is right and Trump is very much a classic populist — in the following sense. Populism isn’t always about taking majority positions or cultivating economic solidarity with non-elites. In some populist movements, specific policy positions that don’t always or even often have majority support gain energy by hooking up with generalized dissatisfaction with elites and the status quo. Late 19th- and early 20th-century populism, from a policy standpoint, put a lot of stress on agrarian issues and crackpot economic ideas that, though there weren’t any opinion polls at the time, don’t seem to have had majority support. So while, as Drezner points out, hard-line immigration enforcement may not be particularly high on the agendas of a majority of voters, Trump can use the issue to signal his contempt for the establishment — and voters pay more attention to the tune than to the lyrics.

Last week, Megan McArdle tried to explain “The Donald” as being the “Ron Paul” of this election cycle:

For me, the high point [of the Republican debate] came when Donald Trump announced that he had made a donation to Hillary Clinton in order to … get her to come to his wedding. Where to begin with such a statement? I have known brides and bridegrooms who cherished a vulgar belief that weddings have a three-figure admission fee, in cash or kind. But outside of romantic comedies, I have never heard of an American wedding in which the payments ran the other way. Trump touts himself as a dealmaker, but if this is an example of his negotiating prowess, do you really want him in charge of your international treaties? “I’m afraid I won’t even consider withdrawing our troops from your border unless you also allow me to give you a billion dollars, a weekend for two at the Maui Hilton, and a personal guided tour of the White House!”

When I pointed this out on Twitter, a Trump fan of indeterminate sincerity tweeted back “Wake … up, sheeple!”

How did this man get onto the stage? And how can we get him off, given the apparent passion of his base, who flood online polls with support for The Donald? He and Bernie Sanders are giving me flashbacks to those heady days of 2007, when a rash mention of Ron Paul’s name in a column, much less criticizing his somewhat tenuous grasp on monetary economics, was good for hundreds of comments and emails, assuring you that Dr. Paul was going to be the next president of the United States because he was FINALLY offering Americans a REAL ALTERNATIVE. (Ron Paul supporters favored ALL CAPS so that you would UNDERSTAND that they were SERIOUS ABOUT CHANGE, or perhaps because the RON PAUL COMMEMORATIVE KEYBOARDS they had bought had some sort of TERRIBLE MALFUNCTION.)

Donald Trump is not going to be president. Bernie Sanders is also not going to be president. Their appeal to their supporters is precisely the reason they are not going to be president. Every few years, a large number of Americans need to learn the same lesson: The reason you don’t hear the solutions that you want coming from the boring, scripted, mainstream politicians who get elected is that the solutions that you want do not appeal to the majority of your fellow countrymen.

Update: Fixed the link to Walter Russell Mead’s article.

Update the second: Mark Steyn takes some heat for his perceived support of Trump:

I’ve had a ton of mail objecting to my “support” of Donald Trump which we’ll try to run some of it in the days ahead. But, for the record, I’m not “supporting” him. As I said to John, the Republican nominating process has failed in the last two cycles, and thus, five months before any actual votes are cast, watching someone disrupt a racket that can use all the disruption it can get is hugely enjoyable. I mean, he’s touched the third, fourth, fifth and every other live rail in American politics, insulting Hispanics, veterans, menstruating women – and the more juice that shoots through him the stronger he gets. He’s discarded every convention of American politics, which, given that it’s the conventions of American politics that have made us the brokest nation in history, is something to be cheered. He’s the richest guy in the race, but he’s not spending a dime – because while the single-digit candidates kiss up to the big donors and blow through a fortune on the usual tedious “I was born the son of a mailman” ads – Trump is sucking up all the airtime between commercial breaks for free. He’s making a mockery of the consultant class, and what’s not to enjoy about that? For as long as it lasts.

August 8, 2015

Election issue – the Netflix tax, “much ado about nothing?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist looks at the major federal party leaders’ reactions to discussion of a “Netflix tax”:

As part of the digital strategy discussion, I stated that questions abound, including “are new regulations over services such as Netflix on the horizon?”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed that question yesterday with a video and tweet in which he pledged that the Conservatives will never tax digital streaming services like Netflix and Youtube. Harper added that the Liberals and NDP have left the door open to a Netflix tax, but that he is 100% opposed, “always has been, always will be.” Both opposition parties quickly responded with the NDP saying they have not proposed a Netflix tax and the Liberals saying they have never supported a Netflix tax and do not support a Netflix tax.

