tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142311452024-03-14T03:08:47.955-07:00Deep ThoughtBIG, BOLD, BRIGHT, BRASH IDEAS!!Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.comBlogger1172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-43467638668097722502019-09-24T18:39:00.002-07:002019-09-24T19:00:02.192-07:00Why anyone would be better next year than Donald TrumpIn response to a Facebook comment (if you ever read this blog and wonder where I've gone, it's mostly to social media, plus life has gotten a lot more complicated over the past few years) on WHY I feel that any Democrat would be better than four more years of Trump, I feel like that is a multifaceted question that requires a more extensive answer than a 'facebook note' so I'm dusting off the blog again.<br />
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First, the obvious part of the answer. I wouldn't be a Democrat if my core beliefs didn't include I didn't believe in helping those least able to sustain themselves in society, in feeding the poor, providing medical care for the sick, housing the homeless (yes, we heard a lot about homelessness last week, but if the Democratic response to homelessness has been inadequate, the Republican response has been far worse, essentially just, "go away and be homeless someplace else.") providing an education to all, and yes, taxing those of us who have been fortunate enough to earn a decent living to help pay for those things (a secret about progressive taxation: If I make more than you, then no matter how progressive the tax laws are, I will STILL make more than you after taxes are paid, just maybe not as many times as much as I do pre-tax.) I care about protecting the environment and about the right of a woman (or anyone) to control her own body (imagine the government telling you that you must let someone else use your kidney in order to save their life; why is a uterus any less a part of a person than a kidney?) There are places where I disagree with some Democrats such as the right to own a gun if you are not a criminal, terrorist or a threat to anyone else, BUT I can say that openly whereas a friend of mine who is a former Republican was roundly drummed out of the GOP some years back for speaking out against the Iraq War when it began. So clearly that is the first reason I'm a Democrat is that my core values align with the liberal end of the political spectrum.<br />
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BUT-- this is also a question about Donald Trump in particular. There are Republicans I might vote for in the right circumstances (such as Colin Powell) but I especially believe re-electing Donald Trump would be a truly awful thing.<br />
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There are many areas where we could begin, but let's start with experience. It is understandable that people would have voted for a man with zero governmental experience. His well-documented business failures aside, Trump had a reputation for leading a company, and his lack of experience in government was actually a selling point. Never mind that nobody in their right mind would want to go to a mechanic, a dentist or an attorney whose main selling point was that they had never worked in that field before and had not a day's worth of experience in the business. Nor would a large company hire a CEO who bragged that he had never worked in the field before.<br />
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The reason lack of experience got people to vote for Trump was the perception that government is CORRUPT and that he would 'drain the swamp.' Now, it is true that there are certainly corrupt people in government. My own former Congressman, Rick Renzi, went to prison after the FBI raided his business and he was convicted of bribery, money laundering and extortion. And we've seen plenty of corrupt members of Congress and other government offices be convicted and go to prison, members of both parties. Dan Rostenkowski, Duke Cunningham, William Jefferson and Bob Ney, to name just a few. But turn that around for a moment. The fact that they have been convicted and gone to prison is NOT proof that the system is corrupt. It is proof that the system WORKS. In many countries a corrupt politician would retire comfortably and not go to prison as long as they stayed on the right side of the rulers of the country. But in the U.S., they can be caught and tried and convicted and jailed, Remember that as the longtime Chair of the House Ways and Means committee, Rostenkowski was one of the most powerful-- and most feared-- men in Washington. But that didn't protect him from being indicted for turning the House Post Office into a personal taxpayer-financed cash cow (for which he later plead guilty and went to prison.) So yes, there are plenty of unethical people in Washington (which Trump fits right in with, very well.) But while he can't be indicted as a sitting President, others can, and others have, and that is evidence that whatever the flaws in the system, it does work to police itself.<br />
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And as far as lack of experience in government, anyone who has read my FB posts knows that one Democrat I'm very leery of is Andrew Yang-- for exactly the same reason. BUT-- even there, at least Yang is smart enough to listen to people who disagree with him (just like Eisenhower did, though as the Supreme Allied Commander in WWII Ike did have to deal with the President (his boss) and members of Congress on a regular basis and the military is in fact part of the government, so he still had some experience.) Trump in contrast surrounds himself with the proverbial 'Yes Men' who will agree with whatever he says and not try to give him contrary advice (or God forbid, disagree publicly with him.) If they do, they're out and he will find someone who will bend over and flatter his ego by telling him he's RIGHT about whatever it is and then go on TV and lie if that's what it takes to prop him up (queue the recent tempest about the tempest when the National Weather Service publicly chastized the local Alabama forecasters for daring to say Trump was wrong about whether the state was at risk from Hurricane Dorian.) And one other difference; as much as I feel Yang would be the most risky Democrat, at least he tries to stay positive, while Trump has done nothing but widen the already deep divisions in American society and rub the sores of resentment raw.<br />
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And this brings us to the second reason I feel Trump is such a disaster, the way he is changing America and the direction he is taking us in. Remember Reagan also ran against 'the government' and 'the system,' but he did it with positivity and a smile. Trump in contrast has promoted a very mean-spirited approach. He may for example criticize San Francisco for homelessness (never mind that the city is surrounded on three sides by water and on the other by other communities as well as a mountain range; of course housing is very expensive there because they are out of land) or Baltimore for having mice, but notice he never offers to help with the problems or suggests any ideas on how to solve them. All he does is criticize. His border policy is straight from hell (yes, when families showed up at the border during the Obama administration sometimes they were separated for a day or so while we vetted the family, but after that they were reunited and free to continue on. Trump, in contrast, has separated families for weeks, months or even in some cases deported the parents while effectively turning the children into orphans, under our care.) His proposed wall is not only a colossal waste of money (a steel slat prototype was <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019/01/10/trump-border-wall-steel-slat-prototype-sawed-through-dhs-test/2534978002/" target="_blank">sawed through with a ten dollar hacksaw</a> ) but has turned us into a laughingstock in the rest of the world (remember when 'build a wall around the country' was an actual joke?) President Trump's targeted rhetoric, not towards individuals but against entire groups like Muslims and immigrants (especially those from places he calls 'sh*thole countries') has spread among his followers to where according to the SPLC, hate crimes against those communities have increased rapidly under his Presidency. His rhetoric warning of an 'invasion' of Central American migrants is not only divisive but brings out the worst of stereotypes. Certainly there ARE people among them who due to felony convictions, ties to gangs or cartels or for other reasons we don't want in our country, but we have the ability to vet people in a matter of minutes or at most hours (we use it at airports all the time) so between that, turning away Syrian refugees and stepped up deportations of people who may not even have any criminal record the message is clear, "GET OUT AND STAY OUT!" A far cry from when my maternal family came through Ellis Island and had to pass nothing other than a lice check. Heck, Bob Cucinelli, Trump's point man on immigration recently even rewrote Emma Lazarus' iconic poem, "the New Colossus" to make it clear that we only welcomed in immigrants of means who would never be a 'public charge' (as even successful immigrants have often been when they arrive with nothing but the shirt on their back and a will to work.)<br />
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Meanwhile, Trump has backed the lawsuit filed by some GOP Attorneys General seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act (something the administration tried by reconciliation when they had control of all of Congress and could pass one bill per year without having to break a filibuster.) They failed then, but now they may succeed. And the lawsuit does NOT carve out exemptions for 'pre-existing conditions' in the ACA, it seeks to overturn every word of the act. Now, disclaimer here: I was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. My plan has been to retire when I can do so next year, then buy insurance from the Obamacare exchange and focus on getting well or at least in staying healthy enough to be somewhat productive. But if they are successful I would be unable to get insurance at ANY price (since cancer is the prototype of a 'pre-existing condition.') I am fortunate in that I could remain employed and keep working until I died, but would still have insurance. But many other people would lose theirs. Now, I favored universal health insurance for YEARS before I actually needed it so my present opposition to the GOP has nothing to do with my cancer diagnosis in 2016, but... it is true if they succeed I would probably die if I retired from work. And it's hard to vote for somebody who personally wants you dead.<br />
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Beyond that, stop for a moment and contemplate this: Why did we outdo the Soviets in gaining international influence during the Cold War? Well, certainly we have warts from that time (ask any Iranian and they will give you the whole history, not just the 'we are victims' version that we get in the U.S.) But OVERALL, we held the moral high ground. Our society was freer, more open and more tolerant than the Soviets' Nobody had to build a wall to keep us in. And we were trusted to keep our word.<br />
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With Trump, those things are no longer the case. Substitute 'China' for 'the Soviet Union.' Now it is true that China is a dictatorship with a dismal, horrible record on human rights. But-- when we criticize our Democratic allies while cozying up to people like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or Philippine dictator Rodrigo Duterte, we become indistinguishable on the human rights front. Sure, we may criticize the governments of China, Venezuela or Iran for their human rights abuses but as long as we embrace dictators we like, those condemnations are seen for what they are: purely situational. Further by withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, the Iran nuclear deal (where the Iranian response of pushing the envelope on their end was entirely predictable and avoidable,) or from various international trade deals, the U.S. is no longer seen as absolutely trustworthy. This matters, as countries like Australia (an erstwhile American ally) sign massive trade deals with China and that nation rushes to fill the vacuum we leave behind. Do we really WANT a world where other nations no longer can count on us to keep our word? It's not like if we withdraw from an agreement that it doesn't create a vacuum, and either Russia or China will rush to fill it. In this regard, Trump is playing a very dangerous game. It takes years or even decades to build trust but it can be destroyed in one rash moment. And Donald Trump is all about rash moments.<br />
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And speaking of the change in America, it is not just mean-spiritedness at home. It is the same policy towards the oppressed elsewhere too. Today I was listening to a story on the radio about how even Iraqis and Afghans who helped U.S. forces are having their visas delayed (and some of them have been murdered for working with us as they waited through the delays we are now imposing.) We may have trouble in the future finding anyone abroad who will work with us as well.<br />
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<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-33419625033557485632017-12-31T20:47:00.000-08:002018-01-01T06:12:40.017-08:00New Year's predictions 2018<br />
January: Doug Jones will be sworn in as the new Senator from Alabama. He will have to dodge Roy Moore, who will run in and try to snatch the Bible off the table and administer the oath of office to himself.<br />
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February: Justin Timberlake will perform at Super Bowl halftime, fourteen years after the infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' in which he ripped Janet Jackson's outfit and exposed her breast. This time he will surprise people and invite Jackson back on stage, but this time, in this year of #TakeaKnee and #MeToo , when Timberlake tries the same thing again he will 'take a knee' from Janet to the nether regions.<br />
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March: The start of baseball season will include a pitch clock. A major scandal will erupt when the Red Sox get caught speeding up the clock when the Yankees are pitching. Donald Trump will send a tweet blaming Hillary Clinton and reminding people Massachusetts is a blue state, even if they do call their team the Red Sox.<br />
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April: The Trump administration announces that entry fees to National Parks will rise again, to well over a hundred dollars for top National Parks. When it is pointed out that this might make it too expensive for a family to visit Yosemite, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders Huckabee says, "Well, then, they can go to Six Flags and see Yosemite Sam instead !"<br />
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May: A few months after passing a tax bill that raises the deficit, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio will cite the skyrocketing deficit as a reason to cut entitlements (as they already have said they will.) Social Security payments will be cut only slightly for present retirees. Future retirees will be promised a t-shirt saying, "I paid thousands into Social Security but all I got was this lousy t-shirt." When somebody points out that immigrants are overwhelmingly young people who could help stabilize Social Security and Medicare, conservatives will drown it out with chants of "build the wall, build the wall."<br />
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June: Six months after moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, citing reasons of 'convenience,' the Trump administration will announce they are moving our consulate with the Palestinian Authority to an abandoned oil platform off the coast of Louisiana, also citing 'convenience.'<br />
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July: The GOP effort to privatize Social Security by ramming it all through in a matter of days that began in May will fail in the Senate. Donald Trump will respond with a series of angry tweets attacking Hillary Clinton.<br />
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August: The record breaking drought continues around the southwest. In southern California and Arizona, mold is added to the 'endangered species' list.<br />
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September: The Trump administration will announce a solution to the Confederate Monument controversy. They will all be relocated to Puerto Rico to serve as windbreaks for families who are still living out in the open with no heat or shelter a year after Hurricane Maria. He will praise himself for helping bring 'a great success' to Puerto Rico.<br />
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October: The Mueller investigation issues a final report several weeks before the election, concluding that there is evidence that Russia was in close collusion with members of the Trump campaign to ensure Trump's election. Rather than indicating any concern about a foreign power being involved in our election, Republicans derisively criticize former FBI director Mueller and start wearing Putin masks at Halloween parties.<br />
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November: Democrats decisively win control of the House, many Governorships and despite the terrible Senate map, are able to pick up a 50-50 tie for control of the Senate. Trump sends out a tweet calling the election results 'fake news.'<br />
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December: On Christmas morning, the nation wakes up to find that the White House is buried under hundreds of tons of coal, with a reindeer poop on top of it. Donald Trump will blame Hillary Clinton.<br />
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<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-42733606125807465342017-12-18T20:07:00.001-08:002017-12-18T20:10:29.034-08:00Trump's contradictory speech about international relationsToday Donald Trump spoke about how the U.S. would continue to engage in international leadership, while criticizing 'revisionist' powers Russia and China.<br />
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Two questions this brings up. First, what is a 'revisionist' power? If Russia lost the Cold War, does that mean they will always be no threat to the U.S.? No more than Germany stopped being a threat to France after it lost World War I. History continues forward and it is foolish to assume that because of an event in the past (be it a military victory or whatever) that the future is thereby settled. At best the immediate future is settled, but never history going forward. By claiming that Russia is a 'revisionist' power (presumably meaning they want to reverse the outcome of the Cold War) it seems that Trump lacks a serious understanding of who they are. OF COURSE Russia would like to reverse the Cold War. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union 'the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century' has simply taken off the uniform and replaced it with a suit. Out with the Hammers and Sickles and in with Tsarist trappings. Out with one candidate elections and replace them with multicandidate elections in which the media are completely controlled by Putin and his allies, allowing only one candidate to be heard.<br />
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Like the Chinese, the Russians have undertaken limited economic reform, 'privatizing' state enterprises and instead allowing them to fall under the leadership of corrupt oligarchs and of Putin himself. His raw territorial ambition and his quest to return to the world stage as great power have been shown by his invasions of parts of Georgia and the Ukraine (including all of Crimea) and more recently by his active intervention to tilt the Syrian civil war in favor of old Moscow ally Bashir al-Assad.<br />
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But the Chinese have even gone beyond this. Doing much of the same in the way of 'reforms' as Russia (though China is still officially a communist country) and bullying its neighbors to the southeast and east, China has also become a military power. But beyond that, the Chinese situation brings up the second question.<br />
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That question is this: With the United States withdrawing from everything from the Paris climate accords to trade deals around the world, China has eagerly jumped in to replace the U.S. as a leader. Showing leadership means to engage. Now, it is certainly true that there have been some bad trade deals and I supported Trump's withdrawl from the proposed Trans-Pacific partnership; Not, mind you, because it was a bad deal. I don't know whether it was or it was not. The reason I don't know is because the whole deal was negotiated in secret and even people who saw drafts of the deal were sworn to secrecy to where they could say nothing about what was in it. The secrecy behind the TPP is what doomed it in the end, as many people felt (as I did) that the practice of negotiating that kind of a deal behind an opaque wall and saying nothing at all about it was itself unacceptable, so we chose not to support it. <br />
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However, it is also true that where there is a vacuum, somebody will fill it. TPP aside, the Trump administration has withdrawn the U.S. from MANY international treaties and deals, leaving the game wide open for China to step into the leadership role and they have already been working out trade deals and inserting themselves anywhere the U.S. has stepped back from. Heavy Chinese investment in Australia (formerly a reliable U.S. trading partner but less so anymore) and even in Afghanistan (where American soldiers have died while Chinese companies have stepped in behind them and opened mines that develop the local economy and feed raw materials back to China) are cases where the failure of the U.S. to engage economically has created an opportunity for China.<br />
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Before making these grand (and contradictory) pronouncements about the U.S. engaging with the rest of the world AND opposing 'revisionist powers' (whatever that is supposed to mean) perhaps the President should consider what it takes to do both of those things-- and balance them against each other as so far he has not done.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-66045451480781253082017-06-18T10:21:00.000-07:002017-06-18T10:24:00.560-07:00Afghanistan-- what the heck are we still doing there?If current reports are accurate, the Trump administration (remember Trump ran on a neo-isolationist policy in which while he promised to get rid of ISIS, otherwise pledged to reduce our involvement in foreign wars) <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/trump-massive-afghanistan-mistake-article-1.3253687" target="_blank">is about to get us in deeper in Afghanistan.</a> The Afghan war, which began in October 2001, a month after September 11 and less than a year into the Bush administration, lasted through the rest of that administration, then through the entire Obama administration and now is into its third administration (arguably its fourth; recall that on August 18, 1998, eleven days after the African embassy bombings the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles in an attempt to get bin Laden in a meeting he was known to be attending that day; unfortunately the meeting ended early, before the missiles arrived and we now know that among the topics discussed during the meeting was the plot that eventually became 9/11. )<br />
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Given that the 9/11 terror attacks were hatched in Afghanistan (not to mention the African embassy bombings and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen) and the Taliban government was at the time giving refuge to bin Laden, it made sense to go in originally because if we hadn't then bin Laden and al-Qaeda would have continued unimpeded in their quest to kill Americans. However, after an offensive in January and February of 2002 drove bin Laden from his hideout in Tora Bora and drove the Taliban into a small sliver of Afghanistan, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made a fateful decision. The Taliban was <b>almost</b> gone, but instead of finishing the job and taking the final sliver of the country they held onto, the Bush administration put Afghanistan on the back burner and then used 9/11 as a rallying cry to invade Iraq, a country a thousand miles away that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. An invasion of Iraq had been on Bush's agenda since taking office after his father had made the decision not to finish off Saddam Hussein in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, and since then Saddam had continued to cause problems for the U.S. and other countries in the region. </div>
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By putting the situation in Afghanistan on the back burner, the Taliban were allowed to regroup and grow back, and by then were learning how to fight more effectively against the few Americans remaining; roadside bombs, suicide bombings and ambushes, especially in populated areas (the same tactics used later on by Iraqi insurgents after Bush claimed 'mission accomplished' a few weeks into the Iraq war.) By this time bin Laden had fled to Pakistan, so we were in effect fighting on one side of a civil war (and propping up a corrupt government then led by Hamid Karzai, which was known to be dealing, just as the Taliban were, in opium poppies that were smuggled out and into the world drug market.)</div>
