What we need is a shepherd, not a pitbull

Former Anchorage, current Buffalo, NY rabbi, Harry Rosenfeld, told me he thought what we needed was NOT an attack dog, but a shepherd that watches over the flock and protects it when there's danger.

Shepherd photo source
Pit Bull Photo source 1and source 2

Words of the Day - Duplicitous

From Word-Net Dictionary

Adj. 1. duplicitous - marked by deliberate deceptiveness especially by pretending one set of feelings and acting under the influence of another; "she was a deceitful scheming little thing"- Israel Zangwill; "a double-dealing double agent"; "a double-faced infernal traitor and schemer"- W.M.Thackeray
Synonyms: double-dealing, double-tongued, two-faced, Janus-faced, double-faced, ambidextrous, deceitful

The Republican thought control machine is working hard to turn sins, that they themselves have denounced opponents for, into strengths.

• After non-stop attacks on Obama as lacking the experience to be a President, they have chosen a VP candidate with experience as a mayor of a small town and governor for less than two years.
• Palin's announcement that her 17 year old daughter was unmarried and pregnant, has been turned into 'real demonstration of her pro-life ideals' and 'something we can all identify with.'
  

Consistency is irrelevant. I believe that probably many people generally do not think in abstract principles so that when their ideal is contradicted, they often don't see the contradiction. They don't see that their strong principle in one area has been violated in another area. Others are clearly spinning the truth to favor their position. For example:

Vision America, founded by Pastor Rick Scarborough, posts on its website:

Abstinence education works; condom distribution in the schools is playing Russian roulette with the lives of our children

From Focus on the Family idol James Dobson:

The real reason that teen birthrates are declining is that young people have rediscovered abstinence.

The Heritage Foundation on abstinence education:

Abstinence education programs for youth have been proven to be effective in reducing early sexual activity. Abstinence programs also can provide the foundation for personal responsibility and enduring marital commitment. Therefore, they are vitally important to efforts aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock childbearing among young adult women, improving child well-being, and increasing adult happiness over the long term.[emphasis added]

But after Palin's revelation of her upcoming grandmotherhood, we hear this sort of thing


From the New York Times:

“Families get in trouble all the time,” said Rick Scarborough, a pastor and the founder of the conservative advocacy group Vision America. “From what I see this family is dealing with it honorably. They are going to carry this baby to a full term as a further testimony of their commitment to life.”

“The media is already trying to spin this as evidence that Governor Palin is a hypocrite,” said James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. “But all it really means is that she and her family are human.”

“I am a high school coach, I interact with 17-year-olds every day,” said Fergus Cullen, the New Hampshire Republican chairman. “And there are a lot of parents out there of 17-year-old high school students. If anything, this is a reminder that Sarah Palin is a real person who has the same experiences that regular Americans do.

From NPR:

"We all have ghosts in our closet," says mortgage banker Reif. . . Hearing the reports that Palin's unmarried daughter Bristol is pregnant, Reif says, "showed me that she is more like us."

I didn't hear anything about ghosts when they pulled out Lewinsky's blue dress.

"More like us"??????????

Unmarried pregnant teenagers are so common that Palin's daughter connects her with the common people???? These are Republicans talking and they aren't talking about their normal poster child for unmarried mothers - African-Americans - they are talking about themselves. This is amazing!!! Does that mean that all the stuff they've been saying about abstinence education is bunk? And that they've known all along it doesn't work?

These are people in serious denial.

I'm sorry that Bristol is pregnant at 17 and unmarried. It's not a moral thing about sex on my part, but rather, at 17, she should be growing up and having fun and studying and preparing to take a responsible role in her community. This is all going to make it much harder for her and Levi not to mention the baby. (I recognize that in past eras, people got married at younger ages, but they also didn't go to college or even finish high school.)

Will anyone of them admit it might have been better if Levi had used a condom? That maybe sex education that reflected the reality of life, that teenage pregnancy is so common that Republican delegates can relate to a candidate with a pregnant daughter? Or does this simply prove that we are all sinners?


This is an example of duplicity. This is not about finding the truth, finding areas we can agree on, 'being Americans not Republicans" as they also said last night. This is about winning at all costs. This is about twisting the truth, stretching our principles, to win. That isn't to say that the Democrats don't do this as well, but I'd like to see more Republicans do what Obama did. He didn't grab this tidbit of Republican duplicity and run with it to his advantage. Instead he said, "Family issues are off limits." That isn't something Republicans are good at.

Guliani and Palin Pandering

I'm afraid our governor has now begun to shill for the worst instincts of the Republican party. Today's speech was full of clever, but meaningless, phrases, nasty distortions, and belittling. The Republicans in the last two elections have found the effectiveness of appealing to fear, and making up their own facts. Giuliani was plain mean and brutish. Palin wasn't much better. When she talked about herself it was one speech, but then she went after Obama and she was just the reader. The belittling of community organizing was just the start. There was no real content, just diatribe against Obama.

One example - I'll let the rest of the blog world take apart most of the speech. She blasted Obama for telling people in one town one thing and in another town something else. But I recall that what she told the people in Juneau about moving the capital was different from what she told the people in Wasilla.

