MattMaroon.com

Wow, this one is too good to pass up. Using 2005 data and 2004 Presidential voting, here’s some interesting statistics in terms of taxation and socialism. 32 states receive more money from the Federal Government in spending than they pay in taxes. 27 of them (84%) voted Republican. 18 states contribute as much as or more than they receive. 14 states (78%) voted Democrat. Click the above link for proof that people don’t vote with their pocketbooks.

I’ve been reading many articles lately by well-known conservatives who have the same opinion of Sarah Palin and the modern Republican Party that I do. It gives me hope. Sometimes I feel like the intelligent ones have just been too silent over the last 8 years as they’ve been shoved aside by the religious right and those willing to sell their core values to them for votes, figuring it was better to remain in power than to alienate their base. But with that base deteriorating and the grim (to them) prospect of a Democratic Congress and White House, they’re making themselves heard and, if we’re lucky, they’ll take back the party.

Christophers Buckley and Hitchens both endorsed Obama, in part due to Palin who they called “an embarrassment” and “a disgrace” respectively. That, most of all, gives me hope. My first instinct about Palin seems to have been correct, and I admit, I was scared for a couple weeks there that I had been wrong. Maybe there’s an open seat for me on the right side of the aisle yet.

In this video interview on YouTube, David Brooks says that Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.” And “there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.”

I disagree that Palin is a cancer. She’s not the disease. She’s far too new and far too irrelevant to be that. She’s merely a symptom. The only possible result of a decade of pandering to the Sarah Palins of the world is that one of them will rise to the highest ranks, however briefly.

The disease is the desire to win even at the cost of selling out their core ideals. Fear of losing their very vocal base has caused the Republicans to develop that rampant anti-intellectualism our nation has suffered under for eight years now. Rather than compete with ideas, they’ve sought to win the other 30% of the vote they needed by marginalizing them, making them appear elite and unpatriotic. When a Democrat argues his ideas to improve our country, they call him anti-American. Wanting to better our nation has been recast not as every citizen’s patriotic duty, which was the belief that made America great in the past, but rather as self-loathing.

So, here’s what I’d suggest for the Republican Party to get back on track.

First, embrace ideas once again. The downside to cursing as unpatriotic anyone who wants to improve our country is that you yourself can’t suggest the same thing. That won’t work well in the era of the 24 hour news cycle. There’s a multibillion dollar industry devoted to making everyone believe the sky is falling, and winning in politics now means reassuring people that you can make it stop. There’s no way to do that but through ideas.

Depoliticize science. Science is humanity’s greatest achievement, and over time it will always triumph over superstition. There will one day be a time when people view strict creationism much as we currently view the belief that Earth is flat. Over half of the nation already does. Stop holding these people up as shining examples of your party.

Global warming, too, is not a political issue, it’s a scientific one. How we deal with it may be political, but its existence is not. No single scientific body in the world denies that it is largely man-made, not even the ones funded by oil companies. A Republican politician arguing the fact is simply insulting, and their penchant for doing so has given the Democrats a base maybe not as large as the religious right, but every bit as fervent.

Marginalize the religious right. I’m not saying tell them to stick their ballots where the sun don’t shine, but totally remove pandering to them from your policy. They’re not going to switch to the other party anyway. They’re too adamant about abortion for that, and Republicans can stick to their Federalist stance, which is not totally repulsive to the center while still being just anti-Roe enough for the right.

Some of the evangelicals won’t vote at all, or might waste votes on a right-wing third party, but you won’t lose that much. You’ll gain far more from the moderate center than you give up.

Stop whining about the media having a liberal bias. Reality has a liberal bias. Or, more accurately, liberals have a reality bias. While you’ve pandered to the people who believe all truth comes from a 2,000 year old book of Jewish folk stories, liberals have been listening to scientists, economists, and the like. Journalists, who are highly educated people trained to report reality as they see it, of course aren’t too enthused by the right’s epistemology (or lack thereof).

The perceived liberalness, according to those decrying what they feel is a lack of integrity, of a given publication is almost directly proportional to the intelligence of the content, with the New York Times and NPR at the top, all the way down to Fox News. Fierce anti-intellectualism isn’t a good way to get intellectuals to write about you, and equating the opposing side with intelligence might not be the best strategy in general.

I’ve been enjoying watching John McCain’s attempts to turn the tide in the election. It’s interesting to see the strategy of someone who is clearly down, and slipping, but not entirely out. Rather than the usual well-planned, well-executed Republican strategy, he seems right now to be in “throw some shit at the wall and hope something sticks” mode. That’s maybe not the best play when you’re already perceived as erratic. In a post later, I’ll write about the mistake he’s made that led up to this, and why I think he could be in better shape, maybe even winning. What can I say, I get off on strategy.

