Coyote Blog

I got a fair amount of grief for being unfair when I posted this about Louisiana politics.  Based on emerging evidence, I stand by my assessment:

Acting New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Thursday
that as many as 40 officers from the department's 3rd District,
including the commanding captain, are "under scrutiny" for possibly
bolting the city in the clutch and heading to Baton Rouge in Cadillacs
from a New Orleans dealership.

As many as 200 cars may have been stolen from this dealership by police deserting their posts in New Orleans.  Those trying to defend the police as merely commandeering the vehicles in an emergency will have to explain why 1) They were leaving the city without leave from their commanders and 2) Why Cadillacs are missing but Chevy's from the same district appear to be mostly undisturbed.

I hate to be the only one in the blogosphere who does not link it, and since this is the only blog my mom reads, here is George Will's take on the Harriet Miers choice.  I am not sure there is much more to say than this.  First, he dispatches the Bush "trust me" argument:

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she
is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses
talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument"
for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments
about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents
acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this
president particularly is not disposed to such reflections....

In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a
custodian of the Constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in
a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law
expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political
speech. The day before the 2000 Iowa caucuses he was asked -- to ensure a
considered response from him, he had been told in advance that he would be asked
-- whether McCain-Feingold's core purposes are unconstitutional. He
unhesitatingly said, "I agree." Asked if he thought presidents have a duty,
pursuant to their oath to defend the Constitution, to make an independent
judgment about the constitutionality of bills and to veto those he thinks
unconstitutional, he briskly said, "I do."

Then he takes on Miers's credentials:

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination
resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such
judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have
given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice,
Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on
those lists....

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year,
she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests
and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of
substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve
into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents
to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the
Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of
friends.

Quoting Bill Paxton:  "That's it man, game over man, game over".  I understand that politicians want to reward their supporters, but that's what ambassadorships to friendly countries are for.  Not FEMA.  And certainly not the Supreme Court.

  Is it too late to nominate Billy Carter to the high court?

I know nothing about Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriett Miers other than she adds yet another possible way for people to misspell my last name.  Todd Zwycki at Volokh has this take, and it doesn't sound too good:

These appointments thus seem to confirm a common criticism of this
President--that he is uninterested in ideas and interested only in
power. While they may both turn out to be perfectly fine Justices, both
Roberts and Miers appear to be both uninspired and uninspiring in terms
of providing intellectual leadership on the Court. The Administration
seems to be narrowly obsessed with winning minor tactical victories
(here, an easy confirmation of a stealth candidate) while consistently
failing to follow-through with meaningful long-term strategic victories
(an opportunity to change the legal culture).

In the end, of course, the lack of a strategic vision means that
even the tactical victories tend to be reversed (for instance,
temporary tax cuts will likely fall victim to the inability to control
spending). As Reagan understood, you have to first have the long-term
strategic vision in mind so that you know when to make tactical
compromises. Ideas are the long-run motivating force of history.
Tactics without strategy, by contrast, leaves you rudderless.

Beyond his evaluation of Miers, I really like his assessment of Bush, which strikes me as dead-on.  I still think Janice Rogers Brown was the choice.

Update:  Apparently, she was on the Dallas City Council when I lived there in the early 90's, but I sure don't remember having heard of her.  And how serious a candidate can anyone be for the Supreme Court if they were on a freaking city council a decade ago -- can you see any of your city council members on the Supreme Court in 10 years?  And by the way, what are the odds that Bush's personal friend and lawyer will do anything to reign in the new powers to suspend habeas corpus that the administration has granted itself.

My liberal in-laws always give me this strange condescending look whenever it comes up that I have voted for a Republican at some point in time, that same look you might give the otherwise beloved family dog that keeps pooping on the front lawn.  As a libertarian, I seldom fully agree with any political candidate of either party.  Every election is a tradeoff:  Do I vote for the unelectable and perhaps truly odd Libertarian candidate?  Or do I vote for a mainstream party with which I disagree with about half of everything they promote?

So here is how I normally make the decision:  On pure self-interest.  Since, as a small business owner, I am much more likely to need strong protection of property rights than I am going to need an abortion, a gay marriage, or legal marijuana, I end up voting Republican more often than I vote Democrat.  For this reason, the Republican party has generally garnered a good many libertarian votes, and the two most identifiable libertarians in Congress (Flake and Paul) have both called themselves Republican, though I am sure with some reservations.

This relationship, however, may be at an end as Republicans are disavowing their libertarian wing, and returning to their large government tendencies of the 1970's.  Bush and his buddy Tom Delay are turning out to be classic Nixon Republicans.  The most recent evidence comes from the fact that the following is not from our Republican President, or our Republican Speaker of the House, but from the for-god-sakes Washington Post:

But this spirit of
forbearance has not touched the Louisiana congressional delegation. The
state's representatives have come up with a request for $250 billion in
federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana alone -- more than $50,000
per person in the state. This money would come on top of payouts from
businesses, national charities and insurers. And it would come on top
of the $62.3 billion that Congress has already appropriated for
emergency relief.

