Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

July 9, 2010

The Politics of Ignorance

If you tire of the seemingly endless demagogic blather that governmental officials and pundits often pass off as discussion of key societal issues, then be sure to read this insightful Will Wilkinson post on the politics of ignorance:

The problem [of ideologues elevating doctrine over wisdom] is heightened by the fact that the reading public generally enjoys ideologues more than three-handed scholars, and so the more ideological among ideologues find themselves with larger audiences and more numerous and remunerative opportunities to publicly opine.

What results is not so much an exercise in public reason as a smash-em-up reputation derby, where elites vie to increase their pull with the public and policymakers by disparaging ideological competitors. Moves in the reputation game take many forms, from sniffs of imperious condescension, to bald �stupidest man alive� name-calling, to self-congratulatory above-the-fray comments like this one. There is no reason to trust that this is a process through which truth unfolds.

In the absence of institutions that limit the scope of democratic authority over intractably complex policy questions, the best we can hope for is perhaps a tad more self-awareness among opinion elites about their tendencies toward dogmatism and for the rise of norms that do more to reward the honestly judicious and penalize highly-regarded doctrinaire assholes.

As noted earlier here and here, the instinct of most politicians and much of the mainstream media is to embrace simple �villain and victim� morality plays when attempting to explain a particular trouble.

Take, for example, investment loss. The more nuanced story about the financial decisions that underlie a failed investment strategy doesn't garner sufficient votes or sell enough newspapers to generate much interest from the demagogues or muckrakers. That's why we periodically endure witch hunts, such as the recent one demonizing speculators. That�s also why it's important that our leaders who are ignorant about the function of speculation in markets take a moment to understand its beneficial purpose.

Morality plays are comforting because they make it easy to identify and demonize the villains who are supposedly responsible for trouble. The truth is usually far more nuanced and complicated, but ultimately more rewarding to embrace.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

July 2, 2010

Rational Optimism

Matt Ridley supplies a dose of good end-of-the-week vibes with this article based on his new book, The Rational Optimist (Harper 2010):

When I set out to write a book about the material progress of the human race, now published at The Rational Optimist, I was only dimly aware of how much better my life is now than it would have been if I had been born 50 years before. I knew that I have novel technologies at my disposal from synthetic fleeces and discount airlines to Facebook and satellite navigation. I knew that I could rely on advances in vaccines, transplants and sleeping pills. I knew that I could experience cleaner air and cleaner water at least in my own country. I knew that for Chinese and Japanese people life had grown much more wealthy. But I did not know the numbers.

Do you know the numbers? In 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

We invent new technologies that decrease the amount of time that it takes to supply each other�s needs. The great theme of human history is that we increasingly work for each other. We exchange our own specialised and highly efficient fragments of production for everybody else�s. The �division of labour� Adam Smith called it, and it is still spreading. When a self-sufficient peasant moves to town and gets a job, supplying his own needs by buying them from others with the wages from his job, he can raise his standard of living and those he supplies with what he produces. [.  .  .]

So ask yourself this: with so much improvement behind us, why are we to expect only deterioration before us? I am quoting from an essay by Thomas Macaulay written in 1830, when pessimists were already promising doom:

�They were wrong then, and I think they are wrong now.�

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

June 21, 2010

Visiting a prison cell

The troubling U.S. incarceration rate and the dubious governmental policy of overcriminalization have been frequent topics on this blog. The toll of the overcriminalization policy on citizens and their families is incalculable.

Part of the problem in modifying this destructive policy is that the constituency of current and former prisoners and their families is not powerful politically. But another aspect of the problem is that most well-meaning citizens who could make a difference on this issue politically have never experienced the hell that is most prisons in the United States. It�s human nature to avoid addressing even an important issue that one has never had to confront personally.

That�s why this A Public Defender post is important � it provides penetrating insight into the destructive nature of our government�s overcriminalization policy:

I sat in a prison cell yesterday.  .   .   .

There was a bed � a small bed � that was the length of the room. At the foot of the bed a metal toilet, with no cover. Just beyond that the heavy metal door, with a slit for a window. The door was maybe 3 feet wide, if that. At the head of the bed, if you were laying on your right side, you�d be about half a foot away from an ugly metal desk with holes that pretended to be drawers. This could not have been more than a foot long. The bed was flush with one wall. The desk with the opposite.

The bed looked hard, cold and dirty. And that�s it. This particular cell happened to have a window at the head of the bed. A window looking out onto nothing. Any future inhabitant of this particular cell would have it good. It was a single. Across the narrow passageway from this cell was another, identical in every respect except two: it was a double cell and there was no window. (Here�s a post I wrote a while ago about a different take on prisons in a foreign country.) [.  .  .]

I willed myself to stand there, though, for a minute. To look around at the bare walls, the bare desk, the dirty toilet and imagine someone �living� there.

I even briefly closed my eyes and tried to picture myself there, day in and day out, for months, which turned into years, which turned into decades.

Would I survive? How does anyone? Would I give up and stop bathing, shaving, eating? Would I maintain my sanity or would I quickly decompensate? How long would it be before I�d want to kill myself? [.  .  .]

People in cells are lucky, though. The next portion of the tour took me to the dorm-style housing. Which is nothing like any dorm you�ve ever lived in. Imagine instead the makeshift MASH hospitals, or perhaps the busiest train station in your neighborhood at rush hour, except instead of standing, people are milling about a hundred bunk beds on that tiny platform.

There is no privacy, there is no solitude, there is no being left alone. You are part of a large crowd. You are in someone�s face and they are in yours. You are a collective. Day in and day out. You share your bedroom with 125 other people.

Leaving the prison, I asked my colleague: cell or dorm? There�s no debate. Cell. I�d rather lose my sanity by myself.

A truly civilized society would find a better way.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

June 18, 2010

What could possibly go wrong?

Earlier in the week, Steve Malanga wrote about the municipal debt racquet in this WSJ op-ed. Not surprisingly, a good part of the article examined dubious decisions that local governments have made in financing sports palaces:

State and local borrowing as a percentage of the country�s GDP has risen to an all-time high of 22% in 2010 from 15%, with projections that it will reach 24% by 2012.

Even more disconcerting is what the borrowing now often finances. One favorite scheme for muni debt is giant and risky development projects.

California�s redevelopment regime is an object lesson. Starting in the 1950s, the state gave localities the right to create public agencies, funded by increases in property taxes, which can issue debt to finance redevelopment. A whopping 380 such entities now exist. They collect 10% of all property taxes�nearly $6 billion annually�and they have amassed $29 billion in debt never approved by voters for projects ranging from sports facilities to concert venues to retail malls, museums and convention centers.

Critics, including taxpayer groups, say most such agency projects add little economic value. Sometimes the outcome is much worse.

In 1999, Fresno conceived plans to revive its downtown area with various projects, including a baseball stadium for the minor-league Grizzlies, which it had lured from Phoenix. The city�s redevelopment agency floated some $46 million in bonds to build the stadium. But the Grizzlies fizzled in their new home, demanded a break on rent, threatening to skip town and stick taxpayers with the entire $3.4 million annual bond payment on the facility. The team is now receiving $700,000 in annual subsidies to stay in the city.

Adding to the city�s woes: Last June, another development project, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum, went bust, leaving the city�s taxpayers on the hook for three-quarters of a million dollars in annual debt payments.

Cities now also use taxpayer-financed debt to engage in fierce bidding wars that benefit private enterprises. Charlotte, N.C., for instance, won the bidding for the new Nascar all of Fame with a $154 million offer, funded by a new hotel tax dedicated to servicing bonds for constructing the hall. But the venue employs only about 115 people�and an economic development study estimated the increased annual tourism from the venture won�t even equal what a single Nascar race generates.

Why did politicians offer the deal? For the dubious and hard-to-quantify purpose of �branding� the city with a major attraction, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Yeah, we in Houston know all about financing those minor league stadiums. Anyone taking into consideration what we are going to do with that thing if the Dynamo and/or the MLS doesn�t make it?

If that weren�t bad enough, the WSJ�s Chris Rhoads chimed in yesterday with this article on the wasting, publicly-financed �assets� that Greece built for the 2004 Olympic Games:

Georges Kalaras used to view with pride the sports hall built near his home here for the 2004 Olympic competition in rhythmic gymnastics and ping pong. Now, he gets mad every time he jogs by.

"Look, it's locked!" shouted the 38-year-old Mr. Kalaras, who works for the Athens city water company. Two stray dogs tangling with each other behind a padlocked metal fence accounted for the only activity in the complex, which seats 5,200 people.

Mr. Kalaras figured the steel and glass hall, costing taxpayers $62 million, would provide recreational space in his neighborhood. Officials envisioned concerts or shops.

Instead, when the Olympic torch went out after the Athens Summer Games six years ago, the doors closed here, as well as at many of the 30-odd other sites built or renovated for the Olympics that summer.

The vacant venues, several of which dominate parts of the city's renovated Aegean coastline, have become some of the most visible reminders of Greece's age of excessive spending. Sites range from a softball stadium and kayaking facility to a beach volleyball stadium and a sailing marina. [.  .   .]

Even boosters of the Olympics are having second thoughts.

George Tziralis, a technology investor, in 2007 co-authored a glowing report declaring the venues as "greatly improving the quality of life of the inhabitants of these areas, providing valuable resources to the community and the economy."

On a recent afternoon, staring at a pile of bricks on the unfinished entrance behind a locked metal fence encircling the Olympic sailing marina, he was less upbeat.

"I hope you're calling this article 'The Nonsense of the Olympics,'" he said. Boats filled about a third of the 120 slips at the marina, which remains closed to people who aren't boat owners.

Later, Mr. Tziralis, 28, gestured out the window of his Opel Corsa at a huge, locked complex of mostly vacant Olympic properties, located on the former site of the city's old airport.

"There's no way there shouldn't be a park here six years after the Games!" he shouted.

That complex, which cost taxpayers $213 million, includes stadiums for field hockey, softball and baseball�sports with little or no following in Greece. The facility for canoeing and kayaking slalom at the site was to become a water amusement park. It didn't.

In light of the foregoing and last week�s lessons on governmental decision-making, what could possibly go wrong with this?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 15, 2010

On Leadership

If you read just one article this week, make it this one (H/T Mike at Crime & Federalism)  � William Deresiewicz�s lecture to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point last year. A snippet:

That�s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things�the leaders�are the mediocrities?

Because excellence isn�t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it�s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they�re done. Just keeping the routine going.

I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason.

As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together�the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution�I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years. [.  .   .]

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don�t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don�t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they�re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don�t have are leaders.

What we don�t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army�a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

June 9, 2010

The futility of regulating failure

David Warren makes a remarkably lucid point about the dubious notion that governmental action is the proper remedy to any wrong:

Politicians try to pass laws against it; to create rules and regulations so complex and cumbersome that (as we saw in the BP disaster) an easily-corrupted "judgement call" bureaucracy must grant exemptions from them, in order for anything to function at all. When disaster strikes, they add more rules and regulations.

But more profoundly, the rules and regulations -- once they pass a point of irreducible complexity -- create a mindset in which those who should be thinking about safety are instead focused on rules and regulations. To those who see danger, the glib answer comes, citing all the safety standards that have been diligently observed.

From what we already know, this appears to be exactly what happened aboard Deepwater Horizon, and will not be rectified by the U.S. government's latest, very political decision, to use means both fair and foul to prosecute British Petroleum, and punish the rest of the oil industry for its mistakes.

Let me mention in passing that President Barack Obama was in no way responsible for the catastrophe, and that there is nothing he can do about it. He is being held to blame for "inaction," as wrongly as his predecessor was held to blame over Hurricane Katrina, by media and public unable to cope with the proposition that, "Stuff happens."

In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything now finds there are some things presidents cannot do. More deeply, the opposition party that persuades the public government can solve all their problems, discovers once in power there are problems their government cannot solve.

Alas, it will take more time than they have to learn the next lesson: that governments which try to solve the insoluble, more or less invariably, make each problem worse.

I like to dwell on the wisdom of our ancestors. It took us millennia to emerge from the primitive notion that a malignant agency must lie behind every unfortunate experience. Indeed, the Catholic Church spent centuries fighting folk pagan beliefs in things like evil fairies, and the whole notion the Devil can compel any person to act against his will -- only to watch an explosion of witch-hunting and related popular hysterias at the time of the Reformation.

In so many ways, the trend of post-Christian society today is back to pagan superstitions: to the belief that malice lies behind every misfortune, and to the related idea that various, essentially pagan charms can be used to ward off that to which all flesh is heir. The belief that, for instance, laws can be passed, that change the entire order of nature, is among the most irrational of these.

Sheer human stupidity is the cause of any number of human catastrophes -- including the stupidity of superstition itself. We need to re-embrace this concept; to hug the native incompetence within ourselves, and begin forgiving it in others.

Amen.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

June 2, 2010

Obfuscation is government’s secret weapon

Over the past couple of years, Bill King has done a great job (and see generally here) of explaining how Houston�s unfunded public pension obligation represents a horrific burden on the city government�s financial condition.

Given that such obligations are clearly unsustainable, why does the city government continue to provide them?

Edward L. Glaeser provides the following particularly lucid explanation of the dynamic that leads to such profligacy:

On Friday, The New York Times ran a front-page article about pensions that took note of a 44-year-old retired police officer who receives an annual pension of $101,333 despite never having earned more than $74,000 a year in base pay. The article reported that in Yonkers alone �more than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were working� and that �about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes.�

The emotional response of many people is to vilify the retirees, but that�s a mistake. The individual police officers and firefighters were following the rules. They have jobs that require them to risk their lives in service of their communities, and large pensions are one payoff for accepting those risks and accepting relatively lower wages up front. I�m sure many of them are no less impatient than the rest of us and would have preferred to get more money in their 20s and less in their 50s.

The fault lies in the political process that makes their negotiating partners � state and local governments � more impatient than their employees. State and local governments don�t want to face the short-term consequences of paying higher wages, so they structure compensation in ways that defer the costs of each new deal for years.

Politics doesn�t just favor delayed compensation; it also favors forms of compensation that are particularly hard for people to evaluate. Governments almost always love obfuscation. The appeal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was that they could subsidize homeownership without appearing to cost the taxpayers anything. Of course, they ended costing us plenty, just like hard-to-evaluate pension promises.

The rest of Glaeser�s post is here.

Sort of reminds one of this, this and this, eh?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

May 27, 2010

Children of the Taliban

Another fascinating TED video.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

May 20, 2010

Is freedom possible without wealth?

From the fine HBO John Adams mini-series, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton debate the relative importance of the creation of wealth to American society. Amazingly, the debate lives on today.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

May 18, 2010

I like Chris Christie's style

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (1) |

May 17, 2010

The shameful state of the Incarceration Nation

The troubling U.S. incarceration rate � a direct result of the governmental policy of overcriminalization � has been a frequent topic on this blog (here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here and here).

In this post from last fall, Scott Henson notes that Kings College in London now has available here its latest "World Prison Population List" that reflects that the United States remains a world leader in incarceration rate by a large margin:

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).

America�s dubious drug prohibition policy is one of the reasons for the high incarceration rate. However, as this Houston Politics/Chronicle blog post notes, this National Sheriffs� Association survey (H/T Doug Berman) reports that the United States imprisons many more mentally ill citizens than treating them in hospitals. This press release on the survey summarizes the sad story:

Americans with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to be in jail or prison than in a psychiatric hospital, according to "More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States," a new report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs' Association.

"America's jails and prisons have once again become our mental hospitals," said James Pavle, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to removing barriers to timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. "With minimal exception, incarceration has replaced hospitalization for thousands of individuals in every single state."

The odds of a seriously mentally ill individual being imprisoned rather than hospitalized are 3.2 to 1, state data shows. The report compares statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected during 2004 and 2005, respectively. The report also found a very strong correlation between those states that have more mentally ill persons in jails and prisons and those states that are spending less money on mental health services.

Severely mentally ill individuals suffering from diseases of the brain, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, often do not receive the treatment they need in a hospital or outpatient setting. The consequences can be devastating � homelessness, victimization, incarceration, repeated hospitalization, and death.

"The present situation, whereby individuals with serious mental illnesses are being put into jails and prisons rather than into hospitals, is a disgrace to American medicine and to common decency and fairness," said study author E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., a research psychiatrist and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center. "If societies are judged by how they treat their most disabled members, our society will be judged harshly indeed."

Recent studies suggest that at least 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have a serious mental illness. According to author and National Sheriffs' Association Executive Director Aaron Kennard, "Jails and prisons are not designed for treating patients, and law enforcement officials are not trained to be mental health professionals."

Ratios of imprisonment versus hospitalization vary from state to state, as the report indicates. On the low end, North Dakota has an equal number of mentally ill individuals in hospitals as in jails or prisons. By contrast, Arizona and Nevada have 10 times as many mentally ill individuals in prisons and jails than in hospitals.

Among the study's recommended solutions are for states to adopt effective assisted outpatient treatment laws to keep individuals with untreated brain disorders out of the criminal justice system and in treatment. Assisted outpatient treatment is a viable alternative to inpatient hospitalization because it allows courts to order certain individuals with brain disorders to comply with treatment while living in the community. Studies show assisted outpatient treatment drastically reduces hospitalization, homelessness, arrest, and incarceration among people with severe psychiatric disorders, while increasing adherence to treatment and overall quality of life.  .   .   .

More evidence of the myth of American exceptionalism?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (4) |

May 14, 2010

The War on Drugs goes viral

The perverse damage that federal and state drug prohibition policies impose on American citizens and our neighbors has been a frequent topic on this blog over the years.

In this must-read Reason.com article, Radley Balko reviews how America�s drug prohibition policies are increasingly being used as a basis for conducting Gestapo-like raids on American citizens:

Last week, a Columbia, Missouri, drug raid captured on video went viral. As of this morning, the video had garnered 950,000 views on YouTube. It has lit up message boards, blogs, and discussion groups around the Web, unleashing anger, resentment and even, regrettably, calls for violence against the police officers who conducted the raid.

I've been writing about and researching these raids for about five years, including raids that claimed the lives of innocent children, grandmothers, college students, and bystanders. Innocent families have been terrorized by cops who raided on bad information, or who raided the wrong home due to some careless mistake. There's never been a reaction like this one.

But despite all the anger the raid has inspired, the only thing unusual thing here is that the raid was captured on video, and that the video was subsequently released to the press. Everything else was routine. Save for the outrage coming from Columbia residents themselves, therefore, the mass anger directed at the Columbia Police Department over the last week is misdirected.

Raids just like the one captured in the video happen 100-150 times every day in America. Those angered by that video should probably look to their own communities. Odds are pretty good that your local police department is doing the same thing.

Meanwhile, after suggesting on the campaign trail that drug prohibition policies needed to be changed, President Obama has cynically and hypocritically retreated and now supports the federal government�s drug prohibition policy. Meanwhile, the enormous costs of the dubious policy continue to pile up.

America�s War on Drugs is lost. It is way past time that we require our leaders to acknowledge that and end it. Their war has now become a war on us.

Update: Scott Henson has more.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

May 11, 2010

My favorite Mayor

Is unquestionably Las Vegas� Oscar Goodman:

Q: Prior to politics, you represented accused organized crime figures. What�s the biggest difference between politics and the mob?

A: My clients gave me their word, and their word was their bond. They always paid me. They always thanked me at the end of the day.

In the political world, none of that happens. A politician�s word usually doesn�t mean a damn. His word is for the moment.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

May 5, 2010

The beneficial nature of derivatives

I don't watch much television news. But when I catch a glimpse these days, it always seems as if some politician is loudly declaring the need for more governmental financial regulation.

Mostly, the politicos contend that financial derivatives are dangerous instruments that are contrary to sound public policy. We have to protect those poor souls who bet against John Paulson, don't you see?

But the proponents of this view simply do not want to understand the nature of derivatives, just as most of the same ones didn't want to understand the valuable nature of the risk management of natural gas prices that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling contributed to markets 20 years ago.

Derivatives are simply a way for an investor to warn by trading - that is, by putting his money where his mouth is - that he has information about an upcoming shift in the markets. That facilitates a transparent and well-informed marketplace.

However, heavily regulating traders from taking advantage of that valuable source of information only makes it more difficult for valuable information about market shifts to reach the marketplace. How is that good for investors seeking as transparent and well-informed marketplace as possible?

An underappreciated cause of the Wall Street crisis was the underlying information failure. As opposed to restricting trading, we ought to be finding ways to bring more information to the market faster so that prices can be adjusted promptly. Rather than demonizing folks who bet their money in bringing information to the marketplace, we ought to be encouraging them.

I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

April 29, 2010

Why do we do this to ourselves?

As we ponder how one governmental agency -- which couldn't uncover Bernie Madoff or Stanford Financial's sketchy affairs despite being told about them -- is going to make a fraud case against Goldman Sachs on a transaction between sophisticated investors who knew what was going on, let's check out another government agency's bumbling decision-making:

More than thirty organizations across the political spectrum have filed a formal petition with the Department of Homeland Security, urging the federal agency to suspend the airport body scanner program.

Leading security expert Bruce Schneier stated, "Body scanners are one more example of security theater.

Last year, the organizations asked Secretary Janet Napolitano to give the public an opportunity to comment on the proposal to expand the body scanner program. Secretary Napolitano rejected the request. Since that time, evidence has emerged that the privacy safeguards do not work and that the devices are not very effective.

"At this point, there is no question that the body scanner program should be shut down. This is the worst type of government boondoggle -- expensive, ineffective, and offensive to Constitutional rights and deeply held religious beliefs," said Marc Rotenberg, President of EPIC.

And if Bruce Schneier's opinion isn't good enough for you, take heed of what a leading security expert who is constantly on the front lines says about the scanners:

A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install "useless" imaging machines at airports across the country.

"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.

"That's why we haven't put them in our airport," Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.

Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.

Despite what the experts say, he wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the Transportation Security Administration to impose on us continues unabated at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.

It's bad enough that the TSA's procedures do virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. What's worse is that the inspection process is really just "security theater" that makes only a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.

And if all that weren't bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental "safeguard" such as the TSA procedures are adopted, Congress has no interest in dismantling it even when it's clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive to citizens. Stated simply, the TSA has become a jobs program for thousands of registered voters.

James Fallows sums up the absurdity of the situation well:

TSA + defense contractor + security theater vs Israeli expert + Schneier + common sense.

Hmmm, I don't know what to believe.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (4) |

April 26, 2010

A real bad mix

Regular readers of this blog know about the human carnage that results from abuse of the government�s prosecutorial power.

Also, the immense damage that overly-broad application of child predator laws is inflicting on many citizens has been a frequent topic on this blog.

But, as Bill Anderson has been chronicling over the past month in regard to the Tonya Craft case, when both of these dynamics are involved in a particular case, the results are so troubling that they seem surreal.

We like to think that we have evolved to a point at which witch hunts are no longer possible. But the truth is that we are still quite capable of mounting them.

As Ayn Rand observed about those who abuse state power to further their supposedly altruistic goals:

"[T]he truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends."

"The truth is that those horrors are their ends."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 21, 2010

Representing society’s new lepers

The increasingly draconian application of child predator and pornography laws has been a frequent topic on this blog.

Norm Pattis does a good job of summarizing the ominous information that defense counsel should provide to defendants and their families face when ensnared in such a prosecution. The bottom line is that the prosecution itself and the usual resulting prison sentence is only the beginning of the defendant�s troubles. The aftermath is often even worse.

No one objects to putting away true child predators. But when the tough criminal laws that are used to imprison the child predators are turned against young people who made a mistake in an underage relationship or in viewing pornography, the stark penalties cause needless damage to lives, careers and families.

Organizations such as Texas Voices are informing the public of this tragic waste and the need for reform. It is a worthy cause for a constituency that has no political leverage. Consider lending them your support. 

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

April 18, 2010

Our troubling tax system

Another first rate Cato Institute video on the horrific cost of our overly complicated taxation system.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 15, 2010

Milton Friedman on poverty

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

April 12, 2010

The Death of American Virtue

I just finished Ken Gormley�s The Death of American Virtue: Clinton v. Starr (Crown 2010) and recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in a thorough examination of the dynamics and circumstances that lead to the abuse of the government�s enormous prosecutorial power.

What started out as an investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton�s small investment in a failed real estate deal (Whitewater) turned into a tsunami of litigation that practically paralyzed the executive and legislative branches of the federal government for months. Essentially, when the attorneys involved in the investigation couldn�t pin anything of substance on the Clintons in regard to Whitewater, they jumped at the opportunity to set President Clinton up to lie in a civil deposition and before a grand jury in regard to his relationship with former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Although few of the attorneys involved in either side of this battle come out looking good, this scrupulously even-handed book places most of the blame at the hands of Ken Starr and his Office of Independent Council prosecutorial team. The fact that Starr and his team thought they could get away with intimidating Lewinsky in a hotel room for over 12 hours without allowing her to contact her counsel speaks volumes of how out of touch they were with the pursuit of justice, not to mention legal ethics. That type of reasoning is why, on balance, Starr and his prosecutorial team come out looking worse than President Clinton and his defenders despite the fact that Clinton lied about his relationship with Lewinsky under oath on two occasions.

One of the most interesting of the dozens of fascinating anecdotes in the book involves Starr�s dubious decision to de-emphasize the Whitewater investigation in favor of the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation. Hickman Ewing, who was Starr�s deputy running the Whitewater investigation in Little Rock at the time the Lewinsky investigation exploded in Washington, had concluded that Hillary Clinton had committed crimes in regard to her involvement in Whitewater. I�m not as sure as Ewing that she did commit any crime � most of what Hillary did appeared to me to be the actions of a lawyer who was simply over her head in dealing with a faltering real estate development and a failing S&L.

At any rate, "[i]n Ewing's eyes, Mrs. Clinton had lied to the [Office of Independent Council], had lied to the grand jury, and would keep lying until the cows came home if she was not brought to justice," writes Gormley. Ewing went so far as to draft an indictment of Hillary for conspiracy to conceal her true relationship with the Madison Guaranty S&L in order to �avoid and evade political, criminal and civil liability, fraudulently secure additional income for the Rose Law Firm and safeguard the political campaigns of William Jefferson Clinton.� But because the focus of the investigation had turned toward President Clinton�s relationship with Lewinsky, Starr and the other prosecutors outvoted Ewing and elected not to dilute their investigation with a prosecution of Hillary.

Thus, with more than a touch of irony, Ewing observed, "Monica saved Hillary."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 11, 2010

The Pope and the NY Times

It all seems so clear, doesn�t it?

As this Laurie Goodstein/Michael Luo/NY Times article presents, Pope Benedict XVI and a chronically corrupt Roman Catholic Church have been complicit in the protection of child-abusing priests.

But as this William McGurn/WSJ op-ed notes, the Times� reporters undisclosed feeding of information from plaintiff�s lawyers who have made a cottage industry out of suing the Catholic Church raises as many questions as the ones the Times raises about the church�s handling of the sex-abuse cases. As McGurn notes:

The man who is now pope reopened cases that had been closed; did more than anyone to process cases and hold abusers accountable; and became the first pope to meet with victims. Isn't the more reasonable interpretation of all these events that Cardinal Ratzinger's experience with cases like Murphy's helped lead him to promote reforms that gave the church more effective tools for handling priestly abuse?