First there was the David Ayers story, which is humorous because it came up before in the primaries and didn’t stick then. The Jeremiah Wright story went much further (though I’m not sure it would fare any better if it were rehashed now, since it got so much play the first time) but for some reason McCain swore some time ago not to mention it, and he’s abided by that promise.

The Obama campaign came back with the Keating story, which wasn’t any better. McCain’s been in politics for a very long time, and he has one somewhat unethical blot on his record. That might have been career-ending for a CFO, but for a politician, especially one who’s been around for decades, that’s nearly worthy of canonization.

The first time I got the email from the McCain campaign (I get them from both) about Ayers I thought “that’s just going to hurt Johnny Boy.” But then what seemed like only a few minutes later I got the Keating email from the Obama camp and realized they had just given McCain the ball back. If anything, that turned out to be the bigger mistake because neither were well-received by the public (in no small part because the Dow was still cratering while the saga unfolded) and he passed up a golden opportunity to take the high road.

Then there was the quote by Biden that America’s enemies will test Obama, which McCain keeps bringing up aghast. Of course they will. They’ll test McCain too. That’s what they do, they test us, especially while we’ve still got the egg on our face from the Iraq war. In fact, that’s possibly the most disastrous thing about that war, it gave them carte blanche to push us around. See Iran.

(For what it’s worth, I have a feeling that no matter which candidate gets elected, Iran will push them too far and end up regretting it. Obama will try harder to resolve it peacefully than McCain would, I think, but I’m more sure than not that that is impossible, and neither would let Iran build the bomb.)

So now there’s ACORN. Wow, is all I can say about that one. I never thought I would see a Republican complaining about the Democrats committing election fraud, let alone a mere week after the Michigan Republican party admitted to doing so themselves. That’s right, people on McCain’s own team were caught, according to the words of the settlement, in “an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote.”

Seriously. Unlike ACORN, which is not affiliated with the Democratic Party (though they often advocate its politicians), this was the Michigan Republican Party. Note to politicians, don’t try to commit voter fraud if your opponent is a constitutional law professor.

In both of the last two elections we saw Republicans pursue a strategy just like the one they admitted to in Michigan this month of disenfranchising likely Democrat voters. I’m not going to say that either definitely subverted the will of the people, but both certainly tried and may have succeeded.

From 2000:

In 1999, shortly after Jeb Bush became governor and Katherine Harris took over as secretary of state, Florida embarked on a project to produce a master list of anyone who conceivably might have been a former felon, who would then be scrubbed from voter rolls.

Florida devoted unprecedented resources to the task. In 1998, under the purview of Katherine Harris’s predecessor, the Florida Department of Elections gave Database Technologies Inc. (DBT) a contract for a first-year fee of $2,317,800 to scrub the voter rolls. (The firm previously doing the work for the Florida Board of Elections had been awarded the job for a bid of $5,700.) The terms of this contract were not publicly disclosed.

Greg Palast reports that even for an ambitious effort, this payment on a per-record basis was more than ten times industry norms. The state and DBT justified this unusually high figure based on contract requirements that called for “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” However, it appears that DBT was paid such a grand sum precisely not to verify names. One list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush’s state officials. These 8,000 Florida voters were all listed as having been felons in Texas, and serious criminals are barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Nearly all had committed only minor violations and misdemeanors. Typical was Reverend Willie Whiting, who was removed from the voting rolls for a speeding ticket twenty-five years earlier.

Under orders from Harris’s office, DBT provided matches of anyone with a close name. Thus, for example, John Jackson is a black man who had served time in Texas, so Johnny Jackson Jr., a black man in Florida with the same birth date, was purged from the registration rolls. DBT used lists of former felons that included names and birth dates and race, but counted as a “match” names that were only approximate. DBT specifically wrote Harris’s office to say that their name-match criteria would include a lot of nonfelons, and Harris’s office advised them in writing to lower the name-match criterion further to 85%. All told, DBT generated a list of 82,389 voters to purge from registries.

DBT subsequently tried to defend their lists by claiming they were 85% accurate. But that would still mean that well over 10,000 mostly minority, poor, and Democratic Floridians were illegally disenfranchised — more than twenty times Bush’s margin of victory in the state. Plus, where verification was attempted, the accuracy of the list was nowhere near 85%. Officials in Leon County, Florida, tried to verify the 694 names on the list from Tallahassee and found only 34 to be a match—a 5% accuracy rate.

