Barack Obama and John McCain seem to locked into a sort of awkward game-theory romance on taking public funds for their (presumptive) presidential campaigns.

McCain: Obama Should Take Public Funding

Decades of advertising-driven political campaigns have created an arms-race scenario that long ago blew past logical extremes and is now tottering around in the illogical extremes of 100s of millions of dollars of candidate’s money being spent each time there’s a US presidential race. No one who unilaterally scales back their campaign financing expects to win — a seperate co-evolutionary process between media and the public have resulted in newspapers, TV and radio which are devoid of the candidate’s positions, just their polls and horse-race commentary. Consequently expensive paid advertising, terrible medium that it may be for communicating political ideas, is the main channel candidates have to distribute their message to people who aren’t already converts.

There is a bi-lateral disarmarment option. Nowadays, a candidate can opt to take public funding for their campaign. It’s free money, from the taxpayers (I think), but the disadvantage is it isn’t nearly as much as a US presidential candidate can potentially raise through private donations. Not nearly enough, in other words, to beat a privately funded opponent. And if they take the public funds, they can’t use their private funds to campaign on.

On the other hand, private funds come with a price. The bulk of private donations come from corporations and other rich actors, who expect loyalty for their money. Whether that channels through lobbyists or not, the sensible name for this interaction is “bribery” and “corruption”. We’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t see it that way, but whatever, it is. US politicians these days are self-selected to be comfortable with the bribery/corruption way of doing things, but both McCain and Obama have made noise about campaign finance reform and getting out of the lobbyist pocket. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that when somebody looked into it, they were each the candidate with the fewest former lobbyists in their top campaign staff, for their respective parties.

So it’s just about a prisoner’s dilemma. The best possible option, in terms of total payoff, is for both of them to go for the public funds. And both of them have speculated charmingly about it in public, mostly back before they thought they had a clear shot at being their party’s nominee. But the best option for either one of them is to stick to private funds and have the other guy go public. Then the one who stays private can advertise their way into the whitehouse and lounge around drinking magnums of Jefferson’s champagne long into the night while speculating languidly about how to use their enormous new power to make sure they future is lobbyist free. But according to Nash’s beautiful mind, they’re going to end up both having to take the private funds, working hard to gather them up, being owned by their donors, and fighting a likewise privately-funded opponent. Because in the prisoner’s dilemma, you have to assume that the other guy is going to bail on you.

Except you don’t of course, it just usually ends up that way. So how can these two avoid that fate? It seems like they’re trying to collude together, in public, without committing to anything, by way of campaign speech soundbites and public news releases. Somebody help these guys out. We need a binding, enforceable mechanism where one can say “I promise that if the other guy promises to take public funds, I will take public funds”, and then they can use that as a holier-than-thou until the other guy makes the same commitment, but if the other guy doesn’t, no skin off nobody’s back. And hey, just maybe the other guy will make that commitment, and we’ll have the first publicly funded US presidential race, and we can write another chapter in the story of the US’s inexorable move to democracy.

update: I remembered that wrong. McCain actually had the most lobbyists working for his campaign. Out of everybody. He is indeed big on campaign finance reform, but it seems to be an open question whether his ideas of reform are positive or just bad.

Strange to see the Albertan oil boom showing up on Kottke.org as a novel topic. If this is news to people who haven’t been personally associated with the oil patch, then it’s far past time this news gets out. This should be and needs to be an major regional national and international issue.

Note that the Edward Burtynsky photographs seem to be of the smaller of the two major oil sands projects.

Well here we are in the Koessler Room of the Michigan League. Violet-tinted windows let the late-afternoon, late-winter light into the wood paneled room. There’s a big table across the front of the room. On the far side of the table are a number of well-kempt academic types. On our side are a range of hastily cleaned-up, slightly underfed (vegans? smokers?) studenty looking types.

The rest of the room has chairs, some empty, some occupied with less-well-kempt slightly underfed studenty looking types. The predominant sound is the clicking of laptop keys. The studenty types at the table occasionally ask a question, slowly and carefully. The man in the center of the academic types answers slowly and carefully. There are pauses in between the questions and the answers and the questions.

