Dispatches from District 48
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category.
My favorite reporter interviews my favorite Presidential candidate
Update: Awesome
“The fact is, I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor.”...
“Don’t get me wrong....We are proud of this distinction. We had a 11.6 percent job growth that occurred during our two terms in office. But the headlines that accompanied that report—referring to governors, including me, as ‘job creators’—were just wrong.”
The Obama administration has abandoned even the pretense of not being in the tank for its union supporters.
First, it handed took ownership of GM away from secured creditors and gave it to the UAW.
Second was the NLRB over-reach in veto-ing plant relocation decisions by Boeing
More recently came the rules changes for quick, midnight unionization elections to prevent target companies from being able to tell their side of their story
Finally, comes news that the Obama Administration worked to trash pensions of non-unionized auto workers while protecting pensions of union workers.
I try not to get into the voting rules arguments between Republicans and Democrats because at their heart, most of these are totally political. However, I am fascinated by the claim by Democrats that producing an ID to vote discriminates against blacks, presumably because obtaining such ID puts an undue asymmetric burden on African-Americans vs. whites.
This seems like a crock to me -- I am not sure why obtaining an ID is harder for blacks than whites, though I will observe that the highest profile black man in the country had trouble producing his birth certificate so maybe there is some racial thing here I don't understand.
But if we take the claim at face value, why aren't the TSA and airports being sued by the NAACP? After all, there is an ID entry requirement and if that is discriminatory for voting, isn't it also discriminatory for flying. Why isn't the DMV, or the highway department being sued of its ID requirement? Ditto the federal government, which required ID to enter a federal building.
Update: James Taranto has similar thoughts. He thought of several I missed, including requirements to show ID (part of the I-9 form) in order to get a job.
My column this week in Forbes elaborates on a theme I discussed last week in this blog.
I am not a big fan of prohibition, or the income tax (16th Amendment) before it, but in some sense these come from a better time. Instead of dealing with the Constitutional problems of these initiatives by having a series of judges stare at the Constitution with their eyes crossed until the problem disappears, they actually wrote and passed a Constitutional amendment. The took the wording of the Constitution seriously.
Consider alcohol prohibition. Today, would we even bother modifying the Constitution? After all, we’ve driven a forty year war on drugs — with massive spending, highest in the world imprisonment rates, militarization of our police, and frequent slashes into the heart of the Fourth Amendment — with nary a hint of the need for a Constitutional Amendment. In fact, in Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana legally (under state law) grown, sold, and consumed in California could still be prohibited by the Federal government under their Constitution powers to regulated interstate commerce. It seems almost quaint today that we sought a Constitutional change for Prohibition.
I was pretty bummed out that Gary Johnson is not to be included in the debate slate for New Hampshire. I am not one (most definitely not one) to invest all my hopes and dreams in a political candidate, but I really like Gary Johnson and thought he could bring a new libertarian voice (in addition to Ron Paul's) to Republican discussions dominated by statists like Romney and Huckabee. I have met him once and listening talk about things like the costs of the war on drugs and immigration is just so refreshing from a politician of any sort, particularly a Republican. And in contrast to Ron Paul, who comes off as a bit wacky (and wonky), Johnson does it all in a very non-threatening way. Many people in this country self-identify as fiscally conservative and socially liberal -- this is their guy. They just haven't heard of him yet.
As an ex-governor well respected by independents, he strikes me as infinitely more worthy of a debate spot than, say, Donald Trump, who did receive an invitation. I wrote a whole column on the importance of being previously famous, rather than experienced, as a qualifier for office nowadays.
I didn't blog the whole Weiner thing during the events because I really couldn't have cared less about the whole deal. I see a nearly 1:1 correlation between the ego-gratification politicians get from the job and the eco-gratification Weiner was getting from young girls, so none of it surprised me in the least. And on the other hand, I would not have been surprised if it had been a hacker. If it was not a hacker this time, it will be some other time.
But I thought this video of Weiner's denials last week and how he comported himself under questioning about his alleged (at the time) behavior is now absolutely fascinating in light of his press conference yesterday admitting everything. Watch this guy - he absolutely looks like a man sincerely angry at being wronged by bogus and, as he says over and over, "outrageous" accusations. You just have to believe the guy. Yet now we know he was lying his ass off. Important lesson to remember as you watch politicians, on any topic, in the future.