And all this nonsense about having more administrative experience than the whole Democratic ticket is pure make believe. It means nothing. If Palin thinks that being Mayor of the town she grew up in that had issues she's known since childhood prepares her to be Vice President, she's delusional. I've already posted that I think what she did with AGIA was impressive. But her rescue of the failing Dairy was itself a failure. The Monehan firing demonstrates how being small town mayor didn't teach her the rules of the merit system and rule of law.

Some of the rhetorical devices they used included: ad hominem attack, straw man, ciruclar arguments. While you're at it, just look at the whole index of fallacies.

Listen Online to Palin Accept the Nomination

For those who want to watch Sarah Palin talk live at the Republican Convention:
[Update 9/4/08: You can listen to the speech here.]

Free video streaming by Ustream

Watching Boats at the Washington Park Arboretum

Monday, in Seattle, M wanted to get pictures of a freeway ramp that was covered with grass that ends abruptly in the Lake Washington Arboretum. She couldn't find exactly what she was looking for, but this one was close.





Then we wandered around the trails. The park is just across the drawbridge south of the UW campus. There's a lock nearby where boats come in from Puget Sound. There are meandering bodies of water, full of water lilies an kayakers and canoes.



















The 270 freeway goes right through the park. This is under the freeway just before the tunnel under it. I went kayaking here New Years day, 2007 I think, with M's boyfriend. It was strange kayaking under a freeway.










Here's a leaf hanging by a thread - a spider web thread I think. Then we got out by the lake and sat on the grass and spent a few hours talking and watching the boats go by. Marty, I hope you're looking at this. Then you can point out which of these is like the one you want to buy.













We had sun more than we didn't.











I fumbled with my camera as the bald eagle flew toward us from the water and landed up in this tree. Here's another good example of the wild life amongst us that most people don't ever see. The eagle is that lump up on the left - if you follow the branch up toward the end. If I hadn't seen it land, I'm sure I wouldn't have known it was there







Then we wandered back to the car, via the Arboretum visitor center. Which was closed. But fortunately, the restrooms were still open.


















Here are mother and daughter strolling through the big trees.

Zum, Chaco, and Plums

Seattle has all sorts of artsy places. I like the look of this, but for a fitness center it seems a little pretentious.



Then we went to lunch at Chaco Canyon. Nice to be able to get tasty vegetarian, even vegan food. Then we went off to the Arboretum and enjoyed the often sunny afternoon. But I'll post that later. Below are some of the plums on the tree in front of the house where my daughter lives.

As usual, you can double click any picture to enlarge it.
We're in Juneau now where we had a chance to visit J and M for a couple of hours. J has a new Prius, but I'll put that picture up here later.

Oh Dear

As a blogger, I tend to understate things, and to crawl to conclusions. As I wrote in my earlier post on the Palin nomination, when I first heard her campaign for governor, I thought she was in over her head. But her standing up to the oil companies and the passage of AGIA gave her lots of points in my book. That ties to a larger issue of importance for me - the power of large corporation - and whatever her other possible failings, this was, for me, a powerful achievement by an Alaskan politician. It was only the first step, but it was a giant step compared to what other governors did with the oil companies.

My initial posts were an attempt to offer a balance of what she'd done well, with some suggestions that there were also some weaknesses that had come out. My positive marks on her speech were not so much an endorsement of her, but my belief that she had delivered exactly the right message to the target audience. Having underestimated her once before, I was suppressing my original gut reaction, that she was in over her head. I figured what would happen would happen. I thought I had bent over backwards to be fair to her, yet one commenter chided me,

Why not give Palin the time to be vetted fairly and fully as she surely will be, in the court of public opinion?

But others thought I'd gone over to the dark side. Chicago Dyke offered a list of Alaska bloggers for people doing oppo research that was sent to her from an Alaskan contact. It described the blog this way:

What Do I Know — http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/ — Normally Democratic blogger who has been very supportive of Palin and Palin’s pick by McCain. I’d be careful…

[9/2/08 5pm - It was late last night. I would say that I look at the world from a perspective that would be closer to Democratic than Republican, but that this is NOT a Democratic blog in the sense that I only say good things about Dems and bad things about Repubs. I have pointed out that Palin had more to her than I originally thought, but I don't remember posting anything that said I supported her being picked as VP.] I don't know how much being out of state when all this hit affected my coverage. I've been out and about visiting with friends and doing things away from the computer. My drafts are still drafts as I have tried to figure out ways to talk about my misgivings objectively. The jobs duty post was one quick attempt to do that. But I just haven't taken the time to do it right.

In any case, I missed all of today's news visiting with friends and my daughter most of the day. Progressive Alaska suggests that things are starting to unravel quickly. It looks like McCain's Hail Mary pass, as one tv commentator reported it, isn't going to result in a touchdown, and it may well be intercepted.

If that's the case, then McCain's rash decision making will be revealed as a failure. Palin's acceptance of the nomination when she wasn't nearly ready will have cost her dearly. How will this affect the oil companies' ability to scuttle AGIA? How's McCain get out of this mess?

