Cleaning house

You will see numerous new blog posts today. This is mostly house cleaning... I have many partially written posts that I am completing as best I can. They are not quite as polished as I would like, but I don't want them to go to waste.

A Year of Lament

Although this blog started in 2004, it really became active this past year. I changed my focus from a being a second rate Daily Kos to being a second rate Rum, Romanism and Rebellion. I am including some fun facts and milestones from the year:

1. Just in under the wire, we have our first blog contributor Joe. Please welcome Joe to the fray! His first post is up...
2. We ended the year with 4,297 unique visitors this year and many more page views.
3. The majority of our readers are from the Phoenix Metro area, Tucson is second and oddly enough Irvine California is third. There were visitors from 51 countries outside of the US. Canada, the UK and Spain topped the list.

Here are the top ten blog entries for the year:

1. Michael Nowakowski: No Friend to Payday Lenders
2. Michael Nowakowski wins!
3. Michael Nowakowski: Why he won
4. Phoenix City Council District 7
5. I hate people like this...
6. http://ademlament.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_archive.html
7. UFCW and Bashas: Eddie just let them vote
8. Wade Leaving State Chair Position: Good For All the Right Reasons
9. Pastor Push Poll?
10. Hepatitis at Cheesecake Factory: There is a moral to this story

Clearly it was a good year for local politics and I hear the message loud and clear, more local politics. I will spend a good part of the coming year talking about Andrew Thomas and hoping for his defeat.

Top 5 topics:

1. Andrew Thomas (32 blog entries).
2. Arizona Legislature (17).
3. Immigration (16)
4. The environment and Phoenix district 7 tied (13)
5. Economics (12)

I want to thank everyone who left comments and participated this year and thanks for reading. Please feel free to send recommendation on what you would like to hear about next year or suggestions (ademlament@gmail.com). Also, anyone interested in becoming a contributor, drop me a line. I am still looking for 1 or 2 more contributors.

Finally, I want to thank my favorite Arizona blogs for doing what they do (in no particular order):

1. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion
2. Blog for Arizona
3. AZ Congress Watch
4. Espresso Pundit
5. Democratic Diva

Sorry if I missed anyone... If you are not on the list, it does not mean I don't like you. Happy New Year everyone!

UPDATE: For some reason this is not showing up in left blogs local section, so here goes: Arizona, Janet Napolitano, Jon Kyl, John McCain, Arizona Republic, Grand Canyon. Hopefully, those are sufficient keywords to get this listed properly....

Landlines vs. Cell Phones: how polling could get it just wrong enough.

It's a minor thing, but it could mean something. Just today, when I was satisfying my fix for more political news, a phrase from Wikipedia hit me in the face. In the article Opinion polling for the Democratic Party (United States) presidential primaries, 2008, the second sentence says, rather bluntly, "The public is generally sampled by land-line telephone only." Now, I usually role my eyes or throw up a little bit when something unexpected happens in politics and people shout "Hey, it's Dewey Defeats Truman all over again!" because they're usually saying it about the dumbest things that don't have nearly as much gravity as a newspaper announcing so surely that the wrong person is now the leader of the United States, but I'm going to probably make myself throw up a little later because, for once, these two things are very, very, very, alike, much more alike than Kerry picking Edwards and not Gephardt being compared to Truman defeating Dewey.

The problem with the Dewey Deafets Truman thing was that the polling company that did the work for that newspaper only did a telephone poll. Back in those days, if you wanted a poll about anything, you found a neighborhood that was the most like the rest of the country, and then you knocked on every door in the neighborhood until you got a good sample. Telephones were nowhere near as common now as they were then (duh), and were clustered in a few areas, like New York-- where Dewey was from. Telephone lines were unknown to vast swathes of America, particularly places where Democrats were more likely to get votes. That's why that poll was so wrong, but so sure about it. Their poll results showed Dewey way ahead-- but the methodology was shoddy.

So let's review that one sentence some anonymous Wikipedia editor submitted one day: "The public is generally sampled by land-line telephone only." What has changed? Cell phones. And who is more likely to have a cell phone? Young people.

I don't really think there's a such thing as a "youth candidate" or a "boomer candidate," and you've probably got a 50/50 chance of being wrong if you label a candidate as either before an election, especially a primary.

The only thing I know about how youth might vote (aside that I am a youth who votes) in the upcoming Democratic primary is that Hillary Clinton saying non-Iowa resident college students shouldn't be allowed to vote in the caucuses may hurt her. I'm holding out on saying whether the phone poll thing will mean that much, but everybody likes to be right.

Just as a final disclaimer, yes, I know it's an encyclopedia anyone can edit. I did get in touch with the person who edited that line into the article, and he told me it was his knowledge of polling procedures. I tried getting in touch with a couple of poll firms to verify, but, suprise suprise, they're not available the weekend before New Year's. I'll try to get some more information soon, but considering that the caucuses are right around the corner, it might just be academic by then.