Robert E. Pierre reported in the Washington Post that responsibility for this faulty voter purge lies with Harris’s office, not DBT: From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. … “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches,” said Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, who headed the state purge effort, in a March 1999 e-mail to Database Technologies product manager Marlene Thorogood, who had warned him of possible mistakes. … Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, confirmed the policy. … “The decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.” “We warned them,” said James E. Lee, vice president of communications for the company. “The list was exactly what the state wanted. They said, ‘The counties will verify the information, so you don’t have to.’”

Florida officials neither sought reimbursement nor penalty, but rather awarded DBT another contract renewal, bringing total fees to over $4 million.

Full article with sources here. Another fascinating article here about the recount stopped by the Supreme Court.

And in 2004? Fascinating article here by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (also with sources) that states that Republicans stole the election once again. The most damning evidence would be the huge discrepancy between exit polls and final vote tallies, which is virtually unheard of.

The arguments for both are pretty convincing but I’ve read some pretty strong arguments that they were not as well, especially 2004. I don’t think the Bush administration had anything to do with either of them if they were. And on top of that, this sort of stuff is not endemic to the Republican Party, they just happened to be in charge of swing states when those particular races were so close and the opportunity arose. The Democrats possibly stole it in 1960, and we’ve heard allegations of it in every close race since.

But there’ve clearly been some serious shenanigans (a mix of willful intent and pure incompetence) from the Republican Party over the last eight years. There have, at the very least, been multiple attempts on their part to subvert the will of the people by disenfranchising likely voters from the other party, and there’s some chance they were successful at least once. There’s some chance they will be again.

So, with all that in mind, McCain’s allegations of voter fraud better have some pretty serious teeth. Unfortunately for him they don’t. ACORN, like many political organizations on both sides of the aisle, is engaged in voter registration drives. Theirs are generally targeted at registering voters who will vote Democratic, so lots of minorities, working class non-evangelical whites, etc.

To do this they hire workers who get paid based on quotas. Unsurprisingly, the workers sometimes come up short, and even less surprisingly, sometimes when they do, they make stuff up to meet the quota so they’ll get paid, even notably going so far as to register Mickey Mouse.

ACORN, like all organizations that participate in voter drives, is required by law to pass on all collected registrations. In fact, part of the 2004 Republican scandal involves a firm called Sproul & Associates that was hired by their national committee to run similar registration drives and was caught shredding Democratic ones. So ACORN passed the fraudulent registrations on, as they were required to by law, fired some offending workers, and even flagged them as likely frauds.

Moreover, making up fake registrations is nowhere near on the level of shredding real ones. Mickey Mouse presumably can’t walk up to a polling station, show a valid photo identification, and pull a lever, however a real person who thought their application was received can get there only to find he’s been disenfranchised by the opposing party.

A large number (somewhere up to 30%) ended up getting thrown out for things like being duplicate registrations, wrong districts, and the like which happen all the time and are the states’ job to prevent. Shockingly, the states seem to have actually done so. Who says government never does anything right?

Clearly some ACORN employees unrelated to Obama or the DNC were unethical, and maybe were even trying to register people to vote in multiple counties at once. I hope we find out. I’d rather my candidate lose the election honestly than win it via fraud (though I’d most prefer winning legitimately) and I’d certainly want that organization destroyed if this came from within.

But of the two parties, it isn’t the Democratic one that is “destroying the fabric of democracy” as the McCain camp loves to say. The fact that I can’t group theories about elections past and present being stolen in with 9/11 being a government conspiracy, bigfoot, faked moon landings, or other crazy notions scares me, and it’s mainly the fault of Republicans, if maybe only because they just had more opportunity and were the ones that happened to get caught.

In the end it makes you wonder, is the RNC somehow trying to disenfranchise voters yet again by striking from the roles all of the legitimate registrations that came through ACORN? Are they trying to set up a challenge to the legitimacy of the results if the race ends up close in swing states? Are they just genuinely concerned that people are trying to vote in duplicate counties, and that the states’ election boards will be unable to stop them? All of the above?

Or is it just a good old fashioned lob from half court with a second left on the shot clock?

I was talking to a Republican-leaning friend the other day and she was asking me why I agree more with Obama’s fiscal policy than McCain’s. I explained to her how, according to the Tax Policy Center, Obama would increase the national debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, whereas McCain would by $5 trillion. Both are, to me, not acceptable but less is clearly better.

So she gave me the current Republican talking point line of “so you support the government redistributing wealth?” This is something I’ve heard over and over from both McCain and conservative pundits, which isn’t surprising. When a political party’s entire strategy is built around populism, some serious rhetoric is needed to explain why they’re cutting taxes only for the wealthiest 5% of the populace.

