Headline of the Day

I am a political junkie, but cheep so I read the free feeds of the Hotline, the National Journal daily online rag. Here is the headline that got my attention:
Dicks Hopeful For "Powerful Position"

But wait, it gets better:

Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA) is making phone calls to fellow members of the House Appropriations Committee to line up the necessary votes to take over a defense panel left vacant by the passing of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA).
Dicks and Murtha joined the defense panel the same day in '79, and since Dems took control of the House Dicks served as Murtha's vice-chair. Dicks is the likely choice, based on his seniority, but he's taking the necessary steps to lock down the vote, he said today.

Stay classy Dicks

Of course he considered Rep. Murtha to be his friend and said good things about him further down in the article. But still, the man has been dead for less than 24 hours and Rep. Dicks is calling around to secure the chairmanship of the Appropriations Sub-Committee for Defense?

Let's just look at some of the members of this corrupting Sub-Committee:

Nearly half the members of a powerful House subcommittee in control of Pentagon spending are under scrutiny by ethics investigators in Congress, who have trained their lens on the relationships between seven panel members and an influential lobbying firm founded by a former Capitol Hill aide.

The investigations by two separate ethics offices include an examination of the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), as well as others who helped steer federal funds to clients of the PMA Group. The lawmakers received campaign contributions from the firm and its clients. A document obtained by The Washington Post shows that the subcommittee members under scrutiny also include Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) , C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.).

The document also indicates that the House ethics committee's staff recently interviewed the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about his allegation that a PMA lobbyist threatened him in 2007 when he resisted steering federal funds to a PMA client. The lobbyist told a Nunes staffer that if the lawmaker didn't help, the defense contractor would move out of Nunes's district and take dozens of jobs with him.

As you can see, this is not a Republican or Democrat problem. The party in power tends to have more targets for the defense industry lobbyists to corrupt, simply because there are more of them on the committee.

Why is this committee the source of so much investigation? Because Defense is a sacred cow in Washington. No one dares to make serious cuts to rid the Department of waste, mismanagement, fraud, or boondoogles...lest they be accused of being weak or pro-terrorist. For example of what a member of that committee can do, read (or watch if your are pressed for time) Charlie Wilson's War.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) for a few days held all of Obama's appointments up on behalf of a foreign Defense contractor--Airbus--to aid them in their longstanding feud with Boeing over a bid to supply a multi-billion dollar air refueling tanker aircraft contract. Now the holds are more relevant, limited to 3 nominees involved in the Air Force and the like.

Defense spending in a members' district means jobs for his constituents and millions in donations in the members' campaign coffers. Its a win-win...for everyone but the American people. So Dicks may get his "powerful position," but it won't change the fact that Norm is a corrupt dick.

ooh look a treasure chest!

image courtesy of Flickr user _delineated

So I have this theory, which I can't remember if I shared it with my ever so loyal readers: every year, the Utah legislature's leaders let one or more of their brethren say, do, or propose crazy stupid things. And while everyone is all hot and bothered (including yours truly) about said stupid thing, the real agenda gets passed without anyone noticing. So for every Wolf Killing bill, every "let's get rid of school because one time I saw an empty school bus on my way to work" bill, every "who needs 12th grade anyway" bill, every the word "international" in international baccalaureate sounds commie bill, for every "global warming is a vast conspiracy to control population growth" bill, there is a slew of bills made or altered at the request of lobbyists.

The same thing happens in Congress. Orin Hatch makes a big fuss about the BCS, and Health Care, and let's his cellphone ring when he is asked to say a prayer at the national prayer breakfast. But Hatch gets big bucks from Comcast and NBC folks when he sits on a key committee to approve the Comcast purchase of NBC. He extends copyright laws all the time and gets his rich friends out of tough spots.

If you as his constituent want help with your real problems? Well how we talk about abortion or "socialism", so something, anything else but the fact that Orin's son is a lobbyist. I am sure it is just because he is really good at persuading people, and not because his dad used to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

I pick on Sen. Hatch because he is easy pickings, but he is far from alone. Democrats couldn't get health care reform passed, but they could get Ben Bernanke reappointed to be Fed Chair. I don't know about you, but I am not going to get distracted by the comical stuff the legislature does every year, I am going to try to focus on the sausage making.

half a headline

So the Deseret News (and Salt Lake Tribune) both have stories on Rep. Jason Chaffetz's second 15 minutes of fame (first was his debut on the cable show about House freshmen), which is justified since he got on national TV with his good question.

