Coyote Blog

We must keep the little people at a distance

Thank God no one can see the future, because if you told me in 1972 that forty years later we would still be using the suffix -gate to denote a scandal, I might not have had the will to carry on.

Sure seems like it.   Here is the list of questions the Ohio Tea Party has asked as part of their application, which should be routine, for 501(c)4 status.  The Virginia Tea Party had similar requests, including apparently a demand for donor lists and confidential materials which the IRS says will be made public.  The latter seems part and parcel of recent initiative on the Left (seen also in the whole Heartland fiasco) to out confidential donors of Conservative and libertarian organizations while demanding no similar transparency of organizations on the Left.

By the way, I am President of a 501(c)4 organization  (basically a trade group) and I can say with some authority that we never have received any sort of parallel set of questions from the IRS vis a vis our status, so this is either a very new requirement or one especially crafted to apply only to the Tea Party.  I can say from all too much experience that having a Federal agency sit on a request for 9 months and then suddenly demand incredible amounts of work in just a few days from the private party is absolutely typical.

Interesting stuff about Media Matters:  The lengths they went to to manufacture a war with Fox are astounding.  In a real surprise for me, this is actually worse than some Republican's ranting about the organization.  I have no problem with focusing your speech on a particular media outlet to repeatedly challenge what they are saying, but doing oppo research into reporters personal lives?

On the other hand, this "expose" into Media Matters' funding and spending seems entirely irrelevant.  Political organizations seek money from rich people who agree with them?  And liberal groups sometimes give money to other liberal groups?  Who knew?  If those are the top 10 most interesting nuggets in their financials, we can move along now.

Update:  Per a reader, I suppose the tax return stuff might be relevant to their 501(c)3 status, but even so I don't see any bombshell here.  The bombshell would seem to be in their activities, not their funding, but I am not an expert on the law.  Besides, I think all organizations should be tax-free so I wasn't really focused on that issue.

Update #2:  Apparently, there is an equally irrelevant scrutiny occurring of the Heartland Institute's funding and spending.  OMG, yet another non-profit fundraising from rich people who agree with its positions.

A week or so ago I wrote an article for Forbes.com attempting to summarize the climate debate.  Despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that I was clear about my personal position in the debate, I thought it was a fair outline of the state of the debate.  In retrospect, one reason I thought it was a useful article is because nowhere in it did I use the words "liar", "myth", "conspiracy", "___-funded", or "scam."  I did not hypothesize about either side's motivations or sources of funding or engage in any sort of ad hominem attack.  In short, while I sometimes said people were wrong, I never said they weren't well-intentioned.

Which is why I enjoyed this post from Chris at the Liberty Papers, which used as a starting point my wondering why my opposition could not be treated as well-intentioned, honest disagreement rather than some sort of scheming.

 they are arguing from ideology not from reality. They believe in what HAS to be true, because their ideology says so; not what reality, or experience, proves to be true.

Their ideology is core to their perception of their identity, and their sense both of self worth, and the worth of others. Their judgement and reason are based on it. Everything is filtered through this ideological prism, because it HAS to be, for the health of their own psyche.

For someone whose entire perception of self worth depends on their adherence to an ideological precept (“I am a good/better person because I believe this morally better thing”), then anyone who disagrees with this precept must be stupid, ignorant, defrauded, deluded, or evil.

There is no room for honest disagreement in this. To preserve their self worth, and sense of identity, there can be no doubt, and no acceptance of any possibility of error. There is one true path, which they follow, and anyone who deviates from it is apostate.

If therefore, one cannot dismiss opponents of their ideological precept as stupid, ignorant, defrauded, or deluded (and in the case of clearly intelligent, well informed people, presenting reasoned arguments against your precepts, you obviously cannot); the only thing you can challenge is their motives.

This certainly rings true to an extent.  I guess my thought is that there is no we-they here.  To some extent we all have a share of this tendency.  I find myself, all the time, wanting to immediately accept evidence that confirms my world view and trying to find reasons why I should not have to accept evidence that seems to contradict that view.  I am more or less succesful in fighting this depending on the day of the week.

But what I have no tolerance for is the demonization of opposition as a substitute for fact-based rebuttal, and even better, working to understand what differences in core assumptions lay at the heart of the disagreement.  The healthiest possible discussion is to trace competing arguments back to the point where both sides can say, yes, here's where we diverge.  I would like to think my climate article last week was a good example of doing this.

I decided today to volunteer for Gary Johnson's independent libertarian run for President.  I have always been a Johnson supporter, and was disappointed that he did not get more attention in the debates and nomination process.