Yeah, but reporting that would not sell as many newspapers. And also not comply with the objectives of undisclosed agendas.

Morality plays are comforting because they make it easy to identify and demonize the villains. The truth is usually more nuanced and complicated, but ultimately more fulfilling to understand and less likely to generate witch hunts.

Update: Father Raymond J. De Souza provides more insight into the Kiesle case.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) |

April 9, 2010

Another absurd cost of security theater

How much wasteful spending on security theater is enough?

Bruce Schneier links to U.S. Representative John Duncan�s Congressional observation about the Federal Air Marshals Service:

Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals.

We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 employees.

Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four arrests each year by the entire agency.

In other words, we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.

Let me repeat that: we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.

One could quibble that spending per arrest is not an entirely fair measure of effectiveness. A good deterrent effect means fewer arrests, right?

Nevertheless, it�s a pretty good indication of misdirected resources if a law enforcement agency�s officers are more likely to be arrested than to make arrests.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

April 7, 2010

How will Obamacare ration care?

During the latter stages of the debate over reform of the American health finance system, one of the key issues that seemed to fade amidst the rhetoric was the question of how the revamped health finance system will ration care (see also here). Inasmuch as it is still not clear to me how care will be rationed under Obamacare, this recent Happy Hospitalist post caught my eye:

I'm down in the ER the other day when I see a chief complaint fly by on the radar.  What is that chief complaint you ask? �Refused by Detox.�

The patient was so drunk, even the community detox center refused them.  So how did this play out?  The patient was taken by ambulance from his home to a small town community ER for altered mental status.  There, he was  booked into the ER and seen by a small town community ER physician family practice resident or PA or NP.  Diagnosis you ask? �Acute alcohol intoxication. Plan:  Discharge to community detox center.�

The patient was then transported to detox  by a cop where he was promptly refused by detox for being too drunk. Too drunk for detox.  How sad is that.  At this point another ambulance was called and the small town hospital refused to accept him back because he was "too drunk" for them to handle if he became comatose and critically ill.

So the ambulance drove him 75 miles to Happy's hospital which has to accept him, where he was promptly booked into the emergency department in front of the 28 year old with heart burn, the 19 year old looking to get a pregnancy test and the 14 year old who's mother brought her in because she just had her first period.  What happened with our drunk?  He was promptly placed in a room where stat lab confirmed what everyone else had suspected.  He was drunk.  The big city ER doctor billing $500 an hour proudly made his diagnosis and disposition plans known to the world: �Acute alcohol intoxication. Plan: Discharge to community detox.�

By now, the patient's alcohol level was down to 320 and he was awake, responsive and asking for a samich as the cops show up to take him away. Let's conservatively add it up:

• Two ambulance rides $1,000
• Two ER visits $3,000
• Two ER physician visits $500

Almost $5,000 to take care of a drunk in which doing nothing would have given you the same result.  And you wonder why Medicaid is going bankrupt.

The Hospitalist goes on to point out how expenses such as the foregoing is eventually going to lead to failure of many inner-city hospitalists. But an equally troubling issue is whether anything will change in regard to future opportunities for misallocation of expenses under an increasingly subsidized health care system?

Frankly, I doubt it.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (4) |

March 23, 2010

Thoughts on health care finance reform

Inasmuch as America�s fractured health care finance system has been a common topic on this blog since early 2004, many friends and readers have asked my thoughts about the health care reform legislation that was passed yesterday. So here goes.

The legislation is fundamentally flawed because it imprudently foists a top-down reorganization plan on something as complex and disparate as financing health care. But frankly, I have no idea whether it will result in a worse finance system than the current one, which is pretty bad.

My biggest criticism with both the current system and the one contemplated by Obamacare is that the patient is not the customer, at least as it relates to non-catastrophic illness and injury. Without cost control � and customer decision-making is the most efficient one available - neither the current system nor Obamacare will be able to maintain delivery of high-quality care to an increasingly aging population.

However, the reality is that we now have two solid generations of Americans now who enjoy having someone else pay for their health care. So, it�s unrealistic to think that such a societal shift is going to change anytime soon. But it�s still important to understand how we got to this point.

Employer-based health insurance became popular during World War II because it was initially exempted from gross income as a way to circumvent wartime wage and price controls. After the war, marginal income tax rates were high and individual medical expenses were tax deductible, so at least some rational incentives were returned to the medical marketplace.

But all this changed in 1986 when the Reagan Administration made concessions to achieve bipartisan tax reform. Individual medical expenses were no longer deductible until they reached 7.5% of gross income, which virtually eliminated individual incentives in the medical marketplace. Not surprisingly, everyone was incentivized after tax reform to move all medical expenses to third-party-payor health insurance. As a result, individual out-of-pocket expenses in the health care market dropped from 22% in 1985 to less than than 10% of the market now.

So, in essence, the Reagan Administration horse-traded personal tax deductibility of medical expenses away, but figured that was acceptable because at least employer health insurance remained tax-free benefit. I�m sure if we could ask him now, President Reagan would tell you that he expected a future Congress would fix such perverse incentives after the dust settled on the benefits of tax reform. But alas, that never happened.

What happens now? The only certainly is that special interests will be descending upon Washington in droves to do their bidding over the transfers of wealth that will occur under the new legislation. At least it will be entertaining to watch who wins and loses.

But there are two big points that everyone should remember as we embark on this new world of health care finance.

First, the Obama Administration�s rationalization of future cuts in Medicare spending as a funding source for the health care legislation is utterly disingenuous, as Arnold Kling artfully explains:

Imagine that your crazy uncle Fred had bought a dozen cars on credit. As a result, he faces car payments far in excess of what he can afford. He comes to you and says he has a plan that in a couple of years will reduce his car payments by a few thousand dollars. "Now I have the money for a down payment on a boat!" he exclaims, as he runs off to the boat dealer.

The equivalent is for Congress to treat future cuts in Medicare as if they were a newfound source of wealth to be tapped. Once they adopt this precedent, they can increase spending on whatever they want, in unlimited amounts, while claiming deficit neutrality. Future Medicare spending is so high that you can always come up with cuts, as long as they deferred.

Second, as Greg Mankiw notes, projected Medicare cuts in payment rates for physician services portend the rationing of medical services that the promoters of the current legislation contend won�t occur. Because few consumers actually pay for their health care, most folks don�t realize that Medicare and Medicaid payment rates for physician services have already been cut by around 30% since the late 1990�s. That has led many doctors to limit substantially the number of Medicare and Medicaid patients who they are willing to treat in their practices. In my view, that trend is likely to continue under the new legislation. Who will tend to the medical needs of consumers who elect to rely on such insurance in the future?

Supporters of Obamacare generally argue that the legislation offers more equality through expanded insurance and redistribution of benefits. But the wealthy will always find ways to get around the rationing and other restrictions of a government-run health care system. On the other hand, the poor will have no choice but to accept the government health care, which is unlikely to be as high a quality as what the rich folks obtain from their private doctors. Accordingly, although the distribution of health care may be a bit more equal in the short term, I'm not sure that means more equality in health care in the long run.

Which leads me to this question: How long will it be before the federal government requires physicians, as a condition to being allowed to engage in private practice, to accept a certain number of patients under government-sponsored insurance plans that limit payments to the physicians far below what the physicians would otherwise accept?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (12) |

March 17, 2010

The Metro Train Wreck

The Metropolitan Transit Authority has been in the news recently mostly because of a good, old-fashioned document-shredding scandal and yet another spectacular crash.

But the more important issue facing Houstonians is that Metro is preparing to force large swaths of the community � including the key Uptown area near the Galleria -- to incur the enormous cost of enduring construction of its inefficient and impractical rail lines.

Bill King has spent a considerable amount of his time over the past several years studying Metro and Houston�s transit problems. In this devastating post, King finds that Metro is close to barreling completely out of any semblance of fiscal control:

There could hardly be a more fitting image for the close of the current Metro administration than the recent photographs for a wrecked Metro buses in front of Metro's headquarters after having been broad-sided by Metro's Main Street light rail. The last six years are likely to be remembered as the most ruinous time for public transportation in Houston's history as Metro has pursued a single-minded obsession to build its version of an at-grade rail system regardless of the cost, both in financial terms and in the degradation of the bus system on which over 100,000 Houstonians rely daily. Fortunately, Mayor Parker has ordered top-to-bottom review of the agency. Here is what that review is likely to find.

Decline in Ridership. Since 2004, Houston population has grown by over 10% from just over 2 million to 2.25 million. At the same time gas prices rose 47% from $1.81 per gallon to $2.67 per gallon. These two factors should have virtually guaranteed an increase in transit. However, exactly the opposite has occurred as bus boardings dropped almost 24% from 88 million in 2004 to 67 million in 2009. Instead of increasing bus service by 50% as it promised the voters in the 2003 referendum, Metro has slashed bus routes and increased fares by over 50%. Today Metro actually operates 225 fewer buses than it did in 2003. An outside performance audit in 2008 found that on-time performance fell by 29% from 2004 to 2008.

Financial Disaster. Since 2003, Metro's sales tax revenues have increased by 43%, rising from $357 million to $512 million. At the same time, its fare revenue increased by 41% from $42 million to $60 million by charging an ever dwindling ridership more. Yet, Metro is in the worst financial shape in recent history. At year end 2003 Metro's current assets exceeded its current liabilities by $125 million. The budget just adopted by the Metro board projects that it will have current accounts deficit of $165 million by the end of this fiscal year, a stunning loss of nearly $300 million in just five years. Over the same period, Metro's debt has swelled by nearly 50% from $546 million to $816 million. [.  .  .]

In the meantime, the cost of the [Metro�s Light Rail Transit lines] has risen from the $1.2 billion originally estimated to something well in excess of $3 billion. Metro is seeking to borrow $2.6 billion to build the LRT, over four times what it promised the voters would be the limit in the 2003 referendum. Originally, Metro assured voters that it could build the LRT without tapping the mobility payments that are so critical to the Houston and the other member cities. Metro's projections now show that it can only afford the LRT if those payments are terminated in 2014. [.  .  .]

In 2003, after a spirited public debate, this community approved, by a narrow margin, a consensus plan to enhance public transportation with a multi-modal approach. Part of that bargain was a limited experiment with a light rail system. The voters specifically limited the resources that Metro could devote to the light rail for fear that the cost might undermine the solid, dependable bus service that existed at that time. Metro's leadership has shredded that contract with the voters in favor of its own grandiose vision of transit that has little to do actually solving Houston's mobility problems. In the meantime, traffic congestion continues to get worse and working families that rely on public transportation to get their jobs everyday find riding Metro a more difficult and more expensive proposition.

Read King�s entire post. Metro�s defenders typically rely on the 2003 referendum as the primary basis for their continued support of such wasteful spending. But the problem with such referendums is that they ask voters to approve large public ventures such as Metro in a vacuum while ignoring Peter Gordon's three elegantly simple questions regarding economic choices:

1) At what cost?

2) Compared to what? and

3) How do you know?

For example, assume for a moment that voters were informed of the fact that the average urban freeway lane costs about $10 million per mile and that the average light rail line costs over $50 million per mile while carrying less than one-fifth as many people as the freeway lane. And these are only average figures.

Moreover, let's assume that voters were informed that the expenditure of a billion or so of public money on expanding a lightly-used light rail system has real consequences, such as leaving inadequate funds to make improvements to Houston's infrastructure that would dramatically decrease the risk of death and property damage from flooding. Or whether the billion or so being flushed down the light rail drain would be better used to fix various area traffic "hotspots" where accidents or bottlenecks occur with high frequency.

No one knows for sure, but my bet is that voting results would be dramatically different if the foregoing costs and alternatives were included as a part of the referendum.

Unfortunately, the relatively small groups that benefit from these urban boondoggles have a vested interest in keeping that threshold issue from ever being re-examined. The economic benefit of light rail is highly concentrated in only a few interest groups, such as political representatives of minority communities who tout the political accomplishment of shiny toy rail lines while ignoring their constituents need for more effective mass transit; environmental groups striving for political influence; construction-related firms that feed at the trough of Metro's poor investment decisions; and private real estate developers who enrich themselves through the increase in their property values along the rail line. As Professor Gordon wryly-noted in another post: "It adds up to a winning coalition."

Unfortunately, once such coalitions are successful in establishing a governmental policy subsidizing such boondoggles, it is much more difficult to end the public subsidy of the boondoggle than to start it in the first place.

None of these above-stated reasons for mass transit appeal to the vast majority of the electorate, so this amalgamation of interest groups continues to disguise their true interests behind amorphous claims that the uneconomic rail lines reduce traffic congestion (they do not), curb air pollution (they do not), or improve the quality of life (at least debatable).

How do these interest groups get away with this? The costs of such systems are widely dispersed among the local population of an area such as Houston, so the many who stand to lose will lose only a little while the few who stand to gain will gain a lot. As a result, these small interest groups recognize that it is usually not worth the relatively small cost per taxpayer for most citizens to spend any substantial amount of time or money lobbying or simply taking the time to vote against an uneconomic rail system.

Metro's rail system is a bad virus that has infected Houston. The cost of treating this civic virus is growing larger each month. Without immediate re-examination of Metro's light rail plan, the increasing costs of this plan risk turning this currently manageable problem into a major civic fiscal crisis that could negatively affect the Houston area's growth and prosperity.

As Bill King exhibits, real leadership involves recognizing that risk and addressing it, not indulging it.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

March 12, 2010

Exposing the myth of American exceptionalism

Conrad Black�s prison routine allows him time to think and write, which is a good thing in view of the enormous waste that results from his dubious imprisonment.

This week Lord Black takes aim at the myth of American exceptionalism promoted in this recent Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnurus essay (Walter McDougall has examined the origins of this myth in detail in the first two books of his fine three-part series on American history). In challenging the myth, Lord Black takes dead aim at a common topic on this blog � the overcriminalization of American life:

The wages of this [Cold War] victory have included the stale-dating of the authors� claim that America �is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.� It is more dynamic because of its size, the torpor of Europe and Japan, and the shambles of Russia.

But Americans do not do themselves a favor by not recognizing the terrible erosion of their country�s education, justice, and political systems, the shortcomings of U.S. health care, the collapse of its financial industry, the flight of most of its manufacturing, and the steep and generally unlamented decline of its prestige.

.   .    .   Rampaging and often lawless prosecutors win 95 percent of their cases (compared to 55 percent in Canada), by softening the pursuit of some in exchange for inculpatory perjury against others, in the plea-bargain system. The U.S. has six to fourteen times as many imprisoned people as other advanced prosperous democracies, and they languish in a corrupt carceral system that retains as many people as possible for as long as possible. There are an astounding 47 million Americans with a �record,� and the country glories with unseemly glee in the joys of the death penalty. Due process and the other guarantees of individual rights of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments (such as the grand jury as any sort of assurance against capricious prosecution) scarcely exist in practice.

Most of the Congress is an infestation of paid-for legislators from rotten boroughs, representing the interests that finance their elections and exchanging earmarks with their colleagues like casbah hucksters.  .   .   .

Lord Black can sure still turn a phrase -- �casbah hucksters.� Ha!

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (9) |

February 25, 2010

The future of the death penalty

University of Houston Law Professor David Dow�s book -- The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve 2010) � prompted Time to ask Dow several questions about the death penalty. A couple of his answers are particularly interesting:

.  .  . I tell people that if you're going to commit murder, you want to be white, and you want to be wealthy � so that you can hire a first-class lawyer � and you want to kill a black person. And if [you are], the odds of your being sentenced to death are basically zero. It's one thing to say that rich people should be able to drive Ferraris and poor people should have to take the bus. It's very different to say that rich people should get treated one way by the state's criminal-justice system and poor people should get treated another way. But that is the system that we have.

And what about the future of the death penalty?

My prediction is that we're going to get rid of it for economic reasons. We spend at least a million dollars more on a death penalty case than on a non-death-penalty case. In the U.S., where we've executed 1,200 people since the death penalty [was reinstated in 1976], that's $1.2 billion. I just think, gosh, with $1.2 billion, you could hire a lot of policemen. You could have a lot of educational programs inside of prisons so that when people come out of prison they know how to do something besides rob convenience stores and sell drugs. There are already counties in Texas, of all places, that have said, this is just not worth it: let's fix the schools and fill the potholes in the streets instead of squandering this money on a death-penalty case. You don't need to be a bleeding heart to make that argument.

Supporters of the death penalty reason that there is nothing morally wrong about the state killing a person as punishment for murder where that person was lawfully convicted in a fair and accurate criminal justice process. But in making that moral justification the central tenet of their support, death penalty supporters are ignoring the glaring defects in the process that undermine their moral justification.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

February 24, 2010

No way to fight a war

Here we go again. U.S. military forces are put on the defensive because of what might be an unfortunate mistake in prosecuting the war against the Taliban.

When are we going to learn that fighting wars under unrealistic rules of engagement is a waste of time and precious resources?

A reasonable case can be made that the U.S. should not be conducting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, a reasonable case can be made that such operations are necessary for the defense of the U.S.

But once the decision is made to commit military forces, no reasonable case can be made -- particularly given the enormous difficulties faced-- that U.S. Armed Forces should be constrained from winning the war by unrealistic rules of engagement.

If we are unwilling to stomach to do the dirty business that is necessary to win such wars, then we have no business getting involved in them in the first place. The defense summation in Breaker Morant brilliantly frames the issue in the context of Britain's involvement in the Boer War:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

February 22, 2010

A culture of abuse

The big legal news over the weekend is the Department of Justice�s decision not to recommend disciplinary proceedings against Cal-Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo and federal appellate Judge Jay S. Bybee for their participation in a series of DOJ memos that provided the dubious legal basis for the use of torture against enemy prisoners after the attacks of September 11, 2001. John Steele has done a great job of cataloging the blogosphere�s reaction to the DOJ�s decision.

The DOJ�s report outraged Jack Balkin, who opined that �the standard for attorney misconduct is set pretty damn low, and is only violated by lawyers who (here I put it colloquially) are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused.� On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal contends that the report vindicates Yoo and Bybee. Yoo provides his own defense here.

Although the DOJ�s report paints a fairly clear case of Yoo and Bybee providing a colorable legal cover for what the interrogation tactics that the Bush Administration wanted to pursue come hell or high water, that conduct is utterly unsurprising. The DOJ has been engaging in torture-like treatment over the past year of Allen Stanford, who is still awaiting trial. Similarly, the DOJ has regularly engaged in other astonishing abuses of power in connection with the prosecutions of Jeff Skilling, Jamie Olis and many others.

Our failure to hold governmental officials responsible for abuse of power toward our fellow citizens helped create the culture in which the leap to sanction torture against enemy combatants was a small one. That culture will be very difficult to change.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

February 16, 2010

How much is “affordable” health care?

Uwe Reinhardt posted this insightful Economix post last week in which he bores in on the key issue to be resolved in reforming the U.S. health care finance system:

I could easily offer every American family a health insurance policy it could afford, simply by varying judiciously the annual deductible, the coinsurance rate, upper limits on items ostensibly covered by the policy and exclusions from coverage of sundry services or products � for example, mental health services or certain specialty drugs.

The policy might be a sham; but it sure would be cheap.

Health insurance is just a means by which needed health care can be made �affordable� to Americans when they fall ill. Therefore the proper target of health policy should be the family�s total outlay on health care, including out-of-pocket spending. That total outlay on �needed health care� should be made �affordable.�

Which requires us to define concretely, for practical purposes, what we mean by �health care� and �affordable,� pedantic as that may sound. Politicians should be forced to be utterly clear about it. [.  .  .]

President Obama could make this idea practical by using a visual device such as the table [above]. In that table �disposable income� is defined as all personal income from whatever source minus all personal income tax payments and other government deductions. The numbers are annual.  .   .   .

Professor Reinhardt makes a good point about the disingenuous nature of health insurance. As I noted here, most forms of health insurance � particularly the employer-based kind -- insulate consumers from understanding the truce cost of their health care choices. As a result, most consumers � and virtually all legislators in Washington � have no idea on what amount of health care costs are �affordable.� Most insureds are pleased that someone else is footing the bill and simply don�t want to lose that perk.

Health insurance is largely the product of bad governmental policy (wage controls during World War II) and, as is often the case with such policies, there are unintended consequences that are even worse than the misdirected governmental policy. In this case, we have two generations of Americans who have been largely insulated from needing to know the true cost of some of their most fundamental choices and needs in life.

Such ignorance is now hindering reform of the fractured U.S. health care finance system.  But any health care finance reform that does not rely at least in part on reigniting a consumer market to control costs will likely be even more expensive and less satisfying than the current system.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) |

February 15, 2010

The common sense of civil unions

This WaPo article from last week on a recent WaPo/ABC News poll was interesting:

.  .  . opinions nationwide remain closely divided, but two-thirds of all Americans now say gay and lesbian couples should be able to have the same rights as heterosexual couples through civil unions.

In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 47 percent say gay marriages should be legal, with 31 percent saying they feel that way "strongly." Intensity is stronger among opponents, however: overall, half say such marriages should be illegal, including 42 percent who say so strongly.

Civil unions draw broader support. Two-thirds now say they favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to form civil unions that would give them many of the same legal rights as married couples.

Frankly, this is one of those contentious political issues for which there appears to be a simple solution. But implementing the solution will take some clear thinking, which is in short supply these days in our legislative circles.

The bottom line is that the state has no business being involved in the �marriage business.� That should be left to churches, some of which will approve gay marriages and some of which will not.

On the other hand, the state should provide for civil unions between same-sex and opposite-sex couples to promote societal stability through conferring the same rights relating to property, family, inheritance, etc. that are presently conferred through the institution of civil marriage.

For practical and legal purposes, such civil unions would be the same as civil marriages. And, as the poll numbers above reflect, most folks don�t have a problem with providing the same contractual and legal rights to gay couples through civil unions as opposite-sex couples presently enjoy through civil marriage. However, because most states presently only provide for civil marriage, the use of the term �marriage� becomes a hot button issue that provokes needless opposition to the implementation of the civil union concept in regard to same-sex couples to promote legitimate societal interests.

Thus, the solution is to have the state get out of the marriage business entirely and provide civil unions to opposite-sex and and same-sex couples. Many couples would still choose to get married in religious ceremonies, which is fine. But a couple that does not have access to marriage in a church would no longer be deprived of the legal and contractual rights that most states presently confer upon only married couples.

It sure seems as if this solution would solve the primary legal issues relating to continued state bans on gay marriages. Moreover, it would relegate the debate on marriage between same-sex couples to the churches and extract it from the political arena.

What�s not to like about that?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

February 12, 2010

Milton Friedman on freedom, capitalism and colonialism

Got to love the way Friedman ignores the contentious introduction to the questions and maintains the integrity of intellectual discourse. H/T Almost Chosen People.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 11, 2010

Lifestyle Nutritionists

In this clever sketch, That Mitchell and Webb Look channel the mentality behind the legislation discussed in yesterday�s post.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 8, 2010

The wisdom of Will

Tax simplification has been a frequent topic on this blog. So, I was enthused to see George Will knock the ball out of the park in describing the U.S. income tax system while addressing the issue in his WaPo Sunday column:

�Today's tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest.�

The proposals that Will addresses would do more for the American economy than virtually any other proposal on the table at this point. Unfortunately, the proposals have virtually no chance of being implemented.

So it goes.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 5, 2010

Justice Kennedy notices a couple of troubling issues

Overcriminalization of life and the appalling condition of our country�s prison facilities have been frequent subjects on this blog over the years. At least one member of the U.S. Supreme Court has taken notice:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy criticized California sentencing policies and crowded prisons Wednesday night, calling the influence that unionized prison guards had in passing the three-strikes law "sick."

In an otherwise courtly and humorous address to the Los Angeles legal community, Kennedy expressed obvious dismay over the state of corrections and rehabilitation in the country. He said U.S. sentences are eight times longer than those issued by European courts.

"California now has 185,000 people in prison at $32,500 a year" each, he said. He then urged voters and officials to compare that expense to what taxpayers spend per pupil in elementary schools.

"The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers' union and that is sick!" Kennedy said of the measure mandating life sentences for third-time criminal offenders.

As Doug Berman points out, perhaps Justice Kennedy�s remarks are a prelude to the Supreme Court�s consideration of several important sentencing cases in its upcoming term. At some point, we need to ask ourselves the question � why are we doing this to ourselves?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

February 2, 2010

Running into the abyss

17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal observed in his Penses that we run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, observed something similar in his quarterly report regarding the troubled TARP program:

The government's bailout of financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" has created a risk that the United States could face a worse fiscal meltdown in the future, an independent watchdog assigned to review the program told Congress on Sunday.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program, known as TARP, has not addressed the problems that led to the last crisis and in some case those problems have festered and are a bigger threat than before, warned Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general at the Treasury Department.

"Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car," Barofsky wrote.

Barofsky wrote the $700 billion financial bailout has encouraged more risk-taking because bank executives, who are still receiving massive bonuses, figure the government will come to the rescue the next time they steer their ships nearly aground.  .   .   .

None of what Barofsky reports is a surprise to regular readers of this blog. It was not rocket science.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

January 8, 2010

A better kind of security theater

The Reason.tv video below puts the Transportation Security Administration's silly security theater policies in perspective, while Bruce Schneier provides another excellent post on the kind of security (including some security theater) that makes much more sense.

Is anyone in Washington, D.C. even listening?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

January 7, 2010

What killed F.D.R.?

This interesting Lawrence Altman/NY Times article examines the theory that that an undiagnosed melanoma contributed to the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevent in 1945.

Of course, regular readers of this blog know that another killer disease -- the dire implications of which were not well-known in 1945 -- was probably the main cause of FDR's death.

But despite the historical curiosity, the most important point to glean from FDR's demise is the importance of continued investment in clinical and scientific research.

We sometimes forget that it was the generation of doctors and researchers who came of age after World War II who embraced the optimistic view of therapeutic intervention in the practice of medicine, which was a fundamental change from the sense of therapeutic powerlessness that was taught to these men by their pre-WWII professors. In short, it has not been that long since medical science has understood that it could cure disease and prolong life.

For example, if FDR's doctors had known in 1945 what specialists in hypertension discovered in the two following decades, then those doctors would never have allowed FDR to be subjected to the stress of the Yalta Conference that doomed Eastern Europe to almost 50 years of totalitarianism and economic deprivation.

Stated simply, earlier discovery of the research into the implications of hypertension could well have changed the course of human history.

In fact, we all tend to under-appreciate the advancements in medicine since World War II. For male babies born in the U.S. in 1960, the life expectancy was about 66.5 years and for female babies a tad over 73 years. By 2005, the live expectancies had increased to over 75 and 80 years respectively. Although medical advances don't account for all of those gains, newly-discovered drugs and medical devices -- as well as enhanced understanding of disease -- have had an enormous impact on improving the quality of life of most Americans.

Thus, as Congress considers reforming the U.S. health care finance system, it is important for citizens to understand that American medical care and research remains the hope of the world. The current health care finance system has generated enormous investment in that medical innovation, which has been a crucial and treasured export of America to the rest of the world.

