Centerfield

Running To The Middle

Kansas Governor Selects Running Mate for Race

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday that the former state Republican party chairman, who switched his affiliation to Democrat only a day earlier, will be her next running mate.

Some red-state GOP moderates are jumping ship, after being forced out of the decision-making process in the state party environs by "social" conservatives. Embattled red-state Dems are willing to join forces with them.

All politics is local.

Remembering the Mission

I while back I wrote a piece on the necessity of honest debate about the war, and how essential it was for us to grasp the big picture. I'm proud of that piece, but Owen West does an infinitely better job than I did. He really hits the right targets, with clarity and courage, like the brave soldier that he is:

Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare — and the need to cultivate national guardians — has not. As Kipling wrote, "The strength of the pack is the wolf."

Finally, today's debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.

We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more. We have crossed several rivers and the nation is hoping that ahead lie streams. But if they are oceans, we should heed Lincoln's call: "With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

Read the whole thing. You won't regret it.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Unity 08

It's public. The initiative that Hamilton Jordan hinted at in his conference call with the Centrist Coalition is now public. It's Unity08.

New Organization Offers Voters an Answer to Partisan Paralysis, Seeks to Elect Bipartisan 'Unity Ticket' to White House in '08

Ticket to be Chosen Via First-Ever Online Convention

DENVER, May 30 /PRNewswire/ -- A new grassroots organization called Unity08 (http://www.unity08.com/) launched a nationwide movement today to effect major reform in the 2008 presidential elections by offering voters an alternative ticket -- a Unity Ticket headed by a woman and/or man from each major party, or by an independent who presents a Unity Team from both parties. By electing a Unity Ticket to the White House, Unity08 plans to force the country's Democratic and Republican leaders to cease their runaway focus on the issues of outlying special-interest groups and once again align with the aspirations and will of average Americans.

Unity08 has three specific goals:

-- Elect a Unity Ticket to the White House in 2008, headed by a woman and/or man from each major political party or by an independent who presents a Unity Team from both parties.

-- Have the American people choose that ticket via the first-ever
virtual, secure online convention of millions of qualified American voters.
Unity08 has no candidate -- the Unity Ticket will be chosen online, by
the people.

-- Effect major change and reform in the 2008 national elections by
influencing the major parties to adopt the core features of Unity08's
national agenda. Specifically, that means dividing the issues facing the
nation into Crucial Issues (e.g., education, energy independence, deficit
spending, global terrorism, health care, nuclear proliferation) and
Important Issues (e.g., gay marriage, gun control, abortion rights), then
focusing on the Crucial.

"A Unity Ticket in office for just one term, or taking part in just one
election will bring new ideas, new integrity and new leaders to
American politics today," said Unity08 Founders Council members Doug Bailey,
former Republican political consultant and founder of The Hotline, and
Hamilton Jordan, former White House Chief of Staff in the Carter
Administration. "Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the ability of
their elected officials to get things done because in recent elections,
candidates have focused on the turnout of their parties' vocal
single-issue interests. They call those people their 'base,' but that base
represents only a small fraction of the American people. As a result
Washington has been polarized and paralyzed and the voters are ready to take
their country back."

"Unity08 will be the long-needed correction," said Founders Council
member Angus King, former two-term Independent Governor of Maine. "Backed
by people of all ages, backgrounds, races, beliefs and political
affiliations, this movement will demonstrate once again that collaboration
and cooperation between the parties is not only possible, but critical to
future progress."

Unity08 plans to build an online community of millions of registered
voters who will participate in an online convention in the first half of
2008 to nominate a Unity Ticket among any two candidates
constitutionally qualified to serve -- as long as they represent more than one party.
Today, Unity08 launched its website (http://www.unity08.com/), which
will be the focal point of the organization's efforts, enabling concerned
voters to register to become members, participate in a dialogue, and
share ideas to shape the Unity08 movement. Through the website, Unity08
members will mobilize to spread the word, and to take off-line action by
placing the Unity Ticket on the ballot in all 50 states. Ultimately,
members in the online convention will vote to nominate the ticket they
believe will enact real change in Washington.

"We are not in this to be spoilers or to hurt either party. We are in
this to win, give the White House a Unity Team that can provide
leadership, and along the way jolt each party back toward the voters in the
center. 2008 is an historic moment of truth for the parties, the people
and the nation," said Bailey and Jordan.

The Unity08 movement is founded by a group of Americans representing
all ages, race, location, political philosophy and party affiliation. To
view a current list of members of the Founders Council in formation,
click here: http://www.unity08.com/founderscouncil.

"Unity08 is essential for our children," said Founders Council member
Janet Kelly of Battlecreek, Michigan, former general counsel at Kellogg
and Sara Lee. "Too much time in Washington is spent attacking each
other and not enough time is spent attacking the issues."

The Unity08 movement has been building for months, through planning and
discussions with civic leaders and concerned citizens across the
country. Recruitment already has begun on college campuses. "Young people are
disgusted with business as usual in Washington and are hungry to
participate in a force for change," said Founders Council member Lindsay
Ullman, a Yale University junior and former president of the National
Associations of Student Councils.

Founders Council member Zach Clayton, a senior and Morehead Scholar at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said, "For decades
now, students across the country have been quietly turning away from our
political system. Unity08 is the best opportunity in a generation for
students to turn that frustration into action, fix Washington and change
the country. Students will show up for this."

Unity08 will follow the law in every instance and seek the opinion of
the Federal Elections Commission to interpret the law where the movement
breaks new ground. Unity08 legal counsel at Steptoe & Johnson has
already requested an FEC advisory opinion on areas where the effort will
break new ground, and the organization is developing a rules committee to
determine precisely how the convention system will work. That rules
committee will be headed by Peter Ackerman, managing director of Rockport
Capital and chairman of Freedom House, and Tom Collier, partner at
Steptoe & Johnson. Unity08 will accept no political action committee (PAC)
and or corporate contributions.

Also today, Unity08 released the results of a poll conducted by
Princeton Survey Research Associates finding that more than three- quarters
(85 percent) of Americans agree that the country "has become so polarized
between Democrats and Republicans that Washington can't seem to make
progress solving the nation's problems." The poll found that 73 percent
of Americans agree it would be a good idea for this country to have more
choices in the 2008 elections than just Republican and Democratic
candidates, and 63 percent express interest in a ticket that would feature a
prominent Republican and a prominent Democrat. To read a summary of the
poll's major findings, click here: http://www.unity08.com/pollsummary.

"The partisan bickering in Washington is causing Americans to believe
the wheels have come off our political system, that the American Dream
is slipping away, and that time is short to get things back on track,"
explained Unity08 president and chief executive officer Jim Jonas.
"Unity08 will be a catalyst for real, meaningful progress."

Unity08 is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The organization
currently is organized under IRS rules as a section 527 political organization,
while it seeks guidance from the Federal Election Commission. Over the
coming weeks and months, through a network of volunteers and leaders
across the country, Unity08 will recruit concerned voters to join the
movement by signing up on the Unity08 website (http://www.unity08.com/).

Web site: http://www.unity08.com

Source: Unity08

The Hill search brouhaha

I had really not planned on posting about this, partially because I have little to add to what others have said (Volokh; Bull Moose et al), but mainly because I remain bemused as to how a story so patently absurd has attained such coverage outside of the summer news slump. I'm piqued to add a few words, though, by comments made on (and reported by) this morning's Washington Journal. The "controversy" regarding whether the FBI can execute a search warrant approved by a Federal Judge on a Congressman's office continues to clank along; the House Judiciary Committee will shortly convene a hearing portentously titled "RECKLESS JUSTICE: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?," while the Wall Street Journal has sadly chosen to weigh in on the wrong side. Meanwhile, on the Senate side, even Bill Frist - not exactly known for his ability to sense the political winds - has figured out that this is a loser of an issue (although, contra Joe, I'm not convinced that he has, in fact, performed a frist-flop on the issue). One recalls the counsel of Tocqueville, who lamented that:

On entering the House of Representatives of Washington one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly. The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity within its wall . . . [the House is] remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent."

We can once again add to Tocqueville's dire assesment charges of venality and self-absorbtion; given that it is hard to take seriously the claim of immunity.

