I was looking up the questions and candidates on which I’ll be voting this November. Figuring that others might like more information and are easily swayed by my golden voice, I’ve put up my endorsements. These are purely my personal opinions and probably ill-formed ones at that.

State-wide Elections

Federal Senator

Kennedy (D). His opponent Chase (R) hasn’t come up with any compelling reasons to prefer him.

Governor

Patrick (D). Mihos (I) and Healey (R) don’t do anything for me. I almost recommended Ross (GR) because I dig on third parties and I support the environmentalism of her party, but Patrick appears pretty green himself. And his campaign and policy positions are a heck of a lot more put together.

Attorney General

Martha Coakley (D). She’s qualified and has a good record in Middlesex.

Secretary of State

Jill Stein (GR). Bill Galvin (D) has been a good Secretary, but Stein favors real voting reform. She supports clean elections, fair redistricting, and most importantly, instant runoff voting.

Treasurer

James O’Keefe (GR). I don’t care too much about this one. The current Treasurer Cahill (D) seems OK. But O’Keefe is distinctly pro-environment and a corporate watchdog. I think his mistrust of nuclear power is misplaced, but he’s a good candidate and third-party to boot.

Auditor

Rand Wilson (WF). I don’t have much of an opinion here either, but Wilson is doing something interesting. He’s a Working Families Party candidate, the first and only one on the ballot in Massachusetts. The WF Party sponsored Question 2 (see below) allowing fusion voting. He hopes to get at least 3% of the vote so that the WF Party will be, if Question 2 is adopted, an officially recognized party that will be able to participate in fusion voting. Again, I like party diversity, so I’m in favor of adding another voice.

Local-to-Me Elections

Federal Representative

Michael Capuano (D). Not my favorite candidate (e.g. doesn’t support my pet issue of voting reform), but he’s decent. Strongly anti-war. Plus, I can’t seem to find any information about his opponent, Socialist Workers candidate Laura Garza. Although I feel mildly guilty at such elitism, I can’t take a candidate without a web site very seriously.

Councillor

Michael Callahan (D). He’s the incumbent and seems to be doing alright — the courts have been doing some good work (councillors approve court appointees). His opponents all seem to favor term limits for judges, but I prefer judges that are not directly accountable.

Binding Ballot Questions

Question 1

This question would allow food stores (groceries, convenience, etc) to sell wine. This would be an additional license category and so increase (apparently double) the total number of liquor-type licenses. It interestingly includes a provision that no one entity can be granted more than 10% of the licenses.

I like it. I think alcohol should not be treated as such a controlled substance, so more access is good. I find it odd that the law would only apply to stores that already sell food and only allow the sale of wine. But whatever. Fewer restrictions are good, so I’d vote yes.

Question 2

This is the “fusion voting” question. It allows a candidate to be nominated by multiple parties and appear multiple times on the final ballot. All votes still count for the candidate, but now the vote has a bit of metadata associated with it: the party the voter prefers. This lets candidates run on a multiparty platform and allows third parties to grow recognition and influence.

I’ve written about this before, and I’m a strong supporter of third parties. This could really help foster wider debate and precipitate a healthy ecosystem of parties.

I highly recommend voting yes on Question 2.

Question 3

This question would allow state-subsidized family child care providers to unionize. They could not strike, but they would be allowed to choose a collective bargaining organization to represent them.

I don’t see why this would be bad. I assume the reason state employees can’t unionize is to prevent striking and denial of state services. Which would definitely suck if the striker was your kid’s provider. But this just gives them more clout and a louder voice when negotiating contracts. I’m for a yes vote.

I know this is kind of a tired point, but really, it doesn’t look like half our population gets it. Terrorism is such a small problem. The real issues are diseases, social inequities, and everyday hardships.

The same reason we feel like we always get the line with the slowest people is because we don’t bother remembering all those times we get quick lines. We are conditioned to remember extraordinary events. But you can’t spend your life worrying about extraordinary problems. The ordinary ones are usually enough.

Daniel Gilbert actually did a really good talk about this at SXSW 2006 called “How to do precisely the right thing all the time.” He talks about the process by which people make estimates and assign values to actions. And how and why we consistently get it so wrong.

A few days ago, there was a Wired article about the numbers of people that die a year from various things. Way more people die in inane ways than from acts of terrorism (e.g. 5 times as many people die from hernias).

The only thing that the terrorists have done is provide a useful boogie man. A War on Terror is such an obviously unwinnable, never ending struggle, that I’m put to mind of the intentionally eternal war in 1984, for the sake of which the populace gave complete power to Big Brother.

“The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
– from 1984

Woo! I just read that Fusion voting is on the ballot for this November in Massachusetts. The Working Families Party has been working to put it there in the hope of being able to be a viable third party in the state.

I’ve long been a fan of third parties and attempts to make them viable. Fusion voting is a nice baby step towards self-sufficiency for a third party. What it does is let a third party endorse a candidate running in a different party. So the Green Party can endorse Senator Kennedy if they like and he’ll show up on the ballot in two places: under the Democrats and under the Green Party. Either vote will be for him, but your vote now has a bit of metadata attached to it: which party you prefer. This is a way for third parties to grow recognition and gradually gain political power.

