Chris Christie’s presidential hopes may be dashed due to Bridghazi, but he hasn’t been doing himself any favors in getting my vote if things do turn around for him. Or rather, that would be the case if it weren’t for the fact that in both cases his actions are at least mildly defensible. The bigger item is that they’ve announced that New Jersey will be blocking direct car sales, most notably affecting Tesla.

The fascinating thing about the direct sales Tesla debate is the amount of anger directed towards the same sort of “consumer protection” licensure agreements that they defend to the hilt elsewhere. Here’s a video “debate” and the defender of the decision sounds quite a bit like defenders of licensure for just about every other occupation.

The best argument the dealers’ advocate makes is for recalls, but that’s not sufficient justification to draft an entire law around it. Alex Taborrak writes more.

I side with Tesla on this one. And it should be said that agreement for licensure restrictions over here do not necessitate agreement over there. It’s mostly just amusing to watch the shoe on the other foot.

I call the Christie administrations’ decision here defensible because it does very much appear to be the enforcement of the law as written, as opposed to enforcement of the law as people would like it to be.

The next involves a subject more pertinent to me, which is a tax on ecigarettes. The health angle is unproven at best and counterproductive at worst, but I call this one “defensible” insofar as New Jersey has the highest taxes in the country and has to find some way to pay the bills. A higher gas tax would be more preferable, but whatever.

According to Gallup, trust in state government runs highest among red states in middle and western America and lowest among blue states on the east coast (and Louisiana and California). The most untrusted state is Illinois, and it isn’t even close. Dave Schuler talks about Illinois.

Gallup tries to paper over the red/blue distinction in a couple of days, but neither of them exactly work. First, their methodology leaves Texas, Georgia, and Arizona as competitive. Arizona I can buy, Georgia is a stretch, but Texas? That can only be true if they are going strictly by partisan affiliation. I assume they are, and they should know better. Second, it’s not as though there aren’t lower-population states of both varieties that we can look at. Maine and Rhode Island are right after Illinois. Maine may be something of a special case because they had a quirk election that produced a governor who was immediately out of touch with his constituency, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Despite, as James Joyner says, the theoretical mistrust of government that occurs on the right.

So are conservative states better run? That’s a pretty subjective judgment. Though if you could demonstrate that their residents trust their government more, that would indeed be relevant.

I propose, however, an alternative explanation.

I suspect that for a non-trivial number of respondents, when asked “Do you trust your state government?” will implicitly think “Compared to what?” I mean, we all trust our government for some things and not for others. But if the answer of “Compared to what?” is “the federal government” then than likely explains a lot of the results. Texas has an independent streaks. Western states have a particular sense of being owned and operated by the feds. When you have mistrust or resentment of the federal government, the state government looks better by comparison. When your idealized version of government carries the sort of authority of the national government, then the state governments can look week and ineffectual by comparison. Oh, yeah, and it probably matters which party is the face of the national government.

This is, obviously, not all that’s going on. I suspect that there may be something to the population thing. If you look at blue states, Vermont and Delaware score higher than New York and Pennsylvania. Iowa and New Hampshire are the only blue (or blue-purple) states with an Above-Average rating. The pattern is less discernible among Republican states, however. But I think there is something to that, and perhaps an argument in favor of smaller rather than larger states. If we’re hyperconcerned about such things.

There are also particulars among various states. I mentioned Maine, but Louisiana and Illinois are particularly known for their corruption problems and it’s no surprise that they are both outliers in their own way. Minnesota is a bit of a surprise since I’ve always had the impression that Minnesotans take pride in their googoo inclinations, but only 11% trust their state government “a great deal” (compared to 16% of Wisconsinites). Maybe the frustration of high expectations? Minnesotans do tend to trust their state government a fair amount, though, with a good/fair rating of 62 (compared to 57 for Wisconsin). Idaho is another interesting case with only 9% trusting good but over half trusting fair (putting it in the top seven), which also makes sense because Idaho isn’t greatly run but is a hard state to govern and therefore tough to rely on. The same is true to a lesser extent of multiple large and rural states, though they might benefit from lower expectations in general.

