Buried Ledes

The following excerpts are from the New York Times:

From October 17:

"The United States Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials.... A 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, requires states to check voter registration applications against government databases like those for driver’s license records. Names that do not match are flagged. Ohio Republicans sought to require Ms. Brunner to provide information about mismatches to local officials. Those officials could use information to require voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones. They could also allow partisan poll workers to challenge people on the lists."

From October 15:

"Republicans have been angered by reports of voter-registration fraud linked to groups allied with Democrats, like Acorn, a community organizing group with ties to Mr. Obama. This month, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion seeking to force Ms. Brunner, a Democrat, to hand over the list of all registration applications that had been flagged when checked using the state or federal databases. In court papers, Republicans said they wanted the names to file challenges.... Social Security data indicate that Ohio election officials found more than 200,000 names that did not match this year; state election officials say their analysis of the data indicates that most of these are individual voters, not duplicate registrations. But Ms. Brunner said that problems with the databases could very well be why the names did not match."

From October 16:

"When Mr. McCain invoked Mr. Wurzelbacher in Wednesday’s debate — some version of 'Joe the Plumber' was mentioned two dozen times during the 90 minutes — as a way to criticize Mr. Obama’s tax plan and wealth-sharing argument, Mr. Wurzelbacher suddenly found camera crews outside his home, Katie Couric on the phone, and himself in the full glare of the media spotlight.... Mr. Wurzelbacher is registered to vote in Lucas County (Ohio) under the name Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher. 'We have his named spelled W-O, instead of W-U,' Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said in a telephone interview. 'Handwriting is sometimes hard to read. He has never corrected it in his registration card.' The records, she said, showed he voted Republican in the March primary."

Abandon Ship

Items that have been abandoned recently:

- Decades of conservative free market ideology, to the overriding requirement to save the economy from effects of that same ideology

- The Bush administration, in Sarah Palin's readiness to point out its failings

- Trickle-down economics: how many Americans would currently support tax cuts for the rich?

- Neoconservatism: remember that?

Moral Authorities

How can President Bush chastise Russia for invading Georgia, after he himself so recently invaded a sovereign nation?

And how can he chastise other countries for human rights shortcomings, after his administration has engaged in torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping?

How can politicians and pundits like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Rush Limbaugh espouse family values after multiple marriages and, often, affairs?

How can Bill Bennett write a book called The Book of Virtues while gambling away several hundred thousand dollars?

And how can Sarah Palin press abstinence programs on the country despite the very visible evidence in her own family that they don't work?

The problem here is that our moral authorities have no moral authority.

Hypocrisy part 2

One of the things the federal census tracks is the balance of payments to the states. In general, the states that tend to vote democratic also tend to be net payers into federal coffers, while states that tend to vote republican tend to be net beneficiaries of federal payments. Ironic, no? Money being transferred from the states that most support federal programs to the states that advocate for small government? According to the most recent census figures, Alaska ranks seventh in the country in terms of how much money they receive from the federal government vs. how much they pay. (Virginia and Maryland are the top two because of the large numbers of federal employees, and federal paychecks, in those states.) So my question is, how can a state whose populace seems to pride itself on its independence and favors small government be so dependent on federal largess?

Hypocrisy

How come no one has pointed out that, of all the recent political sex scandals, the Democratic ones have involved consenting, heterosexual adults (Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer) while the Republican ones have involved homosexuality (Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Jeff Gannon, Mark Foley...), soliciting minors (Mark Foley again), and teen pregnancy? How come no one has pointed out that families and areas with strong "family values" (read sexually repressive) have higher rates of teen pregnancy? Why isn't anyone drawing contrasts between Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton, on one hand, and the Bush twins and Sarah Palin's seventeen year old daughter on the other? And why isn't anyone on the right questioning whether their focus on abstinence, faith, and marriage might be having exactly the opposite effect than the one they intend?

Supporters will say that Governor Palin's family should be off limits from the spotlight of politics. That would be fine, except that social conservatives are the ones who put the family in that spotlight in the first place. If they didn't want to impose their family-related values on the rest of us, I'd agree that private matters should be off limits. But they put that particular ball in play by supporting a sexually repressive social agenda, and they should be held responsible for the results when their own families fail to meet their own tests.

Straight Talk

John McCain has distinguished himself by taking stands that seem to be principled, sometimes because they are counter to those of the administration and the rest of his party. Hence, the "straight talk express". With most Americans now against the war in Iraq, his continued strong support for the war seems to be another example of a principled, unpopular stance.

But could it, instead, be due solely to a basic point of confusion?

McCain has several times recently raised the specter of Iran support for "Al Qaeda in Iraq". Does he not know that Al Qaeda is Sunni and Iran is Shi'ite? He also raises the specter of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" gaining control of Iraq. Does he not understand that the Shi'ites have the upper hand in the Iraqi civil war? If not, is it possible that his entire support for the war is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the differences between these two Islamic sects?

