Buying Seats In Congress

Today, George Will complains in his inimitable style about the apparent evils of Senate and gubernatorial candidates who fund their own campaigns. At least, if they are Democrats and if they are outspending their Republican opponent's similarly self-funded campaign.

But before he can regret purchasing the governorship, he must deal with Douglas Forrester, the Republican candidate who has come from double-digit deficits in polls two months ago to within four points in a recent poll. Forrester, too, is a rich businessman and is largely financing his own campaign -- this is the world that campaign finance reformers have made, with contribution limits that make fundraising more difficult. Since securing the Democratic nomination, Corzine has outspent Forrester by $15 million.

Ah, yes... the evil Democrat self-funds his campaign in order to "buy" seats. The poor, oppressed multi-millionaire Republican does exactly the same thing - but as a victim of campaign finance reform. {sniffle}

Yes, folks, this is the same George Will who has identified the biggest sin of the G.W. Bush as signing campaign finance reform into law:

In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political speech.

Because, apparently, this hampers the ability of a multi-millionaire Republican to get money from others to fund his campaigns, to combat a multi-millionaire Democrat who has the temerity to actually put his own money where his mouth is....

(I did some digging into past self-funded campaigns by Republicans, but Will seems to have been strangely silent on the issue of "buying" seats. On Michael Huffington, for example, who set records for spending in his House and Senate campaigns, Will attributed Huffington's Senate loss to his use of an illegal immigrant as a nanny, and seemed mostly concerned with scolding those who circulated rumors that Huffington was gay.)

And it is somehow emblematic of Will's sneering, elitist "conservativism" that he apparently assumes that the public will vote, like a swarm of proverbial lemmings, for the political candidate who runs the most ads.

Bad Logic and... Lies by Omission?

Not that I would expect more from Tom DeLay, but shouldn't I have a right to expect more?

Our current tax system has been written by and for special interests and is, by design, dizzyingly complicated. It kills jobs, and it simply does not efficiently accomplish the tasks for which it is designed.

The American people are ready for this debate. They are ready for a debate about a flat tax that would gut the Internal Revenue Service and allow almost every American to file his or her tax return on a simple form the size of a postcard.

DeLay isn't a stupid man. He is fully aware that the issues of tax fairness and tax simplification are entirely separate - that you can have an unfair, simple tax code, and a complex but fair tax code. While he is correct that much of the complexity in the present tax code comes from catering to special interests, he is being intentionally deceptive in failing to mention that "flat tax" proposals are backed primarily by wealthy special interests seeking to lower their tax burden.

They are ready, I believe, to learn more about replacing the income-based tax system altogether with a national sales tax, as in the FairTax proposal I have co-sponsored in the House. This plan would allow Americans to choose, based on their spending decisions, how much tax they would pay every year.

Are you sufficiently deluded to believe that the average American could "choose" to avoid paying sales tax? People living paycheck-to-paycheck can suddenly curb their spending in order to "choose" to avoid taxes? If there were an honest bone in DeLay's body, he would devote at least a sentence fragment to the fact that replacing income taxes with national sales taxes would inure almost exclusively to the benefit of the wealthy, and would be exceptionally regressive. (And where is the evidence that in nations which presently employ national sales taxes and "value added taxes" that "planning and budgeting [is] easier for families and businesses"? In which of those nations is economic growth outstripping that of the United States?

Meanwhile, reforming the individual tax system would also provide a long-overdue opportunity to drain the corporate welfare, special-interest morass of our current corporate tax structure.

It would? Please, Tom - tell us how. Oh, I see... out of space.

If a flat tax is so fair, so cheap and easy to administer, and provides massive cost savings and so many efficiencies, why aren't any of the wealthy advocates of a "flat tax" for wage earners (including, of course, Tom DeLay) advocating a "flat tax" for corporate profits?

The Future of Search

Granted, this online search involved some paid services, but it provides some interesting glimpses into the future of search and privacy.

Using nothing more than a swab of saliva and the internet, a 15-year-old boy has tracked down his anonymous sperm donor father, according to details released today.