Yes, I know folks will be saying that if Gary Johnson does well, it will just be guaranteeing an Obama victory.  You know what?  Given the choices, I don't care.  My other choices seem to be the guy who pilot-tested Obamacare and Rick Santorum, perhaps the only person the Republicans could have found with a deeper authoritarian streak than Obama.  You know those 2x2 matrices where one leg is "government intervention in social issues" and the other is "government intervention in economic issues?"  Where libertarians are low-low and Republicans and Democrats are each in one of the low-high boxes?  Did you ever wonder who was in the high-high box?  Well, Obama has moved pretty strongly into that space.  But Santorum staked it out years ago.   He is right out of the John McCain, I-am-nominally-for-small-governemnt-but-support-authoritarian-solutions-for-a-range-of-random-issues school.

In fact, I might argue that freedom and small government would be better served by an Obama second term that the yahoos likely to gain the Republic nomination.  First, there is nothing worse than having statism and crony capitalism sold by someone who is nominally pro-market (see either of the Bushes as an example).  Second, Republicans are much feistier about limiting spending and regulation in Congress when in opposition.  They tend to roll over for expansions of state power when they have a fellow Republican in the White House -- just compare spending of the Republican Congress under Clinton vs. Bush.  Medicare Part D, anyone?

As I heard Ayn Rand say in a public speech in 1981, there is only so far I can go choosing the lesser of two evils.  I am now all in for Gary Johnson.

Today will be remembered in history as the day that had no Republican candidate debate.

Conservatives are mad at Eugene Robinson's mocking of how Rick Santorum and his family dealt with the tragedy of an newborn death.   Patterico (via Glen Reynolds) writes something that is good critique of the Left, but is an equally good critique of the Right

What really infuriates is the contempt they [those on the Left] show for parents who make different choices than they would . . . and the smug arrogance with which they pronounce judgment on the most intimate aspects of others’ private lives.”

Substitute the word "people" for "parents in the first half and this applies to a lot of folks on both sides of the aisle.

Even more interesting than the soft consensus in favor of government intervention was a strong undercurrent that those who disagreed with it were guilty of denying basic truths. One of the questions from an audience full of Senate staffers, policy wonks, and journalists was how can we even have a rational policy discussion with all these denialist Republicans who disregarded Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous maxim that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”? Jared Bernstein couldn’t have been more pleased.

“I feel like we’re in a climate in which facts just aren’t welcome,” he said. “I think the facts of the case are that we know what we can do to nudge the unemployment rate down.…I think the consensus among economists is that this is a good time to implement fiscal stimulus that would help create jobs and make the unemployment rate go down. I consider that a fact.”

In science, you insist most loudly on a fact based on how much it has withstood independent peer review. In politics, it’s closer to the opposite—the more debatable a point is, the more it becomes necessary to insist (often in the face of contrary evidence) that the conclusion is backed by scientific consensus

My new column is up at Forbes, and discusses the proposal by a number of Congressmen for a Constitutional Amendment to strip corporations of speech and other rights.  The post is hard to excerpt but here is just a bit:

This is why this proposed Amendment is so absurd.  In effect, it would mean that we all enjoy the full range of Constitutional rights, except when we agree to assemble and cooperate -- then we lose them all.   If I as an individual bake bread in my kitchen for resale, I could still petition the state to modify regulations relevant to my activity.  If I then join together with my neighbor in a cooperative venture to bake and resell bread, does it really make sense that I would then lose my right to petition the government?

Worse, the proposed Amendment does not limit its scope to just the First Amendment.  It means that individuals, when on corporate property, might have no protection from unreasonable searches and seizures;  corporations would have no guarantee of due process or of a jury trial in civil suits;  corporate assets would no longer be protected from eminent domain seizure without compensation.  Under this provision, the Federal government could seize Apple Computer if it so desired (or even quarter troops in the Apple offices!).  This all sounds like a stalking horse for Socialism, which might seem overwrought until one realizes that Bernie Sanders is the sponsor of a similar proposal in the Senate....

Of all the possible approaches to reducing the ability of private citizens to manipulate government policy to their personal benefit, this is in fact likely the worst.  As mentioned above, there are many different avenues to exercising influence and power, of which election spending and advertising is just one.  But election spending is the most transparent of all of these approaches.  This proposed amendment would in effect substitute highly visible advertising and electioneering with backroom deals and political patronage that is far more hidden from the public eye.  A cynical person might argue that this is exactly the goal.

1.  I had thought that libertarians and conservatives were overwrought when they accused the Obama administration of using their own gun sales in the Fast and Furious program to argue for increased gun control.  Oops.  It appears that is exactly what they are doing.  This article is particularly fascinating, as we get to see a gun dealer, so often vilified by the Left, showing more concern about the guns winding up in the wrong hands than does the ATF.