For my own part, I would probably most of the states I’ve lived in with “Fair.” If asked to give a numerical value, it would likely have more to do with where I was within the state than anything. Some states are better run than others, I think, but outside of Illinois and Louisiana it’s pretty contentious. Different states have different challenges, as I’ve said. One of the easier markers, for me, on how much I trust my state government is how much the part of the state I live in is a priority. Even within the same state, my perspective in Idaho would probably differ depending on whether I lived in the relatively isolated northern part, Boise, or Mormon Idaho. In Utah, faith in the government might depend a fair amount on one’s religious faith, irrespective of one’s own actual political leanings.

One of the things that I find interesting is that the catalog actually seems to be less partisan than one might expect. It’s hard to say for sure since they don’t offer a partisan breakdown, but I would have expected even more of the states to be in the 40-60 range and dependent on whether it’s an opposite-party governor (like Wisconsin) or a governor of the major party (like most states). Instead, there do seem to be more factors at play than my cynicism would have suggested.

In the run-up to the 2012 election, the Obama administration delayed rules until after the election:

Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said.

The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what bodies of water deserved federal protection, pollution controls for industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace.

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection.

On the one hand, it’s kind of a problematic game of “hide the ball” if you’re obscuring what you want to do if your people are re-elected. What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the submission of plans was also pushed back. So in this case, it wasn’t even “We’ll do it after the election” but rather a desire not to be confronted with it. Not to have to decide. Or perhaps, not to have the administration tarred with it if it isn’t actually going to pass.

Ronald Reagan is often associated with the ketchup-as-a-vegetable incident. Which was actually simply a proposal of the sort that the administration was uninterested in hearing about. Whether you like Obama or not, it seems hard to deny the Republicans have often latched ferociously to virtually any sort of criticism as demonstrative of socialistic or coastal-overlord inclintations. Ketchup-as-vegetable stuck to Reagan because it fit his critics’ narrative.

That doesn’t negate the problem here, of course. Especially given the frequency with which Obama has been utilizing the executive to its greatest capability. Which is not to say that either report-punting or executive-expansion is new. But Obama has been, or plans to be, my most accounts more aggressive than Bush. It seems likely that Obama’s predecessor will be more aggressive than him. And then, hiding intentions becomes considerably more impotant. To them, obviously, if not to us.

WaPo White House delayed enacting rules ahead of 2012 election to avoid…

Here’s a way to make a billion dollars:

Corporate money is forever finding new ways to influence government. But Mr. Ackman’s campaign to take this fight “to the end of the earth,” using every weapon in the arsenal that Washington offers in an attempt to bring ruin to one company, is a novel one, fusing the financial markets with the political system. […]

Mr. Ackman is not new to playing chess on a billionaire’s scale. The brash 47-year-old, a graduate of Harvard Business School, built his $12 billion, New York City-based hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, on enormous, risky bets on companies like Jim Beam and Canadian Pacific Rail that earned billions for him and his clients. He has had some big losses too, including an estimated $473 million last August on an investment in J. C. Penney, the struggling retailer.

Regulators frequently get entreaties from financiers urging action for their own financial gain, like the hedge fund executives who in 2010 tried to secretly push Obama administration officials to investigate for-profit colleges, again citing fraudulent industry practices, after betting that their stocks would decline.

But Mr. Ackman’s efforts illustrate how Washington is increasingly becoming a battleground of Wall Street’s financial titans, whose interest in influencing public policy is driven primarily by a desire for profit — part of an expanding practice in the nation’s capital, with corporations, law firms and lobbying practices establishing political intelligence units to gather news they can trade on.

