Category Archives: Statehouse

Regulating For Hazard?


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Earlier this week, Lain got her hands on a pack of Skittles that she got from preschool. We let her have candy in small amounts, but a pack of Skittles is a lot. Still, it was sealed so we didn’t worry about taking it from her. It turns out, somewhere along the way she learned how to use scissors properly (and quietly). While my wife and I both admired her problem-solving skills, it was definitely a “woah” moment.

President Obama has signed into law a regulation involving ecigarette juice, to protect young children from hazard. As many of you may recall, I support ecigarette regulation that makes the product safer without impeding the industry that helped me quit smoking, though I am suspicious of regulation for the sake of regulation, based on undemonstrated and/or unrealistic fears, and for the sake of “getting tough on big tobacco.” I fear we’re headed more in the direction of the latter than the former, but time will tell.

I believe in the greater hierarchy of things to be feared by consumer products, much of the concern around ejuice poisoning is not especially justified. People don’t seem to understand how incredibly awful the stuff tastes. I don’t mean it tastes a bit unpleasant, like sour or something. We’re talking about a level of pleasantness somewhere between soap and gasoline. The nicotine actually stings the tongue.

That being said, I support regulation to address this. It may not be the hazard some are making it out to be, but it seems to me to be a hazard that can be avoided with relatively minimal negative impact on the producers and the product. The regulation that passed, however, may make things worse rather than better.

ejuiceI get my ejuice from three sources: Halo, Bulk E-Juice, and Totally Wicked. You can see the Halo bottles to the left, and Bulk to the right. The Halo bottle has a child-proof cap that Lain would not be able to easily open. She would have to know to push it down and twist it, which is probably enough to satisfy the safety standards. In order to get the juice into the device, it has a dripper underneath. For Bulk, the lid comes off by simply twisting it, and has a squirter below to get the juice into the device. Lain would be able to get the cap off without any problem whatsoever. Totally Wicked has a child-proof cap (you have to squeeze the sides and twist) and a squirter.

While the regulation targets the Bulk containers, I am far more worried about something happening in the Halo bottle than the Bulk. Underneath the lid, the Halo bottle is completely open. Once she gets into the Halo bottle, she could just chug-a-lug it before realizing exactly how awful it tastes. A week ago I would have keep skeptical of her ability to get into the bottle, but parenthood is a series of revelations on what the little ones can’t and then suddenly can do. Like using scisssors to get into a bag of skittles. Or open a childproof container. For the Bulk bottle, she would have to squirt it in her mouth, which I’m not sure she has the strength to do. And if she did, I suspect she would immediately discover that it really tastes awful and she would move on. She could decide to keep going, but there are 100 things in this house she could decide to ingest that worry me more. In order to chug the Bulk juice, she would have to get the squirter off, which I myself can’t do without a thin instrument like a butter knife. So, I’m not worried about the Bulk and kind of worried about Halo.

In preparation for the law, I suppose, Bulk seems to be offering alternative packaging for their juice. I ordered some yesterday and will report the results, but it looks like they’re moving towards Halo-like bottles (it’s described as “child-proof cap with dripper”). Which means that it will be trading less safe (to my eye) packaging for more safe packaging. Which might make this reglation a net hazard instead of a net benefit. It’s hard to say.

What would have been ideal is to require both child-proof capping and a squirt insertion system or something similar). This is what Totally Wicked does, and it is by far the product that I am least worried about.

So, I’m not positive that they thought this through as well as they should have. It could be that I am wrong about the comparative hazard. It could be that they just didn’t think this through. It could be that passing a law was more important to them than what the law actually did. Ultimately, though, the responsibility for all of this is going to fall on vapers with young children in the house. Which is, regulation or no, is how it was always going to be.


Category: Statehouse

A voluntary surveillance


In 1984, the narrator mentions screens that enable the government to observe citizens in their own homes. Citizens were not permitted to turn these screens off. For quite a while I’ve seen a correlation between these surveillance screens and internet access, cell phones, and now i-phone technology, the main difference being that we choose to use them. We can turn them off, and we do, but we depend on them nevertheless.

