Standing Up To Bullies

As part of their ongoing mission to destroy the Enlightenment, the right has latched onto a tweet by Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis, a non-tenured academic at a Rhode Island university. 

They're of course trying to get him fired.  It's completely hypocritical, the substance of their complaint is preposterous and too often this shit works.  They stage a disingenuous freak out, some nervous school administrators over-react and someone's career is in tatters to the chortling glee of a bunch of sociopaths.

I have signed this open letter and emailed the University's mucky-mucks.  This post is to do my little bit to raise its profile.

Newtown: Another Expose on Conservative Ideological Bankruptcy

While liberals debate various forms of gun control, improvements to the psychiatric care system, and other actual measures to make slaughters like Newtown less likely, the abject bankruptcy of conservative thought is something to behold.

The Tea Party suggests more George Zimmermans are the answer.  Armed vigilante squads patrolling school zones.

Gun "academic" John Lott suggests abolishing even more gun laws, specifically gun-free school zones.

Libertarian law Professor Glenn Reynolds approvingly cites a pro-gun man who later shot and killed his wife in a botched (?) puerile gun stunt.

Supposed "reasonable" conservative Eugene Volokh says to arm the teachers.

Libertarian individualist Megan McArdle proposes a creative collectivist solution:  Train seven year olds to rush adult shooters and overpower them.

Is there anything one needs to say in response to such stupidity?  They can't honestly believe this egregious nonsense.  This is the utter and complete bankruptcy of conservativism and right wing thought in general.  It is incapable of responding to this, and thus can only provide risible self-satirizing ideas to cover its shame.

I wrote about this some time ago, and this is more of the same.  Conservativism has no useful answers to the problems of society.  They simply wish to leave problems to fester, where action would impose the least inconvenience or costs on themselves.  If some problem magically solves itself, they might be ok with that, but for anything else, we are simply left to endure what we must.   They simply don't really believe problems can be solved. 

There shouldn't be 40% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) willing to call themselves "conservatives" in the face of this.  This is shameful, and frankly disgusting.  The Emperor has no clothes.  People with ideas this monstrous need to experience sustained criticism and even scorn for refusing to rethink such bad ideas in the face of their self-evident horrific failure.  Teach children to rush at mass murderers?  Encourage more vigilantism?  What has to go wrong in your life that you even could entertain these thoughts, never mind publish it to millions in evident seriousness?

Right To Work For Less Coming to Ontario

My operating assumption is that Tim Hudak's "Progressive" Conservative party of Ontario will win the next Ontario election and form the next government.  I hope I'm wrong, but it's certainly the safe bet after events drove McGuinty out of power and Horwath's NDP haven't managed yet to convince voters they're a plausible non-crazy alternative to the PCs.

One depressing certainty of a Hudak administration would be a war on organized labour.  If Republian Governor Snyder can take on Michigan, Hudak can certainly bring some variant of "right to work for less" to Ontario.  Indeed, he has already (months ago) indicated he wants to:

“In many cases union leaders have become so powerful that many employees in effect have two bosses — their actual employer and the people who run their union.”

To correct that, he would like union membership to no longer be mandatory and would outlaw the “forced paycheque contributions” unionized workers make to political causes.

The arguments will be the same anti-union stuff from the US, but also a dollop of one particular anti-union argument that I really want to see die, it's the one that goes like this:

Unions were important back in the days of the robber barons and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, but now we have all these fancy labour laws that protect workers, and unions have served their purpose.

I really did see someone say something almost exactly like that, including the Triangle Shirtwaist reference. 

The first thing to say here is that we never stopped having Triangle Shirtwaist fires, we just simply outsourced them to Bangladesh, and other unregulated labour countries where such events are depressingly common.

Naturally these facilities are almost never directly managed by brand name Western companies, but they all make clothing for them, and I guarantee those companies' representatives have visited.  We're talking about places built without fire stairs, smoke alarms, sprinklers and where "fire drill" is a meaningless phrase.  I realize companies probably don't send health and safety experts to assess these places, but it doesn't take a Fire Marshall to realize the damn building has no fire safety measures whatsoever.  They don't care. 

