Let me see whether Wordpress will let me paste this whole short story in one entry. It’s about eight pages long, so I’m putting it below the fold.
Inspired by slacktivist’s commentary on the Left Behind series and by the movie Shaun of the Dead.
Read the rest of this entry »
gregdowney at Neuroanthropology blogs about Women on tests update: response to stress. Also, via bloggers at Neuroanthropology, Patient Voices: Bipolar Disorders Culture Shapes How People See Faces. chimpanzees use self-distraction to deal with impulsivity, Interrupting Napoleon on the Genetics of Mental Illness, and lots more links.
Moving beyond race in pharmacogenomics?
Latest Immigration and Assimilation Research.
Interesting chant there at the Ron Paul counterconvention.
Rachel of Rachel’s Tavern speaks out about attacks at Daily Kos on Palin’s teenage daughter (Obama, I’ll note, has asked people to back off on the daughter’s pregnancy).
Fred Vincy suggests seven Republican women who are qualified to be President, but it turns out six of the seven are pro-choice.
MONOGAMY GENE FOUND IN PEOPLE (…sort of): The New Scientist. (For some reason, this study appears to be confined to men.)
First, here’s a link to the Pacific Yearly Meeting Advices and Queries on Integrity and Personal Conduct. I excerpt here just the query part (there’s an advice part preceding it).
How do I strive to maintain the integrity of my inner and outer lives?
Do I act on my principles even when this entails difficult consequences?
Am I honest and truthful in all that I say and do, even when a compromise might be easier or more popular?
Am I reflective about the ways I gain my wealth and income and sensitive to their impacts on others?
Is my life so filled with the Spirit that I am free from the misuse of alcohol and other drugs, and of excesses of any kind?
Do we, in our Meeting, hold ourselves accountable to one another as do members of a healthy family?
I’m going to try (and hopefully be better than last month) to reflect on these queries, but for today I’m just posting them.
Comments are welcome.
I have been meaning to set myself the exercise of reflecting and blogging about the queries each month, but now that Eighth Month has passed, I realize I only really blogged about one of them. So, here is the full set of queries on simplicity that I didn’t blog about.
Do I live simply, and promote the right sharing of the world’s bounty?
Do I keep my life uncluttered with things and activities, avoiding commitments beyond my strength and light?
How do I maintain simplicity, moderation, and honesty in my speech, my manner of living, and my daily work?
Do I recognize when I have enough?
Is the life of our Meeting so ordered that it helps us to simplify our lives?
These queries always get a lot of discussion when we have our monthly reflection on the queries; a lot of us struggle with keeping our lives uncluttered with things, avoiding commitments beyond our strength and light, and the like. So I’m putting them here as a reminder of what I didn’t do. Tomorrow, I’ll blog the queries that actually apply for this month.
The part about simplicity and honesty in speech, I’ll note, is tied to Friends’ historic refusal to take oaths.
I don’t, obviously, believe that experience is absolutely the most important criterion in picking a President; if I did, I’d have been gone into the primaries favoring Biden or Richardson, not Obama. At least I’d have voted for Hillary Clinton - who can fairly be said to have more experience than Obama, both based on her being a Senator for a few years longer and based on her time as a particularly engaged First Lady.
But that’s not my view. I think that in particular cases, judgment and natural talent and skill can trump experience (and advisors supply whatever may be lacking on the experience end). I think I see that natural ability in Obama (and, actually, in other respects in Clinton as well, whom I’d happily have supported if she’d been the candidate instead of Obama).
But that means supporting Obama because a) he took the right position on Iraq, and b) both his biography and his campaign speak particularly well to me of his skill and judgment. That he’s black is, in my view, a nice bonus, but not a reason I’d have voted for him if I’d truly thought him less competent than his rivals.
On the whole matter of “identity politics” considerations, I don’t apologize a bit for thinking them worth considering. But only to a point. We’ve had white male identity politics for generations (what else is all that posturing we get every four years about which presidential candidate is a real man/can pose best with a gun/looks least silly in a tank?). The turnabout of wanting to see that white male barrier broken down (and, really, whether it’s a white woman or a black man who gets in first is of far less consequence to me than that the barrier be broken) is only right, and necessary, to get to the point where candidates’ abilities can be considered without regard to sex or race.
So, other things equal, I prefer a woman to a man, a black person to a white person, where that barrier hasn’t yet fallen. And if my only choices for President were, say, Condi Rice vs. a white man with equivalent experience and equivalent positions, I’d vote for Condi Rice. (I don’t sit out elections, even if I don’t agree with any of my available choices. That said, I still wouldn’t, of course, vote for Condi Rice - my suggestion in the other post was most that she lined up with McCain’s stated values than that she lines up with mine.) The same, obviously, applies to Sarah Palin - having an election in which at least one barrier is broken, whichever candidate wins, has some benefits (however modest).