Like looters who seize six
televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana
legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly
spend usefully. ...

The Louisiana delegation has apparently devoted little thought
to the root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans was
flooded not because the Army Corps of Engineers had insufficient money
to build flood protections, but because its money was allocated by a
system of political patronage. ...

The Louisiana bill is so preposterous
that its authors can't possibly expect it to pass; it's just the first
round in a process of negotiation. But the risk is that the
administration and congressional leaders will accept the $250 billion
as a starting point, then declare a victory for fiscal sanity when they
bring the number down to, say, $150 billion. Instead, Congress should
ignore the Louisiana bill and force itself to think seriously about the
sort of reconstruction that makes sense.

The Republicans are lost.  Combine this kind of spending with their Patriot Act and Sarbabes-Oxley driven Big-Borther-Is-Watching intrusiveness, luke-warm committment to free-trade, and bizarre , and I find nothing at all attractive about the party.  Only the economic insanity of the opposition party continues to keep Republicans in power. 

More on the Louisiana money grab here.

Whether it is the French influence or the long shadow of Huey Long's patronage driven socialist experiment, Louisiana has a tradition of bad government.  I remember several years ago the governor's race featured a Nazi running against a convicted felon (convicted in office of bribery and influence peddling, if I remember right).

So one of the problems with the management of Katrina problems is that Katrina hit Louisiana, the US's own version of Haiti.  Don't believe me?  This is already coming out, and you can be sure there is more:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

President Bush's call for Katrina spending to be offset by budget cuts has spurred a blogosphere effort to identify local pork urge Congress to cut the pork.  I am 98% behind this effort (the missing 2% being that the effort is spurred by a desire to spend the money somewhere else, rather than sending it back to taxpayers where it belongs).  Glenn Reynolds post that got the ball rolling is here.  His followup posts are here and here.  I will note the irony that I recently compared Don Young (of Alaska bridge to nowhere fame) to Huey Long (of multiple bridges to nowhere fame), given that we are looking to cut Don Young's pork to help Huey Long's old stomping ground.

Edward at Zonitics has already identified one of the most visible chunks of AZ pork, that is our earmarks in the recent highway bill.  These include nearly five million for a couple of pedestrian bridges, plus hundreds of millions for a rail system to run empty trains to compete with our empty buses.  Why does the rest of the country need to pay for Phoenix's growth?  Heck, we just took the money the feds saved us on this junk and spent it subsidizing a stadium for the Cardinals, for god's sakes.   I will note that of the mere 8 people who voted against the highway bill, 2 were from Arizona, including my 3rd district Congressman John Shadegg and libertarian Jeff Flake.  Flake, consistent with his libertarian principles (or in retribution for them?) represents the only district in the country without an earmark in the highway bill.

So, to push the ball forward, I will add another bit of Arizona pork.  I wanted to include some items form the energy bill, but I can't find a state by state impact.  But I can find, thanks to the environmental working group, a nice summary of farm subsidies to Arizona.  Here is a summary for the most recent year they have data:

And here is the same data but cut by recipient, with just the top 20 included:

I don't know all these folks, but I can say that all of the first three have extremely profitable casinos they operate.

I am writing my letter now to the my Congressman and Senators, and will post a copy as an update when I am done.  The ubiquitous NZ Bear has a data base he is building of pork identified.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

I had trouble getting going this morning on work -- I had to drop my son off at school at 5AM for a field trip, and I am sitting in my office refusing to address the pile of work in front of me.  So I skimmed over some of the transcripts from the Roberts confirmation hearings.  He seems like a pretty qualified guy, and since he is conservative I expect to agree with him some and disagree with him other times (which is different from my reaction to liberal judges, whom I disagree with some and agree with at other times).

But from reading the transcripts, I was left with one overriding impression:  While I might agree to confirm Roberts to the Supreme Court, I probably would not, if given the chance, confirm many of the Senators on the judiciary committee to their office.  What a bunch of posturing morons.  Many of them seemed like wind up toys reading questions from their staff that they didn't really understand, and all of them come from the Sean Hannity school of interviews, where in a 20 minute interview the questioner talks for 18 minutes.

Jeff Taylor at Hit and Run:

It is official. The GOP is now exactly in the same position Democrats
were in circa 1993 -- the disconnected, unapologetic party of bloated
federal government. Only demographic trends and the Democrats'
steadfast refusal to evince a lick of sense will keep 2006 from being
1994 in reverse.

Captains Quarters suggested that Bush nominate Janice Rogers Brown for the Supreme Court.  Though it will never happen, I am 100% behind this idea.  I never even heard of her until I started reading statements attributed to her by her opponents that were supposed to convince me of her unfitness for the bench.  And you know what, the more I read, the more I liked her.  Also here.