They never did.  The only thing that ever makes them treat workers like humans and take the necessary steps to protect their health and safety are laws.  These laws were almost to a one, brought about by unions.

What happens when organized labour is beaten?  These laws are repealed.  No right wing leader ever campaigns on repealing the building fire code, but they'll talk in general terms about "burdensome regulations" and invent convoluted arbitrary schemes to gut workplace regulations.  Like Hudak has already done.

I'm not in a union and I never was, but I know it is not white collar people like me who make sure my office has a first aid kid, fire extinguishers and we hold an annual fire escape drill.  These are all "burdensome" regulations on my employer and every other.  They also save lives.  The Westray Mine disaster was really not that long ago.  It can and will happen again the weaker these laws are made (along with a host of other labour abuse ills, long forgotten which reemerge the moment the laws prohibiting them are repealed).

It's cliche, but Hudak is shaping up to make Harris look like a moderate.  Past conservative ideologues always seem like moderates but it might actually be true here.

Dirty Tricks Politics Goes Local With Rob Ford Ouster

In the wake of an Ontario Judge ruling that Rob Ford violated the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act and was subject to its mandatory penalty of being removed from office, I've been following the #TOpoli stream on Twitter (which behaves remarkably like the old usenet political debates used to).   So far I have seen two different "petition" sites for outraged Rob Ford supporters to sign.  Both are pretty dubious affairs and I think this deserves some notice, as a sign of the kind of dirty tricks politics that I think should be of concern to Torontonians as we face a likely by-election where Ford is almost certain to be the right's candidate.

1. wesupportford.ca

Democracy Denied!

We the people of Toronto and friends in the rest of Canada who support Rob Ford for Mayor of Toronto.

Our voice was shutdown by an activists who brought Rob Ford to court on a technicality for using the wrong letterhead to raise money for underprivileged kids sports.

Those elitist Ford haters wanted to get Ford anyway they could.

Now it's time to fight back. Let's bring Rob Ford back into the mayor's office with an even BIGGER vote margin.

Sign the pledge.

WE SUPPORT ROB FORD!

First off, this: "an activists who brought Rob Ford to court on a technicality for using the wrong letterhead to raise money for underprivileged kids sports" is a straight out lie (and grammatically atrocious) - Ford was brought to court for voting to save himself from losing $3K out of his own pocket, the most direct and obvious kind of conflict-of-interest there could possibly be.  The reason for that $3K fine has to do with his fundraising for a sports related charity, but that underlying matter is absolutely irrelevant to why he was brought to court.  

The fine could have been for anything, Ford clearly abused his powers as a member of City Council by voting on a matter in which he had a direct financial stake.  If a City Council member voted to cancel all their personal parking tickets, we would all easily understand this was an improper use of their power to vote in Council.  Ford's action was no different.  

Some other features of note in this "petition":

• You can't see who has signed it.  It lists a number of signers at the top right, but we must take the site's word for that.  In a democracy, petitioning is necessarily a public act, where citizens put their name to a particular sentiment for all to see.  That's the point.
• No one is claiming credit for this site.  Who started this petition?  Who will deliver it, and to what authorities?  For what outcome?
• If you sign it via Facebook, it appears to gather an amazing amount of information that the user probably does not intend to provide to the mystery owner of the site, from the source code of the site:user_about_me, user_activities, user_education_history, user_events,user_groups, user_hometown, user_interests,user_likes,user_location,user_notes, user_religion_politics, user_status, user_work_history, email,user_birthday, publish_stream, user_checkins, friends_about_me, friends_checkins, friends_education_history, friends_hometown, friends_interests, friends_likes, friends_location, friends_religion_politics, friends_status, friends_work_history, friends_birthday
  The above means that if you are friends with someone who signs this petition, your info will be provided too.  A better excuse to unfriend any "Ford nation" supporters I can't imagine.
• The site appears to be created by "actgrassy.com" which just screams "astroturf" - a service that creates fake "grass roots" sites for corporate interests.
• Whois records for the domain reveal no individual owner, registered through a service 

2. respectdemocracy.ca

On October 25, 2010, 383,501 Toronto citizens elected Mayor Rob Ford.