But those benefits aren’t reason enough to rejoice in a candidate with slender experience; for that, you need to make the case that the candidate’s judgment, skill, and positions are sufficiently exceptionally good that they make up for the experience deficit. So, Palin may be cause to celebrate if she brings to the table something you strongly want - if, for example, you’re as adamantly pro-life as she is - but not if (like most HRC supporters) you disagree with her most firmly held positions. If people are voting intelligently, she ought to boost McCain’s support among the base, but shrink it among those Democrats who think Obama insufficiently feminist. And the main case for Palin has to be (just as it would be for HRC, or Sebellius, and just as it should be for Obama) a defense of her actual accomplishments; the woman vice president thing can’t weigh too heavily in judging relative merits unless those relative merits are quite close. So, the case that has to be made for Palin involves her skill, judgment, and values, not so much her being female.
Making that case, though, inevitably undercuts the case McCain has been making that experience should, ipso facto, lead you to vote for him - obviously he doesn’t think experience trumps everything, or he wouldn’t have picked someone with so limited experience to become president if he dies. It follows that he needs to make the case more that his policies would be better for the country than those of Obama, and experience becomes a more secondary consideration.
As far as I can tell, the main thing Palin brings to the table is really vehement pro-life convictions; on other national issues (foreign policy ones in particular), her views seem not particularly well formed.
Obama’s speech: the video and the transcript. (My thoughts, as you’d expect - cool speech, and cool coincidence that it came on the 45th anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.)
Checking Kenyan blogs for the reaction to the speech (not surprisingly, it’s positive), I found posts on Emerging Mobile Technology Opportunities and how Masai find cell phones useful, “especially during cattle raids or when communicating with herders in the field.”
The resident Alaskan blogger at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has some Quick Thoughts on Palin.
Writing Raven, the blogger at Alaska Real, has been in Denver for the Democratic convention, but also has lots of posts now about Sarah Palin.
Me, I think he’d have done much better to go for Condi Rice - among others. Sure, that would have meant doubling down on reminders of an unpopular war, but with McCain as the candidate, that’s already a given. At least with Rice, he could have also doubled down on the “experience” argument, rather than totally undercutting it by putting someone a heartbeat away from the presidency who’s actually less experienced (and less knowledgeable about foreign policy) than the candidate he’s been busily attacking as too inexperienced to be president.
Because I’m short of time before work today, and because I like to at least listen to some of the songs, I’m making it Friday Random Three today:
“Lady of the Harbor” is perhaps my favorite Si Kahn song, about that promise on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor,” and what it means. He sings in the first verse about his own grandfather, a “frightened Jewish refugee” from Lithuania, in the second verse about a ship of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany which found no refuge here or anywhere, and went back to Germany and eventual death, and in the third asks the question whether we’ll heed those words on the Statue of Liberty today (those same words being the refrain).
I don’t often think of myself as a patriot - I’m not, at any rate, a patriot of the “these colors don’t run” kind, not fond of expressions of patriotism that make of it macho belligerence. One of my favorite Quaker hymns is the one that begins “This is my land, oh God of all the nations,” and continues later with “But other hearts, in other lands are beating, with hopes and dreams as true and fair as mine.”
But I do have my own kind of love for my country, and what I love are these things: the Bill of Rights, the words on the Statue of Liberty, and the welcome put out to people from many countries to grow new roots here. So, to the extent that I’m any kind of patriot, it’s Si Kahn’s song that represents the sort of patriotism that I can believe in - the kind that would keep my country living up to those words.
Links:
Joel found this account by someone who was a POW with John McCain on why he doesn’t believe he should be President. Not a swift boating (there’s a clip circulating on Youtube, by people who didn’t know McCain, that does look to both of us more like Swift Boating), as he acknowledges McCain’s heroism (even if as part of a larger group) in the Hanoi Hilton
John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did….
just goes on to say why he still thinks McCain has qualities that wouldn’t be suitable in a President (hotheadedness, wrong policies, etc.).
I’ve been having fun looking through the TV tropes site - moving at the speed of plot, applied phlebotinum, etc.
Del Martin died at the age of 87, two months after finally marrying her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon. Martin and Lyon, as long time lesbian activists, were selected as the first same-sex couple to wed, several years ago when Gavin Newsom was doing weddings in San Francisco. Then, after that set of weddings were invalidated by the California Supreme Court, they again became the first same-sex couple to wed once that same court ruled same-sex marriage legal in California.
I didn’t get very far in blogging the “Is Agile QA an Oxymoron?” talk yesterday, so here are a few notes on that talk before I go on to Saturday’s talks:
QA Best Practices Never To Forget
Abnormal variation causes chronic waste
85% of problems come from bad processes, not poor performers
SEI: Stable, Predictable, Repeatable, Reliable
Need to do a good business requirements analysis, even for Agile
Test-Driven Development
Beef up inspection process at requirements and design level
Agile Best Practices
You need strong management support, committed user stakeholders, sustained user involvement, colocation, and a team size of 7 plus or minus 2.
