Is Mitt Romney a Unicorn?

Pretty silly question, huh? Well, several bloggers have begun a campaign to “investigate”, even creating a website (is-mitt-romney-a-unicorn.com) Their logic and criteria are, of course, absurd, but that is precisely their point; they are using exactly the same logic that Arizona’s Secretary of State and Bozo Trump are using to claim that President Obama is not really a native-born U.S. citizen.

Now that the birthers are (we can only hope) ultimately humiliated, is there any chance that we can start focussing on real issues? Not only is this birtherism a distraction, we all know in our subconscious that birtherism is racist.

The sterotypical racist is depicted as an undereducated redneck hick. That is a dangerous presumption. Sometimes, racists wear $1000+ suits and look respectable…with the possible exception of their hair.

Intelligent conservative is NOT an oxymoron!

I’m sure anyone reading this blog knows that I lean left politically, but I am far more concerned with people behaving intelligently regardless of ideology. Unfortunately, blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump get all the attention – which, in itself, begs a question about how we can get $$$ out of driving the news cycle – but there are people worth seeking out on the conservative side of the spectrum.

Jim Geraghty, who writes for National Review Online, is just such a person. Do I agree with everything he writes or says in interviews? No, of course not, but Geraghty strikes me as someone who loves his country more than he loves the sound of his own voice, as someone who is willing to listen to what others have to say, and as someone with the ability to stand back from the babble and chatter and examine it with a sense of humor.

I am confident that there are other Jim Geraghtys in the world, and their equivalents on the other side of the spectrum. We would all be better off following these people.

Chardonnay: Why all the arguing?

If there is a wine grape in the world that has a wider reputation range than Chardonnay has endured in the past 50 years, I have yet to read about or taste it. So, why has Chardonnay attracted commentary like “wine for people who don’t like wine” and “overpriced jug wine”, but also been the center of much of the global respect that the New World now commands, and whose European bottlings were the original wines to be called “poetry in a bottle?”

There are entire books written on the subject, so I’ll keep this brief. I believe there are three primary variables that account for the range in like/dislike for Chardonnay:

1. OAK. Used with discretion, oak is a wonderful enhancement for Chardonnay. Like other wooden storage devices, it allows a very gradual and minute amount of air to reach the wine that takes some of the sharper edges off of it, a quality that is especially desirable in wines containing a lot of malic acid. In addition, oak contains the chemical vanillin which, as you might guess, imparts a slight vanilla quality to the wine that makes even a bone-dry chardonnay seem fruity and even slightly sweet.

The problem is that some Chardonnays are so heavily oaked that no one can taste the underlying grape. In one of my tasting classes, I put a glass of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, and dry Chenin Blanc next to each other and asked my students to taste each and take notes. I dosed the latter three with vanillin extract. The comments were interesting, but most interesting is that every single student (including some with experience in wine-tasting) assumed that all four wines were Chardonnnays! I would wager that a lot of people don’t even know what the varietal character of Chardonnay is supposed to be, but that statement begs the question…

2. TERROIR. Usually translated as “sense of place” it refers to the qualities that a wine picks up from its combination of soil, rainfall, angle of declination, latitude, degree days, etc. that are unique from place to place. When a Chardonnay is allowed to express its terroir, there are few grapes in the world that more wonderfully express a range of tastes. Unfortunately, when it became the most popular white wine, winemakers around the world all seemed to aim for the same sort of flavor: off-dry, easy to sip even without foods.

Want a real treat that will blow your taste buds! Try a bottle of Premier Cru Chablis (100% Chardonnay from the far north of Burgundy, not the jug wine from California) with raw oysters, mussels, or (if you can afford it) caviar. The Chablis has no oak, and the combination of the food and the wine is almost addictive, with the steely, crisp Chablis making you want to eat the salty seafood, making you want to drink the Chablis.

3. TONNAGE. Part of the problem with the meteroric rise in popularity of Chardonnay and the fact that it melds almost too well with oak is that it is an easy grape to grow for high profit. Unlike Riesling, Pinot Noir, or Nebbiolo, to name just a few, Chardonnay will grow almos everywhere. If you grow it in the hot, flat Central Valley, then dose it with lots of new oak, you can get yields of over 50 tons/acre and produce a wine that, to a novice, tastes significantly better than a run-of-the-mill house white. On the other hand, grown in a cool area and limiting yields to, i.e., 5 tons/acre, and you can produce wines that not only sell for over $100 bottle, but are worth it.