2.  I had thought it an exaggeration when Conservatives accused Obama of being a Marxist.  I thought he was reinforcing a corporate state, but politicians of both parties play that game.  I assumed that, like much of the Left, he had socialist tendencies but basically accepted the core approach of free exchange and individual liberty.  Oops.  It is clear from his speech in Kansas that Obama has decided he is going to run in 2012 on a platform of proletarianising the middle class..

This is simply an awful law.  If you had asked me ten years ago if we would see the President (a Democrat yet) claiming the right to assasinate Americans and the Congress threatening to pass a bill requiring the indefinite detention, without trial, of people within our borders, I would never have believed it.  At first I was excited to see that Obama was threatening a veto, but then I read that he was not upset about indefinite detention, but only that Congress was threatening to tie his hands and proscribe certain options.  Obama wants to have the choice of whether to offer certain individuals due process or indefinite decision.

For more, see Rand Paul v. John McCain

Postscript:  As usual, I am left flat by the debate over whether certain injustices, like indefinite detention, apply to all humanity or just foreigners.  I have yet to parse anything in our founder's national rights arguments behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that justify why folks born outside our borders have fewer rights than those born inside them.

Update:  More here, including a lot from the ACLU.  We are supposed to feel better because John McCain says that this only applied to Al Qaeda.  But how in the hell do we know with any confidence that the folks the President locks up are Al Qaeda?  Its bad enough to declare a whole new crime, that of being a member of a certain organization.  The US, through its history, has been much better than most nations in avoiding banning certain parties and organizations.  But even if we accept this law, doesn't there need to be some due process?

I suppose I understand that if I captured a guy in an SS uniform in WWII who 10 seconds ago was shooting at me, locking him up as a POW might not require a ton of due process.  Last I checked, the AQ folks didn't have a uniform or anything.  And most of them are not routinely shooting at us.

We didn't even pass this kind of horrible law at the height of Cold War anti-communist hysteria.  Can you see Johnson or Nixon (or Hoover) being able to indefinitely detain anyone they thought was a member of the Communist Party?

Its absolutely critical that you run over and sign this online petition.  Go now.

So here is an interesting local story giving us a window into race relations.    First, a black comedian named Katt Williams (I never heard of him either) called a Mexican man a "nigga" and told him to go back to Mexico.   Then a Hispanic woman created a profanity-laced 6-minute video calling Katt Williams "a white supremacist."

Outstanding.  Actually, I think that this has little to do with race relations and more to do with a post-modernist view of language.  I am still working on writing about this phenomenon, wherein certain political phrases have become all-encompassing insults or descriptors of the opposition, wholly stripped of their original meaning.  Thus "Soros-funded" or "Koch-funded" become synonyms for being extreme left or libertarian, rather than actually being supported by any evidence of such funding.  My interest in this topic began with a comment on Kevin Drum's site, where one sympathetic reader smacked Tea Partiers as merely mouthing Republican talking points, and the proceeded to repeat in now-standard terminology every Democratic talking point about the Tea Party.  The juxtaposition was so obvious I thought it might be performance art rather than a real comment.

I continue to like everything I see of Gary Johnson.  Unfortunately, I seldom see anything.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, Johnson is being left out of the next Republican debate, despite polling better than many of those invited (and that despite a LOT less pub than folks like Rick Santorum).

I understand why the major media ignores him -- their strategy seems to be to focus on the wackiest Republican candidate, whoever that might be at the time.  My only guess on Johnson is that he ticks off social conservatives who have a lot of power in the party.  This is exactly the type of thing that has me not only indifferent to, but hostile to politics, and why you will almost never see horserace-style reporting of political races here.

Anyway, here is more on Johnson and a Reason video so you can actually see the guy.

I agree with this assessment but did not expect to see it coming from Kevin Drum's keyboard

Contrary to his reputation, Bush mostly succeeded by pressing a moderate, and sometimes even liberal, agenda. Tax cuts aside, which he passed solely primarily with Republican support

He goes on to point out that a lot of Bush's domestic legislation was really liberal (NCLB, Medicare part D).  I agree.

But I think this is related to where Democrats go off track in understanding Tea Party and libertarian spending anger.  Their rejoinder tends to be "much of current spending is Bush's fault."  Leave aside the absurd implicit assumption in this that once a spending level is achieved, no president later has any ability to ratchet it back down.  No, what they really miss is that I think the Tea party would agree.    They are just as angry about Bush's spending and expansion of government, so the "Republicans started it" playground argument does not really get much traction.  The best analog would probably be expansion of Executive power.  Drum is not OK (I am pretty sure) with the notion that the President can have any American he chooses summarily executed in the war on terrorism, and isn't likely to change his mind if reminded that "his guy" Obama invented the power.