The claims, it seems to me, are twofold. Firstly, there is the generic separation of powers argument (there is also the closely-related "comity between the branches argument," which will get you some mileage, but not enough). That argument would have some credibility if this was an invasion purely by one branch, but fails given the judicial approval of the warrant. Nor is it immediatley clear to me why this will have the supposedly chilling effect on debate in Congress: Jefferson's offices were searched after he ignored a subpoena and on presentment of probable cause to a judge, not because he criticized the President.

Second, there is the Art. I §6 argument (members of Congress are "priveleged from Arrest during their Attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same," and may not be interrogated by any other governmental entity for something said in debate). This fails at first glance. Even if the clause applied, which by its own terms it does not (a search is not an arrest; cf. Amdt. IV, requiring warrants for "the place to be searched, and the persons . . . to be seized"), the clause contains exemptions: it is not a defense against "Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace." (It's interesting, by the way, to compare the lack of interest on the House's part in using this clause to defend Rep. McKinney with the present hyperactivity in using it to defend -- I was going to say Rep. Jefferson, but that would concede entirely too much, i.e., that the present fluster is about protecting Rep. Jefferson. I doubt that it is. It is about members protecting themselves). Justice Story puts it even more bluntly: members cannot be arrested "except for crimes"; II Commentaries §856. Story noted that "[t]he privilege of the peers of the British parliament [is] to be free from arrest, in civil cases," id. at §858 (emphasis added), and noted that the wording of the exemption (for treason, felony and breach of peace) "are the same as those, in which the exception to the privilege of parliament is usually expressed at the common law, and was doubtless borrowed from that source," id. at §862. As if to hammer home the point, Story concludes that the exemption extends to any indictable offence: "the phrase 'breach of the peace' would seem to extend to all indictable offence, as well those, which are, in fact, attended with force and violence."

Justice Holmes remarked that a page of history was worth a volume of logic: in this case, both point to the same result, which is that Congress cannot indulge in criminal behaviour and expect to be protected by a clause which is designed to ensure their constituents are not despoiled of their representation. "[T]he[ §6] rights and privileges are, in truth, the rights and privileges of their constituents, and for their benefit and security, rather than the rights and privileges of the member for his own benefit and security" (Story, supra, §847). Congress is the instrument of the people, and the protections that devolve on them protect their actions in their official capacity, not what they do on their private time. While the WSJ is surely correct that "Congress is uniquely protected [by the clause] . . . in its act of legislating," it isn't as clear to me as it evidently is to the WSJ that the act of legislating - as opposed to hiding evidence of criminal activity - is threatened here.

I am generally quite poorly-disposed towards the executive branch vs. the Congress; although this is a minority position in America at large, let alone the GOP, I'm a Congress geek, I believe in the prima inter pares status of legislatures, and I simply couldn't disagree more with Dick Cheney vis-a-vis the appropriate balance of powers between executive and legislative. I wouldn't go as far as the WSJ suggests; I don't want a feeble Presidency, but I do (in general terms) want a pre-Jacksonian one. None-the-less, I would submit that the bad guys in this story are not an overreaching executive branch, but members of the legislature who are letting down the institution in which they serve. The real scandal here is not whether or not Congress is protected by Art. I §6, but why the House has not acted pursuant to its §5 power to expel Congressman Jefferson.

What thinks the Centerfield commentariat?

More Centrist Blogs

I've added the following centrist blogs to our blogroll:

Centrisity
Political Yen-Yang
Virginia Centrist
Weekend Pundit
Minnesota's In The Middle
Across The Aisle

I've also added them to the Centrist Blogosphere Kinja aggregator, which offers the best one-stop shopping post for centrist blog posts.

Note: The list of blogs which are part of the Centrist Coalition, highlighted at the top left, is reserved for bloggers who actively participate in Centrist Coalition beyond just blogging, for instance by participating in our monthly conference call, or our Yahoo group. If you want to raise your level of participation in the Centrist Coalition, e-mail me at cf at centrist coalition dot com.

Hitchens on Memorial Day

What he said.

Memorial Day

As always on Memorial Day, I am reminded of my great-grandfather's speech, given on May 31, 1921.

Those pioneers of the new freedom were not actuated by any hope of riches or pecuniary rewards. They fought and laid down their lives for liberty and they achieved it.

They fought for us; for us they fell. And today we, with one accord forgetting blood and party, sect and creed, in deepest reverence do them honor. Nor, for their sakes, can we forget the desolated ones they left behind. Our tears or words of sympathy cannot bring back the comfort of those loving hands, the music of those voices stilled forever. Only the 'solemn pride' of having given more than all the rest, is theirs who lived to weep. But all the world, because of what they gave, is debtor to the blood that fills their veins.

To him, to my 3 cousins on active duty in the U.S. Army, to all who fought and sacrified for our country, and to all those who loved them:

Thank you

Which Cities Acquire Innovative New Industries?

Slashdot published a pointer to an interesting essay by Paul Graham on why Silicon Valley happened where it did. Well, IMHO it's close but missing a few important things. It's a particularly interesting essay to me because at one time I held a very similar set of theories, which I had to refine because of contrary evidence.

On why New York and other metropoli saw little computer industry success, he says:

You can see this most clearly in New York, which attracts a lot of creative people, but few nerds. [5]

What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York

That was my theory, too, until I actually visited the city for a couple of weeks, and saw geeks by the ton (yeah, I have good geekdar, honed while recruiting for my failed startup). He's simply wrong about geeks not living there; it's just a question of what size city you're comfortable with. So why was NY's famous Silicon Alley an infamous squib? I've come to believe that the answer has to do with mental space of a sort taken by existing industries. If you want to start something having to do with books, insurance, or finance, that's the place. I suspect people will help you out with that kind of thing. But the Bay Area and Austin were really still looking for industries to enter when the computer and network revolutions came along.

Graham made one other minor mistake, which I would've made before moving here, too. I lived near DC a long time, and my first job was for the government, and it the setup of the job (though not the people) certainly discouraged entrepreneurialism. And I felt that was a general problem with govt jobs.

But Austin is a place where innovative industry and governmental industry coexist. You've certainly noticed our governmental industry, since it's ruling most of our blog readers at the moment (bwahaha!). I think that again, in DC it's a case of the attention going to the "house" industries which are government and centralized control.

Is SOX Worth It?

Since the evildoing execs that inspired SOX were both caught and convicted of their crimes under the old laws, is the high cost of SOX justified? Doesn't this just raise the amount lying needed to cover up, make problems harder to spot in the snowstorm of paperwork, and reward the accounting firms that were looking the other way?

A reminder.....

...to please take a moment to remember why we get a long weekend.

Have a good weekend, and be careful out there.

Memorial Day Weekend Open Thread

What is on your mind? What are you up to this weekend?

Random Notes

As Goes Britain...

State pension age to rise to 68

The state pension age is to rise to 68 from 2044, as part of government proposals to strengthen pension provision in the UK.

DOJ: Hastert is not under investigation

Prompted by an ABC report that Hastert was "under investigation by the FBI." Which story has now been re-written, and that phrase excluded. Truth Laid Bear weighs in. As does Riehl World.

Someone forgot to tell Reuters about the change in phrasing in this ABC non-story.

House Speaker Hastert under investigation: ABC

The original Brian Ross story cites the usual anonymous sources. Your mileage as to the propinquitous timing and quietly-retracted and redacted "error" in the story may vary. But it looks like another long and dirty campaign season from here.

Updates, Enron verdict, and more, below the fold!

Hastert threatens legal action against ABC

ABC News’ continued publication of this false information, after having actual knowledge of its falsity, evidences a specific and malicious intent to injure and damage Speaker Hastert’s reputation by continued repetition of a known falsehood.

Gee, wonder who leaked that letter to Drudge?

Lay and Skilling guilty

Skilling was found guilty on 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud, false statements and insider trading. He was found not guilty on eight counts of insider trading.

Lay was found guilty on all six counts of conspiracy and fraud. In a separate bench trial, Judge Sim Lake ruled Lay was guilty of four counts of fraud and false statements.

Interactive Congressional Map

Congressional Quarterly has a cool map which offers projections of the 06 races.

Does Google Need Anti-Trust Oversight?

Google has blacklisted this blog again, for no apparent reason. A couple of weeks ago, I noted that Google had restored our listing, though our Pagerank was starting at zero. However, that state of affairs only lasted a few days, and we were gone again. It's only pages which contain "blog" in the URL, not the Centrist Coalition site as a whole, or even blog comments, which show up in a separate cgi-bin directory.