Let's think hard before radically changing a system that generated the investment that produced those benefits for us and the rest of the world.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

December 29, 2009

Thinking about security theater

Given the Homeland Security Department and Transportation Security Administration's typically over-the-top reaction (see also here) to the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a jet flying into Detroit from Amsterdam, one wonders at what point the government's elaborate "security theater" will finally make flying so miserable that it will choke the life out of the U.S. airline industry? Professor Bainbridge provides a good roundup of the blogosphere's discussion of that and related issues.

The latest incident also reminded me of this prophetic Bruce Schneier post from about a month ago. Schneier does the best job that I've read of explaining why a balance between legitimate and symbolic is helpful in deterring terrorism, but that most of Homeland Security's security theater is utterly misguided, as well as a waste of time and resources.

The entire post is excellent, but two points he makes are particularly important.

First, Schneier observes that the governmental impulse "to do something" in response to an attack is mostly misdirected:

Often, this 'something' is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on aeroplanes. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning .   .   . Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets  .   .   .

Even more importantly, Schneier points out that the right kind of security theater -- that is, the best way to counteract the damage that terrorism attempts to inflict upon all of us -- is to act as if we are not scared of it:

The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant 'bring 'em on' ehetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats .   .   .

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.

Schneier is spot on. Rather than making air travel increasingly distasteful, Homeland Security and the TSA ought to be encouraging Americans to spit in the terrorists' collective eye by traveling even more by air under reasonably tolerable and legitimate security arrangements.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

December 1, 2009

Kay Bailey's health care finance confusion

What exactly is Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's political appeal?

She has never seemed to me to have a particularly good grasp of even basic issues. But I never dreamed that she actually supported universal health insurance even while mimicking the GOP party line against such a mandate all these years.

Uwe Reinhardt provides the Senate subcommittee context for Hutchinson's revelation:

[Hutchison] was proposing that women should not have to decide between spending $250 of their own money to get a mammogram or go without it, and that the key here is to get someone else — either public or private health insurance — to pay for it.

I cannot recall a clearer statement of unreserved support for universal and comprehensive health insurance for America and a more straightforward definition of rationing health care.

I am sure that she would extend her remarkable dictum on rationing to cover routine screening for other cancers as well — e.g., to colonoscopies for colon cancer, to P.S.A. tests and biopsies for prostate cancer or to regular examinations for thyroid cancer.

Furthermore, I would assume that her concern for timely medical attention extends even beyond cancer to the prevention of all serious illnesses — e.g., the control of blood pressure for Americans with hypertension through drug therapy or the prevention of diabetes.

In a nutshell, whether she realized it or not, hers is a clear clarion call for comprehensive, universal health insurance in America.

I don't agree with Senator Hutchison's viewpoint regarding universal coverage. However, I understand it and acknowledge that it's not an unreasonable position. I just don't think it's the best way to control the cost of health care services and products.

But why isn't she honest about her true position?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

November 25, 2009

"People get put in jail for importing lobsters"

The disturbing trend of an increasingly powerful federal government criminalizing all sorts of conduct that should not be criminalized has been a frequent topic (see also here) on this blog.

Adam Liptak of the NY Times, who has written extensively about the over-criminalization of American society, reports that a bipartisan group is finally organizing to do something about it:

“It’s a remarkable phenomenon,” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The left and the right have bent to the point where they are now in agreement on many issues. In the area of criminal justice, the whole idea of less government, less intrusion, less regulation has taken hold.”

Edwin Meese III, who was known as a fervent supporter of law and order as attorney general in the Reagan administration, now spends much of his time criticizing what he calls the astounding number and vagueness of federal criminal laws.[.  .  .]

There are, the [Heritage Foundation] says, more than 4,400 criminal offenses in the federal code, many of them lacking a requirement that prosecutors prove traditional kinds of criminal intent.

“It’s a violation of federal law to give a false weather report,” Mr. Meese said.

“People get put in jail for importing lobsters.”

Nice quote from Meese, but Radley Balko points out that his involvement in the movement would mean more if he admitted his past involvement in the problem.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 18, 2009

Thinking about financial regulation

Peter Wallison and Steve Randy Waldman have each written a thought-provoking and important analysis of the effect of regulation on the recent financial crisis.

First Wallison:

What caused the financial crisis?

The widely accepted narrative, prominent in the media and pressed by the Obama administration, is that the crisis was caused by deregulation--the "repeal" of the Glass-Steagall Act and the failure to regulate both derivatives and mortgage brokers--which allowed excessive financial innovation, risk taking, and greed among financial players from mortgage brokers to Wall Street bankers.

With this diagnosis, the proposed remedy is more regulation and government control of the financial system, from the over-the-counter derivative markets to mortgage brokers and the compensation of CEOs.

The alternative explanation is that the crisis was caused by the government's own housing policies, which fostered the creation of 25 million subprime and other low-quality mortgages--almost 50 percent of all mortgages in the United States--that are now defaulting at unprecedented rates.

In this narrative, the fact that two-thirds of all these weak mortgages are now held by government agencies, or were produced by government requirements, shows that the demand for these mortgages--and the financial crisis itself--originated in Washington.

The problem for the administration's narrative is that its principal examples do not stand up to analysis: the repeal of a portion of the Glass-Steagall Act did not eliminate the restrictions on banks' securities activities (they were left unchanged), the mortgage brokers were responding to demand created by the government, and, there is no evidence that the failure to regulate credit default swaps (CDS) had any effect in causing or enhancing the financial crisis.

Without a persuasive explanation for the cause of the financial crisis, the administration's regulatory proposals rest on a mythic foundation.

And Waldman:

An enduring truth about financial regulation is this: Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.

Remember -- it's the incentives, folks.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) |

November 12, 2009

UPS vs. FedEx

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 3, 2009

Why is Timothy Geithner still employed?

Last week, we learned that Timothy Geithner, while the head of the New York Fed, let Goldman Sachs and several other large investment banks fleece the Fed in connection with the AIG bailout.

Then, over the weekend, we learn that the Geithner-orchestrated $2.3 billion federal government investment in C.I.T. Group last fall without requiring debtor-in-possession financing protections under chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is going to result in a total loss of that investment. Why? Because C.I.T. has decided to file bankruptcy now.

Now, in the big scheme of things, $2.3 billion is not all that much money when placed in the context of the federal budget and the American economy. Heck, it's not even close to as much as Geithner left on the table for the investment banks in regard to the AIG bailout.

But Geithner has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he is in over his head. This bailout stuff is not rocket science.

Why is Geithner still Treasury Secretary?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

October 7, 2009

Fat chance

A couple of interesting health care-related items caught my eye today.

First, I went by my internist's office for my annual physical and noticed that another group of doctors had leased a much larger office across the hall from my doctor's office.

I peaked inside the new doctors' office window and noticed that the reception area was nicely furnished with plush leather sofas and chairs, flat screen TV's, handsome hardwood flooring and tasteful Persian rugs.

The opulence of the office prompted me to find out what kind of doctors were apparently doing so well, so I grabbed one of the doctor's cards from the reception area. It read (not the real name):

"John Smith, M.D., Laparoscopic Obesity Surgery"

Meanwhile, this NY Times article reveals the utterly unsurprising fact that New York City regulations requiring fast food restaurants to post the caloric content of their food did not induce obese consumers from eating less:

A study of New York City’s pioneering law on posting calories in restaurant chains suggests that when it comes to deciding what to order, people’s stomachs are more powerful than their brains.

The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.

It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

The findings, to be published Tuesday in the online version of the journal Health Affairs come amid the spreading popularity of calorie-counting proposals as a way to improve public health across the country.

“I think it does show us that labels are not enough,” Brian Elbel, an assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine and the lead author of the study, said in an interview.

"Labels are not enough?" Makes one wonder what regulation Professor Elbel will suggest next -- maybe governmental rationing of fast food?

The argument in favor of these types of absurd governmental intrusions into our lives is that government subsidizes medical insurance, so government should attempt through regulation to decrease obesity, which unfairly heaps a portion of health-care costs relating to obesity on tax-paying citizens who are not obese.

But putting aside for a moment the debatable notion of whether obesity really increases health-care costs all that much, the far more effective regulation to decrease obesity would be to provide a financial incentive for citizens to lose weight. Namely, reduce the governmental subsidy of medical insurance for those who choose to remain obese.

Fat chance of that happening.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

September 6, 2009

Confession and Avoidance

As our own country confronts the difficult issues involved in conducting war, it seems appropriate to recall the closing defense argument in one of the all-time great lawyer movies, Breaker Morant.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

September 3, 2009

An illusion of safety, but at what cost?

The only two airline-security measures that really matter -- fortified cockpit doors and the awareness of the flying public as to what a hijacking can mean -- have been in place virtually since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Nevertheless, as Patrick Smith explains, the wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the Transportation Security Administration to impose on us continues unabated at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.

It's bad enough that the TSA's procedures do virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. But what's even worse is that the incompetent inspection process is really just "security theater" that makes a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.

And if all that weren't bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental "safeguard" such as the TSA procedures are adopted, Congress is not interested in dismantling it even when it's clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive to citizens.

Smith sums up the dilemma well:

The novelty of the Sept. 11 attacks notwithstanding, the primary threat to commercial planes is, was and shall remain the smuggling aboard of explosives, which is what happened on Pan Am 103 [the Lockerbie explosion twenty years ago whose instigator was recently set free]. The bomb came onboard in a suitcase. The hijack paradigm changed forever on 9/11, rendering the inflight takeover concept unworkable for a terrorist. .   .   .

Yet whether by virtue of incompetence or willful ignorance, TSA continues to waste untold time and untold millions of dollars on a tedious, zero-tolerance fixation with blades and sharps. This does nothing to make us safer, and in fact draws security resources away from worthy pursuits.

Yes, TSA scans most bags for explosives. Mandates were put in place after 9/11 that have greatly increased the percentage of bags that are run through high-tech detectors, with a goal of screening all of them. But eight years later, screening is still not fully comprehensive. It does not yet include 100 percent of luggage and cargo, and procedures remain inadequate at many overseas airports from which thousands of U.S.-registered jetliners depart each week. Neither is there widespread screening for explosive materials that somebody can carry on his or her person. Good luck getting a hobby knife through a concourse checkpoint, while a pocket full of Semtex is unlikely to be noticed.   .   .   .

There is a level of inherent risk that we simply must learn to accept. But, if we are going to have an airport security apparatus, and if we are going to devote millions of tax dollars to the cause of thwarting attacks, can we please do it smartly and at least improve our odds? Am I the only one who finds it maddening, and even a little scary, that we can't get this right? Is it not a national disgrace that TSA should spend its time confiscating butter knives from uniformed pilots rather than focusing on deadly threats with a long historical precedent?

Where are the voices of protest? As I've said before, the airlines ought to be speaking out and pressuring TSA to revise its policies. I know it puts them in a tough spot, liability-wise -- carriers don't want to be perceived as opposing security, even when that security isn't helpful -- but much of what people despise about flying pertains to the TSA rigmarole.

And passengers, for their part, are apparently content with, or at least resigned to, the idea of security theater in lieu of the real thing. Indeed, rather than demand or expect change, hundreds of thousands of Americans have paid good money for the chance to simply circumvent the hassle of TSA.

Food for thought as Congress considers the creation of an even larger governmental apparatus as the "solution" to problems in the U.S. health care finance system.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

August 31, 2009

Rationing health care in a disaster

If you read one article health care-related this week, make it this extraordinary Sheri Fink/NY Times Magazine article on the impossible choices that the heroic doctors -- including Dr. Anna Pou -- faced at the former Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in rationing limited medical and evacuation services for their patients during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Fink summarizes the issues raised by the issues that Dr. Pou and her colleagues well:

The story of Memorial Medical Center raises other questions:

Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides?

What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means?

Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing?

How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?

Interestingly, after the federal, state and local governments largely failed the doctors, other workers and patients at Memorial in the aftermath of Katrina, get a load of how the government forces acted once the decision was made to arrest Dr. Pou:

AT ABOUT 9 P.M. on July 17, 2006 — nearly a year after floodwaters from Katrina swamped Memorial hospital — Pou opened the door of her home to find state and federal agents, clad in body armor and carrying weapons. They told her they had a warrant for her arrest on four counts of principal to second-degree murder.

Pou was wearing rumpled surgical scrubs from several hours of surgery she performed earlier in the day. She knew she was a target of the investigation, but her lawyer thought he had assurance that she could surrender voluntarily. “What about my patients?” she asked reflexively. An agent suggested that Pou call a colleague to take over their care. She was allowed to freshen up and then was read her rights, handcuffed and ultimately driven to the Orleans Parish jail.  .   .   .

Read the entire article. Whose judgment do you trust more? Dr. Pou and her colleagues? Or that of those governmental officials who decided to arrest her?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

August 19, 2009

Robert D. Novak, R.I.P.

Longtime Washington political columnist and television political pundit Robert D. Novak died yesterday, ending a virtually unparalleled 60-year career of reporting on national politics from the nation's capitol. David Broder, Jack Shafer. Tim Carney, Stephen Miller, Jeffrey Bell and the WSJ Editors do a good job of putting this formidable career and fascinating man in perspective.

Inasmuch as I was not particularly interested in Novak's obsessive-style of political reporting in his columns and on television, I didn't appreciate Novak until late in life. That changed when a friend recommended Novak's The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown 2007) (prior post here), which I probably would never have read but for my friend's urging.

Turns out that The Prince of Darkness is a thoroughly enjoyable read, particularly because Novak passes along his reflections on the relationships he had with virtually every major figure in American politics over the past 60 years, which pretty well spans my lifetime. I went from not really being interested in Novak to not being able to put the book down. It remains one of the most unexpectedly delightful books that I've read in the past couple of years.

Characters such as Novak are rare these days, and we are not the better for that.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

August 8, 2009

A good sign

One of the many fascinating aspects of golf is that you can learn much about a person by playing a round of golf with them.

Based on this Time article (h/t Geoff Shackelford), President Obama sounds as if he would fit in quite well with the groups in which I play golf regularly.

That makes me feel better.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

August 3, 2009

Unintended Consequences

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 20, 2009

The Defense of Freedom

There is no question that President Obama is confronted with a delicate diplomatic situation in regard to the ongoing political unrest in Iran. But it is ironic that the main issue that is bubbling over on the streets of Tehran is the same one that John Quincy Adams addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the illegally imported slaves that is wonderfully portrayed in the Stephen Spielberg movie, Amistad. In a magnificent performance, Anthony Hopkins plays the elderly Adams defending the slaves before the Supreme Court. Enjoy.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 12, 2009

Not a good week for freedom

First, in the face of a duplicitous government prosecution and a draconian trial penalty, Kevin Howard was forced to plead guilty to a crime that he did not commit.

Then, the executive branch of the federal government, unchecked by feckless legislative and judicial branches, undermined the U.S. Bankruptcy Code by preferring certain Chrysler creditors over others while improperly using the TARP legislation (see also here) -- which was expressly limited to financial institutions -- as a basis to loan billions to Chrysler. Moreover, the government's shots in regard to such matters are being called by a rank rookie.

Finally, the federal government seized $34 million of American citizens' funds without notice or judicial process simply because those citizens enjoy playing poker.

One of the clearest lessons of the 20th century is that large governments have the capacity to cause unspeakable evil. As these injustices unfold with nary a protest from our leaders, is that important lesson already forgotten?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (7) |

May 12, 2009

How did it come to this?

That's the question I kept asking myself as I watched former U.S. District Judge Sam Kent be sentenced to 33 months in federal prison yesterday (previous posts here).

I had an early-morning hearing in federal court yesterday and another one in the mid-afternoon. So, instead of returning to my office between hearings, I decided to attend the sentencing hearing for Judge Kent. It's not every day that a federal judge is sentenced to prison.

The first hour or so of the hearing was stupefying as prosecutors and Kent defense attorney Dick DeGuerin argued over objections to the government's pre-sentencing report. The main reason for the boredom was that, for the most part, no one except the lawyers in involved in the case and U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson knew what they were talking about. That vacuum of information was a direct result of Judge Vinson's dubious decision to keep a substantial amount of the information about the charges against Kent under seal and away from public scrutiny.

Judge Vinson's decision in that regard might have been somewhat defensible had the two victims of Kent's sexual assaults requested secrecy to preserve what little privacy they could salvage from this ordeal. But neither of the victims requested such treatment, and my sense is that Kent didn't want it, either.

So, Judge Vinson decided to conduct this case largely outside the public eye for his own reasons. In my 30 years of practicing law, I have never seen the volume of information in a case placed under seal as was done in this case.

In sentencing Kent, Judge Vinson claimed that he was upholding the justice system by showing that even a powerful judge is not above the law. Unfortunately, he undermined that same system by preventing the public from learning the details of the accusations against Kent and Kent's responses to those allegations.

Although the first part of the hearing could have induced a snooze, the pace picked up dramatically when the two victims of Kent's assaults made their way to the podium to make their victim statements to the court (one of the victim's statements is here, courtesy of the Houston Chronicle). Both victims were extremely impressive in their presentations, describing the emotional and family carnage that Kent's assaults and abuse of power caused. We also learned tidbits of information that likely would have been already been revealed had Judge Vinson not maintained such tight control over information:

The case manager reported Kent's assaults to her supervisor, who did not take appropriate steps to report it to higher authorities out of fear for her job;

A "culture of fear" existed among employees at the Galveston federal courthouse as a result of Kent's manipulative behavior and frequent drunkenness; and

Kent is estranged from much of his family.

There was a good bit of discussion from the victims and the lawyers regarding Kent's alcoholism and his "serious" psychological issues, for which Judge Vinson ordered him to continue treatment. Also, Kent has been rendered virtually insolvent from his funding of the cost of defense of the case.

For his part, Kent did a good job in his statement to the court, apologizing to his accusers, his staff, his family, other judges and "the system." He promised Judge Vinson that he would continue to rehabilitate himself regardless of the sentence. My sense was that Kent was sincere.

I do not know Kent personally. I handled several hearings in his court over the years and never had a problem with him.

However, I know plenty of lawyers who found Kent insufferable and rude (see also here), and I heard the rumors about his alleged favoritism of certain Galveston lawyers, particularly in admiralty cases. In 2001, the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Texas took the unprecedented step of reassigning 85 cases away from Kent that were being handled by one of Kent's best friends.

And now it appears that Kent was drinking heavily for much of the past decade and that he was frequently intoxicated while at the courthouse. You have to wonder whether concerns about Kent's behavior impacted out-of-town parties' decisions in cases such as this one?

So, I circle back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post -- how did the judicial career of Sam Kent come to this sordid and sad ending?

Where were Kent's "friends" who knew about his excessive drinking and other personal problems, and were in a position to intervene and help him before it was too late?

What are we to make of the federal government's human resources apparatus that an entire federal courthouse could have been placed under a culture of fear by the abusive behavior of one man?

And doesn't the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council have some explaining to do on why it issued its agreed order of public reprimand of Kent without interviewing either of the victims during the council's investigation?

Finally what are we to conclude about our justice system that the Houston Chronicle -- which, along with its coverage of Hurricane Ike, should have been won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the Kent case -- provides much more information to the public about the crimes of an abusive judge than the prosecution of that judge?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

May 1, 2009

American Violet

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 20, 2009

Clear Thinking to begin the week

Former Cardinals and Pirates outfielder Andy Van Slyke from this recent interview ($) in Baseball Prospectus:

"Well, [former Astros pitcher] Mike Scott, to me, is the best pitcher to ever pitch in the big leagues. I went 1-for-38 against him.  .  .  . Mike Scott, when he was at the apex of his career, was actually cheating very well. When he threw that forkball, and he scuffed it all up... he threw 97-98 mph, and then he'd throw a forkball that was in the 90s and I just couldn't hit him."

Q: Were there a lot of guys "cheating very well" in your era?

"I think there was more of it going on back then than there is today. You don't really see guys scuffing balls—you don't see guys with sandpaper—but it was very prevalent when I came to the big leagues. The guys... everybody knew who was doing it. It was just hard to catch them."

Arnold Kling on an upcoming debate that he will be having with Robert Kuttner regarding health care finance:

The debate should be about how the cost-benefit trade-offs and rationing will take place. I will argue that most health care spending should be paid for out of pocket, with insurance reimbursement only for very large expenses over a multi-year period. With consumers paying out of pocket, they will take price into account in making their choices, and they will self-ration. The alternative is to have government officials make the choices about what treatments people are to obtain. I do not think that this is a one-sided debate, in which one position is clearly better than the other. But I hope that Kuttner and I can have this debate, rather than go off into red herrings like drug company profits.

The Financial Times' Clive Cook chimes in on America's intractable but nonsensical drug prohibition policy ($) (other posts on drug prohibition are here):

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed?

The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm. [.  .  .]

Strict enforcement,  .   .   .  has reduced drug use only modestly – supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate objective. The collateral damage is of a different order altogether. Violence related to drug crimes has surged in Mexico and in US cities close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the topic.  .  .  . [.  .  .]

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all the odder is that the US has seen it all before. Everybody understands that alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suffered from many of the same pathologies – albeit on a smaller scale – and was eventually abandoned. [.  .  .]

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately, no. Only the most daring politicians seem willing to think about it seriously.  .  .   . [.  .  .]

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national calamity is no laughing matter.

And finally, Mark Steyn notes the insidious nature of encroaching government regulation over citizens:

The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as [gun owner] Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster - and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 11, 2009

Reason.tv on Tax Time

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 3, 2009

The Tyranny of the Busybodies

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

- C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 1, 2009

The Wavering Rule of Law

So, because of prosecutorial misconduct, the Justice Department decides to move for dismissal of the political corruption case against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens (previous posts here and here).

Meanwhile, Jeff Skilling, who created billions of dollars in wealth and thousands of jobs by revolutionizing risk management of natural gas prices for producers and industrial consumers, sits in a Colorado prison cell under the weight of a barbaric 24-year prison sentence. Skilling's conviction involved even more egregious prosecutorial misconduct than the Stevens case. The criminal case against Skilling was materially weaker than the case against Stevens, too.

It is a sad reflection of the current state of American rule of law that the DOJ readily concedes prosecutorial misconduct against an arguably corrupt legislator, but ignores it in a shaky case against a businessperson who created many jobs and great wealth.

And how bizarre is it that America's primary business newspaper rightly decries the government's abuse of Stevens' due process rights but continues to ignore even worse abuses with regard to a creative and productive businessperson?

Update: Larry Ribstein chimes in, too.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

The Postrel Health Care Finance Articles

Clear Thinkers favorite Virginia Postrel (previous posts here) is well-known in health care finance circles for her authorship of a reasoned critique of one-payor, centralized health care plans back in the 1990's. She now writes for The Atlantic.

Over the past year or so, Virginia has been experiencing serious health care issues, so she has recently penned two extraordinary articles in The Atlantic (here and here) chronicling her personal experience with America's Byzantine health care finance system. Both articles are must-reads for anyone interested in these important issues, but here are a couple of snippets from the second article that are representative of the wisdom that Virginia provides:

Mr. Daily [a critic] shares a common belief, expressed less dramatically in other letters, that there is somewhere a pot of money dedicated to “health care” which “society” divides between winners and losers. In the United States, at least, there is no health care pot, any more than there is a pot for housing or education or magazine subscriptions. There is simply an economy, which includes health care among other goods, and the amount we spend on health care grows out of the largely decentralized decisions made by individuals and organizations. As productivity increases and prices drop in some areas—food, clothes, entertainment—we can afford to spend more on health care (even without overall economic growth or increased health-care efficiency). [.  .  .]

.  .  . We do not currently treat health care as a right. That we don’t is, in fact, what most letter writers are objecting to. Neither do we regard it exactly as a privilege, to be allocated to the worthy few or even to be limited to those who can afford to pay for it, directly or indirectly. Rather, it is a good, produced and purchased in a complex marketplace through a combination of individual, organizational, and political decisions.

Even this formulation is misleading, however. Health care isn’t a single good, nor, like food, is it easily defined in terms of a minimum to sustain life. Studying other countries’ supposedly universal systems only demonstrates how fraught the concept of “health care” is: one bundle of services in British Columbia and a less-generous one in Nova Scotia, one in England and another in Scotland, one in New Zealand before the election and another afterwards. Arguably the U.S. already has universal care, in the sense that everyone can get some care—if only from an emergency room—for some things, and that citizens (a critical word in this context) without money are covered by Medicaid.

The real issue is how you define “health care.” What gets included is a matter not only of medicine and economics but of culture and politics.

What limitations on health care are Americans willing to accept in return for universal coverage? That is one of the core issues that those who are currently crafting health care finance reform are assiduously avoiding. But true reform will never occur without addressing that issue.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

March 30, 2009

Henderson on the Nature of Government

David Henderson makes an insightful point about the Ryan Moats/Robert Powell run-in in Dallas last week in which Powell (the policeman) exhibited an utter lack of common sense, much less prosecutorial discretion (and this incident is apparently not the first time that Powell has exhibited this type of behavior):

So what is the essence? The issue of control. Read the abridged transcript of the interaction or, better yet, watch the whole 20-minute video. What comes out loud and clear is that the policeman was upset because the driver, Ryan Moats, tried passionately to tell him the nature of the emergency, whereas what Robert Powell saw as being primary was that Moats wait patiently while Powell wrote him a ticket. Even once a nurse came out from the hospital and assured the policeman that Moats's mother-in-law was dying, Powell, writing the ticket, said, "I'm almost done." Must get that ticket written no matter why Moats jumped a red light. [.  .  .]

This is the nature of government whether the government employees are policemen with guns on their sides or sometimes in their hands or are teachers in government-financed schools. The whole Powell-Moats incident reminds me of a passage from Steven E. Landsburg's book, Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life. Landsburg tells of the propaganda his daughter Cayley's teachers subjected her to about the importance of not letting the water run when she brushed her teeth. Landsburg writes:

[.  .  .]

Where is the pattern, then? What general rule compels us to conserve water but not to conserve on resources devoted to education? The blunt truth is that there is no pattern, and the general rule is simply this: Only the teacher can tell you which resources should be conserved. The whole exercise is not about toothbrushing; it is about authority.

The Moats-Powell incident is a micro example of the government's proclivity to exert power arbitrarily. That essential nature is being largely ignored as the Obama Administration runs headlong into seeking even greater governmental regulation over broad sectors of the economy.

Given that one of the clearest lessons of the 20th century is the capacity of large government to cause unspeakable evil, any effort to centralize more power in the federal government should be subject to the most careful scrutiny and not the type of superficial posturing that Congress has exhibited to date.

Count me as not confident that Congress will oblige.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

March 28, 2009

Our Congress at work

I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

As regular readers of this blog know, I thought the federal bailout of AIG and various other Wall Street firms was a bad idea from the start because it prevented our bankruptcy system from allocating the risk of loss among the creditors of the financially-troubled firms.

Nevertheless, after various forces stoked a climate of fear, Congress approved broad bailout legislation even though it was clear at the time that few of the legislators understood what they were approving.

Not surprisingly, various large creditors of the financially-troubled firms did very well for themselves under the bailout legislation. Can't blame them for protecting their shareholders' interests, now can you?

So now, confronted with the fact that the bailout primarily benefited these large institutional creditors, various members of Congress and New York AG ("Attorney General" or "Aspiring Governor," take your pick) Andrew Cuomo are starting investigations into why AIG did precisely what it was supposed to do -- i.e., pay its bills -- with the bailout funds.

