Bush or Batman is the hottest new game in town. You have to guess whether the quote you are about to hear was said by George W. Bush or Batman as played by Adam West. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
Archive for the “Politics” CategoryA website devoted to things that are younger than the Republican nominee for President of the US. Cruel but funny. We are in the home stretch now of what has been a marathon Presidential campaign. The end of the Primary season is in sight, with 11 Republican and Democratic primaries to go. Here are some random thoughts. The S stands for stupid
At the moment, Obama is in the lead when you consider his total delegate count. The ’superdelegate’ count (individual notable Democrats that could theoretically swing either way) favours Clinton at the moment. You do have to wonder what the Democratic party is trying to achieve with the whole concept. A few days ago, when appearing on The Daily Show, Senator Tom Daschle outlined the only rational reason I could possibly think of.
Stewart has a point. Afterall, it’s the people that elect the president, not a handful of special Democrats. A comedian who thinks he knows something about politics might be better than a politican who thinks he knows something about comedy (cite: any of Bush’s ‘jokes’ that you’ve seen on Letterman over the past 6 or so years). There is one redeeming (although slightly confusing) feature of the Superdelegate process. From the same interview with Obama-supporting Daschle:
I say confusing because if the Superdelegates are only going to vote for the candidate with the most popularly-elected delegates then what is the point in having Superdelegates in the first place? This isn’t a series of Lost, people want a result as soon as possible so they can get behind their favoured candidate (or have time to make up their minds about which party they are going to go with). Uncle Fester
The Republicans don’t have the same problem as the Democrats in that their nominee has been decided for a few weeks now. John McCain, the presumptive nominee, is a mixed bag of issues and is far more centrist than Huckabee or Romney. He now faces the dilemma as to whether stick with the Republicans who got him the nomination or to push towards the Right, with the lure of Evangelical votes on offer. If he pursues the latter option doing so might risk his more liberal supporters switching to Obama or simply staying home and not voting at all. It must be said that he takes a brave stance on some issues. When running against Mitt “We ought to double Guantanamo” Romney, he advocated closing it and expediting the judicial proceedings of its prisoners. What’s wrong with the good old feather? I find his stance on torture confusing. On the one hand McCain was tortured over a period of more than five years during the Vietnam War. He considers waterboarding to be torture. On the other hand he voted against banning the CIA from using such methods in the interrogation of prisoners. Let’s define torture here so we have a baseline (from the UN):
The Bush stance on torture seems to be that it’s ok so long as there is the ‘ticking bomb scenario’ in play. This isn’t something that McCain is opposing (in public at least). The ticking bomb situation is where the authorities have detained a suspect and they believe that a ticking bomb of nuclear/high explosive/puppies/rainbows capability is about to go off but they have no idea where. The argument is that when lives are directly at stake that torturing the prisoner is acceptable. There are, of course problems with this. * The prisoner in question may in fact be innocent in which case there is probably no sum on money that could compensate someone for the mental or physical aftermath (McCain, incidentally, cannot raise his arms above shoulder-level due to his years as a prisoner in Vietnam). * If you are being tortured and are in fact innocent then victims would have no choice but to make up a confession, possibly implicating other innocent people. Not only does this waste the time of the agency in question but when it turns out to be a false confession the people instituting the torture would most likely resume the torture, maybe with a newly instilled vigour. * There is also the ‘if we do it to them then they will do it to us’ theory. If (generally) law-abiding entities decide that torture in some forms is permissible unlawful entities will take this far beyond the likes of government agencies. * There is a slippery slope where the ticking time bomb scenario is concerned. The fact is that such situations are likely to be extremely rare. I’m sure that if a nuclear bomb was found and defused in New York that we would have heard about it. Officers, having such an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal could easily be tempted to beef up the claim in order to use torture as a tool to extract whatever they wish. * Lastly, it portrays a hypocritical attitude towards the whole concept. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes because they waterboarded American and Allied prisoners of war. So what, you might say. But for the ticking bomb you only need to look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to see that if Japan had a whiff of a massive bomb that they would be extremely interested in extracting the details in any way that they could. XP