At a stroke, that election has been overturned. Why? A politically motivated technical objection over how he raised money for underprivileged kids.

Mayor Ford gained nothing. The City of Toronto lost nothing.

This is unfair, undemocratic, and unacceptable. We elected Mayor Ford to bring respect for taxpayers back to City Hall.

And he’s been doing just that in the face of strong opposition.

We stand with Mayor Ford. We support his appeal. And we support his re-election.

Please show your support for Mayor Ford by signing our petition.  

The similarity in the writing makes me pretty sure the same person or people are behind this too.  Again we have the outright lie about why Ford was in front of that Judge.  We have some fresh sophistry here about whether Ford "gained" anything or the city lost anything.  This isn't really a lie, because I think Ford and Ford supporters really have trouble understanding why Ford's fundraising letter being sent on City letterhead was improper.  Things don't have to require direct financial gains or losses to be a problem.  First of all, if I raise a big chunk of money for some charity, I do gain from that act, not financially, but in social capital.   Being able to say he raised X dollars for charity is good for Ford's political career.  As a public figure, he's likely to get some positive press over it.  He can put it on his campaign site (and he did).  Using the letterhead sends a message to the people who get the letter that Councillor Ford, a person who may be able to help you win some City contract someday, wants you to donate to his charity.  That's plenty of extra reason to give where you might otherwise have passed on this charity.  If Ford someday votes to give one of these donors some City contract, how can we be sure their generosity to his charity was not a factor in his decision?  How could it not be, councillors are human too, someone helps you or helps a cause you care about, you will be emotionally better disposed to them. 

This is all why it is better if public officials steer clear of this stuff.  Honestly, even if Ford didn't use his city letterhead, he is still a city councillor and his donors will know that.  If you got a letter from Stephen Harper asking for money for some charity he likes, how can you ignore the fact that he's the Prime Minister and that you'll gain in his esteem by being generous? 

Again, like the first:

• No one is claiming credit for organizing this, and whois for the domain is a dead end
• You can't see who has signed it, and there isn't even a counter to know how many have done so
• The youtube video linked is a new youtube account with only that video.  Comments and rating are disabled.
• I don't see a nefarious facebook scraping script here, but my HTML-fu is only mediocre.  There's a set of embedded .js scripts which I didn't pursue, so I don't know what happens when you "share" this page on the social media icons it advertises.

I've seen speculation that these "petitions" are just a good way of gathering Ford supporter info for his upcoming campaign.  This makes sense, but of course since no one is claiming ownership, it could be literally anyone.

This is something to watch.

Is Peter Kent Trying to Move Harper on Climate Change?

This starts with a tangent:  I've been trying to understand why the World Bank's climate report is big news.  It's just a rehash of long available science.  The World Bank is not my idea of some kind of recalcitrant climate denial shop, but obviously they have some reason to be concerned since the prospect of a global economic dark age is probably not part of their neoliberal dream.  Near as I can figure, the report is "news" because it might indicate the global elite are starting to take Climate Change seriously.  Up until now, I could only figure that the non-denialist global elites (say, like Bill Gates) were just ignoring climate change because they figured it was inevitable and they would likely be able to profit from it anyway, so they weren't much concerned with a couple hundred million people dying. 

But maybe they're realizing that climate change will be even worse than that.  Even they might actually suffer harmful effects.  So naturally I wondered if the World Bank report had anything to do with the timing of these surprisingly realistic remarks by Peter Kent, Canada's federal environment minister:

Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent thinks recent extreme weather events are forcing politicians in both Canada and the U.S. to focus on the issue of climate change, and that includes members of his Conservative government's cabinet.

[...]

"You don't have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it."

Ok, I'm not going to applaud simple admission of reality to the discourse, but it turns out Peter Kent may have been acting as something of a voice of sanity at Harper's cabinet and caucus tables:

A series of letters signed by Kent have revealed he has faced many questions from colleagues in recent months about whether Canada needs to take action to reduce consumption of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline that produce heat-trapping pollution and other toxic emissions in the atmosphere.