* * *

The boy took the saliva sample late last year and sent it off to an online genealogy DNA-testing service called FamilyTreeDNA.com. For a fee of $289 (£163) the boy had his genetic code available for other members of the site to search. Although the boy's genetic father had never supplied his DNA to the site, after nine months the boy was contacted by two men who were on the database and whose Y-chromosome matched his own. The two men did not know each other, but shared a surname, albeit with a different spelling, and the genetic similarity of their Y-chromosomes suggested there was a 50% chance that the two men and the boy shared the same father, grandfather or great-grandfather.

The article observes,

he boy's ability to use publicly available genetic tests and internet searches suggests that police forces could do the same and obtain the surnames of potential suspects with DNA samples gathered from crime scenes.

Absolutely. Rather than comparing DNA to samples from individuals in a state database, the Y-chromosome from any given male suspect could be compared against the growing genealogical database to potentially identify possible suspects (or their families) even when they aren't in the state system.

More on Work Ethic

There were some interesting comments to the recent discussion of declining work ethic, including:

Now the name of the game is "personal freedom" and "feeling good". (My personal experience being that hard work and civility don't always align well with these things; but that may just be me.) Personal responsibility is passé and hard work is something to be mocked. Actually, pretty much everything that tries to make use do things we don't want to do (take responsibility for our actions, work hard, etc) is to be mocked. To some extent this is no different than most generations "teen years" but for whatever reason (parents had enough money to indulge their children, life got soft, popularity of TV, lack of parental involvement, whatever) this "teen" phenomenon became a cultural norm. It seems to work in both directions, we don't discipline children for behavior that would in the past be viewed as inappropriate (Rude remarks to teachers and other adults), and we see adults carrying on like teenagers (making rude remarks themselves, dressing like their children, etc)

In a nutshell you see a shift from "personal responsibility" to "personal rights" and "governmental responsibility." You also see civility and societal norms go right out the window. To a large extend the cultural norms of today are the adolescent behaviors of the past.

and

One thing the awful teens today *aren't* saying is that they expect they'll be able to put in a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and raise their family at a decent standard of living.

That's because we've pretty much tanked any possibility of that ideal being reality, and that didn't happen in the 1960s. In the 1960s, it was still possible to believe one could work twenty years in the mill and retire with a modest pension, or that as long as you showed up at the office and did the work assigned to you, you'd have a job.

I am interested in the effect to which today's teenagers are expressing diminishing expectations as a result of changes in the workplace and increased international competition for white collar jobs. If I recall high school correctly, I doubt that many are thinking about it.

I am not one to lament about "those awful kids today" and how they will ultimately ruin the country/world. That song has been sung for centuries, yet here we are. I am one to believe that the behavior of kids reflects the behavior of the grown-ups that surround them, and that the values of kids are most affected by the values of their parents. I think that most kids seek peers who share their value systems, rather than "falling in with the wrong crowd" and being "corrupted" by those kids who don't. Most teenage rebellion ends up being more annoying than harmful. Listening to Ozzy or Alice Cooper or even Marily Manson won't turn a kid into a satanist, nor will listening to 50 Cent or Tupac turn a kid into a gangster.

At the same time, our culture has changed a lot in the past century. On the BBC series, Manor House, an elderly woman who had worked as a maid (starting at the age of 14) in the very house where the series was set was asked by the modern-era persons who were performing the "below stairs" servant roles, why people didn't just quit if they didn't like the working conditions. Despite their having worked for more than a month within a context most modern workers would find unacceptable, it hadn't occurred to them that workers of the Edwardian era may have had no choice - they couldn't afford to be unemployed, couldn't risk leaving an employer without a reference, and some had no place to go if they gave up their room and board. We've now progressed to an era where, as mythago recently pointed out, some people (who should know better) can't even envision a world before OSHA, let alone one where a worker could not afford to quit a dangerous job.