Those on the left and the right often try to laugh off libertarians, ascribing to "paranoia" our fear of the power of government. 

Well, I could argue that if this is paranoia, I share a similar phobia with men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose fear of government power permeate all their writings, as well as the Constitution they helped to produce.  They believed that even good men could be corrupted by the government, and they were proven correct in an incredibly short time by John Adams.  Adams is by all accounts a good man, dedicated to freedom and democracy, and one of the chief intellectual architects both of the Revolution and the Constitution.  But it was Adams that signed into law the Alien and Sedition Act, perhaps the worst piece of illiberal and unconstitutional legislation in the history of this country.

Or, if I didn't want to make the founding father's / original intent argument, I could just point to this (hat tip Marginal Revolution):

A federal judge in Texas, calling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. a "corrupt
agency with corrupt influences on it," awarded a Houston financier $72 million
to cover his legal fees in a decade-long suit involving a failed savings and
loan and the government's efforts to take control of a stand of endangered
California redwood trees in the 1990s.

The FDIC, a regulatory agency that insures deposits at banks and
savings and loans, filed suit against Charles E. Hurwitz in 1995, seeking to
collect more than $800 million because Hurwitz indirectly controlled a Texas
S&L that failed in 1988. The FDIC, after a series of legal setbacks, dropped
its suit against Hurwitz in 2002....

On Tuesday evening, Hughes issued a scathing, 131-page ruling. In it, he cited
evidence that the FDIC brought the case largely because of pressure from
environmental groups, members of Congress and the Clinton administration. The
reason: Hurwitz's Pacific Lumber Co. owned 3,500 acres of endangered redwoods in
Northern California. Hughes found that the FDIC, in close concert with
environmental groups, sued Hurwitz to pressure him into a "debt-for-nature"
swap, in effect giving the government his trees in exchange for his supposed
liability in the failure of the United Savings Association of Texas....

Hughes said FDIC officials and lawyers, in depositions, "ranged from
manipulative evasiveness to plain perjury." He cited records of two years of
communications, including extensive discussions of legal strategy and political
matters, between the FDIC and environmentalists over the proposal to use a
banking-practices lawsuit as pressure on Hurwitz to give up the
redwoods.

Hughes said FDIC officials "discarded the mantle of the American
Republic for the cloak of a secret society of extortionists. If the vice
president called, they responded. If a congressman called, they responded. If a
lobbyist called, they responded. They heeded every call but that of duty and
honor."

Wow.  I know many people are paranoid about the lack of accountability of major corporations, and felt vindicated by the Enron case, over which the press spilled acres of ink.  However, Enron is nothing compared to this.  While fraud is bad, Enron at least was never able to use the coercive regulatory and police power that the government has to seek its ends.

I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls.  Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:

This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.

This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets."  This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.

I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls.  Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:

This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.

This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets."  This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.

I trash the Congress a lot, but a brief thanks to our local Congressman John Shadegg who was one of only 8 folks who managed a "no" vote against the pork-laden highway bill.  Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake was also one of the eight.

Update:  Flake also wins an award as the only Congressman who did not slip a special appropriation for his own district into the bill.

I had an interesting discussion with my father-in-law about the term "judicial activism" which has led me to eschew the term.  Here's the reason:  He made the observation, I think from a story on NPR, that though conservatives seem to complain the most about liberal activism from the bench, in fact majorities of conservative judges on the Supreme Court have struck down more laws than their liberal counterparts.  It was the striking down of laws they considered "activist".

After thinking about this for a moment, it made me realize that he, and I guess NPR, used the term judicial activism differently than I do.  As a fairly strong libertarian, when I have referred negatively to judicial activism, I generally am thinking about judicial decisions to create new powers for the government and/or, from the bench, to put new restrictions on individual behavior.  In that sense, I think of decisions like Raich to be activist, because they sustain expansions of federal and government power.  As I have listened to both liberals and conservatives now, I realize that my usage of judicial activism is, ahem, out of the mainstream, and therefore confusing.  My personal concern is how the courts have ignored the 9th amendment and thrown the commerce clause out the window. 
I have decided that, as most people use the term, I am neutral to positive on what the majority refer to as judicial activism.  I think a lot more laws should be thrown out as unconstitutional, and if
this is the accepted definition of activist, them I like activism.  For example, I wish they had been more active in striking down laws and government activities in Raich and Kelo. 

Until I come up with a better term, I now describe myself as being against judicial expansion of federal power.  Maybe I can coin the term "judicial expansionism"?

If you thought the idiots who ran Orange County's finances into the ground were bad, wait until you meet these jokers:

Two months ago, reports emerged that $300,000 in rare coins was missing from a
collection in which the state Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) began
investing in 1998 as a peculiar form of stock hedge. That was bad enough. But
last week, word came that between $10 million and $12 million in coins had
disappeared. That caused BWC director Jim Conrad to announce his resignation,
and launched a flurry of accusations and calls for legal action.

