The urge for the surge

Lots of people have been criticizing President Bush's proposed "surge" of troops into Iraq. Frankly, I don't know whether or not it's a good idea or a bad idea because, frankly, I don't know what his goal is. (And to be clear, "success at our mission," as Bush describes it, is not a goal. It's a description of whether or not you've met your goal. I still don't know what his goals for Iraq are, frankly, although I have some of my own.)

Anyhow, there's sort of a predictable and reflexive response from many - mostly, but not exclusively, from the left - opposing the surge. I think that's as absentminded as the surge proposal itself.

As I see it, the surge could be exactly what we need, or just putting more troops into harms way, but it depends on how they're used. In other words, the surge is neither a good idea or a bad idea - mostly, it's a tactical move rather than a strategic move, and I have no idea whether or not it actually supports our strategy. (Hmmmm....actually, I think the problem is that I don't have a good idea what our strategy itself is). As an essentially tactical decision, I also have a quibble with the fact that Bush spent months agonizing about what to do in Iraq only to come up with a tactical move that he could have ordered one morning over coffee. But I digress...

Here's the thing. It's been said so often that it's cliché at this point, but I'll say it anyhow: the problem in Iraq is fundamentally a political problem, not a military one. This is something that the left has repeated and that the White House still doesn't seem to understand. But equally true is something that the White House points out that the left seems to ignore: you can't solve anything politically until there is stability on the ground. If the surge can provide the stability that is the substrate for any conceivable political solution, then hooray - it's a critical and necessary move.

Of course, that then begs the following question: "Mr. President, now that the surge has been successful and the streets of Baghdad are quiet, how do you ensure that they will stay quiet and won't need a massive military force (ours or Iraqi) for centuries to come?" If the President has an answer to this, then the surge is the right medicine at the right time (no, scratch that - a year or 3 too late), and I'd love to hear the political strategy.

Absent any clear coherent political strategy - or even a strategy for a strategy - the surge is just going to put more gasoline on the fire.

I'm not an advocate of a withdrawal from Iraq. Right or wrong, we made this mess, we need to fix it. (And full disclosure: I felt that invading Iraq was the right decision, albeit for different reasons than Bush provided. It's the subsequent management of Iraq that I think has been so disastrous.) The surge is a tactical move that could provide the opportunity - through stability on the ground - to actually address core issues and actually achieve a stable, democratic Iraq (something that I feel would indeed be an unambiguously Good Thing), or it could just result in more body bags. My fear is that Mr. Bush hasn't thought it through in this way.

There's nothing wrong with taking life

I suppose that's a pretty provocative title, but I think it's true. I don't think that the taking of life per se has any moral issue about it. It's the wasting of life that I think is morally problematic. Why do I draw this distinction, and why do I think it frees me to make the provocative assertion that the taking of a life is amoral? I think it actually provides a better basis for figuring out a host of other issues than starting from the premise that taking life is wrong.

I should point out that despite the claim that killing is not evil in and of itself, the corollary that wasting of life is wrong prevents me from coming to wacky conclusions on the basic moral scenarios.

For example, killing someone for their wallet is pretty clearly a waste; certainly that fails the morality test. And one can generalize this pretty quickly based (perhaps on a technicality) on the inability of one person to judge whether or not another person's life would be "wasted" if they were killed. More to the point: since it's so hard to determine when killing someone would be a waste (who gets to decide, after all?), one must default to the position that it will be wasteful and thus refrain. Of course, we have a number of well defined exceptions where killing is perfectly acceptible (self-defense, for example), but I think my "wasting life" litmus test applies here as well. After all, if someone is lunging at you with a knife, then failure to kill them likely means wasting your own life.

And I don't think that this argument has any actual bearing on the abortion debate. Pick whatever point that you believe that human life begins (see my earlier post on abortion where I argue that this is the real crux of the issue). Prior to that point there is no life to waste (by definition of how we picked the point) so this argument doesn't apply, and after that point then it's pretty clear that the life is being wasted, so it's not OK.

Rather, I think that the distinction about wasting life vs. taking life helps more at the fringe cases - cases where you are balancing interests, or weighing quality of life issues.

Some examples:

• Hunting and eating meat. Hunting for trophies has always bothered me. But someone who hunts a deer and eats the venison and uses the leather is not wasting the deer - and I have no problem with it. In both cases, the life of the deer is obviously taken, but I think the former case is immoral while the latter is not. This is actually the scenario that got me thinking about the distinction between taking and wasting life - after all, it's the same act as far as the killing goes, so I asked myself why the two scenarios felt so different. Even apart from hunting, eating meat necessarily involves taking a life - but if it's to nourish another, then I don't think it is wasted. Butchering the cow and leaving the meat to rot, on the other hand, doesn't feel morally acceptible to me.
• Euthanasia. I think the Terri Schiavo case was the perfect example here: the fight was clearly a quantity-of-life vs. a quality-of-life fight, and my "wasting life" argument suggests that quantity of life is not what's important, it's quality. Prolonging suffering in hopeless scenarios strikes me as very much a waste.
• Death penalty. While I have lots of problems with the death penalty in practice (specifically around my confidence that the system does what it is supposed to do and never executes an innocent person), I don't really have any problem with it from a moral point of view. Assuming that the person truly is guilty and that the crime is serious enough that the death penalty is not unreasonable, then I don't think this is one of the cases where "who decides if it would be a waste" has actually been answered: a jury and several layers of judges.

I think there are many people who have a knee-jerk "life-at-all-costs" philosophy, but I think that this often leads to moral contradictions; I think it makes more sense to focus on why life is important, and that leads to a more insightful understanding of why taking life is sometimes morally acceptible and sometimes not.

The problem with affirmative action

I suppose this is a relevant post for today, being MLK day and all.

Affirmative action has been in the news a bit lately, with the new affirmative action ban in Michigan. Frankly, though, nobody should be surprised that affirmative action remains in the news. It will always remain an issue as long as it is done the way it is done because - as it has been implemented - it is fundamentally self-contradictory.

I should be very clear up front that I think that the goal of affirmative action is both noble and necessary. The legacy of institutional racism from slavery through Jim Crow is clearly still being felt even several generations after the most notorious institutional repression has been erased.

I should also be clear that I think it is not the idea of affirmative action that is flawed, but rather how it has historically been implemented that is broken, and in fact would suggest that alternative approaches are feasible.