These devices make us “observable” to others, not necessarily or only to the state, but in a way that potentially guides our actions and maybe even the way we think.

We buy things online. Most of those purchases are in principle more traceable than cash purchases and perhaps even more traceable than purchases by check. At any rate, Amazon seems to know what I might be interested when I log on. Our search terms are (or so I hear) somehow remembered by my Google and contribute to what comes up when we search. When I go to weather dot com, the site knows I live in or around Big City. I assume that it would be fairly easy to track down my real identity from the blogs I comment and write on, or at least narrow the identity to my apartment building. Even dumber technologies like my flip phone track my phone calls and messages and my time zone.

And this is mostly beneficial to me. All this connectivity is entertainment, shopping, and a way to express myself and talk with people online I would probably never get a chance to meet in real life. I’m part of online communities where in my own way I have a voice and an opportunity to speak my mind and learn from others. I have and use a Roku, which streams channels from the ‘net. I listen to music on YouTube.

This is all mostly voluntary. I choose to turn on my computer first thing when I get home. The computer remains on until I go to bed, even if I’m not using it.

Still, I can’t shake the thought that I’m patched into a world where I and my choices are observed or at least observable.

I don’t think I’m paranoid. If I were, I wouldn’t use the computer at all. Or I’d use it less often. Or I’d take greater precautions than I do to protect my anonymity. I don’t think government bureaucrats are monitoring my to’ing’s and fro’ing’s on the internet. I am wary of identity theft, but not that wary.

As I see it, I’m taking two gambles. The first is that my life and views are so uninteresting and so non-influential and enough on the mainstream that no one (I hope) sees any special need to track me down. The second gamble is that there are a lot of fish in the pond for identity thieves, and I hope the chances of me getting my identity stolen is lessened by some sort of law of numbers, in addition to sensible precautions I can take myself.

Above, I compared this situation with Orwell’s 1984. It’s not entirely a good comparison. I’m not arguing that being “observable” is totalitarianism. I’m not even arguing that being observable is the same thing as being observed. In some ways, by being more exposed and more “visible” to the online world, I enjoy greater privacy than people did before such things existed. I probably enjoy more privacy on the web in 2015 than I would, say, in a stereotypical small town or closed neighborhood or enclave where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

But there’s also something not quite voluntary about it even though I choose it freely. It makes me uneasy.


Who’s The Spoiler, Now?


22356230882_5c4712190e_Bernie-SandersFrom the Thursday night Democratic Debate:

MADDOW: Senator Sanders, as a Vermonter, you have almost a home state advantage here in New Hampshire. But back home across the border, you also have a long history of running against Democrats as a third-party candidate, for governor, Senate, for Congress.

In 1988 your candidacy as a third-party candidate arguably cost the Democrats a congressional seat and sent a Republican instead.

How can you lead the Democratic Party nationally when you have not been a member of the Democratic Party until very recently?

SANDERS: Well, Rachel, actually, that wasn’t accurate. In 1988 the Republican did win, I believe, by 3 points. I came in second. It was 34-31, I think, 19 for the Democrat. In that race the Democrat was the spoiler, not me. And it is true…

Well, if I were in a class I would prefer a response more along the lines of “Show your work.” So here goes… (more…)


Category: Statehouse

Trump Salad


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Category: Statehouse

So, The Iowa Caucuses Happened


I don’t have a whole lot to add that everyone else isn’t saying. Good for Cruz, good for Rubio, not good for Trump.

How bad it is for Trump is uncertain, but no candidate in recent memory has put so much stock on “winning” and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it made an unusually large dent. Fortunately for him, he has quite a cushion in New Hampshire and so he can still lose a chunk of support, come out on top, and be able to brag about being the Comeback Otherkin. Helping him further is that two of the next three early contests are primaries, and thus Trump will be less reliant on the ground game he doesn’t seem to have and there will be less friction for outsider participation.

