A brief slideshow of cucking stools, ending with the one drawn by the latest Spotty (tm) winner, Avidor:
If that last one looks familiar, boys and girls, it is because a color version of it is part of this blog’s masthead.
Remember, a Spotty (tm) is awarded to the author of an op ed, letter to the editor, blog post or comment, or graphic that Spot wishes he had done himself.
Last summer, Patricia Torres Ray came to DL and talked about, among other things, immigration:
Some in D.C. accuse Obama's style of disrespecting Office of the Presidency
Former Bush chief of staff Andy Card says Obama is treating the White House like a locker room. Obama isn't giving the Office of the Presidency the same respect as the Bushes and Ronald Reagan, Card alleged in an interview last week with conservative radio talker Michael Medved.
"I found that Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes treated the Oval Office with tremendous respect. They treated the Office of the Presidency with tremendous respect. And some of that respect was reflected in how they expected people to behave, how they expected them to dress when they walked into the symbol of freedom for the world, the Oval Office," said Card, who served under three presidents.
Regardless of our problems, the US has been a magnet for people from all over the world. Conscious or otherwise, immigrants come here first because of the Rule of Law. But the Rule of Law can be lost if people turn over their individual responsibility to government. In the end, freedom is gone.
While these two days' events [described in detail in the linked post] were rather frustrating, MNDOT came through both times, as did 911. Thanks to all of you. I need a new car but no accidents, I didn't freeze, and all will be well.
We are glad that it turned out well for Janet.
In advance of testifying — maybe — in the Coleman election challenge, St. Cloud State college economics professor King Banaian was deposed by an attorney for Al Franken. The transcript of the deposition is online. It is a PDF file, a series of page images and not text that can be linked to directly, so Spot will reproduce some of the images here. The Professor did a pretty good job, but he didn’t have much to work with.
The Coleman camp wants Banaian — a durable conservative and proprietor of SCSU Scholars — to testify about the, well, fishiness in the difference in the rejection rate among various counties in Minnesota.
Franken’s lawyer started with the aw shucks routine that he didn’t know much about statistics, the subject of Banaian’s proposed testimony.
Now, boys and girls, if you ever find yourself in the position of being cross-examined, Spot wants you to promise to be extra leery of an attorney who professes ignorance on the subject of the examination. Because you see, if the lawyer was really fuzzy about any of the subject matter, you can be assured he wouldn’t tell you!
For the first fifty pages or so of the deposition, Banaian is asked about what he did to come to his fishiness opinion. Where did you get the data you examined? From the Coleman people. What did you do with these data? Plugged them into an Excel spreadsheet. Really?
Isn’t that the way it always is, boys and girls? If you choose wisely, grasshopper, good things will happen.
What are you talking about, Spot?
Never mind, grasshopper, it was just a figure of speech.
Professor Banaian lead us on a hike over hill, over dale, all along the dusty trail, stopping for water at the chi squared spring, displaying his mastery of the discipline of statistics and the fishiness of the election results.
Sadly, in the end, it’s irrelevant. After the Professor struts his stuff, Franken’s lawyer gets to the heart of the matter, at about page 60:
And there is this:
Of course, the Franken lawyer suggests some. Banaian goes on to say:
Now the admission:
Well, Professor, Coleman’s lawyers were hoping to do just that: draw the inference that election officials are the explanation for any variation in error rate. This is because they’re trying to establish some sort of equal protection claim under Bush v. Gore. But it ain’t gonna work on Professor Banaian’s testimony. Because, you see, boys and girls, there is no competent evidence in Professor Banaian’s statistical aerial act.
Nice job, Mr. Burman.
