it gets more interesting

So my local city councilman Eric Jurgensen decided to not run again this year because his family business was facing some serious legal troubles. And while these city positions are technically non-partisan, it was pretty clear that he was a Republican (although he voted very liberally, at least for a Utah Republican). There are many people running for this open seat race, including a classmate and friend of mine from law school--Yossof Sharifi. Yossof is running as a libertarian. There are two obvious Democrats in the race--LIsa Allcott, whose signs and mailings say Democrat on them--and Stan Penfold.

Penfold was the director of the Utah AIDS Foundation, his black on yellow signage is a subtle sign that he is indeed supported by Mayor Ralph Becker. A number of other prominent Dems support Penfold as well, including former Congresswoman Karen Shepherd.

Allcott has more cash behind her, and has a raft of endorsements from the Democratic establishment as well, including Peter Corroon. And although Penfold is a gay man and ran the Utah AIDS foundation, Allcott has the support of the Utah Stonewall Democrats and Equality Utah (although these gay rights groups appear to be supporting both Allcott and Penfold).

These two appear to be the front runners, but it could be that they split the Democratic vote and someone else squeaks into the runoff (that's Yossof's plan). Both Allcott and Penfold have been sending mailings and flyers. I have had door knocks from Allcott's campaign (once with her personally, another with a staffer/volunteer) and Penfold has called my parents house for me twice, once even with a colleague from work. And while I have seen some signs for the other candidates, Jennifer J. Johnson and Phil Carroll, I have not seen any other forms of on the ground presence from them (and nothing from Yossof).

I wish all of the candidates the best of luck and will be following this race closely.

In thinking about Teddy K, it is important to note that we learned of his flaws in real time, unlike his slain brothers. Also unlike RFK and JFK, he was able to live a full live and achieve much more than inspiration. He has effected lives from South Africa to Poland to Norther Ireland. And while his dream of universal healthcare is yet unfulfilled, it shall never die.

SC Sen. Jim DeMint has joined the illustrious company of fellow SC Sens. John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond in advocating for Nullification. Calhoun wanted to keep Slavery alive, Thurman wanted "Segregation forever," and DeMint wants to keep our broken health care system. What is wrong with South Carolina senators?

Shurtleff is shameless

So if you are a politician, and you took money from and appeared to give favorable treatment to a ponzi schemer like Utah outgoing AG Mark Shurtleff, one would think that you wouldn't criticize your opponent for his choice of contributors, lest people be reminded of said lax prosecution of ponzi schemer (although to be fair, Rick Koerber had friends in the legislature too) But if you are Shurtleff, such naked displays of hypocrisy are not troubling.

Shurtleff's campaign, in a news release, said that Bennett's top five donors received $178 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds.

The attorney general is "using TARP to demagogue without understanding the issue," said Jim Bennett, the Senator's son and campaign spokesman. He referred additional questions to Utah Bankers Association President Howard Headlee.

The American Bankers Association was Bennett's fifth-highest donor, Shurtleff's campaign said, although the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics lists the association as Bennett's ninth-biggest contributor.

Headlee said those donations came well before TARP.

"Unfortunately we find ourselves in the middle of a fierce campaign," Headlee said, "and we're concerned about any attempt by any candidate to tie our financial support to specific issues."

So Shurtleff is going to pitch his campaign tent with TARP (sorry, couldn't resist a pun)...let's look at their contributors in detail:

Shurtleff received much of his money through huge donations (much larger than allowed by federal law in Senate races) from corporations, which by law cannot give directly to federal candidates. The cash usually came from local groups interested in his local work as attorney general, ranging from local law firms to payday lenders.

Bennett, meanwhile, received the lion's share of his donations from national political action committees interested in national issues, with donations coming in the smaller amounts authorized by federal law.
...
EnergySolutions. Its PAC gave Bennett $6,000, and the corporation gave Shurtleff $10,000.

CitiGroup (banking and securities). Its PAC gave Bennett $5,000 and gave Shurtleff $1,000.

JP Morgan Chase (banking and securities). Its PAC gave Bennett $2,000 and gave Shurtleff $1,000.

Reagan Outdoor Advertising. The company gave Shurtleff $5,000. Corporations cannot directly give to federal candidates. But the company's principals, William and Julia Reagan, individually gave Bennett a combined $4,800.

Union Pacific Railroad. Its PAC gave Bennett $2,300, and the corporation gave Shurtleff $5,000.

Frank Madsen (former top aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch) gave Bennett $500 and gave Shurtleff $400.

Former U.S. Rep. Howard Nielsen gave $2,000 to Bennett and $100 to Shurtleff.

Hy Saunders (a developer) gave $2,300 to Bennett and $100 to Shurtleff.

So Shurtleff attacks Bennett for taking money from TARP recipients like CitiGroup and JP Morgan Chase...which also gave money for Shertleff. I guess he is mad that they gave him less money than they gave Bennett?

Next time, I hope a reporter doesn't just copy and paste a press release, then go on to opensecrets.org, and then call the other side and call it a day. I pieced this together with google in a manner of minutes.

And they wonder why journalism is not as respected as it once was.

What to focus on during the health care "debate"

The August break, which could be the make-or-break period for health care, is almost half over. And while it is fun to watch the crazies turn out and get in Congresscritters' faces, it is all a big distraction. My sense is that the behavior of these "grassroots protesters" may be great theater for the press to cover, but all it is doing is annoying the members of Congress that are holding town halls. It isn't changing minds of the members of Congress whom they are protesting. Congresscritters are more scared of the TV ads being run in their states/districts.

Rather than go over plowed ground, let's talk about what people that care about health care should be focusing on.

1. What does the House bill look like?
Right now, there are three house bills that made it out of committee that make up the health care reform bill. It will be up to those committee chairs, the Rules Committee, and the Speaker and other Democratic House leaders to merge the bill. This bill will not tell us what the final bill will look like, but it will be a sense of what the most liberal version of the bill possible will likely be.


2. When does the Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" finish its bill?
If it is before October, there will be enough time to merge that bill with the HELP Committee bill and vote on it in the Senate. If it continues to dither, who knows what will happen.


3. Who sits on the Conference Committee?
That is, will strong liberal policy makers, like Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Waxman, be named to that merge the differences between the House and Senate bill (and create a new bill all together)? Or will a milquetoast "bipartisan" Democrat be named like Sen. Baucus? How many "gang members" will be on the committee?

These pieces of information will tell us what health care reform will actually look like, and whether it stands a chance of happening this year. Personally, I think something will get passed. It might not be like the Clinton or Edwards plans, or really like the Obama plan during the primaries, but it will be a hell of a lot better than the do-nothing plan.

Here's an NYT chart that explains it all:
Here are the possible areas of compromise, according to that article:

Orange Herbert

Remind me again why Jim Matheson passed on taking on the not-quite-yet Governor Herbert?

[A] new Deseret News/KSL-TV poll...found [that] only 39 percent would vote for Herbert if he's the GOP nominee in next year's special gubernatorial election.

Even more respondents, 42 percent, said whether they'd vote for Herbert would depend on who else was running or that they didn't know yet how they'd vote.

The statewide poll of 402 residents was conducted Aug. 3-5 by Dan Jones & Associates. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.

Call me crazy, but 39 percent sounds eminently beatable. Of course, if you are a Democrat thinking of running, that's also a problem. Because maybe another candidate will emerge from the GOP convention/primary.

33 percent said the governor should be moderate. Only 12 percent of respondents described Herbert as moderate but 34 percent said they didn't know what his political ideology and philosophy is.

Those 33 percent are called "Democratic Voters" So is Carroon going to take the plunge? Will Matheson do an about face? Will anyone step up to the plate if it appears Herbert will be pushed out by someone really crazy?

Jim Matheson seems to attract terrible GOP candidates to challenge him. Then again, Carroon had his share too. I say let the games begin.