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President Obama, like President Trump, ran on a platform that included getting American troops out of harms way. Only it didn't happen, and in fact eight months into the Obama administration (and on the eighth anniversary of September 11) <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2009/09/its-sept-11-and-in-good-conscience-i.html" target="_blank">I wrote a blog post critical of the Obama administration's Afghan policy.</a> It seemed then that the Obama Afghan policy was really little different than the Bush policy. Obama's "Afghan surge" only got us in deeper and didn't ever seem to resolve anything. Yes, Americans and our allies might win battles and take territory, but just like any guerrilla war, once they left the territory it reverted back to the control of whoever had the support of the local populace (think about it-- HOW MANY times since the Afghan war began in 2001 have you heard about Americans backing allied Afghan government forces driving the Taliban out of strongholds in Helmand province? As soon as we leave, the place reverts back to Taliban control and we don't have the manpower to physically occupy all of it.) With bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda fragmented, clearly there is no threat from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan anymore. Of course now you keep hearing about 'ISIS in Afghanistan.' It's not like a bunch of ISIS fighters somehow traveled from Syria to Afghanistan. It's the same locals we have been fighting who are now calling themselves an affiliate of ISIS. And at some point we have to ask ourselves why we are still there. Does anybody even know what exactly a 'victory' in Afghanistan would be? No administration-- not the Bush administration, not the Obama administration and apparently not the Trump administration, has said what exactly the objective is in Afghanistan. If we are going to stay there then don't we owe it to our troops to state exactly what our purpose is and what we are trying to achieve? Vacuous statements like 'a stable Afghanistan' are useless as an objective. How do you measure 'stable' in a country that has been at war now for over forty years? And how do we plan to create it? If we can't answer these questions then we should GET OUT. </div>
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-75017444795137837232017-01-20T20:11:00.003-08:002017-06-18T09:40:43.133-07:00January 20, 2009-January 20, 2017. The Record of the Obama Economy.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Eight years ago I wrote a post entitled,<a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-20-2001-january-20-2009-record.html" target="_blank"> January 20, 2001- January 20, 2009: The Record of the Bush Economy</a><br />
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As Donald Trump begins his term in office, it is fair to hold President Obama to the same standard. The metrics that were available on that date were the stock market close, the euro exchange rate (in that if it costs more dollars to buy a euro that is both a sign of a lack of faith in the U.S. economy and an indication that it will be more expensive for Americans to either travel or buy goods that are produced outside the country,) net job creation, price of crude oil and national debt. Later the January unemployment rate was also added as a metric.<br />
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Here are how the numbers stood after January 20, 2009.<br />
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Dow Close: 7,949.09 (a loss of 2638.51, or - 25%.)<br />
Euro exchange rate: $1.32 to buy 1 euro (an increase of $.38)<br />
Price of of one barrel of West Texas crude: $34.20 (an increase of $8.22/barrel.)<br />
National Debt: $11.8 trillion (an increase of $6.0 trillion.)*<br />
Net Job creation: + 3.8 mllion jobs (which decreased to + 3.0 million jobs when the January jobs report was added in)<br />
January 2009 unemployment rate: 7.8% (up from 4.2% on January 20, 2001.)<br />
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*-- <b>NOTE regarding the national debt</b> : Generally, the deficit (and corresponding increase in the national debt) for each fiscal year is assigned to the previous President. For example, had 2009 been an ordinary year, then FY 2009 budget (which covers from midyear 2008 to midyear 2009) was passed in early 2008 (though in fact it was a series of continuing resolutions that effectively continued spending levels set in past years) and signed by President Bush. HOWEVER, as we know, FY 2009 was <i>anything but</i> an ordinary fiscal year. The actual budget was dwarfed by two massive spending packages: TARP ($700 billion, which was passed and signed by President Bush but was spent equally by Presidents Bush and Obama) and the Stimulus ($890 billion, which was signed and spent exclusively during the Obama administration.) What this means is that you will see estimates of the share of the national debt run up under each President all over the board, especially as given by people who have an agenda and are being intellectually dishonest. To ensure consistency, in 2009 and again with this post, I am using a National Debt clock (which to a degree I don't like because it mindlessly keeps track of spending regardless of the source, but at least it is a consistent way of measuring using the same metric.) I am not sure which National Debt clock I used in 2009 but they are pretty much all the same. The one that is being used as a source for this post is <a href="http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/unitedstates" target="_blank">http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/unitedstates</a> .<br />
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The Obama record:<br />
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Let's start with the Dow. The Dow closed today at <b>19,827.25</b> . This is up 11,878.16 points, or an astounding + 149 %. In other words, if you'd put your money in the Dow (say by purchasing an index fund) on the day President Obama was inaugurated, by today it would have increased to be worth more than two and a half times what it was then. In fact if you had invested when it hit its bottom on March 9, 2009 (at 6547.05) then you would be up 203 % (in other words you'd have tripled your money.)<br />
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The Euro exchange rate today is that <b>$1.07</b> will buy you one euro. While this is still worse than it was when Clinton left office in 2001, it is much better than the $1.32 it was eight years ago. To be sure, part of that is due to the collapse of the European economy, in which the dollar was seen as a safer currency. BUT that is exactly the point-- the U.S. has been navigating in exactly the same world economic straits as anyone else. Yet the Obama administration has steered our economy into a path of increasing prosperity that has eluded other countries. Not only Europe, but also Brazil, China, Japan and other nations have all experienced economic pain. Considering how difficult a course this has been, it is clear that under President Obama's leadership, the U.S. has come through the Great Recession in significantly better shape than most other nations.<br />
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The price today for March delivery of one barrel of West Texas crude is <b>$53.24</b>. Probably no single commodity is more important in terms of affordability for the economy than the price of crude oil (which is used to produce gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, fertilizer and plastics, among other products.) Among its many uses, gasoline is the single biggest product and the one that most people recognize as either being a strain on their budget or not. <br />
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The growth in the price of crude oil overall was slightly faster than the net growth from start to finish of the Bush administration. However, as was noted in the post eight years ago, the price of oil underwent a large degree of volatility during the Bush administration, rising to over $150.00/barrel in June 2008. It was at times volatile as well during the Obama administration but never reached the degree of boom and bust that the price went through under Bush. It is true that defenders of oil production will say (and correctly) that the expansion of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. 'fracking,') a procedure opposed by many on the left, has increased the supply of crude oil and helped keep the price down. They will also point out that the President banned fracking on federal lands. And on both of these points they are absolutely right. However, the other side of the coin is that the President did not ban fracking elsewhere (though he could have, as some state governments have done) and further it is true that while fracking increased the supply, there are two sides to a supply/demand equation and on the other side, the President <i>decreased demand.</i> He did this by sharply increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards on automobiles (such that the new vehicles on the road today have much better fuel mileage than they did a few years ago; as an example, I have both a 2010 and a 2016 Nissan Versa, and for the same make and model of vehicle, my gas mileage is over 10 mpg higher in the newer car than in the older one.) Also, when he included 'cash-for-clunkers' in the Stimulus package, President Obama specifically made sure that the old inefficient vehicles that were being traded in had their engines destroyed so that they could not be resold on the aftermarket. This had the net effect of taking fuel wasting vehicles off the road and replacing them with vehicles that used less fuel. SO while it is certainly true that there were reasons beyond anything the President did that helped keep crude oil prices reasonable, it is ALSO true that he did do some things that also helped keep them low.<br />
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The national debt is today <b>$19,968,000,000,000</b> (19.968 trillion dollars.) <b>See the note earlier in this post about sourcing and consistency regarding obtaining a fixed figure for the national debt</b>. It is certainly true that this rounds to $20.0 trillion, and further it is also true that the increase of $8.2 trillion during the Obama administration is more than not only the dollar increase during the Bush administration but in fact than the dollar increase during ANY previous administration. Again though, this does not in a snapshot give us the whole story. Yes, during his first year in office President Obama did spend a lot of money between TARP II, the Stimulus and other measures designed to help the economy. Regardless of what others might say in hindsight, this was absolutely necessary spending; the risk of a complete economic collapse was very real and in fact, <a href="http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/panelists-stimulus-was-too-small-more-action-needed-to-jumpstart-economy" target="_blank">many economists argued that the Stimulus was too small</a>. Luckily the nation did not suffer a complete collapse and the fire was put out. In fact, since the disaster in 2008 (which the cost of TARP and the Stimulus hit in fiscal 2009) <a href="http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.html" target="_blank">the deficit has gone down</a> to the point where it is now less than half of what it was then. Obviously a half trillion dollar deficit is still a whole lot of money but it's still important to know that the direction of the Obama deficit has been to generally get less over time. The fact that it is not even lower is a reflection of the fact that there are still tax cuts in place that reduce revenue even faster than one could reduce spending. For example, President Obama extended the original Bush tax cuts until 2012; then during the 'fiscal cliff' deal only the highest rate was raised; most of the Bush tax cuts remained in place.<br />
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Beyond this, it is also worth noting that there is one commercial that you <i>didn't </i>hear during this campaign. That is the claim that President Obama had 'added more to the national debt than <i>every other President combined.</i>' This claim, which has been standard fare during any campaign in which it applies, was certainly used (and correctly, as Bush had doubled the debt) in the 2008 campaign, to try and tar John McCain by tying him to Bush on the debt. But while the Trump campaign had a lot of negative advertising they used against Hillary Clinton and tying her to Obama, <i>doubling the debt</i> was not one of them. That's because it's not actually true. The debt under Obama grew by 69%; This is slower than the rate of growth under most previous administrations, and as shown before, was growing by a lesser amount later in the term. <br />
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I won't claim then that the Obama record on the deficit is a smashing success, because obviously it's not. But it's also not the catastrophic failure that some would have you believe. It will be interesting to see what Trump makes of the debt, given his pledge to push for massive tax cuts that will certainly blow up the deficit, at least in the short term and quite possibly in the long term (keeping in mind that the 2001-2012 tax cuts produced anything but great prosperity during the time when they were in effect.)<br />
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Jobs and unemployment numbers were delayed until the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm" target="_blank">January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics</a> and show a final unemployment rate of <b>4.8 %</b> (down from 7.8% in January 2009.) The jobs creation numbers (from February 2009 through January 2017; <a href="https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth" target="_blank">historical data here</a>) show <b>11,501,000</b> net jobs created. Yes, if I were going to wave the flag unabashedly for Obama then I would begin counting in March 2010 (and give Bush 'credit' for 4,320 million net jobs lost during the first thirteen months of Obama's Presidency and point out that Obama has created nearly 16 million jobs since then) but fair is fair -- I used the same metric for Bush (February 2001-January 2009) so Obama is stuck with those numbers. The only adjustments may be minor as it is routine for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to make minor adjustments in the two preceding months (which would be December and January) in subsequent jobs reports as more data becomes available; If the adjustments are positive then Obama will be able to claim 11.5 million net jobs created. The February 2017 jobs report will be the first one credited to Trump,Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-57321811323808359232016-12-31T12:00:00.000-08:002017-06-18T10:31:17.690-07:00New Year's Predictions for 2017<b>January:</b> Donald Trump is inaugurated. He causes a furor when he interrupts his inaugural address mid-sentence to complain about two female reporters covering the event and call them fat. Later on, the Rockettes perform on schedule at the inauguration but strategically line up behind the President-elect so while dancing the can-can they get to take turns kicking his butt.<br />
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<b>February: </b>The Seattle Seahawks win Super Bowl LI over the New England Patriots. The key play comes in the third quarter, when former Arizona Cardinal and current Patriots receiver Michael Floyd fumbles a short pass but then falls down and is found draped over the ball with a BAC of .217. Since he fell on it, the ruling on the field is that the Patriots recover the fumble, but the reason it is a key play is because the pile on squeezes some of the air out of the ball. On the next play, Tom Brady is unprepared for a properly inflated ball and throws a pick-six to Richard Sherman. After the game Sherman gives another typical Sherman interview and is shortly thereafter given a fifteen yard penalty by NFL President Roger Goodell for illegal use of the Mouth.<br />
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<b>March: </b>President Trump wakes up at 3:00 in the morning to tweet about a pharmacist in an obscure town in Colorado who called him a name in an online chat room. Trump says the pharmacist is 'so unfair' and threatens to sue. Trump's followers immediately crash the pharmacy's website with derogatory comments, threats and insults.<br />
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<b>April:</b> President Trump precipitates a crisis when he fails to sign a debt ceiling increase in time, threatening to default on the U.S. debt. His initial response is that 'walking away from debt worked for me, it can work for the country,' but it later turns out that he was on the phone with a Scottish official arguing about the view from his golf course and couldn't be bothered with unrelated matters until it was resolved.<br />
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<b>May: </b>The Scottish golf course issue not being resolved to Trump's satisfaction, he orders the U.S. marines to invade and seize Scotland. When British Prime Minister Theresa May objects and points out that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, Trump asks what the U.K. has ever done for the U.S., reminds everyone that the U.S. won World War II, and calls the Brits 'losers.'<br />
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<b>June: </b>Trump begins building a border wall by confiscating taco trucks from street corners in the U.S. and stacking them along the border. In order to make Mexico pay for it, he sends troops to occupy Juarez. He says he will give it back when Mexico sends a check. <br />
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<b>July: </b>Following up on his pledge to expand America's nuclear arsenal, Trump withdraws from the test ban treaty, and announces his special Fourth of July program involving nuclear fireworks will be held in California. He also promises that other Americans can participate and show their patriotism by going outside to cheer when the nuclear fallout cloud passes over THEIR state !<br />
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<b>August: </b>Secretary of State and Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson suggests in an interview that the U.S. should invade Iran to get the oil. A sense of deja vu pervades the room and dead silence ensues, until Trump bails out Tillerson by adding, "and to do more of our nuclear testing."<br />
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<b>September: </b>President Trump and Labor Secretary Andrew Puzder celebrate Labor Day by signing an executive order abolishing minimum wage, maternity leave, overtime pay and sick leave, and making unions and collective bargaining illegal.<br />
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<b>October: </b>The Cubs win the World Series again. People start getting bored and talking about how the 'Cubs are always winning.' Yankee fans are jealous.<br />
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<b>November: </b>Once again, Trump is late signing a routine debt ceiling increase, nearly causing a national default. It turns out that the reason why is because the phone lines to the Kremlin were jammed, so Trump had to wait before he got the official OK from Putin to sign it.<br />
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<b>December: </b>Trump's promise to create jobs in coal states actually turns out to be true. That's because in a country full of Trump supporters, Santa needs to buy tons of the stuff.<br />
<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-37823135792904113922015-05-27T22:29:00.001-07:002015-05-28T08:46:52.010-07:00Why Ann Kirkpatrick is the right person for the U.S. Senate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Back in early 2008, Ann Kirkpatrick was doing an event in Winslow as she was running in a primary for what would eventually become a successful run to represent the first district of Arizona in the United States Congress. Our incumbent Congressman, Rick Renzi (now an inmate at the Federal Correctional Facility in Morgantown, West Virginia) had declined to seek re-election after being indicted on multiple counts of racketeering, money laundering and extortion. People wanted a change, and Ann promised to deliver it.<br />
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I'd met Ann and known about Ann a long time before that, which is why I had endorsed her on this blog the day she announced for Congress, and so I felt confident making a promise. As the event wrapped up, I told her, "I've been making one promise on your behalf." She got a worried look on her face, because Ann Kirkpatrick is very careful about not making promises unless she is confident she can keep them. "I've been telling people," I went on, "that you will NEVER end up on the front page of the Arizona Republic after being indicted for money laundering and extortion." Ann looked relieved. "That promise," she said, "you can keep on making."<br />
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And I did. That's because Ann Kirkpatrick is personally very honest and isn't interested in being in Congress (or now the Senate) for herself. As I have told people, "Ann Kirkpatrick doesn't go to Washington because she loves Washington. Ann goes to Washington because she loves Arizona."<br />
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The first thing she did was clean up the office after Rick Renzi and restore the integrity and honor that we as taxpayers and Americans have a right to expect.<br />
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Then she got to work. There is very little of her district that Ann Kirkpatrick has not visited or seen personally with her own eyes. That is a remarkable achievement, because the district is almost half the total land area of the state of Arizona, and is bigger than a lot of eastern states. She doesn't believe in just coming out during campaign season or advertising on the airwaves while staying in Washington, as some people do. One of her opponents complained about campaigning in the district a few years ago by saying he had run up 50,000 miles on his car. Those of us who live here had to chuckle, since if there is one advance in automobiles where the market has responded to the kind of people who live in rural Arizona, it was to start making cars with a six figure odometer. I don't know what Ann's odometer reads but I'm sure she wears out cars like she wears out her well-documented boots-- by using them for what they were made for.<br />
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But she hasn't gone on all those road trips to small towns just to visit them. Though she does go to visit and hear from residents, there is also sometimes a specific need that she is able to address. For example, in our area, back in 2010 there was a paper mill near Snowflake that was about to be shut down due to a problem with so-called 'black liquor,' a byproduct that was costing the mill so much that they would be unable to stay open. Ann went there personally and negotiated a compromise that helped keep the mill open for another two years. Unfortunately Ann lost the 2010 election (the only election she has lost) and before she won again in 2012, the paper mill ran into some other problems and closed, as congressman Gosar, who was then representing the district did nothing to try and save it. Several hundred jobs were lost as a result (and out here good jobs are hard to come by.) Ann has been able to help work towards a more positive outcome in Winslow, where the town is protected by a levee that prevents catastrophic flooding. The levee was built by the corps of engineers decades ago, but funding for maintenance was not a priority for our members of Congress, until Ann was elected. She has gotten some funding to begin needed repairs and maintenance on the levee. When communities she represents need it, Ann is there. She doesn't just fly over it in a helicopter or send somebody to represent her office, she goes and is there to talk to people directly and then goes back to her office and works on getting them the aid they need.<br />
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<i>Ann Kirkpatrick inspecting flood damage near Black Canyon City in 2010. </i><br />
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Ann's voting record has gotten her an earful at times from both the left and the right, but mostly from those who don't see the consistency in it. Speaking from the left side of the spectrum, I certainly understand progressives who are frustrated at for example, Ann's vote against Cap-and-Trade or her steadfast defense of coal burning power plants in northern Arizona. (disclaimer: I should note, to be sure, that I live about two miles from the Cholla Plant; I don't work there but a lot of my friends and neighbors do.) Ann sent a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson shortly after being elected back into Congress in 2012 expressing concern over the jobs at the plants and letting her know that she was against shutting them down. The power plants are a mainstay of the economy in an area where unemployment is still high and a lot of the jobs that do exist don't pay well enough to support a family on. So she favors finding ways to keep the plants here while still addressing environmental concerns, and she has worked as much as she can behind the scenes to save the jobs in the plants. Similarly, many on the left have disagreed with Ann for working on opening a copper mine in Globe with Republican congressman Paul Gosar (who incidentally defeated her in 2010 before jumping into a different district-- but Ann realizes that her job is too important to hold a personal grudge, something that already marks her as being tempermentally an improvement over John McCain, who notoriously holds grudges for years.) But the mine in Globe would provide over a thousand jobs in a community that has suffered steep declines in employment, so Ann while recognizing the opposition to it, supports the mine.<br />