Enough for now. I’ll write about more Chardonnays as the weather gets warmer.

Learn the Constitution, for goodness’ sake!

Earlier this week, one of the letters to the Editor took the local newspaper to task for giving a “thumbs down” to the House of Representatives for their refusal to propose a budget that had any chance of being approved by the Senate and signed by the President. His argument? “You should also be taking the Senate to task. They haven’t proposed a budget at all. Obviously, you are showing your liberal bias!

Er, sir? Article One of the Constitution explicitly states that all revenue-based legislation must originate in the House of Representatives! Criticizing the Senate for failing to produce a budget makes as much sense as criticizing them for not passing a budget in Iceland!

If you are going to be an ideologue, at least learn enough about the Constitution so that you don’t look like a complete idiot when you publicize your opinions. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is to go unnoticed; the worst is for people to assume that people with your ideology are uniformly idiots.

Job Performance Reviews Suck!

Job Performance Reviews Suck! But, remember that they suck for both the employer and the employee. Approach them with that in mind and things are more likely to have a positive outcome.

The three (or four) steps essential to a democratic republic: Part Three

Well, I’ve delayed this long enough. I kept hoping for some inspirational way to close this, and nothing has been forthcoming.

I’ve already written about the first two essential steps for a successful democratic republic:  fair and open elections, and that the electorate must accept the results of the election. Step three is that the “losing” must offer what is often referred to as the “loyal opposition.”

Here is where it gets tricky, and where I was searching for a bright line to draw to better define the goal. What I do know is that there are a variety of ways in which an opposition canbehave, and that those ways can be placed on a continuum. At one end of the continuum is for the minority party to just roll over and allow the majority to have its way, without restraint. This probably sounds appealing if you are part of the majority, but it is very destructive in the long run. I would not want to live in a country in which every policy I believed I wanted would be granted; the ideas would become stale and would never stand a chance of improving. Only through an active marketplace of ideas can the best results be achieved.

On the other end, it is just as dangerous to have a minority that does nothing but obstruct the majority and prevent it from governing. Sadly, even Republican intellectuals  have pointed out that the current Republican policy is very close to this end of the spectrum. While Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is most infamous for his statement that the only vital goal for Republicans was to ensure the defeat of President Obama in his bid for re-election, other GOP leaders have made similar comments on the record. This is not loyal opposition; it is disloyal to the United States and its citizens who badly need for Congress to work toward solutions.

So what is “loyal opposition?” It means both upholding the duty to challenge the majority party and force it to come up with the best possible policies, but it also means remembering that government loyalty is to the constituents and to the government as a whole. This means realizing that, as an elected official, you may not get exactly what you want, but it is more important to create policy that helps those who elected you and, more importantly, your country or state. Obstructionism might succeed in defeating your political foes, but then what is to stop them from turning around and doing exactly the same thing to you? This is a slippery slope that no republic can afford, and it is unfortunate that there seem to be so many GOP legislators at this time who think like Jim DeMint. I am old enough to remember great Republican legislators who managed to craft or strongly influence legislation that has been good for our entire country. When loyalty to ideology supercedes loyalty to citizens, that is selfish and immature, and you have no business being part of the government.

UPDATE:  In the wake of the growing  J.P. Morgan Chase scandal, Mitt Romney’s economic spokesman comes out and says that government should stay uninvolved and that the private sector can solve the problem. This is a perfect storm, combining obstructionism with a ludicrously rabid adherence to Ayn Rand-style ideology.

Reality creeping into my sports!

Sad to say, but reality is starting to creep into my sports. I love the SF Giants totally and irrationally, and my rooting is an escape from the real world (although the number of close games they play means that they are often greater torture than reality!)

They just started the last game of their series against Arizona and I realized that I really want the Giants to anhililate the Diamondbacks, embarrass them, humiliate them, run them out of the league. And it has little to do with baseball itself. But Jan Brewer and her jack-booted followers in state government piss me off so much that I have a big-time chip on my shoulder against the Phoenix metro area. You’ll notice that the sane, humane politicians in Arizona all seem to come from the Tucson area, and I suspect a much higher percentage of  their residents are multiple-generation Arizonans, compared to a high percentage of johnny-come-latelys in Phoenix who are there because they can’t stand the fact that “their” world was co-opted in whatever state they moved from.

So, thumbs up to Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Tucson, etc., and any of my former students who happen to be in the Phoenix area. Otherwise, Phoenix can suck it.

Logical Fallacy from the USCCB needs to be mentioned.