When Google first dropped us, I tried to figure out how to contact them, and couldn't. There does not seem to be an e-mail address or phone number that goes to a human. I waited patiently for six weeks until the next indexing cycle took place, and after we were restored, figured that the problem was solved. But our being blocked again suggests that some sort of program is applied after the Googlebot index to purge us.

Now, I'm angry. Google is a private company, and they provide a free service, so I should be thankful for what I get, you say. But Google now reportedly has 47 percent market share of the search engine market. If they don't play fair, and don't communicate, then I think there may be an anti-trust issue with that level of arbitrary power.

Little Green Footballs thinks that Google may be out to get conservative bloggers, and points to the blog, Riehl World View, which is blocked by the Google search engine (not just Google News).

Personally, I don't think Google has a political agenda. Instead, I think they've tried to de-emphasize blogs in their search results, and somehow screwed up and blocked some entirely. The only way I see that we can communicate with Google is by submitting a reinclusion request. But that form is set up so that the submit button is dimmed until the user checks boxes acknowledging that they violated Googles guidelines, and that Google rightly blocked them. I've read their guidelines, and am unaware of any way in which this blog violates them.

I did create a Google sitemap about a month ago. One Google help page says that the sitemap may indicate when a site is being blocked. So far, it does not.

I'm not prepared to say that Google is evil, but they are sinners.

I Can't Drive 55

Hillary Clinton supports returning the nation to the 55 mph speed limit, wherever feasible.

"The 55-mile speed limit really does lower gas usage. And wherever it can be required, and the people will accept it, we ought to do it," Clinton said at the National Press Club.

I've defended Clinton here from the most vociferous and kneejerk of her critics. Now I'm wondering which comes first, the smug sanctimony, or the stupidity. She just kissed off millions of votes in return for a slight heating of the lukewarm support of people who would never vote for a republican if their lives depended on it. Now of course, tomorrow will bring the predictable backtracking to explain that it's ok to have higher limits in wide open places where hardly anyone lives, but she's lost my vote.

Here's the quick lesson Hillary, from the people who have to drive themselves around every day. 55 miles per hour is just too freaking slow. We will guard our lives from time vampires such as ones who want us to spend even more time in our cars for a marginal increase in fuel efficiency.

Chris Dodd to seek Dem nomination in '08

The Senator from Connecticut that isn't Joe Lieberman will have a try in 2008. Kos gives his chances a boost by denouncing him here.

He joins retired Senator Mike Gravel and sitting Senator Joe "anyone but" Biden as having announced for it; Feingold is pretty transparently planning on It. is anyone else's hat in the ring yet, and what do folks think of Dodd? It strikes me as fairly poor form when a chap's repeatedly refused to take part in Project Vote Smart.

Mmmm, Irony....

A.C.L.U. May Block Criticism by Its Board

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization's policies and internal administration.

Laws are like sausages

Laws made like sausage turn out to be baloney

''Laws are like sausages,'' said Otto von Bismarck famously. ''It's better not to see them being made.'' That's probably true even for good laws and good sausages. But there are times when the law or the sausage seems to represent the dubious process of its manufacture all too faithfully. In a word: It smells. And the last week of lawmaking in the Senate, which is expected to produce ''comprehensive immigration reform'' by the end of today or tomorrow, has been especially odiferous.

The Senate makes immigration sausage. Yes, this really is how it usually works.

Sayin' No to Mullah Mo'

Apparently, reports suggesting Mullah Roy Moore's widespread appeal were off the mark. Or maybe people wised up and tired of the zealous one-note stylings of this lunatic tunesmith. Polls suggest he's way behind in the Alabama guv's race:

Moore, a fellow Republican who believes that God is the sovereign source of America’s laws and government, will face Riley in the gubernatorial primary on June 6. Yet, in what seems to be one the biggest political reversals in recent memory, Moore is trailing Riley in the polls by nearly 50 points.

A new Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register poll shows Riley leading Moore, 69-20 percent, among likely Republican primary voters. It’s the newspaper’s third consecutive poll in four months that has Riley ahead by at least 28 points. Close watchers of the race say these numbers mirror findings they’ve seen in other polls.

The Riley-Moore contest was expected to be a classic clash between two different pillars of the Republican Party: the business community (represented by Riley) and religious conservatives (represented by Moore). But it hasn’t turned out that way.

Seems like "hot" public figures have limited appeal, and that such appeal wanes over time. I don't think the average person feels like they can match the intensity of such firebrands, and then they decide that such relentless and exhausting figures ought not to have expanded powers. Pounding your fist on the podium is nice when your anger matches the public mood. But ultimately, people want governors to balance the budget, fix the roads, and get the trains to run on time. State mayor, IOW. They'll vote for an experienced competent manager who seems like he or she can handle a demanding multifacted job.

But a sanctimonious, confrontation-seeking, finger jabber who wants to be everyone's daddy? Not so much. This shows that Alabamians were right in line with the rest of us when they gave out good old-fashioned horse sense and a-hole detectors!

And be sure to click through. Could MSNBC have chosen a photo better calculated to make Moore look like the right reverend Chimpy McRube?

An Open Thread...

...is needed wherever outlaws rule the West, wherever innocent women and children are afraid to walk the streets, wherever a man cannot live in simple dignity, wherever a people cry out for justice.

Confession from Bush voter. A call for real opposition and, MOSTLY, centrism.

Doug McIntyre of "McIntyre in the Morning" gives an apology for having voted for Bush. But, ofcourse, Dems and liberals should not be rejoicing in having found a convert. They never make the distinction. This is something that bothers me about the Dems since 33% approval ratings for Bush does not mean 67% approval of what they want.

Doug says clearly:

None of this, by the way, should be interpreted as an endorsement of the opposition party. The Democrats are equally bankrupt. This is the second crime of our age. Again, historically speaking, its times like these when America needs a vibrant opposition to check the power of a run-amuck majority party. It requires it. It doesn’t work without one. Like the high and low tides keep the oceans alive, a healthy, positive opposition offers a path back to the center where all healthy societies live.

Tragically, the Democrats have allowed crackpots, leftists and demagogic cowards to snipe from the sidelines while taking no responsibility for anything. [BUT] In fairness, I don’t believe a Democrat president would have gone into Iraq.

The gitty Dem base looking toward Nov. and beyond enjoy the dissatisfaction toward Bush but refuse to study why it is so and how that can repsond with a solution. The convenient "it's because we're better" attitude is wrong-headed, silly and angering. Why their base isn't demanding more is equally dumbfounding.

More from McIntyre on Bush though,

I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period. In 2000, I was a McCain guy.

I cheered when we quickly toppled the Taliban government, but winced when we let Bin Laden escape from Tora-Bora. Then, the talk turned to Iraq and I winced again.

It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We’re about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It’s unspeakable. The liberal media didn’t create this reality, bad policy did.

And back to politics is general, I'm totally with Doug:

I believe... the two party system is on the brink of a second collapse. It’s currently running on spin, anger, revenge, and pots and pots and pots of money.

We’re being governed by paper-mache patriots; brightly painted red, white and blue, but hollow to the core. Both parties have mastered the cynical arts of media manipulation and fund raising. They’ve learned the lessons of Watergate and burn the tapes. They have learned to divide the nation for their own gain. They have demonstrated the willingness to exploit any tragedy for personal advantage. The contempt they have for the American people is without parallel.

This is painful to say, and I’m sure for many of you, painful to read. But it’s impossible to heal the country until we’re willing to acknowledge the truth no matter how painful. We have to wean ourselves off sugar coated partisan lies.

I say Doug McIntyre for President. I say in vain, to all loyalists: wake up and smell the coffee. Both parties are wrong.

The GOP has increased non-defense discretionary spending by 35%, DoD by 44%, Labor 31%, Agriculture 38%, Education 81%. What do they Dems say about that? NOTHING! Just talk of corruption and balancing the budget without saying how. Here's where the Dems won't take a stand and should. They seemed content when under Clinton, real domestic spending on these matters was much lower. But now? They say nothing. Once it's in the books, it seemingly can't come out. Nobody cares. And the Dems don't even have the courage to draw on their own experience under "Glorious Clinton" and say they can make do with what they had in the 90s. It pity them and I pity DC.

Further Proof That Anti-War Politics Turns The Most Reasonable Progressives Into Closeminded Reactionaries

Consider this embarassing display. These people ought to be ashamed of themselves.

I can't get over this bit of all-too-obvious wisdom by former Sen. Kerrey:

Kerrey urged students to exercise the open-mindedness he said was at the heart of the university's progressive history.