A little late, don't you think?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

March 26, 2009

Losing the grip on AIG

The business blogosphere was abuzz yesterday over publication of AIG executive Jake DeSantis' remarkable resignation letter to AIG CEO, Ed Liddy.

But what was even more remarkable was the reaction of some commentators that makes abundantly clear that common sense often evaporates in the face of big money.

DeSantis is a longtime AIG executive who worked for one of AIG's profitable units. When AIG was going down the tubes last year because of losses incurred in the company's untethered CDS trading unit, DeSantis agreed to stay on at a nominal salary and continue making profits in his unit in return for a substantial, but not over-market, bonus.

Such arrangements are not unusual for financially-troubled companies and might very well have been arranged even had AIG gone into a chapter 11 reorganization rather than become the subject of an ill-advised government bailout. In short, it's a good thing for creditors of AIG -- including now U.S. taxpayers -- that the company retain people such as DeSantis who might make the company profitable and valuable again.

Or course, we all know what happened when AIG disclosed publicly that it had made the bonus payments to DeSantis and other AIG executives. They were demonized in a manner that has not been seen since Enron.

DeSantis' resignation letter lays this all out and notes the indisputable hypocrisy of AIG executives and government officials who knew about these compensation arrangements, but who flamed the public uproar rather than provide the quite simple and reasonable explanation for the bonuses.

I mean really. Who could argue that DeSantis and the other similarly-situated AIG executives were treated in an abominable manner?

Well, up to the plate steps one Brian Montopoli, a CBSNews.com political reporter, who establishes beyond any doubt that he needs to remain a political, rather than business, reporter:

Mr. DeSantis is not a plumber. He is a Wall Street executive who has made millions of dollars. And it’s safe to assume that most plumbers don’t believe he has gotten a bad deal, AIG scandal notwithstanding.

In essence, Montopoli reasons that other people are working just as hard as DeSantis and they would gladly trade places with him if they could have made as much scratch as he has earned over the years. Given that DeSantis made a lot of money while he was at AIG, Montopoli thinks he is "tone deaf" for pointing out the injustice of being unfairly demonized and cheated out of the compensation that was promised to him in return for staying on at AIG under extremely difficult circumstances.

In short, those evil capitalist roaders deserve most of our scorn and they should just shut the hell up.

In the face of such addled reasoning, it's hard to know where to begin. But let's start by pointing out that Montopoli ignores the rather important fact that no one has stopped him or anyone else from attempting to compete with DeSantis in his area of business and make just as much money as he has over the years. The reality is that there are relatively few people who do what DeSantis does well. That's why he commands a larger salary than most of us.

The fact that DeSantis makes more money than we do doesn't mean that it's OK to screw him out of his compensation or that he shouldn't be heard to set the record straight when such an injustice takes place.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (9) |

February 23, 2009

The Journal's curious case of myopia

Bully for the Wall Street Journal for running this editorial last week decrying the prosecutorial misconduct of the Justice Department in obtaining the conviction of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens on ethics charges (Mike over at the Crime and Federalism blog has posted a copy of the defense motion describing the prosecutorial misconduct here).

However, where was the nation's leading business newspaper when even more egregious prosecutorial misconduct was involved in criminal cases that the DOJ brought in regard to Enron, particularly the prosecution of Jeff Skilling?

Could it be that the Journal was invested in the DOJ's myth regarding Enron?

How ironic that the WSJ condemns prosecutorial misconduct with regard to the case against a politician, but largely ignores it in cases against businesspeople.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 21, 2009

Quotes of the Week

Emanuel Derman:

"The market wants Churchill and they keep tossing it Chamberlains."

John Nash (via David Henderson) on his progress out of mental illness in the late 1980's:

"Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort."

Dick Armey:

"In reality, no one spends someone else's money better than they spend their own. The charade of the current stimulus package, chockablock with earmarks to favored pet constituencies and virtually devoid of national policy considerations, is the logical consequence of Keynesianism in action. It is about politics and power, not sound economics, and I believe that the American people will reject it."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 14, 2009

An unintended consequence of drug prohibition

While this post from earlier in the week highlighted the historical backdrop to the United States' failed drug prohibition policy, this Telegraph.co.uk article passes along an unintended consequence of that policy that should put to rest any concerns about reconsidering it:

The Home Office has admitted that the street price of both cocaine and heroin has fallen by nearly half in the last ten years, making the most dangerous illegal drugs cheaper than they have ever been.

That means a line of cocaine can cost as little as £1, with an average price per line of between £2 and £4.

The average price of a pint of lager is around £2.75, although some pub chains have reacted to the credit crunch by cutting the price of a pint as low as 99p. A glass of wine typically costs £3.50.  .  .  .

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) |

February 11, 2009

Interesting historical perspectives

Cato Unbound points us to a couple of articles that provide insightful observations on two of the crises that are swirling around us these days.

First, William Niskanen cautions us regarding the fear-mongering that supporters of the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus plan are using to justify emergency passage of the plan:

This is the fifth time in my adult life that the president has asked for or asserted unprecedented authority on an expedited basis with little or no congressional review. Each of the prior occasions turned out to be a disaster. [.  .  .]

The only coherence in this plan is political, not whether it is an effective or efficient method to stimulate the economy.   .   .  .  Again, as in the four prior episodes, there is every reason not to rush to approve a program of such magnitude.

The primary reason for the current financial crisis is that many banks cannot evaluate their own solvency or that of their current or potential counter-parties, primarily because of the difficulty of valuing mortgage-backed securities and other complex derivatives, and neither TARP nor the fiscal stimulus plan addresses this problem.

Our political system, unfortunately, is strongly biased to try to protect people against the effects of a crisis without addressing the causes of the crisis. To Congress: Slow down. Make sure you understand the causes of the financial crisis and the potential solutions before you burden your children and your grandchildren with another trillion dollars of federal debt.

Your present course is best described as fiscal child abuse.

Meanwhile, as Texans continue to watch nervously to the south as the Mexican government teeters on the brink of losing control of large sectors of the country to drug kingpins, Dale Gieringer reminds us that the main cause of this crisis -- U.S. drug prohibition -- is the result of dubious public policy:

This week marks the centennial of a fateful landmark in U.S. history, the nation's first drug prohibition law.  On February 9, 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, barring the importation of opium for smoking as of April 1.  Thus began a hundred-year crusade that has unleashed unprecedented crime, violence and corruption around the world —a war with no victory in sight.

Long accustomed to federal drug control, most Americans are unaware that there was once a time when people were free to buy any drug, including opium, cocaine, and cannabis, at the pharmacy.  In that bygone era, drug-related crime and violence were largely unknown, and drug use was not a major public concern. [.  .  .]

Early 20th-century Americans would be astounded to see what a problem drugs have become since the establishment of drug prohibition. Every year, two million Americans are arrested and 400,000 imprisoned for drug offenses that did not exist in their time.  Drug laws are now the number-one source of crime in the U.S., with one-half of the entire adult population having violated them.

Long gone are the days when Americans were free to keep opium in their closet; today, even gravely suffering patients are denied pain-killing narcotics by their doctors out of fear of federal prosecution. While smoking opium has faded from the scene, the country is now rife with more potent and lethal narcotics, which are widely sold on the illegal market. 

Seen in retrospect, drug prohibition ranks as one of the great man-made disasters of the 20th century. .  .  .

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

February 5, 2009

Thinking about Cheney's remarks

Many Americans were repulsed by the methods former Vice-President Dick Cheney used to consolidate and exercise war powers in the Executive Branch during the administration of George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, that controversy clouds many people's judgment on Cheney's many noteworthy accomplishments during his 30-year career in public service. He has been an extraordinary public servant.

My sense is that Cheney based his aggressive exercise of war powers during the Bush Administration in large part on classified information regarding the risk of more attacks on U.S. citizens after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a point that Barton Gellman notes in his seminal but generally critical book on the Cheney vice-presidency, Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (Penguin 2008).

Cheney's public comments from earlier this week appear to be consistent with my impression regarding his assessment of the risk of further attacks.

Given that, when you have 25 minutes or so, take the time to watch the video below of Irwin Redlener's recent TED lecture on how the nature of a nuclear attack threat on the United States has changed, but our generally deficient approach to preparing for one has not.

As Dick Cheney says, fighting those who would levy such an attack on the U.S. is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.”

Here's hoping that the Obama Administration is up to the task.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) |

January 25, 2009

Can Mayor White pull off another "win-win" deal?

Although the developers of the proposed Ashby high-rise condominium project didn't know it at the time, Houston Mayor Bill White did the developers a huge favor by putting up roadblocks to that project.

Can you imagine trying to peddle those condos in the current real estate market? Mayor White's blocking of the condos ended being a classic "win-win" deal.

Accordingly, I wonder if Mayor White might be inclined to do the same thing in regard to Houston's proposed soccer stadium?

Things aren't looking too rosy for MLS soccer these days:

Major League Soccer is not quite ready to carry its own night on TV.

After two years of anemic ratings that started low and finished lower, ESPN executives decided to cancel the league’s regular Thursday night telecast on ESPN2 this season.  .  .  .

“We didn’t see the kind of ratings climb we’d like to, so we’re trying something different,” said Scott Guglielmino, ESPN vice president of programming.

The decision to cancel the regular Thursday night game marks a stunning turnaround for a league that two years ago believed it was creating destination programming that would increase interest in MLS. But even the 2007 arrival of David Beckham couldn’t boost MLS ratings.

MLS games averaged a 0.2 rating and 289,000 viewers on ESPN2 in 2007. Those numbers dropped to 0.2/253,000 viewers the following year. Its highest rating during that period was Beckham’s second regular-season game in August 2007 that earned a 0.6/658,000 households.

Canceling “MLS Primetime Thursday” is a tacit admission that MLS is not strong enough to anchor a regular prime-time slot on its own. ESPN is entering the third year of an eight-year rights deal that pays MLS $8 million annually.

So, MLS franchises are being downgraded by the most important sports programming network in the nation, which can't be good for the value of those teams. The attendance at MLS games is poor, at least outside Houston and a couple of other cities. And the perception in sophisticated soccer circles is that the MLS is decidedly minor-league.

Meanwhile, Mayor White has already had Houstonians invest $20 million or so in buying downtown property at a premium price for the proposed soccer stadium, despite the fact that the city already owned nearby property that would have been perfectly fine for such a stadium. Moreover, the city will be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars more in infrastructure improvements if the Dynamo owners somehow cobble together their private financing for the stadium.

Now, it's looking as if the Dynamo may not even have a viable league to play in by the time the proposed soccer stadium is completed in a couple of years.

Pull the plug on the soccer stadium, Mayor. It will be another "win-win" deal.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (8) |

January 24, 2009

Oral history of the Bush White House

When you have a spare hour or so, check out this "Oral History of the Bush White House" by Cullen Murphy, Todd Purdum and Philippe Sands in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

The format of the article is a timeline recreating of the last eight years with participants' observations on many of the major moments and a number of minor ones, which often end up being as instructive as the reactions to the major ones.

The entire article is a must-read, but the following observations of Kenneth Adelman, a member of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board, will give you a flavor.

The context of Adelman's comments are a confrontation that he had with the Defense Secretary several days after Rumsfeld had dismissed the significance of the breakdown of civil order in Iraq by publicly observing that "stuff happens":

So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.

Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.

I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?

So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.

And so that was not a successful conversation.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

December 24, 2008

Playing fair

So, now Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is finding out that some federal prosecutors do not play fair (H/T Doug Berman). Of course, we've known that for quite some time down here in Houston.

Oh well, at least the mainstream media has strong incentives to expose such abuses in the case of a major political figure.

But do the same media incentives exist in the prosecution of a wealthy and unpopular businessperson?

What if the reporter most responsible for such a prosecution is, might we say, not particularly motivated to expose prosecutorial abuses? Or what if the reporter for the nation's most prominent business newspaper is so conflicted that he ignores the abuses even when they are playing out in front of him?

And the foregoing doesn't even consider what we should think when one of those reporters in another case actively attempts to help investors score on their positions at the expense of a company and its chief executives.

It's hard enough to maintain innocence against the overwhelming resources of the federal government when the prosecution plays fair. It's next to impossible to do so when it doesn't. What chance is there if the people responsible for exposing prosecutorial abuse have incentives that override that responsibility?

Ask Jeff Skilling.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

December 16, 2008

Blago blogging

The criminal troubles of an Illinois governor would not normally be one of this blog's topics, but this Michael Barone op-ed on the Rod Blagojevich affair is just too good not to pass along.

Barone is well-versed in the complicated web of influences that define Chicago politics, so he is right in his element explaining Blagojevich to other pundits not so steeped in Chicagoland:

The answer, .   .   . is that [Blagojevich is] not crazy, but simply stupid, hugely stupid. I've long since come to the conclusion that Rod Blagojevich is clearly the stupidest governor in all of our 50 states, and he may be the stupidest governor I've had occasion to write about in the four decades when I've been co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. And a stupid man (or woman) in high political office can be very dangerous to all concerned. I have long said that as a political operative I would prefer a smart opponent to a stupid opponent. If you're pretty smart yourself, you should be able to figure out what another pretty smart person will do. But whether you're smart or stupid, it's hard to figure out what a stupid person will do. That's even more true when the stupid politician is your political ally. Stupid people do all sorts of things that are against their own interests. Like tell the press on Monday that you wouldn't mind being taped, even when (as we learned on Tuesday) that you've been saying all kinds of things that you should have known could easily send you to the slammer.

Meanwhile, Joe Queenan compares Blago to Nero, and then wonders what we have come to when a governor of a big state can shake down Bank of America and nobody really notices:

The idea that the governor of a state as prosperous and important and sophisticated and upscale as Illinois would make this kind of threat is terrifying. Even more terrifying is that Bank of America saw no alternative but to give in. Yet even more terrifying is that nobody outside Chicago seems to have gotten terribly worked up about the situation, riveted as they are on the governor's more theatrical transgressions. But peddling a Senate seat or using scare tactics to shake down a newspaper are nowhere near so serious a menace to society as letting the government arbitrarily intervene in financial transactions between banks and creditors. A crooked governor we can all handle. But a governor who capriciously decides which commercial enterprises a bank must finance and which it can ignore is a scary proposition indeed.

Rome wasn't built in a day. But get the wrong politician in office, and you can burn it in a day.

Meanwhile, Patrick Fitzgerald, a prosecutor who is quite capable of pursuing a weak case that nevertheless puts him in the center of the media spotlight, ought to shut up about the Blagojevich case, says Victoria Toensing:

In the Dec. 9 press conference regarding the federal corruption charges against Gov. Blagojevich and his chief of staff, Mr. Fitzgerald violated the ethical requirement of the Justice Department guidelines that prior to trial a "prosecutor shall refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a serious and imminent threat of heightening public condemnation of the accused." The prosecutor is permitted to "inform the public of the nature and extent" of the charges. In the vernacular of all of us who practice criminal law, that means the prosecutor may not go "beyond the four corners" -- the specific facts -- in the complaint or indictment. He may also provide any other public-record information, the status of the case, the names of investigators, and request assistance. But he is not permitted to make the kind of inflammatory statements Mr. Fitzgerald made during his media appearance. [.  .  .]

Throughout the press conference about Gov. Blagojevich, Mr. Fitzgerald talked beyond the four corners of the complaint. He repeatedly characterized the conduct as "appalling." He opined that the governor "has taken us to a new low," while going on a "political corruption crime spree."

Of course, we know all about federal prosecutors violating such ethical duties down here in Houston.

Finally, the always insightful Larry Ribstein puts the Blagojevich affair in proper perspective:

Let's keep that in mind before we hand over more regulatory power to politicians because we think we can trust them more than the market participants who would be regulated.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

December 11, 2008

Would you buy a car from Congress?

The W$J's Holman Jenkins continues what should be Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary on the problems of the U.S. auto industry:

None of [Congress' complicity in the auto industry's problem] was mentioned at four days of congressional bailout hearings, because Detroit knows better than to suggest Congress has a role in the industry's problem.   .   . 

.   .   . The tragedy of GM and Ford is that, inside each, are perfectly viable businesses, albeit that have been slowly murdered over 30 years by CAFE. Both have decent global operations. At home, both have successful, profitable businesses selling pickups, SUVs and other larger vehicles to willing consumers, despite having to pay high UAW wages.

All this is dragged down by federal fuel-economy mandates that require them to lose tens of billions making small cars Americans don't want in high-cost UAW factories. Understand something: Ford and GM in Europe successfully sell cars that are small but not cheap. Europeans are willing to pay top dollar for a refined small car that gets excellent mileage, because they face gasoline prices as high as $9. Americans are not Europeans. In the U.S., except during bouts of high gas prices or in the grip of a Prius fad, the small cars that American consumers buy aren't bought for high mileage, but for low sticker prices. And the Big Three, with their high labor costs, cannot deliver as much value in a cheap car as the transplants can.

Under a law of politics, such truths were unmentionable in last week's televised circus because legislators are unwilling to do anything about them. They won't repeal CAFE because they fear the greens. They won't repeal CAFE's "two fleets" rule (which effectively requires the Big Three to make small cars in domestic factories) because they fear the UAW. They won't hike gas prices because they fear voters. [.  .  .]

We hate to admit it, but the only good idea from the bailout debate is the proposal for a new "auto czar." Along with disposing of Chrysler and downsizing Ford and GM, his job should be to confront Congress with its own policy cowardice and failure. If saving gasoline and Detroit are both worthy goals, let's ditch CAFE and institute a gasoline tax to make consumers value the cars government is forcing auto makers to build. If Congress doesn't have the tummy for that, at least ditch the "two fleets" rule so Detroit can import small cars to meet the mandate.

Alas, Barack Obama's vaunted "change" apparently doesn't include spending the political capital to make Congress acknowledge the failure of CAFE. If he can't do better than throw taxpayer money at a dismal policy disaster like our fuel-economy regulations (and so far he seems to be joining Congress in pretending it's all Detroit's fault), we might as well give up on his presidency along with any hope of progress on the nation's other unresolved dilemmas.

His campaign never really answered the question of whether he was Chance the Gardener or Abraham Lincoln. We might as well find out now.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

December 6, 2008

Frost/Nixon looks interesting

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner 2008), provides more insight into Nixon's fascinating relationship with television.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 28, 2008

Thoughts on the attacks in Mumbai

Remember -- overcoming fascists of all stripes takes a fighting spirit.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 19, 2008

Progress on the bailout front?

So, less than two months after this previous post noted that chapter 11 reorganizations with possible government financing of reorganization plans were the best tools to shake out the current financial crisis, even the NY Times (here and here) is promoting that approach for restructuring the Big Three automobile companies.

I guess that's a sign of real progress.

Funny how the way we typically handle such things in the civil justice system usually is the most efficient solution to the problems.

It sure beats having this bunch fumble around looking for an alternative solution.

By the way, I've mentioned this before, but it merits passing along again. One of the best ways to keep up on developments in regard to the current financial crisis is to check in frequently on the following sites: Clusterstock, Dealbreaker, and Felix Salmon.

The blogosphere rules!

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 18, 2008

Thinking about markets

Now that folks have had at least a bit of time to reflect on the financial crisis on Wall Street, some good historical perspectives are starting to pop up, such as this Niall Ferguson Vanity Fair piece (previous posts on other Ferguson works are here). Toward the end, Ferguson makes an excellent point about market economies that is not widely understood:

The modern financial system is the product of centuries of economic evolution. Banks transformed money from metal coins into accounts, allowing ever larger aggregations of borrowing and lending. From the Renaissance on, government bonds introduced the securitization of streams of interest payments. From the 17th century on, equity in corporations could be bought and sold in public stock markets. From the 18th century on, central banks slowly learned how to moderate or exacerbate the business cycle. From the 19th century on, insurance was supplemented by futures, the first derivatives. And from the 20th century on, households were encouraged by government to skew their portfolios in favor of real estate.

Economies that combined all these institutional innovations performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources than, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, then in the guise of globalization.

Yet money’s ascent has not been, and can never be, a smooth one. On the contrary, financial history is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes. The excesses of the Age of Leverage—the deluge of paper money, the asset-price inflation, the explosion of consumer and bank debt, and the hypertrophic growth of derivatives—were bound sooner or later to produce a really big crisis.

In short, markets are imperfect and sometimes quite messy. But they have stood the test of time in proving more efficient than the alternatives. Don't give up on them just yet.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 15, 2008

The Obama choices

Jan Greenburg sizes up the most likely chances that Obama will have to nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The bottom line -- despite the advanced age of several of the justices, perhaps not as many as one would think.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

November 11, 2008

A stubbornly bad system

So, now that the Democrats have swept in a slate of judges to replace many longstanding GOP state district judges in Houston, the Chronicle runs an article about how some Republicans are calling for an alternative system for appointing judges.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats are not as enthusiastic, at least right now.

Of course, while the Republican judges have been controlling the courthouse over most of the past two decades, they weren't interested in rocking the boat to change the system, either.

However, the problem remains that, partisanship aside, doing nothing about the current Texas system of electing judges simply perpetuates a very bad system.

Thankfully, as Don Cruse reports, Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson of the Texas Supreme Court is showing leadership on the issue, just as the late John Hill and Tom Phillips did before him during their stints as Chief Justice.

But the potential for corruption in the Texas judicial election system perhaps best summed up by the following joke:

Taking his seat in his chambers, the judge faced the opposing lawyers.

"So," said the judge. "Each of you has presented me with a bribe."

Both lawyers squirmed uncomfortably.

"You, attorney Mohanty, gave me $50,000," observed the judge. "And you, attorney Venkat, gave
me $60,000."

The judge reached into his pocket, pulled out $10,000, and handed it to attorney Venkat.

"Now that I've returned $10,000 to attorney Venkat," exclaimed the judge proudly, "I'm going to
decide this case solely on its merits!"

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

October 23, 2008

Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics

If you didn't have the opportunity to watch or record it last Friday, then watch the following six YouTube segments of John Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics when you have the time (the other five segments are below the break). The program is television at its best presenting and analyzing key issues involving government regulation of business and the impact of that regulation on the creation of jobs and wealth. Enjoy:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

October 21, 2008

Security theater

While considering the abject vacuity of the presidential candidates' positions on the major issues this election season, I started thinking about some minor issues that might make a difference in my vote.

For example, if either major candidate came out in favor of dismantling the "security" apparatus that the federal government has foisted upon us to make airline travel an aggravation, at best, and an ordeal most of the time, then that candidate would probably get my vote.

Alas, neither candidate has proposed such a dismantling.

Nevertheless, don't miss this clever-but-serious Jeffrey Goldberg/Atlantic.com article on the utter uselessness of the Transportation Safety Administration's airport security procedures (prior post here).

Inasmuch as the only two airport-security measures that really matter -- fortified cockpit doors and the awareness of the flying public as to what a hijacking can mean -- have been in place virtually since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Goldberg zeroes in on the wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the TSA to impose on us at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.

Moreover, that process does virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. Rather, the inspection process is "security theater" that simply makes a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.

Finally, if all that weren't bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental "safeguard" such as the TSA apparatus is adopted, few politicians are interested in dismantling it even when it's clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive.

That's food for thought as we get ready to endure implementation of the next round of governmental regulation of business.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

October 19, 2008

Why some people should not vote

Posted by Tom at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) |

October 16, 2008

Playing the Jimmy Carter card

You know it's desperation time for McCain when Victor Davis Hanson plays the Jimmy Carter card against Obama:

A great many moderates and conservatives are worn out and tired of Bush and Bush hatred, the European furor, serial charges of racism and illiberalism, and finally, in their weariness, think that Obama will, in a variety of ways, just make all the ickiness go away-as if he will make all of us be liked abroad and end racial and red/blue fighting at home. They should ask themselves whether Jimmy Carter restored American popularity with his human rights campaigns, praise of left-wing dictators, dialogue during the hostage crisis (cf. "The Great Satan"), boasts of no more inordinate fear of communism, etc., or whether Obama, in his Trinity/Acorn/Pfleger years, brought racial healing and understanding to Chicago.

This post from four years ago surveys the disastrous effect that the Carter Presidency had on the Democratic Party, and here is an earlier Hanson broadside on Carter.

The playing of the Jimmy Carter card reminded me of the following portrait of Carter penned by his first Treasury Secretary, W. Michael Blumenthal. The description is included on page 338 of Robert D. Novak's The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown 2007), which is a rollicking good read:

I saw [Carter] in 1977 and 1978 with outside groups in various settings, and I always felt that he made a very good impression because he would ask questions and listen. But I realized after a while that it was a PR operation because he paid absolutely no attention to what they said. He wrote it down, but nothing would happen with it. After a while, you get a sense of it. This was his way of trying to impress people.  .   .

He has a deep sense of inferiority, a very deep sense of inferiority. I discovered it when I began to realize that he confided in no one. Charlie [Chief Economic Adviser Charles Schultze] would have a weekly meeting with him, and he would come out and say to me that he had never worked for a man like that before. He never reacts. Occasionally, he would ask a question. He never debates. He never disagrees.  .  .  .

He doesn't want strong people. He ruled out [John] Dunlop [for Secretary of Labor] and he ruled out George Ball [for Secretary of State]. He ruled out when he knew the people were strong, aggressive, confrontational personalities. He didn't know me from Adam. Had he known me, he would never have invited me in .  .  .

He dislikes people who are very strong and successful. That is why he doesn't like major businessmen, bankers or people who run big labor unions. You have to watch him, and he is very uncomfortable with them. He has this outward sort of politeness and gives his little spiel, but his eyes glaze over and later on he frequently makes derogatory comments about them. He feels very put upon by these people, and it is essentially that he is afraid that they know more than he does .   .  .  .

The danger of isolation is great, and flattery is a commodity in abundance. We had a few Cabinet meetings, and people were kissing his ass. I asked if he recognized it when it was subtle and indirect, and he responded that he could tell. I could see increasingly that flattery went very far with him -- a person who does not recognize when he is being shamelessly flattered and who enjoys it.  .  .  .

He briefs very quickly with sort of a veneer of knowledge and he can give back in an orderly fashion, but he doesn't retain it for very long.  .   .   . I think the President when he came into office was a very inexperienced and poorly informed man.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

October 9, 2008

Say what?

As noted earlier here and here, the lack of leadership involved in the current credit crisis and related Treasury bailout really has been appalling. You don't think so? Check this out:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

October 8, 2008

Campaigning in 2008

Although things aren't going so well for the McCain-Palin campaign, it looks as if they have at least locked up The Villages, the golf-course retirement community in Florida that runs those cheesy commercials during PGA Tour golf tournament telecasts:

With thousands of supporters packing the streets and sidewalks of this massive retirement community, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin took the safe route Sunday and said she and John McCain would reform Washington, put America on the path to energy independence and nurse a struggling economy back to health. [ .  .  . ]

At one point while signing autographs for the sweltering crowd, a surprised Palin laughed when a supporter reached over and handed her a giant, plastic lipstick replica -- an obvious reference to a joke delivered by Palin at the Republican National Convention. Palin's comment about the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom being lipstick has since inspired a volley of campaign rhetoric. As the crowd cheered, a smiling Palin autographed the novelty before moving on for more autographs and handshakes.

Meanwhile, it appears that the Obama-Biden campaign has conceded The Villages to McCain-Palin. At least that's what Senator Biden seems to indicate in the video below:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

October 5, 2008

Did McCain choose the wrong Palin?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

September 30, 2008

This is leadership?

