Bobvis offers up a thought for a radical change in law enforcement: the elimination (or near-elimination) of prosecutorial and police discretion.

In looking through this, I see three basic complaints. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of them, but here’s a paraphrase:

#1 – The law is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, to the point where literally nobody can say with any certainty that they haven’t ever (or even haven’t recently) broken some law. This becomes especially annoying when we apply the legal principle “ignorance of the law is no defense” – since most laws are written such that only a lawyer specializing in Field X really understands them (and even then, plenty of debate usually rages). Expecting everyone to manage to keep abreast not just of the content of all laws that affect them, but also the changes to that law constantly being made, seems pretty absurd.

#2 – “Police disproportionally choose to enforce certain laws against certain groups.” As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the whole “police are always racist” line of thought. However, I will certainly believe that certain laws are enforced more than other laws (and even to the point of “enforcing” when there hasn’t been a violation, see below), simply because it is more profitable (fines, etc) for the police to enforce those laws rather than other laws.

#3 – Where multiple laws become involved, prosecutors can too easily abuse the discretion they have to choose which charges to file. This becomes even worse as the system becomes more and more broken, too many people are coerced into pleading guilty when they are actually innocent by the disparity between plea sentencing and post-trial sentencing (see also here), and of course the system is designed to coerce you directly from the moment you first start talking to the cops. This is especially true when even taking the stand in your own defense becomes a punishable offense if you’re found guilty, under sentencing guidelines that will either (a) attempt to convict you of “perjury” (if you say “I didn’t do it” and a jury finds otherwise) or will bump up the sentencing guideline for your being “not remorseful” (obviously, if you testify in your own defense, you’re “not remorseful”) or “obstructing justice.”

On the flipside, I think there needs to be room in the system for at least some police and prosecutorial discretion. As an example: if someone’s taillight goes out, there’s a good chance they don’t know about it. A police officer pulling them over and giving them a warning (and I believe “warnings” should be logged so that other officers can tell if someone’s already been recently warned or has been simply ignoring the warnings and not altering their behavior) is not a bad thing; it helps get the vehicle repaired and keeps the streets a little safer. Likewise, there are times when the law is simply badly written or otherwise not wisely applied to a situation, and I’d like to think that – on average at least – the police officer would have sound enough judgement to recognize this.

As for the oversight option… we’re dealing with humans, here. If you start analyzing cops by a quota of how many tickets they write, then you give them a quota and we get into the problem of cops who ticket innocent people for imaginary offenses in order to meet quota. If you stick observers with them randomly, all you do is increase the number of eyes in the vehicle looking for crimes – and “missing” a crime can be as simple as having your vision obstructed while taking a sip of your coffee. If you run a camera in the vehicle, same deal; the camera may not always be where the officer is looking (though I DO think that dashboard cameras are laudable for traffic stops, and that retention of the video ought to be mandatory by law to prevent “he said, she said” problems between the cop and the citizen later).

If you got an hour to spare, I cannot recommend this episode of Bloggingheads.tv with Mark Kleiman and Megan McArdle enough. It’s from last year, but very little on it is dated (except a Supreme Court ruling, I think). There are like ten things that they said or discussed that I want to write a post about. They talk about drugs, guns, gambling, and a host of other things. It’s not so much what they talk about but the absence of bickering in favor of actual discussion. It let me with a whole lot to chew on on a number of topics.

Politico ran a rather vapid-yet-interesting article on the hair (and/or lack thereof) of would-be vice president Joe Biden:

The most common hypothesis is that he received a hair transplant, where follicles from the bushier back of the head are grafted onto fading spots closer to the front of the dome.

In 1987, a Washington Post reporter asked him to confirm the theory. “Guess,” he responded. “I’ve got to keep some mystery in my life.”

A quick Politico survey of stylists and hair transplant surgeons — some of whom have followed Biden’s career path for years, while others didn’t know about him until yesterday — found that there was little mystery.

“When he had darker hair it was pretty obvious, he had larger plugs,” said Dr. Michael Beehner, medical director of the Saratoga Hair Transplant Center in New York. “With the lightening of his hair, it looks much, much better now.”