In 2006, Democrats told Americans to put them back in control of Congress so that they could pass legislation, like ending the war. But very little happened. The excuse during the 2007-08 period was essentially "Well, you can't do anything without 60 votes." After Specter switched parties avoid losing in the GOP primary and Coleman threw in the towel this spring, the Democratic Caucus had 60 votes. Now there excuse is this: Kennedy & Bryd are sick so it is really only 58.

The American people voted to give you control of the Congress and the White House because they wanted change, not because they wished Congress critters would get along.

Grow a pair and get some bills passed. No more excuses.

how to keep TEA baggers from crashing your town hall meetings

Jim Matheson, one of the handful of Democrats who voted against health care reform has the solution to the problem of hecklers at Congressional Democrats' town hall meetings.

At least Matheson won't have any organized state GOP opposition on the matter, says Republican Party state chairman Dave Hansen.

Across the nation, some local Republican Party leaders are organizing supporters to attend Democratic incumbents' town hall meetings during the August congressional break to voice opposition to the majority party's health-care reforms.

Hansen says the Utah GOP is staying out for now because "Utahns are pretty ginned up" in opposition to parts of national Democrats' plans.

"They will be going to town hall meetings anyway."

...

But here's the kicker: Matheson, Utah's only congressional Democrat, won't be holding any town hall meetings. He gave them up a year or so ago and now only uses high-tech telephone conference call meetings. And he only does those when he's back in Washington, D.C., while Congress is in session

Way to do your research!

And one more trouble for the state Republican party in getting anti-reform folks to show up:

It's also because the state GOP Web site is down, and GOP leaders so can't communicate with lots of people.

Here's where I laugh, say something about Twitter, and point out that local ISP XMission's owner/founder, Pete Ashdown, is a Democrat. Maybe Hansen should give Ashdown a call so he can unclog the intertubes.

Matheson is being "targeted" by the national Republican party, but the local guys didn't get the memo:

"It is a light (advertising) buy on a few local stations," said Hansen, who heard the first ad Tuesday morning.

I am sure Jim is shaking in his boots while all of the big guns are busy running for the open Governor's race and challenging Bennett to a game of who can out conservative the other.

Matheson is seen by all sides of the health care reform debate as an important vote on the House floor apparently:

The liberal group MoveOn.org has started running some pro-Obama health-care ads in Utah, as well, representing the opposing view.

Heyrend said one national group, Conservatives For Patients' Rights, is running a cable TV ad against Matheson.

Another national group, Tea Party Patriots, has started e-mail campaigns against Democrats nationally, including giving out dates, locations and times of town hall meetings along with talking points, she said. And a third group, FreedomWorks, is e-mailing out talking points and scripts to challenge Democratic congressmen and Obama at their public meetings, said Heyrend.

Deep Thought

In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a leading prez candidate to be. Back then many GOPers wanted to change the constitution for him so the Austrian-born steriod-using-weightlifter-turned-action-movie-actor could run for president. In 2009, a majority of Republicans are birthers.

Utah Dems Carrooned on a Deseret Island

Jim Matheson, Utah's lone Democrat in Congress, decided he would rather stay put in the House. This bums me out, because this was his best shot at the Governor's Mansion. And the Senate could have been a good shot too if Bennett lost. Heck, Jim outraised Bob Bennett thus far. But I guess Jim is having too much fun giving Henry Waxman a hard time being courted by President Obama to take a risk and lose his plum committee assignment. So now Utah Demcocrats have shifted their gaze to Sal Lake Co. Mayor Peter Carroon. Carroon actually represents more people than Jim Matheson. I wouldhave to see who got more raw votes last time. Anyway, Carroon has been positioning himself for a while now, with that loud tax fight woth the County Council. Plus he gets to keep his job and his cousin Howard Dean can raise big bucks for him out of state.
Still, Peter is definately Plan B. Let's just hope he steps up to the plate and gives still LG Herbert (or whomever else the GOP electorate chooses) a good run. As a friend and semi-retired Dem operative said to me today: "I'm tired of losing."

taking his ball and going home

What is Sen. Hatch doing these days? He announced (no real surprise) that he is voting against Judge Sotomoyor for SCOTUS, even though he voted for her--twice when appointed by Pres. H.W. Bush as for the S. District of NY and by Pres. Clinton for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. And then there is the other powerful committee he is on--the one that is addressing our health care crisis, albeit frustratingly slowly, the Senate Finance Committee.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch pulled out of a bipartisan group seeking compromise on health reform [last] Wednesday, saying they were going in a direction he just couldn't support.

His decision is a blow to what has been called the "gang of seven" in the Senate Finance Committee, the last group of lawmakers attempting to craft a proposal that would have some level of Republican support.

"It is a matter of honor that I don't want to pretend that I am helping them with something I just don't agree with," Hatch said. "What I don't want to do is mislead my colleagues."

I don't know if it was a "blow" to the "gang" and I guess I respect him for being honest, unlike Sen. Conrad (D-ND) who seems content to blow up health care reform by going on Sunday talk shows and being a member of this "gang" wherein his fellow Senate Democrats, who hold 60 votes, are being shut out. The gang, in fact, is now three Dems (Chairman Baucus Sens. Bingman and Conrad) and three GOPers (Sens. Grassley, Snowe and Enzi). But fine, Utahns keep sending Hatch back to the Senate so that our state will have clout. What better way than to involve yourself in an important piece of legislation?

The Utah Republican has a long list of concerns with how the bill is coming together, including the requirement that businesses either offer insurance or pay a fee to the government that would be used for health subsidizes for the poor, known as the employer mandate.

"I really believe that is going to cost a lot of low-income people's jobs," he said.

Sen. Hatch, do you know any low income people who have health care via their employer? It is pretty rare. Without an employer mandate, employers will just dump their employees from their health care plan and force Uncle Sam (and John Q. Taxpayer) to foot the bill. Don't believe me? Go into a Walmart some time. That's what they do. In fact, Maryland had a pass a bill a couple years back to prevent Walmart from adding to the state's medicaid bill by doing this trick. The only other way to ensure that everyone gets covered (therefore the health care costs are more fairly spread and shared) is to do an individual mandate, but I suppose Hatch is against that too.

Hatch also dislikes the idea of expanding the number of people in Medicaid and a plan for a government controlled insurance option saying: "I know that it is just a constant push to get us all to a single-payer system."

I suppose offering subsidies so that these same low-income people can get health insurance something that Hatch was previously so concern about (150-200 percent of the federal poverty limit are the cutoff points I have heard discussed) is a horrible thing. And a public option, which would effectively set minimum standards of coverage and force private insurance companies to compete for insureds would also be terrible somehow.

I say "compete" because in many if not most markets, a single HMO holds a dominating share, sometimes even a monopoly. For instance, Blue Cross/Blue Shield controls 83% of the market in Alabama. No wonder Alabama's senators are opposed to the public option.

"Sooner or later I think the president is going to have to realize that they are trying to build a bridge too far here, without the appropriate materials," he said. "They are going to have to sit down and realize that we have to do the art of the doable, not an expansion of health care we can't afford."

I'll tell you what we can't afford, Senator, it is the status quo. Nationally, health insurance premiums have doubled in the past ten years. Doctors are drowning in private insurance companies' red tape. Patients are literally dying because private companies are denying coverage for "experimental" procedures. Maybe you can afford to wait, or do half measures Sen. Hatch. That's because you have a choice of health insurance options provided and paid for by the US taxpayers. Why can't I have your health care? Why are you against that?

Sen. Bennett for $9,000, Alex

It seems that $9,000 from a literally radioactive local company can get you favorable treatment from a embattled and still sitting U.S. Senator.

A Utah-based nuclear waste disposal firm fighting to allow the continued importation of foreign radioactive waste for disposal here has chosen who it is backing in the state's crowded Republican field for a U.S. Senate seat.

EnergySolutions Inc.'s political action committee has donated $9,000 to Sen. Bob Bennett's re-election campaign this year, snubbing fellow Republican Mark Shurtleff, who received a $10,000 donation from the company last year on his way to winning his third term as the state's attorney general.