There is a lot of talk about experience in the race. Clinton promotes her own experience in contrast to Obama, who seems to exude hope more than experience. I’m going to argue that experience doesn’t really matter that much. There is simply no amount of experience that could possibly prepare you for job as the most powerful person in the world. The only exception to this is being an incumbent President, which neither party can produce this time. Hilary, being First Lady during her husband’s administration, will of course talk about her years in the White House but in reality the First Lady does not co-govern with the President. As was pointed out on Countdown recently Clinton’s campaigners cannot name one foreign policy moment where she has been ‘tested by crisis’ because only those in the Executive Office would be the ones to handle such issues. As First Lady, Clinton had no security clearance, no access to National Security Council meetings or White House Presidential security briefings and little or no involvement in the foreign policy flashpoints of the Clinton administration: Somalia, Haiti, Sudan or Afghanistan. In other words, Clinton is now battling Obama on a basis of fear, which is incredibly disappointing, not only because she herself doesn’t have a leg to stand on on that topic but all she is doing is providing the Republicans with ammunition when (if?) Obama gets the nomination for the Democrats. So if experience is irrelevant in this race then what should voters be looking for? I believe they should look for a subset of the nebulous umbrella of people skills. They need to portray a strong public face for their country, a face that can inspire their own citizens but that can also be put on the world stage to do some much-needed fence mending. McCain is not the most charismatic speech-giver. Clinton is ok but by gosh Obama runs rings around both of them, hands down. The second attribute required is the ability to judge character. The President has many advisers. If you think about the actual number of really hard decisions the President needs to make each day it’s not going to be many. Of those decisions all of them would be backed up by experts in their field. A President that surrounds themselves with people of a good character is going to be an excellent President. I don’t think that Clinton has done this. Her campaign has been about attacking Obama. Obama’s campaign, although often criticised for being little more than hot air, has been overly positive in its message. The fear-mongering only plays to the Republicans. Fear is more of a right-wing thing and the Democrats shouldn’t be playing that card. Predictions * Obama wins at the convention, after being ahead in the popular vote. The superdelegates follow popular opinion at the risk of destroying the party. * John Edwards is the vice-presidential Democratic candidate. Obama has already ruled out running as the vice-presidential candidate. I think the Democrats might think that a Obama-Clinton ticket might be a pushing it a bit. Edwards is a polished white male and that will win them votes (sadly….). * In order to capture the evangelical vote, McCain names a conservative running mate. I’m going to say Huckabee because he kept running and in doing so split the conservative vote away from Romney. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been a deal in the works for a long time. * In the general election the flashpoint is Iraq and Obama takes this debate point over McCain hands down. Even if a war is on the whole sucessful the public gets sick of seeing the bodies come home. This point and the murkiness over torture tip the balance to Obama, who wins. Let’s see how I do. Image Credits (Creative Commons): Obama McCain Clinton A very long but informative article from Rolling Stone.
Ahhh…economics. I’ve done a bit of economics at uni. You know the one - more graphs without units on their axes than you can poke a stick at (and of course, as anyone with an engineering/physics/maths background will tell you, this is “really bad” TM). Eco101 is actually quite valuable in a degree - I don’t know why more courses don’t insist on it. If you haven’t done it then I’ll present you the first three weeks of the course through the next graph. The curve can move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. If the price of oil rises, for example, a country that is a large exporter of oil will receive more money which enables the government to increase the stability of the country without having to increase its openness.
