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.
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.
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 elseóthat 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 beforeóand 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.
This is interesting. Maplight.org is a new Web site that attempts to correlate lawmakersí voting records with the money theyíve 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. ;^)
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?
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 crewís chests were clearly marked as ìA&E Film Crew.î
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 funÖthere were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. There was hardly anything ìdangerousî 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?
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.
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 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 yesterdayís 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 didnít 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.
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 relativeís grief and anotherís 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 Librescuís 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 centuryís 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.
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.
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.
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.