Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.

Hillary Clinton’s win in West Virginia made no difference in the expectations game because everyone expected her to win big. She did pick up 12 more pledged delegates than Obama, lowering her deficit to a “mere” 153. And she did net nearly 150,000 popular votes, which brings her deficit there down to anywhere from 30,000 (including Florida where neither candidate campaigned, and Michigan where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot) to 700,000 (excluding Florida and Michigan, and including RCP’s estimates of the popular vote in the caucus states that didn’t record popular vote totals).

The remaining contests are Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota. Baseball Crank estimates that Clinton will net about another 186,000 popular votes from these states (a WV-like blowout in Kentucky and a solid win in Puerto Rico, balanced by solid wins by Obama in Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota), or about 6% of votes expected to be cast in these states. By that margin, Clinton will probably net about 11 of the 189 delegates at stake. That just won’t do.

But Baseball Crank’s projections are based on current poll numbers, and there’s still campaigning left to be done. It’s unlikely but not inconceivable that Clinton would win all of the remaining contests, or at least close the margins in the states Obama currently leads by enough that she nets somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 popular votes and 20-30 pledged delegates, which would put her comfortably in the lead in popular vote counting Florida but not Michigan, and which would put the pledged delegate count close enough that seating the Florida and Michigan delegations would give her a majority.

Suppose that happens. Suppose almost every primary for the next few weeks goes against the presumptive Democratic nominee, often by huge margins. And suppose the following two and a half months until the convention are filled with Clinton surrogates telling everyone who will listen that Clinton won the popular vote, that she has a lead in pledged delegates if you “let every vote count” (*), and showing electoral college maps based on current polls for McCain vs. Clinton and McCain vs. Obama — David Wissing has McCain beating Obama by 301 to 237, but Clinton beating McCain by 290 to 248.

How do you think the superdelegates would react to that argument?

Of course, this all hinges on Clinton outperforming her current poll numbers in all the remaining contest. If Obama wins convincingly in Oregon or if he closes the gap in Puerto Rico, it’s hard to imagine Clinton’s arguments working barring an enormous gaffe by Obama between June 3 and the convention. The odds are definitely in Obama’s favor.

(*) — I personally think it’s entirely legitimate for the DNC to refuse to seat delegates selected in unauthorized early primaries. The party has a clear interest in controlling the primary calendar, and refusing to seat delegates is the only leverage they have. But Clinton needs the delegates seated, and her arguments are likely to resonate with many people in a party which still has unhappy memories of Al Gore in 2000. 

A few days ago I shared this outrageous story with you–Father Jailed Because His Adult Daughter Fails to Get Her GED. In the case, father Brian Gegner was ordered to see to it that his daughter gets her GED, but she has not done so, in part because she struggles with math. The daughter’s problems in school came at a time when she lived with her mother. The daughter herself–now almost 19-years-old–says that she alone is responsible for her own problems and that her father shouldn’t be blamed. Nevertheless, the father is in jail on a six month sentence.

The jailed father goes before Judge David J. Niehaus on Friday–I urge all of you to call Niehaus and also the Governor of Ohio to demand Brian Gegner’s release. The contact information is:

BUTLER COUNTY
Juvenile Justice Center
Judge David J. Niehaus 513-887-3318
fax: 513-887-5592

Contact Ohio Governor Strickland here:
http://www.governor.ohio.gov:80/Default.aspx?tabid=448
Phone: (614) 466-3555
Fax: (614) 466-9354

Michael Robinson of the California Alliance for Families and Children issued a call to action on this case earlier this week, and has been checking into the case and speaking with Ohio officials. Robinson reveals several important facts about the case:

1) Both Robinson and Ohio WCPO TV reporter Deb Silverman have been digging into the Gegner family’s history, and Robinson says “both parents are clean, they simply were unable to get their daughter to stay in school.”

2) This sad chain of events was set off because the parents did the right thing–they were concerned about their daughter’s truancy, acknowledged that they were not able to control her, and called the police for help. I would also add that this is an example of two divorced parents working together to try to help their child, something this country needs a lot more of.

3) Perhaps most significant of all, Judge David J. Niehaus and two colleagues were specifically accused of judicial abuse by Butler County Commissioner Mike Fox in his 2003 report “A Culture of Secrecy, Fear and Judicial Abuse.”

Again, I urge all of you to call the judge in this case and also the Governor of Ohio to demand Brian Gegner’s release. The CAFC press release has generated protest calls but we need a lot more–the contact information is above.

Other relevant details:

1) According to CBS, the judge is “standing firm” and says Gegner will “only be released if his daughter passes the GED.” So a parent can be held in jail until his or her child passes a test?! If my son fails Geometry, should my wife and I be jailed until he passes Geometry in summer school?

2) In “A Culture of Secrecy, Fear and Judicial Abuse,” Fox writes:

“The Domestic Relations and Juvenile Courts of Butler County foster a culture of secrecy, fear and judicial abuse that violates the most fundamental and sacred rights guaranteed by our nation’s Constitution — the rights of due process of the laws. Those who are most directly affected by decisions of these courts — parties to the actions — are routinely excluded from court proceedings and deliberations, told to wait outside the hearing room in a hallway while their lives, personal property, children and homes are divided up by strangers.” To read the full report, click here.