Bennett is seeking his fourth term.

"EnergySolutions' PAC is funded by EnergySolutions employees and we are a very strong supporter of Sen. Bennett," said company spokeswoman Jill Sigal. "The EnergySolutions PAC supports pro-nuclear members of Congress and pro-nuclear candidates."

Would those employees also include management? What percentage of that money comes from management versus the lowest-paid employees, 90%?

So while Rep. Jim Matheson, who father developed cancer and died because of nuclear testing in Nevada, attempts to ban foreign nuclear waste from coming into Utah, Sen. Bennett is non-committal. Must be waiting for a few more checks to clear.

Bennett has not signed on as a co-sponsor to [Sen. Lamar] Alexander's bill [the Senate companion bill to the Matheson-Bart Gordon bill in the House].

In a one-sentence statement to The Associated Press, Bennett didn't say whether he supports a federal ban on importing radioactive waste. Instead, he said he would review a court decision saying whether a regional compact system Utah is a part of can ban foreign waste at a private dump.

In May, U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart ruled that the compact doesn't have authority over EnergySolutions' Utah facility.

Utah has filed notice saying it will appeal the case to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

"I will carefully review the court's decision after the arguments have been made and the parties present their evidence," Bennett said.

What about the Democratic candidate for Senate, Sam Granato? Not much better.

"(Granato) is concerned that EnergySolutions is a business that is here in Utah that employs a lot of people in the Tooele area, and he doesn't want to turn them into the boogeyman like a lot of candidates have for political posturing," [Granato Campaign Manager Rob] Miller said.

Does that mean that Granato is doing a preemptive strike against Matheson? Is he worried Jim will get into the Senate race last minute after all? Why else would you make a not-so-subtle attack on Jim Matheson, the state's leading Democrat?

Personally, I think it is only fair that those who use nuclear to power their communities store it themselves near themselves and not outsource it to poor and/or rural areas. If you don't want it in your backyard, why should a private company get to trampse it through ours?

This stuff has a LONG half-life, longer than humans have been around and longer than we will probably be around. It isn't "political posturing" to be concerned about how this stuff can be safely transported through Utah (and other states) and safely stored for millienia. A private company interests are not aligned with these long-term needs. Rather, they want to make a buck and keep shareholders happy, which are extremely short-term interests.


Winning a Senate primary (and ultimately a general election) is only a slightly longer time horizon.

Reports show that unless we adopt something like the health care bill(s) in the US, thousands of Utahns will lose their health care next year. Yet I don't think anyone doubts that Reps. Bishop and Chafetz will vote against it.
Rep. Matheson has a number of issues with the bill, and since he sits on a key committee considering the bill, Pres. Obama invited Jim and his fellow Blue Dogs on key committee to the White House for a charm offensive.
Why is it so hard to convince our delegation (I am sure Hatch won't support it, Bennett might vote for some useful amendments) not to harm its constituents? Everyone living out in the real world knows that our health care system is broken. Insurance companies are doing harm and making life miserable for doctors, patients, and hospital staff in exchange for no real benefit. Coverage is illusionary and prohibitively expensive. Please stop standing in the way.

The end of a McEra

Robert Strange McNamara died today at 93 years of age. Every piece of news on the matter I have seen or heard first describes his role as the architect of the Vietnam war (he was Kennedy's and then Johnson's Secretary of Defense). And then describes his actions, and/or the war in general, as a mistake. That to me isn't news. What is news is that for the past 10 years, McNamara has been attempting to make amends for his past deeds by trying to learn why and how he and the rest of Washington sent hundreds of thousands of young American men to their deaths and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. By writing books on the subject, sitting down for interviews, by attending conferences with his counter parts at the time of the war.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy — and to “empathize with him,” as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

That wasn't the only war he which admitted to wrongdoing even.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

To my knowledge, no one ever accused the former president of Ford Motor Company of incompetency.

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in "The Lost Crusade" that McNamara's brilliant staff and his "unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington." But McNamara's insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara's approach in a memorable portrait:

"His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o'clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings. . . . . While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers."

He and his "whiz kids" were supposed to use their knowledge from running big complex companies and all of the modern management tools of statistical and systems analysis. In the end, all of his brains and skills didn't help him from dragging the U.S. deeper and deeper into an unnecessary war that had nothing to do with communism or the balance of power.

But the fact that a man who has been characterized as a monster chose to face many of his mistakes head on and in public is a very admirable thing that his family should be proud of and that Americans should reward in their their public servants.

Sure it took him 30 years to admit to some, but not all of his mistakes, even though at the time he was coming to realize the folly of the war.

When Mr. McNamara held a rare private briefing for reporters in Honolulu in February 1966, he no longer possessed the radiant confidence he had always displayed in public. Mr. McNamara said with conviction, “No amount of bombing can end the war.”
...
On Sept. 19, 1966, Mr. McNamara telephoned Johnson.

“I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North,” Mr. McNamara said, according to White House tapes.

He also suggested establishing a ceiling on the number of troops to be sent to Vietnam. “I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher — 600,000; 700,00; whatever it takes.”

The president’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.

Yet the path towards making amends wasn't a smooth one:

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "Murderer!"

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirt sleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd: "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

He also tried to do the right thing as head of the World Bank.

As he had done at the Pentagon and Ford, Mr. McNamara sought to remake the bank. When he arrived on April 1, 1968, the bank was lending about $1 billion a year. That figure grew until it stood at $12 billion when he left in 1981. By that time the bank oversaw some 1,600 projects valued at $100 billion in 100 nations, including hydroelectric dams, superhighways and steel factories.

The ecological effects of these developments, however, had not been taken into account. In some cases, corruption in the governments that the bank sought to help undid its good intentions. Many poor nations, overwhelmed by their debts to the bank, were not able to repay loans.

The costs of Mr. McNamara’s work thus sometimes outweighed the benefits, and that led to a concerted political attack on the bank itself during the 1980s.

He did more than get dams built as president of the World Bank.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America's "century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to [pay] a heavy price for it for decades to come." He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

I read his last book, Argument without End and attended a Q & A when he came to speak at my college (because Prof. James Blight was the co-author). He came across as a brilliant man seeking repentance and trying to tell the world how to avoid another Vietnam. Yet he did not speak out against the Iraq War in 2002 or 2003. The closest he got was this:

“We are the strongest nation in the world today,” Mr. McNamara said in “The Fog of War,” released at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning.”

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” he concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

The real question to ponder today is not McNamara's legacy, whether he was a great man or an arrogant one, but whether, in 30 years or less, Donald Rumsfeld will be making the rounds apologizing for his immoral actions and incompetence. McNamara was still a young man when LBJ kicked him upstairs to the World Bank; he still had 42 years left to live after leaving the Pentagon. In contrast, Rumsfeld is 77 years old. If he is so lucky to live as long as McNamara, he only has 20 years to confess to his crimes against humanity. His memoir, slated to come out next year, sounds like a defense of his actions, not catharsis. Will anyone within the Bush inner circle have a McNamara-style change of heart and desire to come to terms with that they did? Sadly, I doubt it.

nothing to fear but lack of fearmongering itself

Today is the day when we celebrate the birth of America, even though the Declaration was actually passed by the Continental Congress a few days before that.

Yesterday, we watched a spectacle too oft repeated these days: the self-implosion of a GOP presidential hopeful. First Bobby Jindal, then Mark Sanford, and now Sarah Palin. But someone else wants to grab our attention desperately and no matter what your politics in the U.S., you can agree with me that this guy is crazy.

North Korea fired a barrage of short-range missiles off its east coast Thursday, a possible prelude to the launch of a long-range missile toward Hawaii over the July Fourth holiday.

