Politics, Government & Public Policy: November 2005 Archives

It strikes me that since many criminals turn to crime out of laziness, and many lazy people spend all their time watching television, there may be a correlation between crime-time and Prime Time. Is there less crime when high-rated shows that cater to young males are playing new episodes? Is crime generally lower when television ratings are higher? If so, then perhaps it would be a good use of public funds to discover and subsidize the kinds of shows that criminals tend to like.

In response to the earlier story about Chris Matthews excusing evil as a "different perspective", Mr. Matthews sent an email to RedState.org.

I told the students that my way to deal with terrorists was to do what Golda Meir did after the killing of Israeli athletes at the Olympics: track them down and kill them one by one and be rough about it.

I don't know why the reporter chose to ignore my clear statement was the appropriate response to terorism, why he chose to skip to my strong belief that we need to get behind this massive hatred we're facing in the Muslim world.

Check with the University for confirmation. I was invited by the political science students. I'm pretty sure they taped it because that had an audi-visual person there putting on my microphone.

Anyway there were many witnesses who can recall what I said if somebody asks.

Chris Matthews

So it appears that his earlier quotes were taken out of context.

(HT: James Taranto.)

I generally believe that the way to deal with speech you don't like is to counter it with more speech you do like. Limits on speech almost always cause more harm than good, but I sympathize with Hungarians and Austrians who believe that Communist symbols and holocaust denial (respectively) are beyond the pale of public discussion. Considering the millions of deaths attributable to Communists and Nazis I can understand why the people most damaged by those ideologies would want to suppress their resurgence. Still, I tend to think that it would be better to fight bad speech with good speech rather than coercive government force.

Update:
Eugene Volokh agrees, as I figured he would.

I think Mark Steyn may be my favorite columnist because he finds brilliant, pithy turns of phrase that perfectly capture my positions on just about everything. For instance, in his essay on "Big Government, Small Citizens":

This is the paradox of “social democracy”. When you demand lower taxes and less government, you’re damned by the left as “selfish”. And, to be honest, in my case that’s true. I’m glad to find a town road at the bottom of my drive, and I’m happy to pay for the army and a new fire truck for a volunteer fire department every now and then, but, other than that, I’d like to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.

The left, on the other hand, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it’s better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It’s kindler, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the broader societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him. “Social democracy” is, in that sense, explicitly anti-social.

Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. And once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to persuade the junkie to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America that the state should run your health care: A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the DVD stores and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

I'm going to add him to my list of people I want to meet.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have an insightful article in The Weekly Standard that outlines an amazing number of programs that Republicans should consider advocating in order to build a truly unassailable majority. I don't agree with all their implementation details, but I think they identify a great many problems that (inevitably) big-government conservatives could address that would open the party's tent and expand the base.

How did things reach this pass? One difficulty, as a host of delighted Democrats have pointed out, is that a party ideologically committed to a small government may be ill-equipped to run a large one. Many honest small government conservatives aren't interested in overseeing programs that they would prefer to see slashed or abolished, so their place has been filled by an assortment of cynical operators, for whom the only guiding principle is to keep Republicans (and themselves) fat, happy, and securely in power.

But a larger problem is that even the more idealistic aspects of the GOP program--Bush's vision of an "ownership society," the pursuit of a politically risky Social Security privatization plan--have been ill-suited to the present political climate, and to the mood of the American people. It's not just that the American people have shown little appetite of late for dramatically shrinking the scope of the federal government, or taking more economic responsibility into their own hands--it's that there's shrinking support for such goals among reliable Republican voters.

I am a small-government Republican, but since it seems that most of the country wants a somewhat-large government it makes sense to think about how to make the best of that situation. Even though I don't think large government is the best tool to use, many people do, and the Republican party needs to offer up some solutions that appeal to the voters and that do the best that can be done with the smallest government people will accept.