Does anyone else find it funny that after being the butt of Congressional and Administration demagoguery, trying to lay blame for the financial crisis on them for applying AAA ratings to risky debt, that S&P's first visible step to correct such overly-optimistic ratings is to downgrade US debt -- based mainly on the fiscal management failures of Congress and the Administration.

By the way, many observers seem to be declaring this a punishment for not raising taxes.  The lack of accountability inherent in the government's spending like a drunken sailor, and then using such reckless and profligate spending as an excuse to raise taxes, just makes me want to scream.

When the framers of the Constitution designed its separation of powers features, they presumed that members of each of the three branches would try to protect their own turf.  In other words, grabs of power by one branch would be met by hard pushback from other branches.

What they did not anticipate was that Congress would simply give away power to the Executive.  It seems like Congressman only want their job titles, and maybe the ability to pass a few earmarks for the home district now and then, and would really like not to be bothered by that whole legislation thing.  After all, your election opponents can't critique you for votes that were never taken.

This has been occuring for years, with the accretion of regulatory authorities (like the EPA) whose rules-making effectively usurps traditional Congressional regulatory authority.

More recently, the Democrats in Congress gave away immense power in Obamacare by creating an independent cost cutting board.  Cost cutting suggestions of this board become law automatically unless Congress votes to override the changes, and even then they cannot override without passing cost cuts of similar magnitude on their own.  The whole point was to take legislation of things like the doc fix, which just gets everyone riled up, out of the sphere of Congressional accountability.

Now the Senate Republicans are proposing what appears to me to be exactly the same bullsh*t vis a vis the debt limit.  The debt limit is in fact a poor name.  In fact, it should be called the debt authorization.  Issuance of government debt can only by Constitutionally authorized by Congress, but instead of giving the Administration a blank check, it authorizes the Treasury to issue debt up to some limit, kind of like the limit on a credit card and serving much the same purpose.  While Democrats talk about the debt limit as if it is some useless device, sort of like an appendix, it is in fact central to the excercise of power by both branches as set up in the Constitution.

Senate Republicans, though, want to change all that by giving the Executive Branch what amounts to a credit card with no limit.  Why? Again, Congress is just dead tired of being so accountable for so many difficult decisions, and it would rather turn the President in to an Emperor than have to face difficult questions at reelection time.  This is so gutless I could scream:

The debt limit now works as an only if proposition: the debt limit is increased only if Congress votes affirmatively to authorize an increase. Increasing the debt limit therefore requires a majority of the House and Senate to cast a difficult aye vote, plus a Presidential signature. The McConnell proposal would invert this into an unless proposition: the debt limit would automatically be increased unlessCongress voted to stop it. And by changing the key vote to a veto override, you would need only 1/3 of either the House or Senate to take a tough vote to allow the debt limit to increase.

In exchange for this significant increase in Presidential authority, the President would take most of the political heat for the debt limit increase, and he would be required to propose difficult spending cuts of an equal or greater amount.

Congresspersons of both parties don't give a cr*p about the Constitution or fiscal responsibility.  They just want to avoid accountability.

Fortunately, I can see the House buying this at all.  The House has a special role in spending and taxation, and I see them far more loath to accept this kind of deal.

So, should our deficit today be considered a spending problem or a taxation problem?  Kevin Drum argued yesterday it is a tax problem, and used a historic chart of spending as a percent of GDP to make his point.

I have to thank him.  I would have normally been skeptical of such an analysis yielding much that was useful, but I was forced to do the analysis to correct some obvious data errors in Drum's chart.  Having done so, I found the exercise useful and it became the basis for my column this week at Forbes.  The short answer, its a spending problem.  For more, hit the link.

Gary Johnson gave the finger to the Republican my-family-values-must-be-your-family-values set

Presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson charged today in a formal statement through his campaign that the Family Leader “pledge” Republican candidates for President are being asked to sign is “offensive to the principles of liberty and freedom on which this country was founded”.  Governor Johnson also plans to further state his position against the Family Leader pledge this afternoon in Las Vegas, NV at a speech he will deliver at the Conservative Leadership Conference.

Johnson went on to state that “the so-called ‘Marriage Vow” pledge that FAMILY LEADER is asking Republican candidates for President to sign attacks minority segments of our population and attempts to prevent and eliminate personal freedom.   This type of rhetoric is what gives Republicans a bad name.

“Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives. The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues — such a discussion is simply wrongheaded. We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the “public’s pocket book”.