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It is, however a mistake to think that congresswoman Kirkpatrick is a James Watt clone who doesn't care about the environment. She cares about it a great deal and has worked on legislation to protect the Red Rocks near Sedona and has strongly opposed uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. In her travels she has visited the Navajo reservation many times, a place where the few surface water supplies that might have been available have mostly been polluted, and people have been getting sick and dying, from the legacy of uranium mining during the 1950's through the 1980's. The Navajo Nation has banned any more uranium mining as a result, and Ann has supported plans to keep it out of the neighboring national park and surrounding areas.<br />
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On the right, aside from the usual boilerplate claim that Ann is a 'liberal' or 'beholden to the Obama administration' that Republicans make against any Democrat in a swing state (claims that are frankly silly in light of her moderate record and willingness to take on the Obama administration on issues like the power plants) for the most part the criticism is directed at her 2010 vote for the Affordable Care Act and her continuing to defend it after returning to Congress following the 2012 election. But her support for the Affordable Care Act was for a very straightforward reason and it is the same reason she has prioritized supporting jobs. When she voted for it, 21% of the people in Congressional District 1 (with slightly different lines than it has today) had no health insurance. This was one of the highest figures in the country. Rural hospitals were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of all the uninsured patients flooding into emergency rooms.<br />
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In addition, Ann worked to get permanent funding for the Indian Health Service (IHS) included in the ACA before she would vote for it. We have forgotten that today, but it used to be that IHS funding was sort of like the Medicare 'Doc Fix' or the 'Alternative Minimum Tax' (AMT) fix that was finally really fixed during the 'fiscal cliff' negotiation --a political football Congress had to fight over every year before they'd pass a short term fix. Ann insisted on and got a permanent 'fix' so Congress has one less political football to fight over.<br />
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Similarly, she supported the Stimulus, not only because of the dire national emergency we were facing at the time (in case anyone forgot we were losing nearly a million jobs every month and the economy was headed straight to hell) but also because of the glaring need for infrastructure in a broad spread out district. This is a huge district with a lot of underpopulated areas so building and maintaining infrastructure is very important here. In my morning delivery job I drive over a bridge south of Joseph City that was rebuilt a few years ago with Stimulus funds. The old bridge was rickety and after the I-35 and I-5 bridge collapses caused by past neglect of infrastructure (in no small part thanks to John McCain's crusade against dreaded 'pork') I really wondered a few times whether they would even notice if that one fell into the Little Colorado River. But fortunately, because of the Stimulus and Ann Kirkpatrick and other members of Congress who were willing to stand up and vote for it because it was the right thing to do, I can breathe a little easier in the morning when I drive across that bridge. <br />
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Ann did however oppose the release of some TARP funds. Fundamentally, it did not help people who needed help. Bank bailout funds were not of much use to people in Arizona who were losing their homes.<br />
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And that defines the consistency in Ann Kirkpatrick's positions. IN EVERY CASE the defining question has been a simple one: What most benefits her constituents. In a district as large and diverse as CD-1 that is not always an easy question to answer, but it has defined Ann's concerns and her realization that she works for us, not the other way around. <br />
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Let me summarize that again: Ann Kirkpatrick in the end makes her decisions not based on what the Obama administration wants, or because of what some Washington lobbyist wants, or what some Super PAC wants, or what the news media wants, or what some pollster is telling her will be popular. She makes her decisions based on one thing only: <b>What will make the most positive difference in the lives of the people she represents.</b><br />
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Ann also understands a very important principle that few in Washington seem to these days. This is the principle that the voters have sent her there to solve real problems and expect people there to work together to solve them, rather than retreat into partisan camps that throw insults at each other without either of them having the ability to solve anything on their own. That is why she has been working with Congressman Gosar, and also why in a session when Congress as a whole, fractured by partisan infighting set a record for being the LEAST productive Congress ever, Ann was <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/az-dc/2014/03/09/kirkpatrick-bill-first-from-az-signed-by-president-in-a-year/6234169/">the first member of the Arizona delegation to write a bill which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law.</a> Just moving a bill through Congress requires doggedly hard work, and we are fortunate to have someone who is a doggedly hard worker like Ann running for the Senate.<br />
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John McCain may be off galavanting all over the world, trying to make the case that we should send our boys and girls into every foreign conflict when it pops up, or be on all the TV news shows giving us his opinion about national and international issues, but you will probably find Ann in her office at the same time, working on legislation or constituent issues that need to be addressed. As one rancher who lives south of town here told me this morning when we were talking about Ann's announcement, "What's McCain ever done for Arizona?" The answer is nothing. If it doesn't enhance his national profile, he can't be bothered with it.<br />
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In closing, I should add that congresswoman Kirkpatrick is just as doggedly hard a worker on the campaign trail as she is in Washington. In the 2014 election, outside 'dark money' groups spent over $10 million against her, literally beginning even before she was sworn in at the start of 2013 and continuing up through election day. This tide of dark money buried Democrats from coast to coast last year, and helped Republicans sweep all of the state offices in Arizona. But Ann is too tough to be intimidated by that kind of pressure, as those of us who have gotten to know her are aware. Not only did she work hard to raise enough money on her own, maybe not to match that level of spending but at least to get heard, but she put all of us to shame. We may have spent weekends or evenings knocking on doors or talking to voters, but nobody worked harder on her own campaign than Ann. Ever see that famous old photo of Adlai Stevenson with the hole in his sole? Ann may wear cowboy boots on the campaign trail but I bet she's gotten some holes in a few of them by now. Beyond that, people here voted for Ann because she's real. This is a district that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, and went solidly for Doug Ducey in last year's governor's race. But a lot of voters who voted for those Republicans voted for Ann both in 2012 and in 2014. That's because even when they disagree with her (as I sometimes do as well,) we all know that Ann doesn't let anyone tell her how to vote, and she is committed to working as hard as she can to do the best job that she can for the people of Arizona.<br />
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<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-87946008768122117682015-04-14T18:36:00.001-07:002015-04-14T18:41:18.525-07:00The Last Casualty of the Civil War-- was it Lincoln?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A century and a half ago, this very night, Abraham Lincoln was martyred. John Wilkes Booth, a leading actor of his day, had shot the leader of the United States as he sat in his booth watching a play, "My American Cousin." The act shocked the nation, just five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox courthouse had signaled the end of the Civil War.<br />
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For this reason, Lincoln has sometimes been called "the last casualty of the Civil War," a label perhaps immortalized the most strongly by Rod Serling, the creator of the "Twilight Zone." In one of its most famous episodes, called 'the Passerby' <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUxWkVYfMdY">a widow first meets a young soldier walking on the road and learns he has died in the Civil war, then meets Lincoln</a> and learns he has also died.<br />
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It is certainly symbolically appropriate to call him the last casualty of the Civil War, but is it accurate?<br />
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No, it is not, except that Lincoln perhaps has as much claim as many others, for there are many ways to define who was the last casualty of the war that perhaps it can be argued, the United States itself is to this day still a casualty of. <br />
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On May 13, 1865, the battle of Palmito Ranch was fought, between small groups of soldiers who had yet to lay down their arms, in South Texas. Most of the dead died quickly, but Indiana Private John J. Williams was only mortally wounded and died hours later on the battlefield. So some historians consider Williams the last casualty of that war.<span style="background-color: transparent;"><br /></span></div>
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Six days later however, on May 19, 1865, there was a small skirmish between former confederate soldiers who were described as ‘unrepentant rebels’ and a union force lead by Lt. Joseph Carroll, at a place called Hobdy’s bridge in Alabama. One member of the force, Corporal John W. Skinner was killed in that fight and can also lay claim to being the last casualty of the Civil War. However, three of Skinner’s comrades who were wounded in the same fight, were later denied pensions on the basis of a claim by the government that the war was over and they were not eligible for pensions for injuries received during ‘peacetime.’<span style="background-color: transparent;"><br /></span></div>
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Was it confederate Major Henry Wirz, the commander of the notorious Andersonville prisoner camp, who was hanged on November 10, 1865 after being found guilty of what we would today refer to as atrocities? You could make that case.<span style="background-color: transparent;"><br /></span></div>
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In fact, if we consider hangings, a case could be made in relation to the notorious family feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. Asa Harmon McCoy (in contrast to some other members of his family) joined the Union army. When he was injured in the war he returned home, but as a returning union soldier was murdered by pro-confederate members of the Hatfield family. The feud sprang directly from the civil war, so a case could be made that the last casualty of that war was Ellison Mounts (a Hatfield,) who was hanged on February 18, 1890 for the murder of Alifair McCoy.<span style="background-color: transparent;"><br /></span></div>
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Or, was it Sam White of Chesterfield, Virginia, who died on February 18, 2008 (118 years to the day after the hanging of Mounts) while trying to restore an unexploded Civil War cannonball? There are still to this day hundreds or perhaps even thousands of unexploded shells from that long ago conflict buried in the eastern U.S. And there is no guarantee that White is the last casualty if you count him as one, either.</div>
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And so perhaps that brings us back to the present day. It is sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction, but especially in learning our history, we must try as hard as possible to do so.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-36114984887926807032015-03-27T01:07:00.000-07:002015-07-13T16:22:43.118-07:00The real questions about Jeb Bush are about what he's been doing since leaving office. <div class="MsoNormal">
Lately all the speculation about Jeb Bush has focused on his
last name, asking whether as a ‘Bush’ he
can win following his father and his brother. Both left the Presidency in the
midst of recessions and his brother is also associated with unpopular and ruinous adventures abroad. <br />
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In so doing, the focus has not been sufficiently on Jeb himself. Occasionally stories do come out—for example
when the Clinton email flap surfaced, it was pointed out that <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/jeb-bush-owned-personal-email-server-he-used-governor-n317286">JebBush used his own private email server while he was Governor</a> but in fact that is something of a non issue
since apparently <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0307/From-Jeb-Bush-to-Scott-Walker-other-2016-hopefuls-used-private-email-video">it’s the norm among potential presidential candidates.</a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the big story regarding Jeb Bush is not what he did
WHILE he was Governor, it’s what he did after leaving office. His first job was as a paid consultant to
Lehman Brothers bank. In case you
forgot, Lehman Brothers was the touchstone for the economic collapse. During
the 2000’s, rampant speculation in the housing market and the quick money to be
turned as a result led a number of banks, including Lehman Brothers, to invest
their money in risky investments tied to home mortgages that quickly turned bad
when the housing market tanked. And what did Jeb do for Lehman Brothers? Well, he was assigned a special mission
(while his brother was still in the White House.) Jeb was asked to <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2014/04/21/desperate-mission-jeb-bush-asked-mexican-billionaire-carlos-slim-to-save-lehman-brothers/">go to Mexico</a> and try to persuade billionaire Carlos Slim to bail out the
company.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Slim, the world’s second richest man, patiently listened to Jeb’s plea, but could
see where Lehman Brothers was headed and wanted no part of propping it up to
stave off the inevitable collapse. It is
hard to imagine that Jeb, who is supposed to be brainy, didn’t see it
as well. So as a consultant, one has to question either his judgment in trying
to get people to invest in a bank that was sinking like the Titanic if he was
one of the few in the company who didn’t see that, or his ethics if he did see
what was happening.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
So after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, did Jeb leave the
banking business? Not at all. In fact,
he moved on to a position as a consultant with of the British banking
giant Barclay’s (a position he kept until very recently when he resigned all of
his board positions and other positions in order to begin putting together a run for President.) So
how did Barclay’s do with Jeb Bush advising them?<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He stepped into Barclay’s as the company was actively
working to manipulate LIBOR, officially
the “London Interbank Offered Rate,” which is a key rate used to set fixed
interest rates. Barclay’s continued with
the collusion of several other large banks including the Royal Bank of
Scotland, JP Morgan-Chase, Deutsche Bank and Citibank (which it is hard to imagine a financial consultant would be unaware of) to manipulate the rates until in 2011 when it
was reported that the banks were under investigation and then in February 2012
when the scheme unraveled. Eventually
Barclay’s agreed to fines of nearly half a billion dollars to several different
international regulatory agencies. As part of their agreement with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, Barclay’s <a href="http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/9312012710173426365941.pdf">agreed that some fixed interest rates may have changed</a> as a result of the
manipulation.<br:><br /></br:></div>
This is not a
small thing. One memo between a trader
and Barclay’s revealed that <span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21557772">for each basis point (0.01%) that Libor was moved, those involved could net, "about a couple of million dollars."</a></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">After Barclay’s got out of
the business of manipulating interest rates (or at least we would hope) they
moved on to currency. Some of the same
banks Barclay’s colluded with on LIBOR, discovered a new way to gamble with the
economy in order to skim some money off the top. They all colluded on foreign currency
exchange rates. In theory international currency is supposed to ‘float,’ so
that people who want to, for example, trade in their Euros for dollars can do
so at a rate that is set purely by the international markets; high demand for a currency makes it more
expensive and lower demand reduces the price.
However, the banks discovered they could move the price around the
edges, and as a result make a lot of money by investing in currency that they
could then move the exchange rate just enough to make a profit. Never mind of course that the profit they
made means someone else lost money, they
found they could make money, and a lot of it. After being burned by the LIBOR
fine, Barclays’ this time became the ‘snitch’ in the group and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/30/barclays-cooperating-investigation-manipulation-currency-markets">essentially ratted out the others</a> <span style="background: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">;</span><span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> in exchange for a smaller
fine</span>. Because of their
cooperation, Barclays was subject to a fine but got a ‘deferred prosecution
agreement’ which in effect means they don’t actually have to pay the fine. All they have to do is keep their nose
clean.<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"><br:></br:></span><br /><br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">That can’t be too hard,
can it? Apparently, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/big-banks-face-scrutiny-over-pricing-of-metals-1424744801">it is pretty hard, for big banks anyway. </a> </span>Like a hungry swarm of locusts, the same clique
of megabanks (including Barclay’s) that had such a big role in manipulating
interest rates and currency exchanges,
moved on to manipulating the price of metals. As before, the banks raked in big profits
while small investors were left holding the bag for the losses on one side of an equation where the other side turned into big bucks for banks. The investigation into price fixing in the
metals markets is ongoing, but suffice it to say that I suspect a lot of ‘gold
bugs’ will be furious that instead of the free market determining the price of
their favorite metal, it was instead a small group of deeply pocketed bankers
who decided what it would be. And again,
any consultant on any bank that was unaware of the metal price manipulation (especially after
having gone through the LIBOR and FOREX,
or foreign currency exchange manipulation scandals) would have been completely absent in their
duties to pay attention to who they were working for. Maybe that's why the establishment wants Jeb so much. Some apologists for his brother claim George W. was 'out to lunch' and could be manipulated by a Praetorian Guard who could pull his strings. Jeb's work for Barclays when they were involved in financial scandal after financial scandal after financial scandal seems to suggest that that might be the case.</div>
<br:></br:><br />
<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">It is true that there is
more that could be said about Jeb Bush and the record of corporations he has worked for or been on the board of both
in and outside of the banking industry since leaving office, but the most important thing that
can be pointed out is this, because it speaks to the entire outlook of the organization he was advising at Barclay’s: The
year (2013-2014) when profits fell 22% (largely because of fines) and the
bank was caught up in three major scandals
(in other words a bad year for Barclay’s) <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/08/barclays-to-cut-19000-jobs-scale-back-investment-bank-antony-jenkins">the bank laid off 19,000 people</a> </span>followed by an announcement they would <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-11/barclays-fires-12000-reports-horrible-earnings-awards-itself-bigger-bonuses">lay off another 12,000 people</a> because of an abysmal earnings report.</div>
<br:></br:><br />
<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">BUT what did Barclay's do
after the abysmal performance and layoffs of thousands of people? What the boards of large companies often do
these days (too often): <span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> p<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/05/us-barclays-pay-idUSBREA241JG20140305">aid 481 people at the top </a>enormous bonuses
</span> of over a million pounds (meaning substantially over a million
dollars) apiece. This reward voted by
the members of the board of the bank that Jeb Bush was advising is a depressingly familiar narrative. The members of the Board (millionaires
themselves) apparently at least understand
and do not hold responsible the millionaires who work for them at the top of
the company (including those Jeb was working with,) and understand them well enough to give them massive bonuses even
when they do a poor job or harm the company by exposing it to unwarranted
risk. So what did Jeb Bush do? Simple. Continued advising Barclay's.<br /><br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">So to summarize, after sustaining
losses but rewarding the people in charge (likely the only ones the Board
Members see very often) the bank Jeb was advising balanced the books
by cutting the jobs of secretaries, data analysts and computer techs, and
perhaps also others who take orders from the people who actually were in charge
and caused the poor performance in the first place.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"><br:></br:></span><br /><br />
<br /><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">
That kind of thinking, making the poor pay for the sins of the rich while
rewarding the rich for sinning is standard fare for modern conservatives. But a letdown if you were optimistic that
somehow this Bush would be different.</span><br /><br /><b>NOTE: AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS POST NAMED JEB AS A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AT BARCLAY'S. THIS WAS BASED ON INFORMATION THAT WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN WAS WIDELY PUBLISHED ON THE INTERNET INCLUDING FROM SOME RELIABLE SOURCES, BUT HAS APPARENTLY BEEN WITHDRAWN. THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED TO REFLECT WHAT IS NOW BEING REPORTED THAT JEB BUSH WAS AN ADVISOR TO BARCLAY'S BUT DID NOT SERVE ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS.</b></span><span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-15936413426140461262015-03-06T17:38:00.003-08:002015-03-27T01:11:33.482-07:00Why I Support Capital Punishment (Almost) NeverOver the past twenty-four hours I've had a couple of events that have caused me to contemplate the death penalty and clarify how I feel about it.<b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
One of them is that a friend of mine posted a link from the U.S. conference of Catholic bishops opposing it. Of course I am not Catholic, but I understand the concerns of the bishops. However I had to disagree with the premise of her post, though in fact in most cases I would agree with her (and the bishops.)<b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
The second of course, living here in Arizona, was the Jodi Arias sentencing case. As many may know, a single holdout juror refused to vote for the death penalty, and as per state law that means that Arias, convicted of killing her boyfriend Travis Alexander will not be sentenced to death, but instead will spend the rest of her life in prison.<b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
Let me state a summary, and then go on and clarify as to why I do not support capital punishment today, but if some specific problems were fixed then I could support it:<b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
1. I believe that there are cases where capital punishment is warranted. However, these cases are exceedingly rare, and I do not believe that Jodi Arias, as brutal as her crime was, qualifies.<b></b><b></b><br />