This is a difficult post. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have been admirable in taking states like Wisconsin to task for being “unChristian” in their treatment of workers’ rights and their desire to cut assistance to the poor. Bravo!

Unfortunately, they have taken some of the luster away from their stand by condemning the Sisters in the United States for spending too much energy on fighting poverty and not enough on fighting for Pro-Life causes. Regardless of your personal position on pro-life issues, the USCCB are guilty of one of the most common logical fallacies:  creating a false dilemma. Creating a false dilemma is when you are told that you have only two choices, and that they are at odds with one another. False dilemmas are the meat-and-potatoes of negative political campaigns; i.e., “A vote against candidate A is a vote for American values.”

So, why is this a false dilemma? Simply put, there is a 100% correlation between the number of abortions sought and the poverty rate. I can understand why the USCCB, given their drive to eliminate abortions, want to take anyone to task who doesn’t confront the abortion issue head-on but, with all due respect, the Council has let its emotions cloud its judgment. If American Nuns are allowed to pour all of their energies into fighting poverty, it will also reduce abortions. On the other hand, directly confronting abortion laws will not do anything to reduce poverty.

Some Background Before Proceeding

I have found myself in a state of “paralysis by analysis” this week; with so many political and philosophical bombshells being dropped, I froze up, not knowing whether to tackle Part Three of what makes for successful representative governments, or to take on the issues involving the LGBT community first. I decided that what I needed to do was to explain the main constitutional issues concerning both topics first; that way, I can be relatively efficient when taking on those subjects.

First of all, it is vital to understand how the U.S. Constitution works, in general:

• Its primary function is to limit power, not to grant power, although it does delineate specific powers to various government branches.
• Subsequent amendments always supercede what came before them. I remember one mental midget, a state legislator, argue that a proposed constitutional amendment would be “unconstitutional”. Er, um, sir?…if you amend the constitution then your amendment is automatically constitutional.
• The U.S. Constitution, in the opinion of most legal scholars, was and continues to be written with a certain degree of deliberate ambiguity so that it can adapt to an ever-changing world. This is done chiefly through direct court rulings and opinions and, if they are in place, by legal precedents based on those court rulings. It can get complicated, though; for legal precedent to be applied, the new case must be substantially the same as the previous one…but there is no hard and fast rule for determining where that line is to be drawn.

With this in mind, here are the portions of our U.S. Constitution that apply today. If any of them seem confusing, don’t feel too bad; you’re in the same boat with a lot of very bright legal scholars.

1. Article One: This is known primarily for creating the Congress and specifying its powers, but it includes two areas of particular interest here. One is what it does not include; this will come into play later. The other is what textbooks call either the Elastic Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. This states that Congress has the power to pass any laws that are necessary and proper in order for it to be able to carry out the powers it was specifically granted. For instance, since Congress has the power to tax, it implicitly has the power to start a bank in which to store the monies that it has collected. Another real-life example is that Congress can prohibit hotels and motels from racially discriminating because it has already been given the power to regulate interstate commerce; obviously, an African-American driving across the country would be engaging in interstate commerce if he rented a motel room in Omaha. This clause is one that infuriates states’ rights supporters because they feel Congress is overstepping its bounds; however, the Constitution is very clear in its language and both of the cases I named are real-life cases, the challenges to which failed.
2. Article Four: This is the article that defines the relationships among the states and between the national government and state governments. Its importance here is the Full Faith and Credit Clause which stipulates that states must, among other things, uphold civil contracts made in other states. For instance, if you get married in a state that still permits people to marry at age 14, and that married couple moves to a state where the minimum age is 18, the marriage is still legal and valid. You can probably see where this is going:  if a gay couple legally marries in New York, then moves to North Carolina (which just amended its constitution to prohibit gay marriages), must North Carolina provide full recognition to that marriage? (BTW, I have heard people call both G.W. Bush and Obama “cowards” because they are both on record as stating that gay marriage is a decision for the states to make. Wrong! Both men are following the U.S. Constitution, as you will see in a moment.)
3. Article Six:  This is where things really start getting interesting. Article Six is a catch-all for the elements that did not neatly fit into one of the other articles. What is vital here is the Supremacy Clause, which reads that the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that, when in conflict, national laws take priority over state laws. You are likely to hear the Supremacy Clause and/or Article Six mentioned by both supporters and opponents of LGBT rights, including those talking about amending the Constitution.
4. Amendment Ten:  This stipulates that any power not granted to the national government nor specifically denied to any government belongs to the states. This is why both Bush and Obama are correct in saying that marriage decisions are a state concern, since marriage is not mentioned as a national power. However, especially on matters such as joint property, living wills, visitation rights, etc., I could see the national government applying the Necessary and Proper Clause. However, any broad-based legislation concerning marriage, passed by Congress, is an utter waste of time and serves as no more than a publicity stunt. The “Defense of Marriage Act” is and was a total joke and anyone associated with it should be ashamed.
5. Amendment Fourteen:  This is probably where most of the disputes will come from; it is the amendment that guarantees that every U.S. citizen has equal rights and enjoys equal protection under the law. In the 1870’s, the Supreme Court intentionally misinterpreted it along North-South lines in the Slaughterhouse cases, saying that the 14th Amendment stipulated that people were both U.S. citizens and citizens of the individual states in which they lived; it took almost a century to overcome the stupidity that grew out of this decision (separate but equal, Jim Crow laws, etc.). So, where will the disputes arise?
6. The first area is marriage itself. Is it a fundamental right? The Constitution does not list it as such, but various court precedents have included language that suggests that it is.
7. The second area is the “nature vs. nurture” dispute. We have all heard plenty of people argue that sexual orientation is innate, not learned, but have also heard plenty of people argue that it is a conscious choice. Michelle Bachman’s husband owns a series of psychiatric clinics that include deprograming sexual orientation as a treatment one can choose. This matters because it is why one cannot refuse to hire someone on the basis of race (innate) but one can set minimum education standards for job applicants (choice of what degree a person wants to pursue). While scientific studies are not definitive, there is currently more evidence suggesting that sexual orientation is innate; furthermore, the tendency of the courts has been to uphold equal treatment unless there is a compelling state interest against it. What would be a compelling state interest to prevent people of the same gender from marrying? Just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean that one cannot be argued.