Vikram Bath focuses on the question of whether or not such actions are even wrong (or whether we can presume them to be), but I’m more interested in the NYT focus of money in politics.

Critics of money in politics often make it sound like it’s about “buying elections.” It has a ring of truth insofar as money is a necessary (though not sufficient) component of winning elections, but because the money is necessary and not sufficient that only takes you so far. I don’t worry about people buying elections because ultimately the electorate votes for what it wants and the history of losing candidates with winning war chests is very long.

No, what I worry about is money buying the office holders after they win. Ackman is lobbying. Herbalife is lobbying. Unlike an election, where my input is solicited (on however minor a scale), the Herbalife situation is one that I would know next to nothing about if not for this article. But it matters in the seven to ten digits to the involved players. At least this case involves a billionaire going up against somebody with some money to fight back, but that’s not always the case.

I’d argue that the problem is actually more insidious than that, though. Ultimately, when it’s the wealthy that have congress’s ear, even if everybody is acting entirely on good faith, the perspective of all involved is going to be skewed towards those talking to him. Even advocacy for the less fortunate is more likely than not going to be from someone looking down at them with concern from on high.

Perhaps most concerningly, this is a problem (or a series of problems) for which there are very few solutions. In this case, the money isn’t just going to the coffers of politicians but also activist groups themselves. And at the end of the day, you can’t stop a millionaire from speaking his mind.

I don’t typically sweat the wealth of the wealthy too much. I don’t view the money they have as being money that would be better spent if it were in someone else’s pockets (though, obviously, they gotta pay their taxes, too). But their are an awful lot of zero-sums expression of their wealth that do leave me concerned. Political influence is definitely one of them.

Here is a “Greatest Hits” of Huckabee that was produced in 2007:

Here is Huckabee commenting on the emerging situation in the Ukraine:

Is it me, or has his accent significantly dimished? Between that and his physical changes (aging and weight gain) he’s not all that instantly recognizable.

For the record, I don’t care if he has tried to minimize his accent so that he can be better understood, is taken more seriously, or will be a more viable presidential candidate than he otherwise would be. My own accent, or lack thereof, is variable. I just find it interesting, if I’m not imagining it.

Last October we were expecting to hear a round of regulations that would determine the brave new frontier of vaping, but nothing game. It’s expected that it will come soon. Ordinarily, I’d fear the silence. In this case, though, I wonder if longer isn’t a little bit better. It all depends. At this point I believe the facts are on the side of less regulation and more thought out regulations will be more measured, though it seems a bit like the anti-vaping crusaders are gaining some traction.

Megan McArdle wrote a reasonably good piece on ecigarettes. In which she speaks to the fear:

As nothing but a replacement product for existing smokers, e-cigarettes seem like a public-health win. Widespread adoption by current smokers “could potentially reduce smoking deaths by more than 90 percent,” says Joel Nitzkin, a public-health physician who is a senior fellow at free-market think tank R Street in Washington.

But what if current smokers aren’t the only people who use them? What if e-cigarettes lure back people who used to smoke or attract new smokers? What if people who otherwise would have quit keep using nicotine? And perhaps the No. 1 argument: What if e-cigarettes make smoking normal again in public places, with the attendant annoyance of a neighbor or officemate blowing nicotine-laced steam everywhere?

What is really frustrating is that we don’t know. As important as anything, we don’t even know if there will be much wrong with people choosing to vape. Almost all of the anti-vaping sentiment is based on potential and hypothetical dangers. Well, it’s hard to argue with potential and hypothetical. It’s hard to argue with the notion that vaping may be dangerous, because it’s hard to prove a negative. Tests on propylene glycol, one of the chief ingredients of the eliquid, have been performed because that’s what they use for theatrical fog, and it was found to be safe. They have tested this stuff on animals saturated 24/7 for extended periods of time (eighteen months) and they found minimal consequences (reversible dehydration of the nasal and ocular areas). The head of the FDA himself has said that nicotine addicts you and tar kills you. Ecigarettes do not have tar.