They have to convince the other 95% that making the rich richer benefits them, or at least doesn’t hurt them and is the right thing to do morally, and that’s a tough sell. It’s like trying to convince someone who walked onto your lot asking to buy a used Corolla that what they really need is a brand-new F350.

Trickle-down economics, which used to be the phrase of choice, clearly failed and the populace knows it. Of the last 28 years, 20 of them saw Republican Presidents, and all 20 of those saw an unprecedented landslide of money away from the poor and to the wealthy. The people to whom the money was supposed to trickle down are still waiting for it to rain.

Of course, we all agree that the rich getting richer isn’t a bad thing if everyone else is too, and up until George W. Bush took office that was happening, if maybe not as quickly. But what we’ve seen over the last 8 years is the rich getting richer and the rest of America treading water. To quote Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman:

Rising inequality isn’t new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth — and they know it.

And over the last 4 administrations, how did the market as a whole do? Let’s look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

Exact numbers from the opening price on the day they took office to the closing price on the day they left:

Given all of the above, it’s not a shocker that McCain is fighting an uphill battle on the economy. So instead of trying to promote his own policy to the public he and his supporters are forced to use rhetoric and redefine it to be more palatable. The current buzzwords toward that end are “redistributing wealth” and “socialism”.

Like most rhetoric from either party, though, it’s largely hollow. McCain’s calls to pay people’s mortgages for them is no less socialist than Obama’s health care plan (and possibly more expensive, we don’t really know due to a lack of details). The same with the bailout that both candidates supported, which actually will have our government buying chunks of equity in private banks.  

As for redistributing wealth, any tax changes or large government actions do that. The Iraq war, for example, has redistributed wealth from civilians to the military industrial complex. Bush and Reagan’s cuts, Clinton’s increases, all moved money from one group of people to another. You can’t simply not change taxes or go to war or build roads when necessary just because money is going from someone to someone else.

That’s just the nature of government, and the only true alternative is anarchy. While I’m certainly not in favor of the government redistributing wealth just for the hell of it, I realize that until our country is perfect, that’s going to happen. It’s part of the political process.

So the question isn’t really about whether or not money should be redistributed, it’s about who the money gets redistributed from, and who it gets redistributed to.

In both candidates’ cases, there’s a significant budget deficit, so much of the money is taken from America in the future. Who is going to pay that? It’s unclear. It won’t be the poor, because they won’t have it and you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. It will either be the rich or all of us collectively when the government is forced to print money to avoid bankruptcy and tremendous inflation ensues. My guess is it will be the latter, because nowadays even the common sense politician has a $350 billion deficit. The steps required to ending our budget deficit before it’s unsolvable are too politically unpopular to occur. Our government’s fiscal policy is much like mine was back when I was 19 and charged my college tuition and a computer to my first credit card, and I see no reason to believe that the eventual results won’t be equally disastrous.

But back to the present (and past). The Bush tax cuts (which McCain originally opposed, and which was one of the reasons I used to be a big fan of his) gave the money almost exclusively to the wealthy. McCain wants to make those (which are set to expire in 2010) permanent. Obama wants to take some money from the future, and some from
the today’s wealthy people, and give it mainly to the lower and middle classes.

So, when given the choice between borrowing from the future and giving to the rich, or taking the money from the wealthy now and (and borrowing less money from the future) and improving the middle class, I’ll take the latter. In fact, people say that voters decide with their pocketbooks, but if that were true, Obama would be leading by 90 points instead of 10-15.

Moreover, I believe we have a serious problem in this country whereby the wealthy are paying half the tax rate of the middle class due to capital gains. Obama is the only candidate addressing this. the lower capital gains tax was designed to encourage investment, inspiring people to start their own businesses and invest in others, which is good for the economy in many ways. It has probably accomplished that somewhat. But unfortunately, what it has also done is ensure that guys like Warren Buffet pay taxes at half the rate of their secretaries, despite making many times more money.

Obama wants to keep capital gains taxes at 15% up to $250k in income, and then increase them to a more reasonable 20% after. This will encourage people to start businesses and invest for their future, while also partially closing the largest personal tax loophole in the history of our country. I personally liked his earlier plan of bumping them all the way up to 28% at the top, which is still significantly lower than income tax, and that’s coming from someone who has worked over a year with almost no salary to start a company that will pay mainly capital gains if/when it succeeds.

So while I’m not happy that both candidates are fiscally irresponsible, I recognize that as an inherent flaw in democracy. It’s a large part of why I liked John Kerry, and probably part of why he didn’t win. So I’m going with the guy who is less fiscally irresponsible and crossing my fingers.