The goal of the civil rights movement was to achieve a colorblind society - something that it has, fortunately, been largely successful at. (Not entirely of course, but overt racism is certainly no longer socially acceptable and not only have institutional barriers been removed, but protections have been enshrined in the law. But I digress...) The goal of affirmative action was to make up for the effects of past repression. But herein lies the internal contradiction: in order to make up for past wrongs, many affirmative action programs end up being quite color-sensitive - the opposite of the very colorblind ideal that gave root to the cause of affirmative action!

Furthermore, because affirmative action has largely been implemented in zero-sum games such as college admission, helping a minority because they are a minority comes at the expense of someone else who is not a minority. This, of course, is the issue that most conservative opponents of affirmative action decry - both because it is a form of reverse-discrimination (how can that possibly be morally acceptable if discrimination based on color is unacceptable?) and because it effectively punishes this generation for the sins of prior generations - something that western society has for a very long time looked down upon. The fact that affirmative action has patently noble goals blinds many of its advocates to the very real fact that - as implemented - most affirmative action has a necessary side effect of embracing the very evils to which it aspires to provide redress!

I mentioned "zero-sum" above, and I think that is the crux of the problem: giving preference to one person comes at the expense of another. Remove that and I think the controversy around affirmative action goes away. After all, there are many sports scholarships and nobody decries the fact that non-athletic students do not have access to these scholarships. Nor should they: failure to win a sports scholarship doesn't bar you from attending a school (though of course, economically, it may make it more difficult), and there are other scholarships or student loans available.

There is yet a third argument raised by opponents of affirmative action: that it provides opportunities to people who are not qualified to take advantage of those opportunities. Sadly, there is some merit to this objection, even if it is not actually happening in practice, it could. In my opinion, affirmative action done correctly focuses on the supply-side of the equation - expanding the pool of qualified minority applicants for jobs, school admissions, and such - rather than the output side of the equation (how many minorities get hired or accepted). In these pools, consumption from the pool can (and should!) be strictly merit-based. Of course, to fill the pool, you have to feed the pipeline at the other end. You can have a merit-based job applicant pool, but to ensure that minorities have the same opportunities, you have to get more of them through school. And getting more of them into school means reserving more spots for them ("quotas", or at the very least displacing other qualified candidates since school size makes this a zero-sum situation), or lowering standards so that you can accept students that you would not have otherwise accepted.

Neither of these are attractive approaches, but I think there is a third option: that feeding the pipe means consuming from a secondary pool of applicants, and that if you can push the problem down a level. The job applicant pool is fed by the output of our universities. Affirmative action today tries to directly fix the output of our universities by force-fitting more minorities into them, with the problems above. But viewed as a supply chain problem, one realizes that the output of the universities is a result of the applicant pool from which the university itself consumes. Get more qualified minorities into that applicant pool, and you'll see more qualified minorities coming out. And how do you get more minorities into that applicant pool? Get more of them successfully through high school. And so on.

In other words, remove the zero-sum nature of the problem. Smart affirmative action programs would start in grade school to ensure that minority kids are getting a great education and any additional help that they need to succeed. This doesn't come at the expense of the education of a middle-class white kid - it's analogous to the sports scholarship. Then you get a lot more minority kids coming out of grade school ready for high school. Do the same thing in high school, and you see a lot more qualified applicants for college. If you have more qualified applicants from all races, there is no need to use race as a deciding factor where the zero-sum bottlenecks apply: you can do admissions based on merit and still find yourself having proportional representation in your student body.

While there are fortunately many programs that seek to help minority kids early in their educational career, this is sadly not where most affirmative action advocates focus. But it's really the crux of the problem - otherwise, you're treating the symptom rather than the cause, and doing it in a morally problematic manner at that.

"Fair Trade Oil?"

I just finished reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin. Fascinating (but long!) history of the past 150 years or so, as told through the lens of the oil industry. It starts out talking just about the industry itself, which occasionally starts bumping up against events of the day, but shortly into the 20th century an interesting inversion takes place whereby the significant events (such as the world wars) can be described in terms of oil itself as oil takes on strategic national significance for many nations of the world. He's not trying to claim that the wars or economic policy were specifically about oil (as many people claim about the current Iraq war) or anything radical like that; rather, he describes how the need for reliable oil supplies shaped strategies and policies and international relations.

Anyhow, I didn't intend this post as a book report; however, it did get me thinking.

Many nations have been "blessed" with rich deposits of oil. But this is a decidedly mixed blessing. Most nations with oil reserves have used that oil to help provide income for the country (in most oil-exporting nations, oil is nationalized) - and for most of these nations that income is (or was) badly needed. However with startlingly few exceptions, most of these nations have also not progressed very far at all, because the wealth stays captured within the government and the well-connected; on the whole, many of these governments are quite repressive, and even the ones that aren't rarely reinvest this money wisely in a way that diversifies the economy, creates a vibrant middle class, increases education, decreases poverty, or otherwise makes life better and more secure for everyone in the country.

My personal opinion is that this results from the fact that the income is "free" - once the well is in the ground, you don't have to do incremental work to gain incremental income. And if the government is getting a stream of income that is reliable, there isn't much incentive to improve its efficiency or reduce corruption. And worse, if that stream of income is coming from oil importing countries rather than from its citizens, then it doesn't need to be terribly responsive to its own citizens, and in fact has a strong incentive to ignore them in their effort to satisfy the foreign customer. A classic economic game of getting what you reward - frankly, nobody should be surprised.

I look at the coffee industry. Economic realities have incentives aligned for some pretty nasty environmental and labor practices in the industry. As a result, over the past few years we've seen a pretty strong rise in "fair trade" coffee, whereby producers and retailers commit to sustainable agricultural processes and fair wages to farmers, and label the resulting product as such, and consumers "agree" to pay a little bit more for the resulting coffee. Heck, even Starbucks, the Wal-Mart of the coffee world (yeah, I'm just saying that; I like Starbucks just fine) has embraced the concept, which says to me that the concept must be economically viable.

So I ask myself this: if its possible to alter the basic economic equation in coffee to account and correct for the intangible social consequences, is it idealistic/naive to suggest that perhaps we find a way to do the same with oil? We could add a "fair trade" certification for oil that comes from countries who:

• Have certifiably open/transparent government processes that are free of any meaningful degree of corruption
• Respect human rights - for example, if they want to drill a well in your yard, they actually pay you for your property
  
• Respect their environment
  
• Plow petroleum profits back into proper investment in their citizenry
• Work to diversify their economies in order that people outside of the oil industry can have opportunities, and so that the country is not so wholly dependent on oil.