Given that voters apparently want the government meddling in their lives, I think we Republicans can come up with some better policies than those from the left, and Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam take a good stab at it. Their conclusion is that Republicans should adopt the British Tories' theory of "And" conservatism:

So today's Republican party should be in favor of helping recent immigrants get ahead and slowing the flow of illegal labor--in favor of providing a helping hand to the hard working poor and cutting subsidies to the idle and shiftless--in favor of a tax policy that favors the working class and the productive rich. Above all, it should be in favor of limited government, and in favor of using government's considerable power to shore up the institution that makes a limited government possible--the beleaguered but resilient American family.

Critics will carp that such a party would be trying to be too many things to too many people. But there's a term for a party that attempts this feat and succeeds: a majority party.

Last time I checked the "And" theory isn't working very well for the Tories, but there's a lot in this essay that's worth considering.

(HT: Michael Barone.)

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer, says that the CIA is fundamentally unserious about maintaining cover for its agents.

• Fact: The vast majority of CIA officers overseas operate with little to no cover and have done so since the foundation of the post-World War II clandestine service in 1947. Most case officers posted abroad carry official cover, which usually means they serve as fake diplomats. The use of official cover allowed the agency to grow rapidly in the 1940s, when panic about Soviet expansionism was real and America's experience with espionage and global secret services was small. Developing an agency weighted in favor of nonofficial-cover officers would have been vastly more difficult, time-consuming, and not necessarily useful for a CIA aimed overwhelmingly at massive covert-action programs that did not require officers to be particularly stealthy in their daily routines.

Today, operational camouflage is usually shredded within weeks of a case officer's arrival at his station, since the manner, method and paperwork of operatives is just too different from real foreign-service officers. (Even if the CIA really wanted to fix this inadequate verisimilitude--and it does not--it probably couldn't reconcile the differing demands and bureaucracies of the two institutions.) Minimally competent foreign security services know a great deal of what occurs inside U.S. embassies and consulates since these institutions are completely dependent upon local employees--the State Department calls them "foreign-service nationals"--who, through patriotism or coercion, often report on the activities of their employers.

Regarding Joseph Wilson and his "covert" wife Valerie Plame:

angley's systemic sloppiness--the flimsiness of cover is but the tip of the iceberg of incompetence--has repeatedly destroyed agent networks and provoked "flaps" with some of our closest allies. A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short "fact finding" mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that's not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn't deserve.

Disheartening to someone who cares about American security and likes to think that someone is actually on top of things.

Given the best opportunity in years to begin dragging our state back from the brink of destruction, California voters appear to be balking. I'm very discouraged to see every proposition I backed losing except for, at this moment, Proposition 75 which will protect the dues of union workers. Ah well; in the end that may turn out to be the most important proposition on the ballot.

Update, the next morning:
Nope, they all failed. Good job California. Sigh. Someone was telling me about some great tech jobs in Idaho.... Turnout was a miserable 42.6 percent, which means that if enough Republicans had felt connected to the issues and interested in changing the status quo we could have passed every proposition handily.

I won't fall into the Democrat's trap of blaming the "stupid" voters or attributing these losses to "bad communication". I honestly think Californians either like the way things are, don't want to improve their lot, or don't think it's possible. So it goes. We have to do more convincing, I suppose.

The only good news is that my mom won re-election in our local school board election. Congrats!

(HT: Patterico.)

A pair of stories from China illustrate how freedom of speech and freedom of religion go hand-in-hand. Many conservatives (especially Christians, like myself) advocate moral positions that I generally agree with and are eager to ban sexually explicit material; however, when a government has the power to decide who gets to say what, it's generally easier to ban Bibles than to ban pornography.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese court on Tuesday sentenced a Protestant minister, his wife and her brother to prison terms of up to three years for illegally printing Bibles and other Christian publications, one of their lawyers said.

The conviction of house church minister Cai Zhuohua, 34, and his family by the Beijing People's Intermediate Court came days before U.S. President George W. Bush arrives for a state visit.

In atheist China, printing of Bibles and other religious publications need special approval from the State Bureau of Religious Affairs. Bibles cannot be openly bought at bookshops in a country long criticized overseas for intolerance of religion.