The article was originally interesting to me because I’ve always found the notion of people (by which I mean men, because it’s so commonly accepted of women) bolstering their appearance in ways that are supposed to look natural and yet pretty transparently isn’t. I am thinking of an old Colosse County Commissioner who was 80 and looked it but nonetheless colored his hair a very implausible dark shade of brown. Or people that after having gone gray suddenly come in to work with brown or black or whatever hair. Or comb-overs in general.

I decided when I was young that if I was ever going to color my hair, I’d do it in a transparently fake color like light blue or purple. Ironically, the only two times I ever have colored my hair was once gray for a costume (though it stayed gray for weeks) and once brown for odd work-related reasons that may warrant its own post at some point. On the other hand, I can also think of it like a tattoo or some other body decoration wherein if the guy thinks that he looks better with it than without it who am I to argue?

But then I saw pictures of Biden at the convention with Obama and my mind went off on a different trajectory altogether. Even though I follow politics relatively closely and knew who Biden was and all that, most of the pictures I’d seen of him were from the front. I hadn’t realized that despite the fact that he looks full-headed (with assistance, of course) from the front, the entire crown of his head is shiny-bald.

So that got me thinking… if he’s going to go to the trouble of covering up his baldness in front, why do it so half-assed? Particularly in this age of Rogaine which covers precisely the part of the head where Biden remains bald. Biden would look much better bald than in his current state. At some point in the 2000 election, Gore mysteriously lost the growing bald patch in the back of his head and you know what? It worked! The bald patch was far more conspicuous and distracting than its mysterious disappearance.

Then again, maybe I’m the only person that finds the bald patch so distracting. For some reason, I find that style of baldness the be by far the most unsettling. Far moreso than horseshoe hair, excessive devil’s peaks, or pure baldness. There’s something weird to me about a person appearing not-bald from one angle and then obviously bald from another. Or maybe it’s sorta like the first paragraph of this post… the trying to cover something up (the goingness of bald) and yet doing so unconvincingly. So much worse to try and fail at such things than not to try at all. Yet for the most part they aren’t even trying. Except for cases like Biden, they’re not planting hair in the front it’s simply still existing there (at least for the time being) and they’re simply declining to take it off. Though then again, isn’t that essentially what a combover wearer is doing?

Me? If it comes down to it, I’ll actually cut the front off before I’ll sport a bald crown with hair surrounding it. I’ve already decided this, probably about the time I was deciding on the blue/purple that I never followed through on. I’m not too proud to try Rogaine first, but if that doesn’t work I’ll shave it all off or get a buzzcut before I let a bald crown empire slowly overtake the rest of my head. I guess that’s my personality… either do it completely or not at all.

If Biden does become Vice President, it’s really going to be oddly difficult for me to stomach his differing point of view on this particular issue.

There was a short time in Colosse when the Republicans were on the rise in city government. They couldn’t seem to swipe the mayor’s mansion, but they got quite adept at picking up lower profile races where the Republican voters were well-organized and the Democratic voters complacent and not always knowing that the guy that they see all those signs for is an icky Republican. They managed to win even city-wide elections despite the Democratic tilt of city politics in addition to a handful of Republican-leaning districts. With a couple surprisingly conservative black Democrats and a not-popular mayor, they even had a majority on the council for a couple of years.

The funny thing about the Republican city councilman is that they almost all looked exactly the same. Unusually young-looking handsome white fratboyish men with dark hair and a winning smile for the cameras. I followed politics closely and even I couldn’t always tell them apart. When one was term-limited out, another would step right in and take over the same role as seemlessly as Girard Christopher took over for John Haymes Newton as Superboy. Coincidentally, both actors looked a lot like Colosse Republican city councilmen.

Anyway, this post in particular involved Councilman Trevor Gaines. One night Gaines left a strip club that he’d been cut off for drinking too much. While driving, he swerved off the road, hit the railing, and ended up with a flat tire. He was walking down the road to his mother’s house, which was apparently nearby, when someone pulled over to offer aid.