So is this much ado about nothing?

Not exactly. First, there are groups and provincial governments that support a Netflix tax or mandated contribution to fund the creation of Canadian content. These include the Ontario and Quebec governments along with many creator groups. Earlier this year, I obtained documents under the Ontario Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that showed that the Ontario government spent months working toward a recommendation to expand the regulation of new media, including Canadian content requirements and increased regulation of foreign online video providers.

Second, while the Liberals and NDP have not proposed a Netflix tax, they have called for requirements that online video providers disclose revenues, Canadian content availability, and subscriber numbers to Canadian regulators. This is a very soft form of regulation that Netflix and Google have rejected as beyond the power of the Broadcasting Act. Providing information to allow for more informed regulatory analysis does not seem particularly unreasonable, but the companies unsurprisingly fear that that analysis could ultimately lead to calls for more regulation or payments.

Third, the real Netflix tax is the prospect of a levying sales taxes on digital products such as music downloads or online video services. It was the Conservatives that raised this possibility in the 2014 budget, launching a consultation on the issue that garnered supportive comments from companies such as Rogers, which noted that Canadian-based online video services such as Shomi operate at a disadvantage since they collect GST/HST, but Netflix does not. With many countries moving toward some form of digital taxation (as I noted in a January 2015 column on the issue, the real challenge lies in the cost of implementation), it seems inevitable that Canada will do the same in order to level the playing field and recoup a growing source of revenue. The Conservatives would presumably seek to differentiate between a generally applicable sales tax and a tax or fee targeting online streaming services, though many may feel it is a distinction without a difference.

August 7, 2015

Canada to hold longest election campaign in living memory

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

For those of you not familiar with Canadian politics — and unless you’re a Canadian why would you be? — the longest election campaign since the 19th century kicked off on Sunday, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper went to the Governor General’s office to request that parliament be dissolved. This is going to be a long, long, gruelling political death-march. Eleven whole weeks of politicians bloviating, TV talking heads pretending to interpret every twitch in the polls, political candidates of all shades from light pink to deepest red popping up at every possible gathering of more than three people to beg for votes … it’s going to be awful.

Over at Gods of the Copybook Headings, Richard Anderson provides the early scorecard on the leaders of the major federal parties:

In his infinite cruelty the PM has imposed upon the Canadian people, who never did him any harm, a formal eleven week election campaign. The longest since 1872. Much of Canada still wasn’t part of Canada in 1872. After eleven weeks of politicking those regions might be thinking of leaving. British Columbia we will miss you dearly. Newfoundland much the same.

Lest we complain the status quo remains. As Ronald Reagan once observed status quo is Latin for the mess we’re in. Our particular mess has a dull and worthy quality befitting our national character. This brings us to the vital question: What is Election 2015 about?

Is it about Justin Trudeau’s fitness to rule the nation? No, because nobody in their right mind thinks the Dauphin is fit to rule. He’s a front man for those shrewder than himself. If current polls are to be trusted it appears that Canadians are not keen on a Gerald Butts government.

Perhaps it’s about Thomas Mulcair and his ability to lead. Can you, the good and sensible people of our fair Dominion, imagine yet another Quebec lawyer as ruler of all the Canadas? And if you can hold that mental picture, while still holding your lunch, have you thought carefully about who is part of Team Mulcair? However astute and moderate a PM Tommy might turn out to be he will need build a cabinet. Have you seen the timbers of the NDP caucus lately? […]

Canadians, it is understood, are creatures of habit. We likes what we likes. There is a tendency for the electorate to plunk for the bank manager candidate. The safe pair of hands who won’t screw things up too much. As a people we generally avoid Messiahs or Rabble Rousers. It offends our sense of proportion. We want someone clever enough to deal with basic problems but sensible enough not to wreck the place between elections. In our long national history we have deviated from this common sense approach just once. Way back in 1968 we took a wild and daring risk. The result was fifteen years of Pierre Trudeau.

Bill Davis, perhaps the most quintessential of Ontario politicians, famously attributed his success to a simple formula: Bland works. Stephen Harper is our bland candidate. Beneath the bad hair cut the enormous brain continues to plot. It plotted the Canadian Right out of the political wilderness. It plotted Canada away from the disaster of an Liberal-NDP-Bloc Coalition. Nimbly has it darted us through the shoals of the world economy. He ain’t great but he’s better than what else is on offer.