Now for Saturday’s talks.
First keynote was Joel Manfredo, Principal of Acies Consulting Group, on “2008 Trends - Today’s Top Technologies.” This one pulled together reports from Morgan Stanley, McKinsley, Gartner, and Forrester on the top technical trends. Both Gartner and Forrester had Green IT as a top trend, and every one of the four had some version of what Manfredo called Web 2.0, so he talked about these two trends in more detail.
I noticed mobile on Morgan Stanley’s list, which I know is big in Africa; a lot of the stuff that gets written about by Timbuktu Chronicles involves new mobile applications. (By the way, recent computer related items on Timbuktu Chronicles: Babawatoto, “an e-commerce company that allows the Kenyan Diaspora to meet the needs of their family at home without the need for money transfer services,” and Donatebandwidth.) Manfredo said China is ahead of us in mobile update. Other non-US leaders: the Philippines leads in microtransactions, and Japan in mobile payments.
Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies: starts with rising expectations, then disillusionment, then climbs more slowly to a new plateau. Green IT was placed at the peak of inflated expectations, corporate blogging down in the trough of disillusionment, and basic Web services on the plateau of productivity after the slope of enlightenment.
Web 2.0: The web as a platform, participation, open source, perpetual beta.
Tracks I attended: GIS: Enabling Spatial Thinking (sparsely attended, but cool, involved applying geographical thinking to cases ranging from a cholera epidemic to the capture of a pedophile in Norway), and “What’s Wrong with Agile” (as you can see, Agile’s a recurrent theme here). That speaker, Paul Trompeter, recommended Michael Fagin from IBM as a reference; my notes also say “Read up on psychosocial stuff.”
Next key note: Dianne Gubin, President of TechExec Partners, Inc., on “Recession Proofing Your Career In A Really Tough Economy.” If you’re laid off, expect 1 month of job search time for every $10,000 you hope to earn. Web sites recommended included indeed.com and simplyjobs.com. Also, linkedin.com is the big place recruiters look these days. Other career advice about making yourself easy to work with, continuing your education, expanding your professional network, etc.
Next two tracks that I picked:
Grabbing Authority, by Thomas Cutting. Types of authority include positional (your role in the organization), referent (people like you), reward/punishment, and expert. Discussed how to grab and use each type.
Chris Petrou, on Test Automation (this is actually what I do for a living).
Keyword Driven Framework
GUI Layer
GUI Unit Tests
Clean Front End
Static Test Validation
Automated Workflow
Instant Reports
Building Blocks
Intelligent Record Selection
Data Driven Tests
Fast Tracking - Automated Tests
The Southland Technology Conference, the conference I went to Friday and Saturday of last week, is an annual conference sponsored by local quality assurance and project management groups (where “local” means Orange County, Los Angeles, and the Inland Empire). This is its ninth year. Last year, it was upgraded from a one day conference to a two day conference, and this year it was upgraded again, this time by getting more experienced speakers.
I think the PowerPoint slides for the speaker presentations will be up on the web site, so I won’t blog my notes straight, since some of them simply repeat things that will be on the slides.
Vendor descriptions: There were thirteen vendors. These broke down into several categories: the ones that provided software tools, the ones that provided people to do a particular job, and the ones that provided education or training (including UCI). The sponsoring organizations also all had tables in the vendor room.
Talks:
The first keynote address was Kevin Parikh, CEO of Avasant, with “Outsourcing in 2020: A Forward Looking Perspective.” Avasant is a management company, focused on outsourcing. “In 2020, organizations will ‘right-source’ to locations.” One slide showed the different countries’ specialties: Israel for high end software and learning systems, China for embedded software and hardware solutions, India for application outsourcing and ITO, BPO, and contact centers, etc. Near term prospects could be found in Ireland, Russia, the Philippines, Canada, and Mexico, and longer term prospects in South Africa, Poland, and several Latin American countries. In 2020, the Western world will be competing with new market entrants - India, China, and Brazil. In 2020, Software as a Service will become the predominant delivery model for the application industry (SaaS also showed up in other talks as a trend). The pace of outsourcing: IBM increased from 3000 in India to 7300 in India in three years. However, “In 2020 organizations will focus on business innovation and keep critical skills in house.”
For the first parallel track, I went to Paul Hodgetts, the CEO of Agile Logic, who talked about “The Keys to Success with Agile Processes - Lessons Learned and Best Practices.” First we got where Agile came from. Ad Hoc software development -> Activities -> Waterfall -> Spiral -> Iterative/Incremental -> Evolutionary -> Lean -> Agile. All Agile talks at some point wind up contrasting Agile with the Waterfall model. The Warerfall model is a traditional software development model where you go through certain stages - first Requirements, then Design, then Coding, then Testing, etc. You can have some variation in how you subdivide things, for different numbers of stages, but all of them assume that you’re supposed to have fully completed one stage before you move on to the next. Agile, in contrast, assumes that you have smaller cycles, where you come up with some kind of functional prototype of the features you’re supplying, and then you go through iterations where you keep refining what you want. You release in smaller increments, adapt to change, and your team is supposed to be working together in a collaborative way and continually improving your process. This particular Agile presentation focused a lot on Scrum, which is a particular way of implementing Agile (as opposed to, say, Extreme Programming, another way of implementing Agile that the speaker considered less broadly usable and more specific to particular kinds of environments). Scrum involves Daily Scrum meetings, 30 day sprints, and stories (which are sort of like subsets of use cases).