As each new section of the contract comes up, paper print-outs are passed out throughout the crowd. These copies show the contract proposal as submitted by the union, with the administration’s response superimposed in the form of MS Word-style revision mark-up. That mark-up is mostly in the form of large-scale deletions.

It’s not a particularly exciting event to live-blog. Most of the substantive issues are dealt with very quietly and in small-scale language.

Here’s the gist as I see it:

Your request of pay raises in keeping with cost-of-living increase: No.

Your request for same-sex benefits: meh.

Your request for pay during required training events: No.

Your request for partial tuition waivers for small-fractional GSIs: No.

Your request for tuition waivers for quarter+ fraction GSIs: No.

The key words here are: “current contract language”. As in the old one. AT least we’re not losing ground I guess.

The justification is: we can’t deal with that proposal until we know what the financial impact of those other proposals is. Repeat as necessary.

—

Best moment so far: one of our guys asks “of the substantive proposals we’ve put forward, can you think of a single one which you not turning down?” Followed by 20 seconds or so of silence. Then an “okay, moving along…”.

—

Us: “Given that almost everything you’ve given back to us is just “orginial contract language”, I’m a little surprised that it took you until today to give it to us…”

—

Also good (but again, the good stuff mostly comes from people getting frustrated and saying stuff which probably isn’t particularly productive):

Us: “You’ve framed this as a series of economic “repercussions”, which sounds really bad, we’ve framed it as an investment in people who will bring more money to the school. Do you reject that philosophy?”

Them: “Well, can you ask a yes or no question?”

Us: “It was.”

—

Them: “With respect to your proposal for professional leave, the language you’ve proposed leaves it open to being as much as a term..”

Us: “Uh, I think you mean pregnancy leave…”

Them: “Oh right sorry.”

Us: “Yeah ‘I have to go to a conference, it lasts 4 months”.

Them: “Well, actually, that could happen under the language you’ve proposed for professional leave too”.

Oh snap.

—

Us: “yes, so you’ve struck the word (inaudible), because it’s passive and unclear I suppose…”

Other us: “…ask an english major…”

Them: “we’ll check that with our english majors…”

—

And so on. Scintillating material. Now we’re negotiating the number of copies of the contract to be printed. Vigorously.

I guess this has to do with September 11th 2001 in some way. The state of Michigan has decided in it’s excellent wisdom that if you want get a driver’s license you have to provide proof of citizenship or permanent residency. Since the US defines anyone without a green card as “non-resident”, regardless of whether you live here or not, that means that most internationals won’t be able to get licenses.

I’ve lived here over a year, and in the US for almost 4. My tax money pays for US foreign wars, as well as the State of Michigan’s doings. I’ve formally pledged myself to the Constitutions of the USA and the State of Michigan. But I can’t get a license.

Does this mean they’re going to relax the expectation that you get a state license to replace your international one, or does it just mean we’re not allowed on the roads?

It looks like Vantreight Farm’s proposal to develop a piece of their land has been shot down:

Council rejects Vantreight proposal — Times Colonist

The proposal for about 250 homes on a 13-hectare chunk of land that Vantreight said is rocky and unfarmable has caused much division in the largely rural community. Although the majority of people who spoke at a packed public meeting Monday were in favour, municipal staff recommended against it.
….
Vantreight proposed a “green development” on the property at 8410 Wallace Dr., using a system that recovers organic waste, water and heat from the residential development to provide energy and organic fertilizer for the farm.

But the proposal is contrary to the Official Community Plan, the document that outlines the long-term vision and goals for the municipality. It would also require changes to a regional plan on where growth is to happen, and isn’t on municipal sewer or water system, municipal staff said in a report to council. The site also has Garry oaks and woodland, none of which appeared to be saved with Vantreight’s plan.

Staff said a smaller development might be appropriate, and some councillors suggested Vantreight come back with that, rather than a proposal so clearly beyond what the community plan calls for.

Nuff respek to the Central Saanich council for sticking by their community plan I suppose, those things are often the last line of defense against heavy development, but I have to admit, I’m awfully torn on this one. Somebody commented in my very first daffodil post asking how to get work at the farm. I’d hate to think it’s not going to be an option in a year or two. And were they really going to recycle their own waste? Damn, that’s really far out on the edge of green-ness. If they could be held to that, they’d be setting a precedent for other developers.

