The 53 Percent

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the President starts off with 48, 49 [percent.] He starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do  is convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.
Governor Mitt Romney, 17 May, 2012.

While this is supposed to give us a glimpse into the wealthy Romney's contempt for Americans at the lower end of the income scale, it's really, when viewed in its entirety, simply a matter of overexplaining the answer to a question. It's long been considered a given that most Americans have some sort of more or less ironclad partisan affiliation, primarily Republican or Democrat, and that most people have pretty much already made up their minds as to whom they are going to vote for this November. It's a large part of the reason why the state of Washington, where I live, is pretty much an advertising-free zone, as far as the national campaigns are concerned. Washington is already considered to be in the Blue column, long before any of the voting actually starts. (We should be receiving our ballots late this week or early next.)

To the degree that this hurts the Republican Party, it's because it plays into the commonly understood "for us or against us" narrative of good and evil that has become associated with the GOP. Romney places himself and the Republican Party in general in opposition to a large block of voters who are portrayed as supporting the President for their own selfish and immoral reasons. This narrative has been around for a while now. Governor Romney is not the first person to portray Democratic voters as, basically, parasites. Nearly all of the Republican Party's appeal to Libertarians has been about "reducing government" through cutting the services that government provides to those seen as unworthy. When Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal complained about "something called volcano monitoring" in a response to a State of the Union address, he wasn't decrying disaster preparedness - after all, where would southern Louisiana be without a robust Federal disaster readiness and response plan? The citizens of New Orleans don't pay out-of-pocket for the levy system that protects them. Instead he was pointing out monitoring rare hazards that mainly occur in Blue states - Alaska is the only Red state with active vulcanism - as a waste of funds better spent on deserving Republicans. Governor Romney's statement should not have taught anyone anything new. If anything, it merely illustrates that this particular Republican stereotype has some basis in fact, at least among donors. (One of the things that writing checks buys you is the privilege of having your opinions parroted back to you.) Which is only to be expected in a polarized electorate in which people on either side of the divide often look across it and see deliberate wrongdoing.

On whether or not this offers a glimpse into Romney's soul, I'm skeptical. After all, a large part of the job of a campaigning politician is telling people what they want to hear. Many people feel that Romney does this TOO well; he's commonly viewed as slick and inauthentic. While there seem to be people in both parties who regard this as the real Mitt Romney standing up, a good politician is almost always pandering. Wealthy people don't like to see themselves as greedy, or harming the truly indigent, any more than anyone else does. If you're telling them that you're going to lower their taxes by cutting programs, appearing to concede that the recipients are genuinely needy seems like a bad plan. So regardless of Romney's actual thoughts or plans on the matter, it made political sense for him to cast Obama voters as irresponsible as opposed to either unlucky or the inevitable casualties of changing economic conditions.

Oddly, little time has been spent on the idea that Romney's message betrays a fundamental weakness in the Party's public face. Romney is pretty much saying that: "The message of lower taxes is all I've got. If that doesn't sway them, we may as well write them off, because I got nothin'." While there are admittedly a large number of single issue voters in the United States, banking a presidential election on a single idea - that of lowering taxes - seems to be a remarkable gamble.

By the same token, Romney's statement effectively reserves electoral "thoughtfulness," even if it is sometimes based on emotion, to "the five to ten percent in the center." You'll note that this doesn't include Republican partisans any more than it does Democratic ones. This is part of the reason why the label of independent is so highly sought after - the understanding that these are the voters who act more on thought than on knee-jerk partisanship.

Definitions

"Don't Redefine Marriage," huh?

I only have one question.

Why, precisely, do I care? I mean, seriously, if the State of Washington allows same-sex couples to have all of the same rights, responsibilities, privileges and obligations as married opposite sex couples, how will that make a difference in my life? Or my sister's life? Or my neighbor's life? Or my office-mate's life?

I've always been amused by people who tell me that I have a dog in this fight, but then can't seem to see their way clear to telling me which one it is. On the other hand, I do know plenty of same-sex couples, whom, outside of the fact that they're sometimes willing to hang around with me, come off as fairly normal, well-adjusted people who are loving and stable relationships. I don't understand what I have at stake that I'm supposed to look them in the eye and say that they're not entitled to something they might want. Even if I were to approach it from an angle of morality, I don't see what the hoopla is all about. Okay, so someone else is doing something immoral - what else is new? American religiosity long ago developed a habit of ignoring any strictures that it found inconvenient. There are all sorts of immoral acts that are perfectly legal. Like sex outside of marriage.

Anyway, not really wanting any marriage for myself, I see no reason why other people shouldn't have it instead. Preserving someone's idea of a "definition" surely doesn't cut it.

The End of Stuff?

Supreme Court case will decide whether you own your stuff

Sounds pretty serious, doesn't it? But maybe it's worse than that...

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril
It could become illegal to resell your iPhone 4, car or family antiques

This is a major legal crisis! How did it go unnoticed? Well, for starters, because, like a lot of headlines, these are a bit... overblown.

To hear Mr. Doctorow and Ms. Waters tell it, the Supreme Court of the United States of America holds in it's hands the ability to decide if you can re-sell anything you own that was made overseas. But... that's not really quite the case.

What's really at stake here is which takes precedence, Section 602(a)(1) of the Copyright Act, which says that you can't import copyrighted items without the consent of the copyright holder, or Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which says that once you've purchased something, you may resell it or otherwise dispose of it as you wish.

The language around this case has become fairly dire:

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.”

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale.

And according to Mr. Doctorow:

Following Wiley's theory, you don't really own most of your possessions. You share ownership in your goods with the companies that made the goods you "bought" from them, and they get a veto over your disposal of them, and can also demand a cut of the proceeds.