Next track: I went to Mike Sanders, PMP of Southern California Edison, who talked about “Advanced Multitasking, Do More, Work Less, Be Happy.” The talk began with a story about him driving down a highway while on two cell phone conference calls (separate cell phones, one Bluetooth in each ear), thinking about a presentation, and eating a banana - and thinking what a peak of multitasking he’d reached, and how he needed to tell the whole world about it. I couldn’t help thinking of the descriptions I’ve heard of mania - it wouldn’t have felt out of place for the next words to be, “and then I discovered lithium.” But of course the wild example was the set up about how to do multitasking wrong, how doing too many things at once means getting less done, being less happy, etc. Doing multitasking right involves knowing that you’re actually task switching, and stuff like taking time, when letting go of a task, to record where you are and any information you’ll need when picking up the task again. This talk was a participatory one, where we were encouraged to put aside our notebooks in favor of responding.
Second Friday keynote: Eddie Hartman, cofounder, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer of LegalZoom, talked about the founding of that company, and “The things you have to do to get a company started vs. the things you have to do to make a company great.” The thing they did to get the company started was to be hungrier than everyone else, work long hours, and take process shortcuts (”planning is for dummies”). The thing they needed to do to keep the company working over the long haul was relearn the value of process.
Next track: I went to Cathy Moran, talking about “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” The session objective was to “Motivate and enable you to discuss ‘Green Wave’ opportunities.” We need to reduce emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. As it stands we are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Middle East to harm the environment. A state of the art or best practice scenario could dramatically reduce energy consumption, by 2012, from what it would be if current trends continued (cue visual graph showing energy consumption either continuing to rise or going down, depending on what practices you adopt). Various green choices were discussed, including turning computers off at night, high efficiency technologies, virtualization and server consolidation, recycling, etc.
Last track on Friday: I listened to Lois Zells, consultant, talking about “Is Agile QA an Oxymoron?” She makes much of her money as an expert witness in failed software litigation cases that wind up in court. Save for a few Y2K cases, all of these cases have involved iterative software development. The presentation discussed best practices for QA, and for Agile development, and how to avoid being one of those cases of failed software development.
More tomorrow.
I’ll have a post up tomorrow on the conference I went to on Friday and Saturday. In the meantime, here are some links.
Kyle Payne is being sent to jail.
Joe Biden, American Racism, and Optimism.
Election 2008: Race Is More Than Black and White.
Joe Biden: Obama’s Catholic gamble?
Jerome Corsi: Politician-Basher’s White Supremacist Ties Revisited.
Comparative Deaths in Television and Film.
Remember Zimbabwe? - An update on the continuing catastrophe.
News of the Weird: Man Uses Barbie Fishing Rod To Land Record Catfish.
Role of Emotions in Brain Function.
Kenya Pundit on KNHCR report on post-election violence. (Actually, this link is from a couple of weeks ago, but I think I forgot to link it at the time.)
Fr. Gawain has A thought about priests, sex, and money.
So, Biden’s a mixed bag like most anyone Obama could have picked. And, predictably, some progressive bloggers are relatively satisfied, but others not so much. Voted for the bankruptcy bill, on the one hand. Has among his major legislative achievements the Violence Against Women Act, on the other. Etc.
Count me among those who are relatively satisfied. Take foreign policy. Years of experience and expertise, knowledge of wonky details - good. Vote for the Iraq War - not so good. Look, I’m a Quaker. Obviously Biden’s way more hawkish than I am. I never thought the Iraq War made sense even from a just war perspective, let alone a Quaker one. But, more hawkish than I am though Biden is, he’s still someone with a tolerably sober knowledge of foreign policy who has priorities and doesn’t uniformly wildly overreact to every darn foreign policy event. Unlike McCain, he understands that we can’t treat Russia and Iran and Iraq and North Korea and Al Qaeda all as the biggest crisis ever - we have to pick and choose. Moreover, he’s willing to actually forthrightly take up the argument on foreign policy with the Republicans - he doesn’t roll over and expect the electorate to treat foreign policy as his weak spot.
Given that I wasn’t going to see anyone remotely as dovish as me in the VP slot, I’m glad at least to see a centrist who’s both knowledgeable and prepared to aggressively argue the case against a foreign policy that really goes overboard in the trigger happy direction.
