The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

The State of the Union

"Mister Speaker, the President of the United States."

21:00 EST: I switched to CNN because Paul Krugman said he'd be on. He is not in evidence. Over to NPR, because the CNN commentators are so annoying.

21:03: I love NPR, and Mara Liasson in particular, but wow. Nobody knows anything.

21:05: The Republicans have had training on how to talk to women. That says everything you need to know about American politics these days. Fortunately, only men who own property can vote, so it doesn't really matter in November.

21:14: Is Boehner already drunk?

21:15: Education! Fuck yeah!

21:16: I can't even watch CNN video, it's too far behind the radio. I mean, what, they've got him on a delay? Seriously, CNN is 8 seconds behind NPR.

21:17: "It is you who make the state of the Union strong." My ruling on drinking games: this is semantically equivalent to "The state of the Union is strong."

21:18: China, already? Must be a mid-term year.

21:20: What un-american person would shut down the government? Commies. That's who.

21:21: "Inequality has deepened. ... Too many Americans are working too hard just to get ahead, and too many aren't working at all. ... Wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation...." I mean, I like this guy, and I'm frustrated by Republican intransigence, as happy as I am about recognizing inequality, I'm not happy about strengthening the executive.

21:25: "The son of a barkeep is the Speaker of the House." Thank you, thank you, don't forget to tip your bartenders.

21:26: "Both Democrats and Republicans have complained that our tax code is riddled with loopholes..." Yes, but we complain about different loopholes. Middle-class wage earners aren't exercised about the mortgage interest deduction; they're pissed about capital gains exclusions. This is non-trivial. And when I say President Obama—who I've supported in two presidential races and two U.S. Senate races—when I say this guy is a Republican, this is what I mean. If only the Republican Party could accept this.

21:31: Energy independence isn't possible in the U.S., not until we cut consumption by 40%. But he has to say this. And the Republicans have to sit on their hands, because they're in thrall to the energy companies. Wow, I wish we had an opposition party instead of a fringe group.

21:32: A friend just texted that her phone kept auto-correcting "Boehner" to "Bieber." Oddly, despite Bieber being a foreign national and citizen, I would be OK with the switch.

21:34: Sigh. Our children's children might say things to us, but we X-ers are getting married and reproducing so late in life, it's odds-against that we'll survive to see our grandchildren.

21:36: Immigration, fuck yeah! If only because, you know, 99.8% 100% of all Americans are descended from immigrants. (Seriously, what kind of hypocrite opposes immigration reform?)

21:38: "This Congress needs to restore the unemployment insurance you just let expire for 1.6 million Americans." YES. How can people actually oppose people having food, shelter, and health care?

21:43: Again, how can anyone oppose these things? Well, if you believe that partisan politics is more important than policy, it's natural. But if you get your head out of your ass, it's really hard to disagree.

21:46: Oh, no, the 77c fallacy. I mean, you read my blog, you know where I stand, but seriously. Our problem is parental leave, not "a Mad Men episode." Do we really have to make the same arguments we've been making for 60 years? I guess so, just in case some women might vote Republican in November. Comments, please: doesn't this sound patronizing already?

21:50: A $10.10 minimum wage may not even be enough. But it's a good step. My state's is $8.25, which isn't enough. Again, how do people oppose this?

21:54: WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU 50 MINUTES INTO THE SPEECH AND ONLY NOW TALKING ABOUT HOW GREAT THE ACA IS? This is simply the biggest accomplishment of his first term. Let me repeat that: THE ACA IS THE BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PRESIDENT'S FIRST TERM. "Let's not have another 40-something votes to repeal a law that's already helping millions of people." I mean, shit, talk about burying the lede...

21:58: "Citizenship means everyone's right to vote." It's really sad that the President has to point this out to Congress. "It should be the power of our vote, not the size of our bank accounts, that drives our democracy."

22:02: "America's longest war could be over." America's longest war. Yeah, 13 years already. Except for the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on metaphor, none of which we've ended. (Sorry, too snarky?)

22:05: "America must move off a permanent war footing." Sigh. Such a plain-English statement, with which I agree completely, but will it come to pass? Please, in the next 22 months, please help us not be Rome.

22:06: Closing Guantanamo? Because Constitution? Don't lie to me Barry. Don't lie to me.

22:07: "America's diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria's chemical weapons are being eliminated." It's sad he has to mention our threat of force. But we live in the era of MURICA FUCK YEAH so, you know, baby steps.

22:10: "If Congress sends me a bill [that fucks with our diplomatic efforts with Iran], I will veto it." We have the chance to come to rapprochement with Iran. We are this close. Congress is now on notice not to start a war.

22:12: Shout out to Ukrainian democracy.

22:13: Seriously, the President mentions the Olympics, and you start a "U-S-A" chant? How insecure are you children?

21:17: I respect everyone who serves, or who has served, in our armed forces. But my dog, I hate props. Google these terms: argumentum ad populi. Argumentum ad misericordiam. Argumentum ad vericundiam. Circulus in probandum. Petitio principii. Let me suggest, with no irony, that these things named in Latin argue for their universality.

