The Greatest Filibusters – The Daily Beast

The filibuster isn’t allowed under general United Nations parliamentary procedure–but its still a great tactic in the U.S. Senate and worthy of major C-Span coverage each time its employed:

As Sen. Joe Lieberman threatens to filibuster the Senate health-care bill, The Daily Beast looks back on obstructionism’s greatest hits. From presumed poisonings and Roquefort salad dressing recipes to public urination and the 15 hours devoted to saving a typewriter company, the strange and twisted history of the Senate filibuster.

via The Greatest Filibusters – The Daily Beast.

 

 

 

How The Nobel Peace Prize Works | The New Republic

The big debate over Obama’s Nobel obscures an intriguing voting system that starts with broad nominations.  (Did you know Armand Hammer tried to buy the prize, but lost out to the Dalai Lama?):

“In 2009, a record 205 nominations were received. Unlike the Oscars or Golden Globe awards, The Committee keeps the nominations secret and asks that nominators do the same for several years. (When the past nominations were released, it was discovered that Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1939, as were Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini.)

“Nominations are considered by the Nobel Committee at a meeting by permanent advisers to the Nobel institute, which consists of the Institute’s Director and Research Director and a small number of Norwegian academics with expertise in subject areas relating to the prize. The 5-man Committee then selects the laureate. Even though it seeks a unanimous decision, the winner may receive a simple majority of 3 votes.”

via How The Nobel Peace Prize Works | The New Republic.

Unesco Voting Concludes

And we have a winner… and she’s from Bulgarian.  The voting was more interesting (perhaps) than the actual outcome; it all came down to the backroom, and this tantalizing tidbit (we heart anon sources!):

In the fourth round of voting on Monday night, the candidates were tied, 29 to 29. Two countries changed their votes overnight in the secret balloting, but it was not clear which ones, since some countries had promised support to Egypt in the first round, but shifted in later rounds, diplomats said.

One person close to the proceedings said that Spain and Italy had shifted their votes after learning new information about what is alleged to have been Mr. Hosny’s role, as an Egyptian diplomat, in protecting the perpetrators of a terrorist act involving an Italian cruise ship in 1985, but that could not be confirmed Tuesday night. The person spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the matter.

The lastest on the round 4 of UNESCO voting:

In the fourth round of voting of Unesco’s 58-nation executive board, the two candidates were tied, 29-29. If the vote remains tied on Tuesday, the 193-member General Conference will choose a new director general next month, and Mr. Hosny is expected to win in the larger body, where Egypt is thought to have more influence.

The original field of nine candidates has been slowly thinned, with Ms. Bokova, who comes from a family that was prominent in the old Communist government, becoming the alternative to Mr. Hosny, 71, who has been Egypt’s culture minister for 22 years.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has pressed hard for his candidate, who had hoped to win with 30 votes in the first round.

But some of the countries that had pledged to Mr. Mubarak to vote for Mr. Hosny — like France, Italy and even Israel — have not felt obliged to keep that commitment in later rounds.

Some American Jewish organizations and civil libertarians have fiercely opposed Mr. Hosny.

In the Egyptian context he is considered liberal, but last year, in a parliamentary debate, defending himself against charges that he was soft on Israel, he said he would personally burn any Israeli book found in the Alexandria library, Egypt’s most important.

Via NYT 21 September 2009

PREVIOUS STORIES:

With more voting on Friday, the game is on for Unesco:

The candidacy of the Egyptian culture minister, Farouk Hosny, left, to lead Unesco suffered a setback on Thursday when he failed to win in the first round of voting. Mr. Hosny had said he had more than the 30 votes required from the 58-nation executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to win outright. But he got only 22 votes, Unesco officials said, and some of the country votes pledged were for only the first round.

via World Briefing – United Nations – No Winner in First Round of Votes for Unesco Chief – NYTimes.com.

And my previous link to the Op-Ed making the case for Hosny.

Taylor Swift and America’s Future – The Conversation Blog – NYTimes.com

To follow up on the enlightening class discussion–led so effectively by TA Chase–here is a teaser from David Brooks (more conservative) and you can follow the link at the bottom to see Gail Collins’ (more liberal) response on this Swiftian crisis of civility:

Thus I am heavily invested in Ms. Swift’s welfare and was grievously afflicted when Kanye West ruined her big moment the other night. My fear is this trauma will send Ms. Swift into the slough of despond and her next album will make Alanis Morissette seem like a trip to Disney World.

My secondary fear is that this moment will mark a turning point in World History, like the battle of Gettysburg, the defeat of the Spanish Armada or when Hot Lips became sympathetic on “M*A*S*H.” I’ve really begun to get quite glum about the future of the republic.