Obviously, you can't very well go in and make Iran or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria adhere to guidelines such as these - particularly when their ruling classes are making so much money from oil sales. However, unlike coffee where the fair-trade rules increase the cost of the resulting product, in this case I don't believe that adhering to these guidelines needs to increase the cost of the oil at all. As such, you can turn the economics around: raise taxes on all oil by some amount, and then eliminate taxes for "fair trade" oil. You could even do this in a revenue-neutral way, making by making the total tax rise fluctuate based on the amount that gets reduced for the fair-trade exemption. That way, you're not hurting the economy or paying more in total for oil, but you are introducing price discrimination into the equation to favor behavior we approve of over that which we do not. Classic economics: if you want a different outcome, change the incentives equation.

Doing so would sure be a whole lot cheaper and easier than going to war over the point.

And people complain about political correctness run amock?

You may have heard about a massive wind storm that hit Seattle last week. It knocked our power and Internet access out for 6 days, and my in-laws still don't have power more than a week later.

While a few people died from flooding and trees falling onto their homes - quite tragic under any circumstances - the largest single cause of deaths appears to have been from carbon monoxide poisoning, from people moving generators or grills indoors. This is particularly tragic because it is so obviously preventable. After all, when the wind is blowing, you can't necessarily stop a tree from falling on you, but you sure as heck don't have to bring a generator or grill inside.

Anyhow, responding to this, our major daily, the Seattle Times, published big bold front-page headlines a few days ago in about 6 different languages warning about what a bad idea it was to bring these fuel-burning devices indoors. Great public service announcement.

Would you believe that the Times actually got letters from people protesting the fact that they published this in a bunch of languages other than English? I understand the goal of having people that move here learn to speak English; heck, I've blogged on this very topic. But let's get some perspective, folks. Which is more important: (a) keeping people alive by giving them some very basic information in a form that they can understand, or (b) advancing your ideology about "English Only?"

Whether or not English is or should be our official language, the facts on the ground are that many people don't speak it or read it, and suggesting that they should not be presented with potentially life-saving information is simply a disgusting elevation of ideology over humanity. Let's save the English-only debate for non-life-threatening issues, OK?

Hard for me to build on this

So I won't even try. I think Fareed is one of the most clearheaded analysts out there, and this is a great summation of the Iraq war.

Transfats and Foie Gras

Motherhood and apple pie may epitomize "America," but governments lately are taking this literally as they try to act like parents and police what we eat. Chicago, of course, gained notoriety this summer for banning the sale of foie gras (though, in a humorous loophole, I understand that they can still give it away - leading to $100 pizzas with free foie gras on top!) And now New York has banned the sale of foods with trans-fats in them, and is considering following Chicago's lead with foie gras.

The trans-fat issue is one where I think the government might actually have a legitimate role, but is going about it all wrong. Trans-fats raise legitimate health issues, but an outright ban makes no sense - it's heavy handed, and restricts many legitimate uses along with the problem scenarios. Bans like this for decisions that a rational adult should be perfectly capable of making should be anathema to anybody that loves freedom.

Most trans-fats in cooking are a relatively recent (last century or so) invention, and are not naturally occurring (though some small amounts are natural). More to the point, switching away from trans-fats to other fats can generally done transparently, with no obvious effects on taste or outcome. I say "generally" because there are places where these fats fill a unique role - a little bit of Crisco in a pie crust can make it somewhat flakier more effectively than butter.

So going without trans-fats is, with a few minor exceptions, a fine and doable option, and a good thing for people to do. If this is the case, and if a ban is a bad idea, what is a reasonable approach to addressing the health issues associated with trans-fats? The best idea I've heard is one where the government doesn't ban trans-fats explicitly, but requires (a) clear labeling of any foods that contain them, and , (b) taxes levied to recover the associated health costs. This is similar to the approach with cigarettes, of course, and smoking has been declining steadily over the last several years.

The two best ingredients to people making smart personal decisions are good information, which the labeling provides, and an economic proposition that reflects more or less the realities and tradeoffs of the decision at hand, which a tax would provide. Then let people make their own choice. If they decide to get fat and have a heart attack, why shouldn't that be their prerogative, as long as the rest of society doesn't have to pick up the tab for that decision?

The ban on foie gras is not quite the same, in that the issue here is not so much a personal decision as it is one based on an argument of animal cruelty. I would have a hard time trying to justify animal cruelty, but the issue is not whether or not you support animal cruelty, but whether what happens meets the definition of animal cruelty. (I think this argument is analogous to the one I recently made about abortion being a debate about where the line is for infanticide).

"If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"
-- Homer Simpson

If foie gras truly is animal cruelty, then tasty as it is, it is reasonable for governments to ban it. I argue above that the decision to eat trans-fats is a personal one and a "victimless crime," but abusing animals is hardly victimless; it is certainly within the reasonable jurisdiction of governments to ban such activities or their outcomes.

I personally love seared foie gras, and would hate to see it banned. (And frankly, I think Chicago and NY should focus on more pressing problems facing their populations.) Given that geese do not have a natural gagging relfex, it is also not clear to me that this crosses the line to animal cruelty.

Absent a clear distinction between foie gras and other "cruel" foods (veal, factory-farm poultry, etc.), then I worry that banning foie gras is just the first step down a slippery slope towards banning a host of other food products.

Profiling - what's wrong with it?

Profiling seems to be getting a bad rap these days, whether it's racial profiling (getting pulled over for "driving while black", for example) or other forms of profiling, such as suspicions of anyone doing anything overtly Islamic, such as the recent detention of several Muslim clerics from a US Airways flight. (Note that I am deliberately using simply "profiling" rather than the more commonly used "racial profiling" because profiling can go beyond simple race, as the example above illustrates.)

Is profiling inherently problematic? The answer, surprisingly, I think is "no." From a civil-rights perspective, I think there is nothing wrong with profiling per se, provided that it meets one critical test: is it effective. Most of the time, it isn't, and this is where profiling inevitably crosses the line from inconvenience to personal infringement for the person being profiled.

Consider two examples to prove my point about effectiveness. In the first, there is a report of a shooting in a predominantly black neighborhood. If the police are out looking for suspects and focus exclusively on blacks, that IMO is "bad" profiling - you're casting unfair and undue suspicion upon someone because of skin color (seems like an infringement on their rights to me), and you're also ineffective because you are needlessly cutting off leads that could be fruitful.

On the other hand, suppose in the same situation there are eyewitness reports that the shooter was black. In this case, I don't think anybody would think it controversial to focus on black suspects; frankly, I doubt anyone would actually call this "profiling" in this situation.

