The Wondering Mind

If you’re in favour of a woman’s right to choose, you probably find the people depicted in the NY Times article not just objectionable but downright crazy. We can argue about the merits of allowing or banning abortion, although I suspect it wouldn’t be much of a debate as few people’s minds would be swayed.

What is rather sad are the people who engage in these activities. These are all broken people, in one sense or another. They may not all have obviously traumatised childhoods like Deborah Anderson, but they all clearly have some void in their lives they are desperately trying to fill by hectoring other people on how they should lead their lives. So often, people who feel something broken in their lives find it easier trying to fix what they think is wrong with other people’s lives, even if those other people see nothing that needs fixing. It’s not hard to see why: it takes less courage to face other people’s demons than to face your own.

The other thing is that they are all obviously craving attention. Desperately. I quote from one of the people in the story.

“I don’t want to say the conflict is fun, because it isn’t,” said Mr. Brewer, 40, an easygoing state pool champion with an earring high in his left ear. “But the interaction is fun, to be able to talk to people who take the time to listen to what you have to say.”

Whether you’re talking about anti-abortionists or the Fox News tea-baggers, these are people with inflated egos who cannot understand why the world is not paying them their due attention. They love being the centre of attention, even if they have to act out like cranky 5 year olds throwing a tantrum. How much more attention can you get than to have someone getting in your face and yelling at you?

Only weeks ago, we heard about what has got to be the dumbest US Airways employee ever (which is saying a lot) helping his equally retarded roommate smuggle an unloaded handgun on board a US Air flight. The only reason this master-plan failed was due to an observant passenger who reported the suspicious activity. Makes those long lines and waits at the security checkpoints all worthwhile, knowing these sleuths can’t even spot a passenger handing over his luggage to his roomie at the gate.

Now, we have another episode of stupidity on the part of the TSA.

Steve Bierfeldt was pulled aside at a TSA checkpoint and questioned about a box of money in his carry-on luggage. Bierfeldt, who works for a Ron Paul organization appears to have asked if he was required to answer questions about the money. And for his troubles, he was detained for half an hour.

You can hear an audio recording of the entire half hour in the interrogation room here. But as the website summarises, as does the CNN article, essentially, Bierfeldt wants to know if he is required to answer any of the questions he is being asked. The TSA “agents” refuse to tell him whether he is required to or not and basically demand that he just do whatever he is told. The incident is not resolved until an FBI agent comes on the scene and is able to guess that the money in question is for the Ron Paul organisation, which Bierfeldt (I think somewhat inadvertently) confirms.

What you can’t get a sense of without listening to the audio recording is that Bierfeldt is being somewhat of a smart-ass. He’s not being rude in any way, but he is being a smart-ass. Of course, that’s not against the law, and it’s his right to be that way if he so chooses. He is also not acting particularly suspicious or gives any reason for a reasonable person to believe he is acting suspicious, unless you have an overactive imagination.

The trouble really seems to have stemmed originally from the fact that TSA agent #1 is an idiot with a chip on his shoulder, who felt Bierfeldt represented a threat to his self-perceived authority. I’m guessing from the recording that his sense of threat was heightened by the fact that he seems to have no idea what Bierfeldt is or is not required to do under the law. I mean, it would have been bad enough if Beirefldt was only not bowing down to his authority.

Even after it is revealed who Bierfeldt is and what the money is for (about 6 minutes left on the recording), when the FBI agent tells Bierfeldt he’s free to go, this moron insists that he won’t let Bierfeldt go without checking with his supervisor, because Bierfeldt is “suspicious”. The FBI agent curtly tells him he can do whatever he wants, but as far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing suspicious about Bierfeldt or his money.

This hero is probably the one who was disciplined. If the TSA has any idea what it is doing, that meant he was fired, or he’s doing a task where he is under constant supervision by someone without a Napoleon complex.

TSA agent #2 is, at least, not a complete douche. He is, generally, not on a power trip and is genuinely more concerned about trying to get to the bottom of things. Unfortunately, he also seems clueless as to what passengers are actually required to do, versus what the TSA would like them to do. As a result, he too is unable to answer Bierfeldt’s questions and gets frustrated. He probably would have acquitted himself much better if only he was actually, you know, given real training.

In fairness, the FBI agent too is unable to tell Bierfeldt what he is or is not required to do. Now, it is entirely possible that Homeland Security and the Justice Department don’t think this is something they should teach their agents. If that’s true, that’s stupid.

