Boffoblog

The Senate GOP Privatization Campaign

Yesterday the AP reported that the Senate GOP is distributing "campaign-style materials" to members in order that they push privatization during their February trip home.  Consistent with their Happy Happy, Joy Joy message, there is no mention of the benefit cuts in the president's plan.

The facts are always so inconvenient, and a downer to boot.

Greenspan, Stenholm and Others on Privatization

Today Greenspan weighed in on Social Security privatization.  As with much of his history of testimony before Congress, there was something to please everyone.  Read this NY Times story for some details.

The Bush people no doubt will walk away pleased that our monetary Yoda came out in favor of privatization, at least in theory.  We opponents will focus on the rest of what he said: The Bush plan is far to hasty and costly.  He also says that Congress should consider raising payroll taxes, which the president has ruled off the table.

Speaking of ruling things off the table, former dean of the Fainthearted Faction ex-Rep. Charlie Stenholm yesterday blamed the Democrats for ruling privatization off the table.  CongressDaily quotes him, "When anyone begins to take anything off the table, that narrows our ability to get to a solution."  Er, has he looked at the president's proposal?  Bush has made most elements of Social Security policy non-negotiable, making it all but inevitable that were privatization to occur it would be costly and rapid, contrary to Greenspan's wishes, and would do nothing to make the financing of Social Security either more stable or less regressive.

The GAO's Comptroller General, on the other hand, says that the president's strategy has turned what should be a serious policy debate into a partisan game.  Couldn't agree more, though from his other comments he seemed to see more urgency than is warranted.

Among the others who spoke, Trent Lott's stand out as the most peculiar.  He said that he would prefer the House to act first on Social Security privatization since "on stuff like this they're smarter than us and have more courage than us."  Read: Have more party discipline and don't have to worry about filibusters.  Having more expertise has nothing to do with it.  As CD points out, that also means the House GOP would be left to hang out to dry if they passed a privatization bill only to see it stall in the Senate.  Then Lott said that there is an eighteen month window to get this done, and that window is only available in a president's second term.  In other words, there is hell to pay electorally by getting out in front of this issue.  Which is exactly why he wants the House to act first (even though their electoral pressures, with two-year terms, is even greater).  As I said, rather peculiar.

Oh, and Santorum was his usual hardline self.

Update: Go read Anrig take apart Greenspan (via TPM).

Who's In and Who's Out

The Washington Post reported today on efforts by HHS to excise mention of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender from the title of a talk in a program on suicide and suicide prevention.  It is not that the issue is not important -- the article notes that suicide rates are 2-3 times higher for these groups.  Instead, the Bush bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the topic being so, well, out front.

The suggested wording reveals the prejudices behind the move.  The organizers were told they ought to replace those words with "sexual orientation."  The article continues:

[T]hat did not make sense to him. "Everyone has a sexual orientation," he said in an interview yesterday. "But this was about gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders."

Moreover, he noted, transgender people differ from others in terms of sexual identity, not sexual orientation.

"Unless you use an accurate term, the people you are trying to reach don't recognize themselves and don't attend," he said, adding that the agency told him he should not use "gender identity."

There are two issues, one overt and the other more subtle.  The obvious issue is that removing any mention of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender was an attempt to hide groups that make the bureaucrats uncomfortable, and as a result do an injustice to the very real social problem the panel is meant to address.

The more subtle issue is what makes "sexual orientation" such a bad substitute, even leaving aside the fact that it is inaccurate for some people included in the original title.  It starts from the assumption that there is a baseline or default sexuality and everyone who deviates from it has a distinctive characteristic, a sexual orientation.  All others -- presumably heterosexuals -- need not reflect on their sexuality and therefore do not have an orientation.

