Georgia: In the “Better Late than Never” Category…

Seven years and six months into his administration, President Bush seems to have realized that Vladamir Putin isn’t always such a nice guy. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration is putting all bilateral contacts with Russia under review. This occurred after a near face-off between a Coast Guard cutter and the Russian navy. As I have written previously, we are at least in part to blame for the fiasco in Georgia, and so this can be seen as corrective at best, and palliative at worst. Just like his father, had President Bush sent strong messages (perhaps with soldiers) before the invasion, perhaps there never would have been one to begin with.

This was a win/win/win for Russia. They managed to demonstrate to the west and elsewhere that they will have their views taken seriously, they invaded the portion of a neighbor that has many Russians, and they may well have destabilized alternative energy transmission paths that the U.S. proposed, demonstrating the old axiom that all war is over wealth.

President Clinton reminded us at the Democratic National Convention this week that we as a nation cannot go it alone, that it is not in our best interest to go it alone, and that cooperation amongst nations is best for the United States. I am glad we are standing by Georgia, even if it is very late, and I hope that other countries will send stronger messages than they have until now. I am referring in particular to Germany and France.

Obama v. McCain on Education: And the winner is…

It is typical for candidates to speak in platitudes on the campaign trail. As the son of a teacher and a parent I look at the education system in America as creaking. The average teacher salary in California is $59,345 while the median salary in California for people with between five and nine years of experience is $67,552. In other words, we grossly underpay our teachers and undervalue our childrens’ future. While the states take the lead on providing for our childrens’ education, the federal government has had a role for quite a long time. The No Child Left Behind Act has done a very good job of leaving all children behind, unless you have a lot of money for private schools. Teaching to tests and eliminating such “frivolities” as orchestra, music, and art, does not make for a well rounded education.

What am I looking from the candidates? I want money, plain and simple. I want them to see more money devoted to education. Providing tax breaks is not the answer to me, because it generally robs money from our public school systems. The lack of economies of scale in both the private and the public market for the foreseeable future would be intolerable. In addition, faith need not apply. Want religion? Go to church, temple, or whatever else suits you. Want science, arts, music, reading, language, and social studies? Let’s have that in the schools. I am not opposed to choice of school so long as everyone has that choice, it is not used as a back door for religion, and the basic standards are upheld (including building, health, etc).

How do the candidates rate? According to OnTheIssues.Org John McCain believes in school choice, but does believe creationism should be taught alongside evolution in our schools (but see below). He would fund education by reducing subsidies in other areas, including sugar, oil, and ethanol. He wants tax breaks for charter schools, and he is a strong proponent of vouchers that could be used for any school, including religious schools. He claims the money would not come from other education efforts, but that’s the sort of thinking that only someone who has been in Washington too long could have, and as a fiscal conservative, it offends me.

At that same web site, Barack Obama’s position boils down to this: we don’t pay teachers enough, we didn’t put any money into the No Child Left Behind Act, hire more teachers, pay excellent teachers excellently, provide a capital improvement fund for crumbling buildings, and free education for people who maintain a B average. My problem with Obama’s plan is that it is a wishlist a mile long with a bill to go with, and perhaps even more than I could stomach, and he does not provide a way to pay for any of it.

Still, on the whole I am far closer to Obama than McCain on education. If we are to err, it seems right to err on the side of too much, rather than too little, education. If people reach their potentials through education, the other problems seem so much easier.

So round one goes to Obama, but it was a decision, not a knockout. In fact, in scoring the candidates, I’d give Senator Obama a B- for having the right idea but not clearly stating how he would pay for it, but Senator McCain a D for bringing church into the back door of schools, but at least stating what he would do. Or put another way: 80/100 for Obama, and 65/100 for McCain, a difference of 15 points. Have faith, Senator McCain. There are many more issues.

The Do Nothing Presidency

Smoke Stack

Yesterday, the Bush Administration released a long awaited report by the Environmental Protection Agency, that says that Carbon Dioxide can and should be regulated. One would think this a remarkable departure for an administration that has done everything within its power to destroy the environment, through drilling in fragile environmental areas, unmitigated logging, and the failure to protect endangered species. There’s a catch: the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to develop the report, and in releasing it, in the same breath, the administration argued that regulation by the EPA to protect our children will hurt business and industrial growth.