Yesterday I spent all day at a work related conference in Long Beach, where I will be again today - more blogging about the actual conference later. During a break in the conference, though, I went for a walk around the hotel, and ran into a film crew for a TV show. After I’d been shooed away from the filming area, another bystander pointed out to me where they’d crashed two cars in the street, and described how he’d watched one car pass right by the other a few times, before the actual crash.
I came back after the last conference session of the day. By this time, there were a couple of actors by the crashed cars, being filmed as the man repeatedly removed the woman from the car. After I’d been standing on the corner watching for a few takes, in a small knot of people, someone came and told us to move away, down the street, to a small coffee shop. When I arrived at the coffee shop, I discovered that I’d wound up among the extras - a couple of cops and a couple of paramedics. They were waiting for their scene. I sat and talked with them for a while. One paramedic was full of gossip about how bad Shannon Dougherty was to work with, but I suspect it may have been from the same tabloids where everyone can read such gossip - it definitely wasn’t that she had worked with Dougherty personally. I asked the extras how you get such a job; they said you sign up with Central Casting in Burbank. They speculated on whether they could order things from the coffee shop on the TV show’s tab, but decided not to venture it. Finally, someone showed up, turned to me, and said, “Is she supposed to be in this?” One of the extras explained that I just needed to get to my car, and I was allowed back through to the parking lot and left.
We got the text message earlier this morning. A page has been set up for Obama supporters to send personal notes welcoming Biden as VP candidate.
McCain’s been getting a lot of flack for his failure to remember how many houses he has.
He deserves it. Attempts to paint the other candidate as an out of touch elitist when you’re actually as rich as he is are common place - e.g. Bush vs. Kerry, where we were supposed to believe Bush was the common man and Kerry the elite snob when they’d both been pretty much elite their whole lives. It’s all the more egregious, though, when you’re the one who was a son and grandson of admirals who then married a rich heiress, while your opponent is the one who grew up in modest circumstances as the son of a single mother, was once on food stamps as a child, went to high school and college on scholarship, just finished paying off his college loans in his forties, and only within the past few years has made seriously high incomes. Not saying Obama isn’t rich and elite - of course he is, now, like anyone who ever has a serious shot at the presidency in this country. But even last year, the first year his reported household income broke a million, he was still down in the $4 million or so range that McCain has said he considers not quite rich yet. Cindy’s money places McCain above that “middle class millionaire” income range, and has made him rich by any normal person’s standards for a long time now.
But what this brings to mind, for me, is the strangeness of the things we’re often asked to think of, in election year, as elitist. John Kerry really had been born to the upper class - but what we were asked to mock, as elitist, was that exotic elite sport of - windsurfing? Is it just being near the surf in California that makes me think it very strange to see wind surfing as an elite sport? Is there really a large swathe of people in the Midwest who think a sailboard is either incredibly expensive or really hard to store?
This year it’s apparently supposed to be incredibly elite to know what arugula is, and to vacation in Hawaii - even when your grandparents were born there, and still live there.
Thing is, I know I’m not rich - a single family income from software quality assurance only suffices to make you middle class. I live in a not so luxury condo. But people in my class windsurf, occasionally eat arugula, and save up occasionally for a vacation in Hawaii (more than occasionally, when they actually have family in Hawaii). I myself, next month, will be flying East to visit my mother in Maine (on frequent flyer miles, because I try to travel thrifty), at which point I’ll be at a (small and rocky) private beach that happens to be right next to the house where my mother actually lives. While in Maine, I’ll probably sail a bit. All these things are normal to me, and middle class.
Not so normal - stuff like being unaccustomed to a grocery scanner (as Bush was), not being able to remember when you last pumped your gas, or not being so sure how many houses you own.
In lieu of my usual Friday random ten, I give you William Shatner, singing “Common People.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates asks for comments on McCain’s and Obama’s tax plans (Obama’s economic advisors summarize his plan here.)
Neither plan, of course, would ever make it into law intact. Unlike foreign policy, where presidents have a very free hand, tax policy is an area where Congress is liable to heavily alter any President’s proposal. McCain in particular is unlikely to get his full plan through a Democratic Congress, but even Obama would face a Congress with its own ideas about tax policy.
McCain’s plan looks as if it pretty much has tax cuts across the board, while Obama’s has tax cuts for middle class and lower, with tax increases for the rich. Consistent with Obama’s remarks at Saddleback (where he gave $150,000 a year as his number for no longer being middle class, and $250,000 a year as his number for actually being rich), the richer people who get the tax increases are, in this case, those making over $250,000.
My knowledge of economics is limited - I’ve read a bit but never taken any actual economics courses. It’s my understanding, though, that there is a Keynesian argument for running deficits temporarily in a recession - you either cut taxes or increase spending (e.g. Roosevelt’s WPA) to provide a stimulus - but that running deficits long term is a really bad thing. So, one concern about McCain’s budget is that he seems to want to make certain tax cuts permanent without enough spending cuts to actually balance the budget.