This October my fellow Canadians let us be boring. Let us be sensible. Let us be bland. It’s what we do best and why, whatever happens over the next eleven weeks, Stephen Harper will probably still be running the joint for years to come. All hail the new Mackenzie King.

August 6, 2015

Jeb Bush shows his true colours: “I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ace explains why Jeb’s little mind fart is such a huge gift to the Democrats:

Talking about defunding Planned Parenthood Jeb Bush, the presumptive GOP nominee, went just a bit off message about the whole baby parts for sale in violation of federal law thing and mused….

    “The argument against this is … it is a war on women and you are attacking women’s health issues,” he said. “You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues — but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations that exist.”

Emphasis mine and everyone elses.

DUDE. NO! BAD JEB! BAD!

So the GOP actually had a reasonable plan, this wasn’t about budget root canal and saving a few bucks, it was about not funding illegal and immoral acts, even indirectly. And hey, we’re going to send this money to decent and honest places that actually, you know, help improve women’s health.

Pretty solid for the GOP.

But instead, Jeb for some reason thought this would be a good time to toss out there the idea that he, and by extension the party he seeks to lead, really just want to stick it to poor women.

Fantastic work!

Well, he did issue a statement saying that’s not what he meant. I’m sure Hillary and every Democratic candidate will be sure to include that correction in the four million ads they’re going to run with the, “although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues” sound bite. So no big whoop.

Your party has already been castigated — extensively — for the “War on Women” they’ve apparently been waging for years … so you just casually drop in an aside that totally justifies all the accusations? Man, that’s a serious day’s work in this election campaign! I’m not sure even his brother George could have malapropped his way quite so convincingly.

Democrats, Republicans, and – their natural prey – voters

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

P.J. O’Rourke on the real motivation for politicians to interest themselves in you:

I would like to address myself to the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refugees teeming to America’s shore, the homeless, the economically, socially, and mentally tempest-tossed. Also, I’d like to address the young, the hip, the progressive, the compassionate, and the caring. I’d like a word with everyone who votes for Democrats.

Democrats hate your guts.

Democrats need your vote and they’ll do anything — no matter how low and degrading — to get it. They hate you the way a whore hates a john.

All politicians hate people. Politics is a way to gain power over people without justification for having that power. Nothing in the 11,000-year history of politics — going back to the governing elites of Mesopotamia — indicates that politicians are wiser, smarter, kinder, more moral, or better skilled at any craft (aside from politics) than we are.

But political rulers need the acquiescence of the ruled to slake the craving for power. Politicians hate you the way a junkie hates junk.

Politicians gain power by means of empty promises or threats, or both when they’re on their game. Should you vote for people who are good at politics? No. You should vote for Republicans. We’re lousy.

Believe me, I know why you don’t vote for Republicans. You see the Republican candidates and they look so … Bush-League, Dog Walker, Rubio Rube, Get-Outta-the-Carson, Hucka-Upchuck, Ap-Paul-ling, Cruz Control, Fat-Fried Christie Crispy, Son-of-a-Kasich, Dingleberry Perry, Flee the Fiorina, Sancta-Santorum, Graham Cracker, and Nervous 7/11 Night Shift Manager Jindal.

And never mind the busted flush Trump Card who should be spray-painted with Rust-Oleum primer, have a squirt gun super-glued to his hand, and kicked through the front door of the Ferguson, Mo., police station.

You think, “I don’t want to vote for these people.”

Just between you and me, we Republicans think the same thing.

Republican politicians stink. This is because real Republicans don’t go into politics. We have a life. We have families, jobs, responsibilities, and it takes all our time and energy to avoid them and go play golf. We leave politics to our halt, our lame, and our feeble-minded. Republican candidacies are sinecures for members of the GOP who are otherwise useless and/or retired.

Democrats, on the other hand, are brilliant politicians. And I mean that as a vicious slur. Think how we use the word “politics.” Are “office politics” ever a good thing? When somebody “plays politics” to get a promotion, does he or she deserve it? When we call a coworker “a real politician,” is that a compliment?