It is also possible that this is standard operating procedure, trying to keep the “suspect” in the dark and off balance. If that’s true, then between all these agents you would think at least one would have realised that it was not working and wasn’t worth continuing, and that they should have just told Bierfeldt, “Yes!”

One last possibility is that answering that question constitutes giving legal advice and the agents are barred from doing that. If that’s the case, I’m not sure how you deal with that without it escalating to everyone “lawyering up” whenever they encounter law enforcement. Like I said, Bierfeldt was being a smart-ass.

In any case, being a TSA screener is probably not one of the more desirable jobs in that agency. It’s probably tedious, definitely monotonous, and is probably not all that pleasant, having to deal with the public who are probably mostly not all that happy with the hassles of the security checks. But it is an important job. One that has to be done properly and diligently. By people focused on their jobs, not on a power trip.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea for anyone, regardless of what they’re supposed to be doing.

There’s been lots of press over the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies. Only time will tell how they will work out.

My personal view is that buying Chrysler is a mistake for Fiat. Chrysler has done much over the years to destroy the brands it owns. So much so that Jeep is about the only brand with any kind of goodwill of value left. (I realise that there are undoubtedly fans of various Chrysler brands still out there, but I suspect the benefits they bring to owning the company is easily outweighed by the negatives.)

And for that prize, Fiat is taking on a company whose problems are legion. As many commentators have pointed out already, Fiat has pulled off a remarkable turnout of its own in the past few years, but it still has a long way to go to finish the job. There are arguments to made that if Fiat really wanted to enter the U.S. market for the sales volume, they may have been better off purchasing Saturn for the dealership in the U.S. They could have supplied the excellent and relatively new dealership network (probably much better than Chrysler’s), with vehicles from existing factories, or from greenfield sites which do not suffer all the issues of legacy, both good and bad, that come with Chrysler plants.

As for GM, being unburdened of some of its debt will help, but it needs to start producing better products or it will fail. The reason not enough customers bought GM cars wasn’t because they didn’t like the fact that GM workers supposedly got better pay than those in a Toyota plant (why does the customer care, as long as the price is right?); it was because they did not design and build sufficiently attractive cars.

What I really hope GM does in bankruptcy though, is to treat its dealers better than Chrysler has. While they did need to shed dealers, and they did need to do it far more drastically than the dealers would have liked, many of the tactics smacked of callous opportunism. Pressuring dealers to take on excess inventory, with promises that they would then survive the coming dealer cull, literally days and weeks before they were axed was clearly cynical and dealing in bad faith. Refusing to take back inventory while hiding behind bankruptcy is just pathetic.

What I didn’t know, and what many people probably don’t, is that the axed dealers only have a short time to sell their inventory of new vehicles. After a deadline, it is illegal for them to sell those vehicles!

This only adds to my opinion that those running Chrysler are scum and bad enough things cannot happen to them. And just to confirm the righteousness of that stance, I noted this in the last paragraph of the article referenced above.

Chrysler points out that since it hasn’t produced vehicles since May 1, many dealers are hungry for inventory, and they’ve been buying vehicles from the soon to be closing retail stores.

What a load of crap! The reason Chrysler hasn’t been producing vehicles since May 1 is that it’s been months (actually, more like years) since they’ve been able to find enough people crazy enough to buy their horrendous products! They still have inventory built only God-knows-when, sitting on their lots waiting for a buyer. The only reason anyone seems to be buying Chrysler these days is the dealers who were canned by Chrysler are practically giving them away to get rid of them.

If these vehicles really were in demand, there is no reason why the company could not take them back from the closing dealers and simply send them to the dealers who are still open.

The other possibility is that the vehicles are in demand, but this way Chrysler can give a bonus to the remaining dealers of bargain-basement deals on their inventory. It’s at the expense of the closing dealers, but Chrysler has already demonstrated they don’t actually care about those dealers.

Another inmate at Guantanamo has apparently committed suicide.

It is way past time that the Obama administration shut this place down. Congress may be balking and the American public maybe hesitant. But they are wrong. The camp is a continuing source of shame to the U.S. and does not make the country safer one iota.

We can find any number of people in American prisons who are, and would be if released, more dangerous than some of the people being held in Guantanamo. The continuing existence of this camp sends nothing by negative messages about this country to the world, and to the terrorists who want to do it harm.