Uh-uh, so much for THAT idea.

The Sublime Truth of Cartoons

To speak truthfully and insightfully today you must have a sense of the absurdity of human life and endeavour. Past attempts to construct grand and noble theories about human history and destiny have collapsed.

We now know we're just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.

According to philosopher Julian Bagini, Matt Groening is the true heir of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

Revealing simple truths about simplistic falsehoods is not just a minor philosophical task, like doing the washing up at Descartes' Diner while the real geniuses cook up the main courses.

For when it comes to the relevance of philosophy to real life, all the commitments we make on the big issues are determined by considerations which are ultimately quite straightforward.

How true. And I'm sure he'd say the same thing about South Park. Hat tip: Althouse

I'm Sorry, I Seem to have Wandered into the Non-fiction

Reportedly the Da Vinci Code is a thoroughly mediocre film adaptation of the same-named bestseller. Yet the film, as it opens, basks in the free publicity generated by the irritated faithful. Now I eagerly grant that it's their right to protest. But what precisely are they protesting, and what sort of remedy would they find satisfactory?

Freelancer Ethan Gilsdorf asks the money question over at the Boston Globe:

How did we lose the ability to distinguish an invented story from a piece of information? Who's to blame for this shift in perception?

Read the whole thing. The answer to the above? I guess it's a conspiracy of commerce and laziness, if not outright apathy.

We Don't Need No Stinking Juries

SJC says tobacco firms can't blame smokers as defense

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that cigarette makers cannot defend against personal-injury lawsuits by arguing that smokers should know the health risks of cigarettes and thus are responsible for harming themselves.

Cigarettes, the court said, are so dangerous that they cannot be used safely by anyone.

The ruling, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation by a top state court, said Philip Morris Inc. cannot shield itself from a lawsuit by the widow of a Douglas man who died of lung cancer by arguing that he knew cigarettes were harmful and thus had used the product unreasonably. Tobacco companies have successfully used that defense in wrongful death suits across the country.
''Because no cigarette can be safely used for its ordinary purpose, smoking, there can be no nonunreasonable use of cigarettes," Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall wrote for the court.

Sigh. MA judges are doing their best to help our state live down to its reputation as a bunch of zealots. I think this is a chasmic overreach of judicial authority. Apparently there is, at this point, no need to even have a trial. Just sue, and get a check. The only defense is not a defense. I hope this leads to a slapdown.

Random weirdness...

For your Friday open thread enjoyment, we have 10 Things I Hate About Commandments and Casablanca in 30 Seconds with Bunnies. Why?

Why not?

The Flu Isn't a Big Killer Anymore in Industrialized Nations

I don't believe any kind of flu is a big threat in terms of megadeaths in industrialized nations. The reason for that is precisely because the articles sensationalizing the possibility talk about how a 1918-like flu could strike again. That says to me that influenza has had almost a century to try and mutate into a sufficiently broadly fatal form to get through modern flu defenses, and has failed that whole time. That makes it pretty unlikely.

The only big difference between then and now that seems to show up in all too many articles fearing flu is the vast increase in air travel that really does make infections more of a global threat. But there are other changes, at least as important.

Then, even in industrialized nations, hunger was a real day-to-day threat to a huge percentage of the populace, and the widespread water network that makes it trivial to wash hands today had much worse coverage. There were vastly more opportunistic diseases waiting to do you in if you survived the flu but were weakened.

A brutal war was winding up. Not only did that make it easy to transmit the disease (as air travel does today), but I see that as the factor that made its spread with high death rate easy. The soldiers were an easy target and reservoir for the disease. If the Iraq War had been anything like as hard even on the Iraqi defenders as WWI was to the winning Allied troops, the GOP would rightfully have been tossed from office. War back then was far harder on soldiers. Soldiers were indifferently fed, marched long distances under harsh conditions, underclothed, exposed to many bursting shell fragments and machine gun bullets, already facing other widespread diseases. Few trenches came with fresh running water.

Of course, many of the problems that made flu a killer are still true in the nonindustrialized world.

Kos Debut

Markos "Screw 'em" Moulitsas, a.k.a. "Kos," makes his campaign commercial debut on behalf of Joe Leiberman's primary opponent, Ned Lamont.

The original ad can be seen here.

AllahPundit weighs in (via Hot Air) here, with commentary and Photoshopping. Jim Geraghty of National Review calls it "perhaps the most surreal campaign ad I've ever seen..."

Best of all is AllahPundit's follow-up remix of the commercial.

Are We "Secure Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures" Anymore?

How's our 4th amendment privacy holding up these days? Laurence Tribe talks about it in a Boston Globe Op Ed:

Tribe on Privacy

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week.

I could live without the "Bush Stomps..." hyperbole in the headline, but that's the headline writer's bad. What I wonder about is whether we'll have any privacy left if we don't start caring about it more. Constitutionally speaking, I think there's far more wiggle room in the "unreasonable" part of the 4th amendment's phrasing than Tribe bothers to address. But I'm pretty sure that reasonable is supposed to represent a higher standard than "whatever the government can get away with without too much grumbling."

C'mon, Let's face it, when it was written that the people should be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," the meaning was that Big Brother shouldn't be free to look, listen, and sniff at the more intimate aspects of a persons life without some sort of damn good reason. If we the people really want to continue to have any expectations of privacy, we'd best get busy telling the government what those expectations are ....we need to get past the clever details of what technically is and is not private according to what has been legislated and ajudicated, and TELL our senators and congressment what we think SHOULD be private.

JK Galbraith Passing Links

Here's are a couple of interesting obits/discussions about JK Galbraith, one from economist lefties, one from a libertarian rightie.

The first thing I read by him was a guide on debating, coauthored with his perennial opponent Bill Buckley. I still use alot of the tricks there... When I was old enough to start understanding, I read his autobiography and his memoir about his ambassadorship in India.

Economics has rather passed him by now, but he was a great man, and there will always be much to learn from his books.

Free and Unfree Authors are Very Different

This post is provoked by watching a documentary about Catherine the Great, in which they read aloud a flattering letter by a French philosophe as though it meant something. Well, it really meant something very different and smaller back then.

When you read something by an unfree author, keep in mind that flattery is a basic necessity for that author. If he wishes to stay physically unharmed, he has to strictly limit who he criticizes. Indeed, he is liable to see harm if he doesn't actively flatter powerful people he meets and corresponds with. Keeping his job means regular flattery of his patron. With this in mind, you can understand that flattery is pretty popular among unfree authors, and indeed the perennial popularity of the effluviently praiseful panegyric.

Many say about the very different style that it's just as valid.

I feel that our freedom is a huge advantage because it allows us to spend much more effort on what we're writing about, and allows us to constructively criticise much more readily. Interestingly, many Dark Ages unfree scholars felt the free product came out better, hence their awe of Aristotle and other ancient free Greek and Republican Roman authors.

Plus Ça Change...

...plus c'est la même chose!

European Nations May Give Iran a Reactor

Key European nations are considering offering Iran a light-water nuclear reactor as part of incentives meant to persuade Tehran to give up its uranium enrichment program, a senior diplomat said Tuesday.

Now, where have we seen this approach before? Oh, yeah. There. That was it.

Who Knew?

Too much heath care for the elderly can be hazardous to their health. Seriously.

A recent study indicates that overuse of health care for chronically ill patients results in higher spending (duh!) and higher mortality for the same conditions.

Researchers did not measure whether those who died in Utah got better or worse care than patients in New Jersey. But they did try to monitor care by following three types of patients for up to five years after they suffered a heart attack, a fractured hip, or a colectomy for colon cancer. For each illness, they found higher mortality rates for patients in the regions with the most intense care.

One speculation is that overuse of health care greatly increases the odds of medical error and iatrogenic complications.

Dr. John E. Wennberg, director of the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School, said the higher mortality rates in some regions could be caused in part by medical error.

"There's a lot of concern about medical errors," Wennberg said. "If you hospitalize people twice as often in a community on a per capita basis, you have twice the risk of having a medical error problem."

Wennberg said another policy ramification for the government to consider is hospital capacity. The more hospital beds there are per capita, the greater the likelihood the patient will be admitted.

"We need to redirect resources away from acute care and invest in infrastructure that can better coordinate and integrate care outside of hospitals - for example, home health and hospice care," the report said.

Also duh.

An Open Invitation...