August 3, 2015

Camille Paglia on the presidential race

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

From the third and final part of the Camille Paglia interview in Salon:

First of all, when we look at the abundance of candidates who have put themselves forward on the GOP side, compared to the complete paralysis of the Democratic party by the Clinton machine, I think you have to be worried about the future of the Democratic party. Young feminists are asking why there hasn’t been a woman president and automatically blaming it on male sexism. But there are plenty of women Democratic politicians who are too scared to put themselves forward as candidates because of the Clinton machine. There’s something seriously wrong here with Democratic thinking. You either believe in the country, you believe in your party, or you don’t!

Given the problems facing the nation, this passive waiting for your turn is simply unacceptable. The Democrats have plenty of solid, capable women politicians who are just too timid to challenge the party establishment. Well, excuse me, that proves they don’t deserve to be president! You sure won’t be able to deal with ISIS if you can’t deal with Debbie Wasserman Schultz! The paucity of declared Democratic presidential candidates is a major embarrassment to the party. Look at that herd of eager-beaver competitive guys on the Republican side – overflowing with energy and ambition. There’s even a woman, Carly Fiorina, who has no political experience and therefore no chance of winning, but she is bravely putting herself forward and speaking out. And she has impressively informed herself about international politics, which is a No. 1 requirement for any woman presidential candidate. I said in a recent op-ed for Time that women must take responsibility for mastering more than the usual social welfare issues. Women politicians have to develop themselves beyond the caretaking side of the spectrum. All this talk about the lack of women engineers and how that’s somehow evidence of sexism – oh, really? It’s mostly a self-selecting process, as proved by the way that the overwhelming majority of women politicians around the world actually behave. What do they instantly gravitate towards? Social welfare, caretaking, the environment. They ignore military history and strategic geopolitics.

I have constantly said that Senator Dianne Feinstein should have been the leading woman presidential candidate for the Democratic party long ago. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is a very deft and clever behind-the-scenes legislator and dealmaker, a skill she acquired from her political family – her father and brother were mayors of Baltimore. Both of these women, to me, are far better politicians than Hillary Clinton. Hillary has accomplished nothing substantial in her life. She’s been pushed along, coasting on her husband’s coattails, and every job she’s been given fizzled out into time-serving or overt disaster. Hillary constantly strikes attitudes and claims she’s “passionate” about this or that, but there’s never any sustained follow-through. She’s just a classic, corporate exec or bureaucrat type who would prefer to be at her desk behind closed doors, imposing her power schemes on the proletariat. She has no discernible political skills of any kind, which is why she needs a big, shifting army of consultants, advisors, and toadies to whisper in her ear and write her policy statements. There’s this ridiculous new theme in the media about people needing to learn who the “real” Hillary Clinton is. What? Everything they’re saying about what a wonderful person Hillary is in private tells us that she’s not competent or credible as a public figure! A politician, particularly a president, must have a distinct skill or expertise in communicating with the masses. It’s the absolutely basic requirement for any career in politics.

If you don’t have an effective public persona, if you’re not a good speaker, if you don’t like to press the flesh, if you’re not nimble enough to deal with anything that comes along, then you are not a natural politician! And you sure aren’t going to learn it in your late 60s! Get off the stage, and let someone else truly electable on! All this silly talk about how wonderful Hillary is in private. Oh, sure, she’s nice to the important people and the people she wants or needs something from! Then she’s Pollyanna herself! There are just too many reports stretching all the way back to Arkansas about Hillary’s nasty outbursts toward underlings when things aren’t going well. The main point is that the ability to communicate with millions of people is a special talent, and Hillary pretty obviously lacks it.

June 22, 2015

“Because economic growth is a dead end. The greens present the only way out”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.R. Ireland pokes fun at the UK Green Party manifesto for the last general election:

All around the world our cultures might be different, our languages might be different, and we may think differently and act differently, but there is one fact which is true in every country on the face of planet Earth: The local Green Party will always be completely and irredeemably insane. From Australian pundit Tim Blair I’ve been made aware of the manifesto for the United Kingdom Green Party, a ludicrous amalgamation of wishful thinking, happy talk, and a total unwillingness to consider the unintended consequences of their proposed policies. From the absolutely bugfuck bonkers Youth Manifesto:

    Because economic growth is a dead end. The greens present the only way out.

Vote Green because they’re the only party courageous enough to promise voters that they will end economic growth. If there’s one way to win elections, it’s to tell the good people of Britain that you promise them an eternity of poverty and absolutely guarantee they will never get any richer.

Furthermore:

    We would introduce the right to vote at 16 because we believe that young people should have a say, as proven by the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014.