Ok, got that? Note the lack of units? Note how the graph isn’t defined for all values of price? Ok - that’s all you need to know. Welll…I tell a lie, actually. It’s not all you need to know, it’s all my economics lecturers implied I needed to know. The thing is, the most important factor in a market is consumers. Consumers are not rational. Therefore, whilst drawing up silly graphs might be fine in theory, in practise observations of consumer behaviour don’t fit to the pretty lines. (At this point, if you’re still reading you’re probably vaguely interested in the subject matter. Good on you! Here’s a reward. Jessica Hagy’s website contains more graphs without units on their axes but they’re really funny/thoughtful graphs and Venn diagrams. It’s a like a social mathematician’s ultimate comic.) But wait, isn’t this review filed under ‘Politics’? Yes it is. Bremmer’s book discusses the stability of nations being a function of how open they are to the outside world. If you were to plot stability versus openness the graph would look a bit like the letter ‘J’, hence the title.
So just looking at the J Curve graphically what can we imply? Nations that are closed (left side countries) can be more stable than slightly more open countries but cannot ever be as stable as the most open countries (right side countries). We can also see that for a country to progress from a very open system to a very closed one (or vice versa) it must, at some point, suffer a period of instability (the depths of the J curve) as it transitions. The curve can also move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. For a large exporter of oil, a rise in the price of oil gives the government more money which it can use to increase the stability of the country without making it more open. Hence, the entire J curve rises upwards. Finally, notice the slope of the graph. It is easy for a left side nation to fall into the depths of the curve quite quickly but it will take a right side state a lot more effort to do so. Likewise, little effort is required for a close state to reach stability but an open state has to work much harder to achieve the same level. That, in a nutshell, is the gist of chapter 1. The remainder of the book discusses three far left side nations (North Korea, Cuba and Iraq under Saddam), three borderline left side nations (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia), two nations in (at the time) the depths of the curve (South Africa and Yugoslavia) and three right side nations (Turkey, Israel and India). The penultimate chapter is devoted entirely to China, such is the importance Bremmer places on it. In each of these country dossiers Bremmer gives the reader a brief history of the country in question, then justifies why it resides on the given point of the J curve. Although on the whole I found these parts fascinating, as I ploughed through I began to find Bremmer’s language to be somewhat repetitive - I felt that it went beyond hammering home his message. In the end I found myself agreeing with Bremmer’s central concept. The model holds up well, although as he notes, China is attempting to cross from the left to the right of the curve without bottoming out into chaos so time will tell as to whether the model is broken by the worlds most populous nation. Having said all of that I would hesitate to recommend this book to someone with only a passing interest in world politics and/or history. As I mentioned, I didn’t find the pages slipping away under my fingers. It certainly is a book for thinking. It is not, as the cover jacket suggests, the Freakonomics of world political books. This will not bring a whole new group of people who have never cared about politics before to the field. It will most likely only interest people with an existing affection for global politics. So…to buy or not to buy? I’d suggest getting it 2007 has been, and will continue to present, an interesting year in Australian politics. It has signified the 11th year of John Howard’s Prime Ministership and Coalition governance. It has also seen the emergence of an intelligent, charismatic Labor leader in Queensland’s Kevin Rudd, who, at this point in time, presents the most viable option for a future Labor Prime Minister since Keating. The leadership conundrum between Howard and Rudd poses to be an interesting example of how and where Australian politics is in the early 21st Century. However, the leadership conundrum position as the front runner of examples has been under constant attack over the last month. First, through Burkegate, and now through, what can only be described as a complete lack of diligence and forethought a member of Howard’s Cabinet, in Santo Santoro Affair. Both Burkegate and the Santoro Affair have shown, at last, the presence and influence lobbyist have in Australian politics. Sure, any worldly person would understand that lobbyist exists, but before the events of the last month, it would have been thought that this was an issue that doesn’t affect Australia like it does the U.S. or the U.K. and E.U. We now see that is view isn’t correct and presents a worrying outlook on Australian politics. It poses questions to where the validity and responsibility of our elected officials lays. Is our Federal and State government, which is voted for by