Spot is reminded of a quote of John Ralson Saul’s in Voltaire’s Bastards that Spot has referred to before:
Their [the experts'] standard procedure when faced by outside questioning is to avoid answering and instead to discourage, even to frighten off the questioner, by implying that he is uninformed, inaccurate, superficial and, invariably, overexcited. If the questioner has some hierarchical power, the expert may feel obliged to answer with greater care. For example, he may release a minimum amount of information in heavy dialect and accompany it with apologies for the complexity, thus suggesting that the questioner is not competent to understand anything more. And if the questioner must be answered but need not be respected — a journalist, for example, or a politician — the expert may release a flood of incomprehensible data, thus drowning out debate while pretending to be cooperative. And even if someone does manage to penetrate the confusion of material, he will be obliged to argue against the expert in a context of such complexity that the public, to whom he is supposed to be communicating understanding, will quickly lose interest. In other words, by drawing the persistent outsider into his box, the expert will have rendered him powerless.
Here, our intrepid Mr. Burman draws Professor Banaian out of the box.
Republicans said the bill was unfair to employers. They will be exposed to “decades-old discrimination claims that they have no ability to defend,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota.
[It does]nothing for the struggling American worker and go a long way in lining the pockets of a key political ally of the House majority– trial lawyers.
Now there’s a term you don’t hear very often.
I’ve never heard it, Spotty. What does it mean?
We’ll let the BBC explain it to you, grasshopper:
The term Lebensraum was coined by the German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). During the last two decades of the 19th century, Ratzel developed a theory according to which the development of all species, including humans, is primarily determined by their adaptation to geographic circumstances.
Above all, Ratzel considered species migration as the crucial factor in social adaptation and cultural change. Species that successfully adapted to one location, he thought, would spread naturally to others. Indeed, he went on to argue that, in order to remain healthy, species must continually expand the amount of space they occupy, for migration is a natural feature of all species, an expression of their need for living space.
This process also applied to humans, who operate collectively in the form of 'peoples' (Völker), with one Völk effectively conquering another. However, according to Ratzel, such expansion could be successful only if the conquering nation 'colonised' the new territory, and by 'colonisation' he meant the establishment of peasant farms by the new occupiers.
Lebensraum was, of course, Germany’s rationale for expansion in the 1930s.
Now, and this is really important: Spot wants you, boys and girls, to go to the Bob Simon video that Spot has referred to several times, fast forward to about 9:40 and watch until the end, listening carefully to the mayor of a West Bank colony who talks in a couple of places about the role of the West Bank in the future of Israel.
Update: Link fixed. This is, of course, the same video that Spot has linked to before. Sorry for the mix-up.
On Tuesday, Obama did an interview with Arab television. You can read about it, and get links to video clips, here. Here’s part of what Obama said:
In an interview broadcast Tuesday on one of the Middle East’s major news channels, President Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world, saying he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.”He also said the moment was ripe for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
Well, according to Bob Simon and many of the Israelis and Palestinians he interviewed for 60 Minutes on Sunday, the time is overripe. Rotted. History has passed peace by.
Obama went on to say this:
In discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama told Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya's Washington bureau chief, that "the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away." He said he told Mr. Mitchell to "start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating."
"Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what's best for them," Mr. Obama said. "They're going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that, instead, it's time to return to the negotiating table."
Frankly, the “we cannot tell the either Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them” stuff sounds chillingly Bush administration-like to Spot. We’ll bring a table — at least he offered that — but the parties will have to work this out themselves. When we give one side three billion dollars a year or so in armaments, how well do you suppose that’s gonna work?
Obama does seem to “get it” about the conflict being a key to peace in the whole region:
But he also said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be seen in isolation. “I do think it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said.
Apparently, we can invade Afghanistan and Iraq and fire rockets into Pakistan in the name of national security, but we can’t even make suggestions to Israel when it would bring national security returns that are orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve accomplished in the region in the last eight years. And we certainly cannot tell it to dismantle its illegal colonies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem; heaven forefend!
There was hope, mixed with skepticism, in Arab reaction:
There was also [in addition to hope about Obama’s remarks], however, a reluctance to judge Mr. Obama on his words alone. “Let’s see your promise, American president, for an independent Palestinian state,” said a commenter on Al Arabiya’s Web site, identified only as Alsomary. “And let’s see your promise for peace with the world, and especially the Islamic world. Then for sure we will learn to love America through your actions.”
You wonder if Obama saw the Bob Simon piece.