I have previously expressed some skepticism of the health consequences of these things, taking the middle ground that while they’re not nearly as dangerous as the critics claim they’re probably not as safe as the advocates say. The more I’ve read, though, the more confident I am that the health threat is likely very minor to non-existent. The advocates’ claims are based on study after study after study, while the opponents claims are based on hypotheticals. Not even hypothetical models, but vague statements about what we don’t know.

Which brings us to the next argument, which is that it will prevent people from quitting smoking or quitting nicotine. In the case of the latter, if the health risks are so marginal, should we really care? In the case of the former, that could be bad, save that there is no real reason for it to be true. According to a UK study (STS140122) on cigarette, ecigarette, and NRT (nicotine replacement therapy – the gum or patch), “There is no evidence that electronic cigarettes are undermining motivation to quit or reduction in smoking prevalence.”

It goes on to say: “Use of e-cigarettes by never smokers or long-term ex-smokers is extremely rare.”

It does not provide any data on people starting with ecigarettes and moving to the regular kind, which is another concern (supported by hypotheticals). Speaking from a personal perspective, once you’re using ecigarettes and get the regular cigarettes out of your system, the latter becomes superfluous. I can quite honestly say that I have no desire to pick up a real cigarette at all. What I’m doing now isn’t just healthy, it’s more enjoyable. Vaping offers advantages that smoking can’t match. Including, I should add, the very flavoring that the anti-vaping advocates want to ban. Not to mention the ability to do it in more places, though right or wrong anti-smoking crusaders are going after that, too.

In other words, due to their anti-smoking zeal, they are methodically trying to reduce incentives to take advantage of an amazing new tool to help people quit. Even if they don’t quit the vaping, they’re still ahead. Arguments otherwise assume that if they can’t vape they will quit For Real. They remind me of my father who, on finding out that I had indeed quit smoking entirely and was now vaping, wondered if I could just quit without vaping. The last eight years of my life indicate otherwise. Strongly.

And on a more personal level, by god I have found something that works for me. Not just because I don’t smoke anymore, but because it allows me the ability to continue to do the things that drew me to smoking in the first place. I may quit the ecigarettes or I may not. But I have finally found myself not having to obsess over this question. Do you know how amazing that is? A world has been lifted from my shoulders. The monkey that has been on my back for years and years is gone. At worse, replaced by something by all measures benign by comparison. It makes me want to kiss the skies. And it makes me furious at those who see this as some nefarious new threat to the public health.

Right now I am just waiting to find out how bad it’s going to be. Whether the thing that right now costs me twenty-five cents a milliliter will shoot up to seventy-five cents (a very real possibility). Whether the people I get my supply from will be allowed to remain in business. Whether I am going to have to throw everything out and start all over with an FDA-approved device. I’m concerned about the number of people out there who could take the same path as I did to recovery, but as much as anything I just want to keep doing the thing that has put more distance between me and cigarettes than I have had in over ten years. Or whether it will be made more complicated and disrupted with right-now unthinkable consequences. In the name of public health. In the name of my own well-being.
(more…)

Even the New York Times seems to have been exasperated over the New York City Council’s recent debates on vaping:

In a city where the technocratic mayor prides himself on making decisions based on the evidence, the proposed ban produced one of the most scientifically vague and emotionally charged health committee hearings in recent memory. Anyone who used the word “smoke” or “smoking” to refer to electronic cigarettes, which typically contain nicotine, was instantly corrected by audience members hissing “Vapor!” and “Vaping!”

The health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said electronic cigarettes were such a recent invention that he could not say whether they were hazardous to the health of those smoking them or those who might breathe in secondhand vapor. He said that they do put out fine particles and chemicals, and “I certainly can’t guarantee that that is safe.”

And what we do when we can’t “guarantee” something is safe… we here in the land of the free ban it. Of course, ecigarettes are not banned, but only because a judge said so.