The AP tries to scare us. Long range missiles? Aimed at President Obama's home state on America's birthday weekend? But wait, did you catch the key word, "toward"? How long is "long range"? Let's ask the Posrt:

Military officials told South Korea's Yonhap news agency that they appeared to be Scud-type missiles and described them as more dangerous than the short-range weapons fired Thursday.

Government sources in Japan and South Korea told reporters that the missiles may have been Nodongs, a mid-range Scud.

North Korea has more than 200 of these missiles, which are capable of striking nearly all of Japan. They are regarded by the Japanese government as a serious threat, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years buying two U.S.-made anti-missile defense systems.

Scuds, the legendarily inaccurate missiles Saddam used during the first Gulf War. This one too is extremely crude for 2009.

A Nodog has a range of 500 to 1300 kilometers depending on whether it is a Nodog-1 or -2. And remember it is about 3800 kilometers from Tokyo to Honolulu, and from North Korea you have to add another couple hundred kilometers. Which explains this paragraph of the AP story:

The head of the U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Victor E. "Gene" Renuart, said in an interview with the Washington Times this week that U.S. missile defenses are prepared to knock down any incoming North Korean missile.

Now to be fair the Taepodong-2 missile could hit Sarah Palin's house in Wasilla (making her a foreign policy expert). But the other reason Northern Command is prepared to knock down any long-range missile from North Korea is this:

In 2006, North Korea launched its most advanced Taepodong 2 missile while the U.S. celebrated Independence Day, though the rocket fizzled shortly after takeoff and fell into the ocean.
...
The April 5 [2009] launch of a Taepodong-2 required 12 days of preparation on the launch pad, which was fully observable to U.S. satellites. Short and medium-range missiles, however, can be launched with little notice.

So they can try to hit a major city in Japan and risk not only pissing off but hitting U.S. military forces stationed on the archipelago, or they can try to hit the U.S. directly, but it takes so long for those missiles to warm up, we can blow them on the launch pad with ease if we felt like it. No need for "Star Wars" here. The Axis of Evil, in short, is no excuse for the so-called National Missile Defense.

This is all a long way of saying the AP article, which was picked up by the Tribune, among others is all about scaring us despite the fact that the only think North Korea is capable of is starving its own people while building crappy weapons.

the imaginary middle

I have grown tired of those who claim to represent the ideological center but in actuality only represent their need to be the center of attention and action. Yesterday, I had lunch with one of my Conservative Republican friends who agrees with me on this point, as well as who the phony centrists are.

So, to name names and get particular, by phony centrists, we mean Sens. John McCain, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, and SCOTUS Justice Kennedy. These people continuously create imaginary divisions and problems so that they can be the solvers of said problem and the beltway media can fawn over them about how statesmanlike, bipartisan, centrist, important and powerful they are.

There are countless examples, but here are a few. Thanks to a prior vote earlier this year, Democrats can pass health care reform within the budget process, which means they only need 50 votes and their can't be a filibuster. Moreover, the budget framework already passed (which created 50 votes only possibility) set aside $634 billion as a "down payment" on health care reform. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the Senate Health Education Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee bill to cost $611 billion. Using my amazing math skills, this means that if this bill is passed as is, there is $24 billion of wiggle room when you merge the Senate Finance Committee bill into the HELP bill and only 50 votes are needed to pass the HELP bill. Yet Sen. conrad wants there to be some sort of fake compromise to axe the public option, claiming the health care reform legislation is in a "60 vote environment." Sens. Snowe, Specter, and the other Maine Senator who just does whatever Snowe does changed the Stimulus Bill to cap it at some arbitrary number so that they could be "fiscally responsible."

Justice Kennedy's need to be in the middle often results in unreadable and incomprehensible opinions that cause confusion for lower courts and attorneys. Other times, the opinions just make no sense and are internally inconsistent.

The problem is not just bad policy is the result of their pomposity but the fact that these folks are only representing themselves and there is not a silent majority of folks in the middle that agree with them. They oppose or alter widely popular things just so they can have their fingerprints on them and get written up in the big papers. Enough already.

What a crazy week of news: a governor that skipped out on his state, staff, and family to go see his lover in Argentina; the US getting to its first FIFA finals and only losing by one goal to Brazil; the sudden, odd death of Michael Jackson; and now Billy "shouting about made for TV products" Mays found dead in his home. The only "normal" pieces of news were continuing protests in Iran and the House passing a watered-down cap-and-trade bill. I wonder what next week will bring.

question

Is it wrong to that I have SNL's Andy Sandberg's "I ran" music video stuck in my head ever since the protests started on June 12?

I wrote that this morning before we learned of Stanford's year long affair with an Argentine.

Stanford's whereabouts are answered...sort of. A reporter for SC's big paper, the State, cornered him getting off a plane from Argentina. So either he lied to his staff, or they lied to us about the whole hiking in the Appalachians thing. I think the former is worse.

When asked what the hell he was doing in Argentina for 5 days without telling his staff, the LG (or transferring power), let alone his wife and kids, Stanford said he walked along the coast. Only where he went (Buenos Aries) is along a river, not the ocean.

The story of where's Mark Sanford got stranger. The governor's staff settled on the story that we was "hiking on the Appalachian Trail," which is sure to become an internet euphemism. The story seems wrapped up. Except for that nagging tid bit about Sanford's cell phone's last whereabouts was in Atlanta, which is 80 miles from the trail.

The word surfaced that the SC star car Stanford took was at the Atlanta airport and a federal agent saw him boarding a plane there too. Where was he going?

Meanwhile, when asked if she had heard from her husband, Jenny Stanford said she was "busy being a mom" and no. Sounds like someone is pissed.

This story just get stranger all the time with more questions than answers. Stay tuned for the startling conclusion. I know I will.

priorities

Since last Thursday, South Carolina Governor (and Presidential aspirant) Mark Sanford has not been seen in public. That's odd, but odder still was this:

First lady Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press today her husband has been gone for several days and she doesn't know where he is.
...
Jenny Sanford said she was not concerned.

She said the governor said he needed time away from their children to write something.

Remember this weekend was Father's Day, an odd time to want to be away from your children.

So what did he write about while on sabbatical from his family and his job? From his Twitter account comes the following:

# SC's government structure fundamentally flawed http://www.postandcourier.c... #sctweets #gopabout 13 hours ago from web

#
stimulus discussion shows need for restructuring in SC - http://tinyurl.com/nr53wx #sctweets #tcot5:48 AM Jun 21st from web

What is he talking about?

Well the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Gov. Sanford had to stop posturing about the Stimulus Bill and take the money that the Legislature approved of taking (overriding Sanford's veto). Yes, the structure of South Carolina's government, with its popularly elected legislature overruling its popularly elected governor and having the appointed judiciary interpret the South Carolina Constitution and statutes, just like every other state in the country, is completely out of wack and needs restructuring.

Or maybe the Governor needs a vacation from his vacation. Maybe running away from your staff, security detail, your wife and children on Father's Day weekend and not telling anyone where you are so you can go off and tweet about how bummed you are that the other branches of state government think you are out to lunch isn't a great idea.


But hey, I am not a leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, what do I know.

on the unfolding revolution in Iran

Sixteen days ago I was commenting on the twentieth anniversary of Tienanmen Square. I said that "[T]he world will change again, but when?"

Turns out, last Friday was the answer. The people of Iran were shocked that their government would so blatantly overturn their will for the election of president. If leaked results from the Interior Minitry are to believed, then

Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.

The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively.

A far cry from the landslide 63-30 official results for Ahmadinejad over Mousavi. But the people of Iran, half of whom are my age (30) or younger knew that the official results were a sham.

They have organized using online tools, and have kept the world informed via Twitter, YouTube and listsrvs. The videos and pictures and tweets coming out of the "Islamic Republic" show a brave people facing down thuggish government directed goons who delight in beating to death men and women for merely protesting.

The world watches with its heart in its throat. We pray for the Iranians to have their voices heard, for the police forces to put their batons down, and for the election to be annulled. While we sit comfortably thousands of miles wishing we could help. But we are neither as brave or as able to lend a hand because the government would like nothing more than to claim this organic uprising to be the product of a Western plot.