2. I believe that the system is broken, both in terms of the number of proven errors that have been made, and in terms of the basic inequality of the justice system in which race, class and ability to pay are correlated with likelihood of being sentenced to death when convicted of the same crime, when in fact if the system was working properly these factors should have no such correlation.<b></b><b></b><br />
3. Until the system is fixed, I do not support any further executions. In other words, I favor a moratorium, and then perhaps a resumption only after these problems have been addressed.<b></b><b></b><br />
4. While it may be warranted in extreme cases, I do not buy the argument that it is any kind of a deterrent, will address prison overcrowding, or will save money (though 'saving money' would be a terrible justification for executions, even if that were true.)<b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
First, when is it justified? I believe that taking a person's life (assuming we are absolutely certain of guilt, which I will get to later) is only justified if the particular crime is so heinous as to completely be beyond the bounds of civilization, and further that it rises beyond ordinary human expressions of rage, violence, jealousy, passion or other kinds of reasons why murders happen, but maybe are not characteristics of a person who is a cold blooded killer. In other words, premeditation must be a part of the murder. Someone who gets angry and kills may need to spend the rest of his or her life in prison, but I don't believe that is a good enough reason to kill them. People can of course argue this point, but I do not believe a person who kills in a fit of anger but may regret it later is on a par with someone who coldly calculates what they are going to do and then does it. <b></b><b></b><br />
<br />
Between this sort of premeditation and the heinousness of the crime, I can name a couple of people who I believe should get or should have gotten the death penalty. I would have given it to Charles Manson (but not to his followers, who were after all followers.) Timothy McVeigh was executed for his crime, and rightly so. The one case that really haunts me however happened in 1999. My daughters were just about the age of Shawn Ryan Grell's daughter, Kristen Salem. I still can hear a two year old child's terrified scream, 'No, daddy NO!!!' when she realized what he was about to do. I don't want to say anymore about that here, other than the case was so horrible that it at one point caused a judge who had sat on the bench for 30 years to impose the one and only death sentence she ever imposed. Later it was thrown out on the technicality that the law had changed and required a jury to consent to a death sentence, but in 2009 it was reinstated when he was in fact sentenced by a jury. The details if you have a strong enough stomach to read them <a href="http://murderpedia.org/male.G/g/grell-shawn.htm">are here </a> . Grell's crime was so awful that a judge who sat on the bench for thirty years only handed down one death sentence in all that time: his. Put it this way: I agree with the judge. The death penalty is assessed far too frequently and it should be very rare. But his is the rare case where I can agree with it. Sitting on the bench for thirty years and ONLY opting for the death penalty for Grell? That's about where I am on this. Only very rare, and horrendously evil cases.<b></b><br />
<br />
Beyond the requirement that a crime must be unthinkably heinous, I also do not think the death penalty should be imposed if there is clear evidence that it is what the defendant wants. A good case in point is that of Major Nidal Hassan, who murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in his pursuit of martyrdom on behalf of Allah. Only an odd thing happened to Major Hassan. Instead of dying a martyr's death as he had planned, he was cut down by a policewoman whose bullet severed his spine, stopping his rampage and leaving him permanently paralyzed and in a wheelchair. During the trial, it became very clear that Major Hassan and prosecutors were on the same page. He wanted to be a martyr and die, and they wanted him to die. His defense attorneys were in the ridiculous position of arguing a position that is based on the presumption that the defendant seeks to avoid the death penalty, even though in that case it wasn't true. The prosecution, much to the joy of the defendant, prevailed. He will be executed, rather than spending decades in that wheelchair having the daily reminder of what he did. He thinks he will get 72 virgins when he is executed. Whether he is right or wrong becomes a matter of blind faith. <b></b><br />
<br />
The second point is that the system is broken, as evidenced by the number of innocent people sentenced to death. Quite a few years ago a man named Ray Krone, who had been on death row here in Arizona, was exonerated after DNA evidence proved he had nothing to do with the crime. His case was remarkable only in that he was the 100th person who had been sentenced to death, to be exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977 after a moratorium. Dozens more across the country have since been cleared. By some estimates as many as 5% (or one out of twenty) people on death row may actually be innocent. Even if it is lower than that, the number who have been proven to be innocent after being convicted and sentenced to die is far too high for comfort. It is true that there is no proof that an innocent person has actually been executed since the reinstatement of the penalty but there are cases such as Joseph O'Dell in Virginia and Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas in which it seems quite likely. Of course prosecutors have vigorously fought any attempt to reopen cases of people who have already been executed. But given the number of people who have been sentenced to death and later released after being exonerated it is statistically very likely that at least a few innocent people may well have been executed. If we ever agree that this is 'acceptable' then we really are a morally bankrupt society, as death penalty opponents claim.<b></b><br />
<br />
This leads directly into the third point, that the justice system is not an even playing field. The amount of money a defendant can spend on legal representation dictates the quality of defense he or she is likely to receive. We all remember the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Simpson, at the time a deep pocketed millionaire, was able to hire a virtual Who's Who of the nation's best lawyers. The limited resources available to the L.A. County prosecutor's office just weren't enough to keep up with the demands of the case. Simpson got off, as we may recall the words, "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit." Further, even a moderately wealthy defendant can afford a good enough lawyer to probably avoid the death penalty (there are lawyers who specialize in just such cases and have a very good track record of helping their clients dodge the executioner's table even when found guilty.) A good example is Judy Clarke, who is just now representing Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev; in the past she has represented Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, South Carolina mother Susan Smith (who drowned her sons,) Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Tucson shooter Jared Loughner; all were found guilty, as the defense is already conceding about Tsarnaev, but she helped all four of them avoid the death penalty. If a suspect is convicted and sentenced to death, they can further appeal the sentence, to the point where strained county prosecutor's budgets just aren't there to play the game out. Even going for a death sentence is very expensive, and in an era of budget cuts for prosecutor's offices that may well explain why so many fewer prosecutors are even trying for it anymore than the number of cases where they used to.<b></b><br />
<br />
However, the unequal playing field in which a very wealthy (or in the case of Tsarnaev, very notorious, who can bring out a lawyer like Clarke) defendant against a state with limited taxpayer supplied funds to spread around, is reversed when the resources of the state are pitted against an indigent or very poor defendant. Often these people are represented by a public defender. Now, don't get me wrong. There are some very good public defenders (in fact Clarke herself is a former public defender, which is how she got the Kaczynski case.) Some public defenders are true professionals who take their jobs very seriously. At the same time however, there are also some who are the opposite. There are some lawyers who are just too inept to be hired by any reputable law firm, and often end up as public defenders. In 2000 the Dallas Morning news found that <a href="http://www.texasappleseed.net/pdf/projects_fairDefense_defense_lacking.pdf"> nearly one out of four</a> death row inmates in Texas had been represented by public defenders who in the past had been disciplined for professional misconduct. Often this involved things like sleeping or drinking on the job. Some public defenders haven't won a case in years.<b></b><br />
<br />
Further, even if a public defender is committed to the job, he or she has a heavy workload (so not much time to spend on each defendant) and a budget that is even more limited than the prosecutor's budget. It takes money to do things like run a DNA test or go interview a witness, and often the money just isn't there in a public defender's budget. This may be one reason why for example, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/HRP_UPRsubmission_annex.pdf">95% of death row inmates in Alabama are indigent</a> (page 8 of the link) but no one would suggest that anywhere near 95% of the murders in Alabama are committed by indigent people. The obvious next question is how many of them may in fact be innocent, but we are unlikely to know because public defenders typically don't handle appeals and none of them has the money for an appeal, even if they could prove incompetent representation at the outset. Until COMPETENT legal representation WITH ENOUGH RESOURCES to do the job properly can be provided for everyone who can't otherwise pay, I can't with good conscience support a system where whether one is convicted and receives a death sentence may depend as much on income level as on actual guilt or innocence, or the details of the crime.<b></b><br />
<br />
There is also a well-documented by now correlation between race and application of the death penalty, even when factors such as the specific nature of the crime, number of victims, aggravating factors, etc. are taken in to account. In other words, <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-black-and-white-who-lives-who-dies-who-decides">in cases with comparable crimes. blacks are more likely than whites</a> to receive the death penalty. While this study only compares blacks and whites, there are other studies that show that for comparable crimes minority perpetrators are more likely to get a harsher sentence (whether jail for jaywalking or death for murder) than the identical crimes perpetrated by whites. How much of this is already explained by the previously noted correlation between income level and sentencing outcome is an open debate; but it is unlikely that 100% of this difference is only due to that factor; so in other words conscious or subconscious racism could also play a role.<b></b><br />
<br />
Beyond that, there are some arguments in favor of the death penalty that I find specious. One is that it is a deterrent. However, most murderers, especially those who premeditate murder, expect to get away with it. I've heard that from many people who would be in a position to know, including police officers. People who plan murder think they are smarter or shrewder and in most cases just don't expect to be caught. So the penalty is of little concern to them if they think they have a plan to get away with it. Secondly, in many cases people who have for example, shot at people are later killed in shootouts with police. Now, there are probably faster ways to guarantee your instant death than pointing a gun at a police officer, but right now I can't think of one. Clearly these folks don't care if they live or die, if they can just seize on the smallest chance of escape. And finally <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state">we have evidence it is not a deterrent</a>; states without the death penalty actually have a LOWER homicide rates than states that do have it. I've even heard the counter argument, that in states with the death penalty the state makes life 'cheaper' so people are more likely to take it themselves. I don't actually believe that, but there is a stronger statistical case to be made for that point of view than there is to be made for the argument that it's a deterrent.<b></b><br />
<br />
Another of the what I consider specious arguments has to do with the well-documented problem of prison overcrowding. However, at least as of a couple of years ago the prison population was growing so fast that if you lined everyone on death row up against a wall and shot them tomorrow, in less than two weeks the prisons would be just as full as they are today. In other words, death row is an insignificant part of the problem. I fully support prison reform, but that has to begin with non-violent offenders (especially drug addicts) who are in prison rather than in a treatment facility where they belong, as well as mental health patients who also should be getting treatment, not a prison cell. But worrying about the vanishingly small number on death row in the face of a sizeable segment of the population that is behind bars is at best a diversion from what is a real problem of mass incarceration in America today.<b></b><br />
<br />
This does however bring up the question of money. Even though death row is a tiny part of the prison system, most states are in fact struggling under the burden of keeping this many people locked up. So the argument has been made that executing a prisoner frees up a bed and should reduce costs. However, largely owing to the cost of appeals and obtaining experimental drugs, in fact <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/execute-or-not-question-cost/">it is more expensive to execute an inmate</a> than it is to keep them in prison for life. So still not a good argument for the death penalty, even if you think cost is a good basis for making this decision.<b></b><br />
<br />
So for me to support the death penalty I'd have to see these problems addressed in a way that would make being subject to the death penalty applied in a manner that is fair and equitable. If it is applied in a capricious manner as it is now then I can't support it. AND once the system is fixed, I would still only support it for very specific and unspeakably monstrous crimes, such as Grell ruminating on the idea while he drove around for nearly an hour and then burning his two year old to death. Which brings me back to Jodi Arias. Apparently eleven of the twelve jurors supported the death penalty for Arias, but the twelfth refused to go along with them. Well, I'm with the twelfth juror. There is no question that Arias' crime, stabbing Alexander as many as 29 times plus a gunshot wound to the head, was as brutal as it was bloody. It can be argued that she could have premeditated the crime, but there is also evidence that the two of them had sex shortly before the murder. So do we know for sure everything that happened? Not absolutely. The jury that heard the evidence did convict her of capital murder. And I believe they were right to convict her. But I do not believe that we can be sure that she didn't in fact, 'snap' (as she said at one point, though she certainly damaged her own credibility by changing her story several times.) So I'm not sure that Arias' crime meets my own standards for when I could support the death penalty (see above: almost never, just not absolutely never.) Her spending the rest of her years wishing she hadn't done it, is good enough.<br />
<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-24503958758052859902014-10-15T14:13:00.000-07:002014-10-15T14:15:34.607-07:00All Hat, no Cattle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a9MNR-foS7M/VD7Ud9_KhTI/AAAAAAAAAJo/R4FT9GMmQ1o/s1600/tobin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a9MNR-foS7M/VD7Ud9_KhTI/AAAAAAAAAJo/R4FT9GMmQ1o/s1600/tobin.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
Have you ever had the experience of hearing somebody claim to be the exact opposite of what they are?<br />
<br />
It can be jarring, but that's hardly surprising from Andy Tobin, the speaker of the Arizona legislature. Tobin has been wearing a new hat lately to try and convince voters in CD-1 that he fits into rural Arizona despite the fact that he doesn't actually live in the district and spends most of his time in Phoenix. So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to hear Andy Tobin tout his 'bipartisanship' in a debate this week with Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick. He even had a statistic, claiming that 90% of what was passed by his legislature was 'bipartisan.'<br />
<br />
In fact, if you were to lift the brim up and take a peek under Andy's new hat you<b> </b>will find a baldly partisan speaker. Democrats have routinely been shut out of negotiations, denied the opportunity to offer amendments either in committee or on the floor, and even been cut off to prevent them from speaking on legislation.<br />
<br />
As for the 90% number, it is little secret that most bills passed by any legislative body are non-controversial, and will be passed unanimously or nearly unanimously. Typical of this type of bill might (just for example) be HB 2307 clarifying the rules for driving golf carts. It passed the House (and Senate) unanimously, as did numerous technical clarifications, memorials and resolutions (after all, who would vote against HR 2008, designating the first Friday in September as ovarian cancer awareness day?) <br />
<br />
Counting these sorts of bills helps mask the truly partisan nature of the Tobin legislature. All of the important bills (such as HB 2305 last year, the voter suppression bill, or SB 1062 which would have allowed discrimination on the grounds of 'religious freedom' or the past few years' budgets which slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from education) you would find that all of them were written and sponsored by only Republicans and passed with only Republican votes. Which is exactly the way Andy Tobin wanted it. As Speaker he had the right to hold a bill or get everyone on board but he put those bills on the floor anyway for a strict party-line vote. He does have that right since his party controls the legislature and he controls his party, but don't call him 'bipartisan' because he is NOT bipartisan. Not at all.<br />
<br />
If you want 'bipartisan' where it counts, then look at the congresswoman he is trying to replace, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. As most people know or should know, Kirkpatrick has put aside differences with Republican congressman Paul Gosar (the man who defeated her in 2010) and <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20130821gosar-kirkpatrick-bipartisan-boost-arizona-mine.html">worked on moving a mine project forward that promises to deliver thousands of jobs.</a> Recently, in a Congress that is so warped by partisanship and divided control of the government that it has literally set a record for getting very little done (no Congress back to the founding of the Republic has passed into law fewer bills) it was Ann Kirkpatrick who <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/az-dc/2014/03/09/kirkpatrick-bill-first-from-az-signed-by-president-in-a-year/6234169/">became the first member of the Arizona delegation</a> to do the ridiculously hard work of writing a bill that both parties could sign onto and shepherd it through the house and the Senate so that it eventually could be signed by the President. The bill improves service at the Veterans' Administration. In the past, that might not have been that hard to pass but this year, with everything as a political football, it shows Rep. Kirkpatrick's doggedness and determination to do the work to get something done instead of political posturing. More recently, Rep. Kirkpatrick <a href="http://kirkpatrick.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/statement-on-new-epa-rule-for-existing-power-plants">issued a press release</a> opposing publically the EPA's new proposed regulations on coal burning power plants. And while Rep. Kirkpatrick has continued to support the Affordable Care Act, she has been among the first to suggest that it can and should be improved.<br />
<br />
Further, some may recall that Republicans made commercials saying that Kirkpatrick voted '88% of the time' with Nancy Pelosi. This is the other side of the coin we referred to above in regard to Andy Tobin's claim that his legislature is '90% bipartisan.' Congress too, passes a lot of non-controversial bills over stuff like naming post offices or remembering somebody's service (I wonder if a vote to adjourn is counted in their 88% statistic?) But on the bills that Ann Kirkpatrick has differed on, they are substantive bills, but bills that matter to the district (for example she opposed bank bailouts and cap-and-trade legislation because this is a district where energy production is a lot more important to the local economy than Wall Street.) <br />
<br />
And therein is the difference. Does anyone expect that Andy Tobin will reach across the aisle on VOTES THAT REALLY MATTER? I don't. Ann Kirkpatrick however does have the courage to do so when it will benefit her constituents.<br />
<br />Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-53416705201041053822014-06-27T12:47:00.001-07:002014-06-27T12:47:50.356-07:00100 years ago todayOne hundred years ago today, we lived in a different world.<br />
<br />
Colonialism was in full swing. European powers justified it with notions of 'bringing civilization to the savages.' If a revolt did occur, the colonial powers would brutally but efficiently put it down. The United States had a few small colonies too, spoils of the Spanish-American war, but with 'gunboat diplomacy' the U.S. could claim that Latin American countries were 'independent republics,' while making sure their leaders would run the country to U.S. specifications.<br />
<br />
It was an age of optimism. Just within recent memory, amazing new inventions had changed life forever, or had the potential to do so in the very near future: the telegraph and then the telephone, that allowed instantaneous communication (at least within a continent, though the first transatlantic telegraph cable had been in operation since 1858, allowing messages to be transmitted between North America and Europe within a matter of minutes); the radio, allowing everything from vital information to entertainment to be instantly transmitted to the masses. Between the radio and the phonograph, boredom seemed a thing of the past as endless entertainment was but a click of the 'on' switch away. Other recent inventions were still the exclusive domain of the wealthy but might not remain so for long as entrepreneurs looked for ways to make them more affordable: the home telephone, the horseless carriage (automobile) or for the really exciting new invention, the aeroplane. Advances in science and medicine (especially the discovery of germs and sanitation-- remember that the water closet, or flush toilet, was another invention that was becoming widely available) were improving the health and lifespan of people by leaps and bounds. As for household goods, everything from clothes to tablewares to furniture, what had been handmade for thousands of years was now being spun out by the whir of machines in thousands of \factories (as for the undiluted soot that they belched out and made it necessary to turn on streetlights at noon in places like Pittsburgh, that too was considered a sign of 'progress.')<br />
<br />
It was an age of monarchy. There had been no serious wars in Europe since the days of Bismarck, and most nations were led by kings, kaisers, czars and with a royal lineage that in most cases was intermixed (which many people gave credit for the lack of warfare, thinking that somehow the fact that the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm was the grandson of the recently departed Queen Victoria meant that Germany would never fight England.) For perhaps the last time in history, monarchs in Europe not only led their nations, but exercised real (though except perhaps for the Czar, not absolute) power over them.<br />
<br />
It was an age when the world was explored (so globes, if still drawn without the benefit of aerial photography, were still very accurate) but still held vast stretches of unexplored wilderness; when telescopes were learning much more about neighboring planets but they still held their mystery; so Jules Verne's or Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantasy science fiction still could have been real, because we didn't know otherwise.<br />
<br />
One can certainly point fingers at the racism, sexism and self-indulgence of the 'gilded age' which was drawing to a twilight that no one imagined it could be, but in many ways it was a wonderful time to dream, an illusion of a better world completely oblivious of the yawning chasms about to open in the world or of the horror it was about to fall into....<br />
<br />