I can 't decide if the last question asked of Congressman Weiner today is a new low in journalism or a step in the right direction of treating Congress with exactly the dignity it deserves. Maybe we can just merge Cspan and TMZ. In either case, it has to be the first time these words were ever uttered in a press conference:
Were you fully erect, Congressman?
There used to be two Americas -- the small portion who were criminals and the large majority of law-abiding citizens. Now there is just one America, since with the proliferation of regulations, we all are guilty of something. If we fall out of favor, we can all be rung up on charges.
Local Conservative pundit Greg Patterson makes this observation about the looming Jon Edwards prosecution, and observes that as much as he may dislike Edwards, his prosecution is downright scary
It looks like former Presidential candidate John Edwards is about to get indicted. Edwards is an awful person who embodies the characteristics that most of us despise. His hypocrisy and hubris together with his unbelievably boorish behavior while his wife was dying of cancer are the stuff of Greek tragedy.
However, Edwards' downfall is also a great example of how the US has so criminalized the political process that the Government can indict anyone who falls out of favor. Once it was clear that Edwards no longer enjoyed any personal political authority, prosecutors combed through his entire political history and found this charge:
Much of the investigation, however, focused on money that eventually went to keep mistress Rielle Hunter in hiding along with former campaign aide Andrew Young, who claimed paternity of Hunter's child in 2007 so that Edwards could continue his White House campaign without the affair tarnishing his reputation. Investigators have been looking at whether those funds should have been considered campaign donations since they arguably aided his presidential bid.
Really? Someone gave Edwards a bunch of money so that he could hide his mistress...and those funds "arguably aided" his presidential bid? That means that every dime that any candidate has ever received could later be classified as a political contribution because it "arguably aided" his candidacy.
How many millions has Edwards spent defending himself from this charge? How much time is he going to spend in jail? How many other candidates--or contributors--can be indicted for falling out of favor?
By the way, kudos to Patterson for bringing up this point in the context of his political opposition. All too often groups seek to establish terrible precedents in the name of counting coup on political opponents. For example, I have been depressed at how hard certain of my fellow climate skeptics have labored to try to bring warmist Michael Mann up on criminal charges.
By the way, I disagree with the second half of Patterson's post, wherein he tries to draw a parallel between the Edwards affair and shenanigans and political payoffs around the Fiesta Bowl. Patterson describes politicians as having been "victimized" by the Fiesta Bowl, such victimization taking the form of the politicians accepting luxurious trips to college football games and failing to do all the necessary reporting for these boondoggles.
I have a hard time seeing this as victimization. It would take a really, really, really naive and stupid politician to credibly argue that these trips were purely fact-finding trips and that they had no idea these expenditures represented an effort of the Fiesta Bowl to woo them in return for various quid pro quo's. Politicians should not even be considering public subsidies of college football games, particularly ones that are so incredibly lucrative to the schools and bowl organizations. Politicians could have avoided being "victimized" by such lobbying by simply saying that their city/county/state was not going to be handing out taxpayer-funded goodies to sports teams and games. I don't necessarily want to send these guys to jail, but calling them victims is a joke.
It is interesting to see this attitude from a Conservative. My mother-in-law the Boston Liberal takes the same line, that the evils that result from lobbying and outright bribery are entirely the fault of private enterprises and not of the politicians themselves. Of course, the libertarian position on this is simple -- the fault is not any particular person, but the changes in government power that have put so many chips on the table. If the government has the power to give or take billions, to make or kill whole industries, then it is worth a lot of money for individuals to harness this power or at least to protect themselves from being gutted by those who do manipulate the power. To this end, 19th century corruption arguments are almost quaint, where the biggest concern was politician's ability to appoint their friends as postmaster. Reduce government's power to give and take arbitrarily, and the amount of money spent on lobbying, elections, and outright bribery will fall precipitously.
From my column today at Forbes.com, this week on Donald Trump and campaign finance reform. An excerpt:
Have you heard the news? Apparently Donald Trump is running for President. Of course you would have to be living in a hole not to know that. Over the last couple of weeks, based just on media stories tracked by Google News, there have been over a thousand news stories a day mentioning Trump’s potential run for the White House. In fact, there are more than double the number of articles on Trump’s potential run than their are on the actual candidacies of Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, and Tim Pawlenty combined.