But the headline should not be limited to "conservative House Republican confronts Democratic President, claims Democrat broke campaign promises." That is the journalistic equivalence to "Dog bites Man," i.e. completely expected. What is news is that President Obama and Rep. Chaffetz had an intelligent exchange on national TV. You be the judge who came out ahead:

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Thank you, Mr. President. It's truly an honor.

THE PRESIDENT: Great to be here.

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: And I appreciate you being here.

I'm one of 22 House freshmen. We didn't create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up. You talked a lot about this deficit of trust. There's some things that have happened that I would appreciate your perspective on, because I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists. Democrats have the House and Senate and the presidency. And when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn't. And I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed.

You said you weren't going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it -- and disappointed when you didn't.

You said you'd go line by line through the health care debate -- or through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, "We would like to take you up on the offer; we'd like to come." We never heard a letter, we never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions.

And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks -- in fact, you didn't want to have any earmarks in any of your bills -- I jumped up out of my seat and applauded you. But it didn't happen.

More importantly, I want to talk about moving forward, but if we could address --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, how about --

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: -- I would certainly appreciate it.

THE PRESIDENT: That was a long list, so -- (laughter) -- let me respond.

Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process -- just over the course of the year -- overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating. I mean, how many committees were there that helped to shape this bill? Countless hearings took place.

Now, I kicked it off, by the way, with a meeting with many of you, including your key leadership. What is true, there's no doubt about it, is that once it got through the committee process and there were now a series of meetings taking place all over the Capitol trying to figure out how to get the thing together -- that was a messy process. And I take responsibility for not having structured it in a way where it was all taking place in one place that could be filmed. How to do that logistically would not have been as easy as it sounds, because you're shuttling back and forth between the House, the Senate, different offices, et cetera, different legislators. But I think it's a legitimate criticism. So on that one, I take responsibility.

With respect to earmarks, we didn't have earmarks in the Recovery Act. We didn't get a lot of credit for it, but there were no earmarks in that. I was confronted at the beginning of my term with an omnibus package that did have a lot of earmarks from Republicans and Democrats, and a lot of people in this chamber. And the question was whether I was going to have a big budget fight, at a time when I was still trying to figure out whether or not the financial system was melting down and we had to make a whole bunch of emergency decisions about the economy. So what I said was let's keep them to a minimum, but I couldn't excise them all.

Now, the challenge I guess I would have for you as a freshman, is what are you doing inside your caucus to make sure that I'm not the only guy who is responsible for this stuff, so that we're working together, because this is going to be a process?

When we talk about earmarks, I think all of us are willing to acknowledge that some of them are perfectly defensible, good projects; it's just they haven't gone through the regular appropriations process in the full light of day. So one place to start is to make sure that they are at least transparent, that everybody knows what's there before we move forward.

In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren't participating in the administration than any administration that's come before us.

Now, what we did was, if there were lobbyists who were on boards and commissions that were carryovers and their term hadn't been completed, we didn't kick them off. We simply said that moving forward any time a new slot opens, they're being replaced.

So we've actually been very consistent in making sure that we are eliminating the impact of lobbyists, day in, day out, on how this administration operates. There have been a handful of waivers where somebody is highly skilled -- for example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist; on the other end, has more experience than anybody in figuring out how kids don't get hooked on cigarettes.

So there have been a couple of instances like that, but generally we've been very consistent on that front.

OK, I am going to judge too... sorry, I can't help myself.

Chaffetz has some good points. Obama has some good counters, let's take them one by one.

