Two cheers for Obama View 20110902

View 690 Friday, September 02, 2011

The high dudgeon kerfuffle continues. A bunch of White House kids snuck in a fraternity prank: let’s schedule the President addressing a Joint Session of Congress opposite the Republican debate! That’ll drive them nuts! Yeah! Let’s do it! It’ll be a gas! And so they did. Apparently the adults in the White House didn’t notice that the President was requesting time to upstage the Republican candidate debate; at least they claim they didn’t, which is a bit odd because you’d think that the President might actually want to watch to see what the opposition looks like, but they say they didn’t know, and of course the White House official spokespeople would not lie to the American people, so it must be so.

And then – and then – the Republican Speaker declined the opportunity to step all over the Republican presidential candidates! He had the temerity to decline! And the President wanted to improve the economy!

Today, however, the Republican primary debates have suddenly become more important, so much so that the U.S. president was asked to take a rain check to accommodate them.

This week, Boehner rejected a White House request for Barack Obama to address a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7, the date the president wanted to deliver his much-anticipated speech on job creation and plans to improve the economy. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/09/02/f-rfa-champ.html

And that beat is repeated all over. In today’s Los Angeles Times:

"We consulted with the speaker about that date before the letter was released, but he determined Thursday would work better," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. "The president is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy, so he welcomes the opportunity to address a joint session of Congress on Thursday, Sept. 8, and challenge our nation’s leaders to start focusing 100% of their attention on doing whatever they can to help the American people."

The original timing of the president’s speech request was seen by Republicans as political big footing, and a sign that the partisan tension hasn’t dissipated much, if at all, over their summer vacation.
The situation struck some Capitol veterans as almost unprecedented in modern times.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-jobs-20110901,0,2876753.story

Of course there was no consultation in advance, because however unaware the Democrats are of the Republican campaign schedules, people in the Speaker’s office know very well what’s happening in the Reagan Library next Thursday. Anyone who isn’t won’t have the job very long. There’s no possibility that the Speaker’s office agreed to a date and then later withdrew it. As to the intent of Democrats to place a primary hamper on the Republicans, the White House pleads incompetence rather than malice, and one suppose we ought to accept their plea, although were there any way to resolve the bet I would bet fairly large sums that there were some staffers thoroughly aware that the Republicans were holding their debates on the day the President was requesting, and there was among them much yukking it up and general merriment.

There is no indication of why the President has waited this long to present his jobs plan, or why it is suddenly so urgent that it be presented to a Joint Session of Congress. Perhaps this will be explained Friday.

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As I was digging about looking for a reference to link to Primary Hamper, a Gamesmanship term than I suspect most of my readers will find puzzling (Gamesmanship and Lifemanship were cool topics when I was in graduate school, but so were Kerouac and On The Road) I found this gem

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/intellectual/intcap1.html . There are several 1998 essays in this collection, including the real story of IBM vs. Microsoft, the Microsoft monopoly trials, and some predictions about the future of the computer in the 21^st Century. It all holds up surprisingly well. I am thinking of collecting my Intellectual Capital essays into a Kindle book for convenience, but they are in fact already available free here (but of course not in Kindle format). One more thing to do. Many of my old works are out in Kindle editions, and the revenue is not astounding, but it is significant. Publishing seems to be moving to the eBook, and Kindle sales are 85 to 90% of those sales. Note that includes sales to people who read through Kindle apps on PC’s, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and various other readers. Anyway, the section noted above has some interesting essays I wrote back when the computer revolution was in full swing. They include an explanation of Bayesian Analysis as it ought to be applied to global warming back when that debate was barely on the horizon.

Qaddafi remains uncaptured. He’s doomed, of course. There seem to have been some masterful information ploys (there we go using Gamesmanship jargon again) played by someone in Tripoli, such as the announcement of the capture of one of Ghaddaffi’s sons causing the lad to reveal his location in order to prove he was alive lest all his troops defect, and various other timely releases of disinformation. One supposes the interim Council that is trying to coordinate the Libyan revolt is getting advice from professionals, presumably French or British, possibly American but I doubt it. The White House has chosen to lead from behind and let the Europeans take the lead in wringing the neck of this enemy of the United States. That looks like a good move; cheers for President Obama on this one. The Libyan war cost us a bit, but nothing compared to what it would cost if we took responsibility for the outcome.

Another plus for the Obama administration is the rejection of the AT&T takeover. I don’t want to see The Phone Company get any larger. The old regulated public utility was arrogant, but they were at least obsessed with technical reliability; the new one is less competent and obsessed only with profit. Why should they take over another phone company? Competition is a good thing, and there is no natural monopoly involved here.

I tend to opposed the whole notion of companies that grow by buying their competitors. Growth by offering better services at lower price, driving the competition into bankruptcy, is the best route to the creative destruction required by capitalism; buying out the opposition is more of a Marxist growth, consolidation for the sake of consolidation, and I do not think the public or the Republic is well served by such things. This is a topic for another time, but cheers for Obama on this one.

That’s two cheers. I don’t think of any more just now.

We are so obsessed with hate crime that we can’t deal with a 14 year old kid who murdered a classmate. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. I wonder how many murders by 14 year olds can only be satisfied by trial as an adult and life imprisonment? I seem to recall that the penalty for gang murder, even by 16 year olds, is somewhat less. Very odd.

The whole notion of hate crime is disturbing . Thoughtcrime.