Karl Gallagher

A brief index to my major posts:

War
I'm an advocate of taking the offensive in the Global War On Terror, the official name for our war against the Islamofascists. I've done a Venn Diagram showing how different current conflicts relate to the war as a whole, and a state diagram showing the different strategies available to us and their possible outcomes. I think there's a limited amount of time to win before a catastrophe is inevitable.

Politics
I've looked at better ways to categorize views than the "left-right" axis, why our political system forces everyone into two parties, and how we could modify the system to better express everyone's views. I also discuss how our political divide comes from different visions of how families should be organized and why the "War on Drugs" is the real threat to our freedoms.

My Beliefs
Things I believe in, and the books which most influenced me. I want to lay out the assumptions behind my beliefs clearly. If one of those principles is disproved I'll have to rethink my stands.

If you're looking for a particular issue, here's a few I've got opinions on:
Abu Ghraib, Gay Marriage/Polygamy, Global Warming and who to believe about it, Torture, War on Drugs (more here), Iran, putting the Army on a war footing, Trinity River Vision, civil war, political quizzes, mistakes made in Iraq.

One of the top institutions supporting the theory of man-made global warming is the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. A couple of weeks ago some anonymous benefactor decided to share their work with the world. Not just the peer-reviewed papers, which were already available to the world. Nope, this sharing included their email database and the source code of their world climate simulations. This has been a delight to their critics as all sorts of unsavory bits have been exposed to sunlight.

The initial focus was on emails with juicy bits alluding to monkeying with data sets, avoiding FOIA requests, and blatant efforts to game the peer-review process to keep contrary views from being published. Shocking to some, but not me as I've been cynical about peer-review for a while now.

The deadliest finds came from programmers who started digging into all that code. They had a good road map to the worst parts in a log file from a programmer (Harry) who'd taken over the simulation from the original one. Unfortunately for the quality of the code these guys were climatologists who'd picked up some programming knowledge along the way, rather than being software engineers trained in how to handle this kind of very complex project. So they let a variable grow past the maximum value for its data type and then didn't understand why it became negative. Worse was their lack of any type of versioning or source control. Poor Harry wound up digging through files trying to find out what happened to the original data. At least some of it had been overwritten by "corrected" data . . . and the nature of the corrections wasn't always recorded. Some of the recorded ones are blatant manipulation. I'm on the record as being distrustful of simulation-based science and this is exactly why.

(Having spent time digging through old code myself I've got a lot of sympathy for Harry. I don't have any for his organization, which ran wild with the results of something they'd under-resourced and failed to check. My code wouldn't stand up to a mass review by Slashdot . . . but I'm not claiming moral superiority and a trillion-dollar tax code rewrite is justified based on my results.)

So there's no way to check the accuracy of those simulations without going back to the original weather station records (if they still exist), tree rings, and other raw data and starting over from scratch. Eric Raymond advocates doing just that as an Open Source project, making data and algorithms publicly available. That might be the only way to get something that we can trust. At this point any fresh analysis can't be done in an objective manner. There's too much money and too many careers resting on who's right and that's going to be an influence on every researcher who looks at the problem. Anybody not wanting to be forced into choosing a side is just going to avoid the whole field. Sure, we might get a martyr-type willing to be hated by both sides . . . but those are rarely the best analysts. An open-source project with partisans from both sides contributing would have a chance to develop a trustworthy model of our past climate. And that would make explicit the assumptions of the competing factions as they create models to simulate the future.

Once we settle the question of how much the planet is warming we'll have a chance to tackle other important questions:

1. Is the warming a product of human activity or just the normal fluctuation of an interglacial era?

2. What is the optimum average temperature for the world (Tongans and Siberians will disagree)?

3. How much damage will there be from being off that optimum, and who will suffer it?

4. How much will it cost to get us to the optimum (by restricting emissions or geoengineering)?

5. Is that expense worth it compared to other things we could do with the money?

6. Who's going to collect that money and oversee its spending?

The last is the most important. There's a lot of people fervent over global warming because they want "a global authority not answerable to voters" to be the answer to it.