Since the Green Party could also endorse a candidate for the Democratic primary, they could have a significant effect on how Democratic candidates position themselves. They could always run their own candidate if they want, but there’s no longer the requirement to do so.

Anyway, I recommend voting for it come November.

My friend Sarah writes about Macy’s and their concessions to the anti-gay lobby. I totally agree with her.

However, one thing she said caught my attention: “[P]eople don’t choose to be gay.” I see this point made frequently by gay apologists, and I don’t understand why it’s relevant.

In fact, Jon Stewart recently made the point when talking to Bill Bennet, and as much as I loved seeing Jon cut through Bill’s bigotry, I was very uncomfortable when he said, “[Polygamy's] a choice. Being gay is part of the human condition. There’s a huge difference.”

If people were to choose to be gay, would that validate oppression? Why do we care whether it’s nature or nurture? Gays are still people.

By fighting for gay rights under the banner of it just being their nature, we invoke this sort of patronizing victimization. Like, “Aww, they can’t help being so [regrettably] gay. We should give them a break.”

We should be fighting for precisely the right to choose one’s sexuality, not excuse it.

Ah, a political party of which I would be proud to be a member: the Pirate Party.

Newly formed, it’s tenets are:

• Reform copyright law to decriminalize noncommercial sharing, limit copyright to five years, and ban DRM.
• Refom patent law to curb excesses and again limit the granted monopoly to five years.
• A return to pre-9/11 privacy rights and hopefully better.

Plus you get to be a card-carrying pirate.

Now, this seems like a very small and narrow plank to promote, even to me. But whatever, third parties are great. There are so many angles to approach politics. It boggles my mind that people are satisfied with merely two views of the world.

Imagine for a second that America woke up and started using the Condorcet method. Then so much pressure would be off third parties. Not only could they start fielding candidates even if that candidate didn’t have a very good shot, but they could field multiple candidates.

We might see a proliferation of single-issue third parties like the PP that could simply endorse candidates in various races as meeting their approval. So Jane Doe could run not just as “the Pirate Party candidate,” but as a candidate endorsed by the Pirate Party, the Libertarians, and the Party For People Named Jane. Kinda like open ballot voting, but from the other end.

Anyway, I should give a shout out to FairVote for consistently pushing for better voting systems in the US. If I had to be pigeonholed as a single-issue voter, it would probably be for more representative voting.

I’ve always felt that government should govern smarter, not harder. There’s a lot of crazy inefficiencies that come attached to a big hammer approach.

By way of analogy, imagine an aquarium where I keep sharks. I could buy and feed them some fish everyday at great expense and manpower. Or, I could put lots of fish in there and smaller fish, and plankton, etc, and create an ecosystem. This system would fuel itself at little further cost to me.

OK, maybe not a great analogy. What I’m trying to say is that the machinery for a healthy society is so much more valuable than temporary applications of the end result.

My favorite example of this is community voice mail — free voice mail services for homeless people.

Being homeless makes it very difficult to aquire a job and thereby pull yourself up by your bootstraps. One huge stumbling block is not having a way for an employer to contact you. But a pay-phone-accessible free voice mail account solves that problem nicely at very low cost.

Another example is carbon credits, where polluters can buy and sell on an open market the right to pollute a certain amount. There’s now an economic pull to pollute less, because you can sell the unused credits. It doesn’t cost much money, is a very malleable system, and incentivizes responsible behavior without crippling the industry with excessive oversight.

By combining market forces with environmental stewardship, you get the principle actors to do much of the heavy lifting. This subtle change to the bottom line yields drastic results at the top.

Public education is also machinery for social good. It’s an admittedly non-trivial investment and the payoff is difficult to measure, but it’s not hard to believe it’s worth the cost. You get a skilled work force, a critically-thinking electorate, and smart people ready to solve the next round of social problems.

Such social investments elegantly sooth community ills much more effectively than the one-time relief oft doled out.

While looking at the house in which John Adams first cried, the tour guide mentioned that Massachusetts is the only state to have the importance of an accessible education codified in its constitution.

That is awesome. Maybe we’re not enacting that directive the best, but our hearts are in the right place.

I always liked the West Wing episode where Sam is trying to formulate a policy position on school vouchers. He plays devil’s advocate for a while before saying:

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. School should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

Massachusetts should just take over the other 49 states.

I am so sick of the Republicans threatening to change Senate rules to disallow filibustering. Or really, I’m so sick of Democrats being afraid of them.

Just filibuster already! If the Republicans throw out filibustering in response (the so-called nuclear option), more’s the pity, but two things:

1. If Dems never filibuster because they are cowering in fear of the threat, they’ve already lost the ability to filibuster. The terrorists will have already won! In fact, it means that only Republicans can filibuster, a worse position than no filibusters at all.
2. The Senate majority has always had the ability to ban filibusters, but they’ve never done it. There must be reasons, like oh, the shear audacity of destroying a democratic tradition purely for short-term partisan benefits. If they do it now, surely there will be some backlash. I suspect banning filibusters is easier said than done.

Democrats, don’t let the majority threaten away one of the few tricks left in your bag. Use it or lose it. And if you both use it and lose it, at least you went down fighting.