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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, May 24, 2008
The Virtues of Motherhood This article in the May 23, 2008 Daily Mail (a British newspaper identified with the Conservative Party) about the virtues of motherhood and how "Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness" wouldn't surprise you if it came from Phyllis Schlafly, or Focus on the Family--but it's from Rebecca Walker, daughter of feminist writer and icon Alice Walker: The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman. You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.
Labels: feminism Cirque de Soleil A friend of mine works as a rigger for the Cirque de Soleil, and arranged for tickets for my wife and I when their Saltimbacco show came to down. It is like nothing that I have ever seen before. Think of it as 3D ballet combined with highwire circus thrills combined with something vaguely Punch and Judy. Okay, that doesn't paint much of a picture, but it was still quite interesting. It had rather a slow start--but soon moved into some truly astonishing and beautiful gymnastics. I am not sure how well this would play to really small children--but I suspect that most ten year olds and older would enjoy. My daughter and son-in-law went to see it earlier in the day; my daughter was really enchanted by it. The New Indiana Jones Movie A bunch of us from work went to see it yesterday. It has been quite a wait since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and in that time, Harrison Ford has aged a good bit. (Haven't we all?) To their credit, Lucas and Spielberg had the good sense not to pretend otherwise, and the movie is set in the late 1950s. The bad guys are no longer Nazis--I think you can guess who. On the plus side, it has many of the same endearing qualities of the previous movies. The action sequences are both exciting and funny. There is some clever dialog, a few surprising plot twists, and there is an odd mixture of the supernatural and the natural. You aren't supposed to take it seriously (unless you are a von Daniken follower, I suppose). On the down side, the action sequences in the first three movies, while clearly impossible, were often just a bit beyond impossible--just enough for you to laugh and say, "Okay, we're making fun of the 1930s action adventure genre." A couple of the action sequences here--for example, involving some waterfalls and a refrigerator--just didn't work. They were so far beyond impossible as to fall a little flat. In the first movie, Indiana Jones comes out of these horrendous action sequences pretty clearly injured and in serious pain--but Harrison Ford was much younger. It gave a little implication that while these action sequences were impossible, the screenwriter was acknowledging that Indiana Jones wasn't Superman. In this movie, he much, much older, and if anything, the consequences of Indiana Jones' heroics are less severe. Making a cartoonish adventure even less realistic definitely did not help the drama or the humor. Great special effects have been part of all the Indiana Jones films, but great sight gags and dialog have been even more important. Who can forget the Nazi in the first film opening up what we assume is a torture device--but it turns out to be a foldable coat hanger? Or that great moment when the heroine asks Indiana about his plans as he gallops off to catch the Nazis: "I'm makin' this up as I go along." By comparison, there are a few good gags (we see the Ark of the Covenant again) and some mildly witty dialog--but I was hoping for more. (And the mushroom cloud is all wrong--bad perspective, and a former co-worker who was 5000 feet from Ground Zero on one of these tests tells me that they are way colorful and pretty.) And the last ten minutes of special effects really took a pretty decent action adventure movie and gave a rather leaden ending. Unlike the first three movies, where there was an adequate explication of what was going on, I found the explanation disappointing. There were too many unanswered questions. I would say that it was inferior to the first and third movies, but clearly superior to the second movie--which I, like many others, just hated. Labels: movie reviews Dialing for Votes The conversations that I am having with voters that I call on the phone are very interesting. Generally, I'm getting: 1. Largely friendly reactions, not committing one way or the other, but often asking questions about where I stand on issues that they care about. 2. People who are committed to voting for me because of Corder's support for S.1323, the sexual orientation bill. (And many of these are former Californians, who know where this takes us.) 3. A couple of people very committed to Corder--to the point of being uninterested in talking. 4. One reminder that you should never let how well someone fits a demographic profile cause you to make assumptions. I talked to a 78 year old Republican woman who was very concerned about the religious right's influence in the Republican Party--in particular, because of her support for same-sex marriage. But she seemed to be pretty libertarian, and was planning to vote for me because she agrees that the government shouldn't be telling people what they do in private--and that includes hiring decisions. 