One hundred years ago tomorrow, as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne was visiting Serbia, a bomb went off. It missed the Archduke in his car, but killed and wounded others who were behind him in the procession. Later on, the Archduke (a member of the nobility and therefore attempting to be noble) insisted on visiting the hospital where the bombing victims had been taken. He and his wife Sofia in their car passed in front of another would be assassin, a young Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Unlike the assassin with the bomb, Princip did not miss. He fired two shots, one into the Archduke and one into his wife, and they both killed their target. And the sun set on the world of the gilded age.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-55691942741658640302014-05-30T22:03:00.001-07:002014-05-30T22:26:37.820-07:00An Epiphany I had About Early American Government and the Welfare they Gave to the Poor.While away from a computer for several days, I did have an epiphany, one of those things that ties a lot of things together.<br />
<br />
The Tea Party keeps waxing nostalgic about the America of small government that in one form or another lasted from the founding days of the Republic into the early twentieth century.<br />
<br />
They like to point out that the Government at this time did not provide welfare, and people who had no job and no food had to somehow 'make it on their own.'<br />
<br />
Only that's not quite right. They gave them welfare, in a different form. Via the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 and later the Homestead Act of 1862, they would (after clearing the Native Americans off the land and mostly stuffing them onto small tracts of undesireable land or packing them off to Oklahoma) offer them land (160 acres, in plots all tracted out into ranges and townships) on which they could establish a farm and feed themselves and their family. Eventually, they even opened up Oklahoma, which had been set aside for the Native Americans who they had driven off their land elsewhere, but even that ended by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state. But for the first century and a quarter of the time that the nation was in existence, the phrase 'go west, young man' was a part of the lexicon, and the government had land in abundance to give away as 'government welfare' to anyone who would move there and work it (though they did so very reluctantly, it should be noted, for African Americans, for whom the promise of 'forty acres and a mule' never materialized and forced most of them to work as sharecroppers, especially in the South, but that's a different discussion.)<br />
<br />
<br />
Now I also can anticipate what some Tea Party supporters will say. They won't disagree with me (since history records that this is exactly what happened) but will instead pull out the 'Cliven Bundy' card and complain about how much land the government still owns, especially in the West (after all, the Northwest Ordinance gave out parcels of land in what is now the eastern third of the U.S. and the Homestead Act more or less focused in the same way on what is now the middle third, but no similar act was every passed, at least on a significant scale, for the West.) And it is true that even today the majority of the land in the West is owned by the Federal Government (though anyone who argues that the Federal Government somehow doesn't legally own it is wrong, since the Federal Government paid for most of it for $20 million (the combined purchase price of the Mexican Cession and Gadsden Purchase) and obtained the rest by an international treaty with Britain over the Oregon territory in 1845.)<br />
<br />
<br />
But, they will argue, if in fact the Federal Government owns the land, why not just give it away in a similar manner to what was done before?<br />
<br />
<br />
First, it's because a lot of it is not land you could farm on. The places you could farm on, have virtually all been transferred to private ownership already, but most of the rest doesn't make good farm land. Around here, and around a lot of the rest of the southwest, it is too hot, too dry and the land too unsustainable to be able to farm, except perhaps in small areas that have consistent water like river valleys. We are already outstripping our water supply, and it's hard to see how thousands more farmers would (if we had them) do anything beyond drain the scarce resource faster. In fact, as the jet stream moves northward, we have already seen reports that <a href="http://www.crwcd.org/media/uploads/200708_climate_change_impacts_USGS.pdf">precipitation in the Colorado River basin could decrease by 15-20% annually</a>. Yeah, I know, some skeptics of government welfare probably don't believe that either, but the science is sound and denying that a hungry lion is coming towards you won't prevent it from eating you when it gets there. But even without it, we are losing the water battle in the southwest, and most of the land the federal government does own is either marginally useful as grazing land (which they already allow ranchers to graze on it for $1.35/cow per month, a fraction of what private grazing rights run) or it is part of a national park, national forest or national monument. Cattle ranches (and I know several ranchers) will always be an activity that at least in the west requires thousands of acres, so even making people on welfare into cattle ranchers would result in a relatively small number of them being given this land, because ranches in general are so large and the cowhands who work on it now, would still be working on it then.<br />
<br />
<br />
Keep in mind regarding national parks, forests and monuments, that we do allow some kinds of economic activity in these areas (such as logging in national forests) but these are areas that are preserved for all of us to share. Do you really want the government to throw open Yellowstone or Yosemite to people who would come in and just turn it into a bunch of farms?<br />
<br />
<br />
But beyond that, even if they did do that, DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE that the people that they would want to get the land would be a bunch of welfare recipients from New York or Chicago? Of course not. They expect it to be some kind of 'patriotic Americans' (probably meaning them) though in reality it would likely be a bunch of multinational corporations. And frankly, compared to the value of the kind of land needed to farm or ranch on, the value of public assistance is much less.<br />
<br />
<br />
So in conclusion, the people who argue that the small, federalist government in the days of the founding fathers didn't give welfare to people who needed to feed themselves is false. They did understand the need to do so and that it was the duty of the government to help provide for people, they just used a different kind of currency.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-43967454703242626902014-04-25T22:51:00.001-07:002014-04-26T18:01:25.479-07:00Duck, Dodge and Weave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f1FotPG3yQY/U1tJMotwMFI/AAAAAAAAAJY/k3IrYA0hahc/s1600/tobin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f1FotPG3yQY/U1tJMotwMFI/AAAAAAAAAJY/k3IrYA0hahc/s1600/tobin.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been following the recent controversy over Cliven
Bundy, and there is one politician in particular who has completely unimpressed
me, and it’s hardly the first time:
Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin.<br />
<br />
<br />
Speaker Tobin just two weeks ago issued a strong statement of support for
Bundy, a deadbeat rancher who has not paid grazing fees for twenty years, in
his standoff with the BLM. He left no
doubt that he supported Bundy, in the
process working hard to appeal to the militia extremists who advocate armed
resistance to the federal government. </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the past two days, Bundy’s racist comments have drawn a
lot of criticism, and across the political spectrum. As has been widely reported, Bundy, who
apparently has been enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame so much that he’s
attempted to drag it out with daily news conferences since the standoff ended, finally
revealed himself during one of them when he said that blacks (who he referred
to by the obsolete and offensive name, ‘negroes’) should be ‘picking cotton’
and were better off as slaves because then they had a ‘family life’ (well if you consider being selectively bred
with whoever the slaveowner decided, or having yourself or members of your
family sold out from under you ‘family life,’ I guess. ) And Bundy, when asked
to clarify his remarks, instead doubled down on them, when he repeated essentially the
same quotes as what he thinks about
when he drives by houses with open doors in Las Vegas. Since he said the same thing twice, it is clearly no minor slip of the tongue, but rather it is who he is.<br />
<br />
<br />
So what did Speaker Tobin do? Did he condemn Bundy’s remarks or try to distance
himself from them? <br />
<br />
<br />
No, he did not. In fact, he has said
nothing. CONSIDER, that even right wing flamethrowers Glenn Beck and Sean
Hannity condemned Bundy’s remarks over the past couple of days on their
shows! It speaks volumes about Tobin’s
lack of either judgment or decency when he has to be schooled by Glenn Beck and
Sean Hannity about why what Bundy said is offensive and wrong! <br />
<br />
<br />
So is this the only time Tobin has exhibited poor judgement and then instead of
condemning what ought to be condemned, just clammed up and tried to fade into
the background (despite being one of the most powerful politicians in the
state) and hope nobody will notice his silence? <br />
<br />
<br />
Sadly, no. Recently Andy Tobin brought
SB 1062 to the floor of the House for a vote, and supported it. SB 1062 you may recall, was the divisive bill that would have allowed businesses to discriminate
against anyone they saw fit to discriminate against by claiming a ‘religious
exemption’ to both state and federal anti-discrimination laws. In practice, this
law would have allowed businesses to discriminate in particular against gay
couples. Again, Andy Tobin didn’t see
why this was a bad thing. First, he brought it to the floor of the house. Then he voted for the bill. <br />
<br />
<br />
Of course SB 1062 immediately engendered a torrent of criticism, not only from
those targeted by the bill, but by many others and in particular the business
community. Businesses in Arizona
remembered very well the damage to the economy and reputation of the state from
SB 1070 several years ago and did not want a repeat (especially with the
obvious economic target and a threat by the NFL to move the Super Bowl next
year out of Arizona.) Three members of the legislature admitted that they had
made a mistake in supporting the bill and urged Governor Brewer to veto it,
which she did. <br />
<br />
<br />
Andy Tobin, however? Nowhere to be found. He said nothing about SB 1062 when it
became controversial, either supporting his own vote, or joining the members
who said their votes had been a mistake.
He was quiet as a mouse. <br />
<br />
<br />
This willingness to take the most extreme positions and then say nothing when
others who have taken them get into trouble would be bad enough in a Speaker (a
position that exerts leadership.) But
now Tobin wants to go to Washington. No,
he is not running for Congress in his district. Tobin is a resident of CD-4,
but he has decided to run in a district he does not live in, CD-1. Of course carpetbagging is nothing new to
Republicans in the district; For years rural Arizona was represented by Rick
Renzi, a Virginia resident who bought (but
only stayed in during infrequent campaign trips) a home in Flagstaff. Renzi
was later convicted of a number of felonies and sentenced to three years in
prison, but it hasn’t stopped the GOP from nominating Phoenix resident who
owned land in Munds Park Sydney Hay and Tucson resident who moved to Marana Jonathan
Paton in previous years. I guess they think to represent rural northeastern
Arizona you don’t actually have to live
in rural northeastern Arizona. <br />
<br />
<br />
This relates to the Bundy situation as well, I might add. I know a number of
cattle ranchers. They certainly do have their issues at times with the federal government, but all of them pay the
grazing fee. Mr. Bundy is nothing but a deadbeat who does not pay his taxes,
and most ranchers do appreciate that. But apparently living in the more urban
enclave of Prescott, Tobin doesn’t realize this. He might if he lived in the
real CD-1. <br />
<br />
<br />
It gets worse though. As a candidate for
Congress, Tobin was asked about the Paul Ryan budget that a lot of Republicans
in Congress are on record as supporting. The budget makes big changes and ultimately
big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, trying in particular to replace Medicare with
a privatized system of partially subsidized health care, where the government would
help seniors pay part of the cost of private insurance from an exchange. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Yeah, I know. If you follow GOP
Congressional logic, private exchanges with partial government subsidies are
better than Medicare. But, private exchanges with partial
government subsidies (the heart of the Affordable Care Act) are worse than
having no insurance. So put those
together and you have to wonder how long it will be before they just say that having no insurance is better than Medicare. </i> <br />
<br />
<br />
So as a potential member of Congress, Tobin was asked about the Ryan
budget. You can listen to his response
here: <a href="https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9mnjYajGk&hd=1%E2%80%9D">Andy
Tobin not answering the question.</a>
<br />
<br />
<br />
I suppose you might argue that he’s a politician and politicians are always cagey. But that is not so. Ann Kirkpatrick, the
congresswoman Tobin seeks to replace, has been quite clear that she opposes the
Ryan budget. Further, she also took on a President of her own party when she
said she would oppose any cuts to the Medicare Advantage program, which helps seniors who need or want it to
purchase higher quality medical insurance than just what they would get
directly from Medicare. Based on his
failures so far to take a position when things get tough, are you optimistic
that Andy Tobin would have the backbone to confront his own President or house
leadership if his own President or house leadership was wrong? That’s why we need Ann back—she’s not afraid
to make the tough call and reach across the aisle sometimes if she sees it’s in
the best interest of CD-1. <br />
<br />
<br />
Maybe the most telling example of why Andy Tobin is unfit to lead the district
is found in <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/28/divided-arizona-house-nears-budget-deal/6995315/"> the
budget he helped negotiate</a> . It does two
things that harm rural counties a lot. The first is to include a tax cut that
takes money away from counties. We know
that counties are already understaffed. As
I alluded to <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2006/04/my-grand-jury-experience.html">in my blog post about serving on a Grand Jury</a>, some of the court cases we got were years old.
Hard to see how laying off more people will make that kind of backlog anything
besides worse. The second is to
<b>CUT funds from rural highways</b> and divert them to urban districts. So much for somebody who seeks to represent
you. He apparently doesn’t know how bad some of the highways here can get, or
doesn’t care. Do you really want a CONGRESSMAN who shows a similar disregard
for the needs of a district he doesn’t live in? </div>
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-35329874402025074282014-03-28T22:34:00.000-07:002014-03-28T23:09:22.363-07:00The Nationalization of ElectionsThe idea of a representative democracy is that in contrast to a President who elected nationally, there will be Senators elected from the various states, and representing the interests of their states, and representatives who will likewise be elected from only a part of a state, and represent and look out for the interests of that part of their state. <br></br>
Throughout the history of the Republic, this has worked pretty well. Critics may argue that at times it has led to the funding of projects of limited value (such as a highway interchange that will serve a town of a few hundred people or a research project on a topic of dubious importance but directs funding to a particular college where the research will be carried out,) but in fact this has always been as conventional wisdom had it, an important part of government. Standard wisdom in an earlier day was that <a href="http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/blog/congress-pork-way-fix-government">"Political hacks used to say pork was the political grease that lubricated legislative deals."</a> <br></br>
This meant that it was possible to get enough votes for key legislation by including yes, some pet projects (though one man's 'pet project' may be another man's lifeline to the outside world; hardly any of the infamous 'pork' legislation did not in fact provide at least some benefit even if it was to a relatively small part of America; there are frankly a lot of towns that could be benefited by a new post office, a road paving or some other investment in infrastructure.<br></br>
What we see today, instead of members of Congress who are able to effectively represent their district and in the process get the necessary funding for improvements, are members of Congress who may not even be beholden to their districts at all. Big money has (especially since Citizens United) moved into the political arena in a major way, to where even members who raise millions of dollars on their own, may have it matched by groups that have one or two anonymous donors. In 2010, these groups were almost entirely working on behalf of the GOP, but by now there are a few working on behalf of Democratic candidates as well. <br></br>
Ironically, most of the members of Congress that these groups target are those in the middle. By now there are very few northeastern Republicans left (none at all from New England states in the House of Representatives) and only a couple of southern Democrats who come from districts that are not majority African-American. In particular, the northeastern Republicans have been replaced by Democrats who are almost all very liberal (so among the least likely Democrats to vote against the party line) and the southern Democrats have been replaced by very conservative Republicans who are similarly likely to march in lockstep. Since it was northeastern Republicans and Southern Democrats who traditionally were those most likely to vote for compromise or provide the key votes in moving legislation forward that might be of a bipartisan nature, what this means is that Congress is very polarized. To exacerbate this, most of the money is spent in 'swing districts' that are more likely to elect moderates to Congress. To cite one example, the district I live in changed partisan hands in 2008, 2010 and 2012. That makes it among the swingiest district in the country, and not surprisingly we see a great deal of political ad spending (almost all negative.) Members elected in a district like this, who might not be all that ideological otherwise, are pushed to toe their own party line because the attack ads will come regardless so in accordance with the old saying that 'if you will call me the devil whether I am or not, then I might as well be the devil' often they find the best path to re-election is to fire up their base (since the other side will turn out against them anyway) so therefore they are more likely to swing to that side.<br></br>
In the short term this favors Republicans, if only because Republicans controlled redistricting so well after the 2010 election that they were able to draw a map that elected a Republican majority in 2012 even though <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/republicans-win-congress-as-democrats-get-most-votes.html">Democrats got more votes FOR CONGRESS</a> in 2012. In 2020, it will be a Presidential election year though so it is unlikely that Republicans will be able to maintain the kind of control over legislatures that they had after 2010, so their control of the House, if unlikely to be broken before then, may well be broken after 2020. In the long term however, the change is likely to simply harm communities across most of America. That is because the people who donate to the large Super-PACs are mainly national donors (even if we don't know all of what who donated, we do know that they are people with a national, rather than a local, agenda.) Since pork is also now banned, there is virtually nothing that a member of Congress can do that will win more votes in their district than making sure they are in the good graces of the Super-PACs who are running ads in their districts. As they will be attacked by the other side's PAC's, their main goal will be to give their own financial backers what they are asking for. In such a scenario, individual voters are less and less important, and that is the real tragedy of what we have come to. Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-83052287980045953802014-01-01T21:04:00.004-08:002014-01-02T00:09:07.357-08:00New Year's predictions-- 2014JANUARY: Congress will convene to discuss an extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans who have been trashing President Obama’s economic record and saying the economy hasn’t been recovering fast enough, will suddenly turn on a dime faster than the Communist party in the days of Stalin, suddenly arguing that the economy is recovering so fast that we don’t need to extend them anymore because there are enough jobs available for everyone. At least until the vote is taken, at which point they will finish a complete 360 and go back to trashing the President on the economy (“Who, me? I didn’t say that!”)<br></br>
Also in January: Edward Snowden will stir up another controversy when it is revealed that the NSA has been spying on singer Katy Perry. It will turn out, however, that some cheapskate in the intelligence division just wanted to listen to her songs without paying for the download.<br></br>
FEBRUARY: The Seattle Seahawks will beat the Denver Broncos in a snowy Super Bowl. Seattle head coach Pete Carroll will sustain a concussion when players will try to give him the traditional Gatorade shower, but in a cold Giants stadium the Gatorade in the bucket will have frozen solid. (KLONK!! oops.)<br></br>
MARCH: Another government shutdown looming, John Boehner will tell the House Sergeant at Arms to lock the doors if he sees Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) coming to speak to house members.<br></br>
Also in March: The Tenth Circuit Court in Denver confirms a lower court ruling that Utah’s same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional, leading to a cascade of states allowing same-sex couples to wed. Opponents of marital equality will quote the Bible verse about how the penalty for homosexuality is death by stoning, but will be so out of touch with young people with more liberal attitudes that the young people think ‘death by stoning’ means a whole lot of marijuana.<br></br>
APRIL: We will finally learn why Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson keeps shooting himself in the foot, when it is revealed that he hides a fifth of Jack Daniels deep inside that beard and takes it out for a quick swallow when nobody’s looking.<br></br>
MAY: Surprise drug testing will be implemented at the Kentucky Derby. Owners will breathe a sigh of relief when they find out it is for the jockeys, not the horses.<br></br>
JUNE: Kanye West will get married to Kim Kardashian. The smiling couple will be photographed with their child, North West, as Kanye gives Kim instead of a diamond, a platinum ring with his image stamped on it. <br></br>
JULY: Kanye West and Kim Kardashian will announce their impending divorce. It will turn out that the ring was really made out of pewter. By this time though, she will announce she is pregnant with their second child, Wild West.<br></br>
Also in July: It will be revealed that Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-not the sharpest tool in the shed) was once hospitalized with Naegleria fowleri, the notorious brain-eating amoeba. Fortunately, Gohmert survived the encounter and even got elected to Congress, as a true half-wit.<br></br>
AUGUST: There will be renewed interest in Mars, as NASA announces proof of life on the red planet after a Mars rover stumbles across a mysterious abandoned dome. Nothing about the design of the building will look familiar to anyone on the earth, except for the Dallas Cowboys logo on the back wall.<br></br>
SEPTEMBER:The band One Direction will announce a break-up. Their fans bid the price of Hari-kiri kits on the internet up to $10,000 apiece.<br></br>
OCTOBER: A three dimensional printer will bring about a huge breakthrough in the field of 'bioprinting,' and will print from a model a fully functional inner ear which will be transplanted to a patient who was formerly deaf. Unfortunately, the breakthrough will occur at the height of the campaign season and after a few days of listening to radio and television, the patient will ask the team of surgeons to take it out again.<br></br>
NOVEMBER: It being late in the year to make headlines, the North Korean regime will launch a man into space. However they will be embarrassed when the astronaut realizes he is beyond the reach of Kim Jong Un’s security police, and intentionally brings the lander down in a corn field in Nebraska instead of the intended landing site in North Korea. <br></br>
DECEMBER: In his Christmas message, Pope Francis will continue to question income inequality and talk about the need to help the poor, the sick, the destitute and the elderly. A pastor at a Dallas megachurch will ask his congregation to pray for the Pope to convert and become a Christian.<br></br>
Also in December: Santa Claus will be inundated with the same unexpected increase in volume that affected FedEx and UPS this year, and will still be hustling around delivering presents on Christmas day and on December 26.