That line of thinking is common with regards to race, gender, language and any number of other socially important categories.  In the first half of the 20th century it was common to label all music made by African Americans as "race music" -- jazz, Delta blues, Piedmont blues, gospel, jump, ragtime, big band, work songs, the gamut.  That is to say, the label signified that blacks had racial characteristics but whites did not, and those characteristics were far more salient that the myriad differences within the group.  Billboard in fact listed African American recordings as "race music" until 1949, when it decided to replace the label with "rhythm and blues" (again something of a catch-all, but with less obvious political overtones).

It's not that long ago that such thinking dominated the music industry (and in many ways never disappeared).  I remember from my youth in the early 1980s in central California walking into a record store, the Wherehouse, and seeing a section labeled "black music."  (In fact, I remember my puzzlement both at the category and the fact that Madonna's first record was put in that bin at my local store.)

Let's take another example.  For the last couple of decades there has been much discussion of a gender gap in elections, and even among the well-meaning there is an unfortunate tendency to characterize women as the source of aberration.  Yes, men and women tend to vote differently.  But is the source of it an increasing conservatism among men or liberalism among women?  By a ratio of a hundred to one, the conversation has focused on the latter rather than the former.

(As a side note, even data that would show the partisan leanings of men staying stable and the leanings of women growing more Democratic does not necessarily support that interpretation.  If the political agenda grows more conservative, then that partisan pattern would reflect women remaining consistent in their policy preferences while men become more conservative.)

Check out a brief sampling of some of the writing on the subject:

• From the American Political Science Association website: A short paper entitled "Women Voters and the Gender Gap"
• From Ms Magazine, "Why the Gender Gap Matters":  "This is a good thing for women. Without the gender gap, women’s votes — and women’s issues — would be ignored. Even with it, too often women’s issues are neglected by consultant-driven campaigns.       The gender gap is fueled by issues such as women’s rights, abortion rights, human services (education, health care, Social Security), war and gun control."
• From NOW: A page entitled "Women Voters Maintain Gender Gap in 2004 Elections"

I do not indict all such research as misguided.  There are analytical reasons to focus on the voting patterns of a certain group, and there are political reasons why we want to understand the distinctive demands and desires of female voters.  In part by shining the light here it helps makes up for decades of neglect.  However, at the same time it also makes it seem as though only women have a gender and therefore only women act politically based on their gender.  That in itself can have the paradoxical effect of marginalizing and undermining the political goals of women.  And if in fact it is men who are voting increasingly conservatively, it may be inaccurate as an explanation for recent voting trends.

The gender gap example also shows that the idea of "normal/deviant"  or "in/out" is not based on actual population distributions.  Unlike with the "race music" and "sexual orientation" examples, the group being used as the baseline category here -- men -- are in the numerical minority.  Intead, who is the "in group" is defined by social and political power.

The point isn't that someone who uses this line of thinking is always racist or homophobic or sexist -- I certainly wouldn't claim that NOW is sexist on this basis -- but that the thinking has social and political consequences.  There are consequences for who we think of as an "in group" and "out group" and whose claims for equality, tolerance or consideration ought to be heeded.  There are consequences for who we think has the power and who ought to change.  There are consequences for how we think of ourselves in relation to others.

It is far too utopian to think that we rid ourselves of all "in/out" and "normal/different" categories, and in many ways it might not even be desirable.  However, we ought to be conscious of the choices we make in using categories and their implications.  Language has power, but even more than that it is reflective of power.  The decision by HHS was a naked display of such power by a dominant social group.

Questions About Civil Service Reform

The Washington Post today has a rather tepid Federal Diary by Stephen Barr raising more questions about the proposed civil service reforms.  It quotes extensively from the rationales for the new regulations issued by DOD and DHS, which rely heavily on vague gestures at the post-9/11 world and the need to respond quickly and flexibly to threats.  This is a topic we have covered here and here.

Yes, there is a need to respond quickly and flexibly, and so some call to lend agency managers a greater hand through such things as performance rewards.  However, as Barr points out the rhetoric has not been linked directly to the kinds of department-wide changes DOD and DHS are moving toward.  While such flexibility might be justified for some positions, it is hard to imagine that it is universally justified regardless of the proximity of its connection to anti-terrorism and security.

