Politics, Government & Public Policy: September 2005 Archives

Here's my take on how you should vote on the various propositions that will be on the ballot in November, 2005.

Yes! on Proposition 73 -- Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Yes! on Proposition 74 -- Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status. Dismissal. Initiative Statute.

Yes! on Proposition 75 -- Public Employee Union Dues. Restrictions on Political Contributions. Employee Consent Requirement. Initiative Statute.

Yes! on Proposition 76 -- State Spending and School Funding Limits. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Yes! on Proposition 77 -- Redistricting. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Soft yes on Proposition 78 -- Discounts on Prescription Drugs. Initiative Statute.

Soft no on Proposition 79 -- Prescription Drug Discounts. State-Negotiated Rebates. Initiative Statute.

Both 78 and 79 look confusing and bloated, I doubt we need either.

No! on Proposition 80 -- Electric Service Providers. Regulation. Initiative Statute.

I haven't been neglecting to mention my desire for a pro-life Supreme Court nominee because I'm hoping for one to fly in under the radar, but rather because I figure that my desire goes without saying. However, Manuel Miranda -- whose Supreme Court nominee articles have been invaluable -- suggests that pro-life Republicans have allowed themselves to be sidelined by the Bush Administration, and that we should speak up.

Preparing for the Supreme Court fight, pro-lifers were told by White House surrogates to stay out of the light and out of the newspapers, to be quiet so as not to scare the horses. Even before Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement this summer, while liberal reporters worked to connect conservative concern over the Supreme Court with the abortion issue, pro-lifers were measuring their words, beating each other up, and trying not to appear too demanding of the president that, in the small margins that matter, they had elected.

Ever so smoothly, pro-lifers were corralled and managed, so that if the president appointed yet another Republican disappointment to the Supreme Court, it would be too late after the fact to do anything about it. It isn't that pro-life leaders don't trust President George W. Bush. They do. They trust what they think is a working internal compass. Yet there is the fear that for some who surround him "Roe versus Wade" are merely two alternative means of exiting New Orleans.

Not that I'm any sort of "pro-life leader", but I'm not sure how much I trust President Bush. He's been pretty reliable when it comes to moral issues, granted, but his prolifigate spending has made me wary in general. So, for whatever it's worth, let me throw in my $200 billion and urge the President to nominate someone who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade on legal grounds.

Our Constitution should be construed to protect federalism, and Roe v. Wade violated that principle and laid the groundwork for ever-more intrusive government intervention into local politics. As Charles Krauthammer wrote, has any other judicial decision ever disenfranchised so many?

In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade ? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

The corruption continues 32 years later. You could see it played out hour by hour in the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge John Roberts. Question upon question that pretended to be about high constitutional principle was really about abortion in ill-concealed disguise.

End the farce. Let the people vote.

And when we can, I will do my best to convince people to vote to protect the sanctity of life.

I've just been thinking that the political spectrum is a lot like a giant rubberband, with politicians stretching it in every direction, pulling against each other. One significant characteristic of this metaphor is that only the movements of the politicians on the outside are constrained, in that it's hard for them to push the rubberband out further from the center of mass. Politicians on the inside can move around freely until they bump up against the rubberband, and those on the outside can move away from the band, possibly allowing the band itself to move inwards. For instance, as we've seen with the Bush Administration, it's easy to Republicans to become big spenders because the Democrats' constituents want the money, so the Dems can't oppose spending even if they don't like it. Likewise, as with Bill Clinton, Democrats can declare war on anyone they want because Republicans are eager to exercise American military might to protect the country.

The flaw with the rubberband model is that even inlying politicians affect the size and shape of the rubberband, so maybe we should picture the entire thing sitting atop a balanced table of some sort that shifts as the politicians move around. The problem is that I don't like the idea of a fixed fulcrum, since the political "center" moves around in correpondence with the edges of the rubberband.

JW points me to a Lloyd Grove article about the new Steve Rosenbaum movie "Inside the Bubble", which promises to finally give John Kerry and his campaign the attention they deserve.

