Choices

Is it just me, or is this year's crop of Republican candidates the worst ever? They make Reagan look brilliant and Nixon sound honest. There's not one that I'd want selling me a car, much less running my country. On the flip side, the Dems seem a pretty viable bunch, with occasional lapses. Granted, I'm biased. But OMG.

Republican Holiday Song
On the first day of Christmas, my Party sent to me
A fem-bot named Giuliani.

To be continued. . . .

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Buck

This one has both antlers. The one-antler guy has vanished, perhaps due to hunting season, perhaps not.

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Consensus v. Majority Rule

I've written before about the difference between the political board and the professional, or corporate, board. In NYS, and perhaps in most states, school boards are encouraged to work toward consensus, which is a management model, not a democratic one. Interestingly, it is also a Quaker model, and a model historically used by the Haudenosaunee people of upstate NY.

Consensus decision-making is egalitarian and requires universal participation, both of which are good things. The main issue for school boards (and businesses), though, is that it builds commitment to a decision--if everyone agrees to a greater or lesser extent, then everyone is automatically behind the decision and must (in theory, anyway) therefore support it publicly.

The negatives, as I see it, are that consensus building is time-consuming, that it often results in halfhearted decision-making, and that it tends to lead to groupthink, which is not necessarily the same as genuine thought. (One classic example is the so-called "Abilene Paradox.")

I think consensus decision-making does not fit with a political model of board governance. If a board member truly represents a constituency, he or she cannot reasonably alter that to suit the whim of the group. That's a paradox all of us on BOEs face as we try to make decisions for the districts we serve.

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Just Another Pretty Face

SAZ writes the following:

I thought you might like to regret with me this scientific paper from PNAS last month:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Vol. 104 page 17948
Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments

Charles C. Ballew, II* and Alexander Todorov*

*Department of Psychology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540

Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved September 25, 2007 (received for review June 10, 2007)

Here we show that rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded from all analyses. Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces of the winner and the runner-up as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure (Experiment 1). Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s (Experiment 2). Finally, competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races (Experiment 3). These effects were independent of the incumbency status of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

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Afghanistan

Lisa sends these photos from Afghanistan, where her Alliance runs an armchair ESL program. Pretty remarkable. Kabul is not exactly Baghdad.

Women faculty members leave their burkas at the door outside of the computer lab.

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Mitt Romney, You're No Jack Kennedy

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so--and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.

I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.

This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died."

And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died--when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches--when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom--and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey--but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.

--JFK, September 12, 1960

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His Future's So Bright, He Has to Wear Shades

Here's Andy Cuomo's new website, designed to tell all NY'ers exactly to whom their elected officials are pandering--oops, I mean for whom they are bringing home the "bacon"--and who is filling their coffers at the same time. It's a work in progress, but the potential is there for it to be quite useful and educational. There's a lot of information here that's available elsewhere, but here it's all nicely combined and easy to access.

And of course, we all notice that AC is getting a lot more favorable press than ES. Loved his dad; that's the best I can say for the guy.

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