And from the second story:

BEIJING (AFP) - China's media watchdog has launched a monitoring system to step up surveillance of illegal websites with sexual and violent content.

The General Administration of Press and Publication has already issued warnings to 53 websites that provide downloads for pornographic games, the communist party mouthpiece People's Daily reported Tuesday.

The 14 games included "Lives filled with the blessing of sex," "Love the sisters" and "Artificial young girls," it said.

The move was launched in a bid "to safeguard the order of the Internet, purify the web environment and to protect the physical and mental health of the youths," the report said.

Even though freedom can be used for disgusting, evil purposes, God created humanity with free will for a reason: he wants us to choose to do right. If we try to take that freedom away from other people we diminish their God-likeness and we risk giving others the power to restrict our preaching of the gospel.

Yeah suckers, I voted according to the California proposition voters' guide I wrote two months ago! Take that, forces of tyranny and evil!

Meanwhile, Todd Zywicki points to an article by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt about why economists don't vote.

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your "civic duty." As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, "A rational individual should abstain from voting."

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years - a 1910 race in Buffalo - was decided by a single vote.

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands - most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

I met dozens of economists (and economics majors) at UCLA, none of whom voted. I'm sure there are thousands of such economists in the country who don't bother to vote.

But wait a minute, you say. If everyone thought about voting the way economists do, we might have no elections at all. No voter goes to the polls actually believing that her single vote will affect the outcome, does she? And isn't it cruel to even suggest that her vote is not worth casting?

This is indeed a slippery slope - the seemingly meaningless behavior of an individual, which, in aggregate, becomes quite meaningful. Here's a similar example in reverse. Imagine that you and your 8-year-old daughter are taking a walk through a botanical garden when she suddenly pulls a bright blossom off a tree.

"You shouldn't do that," you find yourself saying.

"Why not?" she asks.

"Well," you reason, "because if everyone picked one, there wouldn't be any flowers left at all."

"Yeah, but everybody isn't picking them," she says with a look. "Only me."

And that's the point! Economists' group-think has politically castrated their profession. Each individual economist is too smug to vote, but wait... those thousands of votes actually could affect an election! Since economists tend to be conservative/libertarian leaning, their smugness reduces the chances that the policies I prefer will get enacted.

Time Chapman has posted a revealing internal Senate email from one staffer to a group of others. The bolded text is from the original email.

Well… Here we are. The end is drawing near, and since it’s been so long, I wanted to check in with you all and confirm your priority lists. Please send me an updated list of priorities. Remember, we will start at the beginning of your list and fund down until we run out of money. So if you spend big… you’ll likely only get one or two projects. Please respond to this e-mail even if your list has not changed, so that I can be sure that your Senator’s needs are being addressed. Hope all is well. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail or call.

As Mr. Chapman points out, there's no mention of not spending some of the money or of using any of it to offset the costs of Hurricane Katrina.

(HT: Instapundit.)

I'm amazed to find myself on the same side of an issue as Kweisi Mfume, former CEO of the NAACP, but I'm even more amazed that other leftist politicians (of every color) are so disguistingly racist.

Three of Maryland's top Democrats -- including the two leading candidates for governor next year -- declined to repudiate comments by black Democratic leaders who said racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele are fair because he is a black conservative Republican. ...

But Kweisi Mfume, who is running for senator, yesterday outright condemned the comments by his fellow black Democrats.

"Racially tinged attacks have no place in this campaign for U.S. Senate," said Mr. Mfume, who has chided his party's lack of support for his campaign. "If they did, I could very well be the object of public racial humiliation, based on my skin color, by people who don't like my politics."

"Black bigotry can be just as cruel and evil as white bigotry. There are too many bigots in too many places," Mr. Mfume said, repeating a common refrain from his speeches.

These "racially tinged attacks" against Michael Steele include pelting him with Oreo cookies (to indicate that he's "black on the outside, but white on the inside"), calling him an "Uncle Tom", and equating him to a house slave because he isn't a leftist Democrat.