...to an illegal immigrant to come to America. I would be happy to sponsor her, and help find other support.

Hirsi Ali has acknowledged that she lied on an asylum application in 1992. But after a television program again reported on the matter last week, Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk ruled Monday that her naturalization had been improperly granted...."I am therefore preparing to leave Holland," Hirsi Ali told reporters in The Hague.

I think Ayaan Hirsi Ali would make a fine American, in spite of her previous record of lying on immigration forms. She's already demonstrated that she is willing to learn the language of the nation she lives in, and to work hard to make a real difference in the lives of others. I hope she considers our country when deciding where she wishes to go next.

UPDATE: I wasn't the only one thinking along these lines. Ms. Ali was also, and the Associated Press missed the boat entirely. The American Enterprise Institute, on the other hand, was ahead of the curve.

Welcome to America, Ms. Ali!

Immigration - Take Home Test

1. What has created the apparent perfect storm that has made illegal immigration the urgent issue of the day? (It is not like the problem hasn't been apparent for 20 years, at least.)

2. What are the best approaches to the issue that are actually likely to make a difference?

3. Does the current political environment make an effective response to the problem impossible?

My response to all three questions is "don't know." Please help.

Just $6

What if the oil industry, the insurance industry, trial lawyers, and all the big name lobbyists did not have the option to write a check for a Congressional candidate who accepted public funds? Who would run for office if it didn't cost so much? Who would Members of Congress be loyal to if their campaign was financed by the public? What impact would it have?

I just listened to former Senator and Republican centrist Alan Simpson of Wyoming on the radio, and he, along with former Senator Warren Ruddman (R), former Senator Bill Bradley (D), and former Senator Bob Kerrey (D), thinks it would make a big difference. They are right.

Our campaign finance structure is destroying Democracy, and I mean that exactly how it sounds. Average citizens don't run for office today because they cannot afford it, and it isn't the constituents of most Members of Congress who take up their daily schedule. The truth is, you only get a voice in politics these days if you can afford it. If you don't believe me go work on a political campaign or on Capitol Hill, and then come back and we will talk. We aren't asking ourselves what the best public policy is anymore, but rather, what political campaign finances will be lost if I vote "yea" on this or "nay" on that.

Americans for Campaign Reform tell us that we can work to begin ending the problem with voluntary public financing for Federal legislative races, and that it will only cost $1.8 Billion or $6 per American. $6 to take the power back from the special interests. $6 to ensure that income level doesn't determine whether qualified candidates choose or not to run for office. Just $6.

How does it work? Either one of two ways. First, either a candidate accepts public funds and chooses not to accept private funds, or second, candidates receive matching funds for the private funds they raise.

One could argue that those who choose to take private funds would blow the publicly financed candidates out of the water. In some cases it would make a difference, no doubt, but I don't think Michael Huffington, Steve Forbes, Blair Hull, or Katherine Harris will tell you that endless campaign funds necessarily means victory. John Kerry took them, George W. Bush didn't, and he almost beat an incumbent President during war time.

ACR says the results will be:

1. Leaders will be accountable to voters, not just large donors.
2. Leaders will have more time to focus on solving problems, rather than raising campaign money.
3. More citizens will participate in the political process.
4. The legislative system will represent all segments of our society.

That in my opinion is one hell of a good start.

More info here.

Urban Density and Gas Prices

Conventional wisdom suggests that high prices at the pump mean less driving and, hence, the withering of far-flung suburbs, whose residents must drive to jobs, shopping and recreation.

Urban planning authority and futurist Joel Kotkin says such predictions may be greatly exaggerated.

[Hat tip: Instapundit]

Everything You Wanted to Know About Network Neutrality

The Problem

So what's all the ruckus about passing legislation to ensure Internet fairness? Well, it's very complicated, so I guess I'd better try to explain.

What seems to have triggered the ruckus was BellSouth's assertion that it should be able to charge Google for the high amounts of bandwidth consumed between their users and Google. It sounds fair, because it's their wires that they spent money to build, but that's just their spin, lacking context. The truth is that actors in the business they're in here - Internet Service Provision - are expected to and generally do operate otherwise. They've probably already signed contracts saying they'll operate otherwise that they're blithely ignoring.

BellSouth appears to be supported by a handful of monopoly broadband ISPs, inxluding the cable provider Comcast, AT&T, though their rhetoric has been less direct, and certain others who've already taken action:

In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.

In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute.

Shaw, a big Canadian cable TV company, is charging an extra $10 a month to subscribers in order to "enhance" competing Internet telephone services.

In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com, an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

The monopolists have hired lobbyists and PR firms to bring their point of view to the media and Congress.

So what's so bad about this? Don't they deserve recompense for services delivered? Can't people just switch ISPs if they think they're being treated badly? My answer comes in the form of the name I'm giving them: in the rest of this post: monopolists. I believe they are trying to take advantage of their monopoly power to act in bad-faith manner for an ISP, both to make more money by limiting consumer choice and to perpetuate said power beyond the telco world.

Best-Effort Traffic

Most Internet traffic operates with a deliberately simple charging model. You pay a single fee to your ISP solely depending on how much stuff you're sending and receiving. This is where all broadband ISPs are paid for their users' Google traffic. So, really, BellSouth wants to be paid twice. The Internet operates on that kind of simple charging model so that small Web businesses don't have to negotiate and pay bandwidth charges to half the ISPs on the net, an activity that would put many out of business.

There are other, more complicated, arrangements for paying ISPs for traffic that just goes through the ISP. Pretty much no traffic goes anywhere without money being made from it.

The monopolists also say that increasing demand for multimedia places increasing demand on their equipment, and they should be able to be recompensed appropriately. They talk about how multimedia means potentially high bandwidth uses, and thus that model is no good, and Congress should allow them to break their contracts to collect on that basis. Well, the rest of this post explains wny they're wrong. Basically, it's because the Internet allready has a multimedia model, and it does, in fact, already state different terms for the multimedia exception, but it's not the point here. None of the traffic they're talking about comes under that exception.

That traffic charging model described above operates on what's called a best effort model. Best effort means that individual low-level IP data packets will go through so long as there is enough bandwidth to do so. If there isn't the packet is deliberately dropped where the bandwidth bottleneck is and doesn't make it through. That apparently bloodthirsty model actual works very well because those low-level packets are sent by a higher-level network protocol like TCP that either expects lost packets or resends them, and adjusts bandwidth use to fit. All Web traffic, like Google's search services, is in that model.

Multimedia Traffic Models

There is another model for multimedia that the user wants to be reliably good. Under this model, conversations start with a request to each router between sender and receiver for access to guaranteed bandwidth. If the guarantee is granted, the network guarantees not to throw out for overcapacity reasons any amount of data up to the guarantee. Most network traffic, like the Web, doesn't do this because it's a pain to set up, and its streaming-bandwidth model corresponds poorly to most network uses. You have to be sending multimedia or something else more-or-less constant-rate for it to make any sense.

It's probably more reasonable for intermediate ISPs to charge extra for this model, because it does demand extra resources and bandwidth from their routers. So far, I believe the custom is not to charge. So far, though, this model has only taken off sporadically outside academia. It's unclear if that's because of ISP willies or sporadic router implementation or because they aren't really needed for most things, not even for most audio or video.

Now, because people wanted to use multimedia before guaranteed models were available everywhere, and also because people wanted to see how far they could push things without guarantees, theguaranteed-bandwidth model is astonishingly rarely used. Internet telephony doesn't use it. Most streaming video doesn't use it either, at a cost in having to wait longer before starting a video and a reduction in reception quality. For casual purposes it works pretty well.

Why the Monopolists Are Wrong

So, does the wide use of multimedia within best-effort service mean the monopolists are right that should be paid extra? Well, of course they're right. But they're already being paid extra, by broadband ISP customers paying for broadband. High-volume broadband users are often charged extra beyond that. So users paying more for good service is already in the model. No, this is solely about the wish to violate the nondiscriminatory rules for best-effort service.

Above I claimed that the monopolists were trying to abuse monopoly power to extend their powers beyond what they were given. Remember that companies are given a monopolies with the expectation they will serve the public. For a monopoly to refuse to or charge extra to pass internet phone traffic to subscribers who only have one broadband service, or even another one that's worse, strikes me as being about preserving an old-service monopoly and/or seeking to extend to a monopoly over internet phone service that did not previously exist. Similarly, attempts to get Internet companies to have to pay for user access is an attempt to use a monopoly power to extend ISP access to the Internet. It's alot less relevant where choice exists, because then customers denied good Google access can easily switch. Telus blocking access to critics is using monopoly...enough, you see the pattern now.