Like Obama, Mousavi is a vessel that these young Iranians have poured their hopes and dreams into. Now they are going to have to fight for their dreams on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, and on the internet. Mousavi and Obama are but men, but the ideas of the revolution of 2009 cannot be beaten away or tear gased out of existence. Governing through fear only lasts so long. The people of Iran overthrew a government 30 years ago, we just might be watching them do it again.

Jim, please decide

Jumping the gun, the Desert News ran with the headline "Utah Governor Gary Herbert questions whether climate change debate is 'over'." This might lead you believe that a) Gary Herbert is governor already not Lt. Gov. who is supposed to be governor any day now b) that Herbert sides with the thousands of scientific studies that confirm that our climate in rapidly changing and warming and that the cause is (at least to some degree) human activity. But you would be wrong on both counts.

"I've heard people argue on both sides of the issue, people I have a high regard for," Herbert said. "People says man's impact is minimal, if at all, so it appears to me the science is not necessarily conclusive."

This is GOP code for "I don't want to hear the bad news that hurts my friends in the polluting industries." Case in point comes a few sentences later in the article.

"What are we doing to bring people together? Is there a hidden agenda out there?" Herbert asked. "Help me understand the science."

He had stepped out of the discussion during a presentation by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the latest research. "The indications are not only that the climate is changing but is changing more than what were thought to be doom and gloom predictions," Chu said, warning the future could be bleak.

Actually it is the governor-in-waiting, not the science, that is still out. Dr. Steven Chu is not just the Secretary of Energy but a Physicist and knows what he is talking about. Herbert, on the other hand is willfully ignorant.

The reason the Western Governor's Association is even talking about climate change while they are here in Utah is because of Govs. Huntsman and Schwarzenegger. Which brings me to the title of this post.

Jim Matheson has been toying with the idea of running for Senate because he might face some loony or AG Mark Shurtleff and not incumbent Bob Bennett. And even if he isn't, Harry Reid probably has been calling him repeatedly to convince him to run. He has probably also been thinking about running for governor since Herbert is become less and less of an incumbent with each passing day that Obama dithers with sending his nomination to the Senate. I am sure it is no fun to be a moderate Democrat when folks in the leadership is yelling at you to get out of the way and vote more liberally than you are inclined to, given your district.

Plus as governor, Matheson would actually get to do something. And instead of being 1 of 100 senators, you get to be 1 of 50 governors, and go toe to toe with those lovely folks up on Utah's Capitol Hill.

But really, Mr. Matheson, we Democrats need you to decide to have a fighting chance at any of the three offices you are considering. 2010 is not too far away and money needs to be raised. If you decide not to run for governor, then everyone focus on pushing SL Co. Mayor Peter Carroon to run rather than waiting to see what you do. And then people can go work for Sam Granato, knowing that you don't need their help. But if you do choose to run statewide, money and staffing will come out of the woodwork to help you. But please, the sooner the better.

VP Joe Biden (still sounds odd to me) toed up to the line about Iranian election fraud by saying he was "suspicious" ... The reformers need to do this themselves though (in order for the movement have credibility within Iran), with help from the outside world but not the US leading the charge. So it seems like Biden might have actually struck the right balance and not said to much...this new Joe Biden is going to take getting used to.

What were the old guard thinking by rigging the election results in Iran? People are rioting in the streets, the internet has been shut down and none of this is out of joy for Mr. A's "reelection". This regressive stunt will do more for reform than the inauguration of the actual winner would have.

buying a justice to buy justice

Two years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas visited my law school while I was in my Third Year and when asked what decision, if any, he regrets, he stated that Republican Party of Minnesota v. White was the case he said he regretted because he believes now that the elections of judges has gotten a bit unseemly.

Yet Justice Thomas voted with the other three extremely conservative justices that it was A-OK for a coal mine owner to spend $3 million to elect a new state supreme court judge (replacing another justice), who became the deciding vote in overturning a $51 million verdict against said coal mine company.

The other 5 members of the Court thought that this conflict of interest was grounds for mandatory recusal.

This marks the latest time that "umpire" Chief Justice Roberts has called a strike for the big corporation and a ball for the little guy (in this case, the owner of a smaller mining company had sued the bigger mining company for driving him out of business and won, so the big CEO drove a justice up for election out of business, calling him a child molester). In fact, Roberts so far has always voted in favor of the government or the big company. The worst was for Exxon Mobile.

And it also marks the latest time that Justice Thomas says one thing and rules crazy conservative another way. He is a nice man, but makes for a terrible justice.

It has been twenty years since the revolutions of 1989 ended in the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Tienamen Square. Sure, the Berlin Wall might have fallen a few months later, but the limits of the revolution were set. it is not unlike the pushback that happened after the tide of revolution that started in America reached the shores of Europe.

While the New World Order that George H. W. Bush promised in the wake of 1989 never happened, the world was indeed forever changed. But not how things were expected to change. The lack of the Soviet Union was a destabilizing force for two reasons: 1) countries imploded from Europe to Africa to Asia, allowing for civil wars, genocides, fundamentalism, tyrants, and terrorism; and 2) America's dominance turned to arrogance, culminating in George W. Bush's folly of opting to invade Iraq because he could.

The world will change again, but when?

I used to think the phrase "culture wars" was a phrase by the Pat Buchanan's of the world to rile up a portion of the American populous. But it appears that a smaller subset of that group took it literally and are at war with those they disagree with.

If you haven't heard, a doctor in Kansas who performed abortions despite being aggressively targeted by radical anti-abortion groups, the former attorney general and talking heads for decades was murdered on Sunday at his church.

The instigators, like Bill O'Reilly, refuse to apologize for demonizing the doctor and others like him. Is it really any surprise that one of their followers took it too far? Even if their conscience is clear, their hands remain dirty.

I love going to Starbucks in heavily Mormon areas (yes they do exist). They are so clean, new, fast, and uncrowded.

I have say for once the big papers have live up to their billing. The stories about the process of selecting Sotomayor have been very well researched and very interesting reading. The stories about what other attorneys think of heran and GOP oposition plans, however have been less than inspired.

I went to a target today that has crammed because of remodeling and it still felt better than a Wallmart. Those places sap my soul.

The tortured debate about torture has grown stale and tiresome. It is pretty obvious from the evidence that it does not work in the sense that you don't get reliable information from torturing people, just like it is obvious that there are US prisons that can handle the actual guilty people from Gitmo. Yet emotionally, it seems that torture is somehow justified and must work (just ask Jack Bauer)...and that it is scary to think of inviting Al Qeada onto American soil even if it is a supermax in the hinterland. Thanks to Dick Cheney, torture is now something like abortion, where you have an opinion and no one can seem to sway you and the other side must be not just wrong but immoral.

Californians, please redo your constitution rather than just take a bailout. CA's system has the Reaganesque fantasy revenue side, lead by prop 13 combined with the fantasy budgetary quotas on the spending side. Add to it non-competitive races, too short of term limits, and super majorities to pass budgets yet simple majorities for referenda to radically change finances, plus a recession and you get this ungovernable-multibillion-dollar-deficit mess of a state. I say time for a constitutional convention to change the all of aforemented parts of the structure that caused this disaster.

without Jim

The biggest environmental bill since the Clean Air Act passed the House Energy & Commerce Committee yesterday...with a nay from Utah's Rep. Jim Matheson (D-02). The vote was 35 to 25, with one Republican, Rep. Mary Bono of California, voting in favor of the cap-and-trade bill. Some Republicans on the committee thought that requiring the bill to be read aloud would be be a good way to stall--and thereby kill the bill. This prompted committee Democrats to hire someone like this guy to do the reading:

All fun aside, at least Jim had constructive criticisms, perhaps suggested changes that could make passage in the U.S. Senate more likely:

Matheson plans to propose an amendment that will help small refiners meet the new requirements. Small refiners, of which there are a handful in Utah, Wyoming and surrounding states, produces less than 205,000 barrels of oil a day.