As if my workers comp. rates weren't already too high.  There goes my idea to invest Social Security funds in beanie babies and 60's lunch boxes.  Apparently most of the major lawmakers in the state got large campaign donations from several large coin dealers, and they returned the favor by investing public funds in coins through these dealers.  I often make the argument not to let the government have control of large equity investment funds -- I did not even occur to me to include coins.  One of the things about coins - you have to hold them for a long, long time to make money, in part because commissions markups are so high vis a vis other investments (which explains why coin dealers so readily donated large sums of money for government business).

Reason has a good roundup.  Unfortunately, I am sure this will all lead to more restrictions on spending and speech in campaigns, though it appears the system is working fine - full disclosure of funding sources certainly has everyone running for their lives.

The real solution is to make elected officials take a real fiduciary interest in the state's investment funds (pensions probably being the largest).  What they would prefer to do is to legislate a set of rules and then leave managers to follow these rules, giving them plausible deniability.  What they should do is sit down once a quarter and review portfolio investment performance and asset allocations.

In my earlier post, I lamented the fact that "progressives" who criticize Bush for being undemocratic, illiberal, overly dependent on the military, and theocratic are proposing alternatives that are much, much worse.  In that post, they were championing Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as their savior.  Now, they seem to be latching on to Muslim countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran as their champions of liberal values. In this interview of George Galloway, recently feted by liberals and progressives on both sides of the Atlantic:

M.B.H.S.: You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally.

How far is it possible under current situation?

Galloway: Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary

and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive

movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies.

*Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British

occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. * * *

*They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which

is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory

chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to

Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture*. And *whose only role in life is to consume

the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations.* And the

progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims.

Otherwise we believe that we should all have to speak as Texan and eat McDonalds

and be ruled by Bush and Blair. So *on the very grave big issues of the

day-issues of war, occupation, justice, opposition to globalization-the Muslims

and the progressives are on the same side*.

By the way, this is the movement that calls itself "reality-based".

Can't someone today emerge as a rallying point for those of use who are classical liberals and libertarians?

Hat Tip LGF.

For years, high school civics books have portrayed our political choices as ranging from socialism on the left to fascism on the right.  These textbooks represent the statists' wet dream -- the reframing of political discussion such that all possible outcomes are defined as rigid government control of individual lives.  The only difference is who is in charge, and the path they took to get there. 

Think I am exaggerating?  Here's an example:

The left hate George Bush.  Fine.  I have my own problems with the man.  Over the last few years, the left has cast about for a person to rally around as a counterpoint to Bush.  Some latched on the the French leadership, some to Saddam Hussein, some even recently to George Gallway.   I think you can see the problem here, and the mistake Michael Moore made.  Forcing voters to choose between Saddam Hussein and George Bush is practically begging them to vote Republican.

After the last election, I had hoped that the left had gotten wiser.  I guess not.  Apparently the "progressive" community is rallying around Hugo Chavez as their next model leader:

Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a
president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to
benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call
him "the Anti-Bush."...

Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does,
Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor
in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn't have 60 percent of its
people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement
behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That's why large
majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the
Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to
overthrow Chavez.

And this is the group that calls themselves "reality-based"?  Does anyone really believe that poverty results solely from not handing oil revenue to the poor?  The US doesn't do this (well, except in Alaska), yet despite this our poor in this country are wealthier than the middle class in Venezuela, and its because we have a stable government that protects property rights and individual freedoms and provides a stable environment for investment.  Prosperity comes from building a healthy and growing economy, not looting a particular industry.  (By the way, I am sure that the previous regime was looting the oil industry as well, so I am certainly not defending them.)

However, this point is worth repeating:  Progressives consider Venezuela to have a better policy for helping the poor than the US, but the poorest 20% in the US still make more money and live better and longer than at least 80% of Venezuelans.  A person in the middle of the "poor" quintile in the US would be upper middle class in Venezuela.  And I will bet anyone that after 10 years of Chavez rule, this will be more, not less, true.

Chavez is a totalitarian thug.  Human Rights Watch has plenty to say about his miserable record of trashing freedoms.  In particular, you can compare the supreme court shenanigans of the "anti-Bush" with ridiculously mild controversy in this country (at least by comparison) over judicial nominations.  More background on Chavez here.

So there you are.  We are given the choice of Bush or Chavez.  Statism or statism.  Thanks a lot.

Again, small government libertarians like myself, who held their nose and voted Republican in the last election, have been used.  From the NY Post today:

THE Republican promise of smaller,
less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe.
Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that
the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to
pursue a political strategy based on big spending.

For the latest, check out a report just released by the
libertarian Cato Institute that tells a striking story about just how
out-of-control spending has gotten under President Bush.