But in each of the letters, released through access to information legislation, Kent defended scientific evidence, while dismissing myths such as a suggestion from one Conservative that volcanoes were a major contributor to global warming.

“Even major volcanic eruptions emit only a very small fraction of carbon dioxide compared to annual human emissions,” Kent wrote in a Sept. 6, 2011 letter to one colleague that noted volcanic ash can cause short-term cooling in the atmosphere, lasting up to three years.

Obviously I'm reading tea leaves here, and this is the Environment minister who pulled Canada out of Kyoto, but this is better than having the MP who asked the volcano question as Environment minister.  That piece also quotes Green Party leader and sole MP Elizabeth May who raises a pertinent issue:

 “The biggest worry I have is (regarding) the member of his caucus who doesn’t understand climate science [...] is [...] the prime minister. That’s the biggest worry I have, because I cannot find any evidence that the prime minister of Canada has ever had a briefing on climate science from any of the prominent climate scientists in Canada, in or outside of government.”

Is Kent trying to move the system from within?  I doubt it will work, but who knows.  Conservatives seem to place primary value on the source of any information as a means of verifying whether it is true.  Having the Conservative Federal environment minister tell his colleagues that "no, volcanoes aren't causing it..." and so forth probably has better odds of at least persuading them.  They won't listen to the likes of egghead grant sucking climatologists, but they might listen to one of their own.

The Census is not 100% Accurate

Judging by reading the #tcot twitter stream ("top conservatives on twitter") and sites like this one (claiming 50,000 hits in less than 2 days online), it appears rather than learning that reality > ideological fantasy, conservatives are intstead opting to double-down on ideological fantasy and are busy constructing an even more elaborate set of voter-fraud theories. 

The leading attempt to empiricize their claims revolves around locating counties which have more registered voters than the US census bureau indicates their population should be in its county level data set.

The first and most obvious thing to point out to conservatives is that the number of registered voters in a county is not the number of Obama votes or even the number of total votes recorded in that county as I doubt more than a tiny number of US counties see 100% turnout in any election.  Typical of the right wing noise machine, they appear to be deliberately conflating these things, such as this RedState headline "Colorado Counties Have More Voters Than People" - the article itself is discussing voter registration but the headline is pretty clearly mendacious, indicative that these counties had more actual votes cast than people living there.

Putting aside the sadly typical right wing disingenuity, the deeper flaw of all this is that they're basing the number of "people" in these counties on the US census, as if the US census was some kind of perfect count of population without any error, and completely accurate even 2 years after the actual 2010 census attempted to count everyone (something that no census actually achieves).  The Census is not 100% accurate even the year it is taken, and every year becomes less accurate.  It is simply insufficient to conclude that because a county has more registered voters than the census shows as population that this is indicative of anything untoward. 

The Census attempts to estimate population changes at State and County level over time between actual censuses, but of course these are estimates and subject to error.  According to research into past censuses, the average of these errors in small counties can be as high as 8.8% per year, and for all counties, averages 3.5% to 4.6% in error.  That smaller counties are more subject to drift over time may appear counter intuitive, as it should seem simplier to accurately count the number of people in a small county, but the drift is more significant because small events like a single factory opening or closing can have an outsized effect on small counties.  A county that includes a big city is going to "average out" events that cause people to leave the county with events that cause people to enter it.

Consider all the variables and sources of error:

• Some people really don't want to be counted in the census.  This includes Michelle Bachman and the paranoid right, who were particularly concerned about the 2010 census seeing as it was being run under President Obama. 
• People die, and while national death rates are easy to measure, there's no reason to assume people die evenly at the county level.  A county with lots of elderly people is going to have a lot more deaths than a young county.
• People have babies, again unevenly.
• People move internally, and the US census isn't notified
• Legal immigration - numbers of immigrants can be measured, but what counties they settle in, not so much
• The 2008 economic collapse and housing crisis has made for a much higher deal of internal migration and churn as a much larger than normal group of people were evicted and foreclosed, forced to move in with relatives and so forth. 