Immigration, the drug war and unintended consequences

There was this article in the Arizona Republic today about many of the negative and unintended consequences of enforcement only strategies to problems like immigration. There is a very simple economic principle at work on the border. The demand for immigrant labor is largely unchanged (perhaps the Employer Sanctions law will change this?) while the supply is being affected. The anti-immigrant folks will say this is exactly what they wanted. They will say less supply is good, but the problem is that as supply decreases the costs and profitability per person smuggled increases. This leads to greater violence on the border and in our cities as smugglers protect their cargo and profits.

If you are a smuggler you might not be willing to get in a shootout with police over 10 recently smuggled immigrants at $500 dollars a head, but what happens when the price increase to $3000 to $4000 per person? This leads to other smugglers protecting their routes with violence and increases the incentive to kidnap immigrants mid-smuggle.

We have had this same problem with our disastrous drug war. When our public policy is formulated we are not considering the incentives we are creating. Worse yet, we do not try to create the right incentives to bring about our desired goals.

The Employer Sanctions law could be a step towards decreasing demand if it were formulated correctly, but I suspect it is more likely to create a larger underground economy where companies will just pay people off the books to avoid the law. We may very well end up with nearly as many immigrant laborers who paid significantly more to get here and then are forced into worse working conditions in an underground economy. The result will be stronger more profitable gangs of smugglers, a poorer immigrant labor force with a greater likelihood of exploitation and a loss of the current revenue (SSN, Medicare, Fed and State) being collected (I know you anti-immigrant people don’t like to hear it but undocumented workers pay billions into programs like Social Security with no hope of collecting any benefit).

There is a lot of doom and gloom predicted with the Employer Sanctions law (and I don't mean the negative affect it will have of the lives of immigrants already here). I am still not convinced that the sanctions law will devastate the economy. If the immigrant labor force shrinks during an economic contraction (which I think we are entering, especially in construction), I think it may not have a great effect right now. However, it may adversely affect any recovery. It is hard to recover when there is insufficient supply of labor for the activities necessitating a recovery. The economy does not turn on a dime. If there was less immigrant labor inevitably, native born US citizens would fill those jobs, but only after pay and costs rise. I don't buy the they do jobs that Americans won't argument. Having said all of that, I think I share a feeling not uncommon among liberals who completely distrust the authors of this law to be fair and judicious in the intent and execution of this law. I don't trust their aims or motives nor do I believe they have the best interests of this state in mind.

I have been mostly addressing economics in this post, but we cannot overlook our responsibilities as human beings to be compassionate towards the people that live and work beside us. No policy discussion should ignore or fail to acknowledge the humanity or the struggles of the immigrants that have come here seeking a new and better life. They are here because of our policies (and our policy failings) and we have the ultimate responsibility for that.

The Republican establishment finally comes around

Lately, there has been a lot of consternation among establishment Republicans about Mike Huckabee. I find the whole thing pretty funny. To quote the bible, "You reap what you sow." There was this from the Arizona Republic today about Huckabee being offensively and overtly religious in his appeal. I find it particularly funny that so many Republicans can complain with a straight face.

Here is the problem that I think Republicans really have with Huckabee:

They don't control me. I'm not one of theirs. I'm not one of those guys that just owe my soul to the people on Wall Street. I'm not a wholly-owned subsidiary of them. I don't live in the circles of power in Washington. I really do come right up from the people. . . .

There's a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party. They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs, and they say, Oh, my gosh. Now they're serious. They don't want to just show up and vote. They actually would want to be a part of the discussion, and really talk about issues that include hunger and poverty and things that ought to be really a concern to every American, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. . . . (emphasis mine)

I never did propose that we would impose our religion on somebody else. What I did do [as Governor] was improve children's health, education, the road system. But we didn't do it just for the people at the top. The tax policies and other things we did, it helped the people at the bottom so they might have a chance to live the American dream. For that, I apologize to no one. (From the Today Show Via Glenn Greenwald)

I agree that his overt religious gestures have no place in politics, but I find them no more offensive or egregious than most other Republican candidates of the past 10 years. As far as the criticism of Mormons,

"Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Isn't that truly what they believe? That is a pretty soft attack when compared to the attacks lavished on homosexuals, atheists, feminists and liberals over the past eight years. According to many we are destroying the very fabric of society and caused 9/11. Welcome to our club... Tell your former friends to layoff the hyperbole pills...

BTW -- In the interest of being self-congratulatory, I have been warning people about Huckabee for about a year. Even still, I am surprised by his sudden rise. In the end, I think he may end up being a Dean type candidacy. It is hard to fight your own party establishment. Also, just for record, I have been saying that Giuliani did not have a snowballs chance in Hell. I stick by that earlier assessment.