But perhaps it's worth pointing out what started this all in the first place.

College student Supap Kirtsaeng came to the United States from Thailand to study mathematics at Cornell. When he got here, he realized something - textbooks in Thailand were much cheaper than the same book being sold here in the United States. So, he had his family buy and send him textbooks, which he then sold on eBay at a profit. He repaid his family members for their costs in buying and shipping him the books, and used the reminder to pay for school. There's a simple term for this in finance - arbitrage, and people do it all the time - it's called selling at retail. Here's an example - I go to Costco and buy a box of candy bars. I then take the candy bars to work and sell them to my co-workers for less than they would pay for the same candy bar, were they to buy it from the vending machine in the kitchen.

And this practice is perfectly legal, even for copyrighted materials like books. It's the model that Half-Price books works on when they deal in used books. They buy the books at a discounted price from the owner, and then turn around and sell them at a higher price. Mr. Kirtsaeng, wanting to be on the right side of the law, "sought advice from friends in Thailand and consulted 'Google Answers,' a website which allows web users to seek research help from other web users, to ensure that he could legally resell the foreign editions in the United States." Which he conceivably could - except for that pesky Section 602(a)(1). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the publishers, sued, claiming that under that section, Kirtsaeng needed their permission to import the books into the United States. Now, they admit to the fact that the Thai versions of the books is less expensive than the domestic version - this is what created the arbitrage opportunity in the first place.

In this light, the question: How do Section 602(a)(1) of the Copyright Act, which prohibits the importation of a work without the authority of the copyright’s owner, and Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which allows the owner of a copy “lawfully made under this title” to sell or otherwise dispose of the copy without the copyright owner’s permission, apply to a copy that was made and legally acquired abroad and then imported into the United States? seems a lot less apocalyptic. After all, Mr. Kirtsaeng wasn't just selling his old books when he was done with them, like many college students do. Nor was a selling a family heirloom, brought over from the Old Country. He was racking up some $900,000 (at least) in gross revenues from systematically importing and selling textbooks.

Given all of this, I find it difficult to believe that if I sell the copy of "Gundam Senki" I picked up when I was in Japan a decade ago, that Sunrise, Bandai or T.O.Y International Inc/Aspect are going to come after me for a cut of the sale price. I suppose that they could, and this raises another interesting question - what's the difference between "bringing something back with you" and "importing?"

But honestly, the likely impact of this case (given my limited understanding of the law) is that if John Wiley & Sons, Inc. win, rather than the end of resale at we know it, the status quo will remain in place. To import things for sale, you'll need permission from the copyright holder. As I see things, it becomes interesting if Mr. Kirtsaeng wins in the Supreme Court. Because (again, in my layman's opinion), what I expect will happen is that you'll see an end to differential pricing in different markets for identical items. Whether that means that prices level off between countries (which will likely suck for some poorer nations) or you start seeing differences between items sold in various places, I don't know.

But I suspect that either way, I'll still be able to sell some stuff the next day.

H/T to George Williams.

Population: 3

"Georgia Republican Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks on Sept. 27, 2012 that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are ‘lies straight from the pit of hell’ meant to convince people that they do not need a savior."Congressman calls evolution lie from ‘pit of hell’

And Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son.
Genesis 4:17

Welcome to Enoch. Population: 3. Seems a bit... small for a city, doesn't it?

While Representative Broun's remarks will get plenty of airplay (which will in turn generate the predictable umbrage from Christians who feel that media is out to make fools of them again), what I find most interesting is the ongoing debate about what science means. For Representative Broun, if the parts of science that contradict a literal interpretation of the Genesis account are correct, then there is no need for salvation. One wonders why. After all, plenty of Christians are perfectly okay with the idea that Big Bang is the origin of the Universe that we see today. One wonders if Representative Broun was merely attacking science, or if he was also, for the benefit of his audience, attacking those people who don't believe as they do - namely that the Bible is an accurate (although necessarily incomplete) historical account of the events that it purports to chronicle.

Devils In The Details

Sunday's Double Take 'Toons feature on NPR dealt with polling and whether or not the numbers were what they purported to be. The second of the two cartoons was drawn by Milt Priggee, who, according to NPR: "thinks the economy is about to catch up with Obama's approval ratings." In the cartoon, a think black line plunges from charts near the ceiling straight through the floor, while a pair of pitchfork-wielding devils, complete with horns, hooves and tails, look on. "Number of employed or consumer confidence?" one asks, to which the other replies: "More like Obama's approval rating..." Many NPR readers pounced, noting that the Presidents approval rating was not, in fact dropping sharply. In the comments, one reader accused him of "living in a dream world," another said that the cartoon was "untrue to boot."

There's only one problem. The cartoon in question is not current. It was published 25 months ago, back in 2010. By most measures, two years is quite some time. In politics, it's an eternity, especially considering that this would have been only several weeks prior to the 2010 midterm elections, when the Democrats famously took a "shellacking" at the hands of Republican candidates.

Even after this was pointed out to NPR, the description remained unchanged, and people continued to vote up incorrect criticisms of Milt Priggee. NPR should have made clear that the cartoon was not recent, rather than present a featured cartoonist as either incompetent, or a partisan hack. (It should be noted that unlike many political cartoonists, Mr. Priggee freely goes after all parties, calling them as he sees them without regard to party or ideology.) Inaccurate journalism is worse than useless because it gives people an understanding that they are informed about something, while leaving them functional ignorant about it.

People have short memories, and so this will quickly be forgotten, in the grand scheme of things. But in the meantime, it's another reminder that a constant skepticism concerning information is always a useful tool.