Morning Fog

The Wages Of Certainty

Leaker-to-Terrorists Edward Snowden.  Former Virginia Senator Robert F. Byrd.  Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell.  Die-hard Republicans who insist that the Affordable Care Act is "bad for us" for reasons that have nothing to do with health care.  Maybe even that other leaker, Bradley Manning, due to be sentenced today.

What do they have in common?  Well, they're all in the news lately for varying reasons.  Snowden's father has been interviewed; Byrd died; McDonnell is apologizing for taking expensive gifts from people with axes to grind; the Republicans are just grinding their axes.  And so forth.

More important:  apparently, all these people "know" they have "done the right thing."  (Those are the words Snowden's father uses with respect to his son.)  

Any sensible person realizes, however, based on his own experience, what that really means.  It means that they think or believe - fervently, logically, without reservation and with complete assurance believe - they've done the right thing. 

But it's possible to believe in something that is not "right."   Was Senator Byrd "right" about segregation?   We can be certain, but we may be wrong.   It's a risk we take when we profess certainty.  Being wrong can affect many people's lives (Byrd, Snowden) or a few (McDonnell); we should expect penalties might be the result of being wrong, even if they aren't always. 

Immigration: Will Narrow Agreement Become Broad?

A few writers are suggesting that a bipartisan and unanimous agreement on a border security plan in the House Homeland Security Committee might be a harbinger of broader agreements on immigration policy when the Congress returns to work in September.

I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure.  Elsewhere - for example in the recent remarks by Iowa Rep. Steve King about drug-toting illegals crossing the border -- there is plenty of evidence that the Republican Party itself remains split on many aspects of immigration reform.   A more mundane but probably more consequential factor is simply Congressional history; how often, we might ask, has seeming unanimity in committee, or on a panel of a committee, resulted in controversial fights once it came through committee, with little or no practical result?

Well, maybe I'm too pessimistic.  Time will tell.

I do agree, as many observers have noted, that on this one issue (immigration reform), there appears to be a much greater chance of breaking the partisan gridlock that has so negatively affected every other political matter.  One reason is that both parties want to court the growing Latino vote, but it's interesting to note also that this is the only issue on which the people most affected don't have a vote.  Thus Representatives in Congress are freer to fashion policy decisions because they don't need to posture for the benefit of their constituents' biases. 

Whatever the reason for greater bipartisan collaboration on immigration, I suppose we should be thankful if it results in major legislation addressing our immigration mess.  We should be doubly thankful if it also proves contagious to other issues.  

 

Republicans And Democrats - Splinter Parties?

The Washington Post features a "report" today that the Republican Party has a new-found interest in mastering digital data-gathering, as the key to beating the Democrats at their own game both in appealing to small-niche voters, and in raising funds from those voters.

I don't doubt that it's true, but it remains to be seen whether it will help the Republicans at the polls in 2014 or in 2016.   The new interest in information technology comes about because the Republican National Committee concluded that the party's unexpectedly poor showing in November 2012 elections was due to its poor mastery of the levers of something resembling computer-dating machinery. 

But is that the right conclusion?  Possibly in part.  Yet many people who aren't party functionaries believe it was the Republican message that was at fault.  Will the GOP put all its hopes in better data-processing, and deceive itself into believing yet again that people just "failed to understand" its message of selfishness, exclusionism, superstition and privilege?

On a deeper level, the tendency toward pinpoint delivery of messages to tiny bits of a nationwide electorate is probably inevitable and unstoppable, but no less regrettable for all that.  It continues the trend toward sequestering us all into compartments with people "like us" who read the same media, watch the same TV shows, go to the same restaurants. It assumes we all have only one or two key interests that we care about deeply, and that we don't concern ourselves with the greater good, or the larger community. 

Again, there is an element - even a strong element -- of truth in that view, but it is something we should applaud and encourage?  I would say not; because my concern is that it leads us down the political path of Egypt, or even France. 

Zimmerman's Acquittal - Does Jury "Consulting" Give Us Justice?

Well, I predicted that manslaughter must inevitably be the verdict on the Trayvon Martin case and I was wrong.  Or was I?  I don't really think so.  For the reasons I stated five days ago, a complete acquittal seems incomprehensible.  And for those same reasons, I expect that  Zimmerman probably faces an appeal (if grounds can be found) or a civil suit.

Meantime, an item in today's USA Today about the role of jury "consultant" Robert Hirschhorn details how that gentleman goes about his work of being paid to pick sympathetic jurors.  The practice is now time-honored; Hirschhorn has made a profession of it for 28 years, and we see the tactic in use amply in countless television shows and movies, but I can't help but think that it's gone too far.  A "jury of one's peers" has become a meaningless phrase.  Unless we think it means "a jury of people who agree with the defendant's beliefs," which I don't. 

To my mind, a jury should be a representative sample of citizens.  To protect a defendant's rights, the system allows for some investigation of prospective jurors' beliefs and dismissal of those who appear to have a specific bias.  But there should be a balance between that and hand-picking each juror.  Usually that has meant limits on the number of challenges each side can exercise. 

Those limits appear to have been stretched.  In the Zimmerman trial, the authorities assembled a list of 211 jurors in order to select just six (and six alternates).  This huge number means that in order to pick a representative sample of 12, it was considered necessary to have a pool of eighteen times that number.   This permits lawyers and their "consultants" to game the system to the extent that in the end, the jury could be quite the opposite of representative. 