It features, among other not-ready-for-prime-time moments, Clinton scowling and rolling her eyes over an apparent Kerry gaffe during a presidential debate; Kerry pretending to interview himself and babbling in Italian while waiting for a real interview to begin; Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) cursing at reporters during a campaign stop, and Kerry message guru Robert Shrum confidently declaring a few days before the 2004 election: "Zogby [a prominent pollster] just announced who's gonna win. Us!"

Sounds like a blast! I expect that, similar to "Fahrenheit 9/11", most of the enjoyment will come from how terrible it makes the other side look, but hopefully unlike the earlier movie this one will be at least loosely based on reality.

Interestingly, I can't find any reference to "Inside the Bubble" on the Internet Movie Database.

In a comment, TM Lutas pointed me to Porkbusters, a new endeavor by The Truth Laid Bear to help Congress find and cut excessive spending from the federal budget. As of now, only one politician has committed/offered to cut federal funding for projects in her district, and I want to give credit where credit is due: to the much-lamented House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA. Now if only her Republican collegues would follow suit!

As most of you know, the federal government is planning on spending billions of our tax dollars on two enormous endeavors, neither of which it is actually empowered to perform. First, the government proposes to spend as much as $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans -- a city that's 80% below sea level and just about to be further destroyed by yet another hurricane. Second, they want to spend more than $100 billion to send men to the moon -- a project that will be "very Apollo-like, with updated technology". I like moon bases and underwater cities as much as the next guy, but the Constitution doesn't grant our federal government the authority to spend our money on either of these things. If we as a nation want our government to do them, we should insist upon amending our Constitution to allow it.

However, I have an even better idea! Why spend $200 billion and $100 billion on separate projects when we could just put the two together and rebuild New Orleans on the moon? Our satellite doesn't have any hurricanes, and its oceans are full of dust! Plus, there wouldn't be any shortage of entrepreneurs eager to take up residence.

If House Majority Leader Time DeLay was joking (as some have argued) last week when he said there's simply no fat left to cut from the federal budget then there's no one more at fault than him for failing to implement the cuts. He's in charge of the House Republicans, and there's no one to blame for soaring federal deficits other than the majority. Sure, the Democrats want to spend more, and on different things, but they're not in power now. Being more frugal than Ted Kennatee isn't anything to brag about, and refusing to face reality in the wake of Katrina is childish.

There's an old adage that no one in Washington can tell the difference between $1 million and $1 billion. Seldom has that Beltway learning disability been more vividly demonstrated than in the weeks since Katrina.

When President Bush announced last Thursday that the feds would take a lead role in the reconstruction of New Orleans, he in effect established a new $200 billion federal line of credit. To put that $200 billion in perspective, we could give every one of the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and they could each build a beach front home virtually anywhere in America.

Instead what are we going to do? Build the levees higher and buy more pumps? And borrow money to do it? Stupid.

Congressman Todd Aiken of Missouri complains that Congress was forced to vote on the $62 billion first installment of funds "even though we knew a lot of the money may go to waste." Mr. Aiken and several dozen other House conservatives proposed an amendment to the $62 billion hurricane relief bill that would offset at least some of the emergency spending by cutting other government programs a meager 2.5 cents out of every dollar that federal agencies spend.

Was the amendment defeated? No. The Republican leadership would not even allow it to come to a vote, on the grounds that there was no waste which could be easily identified and cut.

Dozens of other reasonable proposals to offset Katrina's tidal wave of deficit spending have been similarly repelled. Mike Pence of Indiana suggested a one-year delay on the multitrillion dollar new prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. For 220 years, seniors have managed without this give-away; one more year of waiting would hardly be an act of cruelty. It would save $40 billion, but there were no takers. Then there was the well-publicized idea by Republicans and several Democrats in Congress to cut $25 billion for bike paths, train-station renovations, nature trails, parking garages, auto museums and 6,000 other such pork projects in the just-enacted highway law. It was torpedoed by the powerful committee chairmen who patched this abominable bill together in the first place.

