2006 October 30 | Hanlon's Razor

Giant boost of Iraqi troops needed

By Hanlon, on October 30th, 2006 at 09:01 PM

Oo boy. Bush has spent quite some time reminding us that he listens to his generals (as this video will attest), specifically General George Casey. So it must be disheartening to find out that 100,000 or so more Iraqi troops are needed.

CBS News has learned exclusively that Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Commander in Iraq, is expected to recommend the size of Iraqi security forces be increased by up to 100,000. This comes just as the U.S. military is about to reach its long-stated goal of training and equipping 325,000 Iraqis to take over the fighting from American troops.

Officials say the explosion of sectarian violence, which Gen. Casey calls a fundamental change in the nature of the threat, now makes that number look inadequate. On top of that is the fact that any given day, one quarter of the Iraqi Army is on leave.

They aren’t stepping up, and we sure as hell aren’t stepping down. Often times it seems like the only ones stepping up are the insurgents and those participating in the “no it’s not really a civil war”. Let’s hope this accomplishes something.
UPDATE: Ascap in the comments helpfully pointed out my absolutely awful misreading of the article first time around. Clearly states Iraqi forces, I wrote this as though it said US forces. I’m man enough to admit I was wrong, and it is encouraging when people correct me rather than letting errors just sit on the page for all to see.

Exit polling: biased

By Hanlon, on October 30th, 2006 at 03:40 PM

I caught this one on MSNBC and just HAD to say something about it. Showing an impressive ability to invent explanations to avoid the obvious, we have a few guys pointing at the reason the exit polls favored democrats while the elections themselves had republicans winning: bias in the polls themselves. The source article:

Interviewers can inject bias in the results. The late Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the 2004 NEP exit poll, went back and found that the greatest difference between actual results in exit poll precincts and the reports phoned in to NEP came where the interviewers were female graduate students — and almost all the discrepancies favored the Democrats.

The brilliant analysis:

Seems to me that Republican women and conservative men might tell young women they voted liberal when they didn’t for admittedly different reasons. Some small fraction of, say, married women might not want to seem “un-progressive” with young clipboard-carrying women who effuse progressiveness (we can debate another time whether young liberal female grad students have “tells” about their ideology even when not wearing their “keep your rosaries off my ovaries” buttons). Meanwhile, some men might be inclined to tell young attractive ladies what they want to hear. Not me, of course. But I hear rumors that this sort of thing happens.

I’d like to point out that, as far as I am aware, I never put anything on here like that bolded statement. I don’t put up something that is a “rumor” or unsubstantiated without letting you know that this is MY opinion and something I think might be possible. I’d never claim that something I “heard about somewhere from some guy” may be reality.

Now then, notice that the explanation here is that people are lying to the exit poll takers, the women, because they either want to appear progressive or they want to appease the women (presumably by appearing progressive). I’m seeing at least two massive flaws in the reasoning here.

For one, it assumes that the people being asked are all assuming that the women are liberals and that the people are trying to appeal to them as such. Naturally he doesn’t want to have the debate, which is a “tell” that he can’t defend it if one arose.

Another is that it means that voting republican is a source of shame for these people, while voting democrat is something that sounds attractive. So we’re to believe that voting republican is the kind of thing you do in secret but don’t admit publicly? Actually, wait. That’s not much of a flaw, I have to admit that makes sense. I’d be embarrassed, too.

A third (since that last one didn’t count) is that we aren’t given location information. Where are these women conducting the polls and where are the men doing it? If a man switches shifts with a woman during the day, does the vote count suddenly go red?

A fourth (let’s keep going, shall we?), is that it’s entirely neglecting who’s getting asked. While I find this all a completely stupid premise to begin with, if we’re going to start attacking polling as having a liberal bias we might as well consider that these women are asking people who look like they voted democrat. Maybe they tend to go after people in their own demographic which, likely, would be more left-leaning people.

And a problem not with the argument, but with the issue entirely, is that exit polls don’t mean jack. They’re an indication for how the voting probably went, but they aren’t the be all and end all. What bothers me is that the voting machine errors all seem to favor the republicans. Odd that the NRO and others don’t care much about that.