I've already said my piece on the proposed Treasury Bailout of Wall Street, so I won't belabor that view.

In the meantime, there are much better places to keep up with the minute-by-minute political developments on the proposed bailout -- for example, check out Clusterstock, DealBreaker and Felix Salmon for astute and up-to-the-minute analysis.

However, one point from my previous post deserves further review -- that is, circumstances such as this provide us with a revealing view of our political leaders. Do they inspire positive and collaborative action in difficult times for the better good of society? Or do they attempt to generate support for their political position through fear-mongering and demagoguery?

In my view, President Bush's handling of the negotiations over the proposed bailout has been abysmal. As Jeff Matthews points out:

The President’s unfortunate choice of words—"this sucker could go down"—carry the same deer-in-headlights quality as his televised speech to the American people last week, in which he used the word “panic,” as we recall. At a minimum, it makes you nervous; at a maximum, it makes you want to throw up first and sell everything second.

What happened to the heroic, forward-looking rhetoric great leaders are supposed to provide in times of crisis?

FDR gave us “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Churchill gave us “We shall fight on the beaches.”

George Bush cruises in with “This sucker could go down.”

We wonder: has a more irresponsible sentence been uttered, by anyone, during this entire crisis?

John Carney reports that President Bush wasn't any better today in responding to the House's rejection of the proposed bailout:

"We put forth a plan that was big because we got a big problem," Bush just said, sitting in a chair placed before a fireplace in the White House. He's meeting with advisers, he said. "I'm disappointed with the vote in Congress," the president said.

Was that his version of FDR's famous fireside chats? Bush looked annoyed he was being bothered with this stuff.

This from a President who failed to persuade more than a third of his own party members in the House for his position in response to a financial emergency?

Meanwhile, proving that dubious leadership is bipartisan, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi provided us with a lesson on how not to win support for a position:

Finally, Tina Fey didn't even need to change any of Sarah Palin's words to drive home the point that John McCain certainly didn't bolster his lack of financial and economic acumen with his running mate selection:

Update: More "leadership."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (6) |

September 26, 2008

Lord, help us!

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

September 24, 2008

The Treasury Bailout is not rocket science

The debate over the proposed Treasury bailout of Wall Street firms is coming at a fortuitous time -- the election season. Be wary of any candidates who, after looking appropriately concerned about the dire predictions of the plan's promoters, throw up their hands and vote in favor of the bailout because "we just have to do something" even if they don't understand what they are doing.

The fear mongering that the promoters are using to sell the bailout is laughable. This is not rocket science.

For example, when Enron tanked in late 2001, it was the seventh largest public company in the U.S. Enron traded derivatives and other financial instruments with counterparties that were among Wall Street's biggest commercial and investment banks, which were heavily exposed to its losses. To make matters worse, these investments were concentrated in the energy sector, which is at least as important to the nation's economy as the housing sector that is at the center of the current crisis.

In short, at the time of its bankruptcy, Enron was one of the nation's largest publicly-owned companies, a vitally-important market-maker in the natural gas trading industry and a leader in hedging corporate risk through structured finance transactions.

Despite the huge wealth destruction that would result from Enron's insolvency, not one government or Wall Street leader proposed a bailout of Enron in order to preserve the huge value to the public of the natural gas trading industry and the market for structured finance transactions.

Enron's bankruptcy proceeded to cause enormous tremors through various industries -- particularly the energy industry -- because valuable resources for hedging risk of loss had evaporated seemingly overnight. The natural gas trading industry nearly fell apart completely, costing companies and their customers untold billions of dollars that they otherwise could have saved through hedging risk of loss. Similarly, the market for many structured finance transactions dried up, also costing companies another valuable avenue for hedging risk.

However, the nation's financial system did not break down. Companies adjusted to the changed circumstances and endured their additional costs as best they could. Markets also adjusted. Slowly but surely, both the natural gas trading industry and the market for structured finance transactions rebounded so that both are again providing companies with valuable alternatives for hedging risk and saving money.

Now, the tables are turned on Wall Street. Rather than facing the consequences of their risk-taking decisions in chapter 11, Wall Street's politically well-connected leaders are weaving their tales of doom for the overall economy to compliant governmental leaders who are only too willing to do their bidding.

In reality, each of these Wall Street firms should be required to endure the same thing that Enron and its creditors did -- a chapter 11 reorganization where equity gets wiped out and creditors either take a haircut on payment of their debts or convert their debt to equity in a reorganized firm that emerges from bankruptcy with a cleaned-up balance sheet.

That process ensures that investors and creditors who undertook the risk of investing or dealing with the bankrupt firms share the losses of their risk-taking. Moreover, it allows the firms that really are worth saving (as opposed to simply liquidating) to emerge from bankruptcy with an improved financial condition that should provide the firm with an enhanced opportunity to create wealth again.

What the bailout plan proposes to do is insulate investors and creditors from risk of loss by having the government -- funded by taxpayers such as you and me -- undertake that risk. There is simply no moral justification for foisting that risk on taxpayers and the only possible practical justification is that sorting all of these firms' problems out in chapter 11 might take awhile.

But even if the government saw fit to accelerate the Wall Street reorganizations to hedge the risk of a prolonged economic downturn, there is simply no reason for the government to overpay for assets from financially-troubled firms. Rather, the government should simply propose a plan that implements the going-concern liquidation and debt-for-equity reorganization features of chapter 11 on an accelerated basis in return for some reasonable financial contribution to the process. And you can bet that contribution doesn't need to be close to $700 billion.

Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. Mc Cormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago, has written the most cogent piece I've seen to date on why the bailout is a bad idea. Even though it was wrong for the government to contribute to the massive amounts of wealth destruction that resulted from the demonization of Enron, the government was right not to bail out Enron. The circumstances are different now, so perhaps a different approach is more prudent than simply allowing all of these Wall Street companies to be sorted out in chapter 11.

But throwing $700 billion at investors and creditors who should be sharing the losses of their risk-taking is not even close to the best way of doing it.

Update: I couldn't help but laugh out loud this morning as Warren Buffett and the promoters of the Treasury bailout plan point to Buffett's sweet $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs as an endorsement of the plan.

I prefer to look at what Buffett is doing rather than what he is saying.

What he is not doing is what Paulson and Bernanke want the U.S. Treasury to do -- buy investment banks' toxic assets. Rather, Buffett is buying preferred shares in Goldman with a big yield and warrants to buy Goldman stock at $115 (its trading at over $130) so that he can recover the profit his investment helps foster while Goldman transitions from an investment bank to a bank holding company over the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, Paulson and Bernanke keep promoting their plan to throw $700 billion at whatever trashy assets that Wall Street serves up to them.

It does not engender much confidence that Buffett can cut a far better deal with Wall Street's best-run investment bank than Paulson and Bernanke propose to cut with the worst-run ones.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (5) |

September 21, 2008

This is too easy

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

September 11, 2008

Hank's Thank-You Note

Mr. Juggles over at Long or Short Capital passes along this fictional thank-you note from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to American taxpayers after this week's seemingly inevitable federal bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (prior posts here):

Dear US Taxpayer,

I would like to congratulate you on your recent purchase. I am glad I was able to convince you that now is the ideal time to offer an uncapped backstop on a $5.2 trillion book of mortgages. We here at the Treasury Dept (along with our sisters over at the Fed), appreciate your repeat business. I am confident that this acquisition will be a profitable one; perhaps even more profitable than your recent purchase of JPMorgan’s Bear Stearns’ liabilities!

Please know that we are actively seeking more deals on which we can work together. I am confident we will find more interesting opportunities before the end of the year.

Yours Truly,
Hank Paulson

Herbert Spencer got it right long ago (H/T Bryan Caplan):

"The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

September 4, 2008

Election 2008

Inasmuch as the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign resembles a high school student council race in terms of sophistication, it appears that Jon Stewart and Comedy Central are going to have a field day between now and Election Day. Below are a recent segments on the "substance" of Obama's campaign and McCain's VP selection:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

August 13, 2008

The fall of a demagogue

I wasn't going to blog anything about John Edwards' recent public admission to an affair with Rielle Hunter. As has been noted many times previously on this blog, Edwards is a demagogue who represents the worst in American national politics. I would have much preferred that Edwards' demagoguery be the reason for the demise of his political career rather than a tawdry affair that is hurtful to Edwards' innocent family members, even if it was "oncologically correct," as Maureen Dowd put it.

But turning to Ms. Hunter, check out this Jonathan Darman/Newsweek article. What a piece of work. Once Hunter decided to pounce, Edwards never had a chance. It almost makes one feel sorry for him. Almost.

By the way, while considering matters political, don't miss Josh Green's Atlantic piece on the demise of the Hillary Clinton campaign (previous posts here).

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

August 11, 2008

Barackroll

As political satire, the video below probably doesn't top this one, but it's close.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

July 28, 2008

Another innovative California industry

The New Yorker's David Samuels reports on how medical marijuana is changing a popular California industry:

Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder. [.  .  .]

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.” [.  .  .]

A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars. [.  .  .]

I recently spent six months, off and on, with ["Captain"] Blue [a pot broker] — at his apartment, in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places where “medical marijuana” is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, traveling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.

Read the entire article. Meanwhile, take a moment to read about one of the many costly reminders of the misguided nature of American drug prohibition policy.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

July 6, 2008

An excellent primer for the political season

The Heritage Foundation provides this outstanding series of charts (example to the left) reflecting various issues relating to federal revenue and spending.

Recommended reading before listening to any candidate during the upcoming political campaigns.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 28, 2008

U.S. Energy Policy

Via Tom McMahon.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 26, 2008

Colbert on Hannity

Stephen Colbert channels Jessica Hagy in analyzing conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 23, 2008

Clear thinking to begin the week

In three and a half minutes, Richard St. John explains the keys to success.

The late Milton Friedman explains the folly of the prohibition policy against drugs.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 8, 2008

Colbert v. Will

Clear Thinkers favorite Stephen Colbert finally meets his match -- syndicated columnist George Will:

By the way, check out Will's latest on Obama and McCain:

On Obama: "Obama's words mesmerize a nation accustomed to leaders who routinely use words with antic indifference to their accuracy."

On McCain: "If he really opposes torture, he will take pity on the public and master the use of a teleprompter."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 6, 2008

Hillary's flaw

The strangely obsolescent presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton is one of the most intriguing stories of this political season. The Financial Times' Clive Cook provides a spot on foreigner's perspective:

[Clinton's] performance last night was stunningly ill-judged, and speaks volumes about her fitness to lead—or lack of it. Under the circumstances, one can understand, maybe, a reluctance to concede. But to declare moral victory; to insist, knowing that she had lost, that she remains the stronger candidate; to start positioning herself to demand the VP slot as of right: all this was not just remarkably ungracious, it was also patently counter-productive from a strictly selfish point of view. Can’t she see that she has made it easier, not harder, for Obama to keep her off the ticket?

One of the CNN analysts debating Hillary’s non-concession speech mentioned emails coming in which said that Tuesday “needed to be her night.” At this one of the others spluttered, “It had to be her night? Obama just won!”… before, in a valuable moment of reckless honesty, referring to “the Clintons’ deranged narcissism”. Yes, I thought (recalling, incidentally, Alistair Campbell’s comment that Gordon Brown was “psychologically flawed”). Read her speech, and compare it with Obama’s. His extravagant (and tactically shrewd) praise of her; a speech addressed not just to the whole Democratic party but to the whole country; calculated, of course, calibrated—with nothing in it that was smug or self-regarding or sectarian. Contrast that with her perfunctory acknowledgement of him, followed by a recitation of her achievements and the obstacles that had been put in her way: Enough about our nominee, this is my night and I want to talk about me.

Something tells me that she is not cut out to be Obama’s deputy. If he puts her on the ticket, I think he will be making a big mistake.

Clinton's inability to compete with Obama's charismatic articulation of a vision for the country definitely worked against her in the campaign. But my sense is that the genesis of her downfall was voters' distrust of her inner Tracy Flick.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

June 2, 2008

Ron Paul, we hardly knew ye

This post from last June noted Houston-area Congressman Ron Paul's deft media touch on Comedy Central's Daily Show. Now, a year later, Jim Henley sums up the utter failure that Paul's presidential campaign became:

This fellow can’t spell "candidate," but by being willing to come out and say that Ron Paul Lost, he’s closer to wisdom than the entire staff of Takimag. The full measure of Paul’s failure isn’t even that he’s not going to be the Republican nominee. It’s that, even since everyone else dropped out of the race but Paul and McCain, he’s still been losing to Mike Huckabee in every state where the Huckster was on the ballot except Pennsyvlania (Paul was born in Pennsylvania.) Idaho is the only other primary state where he broke 10%. (He hit low double-digits in a few caucus states.) He has 35 delegates by CNN’s reckoning. Huckabee has 275 and Romney 255. With his $30 million in donations, he’s barely breaking the million-bucks-a-delegate mark. That’s ten times the much-ridiculed rate of Mitt Romney.

Paul failed to win any states, to move the GOP debate in his direction, to accrue significant delegates or to leverage his fund-raising into a third-party run. And word is he’s staying quiet about endorsing an independent because he doesn’t want the Congressional GOP leadership to strip him of committee assignments come the fall. Paul accomplished the one thing he’s always been good at: using political appeals to get people to send money. I don’t feel freer.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

May 13, 2008

Ignoring the noise from next door

The problems that the obsolescent U.S. drug prohibition policy exacerbate along the Texas-Mexico border are a frequent topic on this blog, so this Mary Anastasia O'Grady/W$J article on the latest developments in the drug war just south of the border caught my eye:

American nonchalance about drug use stands in sharp contrast to what is happening across the border in Mexico. There lawmen are taking heavy casualties in a showdown with drug-running crime syndicates. On Thursday the chief of the Mexican federal police, Edgar Millán Gómez, was assassinated by men waiting for him when he came home, becoming the latest and most prominent victim of the syndicates. [.  .  .]

It's no secret that the narcotics trade is like a roach infestation. If you see one shipment or dealer, you can be sure that there are many others that go undetected. That's why such brazen behavior at [San Diego State University] should be disturbing to America's drug warriors. The signs of an infestation are everywhere, making a joke of their 40-year claim that any day now they will wipe out American drug use. [.  .  .]

The upshot: Americans underwrite Mexico's vicious organized crime syndicates. The gringos get their drugs and the Mexican mafia gets weapons, technology and the means to buy off or intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Caught in the middle is a poor country striving to develop sound institutions for law enforcement.

The trouble for Mexico is that, even if it understands that U.S. demand is not going away, it cannot afford to cede large swaths of the country to the drug cartels. Thus Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made confronting organized crime a priority since taking office in December 2006. His attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, told me in February that the goal is to reclaim the state's authority where it has been lost to the mafias.

But after 17 months of engagement, while San Diego students party on, victory remains elusive and the Mexican death toll is mounting. Most of the drug-related killings since Mr. Calderón took office seem to be a result of battles between rival cartels. Still, the escalating violence is troubling. The official death toll attributable to organized crime since the Calderón crackdown began now stands at 3,995. Of that, 1,170 have died this year.

Especially alarming are the number of assassinations among military personnel and municipal, state and federal police officers. The total is 439 for the 17 months and 109 so far this year. Many of these victims have been ordinary police officers whose refusal to be bought off or back off cost them their lives.

But as the murder of police chief Millan makes clear, high rank offers no safety. Two weeks before he was gunned down, Roberto Velasco, the head of the organized crime division of the federal police, was shot in the head. The assailants took his car, which leaves open the possibility that it was a random event, but most Mexicans are not buying that theory. Eleven federal law enforcement agents have been killed in ambushes and executions in the last four weeks alone.

If U.S. law enforcement agencies were losing their finest at such a rate, you can bet Americans would give greater thought to the violence generated by high demand and prohibition. Our friends in Mexico deserve equal consideration.

The most troubling aspect of all this is that spillover violence toward U.S. authorities would probably just be met with beefed-up prohibition efforts. Are the vested interests who benefit from the outmoded-but-lucrative prohibition policy simply too entrenched for there to be serious Congressional consideration given to a more humane and cost-effective drug policy?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (2) |

May 11, 2008

Nixonland

George Will gives Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland (Scribner 2008), a history lesson.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

May 10, 2008

Worth a watch

For those of you interested in the vexing issues involved in application of the death penalty and child predator laws, the scene below from Boston Legal is worth ten minutes of your time (H/T David Feige). I don't agree with everything that Alan Shore says in his argument to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the scene is certainly far-fetched, but it's a thought-provoking performance nonetheless:

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

May 5, 2008

Chron: Sacrifice the local economy for the polar bears

Given the editorial slant of the Houston Chronicle over the past several years, it's not particularly surprising that the editors ran this editorial calling for polar bears to be declared an endangered species under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Unfortunately, it's also not surprising that the Chron editorial failed to mention that the oil and gas business -- a key source of jobs and wealth for Houston and the nation -- is likely to suffer considerable financial damage as a result of the polar bear listing push, which Hugh Hewitt notes "is not only an abuse of the ESA's original intent but also unsupported by the facts concerning the ice and the polar bears."

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 29, 2008

Fueling food riots

Peter Gordon observed the other day that "politicians are better at creating problems than addressing them. Schools, housing, health care, transportation and others suffer from too much political attention."

Echoing that idea, Clear Thinkers favorite James Hamilton writes about one of the underlying economic reasons for food riots that are occurring in developing nations in some parts of the world:

As a result of ethanol subsidies and mandates, the dollar value of what we ourselves throw away in order to produce fuel in this fashion could be 50% greater than the value of the fuel itself. In other words, we could have more food for the Haitians, more fuel for us, and still have something left over for your other favorite cause, if we were simply to use our existing resources more wisely.

We have adopted this policy not because we want to drive our cars, but because our elected officials perceive a greater reward from generating a windfall for American farmers.

But the food price increases are now biting ordinary Americans as well. That could make those political calculations change, and may present be an opportunity for a nimble politician to demonstrate a bit of real leadership. I notice, for example, that although Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was among those who voted in favor of the monstrous 2005 Energy Bill that began these mandates, Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ) were among the 26 senators who bravely voted against it.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if one of them actually tried to make this a campaign issue?

Sigh. Read the entire post.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) |

April 27, 2008

Thoughts for a Sunday

The NY Times' Adam Liptak has penned a couple of interesting articles recently (here and here) on a frequent topic of this blog (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) -- the troubling incarceration rate in the United States.

With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. now houses almost a quarter (2.3 million!) of the world's prisoners. One in 100 adults in the U.S. is now behind bars and 751 people are in U.S. prisons or jails for every 100,000 in population. The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close to that rate of incarceration is Russia with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. England’s rate is 151, Germany’s is 88 and Japan’s is 63. Attempting to keep all of this in perspective, Pepperdine University's James Q. Wilson provides this recent op-ed that puts the U.S. incarceration rate in a more favorable light with regard to reducing serious crime.

Among other things, these incarceration numbers certainly makes one wonder why on earth we are sending folks like Jeff Skilling, the NatWest Three, the Merrill Four and Jamie Olis to prison?

Meanwhile, in this five-part LA Times debate, Reason's Jacob Sullum takes on the Heritage Foundation’s Charles Stimson over one of the main reasons for the high U.S. incarceration rate -- drug prohibition. At least in this first installment, Sullum makes a much more compelling case than Stimson. And Peter Gordon has this sage observation about the genesis of drug prohibition.

Posted by Tom at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) |

February 27, 2008

Dick Armey on immigration

I must admit, I never thought that former House Majority Leader Dick Armey would sound like a statesman to me. I was wrong. Watch the video to find out why.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) |

The diversity of Texas

Yes, Texas is a diverse place. It's a part of its charm. But following on this post from yesterday, that diversity does not make it an easy place to get one's arms around.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

February 26, 2008

The importance of running a Presidential campaign

On the heels of the Frank Rich/NY Times column castigating the Hillary Clinton campaign team, one of the best business law professors in the U.S. explains why the ability to run a large political campaign is an important qualification of a President:

A virtue of our political system as it is operated today is that it ensures that no one can be elected president who cannot run a major organization. This may not be enough – Bush ran two smooth campaigns but has had more trouble running a war. But it should at least be the price of admission.

And candidates should keep all this in mind before they go bashing "big business." If the candidates can't achieve the same level of competence as the firms they bash in bringing order out of chaos, they should just stay in the Senate and let others do the more important jobs.

Read the entire post. As this Richard Murray post indicates, early voting trends in Texas do not look good for the Clinton campaign.

By the way, did you catch the following Jon Stewart crack during the Oscars?: "Away From Her is about a woman who forgets about her husband. Hillary Clinton called it the feel-good movie of the year."

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) |

February 25, 2008

Rate Congress on free trade

Check out this excellent Cato Institute website that allows you to evaluate the voting record of each member of the past six sessions of Congress on free trade issues.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

February 22, 2008

Hillary's redemption?

It's rare that I post on politics two days in a row (or even two times in a week, for that matter), but the meltdown of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has been one of those fascinating political developments that simply begs for analysis (yesterday's post is here).

David Berg, one of Houston's best trial lawyers and a longtime Democratic Party supporter, provides this insightful op-ed in the Chronicle yesterday explaining why he switched from supporting Clinton to Obama and why Clinton is suffering in comparison to Obama:

I guarantee you, as the oldest living man in America who has actually attended a Hannah Montana concert, my daughter is completely colorblind. From what I have seen of her generation, and that of my grown sons', that is the norm, not the exception. Racial politics simply won't work; not this time � and if all that good will seeps into the wider world � perhaps never again.

I wish, frankly, that the Clintons, who in many ways helped make Obama's candidacy possible, could hear firsthand how they let down so many people who cared about them and supported them through many tough years � how by their divisive tactics they have become the people and politics they deplore.

In short, I wish they could have been there Tuesday night to understand clearly how times and mores have changed and, perhaps, to understand how important it is that a new generation be given a chance.

By the way, on more mundane topics, it appears that Clinton's management ability is not what her supporters crack it up to be. $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on Dunkin� Donuts?

Meanwhile, NY Times columnist David Brooks examines the new political syndrome -- Obama Comedown Syndrome (a/k/a "OCS").

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) |

February 21, 2008

Bashing the capitalist roaders

Does it appear to anyone else that Hillary Clinton is getting a bit desperate in attempting to salvage her campaign for the Democratic nomination? Get a load of this:

Sen. Hillary Clinton took a swipe at [investment bankers], suggesting wealthy investment bankers and hedge fund managers on Wall Street aren't doing real 'work.' [. . .]

"We also have to reward work more," Clinton told a small group of Ohio residents today. "and by that, I mean, I have people in New York working on Wall Street as investment managers, as hedge fund executives. Under the tax code, they can pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes on $50 million dollars, than a teacher, or a nurse, or a truck driver in Parma pays on $50,000. That's very discouraging to people." [. . .]

The line about investment fund and hedge fund managers has been introduced into Clinton's talking points as she campaigns across the economically struggling state of Ohio.

Investment bankers are certainly an easy target, but Clinton's statement that they don't do "real work" is either disingenuous or appallingly ignorant. Would Clinton say such a thing about other financial intermediaries such as real estate brokers? Investment bankers working on multi-billion dollar mergers are not all that different from real estate brokers -- they are financial intermediaries who get paid a commission for helping to originate and close deals. In short, they are being paid a fee for arranging a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller.

And believe me, for anyone who has ever seen investment bankers work a deal, it's definitely hard work. Finding potential buyers and sellers, persuading them to become involved in a transaction, and making the deal happen amidst the myriad of risks that could undermine it is not a cakewalk. Long hours, the ability to deal with rejection, the uncertainty of the fee until the deal closes, grinding travel and pressurized work conditions are just a few of the hardships that investment bankers endure.

Inasmuch as such work is hard, it's not for everybody. Thus, with really good investment bankers in short supply, they can command high compensation. And the good ones are well worth it. Where else will a seller or buyer find someone with a comprehensive list of direct contacts among potential parties to a transaction and extensive experience getting difficult deals closed? A principal to a transaction is simply renting those contacts and experience and, although often expensive, the investment banker is worth every penny if he or she can pull a deal together for the principal.

The foregoing is pretty basic stuff, so it's alarming that a Senator from a state with more investment bankers than any other would engage in demagoguery over them. John Carney over at Dealbreaker sums up the irony quite well:

"Now being the First Lady for eight years and a Senator from a state in which you've never lived, that's real work."

And lest the Obama crowd get too over-confident with Clinton's increasingly bizarre statements, get a load of this performance by Austin lawyer, former Austin mayor and current Texas state senator Kirk Watson, who has endorsed Obama:

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (2) |

February 14, 2008

The aftermath of the Clemens hearing

Many folks have been asking me about my thoughts on the Roger Clemens saga, but I am so disappointed with the abysmal level of discourse regarding the Mitchell Commission Report and the issues involved with the use of steroids and other PED's in society that I find it hard to drum up much enthusiasm for addressing it. Compare the discussion of the issues from this earlier post with this live blog analysis of the questions and answers from Clemens hearing and you will see what I mean. Sort of makes you want to whipsaw the committee in the same manner as this Colman McCarthy/Washington Post op-ed, doesn't it? Art DeVany expresses similar sentiments.

Although I expressed reservations early on about the unconventional way in which Clemens' legal team has been defending the matter, I don't think the hearing measurably increased Clemens' risk of being charged criminally. In fact, in an odd way, the hearing may have actually mitigated that risk somewhat.

McNamee came across as such a manipulator that my sense is that it's doubtful that prosecutors would base a criminal case against Clemens primarily on McNamee's testimony. Thus, unless investigators come up with a conduit of the PED's who is willing to testify that the PED's were delivered to Clemens and McNamee, Clemens may avoid criminal charges. He is certainly not out of the woods yet, but the Congressional hearing probably hurt him more in the court of public opinion than it did with regard to a potential criminal case (Update: Peter Henning agrees with me).

Nevertheless, I'm not yet ready to bet on that prediction. At least without long odds in my favor.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (1) |

February 11, 2008

Vetting the Trans-Texas Corridor

This Ralph Blumenthal/NY Times article does a good job of summarizing the massive scale that is the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor project:

. . . the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state�s � or probably any state�s � history, that would stretch well into the century and, if completed in full, end up costing around $200 billion. [. . .]

The plan envisions a 4,000-mile network of new toll roads, with car and truck lanes, rail lines, and pipeline and utilities zones, to bypass congested cities and speed freight to and from Mexico. [. . .]

The corridor project grew out of the 2002 governor�s race when [Governor] Rick Perry, . . . surprised transportation experts by taking ideas they had discussed a decade earlier, to little interest, and �supersizing them,� as one recalled.

The project grew to consist of four �priority segments:� new multimodal toll roads up to 1,200 feet wide paralleling Interstates 35 and 37 from Denison in North Texas to the Rio Grande Valley; a proposed I-69 from Texarkana to Houston and Laredo; I-45 from Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston; and I-10 from El Paso to Orange on the Louisiana border. But the exact routes are years away from being designated.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

February 9, 2008

Elevating form over substance

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill was not John McCain's finest hour. John Lott makes a good point about the utter hypocrisy of it all in connection with the Clintons' recent loan to Hillary's cash-strapped campaign:

Former President Clinton stands to reap around $20 million -- and will sever a politically sensitive partnership tie to Dubai -- by ending his high-profile business relationship with the investment firm of billionaire friend Ron Burkle. . . .