I last cast a vote in New York in 1990, so I haven't kept up on the politics there much. But the special election in the 23rd Congressional District has been making the news because the Republican candidate nominated by the party establishment has been forced out of the race by a conservative insurgent riding on the enthusiasm of "tea party" types. I'm all for third party runs and by-passing the establishments of both parties, so it sounds like good news to me.

Most of the people considering it bad news are worried about "moderates" being purged from the Republican party by "conservatives," dooming it to generations of electoral irrelevancy. Why liberal commentators are expressing alarm instead of capering with glee at this prospect is beyond me. I'm looking at it as another example of how badly defined our political labels are.

A "conservative" in American politics can range from someone wanting to use government power to enforce specific behavior on everyone (pro-lifers and creationists) to ones wanting to minimize the power of the Federal government in all areas (Ron Paul). Let's take a look at this Hoffman guy in New York and see what kind of conservative he is. The first four items on his Issues page all boil down to "The Federal Government shouldn't spend so much money," along with four more lower down. So that's 8 of 14 trying to reduce the government's budget and the power that goes with it. Plus a 2nd Amendment discussion that stresses the importance of being able to resist government authority. Meanwhile abortion gets all of four words. So Mike Huckabee this ain't.

The NY-23 election seems to be boiling down to a pro-spending / anti-spending dispute. The nominal Republican candidate is fond of spending, and dropped out to endorse the Democrat when she faced a 3rd place finish. Hoffman is making a stand against increased government spending. That's something you don't have to be a conservative to support. I wish him well, and I'm supporting local candidates who are taking the same stand.

I didn't make the local Tea Party on Saturday--mandatory overtime kept me in the office during the day, and I had something important to do in the evening. Here's some nice coverage of the DC Tea Party protest. I'm glad they caught that the objection is to spending, not taxes. If the government keeps spending more than it takes in we still have to pay for it somehow, whether as taxes, debt on our kids, hyperinflation, or the economic chaos from repudiation.

rjlippincott points out that "death panels" are nowhere in the health care reform proposals because no one wants to sit on a panel and take responsibility for the decision. Instead that buck will be passed around until it disappears. Gramma gets unplugged to everyone's horror . . . but it's no one's fault.

Or as Howard Taylor explains bureaucracy is evil.

It is better to avenge a friend than mourn him long. - Beowulf

President Obama addressing the VFW:

But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a -- this is fundamental to the defense of our people.

I agree with this. What I disagree with is the implication that we should fight a "war of necessity" and should not fight a "war of choice."

A "war of necessity" is what happens when the enemy is given all the time and space they want to make their attack. It lets them be fully prepared and in control of the initiative. They can pick their moment for the attack that they feel gives them the best chance of victory. A "war of necessity" is a war of the enemy's choice.

That can only happen when our leaders pass up every opportunity to take the initiative, to disrupt the enemy's preparations, to open battle at a time that favors us instead of them. That's happened more than once in our history and it's led to unnecessary American deaths.

Our nation should only fight "wars of choice." Anything else is a failure of our leaders.

I was never a big fan of the Whole Foods grocery chain. I'd shop there to get stuff for my stepson's GFCF diet but they deliberately avoided carrying the things that appeal to my prole tastes. Their CEO John Mackey, on the other hand, has a health care reform proposal that's precisely to my taste. Get employers and government restrictions out of the loop so people can get the health insurance they need. He also suggests how to help people who can't afford health care--keeping Medicare from going bankrupt and allowing people to contribute to the needy through their tax returns. Looks like a good contribution to the debate to me . . . but some of his customers are outraged to the point of organizing boycotts. So much for "Dissent Is Patriotic."

Another post I recommend is strega42's discussion of the below-the-radar issues that are affecting our health care. I completely agree on the problems the FDA and DEA are causing.

One blog I used to follow closely was that of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. This was two guys, Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder, trying to get a head start on the ethical and legal issues that will come up when we have efficient molecular-level manufacturing. For a while I was the resident skeptic, doing a lengthy critique of Chris's since-abandoned nanofactory design and generally pointing out reasons things would take longer and be harder than they were suggesting. The technical arguments were with Chris. My exchanges with Mike were limited, usually just a "not everyone believes this" comment when he posted a point of leftist dogma as a fact. Eventually I decided I was repeating myself--making hardware manufacturing as quick and easy as compiling code will not make creating new systems effortless--and stopped reading them. Hopefully there's still some engineers reminding them that complexity is difficult.