It says that America is so terrified of these few criminals that they can’t stand to have them on American soil, even in some of the most secure prisons on Earth. It says that the U.S. won’t try these people because Americans themselves believe that their justice system is so weak and ineffective that they cannot stand up to a motley crew of Third World thugs. It says that Americans believe that they are above the standards that they preach to the rest of the world to abide by. That they think they are somehow special and above everyone else.

If the debacle in Iraq, the current troubles in Afghanistan, and the continuing fight with terrorists has shown us one thing, it is that even the most powerful nation needs friends. Getting rid of Guantanamo won’t dissuade those inclined to believe the worst about America, but it wont’ hurt to make everyone else more sympathetic to the American cause.

So someone actually published a study on something I’ve always wondered about when watching The Colbert Report. Specifically, when I watch some conservative guests, I wonder if they realise that they are sometimes being mocked, and usually being challenged, on their conservative views. You really get the feeling that some of these people just don’t realise they are not on a conservative show.

Well, there appears to be plenty of evidence that there are conservatives who don’t get it. An observation now backed up by the study.

I don’t have access to the full article so I don’t know if the researchers reached any conclusions beyond the observation that the viewer’s opinion of the show’s political leanings appears to be influenced by the viewer’s own political sympathies. But I’m more interested in exactly how and why the viewer’s political sympathies would colour their perspective of the show.

So without the benefit of any empirical evidence, I would like to speculate on a few hypotheses of my own. In no particular order, they are:

1. They just don’t watch the show that often. If they did, it would be rather difficult for intelligent and educated viewers not to catch onto the biting sarcasm of some of the “bits”, especially some of the “The Word” pieces. I’ve often wondered if this is the case with some of the politicians interviewed for “Better Know a District”. To be fair to these people, if you are only an occasional, or even sporadic, viewer and you don’t know much about Stephen Colbert, you could easily be confused as to whether he’s serious or not. To be even more fair, these people can, and probably should, do more research before they go on the show. Or answering a study.
2. The conservative brain is different. Conservatives may genuinely perceive the world differently. I don’t mean to imply there’s anything necessarily defective about that. I just mean that it’s entirely conceivable that at least part of the reason conservatives hold a different world view to more left-wing people might be that their minds work differently.
3. Some conservatives, just like some left-wingers, are just idiots. There’s no way around it. People like Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage (“NOM”), are clearly stupid. How else would anyone who actually saw the bit Colbert did on the NOM advert think it was serious? At least Brian Brown, NOM’s Executive Director, seemed to realise in the same press release that the bit was not serious and not at all complementary, thanking Colbert only for the free playing of the ridiculous advert. (I don’t fully understand, though, why he or anyone else at NOM didn’t think to tell Maggie Gallagher.)

As I said, these are pure speculation and conjecture, since I have nothing more than annecdotal evidence, at best, to support them.

But they are an attempt to answer what is the most interesting aspect of the study. Not that some conservatives don’t get The Colbert Show, but why they don’t get it.

A while ago, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, (IIHS) published videos and results from crash tests they conducted using some compact cars crashing into mid-sized ones. The results appeared alarming, with the smaller vehicles apparently not fairly all that well. The upshot, as far as IIHS was concerned, was that small cars are bad for safety.

Well, that’s one, very simplistic interpretation. A conclusion laden with a barely hidden bias.

To begin with, the clear implication the IIHS is spreading is that small cars are just inherently unsafe. Period. If you pushed them on it, they would almost certainly deny that that is what they are saying, or even implying, but it is. And the reason they would deny it is because it’s not true.

The Smart car, as well as the Yaris, have been sold in Europe and other parts of the world for years before coming to the U.S. and they have a safety record that is generally no worse than other vehicles. And all three vehicles have performed well in most, if not all, standardised crash tests until the IIHS’s newly concocted demonstration. That doesn’t mean that they are the safest vehicles, or that they couldn’t be safer, but inherently unsafe they are not.

Are they likely to be less safe places to be in a crash against a hulking truck, than in the hulking truck? Yes. And the IIHS is correct in saying that is a simple matter of physics. The smaller vehicle, and its occupants, having less mass in the collision, will decelerate at a much faster rate (or even be pushed back). That means that the occupants of the smaller vehicle will experience more force in the impact. The smaller dimensions of the vehicle also mean there is less material and leeway for the force of the impact to be absorbed and dissipated by the vehicle structure.