Proposed Remedies

So why's the government needed here? Because bandwidth is nothing like a free market. I've seen many capitalist bloggers miss this crucial point. I'am alot less concerned over AOL's behavior, mentioned above. It's evil, for sure, but AOL has plenty of competition, and AFAIK the users in question can switch. The decidedly monopolistic Baby Bells still own most of the bandwidth. 15-30% of the country operates in an area where there's an effective broadband monopoly by either a Baby Bell or a cable company.

But even many of the rest have very lazy competition. It takes three competitors to have a healthy market, and amazingly few people have three or more competitors for broadband services. It's because wireless is only competitive where it competes with just one at least slightly lazy monopoly.

Legislation has been introduced in both the House and Senate. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of Markey's proposed House bill on the subject. The Senate Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006 mandates ISP network neutrality. It places a duty to enforce on the FCC.

I did notice a bug in the bill: it should allow ISPs to deny service to malicious users such as spammers and spyware vendors.

A better remedy would be to end exclusive franchises to build networks. 100 years ago, the Bell monopoly probably made sense, because the nation was stretched to build even ONE nationwide phone network. This nation is vastly richer now, and we now understand big network construction and management. I think we could afford to have multiple phone networks now. In fact, because that would let the machinery of capitalism work, I think we'd SAVE money. We'd certainly get much better service and faster upgrades.

Disclaimer: Telecommunication and Internet companies have a long history of disagreement. I am strongly on the Internet side. From my point of view this looks very like an attempt by monopolists to extract Danegeld from pockets enriched by the services they only wanted to see happen slowly, under their direct control.

I feel a little bad for having delayed so long on explaining this issue. I've been reluctant to post on this issue because it seems too much like work somehow. But it's gotta be done, I think.

Russian Nationalist Violence Putin's Fault?

I think The Economist is too easy on Russia's new dictator, Mr. Putin. They refuse to link growing nationalist violence with Putin, despite his goverment's refusal to take much effort to discourage such cases. Like Hitler before him, he says and does just enough against nationalist violence to keep from losing world opinion.

It's not just Hitler. Border- or openly violent nationalism is a standard ploy for encouraging your citizens to overlook how bad your rule is for them (remember the President of Iran doing this recently by trash-talking Israel). Out of curiosity, can anybody think of a rightie dictator other than Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew that DOESN'T do this? It's rather convenient that it got big about the same time as Putin was hacking his constitution.

Centrist GOP Suburban Agenda

Congressman Mark Kirk, a centrist Republican who represents a Chicago suburb, is fighting on the right side of the density/growth issue.

He says:

“I don’t want a situation ten years from now in which we are driving to work or to school by an endless strip of malls. We should protect green and open space."

Amen brother, I have long been a pro-smart growth, pro-density Republican. It just makes sense. Why grow in areas without proper infrastructure. Why make commute times longer and more stressful? Wouldn't our quality of life be better if work were a short drive, bike ride, or even a walk away?

Encouraging people to return to the cities and live close to work is a good thing, in my book. If you want your single family home in the middle of nowhere, that is your right, but don't move there and then demand the rest of us pay for the service and infrastructure needed such as new roads, while further depleting our natural resources. Don't expect the farmers around you to stop being farmers, the bird hunters to stop being bird hunters, and propose a ban on fireworks during the Fourth of July. Let small towns be small towns.

Kirk is leading a suburban agenda in Congress, “For me this represents moving the Congress back to the political center,” he says. Speak the truth, brother Mark!

The agenda includes:

1. Incentives for preserving rural land and farms from housing and mall developers.

2. A bill to link state and national criminal data files to ensure that pedophiles can’t cross state lines and get hired as teachers or coaches.

3. An effort to protect children from online sexual predators on social networking websites such as MySpace.com.

All good ideas.

Congressman John Boehner says:

“A lot of people in the suburbs, where I live and many of us live, I’ve got to believe, some days they look up and wonder ‘Do they (Republicans) get it?

And you'd be right to believe that... The Republican Party will lose the suburbs as long it continues to embrace a narrow, right-wing agenda that covers extremism with spin words like "property rights." The last time I checked, if you build an apartment complex up the hill from where I live and cause a mudslide on my property, you have invaded my rights.

Friday's time-wasting open thread

Remember Lemmings?

You can excoriate me in the comments if this link causes you to get no work done today... or, of course, you can talk about anything else that tickles your fancy in this, our weekly open thread.

(For the Dutch-impaired, "Klik hier om Lemmings te spelen!" means "Click here to play Lemmings!")

New Tax Bill Spat Shows the Method of the Beast

The House just voted basically along party lines to extend two more years the tax cut on captial gains and divends set to expire at the end of 2008. The tax cut is worth $70 billion over 5 years. The Senate is still working on its version.

In the trenches, are Dems and Repubs arguing about if it's fair. Dems say it's a rich giveaway with 77% of taxpayers seeing less than $100 break, upper middle about $1400 and over one mil will see an average of almost 43,000. Then there';s fuzzy details about tranfering funds from IRA to Roth that will boost revenue in the short term and cost over 35 billion in the long run. The GOP argues we need this to create jobs and they pay the most anyway and.....bla, bla bla, bla.

Throw in the debate of tax break repeals or continuation for oil companies, the suspension of the gas tax, Schumer's proposal to lower tariffs on ethanol imports and ongoing grumble over the 2001 tax cuts.

I thought of some words in a recent post that rang very true:

We have one Incumrepublocrat Party containing two caucuses with minor disagreements over how much of our earnings to confiscate, and where best to spend it to buy votes to get reelected, but they always agree to do whatever it takes to keep the system rigged for incumbents.

Tax reform is one of my biggest concerns and, IMO, one of the keys to cutting corruption and lack of transparency and meaningful debate.

But as the quote suggests, without this tax tool to tinker, twist and toss back and forth, our pols would need to find other reasons to win votes.

A simple tax code that fits on 1 page and is immune to special inerest manipulation and counter-manipulation and so on and so forth is the cure to this endless tit for tat debate.

So what's the answer? flat tax, almost flat tax, consumption tax, simple progressive tax with no deductions or breaks, land value tax (which I find very interesting BTW)? should we apply these taxes equally on all revenue to avoid this exceptions/loophole stuff?

Somewhere therein lies an answer to remove much of the tinkerng ability of special interests and self-perpetuating debate among pols.

Yes that's it. And that's why nothing happens. I'm at a point where I'd be willing to try anything to get this tit for tat, "percent here for percent there" argument off the table.

Then the other half of the equation is eliminating discretionary subsidies and special interests will really have little to fight for.

Sad thing thing is: most people across the country would love to pursue this idea regardless of ideology but it stays off the table so pols can inflate their worth by throwing this complex football back and forth.

Big Brother Open Thread

Okay, so according to USA Today, three major communication companies are working with the NSA to develop a database that contains over ten billion phone numbers, with the goal of tracking every call in America.

I don't even know where to begin on this one, so I am not going to try. Let's just say it doesn't look good.

Have at it.

Thoughts on what's snapping at Bush's heels.

Captain Ed offers a lucid response to this WaPo story about the flight of conservatives from Bush. The only thing that seems missing from both stories are those two litte words: Harriet Miers. Perhaps it's only me, but as I see it, that was where it all started to go badly wrong; not just on the nomination's own merits, but because it came at the pinnacle of (and seemed to represent) a string of administration failures. Whatever else people had stuck with the administration for, one of the key unifiers was the long term project of remaking the judiciary; to be sure, different sections of the GOP had different ideas of what that project was about, but the Miers nomination displeased all sides. And of course, what did the administration do? It savaged its critics, which are the very people who are now telling opinion pollsters how unhappy they are. Am I alone in seeing this connection?

I'm not suggesting that the Miers nomination is what people are angry about (although I still am, and I'm sure others are too). What I'm suggesting is this: the corollary to Reagan's eleventh commandment seems to be that it ceases to apply after the first shot is fired. Until the Miers debacle, there had always been a few dissatisfied voices in the GOP, but dissent had been muted. The Bush administration broke the taboo and opened the floodgates by its treatment of the party over the Miers nomination. Thereafter, criticism has mounted and flowed freely, not because it was never there before, but because the Miers nomination broke not only the sense of trust, not only the sense of common cause (compounded by, as ConfirmThem keeps pointing out, the failure to move judicial nominations into courts in the last year) but more than anything else, the sense of "keep it in the family" no-public-dissent comity.