1. Lack of Transparency on Health Care Reform bill vs. Campaign Promise to have debates on C-SPAN: Obama was correct that all of the markup hearings were on C-SPAN as well as floor debates and various speeches/rallies by people for and against. But that is largely a dodge. Chaffetz is right that the important part of the decision making was done behind closed doors. Obama was smart to admit to this and accept responsibility for it. While that particular campaign promise sounded like a good idea at the time, it was completely unrealistic and I bet Obama regrets making it.
2. Earmarks: Again, pretty good point by Chaffetz. While certain spending tags were not technically earmarks, again I think Obama did a bit of a dodge because there was a lot of spending allocated for particular projects. ProPublica, not known as a conservative rag, called them earmarks by another name. Obama'z 2009 strategy of being above the fray and allowing Congress to do the heavy lifting while he pushed behind the scenes on major legislation seems to have had messy, as in the case of the Recovery Act, and disastrous, in the case of the Health Care Reform bill, results. Now again, Obama said we will try to do better and have been making incremental progress. That is true. And really as I have stated before, earmarks per se are not a bad thing. Boondoogles that get in dead of night as earmarks are the real bad. And some times one has to weigh the greater good of the bill versus the wasteful earmark that is needed to get someone (or some group of someones)'s vote. see the Louisiana Purchase.
   Obama's challenge to Chaffetz though was brilliant. He essentially said, sure, I haven't done everything that I said I can do, but I am just the president. Congress writes the bills, the President (unlike many Governors) cannot do line-item vetos to eliminate earmarks. So Congress likes to stuff pork into "must pass" bills like Defense appropriations, or their even more obese cousins Continuing Resolutions or Omnibus Appropriations bills. Obama's retort isn't just good politics, it is true. Republicans were rather fond of earmarks when they were in charge of both the Congress and the Presidency and still are. Even Chaffetz is not immune. First, he said he would do zero earmarks, even if it would hurt his district, but then he changed his tune and talked about earmarks vs. "congressionally directed spending" the difference? These were earmarks he liked.
3. Lobbyists: Chaffetz is right that Obama did make several exceptions to his no lobbyists rule and it burt him badly. Case in point was former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was (as is his wife) a lobbyist and who failed to report all kinds of income while being a lobbyist. The Daschles "went Washington," and never looked back. And arguably, this doomed the health care bill back in February of 2009. So Obama learned his lesson the hardway. And Obama is right that they are still the most lobbyist-free administration since the lobbyists took over the city. And 43 percent of Chaffetz's money over his brief career have come from PACs, which are by definition "special interests" lobbying for something. By contrast, less than 1% of Obama's 2008 money came from PACs.

So my vote? Narrow edge for Obama.
What's yours?

present tense

So I was reading an email I got from a fellow political junkie friend of mine and I happened to have noticed the gmail contextual adds. One was for Andrew Cuomo for NY governor, the other was Pat Toomey for the PA senate seat, and the third was for Bob Bennett for the UT senate seat. Let me know if you had the same impression I had:

Bob Bennett For Senate
A Leader Who Will Work For Utah. Support Bob Bennett By Joining Now.
www.BennettForSenate.com/Join

Shouldn't Senator Bennett be a leader who has worked for Utah and wants to continue working for Utah? Maybe I am being reading too much into it, but it almost reads like an admission that he is only paying attention to the public now that he is under serious threat of losing his and his daddy's seat.

Or maybe Bob is singing that Pearl Jam song:

You can spend your time alone redigesting past regrets oh...
Or you can come to terms and realize
You're the only one who can forgive yourself oh yeah...
Makes much more sense to live in the present tense...

Your Government Failed You

(title credit: Richard Clarke)

Despite what was said a few weeks ago, I think the decade just ended tonight. This decade will go down as the one where the government of the United States showed it is currently incapable of addressing the challenges of this era. Let us quickly run down all that happened in the last ten years:

1. On November 12, 1999, by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act repeals the Glass-Steagall Act, paving the way for mega-banks like CitiGroup to be formed. Phil Gramm goes on to represent UBS, another massive bank, which is revealed to have provided illegal tax shelters for the uber rich.
2. 2000: stock market crashes due to insane belief by mega-banks that market will continue to go up
3. 2000: The U.S. Supreme Court overturns Florida Supreme Court interpreting its own constitution, case law, and statues, resulting in George W. Bush becoming the 43rd President of the United States.
4. 2001: using the budget reconciliation process, the Republican majority in the Senate, combined with a handful of conservative Democrats, pass a $1.35 trillion tax cut, that due to the reconciliation rules, expires in 2011.
5. 2001: 9/11...I don't need to tell you what happened.
6. 2001-present: the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates near zero and for a large portion of this time, decline to regulate derivatives market.
7. 2002: Bush begins drawing down in Afghanistan in order to ramp up for war with Iraq and after bungled Operation Anaconda allows bin Laden to escape into the Pakistani side of the Tora Borra Mountains.
8. 2002-03: The Congress Authorizes President Bush to go to war with Iraq for reasons unknown. Those who voted for the authorization do not spend sufficient amount of time reading the classified intelligence report which contains numerous holes. Later, it is revealed that even this intelligence was grossly overstated and "stovepipped" by Vice President Cheney. Major media outlet, excited by ratings, promote those seeking to go to war, and fail to examine the claims of weapons of mass destruction.
9. 2001-08: believing that increased homeownership and stock ownership will result in a permanent Republican majority (and help privatize Social Security), President Bush pushes for policies to deregulate and expand mortgage and financial instruments as part of his "ownership society."
10. Thanks to large donations to both parties, mega-banks and other financial institutions like AIG continue to be largely unregulated for their largest "profit" making sectors: derivatives like CDOs, CLOs, Credit, Default Swaps.
11. Thanks to large donations to both parties, the pharmaceutical industry continues to make its profits on the backs of Americans, while every other industrialized nation manages to reign in spending on drugs.
12. 2008: the stock market collapsed after mega-banks' balance sheets are exposed by derivatives such as CDOs, CLOs, mortgage-backed securities.
13. Bernie Madoff admits to his sons that the whole multi-billion dollar fund was a giant Ponzi sceme. Several individuals complained to the SEC of Madoff's suspicious activities, yet the agency failed to act.
14. 2006-08: After a series of corruption scandals, an unnecessary war that lasting too long and costing too many lives and dollars, and a necessary war poorly managed, a massive collapse in the economy voters give Democrats a series of landlide electoral victories, handing the Congress, and then the Presidency to Democrats in overwhelming numbers.
15. 2009-10: Not wanting to lose their new majority, Democrats decide to attempt to compromise with Republicans, who unify behind opposing practically every major Democratic policy proposal, and not use the reconciliation process for their most important piece of legislation: health care reform. Other major policy proposals wither on the vine as conservative Democrats, faced with near universal Republican opposition, do not wish to risk losing re-election by supporting something wholeheartedly.
16. 2009: Martha Coakley is nominated to replace the late Ted Kennedy, whose "cause of [his] life" was health care reform. She proceeds to take a vacation and not campaign or run tracking polls.
17. 2010: Suddenly realizing the 60th senate seat was at risk (made necessary by the refusal to use reconciliation), Democrats and their union allies attempt a last minute GOTV and ads for Coakley. It fails and Republicans gain 41st seat. Health Care Reform has not passed both chambers in a form that President Obama can sign. He may never get anything to sign.

Our institutions cannot function due to hyperpartisanship, massive campaign donations, intrenched special interests with lobbyists, incompetency, ideology that refused to bend to reality, petty vengeance, political self-interest, and anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate.

The result is 10% unemployment nationally, trillions of dollars spent on tax breaks for billionaires and multi-millionaires, the Iraq war and bailing out the mega-banks, 54 million uninsured, thousands dying daily because they cannot afford the necessary medicine or medical treatment, hundreds of thousands more filing for bankruptcy because of medical costs, global climate change without global will to try and stop it, along with Al Qaeda morphing into a new organization with bin Laden still at its helm (or dead by natural causes).

Richard Clarke was right in 2004. Our government failed us. But not just in failing to prevent 9/11, but in failing to prevent the economic collapse of 2008, failing to catch Bernie Madoff, failing to pass meaningful and necessary reforms.

This last decade has been ten years of the mighty making their own right: from bankers to baseball players. All of us were expected to grovel at the feet of the CEOs, the intelligence agencies, the major media outlets, the syndicated newspaper columnists, and the professional athletes for their purported omnipotence and wisdom. It turned out they were incompetent, had no idea what they were looking at, were in love with having powerful people talk to them, were in love with hearing themselves talk on the TV, and pumping themselves full of drugs when they are not committing various other crimes.

The only good thing to come out of this period has been the internet's blossoming. Now I can instantly find out exactly how full of it a politician, talking head, lobbyist, CEO, or jock is and why. Now I don't need to subscribe to the New York Times and listen to the drivel of Thomas Friedman to know what is happening the world. I don't need to read press releases or speeches, or watch cable television for news.

One can get depressed by all this. Or use it as a cause for action. Voters thought they were getting change in 2008. Turned out, the establishment and the system is really good at fighting the will of the majority and keeping things the same.

