By Patrica Renick, 1977
Posts published during February, 2010
From the most happening, data-tracking, investigating journalists on the web, ProPublica brings us some perspective on the bailout.
Note the incredible disparity between outflow of bailout money and revenues returned. And for any folks (those in Congress/media in particular) who lament the bailout or consider the national debt a burden on future generations : you must be taking something under the table if you oppose a fee on the same giant banking establishments that our concurrently turning out record profits/bonuses while acting as a vacuum for taxpayer money. THEY OWE US NOW, not the other way around.
Every so often, school districts face budget shortfalls. They either decide then, to hold a referendum or bond measure, or to cut back in order to work with their revenues. But in this recession, a budget shortfall is no matter of small consequence.
In Utah, the latest attempt to rectify the state’s budgetary woes comes at the apparent expense of students attending public high school. The latest proposal, seeking to lessen the pain of a 700$ million budget shortfall, calls for the elimination of the 12th grade. Rather, it toys with the idea of eliminating the 12th grade, either fully or through an opt-out sort of arrangement.
Sidenote : the legislator who proposed this is none other than State Sen. Chris Buttars, who so callously opined that he considers gays and lesbians “the greatest threat to America going down,”. But moving on from that…
His proposal also calls for the elimination of bus service for high school students.
Seems to me, as a former public high school 12th grade, bus-riding student, that this proposal is impulsive and short-sighted. If Utah sets the precedent that budget shortfalls can be met by hacking away at the public school system, our country will be in trouble. Public school is not an entitlement, not a spending program, not social welfare and not expendable. Proposals such as this one should be called out for what they are – opportunist and disinterested.
I highly doubt that any legislator who proposes the whole-sale cutting of an entire grade has any interest in improving the public school system. Further, I highly doubt that any legislator who proposes this as a means to rectify a budget gap caused by a nationwide recession should be taken seriously as anything but an ideologue.
But then again, it may be too early to see if anyone actually takes this seriously. Things like this make for great controversy and really stir up the pot, but will it solve any problems? No. It will create a whole new slew of problems, the so-called slippery slope of selling-out Utah’s students. Because if 12th grade is dispensable, why not 11th? Why not just do away with free school lunch programs then too? Or what is to stop these partisans from just cutting all funding for school districts in time of budget shortfalls?
One thing is for sure though. I take pride in my state, Oregon’s, ability to prioritize its public schools above their corporate benefactors. We passed a tax increase, the largest one in Oregon’s history, to ensure that our budget shortfalls do not hurt the public school system and its benefactors (ie, children, students everywhere). Our state legislature passed the tax increase last year, as our 2011 budget was hinging upon the increased revenues from this increase, but it was forced to undergo a ballot referendum because of the anti-tax, Nike lobby. Even within that narrative though, common sense and the common good prevailed when a majority of Oregon voters chose their public schools over their measly 10$ minimum corporate tax rate.
So the latest thing to shake up Washington’s frail bones is the news that a conservative blue-dog Democrat from Indiana is not going to seek re-election. Sure, he had an easy 20 point lead over his nearest Republican contender in prospective polls, but the man just has got to be moving along.
What is the problem here though? It seems like from the way people are already reacting to it, that something inconceivable is happening. But really, he is a 2 term Senator – 12 years! Let him go. He has been in Washington too long already.
I’m no fan of political dynasties. Bayh had a certain edge in his pursuit of national politics, as his father was a notable Indiana political figure, which many pundits and pollsters are already saying makes any other Democrat’s chances of winning in Indiana in November slight. But fuck that. For the first time in more than half a century there will not be a single Kennedy in Congress. Yet, we continue to bemoan the electoral downfalls that occur when political dynasties end. The people who comprise these dynasties may indeed be high caliber statesmen and women, worthy of their service to our country, but I refuse to consider the political dynasty as an inherently good characteristic of any government.
There is something to say about political/congressional veterans, those who know how the machine works, in their ability to help grease the gears of legislative agendas. But is that information that cannot be communicated to someone new?
