Arizona SB 1467 Demands Total Excretion Failure

Mathematician friend Johanna Franklin draws my attention to fantastically ill-drafted Senate Bill 1467 in Arizona, which begins:

A. If a person who provides classroom instruction in a public school engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio:

...and then outlines penalties including a one-week suspension without pay for the first offense, and termination for the third. "Public school" is defined to include everything from public preschools to public elementary schools to public universities.

The catastrophic failure of drafting is that the bill doesn't ever say that the offending "speech or conduct" has to occur while teaching, or in front of students. If any teacher visits the restroom and performs standard human restroom activities (never mind going home and having sex with one's partner) they get suspended and eventually fired. After all, you couldn't show that on TV.

Not that a version of the bill that restricted the restrictions to teaching contexts would be reasonable. You couldn't discuss R-rated movies in college-level film studies classes or explain Cohen vs California in law school. But it's rare that you get legislation so badly drafted that it would render the excretory systems of all public school and university teachers legally unusable.

Don't Fear The Bishops

If Amanda Marcotte, Jon Cohn, and Scott Lemieux are happy about the Obama contraception decision, I'll be happy too. Other happy groups include Planned Parenthood and the Catholic Hospitals Association, as Cohn says.

I'm impressed with the number of American Catholic groups that have these issues right. The nuns supported health care reform, and polling results often show lay members of the church to have positive attitudes towards contraception. The bishops get a lot of press and drive media coverage, but they seem to be pretty badly out of step with the views of ordinary Catholics, with little hope of converting others to their conservative views.

How Does The Oil Critique of US Foreign Policy Work?

It makes a lot of sense to me that America's military interventions in the Middle East are driven in some unfortunate way by oil-related issues. But I really don't understand how the details work out.

Is American foreign policy about increasing the short-term profits of US oil companies? Increasing their long-term profits? Ensuring a stable flow of oil in the short-term? Ensuring a stable flow of oil in the long-term? Some of these things push in very different directions, and if you were trying to promote one, it would be at the cost of the other.

Suppose, for instance, you were trying to cause short-term increases in US oil company profits. Then you'd be interested in disrupting the stable flow of oil into the US in the short term. Perhaps you'd start wars and create oil supply disruptions in various parts of the world, especially where foreign oil companies operate. With supply reduced, global oil prices would rise, and American companies could charge more for their oil.

Short-term stability of the oil supply also trades off against long-term stability. Wars in the Middle East risk disrupting short-term stability of the oil supply. But presumably part of the reason you'd fight such a war (according to the oil critique) is to ensure long-term stability of the oil supply.

I'd guess that electoral incentives push towards short-term stability of the oil supply, since that has immediate economic relevance that could affect the voting behavior of swing voters. The funny thing is that it seems to push us towards supporting peace in the Middle East rather than war, and reducing short-term oil company profits rather than raising them.

And in any of the short-term versus long-term tradeoffs, you have to wonder what people's time horizons are. How much do politicians care about the oil supply 10 years from now? How much do CEOs care about the oil supply 10 years from now? At that point, the presidents and CEOs will likely be doing something else, so nothing is personally at stake for them. Are they trying to nobly look out for the futures of their institutions at personal cost... by supporting wars? It's hard for me to figure this out.

It's Mitt!

It looks like Republicans have set themselves up to nominate Mitt Romney, answering the longstanding question of whether we'd be running against him or the easier-to-beat but crazier Gingrich / Santorum / Cain / Perry / Bachmann / Palin.

For a long time, I wondered how Mitt would win a one-on-one campaign against a genuine conservative. The answer turned out to be pretty simple -- by buying lots and lots of negative ads. While running one-on-one would in theory take the large number of people who opposed Mitt because of his heterodoxies and unite them behind one candidate, it also allowed Mitt to go massively negative against one opponent with all his money. We saw this twice in the campaign -- Iowa in early December, and Florida in the last week, knocking Gingrich out of sizable leads both times. That Gingrich had lots of flaws made it easier, but really I see Mitt's ability to devastate any underfunded opponent with focused negative advertising as the crucial factor here. I'm hoping that Gingrich fights on and fights hard, so that Romney has some difficulty transitioning into general election mode, but that's really all he's good for at this point.

Cain Endorses! (Nobody Cares)

A while ago I wrote that it was smart of Gingrich to do friendly one-on-one debates with implausible GOP candidates like Herman Cain, because their fans would think well of him. Turns out that he managed to get Cain's endorsement out of it too.

This won't matter for the current race, as Romney's pulling ahead in Florida. And after Cain's disgraceful fall, I doubt that his endorsement moves anybody at this point. But it's the kind of strategy that future presidential candidates might do well to look into.