"These are just some issues I'm really concerned about," he said.

But Matheson, considered by many to be a key swing vote, said he is not philosophically opposed to the ideas in the bill and believes with some changes he could support it.

"We've got to deal with our energy independence challenge and we've got to deal with our climate change challenge," he said.

To me, this bill is good and we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I think a lot more needs to be done.

Even if we humans were to stop putting CO2 up in the air tomorrow, rather than reducing the amount we put up, there still would be WAY more CO2 in the atmosphere than has been there in at least 650,000 years, as far back as we can measure. We need to figure out a way to dramatically absorb all of that CO2, something like limestone or bacteria, otherwise we are well on our way... Not to being America's Next Top Model, but to becoming Venus.

I don't get the whole Pelosi versus the CIA controversy. Congressional Democrats like her, Rep. Jane Harman, and Sen. Jay Rockafeller are all complicit in two big debacles: the Iraq war and torture. Their level of fault however, pales in comparison to those that orchestrated and relentlessly pushed for those two things. So in the end, Pelosi and her ilk are partially to blame for not raising holy hell at the time, especially those like Rockafeller who voted the same wrong way. But 90 % of the blame still lies with Cheney, Bush and their henchmen. Especially those who still think it is a good idea.

I can now post blogs via SMS. Since I opted for unlimited texting, you are in luck. Obama's speech was good, but broke no ground. His common ground on abortion concept was something Hillary Clinton had said prior to her reelection to US Senate, and while nice, gives the press another chance to talk about that poll that supposidly proves that America is suddenly pro-life after 35 straight years of being pro-choice and voting in a pro-choice president and 59 senators who inclined to allow, if not vote for pro-choice judges to get appointed. If you can't tell, I really doubt this poll is accurate.

Probably for most people though abortion rights one way or another aren't pressing priorities. They would rather have a good economy, get better healthcare for less, and reduce greenhouse gases. Oh and not getting attacked by terrorists anymore and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ASAP would be nice.

I forgot to add that one thing I will miss about Huntsman is that when walking my dog past the guv's mansion, his English Bulldog--Winston--would have a friendly exchange with my dog. What a great name for an English Bulldog.

a good pick

Hello faithful readers,

I am finally back from blogging oblivion, crazy ultra-high stakes rapid trial that is only partially complete. You can read about it here, here, here, here, here, here, and other places.

Anyway, what I really want to write about is the news that Gov. Huntsman will be our next ambassador to China. This was the first Republican I had voted for statewide...sorry Bob Springmeyer. You could tell from the moment he stepped into the governor's mansion on South Temple, he was angling to get back into an Administration, not run his own. He smartly chose McCain over Romney, the safe choice in Utah, but it was not a GOP year. He represented the future of the Republican party: moderate on issues like climate change and gay rights. Trouble was, he was LDS and from Utah, which was a liability in the Republican party, which is nationally dominated by evangelical primary voters who are suspicious of the Mormon religion to say the least. Just ask Romney how that Iowa Caucus and South Carolina primary went.

Gov. Huntsman actually speaks Mandarin fluently from his days as a missionary in Taiwan. He has experience as an ambassador for Singapore, and as assistant trade representative under Dubya. I think this is a great choice on Obama's part in terms of qualifications and "bipartisanship"...but bad for the state for the next year or so. Lt. Gov. Herbert said proudly that he understands rural Utah, which is great and all, but Utah is the most urbanized state in the country. Something like 75% of the population live in a city or suburb, and most of those along the Wasatch front.

This move opens up the governor's race in 2010, which will pit Herbert or Shurtleff (if he doesn't have another Twitter spasm) against a quality Democratic opponent. There's already a Facebook group for Peter Carroon, and I am sure Jim Matheson will give the race a serious look.

I have to go now back to my regularly scheduled life, but I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you all after so many months.

on entering my third decade

I feel that it is mandatory to write some musing given the fact that I am reaching a milestone in my culture: the thirtieth birthday. You are still considered young, but now there are no more excuses for lack of achievement or accomplishment.

These last 6 months of practicing law has been a real whirlwind tour, with my mentors telling me I really should not be experiencing these level of cases this soon and not to get used to multibillion/multimillion dollar cases. The learning curve is steep, and very overwhelming at times. But we are having great fun, even if it means working nights and weekends for several months.

These last 7.5 months as a father is the same way: crazy, busy, exciting, fun, tiring, but I think I am getting the hang of it.

The never seems to be time to devote to keeping up with what is happening in the world or my state, and rarely do I get a chance these days to keep up with pop culture. Still, it makes me enjoy those moments of free time all the more.

I have missed my blog world, those whom I used to read religiously and those who I would enjoy comment battles with. After this storm passes, perhaps I will be able to engage in blogging on a more routine basis. Although the days of daily postings appears to be a distant memory.

Whatever wisdom I have gained over the years I owe my peers, mentors, family, friends, and even enemies. Whatever faults and bad habits are entirely of my own making, and part of what I have learned over the last few years is that some of them can be fixed, others must be worked around, and some I have to be extra vigilant to correct on the fly. Thank you to all that continue to check and read this woefully out of date blog. Have a joyous Easter, lovely Passover, or just have a nice weekend.

Raising a (half) glass to the Legislature

Well the hostage crisis legislative session is over, and now it is time to grade the folks on "temporarily" reside on Capitol Hill every winter.

In no particular order...

• Liquor reform: The nation's most popular governor finally got something he wanted, an update to our liquor laws to make them more like the rest of the country. Gone are "private clubs," which were really just bars that were required by law to charge a cover fee. Ditto to the silly stickers on booze which did nothing but give you cache that you bought your alcohol at the state stores rather than smuggled it in (and cost the state $1M/year in printing costs). Same goes for the so-called Zion Curtain that made places separate their bar from the rest of their resturant with a glass wall. In exchange, there are tougher penalties for repeat DUIs and scanning of IDs of people who look like they might be under 35 (aka possibly faking). If only the weak beer rule would go away, along with the "no bar hopping" zoning rules, we would be just like everywhere else. This will be good for tourism, which in turn is good for the state's economy.


• ethics reform: very minor improvements were made, and relucantly as well (I have to say I am dissipointed in Sen. Ross Romero (D-SLC) for putting his foot down at one year). The revolving door of legislators turned lobbyists is now delayed by 1 year...and it barely passed. Why does this matter? Former Speaker Greg Curtis is now a lobbyists for tabbacco interests, and "surprisingly" ciggarette taxes didn't happen this year, the only politically popular tax, along with a host of other anti-smoking bills.


• The Budget: no thanks to Reps. Bishop and Chaffetz (as well as Sens. Hatch and Bennett), a half a billion dollar plug was put into the state budget from the federal stimulus package, enabling previously draconian cuts to important items like education to became more limited and precise. Still, another half billion had to be cut, meaning some government workers lost their jobs in a recession, and some good programs were harmed with the bad ones that were cut. Still, it could of been worse.


• Tone: Sen. Bramble tried again to get back at teachers unions and the PTA for supporting the anti-voucher referendum. The anti-union bill (I think succeeded) but the PTA bill went down in flames. Sen. Buttars was an offensive moron again, but other than that, legislators got along much better and tried working with the other side in a constuctive fashion. I hear that everyone was much more relaxed and content going into the last day, and no stunts were pulled. They even ended "early," which always makes legislators less grumpy.

Overall, not as bad as it could have been, but it certainly could have been better. I still think the fiction of a part-time legislature should be ended so that the "saved by the bell" excuse will go away and people can honestly say why a bill was killed.

AG stands for Aspiring Senator

Two years ago, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff visited my State and Local Government law class to discuss how he handled the Polygamous theocracy in Hildale, Utah and what powers the state and county officials had to reign in rouge city officials who obeyed Warren Jeffs over the law. It was an interesting talk, and I commend Shurtleff for the work he did regarding polygamists, especially when you contrast it with the heavy-handed and disastrous approach of his counterparts in Texas.

