Category: Politics – Politicians – Government in Action

It’s Worth Saying Again

All the premature hysteria about balloting in Florida leads, inevitably, to a discussion of the Florida results of 2000. Richard A. Baehr of The American Thinker addresses some of the premature hysteria, after having dealt a death blow to “The Myth of the Stolen Election”. Dave Kopel at Independent Institute, in this section of a piece on “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11”, also puts the myth of the stolen election to rest (for those who are open to reason).

What needs to be said, once more with vehemence, is that it is the voter’s responsibility to cast a ballot correctly. Chads don’t hang unless voters allow them to hang. Touch screens don’t record votes incorrectly unless voters are careless about using them and fail to review their selections before pressing the “vote” icon. And so on.

When election results are contested this year — as they surely will be — the main cause of controversy will be voter error. Remember that in the hysteria that ensues November 2.

This Guy Wants to Be Commander-in-Chief?

The New York Times reports:

Kerry Criticizes President’s Troop Plan

By JODI WILGOREN

Published: August 19, 2004

CINCINNATI, Aug. 18 – With repeated references to his own service in Vietnam, Senator John Kerry told fellow members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars here on Wednesday that President Bush’s plan to move 70,000 troops out of Europe and Asia was vague and ill-advised in view of the North Korean nuclear threat….

Ground forces aren’t a counter to a nuclear threat. For that we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, sea-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers with cruise missiles — none of them based in Korea. The only thing Kerry learned in Vietnam was the location of the Cambodian border. Nope, not even that.

I Knew There Was a Reason to Vote for Bush

Virginia Postrel points to this NYT graphic. She notes that it’s part of a media campaign, led by The Washington Post, to discredit Bush’s record on regulation. But, as she says, “this latest media campaign offers an answer to an oft-asked question: Why on earth would a libertarian vote for George W. Bush?” Click the link to see why.

I Wish I’d Said That

Michael Munger, writing at the Library of Economics and Liberty, remembers when he worked at the Federal Trade Commission:

…In the afternoon, we would take a break from our exhausting day of blocking asinine regulations, and go have a big frozen yogurt at a place right beside the entrance to the Washington School for Secretaries. Sitting there having a yogurt, watching dozens of attractive women walk by, we would sometimes say to each other, “You know, this is criminal. We are just stealing our money.”

But then one of us would state the standard defense, one all of us believed fervently: “Not true! If it weren’t for us, occupying these crucial desks, they might very hire someone who would write new regulations! We are doing God’s work here, gentlemen! We are constipating the intestines of the cow of regulation!”…

And he had a good point. I often felt guilty about working for a tax-funded think-tank. But at least I tried to enforce frugality, and I fought the good fight against “diversity” — in the name of which an entire program has been erected since my retirement.

Regulation, Competition, Wages, and Employment

Just a quick note to remind non-economists about the effects of regulation on wages and employment. It’s been shown many times, by many economists, that economic regulation raises the costs of doing business, thereby discouraging business formation and reducing competition. The results: (1) Prices are higher because (a) costs are higher and (b) there is less competition. (2) Wages are lower because there is less demand for labor. (3) Employment is also lower because there is less demand for labor.

Scientists in a Snit

Some scientists are “hopping mad” because the Bush administration doesn’t always do what they want it to do. As AP reports via Yahoo! News:

Science, Politics Collide in Election Year

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer

Last November, President Bush gave physicist Richard Garwin a medal for his “valuable scientific advice on important questions of national security.” Just three months later, Garwin signed a statement condemning the Bush administration for misusing, suppressing and distorting scientific advice.

So far more than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel prize winners, have put their names to the declaration….

Later in the story we get some perspective:

Scientists collect evidence and conduct experiments to arrive at an objective description of reality — to describe the world as it is rather than as we might want it to be.

Government, on the other hand, is about anything but objective truth. It deals with gray areas, competing values, the allocation of limited resources. It is conducted by debate and negotiation. Far from striving for ultimate truths, it seeks compromises that a majority can live with.

When these conflicting paradigms come together, disagreements are inevitable.

The catch is that scientists don’t always “describe the world as it is.” Take the pseudo-science of climatology, for instance, which seems to be populated mainly by luddites who think that the world is coming to an end because of SUVs. (I exaggerate, but not by much.) Working from inadequate data and arguably false premises, they would have us stop in our tracks and revert to a standard of living last “enjoyed” in the 1800s. And climatologists aren’t the only “scientists” who inject their personal preferences into their recommendations.