• If you’re a city councilman, it’s not good to be caught drunk driving, much less doing so in a way that results in your car kissing the rail.
• The people that stopped to help him almost certainly didn’t know who he was, so all he needed to do was refuse the help and keep on walking.
• If he could just sleep it off, he could return and pick the car up the next day. Or perhaps it would have been towed, but that was preferable to a DWI.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t moving very fast physically or mentally. He didn’t really manage to get away completely before onlookers started gathering. He told the Samaritans, “No, thanks! I can’t get caught here because I am drunk and I am a city councilman and I drove my car into a rail!”

Though he’d cleared the first, he was apparently hadn’t made the second stop on the above logic train.

He pleaded it out for a fine and community service announcements. You might think that his political career was over, but shortly before election day he had a stroke of good luck that got him some sympathy votes: The newspapers found out that his wife had been sleeping with another Republican city councilman. Maybe she thought that the Republican City Councilmen were as interchangeable as I did.

If Barack Obama and John McCain both get 269 electoral votes on election day, the election goes into the House of Representatives. Rather than an up-down vote, though, which would clearly favor Obama, it is instead done by statewide delegation wherein each state gets one vote, which would favor McCain since he is likely to win more states than Obama (Bush won 30 states in 2000 and 31 in 2004, if I recall) because the unpopulated rural states trend Republican.

So I went to Politics1 and took a look at the delegations, and the likely winner in such an event is… Barack Obama. Despite the fact that Republicans typically win more states in presidential elections, only one Gore/Kerry state has a Republican congressional delegation (Michigan) whereas seven Bush states have Democratic delegations (Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, North Caroline, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia) and the two states with split delegations (Arizona and Kansas) are Bush states.

In order to pull it off, McCain would need to get the split delegations and flip four delegations while preventing Obama from flipping any.

The most likely scenario for a tie has the 2000 electoral map except with Nevada and New Hampshire going to Obama. With this electoral map in mind, there are eight states where the Democrats have only a margin of one vote, so McCain would need to change the minds of congressmen in six of those eight states states (which are Colorado, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia) or turn two of the tied states (AZ and KS). McCain is likely to win the Dakotas and West Virginia by a fair margin, though there is only one congressperson in each Dakota to flip (WV has three so he would have two there) so it would depend heavily on the personalities involved. Indiana is another state that it’s likely that McCain would win handily and there are five Democratic congressmen there. North Carolina and Tennessee are more likely to be closer in a tight race (and Nevada and Colorado extremely close) and without a clear victory in the state it seems less likely that they will be able to play the “vote your state/district” card, though if Obama’s vote is heavily concentrated in urban districts and McCain is able to clearly win the suburban and rural ones he might have a shot as there are more Democratic congresspeople to pick from.

If McCain were able to flip eight of the ten states (and/or gain eight by pulling over more than one congressman from Arkansas or Mississippi), the election would be his. If he falls short of eightstates, though, Obama can get the election back by flipping New Mexico (by persuading one congressman), Nevada (one congressman), and Michigan (two). New Mexico has an open district that is ripe for a Dem pickup and Obama may have that delegation anyway (Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming appear to be other cases where the delegation may flip, though neither seems extremely likely). There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of volatility in Michigan and unless Nevada changes congressionally it seems unlikely that he would be able to flip a congressperson since he’s only likely to win one of the three congressional districts even if he wins what would likely be a tight race. If McCain flips seven states, Obama would only need New Mexico.

It seems extremely unlikely that McCain would be able to pull off this feat absent some mitigating circumstance such as a huge popular vote victory or substantial victories in all the right districts. If the GOP controlled congress they could convince some Democratic congresspeople to change parties to be with the majority, though it seems unlikely that any would change to be a part of the minority and it seems unlikely that they would be able to remain in their political party if they chose the other guy for president. Even more unlikely that they would do so what would functionally keep the first black president from obtaining office (one of those things that perhaps shouldn’t matter, but will).