Obama’s tax plan is clearly more progressive than McCain’s (where “progressive” means “the rich are taxed more” and “regressive” means “the poor are taxed more” - I’m not using “progressive” as a synonym for leaning left). His tax cuts would be more focused on people with a lower income. TNC’s commenters argue that tax cuts focused on people who make less money are more likely to stimulate the economy because, the less money you make, the more likely you are to go out and spend it.
Going beyond the broad outlines of the two plans, there’s one specific aspect of McCain’s plan that concerns me. From the comparitive chart that TNC linked, I see, on Obama’s side, “Income-related federal tax subsidies for health insurance,” and on McCain’s side, “Replace exclusion from income for employer sponsored health insurance with refundable credit of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families.”
My concern here is that by replacing our current system of simply not taxing health insurance with a more complicated one involving a refundable credit, McCain sets up a situation where opting into employer sponsored health insurance may come to be more of a financial liability than it now is. In the absence of the sort of government sponsored single payer systems that other countries have, employer sponsored health insurance is how the US ensures that most people have health insurance (though many are still uninsured).
Sometimes we get insurance automatically by being a full time permanent employee. But sometimes we get choices of whether to opt in, particularly for family members. For example, at my company we have a cafeteria benefits system, where once a year there’s an open enrollment period, and we get to choose which things to opt in for. Do I want to insure my husband? Do I go POS or PPO on my health plan? Do I want to get more disability insurance than the company automatically gives me, or more life insurance, or perhaps put money in a 401k?
The more health insurance looks like a liability, the more likely it is that young and healthy people will opt out when they can. So, at my company, they’d still be stuck with my chronically ill husband - no way am I missing a chance to put him on health insurance - but other people’s healthy husbands and wives disappear from the plan. As skylanda at Echidne of the Snakes (who is guest blogging for fifteen days on health care reform) points out, young and healthy people opting out of health insurance already contribute to our health care crisis.
For the generations known as “X” and “Y”, this is not an unfamiliar story. Most of my friends went uninsured for some period of time, some by choice and some because they could not find or afford coverage. For the most part, it’s a gamble, but a fairly safe one….
Let’s set aside for a moment the disastrous consequence for the unlucky few opt-outs who get sick enough to go to the emergency department - even once - without insurance (mostly because the reverberating effect of a single ER bill on credit, savings, and ability to access future care for years down the line is topic for an entire other post). This is about the effect of opt-outs who successfully navigate the uninsured years without incident….
In America today, we’re watching the collision of two inexorable forces: the aging of the baby boomers out of their working years, and the normalization of the opt-out phenomenon among the young and healthy. The astronomical rise in premiums - twice the rate of inflation in recent years - can be attributed to a multitude of phenomenon, but this is one of them: at a time when a large proportion of the population is drawing heavier and heavier services, the young and healthy are contributing less and less to the risk pool. Not necessarily because they don’t want to (because really, who wants be to uninsured?), but because barriers are so high to entry into the pool. There is nowhere good this path can go.
The last thing we need is to encourage more young and healthy people to think of health insurance as too expensive to bother with. As skylanda says, “we need to start treating health coverage like the public good that it is.” That means that counting employer sponsored health insurance as taxable income is making a change in exactly the wrong direction.
Other campaign-related links: Daisy comments on the Saddleback Church Civil Forum in Why Rick Warren is on my last good nerve.
Joel’s signed up to be one of the people getting the text message about Obama’s VP pick (I just signed my email address up, not my cell phone).
Saddleback Church, liberal bloggers have been saying, is McCain’s base, a forum which could be expected to favor him over McCain.
Saddleback Church, some conservative bloggers grumbled before the forum, is liberal, not mainstream evangelical, a church that could be expected to be friendly to Obama - and wasn’t Rick Warren preparing questions about poverty and global warming that would showcase Obama’s strengths rather than McCain’s?
As a neighbor of Saddleback Church, though not someone who has visited and seen it first hand, I’d say the liberal bloggers have been closer to the truth. Let’s start with the neighborhood. We’re in Orange County, easily the most conservative place I’ve lived (I had previously lived in the suburbs of New York City, and then in Silicon Valley). The church draws from a largely white, largely well off section of Orange County - did you see the part of the forum where Obama said that people making under $150,000 would count as middle class, and Rick Warren joked back that in this area, they’d be poor? That’s not actually true - the average income per household in Saddleback’s zip code is $68,311* - but there’s an element of truth to it. When you consider that the average includes some retired people and some single income households, well, a married couple with a household income of over $150,000 probably isn’t super rare in the Saddleback congregation. Less rare, anyway, than in some other areas.
Saddleback Church itself strikes me as a largely conservative church, with perhaps a few streaks of liberalism. It’s not what I’d think of as hard core religious right - it has its HIV/AIDS initiative (the description for which includes condoms as a preventive measure - after abstinence and monogamy, of course, and presumably less preferred by the church). The director of that initiative speaks of the stigma and shame of AIDS. The church’s activities have included walking to raise money related to AIDS, assembling web resources, and organizing conferences (at one of which Obama, along with Sen. Sam Brownback, spoke).