Over the past few years, I think we've seen a lot of hysteria over profiling with regard to terrorism. The imams mentioned above are not the first example of Muslims being removed from airplanes because of middle-eastern looks or because they were overtly Muslim. I hope I'm not saying anything scandalous in saying that this is pretty bad profiling. After all, I'm not aware that we've ever actually caught a terrorist this way. On the other hand, the sort of profiling that has actually stopped terrorists has been looking for people who, say, try to light their shoes on fire on an airplane.

Much of this hysteria I think arises from a mistaken understanding of statistics and probability. For example, it is a fact that the most deadly of terrorist attacks (9/11) and the vast majority of terrorist attacks around the world over the past several years have been committed by Muslims. Sad fact, but pretty obviously true. So the odds that a given terrorist is Muslim are much higher than the odds that the terrorist is, say, Catholic. However, we aren't looking at random terrorists, we're looking at random people. And even if the odds that a random Muslim is a terrorist are twice that of a random non-Muslim, you're still looking at minuscule odds in either case. Stated another way, with over a billion Muslims in the world, if there are even 1 million terrorists among them (which I'm sure there are not), that's still only a 0.1% chance that any given Muslim is a terrorist.

So suspecting a given Muslim of being a terrorist simply because of his religion is a lot like trying to solve a rape case by detaining all of the men in the city. You haven't really narrowed the problem in any meaningful way, and you're violating the rights of a lot of people in the process.

This isn't just an academic point - efficiency in security is actually critical. Trying to achieve good security without efficiency has two very dangerous side effects: (a) it overwhelms the process that you are trying to keep secure, and (b) all the effort expended on pointless security procedures distracts resources from genuinely useful security work, thus creating security holes or lapses that can be exploited by people who don't simply look like the stereotype of the bad guys but who actually are the bad guys.

Removal of shoes and bans on liquids at the airport both offer examples of the latter, and as far as I can tell neither of these time-consuming, arduous, and expensive procedures has stopped a terrorist. Alert passengers on a plane stopped the shoe bomber, and good intelligence stopped the liquids-bombers.

Frankly, I've yet to hear of examples of profiling that are actually effective in practice. And that is what makes the inconvenience and infringement that results so unacceptable.

A bit of support for my hypothesis

A few weeks ago I posted about the unintended consequences of increased energy efficiency - namely, that increased efficiency (or low cost cheap power or fuels), while it would decrease consumption for a given task, would actually lead to greatly increased energy consumption overall.

I made a not-so-rigorous argument in a not-too-coherent manner, but I've just read a book (The Bottomless Well - The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Huber and Mills) that spends much of its pages making precisely the same point with much more data and rational than my mere conjecture contained.

I don't quite agree with all of its assertions. For example, it correctly points out that waste is necessary, that you cannot have perfect efficiency in, well, anything. According to the laws of thermodynamics, this is absolutely correct (and is also why only 2-15%, depending on how you measure, of the raw energy available in a gallon of gasoline actually gets converted into forward motion for a car). But because this inefficiency is unavoidable and a key side effect of extracting work from energy, they claim that waste is therefore "virtuous." That's a stretch to me - just because it is vital doesn't mean you want any more of it than you absolutely have to have.

But most of these disputes are quibbles; I thought that overall the book was quite enlightening in describing the history of human energy consumption, the importance of energy to our economy, and the importance of using energy to extract and refine energy itself, all using compelling data to make some rather counterintuitive points.

Happy non-denominational winter solstice event

Last week there was a funny segment on The Daily Show where Jon Stewart pokes fun at the whole "war on Christmas" thing. I think his satire here is spot-on; the whole "war on Christmas" (obviously a sub-battle of the whole "war on religion") is a farce by people who confuse defensive pushback with offensive attacks.

Let me start small with the Christmas angle. There was a big debate last year certainly (and in other years) about various stores trying to "banish" Christmas by having their employees say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Many people felt that this was political correctness run amock, or else saw larger anti-religion overtones in this, and thus felt not only offended by the use of the term "happy holidays" but also that the minority was again ("again" is a funny word to use here, since it presupposes prior legitimate examples) running roughshod over a majority.

But I think this point of view is erroneous for several reasons:

• I have yet to hear a tale of someone taking offense or filing a lawsuit or a formal complaint or whatever because somebody else wished them Merry Christmas. (Heck, I'm Jewish and I have no problem with it, and I wish people Merry Christmas myself at this time of year.). Yet many people were proposing boycotts of stores for using Happy Holidays. This makes the notion of the minority oppressing the majority tenuous at best.
• The stores that said Happy Holidays inevitably were filled with red and green inside; there was absolutely no evidence of Christmas being ignored or banished. (And I might argue that that such materialism alone, not the greeting used by the employee, is a far bigger and truer "banishment" of Christmas.) Best Buy this year provides a recent example of this.
• If you are a shopkeeper know that many of your customers are Jewish or Muslim or whatever, why wouldn't you want to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible?
• It's a free country, last I looked. Nobody is forcing anybody to say Happy Holidays, so why can't they choose to say what they want?

And at the same time, lots of folks say Merry Christmas. That's fine too. (Other than the fact that Christmas is a holiday that seems to last for a month and a half of the year. But I digress.) While we're on the subject: it's a Christmas tree, not a holiday bush or any other euphamism. The tradition of decorating a tree this time of year is essentially exclusive to Christmas, no harm in calling it that.

So how or why the Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas debate ever became an issue escapes me; it seems to me that it's only an issue, frankly, if you're a religious Christian who can't bear the acknowledgment that there are quite a few non-Christians in the country. Fortunately, most Christians know and behave better.

But there's the larger issue of the "war on religion" that I hear about a lot from my conservative friends who decry the lack of school prayer, or the display of religious symbols in public, or attempts to remove "under God" from the pledge of allegience.

This is an issue where perspective is everything, I think. Take organized prayer in school, as the most glaring example. From the perspective of a religious person, banning organized prayer may seem like outright hostility (rather than neutrality) towards religion. But to a non-religious person - or someone from other religions - such prayer clearly crosses the line to imposition of religion, or at the least a demand that government somehow endorse a religion in particular or religion in general. Yet the defensive pushback to that imposition is viewed as an offensive attack on religion.

School prayer may be the most effective tool in highlighting this, but I think all of the other "hostility to religion" issues fall into the same basic model.