the entire population, the voice of a select few? And, subsequently, how “representative” is our representative of government? Let’s leave that question there for the time being and take a closer look at Australia’s leadership conundrum. I say conundrum because of the precarious position of Australian Politics has in 2007. Howard is our second longest serving Prime Minister and while that is something to celebrate as a country it is also a worrying sign. It is fair to say that the previous elections have provided Australia with the choice between the classic saying of “the devil we know or the devil we don’t.” The Howard-Latham campaign was a classic (remember the L-Plate adverts). I’m not saying that the Coalition won just because the alternative wasn’t any better, but the campaign’s promises definitely liked to point this fact out to the electorate (Well Managed Economy and Interest Rates as one example). Anyway, back to the conundrum, and Howard’s and the Coalition’s time in power now presents a liability as opposed to a strength in the 2007 election battle. Western Democracy has shown that the people, and I use that phrase loosely, inherently swing their votes in 15-20 year cycles and Australia is coming towards the end of its current cycle. Combine this with Howard’s age and length in office and the liability can be seen. Also though, the recent resignation/sacking of Santos Santoro and Ian Campbell has shown that holes are starting to appear in the Coalition. For the past 10 years the wholes have been relatively small and patched up quickly. Sure, the AWB scandal had some big names involved and allowed the newspapers to fill the pages but, seriously, Labor’s disarray at the time allowed the government to escape relatively unsaved. We digress. The resignations of Santoro and Campbell not only show the holes, but, when combined with the recent Cabinet reshuffle in which long-time scapegoat Amanda Vanstone was dumped, present a Cabinet almost as inexperienced as that of Labor. Costello, Downer and Rudd’s experience is quickly counteracted by the presence of freshman MP’s such as Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne at the table, while previously important portfolios like immigration now have the face of the unions’ dartboards, Kevin Andrews, attached to it. All in all, the Coalition no longer presents an ultra-experienced government that has guided Australia down a path of stable economic prosperity. It does, however, present Labor with its greatest opportunity to govern since 1996. 1) Frequently, Federal and State elections have presented the electorate with a choice between the “lesser of two evils.” The votes received by Nick Xenophon in South Australia’s last election indicate this. Through a more direct representation, where candidates go through a nominating process rather than a small party vote or discussion in a smoke filled room, would allow voters a legitimate vote for who they want to represent them. 2) Following on from the first point, currently our form of government allows us to choose which party will represent us better. This means if you think the leader of one party will run Australia well but you think your local candidate, from a different party, will represent your area better you currently cannot vote for both. By introducing a form of representation this would be a viable option and will provide Australia politics with a greater diversity and independence. 3) As the corruption and influence scandals of the last month have shown, the amount of accountability ministers and elected members have is being questioned. Sure they will get sacked from the Cabinet position, but in the current form of representation they are accountable to their party who may or may not refuse to remove them from running. With direct representation, they will be accountable to the voters in their electorate. If they stuff up the voters will decide if they are worthy enough to be a candidate, let alone a member of parliament. 4) The end of the last century and the beginning of this century has seen the presence of popular politics in society flourish as technology and alternative media sources grows. The internet has allowed culture and society to move and evolve, the natural progression of this is for politics to evolve too. It is already happened in the United States, the Bush family has its own private internet portal to allow its many friends and relatives to keep in touch, while every candidate in the 2008 Presidential race invests heavily in using the internet to promote their cause. As popular politics continues to flourish, Australia as a society faces the possibility of being left behind if it continues to use its current form of governance. If a direct form of governance is not introduced, generations x, y and z with our mySpaces, blogs and YouTube video’s, may begin to feel alienated and disconnected from the political process which runs this country. If the people don’t care who runs the country, who will? Thus, for Australia to remain a competitive, flourishing, proud nation, it is imperative that it allows the people who make this country great to have a direct voice in who leads them. Over 1 million views already on YouTube and quite cleverly done. |
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