Gambling on Elections

Which do you think is better protected against fraud: Las Vegas slot machines or electronic voting machines?

To no one's surprise, I'm sure, the answer is Las Vegas slot machines.

This gives me an opportunity to highlight the work of Verified Voting, an organization dedicated to verifiable elections. Election fraud has a long and storied history, but electronic voting machines can dramatically increase the risk.

(Disclaimer: Verified Voting was founded by David Dill, a Stanford computer science professor and a friend of mine, and I have donated money to both the lobbying arm and the education arm.)

A Modest Proposal

I am a woman of child-bearing age. My personal autonomy seems be under assault these days. So I have a modest proposal for all male congressmen, legislators, governors, and presidents who vote for or sign bills that limit my access to contraceptives, emergency contraception, HPV vaccines and abortion.

You have never been pregnant. You never will be pregnant. You can never know what it's like to be pregnant. But, since you seem determined to force me to be pregnant, I think you ought to give up some degree of autonomy as well. Every year or two, you should be required to take a homeless person into your home and house and feed them for nine months. Ridiculous, you say? What if they bring a weapon with them, you ask? Oh, they probably won't kill you. Sure, that stab wound might harm your health, but that homeless guy is a person, too! If you don't house him, he might die of exposure out there in the cold night. It's only nine months, after all.

I've never had an abortion, and hope to never have one. However, I do know there are conditions under which I would seek an abortion. Were I to get pregnant and discover there was a serious defect, such as anencephaly, with the fetus, I would abort the pregnancy. If I were raped and impregnated, I would want emergency contraception.

There are other scenarios I could imagine as well, some less clear cut than others. It would be a complicated, difficult decision, but it should be my decision, since I'm the one who has to live with it. I'm the one who has to go through pregnancy and the risks associated with it, if I don't choose abortion. How can you possibly know what the right decision is for me?

Do some women choose abortions in cases where I wouldn't? I'm sure they do. I'm sure some women choose to carry pregnancies to term is cases where I would choose abortion, as well. Limiting our access to contraception, whether it's by denying funding for contraception at public clinics or overriding state laws requiring insurers to cover contraception, just creates more difficult situations where that decision has to be made. Telling women to just not have sex if they don't want to be pregnant denies our humanity.

And taking the decision away from us denies our autonomy. So, until you're willing to give up your autonomy, or until you can figure out how to be pregnant, please respect our desire to have some control over what happens to our own bodies.

Torts Aren't Enough

I have a friend, good Republican that he is, that believes that we should have very little government regulation. He believes that the tort system is good enough to keep companies in line. They do something wrong, sue the pants off 'em.

We can debate the merits of that stance in theory, but in practice, a big company can tie up legal judgements for years in appeals. Take Exxon, for example. Eighteen years ago, an Exxon oil tanker piloted by a drunk captain ran aground in Prince William Sound and dumped 11 million gallons of oil into the waters of a prime fishing area.

Eighteen years ago. Exxon paid $2.3 billion in cleanup costs, though only about 10% of the oil spilled is estimated to have been cleaned up. They have not paid on a $5 billion punitive damages class-action suit they lost 13 years ago. That number may sound high, but it was based on one year's worth of profits back then.

Exxon's profits last year? $36 billion. Think they can afford a team of lawyers to keep this thing tied up indefinitely?

Without punitive damages, big companies can just make cost-benefit analyses about safety and protecting the environment. They'll make estimates about the cost of damages, and may conclude that it's cheaper to roll the dice and pay the damages if they lose than to pay money up front to lessen the risk of creating the damage in the first place. They'll estimate the cost of cleaning up the environment, without taking into account that environmental damage of this magnitude basically can't be cleaned up. Punitive damages are necessary to disrupt that calculation.

But if the company can keep the judgement tied up for this long, the calculation hasn't been disrupted. Exxon paid $300 million in actual damages. Think that's enough to make them be more careful?

You Don't Know Me At All

You don’t know me.