3) The CAFC’s press release on this case can be seen here.

3) The most recent Associated Press article on the case can be seen here. A Butler County TV station cites the CAFC on the case here.

4) To watch a video of the daughter discussing her father’s jailing, click here.

5) In a letter to officials, Robinson poses an excellent question:

“What was the juvenile court doing to help these parents with dealing with Brittany’s destructive behavior before it got this far? Did the court offer any kind of parenting resources like The Parent Project, which help parents deal with such problems?

“The Parent Project is a parenting skills program designed specifically for parents with strong-willed or out-of-control children. Because of its success in preventing, identifying and intervening in the most destructive of adolescent behaviors, the Parent Project has won three state awards in California and has been successfully adopted for use by hundreds of communities throughout the nation.”

I think Robinson’s remarks are particularly relevant because the parents got in trouble because they went to authorities asking for help.

Again, I urge all of you to call the judge in this case and also the Governor of Ohio to demand Brian Gegner’s release.

Glenn Sacks, www.GlennSacks.com

[Note: If you or someone you love is faced with a divorce or needs help with child custody, child support, false accusations, Parental Alienation, or other family law or criminal law matters, ask Glenn for help by clicking here.]

In response to a paper in Nature that argues that global warming may be entering a lull, the RealClimate blog is extending a friendly wager offer to the authors of the paper, and inviting them to guest post on the blog. I hope the authors (Keenlyside et al.) take RC up on this, as it’s a great idea and very much in the spirit of open scientific debate. As the RC folks put it,

Framing this in the form of a bet also helps to clarify what exactly was forecast and what data would falsify this forecast. This was not entirely clear to us just from the paper and it took us some correspondence with the authors to find out. It also allows the authors to say: wait, this is not how we meant the forecast, but we would bet on a modified forecast as follows… By the way, we are happy to negotiate what to bet about - we’re not doing this to make money. We’d be happy to bet about, say, a donation to a project to preserve the rain forest, or retiring a hundred tons of CO2 from the European emissions trading market.

We thus hope that this discussion will help to clarify the issues, and we invite Keenlyside et al. to a guest post here (and at KlimaLounge) to give their view of the matter.

RC presented their own scientific case and critique of the Nature paper to clarify exactly where they disagree. This promises to be genuinely informative and rigorous.

In related news, John McCain is distancing himself from the Bush Administration on global warming and presenting his own plan, which includes mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. His campaign website has an entire section devoted to it. His plan is not as aggressive and ambitious as that of either Clinton or Obama, and he seemed confused about his rivals’ commitment to the issue:

Asked at his news conference why voters who are concerned about the environment should support him over Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, Mr. McCain said that his proposal was “doable” and that his rivals “have never to my knowledge been involved in legislation nor hearings nor engagement in this issue.”

He did not mention that in 2007, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were co-sponsors of an emissions-curbing bill that he introduced with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. In addition, Mrs. Clinton went with Mr. McCain and other senators on a 2004 trip to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, to see the effects of global warming. Mr. McCain mentioned that journey in a speech Monday on climate change, but he did not mention that Mrs. Clinton was one of those who went along.

An honest lapse in memory, I am sure. We must be forgiving of these from him, given his age. Anyway, McCain deserves sincere credit for bucking the conservative, anti-science trend.

60 years ago today a nation-state that ceased to exist for some 2500 years reappeared on the map overnight.

Happy birthday, Israel.  Here’s to 60 more!

I’m not sure how significant this is, but Senator Clinton just trounced Senator Obama thoroughly.

I’m not sure what the significance is, so why don’t you tell me?

at Haibane, I develop a Theory of Everything for BSG. I invite commenters there to help me flesh the idea out with my other readers.

A friend of mine emailed me this article about Irena Sendler, who died yesterday at the age of 98. During World War II, she saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and setting them up with false identities.

(I’m only using politics as a jumping off point, I’m not really discussing politics.)

I’m not a libertarian because I think that a libertarian utopia is either achievable, or likely to be a good government if it’s achieved. The United States is never going to become a libertarian ideal, so the relevant question isn’t what the US would be like if we achieved that, but what will trying to achieve that do for the United States.

My answer is that government always tends to grow, so the US having a strong libertarian bent will prune that growth, and strike a very liveable balance. Kind of like how our cells kill themselves off all the time through apoptosis to balance out their growth, and so produce a healthy living organism.

The reason that I think this is my point. The spirit of the times is in favor of government regulation (if you don’t think so, just pay attention to what the public reaction is to the next heinous crime or corporate malfeasance — they are always followed by calls for more law and regulation). Whether this is the case isn’t a point I’m trying to debate, what I’m interested in is the idea of a “spirit of the times” (often called the “zeitgeist” by people who prefer German to English).