Let’s review our tally for this administration:

Housing — Failure to properly regulate the housing market has led to a massive series of bank failures.
The Energy Market — we are suffering from inflation due to a massive increase in oil prices, which itself is in part due to an inability of Americans to conserve. The administration has done absolutely nothing to reduce consumption, or for that matter offer fuel alternatives. Instead, they’ve argued that drilling in wilderness refuges will offer some form of relief, a claim that is disputed by every expert in the field, because it will offer no short term relief, while medium and long term relief are by no means at all assured.
Security— having gone to war twice and wasted billions of dollars on meaningless programs, the administration has managed to alienate America from the rest of the world, reducing people’s desires to visit, impacting tourism, and reducing our national credibility. At the same time the Taliban has rebuilt itself, and we’ve lost our allies in Pakistan and now, seemingly Iraq (not that Prime Minister Maliki was every clearly an ally).
Education— No Child Left Behind has meant that our children haven’t gone forward as a group. Our public education system remains in a shambles due to lack of incentives for good teachers, buildings that are falling apart, and a general willingness by this administration to divert funds to religious programs.
Public Transportation— our skies are more dangerous than they have been since the creation of the FAA. More runway incursions, more close calls in the air, disgruntled workforces, and disgruntled passengers have left our air transportation system in a mess, while we’ve invested nearly nothing in ground public transport.
Public Welfare— with a remarkably lame response to Hurricane Katrina, the administration demonstrated that they could not be trusted with emergency crisis management.

In short, they did nothing except collect pay checks. Perhaps Americans will pay more attention to our civic responsibilities the next time we hand someone the keys.

Voting Machines: Thank Heavens for Academia

vote button Often times it is said that the purpose of academic research is to seek the truth, no matter where it leads. The purpose of industry representatives is often to obscure the truths they do not like. Such apparently was the case at a recent hearing of the Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Elections. These are the guys who are nominally supposed to ensure that each citizen of Texas gets an opportunity to vote, and that his or her vote is counted. The committee provides oversight and legislation for electronic voting.

How secure is your electronic vote, compared to a paper ballet? Can you have an electronic hanging chad? A group of researchers have spent a fair amount of time answering that very question. Drs Ed Felton & Dan Wallach, as well as others, have looked at numerous different voting systems, and found all sorts of little problems. For instance, some voting machines are susceptible to virii, and if they get it they can give it to their peers. That’s not a problem, according to the manufacturers’ spokesmen. But who are we to believe? An academician whose purpose is to advance the state of the art and find truths, or a spokesman, whose purpose is to obscure them?

There are mistakes made in many, if not all elections and surveys. Here are just a few questions:

What is an acceptable rate of error? As 2000 demonstrated, even a hand count of paper ballots can have problem.
Rather than prevaricate, why shouldn’t the vendors of these voting machines fix the problems that have been reported?
What sort of regulations are appropriate? The spokesmen all but demanded a common standard in as much as they complained that there was none.

Conveniently Dr. Wallach has an answer to that last question. His testimony recommends just that.

For what it’s worth, as an expatriate I do not expect to use a voting machine for quite some time, but rather a paper ballot.

The CIA’s torture teachers: Communist China

Continuing our theme from Independence Day, let’s talk about freedoms and rights. For those such as Alan Dershowitz who advocate such things as torture warrants, or for simple apologists for the Bush administration’s shameful behavior, now comes this little ditty from the New York Times about how the CIA took a crash course in rough interregation techniques for Guantanamo Bay just after the Towers came down. What they probably didn’t know was that the material was derived from a 1957 Chinese training manual that an airforce psychologist discredited as generating false confessions. Of course, even if the method did work, we now know who this administration turns to for guidance: a discredited regime used by a form of government we despised. This brings me to a point that I’ve always believed: fasism, communism, whatever: each can be used to subjugate citizens in just the same manner. It’s just a slightly different rationale. Yes, that says that it can and has happened in the United States, and it goes back to what Benjamin Franklin said: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. We’ve already seen that U.S. Senator Kit Bond was a perfect example. Of course, Franklin was defending against a different King George.

With our King George and in this case, we have to worry about what moral authority we have lost. Those Americans who happen to be abroad and in the wrong place and the wrong time will be the sorry beneficiaries of this president’s legacy.