The three (or four) steps essential to a democratic republic: Part Two

I have found that there are three major essentials for as democratic republic to succeed. Step one is fair and open elections. Step two is that the electorate must accept the results of the election.

Obviously, if your candidate or issue won, you will find it easy to accept the outcome. But it is just as important that the “losing” side will accept the results. Luckily, the United States has not suffered through a military coup d’etat such as those inflicted on many fledgling democratically-elected governments; think how long it has taken for much of Latin America (Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, et al.) to learn the importance of patience. A legitimate argument can be made the refusal to accept election results triggered the U.S. Civil War.

So, how do you get the conditions needed for getting the body politic to accept election results, regardless of the outcome? There are several elements that help; I don’t pretend that this is a comprehensive list, and welcome  any suggestions. I do know that the elements I have create momentum, just as refusing to adopt them creates negative momentum.

1. Make this a part of the curriculum for all schools, either through a required civics class or through a critical thinking class. Of course, that means that there has to be more time dedicated to teaching students to think and less standardized testing, AND that there needs to be broader-based support for public schools, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
2. Tell Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and their ilk to put a sock in it. Their standard fall-back excuse is that they are entertainers, and no one should be interfering with their First Amendment rights. They’re right in that respect, but they need to understand that with influence comes responsibility. Even though it has been suspended, there was a good reason for the Fairness in Broadcasting Act to be created. Let me be clear here; I am not for oppressing Rush’s opinions in any way, but I am arguing that he needs to be civil. For example, the Oxbridge schools have developed a sophisticated political spectrum that is far better than our current model (more on that in a later post), and it shows that Rush and George Will are virtually identical in their placements upon the spectrum. Yet, I read everything Will writes and condemn almost everything Limbaugh says. The difference? George Will treats his opponents with respect, always refers to “the President”, etc., while Limbaugh holds up a photo of Chelsea Clinton and refers to her as “the White House dog”, let alone the publicity insults he has spouted since then. When Limbaugh does stuff like this, or Anne Coulter suggests that certain Supreme Court justices should be assassinated, they provide mentally-unbalanced types with a rationale to objectify those they oppose, leading to hate speech and incidents like the attempted assassination and real-life murders in Arizona.
3. Overlapping with Part One, there has to be all that can be done to avoid the appearance of impropriety. While hardly my favorite president, George W. Bush was unfairly undermined by the controversy in Florida and he never got to start his presidency with the “honeymoon period” that is standard. Not coincidentally, I heard more Democrats treat him with incivility and disrespect than I ever heard aimed at all the previous Republican presidents of my lifetime combined (incivility is inexcusable, regardless of who the target is.)