As a side note, the whole notion of not displaying religion in public I think also reflects a subtle but critical distinction in meanings of the word public. "Public" displays by private individuals or groups has always been and (fortunately) continues to be perfectly acceptible. But "Public" can also mean "owned or operated by the public", i.e., government, and this is where neutrality towards religion must be enforced.

I believe in the first amendment. And I have no problem acknowledging that the founding fathers were all Christians, some of strong faith. But that doesn't change the fact that the country that they founded was quite deliberately set up to be a secular government in which religious people could thrive; the first amendment makes that abundently clear to me. And it's worked quite well to keep government out of anything religious.

Religion belongs in the home and in the heart, not in the government. For a perfect example of why, just look at almost any country in the Muslim world that has embraced Islam as a basis for its government. I say that not to slam Islam, but most off the governments that explicitly embrace religion are Islamic and collectively these governments and societies provide ample evidence that government and religion are not a compelling mix.

I have absolutely no problem with PDR (Public Displays of Religion). I have absolutely no problem with religious people of any faith practicing, embracing their religion, or letting it guide them. I have no problem with politicians being guided by their faith - quite the contrary, I think that's quite healthy. But there is a huge difference between being guided by faith and demanding that your government get out of the way of your practice of it, and demanding that government embrace your religion.

Jury duty and the presumption of innocence

I had the pleasure of serving on a jury a few weeks ago. As part of the jury selection process is something called voir dire where the lawyers try to suss out any points of view that the prospective juror might have that might make it hard for them to be fair.

In this particular trial, the defense's strategy more or less boiled down to trying to establish reasonable doubt (something they failed to do, as it happened) and thus the presumption of that the client is innocent played a large part in the defense's voir dire questioning.

To this end, at one point, the defense lawyer asked a prospective juror "is my client guilty?" The prospective juror gave the correct answer that no, because the case had not yet been proved (heck, it hadn't even begun). More specifically, the defendent is in fact innocent at this point because a guilty verdict has not yet been rendered, and he is not guilty prior to that point. This is, I suppose, what presumption of innocence is about.

But I would have answered this particular question differently. I would have said "most likely." I might have even added "I hope." Because while the defendent most certainly is entitled to the benefit of the doubt as to his guilt or innocence, the very fact that he sits in the defendent's chair is a result of some degree of vetting by the police and prosecutor and perhaps a grand jury as well. They believe they have a good case, or they wouldn't try the case.

In other words, a presumption of innocence very different from a likelihood of innocence, and the lawyer's question was ambiguous about which question (presumption or likelihood) he was asking about.

And it should be so. I'd certainly hope that a high percentage (80-90%?) of cases that make it to trial ultimately result in a guilty verdict. Much less than that and the prosecution is being indiscriminate about who it chooses to try, wasting a lot of time and money on anybody vaguely suspected of the crime. Much more than that and they're either not trying hard enough or the jury system itself isn't working. And ultimately the role of the jury can be viewed as keeping the prosecution honest (i.e., making sure they do the right thing and prove the cases) and making sure that none of the minority of cases where they put the wrong person on trial (or put them on trial for the wrong thing) gets through.

Does this view conflict with the objective role required of a juror? I don't think so, with one big condition: the fact that a defendent is very likely to be guilty must not be treated as a reason to think that the defendent is in fact guilty. Otherwise, you have circular logic creating a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby defendents are found guilty because they are likely to be guilty. It is for this reason that I believe jurors should ask themselves not only should they ask themselves if the case was proved, but also if this could possibly the exception case where the prosecution got it wrong.

Gay Marriage

I guess that now that the Dems have control of congress, this will be a big topic over the next two years. This is another one of those debates where I think a lot of people talk right past each other and miss the key points.

I think the biggest casualty in the debate is a subtle but critical point, which is this: marriage is a twofold institution. There is the social/religious/traditional side of it, and there is the legal side of it (inheritance rights, for example). The former is the domain of society, the latter the domain of government. The "protection of marriage" folks seem to focus exclusively on the former, while the pro-gay-marriage folks blur the two and want both the legal and the social recognition.

The New Jersey supreme court recently ruled on the issue, finding that the social side of this was a political question, but that the legal side of it was pretty clear. While this may seem like a "split the baby" decision that punted on the hard issue, I think that it was actually entirely the correct decision.

With the usual disclaimer that I'm no lawyer, I don't see how they could have ruled any other way. The 14th amendment to the US constitution says that no state shall make a law that would "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". In other words, a rule must apply to everyone or nobody, it cannot be selective. So if the rule is that anyone can enter into a lifetime contract with a single other person and get a set of benefits as a result of doing so, then that's OK - you can make that contract with anyone who is legally capable of entering into such a contract. This amendment appears (to me at least) to make it illegal to say that if you are white you can only marry another white person, for example, since that is not providing equal protection.

There are of course exceptions that do not violate the 14th amendment. 3 come to mind:

• You cannot marry more than one person. But the "one other person" rule applies to everyone equally.
• You cannot marry a minor. But marriage is a contract, and you can't have contracts for illegal behavior (e.g., you cannot have a legal contract to kill someone). Two strikes here: minors cannot legally enter into these sorts of contracts, and sexual relations with a minor are illegal, so this isn't an equal protection issue so much as a "legal contract" issue.
  
• You cannot marry a close blood relative. Again, since those relationships are illegal anyhow, the marriage contract would be illegal.
  

Homosexual relationships were once illegal, and if they still were, then I think there would be a strong analogy with incest and underrage marriage. (Frankly, I think this is one reason that in our 230 year history as a nation, this issue has only come up relatively recently.) However, gay relationships are no longer illegal, so the analogy with illegal contracts evaporates. So I can no longer match up gay marriage with any of the exceptions above. And I can find no fundamental principle that separates gay marriage from interracial marriage, frankly. Interracial marriage bans are anathema, and if there is no principle to distinguish gay marriage, then I am forced to conclude that gay marriage bans - at least from the legal perspective - must also be anathema.

In other words, it seems to me that the decriminalization of homosexual relationships coupled with the 14th amendment has as a natural and direct consequence a requirement to offer gays the same legal benefits/protections/responsibilities that straight couples enjoy with marriage, whether you call it marriage or not.

The NJ supreme court probably used different reasoning (I'm assuming it was actually based on the law, rather than my arguments above), but seem to have come to essentially the same conclusion. They don't care what it's called, as long as the legal rights - i.e., what government actually has a role in - are provided equally.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."

--From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

The other side of the equation, of course, is not the legal side, it is the cultural/social side. If you provide equal rights, do you call it marriage or civil unions or something else. I think this is a silly debate. It's just a name, and Juliet was right. Have a referendum, pass a law, run a campaign - this is just a decision to make, but it doesn't really matter in the end.

