Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

"What impresses me about this is how much Bush's answer sounds exactly like the answers you read on the short-essay exams of students who are so unprepared that the question itself makes no sense to them."

In fact, the question doesn't make much sense.

I like the student's answer, but he couldn't be George Bush. He probably doesn't believe in natural selection, and even if he did, he wouldn't admit it. And even if he would admit it, natural selection is at the back of the biology book, after the xylem and phloem and before the biogeography. Bush doesn't strike me as a guy who would read ahead.

If you can, get a hold of the audio. After the first part of his answer, the people in the room start laughing out loud.

aWol knows all about soverigns. He kisses up to
the best of them in Saudi Arabia.

What was the fellow yelling in the back of the
room?

Isn't the answer to sovereignty building stronger relationships with gambling interests and opening more casinos?

Bush's brand of misspeach involves a problem finishing series. So it would probably go: "Carbohydrates are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and some other stuff like oxygen in the proportions 1 C, 2 H, no more and no less."

The issue of tribal sovereignty is of considerable significance. They were here first, and they have legally cognizable claims, as witness the various lawsuits. These are the result of treaties, which come into existence between sovereigns. Among other things, they have a huge claim for money against the Bureau of Indian Affairs arising from breeches of fiduciary duty in the care of money arising from their claims to certain natural resources (pardon my ignorance of the precise nature of these claims or the source of the money).

On the other hand, Indians do not conduct foreign policy, and there are questions about the exact extent of their control, even over their own lands. They permit things on their reservations that the states do not permit inside their own boundaries, like casinos, and untaxed sale of cigarettes. So, the question of what sovereignty means for them today, in the context of our system of nation-states, is a very serious one.

Bush, apparently, is not aware of any of this complexity.

Many of the posts on this and other lefty blogs show broad knowledge of the world, outside the expertise of the commenter. I have been reading trolls for some time now, and I wonder if any of them have any expertise of their own, or any knowledge outside their work, other than whatever they pick up on their own sites.

Here's hoping the Kerry team has already cut the ad and is ready to launch in NM, Nevada, AZ, and Colorado.

"In fact, the question doesn't make much sense."

This explains why you keep sniffing around the Prez's rear exit.

I watched the video on CSPAN, and seeing Bush fumbling for a half-way cohesive answer had me rolling on the floor. As jp said above, I thought I heard laughter in the room.

Another great part of the video was when Bush is asked about affirmative action, and how legacy admissions to prestigious schools are the oldest form of this. I think Bush makes a joke about his own legacy admission to Yale. To give him credit, he stated that legacy preferences should not be allowed. I just wonder if this would ever be followed by any legislative action. Probably not, since this would upset his base, the haves and the have-mores.

I have been reading a book called "What You Can See In Clear Water", by Geoffrey O'Gara, which is about the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes trying to work in the US courts to enforce the treaties that the US signed with them. One interesting part is how the initial agreements over rights, reservations, etc., were altered over the years by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, almost always to the detriment of the Indians.

I would recommend this book to Bush so he could get a better understanding of this issue, but he would probably have his staff summarize it to one page that would then be read to him, like those National Security briefings.

Not that I think Australia's a model for good relations with the aboriginals generally speaking, but I do kinda like the idea of an Indian-elected commission having authority over funds currently under the BIA.

Then again, I'm a slightly wacky type who thinks that the 1871 changes to Title 25 of the U.S. Code effectively stripping Indians of sovereign status was kinda unconstitutional anyway.

I think that if Brad had left out the "hypotonic / hypertonic" stuff in his parody it would have been even better. Someone who knows that much has obviously opened a textbook at least once. The rest all could have been written out of a dictionary by pure guesswork.

Brad tries to be stupid, but fails. But you cannot fool the Spanish Inquisition. To the stake with him!

He fooled you, zizka, because if you read carefully, he got "hypertonic" and "hypotonic" backwards. I'd give extra points for hidden depths of cluelessness.

You're both fooled, then, because it was Bob from Unfogged who got them mixed up.

The student's answer would have been more Bushy if he had wandered off to praise the importance of the interstate highways, railroads and other key aspects of the transportation network.

Brad,

Never mind coherence, how many politicians, say John Kerry for example, would give an honest answer like:

" Tribal sovereignty is an archaic legal fiction that the USG tolerates out of a sense of historic guilt mixed with apathy. Many reservation governments are so corrupt and authoritarian as to violate the Constitution's guarantee of republican government. However, I'm not going to do anything about this and neither will anyone else because the subject raises no-win political headaches for me. Next question."

