Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May

Current entries

Tuesday, May 27, 2003, 4:45 pm

Butterflies Again. I wrote the following in the comments to a Jane Galt posting. Not that she brought up the 2000 election in Florida, and the "butterfly ballot," but the issue came up among the commenters.

Pictures of the butterfly ballot don't really do it justice. The problem with the old punch card voting stations is that the punch card is in a significantly different plane, behind the printed ballot. If you are taller or shorter than average, looking at the ballot presentation from the "wrong" angle, the holes do not line up with the names at all.

The non-butterfly version (with the names all on one side) is easier to figure out, since (a) there is usually more space between the names, and (b) there is an easy one-to-one correspondence of names to holes. Alternating the positions of the names, as the butterfly ballot does, makes it a good deal more challenging to locate the correct hole for a given name. Due to parallax and the dense use of every hole, each name lines up "better" with the "wrong" hole above or below it.

A careful person might pull out the punch card after voting and compare the numbers by the punched holes with the numbers listed with each candidate on the ballot, but not everybody has time or patience for that — especially in a presidential election with dozens of offices on the ballot, and a long line of people waiting to vote behind you.

Here in outstate Michigan, though we never had the butterfly ballot layout to my knowledge, we used punch cards for voting since the early 1970s. Apart from the awkwardness of the voting itself, it worked extremely well.

I personally went through several recounts involving punch card precincts: there was hardly ever more than one vote changed from the first count. Punch card results came to be regarded as being much more solid and reliable (and less subject to being changed in a recount) than results from traditional lever-handle voting machines, or worse yet, paper ballots (subject to varying interpretations of what different marks meant).

At first we were stunned that Florida had so much trouble with punch cards in 2000. I don't remember seeing "dimpled chads" or "pregnant chads" in any recount I was involved in. Punch cards were almost 100% binary: either the hole was punched out, or it was not, very few if any ambiguous cases.

Finally, it was disclosed that many of the Florida voting devices were packed full of old chads due to never being emptied. That would have been very unlikely in Michigan, where emptying out of every machine is part of the required legal process for opening and closing the precinct. I did this myself when I worked as an election inspector.

I suppose Florida's damp climate and perhaps cheap punch cards could have contributed, too.

Punch cards now stand discredited as a voting system. That is somewhat unfair. But punch card balloting, besides being a quaint old technology, has one colossal flaw: the ballots have to brought to a central counting center for processing — a very bad idea that makes the process vulnerable to fraud.

Much better to have the counting happen in the precinct, where it is less prone to manipulation, and more likely to be monitored by independent observers. Newer voting systems usually do this right — but you still have to worry about the software.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, May 27, 2003, 11:59 am

Changing the tone? This candid quote comes from the Denver Post:

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship," said Grover Norquist, a leading Republican strategist, who heads a group called Americans for Tax Reform.

"Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," Norquist, a onetime adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said, citing an axiom of House conservatives.

Certainly that tone-changing effort has succeeded in Michigan.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Monday, May 19, 2003, 11:04 pm

Suicide Bombings and Grim Portents. Today, Atrios posted a rare (for him) item about the Middle East. Trying to put aside the historical arguments, he asks his readers to comment:

The point is, I'm asking to evaluate the success of the Sharon govermnent in purely utilitarian terms from the point of view of Israelis. My larger point is that Barak's attempts to negotiate and make nice eventually led to a new wave of suicide bombings, and no one had problems linking cause and effect there. Sharon's tough approach has led to multiple waves of suicide bombings.

Naturally, there were over a hundred comments, raising all the myriad issues he had wanted to avoid.

I did post to that thread, and tried to answer the question that was posed. The following is a somewhat longer version of what I wrote.

Unfortunately, it isn't at all possible to compare Barak and Sharon on an economist's all-other-things-being-equal basis, calculating bombings or deaths per year on either side, because all things are NOT equal for reasons that are not directly attributable to either man's specific policies. Things have changed over the last few years, particularly with the growing frequency and effectiveness of suicide bombings worldwide.

People generally give too much credence to religious fervor, individualized rage, or poverty/desperation as factors motivating suicide bombing. Rather, suicide bombing is a calculated, rational, political and military tactic, and unfortunately a very successful one.

Preparing and placing suicide bombers in more than trivial numbers requires an organizational infrastructure. The Israelis believe, with plenty of reason, that military control over the occupied territories enables them to disrupt that infrastructure and limit the number of successful suicide bombings (even as it deepens the anger which allows Hamas to recruit more bombers).

Much as I detest Ariel Sharon, I'm sure he's right in the short run about this. If the IDF were to withdraw tomorrow morning from even just the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, the number of suicide bombings would dramatically increase; probably tens of thousands of Israelis would die in a week, proportionately the equivalent of a World Trade Center-sized disaster in every sizeable U.S. city, all at the same time.