It’s actually difficult to imagine any scenario in which a not-insignificant minority are satisfied with the result. In the event of an Obama presidency, we’d be able to look forward to eight years of people saying that he stole it by getting the votes of congresspeople bucking the popular vote in their state. If McCain wins, he will be considered as having done so by making ugly backroom deals. It even gets further complicated by Kansas and Arizona, which could allow for Obama to have more delegations than McCain (25 to 24 or 25 to 23) but still not enough to claim the presidency and the victor (Obama, likely) will only have won because the other side (McCain, likely) did “the honorable thing” by dropping out of a race that they likely couldn’t win (I can see no other way either of these candidates would drop out… Gore, Kerry, and Clinton only dropped out when they had exhausted all other options and they are still varying degrees of martyrs for having done so).

One of the other larger results of such an event would be the reconsideration of priorities among voters in heavily red states. Over the last decade or two voters in the northeast have decided that it’s more important to have a Democrat in office than it is to have a liberal Republican and one by one the Republican congresspeople in the northeast have been losing which is one reason why there are so few Blue States with Republican delegations compared to the inverse. Conservative voters in the south and mountain west have not yet come to that conclusion and don’t have a problem electing Democrats as long as it is “their kind of Democrat”. Watching their kind of Democrat put Barack Obama into office may result in southern voters viewing party label as more important and could ultimately hurt the Democrats in the House and Senate over the longer term.

Below the fold is a list of states under their congressional delegations:
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A while back I read about an attempt in San Fransisco to rename a sewage plant after our current president:

The measure, if passed, would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. McConnell said the intent is to remember the Bush administration and what the group sees as the president’s mistakes, including the war in Iraq.

Some people aren’t laughing, including the San Francisco Republican Party, which sees the measure as an embarrassment, even to this famously liberal city. Chairman Howard Epstein has vowed to fight the measure with all means available to him.

A White House spokeswoman, when asked about the measure several weeks ago, refused to comment.

My original thought was that it’s a disservice to a sewage plant to use it in such a derogatory political manner… but that actually gave me an idea.

If the Republicans were actually smart, what they would do is completely embrace the notion. If the local GOP embraced it, it’d fail. Perhaps better yet would be if they continued their objections right up until they passed it then have the President request a tour of the facilities. He could then give a speech on how important waste processing facilities are and how modern plumbing and waste material has perhaps had the greatest effect on our quality of life and longevity than any other individual thing. That would leave the Presidents opponents stammering “It is tooooo an insult! Is too, is too, is too!” and the whole thing will look about as childish as it is.

On the subject of naming things after presidents, the No Child Left Behind law resulted in one of the local high schools where I was living in Estacado being shut down. It’s going to reopen as a new school under a different name this fall. Its temporary name is Northside High School though they’re aiming to name it after somebody. Interestingly enough, they’ve pushed back the naming of the high school to November 7th, which is the first Friday after the presidential election. The high school is in the dominantly black part of town and I can’t help but wonder if they’re angling to be the first Barack Obama High School in the nation.

On a sidenote, I prefer the comment section of this post not become congested with commentary on how terrible/great Bush, Obama, or the NCLB act are. I’ve been considering a post on the lattest (though perhaps that would be more appropriate on Bobvis), but this post is about the naming of buildings and schools and whatnot.

Sucks to be proven wrong. Some people are speculating that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States. A person that I was talking to – making an argument about media bias – said that several months ago the media was saying that John McCain might be ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Panama and is thus not a “Natural Born Citizen”.

I called BS, but he was right and I was wrong. There were in fact a couple of articles on the subject that suggested that there could potentially be an issue, though the tone of the articles leaned towards the notion that it was likely that McCain was eligible but that it wasn’t a “slam dunk”.

It’s all a pretty silly question. There is no way that any court would ever rule that someone is ineligible for the presidency because he was born overseas while his father was serving our country in the military. It’s also extremely unlikely that if Obama was in fact born in Kenya that Republicans – who also nominated a foreign-born candidate – would suggest that neither of the two party’s nominees could Constitutionally be elected president.