Indeed. Who wouldn’t want to have their country governed by the preferred candidates of middle teenagers? Why, the average 16 year old is so incredibly knowledgeable about the world and completely understands such complex topics as economics, immigration, and that hot chick Kristy’s red panties that he accidentally saw when she was uncrossing her legs in homeroom. With those sorts of brilliant minds choosing the leaders of the future, what could possibly go wrong?

[…]

But the real crazy, the high-end crazy, the crazy with a ribbon on top was saved not for their youth manifesto but for the manifesto allegedly meant for the big boys and girls who have hit puberty biologically, even if they never quite made it intellectually. The Green Party, you see, promises to give you infinite happiness without any negative consequences whatsoever:

    Imagine having a secure, fulfilling and decently paid job, knowing that you are working to live and not living to work. Imagine coming home to an affordable flat or house, and being valued for your contribution and character, not for how much you earn. Imagine knowing that you and your friends are part of an economy that works with the planet rather than against it. Imagine food banks going out of business. Imagine the end of poverty and deprivation. The key to all this is to put the economy at the service of people and planet rather than the other way round. That’s what the Green Party will do.

Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.

Indeed. Now if only John Lennon lyrics were a governing philosophy, by Jove the Greens might be onto something! Unfortunately for the Green Party, our actions often have consequences we could not have foreseen and, unsurprisingly, if you declare war on business with massive taxes, anti-trade legislation and the nationalization of banks and the housing industry, it’s awfully difficult to ‘end poverty and deprivation’ since you’ve completely eliminated the way by which people have the opportunity to lift themselves up. But don’t worry — the Greens will just sprinkle some fairy dust around and negative consequences will magically be done away with! Supply and demand is simply a filthy conspiracy perpetuated by the bourgeoisie!

June 20, 2015

Prediction Markets

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 8 Feb 2015

We’ve discussed how prices are signals that convey information about goods — but can prices also convey information about events and even predict the future? For instance, can we predict Middle East politics based on the price of oil futures? Or predict the consequences of climate change based on the price of flood insurance in coastal cities? Of course, prices in these examples are imperfect predictors as there are many factors that influence the price.

We also take a look at some markets that have been designed to make predictions, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, and a specific example of how it was used to predict the outcome of the 2008 presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama. What about the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where traders buy and sell shares and options in movies and music? What did the studio learn about its casting choices for the film, “50 Shades of Grey”? We discuss these examples and more in this video.

June 18, 2015

P.J. O’Rourke – Donald Trump may be the perfectly “representative” candidate

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’re looking for the Tsar of Tacky, the Baron of Bad Taste, the Grand Duke of Garishness, then you really will love Donald Trump for President, because he is America personified:

Has the office of the presidency diminished in stature until it attracts only the midgets of public life?

Or have our politicians shrunk until none of them can pass the carnival test “You Must Be Taller than the Clown to Ride the White House Tilt-A-Whirl”?

During this endless grim, foggy, electoral season with its constant drizzle of wannabes, I intend to make little prose pictures of each candidatural dwarf until we are down to two.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that the two may be “Clinton” and “Bush.” Members of the electorate in their right minds will go into the ballot booth, see the names, think to themselves, “I did this already.” And leave with the ballot unmarked. Voter turn-out will be 6 percent. The shuttle from the local extended care facility will send a few memory-impaired Republicans to the polls. A DNC bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first President of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.

Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.

Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.

May 27, 2015

The dis-United Kingdom

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the result of the British general election:

It would be churlish to deny oneself the pleasure of hooting at the politico-media establishment, but, when that’s done, this is a deeply unhealthy electoral result. The Conservatives won because Labour got wiped out in Scotland and the Liberals got wiped out in England. But the reality is that, for a supposedly United Kingdom, the country no longer has any national political party. England and Scotland have taken on the characteristics of Northern Ireland — hermetically sealed polities full of weird, unlovely regional parties (“SNP”, “Conservative”, “Labour”) that have no meaning once you cross the border, and whose internal disputes are of no relevance to the other three-quarters of the kingdom: Nobody outside Ulster cares about “official” Unionists vs the more red-blooded Democratic Unionists. And so it goes with the Scots Nats and Labour in Scotland: nationalist socialists vs unionist socialists; Likewise, with the Tories and UKIP in England: transnationalist conservatives vs nationalist conservatives.