Obviously Clinton has gotten a lot of money from other sources, so there is no need to single out Burkle, but Burkle obviously can't donate $10 or $12 million to Clinton's campaign. Yet, if he pays Clinton for work that isn't very obvious, Clinton can then turn around and spend it on a campaign. Does it really matter that Burkle can't give the money directly to Clinton?

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

February 4, 2008

A birthday wish

Don't miss Greg Mankiw's birthday wish:

My birthday wish is for all of us to stop asking what the government can do for us today. Instead, we should focus on what we can do together to prepare the economy for our children and grandchildren. That means getting ready to care more for ourselves in old age, perhaps by retiring later, perhaps by saving more. I hope that when I celebrate my 100th birthday in 2058, my descendants won�t look upon Grandpa and his generation as the biggest economic problem of their time.

Read the entire op-ed. Salient thought for a political season.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

An uncomfortable issue for John McCain

The hypocritical and unproductive nature of the government policy of drug prohibition has been a frequent subject on this blog (see here, here, here and here), so this Radley Balko post about Cindy McCain, John McCain's wife, caught my eye:

. . .the problem with the hypocritical practice of letting politicians� family members get off for drug crimes that land normal people in prison is that it doesn�t seem to do much in the way of making them more sympathetic. It just hardens them into more militant drug warriors.

Read the entire post.

Posted by Tom at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) |

January 31, 2008

The wisdom of U.S. Presidential campaigns

Much is wrong with U.S. Presidential campaigns. They last much too long, are far too expensive and the rhetoric is mostly mind-numbing.

However, for all its faults, the messy process does have a way of eliminating the candidates that need to be weeded out (see also here and here).

By the way, Megan McArdle has the New York City perspective on Giuliani's withdrawal.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

January 29, 2008

Hillary Clinton's Inner Tracy Flick

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (2) |

January 28, 2008

The costs of prohibition

The nature of the problems that confront Texans and law enforcement officers who live near the Texas-Mexico border have been a frequent topic on this blog (see here, here, and here). Those problems are exacerbated by the archaic nature of U.S. drug laws (see here and here).

This must-read Scott Henson post does an excellent job of defining the parameters of the increasingly serious problems on the Texas-Mexico border.

No Country for Old Men may be fiction, but the story it tells is very real.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

January 27, 2008

A truly frightening thought

It's been comforting that John Edwards' demagoguery has not generated the type of buzz and political support that would make him a top contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. However, this Robert Novak/Rasmussen blurb ended my sense of comfort:

Illinois Democrats close to Sen. Barack Obama are quietly passing the word that John Edwards will be named attorney general in an Obama administration.

Installation at the Justice Department of multimillionaire trial lawyer Edwards would please not only the union leaders supporting him for president but organized labor in general. The unions relish the prospect of an unequivocal labor partisan as the nation's top legal officer.

What would an anti-business demagogue be like as attorney general? Here's a preview (another one here). That's not the way to encourage risk-taking for job and wealth creation.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (1) |

January 23, 2008

At least he's consistent

Well, at least Rudy Giuliani behaved consistently both before and after becoming Mayor of New York City (Reason's David Weigel also provides this interesting Giuliani piece along the same lines).

Having said that, I don't think that's the type of consistency that most reasoned folks want in a U.S. President.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (1) |

January 22, 2008

Birds of a feather?

Perhaps coincidentally, I came across the following two news reports consecutively yesterday morning. First from this BBC article:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has threatened to nationalise farms, in an effort to tackle food shortages.

Government controls keep food prices low in shops to help even the poorest Venezuelans feed themselves.

But some farmers prefer to sell their produce in neighbouring countries where prices are higher, leading to shortages of bread, milk, eggs and meat.

In his weekly television show, Mr Chavez said farmers doing this should have their farms "expropriated". [. . .]

On Saturday, Mr Chavez threatened to nationalise banks which did not give enough low-interest loans to farmers.

Banks are not allowed to charge farmers interest higher than 15% - even though inflation last year ran at 22.5%.

"The bank that fails to comply must be sanctioned, and I am not talking about a little fine," he said. "The bank that does not comply must be seized." [. . .]

Critics say complying with government policy could drive some businesses into bankruptcy.

Then, a little closer to home, came this NY Times article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's views on government control of the economy:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.

. . . Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.

She said that economic excesses � including executive-pay packages she characterized as often �offensive� and �wrong� and a tax code that had become �so far out of whack� in favoring the wealthy � were holding down middle-class living standards. [. . .]

�If you go back and look at our history, we were most successful when we had that balance between an effective, vigorous government and a dynamic, appropriately regulated market,� Mrs. Clinton said. �And we have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced.�

She added: �I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.� [. . .]

�We�ve done it in previous generations,� she said, alluding to large-scale public projects like the interstate highway system and the space program. �But we�ve got to have a plan.� [. . .]

�Inequality is growing,� Mrs. Clinton said. �The middle class is stalled. The American dream is premised on a growing economy where people are in a meritocracy and, if they�re willing to work hard, they will realize the fruits of their labor.�

So, on one hand, Chavez is demonstrating that, even with the economic benefit of having high-priced oil to export, a government can still lower the living standards of its citizens if it tries hard enough.

On the other hand, Hillary does not appear to recognize that her proposals are quite capable of accomplishing the same thing within the world's most dynamic economy.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) |

The Thompson plan

Last week, Ironman over at Political Calculations reviewed the Giuliani income tax simplification plan. This week, he tackles the even more impressively simple tax simplification plan advocated by GOP Presidential candidate, Fred Thompson.

Of course, as if on cue, Thompson dropped out of the GOP race today.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

January 16, 2008

What's missing in the tax debate

Wouldn't it be nice if at least one of the Presidential candidates would embrace the basic reform that is really needed in the U.S. tax system? Simply simplification. Previous posts on tax simplification issues are here. Interestingly, one of my least favored Presidential candidates -- Rudy Giuliani -- has the best tax simplification proposal that I've seen so far during the campaign.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (2) |

January 14, 2008

Myths about oil are hard to dispel

Amidst the demagoguery of a U.S. Presidential campaign, it's rare to find the mainstream media willing to run Robert Bryce's common sense on energy policy and oil prices. For example:

Myth 3: Energy independence will let America choke off the flow of money to nasty countries.

Fans of energy independence argue that if the United States stops buying foreign energy, it will deny funds to petro-states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. But the world marketplace doesn't work like that. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally. Oil buyers are always seeking the lowest-cost supplier. So any Saudi crude being loaded at the Red Sea port of Yanbu that doesn't get purchased by a refinery in Corpus Christi or Houston will instead wind up in Singapore or Shanghai.

Refer to this article whenever you are listening to the candidates from either party start talking about energy policy. Come to think of it, while considering political choices, you should also keep handy this Bryan Caplan/WaPo op-ed entitled 5 Myths About Our Ballot-Box Behavior.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (2) |

January 8, 2008

The power of words

James Fallows hits on what I believe is a very important dynamic in Barack Obama's surge past Hillary Clinton among Democrats -- the power of words:

Words and deeds. Talk and action. Poetry and prose. Presidents obviously do best when they can do both.

But only Obama captured what is unique about a president's role. A President's actions matter -- Lyndon Johnson with his legislation, Richard Nixon with his opening to China -- but lots of other people can help shape policies. A President's words often matter more, and only he -- or she -- can express them. Grant led the Union Army, but Abraham Lincoln, in addition to selecting Grant, wrote and delivered his inaugural and Gettysburg addresses. Long before Franklin Roosevelt actually did anything about the Great Depression, his first inaugural address ("the only thing we have to fear...") was important in itself. The same was true of Winston Churchill just after he succeeded Neville Chamberlain. It would be years before the Nazi advance would be contained, but Churchill's words and bearing were indispensable to Britain's recovery.

On the other hand, George W. Bush's difficulty in expressing himself publicly has exacerbated the perception of a rudderless Administration. With that constant reminder over the past seven years, I'm surprised that Clinton's handlers don't have her better prepared to express herself well in public debates. Perhaps, as with Bush, she simply lacks the public speaking gift of her husband. But I am continually amazed at how often her extemporaneous public statements are littered with the ubiquitous "you know" crutch as she gathers her thoughts. That habit, as well as her instinct to default to a government solution on virtually every issue, fuels the perception that she lacks substance.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

January 5, 2008

The Great Debaters

My younger daughter, my wife and I took in Denzel Washington's new film the other night, The Great Debaters. Although the story was somewhat formulaic and the movie certainly not perfect, we found the movie to be hugely entertaining. The acting is superb, particularly the reliable Mr. Washington and newcomer Denzel Whitaker, a delightful young actor who literally steals the show as the youngest of the college debaters. Mr. Washington, who also directed, wisely decided to tell the story through Mr. Whitaker's character (James Farmer, Jr.), and Mr. Whitaker is more than up to the task. What a talent!

Interestingly, the always-excellent Forest Whitaker plays James Farmer, Sr., the father of the young Mr. Whitaker's character in the movie. However, despite their common last name, the two are not related.

At any rate, in discussing the movie on the way home afterward, my daughter observed that it sure is a good thing that the horrific racism depicted in the movie is not condoned in American society anymore. My reply was that brutal discrimination of blacks is still not as uncommon as we like to think. Scott Henson and Radley Balko comment on the unacceptable revelations of, at minimum, prosecutorial negligence in Dallas. Where is the outrage?

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

December 18, 2007

That governmental Ponzi scheme

At the end of this common sense post that mostly points out that no useful public policy is served by the government denying grandparents the right to establish Health Savings Accounts for the benefit of their grandchildren, the always entertaining Art DeVany makes the following observation about a common topic on this blog -- Social Security reform (previous posts are here):

By the way, there is no such thing as social security. There are only people who are more or less secure against contingencies. They might pool their risks against these contingencies, but there is no effective way for a society to avoid risk. As a program for risk pooling, Social Security is very ineffective. It is not insurance, it is redistribution among generations. It is a Ponzi scheme because the risk pool is allocated from one generation to another. And, it is fraught with demographic risk and political risk. It will eventually go under or have to be modified substantially by disavowing the contract between generations because it is not sustainable.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

December 17, 2007

Giuliani's ideas on transparent government

Jim Dwyer of the NY Times reports that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's ideas about transparency in government are quite similar to his crimebuster practices.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

November 30, 2007

Say what, John Edwards?

Following on the previous post, have you heard about demagogue John Edwards' latest proposal?

A two-year ban on advertising for prescription drugs.

Paul Jacob suggests a common sense ban of another sort.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (2) |

The key issue in the 2008 Presidential race

As usual, the Onion identifies the issue with precision:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

November 16, 2007

Remembering 1968

In 1968, I was a 15-year old concentrating on playing various high school sports in Iowa City, a Midwestern college town. However, even in that somewhat sheltered environment, it was impossible not to realize that 1968 was an unusually tumultuous year. This Daniel Henninger/Opinion Journal op-ed reminds us of just what a wild ride 1968 was:

In 1968, Nicolas Sarkozy was 13 years old. John McCain was 32 and Hillary Clinton was 21. Barack Obama was 7. It is not beyond imagining that the precocious Messrs. Sarkozy and Obama were alert to events in 1968, but for the first wave of baby boomers just touching adulthood that year, it was the beginning of a strange journey.

Nearly any one of the events that went off in 1968 would have been enough to dominate another year. To list what actually happened that year even today boggles the mind, and spirit.

The year began with sales of the Beatles album, "Magical Mystery Tour." In retrospect, it was a premonition. In late January, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo and crew members. A week later, the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive.

On Feb. 27, Walter Cronkite announced on CBS News that the U.S. had to negotiate a settlement to the Vietnam War. On March 12, Sen. Gene McCarthy defeated incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, aided by antiwar students that Sen. McCarthy called his "children's crusade." Two weeks later, LBJ announced on TV that he would not run for re-election. One week later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was only April 4.

There were race riots everywhere. On April 24, students occupied five buildings at Columbia University, protesting the war. In May bloody student riots erupted in France, likely witnessed by the impressionable Mr. Sarkozy.

On June 3, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in a New York City loft. Two days later, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In August, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia. Seven days later, antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention fought pitched battles with the Chicago police.

On Nov. 4, having absorbed all this, the people of the United States voted. They gave 43.4% of their vote to Richard Nixon and 42.7% to Hubert Humphrey. Alabama Gov. George Wallace got 13.5%. Four years later, George Wallace was shot while running for president. 1968 lasted a long time.

Whatever civic culture the U.S. had until the 1960s, it was now transformed. After '68, we had a new kind of political and social culture, pounding like a jackhammer into the older bedrock. The country cracked. Look at those 1968 popular vote numbers; half the country went left and half went right.

Read the entire piece.

Posted by Tom at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) |

November 15, 2007

Edwards returns to demagoguery

After an effective television ad, the John Edwards campaign returns to Edwards' usual form of demagoguery against business interests in the ad below:

By the way, one of Edwards' proposed ways in which to force Congress to take action on his call of universal health care coverage won't fly.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

November 7, 2007

Bad judgment alert

As if corruption in the Texas Youth Commission, the bursting state prison system, reform of the judicial selection system, or reorganization of TSU isn't enough to keep Texas legislators occupied. Now, a local state legislator is teaming up with a colleague to confront a truly important issue -- that Texans are not going to be able to watch certain NFL football games on certain cable television networks:

Cable companies and the NFL Network are competing for Texas lawmakers' support in their national fight over whether cable customers should be charged extra for the football channel.

While some cable companies have agreed to carry the network's eight regular-season games, Time Warner Cable, the largest in Texas, has not come to terms with the network.

Pressure has been mounting on all parties as the Dallas Cowboys' Nov. 29 matchup with the Green Bay Packers approaches. The game will only be shown on the NFL Network.

"I've had a lot more people contact me about NFL football the last two months instead of child protective services, windstorm insurance or worker's compensation, which are frankly more important issues," said Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, R-Tomball. "I don't control what constituents call me about." [. . .]

Van Arsdale and Sen. Kim Brimer, R-Fort Worth, said last week that they would consider introducing consumer-oriented legislation in the 2009 session if the two sides don't reach an agreement.

"Cable companies need to focus on giving their customers what they want, which is football," Brimer said. [. . .]

Five Democratic members of the Texas House from Bexar County have sent letters to the Federal Communication Commission asking it to intercede in the argument.

Of course, all of these games are readily available on the Dish Network, so no consumer is prevented from buying that product if they want to see these NFL Network games bad enough. However, that doesn't stop the seemingly limitless amount of bad judgment in legislative circles over defining a legitimate legislative issue.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

November 5, 2007

Edwards scores

I've criticized John Edwards over the years for his demagogic tendencies. However, I must admit that the video below by the Edwards campaign is darn effective. Don't you know that Team Hillary will be working on those debating skills in the coming weeks?

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

November 1, 2007

Speaking with authority

I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

On Tuesday morning, Ohio congressman and chronic Democratic Party presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich questioned President Bush's mental health:

"I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health," Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board on Tuesday. "There's something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact."

On Tuesday evening during a debate between Democratic Party presidential candidates, Kucinich confirmed that he had once seen a UFO and that it was O.K. because former President Jimmy Carter once admitted that he had seen a UFO, too.

As the blog post notes, at least Carter didn't admit it on national television.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

October 31, 2007

Mayor White's L.A. moment

Houston Mayor Bill White is capriciously manipulating local governmental power to sidetrack development of a condominium project (nicknamed the "Ashby high-rise") in a neighborhood where he raises a substantial political campaign funds. The incident has received some national attention through this Wall Street Journal ($) article, which somehow suggests that Houston's phenomenal growth over the past 50 years has been in spite of -- rather than because of -- the city's lack of zoning and liberal land use policies.

At any rate, it's really a sad reflection of the state of political discourse in Houston that the Mayor has been given a pass on undermining a project for the benefit of his campaign war chest. The property was valued and sold to the present owners on the assumption that a large-scale redevelopment would be built there and the owners followed all the city's rules and regulations in obtaining the necessary permits to proceed with construction. When a few wealthy neighbors of the development pulled Mayor White's chain, he blithely ordered one of the city's approvals to be revised to delay the development and now is attempting to ramrod two ordinances through city council to stop the project altogether.

In short, the developers invested a substantial amount of money in buying the property and followed the laws in preparing the large-scale redevelopment, dozens of which dot Houston's landscape. Mayor White and his friends don't like the development, so White is changing the laws. And this is political leadership?

At any rate, all of this reminded me of this excellent Virginia Postrel/Atlantic.com article that compares the radically different land use policies of Los Angeles, on one hand, and Dallas (which are quite similar to Houston's), on the other. Suffice it to say that the likes of Mayor White favor the Los Angeles approach over that of Dallas and Houston. Think about that the next time you vote for mayor.

Update: The website for the group opposing the project is here. A copy of the proposed "emergency" ordinance is here.

Update 2: A recent West U Examiner article on the project is here.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (7) |

October 4, 2007

The genesis of bad regulations

I'm not an advocate of using cell phones indiscrimately while driving. In fact, I try to avoid it as much as possible. But every few months or so, some media outlet passes along another superficial story (see also here) on the latest study or tragic story that supposedly suggests that use of cell phones while driving leads to accidents and, thus, should be outlawed.

Cell phones are a distraction while driving. No question about that. But so are conversations with passengers. Are we going to outlaw those, too? Granted, much cell phone use is trivial and unnecessary, but cell phones have unquestionably been a tremendous improvement in communications. Wouldn't it be prudent at least to perform some cost-benefit analysis of the probable impact of outlawing a valuable improvement in communications before foisting yet another regulation on the public?

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

September 17, 2007

Jane Fonda, global warmer

Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt discover the not insubstantial impact that actress Jane Fonda has had on the United States' continued reliance on coal and other fossil fuels rather than clean and cheap nuclear energy.

Of course, Larry Ribstein has been writing about this phenomenom for years.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (1) |

September 6, 2007

Considering Giuliani

Daniel Drezner has an interesting recent observation about Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid:

Take this for what you will:

Over the past month, I've had at least two dozen conversations with various people about Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. A lot of these people are Democrats, but there were a healthy number of Republicans and independents as well. These are all smart observers of politics who generally do not make knee-jerk assessments. The one common denominator was that, at some point, all of these people had lived in the New York City area while Rudy was mayor.

What is astonishing is that, despite the fact that this collection of individuals would likely disagree about pretty much everything, there was an airtight conensus about one and only one point:

A Giuliani presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States. That is all.

UPDATE: Commenters have reasonably asked the "why?" question. For some answers from New Yorkers, click here and here.

Here is my contribution on why Giuliani should not be elected president.

Posted by Tom at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) |

September 4, 2007

You don't say?

This NY Times article reports on more research that goes into the "who needs a research project to prove that?" category:

. . . the broader question � whether police officers in some towns are motivated by fund-raising as well as safety when writing traffic tickets � has been examined systematically by others. Michael D. Makowsky, a doctoral student in economics, and Thomas Stratmann, an economics professor, both at George Mason University, studied the issue in a recent paper, �Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?�

They examined every warning and citation written by police officers in all of Massachusetts, excluding Boston, during a two-month period in 2001 � over 60,000 in all. Their conclusion wasn�t shocking to an economist: money matters, even in traffic violations. They found a statistical link between a town�s finances and the likelihood that its police officers would issue a speeding ticket. The details are a little sticky, but they show that tickets were issued more often in places that were short on cash, and that out-of-towners received tickets more often than drivers with local addresses.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

August 10, 2007

Spitzer channels Dr. Phil

Has the mainstream media sentenced the Lord of Regulation to sensitivity training?

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

August 8, 2007

The cultural legacy of politicizing religion

The pastor of the local church that my family and I attend has used the pulpit from time to time to advocate political positions and certain politicians, which I have always viewed as a dubious practice. I was reminded of my pastor's sermons as I read this Cathy Young/ReasonOnline article on the questionable cultural legacy of the late Jerry Falwell:

Though the movement Falwell helped launch was unable to enact much of its agenda into law, there is no question that it transformed the American political landscape. Even the battles it hasn�t won, such as the effort to teach �intelligent design� in schools on a par with evolution, are still battles it was able to force on its opponents.

More broadly, it helped create a climate in which the language of politics is saturated with references to God, a political culture in which a major political magazine (Newsweek) can ask a presidential candidate (Howard Dean) whether he believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the path to eternal life.

Despite these political inroads, Falwell�s brand of religious conservatism has suffered losses in the culture wars. Feminism, its radical excesses mostly discarded, has become firmly integrated into America�s cultural mainstream. (Even, apparently, in Falwell�s own family: His daughter is a surgeon.) Acceptance of gays is now at a level that would have been unthinkable in 1980. Sexual content in mainstream entertainment has steadily increased, and adults-only material is more available than ever thanks to new technologies. While divorce rates have dropped somewhat, so have marriage rates; in much of America, sex between single adults is widely accepted as a social norm.

Along those same lines, this CNN article reports on a Kentucky church's "Court Watch" program in which volunteers attend court hearings to monitor how judges are handling drug-related cases. It's clear that the members of the church group are not interested in facilitating leniency in sentencing in such cases.

Several years ago, while sweating a jury in a civil case at the courthouse, I attended the daily initial appearance docket call in the juvenile criminal court next door. It was a heartbreaking experience and prompted me to begin doing pro bono work in the local juvenile criminal justice system. Since then, I've attended numerous such initial appearance dockets in the juvenile criminal justice system. I have never seen a member of any Christian organization attending one of those dockets.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (4) |

August 4, 2007

Latest on the Las Vegas Monofail

With the crunch worsening over the past several weeks in the credit markets, the bankruptcy reorganization forces are gearing up and eyeing potential debtors. Well, in this Heartland blog post, Thomas A. Rubin predicts one of the probable debtors that will need serious reorganization -- the Las Vegas Monorail Company (prior posts here):

In short, the Las Vegas Monorail appears headed straight down the path to bankruptcy by approximately the year 2010 with nothing on the horizon that could prevent it � other than, perhaps, an ill-conceived government bailout or the absolute dumbest group of investors/suckers in recent financial history.

This result should come as a surprise to no one. Over the last several decades, I know of only one U.S. rail transit system, or quasi-transit system, that has come remotely close to covering its operating costs out of fares and other operating revenues (the Seattle Monorail), and none that have made any contribution what-so-ever to capital costs. However, the Las Vegas Monorail promoters assured everyone that operating revenues would not only cover operating costs, but would also cover all the debt service costs of the bonds sold to pay for the construction of the Monorail. [. . .]

One hopes that someone, somewhere, in a public sector decision-making capacity will tell the various casinos along the right of way that, if they want to see it continue to operate, well, it is all theirs.

Read the entire post, which lays out the public risks involved in even a privately-financed boondoggle of this nature. Meanwhile, this clever Political Calculations post comes up with an entertaining solution to achieving the same benefits of a light rail system at a far cheaper cost.

Posted by Tom at 12:26 AM | Comments (0) |

August 2, 2007

The Incarceration Nation

Following on this post from yesterday on a troubling growth sector in the burgeoning prison industry, Doug Berman points to this daunting Boston Review piece by Glenn C. Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. Loury reviews the increasingly brutal nature of punishment in American society:

Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States�with five percent of the world�s population�houses 25 percent of the world�s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America�s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown. [. . .]

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why? [. . .]

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today�s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these brutal facts do at times incline me to cry out in despair. But my argument is analytical, not existential. Its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society � the society we have made � creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems�unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens�even those who break our laws?

There is much, much more. Take the time to read the entire piece.

Posted by Tom at 12:15 AM | Comments (7) |

August 1, 2007

A disturbing growth industry

This New York Times article reports on one of the expensive consequences of the increasing criminalization of everything -- already overcrowded state prisons looking to export inmates:

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.

The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the country�s total prison population � about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate � but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing. One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year. [. . .]

But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.

Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release. Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.

See related earlier posts here and here. By the way, if you are interested in understanding the main reason why we are dealing with this seemingly endless cycle of criminalization and imprisonment, then check out the clever minute and a half video below for the answer:

Scott Henson, the Texas blogger-expert on prison overcrowding, has more here.

Update: Has America become the Incarceration Nation?

Posted by Tom at 12:15 AM | Comments (0) |

John Edwards, demagogue

Democratic Party presidential candidate John Edwards has been a frequent topic on this blog, but it's rare that his special style of demagoguery is captured as succiently as in this video of a bit over a minute. I don't know what's more disturbing -- Edwards' rantings, the audience's unquestioning acceptance of them, or the fact that the Edwards campaign is promoting the video as an example of Edwards' charm.

Posted by Tom at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) |

July 25, 2007

A bully exposed

As noted in this post from a couple of weeks ago, more than a few folks are not losing any sleep over the fact that former crusading state attorney general and current New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is having trouble getting along with with his new playmates in Albany.

But now things are getting even more interesting. According to a report issued yesterday by Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer's successor as New York AG (and perhaps as governor sooner than we thought), Spitzer's aides used the state police to gather information about whether Spitzer�s chief political rival, Joseph Bruno, improperly used state-owned aircraft for political purposes. To make matters worse, when the improper use of state police was revealed, Spitzer�s communications director, Darren Dopp, concocted a false story as to why the aides sought the information. Although the Cuomo report concluded that the aides� conduct was �not unlawful,� Spitzer suspended Dopp and conceded at a press conference that his administration had �grossly mishandled� the situation. And all this occurred despite the fact that Cuomo's report was not thoroughly prepared.

Spitzer has a lot of experience in the area of "grossly mishandling" situations. OpinionJounal notes the same thing.

The irony of Spitzer's plight has generated quite a few entertaining blog post titles around the blogosphere, the best of which are Ellen Podgor's (she of "Busted for Yoga" fame) "Spitzer Spitzered" and Nathan Koppel's "Spitzer Schadenfreude." Seems as if Spitzer is redefining the bully pulpit.

Posted by Tom at 12:11 AM | Comments (1) |

July 23, 2007

Dalrymple on Tony Blair

The recent resignation of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair provides an opportunity for British psychiatrist and author, Anthony Daniels (who writes under the pen name of Theodore Dalrymple), to provide this interesting early appraisal of the Blair years:

There undoubtedly were things to be grateful for during the Blair years. His support for American policy in Iraq won him much sympathy in the U.S., of course. He was often eloquent in defense of liberty. And under Mr. Blair's leadership, Britain enjoyed 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth, leaving large parts of the country prosperous as never before. London became one of the world's richest cities, vying with New York to be the global economy's financial center. Mr. Blair did inherit a strapping economy from his predecessor, and he left its management more or less to the man who succeeds him, Gordon Brown. Still, unlike previous Labour prime ministers, he did not preside over an economic crisis: in itself, something to be proud of.

But how history will judge him overall, and whether it will absolve him (to adapt slightly a phrase coined by a famous, though now ailing, Antillean dictator), is another matter [. . .]

Tony Blair was the perfect politician for an age of short attention spans. What he said on one day had no necessary connection with what he said on the following day: and if someone pointed out the contradiction, he would use his favorite phrase, "It's time to move on," as if detecting contradictions in what he said were some kind of curious psychological symptom in the person detecting them.