Many people will be unduly impressed by an anti-Bush declaration signed by 4,000 scientists. They shouldn’t be. Science is like sausage-making. When you see how it’s done, you have qualms about swallowing the end product.

Interesting but Not Surprising

Kevin Hassett, writing at Tech Central Station, reports on Kerry’s budget proposals. The bottom line:

Even with [a] generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

It’s not the greater deficit that matters as much as the greater spending. The real cost of government is measured by the resources it commandeers through spending.

Just the Facts

Bush won Florida, as close followers of the controversy will know. But it still bears repeating, so here’s the definitive account by Richard Baehr at The American Thinker. The bottom line:

The conclusion from all this is pretty clear. Florida had a very close election for President in 2000. It was so close that it was almost a tie. But by every official count that was made at any time during the 37 day recount period, and using virtually every consistent method for counting “undervotes” that was considered after the election, Bush won Florida and the Presidency. I will say it again. Bush won Florida. He did not steal it.

Oops, Rudy’s Gone Over to the Dark Side

You can tell by the headlined sneer that The New York Times is afraid Rudy Giuliani might swing some votes to Bush: Leveraging Sept. 11, Giuliani Raises Forceful Voice for Bush

What’s Your Political Flavor?

I’ve come across three political quizzes that “place” you on various scales: left-right, authoritarian-libertarian, pragmatic-idealistic, etc. The three quizzes are Political Compass, Political Survey, and World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

Political Compass comprises about 40 questions, many of them ambiguously worded. Your score places you on a two-dimensional scale: economic left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. The labels are misleading because libertarianism, in this case, is something akin to anarchism. The author considers those whose scores place them in the lower-left quadrant (libertarian-economic left) to be libertarians, whereas they are in fact pot-smoking, pro-abortion, anti-war adherents of the welfare state — socialist-anarchist-libertines, if you will. My score, in the upper-right quadrant, makes me “right authoritarian” — which puts me in some pretty good company with the likes of Dean Esmay, Stephen Bainbridge, Michael Rappaport, Daniel Drezner, and Timothy Sandefur. What it really makes me is a personally conservative free-market capitalist libertarian who believes in a minimal state to protect Americans from force and fraud.

Political Survey comprises 75 questions, which are sharply worded. Your score places you on a two-dimensional scale: left-right and pragmatic-idealistic. The labels of the Political Compass survey would do as well. The scores are distributed similarly, with a strong bias toward the lower-left quadrant. I am, again, in the upper-right quadrant, this time surrounded by a lot of names I don’t recognize. (Political Survey has drawn far fewer participants than Political Compass.)

World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which is touted on the Libertarian Party’s home page, comprises 10 unambiguous questions, five about personal issues and five about economic issues. Your score places you on a two-dimensional grid with two axes: personal issues and economic issues. The surface of the grid is subdivided into five areas: libertarian, conservative, statist, liberal, and centrist. Which of the five areas you land in depends on your score. I’ve taken the quiz several times and always come out in the libertarian part of the grid. In fact, I took the quiz today and came out “pure” libertarian because there’s no longer a question about immigration, which I always got “wrong” in the past.

World’s Smallest Political Quiz is the easiest to take, and it places you accurately on a nuanced scale of political persuasions. Try it and see what political flavor you are.

John Kerry Knows When He’s in Nevada

From Washingtontimes.com:

Kerry vows to abort Nevada waste plan

By Stephen Dinan

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

LAS VEGAS — Sen. John Kerry promised yesterday never to store the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a major play for votes in this swing state that would mean the waste would remain stored at dozens of sites throughout the country.

“When John Kerry is president, there’s going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain — period,” the Democratic nominee for president said at a forum with supporters held to highlight the issue….

If not Nevada, where? Massachusetts?

It’s About Time

I predict that knee-jerk “civil libertarians” and various ethnic groups will protest this: U.S. to Give Border Patrol New Powers to Deport Illegal Aliens (from NYTimes.com, free registration required). But the operative word is illegal. The Times explains:

[T]he Department of Homeland Security announced today that it planned to give border patrol agents sweeping new powers to deport illegal aliens from the frontiers abutting Mexico and Canada without providing the aliens the opportunity to make their case before an immigration judge.