We can go on, but the point is that the census is only a tool.  It may be useful as a guide to compare its numbers against what various counties recorded for voter registration is suggestive but hardly conclusive.  In fact, it is highly likely that the county data is in some sense more accurate since it is gathered every year.

As an amusing coda, I looked into several of the counties that RedState fixated on in Colorado, and as predicted above, in every case, the counties were low population places (all below 10,000 by the 2010 Census), and in every case I checked, had 2012 results that closely matched the county's 2008 Presidential results as far as two-party breakdown:  San Juan 2008 (Obama 53, McCain 44), San Juan 2012 (Obama 52, Romney 42), Mineral 2008 (Obama 43 McCain 54), Mineral 2012 (Obama 45 Romney 45), Gilpin 2008 (Obama 59 McCain 38), Gilpin 2012 (Obama 57 Romney 40), Hinsdale 2008 (Obama 39 McCain 56), Hinsdale 2012 (Obama 38 Romney 59).  Some trail of fraud there!  Each county voted pretty much the same way it did in 2008, and in only 1 did Obama actually increase his vote share. Amusingly, RedState contacted local officials in these states and they all gave explanations for the disparity in their registration figures to the census that comport to what I said above - transient populations, vacation homes, students, errors in the census. 

Because I've already wasted more time on this than I care to admit, I will also point and laugh at this bit, which notes that Obama lost EVERY state that has a photo ID requirement.  Turns out there are a huge sample of four states with such requirements:  Kansas, Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee.  Lucky those voter ID laws were there to stop Obama from winning Kansas, a state that last voted for a Democrat in 1964.  Al Gore couldn't win Tennessee in 2000, but surely voter fraud would have given it to Obama.  Indiana and Georgia are a little more interesting, in that Indiana did vote for Obama (barely) in 2008, but per polling no one expected him to win it in 2012.  Georgia was also suprisingly close in 2008, only going for McCain by 5% but there was no reason to think it could possibly have voted for Obama this time around.  Really at best these voter ID laws cemented a foregone conclusion by disenfranchising enough potential Obama supporters to merely pad Romney's margin in these states (but were probably consequential at the House and State level races).  The whole argument presumes that voter photo ID laws only prevent fraud that is presumed to exist.  But if they also (and more substantially) disenfranchise voters without easy access to photo ID, then they also succeed at keeping teetering "red" states more solidly red than they might otherwise be. 

Tim Hudak Proposes to End Overregulation with More Regulation

Ontario PC Leader, and most likely our next Premier Tim Hudak has released his predictable rehash of the Harris "common sense revolution."  Massive tax cuts are of course there, but it seems Mr. Hudak can't quite decide how best to shovel money at rich people, immediately under his top priority (groan) "Balance the Budget," which has absolutely no plan for doing that, we get "Tax Cuts Create Jobs":

Significantly reduce Ontario tax rates to attract investment, create jobs and expand the economy. Acknowledging Ontario’s debt crisis drastically reduces manoeuvring room to reduce taxes as much as we would like, use this Paths to Prosperity discussion paper to solicit the best advice from Ontario’s businesses, individuals, economists, think tanks and associations on which tax cut would have the most impact on job creation: the corporate income tax, the personal income tax or the provincial portion of the harmonized sales tax.

Why choose Mr. Hudak, you can cut all three!  After all, we are always on the right side of the Laffer curve and tax cuts always increase revenue.  I wonder if the orders of both groups to solicit opinions from (businesses first) and which taxes to cut (corporate taxes first) is a coincidence? 

Ok, I should be fair I'm quoting from the summary web page.  Perhaps the actual white paper PDF gets more heft and detail.  Let's see:

It’s time to be realistic. If you own an elephant and you only have enough rations to feed a horse, it’s time to ask, why do you need the elephant?

Well with logic like that, I'm convinced.   That's from the section on Balancing the Budget (p7), which reads like a high school essay written by an Objectivist.  I really like the random charts and stats which fail to account for relative size.  So PEI's $79M budget deficit looks soooo tiny compared to Ontario's $13B.  Ontario does have a larger deficit per capita, would it have been so hard to be at least minimally intellectually honest and present us some kind of per-capita figure?