5. One person who indicated that she and her husband were going to vote for me because they had some personal run-in with Corder, and were so upset with him that they wanted him out of office. Maybe not the best reason to vote for me, but I'll take the votes where I can get them! Labels: Idaho politics The Dangers Of Not Reading I saw a college student's paper recently that showed the dangers of listening, but not reading. The paper discussed the problems caused by the "predigest to the Jews." It took several re-readings of the sentence to figure out that "predigest" is what happens when you hear "prejudice" and haven't a clue as to how it is spelled, because you've never seen the word in print. European anti-Semitism, as bad as it became, never moved onto the cannibalism stage. Friday, May 23, 2008
The Downside of Independent Campaigns I received a very irate letter today from a retired soldier: I find your use of the Unites States Army uniform to further your campaign to be an outrage. This is prohibited under DOD policy, and imperils the poor soldier depicted. Further, the flyer I received contains no photograph of you, leaving the impression that it could be you depicted in the photo. I strongly recommend you denounce this flyer immediately and apologize to the thousands of men and women in uniform whose sacrifice you cheapen by dragging them into a campaign flyer.I explained that I had no control over the flyer, didn't pay for it, produce, or have anything to do with it--that it was from an independent campaign that is hot to remove Senator Corder. As much as I appreciate the help of independent campaigns, this is the downside of them--people may see these materials and not realize that they are not something the candidate controls. I would not have used the photograph in question; I would have preferred my picture on it. I don't back down even slightly from the point of the flyer, however: that Corder's vote in committee saved the state not one penny, but did make it more difficult for taxpayers to voluntarily contribute to the state's veterans' services program. UPDATE: I received an upset phone call along the same lines today who also didn't realize that these are from an independent campaign committee. Although I suspect that the real reason for the upset was that this was a Corder supporter. She defended Corder's sponsorship of the "sexual orientation and gender identity" bill as a way of protecting heterosexuals from discrimination by gay-owned businesses, and insisted that such a law would not produce any lawsuits. Labels: Idaho politics Thursday, May 22, 2008
Congress Overrides Bush's Veto I mentioned a few days ago how Bush's objection was that it provides farm subsidies to married couples making $1.5 million a year. You know: poor people. Congress has overriden Bush's veto--well, sort of, according to this May 22, 2008 CNN report: WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Congress enacted a $300 billion farm bill Thursday over President Bush's objections, but questions remain about whether a clerical error will keep the bill from going into effect.Local news coverage reports that both of Idaho's U.S. Senators and both of Congresscritters voted for the override. I was actually expecting a bit better than this out of Rep. Sali. It's unfortunate that there are no realistic alternatives, since the Democrats are even more deeply corrupted by crony capitalism than Republicans. Labels: farm price supports More Signs That Californication May Still Happen to Idaho Two signs today that Idaho may be heading down the California path. 1. I pulled into the parking lot at the store today to get a prescription filled--and ended up parking between two new Mercedes-Benz sedans. One of them was the S550, the full-sized version that costs a mere $87,575. Of course, the woman getting out of the Mercedes with her baby was in her mid-20s. I fear that the excesses of wealth are arriving. Widespread poverty is bad for a society; excesses of wealth are bad, too. 2. Shortly before we left the San Francisco Bay Area, I noticed that there were now services that transported children by van from San Francisco to Sacramento for broken families. Today I heard a radio ad for a similar service for moving kids from broken homes where one parent living in Twin Falls, and the other in the Boise area. The company is Child Safe Transportation, and let me emphasize that I am not criticizing that they provide this service. I am criticizing parents who let their marriages get to the point where divorce makes sense--and then move three hours away from the other parent and their kids. It's bad enough that the marriage ends in divorce; now, on top of the rest of the tragedy, some kid is being transported back and forth across the state. Please:
Labels: divorce Wednesday, May 21, 2008