To be fair, it’s hard to have a scientific discussion when the evidence, pro or con, simply isn’t in yet. I have said before that I expect we will find out this thing is more dangerous than its advocates suggest for vapers. But I also think it will prove to be fine for non-vapers, no matter how much Of course, after years and years of hearing about how smoking bans were justified because of the physical dangers of second hand smoke. That threshold – a reasonable one within limits (family restaurants, yes, entire college campuses, no) – has been lowered to “I don’t like it” and “it makes me uncomfortable.”

The other two arguments are (a) it brings “smoking” back into the public eye which will entice children and (b) “bartenders and staff can’t tell the difference between cigarettes and these things.” In the case of the former, this could be avoided by pushing smoking out of the sidewalks and into the bars. In the case of the latter, as with the discomfort, that’s a fair reason for an establishment to ban them, but not a reason for City Council to get involved.

But, of course they have to because Big Tobacco and Big Tobacco’s invincibility. Big Tobacco, which hasn’t really won a political battle since… I don’t know when. Hookah lounges are still legal in NYC, but vaping lounges are more important because… it’s harder than targeting establishments primarily operated and patronized by Middle Easterners?

Having said all of that, the people who were vaping in the council session? Bad messengers. Terrible messengers. The same applies to a lot of vapers who seem to get a thrill out of being in-your-face about it because they can. That’s a good part of the reason why they won’t be able to for much longer. While “it makes me uncomfortable” isn’t a sound basis for a law, it is more than a sound basis for common courtesy. Smokers lost the smoking ban wars in large part because of their own lack of courtesy. Vapers are positioning themselves for the same fate.

Which I fully expect to happen. This is a certain loss. At this point, the real battlefield is (a) keeping it legal, (b) keeping the flavor spectrum as wide as it is now, and (c) keeping Internet sales as open as possible.

New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio is shutting down horse-carriages.

On reading the headline, I thought it was going to be a case of disrupting the public. They hold up traffic or cause disturbances on the sidewalk. Maybe some people got hurt or something. Or the inconvenience of horse poo.

Evidently, he’s more concerned about the horses. This will, no doubt, be old news to most of you with ties to the city. But seriously: Animal rights? What are the statistics for animals injured or killed by this “dangerous” activity? I glanced around and didn’t really see any. Meanwhile, a lot of these horses are either going to be killed or are going to take spots in shelters for other horses that will be killed.

Was there really no way to improve animal safety through regulation? Yes, yes, being an ignoble right-leaning individual I might be rolling my eyes at stringent regulation of this sort of thing. But that would certainly be better than killing the industry, I’d think.

Honestly, I might even prefer that this be about something as frivolous as horse poo. At least that, even if I don’t disagree, I can understand. Or I could even be convinced that “Dude. Seriously. Horse poo everywhere. We mostly want to use this as leverage to make them clean it up.” But the only purpose of this seems to be to make ourselves feel better by not having to watch those poor horses pulling people around.

Steven Taylor argues that one of the main reasons that we don’t have a third party is that we have the primary process as opposed to the parties selecting its nominees:

Indeed, I would argue that one of the main reasons we do not have serious third parties in the US is that the primary process allows a method by which groups dissatisfied with a mainline party to work from within that party (e.g., the reason that Ron Paul always ran for congress as a Republican, rather than as a Libertarian). Of course, the main manifestation of this phenomenon at the moment is the Tea Party. The Tea Party faction of the Republican Party has no incentive to go the third party route, but every incentive to take the primary route. Players play by the rules of a given game, and they adapt to the options that a given game allows.

It’s certainly the case that political parties in the United States are nimble. I can also believe that they are nimble in a way that prevents third parties from rising up because their issues end up getting absorbed into the main parties.

