Category: Politics

My poker and politics obsessions come together in a post at the Cake Poker blog that refers to a story by Randall Lane about Barack Obama’s poker-playing days in Illinois in The Daily Beast:

Lane puts all this information together and says that Obama’s concessions to the Republicans on the tax bill, the federal wage freeze and “unreciprocated health-care and fiscal concessions” that they’re confident in their ability to bluff the president. That’s bad news for him since the Republicans will be in control of Congress for at least the next two years, where they’ll have plenty of time to make him fold his medium-strength hands to their unsuited garbage. If the president is as big a nit as The Daily Beast suggests, he’d better hope his stack doesn’t dwindle to where he has no fold equity before the next election.

You can probably make out the sense of that without knowing the specific terminology, but a “nit” is someone who us si risk-averse that they can often be forced out of a hand they’re not absolutely sure of. “Fold equity” is the amount of money you can bet to force other players to back down; if you don’t have many chips it’s difficult to protect weak hands or to bluff because it costs little for others to match your bet.

As I wrote back in July, poker is a game of imperfect knowledge, unlike tic-tac-toe or chess. You can sometimes be sure you have the absolute best combination of cards but that’s not the usual situation, particularly in the early stages of betting in a hand when you only know about a portion of the cards that will be dealt. This is from Lane’s article:

“He wasn’t a bluffer,” says [Will County executive Larry] Walsh. “When Barack was betting, you could pretty much know that he had a hand.”

[State Senator Terry] Link remembers more bluffing, to a point: “He bluffed, with the cards. He wasn’t going to bluff with a total longshot.” In poker parlance, this is known as a semi-bluff: even if you’re called, you still have a so-so hand as insurance.

And if his opponents bluffed? Both Link and Walsh remember Obama as disinclined to engage unless he already held an overwhelming advantage. “If he was chasing [another card to complete a straight or flush], he’d give her about two shots and then fold,” says Walsh.

If nothing else, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and the GOP Republicans have demonstrated their bluffing proficiency. Obama confirmed as much at yesterday’s press conference: “I have not been able to budge them. And I don’t think there’s any suggestion anybody in this room thinks realistically that we can budge them right now.” There’s only one way to find out, but Obama, lacking an overwhelming hand, has been unwilling to do so over the first two years of his presidency.

Then again, the other possibility is he’s getting exactly what he wanted.

From the Oregonian, in an article about how Chris Dudley didn’t even win the vote for the governor’s race this month in his hometown of Lake Oswego (text in the print edition varies from the online version):

Republican pollster Bob Moore, with perhaps a touch of GOP scorn, complained that Lake Oswego is now dominated by an “uppity, well-to-do, West Coast, liberal-left crowd.”

Apart from the “liberal-left” label, I’m not sure what city Moore thought he was talking about. Lake Oswego has been one of the more monied, exclusive communities in the state for a long time. And I’m pretty sure it’s always been on the “West Coast.”

I’ve been banned again by Jack Bogdanski. Sometimes I have to wonder why I even bother.

As ever, I’m not sure what the offense was, but I think that it’s related to a post he made alleging that a Portland Online web page about getting around without a car was “hectoring” him day after day to spend less time in his car.

I pointed out that a passive web page isn’t exactly the kind of bullying, abusive behavior you’d associate with the verb “hectoring,” but naturally there were a number of mouth-breathers thumping their chests about how they were all imposed on by bike lanes and stuff. In a follow-up comment after someone said “Consider biking to school. In the fog. When it’s 33 degrees. And the road is wet” I mentioned that I used to do just that for miles through junior high and high school (I neglected to mention that I did it for a few years after that as well). I think the thing that got me banned was a closing statement I made where I equated the hyperbolic claim of hectoring came from the same part of the brain as the claims of Republicans that anything they don’t like is being shoved down their throats.

Didn’t realize I was banned until I tried to post a reply to another comment, by which time the biking story was scrubbed.

First, the discussion wasn’t about “being active”, it was specifically about “bicycling”.

Actually, the überdiscussion was about non-car transportation. The link Jack referenced includes alternate forms of getting around from walking to public transit to carpools. Not just bicycles.

Actually, the car part is exactly what’s happening all over the world through congestion taxes, tolls, fees, reduction in auto access, and other policies.