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-3174383876248998892013-10-19T20:36:00.000-07:002013-10-19T22:45:13.486-07:00Cruise vs. Cruz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5HZsM26C8Og/UmNLYKoL8II/AAAAAAAAAIU/i2ndH3Kp8n0/s1600/TedCruz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5HZsM26C8Og/UmNLYKoL8II/AAAAAAAAAIU/i2ndH3Kp8n0/s320/TedCruz.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5IJaJvIXC8g/UmNMJVOi9xI/AAAAAAAAAIc/mXc6m0p8WU4/s1600/tomcruise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5IJaJvIXC8g/UmNMJVOi9xI/AAAAAAAAAIc/mXc6m0p8WU4/s320/tomcruise.jpg" /></a></div>
I thought it might be a good idea to help people tell the difference between Senator Ted Cruz, who led the recent shutdown of the Federal Government, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/shutdown-to-cost-us-billions-analysts-say-while-eroding-confidence.html">costing $24 billion and harming the economy</a> with actor Tom Cruise, who at least in recent years has exhibited other kinds of bizarre behavior. <br></br>
Here are some differences between Cruz (pictured in the first photo) and Cruise (pictured in the second.)<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise starred in ‘Mission Impossible.’<br></br>
Ted Cruz just led ‘Mission Impossible,’ and yes, it was impossible.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise is a member of a religion that a lot of people consider a dangerous cult.<br></br>
Ted Cruise is a member of a political faction that a lot of people consider a dangerous cult.<br></br>
<br></br>
While on the set of ‘All You Need Is Kill’ , a movie being shot in London, Tom Cruise had his daughter flown in so he could show her around.<br></br>
While on the floor of the Senate, Ted Cruz read his daughters ‘Green Eggs and Ham,’ and missed the point.<br></br>
<br></br>
Katie Holmes has questioned Tom Cruise’s mental state.<br></br>
The country has questioned Ted Cruz’ mental state.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise went nuts on national TV one time and jumped on Oprah’s couch.<br></br>
Ted Cruz went nuts on national TV and jumped in front of all the TV cameras.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise has played a jerk in several movies, including ‘Cocktail,’ ‘Jerry McGuire’ and ‘Rain Man.’ It seems to come naturally to him. <br></br>
It comes naturally to Ted Cruz, too.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise’s first movie was ‘Endless Love.’<br></br>
Ted Cruz’s first stunt during the shutdown was ‘endless speech.’<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise flew a fighter jet in ‘Top Gun.’<br></br>
Ted Cruz supported the sequester, which has grounded all the fighter jets flown by the Navy Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds.<br></br>
<br></br>
A forum on the Razzie Award website once described Tom Cruise as a ‘world class wacko.’<br></br>
John McCain called Ted Cruz a ‘wacko bird.’<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise, in a 2006 interview with Parade Magazine, described his father as ‘a merchant of chaos.’<br></br>
Ted Cruz fits that description.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise gave nothing other than expenses for Suri to Katie Holmes in their divorce agreement.<br></br>
Ted Cruz helped make sure that in the end Republicans had such a weak hand that they got nothing other than $3 billion for a dam in Kentucky in their agreement to reopen the government.<br></br>
<br></br>
Tom Cruise once appeared in ‘Interview with a Vampire.’<br></br>
Ted Cruz’s shutdown helped suck the blood out of the economy in a lot of places around the country.<br></br>
<br></br>
Via Perii Maestas Calles: <br></br>
Tom Cruise is a dramatic actor.<br></br>
Ted Cruz is a comedic actor.
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-27646229791344678302013-02-02T08:36:00.002-08:002013-02-02T08:36:50.201-08:00Liberal Groundhog Day predictionsOn Groundhog day:<br></br>
President Obama will not see his shadow, because he is facing resolutely forward to meet and take on the challenges of building a better future.<br></br>
Hard to say whether the President's GOP critics are seeing their shadows as they are running from raincloud to raincloud and standing in every little squall they can find as they insist there will be four more years of winter.<br></br>
Lance Armstrong is seeing his shadow. And he is standing very much alone.<br></br>
Bill Clinton is seeing his shadow, and he is quickly doing the dishes, vacuuming the floor and folding laundry, because his wife called to say that she is on her way home from the office.<br></br>
New Secretary of State John Kerry isn't seeing his shadow, because he's still standing in Hillary's shadow.<br></br>
Rush Limbaugh is seeing his shadow. The big, red, round nose, afro wig and size 22 clown shoes are easily visible.<br></br>
Former Senator Jim DeMint may still be able to see his shadow, but it is fading rapidly.<br></br>
New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg is seeing his shadow. It looks like Cory Booker.
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-79134588471510417932013-01-23T23:27:00.001-08:002013-01-23T23:51:02.494-08:00A Liberal Contemplating the National Debt and SpendingIn the coming months, it is clear that we will have a big debate about government spending and the debt.<br></br>
And while I have often debated Republicans who advocate deep cuts in spending on various social or entitlement programs, <b>these Republicans do have a point.</b> And it's a point that we on the left made not too many years ago (during the Bush years.) We can't continue to run trillion dollar deficits and continue ignoring the pending storm clouds like the proverbial grasshopper. The winter of unsustainable debt, along with the crushing austerity that it will bring, isn't that far off. And to be honest, in everything from insisting on the Bush tax cuts remaining in place for the middle class to hardly even mentioning spending, I can see where the Obama administration is still fiddling when in fact we should all be working together like the ants to identify what we can to do bring the budget into balance again. We can make the debt if not vanish, at least become manageable, but not by just ignoring it. Granted, the periodic GOP gambit of threatening to default on the debt and not pay our bills would be a disaster if it happened and won't solve anything, but nevertheless they do have a point about the failure to address the debt and should be given credit for insisting that we pay attention to it.<br></br>
In fact, we are fortunate that right now (partly because the economy has been so lousy for the past five years) interest rates are at historic lows and have been there for a long time. That means that the interest we pay just to service the debt is also very low. Imagine when interest rates go back up-- we could be paying a substantial portion of our tax not to actually do anything or benefit anybody, except to pay those who hold our I.O.U.'s for continuing to hold them. <br></br>
My main areas of disagreement with the right have focused on two areas: 1. their insistence that the deficit is a function of spending alone (while conspicuously ignoring revenue,) and 2. that we must balance the budget on the backs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other government services that benefit working people. <br></br>
The revenue area is one that was somewhat addressed by the recent 'fiscal cliff' agreement but still should have been addressed farther. The right tends to focus only one side of the budget. But in fact a budget has two sides: what you take in and what you pay out. When you spend more than you make, you run a deficit. In that case, it is necessary to look both at how to cut spending and also if there are feasible ways to increase revenue. For example, when our household ran a deficit (in fact we ended up losing a home to foreclosure during the housing crisis a few years ago) we did cut back on our spending, but I also took a second job early in the morning that brings in some extra income. Both of those things were part of the equation towards fixing our household budget. But to rule out earning extra income would have made no sense then, and we ended up making extra income instead. That said, the 'fiscal cliff' tax deal allowed only the taxes on the wealthy to revert to the Clinton rates, but kept the 'middle class tax cuts' intact (except for the payroll tax cut that was implemented under Obama, and which I thought was a mistake then and am glad that it is gone.) I am a middle class taxpayer. And in fact, I enjoy, for example, my expanded child tax credit every year. BUT-- I'd frankly rather have gone back to the Clinton tax rates now than have less Social Security available when I retire. The deal we got is expected to raise <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/02/politics/fiscal-cliff/index.html">$600 billion in revenue over the next ten years</a>. Granted, it's better to have $600 billion if the goal is to bring down the deficit than not to have it, but the truth is that repealing ALL of the Bush tax cuts would have <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/12/05/Repealing-Tax-Cuts-Would-Meet-4-Trillion-Savings-Goal.aspx#page1">raised four trillion dollars in revenue</a> over the next decade. Getting 15% of the revenue that would have happened if we did nothing convinces me that to a degree, the administration doesn't take the deficit as a whole seriously enough. <br></br>
Of course even if we did have $4 trillion in new revenue, that would only be enough to pay a quarter of the existing debt, not to mention any more deficit spending going forward if nothing is done on the spending side. So in other words, while revenue is part of the equation (and I refuse to even debate anyone who is so ideological that they ignore it completely) it is the lesser part of the equation. Even though most of the recent deficit spending can be justified, the money was still spent. For example, while we may not like TARP and the auto bailout or the Stimulus, those things did rescue an economy that was headed straight to Hades and bring it back to at least a slow rate of growth. But like an emergency loan to repair a vehicle that is needed to drive to work or to pay for a necessary medical procedure, once that is done the loan is still there and must be repaid. Other recent spending was probably less necessary (for example we wasted a trillion dollars to install a government in Iraq that is more friendly to Iran than it is to the U.S.) but that too, was charged to the national credit card and must be repaid. And beyond that, the driver for spending going forward is not one time spending like the Iraq war and the Stimulus, but rather ongoing expenditures in which the budget is just too large to support with what we are bringing in.<br></br>
When we do discuss spending cuts, we on the left love to point to two areas: the War budget (known officially as the 'Defense' budget, although the United States hasn't been attacked by a foreign power on our soil since World War II, and not seriously threated by a foreign invasion since the War of 1812); and corporate welfare (a catch-all phrase that includes tax breaks to industries or specific corporations, direct payouts or subsidies, and contracts frequently championed by lobbyists that often pay corporations to do work that is less important to the people that the work is supposed to benefit than it is to the corporation's bottom line.)<br></br>
And there is certainly ample room to cut in both of these areas. Perhaps nothing better exemplifies both than spending that Congress, under the influence of defense industry lobbyists, has appropriated for weapons systems that even the Pentagon has said they don't need, don't want and have no use for. Examples include the continued production of M-1 Abrams tanks, despite the fact that the army already has six hundred of them and says that is more than enough, the continued production and use of the C-27J Spartan transport aircraft, despite the fact that it has been rendered obsolete by the C-130 and the Pentagon wants to retire those still in operation (and certainly does not want any more,) and perhaps the poster child for this kind of thing, the F-35 fighter jet, an expensive boondoggle that has already been overbudget by billions of dollars (partly because it was rushed into production at the behest of lobbyists working for Lockheed before the prototypes had been fully tested) but now has literally become 'impossible to kill,' with accessories like an extra engine costing billions of dollars that the Marines (who would be operating the jet!-- when did Marines fly jets?) have said they have no use for. Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) deserves some credit here, for doggedly trying to get the funding for the extra engine out of the defense bill, but somehow it is never put to rest and keeps threating to come back.<br></br>
<b>HERE'S AN IDEA: What if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had something like a 'line-item veto' for the defense budget?</b> If they found an item they just didn't want tucked in there, they could line item it out, with 50% of the money saved going back to the U.S. Treasury and the other 50% we would allow them to transfer to other parts of their budget as they saw a need. I'm sure the defense industry lobbyists would still make their case but since the Joint Chiefs are not elected they don't have to worry about which congressional district it's made in, or about campaign donations from defense contractors.<br></br>
Beyond that, the United States spends over $700 billion per year on 'Defense,' which is five times what China spends, ten times what Russia spends and in fact more than China, Russia and the next ten nations after them(most of whom are our allies) all combined. As we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, just throwing money at the problem doesn't win wars anyway (I don't know what the defense budget for the Taliban is, but I'm sure it wouldn't be enough to afford even a single F-35 fighter.) The truth is, we could cut our defense budget fully in half and still spend more than twice as much as China and way more than anybody else. Even if you don't like that idea, the truth is that there is plenty of room to cut out a lot of the expensive military hardware we have stockpiled. Part of the problem is that in fact we do spend a lot of it to 'maintain a presence overseas.' Why? Why should the U.S. be jumping in and trying to solve everyone else's problems? Unless it is a matter of American national security, there is no reason for us to be deployed all over the world-- or more bluntly, to spend what it takes to be deployed all over the world. We can't afford it anymore. <br></br>
Corporate welfare is not limited to Defense contractors, of course. Healthy industries like big agribusiness, the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry are the beneficiaries of billions of dollars in government subsidies, tax breaks and special deals. They all employ lobbyists on K Street who make sure that those breaks and subsidies continue in any new bill, and perhaps even grow or multiply. I could give a long list of such breaks, but let's focus on one in particular: Medicare was actually solvent until the 2004 prescription drug bill. As I wrote at the time, <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2005/11/turkey-stuffed-with-prescription-pills.html">the bill actually made it harder, not easier for a lot of seniors to get their medication</a>, but beyond that it increased the cost to Medicare by $400 billion over the last decade but is projected to increase the cost by <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2004/01/15useconomics-aaron">$1.5 to $2 trillion over this coming decade.</a> While ostensibly this is going to help seniors pay for drugs, in fact most of it is a subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry. This does NOT decrease the cost of drugs, folks! The subsidy is supposed to hold the price of drugs down, but in fact the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to selectively gouge Americans and charge us higher prices (whether we pay or the government pays through Medicare, Medicaid or some other program) than the price of the SAME DRUG, from the SAME FACTORY in any other country! And not by a little either, but <a href="http://rxoutcomesadviser.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/drug-prices/"><b>SEVERAL TIMES MORE!!</b></a> That is because tucked into the prescription drug bill was a provision making it much more difficult for Americans to reimport prescription drugs from Canada or elsewhere. I do know people who do, in fact, go to Mexico to buy prescription drugs and pay a fraction of the cost (even though their insurance won't pay for it there) that they pay in the U.S. for the same unopened container that they would buy in the U.S., but the prescription drug bill <b>prevents Medicare from negotiation of prices with suppliers as the governments in other countries do</b>. This is truly corporate welfare at its worst: hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies on one hand to a very profitable industry to supposedly make their products cheaper, but in fact they turn around and price-gouge with the other hand, and our government BY LAW lets them do it! And don't tell me that the pharmaceutical companies are selling at a loss in Canada and Europe and everyplace else either. They aren't, or they wouldn't be selling there at all. They are just raking it in here from both customers <b>and</b> the government, because the bill that allowed them to do it was written on K Street by their own lobbyists.<br></br>
<b>WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT</b>: First, we should immediately re-open the prescription drug bill and allow Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical manufacturers. Also pare down or eliminate the subsidies. If we need to reign in the long term growth of spending of Medicare (and we do) this is where we should begin. And then after that, take a similar look at subsidies and special tax breaks that benefit agribusiness, the energy industry (both green energy AND big oil,) banking, and yes, those subsidies that we have heard kicked around for years that pay companies to move jobs offshore. If it can't be justified get rid of it. And just to make sure, don't trust Congress to do it-- they are too mesmerized by lobbyists. <b>Create something like <a href="http://www.brac.gov/">BRAC</a>, except for corporate welfare that would have the ability to get rid of this stuff.</b><br></br>
<b>OK, so right about now I sound like the typical liberal</b>. I've talked about raising taxes, and I've talked about cutting defense and corporate welfare. And we do need to look at those things, but our deficit is so massive that we can't get rid of it only by raisng taxes and cutting things I want to see cut. What else?<br></br>
Well, let's be honest here. So-called 'entitlements; have grown pretty much unrestrained for decades. They aren't really 'entitlements' because they have been earned-- people paid into Social Security and Medicare for their whole lives, with the promise that it would be there. I have. I'm fifty, and got my first job when I was 16. And I expect Social Security and Medicare to be there when I'm old enough. However, as we can see from the travails of state pension plans, you can't expect to put tens thousands of dollars into a plan and take hundreds of thousands out unless 1) you do fully fund the plan every year (one reason I was frankly unhappy with the payroll tax cut and am glad it was allowed to expire) and 2) you either get a very good return rate on your investments or you have some mechanism for slowing down the rate of growth of expenditures. <br></br>