Buried Lede

From Business Week, April 7, 2008, "China's Factory Blues", by Dexter Roberts (pp. 78 - 82):

"'Unlike in the last 20 years, when China exported deflation, from now on, China will export inflation,' says Peter Lau, CEO of Hong Kong retailer Giordano International, which has extensive operations in China. (p. 82).

The article describes how Chinese producers have hit the cost floor: the rising yuan, cancellation of preferential policies for exporters, and increased labor and environmental regulations are raising the cost of production in China. This is probably a good policy for China because it squeezes out the lowest cost producers who pay the lowest wages and contribute disproportionately to pollution. However, it's potentially bad new for us because low cost imports have kept inflation in check even as the economy expands. Now, with the economy contracting, the closing of this inflationary safety valve means that the Fed has less flexibility to stimulate the economy. Until now, the Fed has thrown considerable weight behind economic stimulus policies with a rapid series of large rate cuts. Now, that approach is much more likely to cause inflation.

In the best of all possible worlds...

In the best of all possible worlds, this is the answer that Barack Obama gave to the question in Wednesday's debate about his refusal to wear a flag pin:

"One of the problems we have in America right now is that too many people confuse symbols with the principles that those symbols stand for. We claim that terrorists 'hate us for our freedoms', yet we're willing to give up those very freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. This administration has suspended Habeas Corpus, circumvented legal protections against spying on Americans, violated Constitutional mandates for due process and against cruel and unusual punishment, kept vital information from the American people about Iraq and the war on terror, and carried out other policies that fly in the face of the Constitution and our deepest values as Americans. Yet, they wave the flag and claim to be patriots. Let me tell you something: wearing the flag does not make you a patriot, particularly when you fight against free speech, due process, and the very liberties that it stands for. And not wearing the flag doesn't mean you're not patriotic, particularly when you are fighting for those values. When we go to war, we are not fighting for the flag; we're fighting for what it stands for. We're not fighting for the flag, we're fighting for the people who it represents. And when we confuse the symbol for the principle, we risk giving up the very thing that gives the flag its value."

Shooting Yourself in the Foot in the Middle of a Class War

I've decided to broaden the content of my blog to include thoughts in areas beyond human factors and user centered design. Politics, for example. Actually, you could make a case that politics are very closely related to the user experience of living in, and interfacing with, society at large.

I've noticed that most of the people I know who work in this area tend to be either liberal or moderate, and I wonder if it's because at the very heart of human factors is the recognition that people, in all their varieties, need to be accommodated by systems. It seems to me that liberalism and human factors both put people first, to borrow a phrase, the former in terms of societal priorities and the latter in terms of systems and product design.

So here's a first contribution to this area: an assertion that the subprime mortgage mess was based on a large bet that the upper classes put on the financial health of the lower and middle classes. And that the bet was essentially illogical because of all that's been done to weaken those latter classes over the past decade or so.

Here's a short list of ways the lower and middle classes have suffered in that time:

• falling real wages
• less access to health insurance
• bankruptcy "reform"
• welfare reform
• outsourcing
• the growing wealth gap
• rising education costs
• fewer social services
• the Iraq war, whose direct participants are disproportionately from these classes.
  

In all of these cases, the benefits of these changes have gone to the wealthy, but the lower and middle classes have bought into them. Why? I suggest that it's because the notion of trickle-down economics is basically designed to convince the lower classes that they have a stake in the health of the upper classes. The better off the latter are, the better off the former will be because of trickle-down effects.

So the lower and middle classes believe they have a stake in the health of the upper classes. What does this have to do with the subprime mortgage mess? Because, after reaping the benefits of a weakening lower- and middle-class, the upper classes placed a huge, unsecured bet that all the people in those classes could pay off any mortgage they signed up for, and bought billions of dollars' worth of securities derived from these mortgages. In essence, they placed a big bet on the health of those classes after doing whatever they could, in the preceding years, to weaken them.

I suspect that people in the financial industries won't recognize this tacit investment. I suspect that many of the conservatives in those classes will continue to advocate policies that continue to weaken the lower and middle classes. Ironically, though, this would further erode the value of their own investments in those classes.

If they did recognize this tacit investment, I think it would be a good thing. Just as, I believe, trickle-down economics has given the lower and middle classes an illusory stake in the health of the upper classes, mortgage-derived securities give the upper classes a real stake in the health of the lower and middle classes. I would love to see them recognize this stake, and start taking an interest in the real health of those classes. Perhaps then we would start to see better schools, better social safety nets, and other mechanisms that would benefit the lower and middle classes directly. Because they would also indirectly benefit the upper classes by protecting their investments.