As I've previously argued, with no claim to having originated the idea, within the workplace there is also a top-down element to these issues. It is difficult for workers to remain dedicated and motivated within the context of a workplace where management treats and compensates itself like royalty, while showing little in the way of competence, honesty, work ethic, or loyalty. Where a CEO is siphoning off millions from the company for new corporate jets which are essentially reserved for the CEO and his family (ENRON-style), lavish multi-million dollar parties (Tyco style), multi-million dollar "loans" which are quickly forgiven.... it becomes easy to rationalize taking an extra fifteen minutes for lunch, or spending time surfing the web instead of working. And if you work for a company like Delphi, where management scoffs at the value of your work and demands that you agree to have your wages slashed by two thirds, all the while rewarding itself at record levels.... Well, let's just say that I doubt that worker productivity or morale are at peak levels.

Solutions for the working family? Once you get past his acknowledgement of how hard many people work, Sebastian Mallaby seems to exemplify the management position:

The high-risk, high-reward economy encourages people to put everything into their jobs, with the result that they have little energy left over for chores that might save money. To keep up with their work, two-career couples buy cooked meals, send the laundry out, bribe the kids with toys rather than attention. Perhaps in time the pendulum may swing back. The spend-hard-in-order-to-work-hard family may give way to thriftier behavior.

Is he actually suggesting that if their wages are slashed, workers will muster what little is left of their energy after the workday to spend more time doing their own cooking, cleaning and child care? And what of the service economy that is presently driven in no small part by the hard spending of working families?

Some of our nation's political leaders depict this as the result of an entitlement culture. The Gingrichian-type solution is to suggest that we kick out any social safety net which might catch a falling worker - with emphasis on "worker", not "manager". These individuals advance the argument that employer-provided or employer-subsidized benefits amount to a "welfare state". None of these consequences are to be extended to the nation's wealthy or politically connected classes - which is perhaps the segment of society with the greatest present sense of entitlement.

The movement to strip workers of benefits, privatize Social Security, and reduce job protections goes hand-in-hand with the movement to end taxation of wealth in favor of the taxation of wages. The former position is insincere - the Republicans who wish to deprive workers of pensions and health benefits are part of a majority in both houses of Congress and control the White House, where if they were sincere they have now had ample opportunity to put their money where their mouths are, ending their own generous health and pension benefits. Consistent with their... hypocrisy, they advocate "bankruptcy reform" for individual consumers, while perpetuating a bankruptcy system which permits even profitable corporations to escape their freely negotiated labor contracts and to shift their pension obligations to the taxpayer.

Are there easy answers? I wish there were. It seems likely that reduced opportunity for workers will force an increase in work ethic, but at significant consequence to other aspects of our society which we (meaning, middle class America) deem valuable (and perhaps also at significant cost to the service sector). There seems to be no chance of reigning in the practices at the highest levels of government and industry where cronyism, self-indulgence, and even outright laziness are seemingly accepted as the just rewards of success (even for those who hold their positions only by virtue of an ancestor's hard work or good fortune).

Meanwhile, we'll probably continue to pretend to be a classless society. (In the economic sense, that is.)

Okay, so what is he trying to get at?

In an editorial entitled Do Seniors Need Saving? Sebastian Mallaby carries on at length on the question, "Can we expect citizens to weather the challenge from India and China without some new form of government help, especially when the baby bust is threatening to shred traditional welfare programs?". Which begs the question, exactly who is proposing that we enact "some new form of government help" for seniors? (Is this what happens when he writes a column without the aid of a press release from an advocacy group, or is there actually something behind this?)

Tuckered Out

I caught an episode of Bill Maher's show on HBO with Tucker Carlson, and found myself, well, tuckered out. Oh, he seems dogmatic enough for opinion-based television, but how much of that stuff can you take without choking? I mean, the man actually argued that health care costs in the United States consume a lower percentage of GDP than in nations with national health care plans. (And he actually appeared to believe it.) Note to Tucker: On Real Time, Maher's supposed to be the comedian.