There are other arguments against gay marriage that have been made including:

• Procreation: gays cannot (naturally) conceive children. If this argument were at all valid, then you would also prohibit sterile people from marrying, people that don't want to have kids (or use birth control), or elderly people from getting married. Lame argument, doesn't wash.
• Differing state laws: what happens when Massachusetts legalizes gay marriage and other states don't (or are forced to do so due to the full-faith-and-credit clause). Again, I think this argument is weak since the states already have to deal with differing rules on legal age to get married or closeness of relatives.
  

A lot of folks are very threatened by the notion of gays calling their union "marriage." Frankly, I simply don't get how this can possibly be a "threat" to marriage. I'm a happily married straight man, and I don't see how a gay couple that I don't know getting married possibly impacts my marriage. I can't imagine a single straight man now saying "I was going to propose to my girlfriend, but now that gays also have marriage, what's the point." This simply doesn't weaken marriage.

So despite being somewhat nuanced, I think that the NJ supreme court actually got it right.

Be careful what you ask for

Well, it appears that the democrats have made significant gains in the elections yesterday (as I write this, the senate is still too close to call). Congratulations are in order, I suppose. However, for most of the past 12 years, the party has been their own worst enemies. And if they're not careful, they will continue to be so.

In particular, Democrats risk interpreting yesterday's vote as an endorsement of them rather than a repudiation of Republicans. I think doing so would be a huge mistake. While the Republicans (for once) were the source of their undoing, the Democrats largely won because they weren't Republicans, not because they had any great ideas of their own.

Pop quiz: while we all agree that Bush has done a terrible job of conducting the war in Iraq, what serious proposal have the Democrats had for doing it better? Yes, congressional oversight and getting Rumsfeld out (looks like the latter just came true) help, but gosh, those are the conditions for a strategy to succeed (which admittedly have been lacking), not an actual strategy itself.

I also worry that the Democrats will waste a lot of time on vindictive investigations rather than productive policymaking. The Democrats have been out of power for a while now, they may forget that it's very easy to complain about the folks with power, much more difficult to actually govern.

I predict that if they step up to their new responsibilities, govern in a unifying manner, avoid the vindictive investigations and focus on positive steps for a successful resolution to Iraq, they will do very well in 2008 and have a decent chance of capturing the white house (unless they nominate another dud like Kerry).

However, I suspect that the more likely scenario is that they will revert to their default behavior, have no credible policy alternatives of their own, and when 2008 comes around the Republicans will have a field day saying "we told you so" and will run roughshod over the Dems.

It will indeed be interesting to see how it turns out.

Internet Gambling

It's somewhat difficult to build on George Will's good column in this week's Newsweek about the recently passed law criminalizing most Internet gambling, but I'll give it a try with two additional broader philosophical points:

a) The government should not be legislating morality, especially in this hypocritical manner. Morality should certainly guide legislation, but legislation should not enforce morality. Freedom means nothing if it constrains the freedom to make potentially bad choices. (This is a huge part of why I think so much of the Muslim world is so messed up, frankly - it has nothing to do with Islam per se, and quite a bit to do with governments viewing their role as enforcing Islam's notion of morality.)

b) "Victimless crimes" should not be criminalized. Yes, some problem gamblers or alcoholics let their vices get out of control to the point where it clearly is not victimless, in which case the right thing is to define those lines and criminalize the behavior that has victims. Millions of people every day consume alcohol or gamble, though, with no problems whatsoever.

Insurance Irony

There's an old joke about banks that says that in order to get a loan you first have to prove that you don't need it. Health insurance is similar in many ways, and likely to get moreso.

At my physical exam last week, my doctor expressed his opinion that over the next decade or two we will probably find ourselves doing more genetic testing to predict predispositions for cancer and other diseases with strong hereditary links. He further opined that this naturally raises a host of issues with insurance companies and privacy, since people who have marker genes for some nasty illness will either be charged outrageous rates for insurance or else will be denied insurance altogether. Or, an alternative consequence would be that people would avoid having these tests done in order to avoid these outcomes - which seems to me to be an even worse outcome, frankly.

I think that either outcome would be a shame, of course, but I think it is also unnecessary. In fact, I think there is possibly an opportunity for a whole new business model to grow.

Let's step back for a moment and understand why people buy insurance and why insurance companies would charge higher rates (or refuse to offer coverage) to people with known, quantifiable risks. At the simplest, insurance companies are betting that you'll stay healthy while policyholders are betting that they will get sick. The word "bet" here is not accidental - it's entirely a statistical process. The insurance company makes money by charging rates that cover the expected rate of claims, plus a small margin for profit. In exchange, the value for the patient is that the financial downside potential of getting sick is capped.

This, of course, only works because of three reasons:

1. The risk for a given person gets spread among many people, including healthy people
2. Information about who will get sick (and how sick they will get) is imperfect
3. Insurance companies have good oddsmakers figuring out the right premiums to charge each policyholder based on known risks (e.g., smoker, overweight, etc.)
   

The level of predictive quality around those known risks is still pretty low, which is why it must remain a statistically-driven process. However, with genetic testing for serious hereditary diseases, of course, the insurance companies can make far better predictions about expected rates of illness.

Let's take this to its logical extreme to see why my doctor's fears are not unreasonable: suppose that the insurance companies could predict with 100% certainty the future healthcare needs of a given individual. What premium would they charge? Precisely the cost of that healthcare plus some margin (hopefully reasonable!) for profit, of course. On the other end, if a person knew that they would remain perfectly healthy until they die by getting hit by a bus, they would not bother buying any health insurance. In this world of perfect knowledge, therefore, there really is no need for an insurance product at all, since the only people who need insurance would end up having to pay more (by the profit margin) than the health care would cost out-of-pocket. Obviously, that's not good for the insurance companies, nor, frankly, is it good for customers because they have not been able to cap their downside expenses.

In other words, in a world of perfect information, insurance collapses because conditions 1 and 2 above fail. Of course, perfect information is not now nor will it ever be possible, but we will continually get closer.

So how do you prevent these fears from becoming reality as we get closer to perfect information? I think one possible answer (and the potential business opportunity to which I alluded) is by providing an anonymizing buffer to the insurance companies.

Here's how it might work. A buffer company collects customers in groups of, say, 1,000. It collects all of the information it can about the customers so that risk assessment can be accomplished as accurately and completely as possible. It then contracts with an insurance company to insure the whole 1,000 person lot.

