The View from Right Field

The Right Way to Eat a Hot dog

Paul Trap, in the current issue of Baseball America, tells the right way to eat a hot dog:

Three Cheers for Virginia: They’re Dumping Touch-Screen Voting Machines

Three cheers for Virginia because the Virginia Board of Elections has ordered that electronic, touch-screen voting machines cannot be used in the statewide elections coming up in November.¹  Earlier this year, in a demonstration at DEF CON in Las Vegas, a touch-screen voting machine previously used in Virginia was hacked in less than two hours.  Instead of touch-screen voting, Virginia will use paper ballots counted by scanning machines in November.

This seems so logical, even before the reports of Russian hacking attempts in last year’s election, that the decision is an obvious one.  Touch-screen electronic voting has no paper backup.  You touch the screen, your vote is counted, and poof, any evidence of how you voted disappears.²  There is no way to recount the votes.  There is no way to know for sure that when you touch Candidate A, your vote wasn’t counted for Candidate B.

Sexual Assault on College Campuses: Betsy DeVos Is Doing It the Right Way

A presidential administration is more than just the person at the top.  It includes all of the people working for the president, too.  Sometimes a lower level appointee can do something really dumb or stupid.  The policy they are trying to implement might be bad or the way they are going about doing it is wrong.  And this reflects on the president.

On other hand, sometimes it is the president who is the one doing something stupid while it is his or her appointees who are doing things the right way.  Just last week, we saw a great example of this coming out of Washington. 

Something I talk about a lot in his blog is “proper procedure,” what others call “rule of law,” I call proper procedure.  (See, for example, here and here.) To me, one of the most important things government, and the people in government, can do is to follow proper procedures.  Getting policy right is important.  Following the proper procedures is more important.  Because making sure government follows proper procedures, i.e., rule of law, is what preserves our rights and protects us from abuse of governmental power, something which is ever more important as government does more and more.

Remember: October Is a Whole New Season

Three days ago, the Cubs had a five-game lead in the National League Central on both the Cardinals and the Brewers.  And with the Brewers coming to town, we had the chance to put them away and then just worry about the Cardinals.  Obviously, things did not work out that way.  The Brewers swept the Cubs; the Cardinals swept the Pirates.  Now both the Brewers and Cardinals are just two games behind.

Last year at this time the Cubs were cruising.  We had the best record in baseball, and we were going to postseason.  The enthusiasm was getting to be so much that I wrote a couple of posts, warning that in baseball today, with all the teams that make the playoffs, what you do in the regular season isn’t that important.  It’s all about October.  October is a whole new season.¹

If North Korea Tests Yet Another ICBM

Reports are that North Korea will be test launching yet another ICBM.  The question, of course, is what should the United States do.  David Sanger lays out some of the options.

As noted, the “shooting it down once it is launched” option sounds great – except what if it doesn’t work.  And it’s not just a matter of who would win a resulting propaganda war.  It’s more a matter of sending the wrong signals to North Korea.  A failure might give the North Koreans, or at least Kim Jong Un, the wrong idea as to what he might be able to do.  Better that we keep developing our anti-missile defenses, and forcing Kim Jong Un to think they probably will work.

While it may be hard to decide among the courses of action Mr. Sanger lists, there are things that are easy to decide.  Here are some of them:

A Few Thoughts on “Dreamers”

“Dreamers” is shorthand for people who were brought to the United States when their parents came here illegally.  In 2012, Barack Obama issued an executive order¹ establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program.  The program allowed people, who came to the U.S. before 2007 and before they turned 16 and who do not have a criminal record, to apply for two-year renewable permits to legally live and work here. 

President Obama initially called on Congress to pass a law to protect Dreamers (among other things), but when Congress failed to do so, he invoked his own special “Congress-won’t-do-what-I-want-so-I-can-do-it-anyway” principle of constitutional law² and issued an executive order establishing the DACA program.

Just How Welcoming is Welcoming?

The town I live in just passed a resolution declaring it was a welcoming community.  My church did the same thing.  All of which is fine.  You should welcome people.  It’s what churches are supposed to do.  And towns, too.  Welcoming people is the nice thing to do and the proper way to behave.

But I do sort of wonder how welcoming some of these groups really are.  Are they going to welcome people who support President Trump, too?  If it doesn’t matter what you do in your bedroom or where you go to the bathroom, should it matter who you support politically or who you vote for in the polling booth?

True welcoming is not about being nice to people you agree with.  It’s easy to welcome people you like.  Real welcoming is about being nice to people you disagree with.  That’s harder.

Does It Count As a Lie, If You’re Just Doing What Your Predecessor Did?

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that we have 11,000 troops in Afghanistan, not 8,400 they had claimed since back in the Obama administration.  Foreign Policy explains:

“The accounting issue had long dogged the Obama administration, which established a troop cap of 8,400 in Afghanistan, as well as Trump defense officials who inherited the policy.  The force levels chosen by the Obama White House[,] which capped troop numbers at 5,200 in Iraq and 503 in Syria, were handed down with little regard for the size of individual units, who were forced to deploy in bits and pieces. …

Military commanders bristled at having to break apart units to fit within the arbitrary caps, and sent thousands of troops on temporary assignments to fill holes.  Those deployments pushed the deployments over their approved limit, but Pentagon leaders said since the additional troops were only there for weeks or a few months at a time, they didn’t count against the cap.”