What is a bit distressing, though, is reading a few blogs and whatnot where people have actually invested themselves in the argument that McCain is not eligible. It’s such a transparently political argument (made both by Democrats and anti-McCain Republicans) dressed up as Constitutional scholarship.

In the previous comment section, Gannon asked how come we haven’t converted to the metric system. Before I get to that, I’m going to write about the keys to the Internet.

I’d link to it if I could find it, but a few years ago I ran across an astonishingly dumb column in The Guardian that completely misunderstood the United States of America, the Internet, and most importantly human nature. You may recall a few years ago that there was a big push by other countries to try to get the US to hand over the keys to the Internet from the Department of Commerce to the United Nations. The aforementioned article in The Guardian said with a certain amount of glee that with the world united in insisting that the US give up control over the Internet that we would have (and I’ll never forget this wording) “little choice but to comply”.

That left to beg the question… “or what?” As in, we will have to comply “or what?” The UN will set up the infrastructure for its own Internet? A league of countries will go to the trouble of building an alternate Internet so that it can hand it over to the UN? They’ll invade Washington DC? If there is no “or [insert some consequence that the US could not endure]” then there is a choice. As it turned out, there was indeed a choice and the US chose to hold on to control of the Internet for the time being. Haven’t even heard mutterings about the issue since.

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A few years ago when I went to a friend’s wedding in Canada, a discussion about the differences between the United States and Canada came up. When these conversations come up with Canadians, it is almost invariably in the form of them asking us “What is wrong with you people?!” about this issue or that. If the subject were to come up today I would probably be quizzed about our warmongering or our president or one of the many problems that they have with the current direction of our country, but given that it was pre-9/11 I was surprised by the two subjects that came up most frequently. I expected that it would be our health care system or gun-loving or something, but instead it was our tort system (a subject I will expound upon at a later time) and… the metric system.

One guy asked why we hadn’t adopted it and a couple more idealistic fellows asked why the conversion process was taking so long and when it was going to happen. My answers were “not sure”, “what conversion process?”, and “it may never happen”.

After I got back to the states, I asked started asking myself why it hadn’t and it didn’t appear that it was going to. I came up with an answer and then forgot the question and moved on to more important things like repercussions of Robin’s flirtations with Spoiler on his relationship with his then-girlfriend Arianna.

When I was in elementary school, I was dutifully informed by my teachers that the metric system was the wave of the future and that the English system they were teaching us would become obsolete. If I needed an excuse not to learn the English system, I had one. The problem is that I had to learn about inches, feet, gallons, and pounds anyway. Reality made me even if the teachers at West Oak Elementary were telling me that it would be useless knowledge.

The teaching of the metric system never entirely went away, though the examples in the math textbooks slowly started moving back to gallons and yards by the time I got to high school. I remember this because I remember thinking that the books must have been out of date, though in retrospect I’m not sure that they were.

In addition to their odd pronunciation of the word “applicable”, their odd-yet-correct pronunciation of the states Nevada and Colorado, their use of the phrase “Oh my heck/hell”, and a million other things, one of the quirks of Deseret (or more likely the corner of it where I worked) the metric system kept coming up along with the question of why we never adopted it.

Remembering the question reminded me of the answer which actually came indirectly from the Canadians which had asked the question to begin with. When they asked, I asked how the conversion in Canada went. They basically said that the government said that they were going to convert everything to the metric system because it was more logical and it was what everyone else was doing and so Canada went metric. They described it about that simplistically, though I kept trying to make it more complicated by asking “why?” like a bored second grader sitting in the back seat on a 600-mile car trip.

The thing is that everyone in the US had decided, once upon a time, that it would happen here, too. It just didn’t. And I think that part of the answer to the “why” is that Americans are extremely reluctant to being told from on high “this is what we’re going to do” even when there might be a logical reason behind it if we don’t feel like we were adequately consulted on the matter. Part of the success of persuasion is to make people think it was their idea or at least that they had a hand in the decision. It’s noteworthy that the many of the most fierce political backlashes come from Supreme Court decisions (Roe v Wade, gay marriage) rather than legislation.

Unfortunately, by its very nature conversion to the metric system is more of a top-down decision.