If there are, say, 200 smokers in that group of 1,000 and 150 people who are likely to get Alzheimers, the insurance company is told these facts. However, the insurer is not told which members of the group of 1,000 are the smokers or the Alzheimers candidates, so it cannot cherrypick the healthy patients - it must cover the whole group of 1,000 or not. The premium it charges, of course, must reflect the fact that (in this example) 15% will likely get Alzheimers and 20% are strong candidates for lung cancer. However, because the group is insured as a block, this model forces the risk to be shared/spread among healthy and unhealthy, and the insurance company is forced to cover all using statistical models.

Of course, premiums should not be the same for everyone. People with discretionary risk factors such as smoking should pay higher premiums, young healthy people typically should pay lower premiums than older people who are almost certain to make greater use of health care services. The buffer company could adjust the premiums as needed to make sure that, in the example above, the smokers pay more than the non-smokers. But by anonymizing/grouping patients, it becomes possible to make sure that everyone can get insurance, to make sure that people with non-discretionary health issues (i.e., inherited) can have reasonably priced coverage, and to make sure that there is no dis-incentive to collecting the most accurate and most complete information possible.

There are a thousand business model details that would need to be worked out to make this new intermediary business work, including the obvious one of "how would it make money?" I suppose that if I were interested in acting on this, I'd be diving in to these details. But I'm not; I leave execution of this idea as an exercise for the reader. I merely offer it as a possible way to solve the "problem" of constantly improving medical information.

China might need an omelette on its face

This week North Korea defied the whole world - including China - by testing a nuclear weapon. That leaves egg on China's face, but I fear it will take more eggs before China behaves like the responsible world member that it wishes to be treated as.

Like a teenager who demands to be treated like an adult but has not yet demonstrated that they have the maturity of an adult, China has long demanded a level of respect on the world stage that it has not yet earned. Like a teenager, it finds itself in a grown-up body economically (and militarily, frankly), but from North Korea to Taiwan to Tibet to a list too long of shady business partners, it has not yet demonstrated the maturity that such a position requires.

Every country must, of course, follow its national interests; even when those interests are opposed to the interests of other nations. The United States certainly does. However, true leader nations also recognize that their long-term interests often require doing things that are short-term undesirable. China has been unwilling to reign in North Korea because of fears of instability and refugees. But by propping up the North Koreans, they're actually creating a far worse long-term problem not only for China but for the whole community of nations.

This was their moment for China to stand up on the world stage and show that it knows how to do the right thing, even when it is difficult to do. They failed this test miserably. Pyongyang has embarassed Beijing, and, frankly, Beijing deserved it.

The right thing to do here is not a pleasant one. China needs to seriously curtail its support of North Korea. Given Pyongyang's policy of putting the military first, doing so will almost certainly cause even more hardship for the already suffering population of the North, but failure to do so only prolongs their existing suffering.

It's time for China to do the right thing. I hope they do, but I am not holding my breath, for the Chinese regime has shown time and again that it has no interest in the broader good, only its own.

We could all learn from this

So what to you do when a madman shows up at your community's school and murders 5 of your children and shoots 5 more before killing himself? Mourn at his funeral, apparently. Almost half of the people at the killer's funeral were Amish.

Wow, that is unbelievably classy; Webster's should rewrite its definition of the word to cite this example. How many of us would do the same? Many religions preach forgiveness and peace, but very few actually act on those convictions when tested as the Amish have been this week.

The Amish had my sympathies this week for an unspeakable tragedy, they now have my awe as well.

The problem with the abortion "debate"

Abortion is certainly a sticky issue in America, and probably one of the longest-lasting; it's been a front-burner issue for many people for pretty much my whole adult life; few other issues can claim that sort of longevity. Why is this? What is it about abortion that makes it so fundamentally intractable?

I think the biggest problem is that, as with many other ideology-based issues, it's one where the principle zealots talk right past each other. Here's the thing: I think that upwards of 99% of Americans actually agree on this issue. As proof, let me offer the statement that I think would garner that level of support: "Infanticide is wrong." Is that really a controversial statement? (Gosh, I sure hope not).

So why the problem? I think it's the whole definition of the Magic Point where something becomes worthy of the designation "baby" (or "person" or "infant," take your pick - it doesn't really matter.) Termination or prevention of pregnancy after the Magic Point is infanticide and hence morally unacceptable; prior to the Magic Point, it is morally a non-event.

I think this gets to the key about why the abortion debate is so intractable. The defining point of babyhood is ultimately a matter of faith, ideology, laws, or convention; it's not a hard-fast scientifically provable point. Catholicism holds that the Magic Point must occur even prior to conception - that it's wrong to even prevent conception via birth control. Many folks including most fundamentalist Christians believe the Magic Point is at conception, whereas at the other extreme Judaism considers the point of viability to be graduation from medical school or law school. (Easy, easy, folks, that was a joke).

Religions might also define the Magic Point as when a new soul is created. That seems reasonable to me, but of course it begs the question of when that happens. Conception is a pretty good candidate event for this, but it doesn't quite work because identical twins arise post conception, and nobody would argue that they share a common soul.

My own point of view? The Magic Point is, unfortunately, to my thinking, very hard to crisply define.

I'll use a loaf of bread as an analogy. (And remember, it's just an analogy - although the similarities are striking, babies are not loaves of bread.) To make bread you must mix water, flour, yeast, and salt together and bake it in an oven for some period of time (we'll skip kneading and rising for simplicity). The "point of conception" for a loaf of bread is the point at which the ingredients are mixed - after all, if you don't mix them, you don't get bread, and it's at the point that you mix them that you have something that is neither flour nor water nor salt nor yeast but something somehow different. Mixing of the ingredients also has a nice secondary property that it is a very well defined point; you can easily point to "before" and "after".

But is a lump of dough just about to go into the oven fairly called a loaf of bread? That's where I have a hard time with this definition. In my view, it clearly is not a loaf of bread - and I do not think that a fertilized egg or a clump of cells shortly thereafter is a child either. Some very critical and very well defined steps have taken place, but additional critical steps still remain, and unfortunately they are not so neatly defined. In the bread case, if the baking time is 20 minutes, it's pretty clear that I will have bread at 20 minutes. I will probably have something that is still decent bread at 15 minutes. I may have something salvageable at 10 minutes. But at 1 minute it is still just dough. Somewhere between minute 0 and minute 20 the Magic Point is clearly crossed, but darned if I can point to the precise point.

