More GOP debates, too few glimpses of decency

Public discourse in the 21st-century USA sometimes forgets clear fundamentals, and the problem is most acute in the Republican Party sector.

Yesterday I wrote that I would post a follow-up after watching last night’s GOP lineup on Fox Business News, to see whether any of the candidates would refer to mass deportation. Discussion of the debate is below, at bottom (scroll down).

Meanwhile, forgetfulness has clearly set in among people who oppose any kind of “regulation.” These people are inwardly divided. Some of them want to deport children whose parents were not born in this country, for example, forgetting that there would have to be careful fact-checking before anyone’s parents could be proven not born in this country.

Deportation: more regulation, more government, more cost, more taxes

Note to other writers and journalists: not to join in media-bashing, but why doesn’t some moderator or television reporter or interviewer ask the obvious question, when one of these guys comes out whaling on deporting children of “illegals”? Question:

How would you know that their parents are ‘illegal’?

Follow-up questions:

Who would determine that the parents of a five-year-old are undocumented?

Who, if anyone, would check?

Who would verify?

As we live now, under the Fourteenth Amendment, a person born in the United States is an American citizen. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, who my parents are, or were, is my business. Who your parents are, or were, is your business. (This is America.) Expunging the Fourteenth Amendment would make it anyone’s business, or someone’s business. Exactly whose has not been designated. Donald Trump never mentions who would handle a mass shipping-out, but the facts would have to be checked by duly constituted authorities. The authorities in turn would have to be monitored–Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? There would have to be oversight. There would have to be a route for appeal, in cases tainted by (inevitable) error or corruption. There would have to be meticulous records, documentation (this being the concept, after all), preferably supported by video recording. All of this (nightmarish) process would involve regulations.

Not that deportation is the only work site requiring regulation. (I cannot believe I’m having to write these words.) Fuel manufacturing, handling, and storage require oversight, monitoring, and concern for public health and public safety; and not every human being can or will provide these prompted by conscience alone. In other words, they have to be regulated. So do the manufacturing and handling of all other explosives. The same goes for airplane maintenance; airplane parts should not fall off in the air. Fruit juice fed to babies should not contain pesticides and herbicides. Meat and bread should not catch mold and worse from grocery shelves. Children’s toys, cribs, and car seats should not be accidents waiting to happen, causing the deaths of an actuarially predictable number of toddlers each year. The contents of prescription medications should be what the label says they are, in the proportions specified and prescribed. All of the foregoing are sites where regulation is necessary. So are manufacturing and storage for fertilizer and the many other household and construction products, whether or not created for demolitions, that turn out to be flammable and/or explosive.

Here and there

Fortunately, there are good-faith ways to reduce the need for regulation. Organic farming and local buying alleviate problems connected to toxins, transportation and freight. If any of the current presidential candidates are actually interested in reducing ‘excessive regulation’, they could consider helping the environment. The need for regulations could be made less urgent, and big areas to build improvement include food and water, travel and shipping, and health and medical care. There will be less difficulty regulating toxins and other hazards, when they are not disseminated into the environment in the first place.

(Side note: Look for Hillary Clinton using these or similar words in the next couple of days. Her campaign people are constantly on the lookout for lines she can appropriate. As a voter, and a viewer, I do wish she would stop trying to sound like Elizabeth Warren. My own sense is that if she were going to ‘fight for you’, she would have done it years ago.)

Back to illegal immigration–the undocumented immigration so vilified is a perfect example of lack of forethought, lack of clear thinking, and lack of rational prevention beforehand creating back-end problems. The hysterical eagerness to deport millions of people forgets that such a process would require the ‘regulation’ vilified as much as immigration itself. More importantly, the anti-immigrant hysteria also forgets why this immigration happens in the first place.

The immigration stems from the wish for survival. People risk their lives, and many of them lose their lives, to slip across our border hoping to be able to make a living, hoping for freedom from poverty and worse, hoping to move farther away from imminent danger and the threat of starvation as well as from local dictators. Some of the world’s poor people put themselves into the hands of human traffickers, sometimes getting scammed and virtually always in danger en route. They do so to survive. Heartbreakingly, survival in Latin America is jeopardized by the flood of weapons shipped south of the border, weapons sourced overwhelmingly from the United States. But American citizens have been prevented from taking rational measures to stem the flow of weapons south–largely by the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for operative, the GOP; partly by self-advancing Dems like Rahm Emanuel and the Clintons. Yet the most vehement opponents of gun control also tend to be the most vehement critics–to put it nicely–of illegal immigration.

This failure of logic in the public discourse is not entirely accident. It is intensified by deliberate assaults on logic, information and common sense mounted daily by lobbyists. The loosely defined but well funded gun lobby pressures elected officials; pressures media outlets; pressures schools, colleges and law schools. Scientists and researchers are under pressure. So are scholarly journals. The assault has been blatant, intense and profitable for the last thirty years.