I have no doubt that some people have been commenting to represent the libertarian viewpoint, however. Mike's been annoyed enough to publish a manifesto calling for libertarians to be banned from Transhumanism. Clearly there's limits to his attachment to diversity. Instapundit suggested a libertarian-free transhumanist future would like Huxley's Brave New World. Replace soma and sleep-teaching speakers with direct brain feeds for propaganda and positive reinforcement and it might not be far off. That's the kind of world you get when a committee of "experts" decides what the best way to live is and imposes it uniformly on everyone. Right now even the strongest governments are limited in how much control they can exert because of the inefficiency of using human enforcers. Cybernetic oppression can cause a lot more damage.

I don't like the Administration's plans for health care. As far as I'm concerned we've got too much centralized control already, and I'd like to get my employer out of it.

Megan McArdle sums up why I don't want the Feds getting more involved in health insurance:

Once we've got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government's incentives? I think they're bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I'm afraid that instead of Security Theater, we'll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we're getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it.

Ronald Bailey has a good proposal for how to actually improve paying for health care:

What would real reform look like? It would be consumer driven, transparent, and competitive.

Ron does skim past one of the issues that confounds this debate--finding "insurance" to cover known health issues. The problem is that "insurance" isn't the way to deal with that, any more than I could get homeowner's insurance after my house burns down. If I can't afford a new one I need a homeless shelter or housing vouchers. It shows how screwed up this has gotten that "insurance" now means "paying for expected health care expenses." Insurance should be for the unexpected events. Known ones should be out of pocket expenses, and people who can't afford that need to be taken care of by some welfare system. Trying to combine welfare for the poor and sick with an insurance system for the healthy and comfortable is asking for an unmanagement mess of a government program.

Jimmie Bise digs out the details of Cap and Trade that will directly affect almost everyone.

Turns out the Federal Government wants to get into the local building code business. They're imposing new provisions that homes built in 2014 must be 50% more energy-efficient than the current code requires. Your current home isn't directly affected, but is subject to a state audit under circumstances such as selling it, renovating it, or changing the name on the utility bill. There's no Federal penalty for flunking the energy efficiency audit . . . but states only get their Federal funding for energy if they meet the "goals" set for housing stock energy efficiency. So it depends on whether your state legislature wants to meet the goal at the expense of new housing construction (done by generously-contributing contractors) or existing homeowners (unorganized taxpayers).

The Feds did put some chocolate sprinkles on the turd sandwich by offering to cover half the cost of a renovation, up to $12k, if you manage to reduce your house's energy consumption by 20%. Folks in drafty old farmhouses can consider this easy money. If you're in a state-of-the-art Eubanks-designed masterpiece of efficiency you're probably up the creek trying to meet a percentage goal.

Tell me again how the setting my dryer runs at counts as "interstate commerce?"

The Iranian government is getting harsher on the protestors. Most times this means they're going to be crushed. Governments fall when the troops aren't willing to shoot protestors and point their guns the other way. There's some danger of the Iranian army doing that as the government has brought in Arab irregulars to do some of the dirty work. I'm not going to get very hopeful, though. I remember the rumors of Chinese Army revolts during the Tianamen massacres and they were just wishful thinking.

The start of this was in-fighting among the mullahs. The election was restricted to candidates pre-approved by the regime. The President of Iran isn't as powerful as the Supreme Leader (chosen by a council of mullahs to serve for life) but has enough clout to affect which faction will be able to control the levers of government. So there was motivation for Ahmadinejad to steal the election.

Mousavi and his supporters didn't want to give up so they're demanding an investigation. This is separate from the actions of the street protestors who are angry at the mullahcracy as a whole. Mousavi is riding that tide but even if they win it won't take him where he wants to go. His history shows him as committed to theocracy as Ahmadinejad. He'd like to be a Gorbachev-style reformer, ascending to power through the process and making modest changes.

That's not going to happen now. If Mousavi becomes President it won't be by approval of the "Guardian Council", his peers in power. Instead he'd be installed by the mob or the army. Either way he'll have to adjust to his new power base and keep them happy lest he be quickly replaced. Possibly he's already converted to a belief in democracy. George Washington was a loyal soldier of King George in his younger days. Hopefully Mousavi will take Washington as his model . . . otherwise he may be a Necker or Kerensky.