The problem is that Americans have become whiny cry-babies, many of whom can't fend for themselves. We're becoming a nation of 30-year-old adolescents who don't have the nerve to move out of Uncle Sam's basement... but there's no real "Uncle Sam"... that's just what we call the middle class taxpayers (and their children's children's children) who finance the present with nary a thought of the future.

It seems inevitable to me that, given enough time, the United States of America is doomed to an end state similar to that facing Germany after it's recently ambiguous election.

The late economist Mancur Olson argued that the downfall of democracy would be its tendency to calcify into special-interest gridlock. Germany's extensive welfare state has created millions of voters who fear the loss of any benefits. Combine that with voters in eastern Germany who cling to outmoded notions of state support and you have an formidable challenge to bring about real reform.

"The lesson for America is do not go down the road as far as Germany has," says Horst Schakat, a German who created a series of successful businesses in California for 30 years but retired to his native land in 2001. "You may find yourself unable to go down a different but correct path once too many people have become dependent on the state."

Occasional revolution is required to break up this calcification, though it need not be violent if undertaken in a timely manner. However, were there political will to foment a liberty-enhancing, non-violent revolution, then perhaps such a thing would not be needed at all. More likely America, the oldest republic on the planet, will eventually stagnate and be overtaken by the nations just now emerging from under the boot of totalitarianism.

I've written about deficit spending int he past and argued that it isn't necessarily bad, long or short term, but I still agree with President Clinton when he admonishes the current government for over-spending.

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.

"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said.

"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."

Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

All true, and it doesn't make sense. Where I'd differ is that Mr. Clinton probably wants to increase taxes to reduce the deficit, whereas I think we should focus on slashing spending. (And no, tax cuts don't count as "spending".) Most of the blames rests with Congressional Republicans, but the President himself has motivated loads of new spending (like the prescription drug plan) and he hasn't vetoed anything that's hit his desk.

DeoDuce has more about Clinton from the same article, getting caught in a big fat lie.

I completely believe that the CIA needs to be reformed after the colossal failure of 9/11, and absent other knowledge I'm encouraged by the house-cleaning being performed by CIA Director Porter J. Goss, but I wonder if things are going as badly as page two of that article implies.

"The biggest problem for CIA can be summed up in two words: No spies," said one official.

The agency, in the two years since a presidential commission called for reforming human spying efforts, still has not succeeded in penetrating the major targets of U.S. intelligence with human spies, the official said.

Those targets include the terrorist group al Qaeda and the governments of China, North Korea and Iran.

But you'd hardly expect the CIA to announce how well it's doing placing spies in all those organizations, right? Then again, a CIA announcement that "Yeah, we've got several spies very high up in the North Korean military, in al Queda in Iraq, and in Iran" could eliminate a few enemies by playing on their paranoia....

Representative Tom DeLay's declaration of victory over government waste is a parody, right?

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.

Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible.

"My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I'll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet," the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.

Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

It's just so absurd, I don't see how he could possibly utter those statements. Maybe Scott Ott has infiltrated the Washington Times?

The only other explanation I can think of is that DeLay and Congressional Republicans have completely different spending priorities than I and many other fiscally conservative members the party do. The federal budget has swollen by more than 25% from 2001 to 2004 -- the chart below doesn't even include 2005.

Note that the y-axis doesn't start at zero.

If you're more than four years old you may remember that the country seemed to operate pretty smoothly during the 1990s. Sure, there was some occasional philandering, but the budget at least stayed down. If all the fat has been trimmed, how come we weigh 25% more? If we survived the 1990s, is it fair to argue that the subsequent increases aren't "fat"? Sure, some of the extra spending is due to the War on Terror, but most of it is not. President Bush's prescription drug benefit alone will end up costing more than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Continuing my series about being poor in America, here's an article by George Will that points out the failure of the exorbitantly expensive "war on poverty".