More troubling, which Barr does not address, is that these same justifications evaporate when transporting the reform proposals to Labor, Education, and Veterans' Affairs.  A case can certainly be made for civil service reform, but the Bush Administration has not done so.  Intead it appears more like an opportunity to exert greater political control over the federal bureaucracy using -- no surprise -- vague and winking nods to the needs of the post-9/11 world.  Now where have we heard that before?

A Senate hearing late last week showed that some in Congress, including the GOP chair of the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the civil service, are skeptical of the need and design of the plan.  Government Executive reports that Voinovich, together with the ranking Democrat Akaka, both expressed great skepticism at OMB's enthusiasm to roll out the reforms government-wide without seeing how they play in the two departments for which they were initially intended.  Since it requires congressional approval, and federal employee unions are poised to mobilize, there will be a fight.  Whereas the unions lost in the rush to create DHS the first time around, they have a much better shot to slow the rush to reform this time.

Fixing Firefox

I highly recommend Firefox to everyone who browses the web.  Yes, that includes you.  One of the selling points (if you can say that about something which you can download for free) is that it does not suffer from the security vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer.  Another selling point is that it is more faithful to the platform-free standards of the web.  Alas, not long ago the two came into conflict with one another.

It was found that by taking advantage of International Domain Names (IDN), which use non-ASCII characters in the URLs, a hacker could spoof a site, redirecting you to a pirate site without your knowledge.  Obviously, if that is done with, say, a bank's website that could be a serious problem.  IDN is not supported yet by IE, but is by the major alternatives, including Firefox.  The hitch is that it is not supported safely, yet.  Hence the security problem which affects non-IE browsers.

Netaloid alerted us to a fix posted a few days ago on tech.life which involves a minor hack of the Firefox profile.  For ordinary users that might seem intimidating, and it also is not permanent since the installation of extensions to Firefox will undo the fix.  The site provides a second fix which is easier and more permanent, and uses an extension which is one of the best reasons to get Firefox: Adblock.

Adblock allows you to block not just ads, but almost any annoying graphic that appears on websites.  Is your fave site slowed down because you have to continually re-load large and very slow gif files every time?  Just block them.  Want to universally block ads from a particular server, no matter where you surf?  Block them, too.  And, if there are some you want to let through, you can be selective in your blocking.  Lots more can be customized as well if you are hip to writing regular expressions, but most can be done simply by clicking a helpful Adblock button.  (In this way, it has much in common to that late great tool of web customization, Proxomitron.)  And as with everything Firefox, unlike IE it is in constant development, so feel free to suggest changes and report bugs.

Now, back to the IDN fix.  Turns out that by using Adblock, a simple regular expression will block the exploit.  This post on tech.life has the details.  Nothing to download and install if you already have Adblock running, and it is not platform-dependent.  Now, if only IE security fixes were that easy.  And so rarely needed.

Valentines for Our Times

Need to find the perfect Valentine for the person on your list?  Here are a few poems you could use:

1.
Texas is red,
New York is blue.
When I cast my ballot,
I'm voting for you, except I might have to wait ten hours in line to do it and if the poll worker sends me to the wrong precinct then an Ohio court will throw it out, or Carteret County, North Carolina might not count it at all if its electronic voting machine is "full."

2.
Don't send me flowers
or chocolates with a bow.
Just convince the Supreme Court
to let me out of Gitmo.

3.
You think my theories are crackpot
and I'm crippled with fear.
But besides my tinfoil hat
my only warmth is you, dear.

4.
Our love will last forever
and that makes me glad.
Since Social Security was privatized,
one out of two ain't bad.
(Save this one for next year.)

5.
Your beauty and charm
are the weapons you wield.
My resistance to you
is like the missile defense shield.

6.
Our love is forbidden
from Oregon to Ohio.
But as med-buying seniors say,
at least there's Toronto.