The move…represents a broad expansion of the authority of the thousands of law enforcement agents who currently patrol the nation’s borders. Until now, border patrol agents typically delivered undocumented immigrants to the custody of the immigration courts, where judges determined whether they should be deported or remain in the United States.

Homeland Security officials described the immigration courts — which hear pleas for asylum and other appeals to remain in the country — as sluggish and cumbersome, saying illegal immigrants often wait more than a year before being deported, straining the capacity of detention centers and draining critical resources. Under the new system, immigrants will typically be deported within eight days of their apprehension, officials said.

Immigration legislation passed in 1996 allows the immigration service to deport certain groups of illegal aliens without judicial oversight [emphasis added], but until now the agency only permitted officials at the nation’s airports and seaports to do so. The new rule will apply to illegal aliens caught within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders who have spent 14 days or less within the United States. The border agents will focus on deporting third-country nationals, rather than Mexicans or Canadians, and they are expected to begin exercising their new powers on Aug. 24 in Tucson and Laredo, Tex.

So, it’s better than nothing. But why limit it to illegal aliens caught within 100 miles of a border? Why limit it to illegal aliens who’ve been in the country less than 14 days? And why tell everyone when and where enforcement will begin, unless it’s disinformation?

UPDATE: I’m not going to track all the negative comments about the new policy, but here’s a sample. Repeat after me: We’re talking about illegal immigrants.

Boo Hoo!

Headline from AP via Yahoo! News: Party-Switching La. Congressman Draws Ire. Well, Representative Rodney Alexander is drawing the ire of Democrats because he’s decided to run for re-election as a, gasp, Republican. The story notes that “Democrats reacted to the news by calling the first-term congressman a turncoat and a coward.” That’s a fine thing to call someone who until two days ago was your “friend and colleague” — as they say in Washington about anyone who isn’t Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.

John Lehman Nails It, As Usual

Rod Dreher, posting on The Corner, shares his notes from an editorial board session with John Lehman. Here’s my favorite:

8. “The Secretary of Transportation is obsessive about [racial profiling]. He will not relent on it….”

He raked Norm Mineta over the coals for his “absurd” fear of racial discrimination, which prevents common sense screening at airports. Lehman said we have limited resources, so we should apply them intelligently.

“We’re spending nine-tenths of the money we have on people who have 99/100ths of one percent of the likelihood of being terrorists, because we want to be politically correct. It’s crazy,” Lehman said.

One of my colleagues suggested that perhaps as a Japanese-American who was interned as a child during WW2, he has a special perspective on how badly things can go when profiling goes too far. Lehman wasn’t having any of this.

“Look, that’s his problem, not my problem,” he said. “I’ve got problems too, and I don’t take them out on [public policy].”

Lehman leapt into prominence as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Unlike most Navy secretaries, who were content to be figureheads, Lehman actively pushed his agenda: rebuilding the Navy, which had shrunk considerably in the aftermath of the debacle in Vietnam.

One of the obstacles Lehman had to overcome was a nay-saying “think piece” — a pseudo-scientific piece of claptrap — that emanated from the think-tank where I worked at the time. Lehman soon took care of that. The think-tank had been operated for 15 years by a university under a contract that the Navy had habitually renewed. But no longer. The contract was let for competition and, lo and behold, the university didn’t win the competition. Under new management the think-tank began to produce a lot less claptrap and a lot more hard analysis of real data. That is, it rediscovered its original mission, with some help from Mr. Lehman.

The Wisdom of Limited Government, Confirmed Again

Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at The Johns Hopkins University, have written Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. This review by Robert Heineman tells me all I need to know. Here are some excerpts from the review:

…Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy….

[T]he proliferation of special interests in the nation’s capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors’ words, “The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away”….

Group conflict within the beltway now dominates American politics, and by the mid–twentieth century political scientists viewed group activity as “the essence of American politics”…. With the rise of what Theodore J. Lowi has critically described as interest-group liberalism, government became little more than a broker for competing interests. Moreover, in terms of information and access, the increase in regulatory institutions at the national level has given group leaders located within the beltway a tremendous advantage over their colleagues in other parts of the nation. Perhaps of most concern, these “insider” groups themselves now discourage their members’ active political involvement….

The proliferation of groups that function without public support has been encouraged by major changes in the litigation process. By providing successful plaintiffs with a right to legal fees in many cases, Congress has encouraged attorneys to push advocacy and tort litigation, which in turn has been facilitated by judicial loosening of the requirements for standing and class action. Thus, special interests now can obtain from the courts policy decisions that previously would have required political pressure on elected officials….