In addition to the swiftboating of Swift, there is this fact: there is a broad consensus on what we need to do to solve many of our major problems, but no political way to get there. Most experts of left and right believe we need a gas tax in order to address our energy problems. No political way to get there. Most believe that we need a flatter, fairer tax code, probably based on a consumption tax. No political way to get there. Most agree that the fee-for-service system drives up health care costs and the employer based insurance system is unsustainable. There is apparently no political way to change these things. Most experts agree that teacher quality is crucial to the schools and that bad teachers need to be fired. Again, no political way to do this.

I could go on. It all reminds me of a thesis that Mancur Olson came up with many years ago, which was nicely explained in Jonathan Rauch’s book, “Demosclerosis.” The thesis was that as nations age they develop entrenched relationships that close off certain avenues of change. This leads to the decline of nations. Germany and Japan, on the other hand, were able to grow so quickly after World War II because those entrenched arrangements had been swept away amid the national cataclysms.

Normally I reject declinism. But seeing Ms. Swift up on stage at the MTV awards, speechless and shocked, has quite obviously shaken me to my core.

via Taylor Swift and America’s Future – The Conversation Blog – NYTimes.com.

For a thoughtful book on the topic, look back at Stephen Carter’s work Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy.  This professor of law from Yale University considers civlity to be the “sacrifice we make for the sake of living together.”

Or how about another angle?  What we need more of are more formal rules of behavior–a kind of parliamentary procedure–to guide our interactions.  It may not reach the level of Robert’s Rules (“Kayne, I’m going to rule you out of order.”) but perhaps it is more of a matter of applying the same logic and structure to our discourse.

Op-Ed Columnist – An Egyptian for Unesco – NYTimes.com

An appointment to a top job is simple, right? Thumbs up or thumbs down?  Roger Cohen analyzes a candidate for the Unesco top job–an agency no stranger to US controversy [see this useful overview by BYU Kennedy Center and former Reagan-era State Department official Gregory Newell, nonetheless]–on an issue that is one of the most explosive (charges of antisemitism), and delves adeptly into the tough work of sorting out the complexities of diplomacy, leadership, and decision making:

This is an important political appointment, behind which Mubarak has put all his weight, so let’s think coolly about it. Hosny, within a grim and repressive Egyptian political spectrum, has shown some openness — taking heat to get Daniel Barenboim to conduct the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, daring to criticize women in headscarves, and pledging to translate the Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossman (although this move is being contested). He brooks debate, at least.

The Obama administration, which needs Mubarak for its Middle East peace plans, is keeping quiet. So is Sarkozy, who needs Mubarak for his dreams of a Mediterranean Union. So, most surprisingly, is Israel.

The daily Haaretz quoted a leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry cable after a meeting between Mubarak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May. It said that “in line with understandings with Egypt,” Israel’s position on Hosny had changed to “not-opposed.” The quid-pro-quo remains unclear. Bibi was ever a horse-trader.

So how does Cohen approach it?  In parli pro we’d call it an abstention:

I’m also in the not-opposed camp. What Hosny said was vile, a reflection of the prejudices of his compatriots — prejudices that Israel’s settlements policy does nothing to assuage. There are good alternative candidates, notably the former Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who carry none of his baggage.

But Cohen is not about to lose some leverage in his consideration:

But there’s also something evasive about the alternatives. Hosny stands at the crux of the cultural challenges confronting us. Let’s get him inside the tent rather than stoke the old anti-Western, anti-imperialist flames — reminiscent of what led the United States to abandon Unesco between 1984 and 2002 — by rejecting him.

And then, with the big U.S. contribution to the Unesco budget as leverage, let’s press him relentlessly to fight the anti-Semitic bigotry poisoning young Arab psyches; favor dialogue; open Arab minds to science and education; and embrace the peace that Unesco was set up to foster by draining the poisonous well from which his own now-regretted venom was drawn.

via Op-Ed Columnist – An Egyptian for Unesco – NYTimes.com.

Parli Pro Can Win the War

Dear Students: Robert’s Rules are not outdated.  Mastery of the rules of procedure is a very quick way to victory if you are patient and skilled.  Case in point:  two new books by masters of the Washington power game, Congressman Henry Waxman and Senator Mitch McConnell.

But among the most telling references in the book was the pride Mr. McConnell took in his realization in September 1994 that he could mount filibusters against routine procedural motions required before House-Senate legislative negotiations could begin. As a result, he effectively ran out the clock that session on the campaign finance overhaul he was to fight for years.

“It dawned on me that it is pretty important and certainly useful to learn as much about the procedure as you can, because frequently procedure is policy,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview about the book, which he cooperated in producing

via Congressional Memo – In Books on Two Powerbrokers, Hints of the Future – NYTimes.com.

Voting Systems | How Procedure Shapes Outcomes

Why learn parliamentary procedure? The arcane set of rules by a long-lost guy named Robert seem destined for contentious planning commission meetings–but why worry beyond local political squabbling? Consider two examples that should cover both sides of the room:  College football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS), and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

First, let’s recognize that college football is a cartel.  An article in the Journal of Industrial Organization tests this hypothesis, concludes

enforced restrictions inhibit weak teams from improving, and protect strong teams from competition. A stratification is implied which should be evident over time as less churning in national rankings and conference standings, and fewer schools achieving national prominence.