One hopeful sign is Mousavi's tacit support for women's political power by having his wife campaigning for him and acting as his spokesman. Women in Iran are pushing back against the restrictions the theocracy has put on them. The regime strikes back at them harshly--the martyr Neda was targeted for having the loosest headscarf in the crowd--but that hasn't made them give up. Hopefully they can force the regime to crack.

I'll be praying for them.

Bill Whittle takes on the Obama = Spock meme and says Yes, Obama is Spock, and that's not the kind of guy you want in the Captain's chair.

Congress has outlawed whittling wood toys for the neighbor kids. Also reselling used children's books. No, really. I'd heard about this a couple months ago but hadn't gotten upset--first reports are often wrong and I've been desensitized to government regulations screwing up businesses.

This is the usual unintended consequence of panic regulation. Chinese factories produced contaminated toys so Congress has outlawed lead in all things intended for children. Bicycle makers pointing out that kids rarely chew on chains didn't keep them from being banned for having some lead in the alloy. To make sure toys were lead-free all manufacturers have to have them tested by a third party lab and label all batches.

For Mattel, that's an annoying expense, but there's cheap labs in China so they can do production and testing in the same batch of outsourcing. Stay at home moms running a website selling toys they get from Amish carpenters . . . are hosed. There's no way they can afford to do all the testing and remain in business. No exceptions for small companies, or using only pure materials though. Congress won't let our children be endangered. Not even by reading books published before 1986.

So far, typical government idiocy--politicians acting to get a good headline then not caring about the consequences of their decisions. There's a lot of laws that are originally written by lobbyists who hand drafts to Congressional staffers. The boss may or may not do an edit (or a read) before proposing it as a bill. That gets us laws like this benefiting large corporations at the expense of their smaller competitors. Ayn Rand totally misread the nature of captains of industry. Government regulations aren't something for them to rebel against, they're the most effective tool for defeating the competition.

The Reason article brought out another interesting aspect of this law--the impacts cross the lines of our normal left/right tribal divisions. The folks hardest hit tend to be hippie-ish organic food fans selling to the fans of "natural" products. In short, core members of the Democratic party (though their fertility does make them an outlier). They've been getting no support from their party on this. The Congressmen stepping up on the issue tend to be Republicans. Vermont liberals have some cognitive dissonance when they find themselves allied with conservative politicians from Texas. There's a great quote from one defensively protesting that she's "not trying to advance an ideology or nefarious political agenda."

The problem for her is that she is trying to advance one: the idea that individuals should be free to do as they wish if they're not hurting anyone else, at least in the small arena of toy making. It just doesn't fit into the left-right political model she's used to.

The Tea Party Movement has one big problem--it's about opposing Obama's proposals and doesn't have one of its own. It'll fizzle out unless someone finds a goal to aim all those people toward.

Randy Barnett has come up with one: the Bill of Federalism. This is a set of constitutional amendments to the US Constitution intended to restore it to its rightful level of authority. Most of them sound like a good idea. Here's my take on them.

***
The Ten Amendments of The Bill of Federalism

Amendment 1 [Restrictions on Tax Powers of Congress] (Removing the income tax and replacing it with a sales tax)

I'm not opposed to the income tax in principle but what we've got now is encrusted with too many complications for anyone to understand it, even a Secretary of the Treasury. So sure, let's replace it with something else. Then when the sales/VAT/whatever tax has become unmanageable from decades of Congressional twiddling let's abolish that and move on to something else. Give the Georgists a chance to implement their taxing land only scheme, maybe.

FOR

Amendment 2 [Limits of Commerce Power]

"And this time we mean it." Restoring the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights by limiting the scope of the Interstate Commerce clause. Wouldn't eliminate laws so much as create a "didn't cross the line" defense in Federal courts. A useful check on the power of Congress if it works.

FOR

Amendment 3 [Unfunded Mandates and Conditions on Spending]

Congress shouldn't be able to make a state government raise the taxes to pay what they want done. Responsibility should stay with authority, not get delegated away. Likewise, bribing states into imposing laws is a bad way to create policy.