What I found most interesting about him was that everything about him screamed "I was a privileged child", right down to his rant about how it isn't moral to brag about your possessions. (He'll apparently challenge the notion that you shouldn't lie to a grand jury, but don't go bragging about your "bling bling".) So I wasn't surprised to read that "He is the son of Richard W. Carlson, who was president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 1992 to 1997. His stepmother is Patricia Carlson, heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune."

How old is his money? Maybe he and Anderson Cooper should have a show together.

What Would Emerson Say?

According to the Volokh conspirators, jurors who are assumed to have ignored the law in order to provide a plaintiff with the level of damages they believe to be just are to be deplored. And praised.

Yes, folks, it all depends upon whose ox is being gored.

She's What?

"Oh, what a cute baby. She's about six months old? My baby is eight... no, ten... no wait... One year old."

One year old?

Wow.

More on Work Ethic

Coming from a profession which can demand arduous hours, with billable hour demands having increased substantially in recent decades for most of the nation's associate lawyers, some of my fellow lawyers may question whether my comments on work ethic also apply to our shared profession. They do.

Here, I'm not just speaking of the absolutely substandard work product that some lawyers and firms consistently produce - they are, in my opinion, the exception. I'm also not speaking of partners who complain about declining associate work ethic, even while imposing billing expectations on those associates that are substantially higher than those they had to meet at a similar stage in their careers.

I'm speaking of a different type of work ethic. Sure, lots of lawyers slave away at the office, six or seven days a week, and barely see their families. But what about their clients? When law firms take a "wink wink, nudge nudge" attitude toward creative and padded hourly billing, or pretend that a caffeine-stoked late-night hour at the office is just as productive as an hour of work after a solid night of sleep, they are not encouraging an atmosphere which is conducive to achieving the best value and best outcomes for their clients. The worst part is, they don't seem to want to do so - for fear of losing income.

No matter how many hours you work, if at the end of the day you put the firm's finances ahead of client welfare and accurate billing, there is a deficit in your work ethic.

Some predict the demise of the billable hour. Others question whether alternatives to hourly billing will primarily serve to add to law firm profits. One way or another, hourly or alternative, a bill should be honest.

Mincing Words versus Lying

The latest on Frist:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was given considerable information about his stake in his family's hospital company, according to records that are at odds with his past statements that he did not know what was in his stock holdings.

Managers of the trusts that Frist once described as "totally blind," regularly informed him when they added new shares of HCA Inc. or other assets to his holdings, according to the documents

* * *

"He [Frist] could have been more exact in his comments," said Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Frist. Stevenson added that Frist might better have said he did not know to what extent he owned HCA shares.

Nice euphemism.

Declining Work Ethic

Of all the things that seem to be hurting us in an era of globalization, a declining work ethic would seem to be near the top. If you look at productivity figures for U.S. workers, you might not immediately suspect a declining work ethic. But if you encounter a spectrum of U.S. workers, or even U.S. college students, it is hard to miss the decline.

Any thoughts as to what is behind this? Where does the sense of entitlement come from, that people think they should have well-paid employment, license to be rude to customers, break time whenever they want it, and not have to work hard? Oh, I grant some of it comes from the top - you can't see a Bernie Ebbers or Dennis Kozlowski-type CEO at the top of your company's organizational chart and be inspired to work hard for your company... quite the opposite. But perhaps that's less of an explanation, and more of a manifestation of how lousy work ethic and and an exaggerated sense of both self-importance and entitlement reach all levels of employment, public and private. (Chicken v. Egg - did the phenomenon start at the bottom or at the top?)

Under a "CEO President", this phenomenon can seemingly put the nation at risk.

Mr. Meaner

A significant number of people believe that the offenses they are charged with are "Mister Meaners" - or "Mistermeaners"... Which perhaps leaves them surprised that the charge they face is less serious than a seemingly far less sinister sounding "felony" offense.

(Don't get on my case about this post. I'm way tired its causing me to find humor in the weirdest things. ;-)

Wages + Benefits = Welfare?

