Positive Liberty

Barring a drastic change, there will be no great showdown on election night, and we’ll all know the outcome before the bars close. Heck, it looks like we’ll know the outcome before the bars open.

My projections show Obama winning 338 electoral votes to McCain’s 200.

What’s fascinating is the movement of particular states. In Colorado and Virginia, which we all knew Obama had a chance to win, the majority of polls now show Obama with a lead larger than the margin of error, and none of them shows McCain leading. Ohio and Florida have both shifted from the McCain column to the Obama column, although it’s still close in both states–but such sizable movements this late in the campaign tend to not reverse. In Pennsylvania, no poll shows McCain closer than 8 points to Obama, and most show Obama with a double-digit lead.

That’s the Pennsylvania that dissed Obama in favor of Clinton, where people cling to their guns and religion, and where the McCain just sent Palin to try to shore up his crumbling support. McCain has already given up on Michigan, and now he might as well give up on Pennsylvania, because it looks like a lost cause.

Except that he can’t. Without Pennsylvania, even if he retreives Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado–all of which went Republican in ‘04–he still only wins 247 electoral votes. Add in Pennsylvania’s 21, and he would have…268, still 2 shy of victory.

So here’s McCain’s situation: He has to retrieve Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and 1 more state from Obama. Raise your hand if you thank that’s possible

[Addendum: I really should have shifted North Carolina out of the McCain column to "tossup," which makes things marginally worse for him. At the very least he has to put money and effort into depending what should have been a certain state, making it that much harder to recover the others. But according to his campaign's political director, they've got Obama "right where they want him." ]

Two nights ago my friend Jeff called, and we had a long talk about the election. As he plumped for McCain I found myself getting unaccountably angry. Why should McCain make me so angry now, when a year ago I was leaning toward voting for him? As I thought about it, I realized I feel like a jilted lover–for the first time since ‘92, both major party candidates had a chance to win my vote, and both have disappointed me, but John McCain has been by far the biggest disappointment. Continue Reading »

I found this interesting bit on my brother’s blog. Apparently John McCain told a newspaper in Peublo, Colorado, that the Colorado River Compact should be renegotiated to give the southwestern members–Arizona, Nevada, and California–a larger share of the Colorado River’s water.

A little background for those who don’t follow western water issues, which are among the most contentious and fascinating but little known politics in the country. (The Eastern media don’t cover it much, because it mostly plays out in flyover country–places where news execs go to rent a fancy cabin and do a little flyfishing while interacting with the locals as little as possible.) The Colorado River Compact was created to deal with the issues of using the water in the Colorado River. It’s a classic collective action problem: no one state has an incentive to conserve the water, but collectively their incautious use is destructive. Mexico is also a partner to the Colorado River, but not to the Compact, and often so much water gets taken out that the river dries up before reaching Mexico, and what does get there is a sludge of agricultural pesticide runoff. (In contrast, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec are Associate Members of the Great Lakes Compact, so Canada’s voce is heard in those matters.)

But traditionally California has gotten the lion’s share of the water, and Arizona, with an ever-growing Phoenix, keeps claiming more and more. Recognizing that a long-established use of water is harder to reverse than a new claim to more water, the more northerly states in the Compact, particularly Colorado, which is also ever-growing, have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent California and Arizona from getting rights to more water, which would limit how much Colorado could use.

So McCain’s comments, if played up by Obama, could easily cost him Colorado’s electoral votes. Colorado, having had an influx of Californians in the ’90s and ’00s, keeps edging closer to going into the Democratic column. Had it done so in either 2000 or 2004, the Democrats would have won the presidency. McCain’s odds of winning the presidency without Colorado–slimmer than Kate Moss’s ass.

In a recent post to this blog, Jason Kuznicki made the point that we should oppose national service plans…

even if nice people like… Barack Obama are the ones holding the whips. Barack Obama? Yes indeed. He touts a “universal voluntary public service.” Right on his website. But if it’s voluntary, it won’t be universal, and if it’s universal, it won’t be voluntary. The plan is self-contradictory right down to the details…

I usually pass up opportunities to criticize Obama because most people assume that means I’m supporting someone else in the race, like McCain. But I’m not.

Obama is, despite the swooning, just a politician — nothing more.

A couple of months ago I heard him close a nationally-televised speech saying something along the lines of, “We live in the greatest country on Earth, and if you join with me, we’ll work together to fix it.” Huh?

Now, I have a theory about this odd, seemingly contradictory behavior. Continue Reading »

Lately I’ve been hearing a very weird and ill-considered argument, and as far as I can tell it always goes unchallenged. I thought I’d put some numbers to it, and when I did, I found that the argument got even weirder.

Marc Ambinder (quoted by Publius at Obsidian Wings) states it as follows:

[McCain’s] concern now [] is procedural, rather than constitutional: the detainees’ having access to habeas in our federal courts would create a tangled web of lawsuits, would expose intelligence secrets, and would needlessly draw out these legal proceedings.

Exposing intelligence secrets is obviously a valid concern, and one for which legislation can surely be crafted. But the flood of lawsuits is a total phantom.

There are now 2.2 million prisoners in our criminal justice system. Every single one of them may file a federal habeas petition whenever he pleases. The rest of us may also file habeas petitions on their behalf, again whenever we please.

This does not mean that the writ will always issue, or that a judicial hearing will necessarily result. It just means that you may ask for the writ, and if the judge agrees, he may issue one. If the judge thinks your petition is groundless, he is free to deny it — but at least you can ask. This is true of all 2.2 million prisoners, and of all 300 million or so free Americans.

Now come 355 detainees who would like the same right. “Oh no,” say the conservatives. “We’d be faced with a flood of lawsuits.”

Give me a break.

For roughly 2.2 million prisoners, there were collectively filed about 19,200 federal habeas petitions in 2004. Let’s assume that the Gitmo detainees — who often don’t even speak English — were to file at the same rate as ordinary prisoners. That would mean about three more petitions per year, a staggering .016% increase.

But let’s assume that these prisoners are extraordinarily motivated, which they may well be. We’ll assume that each of them files one petition, and that an outside agent files one for each of them as well. Assuming that none of these petitions were combined — which is highly unlikely — we would see a 3.6% increase in the total number of federal habeas petitions to review.

And how successful is a typical petition? According to the Department of Justice, 98% of federal habeas petitions are dismissed or denied on the merits, while only 2% result in new trial proceedings. (In death penalty cases, the rate can reach up to 40%, although none of the Gitmo detainees are facing death sentences as of this writing.)

Take our hypothetical group of highly motivated detainees, who were also — hypothetically — very lucky in their selection of habeas causes, such that there are no duplicate or combined petitions. This cohort now has 710 petitions pending before federal judges. From these, we may expect perhaps 14 new trials. Or, if writs end up issuing more like they do in death penalty cases, there will be 284 new trials (assuming that the non-combined habeas petitions are distributed such that only one of them is ever granted per prisoner — again, a highly favorable assumption).

Now consider that there were 69,575 total federal criminal cases filed in 2005. Even granting the most absurdly favorable assumptions imaginable, Gitmo habeas hearings will cause the federal caseload to go up by .4%.

Of course, if the detainees turn out to be more like ordinary U.S. prisoners in their habeas statistics, we may expect one additional trial about every twenty years or so. God forbid that Gitmo stays open that long, but — like I said — this just shows that the “flood” of lawsuits is an ill-considered and very strange reason to deny anyone the right to petition for habeas corpus.

(Yes, 2.2 million prisoners is a shameful statistic all by itself. For the reasons behind it, see this graph.)