The problem is the IIHS conclusion and recommendation, which is not the only possible response to such a dilemma, and displays a clear bias. It also arguably imposes much greater social costs than the alternatives.

The IIHS recommend that we keep larger vehicles, but spend more money on making them more fuel efficient. (They seem to ignore the irony in that larger vehicles will never be as efficient as smaller vehicles, as a matter of simple physics. I guess calling on physics wasn’t quite so convenient in this case.) So their solution is to keep “unsafe” smaller vehicles off the road.

But what about taking dangerous larger vehicles off the road instead?

As the second WSJ article cited points out, the “danger” of the smaller vehicles is primarily in the disparity of the size of vehicles on the road today. One way to reduce that is to take the larger ones off the road.

You can do that by discouraging the sale of new larger vehicles and encouraging the disposal of existing larger vehicles. You can do the former simply by raising fuel prices, or an even more sensible way would be to impose a carbon tax. This means that manufacturers can certainly make their vehicles more efficient by producing larger hybrids or diesel vehicles, and you leave the consumers the choice of purchasing such vehicles. But, it will always be cheaper to buy smaller vehicles. (That damned physics again.)

This would also have the effect of encouraging people to junk older, heavier (and larger) vehicles because it would be too expensive to run. The government could even add an extra incentive for junking those vehicles. (This would probably be most effectively, and most efficiently, used for providing an incentive for poorer owners of older vehicles, for whom the purchase price of newer and more efficient vehicles might be an insurmountable hurdle otherwise.)

As suggested by Mr. Wenzel in the article, the government could provide a certain amount of relief for people who really do need to use the larger vehicles for work, as opposed to just posing. Although, to be fair, any such subsidies should be put in place to be phased out over time. How is that fair, especially on businesses? Externalities.

Externalities are also the reason why its in some ways more “fair” to take the larger vehicles off the road. It’s the larger vehicles, or rather their drivers, who are imposing a cost on other people by their preference for larger vehicles. Drivers of smaller vehicles are only in more danger because the drivers of larger vehicles pose that danger. It seems to make sense to me to eliminate that externality by encouraging people not to drive larger vehicles.

Now there are businesses which do need larger vehicles to haul cargo, or people, or whatever. And in making an initial transition, it makes good policy sense for the government to ease the burden of change, both to encourage, and so that businesses can make the change. (It’s like helping the poor car owner; businesses might not be able to afford the new vehicles otherwise.)

After the transition, however, it doesn’t make sense for a continued subsidy. Fact of the matter is, even if the larger vehicles are necessary, they still continue to impose external costs on other drivers. So why shouldn’t they pay for that cost through higher prices? Will the businesses pass on those costs of consumers? Absolutely! But there’s no reason consumers who benefit from those businesses should not have to pay also for the external costs imposed on society for their consumption.

Such a policy will also have the benefit of encouraging manufacturer to work on more efficient larger vehicles, as long as they are cost effective, and encouraging businesses to buy smaller, more efficient, vehicles as they can use. I often wonder how many businesses really need the Titan V8 truck, as opposed to the smaller V6 version.

It’s not hard to imagine that this model of vehicle safety would ultimately be less costly to society than the one IIHS is pushing on us.

The article in the NY Times is correct, but I think a bit misleading to the lay reader. The benefit they are talking about is only in the tax payable on the investment, not on the whole loss amount. In other words, if you lost $1 million, then you can reduce your taxable income by the amount of your loss, so that the amount of tax you calculate you owe is reduced.

Clearly, value of this reduction in taxes will only be a fraction of your actual loss. So it helps make your net losses smaller, but that is not really going to help people who have been completely wiped out by this.

So in a previous rant, I boldly claimed to have some ideas which might help us avoid the sorts of financial blow ups we keep getting. Again, I reiterate my disclaimer that these ideas are not supposed to be perfect, or even the best ideas. They are not even my ideas, in so far as other people suggested and talked about them long before I thought of them. But they are ideas which make a lot of sense to me.

One favourite idea of mine is to limit pay – ALL pay, whether they be benefits, bonuses, or whatever – for bankers and people involved in similar activities. I want to point out now that I am not completely ignoring all the microeconomic problems in pay limits. I am simply assuming (as I have no data to support my hypothesis) that the net benefits to society of such a move will outweigh any inefficiencies resulting from pay limits, and that most of the costs will fall on the bankers. I can live with that.