America's always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois's freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's inadequate "empathy" and an amazing criticism of the government's "historic indifference" and its "passive indifference" that "is as bad as active malice." The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the "war on poverty" that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since then the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed in more than $6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.

The senator is called a "new kind of Democrat," which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash -- much of it spent through liberalism's "caring professions" -- to cope with cultural collapse. He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal. ...

Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.

If leftists are really concerned with helping the poor -- rather than maintaining them as a permanent class for means of pandering for votes -- they should focus on teaching and encouraging obedience to those three rules: graduate high school, don't have babies out of wedlock, and don't get married as a teenager. The biggest shortcoming of leftism is that it thinks every problem can be solved with a government policy, and it refuses to admit that problems caused by bad behavior can only be fixed if individual people are willing to change.

Meanwhile, SoCalPundit points to a piece by Rush Limbaugh in which the radio commentator says that leftist policies make people poor.

The reality is that liberal Democrat policies fail and make people poor, and do not do anything about it once that happens. The reality that we’re seeing on the media is 180 degrees different from the reality in the country. In the media and liberal Democrat world, Wal-Mart is evil. Wal-Mart, in the real world, has donated something like $15 million (story | story). In media real world, the pharmaceutical companies are evil and killing people. In the real world, the pharmaceutical companies work very hard to make drugs and medicines that save lives and have extended the life expectancy. They have donated more than $25 million in cash and pharmaceutical supplies. And what about the oil companies? In the media reality, the oil companies are the reason for all evil, it’s why we’re in Iraq, it’s why Bush is in the White House, it’s why Cheney is the vice president, it’s why Halliburton is there. But in the real world, ExxonMobil has pledged $7 million, ConocoPhillips and Shell, $3 million apiece, Marathon Oil, one and a half million, the BP Foundation, one and a half million dollars, and guess where that money came from? It came from profits from gasoline (story). The government already runs the oil business. The government tells oil companies where they can’t drill and where they can, where they can’t ship and where they can, on what kind of ships they can ship their goods and on what kinds of ships they can’t. They tell them what kind of gasoline to formulate for 40 different regions of this country. It’s the government that already runs the oil companies. If I were the oil companies, I would convene hearings and I would bring every member of Congress up and I would start asking them questions, “Why are you trying to destroy this industry?” There are two realities. Unfortunately, the Republicans in Washington buy into the media reality, and they think that’s what the rest of the country thinks.

That's the great irony of (true) liberalism and capitalism: by preserving the individual power to be selfish, we actually do more to promote the common good than could any top-down government program.

Former Representative Bob Williams points out that state and local governments control the first-responders, and that Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin bear most of the blame for the debacle following hurricane Katrina.

Many in the media are turning their eyes toward the federal government, rather than considering the culpability of city and state officials. I am fully aware of the challenges of having a quick and responsive emergency response to a major disaster. And there is definitely a time for accountability; but what isn't fair is to dump on the federal officials and avoid those most responsible--local and state officials who failed to do their job as the first responders. The plain fact is, lives were needlessly lost in New Orleans due to the failure of Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and the city's mayor, Ray Nagin.

The primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies does not belong to the federal government. It belongs to local and state officials who are charged by law with the management of the crucial first response to disasters. First response should be carried out by local and state emergency personnel under the supervision of the state governor and his emergency operations center.

The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people. Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved.

FEMA hasn't been flawless, but it should be clear to any thinking person that most of the blame for the deaths around New Orleans belongs to Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin.

This is pretty ridiculous... why should Katrina victims who were smart enough to buy insurance be penalized?

The federal government plans to begin doling out debit cards worth $2,000 each to adult victims of Hurricane Katrina, The Associated Press has learned. ...

Not everyone will qualify for a debit card, said Ed Conley, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Houston.

"For instance you may have some people who have insurance and insurance is meeting their living expenses while they have been displaced. You have some people who may be looking at an option such as a cruise ship where all of their needs are going to be met. It is going to vary by family," said Conley.