“This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

Johnson is easily my favorite Presidential candidate in recent memory.

Kevin Drum had a post lamenting that Congress is doing nothing when it could be spending money that would, in his view, stimulate the economy out of a recession.  All well and good, and predictable based on his assumptions.  But he ended with this

We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we're just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that's politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it's politically risky to fight back. Ugh indeed.

I was horrified by this sort of discourse, and wrote back:

It is so tiring to see both parties ascribing horrible and hostile motivations to their political opponents.  Your last paragraph is just absurd, implying that everyone agrees with your economic prescriptions and that the only reason everyone is not following them is either a) political self-interest or b) loathing for the poor and helpless.

Is it really so hard to understand that well-intentioned, intelligent people who honestly want the economy to get better might disagree with you about the benefits of deficit spending? The literature is at best mixed on this topic and certainly there is nothing about the last stimulus that causes me to become a believer.

Those of us who believe strongly that diverting trillions of dollars of capital from private to public hands (ie from hands focused on productively employing it to hands focused on politically employing it) makes the economy worse by necessity are just as motivated by trying to improve the economy as you.

I really don't understand this absolute insistence on ascribing bad motivations to those with whom one disagrees.  Is it ego, or just insecurity?  If one admits his or her opponents can be smart and well-motivated, it certainly creates an edge of doubt and uncertainty.  Deal with it.  That's healthy.  It keeps us intellectually honest.

It happens all to seldom, for reasons I understand well.  Oil companies and Wal-Mart and other vilified private entities that are the object of populist and cynical political attacks very seldom fight back.  The reason is not because they are in the wrong, but because  the government has the power to gut them like a fish in a myriad of ways, and are populated by petty little thugs who love to dish it out but can seldom take any criticism.

That is why its great to see Koch Industries telling demagogues in the Democratic Party to take a hike.  For some bizarre reason, perhaps because the Left saw how much fun the Right had vilifying George Soros for everything, the Koch brothers are not the source of all imaginable plots and schemes.

Check out this letter, where Koch Industries responds to Democratic fundraising pitch.

Harold Koh on what does and doesn't make for a war:

Koh, a former Yale Law School dean who wrote about the War Powers Resolution during his academic career, said the “narrow” role of U.S. warplanes in the mission doesn’t meet the definition of hostilities.

The circumstances in Libya are “virtually unique,” he said, because the “exposure of our armed forces is limited, there have been no U.S. casualties, no threat of U.S. casualties” and “no exchange of fire with hostile forces.”

With a “limited risk of serious escalation” and the “limited military means” employed by U.S. forces, “we are not in hostilities envisioned by the War Powers Resolution, Koh said.

As an outsider to the political process, it has been absolutely hilarious watching a White House full of children of the 1960's retroactively justifying Nixon's Christmas bombings of Cambodia.  It's not a war, they claim, as long as our soldiers are safe and we are mostly just killing citizens of other nations from the air.  Of course, by this definition, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not an act of war.

There are many reasons to put separation-of-powers-type scrutiny on war-making that go beyond just the risk to American lives.  In particular, killing people from other countries can radically change our relationship with other nations.  I find it ironic that that White House has deliberately put blinders on and declared that the only reason to get Congressional approval is if US soldiers are at risk, since it was Obama who lectured the nation on the campaign trail about how damaging to our world image he felt Bush's wars to be.

I have often described this statist feedback loop:

• Create government program
• Government programs messes up certain aspects of the market
• Blame such messes on "failure of markets" or capitalism or even the rich, rather than the government program
• Create new government program to fix problem created by last program
• Repeat

Obama's new political strategy seems to be even more brazen

• Democrats pass new program over Republican objections
• New program has unseemly subsidies for rich people
• Blame subsidies on Republicans, to the point of using subsidies as example of bankruptcy of Republican party

Specifically, tax breaks for corporate jets:

The chief economic culprit of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference was undoubtedly “corporate jets.” He mentioned them on at least six occasions, each time offering their owners as an example of a group that should be paying more in taxes.

“I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well,” the president stated at one point, “to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.”

But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called “accelerated depreciation,” and a popular Democratic foil of late – was created by his own stimulus package.

Which is not to say that the losers in the Republican party would not likely have supported the same plan had it been their idea.

By the way, this is nearly exactly what Obama has been doing with those so-called special subsidies for oil companies.  This subsidies are in fact the identical tax breaks that all manufacturers receive that allow them to accelerate expensing of capital investment.  This is a tax policy that has enjoyed bipartisan support and no one is suggesting should be eliminated in general -- just eliminated for industries that have bad PR.