I’m the type of partisan who likes my party’s goals, but lordy do I hate my party’s tendencies. We exalt the virtues of participatory democracy, but somehow that only extends so far. For one thing, why don’t Democrats support Congressional term limits? The logic applies wonderfully to the executive, and the public implicitly accepts that as good for our country. So why does that logic not extend to the Congress?
That is what I mean by how I hate my party’s tendencies. If they ever came out to support term limits for Congress (I have no idea how much/what portion of the public would support this idea – any polls out there?), their whole electoral strategy would be flipped on its head. Political party’s love incumbents. There is no way to hide that fact. But do incumbent politicians do any better for those who elect them than freshmen would?
While I’ve got you on a tangent, I predict that the only way for a Congressional term-limit system to work would be within a public campaign finance system. Maybe that would be the way to get the Dems/Repubs behind this, to ease their purse string concerns over how expensive it would be to elect so many less incumbents. That seems pretty realistic to me though, especially considering how the gridlock and partisanship of Congress has become “common wisdom”.
CNET carried a wonderful article this weekend, reporting on a case brought up by the Obama justice department to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals concerning the burden of proof required to be shown by government officials in pursuing stored or prospective tracking records of people’s cell phones. These cases are not uncommon, where the electronic records from one’s telecom provider are deemed necessary in furthering an ongoing investigation – this article briefly mentions cases involving drug smuggling over the Mexico-US border and a murder in LA where suspect’s cell phone records led to their apprehension/conviction. The issue, more specifically, in this case was over exactly what burden of proof was required – be it probable cause, or relevancy or more than probable cause. This presents itself as an interesting dilemma in the execution of the coercive powers of the state, as the judiciary has taken up the cause of seeking to resolve the disparity that may exist between the rulings of different judges in so far as how cellular electronic tracking differentiates itself from other investigative methods that require a warrant to be issued from a judge.
In a 2005 case, Magistrate judge James Orenstein issued this opinion in part :
“…it is my understanding based on anecdotal information that magistrate judges in other jurisdictions are being confronted with the same issue but have not yet achieved consensus on how to resolve it. If the government intends to continue seeking authority to obtain cell site location information in aid of its criminal investigations, I urge it to seek appropriate review of this order so that magistrate judges will have more authoritative guidance in determining whether controlling law permits such relief on the basis of the relaxed standard set forth (under federal law), or instead requires adherence to the more exacting standard of probable cause.”
That was 2005, under the Bush DoJ, where the above opinion resulted in the denial of a Patriot Act surveillance request.
In this more recent case, the Obama DoJ sought to appeal a lower court ruling which was perceived by the DoJ to have required more evidence than the statute regulating the government’s obtaining of electronics records requires. The statute, Title 18, 2703 requires less than probable cause. It requires that “the governmental entity offers specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation,”. As such, the district court, whose opinion the Obama DoJ is appealing, asked of the government to provide probable cause.
Thus, the Obama Department of Justice believes that the tracking of individuals through their cell-phone or other electronics should not require probable cause. They believe that despite a clear judicial review of this issue, as alluded to in the 2005 opinion above, the requirements for a court order be at most what is outlined in the statute regulating this issue – if a court demands more, like probable cause, the Obama DoJ will appeal to a higher court. Keep Reading »
As I was walking home today, I was beginning to step across a street when I heard someone playing the violin. It caught my attention even amongst the cop’s siren and a loud lunch-rush jamming the parking lot.
I was leaving my house later that day and was greeted, when stepping outside of the door, by the same violinist I had heard trolling the streets earlier. She was across the street, carrying on without regard for her audience. I was struck by the way this simple gesture completely changed the character of the street and the neighborhood around the lone violinist. It was a melody that fit perfectly into the breezy, cloudy, Oregon atmosphere of February, reminding me of the blooming crocus I’ve noticed along the sidewalk each morning. The wonderful thing about this whole scene was the backdrop. There was a 15′ tall, 100′ long gray wall punctuated with street trees, and she walked along a sidewalk that undulated with the bulk of the tree roots pushing up beneath it.
We’re all conditioned to think so linearly about improving urban environments : there are lots of buildings in cities, so the solution must be in the form of a building (or in the form of no building), we think. But that mentality will just lead to a state of constant building and development, rebuilding and redevelopment, when in fact a more simple alternative may exist.