Wexley school for girls - Seattle

We were headed for a meeting with Seattle friends at Top Pot Donuts. On the way we passed the Wexley School for Girls.

What's wrong with this sign?

And this is the window to the school.

And here's a sign for deliveries.

And peeking into the front door, I took this picture of the foyer. None of this makes any sense. So when I got home I googled.

Their website took way too long to open on my computer. So I've given you the google search results. They need to figure out how to make their stuff load faster. But they certainly piqued my curiousity.

Land-Lines, Cell Phones, and Poll Bias

[Sept. 10 - I've updated this in a new post with actual study data on characteristics of cell-phone only households and links to a couple of studies on this.]

Tons of different things to write about, but I got this email just now and it is relevant to a question I'd had. My question was whether pollsters were calling cell phones. Could they get cell phone numbers? One theory about why pollsters called the Truman/Dewey election wrong in 1948 is that pollsters relied on telephones and people without phones were more likely to vote for Truman. That raises the question about modern-day polls. There aren't any directories I know of for cell phones, and many younger voters have cell phones and no land lines. If younger voters are more likely to vote Obama and older voters more likely to vote McCain, then calling land lines only would bias the polls.

From a discussion on Citydata.com

Most if not all polls use land line phones to conduct the poll. This eliminates many if not all of a major group of voters. McCain's voters tend to be older less mobile groups of people. They are more likely to have land line phones. Obama's supporters are more likely to be younger, many have only mobile phones, never even having land line.

More Americans go for cell phones, drop landlines


The percentage of people who do not land line phones.

25% ages 18 to 29, no landline.
12.4% ages 30 to 44, no landline.
6.1% ages 45 to 64, no landline.
1.9% ages over 65, no landline.
15.8% of all homes, no landline.
22.4% of poor, no land line

All this was stimulated by the email I got today: [see update below, this is apparently a hoax]


REMEMBER: Cell Phone Numbers Go Public today
REMINDER.... all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies tomorrow and you will start to receive sale calls.

.... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone:
888-382-1222.
It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.. It takes about 20 seconds.
or go to www.donotcall.gov


This seems to confirm my belief that up til now there were no directories of cell phone numbers.

[Update: Sept. 3: After I posted this, I realized that I hadn't checked on the email, something I would normally do before posting something like this. And, sure enough, a reader has sent me the following email:

Hi,
I was alarmed to see on your blog that solicitors might start calling my and my children's cell phones and using up the minutes so I went and listed them with the do not call registry. But then immediately afterward I got suspicious and did a little web search and came up with this page from the FCC that says it is an urban myth that cell phone numbers will be published in a directory and that solicitors will begin calling cell phones. Federal law prohibits solicitors from calling cell phones, and the FCC says cell phone users do not need to register with the do not call registry. The page was last modified in late 2007, but I assume the law hasn't changed since then.
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/04/dnc.shtm
Shana Cxxxxxxxxx

One clue is that there is no date - it just says 'today'. Shana, thanks for the heads up.]

President and Vice President Job Duties

There is a lot of discussion about whether Sarah Palin has the experience to be President. Many people seem to be reacting emotionally, based whether they want McCain or Obama to win. They aren't doing what most organizations do when they look at candidates for a job: review all the experience of the candidate against the duties of the job. Of course, Palin has been selected by McCain to be his vice presidential running mate. But for every vice presidential candidate, we must ask if she can also step in as President.

So I decided to look up the job duties of the President and Vice President in the US Constitution . Just looking at the Constitution (see the excerpts below) the President doesn't have all that much to do compared to the Legislature. The Vice President only presides over the Senate and votes when there's a tie.

Based on that Palin is certainly qualified to be Vice President. But so am I and most other Americans.

Oh yes, and there's the part about becoming President. What rereading the Constitution reminded me was how much the Presidents of late have essentially usurped the power of the Legislature. Our real focus should be on recalibrating the power balance between the executive and legislative branches.

I tried to pick out what the Constitution says about the President, Legislature, and Vice President, but I readily admit I may have missed some things. Here's what I did find:


What does the President do?

Article II: The Executive Branch
Section I
Clause 1:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Clause 8:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Section 2

Clause 1:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Clause 2:

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

Clause 3:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Section 3

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

That doesn't look like too much. So who's supposed to do all the work? If we look at the Legislative section of the Constitution we see:

Article I: The Legislative Branch

Section 2:
Clause 6:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.


Section 8

Clause 1:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Clause 2:

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

Clause 3:

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Clause 4:

To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

Clause 5:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

Clause 6:

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

Clause 7:

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

Clause 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Clause 9:

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

Clause 10:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

Clause 11:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Clause 12:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

Clause 13:

To provide and maintain a Navy;

Clause 14:

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Clause 15:

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Clause 16:

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Clause 17:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

Clause 18:

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

And while we're at it, we should look at the duties of the Vice President.

Section 1

Article I: The Legislative Branch

Clause 6:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office,10 the Same shall devolve on the Vice President,

Section 2:

Clause 4:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.