FOR

Amendment 4 [No Abuse of the Treaty Power] (Treaties don't give Congress additional legislative authority, nor do they have a domestic effect without enforcing legislation)

This is probably necessary given some of the attempts to restrict individual rights through international law.

FOR

Amendment 5 [Freedom of Political Speech and Press] (removing restrictions on campaign contributions and advocating candidates)

The various "campaign finance" reforms have quickly become another set of tools to protect incumbents. Replacing the current political establishment will only happen if we let people support candidates as much as they can.

FOR

Amendment 6 [Power of States to Check Federal Power] (A federal law could be repealed by 2/3s of the states passing resolutions)

A useful way to keep the President and Congress from colluding in something that benefits them but not the rest of the country. Actually implementing it would require getting several thousand legislators to vote for identical resolutions, something that probably would never happen. But once a dozen or two states passed one Congress would probably be taking action to amend whatever they were objecting to.

FOR

Amendment 7 [Term Limits for Congress]

There's 535 arguments in favor of this. But I don't think "the current crop is all stinkers" is a good reason to change the rules. This shifts power away from the elected legislators toward the bureaucracy. It would eliminate the motive for a lot of the current corruption in the budget. If they can't get reelected there's less need to bribe their constituents and contributors.

AMBIVALENT, LEANING FOR

Amendment 8 [Balanced Budget Line Item Veto] (The President would have a line item veto in years when the federal debt had increased)

This is a lovely piece of systems design. Balanced budget rules always break down over how to enforce them while leaving the capability to handle an emergency. Line item veto debates focus on how the President could abuse the power. Barnett's proposal lets Congress decide which set of rules should be in operation at any time. If they splurge on pork the President can pull out the red pen. If they keep the budget in the black they can spend it however they please. If a world war breaks out they can both cooperate to deal with the crisis. Lovely.

FOR, HELL YES

Amendment 9 [The Rights Retained by the People]

"And this time we mean it." Provides the opportunity to introduce a 9th Amendment defense in any legal case. Specifically mentioning some rights in this amendment could have a mixed impact--enumerating additional rights protects them but gives the impression that the "unenumerated rights" that didn't make the list are less important. So it still has some of the weaknesses of the original 9th, but would make a lot of judges pay attention to it for a generation or two.

FOR

Amendment 10 [Neither Foreign Law nor American Judges May Alter the Meaning of Constitution]

I don't think there's a single serving judge who'd deny acting according to this already. No law can control how a judge will read it. Still, passing this amendment would serve to put judges on notice that they're expected to adhere to originalism. That would probably save a few from the temptation to interpret broadly.

FOR

***
While we're editing the Constitution, I can think of a few other changes I'd like to make. Deleting the militia clause from the 2nd Amendment would save some arguments. The 5th should be clarified to make it clear "public use" does not mean "giving it to anyone who'll pay more taxes on it." I'd like to see one house be proportional representation but that's not practical unless we're starting from scratch. The biggest change I'd want is banning gerrymandering.

A big part of why Congress is so static nowadays is that reapportionment lets the politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around. When Congressmen owe their election to pleasing the hard core party members who vote in primaries they keep going to the extreme and ignoring what the majority in the middle wants. An anti-gerrymandering amendment would make for more competitive House races and give us a crop of more moderate winners. "Non-partisan" commissions have been proposed in place of having the legislatures draw the lines. That'd be an improvement but still leaves the problem of having "incumbent protection" gerrymanders instead of ones designed to favor a single party. So let's try this:

Amendment N: Congressional Redistricting.
After each census revised congressional districts shall be drawn by each state. Each member of the state legislature may propose a redistricting plan. Plans with a standard deviation of the number of eligible voters in the districts greater than 2% shall not be considered. The eligible plans shall be evaluated by summing the length of each district's perimeter. The one with the shortest total length shall become the new district map.

That forces the districts to be compact and similar in size. We'd want to do a bunch of tests to make sure this holds up. A contest offering a prize to whoever produces the most gerrymandered map meeting the rule should find any loopholes.