The People Losing Their Houses What kind of down on their luck people are these that are having their houses foreclosed? Were they not very well educated sorts who, lacking the sophistication to see through the blather, were taken advantage of by lenders? Hmmm. This report from the May 20, 2008 Capitol Weekly tells the sad story of one of these poor, unsophisticated sorts: As the real estate market softened in 2007, the new owner of a three-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot house in Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood ran into trouble. The house that was purchased for $535,000 in January had lost equity. The owner fell behind in her payments, and eventually, the bank seized the home.Oh, and Richardson took advantage of the desperation of the couple selling the house to get them to pay $15,000 in closing costs when she bought the place--with nothing down. Richardson receives a salary of $169,300 per year as a member of Congress. Yup, just another poor person who needs the government's help. Mountain Home News Endorses My Opponent From the May 21, 2008 Mountain Home News:
I'm disappointed by not surprised. They refer to their editorial endorsements as "Kiss of Death" which I suspect that it might well be--I rather doubt that many Republicans in district 22 consider Corder's support of the sexual orientation bill to be conservative. Labels: Idaho politics More Progeny of the Lawrence Decision I've previously mentioned how the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decision (based on false history) produced a number of lawsuits and decisions that pretty well confirmed Justice Scalia's concern that it would largely destroy laws that reflect any sort of notion of sexual morality. In some cases, I find the laws in question silly or stupid--but they are certainly Constitutional. In other cases, the laws being challenged are, I would say, pretty useful laws to have on the books, such as the law against adultery and a law against soliciting sex in public restrooms. Oh yes: and this Oregon law intended to protect the mentally defective from being taken advantage of sexually. Now, the 9th Circuit has decided that the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule should be reviewed based on the heightened scrutiny standard, not the rational basis standard of review. In practice, this means that it is substantially more difficult for the military to discharge homosexuals from the military. I have been somewhat ambivalent about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I know that there are many homosexuals who are serving in our armed forces and doing a fine job. The plaintiff in this case, Major Margaret Witt, sounds like one of those examples. Most of them keep their sexuality private--and it sounds like Maj. Witt was "outed" by a former lover. (Or perhaps this is all an elaborate test case.) At the same time, as I discussed near the end of this posting, our military developed this anti-homosexual policy in relatively recent times--and the incident that the Wall Street Journal article I quote describes is one that, to put it bluntly, seems to be pretty common among homosexual men--the use of power to coerce sexual compliance from straight men. (And yes, there's definitely a problem with straight men using power against women in similar situations.) There are times that forcing homosexuals to be discreet about their orientation has some positive benefits--at least, it restrains some of the more outrageous behavior. Lawrence has opened up a can of worms, and with the increasing acceleration down the slippery slope, it appears that the courts will impose full equality for homosexuals in very short order--followed by full equality for polygamists and pedophiles. The bigger problem, unfortunately, is the entire notion of "standards of review." As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out during the oral arguments for the Heller case, this ladder of "rational basis," "heightened scrutiny," and "strict scrutiny" is not in the Constitution, and is actually of very recent origin. My reading of how this standards of review idea came about is that at least into the twentieth century, the courts recognized one standard of review: did the federal or state constitutions prohibit a certain legislative action or not? If Congress or a state legislature was prohibited from action X, then they could not take action X. By the 1960s, however, judges were very liberal, and recognized that if they used this categorical prohibition model, then there would be very limited opportunities for the courts to pick and choose which laws to allow, and which to strike down. This "standards of review" approach gave the courts a series of tools by which they could pick and choose which laws they could strike down and which they could uphold. When you go back and start reading the various Supreme Court decisions on this, you will quickly find that there is no clearly stated model for "standards of review," and in many of these cases, the notion of "standard of review" is clearly something that has been read back into the decision--the notion of "standard of review" is at best implied in these decisions. I was starting to work on a law review paper about this, but it is hard to get much enthusiasm up for a careful analysis of