Many have surmised that there was an essential flaw in Mr. Blair's makeup that turned him gradually from the most popular to the most unpopular prime minister of recent history. The problem is to name that essential flaw. As a psychiatrist, I found this problem peculiarly irritating (bearing in mind that it is always highly speculative to make a diagnosis at a distance). But finally, a possible solution arrived in a flash of illumination. Mr. Blair suffered from a condition previously unknown to me: delusions of honesty.

Check out the entire op-ed. It's worth the time.

Posted by Tom at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) |

July 16, 2007

Fair tax?

Greg Mankiw provides this particularly lucid analysis of the current status of the progressive U.S. income tax system. Keep it handy when listening to the demagoguery over tax rates that will take place during the upcoming 2008 Presidential campaign.

Posted by Tom at 4:05 AM | Comments (0) |

July 13, 2007

The McCain meltdown

The fellows over at Professors R-Squared are having a rather fun time chronicling the remarkably quick demise of the John McCain Presidential Campaign (see here and here). But the best line on the McCain campaign meltdown still came from Jay Leno earlier in the week:

"Sen. John Edwards began what he's calling his poverty tour today. He's visiting people who have no money and no hope. His first stop: John McCain's campaign headquarters."

Posted by Tom at 12:45 AM | Comments (1) |

Myths of the war

My nephew Richard and I had a good laugh about the new Homeland Security Threat Level on the left that resulted from Michael Chertoff's ill-advised warning regarding the terror threat from earlier in the week. But kidding aside, following on this earlier post regarding James Fallows' Atlantic Monthly piece, this Steve Chapman RCP op-ed provides a level-headed analysis of the actual threat of an attack from Islamic fascists and the counterproductive nature of the Bush Administration's characterization of the conflict as a global "war on terror." Check it out.

Posted by Tom at 12:19 AM | Comments (1) |

July 11, 2007

Spitzer is suffering?

So New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and his family just don't know whether the rough and tumble nature of politics at the state level of New York is worth the severe emotional toll.

I wonder what Theodore Sihpol, Hank Greenberg, John Whitehead, Richard Grasso and Kenneth Langone, among others, think about that?

Posted by Tom at 4:05 AM | Comments (0) |

June 12, 2007

How the Presidents stack up

This Wall Street Journal Online provides this nifty graphic overview of the approval ratings of all U.S. presidents since Truman. Take a few minutes to check it out and enjoy the surprises of a quick history refresher. For example, I had forgotten about the length of the bounce in President Carter's approval ratings after the Iranian hostage crisis began in late 1979. Of course, that bounce didn't last as the hostage crisis dragged on for over a year, contributing substantially to Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

Posted by Tom at 4:05 AM | Comments (0) |

June 8, 2007

Snow Fall

Robin Moroney over at The Wall Street Journal's Informed Reader blog picks up on this interesting Ken Dermota/Atlantic ($) article that reports on the weird economics relating to the demand, the supply and the price of cocaine:

Demand for cocaine stays steady, Colombia�s coca fields are destroyed, yet the drug�s street price in the U.S. continues to fall . . . [as] drug smugglers and dealers have eked out efficiencies in their operations to keep their prices low. The U.S. Coast Guard has been able to catch only a small percentage of the drugs entering the country since President Nixon declared a �war on drugs� in 1971. In 2000, the U.S. decided to switch tactics and take the fight to Colombia, which produces 90% of the cocaine sold in the U.S. Since then, it has spent $4.7 billion fighting rebels who grow and sell the crop, as well as spraying coca fields from the air.

The price of cocaine�the pure version, not crack�has kept falling. In the early 1980s, the price of a gram of cocaine was about $600. By the late 1990s the price had fallen to about $200. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the street price of a gram of cocaine in 2005 was $20-$25 in New York, $30-$100 in Los Angeles and $100-$125 in Denver.

Some of the price decrease has come from more efficient distribution networks. Some New York smugglers have chosen to eliminate the middleman and pick up their drugs directly from Colombia, offering �factory-to-you� prices. The surging trade with Mexico has increased the nooks and crannies for drugs to be hidden as they cross the border, making smuggling both safer and cheaper.

Labor costs also have decreased. Street vendors take a smaller cut of the drug�s proceeds. A lot of the drug dealers who fell prey to an aggressive imprisonment campaign in the 1990s are now leaving prison. Their felony conviction and minimal job experience means they have few other ways to make money and are willing to take a pay cut.

The falling street price also reflects the lower risk of handling the drug. The violence of the 1980s crack boom has faded and, since 2001, federal drug prosecutions have fallen 25% as agents get diverted to the hunt for terrorists.

While the Atlantic article focuses on why the price of cocaine continues to drop even though the supply sources are declining, what's particularly interesting is that the demand for cocaine is not rising dramatically as the price declines. Given its addictive nature, it makes sense that the demand for cocaine would be somewhat price inelastic, but it seems logical that demand would increase at least to some extent as the price falls. This does not appear to be happening. Sounds like a good exam question for an economics course.

Posted by Tom at 4:14 AM | Comments (0) |

It's not been a good week for federal agencies

First, it was the dubious decision of the Federal Trade Commission to sue to enjoin the proposed merger between natural foods grocers Whole Foods Markets and Wild Oats Markets.

Then, as this Daniel Drezner post notes, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin chose a rather interesting way to criticize the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision this week striking down the FCC's policy governing "fleeting expletives" on television.

So it goes in the wacky world of governmental regulation.

Posted by Tom at 4:07 AM | Comments (0) |

June 7, 2007

Giuliani's hypocrisy

Doug Berman notes that Rudy Giuliani thinks that Scooter Libby got a raw deal. That is unquestionably correct, but what Giuliani failed to mention is that he is one of the politicians primarily responsible for the culture of criminalization that gobbles up productive citizens such as Libby.

As noted earlier here and here, Giuliani's politically-motivated prosecution of Michael Milken and related destruction of Drexel Burnham during the late 1980's ignited the criminalization of business interests that reached its peak with the destruction of Arthur Andersen, the prosecution of former Enron executives Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay last year and the ongoing trial of former Hollinger CEO Conrad Black this year. Indeed, the Bush Administration's willingness to toss business interests into the cauldron of internecine criminal prosecutions for transient political purposes has largely undermined the Republican Party's credibility in challenging the motives of dubious white collar prosecutions of businesspersons or politicians.

And lest you think that rich and powerful people are the only ones affected by what Giuliani has helped wrought, remember the name of Lisa Jones. As Daniel Fischel brilliantly explains in his book Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and his Financial Revolution (Harper-Collins 1995), Jones is a remarkable American success story -- a teenage runaway and high school dropout who worked her way up through the ranks of Drexel to become the top assistant to one of Drexel's most successful traders. Giuliani threatened to indict Jones in an effort to get her to turn on Milken (sound familiar?), but Jones refused to give in and remained loyal to Milken and Drexel to the end. Giuliani eventually prosecuted and convicted Jones for crimes that were never proven (sound familiar?) and she was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, later reduced to ten months. Other than Milken, Jones was the only longtime employee of Drexel Burnham who ever spent time in prison.

I don't know about you, but that's not the political legacy I'm looking for in a presidential candidate.

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (2) |

Ron Paul shines on The Daily Show

Republican Congressman and GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul from the Houston area exhibits a deft media touch while handling an interview by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

Banjo Jones must be proud.

Paul's political warts and quirks -- and there are many -- will become exposed as the campaign wears on. However, his willingness to speak his mind -- a rarity in American Presidential campaigns -- is refreshing.

Posted by Tom at 4:10 AM | Comments (0) |

June 2, 2007

Edwardsian demagoguery

As if on cue after this post from yesterday, Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards is engaging in his usual brand of demagogery (earlier examples here):

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says a wave of mergers in the oil industry should be investigated by the Justice Department to see what impact they have had on soaring gasoline prices.

During a campaign stop in Silicon Valley Thursday, Edwards planned to berate the oil industry for "anticompetitive actions" and outline an energy plan he says would reduce oil imports "and get us on a path to be virtually petroleum-free within a generation."

"Vertically integrated companies like Exxon Mobil own every step of the production process -- from extraction to refining to sale at the pump, enabling them to foreclose competition," says an outline of Edward's energy plan.

Now, you can peruse the "Economics-Energy Prices" category archive of this blog and find many credible resources that utterly debunk Edwards' theory regarding the cause of rising gasoline prices. But Andrew Morriss, one of Larry Ribstein's colleagues at the University of Illinois College of Law, provides this handy SSRN paper in which he cogently explains that governmental interference with gasoline markets has a far larger impact on gasoline prices than anything Exxon Mobil does:

Rising gasoline prices have brought energy issues back to the forefront of public policy debates. Gasoline markets today are the result of almost a hundred years of conflicting regulatory policies, which have left them dangerously fragmented. In this article, I analyze that regulatory history, highlighting the unintended consequences of regulation that have pushed the United States into a series of loosely connected regional markets rather than a broad, deep national market. This fragmentation leaves the American economy is vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and foreign dictators in ways that it need not be. It also produces higher prices for consumers and reduced innovation by refiners.

TigerHawk understands, too.

Posted by Tom at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) |

June 1, 2007

What is it about John Edwards?

Presidential politics is outside the usual scope of this blog, but Democratic candidate John Edwards is a lawyer and was so underwhelming as the 2004 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate that he became a fairly regular topic with his frequent gaffes. Well, along those lines, in this article in this week's Time magazine, former Kerry campaign advisor Bob Shrum new book is previewed and here's some of what Shrum has to say about Kerry's first meeting with John Edwards when he was considering him as the VP candidate:

Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else�that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before�and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling . . . [. . .]

Kerry also wanted a specific reassurance. He asked Edwards for a commitment that if he was chosen and the ticket lost, Edwards wouldn't run against him in 2008. Edwards agreed "absolutely," as Kerry recalled him saying. If Kerry had shared this at the time, I would have told him what I did later: it was naive to think he could rely on a promise like that.

Shrum also alleges that Edwards told him that wanted to vote against the Iraq War, but didn't do so because he thought it would hurt his career.

Now, Shrum has not been the most successful political advisor, so perhaps these allegations should be taken with a grain of salt as the sour grapes of a bitter man with an ax to grind. But much of it sure seems consistent with what was revealed about Edwards during the 2004 campaign. Given his lackluster performance during the 2004 campaign, and now with a former prominent Democratic Party advisor throwing him under the campaign bus, how does Edwards remain a serious political candidate?

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in this development.

Posted by Tom at 4:10 AM | Comments (1) |

May 31, 2007

Mapping political contributions

This is interesting. Maplight.org is a new Web site that attempts to correlate lawmakers� voting records with the money they�ve accepted from special interest groups. Other sites such as OpenSecrets.org provide information on the source of candidates financing, but to my knowledge, Maplight.org is the first site that attempts to establish the relationship between money given and votes actually cast.

Click the "Video Tour" button on the home page and the site takes you through a six-minute video that illustrates the site's purpose. In deliberating on the U. S.- Oman Free Trade Agreement, the video reveals that special interests in favor of the bill -- such as pharmaceutical companies and aircraft manufacturers -- gave each senator an average of $244,000. On the other hand, lobbyists for the anti-poverty and consumer groups that opposed the bill could generate only $38,000 per senator. Under the "Timeline of Contributions" button, you can see that the contributions increased during the six weeks leading up to the vote and a hyperlink is provided to the name of each member of Congress so that you can see how much money each legislator received.

Oh yeah, in case you had any question about it, the bill passed. ;^)

Maplight.org is not particularly user-friendly, but the folks who designed the website are still adding features and data to the site. It's definitely worth plugging around for awhile and checking back in on from time to time. As they say in the smoke-filled rooms, it's always good to know who is for sale in Washington. ;^)

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (1) |

April 25, 2007

Go Barney Go!

Barney Frank, that conflicted anti-business Congressional crusader (see here and here) who is nevertheless challenging the federal government's ludicrous prohibition of internet gambling, has decided to introduce legislation to overturn the prohibition, and he thinks it has a chance of passing.

Good for Barney. But how sad is it that Rep. Frank -- who is essentially a socialist with regard to economics, business and big government issues -- is one of the only national politicians who is willing to advocate reasonable and common sense restraints on the federal government's prosecutorial power against business interests?

Posted by Tom at 4:30 AM | Comments (1) |

April 22, 2007

Protecting the Metroplex from the evils of poker

This post from late last year reported on the dubious policy of the Dallas Police Department to deploy SWAT teams to bust peaceful poker games. To update that precarious state of affairs, Radley Balko passes along this long email from a fellow who was arrested during one of the raids, even though he was simply chopping veggies for the gamblers to eat. The following is a glimpse of what occurred during the raid:

The raid occurred around 7:40 p.m. I was in the kitchen area which was just inside the front door when suddenly there was loud banging from the door. Within seconds, the room was full of Dallas SWAT officers yelling for everyone to put their hands in the air. Behind the Dallas SWAT team came many more law enforcement officers and several camera crews for the A&E reality show, Dallas SWAT. The camera crew�s chests were clearly marked as �A&E Film Crew.�

Bear in mind that, prior to police entering, the place was virtually quiet. There was the sound of poker chips in the air, but not much else. The players were essentially professionals and working stiffs having fun�there were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. There was hardly anything �dangerous� about the place at all. In fact, the cops found no weapons in the facility or on anyone there. The show of force and weaponry brought by the cops was simply outrageous and unjustified, given the circumstances, but, then again, are they enforcing the law or making a TV show?

Read the entire post. Feel safer?

Posted by Tom at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) |

April 18, 2007

Thoughts on the tragedy at Virginia Tech

The New York Times:

Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

Art DeVany:

The Virginia Tech tragedy reminds me, sadly, of what John Lott said in his article that I posted a few days ago. He said students were sitting ducks because of college gun laws. If only one student had been carrying a gun -- and guys in Blacksburg know how to handle guns -- it might have been very different.

The London Times Online:

The simple truth is that Americans themselves remain unwilling to take drastic measures to restrict gun availability. This is rooted deep in the American belief in individual freedom and a powerful suspicion of government. Americans are deeply leery of efforts by government to restrict the freedom to defend themselves. A sizeable minority, perhaps a majority, believe the risk that criminals will perpetrate events such as yesterday�s is a painful but necessary price to pay to protect that freedom.

William Anderson, commenting on Columbine after the 9/11 attacks, but equally applicable to Virginia Tech:

When the police arrived after hearing reports of a massacre under way inside Columbine High School, they did not storm the building to catch the criminals. Instead, these heavily armed officers, wearing their famous coalscuttle helmets, surrounded the outside of the school, "sealing the perimeter," according to their spokesmen.

Inside the high school, Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold were running freely through the halls, merrily killing and wounding unarmed teachers and students as they tried to escape. In the end, the police didn�t even have to fire a shot, as the two miscreants ended their own lives. Thus, people were treated to a worthless show of force by the authorities, which did almost nothing to save anyone caught in the building.

David Kopel channels that thought in this WSJ ($) op-ed:

At Virginia Tech's sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after the start of the murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho committed suicide when he realized he'd soon be confronted by the police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.

But let's take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the "gun-free zones" in Virginia's public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly's action "because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." In an August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: "Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."

Actually, Virginia Tech's policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns. Virginia Tech's policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university's own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.

Peter Gordon:

Few differences are as clarifying as attitudes towards "gun control". (The quotation marks give me away.) (1) Control advocates trust the authorities to protect us -- and to somehow enforce gun control (consider long-standing attempts at heroin control and consider how carefully the DMV screens auto drivers); and (2) Gun control advocates cannot distinguish between the gun and the owner. Mere access makes us all equally dangerous. I have problems with both thought patterns.

And even amidst the terrible carnage, courage and humanity still shine:

A 76-year-old Jewish-Romanian lecturer was hailed a hero after blocking his classroom door long enough for many of his students to escape the Virginia Tech gunman, before being shot dead.

Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, pressed himself against the door of the classroom while shots were fired in the corridor and surrounding rooms. He stood firm, attempting to barricade the door, while his students clambered out of the windows.

The last person to see Professor Liviu Librescu alive appears to have been Alec Calhoun, a student at Virginia Tech who turned as he prepared to leap from a high classroom window to see the elderly academic holding shut the classroom door. The student jumped, and lived. Minutes later, the professor was shot dead.

There is no meaningful distinction between one relative�s grief and another�s sorrow as the bereaved converge on Blacksburg from as near as Roanoke and as far as India. But it is worth reflecting on the significance of Professor Librescu�s life of quiet heroism, which encompassed the Holocaust, a career of internationally admired teaching and research, and a final act of sacrifice that saved at least nine other lives.

The son of Romanian Jewish parents, he was sent to a Soviet labour camp as a boy after his father was deported by the Nazis. He was repatriated to communist Romania only to be forced out of academia there for his Israeli sympathies. A personal intervention by Menachem Begin enabled him to emigrate with his wife to Israel, from where he visited the US on a sabbatical in 1986, and chose to stay. The appalling ironies of his murder by a crazed student after a life of such fortitude and generosity will not be lost on anyone who hears his story.

Yet neither should those who mourn him forget the role that America played in his life. As for so many other survivors of the mid-20th century�s genocidal convulsions, the US was for this inspiring teacher both a beacon of hope and a welcoming new home. Founded on the idea of liberty, it also made, for him, a reality of that idea. Let those he saved now make the most of it.

Update: The NY Times has more on Professor Librescu here.

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (0) |

April 10, 2007

Washington's biggest business

The Washington Post has just concluded this 27 installment series over the past couple of months on lobbying in Washington, D.C. Although not particularly analytical in terms of evaluating the costs and benefits of lobbying, the series is well worth reading as a thorough review of the enormous growth of the business over the past generation. The following is from the final installment:

As the reach of the federal government extended into more corners of American life, opportunities for lobbyists proliferated. . . Over these three decades the amount of money spent on Washington lobbying increased from tens of millions to billions a year. The number of free-lance lobbyists offering services to paying clients has grown from scores to thousands. [Lobbyist Gerald S.J.] Cassidy was one of the first to become a millionaire by lobbying; he now has plenty of company.

The term "lobbyist" does not do full justice to the complex status of today's most successful practitioners, who can play the roles of influence peddlers, campaign contributors and fundraisers, political advisers, restaurateurs, benefactors of local cultural and charitable institutions, country gentlemen and more. They have helped make greater Washington one of the wealthiest regions in America.

The entire series is here.

Posted by Tom at 4:20 AM | Comments (0) |

March 26, 2007

The Gonzales affair

I leave to the political blogs the current spat over former Houstonian and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' handling of the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys from various parts of the country, but I did chuckle over Jay Leno's comment from one of his monolouge's from late last week:

President Bush held a news conference where he accused the Democrats of playing politics with the firing of the U.S. attorneys. You know, the attorneys he fired for not playing politics.

I don't know enough about the facts of this affair to make an informed judgment on what ought to be done. However, it does occur to me that the President should be a bit troubled that his Attorney General does not know how to fire some subordinates properly. The database of emails relating to the firings is here.

Posted by Tom at 4:20 AM | Comments (1) |

March 9, 2007

Levinson and Balkin on the Dred Scott case

Longtime University of Texas Law Professor Sandy Levinson has teamed up with Jack Balkin of Balkinization fame to author a new SSRN paper, 13 Ways of Looking at Dred Scott. For a provocative abstract, check the following out:

Dred Scott v. Sanford is a classic case that is relevant to almost every important question of contemporary constitutional theory.

Dred Scott connected race to social status, to citizenship, and to being a part of the American people. One hundred fifty years later these connections still haunt us; and the twin questions of who is truly American and who American belongs to still roil our national debates.

Dred Scott is a case about threats to national security and whether the Constitution is a suicide pact. It concerns whether the Constitution follows the flag and whether constitutional rights obtain in federally held lands overseas. And it asks whether, as Chief Justice Taney famously said of blacks, there are indeed some people who have no rights we Americans are bound to respect.

Dred Scott remains the most salient example in debates over the legitimacy of substantive due process. It subverts our intuitions about the relative merits of originalism and living constitutionalism. It symbolizes the problem of constitutional evil and the question whether responsibility for great injustices lies in the Constitution itself or in the judges who apply it.

Finally, Dred Scott encapsulates the central problems of judicial review in a constitutional democracy. On the one hand, Dred Scott raises perennial questions about the judicial role in cases of profound moral and political disagreement, and about judicial responsibility for the backlash and political upheaval that may result from judicial review. On the other hand, the political context of the Dred Scott decision suggests that the Supreme Court rarely strays far from the wishes of the dominant national political coalition. It raises the unsettling possibility that, given larger social and political forces, what courts do in highly contested cases is far less important than we imagine.

Posted by Tom at 4:47 AM | Comments (0) |

March 7, 2007

The politics of destruction

In this International Herald Tribune article, Michael Oxley -- the "Oxley" of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance statute -- confirms the vacuous nature of the politicians who passed that destructive law and encouraged the destruction of Arthur Andersen and various Enron executives:

Presiding over a recent dinner in Paris for more than 200 accountants, Oxley -- the former Republican congressman from Ohio and co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law -- was asked during the question period whether he realized he had helped create one of the most crushing financial burdens ever imposed on business.

Was Oxley aware, his questioners asked, that the law that he and Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, rushed onto the books five years ago after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom had contributed to a sharp decline in listings on U.S. stock exchanges? And, knowing what he knows now about the cost and effects of the law, would Oxley -- who retired in January after 25 years in Congress -- have done it any differently?

"Absolutely," Oxley answered. "Frankly, I would have written it differently, and he would have written it differently," he added, referring to Sarbanes. "But it was not normal times." [. . .]

"Everybody felt like Rome was burning," Oxley, 62, recalled during an interview after the dinner in Paris. "People felt like they were getting cheated. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in Congress in 25 years in terms of the heat from the body politic. And all the members were feeling it."

Until that moment, a bill to tighten corporate controls had been languishing in the Congress for years, held back by lobbying by big business. But suddenly, the impetus was there, and the firestorm led Oxley, then head of the House committee that oversees America's financial services industry, to quickly push forward a solution based on that measure to calm the hysteria of voters.[ . . .]

in the summer of 2002, with pressure also mounting from the administration of President George W. Bush, there was no question that the bill needed to be pushed through, however imperfect.

"The president called Paul and I down to the White House almost immediately after the Senate passed its bill, 97 to 0" on July 15, Oxley recalled.

"I remember it was in the Cabinet Room and you could see the pressure he was under because the Democrats were pressing his relationship with 'Kenny boy'" -- a reference to Kenneth Lay, the chief executive of Enron, who had sought help from the administration to avoid a bankruptcy filing in the weeks before the giant energy trading company collapsed.

"The president basically said, 'Get this wrapped up,'" Oxley said. The House and Senate quickly agreed on a new draft, and Bush signed the bill into law on July 30. [. . .]

A month later, Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that had been convicted of obstructing the government's investigation into the collapse of Enron, declared bankruptcy after 89 years in business, crushed by Enron-related liabilities.

The Andersen prosecution was "a White House decision," Oxley said. "They had to really look tough and so they decided at the highest levels they were just going to give the death penalty to Arthur Andersen."

"I think at the end of the day virtually anyone would agree it was a terrible decision, because you eliminated a major accounting firm," he added, "and you just sent a chill through the accounting industry."

Read the entire article. Yet another example of the legislative overreaction to a perceived problem being far worse than the problem itself.

Posted by Tom at 4:50 AM | Comments (1) |

March 1, 2007

Al Gore's big utility bill

Drudge and parts of the political blogosphere made a big deal out of Al Gore's supposed hypocrisy in personally consuming more than average amounts of energy while advocating conservation of energy to reduce global warming. But my sense is that James H. Joyner, Jr. has the right perspective on Gore's energy usage:

Regardless of what Al Gore preaches about these matters, the way he lives strikes me as reasonable. He was of the manor born, to be sure, but he has earned a lot of money on his own. He has every right to a ginormous house, a fleet of cars, and to be flown around the world in private planes to speak out against the dangers of global warming. While it�s funny in microcosm, it strikes me as a perfectly defensible trade-off to use a thousand times more energy than the average guy in an effort to influence macro-level energy and environmental policy.

Where Gore and I differ is that my aim is for more people to get to live like Gore. While environmental degradation in general and global warming in particular are real problems, certainly a serious case can be made that they pale in comparison with the ravages of poverty. Further, if millions of people not starving to death isn�t its own reward, UC-Berkeley professor emeritus of energy and resources Jack Hollander explains in The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment�s Number One Enemy, that, contrary to conventional wisdom, as societies become more affluent, they produce less pollution. That�s not particularly surprising, when you think about it, as those whose basic human needs are met have both the inclination and resources to worry about cleaning up their environment.

Read the entire piece.

Posted by Tom at 4:11 AM | Comments (2) |

February 27, 2007

Barack Obama's questionable economics

The exceedingly clear thinking Thomas Sowell (earlier posts here and here) is reviewing Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on economic policy and doesn't much like what he sees:

Senator Barack Obama recently said, "let's allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country's middle class again."

Ironically, he said it at a time when Detroit automakers have been laying off unionized workers by the tens of thousands, while Toyota has been hiring tens of thousands of non-union American automobile workers. [. . .]

Senator Obama is being hailed as the newest and freshest face on the American political scene. But he is advocating some of the oldest fallacies, just as if it was the 1960s again, or as if he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since then. [. . .]

Senator Obama is not unique among politicians who want to control prices, as if that is controlling the underlying reality behind the prices. [. . .]

The underlying reality that politicians do not want to face is that here, too, prices convey a reality that is not subject to political control. . .

One of the hardest things for politicians to resist is indulging most voters' tendency to believe economic fallacies. Unfortunately, most politicos do the easy thing and give the voters what they want to hear. That is probably a good approach to getting elected, but it's a lousy one for governing.

Posted by Tom at 4:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 19, 2007

More on the outrage that is the Harris County Jail

Even as things change in Harris County government, the chronic problems of the Harris County Jail remain the same.

A Houston Chronicle review of state and county records reveals that from January 2001 through December 2006, at least 101 inmates � an average of about 17 a year � have died while in the custody of the Harris County Jail. In 2006 alone, after three consecutive years of failing to be in compliance with state standards, the jail recorded 22 in-custody deaths.

At the time of their deaths, at least 72 of the inmates � more than 70 percent � were awaiting court hearings and had yet to be convicted of the crimes that led to their incarceration.

Records and interviews show that almost one-third of the deaths involve questions of inadequate responses from guards and staff, failure by jail officials to provide inmates with essential medical and psychiatric care and medications, unsanitary conditions, and two allegations of physical abuse by guards.

In at least 13 cases, relatives or documents raise questions over whether inmates received needed medications prior to their deaths. Additionally, 11 of the deaths involve infections and illnesses suggesting sanitation problems. In 10 other cases, death reports suggest possible neglect, . . . [ . . .]

Prisoners also claim they have been forced to sleep on mattresses on cellblock floors � sometimes next to toilets. They maintain that the crowded living conditions at the jail are ripe for disease and bacteria, particularly methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, a potentially lethal blood infection.

As a result, numerous inmates contend they have contracted staph infections while incarcerated. Jail records show that between January 2001 and April 2005, there were 60 medical quarantines at the jail. The records show at least two of the quarantines were related to staph infections. The causes of 11 other quarantines are not listed.

Apparently with the exception of the Harris County Commissioners, most everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the Harris County Jail. Yet, as has been the case for the almost 30 years now that I've been practicing law in Houston, while most everyone agrees, nothing ever gets done.