There's talk about torture prosecutions. The current proposed scapegoats aren't the interrogators (just doing their duty) or the elected policymakers (bad precedent) but the lawyers who wrote memos defining where the line was drawn between "harsh treatment" and "torture", while stressing that torture was forbidden. I can just see the opening session of the trial:

"Your honor, the prosecution would like to request a change of venue."
"Oh? To where?"
"Bennington, Vermont."
"No."
"Berkeley, California?"
"No."
"Cambridge, Massachusetts?"
"Look, if you don't want to do it here, we can always have the trial in Lubbock, Texas."
Pause. "Your honor, the prosecution would like to drop the indictment."

There's not too many places in this country where twelve random people are guaranteed to all take the Daily Kos line on interrogation. Of course, there could be a conviction in Lubbock. Jury selection is an art and their decisions can be hard to predict. But I bet AG Holder doesn't have anyone knocking on his door wanting to be lead prosecutor.

I've addressed the issues with torture before. It's ugly, it stains our souls, but it works and sometimes it's preferable to the alternatives when dealing with terrorists. The alternative isn't just accepting a higher risk of terrorist attacks on the USA. It's also dropping bombs on a family of Afghan Hatfields because the local McCoys provided a "reliable report" that they were sheltering a Taliban arms depot. That's blood on our hands and a stain on our soul too.

So we can't be "morally pure" by just banning torture or anything that anyone might consider torture. The choice is between harsh interrogation and more deaths--enemy deaths, American deaths, and deaths of innocents in the crossfire. Do I want us imitating the way Saddam treated his victims? No. But there's a lot of room between asking nicely and clear torture. There's a trade-off to be made and reasonable disagreements over whether to draw the line. The CIA wanted it drawn just short of where we forbid torture by law and treaty when dealing with the most important Al Qaeda prisoners. Others want terrorists to get the same protections as American criminals in police custody.

One proposal that keeps coming up is "Outlaw harsh methods, but break the law in an emergency." Even John McCain's said that. I'm opposed to it.

There's a lot of areas (including my day job) where having harsh rules with vague limits constrains people much more than was originally intended. A felony conviction and a long stay in Leavenworth is something most of our defenders consider worse than dying in action. Banning harsh practices means even milder ones will be avoided if a future investigation might consider them excessive. So we'll lose out on information we could've gotten. The worst effect will be terrorists telling themselves "All I have to do is tough this one out and I'm home free, this is the worst they can do" instead of being told there's always something rougher waiting if they won't talk.

That's one danger. Let's look at how "keep it illegal and accept breaking the law in extreme cases" has worked out in another situation--criminal law enforcement. Cops aren't allowed to beat suspects up to make them talk, or break into houses without a warrant hoping to find useful evidence. They can be put on trial if they do so willfully. How well has the threat of prosecution worked to make cops behave? Hardly at all. It worked so badly that the court system completely abandoned trying to control illegal evidence gathering through prosecutions and instead created the Exclusionary Rule. Because cops could go into a courtroom and confidently put their record of service to the public against the misery of a violent scumbag knowing that no jury will take the side of the scumbag. And if the juries are that predictable prosecutors won't waste their time with a case they know will result in an acquittal.

To have a set of rules you can enforce they have to address the problem in a serious way. If a jury is told that criminals or terrorists have to be treated more gently than they discipline their own children, they're not going to take that law seriously. And if the law isn't taken seriously it's as easy to get away with huge violations as minor ones.

So we'd wind up with interrogations limited by the interrogator's expectations of how a jury would look at the case. Some will avoid a slap on the belly lest a jury think they were too violent. Others will raid the motor pool and dental clinic for tools in the belief that at least one juror will say "You do what you gotta do." The responsibility for both errors will have been evaded by those with the Constitutional duty to protect the nation.

What I'd suggest is a specified set of methods which can be authorized by different levels of the chain of command. So interrogators would have standard rules but could request permission from the local commander to use stress positions or 72 hours of sleep deprivation. If that doesn't work the regional boss could authorize slaps, grabs, and "walling." Next would be the Deputy Director in DC's permission for extended standing or hypothermia. The Director of the CIA could authorize waterboarding with plastic wrap over the face (no water in the lungs) and unconventional methods such as dropping bugs on someone phobic. Requests for anything more severe would have to go to the President, who has to decide whether they were "harsh" (and permitted) or forbidden torture.