On Cruz, I think people are underestimating the importance of this victory. It was not entirely unexpected, but it was necessary. That Trump ended up much closer to Rubio than to him makes it even better. The two-man race between them has gotten more interesting, and he will no longer be criticizing Trump (to the extent that he does) from a position of weakness. It may also help him weather what is likely to be a weakish showing in New Hampshire, to get back down to South Carolina where he is more likely to do well. Cruz didn’t overperform by too much, but he met some important expectations.

Some are irked about Rubio claiming victory despite getting third place, and his victorious posture could indeed backfire. But the reason he is getting the attention is that he really, really outperformed expectations. Further, he did it despite being the recipient of an unusually large number of attacks in a state where, up until a few weeks ago, he hadn’t been paying much attention. He’d been staking his claim in New Hampshire, but his people seemed to wisely make the determination that to succeed in New Hampshire he needed to separate himself in Iowa, which he did. The two man race became a three man race.

There is still room for one more. There were four major candidates in both 2008 and 2012 once the ball got rolling. On the other hand, one of them was Ron Paul in each case. So three is the more likely number, and the above are most likely the three.

Not much to say on the Democratic side. It’s still Hillary’s race. The degree of trouble she seems to have with races she should win might should trouble Democrats, but it is not seeming to. Which is probably just as well because it’s pretty unclear what they can do about it now.

So, in review, primaries are terrible because Donald Trump. Not having (competitive) primaries are terrible because Hillary Clinton.

Choose your poison.


Category: Statehouse

The Anatomy of a Trump Democrat


12998892003_9277f1debb_blue-collarA conversation in Hanley’s post occurred in which there was a lot of skepticism towards the notion that relevant Democratic voters would support Trump or Trumpism. The sense I get is that sure there may be some but it’s got to be very few because most already bolted for the GOP anyway. While it’s tempting to assume that Trump Democrats would be an odd mismatch because Trumpism seems so incompatible with the national party, I suspect that there is more to it than that. I fear that there may be. If I’m construction what a Trump Democrat looks like, it would probably be along these lines:

They’re socially conservative-ish, at least in an abstract way. Somewhat low-information. They’re likely concerned about the minorities moving into “their” neighborhoods. They hate Press 1 For English and probably forward inappropriate jokes. They’re tired of the government letting all of these unauthorized immigrants in. They were against gay marriage, but when the tide turned they realized that they didn’t actually care all that much. They hate the thought of America as being weak and their foreign policy is Jacksonian in instinct (not that they’d know the term). The Wall Street Bailouts probably infuriated them. The word this may remind you of as you read this description is “Republican,” but that’s only a part of the story. The other part is that they think the government needed to bail out homeowners and not the banks. They want health insurance. They think if you work 40 hours a week you should be paid enough to live on and that it’s been far too long since the minimum wage went up. The minimum wage is one issue they are far more likely to be familiar with, even if they don’t work minimum wage jobs they’re more likely to know people who work in between the minimum wage that is and the minimum wage that should be.

So they vote Democrat. Many of them – outside of the South, at least – voted for Obama. If Rubio or Cruz gets the nomination, they’ll probably vote for Clinton. Because the alternative is the Republican Party. That’s their boss’s party, and their boss’s boss’s party. That’s the party of the corporate mongers who lay people off at a moment’s glance. It’s the party that doesn’t even care about the issues on which they probably agree like immigration and affirmative action. On the issues that matter to them, they’re as likely to cave as not. And those aren’t the issues that matter most.

Enter Donald Trump… well, he’s a Republican, but he’s a very different sort. He’s successful and he will make America successful. He’s a corporate gladiator, but he’ll be our gladiator. On immigration, he gets it. He’s not nearly as obnoxious as the Democrats. And he looks like he’s not going to do anything with Mom’s Social Security Check and will fight for my insurance like a Democrat. Except he’ll be less obnoxious and will put those other people in their place. He’s speaking to me and people like me.

If it weren’t for Trump bleeding Republican voters, I suspect there would be enough of these people to put Trump over and make him the next president. But, of course, he will bleed Republican support. He’s going to lose because he is Donald Trump and he doesn’t quite have the coalition. But if the party goes the way of Trump, then they can start building a coalition from there, and without a lot of the less popular economic policies, they’d have room to maneuver. And at some point, that coalition stands a really good chance of winning at some point. With the help of unaligned voters and current Democratic voters.