Despite Mr. Mfume's proper condemnation, there may still be some confusion among his staffers.

Even the spokesman for Mr. Mfume's campaign said pelting Mr. Steele with Oreo cookies and calling him an "Uncle Tom" are simply "pointing out the obvious."

"There is a difference between pointing out the obvious and calling someone names," Mfume spokesman Joseph R. Trippi said Tuesday.

Some other Democrats have come out against this blatant racism, such as Delegate Dereck Davis and U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn; I suppose these two deserve the modicum of praise due to all of us who aren't racist bigots.

Update:
For the record, Joe Trippi says that he was misquoted, and based on his phrasing it's pretty clear that he was.

Two days ago I received a call from reporter S.A. Miller of the Washington Times — he asked me if I condoned throwing Oreo cookies at Lt. Gov Steele or calling him an “Uncle Tom”. My immediate response was that such attacks “were dispicable and have no place in American politics — that such attacks were repugnant”

You can not find that quote in either of two Times stories on the subject.

Miller later in the interview asked me if race would be an issue — I said that civil rights and discrimination were obvious issues that mattered and that there was a diference “between stating the obvious and calling someone names” — and used a recent controversy over a fundraiser for Gov. Erlich as an example of something that was obviously an issue and not name calling.

The California proposition numbering scheme may be of interest to other California residents. Ballot proposition numbers may appear to the casual observer to change randomly every year, but there actually is a system.

If all these warnings are not daunting enough, one must remember that until 1982, proposition numbering began with 1 for each election. Following the November 1982 General Election, propositions were numbered consecutively. This numbering scheme will begin again with Proposition 1 in the November 3, 1998, in accordance with Elections sec. 13117, as it is a ten year rotation.

That Los Angeles County Law Library link above also contains a list of links to every California proposition from throughout history.

The Daily Breeze has another article up about the November 8th election, this time going into more detail about the issues facing the incoming Wiseburn School Board.

The west Hawthorne-based system has already rebuilt Anza Elementary from the ground up, and it has plans to rebuild Dana Middle School. But rising construction costs will leave little money to reinvent Cabrillo Elementary.

In addition, local development is expected to create more than 1,300 new addresses in the years ahead, leaving Wiseburn's leaders to decide whether they want to expand enrollment or restrict the number of out-of-district permit students, who now account for about a third of the total population.

And then there's the local campaign to secede from the Centinela Valley Union High School District by adding a high school.

It's all very exciting local politics, and the plans bode well for property values if everything goes as expected.

My mom, Jo Anne Kaneda, and the other incumbent school board members on her slate have received an excellent endorsement for their re-election from the Daily Breeze, the South Bay's most important newspaper. Not that many of my readers will be eligible to vote in this election on November 8th, but it's still pretty exciting for us.

For more on the silliness of calls for "unity", I refer you to Mark Steyn's recent column on the virtues of confrontation.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, on this week's whirlwind tour of the Great Satan, the Prince of Wales "will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam…because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11". His Royal Highness apparently finds the Bush approach to Islam "too confrontational".

If the Prince wants to take a few examples of the non-confrontational approach with him to the White House, here's a couple pulled at random from the last week's news: the president of Iran called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Kofi Annan expressed his "dismay".

Excellent. Struck the perfect non-confrontational tone. Were the Iranian nuclear programme a little more advanced and they'd actually wiped Israel off the map, the secretary-general might have felt obliged to be more confrontational and express his "deep concern".

In Sulawesi, Indonesia, three Christian girls walking home from school were beheaded.

"It is unclear what was behind the attack," reported the BBC, scrupulously non-confrontationally.

In the Australian state of Victoria, reports the Herald Sun, "police are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits". Tough luck for us infidel wife-beaters, but admirably non-confrontational Islam-wise.

The main difficulty the Left faces is that they are afraid to confront anyone or anything because their ideology prevents them from convincing themselves that any position is better than any other. Self-contradictory, I know, which is why they have such a hard time writing coherent policy or getting elected.