21:20: This is my President. I voted for him six times*. I get the job he has to do tonight. And in today's political climate, I continue to support him. But, wow, my Eisenhower-Republican grandparents would be perfectly happy with tonight's speech.

That's where we are today. President Obama just gave a perfectly competent, perfectly good sixth-year speech. I agree with just about all of it—but (a) how could you not? except (b) he argued for more executive power, in an era of unprecedented executive power.

Even though I've been live-blogging with ample assistance from the most excellent Anti-Hero IPA, I need to think about this speech. I think it's reasonable, living in a democracy, to make compromises; to accept that the leader of your party has to make public pronouncements for politics that you disagree with; to support the person that gets shit done in the general direction you want. And I recognize that my party's challenge in the next 10 months is to hold on to the U.S. Senate, especially since we've blown up the filibuster.

21:33: Oh, dog. The Republican response, from representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers from eastern Washington, is making my stomach churn.

Yes, folks. Here's the distinction. You can have policy, or you can have pabulum. "A vision...that champions the people, not the government...."

Bible...200th woman in Congress...Work hard, help others, and always, always dream for more...married a Navy guy...Down's syndrome...gift from God...we are not bound by what we come from...the gap between where you are, and where you want to be...securing our borders...her premiums were going up $700 a month**...you can find coverage, and a doctor who will treat you...we advance these plans every day...the true state of the union lies*** in your heart...with the guidance of God, we may prove ourselves worthy...may God guide you and our President...

tl;dr: our policies are hurting you, because you're an infidel, but the President is in a different party, so blame him, not us.

All right. Here's my wish. I want a strong, progressive party in the majority, and a strong, rational opposition. I see neither of those things right now. And I am frustrated.

* 2004 U.S. Senate primary, 2004 U.S. Senate general, 2008 presidential primary, 2008 general, 2012 presidential primary, 2012 presidential general.

** This result is actually not possible under the ACA unless she radically expanded her coverage.

*** Her word, not mine. I sincerely hope the state of the union never lies to you. I hope you listen carefully, and listen with reason.

The pain in Ukraine falls mainly on the plain

Via Sullivan, Washington Post staffer Max Fisher explains how Ukraine's divisions are about more than one politician:

Ukrainian is the majority and official language of Ukraine. But, as a legacy of of the country's subjugation by Russia, many Ukrainians speak Russian, which is the native language for about one-third of the population. The Russian speakers are clustered in the south and east. A significant chunk of them are ethnic Russian, as well. In some regions, more than three-quarters of the population speaks Russian as their primary language.

Heavily Russian-speaking regions can tend to be more sympathetic (or at least less hostile) to policies that bring their country closer to Russia, as Yanukovych has been doing. But the Ukrainian-speaking regions have historically sought a Ukrainian national identity that is less Russia-facing and more European. So this is about politics, yes, but it's also about identity, about the question of what it means to be Ukrainian.

I visited Kyiv (Kiev) in 2009, a few months before Yanukovich's return to power. My host and I didn't talk about politics much, but she did show me where the protests that unseated him in 2004 had happened.

Kyiv has roughly equal populations of Ukrainian and Russian speakers, being the capital and all, though it's pretty firmly within the Ukrainian-speaking part of the country. I got the sense, from the few people I talked to, that Russia made everyone a little nervous. But it was spring, the weather was perfect, and I was really only there to see things like this:

My Ukrainian friends here and in Europe are scared for their country. Remember, it's only been independent for 23 years, after centuries of subjugation by others. (Sound familiar?) We'll see. There are a lot of angry people there right now.

Inflation is good for debtors

Why? Because as the value of currency goes down, it becomes easier to pay off fixed debts. As a compensation, interest rates tend to rise with inflation, because the cost of money—if I give you a dollar today, I want more tomorrow—goes up with it.

The flipside is that creditors hate inflation. Raising interest rates kills inflation dead. In fact, raise interest rates at the wrong time, and you get deflation, which makes it harder to pay off debts.

This tells you everything to know about why the very, very rich want to raise interest rates right now, even though we have the lowest inflation rate in history. Paul Krugman fills in the lines:

Keynes describes...a condition of secular stagnation — of persistently low returns on investment, in which there is a chronic oversupply of saving. He believed, in 1936, that this would be the state of affairs in the decades ahead, and was of course wrong in that belief. But he wasn’t wrong about the possibility of such a state of affairs, and since Larry Summers came out as a secular stagnationist, the view that we may well be there now has gone mainstream.

[L]ow rates of interest, he suggested, "would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital."

What Keynes didn’t say, but now seems obvious, is that the rentiers are unlikely to accept their euthanasia gracefully. And therein, I’d argue, lies the ultimate explanation of the persistent clamor for monetary tightening despite weak economies and low inflation. I’ve described on a number of occasions how tight-money advocates are constantly shifting their arguments — it’s about inflation; no, it’s about sound market functioning; no, it’s about financial stability — but always with the same bottom line: rates must rise now now now.