Other charitable activites of the church - and there are many, as fits such a large church - range from their involvement in post-fire assistance in last year’s fires to their post-abortion support group, which offers “a biblically-based process for women who have had an abortion to work through the guilt, pain, anger, and ultimately, to forgiveness of others and, most importantly, of themselves.”
Bumper stickers in my neighborhood tend conservative, and the ones on the churches that sport the Saddleback Church car bumper sticker are no exception. I’ve often seen such cars sport flags and other patriotic stickers (though the really ugly varieties of patriotic bumper sticker - such as the “I love Gitmo” one - I haven’t seen alongside their “You Matter to God” one).
So, on the whole, it was always a forum to which Obama could make some appeal - I’m sure being able to naturally quote Matthew on “the least of these” didn’t hurt, and he’ll likely get more votes from the congregation than Kerry did - but one where, if he’d won out over McCain, I’d really be anticipating a blow out victory for him in the fall.
Other stuff:
There’s been some talk on other blogs about the fact that McCain wasn’t really in a “cone of silence” while Obama was speaking, but was, in fact, for at least part of the time, in his car on the way there, and easily able to listen on the radio if he so chose. I give Rick Warren the benefit of the doubt here; “cone of silence” sounds to me more like a joke than an actual claim that he’s hermetically sealed McCain off. Most of all, though, “cone of silence” sounds to me like a really cool name for a magic item in a fantasy role playing game. Whatever it does, I want one.
I also have a small correction to yesterday’s post. I said McCain cited military men for his response to the wisest people question. Actually he led with a military man, and cited all Republicans. It’s still true that Obama’s answer was more geared toward bipartisanship than McCain’s, and that McCain in general had a military focus to his answers.
The VP speculation now is leaning toward Biden - I’m not sure why, as from where I sit the calculations that lead to people pronouncing now one person, and now another, as Obama’s likely choice are a mystery. But I do agree with Josh Marshall that, among the people currently touted as being likely to be chosen, Biden wouldn’t be a bad choice. (I like Sebellius, too, but for some reason not apparent to me, people aren’t betting on her now, but on Biden, Bayh, or Kaine, and of those three, I prefer Biden.) Scott Lemieux and Jonathan Cohn make a case for Biden.
And a link totally unrelated to politics: Five Puppies and a Sex Slave. A Mormon sex slave. And a three-legged horse.
* I don’t post my own income on this blog, since if any employer should ever lure me away from my current job, I want them to pay me as much money as possible. But suffice it to say that I make enough to place us above that average household income, enough that, if I had a husband who made as much as me rather than one who’s too sick to work, we’d pass Obama’s $150,000 mark, but not nearly enough to pass that mark on my income alone. And not enough to feel rich as a single income family with extra medical bills - though I grant that I’m lucky to be able to handle those bills better than many, and still have the condo and the two cars and the money for the couple thousand we’ve had to spend on repairs this year.
Global Comment has a war diary from the last couple of weeks in Georgia.
I had hoped to be able to get into the Saddleback Church forum, seeing as it happened right down the hill from my house. But trying the blogger requesting a press pass route involved more chutzpah than I was willing to muster, as a Z list blogger, so my chances rested on the general admission tickets, of which Saddleback promised information last Wednesday. Last Wednesday, the information came - already sold out to church members.
Saddleback Church is a phenomenon in itself, one of the biggest megachurches in the country, and, if part of the reason I would have wanted to go to the forum was, of course, to see Obama and McCain, the other part would have been to get a feel for my giant neighborhood church. Though I’ve lived right up the hill from it for nine years now, I’ve never actually set foot in it - I’m not a megachurch person, and I’m not about to forgo my Quaker meeting for their Sunday services. It’s a very visible presence in the neighborhood, though, with many cars sporting its “You Matter to God” bumper stickers. The forum also made a visible difference in the neighborhood - fire fighters and police were out in force, and traffic was being redirected in certain places.
Having missed my chance to see it in person, I did not watch on TV, but rather caught the Youtube snippets and the transcripts afterwards. I like following debates by reading transcripts, since it makes it easy to lay out the candidates’ answers side by side and compare - though I suppose there’s something to seeing delivery as well (Youtube helps with that).
Looking up the transcripts led me to this blog post by an Orange County resident more conservative than me, who favors McCain.
My thoughts? I’ll write Briefly: neither candidate committed any campaign-ending gaffes, but I think McCain gained more from the forum than Barack Obama.
Obama’s likability shines through, but he comes across (as I said on the above program) like a guy who is continually in the process of reconsidering what he thinks. He spoke long and smoothly but without really saying very much of anything. In other words, he didn’t come across as a decisive Commander-in-Chief, but more of an academic bull-session type.