We’ll meet at our regular time, six to nine or so, at the regular place, the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis Thursday (tomorrow) night.
There is no guest scheduled to attend, so perhaps we can discuss the three options for Palestine that Bob Simon described in his 60 Minutes piece on Sunday: ethnic cleansing, democracy, or apartheid.
And then, perhaps, we can discuss which of these terms resemble another term: genocide.
A thump of the tail to A Tiny Revolution and an extra-big thump of the tail to Bob Simon of CBS News for this segment that ran on 60 Minutes:
From the NYT:
Automakers said Monday that they were working toward President Obama's goal of reducing fuel consumption, but rapid imposition of stricter emissions standards could force them to drastically cut production of larger, more profitable vehicles, adding to their financial duress.
Never mind that the public seems to have decided that current gasoline prices are merely a trough between waves – and they’re probably right. Land yachts are profitable, so by golly, that’s what we’ll build!
This is the kind of thinking that made this country great.
The auto execs are suggesting, just like Big Stone II’s owners, that the public bear a greater percentage of the burden of their operations by breathing dirtier air. It’s really that simple. They want to keep that ol’ externality right where it is.
This is not the kind of thinking that Spot and others hoped would come out of the recent automobile epiphany. What we need is a little more beating cars into windmills.
Gosh, Spot, that would make a great post title!
Yes it would, now that you mention it, grasshopper.
Spot described how the owners of the planned Big Stone II coal-fired power plant were trying to avoid some of the costs of operating the plant, specifically through the extra pollution that the plant would emit without stringent emission controls. He called the pollution an “externality.”
You do remember that, boys and girls?
That was a while ago, Spotty.
It was yesterday, grasshopper, but here’s a refresher on what an externality is:
The indirect effect of one agent's consumption activity or production activity on the well‐being or economic activities of other agents. Pollution generated from the production of electricity or loud noise arising from the consumption of music are examples of externalities in markets. These effects may be negative or positive—they may cause disutility or costs to third parties in some cases and provide benefits in others. Thus in markets where an externality exists, social benefits or costs (the well‐being of all) are different from private benefits or costs—defined as those that accrue only to the original parties in the market activity. [from Dictionary of the Social Sciences, subscription req’d]
So Big Stone II is a dis-utility, Spotty?
Very good, grasshopper. That’s a better-than-average play on words for you.
Acid rain, asthma, and laundry getting dirty as it hangs to dry are examples of costs of running a power plant that will be borne by the neighbors and the public, not the plant owners.
That’s a dirty deal, Spotty.
Yes, grasshopper it is, and that’s why we regulate pollution and try to minimize these externalities by imposing conditions on the way power is generated. Obviously, electrical production is a useful thing to society and we need to do it. Virtually all human endeavor comes with some cost to society that we cannot eliminate but need to minimize where possible. That’s what a power plant permitting process is about.
But you know, grasshopper, it can work the other way, too: benefits can accrue to someone when they didn’t participate in the activity conferring the benefit or pay for it.
That’s a ripoff, Spotty!
No, not at all grasshopper, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Let Spot give you an example. A student decides to go to medical school, borrows a bunch of money from a bank to go, becomes a surgeon, and pioneers a life-saving medical procedure.
Well, the doctor gets paid, right?
Sure, but not by everyone whose life is saved by the procedure.
But doctors don’t pay the whole cost of their education, do they Spot?
No, grasshopper. Most medical schools are public institutions; they’re very expensive to run and rely on taxes for support.
Why do we do that, Spot?
How many doctors do you suppose we’d have if we didn’t?
A lot fewer, I suppose.
Um hum. And maybe the doctor who pioneered that life saving procedure wouldn’t have been able to borrow enough money to go to medical school and save so many people.
We all rely on positive externalities every day, don’t we Spotty?
Yes we do, grasshopper. When you play a round of golf on a municipal course, you take your boat through a public lock on the Mississippi River, or you read and rely on the truth of a prospectus of a company that wants you to invest in it, you are relying on a form of positive externality. You received the benefit, but at most paid for a part of it with taxes you pay, and almost certainly didn’t not participate in the decision to make the investment.