Government generally -- and Harris County government in particular -- is responsive to those constituencies that wield political power. Prisoners have no political power and are generally unpopular with those who do. Inasmuch as most voters never set foot in a jail and have no first-hand experience of the abysmal conditions, it is easy to understand why nothing is ever done about this outrage, at least from a political standpoint.

But that doesn't make the condition of the Harris County Jail any easier to stomach. At a time when Governor Perry is bowing to the powerful political forces that want to build even more prisons, it's high time that voters realize the scam that state and local politicians have foisted on them in bowing to the powerful political forces that support the endless cycle of building more and more prisons. The problem with the Harris County Jail is largely the result of too many non-violent or petty criminals being locked up there for too long. Until the politicians do the hard work necessary to reform the barbaric policies that have caused that condition, the jail problem is unlikely to change. Kudos to the Chronicle for keeping this problem on the frontburner. Charles Kuffner and Burnt Orange Report have more.

Posted by Tom at 4:03 AM | Comments (3) |

January 17, 2007

The struggle of recovery made worse

Although the Bush Administration's troubles in devising and implementing a workable strategy for bringing civil order to Baghdad receives most of the mainstream's media attention, the failure of government to facilitate order in New Orleans and rebuilding throughout the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast region is a more appalling failure (earlier post here).

It's not as if my expectations for government in the New Orleans region are all that high -- I'd be satisfied with ensuring law and order, making sure that basic services are provided and creating an environment where entreprenuers will take the risk of starting businesses that will create badly-needed jobs for the residents of the area. In this NY Times article, Adam Nossiter continues his series of excellent series of articles over the past year regarding the failure of the local and state governments in New Orleans to ensure law and order and the devastating effect that failure is having on the region.

Meanwhile, in another not as well-reported failure of government, this NY Times article reports on the Oreck Corporation's decision to move its maufacturing facility and 500 jobs from the Gulf Coast region of Mississippi to Tennessee, in large part because of the company's difficulties in arranging insurance for its operations in Mississippi. As Ted Frank observes, the lack of insurance coverage is the direct result of Mississippi courts expansion of the coverage of insurance contracts beyond their plain terms and the state legislature's response to those court decisions, which "has [made] things worse: criticize the businesses who have left, and seek to further regulate the price of insurance, despite thousands of years of evidence that limiting the price will reduce the amount supplied and lead to shortages."

But at least the region has (for this season anyway) a good professional football team, which continues to exist in New Orleans only because local and state governments in Louisiana found the time and resources to arrange several hundred million in emergency funding for the team and its facilities. And even that subsidy might not work in the long run. As usual, the government has its priorities in order.

By the way, while on the subject of interesting Ted Frank blog posts, don't miss this one.

Posted by Tom at 4:16 AM | Comments (0) |

January 2, 2007

Government Finance 101

In this post from almost three years ago, I noted the utter hypocrisy of Congress regularly vilifying big business for attempting creative financing mechanisms to hedge risk. So, over the holidays, this letter to Washington Post from the Comptroller General of the United States caught my eye:

The largest employer in the world announced on Dec. 15 that it lost about $450 billion in fiscal 2006. Its auditor found that its financial statements were unreliable and that its controls were inadequate for the 10th straight year. On top of that, the entity's total liabilities and unfunded commitments rose to about $50 trillion, up from $20 trillion in just six years.

If this announcement related to a private company, the news would have been on the front page of major newspapers. Unfortunately, such was not the case -- even though the entity is the U.S. government.

To put the figures in perspective, $50 trillion is $440,000 per American household and is more than nine times as much as the median household income.

The only way elected officials will be able to make the tough choices necessary to put our nation on a more prudent and sustainable long-term fiscal path is if opinion leaders state the facts and speak the truth to the American people.

The Government Accountability Office is working with the Concord Coalition, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation and others to help educate the public about the facts in a professional, nonpartisan way. We hope the media and other opinion leaders do their part to save the future for our children and grandchildren.

DAVID M. WALKER
Comptroller General of the United States
Government Accountability Office
Washington

Posted by Tom at 4:42 AM | Comments (1) |

December 20, 2006

The Brownback judicial litmus test fails

This previous post reported on the political posturing of Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who was blocking a long-delayed judicial nomination by President Bush because the nominee had attended a commitment ceremony between a couple of gay friends. Well, Senator Brownback has finally backed off, but he still sounds demagogic even when he tries to do the right thing:

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who blocked the confirmation of a woman to the federal bench because she attended a same-sex commitment ceremony for the daughter of her long-time neighbors, says he will now allow a vote on the nomination.

Mr. Brownback, a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said in a recent interview that when the Senate returned in January, he would allow a vote on Janet Neff, a 61-year-old Michigan state judge, who was nominated to a Federal District Court seat.

Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.

In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff�s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal � asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases � was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented. Legal scholars said it raised constitutional questions of separation of powers for a senator to demand that a judge commit to behavior on the bench in exchange for a vote.

Senator Brownback "did not realize" that his proposal violated the separation of powers upon which the federal government is based?

Posted by Tom at 4:13 AM | Comments (0) |

December 18, 2006

Is Tony Blair's Princess Di premonition coming true?

During a scene of Stephen Frears' clever film, The Queen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's staff is relishing the public disdain for the Royal Family's restrained response to Princess Diana's death because it makes Blair -- who made a passionate public response -- look good in comparison. Blair -- played brilliantly by Michael Sheen -- grows frustrated with his staff's gloating because he knows that the same public venom that is being directed toward the Royal Family could just as easily be directed toward him.

Based on this Daily Telegraph article, Blair may be receiving precisely what he feared:

We have become like any other nation. No more can we tell ourselves that British corruption scandals are qualitatively different from those of hot countries, or that the peccadilloes that shake our polity would barely make the newspapers in Italy. In 1994, in his first major speech as Labour leader, Tony Blair promised that, under his leadership, Britain would never again be out of step with Europe. Now, in a grisly kind of way, his ambition has been fulfilled.

With so many sleaze stories in our news pages, it is easy to become confused. A prominent Labour donor has been profiting from the recommendations of his own task-force. Gordon Brown's supporters accuse Mr Blair of seeking to drag their man into the mire with him. Meanwhile, the Government has ordered an abrupt halt to the inquiry into allegations of hidden arms commissions, just as others begin to suspect corruption.

The sheer blizzard of allegations can leave us snow-blind. Perhaps, we tell ourselves, this is what all governments do. Perhaps Labour is no different from its predecessors. After all, wasn't John Major brought down after a series of sexual and financial scandals?

Yes, he was. But what is happening now is of a different order. The central accusation against this ministry � that it has sold favours, possibly even places in the legislature, to secret donors � is one that has not been seriously levelled at a British government since the introduction of the universal franchise. [. . .]

Tony Blair's belief in the superiority of his motives leads him to reason that, when the New Labour project is at stake, the ends justify the means.

We saw this within weeks of his accession when he sought to explain the Ecclestone affair � the first of many cash-for-favours scandals � on the basis that he was a pretty straight kinda guy. That, essentially, remains his attitude: he regards complaints about probity as petty next to what he is doing for Britain.

A decade later, parliament is cheapened, and the police have been called into Downing Street. That, more than the transformation of his party, more than Scottish devolution, more even than Iraq, will be his legacy.

Posted by Tom at 4:29 AM | Comments (0) |

December 13, 2006

Not another dime

Charles Kuffner, one of Houston's best political bloggers, notes a small sign of progress (also here) in the seemingly relentless and misguided campaign of local governments to build expensive and unnecessary fiefdoms in the guise of large jails:

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said there is no need for [Harris County] to spend at least $267 million building two jails when it could cut the inmate population at the county jail by allowing non-dangerous offenders out on bail before trial.

"I am very suspect whether there is a need for jail space," said Whitmire, who chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. "Harris County wouldn't have an overcrowding problem at all if it had an effective pretrial release program."

Whitmire said the Legislature, in the upcoming session, may look at ways to help reduce jail overcrowding, such as shorter sentences for some crimes.

Commissioners Court likely will ask voters next November to approve bonds for new jails that would add 4,600 beds.

County Judge Robert Eckels and other members of Commissioners Court said the jails are needed to reduce overcrowding now and in the coming decades.

As noted earlier here, the condition of the Harris County Jail has long been a civic embarrassment, but the solution is not simply to build more jails. As noted earlier here, Scott Henson has written this thorough and insightful analysis of the true problem with the Harris County Jails, which is overcrowding from sloppy and lazy processing of prisoners who do not need to be incarcerated pending their trial.

There are some powerful political forces -- county commissioners, contractors, police unions, etc. -- that benefit from and support this unending spiral of jail construction, while the constituencies supporting prisoners are not as powerful or well-funded. However, it is clear that the solution is not simply to build bigger and more expensive jails. Rather, building additional facilities should not even be a consideration unless or until Harris County adopts a sensible pre-trial release policy that frees up literally thousands of existing jail cells that are being wasted on folks who should not be in jail. Moreover, the county should also be required to fix the chronically deplorable condition of its existing jails before seeking to build more. This is a community issue -- and in other communities as well -- that should transcend party politics. But I doubt that it will.

Posted by Tom at 4:57 AM | Comments (1) |

December 3, 2006

Why don't you tell us what you really think?

The NRO Corner's John Podhoretz in this NY Daily News op-ed makes clear that he is not buying into that whole "elder statesman" thing that the NY Times reported last week regarding James Baker, III's co-chairmanship of the Iraq Study Group:

As Dana Milbank reports in The Washington Post, on Monday the [Iraq Study Group's] "co-chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, found time . . . to pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Men's Vogue."[. . .]

Baker, Hamilton and their crew of old Washington hands (and I mean old, like Metheuselah-level old) are recommending a "gradual pullback" of American troops but without a timetable. That basically translates into a nice, long, slow defeat - the "graceful exit" of which the president spoke so harshly.[. . .]

This is the consensus view of the Iraq Study Group, which is very proud that it reached consensus.

Its members also reached a consensus view that Depends is a really fine brand of adult diaper, and that they love reruns of "Murder, She Wrote."

You perhaps note that I am writing with extreme disrespect toward the Iraq Study Group. That's because its report is a scandal and an embarrassment; it's flatly immoral to seek to make or guide policy in this fashion.

Look, if its members believe the war is lost, they should say so. They should bite the bullet and advocate a pullout of American forces sooner rather than later.

If its members could not actually achieve consensus on that point - if, in other words, some of its members still believe the war can be won while others believe there's no way to achieve victory - then it was simple vanity on the part of the Gang of 10 that led to the creation of a "consensus" document that split the difference.

There's no way to split the difference, unless you're hurrying off to have your mug immortalized by Annie Leibovitz and want to bang down the gavel so you can get plenty of time to get hair and makeup done.

America and its allies are either going to win this war or we're going to lose. We will either conclude our military actions in Iraq with terrorists and insurgents dead or fled and an imposition of civil order in the country by its elected government, or we will turn tail and leave the place in chaos and ruins.

What's even more appalling, if true, is the group's other key recommendation - which is that America should try to find answers to its problems through an international conference that would include Syria and Iran.

What do Syria and Iran want more than anything else in the world? To see an American defeat in Iraq. To see an America so crippled that they can work their will in the Middle East without fear of retribution. Syria could swallow up Lebanon whole once again. Iran could do whatever it chooses inside and outside its borders (develop and peddle nuclear weaponry, sponsor terrorism against Israeli and Western targets) with impunity.

They're going to be a great help. But then, that's Baker for you. Give him a problem and he'll tell you your best hope of solving it can be found in sucking up to an Arab dictator.

Read the entire op-ed. The Chronicle's Anne Belli chimes in with a more respectful profile of Baker here.

Posted by Tom at 7:19 AM | Comments (0) |

December 2, 2006

Divided over powerful government

The late Milton Friedman commented recently that he had concluded that the best political make-up for the federal government was one that had the greatest likelihood to develop gridlock because of the damaging policies that the government enacts when one party or the other controls both the legislative and executive branches. In this TCS Daily op-ed, Arnold Kling of EconLog channels that thought:

The conventional wisdom is that we would be better off if politically powerful leaders were less mediocre. Instead, my view is that we would be better off if mediocre political leaders were less powerful. [. . .]

We have to expect mediocrity from political leaders. They are selected by a very unreliable process. In general, I try to avoid contact with narcissists who spend their time pleading for money. Those are hardly the intellectual and emotional characteristics that make someone admirable, yet they are the traits of people who go into politics. [. . .]

The libertarian view is that private institutions, both for-profit and non-profit, are better at problem-solving than government institutions. Regardless of whether political leadership is wise or mediocre, our goal should be to limit the damage that public officials can do. Do not demand that they "solve" health care, "fix" education, or launch a "Manhattan project" for energy independence. Even for experts, those are impossible tasks. The harder we press our existing leaders to address these issues, the more trouble they are going to cause.

The belief that the problem with government is the particular individuals in power is dangerous. The myth is that somewhere out there we could find great leaders who could use government to solve all of our problems. Instead, we need to be vigilant against the enlargement of government, by either mediocre or expert leaders.

Do not look upon the electoral process as a search for great leaders. At best, it gives us an opportunity for damage control.

Posted by Tom at 7:40 AM | Comments (3) |

November 27, 2006

Houston's Mr. Fix-It returns to Washington

This NY Sunday Times article reviews Former White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasury James Baker, III co-chairmanship of the Iraq Study Group, which is currently scheduled to deliver its report to the President by mid-December. Mr. Baker, who spends most of his time these days at the Baker Institute at Houston's Rice University, is described in the article as wanting the chairmanship of the Iraq Group to be the template for his role as an elder statesman in the coming years:

Now, at 76, Mr. Baker is in high diplomat mode, on a mission, friends and supporters say, to aid his country and his president � and, while he is at it, seal his legacy in the realm of statesmen, a sphere he cares about far more than politics.

�I think he�d like to be remembered as a 21st-century Disraeli,� said Leon Panetta, a Democratic member of the group, referring to the 19th-century British statesman and prime minister. �I think deep down he is someone who believes that his diplomatic career, in many ways, helped change the world.�

Read the entire article.

Posted by Tom at 4:26 AM | Comments (0) |

November 22, 2006

The story of the open road

As many of us get ready to hit the road over the holiday weekend, Ralph Bennett in this TCS Daily article provides an excellent overview of the birth of the nation's Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower Administration. We tend to take the system for granted these days, but it is truly an engineering and economic marvel that is one of our many blessings for which we will give thanks this holiday weekend.

Posted by Tom at 7:35 AM | Comments (0) |

November 21, 2006

Does anyone take John Edwards seriously anymore?

As noted in this post from late 2004, a decent case can be made that former Democratic vice-presidential candidate was the difference in costing John Kerry the close 2004 Presidential election, particularly after his Benny Hinn imitation on the campaign trail.

But now as Edwards postures toward a run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008, he provided us an exhibition of hypocrisy that is brazen even by Washington, D.C. standards. On the same day that Edwards was bashing Wal-Mart on a conference call with labor leaders, an Edwards "aide" was requesting that the local Wal-Mart bump the former senator to the front of the line to get a Playstation 3 for his son. Reason's Jeff Taylor wryly observes:

The alternative to a Democratic presidential campaign marked by a downward spiral of Pythonseque depravation one-upsmanship might actually address issues like the federal entitlement explosion or comprehensive income tax reform, two areas where Republicans have failed miserably to advance any coherent solution. Should Edwards or Hillary Clinton or someone find away to talk about these things without class-warfare cant, they'll have a head start on the general election.

In any event, maybe the best thing for Wal-Mart to do is stop chortling and go ahead and give John Edwards a PS3 and a couple games. Throw in a flat-panel too. Maybe that way he'll reacquaint himself with American prosperity and abundance and be a better candidate for the experience.

Is Hillary Clinton even going to have any competition for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination?

Posted by Tom at 4:06 AM | Comments (5) |

November 20, 2006

Liberty and Justice for all?

The chronically overcrowded and abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail has been a frequent topic on this blog (most recently here), so this Bill Murphy/Houston Chronicle article from over the weekend caught my eye because it concerned the changing views of one of the formerly toughest sentencing judges in the Harris County District Courts:

State District Judge Michael McSpadden once believed that long sentences would deter drug sales and drug use.

But after more than two decades hearing felony cases in Harris County, the former prosecutor is calling on the governor and Legislature to reduce sentences for low-level drug possession.

"These minor offenses are now overwhelming every felony docket, and the courts necessarily spend less time on the more important, violent crimes," he recently wrote to Gov. Rick Perry.

Nearly twice as many defendants in Harris County were sent to state jails last year for possessing less than 1 gram of a drug than in Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar counties combined.

McSpadden recommended making delivering or possessing a small amount of drugs a Class A misdemeanor carrying no more than a year in county jail. [. . .]

The judge said the Houston Police Department and District Attorney's Office are clogging court dockets and causing crowding in the county jail and state jails by bringing so many drug-possession cases against those found with pipe residue or a sugar packet's worth of cocaine.

Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast recently touched on the overcrowding issue and the related waste of resources issue in connection with the arrest in the Houston area of Doug Supernaw, the Bryan-born Texas country and western music star, for possession of a roach clip with a small amount of marijuana. Scott also blogged a post on the McSpadden story, and he has compiled a valuable series of posts on why Texas prisons are overcrowded, what counties can do about it, and the particular reasons why the Harris County jails remain such a mess.

Meanwhile, Doug Berman over at the Sentencing Law and Policy blog posted this piece on this Fact Sheet from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency that compares United States incarceration rates with those of other countries around the world. The data does not reflect well on the U.S.:

The U.S. has less than 5% of the world�s population but over 23% of the world�s incarcerated people.

The U.S. incarcerates the largest number of people in the world.

Some individual US states imprison up to six times as many people as do nations of comparable population.

The incarceration rate in the U.S. is four times the world average.

Crime rates do not account for incarceration rates.

The U.S. imprisons the most women in the world.

Professor Berman observes: �And we are supposedly a country founded on freedom? We may talk the talk about liberty, but we certainly do not walk the walk in the way we approach and apply our criminal justice system.�

The overly-harsh and wasteful sentences handed down to businessmen such as Jamie Olis and Jeff Skilling tend to receive the most publicity, but the equally harsh sentences meted out in Texas and much of the rest of the US over minor drug offenses and the like is a national disgrace. As the late Milton Friedman observed in this letter to former drug czar Bill Bennett, we all should be "revolted . . . by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

Posted by Tom at 4:17 AM | Comments (6) |

November 19, 2006

The Friedman influence

Several clever recent posts reflect the tremendous influence that Milton Friedman has had on economics and politics.

First, Larry Ribstein -- who doesn't touch on politics much but always provides keen insight when he does -- reflects Friedman's view on government interference in markets with this observation about the current political scene:

Senate Democrats, who need 60 votes to anything, have 51, and that includes some diverse agendas (e.g., Joe Lieberman). The House Speaker-to-be got thoroughly trampled by her own party on her first move. The WP quotes Jim Moran as threatening revenge on people who voted against Murtha (who, by the way, thinks ethics rules are "crap"). Meanwhile, the last time I checked, GWB was still President, a lame duck thinking about the history books.

In short, the U.S. government appears to be totally paralyzed for the next two years, incapable of doing much more than impotently holding hearings.

I guess the fact that the stock market has been setting records every day must be just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's ($) Washington Wire blog passes along this anecdote about Friedman from none other than John Kenneth Galbraith:

[A]t a lunch in Geneva in 1955, India�s statistician mentioned to [Galbraith] that the Indian government had asked several economists, including Milton Friedman, to visit and comment on Indian�s next five-year plan. [Galbraith] replied:

�Asking Milton Friedman to comment on a five year plan is like asking the Pope to comment on the running of a birth control clinic.�

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux recounts Professor Friedman's legendary debating skill:

Mr. Friedman also was a virtuoso debater. When, to endorse conscription over the volunteer military, Gen. William Westmorland said that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries," Mr. Friedman piped up and asked, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?"

Mr. Westmoreland replied, "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." To which Mr. Friedman then retorted, "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher."

Finally, Lawrence Summers does a fine job of placing Professor Friedman's impact on the worlds of economics and politics in perspective in this NY Sunday Times op-ed.

Posted by Tom at 7:39 AM | Comments (0) |

November 14, 2006

The indiscriminate Hammer

Ben Witherington is a noted New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Institute in Wilmore, Kentucky near Lexington, which is not the typical place that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay would normally have been trolling for money during his heyday in Congress. In this post explaining the danger for Evangelical Christians in aligning themselves with either major political party, Dr. Witherington passes along the following anecdote about DeLay:

Several years ago I was contacted by Tom DeLay. He figured since I was a well known white Evangelical I must be on his side on a host of things. I was invited to the White House, and I was named Kentucky Business Man of the Year. I have the plaque sitting in my office framed to prove it. Now, I am no businessman. Just ask my wife. For five years I ran a little coffee shop in Wilmore for our Christian students as a ministry to them-- its called Solomon's Porch, and its still up and running, employing and feeding students and helping them work their way through college and seminary. Its a good ministry, but its not a business that made money. In fact I lost $40,000 helping those students during that time. I was definitely not a Kentucky Businessman of the Year! There were many who did better than I, and I could talk at length about the plight of small businesses which are taxed right out of existence. Several previous restaurants in that spot had not lasted more than about six months. Wilmore is only a town of some 5,000 souls.

You see Delay was running a scam on Evangelical Protestants. It worked like this--- you call someone, and send them an award, whether they deserve it or not. You invite them to D.C. to meet influential people. Delay gets the photo-op with small business persons, but the real purpose of all this is raising money. I got endless calls out of Delay's office to send money to this, that or the other fund running out of his office to further his causes etc.

In other words, I wasn't given an award for anything. Obviously they were oblivious to the fact that my business was failing from an economic point of view, though not from a ministry point of view. What I was given was a carrot, hoping for a whole bunch of carrots in return. It was purely a quid pro quo deal. What I won was endless phone calls about races, and causes etc. some of it more or less connected to Delay's office directly. It is not a surprise to me that the man was drummed out of office. It is also not a surprise to me that he was a major player in that party and a close ally of George Bush from way back in Texas. "All power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts uiltimately" is a wise saying.

Posted by Tom at 4:32 AM | Comments (6) |

November 7, 2006

To vote or not to vote

It's Election Day 2006, and Houston's foremost political Charles Kuffner passes along that the Texas Secretary of State is predicting that only 36 percent of the registered voters in Texas will cast ballots.

On first impression, such a small turnout seems pretty pathetic.

But on second thought, Greg Mankiw explains why maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Nonetheless, I hope you vote in the election.

Posted by Tom at 4:30 AM | Comments (0) |

November 2, 2006

Those all-important quart-sized bags

I swear, you can't make this stuff up. The Wall Street Journal's airline travel reporter Scott McCartney reports ($) (see McCartney's follow-up article here) about the Transportation Security Administration's latest campaign to make airline travel a complete and utter aggravation:

An airport security screener sat at a Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport checkpoint beside a plastic tub filled with small cans of shaving cream and tiny tubes of toothpaste.

Were they contraband items that ran afoul of safety rules?

"No, people didn't have quart-size plastic bags," the Transportation Security Administration official said.

Where's Seinfeld when you need him? In a quintessential bureaucratic bedevilment, the TSA allows small bottles and tubes of liquids to be carried aboard airplanes only if they are enclosed in a quart-size, zip-top plastic bag. No gallon bags. No fold-over sandwich bags. Even if you have only one bottle on you, it must be carried in a quart-size, zip-top plastic bag. Screeners confiscate any nonconforming items or send travelers to ticket counters to check luggage.

That's just one of the frustrations travelers have found as TSA began implementing new rules on liquids last month and, in the eyes of some travelers, seemingly prohibited common sense. [. . .]

Either frustrated or confused by the new rules, or unable to squeeze all they need into a quart-size bag, passengers continue to check baggage at elevated rates, airlines say. And TSA is encouraging that for passengers who don't want to mess with quart zip-top bags.

All of this to reassure us that airline travel is safe from terrorists? Seems more like security theater to me.

Posted by Tom at 4:23 AM | Comments (0) |

November 1, 2006

All in the Family

Based on this article, it's safe to say that the family get-togethers of New Orleans Saints and former Austin Westlake High School quarterback Drew Brees aren't the stuff of a Norman Rockwell painting:

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has asked his mother to stop using his picture in TV commercials touting her candidacy for a Texas appeals court.

"I think the major point here is that my mother is using me in a campaign, and I've made it known many times I don't want to be involved."

In commercials running on Austin stations, Mina Brees had been using a picture of her son in the uniform of his former team, the San Diego Chargers, to emphasize her ties to football.

"I think the major point here is that my mother is using me in a campaign, and I've made it known many times I don't want to be involved," Drew Brees said Monday.

Mina Brees, an Austin attorney, is running as a Democrat for a spot on Texas' 3rd Court of Appeals. She said replacement commercials that omit any mention of her son were taped last week and sent to stations on Friday.

She said she did not anticipate upsetting her son and that "everything in the ad was true."

She said her connection to football is relevant to her campaign because her father, a successful high school coach, used sports to teach her a strong work ethic that she would bring to the judicial bench.

Drew Brees, who won a state football championship with Westlake High School in suburban Austin, said he got no response from his mother when he first heard about the ads and called her to ask that she stop using them. His agent sent her a letter Oct. 20 threatening legal action, he said.

He called his relationship with his mother "nonexistent" after it crumbled six years ago when he refused to hire her as his agent.

Mina Brees said her son's allegations were a mischaracterization and that she had no intention of becoming his agent.

"I love Drew very much, and I'm very proud of him. But sometimes when people are following a career path, they change," she said.

Sounds as if Mrs. Brees and Marc O'Hair ought to get together and compare notes on child rearing.

Posted by Tom at 4:33 AM | Comments (1) |

October 25, 2006

Litmus test run amok

Earlier in the week, it was the Democrats making silly. But today, this Washington Post editorial reports that a Republican senator from Kansas is one-upping the Democrats in the absurdity department:

IF YOU THOUGHT that fights over judicial nominations couldn't get any worse, consider the case of Janet T. Neff, whom President Bush has nominated to a federal district judgeship in Michigan. Judge Neff, who serves on the Michigan Court of Appeals, is part of a multi-judge deal between the White House and Michigan's two Democratic senators resolving a long-standing fight over federal court nominees from that state. Yet in reaching an accommodation with the home-state senators, Mr. Bush finds himself with another problem. For Judge Neff, it turns out, once attended a commitment ceremony for a lesbian couple -- and that has Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback (R) reaching for the smelling salts and blocking the nomination.

Mr. Brownback has said he wants to satisfy himself that the judge was not presiding over an "illegal marriage ceremony" in Pittsfield, Mass., in 2002 -- before the state legalized same-sex marriage. He has written to Judge Neff asking for an explanation, his spokesman says, and will hold up her nomination until he learns the nature of the ceremony and its legality. . . . An administration official says Judge Neff has told Mr. Brownback that she didn't preside [over the ceremony].

Blocking a long-delayed judicial nomination by your party's President because the nominee attended a commitment ceremony between a couple of gay friends? Even had the judge "presided" over the non-binding, symbolic ceremony, what difference does that make? What on earth is Brownback thinking?