I am also only suggesting them for certain professions. Is that unfair? Perhaps. But then nobody is holding a gun to these Wall Street types saying they have to trade bonds for a living; I do not propose pay limits for bus drivers, if that helps.

And I’ve heard all the inane bleating about how such measure would be ineffective, or be harmful to the economy, and I say “RUBBISH”! What would happen if bankers were paid less? God forbid that MBA students might actually go into engineering, or medicine, or some other human endeavour with tangible benefits for humanity.

There is money enough in the world to fund the great human endeavours and this fairy tale that MBA’s need millions in pay to make this happen, and that they are the only ones who can make this happen, is nonsense. In reality, most of the people doing this work know that they are lucky to have such easy jobs paying a living wage, less ones that pay such fortunes.

Most of the so-called “hardship” involved in such work is in unnecessarily working long hours (you’re getting paid $5 million; your firm really couldn’t use some of that to hire someone else to take some of your load?), and having to work next to some of the most unpleasant human beings in existence day in, day out.

As for the harm to the economy from not having such clever people work in finance, I would suggest that the opposite is true. Activities leading to losses which wipe out a firm’s profits for the past 20 years is the result of greedy people who think they are so clever.

Let me put it another way. One of the most important, and well-paid, activities in finance can be in managing investments. Yet, data shows that very, very few people ever manage to beat market indices in performance. And from what I can tell, almost nobody is able to maintain above average gains for an extended period of time. The reason Warren Buffett is so famous is that he is an extremely rare exception to this rule.

As John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, has repeatedly observed, this suggests that most investment managers are not worth their fees. In fact, most of these supposedly clever people should be paying you to invest your money: you’d actually be better off having less clever people managing index funds.

A less radical, although I suspect also less effective, way to limit such stupidity on Wall Street, would be to bar limited liability for these firms and individuals. We could create a new form of business entity, or require that banks, investment companies, etc. be partnerships, with no limited liability. If the managers of these firms are made personally liable for losses, and their pensions are tied to the future business of their firms, they are more likely to think twice about acting so foolishly.

Unfortunately, even this more limited suggestion is too radical for those in power. Wall Street does not have any significant partnerships left, and I suspect there are no firms left without limited liability. Even public accounting firms, which claim to require partnerships – and that all partners be accountants – precisely because of the discipline that unlimited liability bring to their work, have been busy trying to limit that liability.

It’s telling to see the response of the accountants to the Enron scandal, and the understanding, if not outright sympathy, of many in business to this response. After Enron, accountants demanded even more limited liability protections, so that “the whole firm does not go down because of a few rotten apples”, and blamed the whole thing on David Duncan and others.

They seem to miss the fact that the system of unlimited personal liability is there precisely for such scenarios. There will always be rotten apples. (Although I think that Duncan was less rotten and more a scapegoat for a rotten system.)

By making all the other partners, and indeed the entire firm, liable for the doings of the few rotten apples, it creates an incentive for their colleagues, who are the people best placed to spot the rotten apples, to police them. By limiting liability, these people have less at stake in ensuring that the public are protected from their work.

I agree that there are dangers that people could be discouraged from entering such professions. People point to public accounting as a prime example of ever decreasing interest from college students. As an accountant, however, I posit that the lack of interest in that profession has very little to do with unlimited liability, which is only relevant if you stick around long enough to make partner.

It has more to do with the fact that the profession is deeply unappealing for other reasons. Such as uncompetitive pay, the working hours which are unsociable, and having to work for deeply unpleasant people. As is often the case, the excuses are mere smoke screens for the real reasons, which those in power don’t want to publicise.

If unlimited liability, as a form of self-regulation, for a profession which is supposed to regulate other businesses is too harsh, is there any real regulation that is acceptable?

There will still be a financial market without effective regulation. And there will still be players in such a market. But sooner or later, it will be nothing more than a high-stakes poker game. And like a real poker game, it will be played mostly by pros, and most incautious amateurs who dare to play will be fleeced.

And true supporters of the financial system will recognise that this too costs us in market inefficiencies. Much more, I suspect, than limiting banker pay or unlimited liabilities.

By now, everyone’s heard of the Madoff scandal. And by now, people are beginning to ask some very uncomfortable questions about how the financial regulators managed to miss such a huge fraud. This scandal highlights so starkly everything that is wrong with the financial markets, and to a large degree with aspects of the modern capitalist system, that some truths are inescapable.