Cato finds that:

* Bush has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since Lyndon Johnson.

* Even excluding defense and homeland security spending, Bush is the biggest-spending president in 30 years.

* The federal budget grew from 18.5 percent of the Gross
Domestic Product on President Bill Clinton's last day in office to 20.3
percent at the end of Bush's first term.

Add to that Bush's massive Medicare prescription-drug
benefit, expected to cost $720 billion-plus over the next 10 years.
(The money for that new entitlement, the first created by a president
in a generation, will start flowing this year.)

It is not in the least bit comforting to have my suspicions confirmed by Cato, whose whole report is here.  Bring back divided government!  I will take Reagan-Democrat Congress or Clinton-Republican Congress over this any day.

I have not really had the time to do the research to form an opinion about Bush's judicial nominees, and the MSM is not very helpful in its coverage on the issue.  I wrote here that the judiciary has started to overreach of late, legislating from the bench to advance an agenda generally supported by the Democrats.  I don't know the candidates well enough to decide if these proposed judges are conservative activists who want to legislate from the bench but for conservative ends, or if they represent a first shot at reversing extra-constitutional judicial activism (which I would support).

However, I may have started to develop an favorable opinion on a couple of judges, based on what I have learned from their detractors.

Take this example, from a NY Times editorial, March 6, 2005.  In disparaging how extremist Bush judge nominees are, they use the example of:

Janice
Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as ''our socialist
revolution.''

Woe is me, I must be an extremist.  First, the New Deal was clearly a "revolution", in that it was one of two events (the other being the Civil War) in the last 200 years that fundamentally changed the role of the federal government in what was a massive reinterpretation of the Constitution.  But was it socialist?  We can argue about whether the New Deal legacy that reaches us today is socialist or not- many quite normal non-extremist folks would argue yes and many similarly rational folks would argue no.

However, arguing the nature of the New Deal from what programs reach us today leaves out a lot of the picture.  Much of the New Deal was voided by the Supreme Court.  While some was re-passed later once FDR had a chance to remold the court with his own (for the time) extremist ideologues, some of the most socialist-statist-fascist legislation never was reinstituted.

The most dramatic of these institutions that fortunately were left on the cutting room floor was the National Industrial Recovery Act, or NRA.  Roosevelt actually modeled the NRA on Mussolini's fascism in Italy, so I guess it might be more correct to call it fascist rather than socialist but in practice, I can't ever tell those two apart.*

The image of a strong
leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated
observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt
looked to for ideas in 1933. Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (NRA)
attempted to cartelize the American economy just as Mussolini had
cartelized Italy's. Under the NRA Roosevelt established industry-wide
boards with the power to set and enforce prices, wages, and other terms
of employment, production, and distribution for all companies in an
industry. Through the Agricultural Adjustment Act the government
exercised similar control over farmers. Interestingly, Mussolini viewed
Roosevelt's New Deal as "boldly... interventionist in the field of
economics." Hitler's nazism also shared many features with Italian
fascism, including the syndicalist front. Nazism, too, featured
complete government control of industry, agriculture, finance, and
investment.

If you are not familiar with the NRA, you need to be if you are going to come to a conclusion about the New Deal and just how statist FDR's aspirations were.  The actual text of the act is here.  Henry Hazlitt has a long evaluation here.  In the end, the NRA was scrapped in large part because it was a disaster for the economy.  Many blame the NRA for strangling the recovery that began in 1933-34 and thus extending the depression.  Parts of the law (collective bargaining, minimum wage) were incorporated in other later legislation, but the core concept of organizing industrial cartels with government backing to run industries and set prices, wages, and production levels died, fortunately.

Update:  More here.  Mr. Gregory quotes John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth:

[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and
could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards,
etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized
into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a
corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the
same thing. These code authorities could regulate production,
quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the
supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade
such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing
these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to
combine.

*  I disagree with people who want to argue that socialism is freedom but without property rights while fascism is property rights without other freedoms.  Neither of these conditions are stable, and both converge to the same destination of suffocating statism, just with different starting points and different people in charge.  One of the things that drive libertarians nuts is being presented with a grade school civics book that has a linear political spectrum with fascism on one end and communism on the other.  Are those really my only two choices? 

Many people of late have suspected that Republicans, now that they have power in the central government, have abandoned federalism (federalism being the philosophy of government that legislative power for as many issues as possible be devolved to the most local unit of government possible).  The recent abortion bill passed by the House seems to confirm this:

The House passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal
crime for any adult to transport an under-age girl across state lines to have an
abortion without the consent of her parents.

When selling federalism in the past, Republicans have argued that federalism better protects individuals and their rights, because it creates competition among states.  Individuals and businesses fed up with bad legislation in one state can move to a more favorable climate.  Now, however, the Congress is stepping in to limit free movement between states to prevent individuals, in this case teenage girls, from shopping for a better regulatory climate.  What's next?  Preventing businesses from moving across state lines to a state with lower taxes?