Photo by Gage Skidmore


Category: Statehouse

Trump’s Democrats


While many Democrats are eager to deny that Trump is drawing support from their party, the data show a different story. That data also reveals the falsity of the pretense that Republican party leaders could somehow have prevented their party from being largely captured by an ugly populist contingent.

It’s important to remember that both parties have traditionally had their reactionary factions. While the GOP had the John Birchers, the Democrats had their boll weevils—socially conservative and racist southern Democrats, but who often supported populist initiatives, such as rural electrification. Not only did the Democrats have that group, that group was the foundational core of the Democratic Party, with its Jeffersonian origins in anti-nationalism and defense of a racially stratified society.

The boll weevils are mostly forgotten now, but not wholly gone. The South has shifted from being overwhelmingly Democratic to being highly contested territory where Republicans win regularly. In 1960, 100% of the U.S. Senate seats from the Confederate states were held by Democrats. In 1980 they still held 55% of those seats. Today, the Democrats only hold 18%. But Democrats are often more successful on the local level, where politics is more personal and party label less significant…and where people can know that Candidate Smith isn’t a liberal, but an old time Democrat. Many of these voters still identify as Democrat, even as they vote Republican at the state and national levels. Think, for example, of Kim Davis, the Tennessee County Clerk who refused to give out marriage licenses to same sex couple—a Democrat, not a Republican.

And those folks are often Trump supporters. Other than his home state of New York, Trump’s best states are in a bundle of the old South states plus West Virginia, another state where the old southern Dems long dominated. Out west in the intermountain states, which have always been predominantly Republican, )his support fades.

OK, one might say, they’re not real Democrats (although they are what Democrats predominantly once were), because they’re really conservatives. But as reported by RealClearPolitics, 20% of the Trumpenproletariate identify as liberal. True, a strong majority of 65% describe themselves as conservatives, but only 13% say they are very conservative, and less than 1/3 say they are Tea Partiers. Trump’s supporters are not the radical right-wing revanchists liberals claim are taking over the Republican Party.

All of this helps explain why over 2/3 of Trump’s supporters say they would vote for him if he left the GOP. A lot of them aren’t strongly committed to the party—they are in fact not the mythical Republican base.

Liberal and establishment Democrats don’t want to admit that many of these people are still Democrats. But many of them are, or they are about as much Democrats as they are Republican, willing to vote for either party depending on the candidate.

And this is the reason it’s ridiculous to talk about how the GOP establishment should have kept these people from taking over the party. First, they haven’t; that’s largely a different group of people. Second, parties don’t choose their supporters as much as supporters choose the party. If we think in spatial terms, on a left to right continuum, many of these people find themselves to the right of the median Democrat, so they’re going to take a look at the party that’s also to the right of the median Democrat. If they find that they’re also to the right of the median Republican, they’ll be more attracted to the Republican Party, not necessarily because it is welcoming to their extremist views, but because it’s median is less far away from their views than the Democratic median. Those folks will pull the party away from its establishment, but there’s precious little the establishment can do to stop that.

But those aren’t the Trumpa Loompahs (hattip Steve Horwitz). Those folks tend to support Cruz or Rubio, because they recognize the liberal elements in Trump’s message.

So suck it up, Dems. Trump’s your party’s phenomenon, too.


Category: Statehouse

The Big Swindle (In Which @MarkWBennett Tweets Cons)



Democracy. Ugh. (In Which @varadmehta Tweets Guns)



Category: Statehouse

Bartlet vs Hoynes: Snuffing Out In The Projects


There is a scene in the first season of The West Wing where Jed Bartlet is discussing gun control with Vice President John Hoynes of Texas. Bartlet is trying to get Hoynes to sign on to prohibit concealed handgun carry. In what I’m sure was a QED argument in writer Aaron Sorkin’s head, Bartlet asked if guns are supposed to deter violence with their presence, why should they be concealed. One can imagine the “Boom!” in Sorkin’s mind as he expressed this. There may be a point there, but what it eludes is that largely the same people that object to concealed carry also object to open carry. From my own perspective, there are arguments for why guns should be visible and arguments for why they should be hidden, but if you’re arguing whatever is in front of you it becomes clear that the “carry” is the problem rather than the “open” or “closed.”