In any given society, people generally share certain assumptions — it’s what defines their culture. But that means that there are certain virtues that they’re likely to be especially good at, and certain vices which they’re likely to be especially bad at. It means that some truths will be very plain to them, and some truths will be very hidden. People who worship the state (in a practice sense, like in Meiji Japan, rather than as a pretense, like in Soviet Russia) are often very selfless, but also very cruel to individuals. Being off-balance means that you’ll get something very right, and something very wrong. And societies are always off-balance somehow.

Actually, it’s usually segments of societies. In America, liberals and conservatives tend to make different (not necessarily opposite) sorts of characteristic mistakes. Computer geeks tend to make different characteristic mistakes than artsy people, who make different characteristic mistakes than jocks do. And so on.

It is, therefore, important for a person to figure out what ways they are off-balance, so that they at least know what sort of mistakes that they’re prone to make. The best way to do this is to try to know different people enough to see things from their point of view. If you’re a computer geek and can learn to think like a jock (I’m using the term loosely; for example, a person who’s big interest is rock climbing or distance running), you’ll find some of the things taken for granted contradicted or ignored. But that won’t be very much of a difference. Despite what people like to think in high school, jocks and geeks are actually very similar when considered against the historical range of human experience. It’s good to get to know and sympathise with different people in one’s own culture, but that only gets you so far. You still share all of the prejudices of your culture. So it’s helpful to get to know people from other cultures. But they’re still alive at the same time you are; it’s better still to read people from other time periods. There’s historical reading material available through about 2,500 years ago. It’s very interesting to find out what people took for granted back then.

Why do this? I’m not suggesting that people should start making the mistakes that people in other times and cultures did. But when you figure out how you could make the same mistakes that someone else did, it helps you to see how to avoid the mistakes that you make.

 Bill Ardolino continues his series on the Baghdad neighborhood where he’s embedded: 

The neighborhood watch program in Rusafa is a “real success story,” according to Captain John Thornburg, the commander of the 3-89 Cavalry’s Bravo Troop. The Sons of Iraq man checkpoints, patrol the area, detain militants, and are given the majority of credit for improved security by American personnel and some Iraqi Police officials. “They’ve turned one of the most violent areas of Baghdad into one of the most quiet,” said Thornburg.
…
Support for the Mahdi Army in Rusafa is diminishing as the populace grows tired of the militia’s criminal activity and as the Mahdi operatives clash with government forces. Faris and his men hate the Mahdi Army and consider them on par with al Qaeda.

“They were all corrupted,” said Dhia, Faris’s executive officer. “They have history in crime, robberies, murders, rapes, and all kinds of bad things.”

Read the whole thing.

I think this is what victory looks like:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has slashed its reward for the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq from $5 million to $100,000 because it feels he’s lost effectiveness and is no longer worth such a steep price, officials said Tuesday.

Over the course of the last year, the government first reduced the bounty for Abu Ayyub al-Masri from $5 million to $1 million and then removed him entirely from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program, which pays tipsters for information leading to the death or arrest and conviction of wanted terrorists, the officials said.

Information on al-Masri is now worth only up to $100,000 under a separate and less well-known rewards program run by the Defense Department, which asked that he be taken off the State Department list, they said.

Ouch.  Being the object of indifference is much worse than being hated.

In honor of Aziz’s post on the obesity debate, I would like to offer a similar set of assertions underlying my personal variety of libertarianism. I doubt any of these are particularly controversial claims, even among non-libertarians — they’re designed to emphasize areas of agreement and to provide a framework for constructive debate, and to make it clear that regardless of what some Ron Paul supporters might mean by “libertarian”, when I say “libertarian” I do not mean “anarchist”.

1. Almost ever government program has at least some benefits to certain people, and some have huge benefits to the bulk of the population.
2. Every government program has a direct economic cost that shows up in appropriation bills.
3. Almost every government program has indirect economic costs — regulatory compliance costs, the effort spent qualifying and applying for benefits, the deadweight loss due to the taxes that pay the direct cost of the program, etc.
4. Almost every government program has a freedom cost — it may actively deny or discourage choices, and tax funding is a tradeoff against the property rights of the taxpayer.
5. Some government programs do not produce sufficient benefits to justify the direct economic cost.
6. Some government programs are worth their direct economic costs, but not the combination of their direct and indirect economic costs.
7. Some government programs are worth their direct and indirect economic costs, but not their freedom costs.
8. Some government programs are worth all the costs
9. There are some things the government isn’t currently doing but could do, which would be worth all the costs.

Where I tend to differ from non-libertarians is:

• I place a higher value on the freedom costs of government programs
• I am more conservative in estimating the benefits of government programs
• I am more liberal in estimating the indirect economic costs of government programs
• As a result, I tend to think categories 5, 6, and 7 are larger and 8 and 9 are smaller than most non-libertarians would suppose

Interestingly, it appears that contra most pundit assumptions, most Democratic voters want the nomination race to continue.

Honestly, that makes sense. I think those who are afraid the ongoing race is going to damage the party are basically being sissies. The Democratic race has, in fact, been remarkably positive and civil by historical perspective.

Before I head to the Big City to do some baby wrangling for the next week, I wanted to point out the latest from DAHMW:

As part of our effort to bring more awareness to society about abused men and the availability of our toll free helpline and services for men in relationships