Dismantling the settlements in the occupied territories, which I have always advocated (but which Israel lacks the political will to do, to say the least) would make zero difference to Hamas. Moreover, dismantling the settlements amidst an inevitable onslaught of bombings would be effectively impossible both logistically and politically.

The prospects for the whole region are extremely bleak. Hamas has won: Israelis will be terrorized, and Palestinians will be stateless and oppressed, indefinitely if not forever. Violence and misery have been made permanent. There is literally no way out of this.

Postscript: What about the U.S.? Every terror technique developed to use against Israel eventually gets exported to the rest of the world, including the United States. But the characteristics of the U.S. complicate this simple extrapolation.

First, the use of suicide bombing as a routine technique is at least partly a response to widespread recognition (born of bitter experience) that unattended back packs or boxes may contain explosive devices. Bluntly, we in America are such soft targets that resort to suicide bombing is hardly necessary.

Second, we are geographically somewhat isolated from the populations who are angry enough to generate suicide bombers, and cultural norms here don't tend to promote an ideal of martyrdom. On the other hand, these things can change rapidly. Cultural approval of (a "right" to) suicide has been on the upswing in recent years, and that is one important element. And murder-suicide already accounts for a lot of our homicide deaths.

Third, as discussed in the current Atlantic Monthly (a not-online article titled "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism") the whole point of these bombings is to shrink social space, to make people stay home behind locked doors, unwilling to congregate. Unfortunately, Americans have gone a long way in this direction already without needing the impetus of maliciously placed explosives — see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone for endless documentation on this point.

Suicide bombs on buses and street corners are a potent threat only to residents of old-style cities, typical overseas, but a dwindling minority in increasingly suburban, low-density, car-oriented America. A concerted campaign of suicide terrorism, the kind which has emptied Israel's cafes and public squares, would be little direct threat to the typical suburban middle-class American, who rarely uses public transportation or visits a traditional downtown.

In other words, the impact of terrorist bombings in America would be, specifically, to kill us city dwellers, to undermine urban community, to make the surviving alternatives to suburbia untenable, and to promote much more urban sprawl.

It's a gloomy picture.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, May 17, 2003, 5:51 pm

Blaine and Conkling. I recently received a prepublication copy of Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, by Kenneth Ackerman. It's a fascinating story, even for those who don't share my deep interest in 19th century politics.

The opening section was news to me: I didn't realize that the feud between Roscoe Conkling (U.S. Senator, New York Republican boss) and James G. Blaine (Maine Republican, Speaker of the U.S. House, Secretary of State, and 1884 Republican nominee for president) went all the way back to a debate over a House bill in April 1866. Ackerman vividly describes the climax as follows:

But Blaine wasn't finished yet. The final broadside from Conkling — its arrogance and disdain — had caused him to lose whatever restraint he might have shown a moment before. In his anger, Blaine seemed to forget who and where he was: a U.S. congressman speaking in formal public session. All he saw, it seemed, was a conceited bully needing to be knocked down.

If any doubts remained about James Blaine's precise feelings toward his New York colleague, he removed them now.

"As for the gentleman's cruel sarcasm," — Blaine [to] the galleries, waving dismissively at his opponent — "I hope he will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting; his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all members of this House that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him."

Blaine felt his oratorical juices flowing... He seized on the recent newspaper article by Theodore Tilton comparing the "strong, positive" Roscoe Conkling with the late Henry Winter Davis [a Civil War congressman and political hero], and turned it to ridicule. "The gentleman [Conkling] took it seriously, and it has given his strut additionl pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the mighty Davis? Forgive the almost profanation of that jocose satire!"

Blaine sat down. There was silence, except for an embarrassed laugh or two that resounded in the chamber. Newsmen wrote furiously.

Today you can search the Congressionl Record and Globe through two hundred years of debate and never see a member of Congress insult a colleague so directly, brutally, and articulately, on the record, in public, looking directly at him across the room, as Blaine did to Conkling that day. It was one of the best speeches of Blaine's life — utterly spontaneous, memorably colorful, and profoundly destructive.

After the famous outburst, any hope of reconciliation between Conkling and Blaine disappeared. Bruises hardened into scars....

Conkling and Blaine differed little on the issues of the day, but their feud divided the 1870s and 1880s Republican Party into two camps, the "Stalwarts" and the "Half-Breeds." Both were avid upholders of the "spoils system" of awarding government jobs to loyal party workers, but Conkling, who defended President Grant even through the corruption scandals of his administration, was more outspoken against the civil service reforms which were proposed during the Hayes Administration:

Conkling, speaking to the [1877] annual New York State Republican Convention in Utica, lashed out against Hayes' "snivel service" reformers, calling them "the man-milliners, the dillettanti, and carpet-knights of politics." He said: "When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word 'reform.'"