Despite the acuity of the authors’ insights into the dire direction of the U.S. policy process, they seem oblivious to the possibility that big government itself is the cause of the problem….

Indeed.

In summary: The pigs keep demanding a bigger public trough at which to feed, and their “public servants” in Congress continue to comply.

Don’t Waste Your Vote

I’m not surprised that an antiwar libertarian like Gene Healy sees Bush vs. Kerry as Freddy vs. Jason. He does admit, however, that it’s hard to vote for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate, with a straight face. Healy cites a piece by Bill Bradford, in which Bradford says:

Badnarik believes that the federal income tax has no legal authority and that people are justified in refusing to file a tax return until such time as the IRS provides them with an explanation of its authority to collect the tax. He hadn’t filed income tax returns for several years. He moved from California to Texas because of Texas’ more liberal gun laws, but he refused to obtain a Texas driver’s license because the state requires drivers to provide their fingerprints and Social Security numbers. He has been ticketed several times for driving without a license; sometimes he has gotten off for various technical legal reasons, but on three occasions he has been convicted and paid a fine. He also refused to use postal ZIP codes, seeing them as “federal territories.”

He has written a book on the Constitution for students in his one-day, $50 seminar on the Constitution, but it is available elsewhere, including on Amazon.com. It features an introduction by Congressman Ron Paul and Badnarik’s theory about taxes. His campaign website included a potpourri of right-wing constitutional positions, as well as some very unorthodox views on various issues. He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy and they’d be less trouble for prison guards and to blow up the U.N. building on the eighth day of his administration, after giving the building’s occupants a chance to evacuate. In one especially picturesque proposal, he wrote:

I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped.

One assumes, although one cannot prove, that none of this is an exercise in irony. At any rate, these opinions were removed from the website shortly after he won the nomination, and they didn’t come up when he visited state party conventions. Nor did his refusal to file tax returns, thereby risking federal indictment and felony arrest. While many of his closest supporters were aware of these issues, they were unknown to most LP members.

Irony seems to be lost on card-carrying Libertarians. The Party seems to have been taken over by the tinfoil-hat brigade.

"The Party of the Little People"?

Conjure with this:

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of America’s poorest people and of its very richest. (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros and Donald Trump are all for Kerry. So is almost all of Hollywood and most of Wall Street. Kerry will probably win at least eight of the 12 richest zip codes in America. The four per cent of voters who described themselves to pollsters in 2000 as “upper class” decisively favoured Al Gore over George W Bush.)

The writer is David Frum, a former special assistant to President Bush, but I have no reason to doubt his facts. They’re consistent with the vast sums that are pouring into the treasuries of pro-Kerry Section 527 organizations.

Why are the super-rich more likely to be Democrats than Republicans? Here are some possibilities:

1. Super-rich Democrats suffer from a certain degree of guilt about their wealth, especially those of the super-rich who became wealthy because they happened to have a marketable talent, such as singing or acting, or a remarkable streak of good fortune in notoriously volatile professions, such as investing. Thus, out of guilt, they feel compelled to side with the party that professes to favor the less-fortunate. (They might not call it guilt, but it sure smells like guilt.)

2. They rightly resent the attitude of some Republicans who are super-rich or who aspire to that status, namely, that government can be used to tilt economic outcomes in their direction.

3. The super-rich are little affected by taxes and therefore don’t see why others should care so much about them. They can’t understand, for example, why mere millionaires should resent the estate tax, when they, the super-rich, can so easily get around it with trusts and other devices. Similarly, they’re so wealthy (already) that they don’t care about progressive income tax rates, which they know how to avoid to the extent that they wish to do so.

4. They’re good at what made them wealthy, but that doesn’t mean they are especially well educated or insightful about the causes of poverty and corruption (in both cases, too much government, not too little). To the extent that they’re good at business, they have a wrong-headed belief that government can “run” the economy in the way that a business is run.

5. Then there is knee-jerk opposition to war — peace is good, war is bad — which is fashionable, and easy for shallow minds to embrace. Shallow-minded or not, the super-rich have acquired a taste for consorting with pseudo-sophisticated “opinion makers” and left-wing “intellectuals”.