All that and no mention of the price of gasoline? Gas was an astounding $2/gal. by the end of 2000, after a year of dizzying rises. According to the Pew Center the public paid far more attention to stories about the cost of gasoline than they did to the attack on the USS Cole, the recall of Firestone tires, Elian Gonzalez, or the presidential election. In that order.

Hope you had a great Guy Fawkes Day!

Five years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans due to the failure of the seawalls built by the Army Corps of Engineers, I republished a piece I wrote in 1992 for my book review magazine on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Huey Long by T. Harry Williams. That was on the 70th anniversary of the day Sen. Long was fatally shot in the Louisiana capitol building in Baton Rouge.

Today marked the 75th anniversary of that assassination. In the past five years, Louisiana and much of the rest of the Gulf Coast have struggled to cope with the effects of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans in particular has been irrevocably changed by the flooding of the city and the subsequent exodus of residents, many of whom have been unable to return. Then, of course, this year there was the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the true effects of which we aren’t likely to know for some time.

Huey Long came into national prominence in the hard times of the Depression. He’s thought of today mostly as a demagogue or a proto-fascist who appealed to the basest populist instincts of the masses, but Long’s was one of the first voices in government to be raised against companies like Standard Oil which he viewed as stripping the people of his state of their mineral and resource wealth and giving virtually nothing in return. And that was his view before the Depression hit.

Long’s “Share Our Wealth” plan was a means for reducing income inequality that put restrictions on inherited wealth and income that were far more radical than anything proposed by anyone in politics today, much less an elected United States Senator.

And here we are in the Great Recession. Three-quarters of a century on from the day the Kingfish was gunned down (he didn’t die for two days) and the problems he fought against have only ossified. Nobody in the Democratic Party is fighting corporatism (and forget about the Republicans). Reducing income inequality isn’t even on the radar screen; we’ll be lucky if we don’t get an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich that increased it over the past decade.

I don’t know how to end this post other than with this.

This has ben percolating in my brain for a long time now, but it finally boiled over last night as a comment at First Draft:

The whole chess thing has to go away. Whoever thought it was a good idea to start using chess as an analogue for how “smart” politicians operate knows absolutely nothing about game theory, and the mindless repetition of the trope, if anything, just hammers the point in about how little the general public and commentators understand it.

Chess is a game of absolute knowledge. Nothing is hidden in a game of chess. There’s no chance, there’s no accident, there’s nothing that can’t potentially be foreseen and predicted. The only thing that can go wrong in chess is that someone makes a mistake. All the pieces are on the board. Their starting positions are set. The pieces can only move in specific ways. The only variance is whether you move first or not. Eleventy-dimensional chess is just twenty-dimensional tic-tac-toe.

But life and politics aren’t like that. An unexpected event (aka “shit”) happens. People lie about what they’re going to do. Or they lie about the facts to the public and dare you to call them on it. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen in chess or checkers or tic-tac-toe. There are a lot of games it does happen in, but success in those games requires a healthy dose of skepticism and a willingness to take chances which have been woefully absent in this administration.

By the time you read this, George Stanley McGovern, former Senator of South Dakota and 1972 Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States will be on the ground one way or another, after skydiving on the morning of his 88th birthday today.

Just a little grist to add to the mill for my theory that George McGovern doesn’t scare easily, as I mentioned on Daily Kos the other day.

Today it was in front of Target but I’d seen the bumper sticker before:

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, thank a soldier!

What we see is the evolution (presuming the person sporting this version believes in evolution) of the bumper sticker phrase “If you can read this, you’re too close!” through the “thoughtful” phase which featured just the first line above to a jingoistic, anti-intellectual response that, like most blind expressions of nationalism doesn’t really make any sense. Except for the brain fevers of the Reagan years when the Soviets were going to drive their tanks up from Nicaragua* or the more recent Reconquista fears of Lou Dobbs (or Phillip K. Dick’s novel Man in the High Castle), when has the US been in danger of being subjugated by non-English speakers? The only serious invasions of US territory were two centuries ago, and the people who did the invading spoke English perfectly well because they were the English. You might as well have a bumper sticker that says:

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, thank your
pre-Revolutionary colonial masters!