That gives interrogators the option of always being able to escalate in the worst case. The rules would be clear so they wouldn't be limiting themselves in fear of an unjustified prosecution. If they do go over the line they've broken a direct order from a superior, a much easier issue to prosecute. The responsibility for methods is always clear. That would give the best balance between unnecessary harshness and unnecessary deaths.

The state subsidies and regulations promoting renewable energy are a good example of why I wasn't thrilled to see Rick Perry at my local Tea Party protest. He can talk the small government line, but when it comes to actually delivering it he's as fond of enlarging his personal power as any politician out there.

Steve Chapman pegs one of the key truths about the Tea Parties--they're not a "tax protest." Yeah, there's complaints about taxes but those are a minority. Look at the signs and you see people are mostly complaining about the amount of spending and the expansion of government control. You can force that into the "tax protest" model if you want since the deficit will have to be paid for by future taxes (and the cute kids holding signs with their obligations did fit that) but it's really telling the government "don't do that." Don't spend an extra trillion. Don't take control of key sectors of the economy.

So the counterargument of "Obama's cutting your taxes" is irrelevant as well as untrue. Sure, some people will have their income tax rates cut. That's not much difference. Most American tax payers are paying more in Social Security and other payroll taxes than they are in income tax (and that money is going into the general fund so it's just another tax). Cigarette smokers have had their taxes raised already ("First they came for the smokers . . ."). If the carbon cap and trade proposals become law that'll be thousands more in taxes for every household plus a higher cost for energy and products using energy (ie, everything).

But the larger taxes aren't as important as the amount of control the Administration is trying to take. Just the volume of spending it's planning is a huge increase in the number of people and activities that are controlled by the government. The side-effects will also be huge. There's a lot of projects getting put on hold in hopes that they can be paid for out of the stimulus package instead of local funds. But that means DC bureaucrats are deciding what gets done instead of people closer to the needs. The problem happens with energy policy, except magnified by imposing uniform nationwide roles instead of allowing flexibility. Then there's the attempt to make volunteer activity another part of the government.

Meanwhile doing all this stuff distracts from what the Federal Government is supposed to be doing, namely keeping the pressure on foreigners who want to kill us.

There's a lot of people worried about the direction the government is going. Taking over banks, taking over car companies, hell, regulating what kind of light bulbs you can use in your house, it's a huge increase in government intervention in our lives. The bailouts are rewarding people who did dumb things while the sensible ones get handed the bill. There's also plans for increasing government control of health care and energy use. That's all on top of the question of how we pay for all of this. Obama criticized Bush for his huge deficits, but that's not stopping him from running up a first year deficit bigger than all eight of Bush's combined, and keeping them higher than any of Bush's.

Given that Republican allegiance to balanced budgets rarely survives from election day to arriving in Washington there's no one obvious to turn to. So people are organizing grassroots protests for fiscal restraint and individual responsibility. This has been named the "Tea Party" movement in memory of the Revolutionary War tax protest. After some successful protests (including one in Fort Worth) people decided to have a coordinated nationwide protest on April 15th--the Tax Day Tea Parties.

I went to the Fort Worth Tea Party tonight. The organizers rented the local baseball stadium and we filled it. The estimate from the stage was 5000 people attending. I didn't try to count them, but you can if you like:



There were lots of Gadsden ("don't tread on me") flags. It seemed like at least a quarter of the crowd had brought a handmade sign to wave. Some Christian and Libertarian groups had booths set up in the corner. We were asked to sign an anti-bailout petition using computer terminals. I suspect I'll be getting some fund raising mail from that.


These guys were keeping in the original spirit of the event:


The headline speaker was Governor Perry, appearing at his third tea party of the day. He hit hard on themes of small government, Texas self-reliance, and the 10th Amendment, which got a great response from the crowd. He made a point of acknowledging that the Tea Party movement is not a Republican one but a non-partisan one (this one was organized by the local Reps, but most organizers have been independents). He's running very hard to get to the front of this parade, with good reason. Lots of people are fed up with the Republican failure to actually deliver on small government. Rick Perry is scared of people like this leaving his party in droves.


Let's not forget that the Republican Party owes its existence to the vacuum left by the collapse of the Whigs. I could see that history repeating itself with a "leave me alone" party springing up to fight against increasing government power.