Wales is the exception that proves the rule, where UKIP outpolled Plaid Cymru, albeit with no seats to show for it. The Scottish National Party got 4.7 per cent of the UK vote, and 56 seats. UKIP had nearly thrice as many voters — 12.6 per cent — but only one seat. That discrepancy is because there is no longer any such thing as “the UK vote”. I far prefer the Westminster first-past-the-post system to European “proportional representation”, but it only works if you have genuinely national parties. If the system decays into four groups of regional parties, the House of Commons will look less and less like a genuine national parliament, and more and more like some surly conditional arrangement — Scottish Kurds, Tory Shia and seething Labour Sunni triangles.

The composition of the new house would strike any mid-20th century Briton as freakish and unsettling. It’s a bit like Canada in the Nineties — where Reform couldn’t break out of the west, the Bloc Québécois dominated Quebec, the rump Tories clung on in the Atlantic provinces, and Ontario and a few seats hither and yon gave the Liberals their majority. The difference is that the Bloquistes are pretend separatists; the Scottish National Party are not.

And that’s before you take into account the competing nationalist dynamics of the Anglo-Scottish victors: secession from the UK north of the border and detachment from the EU south. Cameron is a wily operator and one notices he uses the words “United Kingdom” far more than his predecessors. But saying will not make it so.

May 7, 2015

The political landslide in Alberta

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Maclean’s, Colby Cosh reflects on the sudden end to the Conservative era in Alberta:

…[i]t made me start to believe the impossible: that Alberta could really elect an NDP government, and snuff out the PCs like a cheap cigar. Even with plenty of local knowledge, it’s dangerous to model an election without some further model in your head of what your friends, neighbours and family — really, any people who don’t have non-negotiable partisan commitments — are thinking.

With the Alberta Progressive Conservatives in flames, their leader having fled not only his leadership but the Assembly seat to which he was just re-elected, there will now commence a certain amount of mythologizing of new NDP premier-designate Rachel Notley. It’s inevitable; it might even be wrong to resist it. She did what literally dozens of opposition politicians in Alberta before her could not. It’s a file of men and women stretching back through time — intelligent, sincere, often likeable people, Notley’s father among them, who spent careers trying to make holes in the great PC wall and never left a respectable dent. Even the coldest-hearted conservative crank must wish that the irresistible, gamine Pam Barrett could be here to see all this, or that Sheldon Chumir were on hand to make penetrating observations about the fate of his Liberals.

But even Notley might admit that the main difference between her and them is timing and good fortune; that this election was not really about her, or about any sudden mass affection for the NDP. By many, the New Democrats were adopted, temporarily or not, as a vehicle for retribution. The nearly unanimous sentiment of the Alberta voter on this night was: taken for granted for too long. Albertans were determined to send a message to pervasive, enduring power that had begun to resemble Philip K. Dick’s Black Iron Prison.

It’s been more than 25 years since I last visited Alberta, so I can’t even pretend to know what the average voter has been thinking over the last few months, but I can’t imagine that anyone on the political right was happy with the contrived collapse of the Wildrose Party. It showed that all the people who’d been working so hard to create a more conservative option to the Alberta PC party were either suckers or traitors. The budget the PC government brought in would have been offensive to many supporters even in less traditionally conservative provinces than Alberta (I don’t think Premier Wynne could have been re-elected in Ontario on the basis of a budget quite like that). In the wake of the Alison Redford era, the very last thing the PCs should have done is shown just that much contempt for the people who elected them.

Yet, they did.

And now they reap the just reward for their sins. And with the size of the majority they’ve handed the NDP under Premier-designate Rachel Notley, it’ll be at least five years for the conservatives to meditate on their sins … if they stick around to contest the next election, that is.

May 5, 2015

The weirdness of the British political situation

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Charles Stross calls the current situation a “Scottish Political Singularity”:

The UK is heading for a general election next Thursday, and for once I’m on the edge of my seat because, per Hunter S. Thompson, the going got weird.

The overall electoral picture based on polling UK-wide is ambiguous. South of Scotland — meaning, in England and Wales — the classic two-party duopoly that collapsed during the 1970s, admitting the Liberal Democrats as a third minority force, has eroded further. We are seeing the Labour and Conservative parties polling in the low 30s. It is a racing certainty that neither party will be able to form a working majority, which requires 326 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons. The Liberal Democrats lost a lot of support from their soft-left base by going into coalition with the Conservatives, but their electoral heartlands — notably the south-west — are firm enough that while they will lose seats, they will still be a factor after the election; they’re unlikely to return fewer than 15 MPs, although at the last election they peaked around 50.