Do you like candidacies by crazy populist billionaire reality TV stars? If so, then by all means, let’s have campaign spending limits.
It's hard to see populist, wacky GOP candidates making much progress nationally if they can't get any traction in Arizona.
A poll of 623 Arizona voters released today reflects a couple things -- almost nobody likes Donald Trump, and most people would prefer Sarah Palin not move here.In the poll -- from Public Policy Polling -- opinions are recorded about possible GOP nominees for the 2012 presidential election, and how they'd vote if they ran against President Barack Obama.
Donald Trump was the most unfavorable of five possible GOP candidates -- with a full 2/3 of people dissin' the Donald with an "unfavorable" ranking.
Remember that whole thing about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin moving to Arizona for a possible Senate campaign?
Most people would prefer that not happen.
Palin was the second-most-disliked candidate -- with 62 percent having unfavorable opinions -- and a later question revealed 57 percent of people would prefer that she not move to Arizona.
Trump also suffered the biggest blowout in a hypothetical match-up against Obama, garnering votes from only 36 percent of respondents.
My column this week in Forbes is a response to yesterday's Presidential budget speech. An excerpt:
President Obama is working from the assumption that the political leader who suggests painful but necessary budget cuts first, loses. He had every opportunity to propose and pass a budget when he had Democratic majorities in Congress. But Democrats feared that showing leadership on the hard budget choices they faced would hurt them in the November election, so they punted.
Even when Obama did produce a budget, it was the closest thing to a non-entity as could be imagined. A budget that doubles government debt over 10 years and raises interest costs (under optimistic assumptions) to a trillion dollars a year would likely be controversial in any year, but is a non-starter given fresh memories of debt crises in Greece, Ireland and a number of other countries.
Of course there is an 800-lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to acknowledge: Three programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — grow in the next 10 years under current rules to at least $2.7 trillion dollars a year. Recognize that this figure excludes all the other so-called non-discretionary payments (unemployment, food stamps, etc.) as well as everything else the government does including the military and Obamacare. The 2021 spending on just those three programs is 25% higher than the total revenue of the federal government from all sources in 2011.
Later in the article, I suggest ten principles that should be the foundation of a budget deal.
For all the criticism by the Left of corporate corruption, nothing that goes on in even the most dysfunctional corporations matches business as usual budgeting in Washington. This week in my column at Forbes I present a few vignettes imagining Washington budget logic in a corporate board room. A sample:
Board Member: Let’s get started. After an absolutely disastrous year, financially, we’re now five months into our fiscal year and you still have not presented us with a budget for this year. Why?
CEO Obama: My staff was waiting until their employment contracts were renewed before we presented a budget.
Board Member: Excuse me?
CEO Obama: You remember — many of my associates in the company had their contracts up for review in November. They were afraid they might lose their job if you did not like their budget work, so they delayed introducing any budgets until after you renewed their 2-year employment contracts.
Board Member: That seems unbelievably deceptive and feckless. But let’s leave that aside for a moment. November was still several months ago, why have we seen no budget since then?
CEO Obama: Well, as you know, I have a number of rivals for my job in this company. I want to force one of them to suggest a budget first.
Board Member: Why is that? It seems to me it is your job as leader of this organization to define the budget, particularly given the unprecedented fiscal challenges we face.
CEO Obama: If I propose a budget first, everyone will just shoot holes in it. If I let someone else come forward with the budget, I can snipe at it and make my rivals look worse. In particular, I think that Ryan guy down in Finance may be dumb enough to create a plan. If he does, I can spend so much time making him look bad you will forget I never submitted a plan of my own.
I know that this pathetic bit by Kevin Drum was done to death by blogs last week, but I was on the road and still want to get my innings. For those who have not seen it, Drum said (in a post about Obama and Libyan war):
So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do.
A few thoughts
Obama budget director Jacob Lew, who wrote this lucid statement about the Social Security "Trust Fund" back in 2000
"These [trust fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. These funds are not set up to be pension funds, like the funds of private pension plans. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government's ability to pay benefits." [bold added]
Needless to say, he has changed his tune now that he is being paid to shout "all is well" as enabler-in-chief of Obama's spending habit.
