Crazy Cruz and Floundering Ma

With its usual short attention span, the US media seems to have largely forgotten about Syria recently, instead focusing on the irresponsible Republican threat to shut down the government if the health care reform that has been given the rather silly and dismissive nickname "Obamacare" is not defunded. The Republicans, or at least the more extreme among them – which of course means most of them – are using a vote to keep the government funded to remove funding for health care reform, and incidentally inserting various other provisions such as one favoring Monsanto and another allowing employers or insurance companies to opt out of providing birth control coverage into the funding bill. In the upcoming weeks, they also are planning to use what would once have been (and still should be) a routine vote to raise the government's debt limit as a club to try to make destructive budget cuts. At the center of this effort are the House Republicans from the so-called "Tea Party", goaded on by the extremist Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz (I should point out that John Cornyn, the other Senator from Texas, is merely less flamboyantly extreme in his right-wing politics).

Having encouraged the House Republicans to pass a bill that funded the government for a few more months while defunding health care reform, Cruz then pulled an even more crazy stunt. Since he was no doubt aware of – and was probably jealous of – the national attention Texas State Senator Wendy Davis received for her filibuster in the Texas Senate against an extreme anti-abortion bill (I even referred to it myself in an email petition in favor of filibuster reform), he decided to imitate her. He declared that he would speak until he was "unable to stand" against Obamacare, as he termed it. He proceeded to speak for 21 hours, which on the surface might look as if he outdid Wendy Davis, who "only" spoke for eleven hours. However, Davis had to speak on topic and was not allowed to take any breaks, even to go to the bathroom. Cruz took breaks and rambled inanely, going completely off topic and even spending time reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, which as Jon Stewart and others pointed out, about someone who stubbornly insists he doesn't like something that he hasn't even tried – just as Cruz and his fellow Republicans insist they don't like health care reform that hasn't even been implemented yet (it's also worth pointing out that nowhere in his rambling speech did Cruz offer a real alternative). Finally, Davis's filibuster had a point. Regardless of what one thinks of the bill she was filibustering – and I'd say that any law that forces the vast majority of women's health care clinics to shut down or stop providing even first trimester abortions due to absurd requirements is too extreme – she was arguing to stop a particular bill from becoming law, and she even succeeded as far as that particular special session went. Cruz wasn't even actually filibustering (he knew he had to yield the floor at a specific time anyway), and the bill that the House had passed did exactly what he wanted. So while Davis did a real filibuster for a specific purpose, Cruz's stunt was just that, a stunt with no point to it except to draw attention to himself. But only those with similarly screwed up thinking will actually admire him for it.

I will say that I find it difficult to wholeheartedly support the current health care reform myself, mostly because it didn't go nearly far enough. If it had at least included a public option open to all Americans, I would be more enthusiastic about it. But at least it takes a number of positive steps in the right direction. In any case, to refuse to fund the government unless it is stopped is ridiculous. What's more, the additional threat to raise the debt limit unless they get their way on this and other issues is the height of irresponsibility. As has been pointed out many times by many people, a refusal to raise the debt limit means a refusal to pay the debts that the government already owes. Even if these lawmakers consider it important to reduce the deficit, the place to do it is when they are voting on new spending, not on paying for existing debts. In fact the deficit has already been shrinking, and despite the overblown rhetoric, the budget deficit is not actually the greatest problem the US faces. For that matter, the deficit seems to suddenly become less important to the Republicans when it comes time to vote on military spending, corporate tax breaks, or farm subsidies. It's only when we talk about health care reform, or food stamps for the poor, or Social Security (which is still running a surplus and therefore has not contributed anything to the debt) that the deficit becomes a major issue for them.

But Cruz and his fellow extremists in the US Republican party aren't the only politicians showing their electorates how ridiculous they can be. As I have mentioned in the past, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou heads a government that has been doing a lot of stupid and even downright evil things. While he himself may not have been directly responsible for many of these things, he certainly has done nothing to rein in such bad behavior. More recently, he has been directly involved in a mess that is at least partly of his own making, and certainly makes him look bad. I will admit I haven't followed the story very closely, but the broad outlines are clear enough.

First, a little background. The speaker of the Legislative Yuan, Wang Jin-pyng, is, like Ma, a member of the KMT (Kuomintang or Guomingdang). However, he is considered a member of the "native" wing of the party, as opposed to Ma and others in the party who were born in China or whose parents immigrated to Taiwan from China. He was also Ma's rival for the chairmanship of the KMT back in 2005. Though they had seemed to work together well enough earlier in Ma's presidency, relations between them were never warm and recently they deteriorated radically. Not too long ago, I saw a quote from Wang in the newspaper that was highly critical of the way the Ma administration was running the country. At any rate, a few weeks ago it was reported that Wang was under investigation for helping out a senior legislator from the opposition DPP in a court case by pressuring (or persuading) the prosecutor not to appeal a lower court decision in the legislator's favor. It was clear from the beginning that the evidence against Wang was tainted because it had been obtained by apparently illegal wiretapping. Nevertheless, when the story came out ("coincidentally" when Wang was out of the country for his daughter's wedding), Ma roundly condemned Wang, calling his behavior unacceptable "influence-peddling". This was in contrast to his silence about other cases involving KMT figures, such as the mayor of Keelung who in response to a call from a constituent who had been arrested for drunk driving, went to the police station, pounded on a desk and threatened to have the police officers fired if they didn't release her. In Wang's case, not only was Ma very vocal in his criticism, but he had the KMT initiate procedures to have Wang kicked out of the party and removed from the speakership. While Wang certainly has his faults and may even really be guilty of misusing his position, it was immediately obvious to almost everyone that Wang, as a threat to Ma's power, was being treated much more harshly than other KMT officials accused of similar or worse things, a contrast much like that between the lengthy prison term given to former president Chen Shui-bian when he was convicted of corruption and the light sentences received by KMT officials convicted of similar crimes.