Our built environment is calling for musical accompaniment.
One caveat though: in my mind, accompaniment means live music (no loudspeakers, thank you).
The Obama administration loves to tout their support for clean energy. Who wouldn’t? They know it is popular, they know there is a huge market for it and they know it will help our economy in the short-term and long-term.
More importantly though, the awardees of the clean energy manufacturing tax credit have been announced, with the award total reaching 2.3$ billion amongst 43 states and 183 manufacturing facilities (White House press release here). The full list of projects, tax credit requested, technology area, city, state, and description is available here. An abbreviated list of 10 awardees with brief descriptions is here.
Of all the great projects and innovation being supported through this tax credit, one giant contradiction is smacking me in the face.
There are only two projects being awarded tax credits (in other words, only two employable, marketable, innovations) that have anything to do with “carbon dioxide capture and sequestration equipment”, or if you prefer clean coal. Only two projects, less than 5$ million awarded to anything related to clean coal, carbon dioxide capture or sequestration equipment out of the whole 2.3$ billion pot. Yet Obama keeps as a key selling point in his press release. Why?
From the Jan 8, 2010 press release:
Qualifying manufacturing facilities included the production of a wide range of clean energy products:
- Solar, wind, geothermal, or other renewable energy equipment
- Electric grids and storage for renewables
- Fuel cells and microturbines
- Energy storage systems for electric or hybrid vehicles
- Carbon dioxide capture and sequestration equipment
- Equipment for refining or blending renewable fuels
- Equipment for energy conservation, including lighting and smart grid technologies
- Plug-in electric vehicles or their components, such as electric motors, generators, and power control units
- Other advanced energy property designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may also be eligible as determined by the Secretary of the Treasury.
[emphasis added]
One of the projects, based out of Kaukauna, WI, is a system designed to “extract/trap carbon from waste streams from coal fired power plants”. They were awarded a 75,000$ tax credit (awards ranged to 141$ million). Another project based out of Bellevue, WA promises “more efficient and cost effective Carbon capture and storage”, and was awarded 4.7$ million.
What about the gigantic amounts of carbon released in mountain-top removal, which this relatively small investment does not attempt to mitigate? We have seen no action on this contradiction of our energy/environmental policies, and the practice continues to be used in the Appalachians. The renewed support for the EPA under Obama has resulted in less permits being awarded for mountain-top removal mines, but numerous permits are still granted, perpetuating the presence of this horribly destructive practice within our energy policy. Follow this to see the most recent action by the EPA on this issue.
It would be swell if our energy policy supported where we want to go, as opposed to the habits in which we’re entrenched.
An interesting disparity found in a new New York Times / CBS news poll, no visuals available yet though.
Apparently 16% of the Democratic public would support a gay man or lesbian’s right to serve openly in the military before they’d support a homosexual’s. That is just a mind-boggling poll result, but it matches up perfectly with what textbooks on surveys/polling assert: that choice of words makes all the difference. The mind-boggling part is just that such a discrepancy exists in some people’s minds between the word homosexual and gay man/lesbian.
But the take-home lesson from this poll will be that a majority of the public supports the repeal of DADT, regardless of word choice.
The result of this poll reminds me though, of another survey taken in Iowa recently by the Des Moines Register. Lead-in to the survey :
Gay marriage hasn’t affected most Iowans’ lives.
(surprise, surprise)
But this now leads me to question, what if the survey had used “same-sex marriage”?
Daily cartoon from the Independent :
- and then accuse the other side of being radical leftists!
Oh, if there has been anything to bring the hilarity back to Washington, it is those wacky teabaggers. It is too bad that they’ve all spurned Ron Paul’s brand of reform politics in favor of a snarling, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-factual, pro-war, pro-calling-people-Hitler platform (now with fmr Gov. resign-after-2-years-Palin at the helm). Before that ideological re-alignment happened, the establishment Republicans were campaigning against that movement in the primaries (remember when Ron Paul kept getting pushed out of the national Republican primary debates?). But nay, are those the “grass-roots” tea-baggers or the “astro-turf” tea-baggers who are pushing away from the movement created by Paul and toward the movement co-opted by Palin? Hard to tell, hard to tell.