I come into your pharmacy to fill my prescriptions, but you seldom interact with me.  Most of the time, a cashier handles the whole encounter.  If you saw me on the street, you wouldn’t even realize that you fill my prescriptions.  

Occasionally, if I’m picking up a new prescription for a new drug, the cashier will ask if I want to speak to the pharmacist.  I usually say no.  Why would I?  I can read and understand the drug insert myself.  I’ve already discussed the drug with my doctor.  Why would I want to talk to you, when I don’t know you anymore than you know me?

You don’t know why my doctor prescribed this particular drug for me at this particular time.  Even if we were to talk, I might not want to tell you why I’m being prescribed this drug.  There are probably people behind me in line, and more people in the store, and maybe I don’t want to share my condition with everybody.  I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in this situation.  

It’s also unclear to me what degree of confidentiality I can expect from a pharmacist.  I’m sure you are professional and would take measures to ensure confidentiality, but legally, I don’t know what the bounds are.  

So, that’s why I have a problem with you wanting to refuse to fill my prescription on moral grounds.  Without knowing me at all, without having a relationship with me, without understanding the situation, you have decided that the reason my doctor prescribed this drug for me is not acceptable.  

You’d probably think it was ridiculous if the grocery store checkout clerk refused to ring up your steaks because she was a member of PETA.  You might respect her beliefs, but think that she has no right to require you to follow those same beliefs.  Perhaps you’d think that she should respect your right to make your own decisions, and that maybe she should give you some credit for being autonomous and able to make the best decision for your particular situation.  Maybe you’d think that if she can’t ring up meat, she should find another line of work.

And maybe if you can’t trust me and my doctor to make the right choices for my situation, you should find another line of work, too.
  

Why Are We There?

The first rule of holes is, when you’re in one, stop digging.

President Bush says America won’t “cut and run.”  What does that mean, in regards to Iraq?  What is our mission, our goal in Iraq?  How many more people must die before we realize that “staying the course” is exacerbating the problem?

Even if we had a defined goal in Iraq, what gave us the right to go over there and destroy their country?  Trumped-up intel about weapons of mass destruction?  That was an excuse, not a reason.

I never have figured out exactly what the reason was for invading Iraq.  Sure, Saddam Hussein was a vile dictator, and no friend of the US, at least not anymore.  We liked him much better when he was fighting Iran, of course.  Hussein was hardly the only vile dictator on the planet, though, and he was pretty well contained by inspections and sanctions.  The WMD claims never made sense in light of the economic realities of the situation.  Did Hussein want WMDs?  Undoubtedly.  Was he willing to claim that he had them when he didn’t?  Sure, but not to intimidate the US; it always seemed to me that he was puffing himself up to seem less vulnerable to the rest of the Arab world, not the US.  

There’s never been any credible evidence that Iraq was involved with the 9/11 terrorists or al Qaeda.  Hussein is not an Islamic radical; he doesn’t share the goals of al Qaeda.  Iraq may have been a terrible dictatorship, but it wasn’t ruled by Sharia law, either.  Osama bin Laden and his followers are much more likely to be in accord with the Shi’ite majority that will likely emerge as the dominant power in the region.

A re-enactment of the Crusades seems to be the only idea left.  Convert or kill the infidels.  Could anyone have really believed that we’d be greeted as “liberators’?  That it was possible to create a democracy by force?  That democracy would then sweep across the rest of the Arab world?  

There are some who believe that we’re in a titanic, good vs. evil struggle, with the forces of Islam poised to overrun us and destroy our way of life.  While it is certainly true that the Muslim population holds us in no high regard, it’s not clear to me it’s because they want to dominate us and wipe us out.  Their hatred of us seems to me more than explained by our actions in that part of the world.  We’ve propped up dictators when they do our bidding, we’ve funded and trained armies when they were fighting countries we didn’t like, and then we decided that what they really needed was a good dose of democracy, whether they wanted it or not, so we sent troops over there to give it to them.  

They don’t hate us because we’re free.  They hate us because we treat them like pawns, not people.