When "the bad guys" work behind the scenes to pre-cook a trial outcome, we call it jury-rigging.  Some people think it's a crime. Jury consulting is performed right out in the open by the supposed "good guys" but it may not be so different, taken to extremes as it inevitably is these days.

The Sad George and Trayvon Story

The verdict isn't in yet - possibly this afternoon, they say.  Will George Zimmerman be convicted of murder, manslaughter, or of nothing at all?  It's certainly tough to predict.  

Whatever the verdict, both sides are apt to dispute it as a miscarriage of justice, and it won't make anyone whole in any case.  Trayvon will still be dead, and George will still lead a pretty messed-up life afterwards.

There are at least a couple of lessons we might learn from the whole thing, for life after this trial.

First:  Florida's "stand-your-ground" law seems tailor-made to create situations like this.  It should be changed.

Second:  Vigilantism is not a good thing in a civilized society. Neighborhood watchmen need to observe the rules.  Police always tell those law-abiding citizens to WATCH and report, but to AVOID following or getting involved.  And Zimmerman was specifically told that by the 911 operator he contacted.  But off he went nonetheless.  So, Zimmerman is a dumb-ass.  Whether he did so with murder in his heart is unknowable; yet this tragedy would never have occurred if he had not decided to exceed his authority (and his common sense).  Surely this is "reckless endangerment?"   

Back to the trial:  If I were predicting (and I guess I am, here), my own sense is that Zimmerman's story comes across as dubious and self-serving; and his actions as reckless and stupid.  On the other hand, there isn't much hard evidence to prove exactly what occurred between those two people on that dark night a year ago.  I think the odds tilt toward a manslaughter verdict.

No-Name City

Joel Achenbach has correctly identified a trend in the naming of think-tanks and lobbying groups:  the political ones, and increasingly the commercial ones too, choose names that purposely obscure their affiliations and views. 

During the 2012 elections it was particularly noticeable that all the organizations panhandling for money had fuzzy-sounding names involving various permutations of the words "America," "freedom," "justice," "future," and the like.  You would be hard put to figure out what side they represented.

No doubt that's part of the charm of anodyne names; give people a bland name and a vaguely postitive phrase or two, and they may click on a link and send you some money without figuring out that they're contributing to a cause they hate. 

It might also be a necessary tactic, in the days of the internet when people choose their reading matter according to what they already agree with, to try to get your views at least considered by a wider spectrum of the population (or in the case of influence-peddlers, to get yourself a meeting with a congressperson on the other side of the fence).

It's possible that the seemingly deceptive practice of neutral naming is a positive trend, if it can manage to get people exposing themselves occasionally to ideas they don't already subscribe to.  Possible but, I fear, unlikely, if the messages themselves continue to be based more on dogma than on concern for honest and realistic policy-making.

The Politics Of Clean Air

The finding that a reduction of atmospheric aerosol particles probably leads to more tropical storms, is making the rounds in the media.

The good news, I think, is that the Clean Air Act has resulted in measurable reduction of aerosols in our air, and that such measures can, over time, produce real results.  Also good: that the identified storm effect is likely to become less significant over time as our atmosphere rebalances itself to something more like what prevailed in the 20th century.

Doug Smith, the co-author of this research, is quoted as saying "We don't want to give them the impression pollution is a good thing,"  by which he means that the effect of aerosol particles on increasing storm activity is not a good reason to let aerosols increase again, because they are dangerous to human health.  Well, Dr. Smith, I wouldn't count on it.

The bad news is that some of our elected representatives will misuse the headlines from this study to suggest that legislation to protect the environment is unnecessary or misguided.

 

 

More On The Erral Of Snowden

A week since my last post, the latest leaker of secrets, Edward Snowden, remains in the news, though his story is rapidly beginning to decompose as he finds himself trapped in Moscow airport.  (To be trapped in any airport for any length of time sounds like unimaginable torture, but hey, the Moscow airport?  No picnic, I'm sure.  And maybe his just desserts.)  But I digress...

Anyway, last week I suggested that to apply the term "whistleblower" to Snowden was a complete misunderstanding of what "whistleblower" means.  One of the writers who had promulgated that mistaken view was the Washington, DC area journalist who keyboards the regular column "Federal Diary," Joe Davidson.

Thus I want to pass along one writer's rebuttal of the "whistleblower" red herring, similar to my own but possibly more persuasively stated.  I quote here former NSA employee Dennis Barton's letter in full since it is buried in Davidson's column this week amongst several other topics:

"The basic premise of your column of Thursday, June 20 — i.e., that Edward Snowden is a whistleblower — is complete nonsense. (I can think of a better noun, but a family newspaper probably wouldn’t like it.)

A whistleblower is someone who exposes some type of fraud, waste or abuse in an activity that isn’t being managed or operated properly. In this case, we have classified programs that were created, implemented, staffed and funded by officials who were authorized to do those things and who knew and understood all the reasons for doing so. From all accounts, those programs were being operated and managed as intended. When a cleared government employee or contractor compromises such programs because of a philosophical disagreement, that isn’t whistleblowing, that is treason. The intelligence community needs to find a way to weed out any employees or potential employees who don’t understand the difference."

I would add that the matter of "understanding the reasons" is key.  Even if we assume Snowden acted from noble motivation (an assumption not supported by his behavior), it would be fairly evident that he saw the picture only from his narrow, individual perspective and took it upon himself to make the judgment that no serious harm would result from the massive "leaking" of systemic information on intelligence-gathering.