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A week or two back, Jaybird sent me this link about HUD’s plans to ban smoking in its housing:

“What I do in my apartment should be my problem, long as I pay my rent,” said Gary Smith, 47, a cigarette in hand as he sat outside the door to a building in the Walt Whitman Houses in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

The impact of the prohibition would be felt most heavily by the New York City Housing Authority, which is known as Nycha and houses more than 400,000 people in about 178,000 apartments. Though it is the largest public housing agency in the country, it has lagged behind many of its smaller counterparts in adopting smoke-free policies.

Since the federal government began to press for smoking bans in public housing in 2009, more than 600 agencies encompassing over 200,000 households have voluntarily barred indoor smoking. In moving to require the prohibitions across the country, federal officials say they are acting to protect residents from secondhand smoke, which can travel through walls and under doors; to reduce the risk of fires; and to lower building maintenance costs.

This seems like the sort of thing that would rile me up, but… it doesn’t, for the most part. Mainly, because from what I’m reading this would mostly bring public housing in line with private housing. Which is to say that landlords – including the government – have their own incentives apart from social engineering to prohibit smoking in their apartments. Smoking represents a fire hazard. It smells, obviously, and can be difficult and costly to clean. If the places are furnished (which I suspect, though don’t know) they might be, you do get cigarette burns on the furniture. So all of these reasons make such a prohibition pretty valid.

The reason given is characteristically weak, however. A lot of the people who live here live alone, and with other smokers, and no distinctions are made. While smoke can escape into neighboring apartments, it’s less likely to be an issue if they smoke indoors than if you push them outside.

Which brings us to the other side of things. The Bartlet/Hoynes discussion. There are arguments for why we would want smokers to smoke indoors, and arguments for why we want to push them outside. Each offer their own set of benefits and drawbacks. Indoors is more likely to cause acute distress among people in whatever room it is occurring. But outdoors makes it harder to avoid. But if smoking is to be legal, it does need to be legal somewhere. This applies both to indoors/outdoors discussions and location more generally. And as we’ve banned smoking in public places, there has been the implicit agreement that they should be able to smoke in their own private places. Now, of course, that too is being questioned.

The new HUD regulation has opened up a flurry of advocacy over at Vox about smoking bans generally. Dylan Matthews says – with obvious lament – that we can’t ban all indoor smoking even though it would be more fair[1]. German Lopez endorses the idea anyway. This is ostensibly due to concerns over second-hand smoke, but it relies on shoddy data. And while at present there are no plans to include ecigarettes in the mandate, they’re discussing it despite there being little indication that the justification of the fear carries over and almost all movement on ecigarettes has been towards including them in smoking bans[2].

Doing so, of course, will push people outside and their smoking into more public areas. Except that we’re trying to move smoking out of public areas. Which pushes it back inside. But we don’t want people smoking inside. The government has the ability to influence people through HUD, but that’s unfair to people who rely on government housing. So in the sake of fairness we should consider making it uniform. If they can’t smoke here, why should they be able to smoke there? If they can’t smoke there, why should they be able to smoke in that other place?

The ostensible rationales for these policies are getting lost in the shuffle, in part due to the desire of uniformity. The only uniformity that can occur, is to allow smoking anywhere and to allow it nowhere. The first is unacceptable and most people know better than the explicitly advocate the latter. But to avoid the latter, we need to answer the basic question of where we should consider smoking to be permissible. It’s not clear that we have any place in mind.

[1] Taking us way out of any ostensible “landlord’s choice” rationale which I can be on board with. And if you’re paying attention, it should be clear that the second-hand smoking pretext has its limitations, and those limitations are being ignored.

[2] Admittedly, the statist in me is intrigued at using these regulations as an inducement for people to switch to vaping. To do so, of course, would mean accepting that people are going to consume nicotine in form that looks like smoking. I don’t think that’s likely.


Category: Statehouse