“This proposal, whatever you may think of it, is about saving one of the last farms of this size in Central Saanich,” Warner said. “This is our one last chance for one farm of this size.”

Farmland on the Saanich Peninsula is so expensive that farmers can’t make a living off growing crops alone. “Not any legal crop we’re allowed to grow, anyway,” Warner said.

“This is land that could well be of use to us 100 years from now. It has the ability to produce food for this region that we may not get again. Think about that.”

The New York Times has an excellent article up about the problems with touch-screen and other kinds of electronic voting:

Can You Count on Voting Machines? — Clive Thompson

(It may require you to register to see it. Bugmenot has lots of NYT passwords if you’d rather not join another database.)

Among the many excellent and balanced points made, there is this:

“The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.”

If I read that right, all the people who have been concerned about evoting all these years, for mostly the same reasons as the author addresses, were senseless fringe geeks who only happened to be right in the way that stopped clocks are right once a day. Now however, the issue is blessed by the Grey Lady, and the same concern is permissible and dignified. Oh good.

I can’t help pointing out that Canada has (almost) no history of election irregularities, and generally uses a system that doesn’t even seem to be on the radar of any of the election experts the article mentions. We make an X in an O on a little piece of paper, fold it up, then put it in a sealed box which is shipped to a counting center and counted by people. What’s wrong with that, anyway? Our federal elections are regulated, well, federally, so every province and county gets equally reliable elections, instead of the county-by-county business in the US. Silly old US.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has a glowing judgment of the outcomes of the Bali climate negotiations.

I’m going to believe him. To believe any less would be sad, scary and infuriating.

I have no particular response to this Obama Girl business except to point out the irony of the side joke at Kucinich in the “vs. Guiliani Girl” episode. Unlike Obama or Guiliani, Dennis actually does have a smoking hot wife young enough to be his daughter. Kinda seems like Kucinich answered the phone when Kucinich Girl called.

Against expectations, and possibly despite vote-rigging, the Venezuelans have shot down Chavez’s latest power grab in a referendum. From my distant and ill-informed perch, this sure seems like fabulous news. The Bolivarian revolution Chavez helped kick off could turn very nasty if the politicians who are elected in the name of for-the-people politics corral that power to dictatorial ends. Venezuela was moving swiftly down that path. This is a significant turn-around, and it comes because the Venezuelans got organized and protested and out-communicated the state-owned media. Turns out they like the meaning of democratization, not just the sound of the word, and are going to try and hold their leaders to it. A socialist-themed administration that is afraid of the people could yield good results. Lets hope this holds as a precedent for the other South American countries that are facing similar choices.

It occurred to me suddenly that hughstimson.org hasn’t yet declared itself in this round of the Great Race for the Presidency. No problem, this one’s easy. Hughstimson.org possesses a faith not readily shaken, and that faith remains deeply embedded in Dennis Kucinich. Carry on sir, with your duly appointed rounds of winning the presidency. We’ve got your back over here.

Also, I’m willing to throw my support behind this Esquire magazine article if it makes a bid for the vice-president spot. I hear that’s a good spot.

It’s Kucinich Time!

The pure products of America go crazy,” wrote William Carlos Williams — antipoet of “the thing itself” — but Dr. Williams was from north Jersey, and as far as I know never strayed to Cleveland, whose own pure products long have been flame tempered, union made, and born batshit insane. So when I tell you that Dennis Kucinich is first of all a sane, sane man, and secondly, fit to be president — and thirdly: It’s Kucinich time, now, because what this blue-balled, war-thwacked nation needs is not another scleroid corporate whore but a sixty-one-year-old vegan peacemonger, poor beyond corruption and honest as spit, hauling balls big enough to both choke Dick Cheney and keep a smile like a woozy kitten’s on the love-lit face of a twenty-nine-year-old heartthrob wife; and if not now, when? and if not Dennis, who? — when I tell you this hand over heart and cheek untongued, then it behooves me also to say that I am a son of the same crooked flaming river, Cleveland-born and -bred and unashamed.