In his latest editorial, while speaking to the very real effects of globalization, George Will replicates his traditional sneering attitude toward the notion that employers should be obligated to live up to their contractual obligations to their employees:

GM has been forced to allow product development, pricing and other decisions to be driven by the need to keep sufficient revenue flowing in so it can flow out in fulfillment of GM's function as a welfare state.

That's right, folks - in George Will's mind, if an employer negotiates a compensation package that includes health benefits, the employer is acting as a "welfare state". And he apparently believes that any such contractual obligation should be one that can be discarded by the employer on a whim.

Concessions by the United Auto Workers will provide GM with annual savings of $1 billion in health care costs. But GM's hourly workers, who pay no health care deductibles and only nominal co-payments, will still enjoy coverage better than most Americans have. Since 2000, the percentage of American businesses offering any health insurance to workers has declined from 69 to 60.

Is it fair to interpret that last sentence as follows: "Yay!", declared George Will, "More of the working masses are uninsured!" And he also spits on the notion of a blue collar middle class,

Delphi proposes cutting the compensation - pay and benefits - of younger workers from $65 per hour to $20 or less, so it can fulfill the promise to retirees of a fixed percentage of their salaries.

Come back to Earth, George - a proposed slashing of wages by 2/3 is about a lot more than paying contractually dictated benefits to retirees. And if you think Delphi isn't going to try to dump those obligations onto the taxpayer via the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation or back onto GM through the course of its bankruptcy, you're pretty darn optimistic - Pollyanna Will. Oh, I'm giving Will way too much credit - he doesn't actually care if retirees see a penny of their pension benefits; he's trying to create an intergenerational conflict out of what the very quotes in his article indicate is in fact primarily the result of globalization.

[Robert "Steve" Miller, Delphi's chief executive] bluntly says that the social contract written after 1945 is being - must be - repealed because, given globalization, unskilled manual labor cannot be paid $65 an hour, with the cost passed on to consumers. "When you buy a Hyundai you get a satellite radio as your option, but if you buy a Chevrolet you get social welfare as an option. Long term, the customer is going to desert you if you try to price for your social-welfare costs."

You know what is quite telling about hypocrites like George Will? They have a philosophy of life where they are never willing to sacrifice anything themselves, but never stop demanding that others sacrifice for them, for their comfort, for their ideology. Has Will ever issued a whisper about excessive CEO pay? Did it not occur to him in applauding Delphi's abrogation of contract that he might make mention of the extraordinary severance packages it has afforded departing executives? Did it not occur to him to question why executives, CEO's, and the Republican-controlled House and Senate, are completely unwilling to address the cost of their own perks of office, salaries, benefits, and... yes, defined pension plans? Has he called upon his employers to pare back his own wages and benefits, contracts be darned, in the name of ending a "welfare state"? Has it occurred to him that these are contractual obligations, and some people actually believe that a signature on a contract is supposed to mean something more than "I can't screw you now - so I'll screw you later"? Has it occurred to him that shifting the cost of health care from employers of retirees, the blue collar middle class and working poor from employers onto the taxpayer is not the elimination of a "welfare state", but is instead an element of its creation?

Apparently not in this lifetime.

Industry & Health Care Costs

Commenting on "the big squeeze" on American wages and benefits, and the possibility that the Delphi bankruptcy will trigger additional bankruptcies in the auto industry, Paul Krugman comments,

If we had a Canadian-style system - which is enthusiastically supported by the Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. auto companies - the big squeeze might be averted, at least for a while. One more reason to be angry with auto executives is that they never threw their support behind national health care in this country, even though such a system is clearly in their companies' interest.

Long-term interest, perhaps, but short-term? The money for a national health care system has to come from somewhere. Granted the Bush Administration believes that deficit spending provides a bottomless pit of cash for anything it wants but can't otherwise afford, but the Republicans are not the party to reform health care (save, perhaps, in the sense of the cliché, "Only Nixon could go to China.") And I don't think any prior administration would have dreamed that they could get away with creating a national health care program without first finding a source of revenue for that program.