 There's a few specific promises (like public sector wage cuts via a "freeze" which is a cut, and rigging arbitration to reliably side against unions) but mostly it is without numbers and the logic amounts to "we must cut government programs to avoid the future need to cut government programs."  

The chart on p8 actually states "Balanced budgets lead to economic growth" through some magic mechanism where the Producers can only create jobs and prosperty for us when they know government's balance sheet is black or something.  Why?  Do they fear eventual tax increases?  I guess that must be it, but I also know from conservatives that you can't raise taxes on the rich because they all just leave or hire super special accountants to get them out of it, so if that's true, why are they so stressed about future tax increases? 

Near the end we have the obligatory section on deregulation, and it's where the title comes from, we will solve over-regulation by regulation of regulations:

• Reduce the regulatory burden in Ontario by a minimum of 33 per cent (128,750 regulations) over three years. Individual ministers’ cabinet pay would be tied to accomplishing these targets. To prevent future regulatory creep, require that for every new regulation, at least one other must be removed.
• The Deputy Premier will be appointed the minister responsible for reducing Ontario’s over-regulation. All proposed regulations will be subject to the Deputy Premier’s approval. If the Deputy Premier believes a regulation is anti-competitive, he or she will be required to reject it.
• All regulations – without exception – will be costed by the Ministry of Finance. This costing would be made public. Require all proposed regulations that the Ministry of Finance finds have a net cost to be subject to a vote in the Legislature.

Ok, this is nuts.  In order:

• Where does this 33% target come from?  In three years?  This is what Republicans did in the Bush years, even staging press events where they cut up pages of regulation with chain saws.  The outcome was the New Depression of 2008-(not finished).  There is no way you can intelligently reduce regulatory burden this much this fast without unintended consequences.  
• So if someone invents a new chemical that causes birth defects, we can't regulate its use without repealing the regulation on some other chemical that causes birth defects?  Or repealing the 40 hour work week, or maybe we could stop requiring fire exits?  So many Triangle Shirtwaist fires to create, so little time!  After all, if we've repealed 33% of regulations we must really be down to a list of pretty defensible regulations.  All the easy win clearly outdated regulations will already be gone. 
• The Deputy Premier becomes the Czar of regulation?  And what does "anti-competitive" mean?  Paid vacation is anti-competitive in all sorts of ways, it doesn't mean Ontarians want to see it repealed.  I'm sure meat plants can pack a lot more meat without "anti-competitve" rules requiring hand washing and making sure the meat is stored at cold enough temperatures.  Every regulation is anti-competitive.  If they weren't, businesses wouldn't need laws to make them do these things.  Stopping the production line because someone lost a finger in the ground meat is anti-competitive, but I really want competition to stop at such times.   
• Costing regulations is actually not a terrible idea, but having the completely political Ministry of Finance do it makes this a joke.  How many regulations is a conservative Ministry of Finance going to find have a "net" cost?  Think they'll consider lives saved from regulating pollution in their math?  Unlikely.  A non-partisan body reporting to the Legislature, not to the Premier should do this. 

Really, the "repeal one rule for each new one you create" is the stupidest thing in there.

Despite my railing about this, I won't be shocked if this party, rehashing Harris' failed ideas and importing some fresh bad ideas from the US Republicans, forms the next Ontario government.  This document is radical, and I think that's the point.   They sense their long awaited chance is coming.  Hopefully they'll overplay their hand on the crazy ideas and we'll get an NDP government instead.  But they've done so twice already, so they might have learned to stop letting the crazy spill all over the place.  Or the public will simply have too much fatigue with the current government and will vote them in anyway. 

I'm far from a big fan of the current Ontario government, but McGuinty doesn't get nearly enough credit for Canada's relatively better economic performance in the wake of the economic crisis.  Ontario didn't implement stupid austerity in the midst of a damn depression, and at roughly 40% of Canada's GDP, Ontario not laying off tens of thousands of civil servants (like teachers) or cutting the safety net has to have been a big part of Canada weathering the storm.  Stephen Harper certainly owes his 2011 victory to Dalton McGuinty's (general) rejection of austerity in 2009 and 2010.