That is, those who were dissatisfied saw in the Miers nomination that there were a huge number of people who were unhappy about it, the President and his team were recklessly insulting and attacking us, leading to the conclusion that if the President is only interested in us when we agree with what he's doing, and won't listen when we disagree, why should we be any different? Why shouldn't we say "I support this President the way he supports me: when he's doing what I approve of, I support him, and when he does stuff I disagree with, he's on his own." That attitude existed before Miers, but Miers made it widespread, and it is exactly what people are now telling opinion polls.

If so, I wonder if David Frum quite knew what he was starting when he wrote this blog entry, scant hours after the nomination was made.

Don't

Please.

Bush Backs Brother Jeb for White House

Seriously. Give it a rest.

An Honest Question

We all know that there's been a talk about Donald Rumsfeld lately, over the criticism that he's recived, and the criticism of that criticism. I just have one two-part question:

Does criticism of Rumsfeld by retired generals or former analysts, etc. undermine the civilian control of the military, or the war effort? If so, how?

IMO, regardless of one's views of the war or Rumsfeld's performance, criticism of the SecDef is entirely valid. Many have suggested that retired generals criticizing Rumsfeld is somehow seditious or undemocratic. I find the idea that retired members of the military, who've spent their lives defending the Constitution, are somehow unjustified in expressing the First Amendment rights inherently wrong.

Secretary of State Arnold Vinnick

On the West Wing, President-elect Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) is going to nominate his former opponent and the guy I would have voted for, Senator Arnold Vinnick (Alan Alda), to be the Secretary of State. I think this is a great story line, and can't help but think the world would be a better place if the politicians currently running this country did so with grace and wisdom enough to actually *gasp* work closely with those they once tried to defeat.

It used to be that the Vice President was the individual who finished second in the race for President; for instance, Thomas Jefferson beat Aaron Burr. To his credit, Bill Clinton appointed former Senator Bill Cohen of Maine, a Republican, to be the Secretary of Defense, and George W. Bush appointed former Democratic Congressman Norman Mineta to be the Secretary of Transportation, but neither were the former political opponent of their boss. What if Clinton had appointed Bob Dole, undoubtedly qualified to run the Defense or State department, or Bush had appointed John Kerry or John McCain? Like Santos and Vinnick, there is little Clinton, McCain, Dole, Kerry, and Bush disagree on when it comes to foreign policy, with the exception of a few lines in the defense budget. Some of those on the far left or right may not like that fact, but before it became uncool, McCain, Clinton, Dole, and yes, John Kerry, were the President's biggest cheerleaders up to the Iraq invasion.

Maybe we would be talking purple, and not red and blue, if those who won political elections had the integrity to recognize the value of their defeated opponent. Just think about what President Clinton or President Carter could do for foreign relations on behalf of President Bush, or remeber the success of the Bush/Clinton effort to help hurricane victims. What impact would Walter Mondale have had on the Department of Education, Michael Dukakis at Health and Human Services, or Hubert Humphrey at State?

In the meantime, I am wondering why the West Wing is exiting stage left. The show is better than it has been in years.

Kos rips Clinton; champagne corks pop in pro-Clinton households throughout America.

The Bull Moose has a fun and scathing takedown of that chap from Daily Kos' rant about Hillary Clinton. Conclusion: "these netroots types think they are something cutting edge when they are merely McGovernites with modems." As always with the Moose, read the whole thing.

It's good to see that right and sensible left alike think Kos is basically off the reservation, the Pat Robetson of the left. Ryan Sager at Real Clear Politics wonders if "Moulitsas [is] a mole for the Hillary Clinton primary campaign . . . Because, you see, the surest way to guarantee a candidate's election is to put them on the side opposite the Kos Krowd. Let me go out on a limb here: There is nothing Hillary Clinton worries less about in life than whether the folks over at Daily Kos think she's liberal enough." Meanwhile, on the left of the blogosphere, The Democratic Daily Blog's Ron Chusid reaches precisely the same conclusion: "Hillary Clinton’s chances at the 2008 nomination, while still far from certain this far out, jumped tremendously today . . . Considering Kos’s track record, Hillary is probably celebrating tonight." Ditto ReidBlog and The New Donkey.

Last word goes to Sager:

in true Clintonian fashion, [Hillary] could likely not be more delighted at being the target of the far-left's rage. The more they hate her, the more the rest of America will get the impression: maybe she's not that bad. Kos suffers from the typical ideologue's delusion: My party loses when it doesn't do enough of what I want. It's a tempting delusion, found on both the Left and the Right, for sure . . . [but] elections are typically won in the center. If Hillary gets knocked out in the primaries, it will be in favor of someone even closer to the center -- not someone out in Kosland.

Hat Tip: the Hotline blogometer.

Unexpected gifts are the best gifts...

Last week, I was suggesting that the GOP was on its way to losing the House, but that in fact, losing the House might be good for the GOP, and a fortiori, winning it might be a white elephant for Democrats. The crux of my point about it being a white elephant was that the Democratic party would run a serious risk of breaking their back trying to straddle the gap between their base and middle America; that is, the base would demand that the Democrats use the powers peculiar to the House of Representatives (appropriations and impeachment) in ways that would cost them support in the 2008 elections among moderates.

Now we have it, on no less an authority than the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) that faced with an unpalatable choice, they will pander to the base rather than the center. According to slanderous allegations published in those noted far-right propaganda outlets, Slate ("Slate's focus and editorial slant is politically liberal, as seen in choice of columnists, choice of topics, position on topics, and featured cartoon") and the Washington Post ("the majority of paper's political endorsements have historically been awarded to Democratic candidates"):

In a Washington Post interview, Pelosi outlined her plans if the Democrats take control of the House. She started promisingly, vowing quick action to raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures, and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls . . . [perhaps intending] to show what the party stands for and demonstrate that she and other Democratic leaders were actual adults. Then, as if to kill her plans in the same interview in which she was hatching them, Pelosi announced that her new Democratic majority would also launch a series of investigations reaching all the way back into the first months of the Bush administration. Across the country, vulnerable Republican candidates are saying thank you to Pelosi. The GOP congressional majorities may now be secure.

"It's unbelievably tactically stupid," says Slate's John Dickerson - but that, of course, depends on what Pelosi's goal is. If she's sincerely trying to win the House, sure, Dickerson may be right. But on the other hand, perhaps Rep. Pelosi simply agrees with me and David Brooks about the costs of victory in 2006, and is deliberately putting a poison pill in the Democrats' election platform? Neither possibility speaks too well of her; pick your poison.

Four years ago, Andrew Busch noted that "many Republican politicians and conservative commentators were ecstatic about the recent election of Nancy Pelosi to the position of House Minority Leader . . . and [given] her voting record . . . it is easy to understand why [they] think they may benefit from Pelosi’s leadership of House Democrats." It's payday.

Google Restoration

Google has finally re-indexed this blog, and you can now search for entries in our archives with the box at the left and get the full entries.

It's been about six weeks since Google deleted us, apparently due to http errors of some sort. I understand that the Googlebot does have a six week cycle. I did attempt to contact humans at Google, but was unsuccessful. Even when I called their headquarters, I was not able to find my way out of the automated system.

We're back, but our page rank is zero (it was 6/10 before the deletion). That means that we still won't get much traffic from Google for a while.

This would be a good time to do a little outreach. When you write a good post, send an email to a blogger who might be interested in it, and ask for a link. Incoming links are what we need to get our Google page rank back up.

False Shortage Memos from Chevron? Tsk. Tsk. Free Markets my %#&@.

I'd never seen this before. It makes a person take pause about arguments that blame high oil prices on self-defeating government policies to restrict refinery capacity and hamper production through environmental regulation and reconsider if maybe the problem is a little more subtle (or blatant) than that.

consider:

An internal Chevron memo states; "A senior energy analyst at the recent API convention warned that if the US petroleum industry doesn't reduce its refining capacity it will never see any substantial increase in refinery margins." It then discussed how major refiners were closing down their refineries. Read the Chevron memo at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/fs/5103.pdf

Supply and demand? huh?

How about free markets...