I’d argue, though, that in the constellation of reasons that we don’t have continuous third parties, it’s a relatively minor one. The bigger issues are well-explored. I will be exploring them further in a future post, but our lack of proportional representation, and our lack of a parliamentary system are the two largest factors. While there are other cases of nations that lack proportional representation that nonetheless have multiple parties, the electoral college throws yet another wrinkle on it because our mechanism for handling non-majority presidents provides significant disincentives.

In the UK, if none of the three parties get a majority, there is a process of handing the government to a coalition of sorts. It’s not perfect, but it’s there. The center-right party gets a plurality over the two center-left parties and what happens? The center-right party gets the executive. Or maybe that doesn’t happen and the two center-left parties form a coalition. What happens in the US when a candidate fails to garner a majority? Well, who knows? You have to get a plurality of a majority of the electoral votes. And if nobody does? Well, we do have a system for that, but it’s an incredibly lousy one without a semblance of predictability. This is above and beyond a first-past-the-post system and its limitations.

In the comments, Taylor mentions comparable countries that have room for alternative parties despite having elements similar to our own. In addition to the parliamentary countries, he mentions India which also has an electoral college. As a matter of custom, though, theirs works differently from our own. Most notably, perhaps, their selection system can cope with the question of what happens when nobody gets a majority. (Their president is actually typically elected unanimously, but I assume this only occurs because the outcome is not in doubt.)

Because of all of this, alternative parties in the US have to contend with the fact that they have no chance at the executive and can, at most, affect legislation. I have difficulty imagining that being successful even with party unity. Typically, when we do have independent legislators at the national level, it is with the implicit understanding that they will be aligned with one of the two major parties and the voters will know which one (Sanders, King, Lieberman, Goode in 2000, Jeffords if he had run again).

My concern with moving to a system where candidates are subject to their party’s preferences (and then voters choose between parties) is that we wouldn’t see the flexibility between parties that Taylor refers to and instead we would be quashing intraparty reforms where they might be necessary and democratic. I certainly have my issues with the Tea Party, and a part of me wishes that the “adults can take charge!” of the GOP, but the adults in the party were content to deny not just Christine O’Donnell and Richard Mourdock their day, but also Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. And perhaps unlike Taylor, I don’t see their day having come in an emergent alternative party. I may not like the trajectory of the GOP under the Tea Party, but I’d prefer it be sorted out democratically rather than by committee. It was a committee that chose Ken Cuccinelli.

James Hanley says that he will not be voting for Chris Christie, on the basis of his lacking foreign policy experience. While I am a bit wary of Christie’s likely foreign policy, it’s the policy end that matters more to me than the experience. His foreign policy experience doesn’t, to me, seem notably deficient compared to five of our last six president. My main concern is that Christie is going to stake out the hawkish ground to differentiate himself from Ron Paul and Ted Cruz, combined with some… concerns… about his ability to effect diplomacy.

An interesting tidbit about Christie. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Delaware, which is Vice President Biden’s alma mater as well. Which means that in the (relatively unlikely) event that Christie is our next president, that means that we will have a vice president followed by a president who attended the University of Delaware. Not exactly the school you would expect that from. That said, the University of Delaware has a very solid ranking with USNWR so we’re not talking about the University of Toledo here. Presidents that come from public colleges are, in general, pretty rare. The last elected one we’ve had was Lyndon Johnson, who attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University, home of the Bobcats and not the Armadillos). Before that, I think you have to go all the way back to Benjamin before you find another state college graduate elected to the White House.

The specific phrasing excludes Ford who was not elected, Ike whose public school wasn’t a state one, and Wilson who didn’t graduate. Taft got his legal degree from a school that is now a state college, but wasn’t at the time. I’m not 100% positive that Harrison qualifies since I am not rock-solid sure that Miami University as a “state university” at the time. I count it because was founded in part by legislature action. James K. Polk is the last president prior to Harrison to qualify.

In all likelihood, though, our next president graduated from Wellesley and Yale.