From all appearances, this whole affair has blown up in Ma's face. Wang has filed a court appeal against the revocation of his KMT membership. The wiretapping that was used against Wang has created yet another scandal for the Ma administration. Perhaps most importantly, the public seems to have sided almost completely with Wang. In one recent poll, Wang had an approval rating of around 60%, second only to Chen Chu, the DPP mayor of Kaohsiung. Ma's approval rating, on the other hand, was a miserable 11%. An even more recent poll put his approval rating at just above 9%. As several DPP leaders have pointed out, Ma once called for former president Chen to step down when his approval rating was around 18%, still considerably higher than Ma's is now. For now, Ma continues to flounder desperately. A KMT party congress scheduled for last weekend was postponed and moved to a less central location because massive protests were planned outside the venue. Even after the postponement, tens of thousands showed up at various protests around the country. While Ma may still hold the levers of power both within the party and in the government, the fact that even within the KMT many are criticizing him doesn't bode well for the remainder of his presidency.

Voyager 1 Enters Interstellar Space

I was originally planning to write about how the Syrian crisis shows up serious flaws in the international system, or else about the recent political crisis in Taiwan. But while I may write about these things later, this time I decided to write about a completely different and rather more positive news item.

One of the cooler bits of news lately was the announcement by NASA that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space. For those who aren't familiar with it, the robotic spacecraft Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and visited Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, making major discoveries at those two planets (its twin, Voyager 2, also became the first and so far only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune). Since then it has been heading out of the Solar System at a velocity of about 17 kilometers per second (11 miles per second), or about 3.6 AU per year (an AU or astronomical unit is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, or roughly 150 million kilometers). Over the past couple of years there has been debate over the indications that Voyager 1, which is moving slightly faster than Voyager 2 or the earlier but slower Pioneer 10 and 11 (though Pioneer 10 is currently still more distant than Voyager 2), had left the heliosphere, the bubble in space created by the solar wind, but in the latest announcement NASA stated that they finally have definitive evidence that Voyager 1 is now beyond the heliosphere and the boundary area known as the heliopause and has entered interstellar space.

This is a pretty amazing achievement. Voyager 1 is currently almost 19 billion kilometers from the Sun, about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun and over three times the average distance of Pluto, and it is still functioning after 36 years in space. At the speed of light, it now takes signals about 17 hours to travel from Voyager 1 to the Earth, and we are still receiving them. As one article pointed out, Voyager 1 has accomplished this with far less computing power than a so-called smartphone. It is incredible to contemplate that a human-made object has traveled so far into space.

On the other hand, the Voyagers and the Pioneers (and the other, more recent spacecraft on a recent trajectory toward interstellar space, New Horizons) also serve to remind us of how huge the distances in space are. While many headlines have reported that Voyager 1 has left the solar system, this is not really accurate. As others have pointed out, while it is in interstellar space in the sense that it is beyond the solar wind, it is still well within the region gravitationally dominated by the Sun. For example, the most distant substantial object that we know of in the solar system is Sedna, a trans-Neptunian object that probably qualifies as a dwarf planet under the current classification system. Sedna is currently "only" 80-some AU away, but it is now nearing its perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun. At the most distant point in its orbit, Sedna is 937 AU or 140 billion kilometers from the Sun, something like seven times the current distance of Voyager 1. The comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of the Sun's gravitational grip are many times further than that. So in this sense, it will be thousands of years before Voyager 1 truly leaves the solar system (a point mentioned even in one or two mainstream news articles).

Another way of looking at it is to remember that while Voyager 1 is an impressive 17 light hours away, meaning it takes light 17 hours to reach us from it at a velocity of 300,000 kilometers per second, it won't reach the distance of 1 light day (about 172 AU) for well over a decade, around the time it is expected to cease functioning completely, even if it suffers no glitches in the meantime. The nearest star other than the Sun is over 4 light years away. Even if Voyager 1 were heading directly toward it (which it isn't), it would take it tens of thousands of years to reach it. So while this milestone could be said to mark humanity's first step toward the stars, it is a very tiny step. If we really want to explore the stars, it will take a major leap forward in propulsion technology. This isn't to say we shouldn't be impressed at Voyager 1's achievement, but rather than just patting ourselves on the back, we should be inspired to go even further and faster in the future. If we make the effort, maybe by the end of this century we'll have one or more spacecraft passing the Voyagers on the way to the stars.