When I hear something like that I'll be more inclined to join you in criticizing W on this one.

I assume the hypertonic hypotonic was deliberate.

Glucose is not converted to ATP of course. in our metabolism, Glucose, ADP and phosphate is converted to C02, H20 and ATP. In glycolysis Glucose ADP and phosphate or converted to alchohol and CO2. Glycolysis is also called fermenting. It is key to producing beer (hence the link to Bush) but we higher Eukaryotes get much more ATP out of the Krebs cycle (with the products of glycolysis) than from glycolysis itself.

I am not suggesting that our president is not a higher Eukaryote.

Also journalists get to ask follow up questions (as do Italian professors). What would your follow up question be ?

"In fact, the question doesn't make much sense."
That was my reaction!

I think Bush was too polite to deflate anybody.
This question was like a similar pander-bear question Kerry got, which he addressed smartly by grovelly and pandering on cue...

I've used my ring decoder to decrypt these UNITY Q&As - here's the templates:

Q: Mr President, how can you grovel and pander to
my ethnic group XYZ, speak our buzzwords, and show us the money?

A: Ah, I've been pandering to your group for some time. Dweezil Zipper, an aggie by the way, was a good friend from XYZ community, and helped build bridges between Xs and Ys and crossed some t's too. But you need to have self-help too.
So a faith-based solution is a part of the answer.
As you know there are great Govt programs designed to pander to your needs, and I'm proud to support increasing them 13.456% in the Title I Section 13 bill. That helped Cindy Lou, an XYZ, get her braces fixed for cheerleading camp, showing that we can live in freedom despite the plots of terrorists.

And as you know a buzzword means, well, Dweezil Zipper's an aggie so we talk slow with him. That's a joke. He's a lawyer, too, but we don't mind.

Next...

Kerry variant is similar, but has a preface to it:
Kerry: When I was in 'Nam, and boy it seems like only yesterday that I was talking about when I was in Nam, ...

"I like the student's answer, but he couldn't be George Bush. He probably doesn't believe in natural selection, and even if he did, he wouldn't admit it. And even if he would admit it, natural selection is at the back of the biology book, after the xylem and phloem and before the biogeography. Bush doesn't strike me as a guy who would read ahead."

Bush is the kind of go-getter guy who goes to Yale undergrad, gets his Harvard MBA, starts a company, runs for office, manages a baseball team to success, becomes Governor, then President, leaving the smarter-than-thou dweebs to concoct bizarre insults to show the injustice of it all ... JEEEZ.

Liberating Iraq

Or, alternately, Bush is the kind of privileged guy who is legacied to Yale as an undergrad, avoids Vietnam in order to protect the dangerous skies of Texas, blows off his Air National Guard duties so he can work on a losing campaign in another state, gets his Harvard MBA after he is denied admission to the University of Texas Law School, starts several companies with other people's money, runs all of them into the ground, runs unsuccessully for office, starts several other companies with other people's money, violates SEC regulations failing to notify the feds that he is bailing out of a company before the public finds out that it's going to go bankrupt, is given a sweetheart deal for a stake in a baseball team, manages the investor's finances to success by bilking the team's hometown, trades Sammy Sosa to the Cubs, wins election to only the fifth most powerful statewide office in Texas, loses the popular vote for President, is given the Presidency by his brother and the Supreme Court, ignores the most important national security issue until it's too late, torpedoes American credibility and international standing by attacking a sovereign nation that never attacked us, turns a record surplus into a record deficit, and presides over an economy with a net loss of jobs during his term--a feat unmatched since Herbert Hoover.

> In fact, the question doesn't make much sense.

For some curious reason, I suspect that Paddywhack isn't particularly up to speed on issues of Native American sovereignty.

Ahem wrote:
"For some curious reason, I suspect that Paddywhack isn't particularly up to speed on issues of Native American sovereignty"

Let a reservation government attempt to field, say SAM missiles, on reservation territory or trade with Cuba and the Feds will quickly demonstrate that we are talking about
" sovereignty" and not sovereignty as understood under international law.

To be a sovereign you must be outside the rule of another power. By their acceptance of U.S. citizenship and the authority of federal judicial due process the tribes have long-ago defaulted on critical aspects of real sovereignty.

The next question is whether the tribes exercise sovereignty in the same limited sense as the state of Indiana or Maine. Here I'd have to look at case law but my bet is that when it comes to the full faith and credit clause, the extradition of criminal suspects or the exercise of military powers given to state governments by the Constitution, the 9th and 10th amendments, the tribal governments again fall far short.