McCain, on the other hand, met the questions head on and answered them directly. He came across as a man who knows what he thinks, believes he is right and will lead according to those beliefs.
My first thought: Hey, McCain supporters, make up your collective minds - is Obama unfit to be president because he’s too cocky and overconfident, or because he’s not confident enough and indecisive?
Second thought: Actually, if I read the transcripts, I find that Obama did say plenty, and was quite clear and specific in most of his answers - smooth words that fail to say anything don’t describe his responses at all. There is, though, a difference in style between Obama’s and McCain’s answers. McCain’s were shorter, Obama’s did have more of a thinking things through quality, and more of a sense of setting him up as someone with bipartisan ability to reach across the aisle. For example, on the wise people question, Obama started with his wife, for being not just wise but honest enough to get in his face when he was wrong, and his grandmother, and then proceeded to name people from both parties in the Senate (such as Dick Lugar). McCain listed strictly military men. McCain, as you might expect, mined his military record, managing to work in two anecdotes from his time in the Hanoi Hilton in answers to two different questions. Obama’s personal references were to his Hawaii childhood and white grandparents. These personal frames tend to set McCain up as brave and heroic, and Obama up as someone who can bridge gaps.
I thought Obama was more straightforward on the “who is rich” question, and that McCain kind of dodged it. Of course, part of that is that I don’t actually believe Republican “I won’t raise your taxes ever” talk. It reminds me of Bush’s “Read my lips,” and of times when Republicans have closed some tax loophole that happened to be more favorable to poorer people, and claimed that doing so wasn’t really a tax increase (even though it involved a set of people who’d paid less taxes now paying more out of money they’d earned). McCain may be averse to raising taxes, but like any politician he’ll probably do it if he feels he needs to, and so his views on the best tax structure do matter, as well as his views on the right amount to tax people.
McCain does indeed come across as “a man who knows what he thinks, believes he is right and will lead according to those beliefs” - but that’s only an advantage if he actually is right on key things. I’m not particularly interested in having a leader be decisively wrong - as I think McCain is, on foreign policy. Neither candidate is exactly a Quaker, but between the two, Obama seems the one who will examine carefully enough to count the cost before committing our military, and McCain the one more likely to be rash and overreach.
Poor McCain. It must be hard coming up with material to attack Obama, as he’s now been forced to resort to going after him for - taking his shirt off, on a beach, while vacationing in Hawaii.
The actual Reuters headline is (slow news day, Reuters?): “Obama Takes Shirt Off Again, Goes Body Surfing In Hawaii.” And then, having teased with a headline more suitable for People magazine, Reuters disappoints - no topless photos at all. What are you thinking, Reuters? Fortunately, Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times is more obliging. Get your presidential candidate eye candy here.
This is all supposed to persuade me to vote against Obama because, um, I’m not sure why. As Matt Yglesias says
First we learned that real men don’t inflate the tires on their car properly, and now the RNC is mocking Barack Obama for taking his shirt off at the beach. Or maybe they think the problematic thing here is that he likes to vacation at the beach during the summer? Or something. But this all has at least the superficial appearance of excruciatingly normal behavior. What will be next — attacking Obama for shaving in the morning? Brushing his teeth?
No, really, I think I do get it. Obama is good looking. Hot chicks dig him. Beware of the good looking guy. And, I’ll admit, to my own personal taste, Obama’s the best looking presidential candidate of my lifetime. And the sexiest. There, I said it. This is supposed to make me wary of him why, exactly?
Is it because some other woman is bound to snag him first? Wait. Some other woman already did, and has been wearing his ring for the past sixteen years. So sorry I lost you, Obama, but I think I’m over it by now.
It’s not, after all, as if I find you the sexiest celeb on the planet. That would be this guy. These guys are also not bad - especially the last guy. Sorry Obama, when it comes to looks, you’re just not up there with Liu Xiang of China. There are even a few white guys who have you beat. And, you know, if you lost this year, I could always hold out hope for this woman winning the presidential race in 2012 - when she’ll finally be old enough. This woman is even old enough now.
So, why should I worry if Obama has nicer abs than McCain? Perhaps the problem is that a good looking president is bound to be a worse choice than a plain one. No, that can’t be it.
I guess the reason for concern is the way good looking candidates always snow us, and lead us to vote for them regardless of their merits. The history of Democratic Presidential candidates shows that the party has a particular problem in this regard - we always, always go for the most glamorous, sexy, and exciting candidate. It’s time we grew up, and took a closer look at all the plain, or stiff, or just not particularly eloquent candidates that we keep passing up.
But I think the problem of movie star candidates is overblown. It’s not as if it’s so very hard to find out Obama’s positions on the issues or record, that we’re obliged to rely on our gut reaction to how he looks in a swimming suit. Sure, nice abs are no guarantee of a good presidency, but neither is being the shorter and dumpier candidate such a guarantee.
In this case, the candidate who looks better body surfing happens to also be the candidate who looks as if he has more of a clue about the economy. Among other things.