By the way, there is a lot of sloppy thinking in the debate on parental notification for teenage abortions.  In this debate, the legal or moral status of abortion is nearly irrelevant.  Underage children are special class of citizen who are not yet acknowledged by the law as being able to make certain adult decisions.  Already we regulate and restrict underage decision-making on driving, drinking, smoking, voting, etc.  All of these are perfectly legal activities that we don't let teenagers do at all.  So even if abortion is entirely legal and Constitutionally protected, it can still be both legal and ethical to place restrictions on it for minors -- remember that voting, and to some extent drinking due to the 21st amendment, are Constitutionally guaranteed activities we legally deny teenagers).  Heck, most states have parental permission laws for teenagers to use tanning salons, which is certainly a much more trivial activity than getting an abortion. 

I am not an expert on abortion law, but my memory is that the Supreme Court ruled that abortion parental notification and permission laws are Constitutional if the law includes an option for the girl to override her parents veto through the judiciary.  I have always argued that we should place an additional proviso in the parental permission laws, one I think both sides of the abortion debate might accept -- if a parent refuses to allow their daughter to have an abortion, then the girl's parents must adopt the baby and be ready to raise it themselves. 

I am about at the end of my rope on listening to the current filibuster debate, all the more so because whatever side some Senator is on today, you can bet a pile of money that they were on exactly the opposite side 10 years ago, when the majority-minority positions of the two major parties was reversed.  Senators from both sides can argue all day that their current stand is "on principle", but this is crap.  If all these people's stands were "on principle", then about 100 Senators have completely changed their principles in the last 10 years. 

Before I take my shot at truly coming up with a solution "on principle", here is but one example of this switch of sides.  I will use the NY Times as an example, mainly because they are so much fun to criticize.  Thanks to Powerline for pointers to some of these editorials.

In their editorial titled "Senate on the Brink", dated March 6, 2005 the Times stated:

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the
filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare
majority of senators from running roughshod.

and further:

Now [the White House] threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill
their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order
to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be
inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress.

Wow! Its sure good that we have this filibuster thingie to protect our way of life.  And its great to have champions like the NY Times who are stalwart defenders of this procedure. 

Except when they are not.  Back when the majorities were reversed almost exactly a decade ago, on January 1, 1995 the NY times editorialized:

The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The
greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the
Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the
will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition
so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to
forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.

For years Senate filibusters--when they weren't conjuring up romantic images
of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from exhaustion on the Senate
floor--consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin once
spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to
bring Senate business to a halt led to the current so-called two-track system,
whereby a senator can hold up one piece of legislation while other business goes
on as usual.

and further (note the Senators who are players in this quote 10 years ago):

Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now
proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there
must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well
with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to
exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans
frustrated Democrats in 1994.

Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change
the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes,
the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each
subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote--with votes
occurring no more frequently than every second day--cloture could be invoked
with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel
passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely....

The Harkin plan, along with some of Mr. Mitchell's proposals, would go a long
way toward making the Senate a more productive place to conduct the nation's
business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves
practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite
with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates
democracy and serves no useful purpose.

Gee, now I'm starting to think this filibuster thingie might not be so good.  I kindof get confused as to which principled stand by the NY Times I should get behind.

My Plan

First, recognize that I am not a lawyer, nor a constitutional scholar, nor do I play one on TV.  But seeing as the "experts" are tripping over themselves in their hypocrisy, there is not reason I can't jump in the fray too.

My idea for this started when I found out something about filibuster rules -- there are already certain votes that by Senate rules have been made immune to filibuster.  Thank God for blogs, because you won't find this anywhere in the MSM, though its apparently common knowledge.  Everyone treats a change in filibuster rules for judge confirmations as "a break in the dam" or a "slippery slope" which will wipe out the entire filibuster rule.   However, such exceptions have already been made.  The most used one is for budget votes - neither party may filibuster certain budget votes.  The logic for this is obvious - no one want to let 41 people shut down the government.  The majority party should be able to pass their budget.  This exemption is why Senate leaders often bury controversial provisions (recent example:  ANWR drilling) in the budget -- so they can't get filibustered.  Other votes exempt from filibuster include votes under the War Power Act and a number of really trivial things that I can't remember right now - I am looking for a link and would appreciate help.

This leads me to what seems like a fairly obvious, moderately principled position on filibuster:  Change the Senate rules to allow filibuster on new legislation, but exempt votes from filibuster that are required to keep the basic functions of government running.  This latter exempt category would include things like approving budgets, raising the debt ceiling, and voting on nominees of all types.