Shertleff's shtick is always "aw-chucks" country boy whose charm and false modesty is supposed to grow on you. The prior fall, he was very good at debating the other candidates for the AG position at my law school as well using that approach.

After his lecture to my seminar, there was time for questions, so I asked: "The old saying goes 'A.G. stands for Aspiring Governor'" He then chuckled, I continued, asking him if he had plans for future statewide office like Governor. He replied with some trope about finishing out this term as A.G. which would be his last and denying any ambitions for anything else.

Since he is a politician, and a pretty successful one at that, I didn't expect the truth, but I did want him on the record as pretending he didn't want to go higher than A.G.

Potential challengers from his own party have already started lining up for the 2010 race and none is bigger than Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who huddled with some D.C. fundraisers Wednesday, while in town for a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General.

"I've always wanted to serve in the Senate," Shurtleff told The Salt Lake Tribune .

The attorney general isn't a candidate yet -- at least formally. He wants to run and believes he has the makings of a formidable challenger, but isn't ready to commit out of concern for his family.

"I've still got a 12-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old. We are not going to move," he said. That means, if elected, he would have to commute back and forth each week. "Is this the right time for my family?"

He has sought advice from Utah Reps. Jim Matheson and Jason Chaffetz, who commute to D.C. during the week and fly back to their young children on the weekends.

That's right, the same Matheson that he falsely maligned back when it was politically convenient to do so. Yeah, Shurtleff is a real family man who isn't a hack, I get it.

Shurtleff said he has also done some "significant polling" and the results make him only more eager to run.

"He [Bennett]'s vulnerable. He knows it," he said.

A number of Republicans are thinking about challenging Sen. Bennett from the right, and the party's rules are kooky enough that one of them might force Bennett into a primary election. And Shurtleff would be one most capable of tacking back into the mainstream.

Beyond Shurtleff, Mike Lee, who was Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'former general counsel, and former Juab County Attorney David Leavitt, have expressed interest in running for Bennett's seat.

Originally, Shurtleff's political plan was to serve out his term and then take a shot at running for governor. But that changed last fall, when Congress passed the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Bennett was one of the key Senate Republicans negotiating that plan.

"People are pretty upset with that bailout. Now that they know he had a role in it, they are not happy at all," Shurtleff said.

He said he also is unhappy with the way Senate Republicans operated under former President George W. Bush.

"They were just spending us into oblivion," he said.

After Shurtleff floated his name as a potential candidate, Bennett gave him a call and asked him to serve as the co-chairman of his re-election campaign.

Ah, so right-wing "populism" it is. Bennett, with his Appropriations Committee membership, has made it his job to bring home the bacon for Utah, while Hatch gets his celebrity "friends" out of jail.

While one state's bacon is another's pork, most states are want to part with their own Senator Pothole. Alaska didn't part with Ted Stevens until AFTER he had been convicted of seven felonies, and even then it was extremely close. It takes decades for senators to build up seniority on important committees like Approps. That's why Sen. Clinton is now Sec. Clinton, she wanted to be a player in the health care reform legislation but senate lions like Sen. Kennedy (class of 1960) told her hands off.

The point is, I doubt Bennett will lose. If he really was that vulnerable, you would hear talk that Jim Matheson was thinking about running. As it is Jim seems content to stay put, unless something opens up.

Will Bishop and Chaffetz stand against Utah's Fourth?

Most of you who have been following the quest for Utah to get that 4th seat that was so narrowly denied to it in 2000 are also aware that the bill in Congress that would give Utah its extra seat is a debatable constitutional issue.

Now that the Senate has passed a bill that gives Utah another seat, DC a seat, and forces DC to end its restrictive gun laws, passage of a DC-for-Utah bill seems inevitable and since Obama was a co-sponsor, it will become law in the next few months. All of this means a constitutional challenge will occur in the next few months as well, and the issue will go before the U.S. Supreme Court perhaps as soon as October, who will have to decide whether the part of the Constitution that basically allows the Congress to do whatever it wants with the District of Columbia trumps the part of the Constitution about the make-up of the House (that is, its members have to be from States).

But in the law, and especially in Chief Justice Roberts' jurisprudence, anyone challenging the facial constitutionality of a bill must have standing and the issue must be ripe. Now for those of you who didn't go to law school, that means there needs to be a real party in interest whose injury is real and would almost immediately harm the party seeking to overturn the challenged law. So a U.S. Senator does not have standing, nor your average voter in any state or protectorate other than D.C. and Utah (under Roberts' other case law, but who says you have to be consistent versus politically expedient?). No, it would have to be a member of the U.S House whose vote is being diluted by 2/437ths (I am not good with fractions) due to two more members being added to the House. And since everyone except me thinks it will be a wash partisan wise (i.e. 1 GOPer from Utah, 1 Dem from DC), the national political parties also don't have standing.

So that leaves U.S. House Republicans that voted against the bill. And strategically, it is best to have the lead Plaintiffs be not someone like Minority Leader John Boehner from Ohio, but Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz from Utah, so that it doesn't look like big states against Utah and DC. The question is, are these two men ready to be the poster boys of a cause to reduce the potential voting power of their state? Do they want to be the ones that will tell voters in Utah that Utahns really only need them and Jim Matheson to represent them in the House, and that they should just wait until 2012 like good children? Good luck on running statewide when a senate seat opens up or Huntsman steps down.

More on that box

So I am in line for security here at the airport and occured to me
that I didn't finish my thought on Buttars. It defies belief that GOP
senators thought that Buttars would refrain from making outrageously
homophobic comments (the kind that gets you national attention),
especially given the push for the Common Ground Initative.

They knew or should have known this blow up was going to occur, so it
leads me to believe Waddoups et al wanted it to happen. To distract
the public from massive cuts and payback to the teacher's union.

Otherwise, it makes no sense. And good for McCoy for calling their bluff.

Can't keep crazy in a box

OK, so I couldn't resist posting about Utah State Sen. Chris Buttars after I read the latest article by SL Tirbune Reporter Robert Gehrke. It explains why Sen. Buttars was babbling on and on about free speech:

Senate leaders disciplined Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, not for anti-gay comments he made in a recent interview, but because he violated a deal with leadership that he not talk about gay issues, a senator said Saturday.

The irony here is Buttars didn't need to talk about "them gays," thus far, every single one of the Common Ground Initiative bills have gone down in flames, despite the fact that they are popular with Utahns and Utah's popular governor.

Perhaps Buttars is his own worst enemy, and one of these very reasonable and moderate proposals will have renewed life in the legislature. Although I think that sadly the most popular things to do in the legislature is a) whatever ex-Speaker Curtis likes b) cut budgets c) bash teh gay and d) give the gun lobby whatever it wants.

"It [Buttars being stripped of his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee] happened, not because he said a lot of things wrong, but because he decided to be the spokesman [on gay issues] again," [Sen. Howard] Stephenson [(R-Draper)] said.
[...]
"I think the bulk of people in Utah agree with 90 percent of what he said," Sen. Dennis Stowell, R-Parowan, said on Stephenson's radio show.

That right there is the problem with this whole thing in a nutshell: they agree with Buttars, but he is a dristraction from their agenda. That and Sen. Stephenson has his own radio show. Gee, I wonder who has the advantage in that primary or general election.

Utahns [heart] TRAX/FrontRunner

Sometimes, it seems that forcing something on people that you know they will like really is a good idea.

A survey by the University of Utah's Center for Public Policy & Administration finds overwhelming public support for continued investment in rail transit projects. Among 1,002 residents polled statewide, 79 percent said continued funding for rail projects either is very important or somewhat important.

Among the 546 interviewed within the Utah Transit Authority's service area, that support spurted to 81 percent, said Jennifer Robinson, associate director for the U.'s center.