Also, national health care would not emerge overnight. It isn't as if you would go to sleep on one night paying for your employer-sponsored health care, wake up the next morning paying for national health care, and never even notice. If a new payroll tax were created to pay for health care during the transition, employees who are already paying a share of their own health benefits would be justifiably aggrieved. A more complicated system of credits and deductions might avoid taxing those who already pay, but would probably take a huge bite out of the paychecks of the working poor. It's hard to imagine a politician who would want to fund health care through an undisguised payroll tax.

Another alternative would be a transitional corporate tax, meant to fund the transition and the initial period where the uninsured become insured, while a new payroll tax (and matching tax) is created to be phased in as employer and employee contributions to existing plans are phased out. The corporate tax should not be presumed to eventually go away, but would likely remain in effect to "make up for" employer contributions that need no longer be paid. Even with a dollar-for-dollar deduction, such that every cent spent on an existing private plan is credited against the transitional tax, some major employers would probably still see their expenses go up as the wages of their contract workers would trigger transitional taxes, and their non-unionized domestic suppliers would face the additional tax. Even if at the end of the day, the dust settles with a less costly, more stable national insurance plan, and a health tax burden significantly less than the present cost of private insurance, the major domestic auto makers (a) have a poor history of long-term thinking, and (b) could have difficulty financing the transition.

Granted, tax policy isn't my forté - is there something I'm missing which would allow the easy implementation of a national health care plan?

Liberals On Campus

I know you're all crying about Times Select preventing you from reading John Tierney... that is, the little you can't glean from the headline for his column and his first sentence....

He recently wrote a rather incredible piece entitled "Where Cronies Dwell", which whines that it isn't fair that people accuse Bush of hiring cronies while not objecting to the faculty search process at law schools and journalism schools. Apparently he read a David Horowitz screed about the ratios of registered Democrats to Republicans at a handful of elite schools, accepted Horowitz's notion that "Democrat = Liberal" and "Republican = Conservative", ignored any faculty who did not register for either of the major parties (or did not register at all), and concocted "liberal to conservative" ratios based upon that childish analysis. Yes, folks, when Zell Miller taught at the University of Georgia, Tierney and Horowitz would have us believe that the faculty became more liberal.

Needless to say, neither Horowitz nor Tierney paid any heed to the fact that if Bush followed a search process similar to a typical faculty search, he would not have been able to hire the parade of fools he has appointed to important positions, let alone hit the 100% mark in preferred party affiliation. The Bush Administration is unabashed in pressing for Republican-only hiring policies on K Street, and from what I hear even within the lower levels of civil service (where party affiliation is not supposed to be considered). Although in some fields, or with some applicants, ideology may well be suggested by past published works, in many fields of law or journalism there won't be anything obvious about a prospective faculty member's publications which suggests a party affiliation - and the search committee can't ask. Tierney really thinks that there is a parallel?

For some reason - and one can hardly guess why - Tierney and Horowitz also present no estimates of the ratio of "liberals" to "conservatives" at top engineering schools or business schools. (They also don't complain about a lack of conservative professors at top schools of social work... I can only imagine how may hardcore conservatives are clamoring to get faculty appointments, and how many novitiate social workers are traumatized by the left-wing bent of their faculties.) You know what? Different academic fields attract different types of people, often offering them significantly less money than they could otherwise earn, and rewards specific types of thinking and analysis. If you are surprised that certain fields attract disproportionate numbers of "liberals" and others attract disproportionate numbers of "conservatives", you haven't been thinking very hard.

And despite the experience of crybabies like Ann Coulter, I don't recall that the even the most stauch conservatives in my law school class feared retalation, and many were very outspoken in class. I looked up what a couple of them, the most obvious and outspoken of the conservatives in my section, are doing today... One is a partner with a large law firm, and another is a VP and general counsel with a Fortune 30 company. Oh, how they suffer. As for Tierney's suggestion that "more than 80 percent" of the nation's press corp is Democratic, that does not appear to be even close to true:

Another highly regarded study, the 2002 American Journalist Survey, found that 37 percent of journalists called themselves Democrats (just a few points above the proportion of Democrats in the general population), 18.6 percent said they were Republicans, and 33.5 percent were independents.