Postscript:  By the way, as a libertarian, I am generally all for seeing the government shut down, and don't shed many tears when the Senate does nothing.  However, I think my proposal is pretty true to the intentions of the Constitution.  In particular, of all the functions that are currently being shut down by the filibuster, it is galling that it is the court system that is being ground to a halt, since the courts are one of the few institutions where even a hard core libertarian like myself accepts a strong role for government.  Which is not to say that I am happy with the power courts and judges have been taking on themselves of late.

Update:  Here is a further good proposal that I am not sure why no one is talking about - if they are going to filibuster, lets make them actually filibuster, i.e. keep talking and talking:

  However, I think that these Princeton students have the right idea:  If you are going to filibuster, then you should have to filibuster.
Filibusters should come at some personal and political cost. We should
abolish the candy-ass filibusters of modern times, and require that if
debate is not closed it must therefore happen. 

The
prospect of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy bloviating for
hours on C-SPAN would deter filibusters except when the stakes are
dire, if for no other reason than the risk that long debate would
create a huge amount of fodder for negative advertising. If Frist were
to enact the "reform" of the filibuster instead of its repeal, he would
sieze the high ground. He could take the position that the Republicans
are merely rolling back the "worst excesses" of the long period of
Democratic majority in the Congress, and that filibusters will still be
possible if Senators are willing to lay it all on the line. Indeed,
even the students at Princeton would be hard-pressed to argue against
such a reform of the filibuster, since extended speechifying is
precisely the means they have used to make their point.

Okay, how could you resist that title for a post.  My thoughts on this subject were spurred by an article by Fox News about pirates that won election to the NC State student government:

By an overwhelming majority, the Raleigh school last week elected a candidate
called "The Pirate Captain" student body president, giving the old sea dog 58
percent of the vote.

"We're quickly goin' to bae getting our plank started, get the simple things
out of the way," The Pirate Captain (), real name Whil
(or maybe "Will") Piavis, a junior, told supporters after election results were
unveiled Wednesday night.

Many outlets have reported this story with incredulity that such an unserious person could be elected to so lofty an office.  Several student government weenies at NC State agreed:

More sober student-government types seemed appalled that a character straight
from "SpongeBob SquarePants" had crashed their party.

I was not surprised in the least, for two reasons.  First, I think many Americans in general are fed up with the self-importance of most legislators.  This goes double for students and the student government.  In fact, I think it is nearly a law of nature that the more trivial the government post, the more self-important the occupants of that post are.

The second reason I was not surprised was that we had a similar event twenty years ago at Princeton where the student government was taken over by the Antarctic Liberation Front:

Back when I was an undergrad
at Princeton, one of my fondest memories was of a bizarre Student Body
Governing Council (USG) election.  The previous USG administration,
headed by none other than fellow Princetonian Eliot Spitzer, had so
irritated the student body that, for the first time in memory, the
usually apathetic voting population who generally couldn't care less
who their class president was actually produced an energetic opposition
party.  Even in his formative years, Spitzer was expert in using his
office to generate publicity, in this case frequent mentions in the
student newspaper that finally drove several students over the edge.

The result was the incredibly funny and entertaining Antarctic
Liberation Front.  I wish I had saved their brochures, but their
proposals included things like imposing a dawn to dusk curfew on the
school and funding school parties by annexing the mineral rights
between the double yellow lines of the US highways.  All of this was
under the banner of starting jihad to free Antarctica.  The ALF swept
the USG election.  This immensely annoyed Spitzer and other USG
stalwarts, who decried the trivialization of such an august body.  The
pained and pompous wailing from the traditional student council weenies
(sounding actually a lot like liberals after the last presidential
election) only amused the general student population even further.
After a few student-council-meetings-as-performance-art, the ALF
resigned en mass and life went back to being just a little bit more
boring.

Yes, that Eliot Spitzer, the overreaching Aspiring Governor of New York.  He is STILL mad about getting dissed in this student election, and whined about it twenty years later in print.  And don't miss fellow Princetonian Virginia Postrel's reflections on the ALF and Eliot Spitzer.

My post on libertarians and Republicans, and ones like it on other sites, has generated a lot of response from folks arguing about whether there is a true schism emerging in the Republican Party.  I am not a Republican, so I am not on the inside.  Strong libertarians like me (read this if you want to know what that means) can pretty safely be treated as a fringe, so I haven't really been in a position to argue that the Republicans mights truly be in trouble.

However, yesterday I had the chance to interact with a number of family friends.  Included were a number of men, many in their 60's-80's, who have been lifelong classic Chamber of Commerce Republicans, including two that ran Fortune 100 companies.  These were classic red state Republicans, many of whom had been active in the party at some point in their lives.  And, almost to a man, they were disenchanted with the Republicans.  They cited trade protectionism, profligate spending, and Tom-DeLay-type capture by the system.  These men, all who would call themselves religious, were frustrated at the apparent capture of the Party by religious interests.

Several of these folks pointed me to this editorial by John Danforth as representing what is frustrating them about the Administration and the Party.