That is a huge level of support. And it reminds me of the astounded repeated mantra of a local news reporter on election night a few years back, who kept saying that Utah taxpayers had voted to increase their taxes for light rail. Clearly, he had either voted against it, or disbelieved the polling, or both.

People who live in the southern suburbs love the fact that they can take light rail to work, or a Jazz game, or to the U, to the SLC Temple, the Nutcraker, etc. People who live in the northern suburbs are starting to enjoy FrontRunner, and soon people from Provo to Draper will love it too. Out of towners will love taking TRAX from the airport to their hotel downtown.

Now I could dwell on the latest follies of the Utah Senate with their designated moron D. Chris Buttars, or the much-too-soon death of Utah Jazz owner/genius businessman Larry H. Miller, but on this sunny Saturday, I would rather focus on positive things.

next up, health care for all?

Now that the stimulus package was passed with Sens. Al Franken or Ted Kennedy being able to vote (that's right, thanks to court rulings there is virtually no way Coleman wins his election contest)...it is on to the next big challenge: affordable, quality health care for every American.

OK well, actually there is still a budget to pass...which is why the what's in or out of the stimulus package didn't give me much heartburn. And that doesn't need 60 votes, just 51.

And as messy and "bad process" as it is, the budget can be a vehicle to pass pieces of health care reform. Already, sCHIP was expanded and health care records have money to be digitized to reduce errors and save costs. Money can go towards giving every American company state, and individual the ability to buy into the federal employees' plan at a sliding scale. Or giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices like the VA does. Or fixing Medicare part D in other ways to get rid of the 50 gillion different plans that make no sense and eliminate the so-called donut hole of coverage.

And then we can rehash the Edwards-Clinton-Obama debate of how you get everyone covered: mandate or affordability first. Shockingly, Utahns agree with Clinton, but maybe because Romney supported it in Massachusetts (before he ran for president).

As you know from paying your bills, private insurance sucks. It fights you at at every turn to not have to pay whatever it is you need, it screws up when it bills, it sends you fake bills. I could go on and on, but every one has insurance horror stories because the system is disfunctional with reverse preverse incentives. The current system is crippling our competitiveness with other countries who do over universal coverage. Just ask GM.

Utah animus

"Its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests." -- Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996)

While Justice Kennedy was talking about an amendment before Colorado voters, he might have well been talking about the rationale behind the shooting down of each piece of the Common Ground initiative that has come to a vote this year at the legislature.

Common Ground foes argue that extending rights to same-sex couples or recognizing sexual orientation as a protected class undermines Utah's constitutionally enshrined edict that marriage is only between a man and a woman. They warn that even seemingly benign gay-rights measures put Utah on a "slippery slope" toward a court ruling that would legalize same-sex marriage, like in California last year.

"I don't use this word lightly: That's false," says Clifford Rosky, a family law professor at the University of Utah's law school. "Utah courts can't ignore the Utah Constitution."

Even though they know there is no way that these bills effect the same-sex marriage ban in the constituation, they want to claim otherwise because these "traditional marriage supporters" really just think gays and lesbians are icky to some degree. Enough that they believe homosexuals shouldn't be able to visit their partner in the hospital when the partner is sick, or sue when their partern gets hit by drunk driver, or collect on insurance from their partner.

And the Sumpremes have said not liking a group of people is not good enough reason for denying them rights that other people have.

like 1993 all over again

Obama hasn't even been in the Oval Office a month, and I am beginning to see Bill Clinton's disasterous beginning repeated.

I read George Sephanopolis' book "All too human" this summer and was struck by how many early mistakes the Clinton Administration made and how that limited their ability to get their agenda through. Some was self-made stupidity like making an off-hand comment about gays in the military and letting it spin out of control during the transition, then handing the keys over to Colin Powell on the issue. But many were Republican made, like "nanny-gate" that did in many designates for cabinet posts.

16 years later, it was bad tax filings. Not that Republicans made these nominees file erroneous taxes or hire illegal aliens for nannies, but that in the overall picture, these issues are not that important to these candidates qualifications. And the true goal in both situations was not to get a better qualified nominee, but to make the new Democratic President look bad and weaken him.

Republicans remember 1994 and 2002, the lesson they learned was not to compromise with Democrats and the American voter will reward them.

Obama needs to learn the lesson of 2005, if you stand up and ask what the American people think, you can stop silliness like social security privitization. He has high approval ratings and a large majorit of people want this stimulous bill done NOW not in general, so press your case Mr. President.

sympathy for the lobbyists

The Salt Lake Tribune is doing a series of exposes critical stories puff-pieces on lobbyists.

Sure, lobbyists are people too and they should be able to talk to legislators and try to convince them by the power of her ideas. But they shouldn't have more access than citizens and they shouldn't be able to get access because they are related to a famous person, like Sen. Hatch.

the legislators are in the details

The public just got a sneak preview of the ethics bills that the leadership of the Utah House approve. And I have to say there are some genuinely good things in there, like a 1 year prohabition of lobbying by ex-members, ban on personal use of left over campaign cash, and gift ban on anything over $10 (excluding meals, but +$15 meals would have to be disclosed).

But as usual, there was no consultation with House Democrats, and it appears very little with rank-and-file Republicans either. But the best part was at the end of the article:

Representatives asked how the bill would affect legislators who are also registered lobbyists and Dee punted. "Perhaps the different body needs to address that," he said. Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, is also a registered lobbyist for the Utah Taxpayers Association.

Classic.

Utah Representatives against (increased) representation

In all of my blabbing about how stupid it was for Rep. Chaffetz to go against the DC/Utah seat bill, I forgot there was an inaugual member of the Utah Representatives against (increased) Representation: Rep. Bishop

New Rep. Jason Chaffetz says the bill is unconstitutional, and Rep. Rob Bishop, who voted present on the legislation last time, questions whether it would even help Utah since the state likely will get a fourth member anyway.

"The value for Utah is well past," Bishop said Tuesday. He said he wasn't sure whether he was against the bill, but ticked off reasons why he wasn't backing it.

Yeah I am sure he will either vote against it or do the brave thing a vote present. I would rather have a sure seat now than wait 4 years for a likely seat. Bishop is even lamer than Chaffetz, who at least is hiding behind a pluasable constitutional law argument.

So why do 20% of the Utah delegation not support a bill that would increase the power of their state? Is it because they don't want competition for running for Governor or Senate when Hatch or Bennett retire/die? Do they hate D.C. that much? Are they afraid that Jim Matheson will run in the redder district and another Democrat will win the bluer seat after redistricting? Someone please explain this to me.

the end is the beginning

s it bright where you are
And Have the people changed
Does it make you happy you're so strange
And in your darkest hour
Now all secrets fade
We can watch the world devoured in its pain

--The Beginning is the End is the Beginning, Smashing Pumpkins.

Remember this time of year eight years ago? Bill Clinton was doing his midnight regulations and pardons, his 11th-hour Middle East Peace attempt had failed, and Yasser Arafat had declared the Second Infidata, and what almost was a lasting peace broke out into all out war right when the U.S. was transitioning from Clinton to Bush.

That following summer, I was an intern for Rep. Jim Matheson, and us lowly House interns got ask Colin Powell some questions. Someone stood up and said, "what about Israel/Palistine?" The Secretary of State gave us the standard B.S. line about how it is a "top priority" of the Bush Administration. Sure was, that's why they never did anything but photo ops for years while the people living in the land of Caanan suffered and died at the hands of Hamas, random terrorist groups, or the IDF.

Hamas is using the people of the Gaza Strip as props in the political moves to gain more power. They approved of more rocket strikes into Israel. And Israel is equally political in this incursion which they admit will not remove Hamas or the rockets or anything else. But hey, an election is comming up for PM, and all of the potential candidates are trying to out Hawk each other, reality be damned.

Obama should dispatch Bill Clinton to get a temporary end to the fighting. I always find it embarressing when the French trump us diplomatically because the U.S. is too preoccupied to get seriously involved.