A super-rich person may be a Democrat for any combination of these reasons, or others I haven’t listed. Whatever the case, the Democrat Party is no longer “the party of the little people” — if it ever was. That term is not only condescending, it’s just plain wrong.

The Tricks Time Plays on Us

Remember when Barry Goldwater was reviled as a right-wing extremist? Of course, he still is in many quarters, but his ideas have much more currency today than they did in 1964, when he lost the presidential election, in a landslide, to FDR’s spiritual and moral heir, LBJ. Here are some passages from Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention:

[T]he tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways — not because they are old, but because they are true….

[W]e are a Nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.

Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic “make work”; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses….

Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth….

It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don’t rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression — and this is hogwash….

[O]nly the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace….
Now, we here in America can keep the peace only if we remain vigilant and only if we remain strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. And I want to make this abundantly clear: I don’t intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will — and that I promise you, Americans….

Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism….

We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And — And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don’t seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We only seek — only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity — guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed….

A hard-nosed, libertarian Republican. If only….

The Veil of Ignorance in Ohio (and Elsewhere)

I was reminded of the veil of ignorance when I read in The New Republic online that Kerry may have a shot at winning Ohio because, according to Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg, “Bush’s support among …”Country Folk” has weakened”:

The Country Folk are the most anti-corporate in the Republican base (33 percent warm and 35 percent cool thermometer readings). By 57 to 41 percent, they reject the assertion that Bush’s economic policies are proving successful, affirming instead that the middle class is not sharing in the income and employment gains. They are particularly upset with rising health care costs and the fact that people are financially squeezed. Over half agree (60 percent) that Bush is neglecting domestic problems.

The ignorance, of course, lies in the “folk wisdom” that corporations are bad, that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run, that government is responsible for health care and the cost of health care, and that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run. (See, “folk wisdom” makes me so crazy that I start repeating myself.)

“Folk wisdom” isn’t restricted to Ohio, of course. It’s widespread. Ohio’s “Country Folk” have no monopoly on economic ignorance.

Blatant economic ignorance reminds me of John Rawls’s legendary veil of ignorance, which according to Wikipedia,

is a method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following principle: imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue. For example, whites in the pre-Civil War south did indeed condone slavery, but they most likely would not have done so had there been a re-fashioning of society because of which they would not know if they would be the ones enslaved. It is a philosophical idea related of method of two people dividing a cake: one cuts, the other chooses first (see pie method).

The “wisdom” of Ohio’s Country Folk and their ilk — rural, suburban, and urban — illustrates a deep flaw in Rawls’s formula for so-called social justice. The veil of ignorance, aside from being a useless thought experiment, works only if you believe that people can simply make up rules about such things as how an economy should work and what outcomes it should produce.

Free-market capitalism is the best economic system because — when it’s left alone — it produces more income and wealth than any alternative system. And it’s good for everyone, not just those “filthy capitalists” and their corporations. Yes, the rich get richer, but so do the poorer — except for those whose incentives are blunted by the lure of welfare benefits.

Free-market capitalism was invented neither by a bunch of economic ignoramuses operating behind the veil of ignorance nor by Adam Smith. It evolved over centuries of trial and error. Smith merely tried to understand it and explain why it works so well.

Karl Marx and his intellectual heirs retreated behind the veil of ignorance and brought forth Communism, Socialism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and other impoverishing schemes — all in the name of social justice. The veil of ignorance is aptly named.

The Physics of John Kerry

Jay Tea at Wizbang calls it the “Kerry Uncertainty Principle”:

Werner Heisenberg was a quantum physicist of the early and mid 20th Century. He’s probably best well known for his Uncertainty Principle, which states that one can know the exact position of a particle or its exact speed, but not both simultaneously. Heisenberg pointed out that the mere fact of observing such particles changes them, and renders prior observations moot.

Were Heisenberg alive today, and were he more interested in politics than subatomic particles, he would have made the same discovery by observing John Kerry’s positions on issues. It seems the more one examines where the Democratic nominee stands on an issue, the less you actually know.

My comment:

I think Kerry’s mind exhibits the qualities of Schrodinger’s cat; his state of mind is an unpredictable, random event. Wikipedia explains the concept:

A cat [Kerry’s mind] is placed in a sealed box [his head]. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas [his thought processes]. There…is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat…However, when the box is opened [Kerry speaks] the experimenter sees only a “…dead cat” or a “…living cat [whatever happens to come into Kerry’s mind at the moment].”