If we as a society insist that our government be positioned to help people who were capable of providing for themselves but were too foolish to do so, we shouldn't also penalize the victims who did plan ahead.

Of course, as a Californian, I'm basically counting on federal aid if there's ever a major earthquake. Most insurers in California don't provide any earthquake coverage; it can be purchased separately in some cases, but it's horrendously expensive. Typical policies have deductibles of over $50,000 and annual premiums around 2% of the property's value.

Updating my earlier post, the WaPo has corrected their article, now saying that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26th, which was the Friday before Katrina actually hit on Monday the 29th. (HT: Mannish.)

However, it looks like Mayor Ray Nagin deserves more blame than I thought.

Then on Sunday morning, when I checked in again with local NO bloggers and local NO news sites, I again saw no mention of Nagin's behavior. The I watched Nagin's TV interview and I saw how the local news media was too cowardly to confront him about his doing nothing - and I mean absolutely, nothing - to get the poor and the sick and the physically incapacitated OUT of the city when the city was projected to be either totally destroyed or completely flooded with water.

I also watched as local reporters were too afraid to contradict him when he claimed - and this was at the time the then Category 5 was projected to directly hit the city - that in just two weeks - all the water would be pumped out and all the utilities would be back!

Again, not one person anywhere in the MSM said... anything... about this lie, then or since.

I then watched as the news media again said... nothing... as Nagin claimed on TV that the flood waters after the hurricane would NOT be toxic. At that point, I belatedly started blogging non-stop (unaware of Brendan and the handful of others pre-existing efforts), asking - doesn't anyone out there realize that the mayor of New Orleans.... is crazy?

B. Preston at Junk Yard Blog has more pictures of school buses left to the flood rather than used by Mayor Nagin to evacuate his citizens.

With the improved resolution we count 255 buses in that one lot. That means at a capacity of 66 on board, 16,830 New Orleans residents could have been evacced out in one trip. Even if you have a lower capacity per bus, say 50 per bus, you're still getting nearly 13,000 out in one run. In an emergency mandatory evacuation, you could probably get away with putting more than 66 on each of those buses.

When we said that the buses are now expenses instead of assets, this is what we meant. Not only are those buses ruined, their disuse resulting in lives lost, but now they're spilling oil and gas out into the already polluted water. A spark near that slick could cause yet another fire and a whole new set of explosions.

(HT: Clayton Cramer.)

Although it's certainly too early to begin finger-pointing, since it's already started I may as well join in. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) protests so much that her complaints readily identify the group that deserves most of the blame.

Underscoring the strain of the disaster, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., lashed out at federal officials who she said have denigrated local efforts to deal with the catastrophe.

"If one person criticizes them or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me," she said on the ABC's "This Week." "One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."

Maybe the Senator didn't see this picture linked to by Drudge of hundreds of school buses under water that Mayor Ray Nagin didn't deploy to assist residents with the mandatory evacuation. Sure, some residents were too poor or sick to evacuate, but it seems like 25% of the city stayed. Local officials didn't do their jobs to get them out, and the fact that these buses weren't used shows that the locals didn't take the impending disaster seriously.

To some extent it's understandable that local civilian authority broke down so quickly, but no one anticipated it. I don't blame police officers for abandoning their jobs in efforts to care for their own families. Even if my family were safe, I'm not sure I'd want to risk my life wading into a toxic swamp to try to rescue people who were more likely to shoot at me than thank me. Local police aren't equipped or trained for this sort of operation, but the fact that they had to perform it indicates that their superiors didn't do their jobs very well.

What about this WaPo article that mentions how long Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) waited to accept federal aid.

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."

Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.

You can't protect your bureaucratic fiefdom and then turn around and complain that the resulting failures are someone else's fault.

Update:
Updated and corrected!

I was the first person I've seen to write that New Orleans should be abandoned in the wake of Katrina, but now the meme is spreading. Don Singleton and Greg Ransom have concurring posts, and the latter has satellite pictures that show the city post-apocalypse.