(Note that the above quotes are from my prepublication copy and are subject to correction in the final version.)

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Monday, May 5, 2003, 12:45 pm

Mr. Morality. Bill Bennett's gambling losses are in the news lately, and the commentators have been busy. Michael Kinsley in Slate ("Bill Bennett's Bad Bet") writes that:

If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far as we know) what he does. Bennett can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism is what his sundry crusades are all about.

But there is something missing here. It's easy to find fault with Bill Bennett as an anti-libertarian who uses libertarian arguments (and lies) when caught. But only the most dogmatic libertarians use the "if it harms none" standard as the sole yardstick of behavior.

Growing up in a Michigan university town, I knew little of gambling but rumors and portrayals in the media. But my wife is from Northern Kentucky; her mother was from Newport (Cincinnati's vice district then), and her father grew up next to the Latonia racetrack. Every male ancestor, on both sides, was a problem gambler who lost money his family needed. Gambling, and the harm it caused, was ubiquitous.

Bennett himself commented on the role that celebrities play as role models; behavior which may be a harmless diversion for a big star could be catastrophic when copied by millions of others. The gambling lifestyle (and contributing to the prosperity of casinos) is considerably worse as a model than, say, monogamous homosexuality.

I found a good exposition in this comment (by "BeingFrank") in Slate's Fray comments section:

Yes, gambling is legal in certain places. But are "legal" and "moral" synonymous? After all, adultery is legal almost anywhere in America, but there are very few who would argue that it is moral.

The question of the morality of gambling is not an easy one, though. For instance, if, as Bennett claims, he only gambles what he can afford, then where is the harm, and if there is no harm, can it be an immoral act? That's a dangerously relative standard, since it means that gambling is wrong for some and right for others, and Bennett himself has inveighed against moral relativism.

The issue of gambling reaches deeper than simply the economic harm that can come from a compulsive habit. It has to do with the motives for gambling, and the attitudes that it rewards and promotes.

What is the root attraction of gambling? It is, quite simply, something for nothing. The gambler hopes that by taking a risk, he will receive a reward that is out of proportion to the effort which he has expended. He may argue that by taking a risk, he deserves the possible reward, but the transaction is hardly equal. If the gambler wins, he has profvided nothing of value in return for his gain, and if he loses, he takes away nothing of value, other than an imperfectly learned lesson. This hope of gain without effort or exchange of value is greed, and is the root of dishonesty.

The commercial gambling establishments act immorally by promising something for nothing, even though their whole business model is based on breaking that promise. The gambler realizes that this is a lie, but is induced to deny it by the greed which the gambling establishments appeal to.

Further, gambling rewards the cheater. It appeals to those with an impaired moral sense by promising something for nothing, and then rewards those who are actively dishonest by giving it to them.

Essentially, gambling is a practice which, while not immoral on its face, is inescapably bound to immoral impulses, and promotes and strengthens those impulses.

Bill Bennett's defenders are also defending casino gambling as harmless fun. Whether and under what limitations it should be legal is a policy question; but that supposed upholders of morality would paint it as a positive good is appalling.

The unhappy trend of recent years is to make gambling ever more widespread and available. Fiscal pressures on state and local governments, deliberately engineered by the Bush Administration, are prompting more states — currently Pennsylvania — to fall to legalized casino gambling.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Sunday, May 4, 2003, 4:59 pm

Remembering May 4, 1970. Just the other day, I heard the old 1970 hippie anthem on the radio, and it all came back:

Did you pay your dues?
Did you read the news?
This morning, when the paper landed in your yard
Do you know their names?

Yes, my aged brain replied instantly, I know their names.

Allison Krause. Bill Schroeder. Sandy Lee Scheuer. Jeffrey Miller.

Probably some of y'all, of a certain age, know those names, too. Solid Midwestern German-American names, all of them (Miller usually comes from Mueller). Clean, normal college kids, not druggies or radical agitators, who for various reasons happened to be at an antiwar demonstration when the Ohio National Guard opened fire.

It's a funny kind of fame that comes from dying under those circumstances. Another kid was crippled that day, but he lived, and I don't know his name.

I was a high school freshman then, but I had already been to antiwar rallies. I don't even want to think about the mood of May 1970, the rage and fear and excitement of that time, the horrible sense that the era of "sharing and laughing" (as in the lyrics of that same song) was turning to bullets and blood. Fortunately, we were wrong about that.

Some think the "Sixties" (the concept, not the numerical decade) ended that day. I would put it a bit later, maybe in 1972 or 1973, but Michigan State was always a step behind the times. The last big antiwar demonstration in East Lansing happened in mid-May 1972; ours was the only major campus to decide that the mining of Haiphong Harbor was worth demonstrating against.

We have all come a long way in a third of a century. But May 4 always stirs up the old memories.

(I posted a similar text to an email list exactly one year ago.)

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December