what is fundamentally a dishonest approach to Constitutional law. Labels: homosexuality, judicial activism Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Money for the Blind The D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that the government is legally obligated to make paper money distinctive for the blind, under the Rehabilitation Act, 29 USC 794. Essentially, the Court of Appeals has decided that the blind do not have meaningful access to money because, unlike a number of European countries, we have a single size of bill, and there is no way for a blind person by touch to figure out which bills are which (unlike coins). As sympathetic as I am to the situation that a blind person has on this, I cringe a bit at how the courts increasingly find rights that have until recently, not been recognized as rights as all--such as the right of the blind to be able to tell a $1 bill from a $10 bill. If Congress were to pass a law requiring such a change to our currency, I would be very supportive. Changing the size of the bills would be very expensive for current bill accepting machines, but one clever commenter over at Volokh Conspiracy came up with a very clever solution: When first presented with this a year or so ago, a simple and effective solution popped into mind: security threads. Currently, US bills have a security thread running vertically through them (across the short way). It would seem to be a simple solution to make these threads heavier so that they could be felt, and vary the location and quantity to denote value. Independent Campaign Expenditures Have you ever wondered what an "independent election campaign" is? It means that the candidate has no control over the materials that appear, and there is no coordination between the candidate's campaign and the independent campaigns. I used to assume that this "no coordination" was one of those "wink, wink" sort of things. But apparently not! I was asked not to share campaign updates with some people a while back--and as a result, I am now seeing stuff in my mailbox telling me to vote for Clayton Cramer for State Senate--and I have not seen this stuff before. Some of the material emphasizes issues that I might not have emphasized--or that I would not have phrased quite the way that it is. One of these flyers referred to me as a "grandfather" which isn't true quite yet. Seeing this on the flyer certainly created a rather Twilight Zone sensation. "How did they know about that?" Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Campaign Activities I went to the Mountain Home Senior Citizens Center last night as part of a candidates' forum. Again, the format was really not well suited to this: one minute opening statements by all the candidates, and then written questions from the audience. Still, I had a number of people approach me afterwards to tell me how impressed with how intelligent I am. (Perhaps it was just the comparison that made me look good.) One person on the Elmore Republican Central Committee whom I have called several times approached me and explained that he had not returned my calls because he was planning to vote for Corder. After hearing me speak, especially on the Second Amendment, he had changed sides, and asked for a campaign sign. My wife and I also went out to the most eastern part of the district, Glenns Ferry and Hammett, to plant campaign signs. The contrast between northern Boise County and eastern Elmore County is quite dramatic. Both are sparsely populated--but eastern Elmore County is high desert, while northern Boise County is mountainous pine forest. I had another lobbyist show up at the house this morning to give me money. What really impresses me is how little work I have to do to raise money--it flows in, in surprisingly large chunks from gun rights activists, and in chunks from lobbying groups that I have never heard of, never talked to, and would not have thought were interested in me in the least. So, what strings are attached to all this special interest money? I confess that until last year, I assumed that when interest groups gave you money, it was often a form of disguised bribery. John Lott's book Freedomnomics has one section where he evaluates voting records of politicians who have announced that they are retiring. One could assume that if politician A has been voting for X because interest groups are giving him money for that purpose, that once the interest group money stops coming in, politician A might stop voting for X. Lott found that politician voting behavior didn't really change once they announced retirement. This doesn't mean that special interest group contributions don't influence the political process. They aren't raising and giving away money because they are such nice people that they want everyone to be involved in politics. Both from what Lott's study found, and from talking to former members of the Idaho legislature, it is pretty clear that special interest group money does influence legislation--but not in the corrupt "buy off politicians" way that a lot of people assume. It is a considerably more subtle than that. Let's say that there are three people that want