We need to dramatically reform the Senate. No more anonymous holds or any other need for "unanimous consent" to pass or do anything. No more painless filibusters. You have to talk the whole time to stall legislation, not block it indefinitely. If senators repeatedly ignore the will of their state's voters, let them be recalled.

We need to reform Congress. No more districts drawn by politicians to help themselves and their friends. No more privately funded campaigns. No more hiring of relatives of members of congress to lobby any branch of the government.

We need to reform the Executive. Congress needs to take back control of many of the things its delegated to the executive (creating the alphabet soup of agencies and administrative law). And if Congress wants to go to war, it should Declare War, which it hasn't done since 1941. The president should not be able to start war on a bare majority of Congress, or without congress. No more "state secrets" doctrine; have an in chambers hearing proving that the evidence really is a matter of national security and then the evidence is excluded, not that the case is dismissed. No more Gitmo or secret prisons or warrantless wiretaps or National Security Letters...no more PATRIOT Act.

We need to reform the judiciary. Cameras should be allowed in federal court rooms in civil bench trials where the parties don't have a compelling reason to object (like witness intimidation or tampering). Supreme Court Justices should retire after they hit their 80s and decisions they make regarding their own conflicts of interest should be reviewable.

Newspapers are slowly being killed off, but cable news needs to change dramatically too. No more hours of hacks blabbing, more hours of investigative reports. No more softball interviews of politicians, executives, or athletes. Maybe then the fourth estate can serve as the intended check that the First Amendment provides, and not a refuge for the powerful to spout their propaganda.

If only a handful of proposed changes happened, the world would be a much better place for it.

a pattern

Hotline picked up on an insensitive trend:

As the MA SEN race looks to be headed to a photo-finish, several pols and pundits have used a similar, albeit unfortunate metaphor, to describe the prospect of a GOPer taking the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA)'s seat:

Earthquake.

All of the following comments were made over 24 hours after the devastating 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti:

FNC's Sean Hannity: "What a political earthquake, though, that would be" ("Hannity," FNC, 1/14).

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), on MA state Sen. Scott Brown (R): "I know if he wins, then, obviously, it will have a seismic effect on American politics" ("On the Record," FNC, 1/13).

Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, on whether there's a Dem effort to stall a swearing in if Brown wins: "If the earthquake happens and if you have this sudden, stunning, unbelievable result, I think it would be impossible for the Democrats in the Senate, for the president to block the seating of the Republican candidate" "On the Reocrd," FNC, 1/13).

NPR's Juan Williams, on a GOP win: "I know the prospect is boy, that would be something. That would be an earth shaker. Talk about an earthquake. That would be one right here in American politics. No doubt about it" ("Hannity," FNC, 1/13).

The comments offer a contrast to the sensitivities to the term "tsunami" after the late '04 Indian ocean earthquake were still so strong during the '08 pres. primaries that networks abandoned their use of the term "Tsunami Tuesday" to describe the Feb. 5, 2008 primaries.

What do they all have in common? That's right, all appeared on Fox on the 13th and 14th. I am sure it is just a coincidence that they all said the same thing and these "pundits" and politics were not talking from the same script.

a new chapter in the annals of cluelessness

Well it seems that my least favorate State Senator, Chris Buttars, has an ingeneous way of cutting the state's budget to make up some of the $700 million dollar gap:

A state senator says school districts should stop busing high school students as way to save money.

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, told the Legislative Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee on Monday the move would save as much $75 million.
...
Buttars noted that 75 percent of the state's student population is along the Wasatch Front.

Yes, because (a) the other 25 percent of the state doesn't count to Buttars and (b) high school kids in urban/suburban areas can somehow get to school without a school bus.

As the head of the Granite School District noted, high school administrators have enough trouble keeping teenagers in school without having the lack of busing as an excuse. Moreover, how in the world are kids in rural school districts going to get to schools miles and miles away?

As Gubinatorial candidate Peter Carroon said the other day,

"Our state leaders have talked about education as their No. 1 priority for decades and Utah is falling in national standards," Corroon said. "They've cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of our education system. If that's priority No. 1, I'd hate to see priorities 2 and 3."

Buttars' solution will cause more problems which will cost more than the money he seeks to save. Why is this guy on the Senate Appropriations Committee again?