It would seem to me, unless someone can cite chapter and verse otherwise, that the tribal governments collectively have a nebulous legal status somewhere below that of Puerto Rico or American Samoa but above that of a home-rule town within a state.

How would their sovereignty compare to, say, the District of Columbia? A city? What level of self-government do they roughly compare to?

The District of Columbia is constitutionally unique - sovereignty is vested in the Congress of the United States which has delegated ( and sometimes retracted)in recent decades home rule powers to the city government.

If you take tribal sovereignty seriously, and I confess I do not, you would have to look at each tribe on a per case basis to see what their treaty terms were, plus the Federal laws and court decisions since that time. Ultimately though, each tribe ceded it's political independence to the jurisdiction of United States which is the essence of sovereignty. They have long ceased to exist as de jure, autonomous entities.

Questions of sovereignty and botany aside, I think the key lesson that was reinforced here was just how inarticulate and ill-informed our legacy president is (yes, I think he was "admitted" to the Presidency based on who his daddy and brother were, and who in turn were both there because of who their daddies were).

I'm not saying our president needs to be a Rhodes Scholar or anything. Bush probably gets a C minus in oral presentation when reading off a script, but you would hope the most powerful man in the world would be capable of extemporaneously come up with something better than "Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign".

"Another great part of the video was when Bush is asked about affirmative action, and how legacy admissions to prestigious schools are the oldest form of this. I think Bush makes a joke about his own legacy admission to Yale. To give him credit, he stated that legacy preferences should not be allowed. I just wonder if this would ever be followed by any legislative action. Probably not, since this would upset his base, the haves and the have-mores."

Now, that's just plain silly; If that was his only base, Lyndon Larouche would pull more votes. I'm betting Kerry will actually get more votes from people who've benefited from legacy enrollment.

Mark Safranski suggested on honest answer on tribal sovereignty should include a statement that "Many reservation governments are so corrupt and authoritarian as to violate the Constitution's guarantee of republican government."

The Constitution guarantees the *states* republican forms of governments; since tribes are entities that exercise authority over territories not under the government of the states, the guarantee doesn't apply, anyway.

At the time of the Founding, the colonists had been signing treaties with the Natives for 150 years. Jefferson mentions them approvingly in Notes on Virginia. The treaties were arguably contracts of adhesion, but that cuts in favor of sovreignty. Even when they could have just taken the land by force (as they did in some cases) the Europeans recognized prior ownership rights of the Natives.

Brett Bellmore:

You're right, it is plain silly. That's because it's a JOKE, or at least my attempt at one. This was a snarky reference to the video of Bush giving a speech to a room full of rich people and saying something like: "Here tonight we have the have and have-mores; some people call you the elite, I call you my base", followed by much laughter. This clip has been shown on TV and in Fahrenheit 9/11, but I guess you missed that.

As to who benefits from legacy admissions, I'm no expert, but I would guess that in most cases of multiple generations of a family attending a prestigious university, the family is wealthy. I don't think it's a stretch to say that wealthy people are more likely to be Republican. Are you actually saying that the priviled people who primarily get legacy admissions are mainly Democrats?

Given that Bush seems to think (or want to tell prospective voters) that the "handover" has made Iraq a sovereign nation of sorts (despite Bremer's parting restrictions on the interim authority) why would anyone expect him to have any understanding of a complicated concept like tribal sovereignty? Last year I attended a few short CLEs (continuing legal education) on tribal law (there are a number of recognized tribes or tribal groups in OR, one in the county I live in) about a few aspects of tribal law. I learned a little about a fairly complicated area of the law. Masaccio's post provides a very good summary. Tribal sovereignty isn't the same as nation-state sovereignty (although, looking at some nation-states, they don't seem to exercise all aspects of sovereignty either) but passage of legislation such as the Indian Child welfare Act (if I'm remembering the name of the Act correctly) did put an end to one particularly tragic abuse--removal by the government of Indian children from their homes and tribes and allowing their adoption by white people. I do not know enough to know the legal basis for removal--it's quite possible that they were spurious. Now NA children are supposed placed with members of the extended family or within the Tribe if it's at all possible. The local tribe has its own small police force and a judge (who can hear/preside over a limited number of cases--deciding who has jurisdiction--the tribe or the state courts is an evolving area of the law) but the FBI is still responsible for investigating various crimes. The Tribe also owns several mills (timber), forest land, etc., has set up a health clinic (members of the local community can also be treated there), built some low income housing, and helped to fund a charter school in the small town closest to the tribal lands/population concentration. I hear gossip and complaints about tribal politics from tribal and non-tribal members but then I hear alot of gossip and complaints about local politics in general (and some of the complaints are valid). I think of the casinos as the red man's revenge--taking back some of the money (since Native Americans can't take back all the resources and land taken from them over the years) taken from them and payback for some of the destruction wrought by alcoholism and the rapid wholesale destruction of long term cultures, social systems, etc. I read (somewhere) that since Bush was foisted upon the nation, the lengthy litigation involving the BIA and misuse/disappearance of trust funds which seemed close to final settlement, continues because of a Bush/Ashcroft policy of stonewalling etc.