Beyond that, though, another big reason is the same reason that we held on to the keys to the Internet. No one was in a position to force us to do otherwise. We don’t need to move towards the universal measurement system to do trade with other countries because we don’t have a shortage of countries to trade with (at least not on that particular basis). We’re big enough and powerful enough that we can unilaterally expect other countries to work with us on the matter. In other words, we converted as much as we needed to in order to keep doing global business, but it wasn’t as much as it might have been for other countries. Americans would rather everybody else learn English rather than we learn Esperanto. We don’t know off-hand what’s wrong with them learning pounds and ounces rather than us learning metrics. And so on.

To bring these ideas together, not only do we not like being told by our government how it’s going to be, we particularly hate being told that we need to do it because other countries are doing it. It’s not an uncommon mistake, but generally speaking telling us that everybody else does it differently causes us to dig in our heels (unless, of course, someone can actually apply enough pressure to get us to reconsider).

My favorite example of this is the death penalty. As an opponent of it, I get very, very frustrated with my fellow travelers’ tendency to mention that we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to execute people. That the world does something one way and that we do it another is not, on its face, evidence that we are wrong. If other countries do things a better way, it needs to be explained why that way is better. I think that the metric-advocates placed too much of an emphasis on world community arguments rather than the ease with which one can divide and multiply by ten.

My father worked for the Department of Defense on the civilian side as an engineer, then an economist, then a supervisor of economists. He was purely civil service and in fact rose as high in the ranks as he could without losing civil service protections. One more promotion and he would have been part of the staff of a political appointee. For the longest time, being a ranking civil serviceman in the DoD meant that he was prohibited from publicly expressing support for a political candidate. No bumper stickers, no yardsigns, and no political donations.

Though a reliable voter, Dad isn’t particularly outspoken about his politics and this limitation meant that he had a built-in excuse any time a politician asked for money or someone wanted him to put up a yardsign or something. He did resent the fact that he had to remain apolitical while people above him could not only express support for candidates, but could even have their support bought and paid for as “campaign consultants”. Eventually, and I’m not sure when, the courts stepped in and said that the government couldn’t prevent people from publicly expressing their views so long as they did not represent their own views as the views of the government organization that they work for. Even after that ban was lifted, he continued to try to hide behind the no-longer existent regulations.

Last weekend I flew back to Colosse to visit the folks and go to my former roommate Hubert’s birthday party. It’s election season in East Oak, the little burg that I was raised in. The election seems to be hinging on a new condominium project that threatens to bring in all sorts of tax dollars. Oh, the horror.

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that because it’ll result in more traffic and yet more backyard views of skyscrapers. But the long and short of it from my point of view is that the thing is going to get built, the traffic will get worse, and the only question is whether East Oak wants to at least get a great deal of tax revenue out of it.

My folks see things the same way that I do, so you can imagine my surprise when I drove into the driveway and saw yardsigns of the candidate slate that’s trying to keep the condo out. Particularly since they’ve never put up yardsigns, ever, even after the ban was lifted.

I brought it up under the pretense of asking whether the candidates were really against the development (though I already knew from the yardsigns that they were). He said that they were and that he would be sure to vote against them. So naturally I asked, “Why the yardsign?”

They were asked to by the woman in the house across the street and everyone in the neighborhood knows that is not the person you want to make an enemy of for social reasons. “So wait, what you’re saying here is that you’re caving to peer pressure?” I asked.

Sheepishly, Dad said, “Well yeah, I guess.”

“Too bad I didn’t know about this back in high school when you were telling me to resist the evils of peer pressure. I could have done a lot of drugs, Dad!”

He didn’t entirely get my joke.

Michael Hogan can’t vote because he’s a Canadian, but I strongly suspect that he’s hoping that John McCain pulls out a voctory in November. I can’t imagine a better actor to play the part. Take John McCain, lose him a little bit of hair, shave off some years, and add some virility and a boatload of bitterness and Michael Hogan playing Colonel Saul Tigh is pretty much what you get, visually anyway.

Here’s a video. About half-way through you get a slightly better look at him:

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