Bush is ramping up for something…

By Hanlon, on October 30th, 2006 at 02:57 PM

Folks, I’m getting worried. There’s a progression going on in the United States, and the direction it’s heading is, to put it mildly, less than encouraging. You can read down below on the most recent developments, but for a moment let’s mentally make a checklist for what’s happened lately.

We have a president who wants to spy on American citizens. We have a president who has signed a bill that lets him use the military inside the United States. We have a president who has signed a bill that lets him interpret the Geneva conventions however he wants, and detain whoever he wants without giving them the benefit of habeas corpus.

Slipping under my radar, we even had a company hired to build a nice big ol’ prison at an undisclosed location.

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney’s Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

KBR, it seems, has been hired under the guise of making “temporary detention facilities” and this isn’t exactly news.

I want to highlight those three points again. I want everyone to think about them deeply.

U.S. citizens can be spied upon
The military can be used to detain Americans
Anyone held as an “unlawful combatant” has no ability to argue his innocence
Secret prisons are being built

Now, let’s put all of these situations into a single storyline. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Bush spies on some particularly vocal and influential anti-war activists. He sends the military after them and they’re detained without charge. They can’t get a court date or fight their arrest because they were labeled “unlawful enemy combatants.” They’re held indefinitely at a prison at an undisclosed location.

Impossible? I doubt it.

Things are ramping up, that’s the only way to put it. But for what? It’s like Bush is throwing the gauntlet down and declaring an all-out assault on everyone who wants to speak out against him. Bush is gradually fulfilling that whole Emperor Palpatine storyline that everyone pounced on in 2002′s Attack of the Clones.

One problem: Bush is gone in 2009. Or is he? Well, consider both Bush’s words and his actions so far. He has little regard for the law of the land, or any land for that matter. And he constantly tries to say that the Iraq War is like WWII.

Is it conceivable that Bush could declare a state of emergency that requires that he be allowed to run for a third time? I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. Bush may be a little out of his gourd, but he’s not so far gone that he’d go and actually declare martial law and himself emperor of the ol’ USA.

Rather, we could look forward to sideways authoritarianism. Consider that the biggest reason the right is running from Bush now has nothing to do with his policies, but rather the public. As the guy’s on his way out and he’s less than popular, the republicans want nothing to do with him. He’s on the ballot again, you can bet they’d suddenly find themselves in his pocket once again.

Then we’d have another “fair” election to look forward to, devoid of any cheating thanks to those pesky Venezuelans.

I’m not calling this a certainty, or even that it’s very likely, but it certainly seems like Bush is doing all he can to keep himself in power or at least expand the power he has.

Now there’s a problem with that, as well. Not so much with Bush’s power-grabbing, but the public support thereof. The greatest logical fallacy in both the wiretapping debate and the MCA is the fact that there’s no guarantee against abuse. The president can order wiretaps with no warrant, and these people can be imprisoned without defense.

In fact, the only safeguard against abuse seems to be the man’s word, and the right is more than happy to trust Bush with just that. So either they’re actually counting on his ability to keep in office forever, or they’re incredibly short-sighted.

To use an analogy an astute friend of mine came up with, imagine you have a job you like with a boss who you REALLY like. A big project is coming up, so you sign a contract saying he can monitor your internet usage to make sure you’re not slacking, and he can call you at any hour of the day and force you to work overtime without overtime pay. You know he won’t abuse the power, so you gladly sign it over.

Only the contract doesn’t say your boss’s name, it just says “the boss”. And the guy you really like is leaving in a few months. That’s where we are now.

The neocons in America have to ask themselves one question: if Hillary Clinton wins in 2008, or John Kerry had won in 2004, would you support these same laws?

I have a feeling that answer is obvious. So what are we expecting? What is this all leading to? Frankly folks, I’m a little worried. I think we’re just seeing the beginning of what’s going to be a very ugly last two and a half years of Bush’s presidency.