Despite recent cries from Democrats that President Bush nominate a Justice who "unifies" America, I haven't been able to find any mention of such a criteria in the Constitution. Aside from that, I'm not even sure why anyone thinks a Supreme Court Justice should be expected to "unify" Americans, considering that they have almost no public role and shouldn't be making decisions based on popular positions or inclinations.

"In 1990, a Democrat-controlled Senate unanimously confirmed Judge Alito as a circuit judge," Mr. Frist said in a statement dispatched 27 minutes before President Bush announced his selection. "I hope that my colleagues will give his nomination a fair opportunity this time as well."

Moments later, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, took to the ramparts opposite Mr. Frist.

"It is sad that the president felt he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America instead of choosing a nominee in the mold of Sandra Day O'Connor, who would unify us," he said. "This controversial nominee, who would make the court less diverse and far more conservative, will get very careful scrutiny from the Senate and from the American people."

Senators and Representatives certainly make no attempt to "unify" any citizenry who aren't in their legislative districts, and their success at "unification" is measured only once every few years when there's an election. I've never heard a politician standing for election claim that he's hoping to "unify" the electorate and receive 100% of the vote, or 90%, or even 80%. Even presidential candidates often write off entire states as unwinnable. Why should Supreme Court Justices be expected to "unify" anyone?

It's nice for everyone to be in agreement, but in politics the likelyhood of such comity is inversely proportional to the importance of the issue at hand. Even after 9/11 it barely took a month for Democrats to begin undermining the President, and many of their constituents agreed with them; however, enough disagreed that the Republicans were able to gain a majority in the Senate, thus meeting the Constitutional requirement for decision-making.

Even aside from the absurdity of applying the "unity" standard to Supreme Court Justices, "unity" is a fabricated goal generally advocated by those who can't cross the 50% + 1 line that's needed to get their agenda enacted. For some reason, calls for "unity" always assume that the majority should yield to the minority for the sake of fraternity rather than the other way around. If Senator Schumer wants America to be unified behind a Supreme Court nominee, then why doesn't he surrender his ideology and lead his peers in support of Judge Alito? If he's unwilling to do so, they why should he expect the President to surrender his ideology when making a nomination?

I like the general thrust of the tax reforms being proposed by the President's special commission. They sound like a step in the right direction towards simplification, even though they don't go far enough towards a flat tax to make me ecstatic.

Under the plan, most deductions, credits and other tax breaks would be eliminated along with much of the paperwork and equations that baffle taxpayers under a drastically simplified income tax. ...

Under one plan, individuals would pay no tax on dividends paid by U.S. companies and exclude 75 percent of their capital gains from taxation. Under the second plan, all investment income would be taxed at 15 percent.

Both proposals would abolish the alternative minimum tax, a levy originally drafted to prevent wealthy individuals from escaping taxation but increasingly reaching into the middle class. They also would eliminate federal deductions and credits for mortgage interest, state and local taxes and education, among others.

The advisory commission would replace those withdrawn tax breaks with simpler benefits, including three savings plans that supplant dozens currently available for retirement, medical expenses and education.

Removing deductions for state and local taxes is important because these deductions enabled local governments to set tax rates with little consideration for their impact on citizens, since they'd be paying the money to the feds if not elsewhere. It also makes a lot of sense to simplify the number of savings plans available; it's a matter I've been interested in recently, but I can't even figure out plans exist, much less how to take advantage of them properly.

Bush set certain limits on the panel, requiring that the new plans collect as much tax money as the government collects now.

The proposals also had to retain the progressive system that taxes wealthier taxpayers at higher rates than poorer individuals and families. They were also required to recognize "the importance of homeownership and charity in American society."

Hopefully a simpler tax code will evnetually allow for a lighter tax burden without all the political wrangling, but President Bush was smart to leave that battle for the future. This tax reform commission hasn't had a high profile up till now, but if the President can make these changes happen they will make a significant contribution to his legacy and to America's future.