One dead give-away though, is that the Republican establishment (Palin included) embraced the tea party movement after, not before, the movement gained corporate sponsorship and moved further to the right of the ideological spectrum.
Today, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish has been featuring some historical visuals of the alleged “enhanced interrogation” (re: torture) techniques institutionalized in the Bush/Cheney anti-terrorism regime (here, here and here). The shocking nature of these images is not in their graphic content, but in their power to speak to the inhumanity inherent in any torture regime. In the context of the Obama DoJ keeping a lid on as much of the visual record of the Bush/Cheney torture practices, these images emphasize that what was done was nothing new. Whoever came up with the notion that post-9/11 terrorists somehow need to be tortured clearly cannot be said to be particularly creative or ingenious. Nay, they cannot even be said to have thought through the implications of their actions, as is evidenced by the Bush administration’s efforts to remove as much tangible evidence of their acts from the public record as possible.
It is nearly 400 years after the Peruvian Inquisition from which Sullivan’s photos draw their historical context, and history has remembered those events precisely as despicable, barbaric and as exemplifying a tattered, desperate regime clinging to power. This despite the fact that there were to cameras around to document the acts – it is only the public consciousness and what spare written record remains that shapes the perception of these acts within its history. That said, I don’t think that the Obama administration’s attempts to keep the remaining torture photos from various Bush/Cheney blacksites unpublished is going to alter how history judges the last administration’s actions. Think about how easy it is to allude towards an oppressive regime just by saying the name – the Inquisition or the Khmer Rouge. After Obama’s election and during the campaign, there came to be zero ambiguity within the institutionalized perceptions of the Bush/Cheney regime that what occurred was indeed torture and that moving forward America rejects those acts and their justifications. From a March speech by Pres. Obama at the National Archives Museum:
For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable – a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions; that failed to use our values as a compass. And that is why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America
News is that the east coast, which includes Washington DC, which is where our national politicians live, is getting some snow. Oh wait, scratch that, not really news, because it is February. Despite that little fact of life (winter tends to mean snow, sometimes lots of it), the NYTimes decided to run an article in their Science/Environment section titled, “Climate-change debate is heating up in deep freeze,”. This article basically provides an outlet for all the shenanigans pulled by climate-change skeptics who like to take advantage of the average American’s shaky grasp on science, with seemingly anecdotal rebuttals by “scientists” provided as the factual context to this debate (which is heating up, but wait it’s cold outside – leave it to the NYTimes to spend more time coming up with a witty headline than writing a worth-while article).
Sorry, but it isn’t debate that is heating up. It is opportunism. The Republicans pulling these stunts, like building an igloo and declaring it “Mr. Gore’s new home”, don’t care what the factual basis for climate change is. They care that they have an opportunity to reinforce the conclusion that they and their constituents have already come to, science be damned. Rachel Maddow covered this last night, eviscerating those climate-change deniers with the help of Bill Nye, but she did so in an entirely appropriate way – by condescendingly mocking the shallow logic that these Republicans are subscribing to. But the NY Times has decided that all this agitation on the right, completely devoid of evidence-based arguments to buffer their case, constitutes debate.
If you want to know what is wrong with Washington, look no further than what constitutes debate in the media. I had more conclusive, heated debates in high school.
Tonight on Rachel Maddow, Bill Nye (the science guy) provided commentary on certain people’s insistence that a snowstorm on the east coast in February proves that climate change isn’t real. I’m psyched but disheartened that Maddow felt she needed to ask for Bill Nye to explain the difference between climate and weather. I know I learned that concept in school (probably thanks to Bill Nye, come to think of it), but the fact that she thought this was a necessary fact to air is very telling of the level of discourse in which these certain people are conducting themselves.
The whole theme of the full-court shot and the montage of the facts that don’t negate concepts/theories was great, though it was hard to tell exactly where she was going with it at first. I’m more partial towards the insights of David Byrne on this matter :
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them– From “Crosseyed & Painless”
News To (Me)dia
…and everything in between
Stay on point :