* You have to wonder why the hell would anyone want to invade Brownsville, Texas or Red Dawn-era Colorado, anyway. Wouldn’t the Soviets have been smarter to just hop across to Sarah’s house and take over the Alaskan oil fields?

In the land of Atlantis where the sun don’t shine
It gets darker down there every day
That’s when two explorers fell into a mine
And that’s the price they have to pay

They carry their clubs upon their back
Mole men, mole men
They climb above ground and then attack
Mole men, mole men
Beware of the head mole man, Jack
Mole men, mole men

They’re the slavery labor of the underground
Their masters make them suffer and work
If you listen you’re sure to hear the terrible sound
Of mole men crawling out of the dirt

The Dickies, “Attack of the Mole Men”, Dawn of the Dickies

At least momentarily, I can comment again at Bogdanski’s site [apparently, I spoke too soon, I was able to post a comment but he yanked it within a half hour], and a post about the evil anti-business practices of Portland made me give it a shot caught my attention.

At the heart was a segment from an NPR call-in show suggesting that someone interested in moving to Oregon from Utah should avoid the Portland area and head to Salem because of the bad economy here.

No dispute about that from me (I’m coming up on three years of looking for a job) but the commenters went off like a pack of baying hounds about how “Portland is out of control and very unfriendly to business” based on the interviewee’s statement that “Portland is also highly regulated,” which has led to its poor economy.

The idea that Salem or anywhere else in the state that lets you “avoid the Portland-Vancouver, Washington area” is better economically isn’t backed up by many facts.

Oregon’s official overall unemployment rate in March 2010 was 10.6% (compared to 9.7% across the country). Portland metro was 10.7%, but Salem metro is only marginally better, at 10.2%. The advantage Salem has over Portland is equal to the advantage a randomly-chosen place somewhere in the country is likely to have over Salem. Eugene-Springfield is tied with Portland. Medford’s more than a point higher (11.7%) and Bend’s at 13.3%. The only metro area in the state that looks decent is Corvallis, at 7.6%.

And if anyone had done any checking, they would have figured out that Vancouver is what’s dragging the Portland metro figures up. The Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is made up of Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, Yamhill, and Columbia counties in Oregon and Clark and Skamania counties in Washington. You’d think that anyone informed about the local economy would know that the situation on the north side of the river has been dicier than in Portland proper for several years, but let’s take a look at the unemployment rates and the size of the workforce those rates are calculated on.

Multnomah County: 10.1% (392K civilian labor force). Clackamas County: 10.4% (203K). Washington County: 9.0% (291K). Yamhill County is right at 10.6% (49K). To get an average of 10.6% from those counties would be rather difficult, Yamhill would have to have a hell of a lot of people, but in reality just the opposite is true. The most populous counties have rates of unemployment lower than the average for the MSA.

Columbia County’s unemployment rate is 12.1% (25K), but its workforce is 1/10th that of Clackamas County alone. It doesn’t have enough people to bring up the average.

However, Skamania (5K) and Clark (222K) counties are running unemployment rates well over any of the Oregon counties in the MSA, both are at 14.6% in March, and Clark is big enough that it can affect the average unemployment rate for the MSA.

I don’t expect this argument to have any effect on the knee-jerk idealogues, but the truth of the matter is that as bad as Portland’s economy is, the problem across the river — in another state, that’s not “highly-regulated” — is a lot more severe. If people were honest about it, they’d have to find some other explanation.

What I don’t get about this whole argument about whether terrorists or other criminals should be “Miranda-ized” is that the act of “reading someone their rights” isn’t what confers those rights upon them. The Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and for counsel exist whether the suspect is told of them or not.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

There’s nothing in there about “unless we don’t tell you about this part of the Constitution.” These are rights that are supposed to be conferred on anyone involved in the American legal system, apart from the exceptions described in the amendment. Despite the eagerness for a regime oftorture and beatings of suspects, the act of informing them of their rights makes no actual change in their legal status; it’s the suspect’s knowing assent to incriminate themself or to act without counsel that affects that status.

The huffing and puffing about whether law enforcement should have to let them know they have those rights is only going to taint an enormous amount of prosecution evidence going forward. Assuming, of course, that we keep the Fifth Amendment around.