Getting away from the traditional big three parties, the picture gets more interesting. The homophobic, racist, bigoted scumbags of UKIP (hey, I’m not going to hide my opinions here!) have picked up support haemorrhaging from the right wing of the Conservative party; polling has put them on up to 20%, but they’re unlikely to return more than 2-6 MPs because their base is scattered across England. (Outside England they’re polling as low as 2-4%, suggesting that they’re very much an English nationalist party.) On the opposite pole, the Green party is polling in the 5-10% range, and might pick up an extra MP, taking them to 2 seats. In Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (who are just as barkingly xenophobic as UKIP) are also set to return a handful of MPs.

And then there’s Scotland.

Having lived through a couple of near-national-death experiences here in Canada, I’m less than enthused that the country of my birth is now having similar threats from the Celtic fringe. I’m a fan of Charlie’s writing, and I think he’s someone who thinks interesting thoughts, but I hope he’s wrong in this area.

May 1, 2015

Does anyone really know what’s happening in Alberta?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The last provincial election in Alberta exposed the polling organizations’ flaws for all to see, and the self-destruction of the Wildrose party, followed almost immediately by the PC budget fiasco mean that nobody seems to have a clue what the voters will end up doing next week. Colby Cosh is right there with his finger on the political pulse, and even he’s not sure what to expect when the votes are counted:

Nobody trusts the polls. They are mostly being conducted by unfamiliar firms with no record of Alberta tea-leaf reading. But the signal that the New Democratic Party is close to a sweep in Edmonton is so strong that it cannot be ignored. Three different firms who polled the city on or about April 23 have the NDP at 56 per cent, 61 per cent and 54 per cent among decided voters.

There are many undecideds, and they may scooch toward the PCs. But … 54 per cent? 61 per cent? That is a lot of mileage to make up, even if the polls are badly out of whack. NDP Leader Rachel Notley was widely seen — right across the partisan spectrum — to have won the April 23 TV debate. Thomas Lukaszuk’s northwest Edmonton PC seat ought to be one of the safest in the city. When he endorsed the NDP’s corporate tax hike on April 21, contradicting his own party’s platform, it was a hint that internal Tory polls must look almost as bad as the published ones.

[…]

Notley will be the emerging star of the campaign even if she takes third place. During the TV debate she benefited from a tart exchange in which Premier Jim Prentice, trying to emphasize that Notley would raise provincial corporate tax rates by 20 per cent, quipped: “I know math is difficult.” He was trying to crack wise about the NDP making accounting mistakes in the original release of its budget plan. But the joke came off as “mansplaining,” which, for future readers, was a borderline capital crime in 2015.

Notley was also ready with a counter to Prentice’s actual debating point, insisting that the NDP’s fast correction of its error was an example of transparency and accountability. She also got off the best joke of the night: after Prentice mixed it up a little with Wildrose Leader Brian Jean, she told the premier: “That’s not the way to talk to a donor!” This was a cheeky reminder that Jean’s Fort McMurray-based company had donated $10,000 to Prentice’s 2014 leadership campaign.

April 23, 2015

Rand Paul against the machine

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Timothy Carney says that the “war on Washington” that keynotes Rand Paul’s nomination campaign is “the fight America needs”:

Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign Tuesday, skewering the “special interests that use Washington D.C. as their own private piggy bank.” His campaign home page blared the headline “Defeat the Washington Machine.”

This sort of campaign against Washington is a cliché these days, but for Paul, it’s a real thing. He’s been fighting this fight since he entered politics. And that’s why the Republican Party needs him today.

Recall how Paul won his first political race: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had handpicked Secretary of State Trey Grayson for Kentucky’s open Senate seat in 2010. Eighteen Republican senators funded Grayson in the primary. Only one funded Paul. Grayson raised half a million dollars from PACs in the primary — 20 times what Paul raised from them. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Grayson in the primary. Paul attacked Grayson for the “AIG Lobbyists” who threw fundraisers for him, which were swarming with lobbyists.

This was the K Street/GOP Machine. Rand Paul demolished it, beating Grayson by 23 points. That victory, on May 18, 2010, was the day the dam broke in the Tea Party flood.

Since he’s come to Washington, it’s been the same story: Rand Paul against the machine.

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