An internal 1996 memorandum from Mobil demonstrates the oil company's successful strategies to keep smaller refiner Powerine from reopening its California refinery. The document makes it clear that much of the hardships created by California's regulations governing refineries came at the urging of the major oil companies and not the environmental organizations blamed by the industry. The other alternative plan discussed in the event Powerine did open the refinery was "....buying all their avails and marketing it ourselves" to insure the lower price fuel didn't get into the market. Read the Mobil memo at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/fs/5105.pdf

So, is it really all the fault of increased demand and tighter supply exacerbated by environmental groups and ineffcient regulation? Is it really that simple?

These memos, among others, provide a darker side to the argument and definitely takes some steam out of the argument in defence of the status quo.

In the words of Clay Risen at the New Republic:

In light of high gas prices:

Critics cite the cost of compliance to explain the lack of any new refinery construction in more than 20 years, even as demand for gas has increased by more than 25 percent.

It's certainly true that the lack of refinery capacity has contributed greatly to the current domestic price jump--more so, according to experts, than other oft-noted factors, like OPEC shenanigans or demand from China

....But contrary to industry complaints, it's not true that a thousand refineries would bloom if the feds were to roll back costly environmental regulations. In fact, recent government studies and leaked industry memos show that a dearth in refinery capacity is actually the result of a long-term strategy by refineries to short the market, with clean-air rules providing a convenient political cover....

These days, oil companies may shed tears over low refining capacity, but in the early 1990s the situation was exactly reversed--excess capacity had executives worried that refineries would never turn a significant profit.

Something to think about when the usual (and inadequate) talking points from both sides arise....

Back From New York

A dozen centrists from around the country met in New York on Saturday for the National Centrist Meeting 2006. Those present were:

Jeremy Dibbell - Boston, Charging RINO
Alan Carl - San Antonio, Maverick Views
Keith Johnson, Jacksonville
Rick Heller, Boston, Centerfield
Gabrielle Lichterman, New York
Gary Butts, Irvine, CA Moderate Voters
Michael Reynolds, Chapel Hill, NC Mighty Middle
Kent Fernandez Los Angeles
John Avlon, New York, New York Sun
Bill Swann Columbus, Ohio, Centrist Coalition
Wes Sample Columbus, Ohio Centrist Coalition
Annie Gottlieb, New York, Ambivablog

We had the pleasure of being joined via speakerphone for 20 minutes by Hamilton Jordan, White House chief of staff to President Jimmy Carter and advisor to Ross Perot's 1992 campaign.

Annie Gottlieb has already written up the event, so check it out on Ambivablog. I recorded the event, and will be working on an MP3 of it. I will post it here when it's ready, but I don't expect it will be available until next week at the earliest. As time permits, I'll also post my own writeup of the event. One thing struck us. We really are an outside the Beltway group. We had people from as far away as California, Florida and Texas, but no one from Washington, DC.

McMansions Have Their Uses

Here in Austin, I've been amused to see a number of pro-high-density people come out in favor of restricting "McMansions," big houses in small-house neighborhoods, unfortunately including the Council. People are grumbling about old gardens in places they moved from decades ago being in shade.

Of course, there's a stereotype of just one or two people living in these mansions and not caring the least bit about their neighbors, and the property staying that way over the generations. We never see the reality examined, just the grumbling old women who can't grow tomatoes anymore. Never mind that many of the extensions are built to house family members, and thus raise density, and, most important, are a major source of cheap apartments when carved up after the original upgrader sells it (yes, I've seen this in multiple university towns, and I think it probably is already a source of housing in East Austin).

So high density is OK so long as it's an exquisitely decorated, ecologically sensitive tower that doesn't put anyplace into shade. And necessarily costs a quarter million a unit. No, McMansions is part of the realistic way cities expand - incrementally. Austin is moving from mixed low-medium density to uniformly medium density.

In my opinion, losing this rule would do more to help the poor than all the money the city will spend on low-cost housing during the time the rule is in effect.

This is part of a bad trend here in Austin to forget the blue collar and poor when trying to make the city pleasanter for the rich and those already in pleasant neighborhoods. We've also been "slowing down" a number of downtown roads and cutting down on the parking spaces, which makes it hard for the workers who can't afford to live close to come either to work or to join the well-to-do in enjoying downtown.

But what a minute, who's going to pick up the tab?

This was Cover the Uninsured Week. At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation there's a nice summary of the problem, with a link to a fuller report. Two key points:

1) Fewer employers are offering health care coverage.

as health care costs rise, large and small companies are finding it hard to offer affordable health insurance. With premium rising each year for companies and their employees, millions of workers are no longer accepting the health insurance offered through their jobs. If trends continue, this could dramatically increase the number of working but uninsured people in this nation. More and more, having a job, even a full-time job, does not guarantee coverage.

2) Fewer folks can pay the premiums.

more than half of all adults who do not have health insurance coverage say the high cost of coverage is the reason they are uninsured.

Not earth-shattering news but something we need to be reminded of every so often.

Join the Festivus Clean Plate Club

Here's a follow up to a post I made recently about state license plates and political messages. In Massachusetts, a pro-lifer is working on qualifying to bring "choose life" license plates to MA.

Merry Nordeen is gathering support for a ''Choose Life" license plate, part of a nationwide effort by abortion opponents to raise money for groups that support adoption. In some of the 12 other states with Choose Life license plates, critics who contend that the plates are political statements have filed lawsuits, and one case from Tennessee may end up going to the US Supreme Court.

...

Last weekend, Nordeen took her campaign to the Internet, asking supporters by e-mail to back her effort to collect 3,000 registrations by summer. If she gathers $40 registration checks from 3,000 people who agree to buy the license plates, the state will issue them, said Amie O'Hearn, a spokeswoman for the Registry.

...

Massachusetts has 12 special license plates that support causes from environmental protection to curing cancer to the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None supports political or religious groups.

If the Choose Life plates are approved, $12 of the $40 fee would go to the state. The other $28 would go to the groups supported by the Massachusetts Choose Life chapter, headed by Nordeen and her husband, Kenneth, who are the parents of six children. Nordeen said the group would award the money to antiabortion organizations that submitted grant applications, from pregnancy counseling groups to agencies that place children for adoption.

Read the whole thing. It touches on more ideas and provides good details. That's why you should read the whole thing.

IMO it's a bad idea to place overtly political messages on state license plates. If you want your free speech, make an effing bumper sticker, don't drag the state government into a food fight. The currently allowable MA plates are IMO innocuous. Although if you really wanted to, you could construe those as political, too. If pushed for absolute consistency, I'd say "cancel all of them." But if you really want to argue that "Go Red Sox" or "We like Nature" are political messages with a straight face, I think you need to get out more.

It's especially hypocritical that some states will allow some messages and not others, and ultimately, I bet that's some sort of free speech abridgement. States, either don't do any political speech messages, or don't gate keep.

If this effort works and a choose life plate is issued, I may be driven to the only recourse that makes sense...I'll start my own drive for a plate that makes a mockery of the whole shebang. I wonder, can I collect 3,000 registrations with $40 registration checks from 3,000 people who agree to buy license plates that say "choose festivus" or "fart at wingnuts" or maybe "clean plate club" with a logo of a red circle and a line crossing out a wingnut?

Folks, join the Festivus Clean Plate Club. We don't want zealots trafficking their bile on our state license plates. And we want more official holidays. More parties, fewer party-poopers!"

Conservatives Leaving the GOP?

Seattle Times headline:

Conservatives Abandoning Party, Raising GOP Fears About Election Day

Read it here.

So let me get this straight. The conservatives have gotten everything they want from the GOP. Bush over McCain in 2000, his re-election in 2004, the President's opposition to gay marriage and abortion, right wing appointments to the Supreme Court, two of their own leading both houses of Congress, a whack job neocon in charge of Defense, tax cuts, the unilateral invasion of Iraq, no ports run by Dubai, regressive environmental policies, and now, when the stove gets too hot, they run like cowards.

I have one thought:

Na, na, na, na;
na, na, na, na;
hey, hey, hey, goodbye!

It would be best for the GOP if the Conservatives continued their retreat from the mess they made of the party, handing the Democrats control of Congress, and the moderates who have always been loyal stick around and rebuild by nominating John McCain or Rudolph Giuliani in 2008. I could live with Speaker Pelosi under that scenario.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

Open Thread Friday!

Try to be off topic. Just try it.

Ideology is good...

I have often made the point that ideology is a necessary driver of political forces. Unrestraine