Since we already began discussing Medicare under the paragraph on corporate welfare and the pharmaceutical industry, let's talk some more about it. To begin with, Obamacare does not take money out of Medicare. What it does is slow the growth of Medicare by $750 billion over the next ten years. The same $750 billion was in Paul Ryan's budget. Instead of scaring seniors about it, explain that all it does is hold down growth. This is a good thing, but it is insufficient (even if we also rewrote the drug bill into something sane.) Other fixes include getting rid of the cap on income subject to the payroll tax (also applies to Social Security,) cutting payments to providers, means testing for wealthier enrollees and increasing the eligibility age to 67. Personally, I don't have a problem with increasing the cap on income subject to the payroll tax from its present $119,000 since even if we do the payroll tax is still a flat tax (shouldn't conservatives love a flat tax?) However, while under this scenario everyone would still be eligible to receive Medicare, under means-testing, whereby wealthier retirees would received reduced or no benefits on the theory that they could pay their own bills, we have an inherent contradiction. Paying taxes for something we may not use is normal (for example, I pay tax to support the Child Support Enforcement division even though I personally don't get child support.) However, if we raise or eliminate the payroll tax cap, then it is doubling up on the same group of taxpayers if we also go to means testing (yeah, I know-- 'soak the rich' is popular, but can we honestly say it would be fair to raise a tax that is dedicated to paying for a benefit that right now everyone can get, and then turn around and tell them that by the way, they won't qualify for the benefit either? EITHER raising the tax cap OR means-testing is probably on the table but even I would be very much against doing both, as a matter of fundamental fairness. Cutting payments to providers is already in Medicare laws. We haven't been following through on it (i.e. we suspend the rule by passing the so-called 'doc fix' every year.) The concern is that if doctors and hospitals are underpaid then quality will suffer, or perhaps they will get out of the business altogether. There is, however, an easy fix to this which we should be consdering. Living in a rural area, I can see that there is a severe shortage of doctors. So why now go to more of a system of physician assistants, nurses and local clinics (as opposed to hospitals) that can offer medical care for all but the most complex of conditions? To some degree, that is happening now. But <b>accelerate this change</b>. Empower P.A.'s and nurses to do more, pay them accordingly (though probably less than the full price a doctor gets today from Medicare) and the same with smaller, more localized clinics. Train more P.A.'s. This will help bring the overall cost of healthcare down, so that maybe the 'doc fix' won't be needed. <b>FURTHER</b> let's not forget that the reason it is necessary now is because of the number of uninsured patients who show up in emergency rooms and then can't pay. As Obamacare kicks in (whether you like Obamacare or not, this will be true) there will be fewer uninsured people so providers won't get stuck with not getting paid as often. This again will cut costs, making a Medicare payment that keeps to the present schedule more feasible. Maybe the 'doc fix' could be phased out over time. One other proposal that has been raised for Medicare: raising the eligibility age to 67. The logic here is that the retirement age for full Social Security benefits is being raised to 67, so why not do the same with Medicare? There is a good reason why not to, however. Technically this would save the government money because in theory people would pay into the system for two years longer and then draw from the system for two years less. In reality what this means is that the poeple not entering the Medicare pool would be the 65 and 66 year olds, who are relatively the most healthy (meaning the cheapest to cover) so it could drive the cost up for everyone else as the average Medicare patient would require more resources. Conversely, they are generally less healthy than younger workers who are in their private insurance pool, so this could raise insurance premiums for everyone. Not much of a benefit. Further, with the Social Security retirement age going up to 67, many of them will remain working and earning a paycheck (and therefore paying payroll taxes (!!) ) until they reach age 67 anyway. <br></br>
As mentioned a moment ago, the retirement age for full Social Security benefits was raised from 65 the last time a Social Security reform bill was passed, during the Clinton administration, and will be 67 beginning with my classmates and I, who were born in 1962. The logic here is pretty straightforward: people today live longer than they used to. Many people retire at 65 and live to be 90 or 100 or even older. This means drawing Social Security in some cases for virtually as long as the person paid into it (even though what they paid in is a fraction of what they are drawing.) Clearly this is not sustainable as it is presently structured, especially with a declining pool of younger workers. So some people have proposed revisiting the full retirement age again, possibly raising it 70. I have mixed feelings about that. Today, I am pretty healthy and knowing how long 20 years is, I don't believe I would be unable to work until 70. And if I became unable to work sooner than that, Social Security has a disability benefit that covers people who become sick earlier. However, I am a college professor. Physically, this is an undemanding job. But some people who work hard physical labor, like miners and construction workers, may not have a body that can last until 70. <b>So maybe the answer is to put retirement into a range, say between 67-70, in which it is set to 70, but where people who spend more than 10 years working in certain jobs get a year credit for each 10 years worked at that job. </b> Also,the President (causing great consternation among the AARP, made a concession during the 'fiscal cliff' talks which went nowhere because at the time Boehner was hearing from Republicans that they would refuse to vote for anything that included a tax increase. Obama's concession was not about taxes however, it was about using the so-called 'chained CPI' to calculate cost of living adjustments for Social Security. The regular CPI that is used now is based on comparing the cost of the same exact items month after month. But the chained CPI is adjusted by the rate at which folks quit buying those same items and substitute cheaper ones. For example, when the price of milk gets too high, a certain number of people will stop buying their favorite brand and begin buying the store brand, which is cheaper. The government has a pretty good handle now on how that happens, and the chained CPI takes this into account,so it is a lower rate than the traditional CPI. Doing that alone could over the long term save substantial money on Social Security without actually cutting anybody's benefits.<br></br>
<b>What about government itself, then?</b> After all, if you ask a conservative they will say that the prime example of too much spending is not any program, but the Federal government itself. The Federal government does contain layers and layers of bureaucracy, often engaging in fights with each other over regulatory ‘turf.’ In fact, turf battles between agencies are often a symptom of too many people trying to do too little work, because if we had the right number of people working on problems then they wouldn’t be trying to get more work. So I would agree that there is some cutting within the Federal government that can be done, but I’d also caution that every agency or department was set up for a reason, and every regulation was similarly written for a reason, so I reject the approach of just naming entire departments that somebody doesn’t like and doing away with it. As one example, the other day someone told me that they think we should do away with the Department of Commerce; but that would include the weather service, which means that nobody would get any tornado warnings. In other words, think these things through instead of just blithely and casually tossing entire departments out. And in fact a lot of regulation is painfully necessary, as we have been learning from the investigation of the Upper Big Branch mine accident, in which the regulations that were supposed to be followed, weren’t. The answer to that is not to do away with regulation so other mines can be just as unsafe. <br></br>
So what can we do to cut government regulation (which = government spending to enforce?) Well, we have an answer right here in Arizona. Following the giant Rodeo-Chedeski fire on the Mogollon rim in 2002, there was a lot of finger pointing. The timber industry blamed environmentalists for opposing logging that might have created natural breaks in the forest. The environmentalists blamed cattle ranchers for destroying the natural habitat in the forest and fostering erosion along stream beds that helped dry out the soil and eventually the trees. Everybody blamed the government (and with good justification) for decades of mismanagement, especially the policy that was in place for many years of putting all fires out quickly, thereby allowing the growth of thick underbrush that in a healthy forest would be burned out periodically by smaller fires instead of accumulating over decades to help feed a monstrous fire when it happened. But a funny thing came out of that. Stakeholders in the management of the forests, including environmentalists, loggers, ranchers, state, county and local governments and local residents came together in what became known as the <a href=”http://www.4fri.org/index.html”>Four forest restoration intitative</a> (4FRI for short) and wrote their own rules and regulations for how the forest should be managed. And, it’s worked pretty well. The forest is healthier because of logging which thins, but does not destroy, the forest. And a couple of years ago the program showed its success. The Wallow fire burned even more acres than the Rodeo-Chedeski, but it was much less destructive, largely because of forest thinning that limited how much fuel was available at any one time. <b>So here is what that gives us: Regulation may be necessary, but the success of 4FRI shows that it doesn’t have to be the Federal government writing the regulations</b>. 4FRI has the blessing of the Federal government, even though they are not involved. If representatives from the logging industry and the Sierra club can sit down and write a better set of logging regulations than the Federal government could have come up with, then perhaps the same could be done in other places. In that case we would have regulation but not necessarily regulation written by the Federal Government. If so then that would be one area where the government could be cut.<br></br>
In any case, the adage about spending our grandchildren's money is correct, and we do have to fix the problem. Divided government necessitates that for it to be fixed anytime soon, both parties will have to put aside ideologically mandated solutions and figure out a path forward together, or we really will be the grasshopper, stuck out in the cold with nothing to eat when winter does arrive.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-11208854197680454722013-01-07T17:25:00.000-08:002013-01-07T18:31:46.604-08:00Elitists in the Senate don't want an enlisted man in charge at the PentagonThe President has decided to stick by his original intent to nominate former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, as the new Secretary of Defense, to replace Leon Panetta.<br></br>
Many Senators, especially among Hagel's former Republican colleagues are gearing up to oppose him. The truth is that whatever other issues they may have (and we will look at those,) there is one underlying fact: Chuck Hagel, if confirmed will be something that other Secretaries of Defense have not been. <b>A combat veteran and an enlisted man rather than an officer</b>. Hagel rose to the rank of sergeant and served in Vietnam, as a squad leader, where he was awarded the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and a commendation, as well as two purple hearts.<br></br>
Fundamentally, that's what it comes down to. The Senators who will be sitting in judgement of Chuck Hagel are largely Ivy League educated, and often had things handed to them along the way. If they did serve in the military, they were officers, not 'grunts,' as enlisted soldiers are sometimes called. So they were much more comfortable confirming Secretaries of Defense like the past several, i.e. Leon Panetta (who was an army intelligence officer,) Robert Gates (who went directly into the CIA,) Donald Rumsfeld (an officer and flight instructor in the peacetime navy,) Bill Cohen (who was never in the military) William Perry (who was briefly an enlisted man in the peacetime military but later became an officer,) Les Aspin (an officer who served during Vietnam as a systems analyst in the Pentagon,) Dick Cheney(who subsisted on several college deferments to avoid going to Vietnam, though as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush and later Vice President he was perfectly agreeable to sending other people off to fight,) Frank Carlucci (a naval officer who never saw combat) and Caspar Weinberger (a captain on Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff who never saw combat.) <b>IN FACT, IF CHUCK HAGEL BECOMES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE HE WOULD BE THE FIRST SOLDIER TO GO THROUGH HIS CAREER AS AN ENLISTED MAN EVER TO HOLD THE OFFICE!</b> He would also be the first combat veteran since Elliot Richardson, a Nixon administration official who led a platoon at Normandy as a young lieutanant. Later, after he had served as Secretary of Defense, Richardson became the Attorney General and showed he had much the same stuff as Hagel when he resigned rather than fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor on direct orders from the President. Even Richardson was an officer, however. The idea of an enlisted man giving orders to the entire military is upsetting and shocking to elitists in the Senate who believe that a military man must at least have received a commission before daring to stand before them and ask permission to serve in the office.<br></br>
Traditionally, Presidents have had the right to select their cabinet members, with the term, 'advice and consent of the Senate,' mainly a formality. In fact, in the past century, only three cabinet nominees were not approved by the Senate. In 1925, Calvin Coolidge nominated Charles B. Warren for Attorney General. The Senate rejected Warren over his ties to the 'sugar trust,' a consortium of sugar companies that had been attempting to gain monopolistic control over the industry. The Senate rejected him, 41-39 (with over a dozen Senators abstaining.) Coolidge stupidly re-nominated Warren, and the Senate rejected him again. <br></br>
In 1959, President Eisenhower nominated Louis Strauss, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss, as head of the AEC had overseen a monthlong hearing which resulted in the revokation of the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been the director of the Manhattan Project over Oppenheimer's political views. In 1954, when the hearing was held, the United States was still in the grip of McCarthyism, but by 1959 things had changed so much that Strauss' preoccupation with Oppenheimer and previous anti-communist witch hunt were held against him by many Senators, particularly those who saw in Strauss a stand-in for McCarthy, who many of them remembered and not fondly. Strauss didn't help his own case with his abrasive personality, arguing with members of the Senate who were questioning him. In the end, he was rejected by the Senate on a 49-46 vote.<br></br>
In 1989, George H.W. Bush nominated Senator John Tower as Secretary of Defense. The Senate itself has always been considered a 'safe' place to go for a nominee, and that is what Bush thought, as Tower was a sitting Senator and Senators were generally more than happy to vote for a member of their own body, knowing them well (and in addition sometimes wanting to keep collegial relations because one day many of them might be nominees for cabinet positions.) What he miscalculated on was that Senators might know their own members too well. Senators generally don't air each other's dirty laundry to the press for obvious reasons, but as a nominee, it didn't take long for Tower's reputation for womanizing and heavy drinking to become an issue. In other words, Senators may know the nominee, but they may know personally issues that could disqualify him without having to root around and find those things. That was the case with Tower, who was rejected by a 53-47 vote.<br></br>
Despite strong partisanship following the 2000 election, only two of George W. Bush's nominees even faced much questioning over their appointment. The only one who was opposed even by a majority of Democrats was Attorney General John Ashcroft, who won a 58-42 confirmation vote after issues were raised over his past refusal to enforce court orders on desegregation and other issues. Later during Bush's presidency, the Senate blocked one of his nominees, John Bolton as Ambassador to the U.N. over concern that Bolton's abrasive style and inflammatory rhetoric might not be suited to the position; Bush made a recess appointment and appointed Bolton to the position anyway.<br></br>
In 2008, President Obama, despite having a couple of nominees who had to step down before they had a hearing over allegations of scandal unrelated to either the President or the positions they were nominated for, was able to get the Senate to confirm all of his nominees (the most controversial probably being Eric Holder.) But two weeks ago, Susan Rice, who the President wanted to nominate for Secretary of Defense, stepped down after it would be clear that she would be blocked by the Senate over questions related to faulty information she apparently received and relayed regarding the attack on the Benghazi consulate in September. As soon as that happened, attention turned to Hagel, who was even then rumored to be in the running for Secretary of Defense. Hagel is not only a former Senator, but a former Republican Senator, though one who was known for being willing to speak his mind and not necessarily constrained by party orthodoxy; for example Hagel, despite voting for the resolution in 2002 that was used by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq war, was one of the first Republicans to openly regret his vote and speak out against the war. At times his bluntness has gotten him in trouble, for example in 1998, he criticized James Hormel, President Clinton's nominee to serve as ambassador to Luxembourg, as "openly, aggressively gay." However, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/dont-judge-chuck-hagel-by-1998-comment-85806.html?hp=l8">Hagel has apologized to Hormel and said that he was wrong and is now fully committed to supporting the rights of the LGBT community</a>, and while Hormel originally was skeptical he has now accepted Hagel's apology. Hagel has said that if nominated he would continue to fully implement the repeal of 'Don't ask don't tell' that the Defense Department is now enforcing. While he could get some questions over this, I doubt if that would sink his nomination, since many people have over time changed their position on a number of issues including gay rights, and that includes some of Hagel's Senate colleagues (remember that in 1993, Bill Clinton settled for DADT because Congress wouldn't pass a law allowing openly gay members to serve in the military; but two years ago Congress did just that at President Obama's request, and quite a few members who were present in 1993 voted for it two years ago but probably would not have then.) Far better for Hagel to just say, as he has in effect done, "I was wrong," and move on.<br></br>
A bigger issue with some members of the Senate is likely to be officially Hagel's stances on Israel and Iran. In fact, Hagel has several times expressed support for Israel, but has often criticized the power of the Israeli lobby in the U.S. Well, he's right. If the pro-Israel lobby wasn't so strong, we might not have seen so much opposition to Hagel for just cricitizing them. Hagel has openly opposed Iraeli settlement policies in the West Bank (something that President Obama opposes too) and in fact he is also correct that as long as Iraelis are building settlements on the West Bank, they are in effect rendering any kind of a 'two state solution' impossible. Hagel's opponents have taken to smearing him as a result as an anti-Semite. This is not unusual treatment for anyone who speaks out against Israeli policies (I've experienced it myself even though I was raised in a Jewish household) but even former Secretary of State William Cohen, himself both a Jew and a Republican, has <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/hagel-allies-launch-counter-attack-85356.html">defended Hagel against this charge</a><br></br>
Hagel has also been skeptical of U.S. involvement in foreign wars and opposed both the troop surge in Iraq and the continued deployment in Afghanistan. Hagel is also on record as being skeptical of military operations against Iran, believing that it is much easier to get into a war than to get out of one. For this reasons, he wants to give sanctions a chance to work before contemplating military action in Iran or anyplace else.<br></br>
<font size=6><b>THAT'S WHY WE NEED A COMBAT SOLDIER AS SECRETARY OF DEFNSE!!</b></font size><br></br>
Unlike the Secretaries of Defense that most members of the Senate are comfortable with, Chuck Hagel understands the ugly reality of combat and is reluctant to send soldiers into harm's way.