This is why don't we have higher employment, more growth, and rising standards of living right now. And yet mortgage rates are going up—in a housing slump. At some point, the bottom 99% are going to notice, don't you think?

Busy week, quiet blog

I've got outside meetings every day this week, and those tend to compress my days. So there might be more link lists like this one coming up:

Back to the mines.

Too-busy-to-write link roundup

In two and a half weeks, I'll be on a beach doing nothing of value to anyone but myself. Meanwhile, here are all the things I won't have time to read until someday in the future:

Now my long day continues...

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Tomorrow will be quieter than today, I hope, or I might not get time to think until next week. I didn't miss these meanwhile:

Next meeting...

Can the NSA prevent another 9/11? Well, it failed to prevent the first one

CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen argues that the NSA, CIA, and FBI had all the information they needed to prevent 9/11, but the Bush Administration failed to follow through. Providing more tools to the NSA would do nothing except give them more power:

The government missed multiple opportunities to catch al Qaeda hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar when he was living in San Diego for a year and a half in the run up to 9/11, not because it lacked access to all Americans phone records but because it didn't share the information it already possessed about the soon-to-be hijacker within other branches of the government.

The CIA also did not alert the FBI about the identities of the suspected terrorists so that the bureau could look for them once they were inside the United States.

These multiple missed opportunities challenge the administration's claims that the NSA's bulk phone data surveillance program could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The key problem was one of information sharing, not the lack of information.

Since we can't run history backward, all we can say with certainty is that it is an indisputable fact that the proper sharing of intelligence by the CIA with other agencies about al-Mihdhar may well have derailed the 9/11 plot. And it is merely an untestable hypothesis that if the NSA bulk phone collection program had been in place at the time that it might have helped to find the soon-to-be-hijackers in San Diego.

Indeed, the overall problem for U.S. counterterrorism officials is not that they don't gather enough information from the bulk surveillance of American phone data but that they don't sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already possess that is derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence techniques.

The blanket Hoovering up of data by the NSA threatens everyone's liberties. But that cost isn't worth the results by any measure, since the NSA isn't actually making us safer. Their arguments to fear don't change the existing evidence.

How the NSA is making us less safe

Bruce Schneier makes the case:

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings -- even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as US computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

It's all stuff he's said before, but it needs saying again.

Social experimentation in North Carolina

Krugman outlines how the state of North Carolina cutting unemployment benefits has completely failed to encourage people back into the workforce:

The idea behind cutting benefits is that we are “paying people to be unemployed”, and that tough love will force them to go out and create jobs. It’s never explained exactly how greater desperation on the part of the unemployed will, in fact, lead to higher overall employment. Still, you could imagine that an individual state might gain some competitive advantage against other states by cutting wages. What you actually see in North Carolina, however, is nothing....

The unemployment rate did fall — but this was due to a large drop in the labor force, as the number of people looking for work fell. Why? Well, a likely explanation is that some of the unemployed continued to search for work, and were therefore counted in the labor force, despite low prospects of finding a job in a depressed economy, because such search is a requirement for those collecting benefits. Take away the benefits, and they drop out.

[I]f there were anything to the theory that cutting unemployment benefits encourages job search and somehow translates into higher employment even in a slump, harsh policies should work better at the state than at the national level. But there is no sign at all that North Carolina’s harshness has done anything except make the lives of the unemployed even more miserable.

I've asked some friends in Raleigh and Charlotte for comment.

Paging Andy Borowitz

The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama Administration has dumped CGI Federal and hired...oh sweet baby dills, Accenture:

Federal health officials are preparing to sign a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million, probably early next week, with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, HealthCare.gov, the individual said.

Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange. But it has not done substantial work on any federal health-care program.

This contract is worth billions to Accenture, who deserves it about as much as Bashar Assad deserves a Nobel peace prize.

Let me tell you a story about Accenture. A few years ago I worked for one of its subsidiaries. I was on a project I really enjoyed, traveling 100% outside of Chicago. Then I got a new job and gave 30 days' notice so that we would have sufficient time to staff someone else in my role and transfer what I knew to him.

That was Friday. On Monday, when I showed up at the job site, I couldn't log into my accounts on the client's systems. So I went to the client and said, "Hey, I'm having trouble logging in."

He said, "What the f@&! are you doing here?"

It turned out, the Accenture partner on the project had told this guy that I just up and quit, walked off the project, and didn't give any notice. Unfortunately, the Accenture partner did not communicate this fable to me, or to my boss at the subsidiary, so I flew to the project location Sunday night as planned.

I neither know nor care what the client said to the Accenture partner who lied to him and tried to destroy my reputation, but the client assured me it would not be a happy or polite conversation. I never met the Accenture partner personally, which is good, because I might have said something rude as well.

This wasn't the first or last time that Accenture did something Machiavellian at my expense, but it was one of the few that had so many impartial witnesses that I can relay it without fear of contradiction.

So: these are the folks that my President's government has decided to hire.

I'm also chuckling that the contract will begin on March First. Google that phrase and you'll see why it's funny to us in the industry.