So, back to last night’s debates–in which shootings and weapons were mostly not mentioned, while “regulation” and “free market” were much in the air. Anti-“regulation.” Pro-“free market.”

One quick comment on that “free market” meme. As I wrote years ago–in a small community newspaper that has since been sold out, speaking of markets–“free market” is an oxymoron. If it were free, there wouldn’t be money in it. In economics language, constraints are part of the market. One person or entity has something; another person or entity wants it. Party A conveys same to Party B, for a consideration. Something of value changes hands in each direction.

But the big question going into last night’s debate, for me, was whether any of the candidates would refer to mass deportation, and if so, who, and in what way.

The good news: a couple of prominent Republican candidates did indeed mention mass deportation, and mentioned it to oppose it–forcefully.

The bad news: I am so reduced by the level of discourse in general that I for one am pathetically grateful when any GOPer says something decent in public.

Let’s start with the good news. In the primetime debate, when Donald Trump reiterated his ‘plan’ to ship out illegal immigrants, even Trump softened the position somewhat with a throw-away “They can come back.” Neither other candidates nor moderators pursued that softly spoken “come back” line of thought, but he said it.

Better yet, Ohio Governor John Kasich blasted the idea of mass deportation. In a forceful and eloquent statement, Kasich characterized shipping out 11 million people as “silly.” High time someone said it. Following up, Jeb Bush said that “to send them back” is simply impossible. He also pointed out that the plan is not who we are, not in line with American values. Again, high time someone said it. Bush also pointed to the inartful politics–saying that the Clinton campaign was watching this and doing “high-fives.”

(From my living room: I watched the debates with my son and his girlfriend. We all noticed that the GOP mentioned Clinton exclusively. They’re salivating at the chance to run against her, and with good reason.)

Ironically, given the destructive rhetoric Trump has unleashed on the public, at this point I think it’s possible that Trump is better than most of his supporters. Trump is a salesman. He knows his market components. He’s playing to them. That’s why he said “I like this guy,” in a room with the man who accused President Obama of being Muslim rather than Christian, etc. Trump is a salesman. I have no experience in his field myself, but as I understand it, if you as a salesman are in a room full of people, making your pitch, that’s what you focus on. If you catch sight of some guy wearing a white costume with a white pointed hood, you don’t seize that moment to condemn the Klan; you sing out, “Hey, Jim, nice toga.”

But that’s the moment when you’ve gone too far. Trump has unleashed something in the Republican Party that its leaders have long known about–none better–but have long sought to deny and to conceal. I am by no means sure that a President Trump actually would deport millions of people, as declared by my correspondent yesterday. But in the interim, his campaign has exposed a nasty wish to do so, among the electorate courted by the GOP.

 

More later.

Message from a typical Donald Trump supporter

Here is today’s moronic email message. Found in my inbox this morning:

[text follows]

“Here is my insight.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I suggest you continue your education till you learn the meaning of all the words in this founding document. I’ll translate
for you to a more modern version of this Amendment.

Since a well regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

If you are still having cognition problems after reading this, God help you when you are under threat from any enemy of
the people whether foreign or domestic.

If you are not a real American, meaning born here to citizens, English speaking as a first language, please cease and
desist begging and using resources not intended for you and return to your nation of origin, in as timely a manner as
possible. Our next President, Donald J. Trump will remove you and it’s always better to remove yourself than be removed.

Thank you for the opportunity to offer you my insight.”

I did write back to this person. –Briefly rebutted any suggestion about my ancestry, reminded her/him that my doctorate was in English. Forbore to mention that I have just spent close to three years working on my book, Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights.

(Obvious plug: find at Kickstarterhere: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/560423647/firearms-regulation-in-the-bill-of-rights)

I also pointed out that persons of courage and integrity usually put their names to what they say.

Funny how these absolute-gun-rights extremists always seem to think they’re being bravely defiant when they’re hiding behind a username. They probably think they’re going up and giving Joe Stalin a kick in the shin.

In any case, while I doubt that this writer is a careful analyst of language (English or any other), I am confident that indeed this is the vision that Trump voters embrace–a nation in which any of us could be instantly deported, if we happened to be unable to pinpoint our parents or to produce our birth certificate.

In Milwaukee tonight. A nation bates its breath.

More tomorrow, AFTER tonight’s presentation of the GOP lineup. Must admit, though, I may be watching it with the beer that made Mel Famee Walk Us.