Fact is that the whole system is largely corrupt. The incentives of the system are there to provide enormous rewards for a few connected individuals, so no amount of “regulation” will ever properly stamp out unethical behaviour. The rating agencies and auditors who are paid by their clients to “oversee them” is just the most obvious example, but there are others.

The difficulty in changing the system is not only with rich individuals and entities with vested interests in maintaining the current system. The difficulty also lies in the fact that the players in this system have been so effective in their propaganda to convince the rest of us how useful and valuable they are, that they have started believing their own lies.

Just look at this article, as well as the previously mentioned BBC article, to see a list of some of the biggest financial institutions who were swindled. And all the people who have been interviewed since the scandal broke, talking about a “sophisticated fraud” by Madoff are talking out of their backsides. There were plenty of warning signs , for those willing to do a little work and look, which should have told any of these institutions that they should not be doing business with Madoff.

There are some of the biggest, and best run, banks in the world caught up in this, in addition to hedge funds and others. While it may seem, with hindsight, that they were careless in not doing their due diligence, the fact is that this could have happened to any number of other financial institutions.

The ones who avoided Madoff after doing their homework are, in fact, most notable for doing what they should have been doing. This is notable because the incentives in the system actually discourage this. If you are an advisory firm or bank, do you think your clients will praise you for steering them away from a guaranteed 11% plus investment?

Sure, they will, after it blows up and other people lose money, but before the scandal broke, I suspect that firms who cautioned against investing with Madoff lost a lot of business as a result. If your adviser tells you to avoid investing with someone giving 11% plus to HSBC, Santander, and hedge funds every year, and instead recommend something that pays 3%, you are probably going to think that your adviser simply doesn’t know something HSBC and others know, rather than the other way around.

And while institutions like HSBC suffer, it is really the “little people” who suffer the most. Certainly, some of the people caught up don’t sound too little, at least compared to me. But they worked hard all their lives and now they are wiped out and may have to worry about how they’ll live. In other cases, charities have been severely affected, or in the case of one small charity, has had to close. Compounding the tragedy, unlike the HSBC’s of the world, these entities and individuals could have had no way of knowing they were being swindled until too late. They don’t have the resources of HSBC and Santander to carry out proper due diligence without trusting the sorts of people who clearly let them down in this case.

The real solution to such scandals is to reform the entire system. Create a new system where, ratings agencies, auditors, advisers, etc. have an incentive to make the hard calls, rather than letting things slide while they keep their fingers crossed. But don’t expect that change any time soon, historic presidential election results not withstanding.

The vacant position in the U.S. Senate involving the latest political scandal from Illinois is not the only Senate vacancy that will have to be resolved. If, as expected, Hilary Clinton is confirmed as the next Secretary of State, her seat as the junior Senator from New York will also become vacant.

Luckily, there has been no sign that that particular prospective vacancy has attracted the sort of corruption the current vacancy in Illinois has. It has attracted a lot of attention for, among other things, the gender of the potential replacement. The latest person whose hat may be in the ring on this one is Caroline Kennedy.

She may be a great choice. I honestly couldn’t say, since I know nothing about her suitability to fill that seat, except that her politics appears to agree largely with mine. That is, of course, no qualification for anything, since my opinion and influence extends very little beyond my family and friends. And I’m probably not as significant a source of influence even among those people as I would like to suppose.

The piece of information I found objectionable in the article is the insistence of many women that a woman fill that Senate vacancy. My objection could be succinctly, and crudely, summarised in the statement that, “A (fill in any female anatomical part) is not a policy position.”

Put more delicately, while having more women in politics is great for diversity, just as having more gays, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc., none of those qualities are suitable preconditions for any political office I can think of.

The basis of my objections are illustrated in the following quote from the article, attributed to various women and their groups pressuring for a female candidate for the position.

They suggested that the choice for Mrs. Clinton’s successor is especially important not only because of her prominence but because of the central role she played on issues like abortion rights and expanded access to birth control. They said they believed that no man, no matter how well-intentioned, would give those issues the same attention as Mrs. Clinton.

This is an ignorant, outrageous, and bigoted belief. It is the flip-side of asserting that Senator Clinton would never be as qualified to be the Secretary of State, less the President of the United States, as a man because she would be too emotional. I think most people would disagree in their assessment of Senator Clinton.

The search for greater diversity is not an end in and of itself. It is part of our adherence to the belief that people should be judged for who they are, not what they are. These “feminists” cannot demand more diversity by rejecting the very basis for it.