New Year's Predictions for 2017

January: 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.

February: 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.

March: 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.

April: 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.

May: 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.'

June: 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.

July:  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 !

August: 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."

September:  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.

October: The Cubs win the World Series again.  People start getting bored and talking about how the 'Cubs are always winning.'  Yankee fans are jealous.

November:  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.

December: 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.

Why Ann Kirkpatrick is the right person for the U.S. Senate

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.


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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

Ann Kirkpatrick inspecting flood damage near Black Canyon City in 2010.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.  


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:  What will make the most positive difference in the lives of the people she represents.


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 the first member of the Arizona delegation to write a bill which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law. 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.


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.


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.

The Last Casualty of the Civil War-- was it Lincoln?

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.

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 widow first meets a young soldier walking on the road and learns he has died in the Civil war, then meets Lincoln and learns he has also died.


It is certainly symbolically appropriate to call him the last casualty of the Civil War, but is it accurate?

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

The real questions about Jeb Bush are about what he's been doing since leaving office.

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.


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  JebBush used his own private email server while he was Governor  but in fact that is something of a non issue since apparently it’s the norm among potential presidential candidates.

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 go to Mexico and try to persuade billionaire Carlos Slim to bail out the company.

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.

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?

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 agreed that some fixed interest rates may have changed as a result of the manipulation.

   This is not a small thing.  One memo between a trader and Barclay’s revealed that  for each basis point (0.01%) that Libor was moved, those involved could net, "about a couple of million dollars."

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 essentially ratted out the others ; in exchange for a smaller fine.  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.

That can’t be too hard, can it? Apparently, it is pretty hard, for big banks anyway.   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.

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)  the bank   laid off 19,000 people  followed by an announcement they would   lay off another 12,000 people    because of an abysmal earnings report.

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):   paid 481 people at the top enormous bonuses 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.

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.


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.

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. 

Why I Support Capital Punishment (Almost) Never

Over 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.

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.)

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.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.)

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.  

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 are here .  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.

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.

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.

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.

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 nearly one out of four 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.

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, 95% of death row inmates in Alabama are indigent (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.

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, in cases with comparable crimes. blacks are more likely than whites 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.

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 we have evidence it is not a deterrent;  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.

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.

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 it is more expensive to execute an inmate 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.

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.

All Hat, no Cattle

Have you ever had the experience of hearing somebody claim to be the exact opposite of what they are?

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.'

In fact, if you were to lift the brim up and take a peek under Andy's new hat you 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.

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?) 

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.

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 worked on moving a mine project forward that promises to deliver thousands of jobs.  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 became the first member of the Arizona delegation 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 issued a press release  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.

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.)

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.

100 years ago today

One hundred years ago today, we lived in a different world.

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.

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.')

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.

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.

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....

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.

An 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.

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.

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.'

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.)


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.)


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?


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 precipitation in the Colorado River basin could decrease by 15-20% annually.  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.


 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?


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.


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.

Duck, Dodge and Weave

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.


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.

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.


So what did Speaker Tobin do? Did he condemn Bundy’s remarks or try to distance himself from them?


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!


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?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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. 


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.


So as a potential member of Congress, Tobin was asked about the Ryan budget.  You can listen to his response here:  Andy Tobin not answering the question. 


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.


Maybe the most telling example of why Andy Tobin is unfit to lead the district is found in  the budget he helped negotiate .  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 in my blog post about serving on a Grand Jury,  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 CUT funds from rural highways 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? 

The Nationalization of Elections

The 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.

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 "Political hacks used to say pork was the political grease that lubricated legislative deals."

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.

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.

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.

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 Democrats got more votes FOR CONGRESS 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.

New Year's predictions-- 2014

JANUARY: 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!”)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cruise vs. Cruz

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, costing $24 billion and harming the economy with actor Tom Cruise, who at least in recent years has exhibited other kinds of bizarre behavior.

Here are some differences between Cruz (pictured in the first photo) and Cruise (pictured in the second.)



Tom Cruise starred in ‘Mission Impossible.’

Ted Cruz just led ‘Mission Impossible,’ and yes, it was impossible.



Tom Cruise is a member of a religion that a lot of people consider a dangerous cult.

Ted Cruise is a member of a political faction that a lot of people consider a dangerous cult.



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.

While on the floor of the Senate, Ted Cruz read his daughters ‘Green Eggs and Ham,’ and missed the point.



Katie Holmes has questioned Tom Cruise’s mental state.

The country has questioned Ted Cruz’ mental state.



Tom Cruise went nuts on national TV one time and jumped on Oprah’s couch.

Ted Cruz went nuts on national TV and jumped in front of all the TV cameras.



Tom Cruise has played a jerk in several movies, including ‘Cocktail,’ ‘Jerry McGuire’ and ‘Rain Man.’ It seems to come naturally to him.

It comes naturally to Ted Cruz, too.



Tom Cruise’s first movie was ‘Endless Love.’

Ted Cruz’s first stunt during the shutdown was ‘endless speech.’



Tom Cruise flew a fighter jet in ‘Top Gun.’

Ted Cruz supported the sequester, which has grounded all the fighter jets flown by the Navy Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds.



A forum on the Razzie Award website once described Tom Cruise as a ‘world class wacko.’

John McCain called Ted Cruz a ‘wacko bird.’



Tom Cruise, in a 2006 interview with Parade Magazine, described his father as ‘a merchant of chaos.’

Ted Cruz fits that description.



Tom Cruise gave nothing other than expenses for Suri to Katie Holmes in their divorce agreement.

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.



Tom Cruise once appeared in ‘Interview with a Vampire.’

Ted Cruz’s shutdown helped suck the blood out of the economy in a lot of places around the country.



Via Perii Maestas Calles:

Tom Cruise is a dramatic actor.

Ted Cruz is a comedic actor.

Liberal Groundhog Day predictions

On Groundhog day:

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.

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.

Lance Armstrong is seeing his shadow. And he is standing very much alone.

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.

New Secretary of State John Kerry isn't seeing his shadow, because he's still standing in Hillary's shadow.

Rush Limbaugh is seeing his shadow. The big, red, round nose, afro wig and size 22 clown shoes are easily visible.

Former Senator Jim DeMint may still be able to see his shadow, but it is fading rapidly.

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg is seeing his shadow. It looks like Cory Booker.

A Liberal Contemplating the National Debt and Spending

In the coming months, it is clear that we will have a big debate about government spending and the debt.

And while I have often debated Republicans who advocate deep cuts in spending on various social or entitlement programs, these Republicans do have a point. 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.

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.

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.

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 $600 billion in revenue over the next ten years. 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 raised four trillion dollars in revenue 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.

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.

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.)

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.

HERE'S AN IDEA: What if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had something like a 'line-item veto' for the defense budget? 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.

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.

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, the bill actually made it harder, not easier for a lot of seniors to get their medication, but beyond that it increased the cost to Medicare by $400 billion over the last decade but is projected to increase the cost by $1.5 to $2 trillion over this coming decade. 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 SEVERAL TIMES MORE!! 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 prevents Medicare from negotiation of prices with suppliers as the governments in other countries do. 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 and the government, because the bill that allowed them to do it was written on K Street by their own lobbyists.

WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT: 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. Create something like BRAC, except for corporate welfare that would have the ability to get rid of this stuff.

OK, so right about now I sound like the typical liberal. 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?

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.

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 accelerate this change. 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. FURTHER 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.

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. 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. 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.

What about government itself, then? 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.

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 Four forest restoration intitative (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. 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. 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.

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.