    During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with
  each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited
  government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged
  the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges
  should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported
  an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were
  principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

    But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become
  secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried
  every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute
  worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems
  to be the other way around.

    The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope
  for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda
  has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

For those of you who don't know and might mistake Mr. Danforth for some rampaging secularist, former Senator Danforth, beyond having gone to the greatest undergraduate institution in the world, is a pro-life .

I encourage you to read it all. 

Over the last year or so, ad hominem political arguments have really begun to drive me crazy.  I don't think that they are any more prevalent, but since I have begun blogging and tried to really get underneath the factual underpinnings of certain issues, these ad hominem arguments have become more irritating.

What do I mean by ad hominem arguments?  Here are several examples:

Ad Hominem Classic

The classic Ad Hominem attack is one that substitutes a (mostly) irrelevant personal attack on the author of an argument instead of logically or factually disputing the argument itself.  I could pick from about a thousand examples a week from the blogosphere, but a good recent example were conservative attacks on Robert Byrd's admittedly over-the-top defense of allowing filibusters for judicial nominees.  Almost every response I saw to Byrd was careful to remind readers that Bird was a KKK leader forty plus years ago.  Though certainly unsavory, it is unclear how being a KKK member is relevant to the argument about the filibuster rule (the only real connection, though irrelevant to refuting Byrd's arguments, is that Byrd used a filibuster rather famously to try to head off passage of the Civil Rights Act in the early 60's).  If anything, one might argue that Byrd's historic white supremacist activities might make him more rather than less favorable to judicial nominees.  If anything, the one relevant fact about Byrd that might have some bearing on the argument is that he is often considered a constitutional expert, and has been cited as such a number of times by Republicans when it suited his purpose.

Ad Hominem Shorthand

This is a staple of Blog comments.  Examples include "Bush is a Fascist", "Bush is a Liar", "They're Moonbats" etc.  These arguments usually do nothing to enhance an online argument.

Ad Hominem Motivation / bias

A good example is "of course you oppose abortion - you're Catholic".   While bias or group affiliation may be a pointer to potential weaknesses in a person's argument, they are not weaknesses in and of themselves, and pointing out these biases or affiliations does not constitute refutation of an argument.

Ad Hominem Protected Group Status

This is the reverse of the one above.  Rather than trying to refute the argument by pointing out the group affiliation of the other person, you are instead trying to short-circuit the argument by taking advantage of your own group affiliation.  A good example is of those in "protected" groups (blacks, women, etc) responding to arguments by saying you are just being racist / sexist.  This is a very popular tactic on campus's, where members of protected groups use campus speech codes to try to declare certain arguments illegal "hate speech", thereby eliminating the necessity of actually having to respond to or refute the argument.

Ad Hominem Source of Funding

This charge is increasingly prevalent in the blogosphere, as both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of "astroturfing", or offering political opinions for payola.  While source of funds for writing and research are important points of disclosure, the fact that an argument has been subsidized by this or that group does not automatically negate the argument.  For example, global warming activists love to point to studies that refute warming claims by claiming the study was paid for by the power industry, or the oil industry, or whoever.  While this should make one skeptical, it does not constitute sufficient refutation of logic and data, though it is often used that way.

Ad hominem guilt by association

This is perhaps the weakest of all ad hominem attacks.  It attempts to undermine an argument not by pointing out flaws in the person making the argument, but by pointing out flaws in other people making the argument.  For example, conservatives like to dispose of anti-war arguments by pointing the the wackiest of anti-war protesters, and saying "see, you are just one of these moonbats".  More recently, liberals have tried to undermine reasonable people arguing for not removing Terri Shiavo's feeding tube by pointing to how unsavory and unreasonable other people have been in the same cause.  Can't we just admit that for any argument one wants to make, there is someone out there who agrees but who one would not want to be associated with.

*    *    *

Anyway, I probably left a few out.  I don't know if it is still the case, but in British legal arguments there used to be a distinction between hard evidence directly refuting an argument and "pointers", or items that might cause one to be suspicious of the opposite party's arguments, but which don't actually constitute proof.  In this context, ad hominem arguments can be thought to sometimes provide a useful pointer, but they should never be mistaken for a true refutation of the facts.

For more, Wikipedia has a good article.

As a libertarian that voted rather unenthusiastically Republican in the last election, I am right here with Ryan Sager:

While
some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan's
deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is
the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has
never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture.
Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan's other famous lines, sans
irony: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

 

This
represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party
and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident.
Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending,
the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare
prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed
to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party
is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington.
And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state's rights,
the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention
into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual
family.

A few weeks ago I wrote here that about the high-stakes battle over judicial nominations.  When Republicans were out of power, they could be trusted to support non-activist judges against liberal activist alternatives.  Now, however, my fear is that Republicans may have shifted their stand, seeking to nominate activist conservative judges.  Leaving no one at all in Washington to support a constitutional separation of powers.