It's certainly not satisfying to me to wave my hands over the gestation process and say "somewhere in there a clump of cells becomes a baby," but the clarity of a specific point in time (sperm fertilizes egg) is also not a satisfying criteria.

I consider myself "pro-choice" and think that the trimester model is a reasonable approximation (and just an approximation!) of the process, but I also recognize that this is just my point of view. I can argue (as I have above) that this is the right way to view the Magic Point, but cannot prove it - it's fundamentally just my point of view. And unless someone figures out how to get broad consensus on the Magic Point, I believe that this is why the abortion debate will not go away, nor will its acrimony decrease, anytime soon.

Unintended consequences

Lately I've been thinking a lot about alternative and renewable energy. I think it's an inevitable growth area, the question is not "if" but "when." I assume that there is a finite amount of oil in the ground that is economically recoverable. Some people think that finite amount is 20 years, some think 70 years, some think 150 years. Frankly, I don't know - all I know is that some number of years exist and it will be gone (too expensive) for all practical everyday purposes, reserved for only those applications that can afford the high cost or that simply cannot run on anything else.

I'm not an alarmist in the sense that I don't think the sky is falling over this issue - I think that ingenuity and innovation will find alternative sources of energy and that the laws of economics will make sure that ultimately everything works out, maybe not at a price we like, but ultimately at a price we can live with. Of course, coupled with that statement I also think there is tremendous opportunity in this space and I personally find such opportunities quite intriguing. So do many other people, although I think a lot of them go after opportunities because they are, for example, an alternative to oil, rather than because they are economically competitive with oil today. While I think there has been some good technical thinking that arises from this, it's not a particularly smart approach to creating a sustainable business. (See my earlier post on the need to compete on the merits and the payback period I'm expecting on my own solar panels).

I think that the biggest opportunities in the near term will be around efficiency - getting the same benefit for less energy consumption, and alternative sources will slowly become more and more viable.

So why did I call this post "unintended consequences?" I realized today that there is almost certainly a catch-22 involved in any meaningful gains in efficiency or rise in alternative sources of energy. I confess that this is conjecture, that I can't prove it, but I think there's ample prior examples to suggest that I'm probably right. Anyhow, my hypothesis is that any significant reduction in the cost of energy (whether through efficiency gains, discovery of new oil, practical cold fusion, whatever) will actually lead to an increase in energy consumption, which will offset a significant portion of the savings.

Think that's a nutty proposition? Maybe it is, but consider two examples from other domains:

• Traffic: When roads are widened from, say, 2 lanes to 4, initially the result is a relief of congestion. But what frequently happens is that now with a wide free-flowing road, housing and employment opportunities that were unattractive down the clogged 2-lane road suddenly becomes attractive down the wide-open 4-lane road. Development ensues, and rapidly the road is again at capacity. This isn't a bad thing or a good thing, it's nothing more than a reflection of people responding to the incentives that we provide. (Economic laws are pretty powerful things!)
• Computer Processing Power and Bandwidth 10 years ago we had sufficient CPU power and bandwidth for what people were doing with their PCs, and we asked what we would do with more. OK, nobody seriously thought we wouldn't find uses for more CPU or bandwidth, but that's not the same as saying that people were demanding it. Nevertheless, more CPU and bandwidth came, and what happened? I think it's best summarized by Youtube.com. The cost of CPU/Bandwidth fell, and people found new must-have uses for it, which would have been prohibitive at the cost of 1995 CPU/bandwidth, but which in 2006 are so cheap that people can use it for the most inane of endeavors. (OK, I enjoy much of what's on Youtube, but you catch my drift.)

Anyhow, I see no reason to think that Energy is fundamentally different. I have 5 PCs in the house, 2 of which are on pretty much all of the time, the other 3 are on only when in use. Somehow, today, even though I could afford the bill for the electricity they would consume, I can't in good conscience do so. But if someone came along and said the electricity would be half the price, not feed money to terrorists in the middle east, and generate no greenhouse emissions or other bad stuff, would I leave these machines on? You betcha. I'd break out my web server into multiple machines, I'd help out with parallel computation problems computing Pi to the 3 billionth decimal place, I'd loan CPU time to SETI, I'd do all sorts of stuff.

And that's nothing, because I think people who are more clever than I will come up with applications - not just in computers, but in other energy intensive endeavors - that will be obvious 10 years from now but which my small brain doesn't even comprehend right now. (Hey, how many of us understood the internet in 1990?)

So I think it's an interesting unintended consequence of "solving our energy problem" that we will almost certainly end up consuming more energy as a result. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. My instinct says that it has the distinct aroma of opportunity around it. I'm excited.

Now all we need to do is solve this cold fusion thing...

UPDATE: So I'm not insane here, nor am I original (nor am I surprised that I'm not original). Apparently there is a name for this unintended consequence of efficiency, and it's called Jevon's Paradox. The linked article actually goes into a bit of detail about the prerequisites for its existence as well.

Update on civil liberties

Well it appears that the congress has passed legislation defining the rules for treatment of detainees and for wiretaps.

While the legislation has many flaws (and may still not fully pass constitutional muster), I say "hooray" that congress has finally done its job of setting up the rules of engagement.

There are two things that I find very disappointing, though.

The first is that while congress stepped up to its job of defining the rules, they largely punted on any heavy lifting, pretty much giving the president the discretion to interpret the rules by which he is bound. I thought we had checks and balances for a reason; the whole problem is that you don't want the same person who can declare someone to be an enemy combatant to be the one who decides if it's OK to declare someone an enemy combatant. It boils down to "trust me" on the president. But it doesn't matter whether I trust the president -besides, in two years we'll have another one. I want to put my trust in laws, in process, not in specific people.

The second thing that disappointed me was the politicking around this. I suppose it can't be avoided this close to an election, but, for example, John Boehner said "The Democrats' irrational opposition to strong national-security policies that help keep our nation secure should be of great concern to the American people" in describing the desire of many Democrats to provide checks and balances and a legal framework on wiretapping. If I understand this line of reasoning, then we might as well give Bush the power to monitor any phone conversation, domestically or otherwise, without court supervision? Heck, why stop there, why not let the government read any email, instant messaging, or smoke signals too? Why not let the government demand a second copy of our home keys so that they can make sure that no terrorist activity is going on? We'll be safer that way, won't we?

Shame on you, Mr. Boehner. Nobody - not even the dreaded Democrats - opposes the wiretaps themselves. All they want is for them to be done in a framework that prevents abuse. I thought that was quite a patriotic American value, but perhaps I was mistaken.