I think that (non-classical) liberals and libertarians see the problem of "special interests" differently. Liberals view special interests as exogenous to the policy process. You have to overcome special interests to create good policy. Libertarians see special interests as endogenous. Policy is what creates them.
Yep, I have had this argument about a million times with liberals. Liberals will argue that government power is neutral to positive, and that it is private action corrupting government, and this corruption can be avoided if private action is aggressively policed (including campaign spending limits, etc). Example: If Wall Street money could be taken out of politics then financial regulation would work.
I argue that money in politics are a result of the stakes that we have put on the table -- the more power we give to government to reallocate wealth, the more money will be spent to have such decisions made in one's favor. In the age old question of whether a bribe is more the fault of the politician that demanded it or the private party that offered it, I would answer that the fault is with the system that gives the politician enough power to make such a bribe pay. And increasing the government's power to limit private involvement in politics (e.g. via campaign spending limits) only makes the government power problem worse.
This is the response from the Left to a proposed 1.6% cut in the Federal budget, that would reduce the annual deficit by a whopping 6%. Greece here we come!
The Senate is expected to vote this week on alternative plans to approve spending for the rest of this year. They will vote on whether to agree to the extreme cuts passed by the House (H.R. 1) - $65 billion less than last year's spending for domestic programs. The House bill will deny vital services to millions of people, from young children to seniors. Please tell your Senators to VOTE NO on H.R. 1 and to vote FOR the Senate alternative. The proposed Senate bill cuts spending $6.5 billion below last year's levels, compared to more than $60 billion in cuts in H.R. 1. Most of the extreme cuts in the House plan listed below are not made in the Senate bill.
Call NOW toll-free 888-245-0215 (the vote could be as early as Tuesday)
Please call both your Senators and tell them to VOTE NO on H.R. 1 and FOR the Senate full-year FY 2011 bill. Tell them to vote NO on harsh and unprecedented cuts that will deny health care, education, food, housing, and jobs to millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, while at the same time jeopardizing the economic recovery for all.
Local Conservative blogger Greg Patterson is already testing campaign messages for 2012 and the election to fill Jon Kyle's vacating Senate seat. Apparently Jeff Flake is RINO, and, gasp, a libertarian and not a Republican. Well, good. I will observe that Flake has had far more backbone on issues Republicans care about (e.g. spending) than most "true" Republicans in Congress have had.
As an aside, I could get all litmus-testy as well and be disappointed that Flake voted for the Patriot Act reauthorization. And I fear that Arizona politics will pull him further to the right on immigration. But Flake still strikes me as a far better choice in terms of the energy and passion he brings to key issues than some establishment Republican. He has stirred up far more trouble in the House than one might expect given his lack of seniority and plum committee assignments.
Hate to lose him from the House, but love to see him in the Senate.
Bryan Caplan links a 2007 study that looks at voter turnout and weather, and specifically tests the conventional wisdom that rain helps Republicans (by disproportionately surpressing the Democratic vote).
The findings appear to be that bad weather does help Republicans and does supress turnout. However, in studying presidential elections, he finds few that would have had their outcome changed. Here, however, was one exception:
The results of the zero precipitation scenarios reveal only two instances in which a perfectly dry election day would have changed an Electoral College outcome. Dry elections would have led Bill Clinton to win North Carolina in 1992 and Al Gore to win Florida in 2000. This latter change in the allocation of Florida's electors would have swung the incredibly close 2000 election in Gore's favor.
Since we know from Gore that heavy snow, no snow, heavy rain, and no rain are all caused by global warming, his 2000 electoral defeat was obviously caused by manmade CO2.
Apparently a number of Congressmen have been sleeping on cots in their House offices rather than in an apartment somewhere. Why these guys are a bigger threat to democracy than, say, Congressmen who are never in the House and miss tons of votes, is a mystery to me.
If you had told me last week that half the media would be blaming Sarah Palin for the actions of a leftish nutcase, or that Keith Olberman would be accusing, well, anybody, of being too immoderate in their rhetoric, I would have said you were crazy. Seldom have I found the tone and tenor of the media coverage of any event to be less satisfactory than with the Giffords shooting this weekend. So of course, I have joined the fray with my own column on Forbes.