to get elected to public office: Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown, and Mrs. Smith. Mr. Jones is a Big Government liberal who support lots of governmental regulation of business; Mrs. Smith supports free market capitalism; Mr. Brown thinks the big issue the legislature needs to deal with are the space aliens among us. Business interests are going to give money to Mrs. Smith, even if they aren't 100% in agreement with her, because they believe that she is generally going to vote their way. Trial lawyers, labor unions, and other left of center groups are going to fund Mr. Jones, because they believe that he is generally going to vote their way. Mr. Brown is not going to get much funding at all, because the "space aliens among us" crowd is pretty small. (The mind control implants manufactured on Tau Ceti 4 help to keep that crowd small.) So what happens if Mrs. Smith goes off the reservation, and starts voting for business regulation? The groups that used to fund her campaigns get less and less willing to help. If her leap to the left is dramatic enough, she may find that Mr. Jones's interest groups may start to help--but I suspect that small changes in Mrs. Smith's voting to the left aren't going to be dramatic enough for Mr. Jones's backers to consider Mrs. Smith worth backing. The net effect will be that moving towards the center will often lose more funding than it will gain. A former neighbor of mine who was a member of the Idaho state senate for several terms described how this happened to him. He was a Republican, but definitely quite a bit to my left on business regulation issues, and over time, the business interests contributed less and less, and his re-election campaigns required more and more of his own money--and finally, he decided that it wasn't worth spending this much of his own money for a job that only pays about $16,000 a year, and involves a substantial time commitment. So he decided not to run for re-election. UPDATE: Just to clarify: I was addressing the problem of campaign contributions. There is, without question, some serious, direct bribery that goes on out there. The FBI for a while was running around the country, seeing how long it took to give direct bribes to state legislators--and having a depressingly easy time finding legislators in California, Arizona, South Carolina and probably a few states that I missed who were quite prepared to take a cash payment in a nakedly quid pro quo action. Nor do I want to suggest that interest group money is completely without worrisome consequences. But it just isn't quite the nakedly corrupt problem that a lot of people assume. One reader suggested that a fairly ideological sort like myself probably is less prone to being corrupted by the process. There's probably some truth to that. The less rigidly you adhere to a set of standards or ideas about the proper role of government, the easier is to bend to the wishes of the moment. This is one of the reasons that politicians that are proud of their "pragmatism" worry me a bit. The one area which is a real problem is that if an obscure issue comes up, interest groups are likely to have the expertise, the money, and the motivation to present their position in a way that the general public won't. A politician who doesn't know much about this obscure issue may find himself swayed by an interest group's arguments in a way that is not good for the public interest. But this is a problem whether that interest group comes bearing money or not. The best that can hope for is that there will be opposing interest groups who can bring their expertise and motivation to the legislative process. But opposing special interests are not quite the same as serving the public interest. Labels: Idaho politics Monday, May 19, 2008
Need The Pants Scared Off Of You? This November 22, 2007 Middle East Times discussion of recent examinations of the consequences of an Iran/Israeli nuclear war should do it just fine: Anthony Cordesman may be the most influential man in Washington that most people have never heard of. A former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense and director of policy and planning in the Department of Energy, he is now the top strategic guru at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Yet another good reason to not be dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Labels: Islamism Cell Phones & Pregnancy This article in the May 18, 2008 British rag The Independent (and I'm being charitable to call it a rag) reports on a worrisome study concerning cell phones and pregnancy:
I am really, really hard pressed to see how cell phones, especially at the two or three calls a day level, could really have this readily detectable an effect. The study apparently controlled for lots of other possible confounding factors: Yup. I can see how early adopters of cell phones might have been unusually career-oriented, and the high rates of problems might be because they disproportionately put their yuppie puppies into daycare instead of raising their own kids. It is still quite worrisome: "major public health implications" doesn't even begin to describe it. |