But Doug Geyser at Stanford argues that rankings matter most in basketball, and where they are underestimated in football

I find that national rankings are efficiently incorporated into the point spread for college basketball; however, for college football, I find that bettors do not place  enough emphasis on national rankings. Instead, my results suggest that a market inefficiency exists in the college football betting market because the higher ranked team is significantly more  likely to beat the spread when controlling for the favorite/longshot distinction, and thus expert opinion does matter.

The problem here is that the BCS, a system designed to create a surrogate national championship (at least for the teams in the system).  It has been disputed and debated for a while (See the 1998 conundrum for starters.)  As Bomani Jones writes in ESPN.com, the BCS’s efforts to chose a winner is merit-based, but the rest is business as usual.  Schools like Notre Dame can survive by “simply being very good” while Fresno State (or BYU) would have to go undefeated and perform at an above average level to get into a BCS bowl.

The problems of the BCS are bigger than the ones seen when there is only one undefeated team or more than two. The system still doesn’t have an efficient way to make sure that the eight best teams in the country play in the bowl season’s centerpiece. It does nothing to clear up logjams at the top, and can be downright shameless about how it treats teams toward its bottom. Great seasons can still be ignored in deference to the old-money programs and the thinly veiled goal of the BCS: profit maximization.

This year is filled with disputes, like previous ones–but in this Utah is, (was in the case of BYU) undefeated.  Looking at statistics is a helpful approach, necessary but not sufficient–because the BCS includes the more subjective voting/ranking

You would think that in the high-minded case of literature, it would necessarily follow that politics would be minimal and ‘great works’ of art would rise to the top.  Not so, according to Charles McGrath:

Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did. The duds include Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), author of “Quo Vadis,” and Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), whose supposed masterpiece, “And Quiet Flows the Don,” was probably plagiarized (at least according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won five years later).

So how does the system work?  Explain the rules:

There are 18 Nobel judges, of whom Mr. Engdahl is one. They’re all Swedes, they serve for life, and in the early years of the prize they tended to vote for — surprise! — other Scandinavians, writers like Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Selma Lagerlof and Henrik Pontoppidan, who were not exactly household names even back then. There used to be a weakness for middlebrow writers like Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, who championed the downtrodden. But ever since the last American to win, Toni Morrison, took the prize in 1993, there has been a drift not just to the left but away from the conventions of narrative realism. … This is not to say that the Swedish Academy is a united front or that when it sits down for the “big dialogue” there is no conflict of interest. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda didn’t win the Nobel until his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, was elected to the academy and lobbied for him. (Mr. Lundkvist also blackballed Graham Greene, whose politics were almost as left as Mr. Neruda’s. Go figure.) Mr. Gao’s Swedish translator, Goran Malmqvist, a China scholar at the University of Stockholm and, conveniently, an academy member, similarly pressed his case. On the other hand, a member named Knut Ahnlund quit in 2004 over the award to Ms. Jelinek, a feminist, whose work he called a “mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” There was also an internal squabble over whether the body as a whole should denounce the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

In other words, the composition of the group is tilted, as is the decision-making process–against American writers.  Now, if you’re keen to agree, that’s fine–and even if you’re not, no problem. The issue here under consideration is not the merit of Roth or Updike, but rather the fact that (sociologists take note) the structure of the committee will create a particular outcome–in this case, unfavorable for US authors.  (Great literature happens elsewhere, America.)

Bottom line:  Rules and proceedures matter, and the person who masters them (BCS administrators and affiliated league coaches, or Swedish judges and their revered authors) will have a greater degree of power.

Cabinet Lessons in Proceedure

How to craft US strategy in Afghanistan?  To learn from the recent past (Reagan Administration, specifically), consider the Cabinet, as well as the importance of decisive leadership:

Cabinet officers often disagree, and rigorous debate and refinement often lead to better policy. What is intolerable, however, is irresolution. In this case the president allowed the refusal by his secretary of defense to carry out a direct order to go by without comment — an event which could have seemed to Mr. Weinberger only a vindication of his judgment. Faced with the persistent refusal of his secretary of defense to countenance a more active role for the marines, the president withdrew them, sending the terrorists a powerful signal of paralysis within our government and missing an early opportunity to counter the Islamist terrorist threat in its infancy.

Barney Frank, Congressional negotiator

You can’t start off the day thinking about diplomacy without considering the Honorable Representative from Massachussets and his one-liners, nicely published by the NYT.

My fave:

MARCH 11 “Mr. Speaker, a parliamentary inquiry. Mr. Speaker, is blatant hypocrisy a violation of the rules of the House?”

Responding to Republican complaints that Democrats had extended the voting period for 15 minutes to win approval of a bill creating an independent House ethics office. In 2003, the Republicans once extended the voting period for three hours to get their desired outcome.