I thought that Bush's people insisted upon having at least a general idea of what questions would be asked prior to any interviews, appearances, etc. Is that not so? If it is, then it would seem that Bush's difficulties indicate: (1) neither he nor his cronies/advisors/lackeys consider it worth his while to do any homework, ie., prepare answers or become informed about the issues that a given audience can be expected to be interested in; (2) Bush's short term memory is too limited or impaired to enable him to retain/remember the answers prepared for him. Too bad it's not possible to have Bush undergo some neuropsych testing so we could find out just how much damage all his drinking did--seems like the answer would be relevant to his capacity to "preside" or whatever it is he's been doing for the last 3+ years.

Given that Bush seems to think (or want to tell prospective voters) that the "handover" has made Iraq a sovereign nation of sorts (despite Bremer's parting restrictions on the interim authority) why would anyone expect him to have any understanding of a complicated concept like tribal sovereignty? Last year I attended a few short CLEs (continuing legal education) on tribal law (there are a number of recognized tribes or tribal groups in OR, one in the county I live in) about a few aspects of tribal law. I learned a little about a fairly complicated area of the law. Masaccio's post is a very good summary. Tribal sovereignty isn't the same as nation-state sovereignty (although, looking at some nation-states, they don't seem to exercise all aspects of sovereignty either) but passage of legislation such as the Indian Child welfare Act (if I'm remembering the name of the Act correctly) did put an end to one particularly tragic abuse--removal by the government of Indian children from their homes and tribes and allowing their adoption by white people. I do not know enough to know the legal basis for removal--it's quite possible that they were spurious. Now NA children are supposed placed with members of the extended family or within the Tribe if it's at all possible. The local tribe has its own small police force and a judge (who can hear/preside over a limited number of cases--deciding who has jurisdiction--the tribe or the state courts is an evolving area of the law) but the FBI is still responsible for investigating various crimes. The Tribe provides basic health care for its members through a health clinic (members of the local community can also be treated there), has built some low income/elder housing (also for its members), and helped to fund a charter school in the small town closest to the tribal lands/population concentration. I hear gossip and complaints about tribal politics from tribal and non-tribal members but then I hear gossip and complaints about local politics in general (and some of the complaints are valid). I think of the casinos as the red man's revenge--taking back some of the money (since Native Americans can't take back all the resources and land taken from them over the years) taken from them and payback for some of the destruction wrought by alcoholism and the rapid wholesale destruction of long term cultures, social systems, etc. I read (somewhere) that since Bush was foisted upon the nation, the lengthy litigation involving the BIA and misuse/disappearance of trust funds which seemed close to final settlement, continues because of a Bush/Ashcroft policy of stonewalling etc. Which suggests that the Bush Administration feels about tribal sovereignty the same way it feels about that of any weaker/non-coalition "sovereign" state--if it's a question of money or corporate profit involved, might makes right--and the Bushies are all mighty.

I thought that Bush's people insisted upon having at least a general idea of what questions would be asked prior to any interviews, appearances, etc. Is that not so? If it is, then it would seem that Bush's difficulties indicate: (1) neither he nor his cronies/advisors/lackeys consider it worth his while to do any homework, ie., prepare answers or become informed about the issues that a given audience can be expected to be interested in; (2) Bush's short term memory is too limited or impaired to enable him to retain and regurgitate the answers or materials prepared for him. Too bad it's not possible to have Bush undergo some neuropsych testing so we could find out just how much damage all his drinking did--seems like the answer would be relevant to his capacity to "preside" or whatever it is he's been doing for the last 3+ years. Assuming we could get the raw data results--doubtful, no doubt the info would fall under a national security exemption . . .

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