Maybe that's the real reason why mostly Republicans and some Democrats in the Senate are uncomfortable with the idea of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. It's true that he is a mere enlisted man, but they could probably get past their pride and arrogance on the matter if he wasn't so reluctant to send other people's children to foreign shores to fight and die. They don't like Hagel's reluctance, because they've always been so willing and eager themselves to give the word and vote to send the sons and daughters of others to go marching off to the next apocalypse.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-56621822263088151092013-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:002013-01-02T15:50:00.696-08:002013 predictionsOK, back by popular demand (well, I did get one person ask me how come I wasn't doing New Year's predictions this year.) Deep Thought New Year's predictions for 2013. <br></br>
January: President Obama is sworn in for another term. After the swearing in, Republicans will also be swearing. <br></br>
February: Congress takes up the sequester and the debt ceiling. Republicans get some spending cuts in return for raising the ceiling, but as a concession to Democrats, before the ceiling is raised, Grover Norquist is superglued onto it so by raising it they can all just push him away. <br></br>
March: After a vote was taken on raising the debt ceiling at all, Republicans in the Congress rebel and oust John Boehner as speaker. He is replaced by Michele Bachmann, whose plan for solving the debt crisis involves arming all members. This plan backfires when during a heated debate, Louie Gohmert challenges Carolyn McCarthy to a duel. <br></br>
April: Baseball season begins. The Arizona Diamondbacks win their first seven games-- and then lose their next 155. <br></br>
May: Not to be outdone, the Arizona legislature takes up gun law reform. They propose that the solution to school shootings is to add a gun to the required list of school supplies that students are required to bring with them to school every day.<br></br>
June: Congress takes up immigration reform. Rush Limbaugh promises that if they pass it, that he will 'move to Costa Rica.' Which of course it passes, and he does not, much to the chagrin of millions of people who were hoping he was serious this time.<br></br>
July: The President brings up gay marriage and repeats that his position has undergone an evolution over time. Republicans say that they are disappointed in the President. For believing in evolution.<br></br>
August: A massive hurricane hits 11 states and leaves even more damage and deaths than Sandy. FEMA runs out of funds and asks Congress to appropriate more emergency money. The Senate passes a bipartisan relief bill right away, but Republicans in the House agree to act only if the emergency funding is offset by cuts to Medicare and Social Security.<br></br>
September: Football season begins. Frustrated with all the coaching problems that the Arizona Cardinals have had, President Michael Bidwill assumes coaching duties. The team goes 0-16. It is then that he realizes that the fault did not lie with the coaches.<br></br>
October: Halloween movies are not such a big deal anymore, since people can get scared for free just by watching the news.<br></br>
November: Looking ahead to the end of the year when unemployment benefits run out and other factors favor a 'grand bargain,' President Obama again makes major concessions in negotiations with the House leadership. The Republicans get the President to agree to almost everything they want in the proposed deal, with deep cuts in spending on entitlements, and tax cuts for millionaires. The Speaker backs out of the deal when most of the members of the Speaker's own caucus throw another tantrum and refuse to support the deal because the President doesn't have to write a note apologizing for standing for something. <br></br>
December: Visitors to Bethlehem are shocked to find out that the town has been bulldozed to build apartment buildings for a new Israeli settlement in the West Bank.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-87236756553517336022012-12-15T20:15:00.001-08:002012-12-17T16:06:23.263-08:00Call me a Flip-Flopper. But I have Reconsidered and Altered my Position on Guns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've been remarkably consistent in my views on guns over the past few decades. Essentially, it has boiled down to the following statement, which I had posted in more places than I can count:<br></br>
I support your right to own a gun. Any gun. <br></br>
The Constitutional fact that Americans have the right to be armed aside, I fundamentally believe (as a liberal) that you have the right to read, download, drink, smoke, have sexual activity or whatever as you please as long as you are not harming someone else by it, and therefore also to buy what you please (and if it is a gun, then buy it.) In fact, until recently the debate on guns has been moving further and further to the right, where without changing a single position, I had gone from guns being one issue where I generally agreed with the right (when the debate was about registration and limitations on ownership) to where I was more likely to agree with the left (when the debate had moved past that to trying to force guns into more and more places like public buildings and private businesses over the objections of the business owners.) I summarized this several months ago in this post: <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2012/06/debate-on-guns-has-been-changing.html">The Debate on Guns has been Changing.</a><br></br>
Recently though, in light of a spate of deranged gunmen killing large numbers of people, the debate has been moving back the other way. And in theory that would move me back to where I had been focused, against any new restrictions. To restrict individual rights, I believe in a high bar.<br></br>
That bar has been reached. The slaughter of first grade children at an elementary school yesterday has been the point at which I have to reluctantly agree that the harm to society caused by allowing the ownership of a particular category of weapons-- assault weapons with clips capable of firing large numbers of rounds before reloading, and in rapid succession-- outweighs any good reason one could have for owning one.<br></br>
And the fact is, this weekend was only a third as bloody as it could have been. In the past 48 hours you didn't read about another school shooting in Bartlesville, Oklahoma <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/okla-teen-arrested-school-shooting-plot-184243533.html">because of a brave student informant and an alert school administration</a>, nor about a massacre in a hospital in Alabama this morning <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/gunman-opens-fire-alabama-hospital-181915757.html">because of two alert hospital staff and two police officers, three of whom were wounded but who stopped the gunman</a> before he could shoot anyone else.<br></br>
Let's consider the arguments against restricting large capacity clips one at a time.<br></br>
<i>If everyone was armed, then they could take out the shooter before he kills more than a few people.</i> This argument presupposes that people are armed every time they go out in public (because you don't expect someone to walk into your classroom or into a movie theater or into your place of worship and begin blazing away.) Besides, people always assume that if they were armed they would win a shootout against a random gunman. But would they? Yes, they might (repeat might) have the element of surprise, but that would only last for a moment. Keep in mind that these shooters have lately been wearing full body armor, and are likely armed with a much nastier weapon than what most people have for self defense. So unless you could get an exact head shot with a pistol (difficult even for a practiced police officer) just having a gun for self-defense might not be adequate. Further, the random shooter would have the advantage that most people might be deterred if, for example, there were people between them and the shooter or behind the shooter, for obvious reasons. But a deranged gunman wouldn't even care about that. SO IT IS VERY POSSIBLE, that the result of an armed citizen during a random shooting would instead of stopping the gunman, only provide him with another weapon and some more ammunition.<br></br>
Further, if everyone was armed, then that would indeed mean everyone. Including people with a short temper. If we consider that scores of people are killed in arguments (especially domestic violence situations) for every person killed by a random shooter, we can see that having everyone armed would probably not be such a great idea after all.<br></br>
<i>So-called 'gun free zones' aren't.</i> It is certainly true that if someone wants to walk past a sign advising them they can't have a weapon on the premises while armed to the teeth, the sign won't reach out and slap them. However, the truth is that weapon-free zones do work, in preventing law-abiding people who get angry while there from using a firearm. Many years ago, while I was teaching a college class in Albuquerque, an angry young man blew up in class, threw a pencil (hard) at another student (luckily she ducked and it missed,) screamed obscenities at everyone in the class and stormed out of the room. Luckily he did not have a gun at that moment, because if he did I would not be a bit surprised if he had used it. For that matter, Jared Lougher, the Tucson shooter, is by now well-documented in the problems he had in classes at Pima Community College. However, every time he lost his temper on campus, he was at that moment unarmed. In other words, he was complying with the 'gun free zone' rule when he came on campus. Nobody plans or expects to lose their temper. But, the fact is that many people do. Gun free zones may not do anything to stop someone who carefully and methodically plans to go on a rampage, but they do stop the much more common hothead who follows the rules until he (or she) loses control. <br></br>
<i>There are too many assualt weapons out there already for a ban to do any good.</i> In the short term, this is probably true. And I'm not advocating that the government go around and pick up guns that people bought in good faith, believing that they should be legal. However, over time the supply of clips for such weapons (i.e. 30 round rapid fire clips) would diminish. I also don't support the registration of guns (because fundamentally it is still not the government's business how many guns you own or what kinds.) But limiting what new kinds of weapons one can purchase is not a restriction on anybody's freedom (after all, we all agree that you can't own a howitzer and keep it at your house) and starts to work the problems out of the system.<br></br>
<i>Why should we prevent responsible people from owning weapons when the vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens who would never think of killing someone else?</i> Again, the right to own a weapon is on very firm Constitutional ground. However, what would the vast majority of American gun owners need a 30 round, rapid fire clip for? If you are that bad of a shot that you need 30 rounds then maybe you need to improve your aim. The point is, that the potential harm from a few people outweighs the desire of people to have a weapon which is frankly not useful for hunting and was invented for only one reason-- military style weapons which are useful for killing a lot of people at one time. <br></br>
<i>The United States was borne out of opposition to tyranny, and having military-style weapons helps prevent its return.</i> Yeah, I know. That argument is out there. And I concede that our government has gone way past where I feel comfortable in terms of spying on us and restricting our rights. And in fact, I've <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2009/05/slippery-slope-is-what-weve-been-on-for.html">made exactly that point</a>. However, it's hard to see how having assault weapons on the streets answers this. For one thing, rights disappear a little at a time, and often when the folks out there complaining about 'tyranny' aren't even looking (for example, did any individual rights disappear between the end of the Clinton administration and the start of the Obama administration? Of course they did. So how come the militia 'movement' went into hibernation for eight years and said hardly a word, even though rights that get taken away remain for all future administrations to use and abuse? The truth is, that assault weapons would only be useful if tyranny was imposed all at once and provoked an actual civil war (some folks do in fact predict a full out war against the Federal Government.) But in that case, it's hard to see how a Glock 19 would come in very useful against a Predator Drone anyway. In other words, let's not go there. What they have done though is allow criminals to outgun the police. And the police after losing officers <a href="http://www.csgv.org/issues-and-campaigns/assault-weapons/what-law-enforcement-says-about-assault-weapons"> all over the country, have spoken out against them</a>. <br></br>
So what about the NRA? Don't they hold Congress in an iron grip and make sure anybody who challenges them on guns will face a well-funded and well-organized challenge the next time they run? No, not anymore, or at least not any more than they will anyway. For one thing, the NRA held their endorsed candidates liable for a budget bill last year, an investigation of Eric Holder, and several other bills that had nothing to do with gun rights. For another, the NRA did spend heavily to defeat propositions that were on the ballot in several states and <a href="http://www.americanprogressaction.org/press/release/2012/11/30/46501/release-new-polling-shows-vast-nra-spending-had-no-effect-on-election-outcomes-voters-continue-to-favor-stronger-gun-laws/">those propositions passed anyway</a>. Finally, in the wake of Citizens United, in which both sides and their allies were well into the billions of dollars in spending this election, the NRA is just another Washington funding source, but not the largest, or even close to it. Citizens United has in effect defanged the NRA because no matter how much it can raise from its members, it's now competing with billionaires who can write a check in a moment that can match its fundraising for a year. That's not to say the NRA isn't still important (for one thing it is still a bulwark, or will be if it gets back to focusing exclusively on gun issues) against those who actually do want to get rid of all guns, as well as the good work it does in terms of pushing training in the proper use and storage of weapons (because it is still true that far more people, and especially far more children, die from gun accidents than from someone intentionally shooting them.)
Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-7179206029479779032012-09-20T15:47:00.002-07:002012-09-20T15:47:50.184-07:00the bad old days<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-74346205337052868162012-07-24T23:43:00.000-07:002012-07-25T09:06:46.560-07:00The Road to Ruin is Paton with intentions (not all of them good.)About a week ago I attended a Republican debate in Springerville. I have blogged about the Congressional District One race before, but I decided I would go see for myself what the GOP is sending us for candidates this year.<br></br>
All four of the GOP candidates for the office were present, Patrick Gatti, Gaither Martin, Jonathan Paton and Doug Wade. The GOP establishment has annointed Paton, and given their track record in choosing candidates whether local Republicans want them or not (think Rick Renzi, who jumped into the district from outside and spent big outside money to defeat Louis Tenney in a primary in 2002, or Paul Gosar, who did live in the district but who also got a lot of outside money to beat several other candidates two years ago before abandoning the district this year) I suspect Paton will be their nominee. Like Renzi, he jumped into the district just to run; also like Renzi, he is bringing a lot of outside money into the district; and also like Renzi he is ethically challenged (as I discussed in <a href="http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2012/06/cd-1-analysis.html">this post about a month ago.</a>)<br></br>
So what kind of a GOP nominee is he? Well, he sounded very much like a career politician (a good reason for that, because he is a career politician) in most of his answers, consistently ducking and weaving while avoiding providing a lot of direct answers unless the question was a softball (i.e. "did you vote in the last election?") However, he had a couple of answers I would like to talk about right now.<br></br>
I had one chance to ask a question, so I decided to ask it about the Paul Ryan budget, which Paton is on record (both in 2010 and 2012 as supporting.) The Ryan budget proposes phasing out Medicare for workers below 55 and replacing it with a series of exchanges where seniors could purchase subsidized private insurance. <i>Of course this is exactly what is at the heart of Obamacare, but according to Republican logic, Obamacare is better than Medicare for seniors, but nothing at all would be better for the rest of us than Obamacare.</i> So, I mentioned my age (presently 49) and the fact that I have paid Medicare taxes since I had my first job at the age of sixteen (a third of a century ago) and asked about how he felt about the Ryan budget's plan to privatize Medicare. He of course hemmed and hawed a great deal, going back and forth and finally saying it would be 'wrong' to "deny coverage to people that have been paying their entire lifetime into anything." Which was a classic dodge-- the Ryan plan does not seek to deny coverage, it seeks to change it to a privatized system. He then went on to discuss Social Security (which I had not even mentioned in my original question) and said, "I don’t believe I’m ever gonna see a dime of the money that I’ve put into Social Security, and I think most young people believe that today. We should be able to do with our own money what we want to. And I think that’s the right way to go." In other words, keep your money and invest it yourself. Which is to say, no Social Security. Exactly the same thing the Bush people were saying when they tried to privatize Social Security in 2005. Their arguments may be evolving, but make no mistake about it, the plans set forward by the Cato Institute to privatize Social Security are still intact, and Jonathan Paton's comment makes it clear that he will be on board the next time they try to privatize Social Security.<br></br>
The only other thing I'd like to remind people of concerning the Ryan budget is that as bad as their plans are for Medicare and Social Security, Paton and other Republicans who have signed onto it are also supporting deep cuts in a wide range of programs that benefit virtually everyone, in order NOT to cut the deficit (as they have tried to say to sell it) but to finance deep tax cuts for billionaires. The tired old logic that low taxes on so-called 'job creators' will boost the economy should have pretty much been disproven by now, as taxes are already at historically low levels so if they really helped the economy we'd be seeing it boom right now. Instead, tax cuts only reduce tax revenue, which in turn creates deficits. Using deficits as an excuse to cut spending on programs, while at the same time pushing tax cuts for billionaires that will add back onto the deficit is pretty brazen, though I do have to admire their messaging people for convincing people not to think about the math (maybe there really IS another reason for all those cuts we've seen the GOP push in education the past few years.) But make no mistake about it. Paton is fully on board with the entire Ryan budget, including the 'cut spending to reduce the deficit and then cut taxes to blow the deficit up again' math.<br></br>
There was one other answer I would like to dicuss that came from Mr. Paton, and one which left me cold. Someone asked him a question about treaties that we have entered into with other nations as well as the United Nations, and also about the second amendment. Paton first said that we should not observe 'any federal law that's unconstitutional.' Huh? I thought that it was up to the courts to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. And if they do make that determination, then the law is no longer in force. So what exactly does he mean by that? How will he determine which laws to obey and not to obey as 'unconstitutional,' since we already obey only laws which the courts have upheld or which have not been challenged. But it was the rest of his answer which really bothers me. He talked about people (presumably members of Senate, since the Senate ratifies treaties) who vote for treaties made with the U.N. and said, "we should not vote for it, and if you do vote for it, <b>I think you’re a traitor, you’re a traitor to this country.</b>”<br></br>
Excuse me? If you vote for a law that he <i>believes</i> is unconstitutional, then you're a <b>traitor?</b> It's one thing to disagree with a law or what it says. It's quite another to accuse people who exercise their Constitutional duty to vote on whether to ratify a treaty, "traitors" if they do not vote the way he believes they should. Yeah, I know. Just what we need to fit in with the image of Arizona. Another member of Congress who goes to Washington and calls people who disagree with him, "traitors." <br></br>
After going to the debate, I can only say that it is of critical importance that we NOT send Jonathan Paton to Congress!Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14231145.post-86031280644524604402012-07-22T13:21:00.000-07:002012-07-22T17:33:36.885-07:00Joe Paterno offers us a chance to have an honest discussion about cultural obsolescence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.usatoday.net/sports/_photos/2012/07/22/Penn-State-is-taking-down-Paterno-statue-E81THGFT-x-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="360" width="490" src="http://i.usatoday.net/sports/_photos/2012/07/22/Penn-State-is-taking-down-Paterno-statue-E81THGFT-x-large.jpg" /></a></div>
[Workers at Penn State remove the statue of former football coach Joe Paterno] <br /><br />
Joe Paterno had the highest of standards, and paradoxically at the same time the lowest of standards. Paterno, who coached the Nittany Lions as an assistant coach beginning in 1950 and became head coach in 1966 and coached until he was fired in late 2011, was undeniably 'old-school.' An Ivy League product (from Brown,) "Joe Pa" made very sure his athletes graduated and got the academic help they needed to remain in school. Nowadays this would be less remarkable since the NCAA has made academic success a part of what is needed for football players and other athletes to remain eligible, but he did so from the day he began coaching, when there was little or no concern about academics in college football. "Saint Joe" literally had a halo painted over his image in a mural on the Penn State campus. For that matter, when the NCAA caught up with where Paterno had been for years and began to focus on academics and other rules, Paterno's program was able to avoid a single NCAA infraction. The idea of using bribery or other illegal methods to induce players to play for him was unthinkable. Besides academic success, Paterno preached lifelong character, and his players as well as many others upheld him and his unassuming, humble nature as a model of character.<br /><br />
All of which made the Sandusky scandal all the more shocking. It would have been shocking at any university, but at Penn State it was a scandal of monolithic proportions. It would have been no more shocking if the Vatican itself had been caught covering up for pedophiles in the priesthood (wait a second, let me restate that.) <br /><br />
For Paterno to be guilty of covering up such an awful crime as child rape was unthinkable. Except that it's true, spelled out right there in the Freeh report.<br /><br />
In contemplating how this could happen, I keep coming back to Paterno's age (he was 85 when he was fired, and died not long after.) Now, don't get me wrong. I'm 49 and in a few weeks when I turn fifty, I do plan to join AARP. One reason why is that AARP has a long history of fighting against 'ageism,' the term for discrimination against older people in the workplace and elsewhere. But to get to the root of ageism, we need to examine both the myths and the realities of age, and discuss a concern that is at the heart of ageism but is not often discussed because to do so is sometimes difficult.<br /><br />
This concern is simply put, that older workers may be obsolete. I know, you’re thinking this is a post about obsolete job skills. <b>NO, IT IS NOT!!</b> We all know that as the workplace is modernized, all workers of any age must update their career skills to adjust to new technology, innovations and other changes that go along with any job. And Paterno did so. Penn State has over the past two decades (since Joe Pa became eligible for Social Security) been a college behemoth. In every aspect of the game Penn State was an elite football program, often appearing in the top ten in recent years and winning three Big Ten championships after joining the league in 1993, most recently in 2008. Obviously he was still up to running a top level football program.<br /><br />
But it’s a more sensitive job issue that ‘obsolete job skills’ is sometimes used as a code word for. It is <i>obsolete cultural skills</i>.<br /><br />
Let me say that again: obsolete <b>cultural skills</b>. <br /><br />
Some years ago I was on an interview committee for a teaching position. One of the candidates was an elderly gentleman who had some teaching experience, though it was decades old. During the interview, he referred to female students as ‘co-eds.’ This is a term that hasn’t been in wide use since at least the 1970’s, and this and other answers led the committee to question whether he might unintentionally say something that would offend someone. Language is one aspect of cultural skills. The terms we use to describe people or groups of people change. For example, when I was growing up in the 1960’s, I first learned the term, ‘negro’ as a word for black people. However, today the term would be considered so out of date that it would be close to racist, and should never be used. <br /><br />
Returning to Joe Pa, he may have done a good job of adjusting to a more pass-oriented, faster paced offense or to new NCAA rules on recruiting, but he did a poor job of adjusting to a new world. Consider the world he began coaching in, in 1950. Surely child sexual abuse happened, probably at least as often as it does now. But it was never talked about. If something was said about it, most people at the time would (wrongly) assume it was likely a single (or even several) instances of easily correctable misbehavior, and a talk with the offender would have been good enough (with little or no thought given to the victim.) Whether Joe Pa ever had such a talk with Sandusky we will probably never know. One of them is dead, and the other will spend the rest of his life in prison and what he says from now on probably has no credibility at all. But whether he did or not, we now know that child molesters are never ‘cured’ (certainly not by a quick chat or word of warning.) And the crime itself has come to be taken much more seriously. In the 1950’s, very rarely would anyone be prosecuted for the rape of a child, unless perhaps the parents of the victim pressed charges (though the victim would often be too ashamed to acknowledge this in the first place.) People like Jerry Sandusky could count on that, and then he took advantage of troubled kids, who often did not have parents who would stand up for them to begin with.<br /><br />
This is not in any way to excuse Paterno. It is instead to point out that for older workers (whether they remain at their jobs or start new ones) the culture around them is changing. If you want to work until you are 85, as Joe Pa did, that’s great. I commend it. BUT, you have to do more than learn to use the newest computer program or new way to fill out a form. You have to keep up with the world, and adjust your thinking. And when you do, you have to act on it. <br /><br />
I believe that unspoken concerns about cultural obsolescence are at least as big a factor in the decision to pass over older workers as concerns about obsolete job skills. And until we can have an honest discussion about these concerns, we won’t really be able to make the job path smoother for older workers, even those who have a mind as sharp as a tack and who have kept up with every new technological development that comes down the pike.Eli Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792743206074537073noreply@blogger.com2