Florida now, and 2004 election revisited, part 9

Florida–Revisiting the 2004 election, and now

Two debaters in Jacksonville

In Thursday night’s GOP debate in Jacksonville, Newt Gingrich made a point of sounding more decent on stage for CNN than in his stump speeches around Florida (and South Carolina). The “food stamp” prevarication, while repeated, was somewhat softened. He even mentioned his grandchildren. Gov. Marco Rubio’s advice aside, the rhetorical tack of sounding nice temporarily is routinely adopted by the GOP in a national election, to blur the line with Democrats as much as possible in order to pick up votes or to cause enough confusion to get voters to stay home. That ‘voter apathy’ we used to hear so much about, in the national political press.

Also, being in Florida with its large Latino population, Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all made a point of sounding humane on illegal immigration. Gingrich attacked the notion of deporting grandmothers. Santorum mentioned his immigrant grandfather. Romney mentioned his father’s having come to this country from Mexico and his wife’s father’s having come from Wales.

Immigration as a hot-button issue is a staple of Republican Party campaigns and events, of course. The way to help would be to help Mexico.

Sign

Considering the human suffering and injustice involved, what they do not say is galling:

  • The majority of people entering the U.S. illegally come through Mexico.
  • Conditions in Mexico are deplorable. It is hard to make a living there.
  • Ergo, one could infer that many undocumented immigrants are seeking not only freedom but survival.

Where GOPers don’t go:

  • Therefore, to forestall illegal immigration from Mexico, it would make sense to help Mexico.
  • We could stop buying drugs from Mexico, a commerce that bloats the cartels at the expense of everyone else. Sticking it to the man is much more like buying it from the man, where kingpins come into the picture.
  • We could stop shipping assault weapons to Mexico. The cartels use them to impose a reign of terror on the populace.

The only candidate on stage capable of recommending sane and reasoned policy in regard to Mexico and the border, as usual, was Ron Paul. In a nutshell: “You can’t deal with immigration without dealing with the economy.” Paul also noted that we have expended vast resources on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Border-security fanatics might be well advised to fantasize less about building a fence between the U.S. and Mexico and to focus on bringing those resources home.

Or such was the suggestion. Most of Paul’s statements received friendly rounds of applause from the audience—as did converse statements from the other candidates.

Back to Florida—

Nothing I saw or heard in the debate last night dispelled my standing contention that the GOP nominee, whoever he is, will need all the help he can get in a general election. Hence the history reminders–

For background:

Predictably, voting technology tends not to arise as a topic in these debates either. As previously written, Florida was one of the four states in 2004 where the biggest swing from exit poll to published vote tally also swung the state from to Bush. (The other three were Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa.)

Remember, the big voting legislation called the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002 by a GOP-controlled Congress under the GWBush administration, at a time when Team Bush was flying high in opinion polls because of 9/11. One of the bill’s key features was what it did not include—a paper trail. Following the ‘hanging chad’ debacle in Florida, the act (HAVA) authorized the use of electronic voting machines in presidential elections. (N.b. Chads were not the real problem in Florida.) Regrettably, HAVA did not require a paper receipt for voting. Thus there was effectively no provision for ironclad verification, for independent and objective assessment of whether data produced by the voting machines accurately reflected the votes cast. Democrats largely tried to require the paper trail in the bill, but the provisions were successfully fought off by Republican congressional leaders including Tom DeLay. Without the paper trail, it is impossible to have a separate recount.

Problems with Diebold

Among voting machines used in Florida, questions have swirled around Diebold voting machines in particular for years. A reader reminded me earlier of this paper on Diebold machines published back in 2004 by Dr. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. Rubin and his students studied Diebold’s source code—theoretically protected lines of code making up the software that runs the e-voting machines.

Diebold scanner atop its garbage can, also from manufacturer

The software program was supposed to be encrypted. To its surprise, however, Rubin’s team found that Diebold machines were encrypted by a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES)–a code that was broken in 1997.

Furthermore, the key to the encryption was in the source code. Thus all Diebold machines would respond to the same key; breaking into one was breaking into all.

Rubin’s paper was published in February 2004. In April 2004, California’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel said that the Diebold machines had malfunctioned in the state’s March 2 primary. The panel recommended unanimously that the state not use Diebold machines. In September 2004, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting successfully taught Baxter the chimp how to hack Diebold. The film is available on YouTube here.

Voting technology scrutinized by Black Box Voting

And all this is relevant to Florida how?

Florida was one of the close states in 2004 showing exit-poll anomalies, written about previously. The differences between op-scan counties and touch-screen counties in 2004 in Florida look like part of the same picture.

Florida counties, op-scan and touch-screen

It is a pattern of great-to-greater variation between party registration and party presidential voting in 2004, in all 52 Florida counties using op-scan. (Florida has 67 counties.)

The 15 Florida counties using touch-screen machines showed much less variation between their party registration and party presidential voting.