Our other elected guest was Congressman Joe Barton. He talked up his history in fighting for a balanced budget and vowed to fight against the carbon cap and trade system Obama is proposing (that would be a huge tax increase on everyone, even if the source of the price increases is carefully hidden from the consumer).

My Congresswoman, earmark-happy Kay Granger, didn't show. Maybe she's bashful about going places she wants to drown.

The spots with good acoustics were full by the time I got there so I had a hard time hearing the other speakers.

The crowd demographics had changed some from the February event (on top of being 6+ times larger). We had a lot more 20-somethings and people who were new to political events. Hardly any signs accusing Obama of being a Marxist this time, and the secessionists were off having an event of their own. We did get some of the birth certificate conspiracy nonsense from the musical entertainment, sigh. Local candidates were trying to get votes with Clyde Picht making the biggest impression with a banner towed by a circling plane. The signs were mostly anti-spending, including mine.

I was happy to hear the news of Vermont's legislature legalizing gay marriage. This is how major changes should be made--with the support of a majority, with the chance for both sides to have their say, with compromises made as necessary, and with the decision settled. Court-imposed changes lack all of those and are inherently unstable. Losing a 2/3s vote in a legislature tells the opposition it's time to go find something else to do (these conservatives aren't urging action against it, they're reduced to reserving their right to say "I told you so" when the country goes to hell).

Abortion is the most vivid case of a major change that still not accepted by a large chunk of the population. The problem is that it's always been decided by judges. Segregation was originally banned by court orders, but when Congress outlawed it with the Civil Right Act the issue was settled. Now praising a segregationist can cost a Senator his job. Abortion keeps getting fought over in supreme court appointments and with laws designed solely to create court cases. If we'd tackled this by passing laws we'd probably have had a solid majority for a compromise law (maybe like France's) and the issue would be settled instead of constantly popping up.

I suspect this isn't a bad thing from the viewpoint of individual politicians. Right now they can pick one side to give lip service to and collect donations and volunteer labor from the supporters, while avoiding giving any offense to the moderate majority by pointing to the courts and disclaiming all responsibility for what actually happens. But those career benefits for politicians are promoting constant battles which are toxic to our polity.

So as a supporter of gay marriage I'm hoping more state legislatures legalize it, and the example of those states convinces others to follow in their path. That's progress that will settle the issue.

I don't expect the opponents of gay marriage to give up any time soon. They're fighting to protect their culture, one where people have defined roles as part of a community and are expected to carry out their obligations. That breaks down if people are free to create their own roles in life and abandon duties they hadn't agreed to. That breakdown is well under way. The "inherited obligation" culture used to dominate this country, now it's a minority, and many of the supporters of the culture find themselves choosing individual career goals over staying part of a particular community. That's not making them give up, it's making them try to hold on to the few remaining pieces of the culture as hard as they can. And if all they need to do is get a few judges to switch their votes, that's a winnable fight so they might as well keep at it.

The only way we can complete the transition from a community-based culture to one that maximizes the freedom of individuals is to settle the issues, not keep them under debate forever (no matter how addicted politicians are to NARAL/ProLifeAmerica donations). Right now there's more institutions being torn down than built up, and that's leaving a lot of people in a bad situation. We need to find ways to build new communities that support children and relationships. We can't do that while the culture war drags on forever.

I took a few vacation hours yesterday to join in the Fort Worth Tea Party protest against the "stimulus" spending. We had a good turnout and made the paper. More people were showing up after 5pm but I couldn't stay much longer so I don't know how big it got. The organizers said 800 people signed their petition, so we had that many coming through even if they didn't stay for the whole thing.

I imagine the organizers of anti-war protests got annoyed when the Free Mumia types showed up and diluted the focus of the event. Our version of that was Larry Kilgore and some other Texas secession types.

I took a bunch of pictures, but the data cable for our camera seems to have been used as a baby toy or vanished for some other reason. NYTexan took some great pictures and posted them to this Free Republic thread. This picture gives a good view of the protest. There were more people off to the left, and some more behind the bar listening to the band (that counts if they're playing protest songs, right?). I'm the guy in the green jacket under the "cow" in the "Cow Town" sign.

The slogan I went with was "DON'T SUBSIDIZE STUPIDITY." Lots of people liked it. My sign was more readable than most but I think I'll go for a bigger one next time.