People who don’t want to pay anything for these externalities are really freeloaders, aren’t they, Spot?
Well grasshopper, sometimes we call them libertarians or conservatives.
Hard on the heels of a big Sure, Go Ahead! from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, the Big Stone II power plant project got some really bad news from, surprise, surprise, the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Two days into the new Obama administration, the EPA notified the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources that it objected to the permit issued earlier to the utility consortium that wants to build the plant.
This decision was issued by the Denver office of the EPA. It is pretty clear from a perusal of parts one and two of the decision, linked above, that the EPA staffers have been working on this for a while, but the timing of the release is interesting. Here’s what MPR said the EPA was objecting to:
The EPA objection is over an air quality permit issued last November by the South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment. At the time Big Stone II officials called the approval "a major step forward" for the plant. Now the EPA's Denver office is questioning whether the South Dakota air permit is adequate.
"We identified three key issues of the state's title five permit that we determined were not consistent with the requirements of the Clean Air Act," says the EPA's Carl Daly.
The agency wants South Dakota officials to revise the permit, he says.
Among the EPA objections to the permit are the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide output limits and whether the permit sets up adequate monitoring of the plant's overall emissions, Daly says. Both gases contribute to acid rain.
South Dakota has 90 days to change the air permit to satisfy the EPA's objections. Daly expects South Dakota will be able to meet that deadline.
Unsurprisingly, the utility consortium says this will raise the cost of constructing the power plant. In other words, it will have to pay for some more of the externalities of the project that it was hoping to just off load on the public and the environment.
What’s an externality, Spot?
An externality in this case is part of the true cost of operating the enterprise that the enterprise operator avoids:
In a competitive market, the existence of externalities would mean that either too much or too little of the good would be produced and consumed in terms of overall cost and benefit to society. If there exist external costs (negative externalities) such as pollution, the good will be overproduced by a competitive market, as the producer does not take into account the external costs when producing the good. If there are external benefits (positive externalities) such as in areas of education or public safety, too little of the good would be produced by private markets as producers and buyers do not take into account the external benefits to others. Here, overall cost and benefit to society is defined as the sum of the economic benefits and costs for all parties involved.
Pay attention to that definition, grasshopper, because we’ll be coming back to it very soon.
Got it, Spot.
A thump of the tail to Mercury Rising.
According to Dan Sharp, a spokesman for the five-utility consortium that will build the 580-megawatt (mw) Big Stone II plant near Milbank S.D., on Minnesota's western border, about 4.5 million tons of carbon will be dumped annually into the atmosphere each year, much of it carried into Minnesota by prevailing westerly winds.
Spot doesn’t think there is such a thing as “clean coal,” but even if there was, this ain’t it. Here’s what MinnPost’s Ron Way had to say in the lede of the article linked above:
When the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) last week approved transmission lines to enable building the $1.3 billion, coal-fired Big Stone II power plant, it poured tons of soot on state's new law to reduce carbon emissions linked to climate change.
The Sierra Club says this is the equivalent of putting an additional 600,000 cars on the road.
Aw, Spotty, traffic around here is already terrible!
No, grasshopper, it’s not actually cars on the road, just the same greenhouse effect.
That’s still horrible!
Which is why this one is undoubtedly headed to court. Again, MinnPost:
However, two things are likely: Big Stone's owners will accept the PUC's conditions [for the permit issuance], and environmental advocates will seek to block the permits in court. MCEA's Goodpaster said as much immediately after the PUC vote was taken. Sharp said he expects that a lawsuit will be filed once the PUC's appeal process ends in about a month; regardless, he added that construction plans would proceed.
We'll have an Inauguration "post party" on Thursday night at Drinking Liberally in Minneapolis. If you couldn't go to a party on Tuesday night, or you just want another one, come to Drinking Liberally at the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis. We'll meet at our regular time, six to nine or so. The 331 Club has offered to host a complimentary champagne toast to the new president.