Simplifying here, there are three main areas to focus on—counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of the 2000 outcome; counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of party registration in the county; and counties where the 2004 outcome was extraordinarily close.

Op-scan technology predominated in all three categories—but this may reflect the fact that op-scan technology predominated across the state.

Starting with the slightest example, in only three op-scan counties was the 2004 outcome the reverse of the 2000 outcome:

  • Flagler
  • Hernando
  • Osceola

All three switched from Democratic (Gore) in 2000 to Republican (Bush) in 2004. Two touch-screen counties switched from Dem in 2000 to GOP in 2004—Pasco and Pinellas.

But in 28 op-scan counties, the 2004 outcome was the reverse of majority party registration:

  • Baker—switched from punch card
  • Bradford
  • Calhoun
  • Columbia–from punch card
  • DeSoto–from punch card
  • Dixie–from punch card
  • Duval–from punch card
  • Franklin
  • Gilchrist–from punch card
  • Glades–from punch card
  • Gulf
  • Hamilton
  • Hardee–from punch card
  • Hendry
  • Holmes
  • Jackson
  • Lafayette
  • Levy
  • Liberty
  • Madison (close)–from punch card
  • Okeechobee (close)
  • Osceola–from punch card
  • Polk
  • Putnam
  • Suwanee
  • Taylor
  • Wakulla–from punch card
  • Washington

Again, there were 28 Florida op-scan counties where the vote went for Bush in 2004 although more registered voters in each county were Democratic. Eleven of these had also switched to op-scan from paper balloting (the much-maligned punch card).

In six op-scan counties, the outcome was very close:

  • Flagler—switched from Gore to Bush
  • Madison—Bush won, more Dems registered
  • Monroe
  • Orange
  • Saint Lucie
  • Volusia

Bush won all these nail-biters, including one county where the outcome switched from Gore to Bush and one that had more Democrats registered than Republicans.

These op-scan counties are interesting. Many of them are small, and some of the excellent statistical analyses of the 2004 election in Florida exclude small populations. But in toto they were significant, because they showed a heavy preponderance of Democratic Party registration. Of 15 touch-screen counties, only one had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters–Broward, with 50.5 percent.

But of the 52 op-scan counties, 30 counties had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters. In most of these (21 counties) the Democrats constituted more than 60 percent of registered voters. In thirteen of them the Dems had more than 70 percent of registered voters, and in four the Dems had more than 80 percent of the registered voters.

Incidentally, Baker County, with a whopping reversal and 77 percent turnout in 2004, was the only county using Sequoia op-scan machines. Diebold is not the only problem.

Outcomes in op-scan versus touch-screen counties, Florida 2004, have been presented in simple contrasts here, but this is not to say that the 2004 outcome was a clean sweep. For the 52 op-scan counties, of the 43 counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than Republican registration, Bush still lost seven.

For the 15 touch-screen counties, in the three counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than did Republican registration, Bush still won. In the three touch-screen counties where Kerry votes went up over 100 percent compared to Democratic registration, Kerry still lost. There are, as we know, problems with DREs (touch-screens).

There are problems with Florida.

Reiterating: For Florida counties, the biggest difference in the 2004 election was not between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ but between touch-screen and op-scan.  Fifteen Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines, produced by ES & S or Sequoia. The other 52 counties used paper ballots processed by optical-scanning equipment manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia.

The difference is a simple and clear pattern. Touch-screen counties’ vote for president almost always went with their party majority. Op-scan counties’ vote for president mostly went against the county’s majority party. Of the 52 counties using op-scanned ballots, only 21 voted in the direction predicted by their voter registration, fewer than half. The other 31 counties went opposite their own voter registration, all but one going to Bush. The exception was Monroe County, with an exceptionally close outcome.

Even where the op-scan vote ran with party registration, the margin was different, suggesting again that at the last minute John Kerry lost Democrats, independents, and unaffiliated voters–in an election where independents and new voters were trending toward Kerry.

A manual recount of two counties and part of another by two Miami Herald reporters netted Kerry 11 additional votes in one small county, 24 in another. They discontinued the count in a larger county where his projected pick-up would be about 1,300 votes.

Much of the voting public was well aware of these issues after 2004. They were submerged in the Obama landslide of 2008. But they could surface again in 2012—especially if a drumbeat of “close election” predictions is sustained.

In my opinion, resentment at the cavalier treatment of the vote itself fueled public anger and distrust of the GOP before the elections of 2006 and 2008. That neither the FEC, Justice, nor anyone else was able to address these problems after the 2008 election contributed to the outcome in 2010. The right to vote is fundamental. Congressional Republicans, for obvious reasons, have done everything in their power to prevent meaningful safeguards for election integrity.