We libertarians cringe when presented with a “national tragedy” like the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. Not because we are somehow more or less sensitive to vilence and loss of life, but because we begin bracing for the immediate, badly thought-out expansion of state power that nearly always follows any such tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or Columbine or Oklahoma City or even Pearl Harbor. Those looking to expand the power of the state, and of state officials, make their greatest progress in the emotional aftermath of a such a tragedy. These tragedies are the political equivilent of the power play in ice hockey, when defenders of liberty find themselves temporarily shorthanded, and those wishing to expand state power rush to take advantage.
Here is one example from later in the piece:
After 9/11, Republicans argued that it was time to put away political differences to rally around the President in a time of war. They implied that criticizing the President in such a time was somehow unpatriotic and counter-productive. Was this true? I thought the opposite — that the momentous decisions to be made post-9/11 demanded more rather than less debate. America would eventually wake up from this celebration of unity with a hangover in the form of the TSA, the Patriot Act, detention at Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fact is that politicians, particularly those in power, find every excuse to ask Americans to “moderate their public discourse,” in large part because this request translates in the real world to “reduce the criticisms of those in power.” So it should not be surprising that many of those who represent our current ruling party blamed the Giffords shooting on the hate-filled rhetoric of the opposition party, even before we knew the name of the killer,.
From a larger historical perspective, I would argue that current political discourse is really rather tame. Even the wackiest cable opinion show pales in comparison to the fire-breathing political attacks that could be found in nearly any 19th century newspaper. In the 1960’s, political discourse became so heated that it spilled out into the streets in the form of urban riots. In fact, what we should fear far more than our rhetoric is the current threats by politicians like Jim Clyburn of South Carolina to use this tragedy as an excuse to put new restrictions on speech. A number of high-profile comentators have spent more time blaming this shooting on Sarah Palin than on the shooter himself. Given the complete lack of evidence for any such connection, such efforts can only be viewed as an effort by those on power to silence a prominent opposition leader.
I hate to cut and paste so much of another blogger's post, but this is just excellent:
Last week Andrei Cherny wrote an Op Ed piece for the Republic in which he decried political labels and announced that he was the leader of Arizona's version of the "No Labels" movement. Here's the creed of the "No Lables" movement.
We can overthrow the tyranny of hyper-partisanship that dominates our political culture today. We can break down the institutions of power that are corroding our system. We can do this because we have the power of numbers. All we have to do is join together.
This week Cherny announced he's running for Chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party.
In my column this week at Forbes, I discuss my New Year's Resolution, which has not changed over several decades, and how it helped me this year to solve some difficult philosophical issues regarding my business.
Almost exactly thirty years ago, I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, probably the single most influential book I have read in my lifetime. Before I read it, I was on a path to becoming a traditional Conservative in the mold of my parents, and in retrospect my thinking on a lot of issues was quite muddled.
I am no longer the exclusive Rand fanboy I was back in college, if for no other reason than I have since found many authors who come at the topic of capitalism and freedom from many different angles, but Rand was certainly my gateway drug to liberty.
Like many people, around the new year I set various goals for myself over the coming year. Some I have achieved (e.g. getting myself out of corporate America and into my own business) and on some I have fallen short (e.g. learning to play the guitar). But every year I have renewed just one resolution, which I took from Atlas Shrugged. It is
I swear"“by my life and my love of it"“that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I then discuss this resolution in the context of approaches my business has had this year from lobbyists. I discuss how lobbyists have approached me about an effort to make some tweaks to the health care law (it is particularly punitive to our labor model where we hire seniors part time and seasonally) as well as efforts to promote privatization of recreation (my business) and to help me obtain new contracts. The article has much more discussion about details, but my resolution for a lobbying policy turned out as follows, in a rough parallel to the resolution above:
"We will use lobbyists to defend ourselves when the government is trying to gut us like a fish, but we will attempt to do so with generic amendments rather than through special exemptions for our company alone. We will not use lobbyists to create new business opportunities, even when the legislation to do so is consistent with our principals."
By the way, I actually sent notes to several readers out there (you know who you are) asking them their opinions on some of the ethical issues I saw in these issues, and I appreciate the feedback from all of you.
Happy new year to all of you.
I love to watch groups dedicated to victimhood argue with their peers over whose group constitutes the biggest victims. I enjoy it, that is, until I remember that they are fighting over the division of loot plundered from me.