Does this mean that in TierneyWorld, if you're not a Republican you must be a Democrat? He seems to have lost his center.

Today, Tierney's follow-up offers the teaser: "Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views." Oh, I doubt that. But if Tierney's logic is supposed to pass for an example of what Liberals fail to find persuasive... that's nobody's fault but his own.

Tierney whines that the number of "liberal" faculty members, presumably based upon the child-like analysis he cribbed from Horowitz, is increasing. Well, you know what? The ratio of conservatives on the nations courts, particularly the federal courts, seems to be increasing faster. Although Tierney has yet to identify a single qualified conservative who was unable to obtain an appointment to an elite law school or journalism school, he is offended by the concept that such discrimination might occur. (Tierney instead resorts to the standard evasion, "many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus" - many? How many? How qualified are they? How many faculty jobs have they attempted to obtain? How did they compare to the people who got the jobs? While I would not contend that "Righties Can't Teach", it is somewhat amusing to note that in asking "Why Righties Can't Teach" Tierney fails to distinguish opportunity from ability.) The real world? I guess Tierney is trying to impress us that he, himself, truly is an "academic" by observing the caricature that academics are stuck in the ivory tower, and are oblivious to the real world.

Judicial Activism, or Asleep On The Bench?

The Greatest American Lawyer takes on the Michigan Supreme Court.

Pet Peeves

David Brooks quotes Harriet Miers as writing for the Texas Bar Journal,

More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems.

* * *

An organization must also implement programs to fulfill strategies established through its goals and mission. Methods for evaluation of these strategies are a necessity. With the framework of mission, goals, strategies, programs, and methods for evaluation in place, a meaningful budgeting process can begin.

The article at issue reminds me of medical reports I have read, annotated "dictated but not read", or perhaps something automatically generated with this.

The Dog Ate My Homework

"Harriet Miers has tons of experience with Constitutional issues, and has provided first-rate work product."

"Can we see any of it?"

"No."

GW - Failed President?

Unless GW gets very lucky, very quickly, I think he will go down in history as a failed President. The primary basis for my anticipated future assessment is the Iraq fiasco. It is possible at this point that tomorrow's vote on a new constitution will lead to stability - but I doubt that the stability will emerge prior to GW's exit from office. It remains possible that GW will concoct a brilliant strategy to end the insurgency, stabilize Iraq, and foster democracy - but again, absent unexpected good fortune, such a strategy is unlikely to visibly change the security situation before he leaves office. Once he leaves office, his successor will lay claim to any successes. If things haven't markedly improved since that time but improve afterward, the successor will claim that new policies and approaches led to any success. If things don't improve, eventually a President will announce our withdrawal from Iraq and be credited with getting us out of Bush's quagmire. Either way, absent a quick payoff to the present constitutional gamble, Bush would lose.

Meanwhile, one way or another, his reckless fiscal policies will catch up with us. And as much as it is nice to speak of an economic "recovery" that favors the rich, the blue collar middle class is likely to eventually come to resent globalization that results in their downward spiral to lower middle class or working poor. Take a look at the Delphi bankruptcy - which appears to be focused on avoiding union contracts, reducing wages by 2/3, and avoiding present and future health care obligations. (Prior to declaring bankruptcy, Delphi demanded wage concessions of up to 61% as well as significant reductions in its health care obligations - with, of course, no parallel sacrifice by its generously compensated executives - even those executives who are being laid off are receiving an 18 month severance package.)

At the same time, bankruptcies to avoid pension obligations shift more and more corporate debt onto the consumers, through the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., and it is likely that additional major employers (such as GM and Ford) will follow Delphi's lead. Now it is possible that some of the major bankruptcies (such as Ford or GM) will occur after Bush leaves office, which could cause the public to perceive some of the responsibility as falling on his successor, and it is probable that the history books will acknowledge the global trends which contributed to this result. But unless he does something quite surprising and out-of-character, Bush will still be the President who didn't even attempt to formulate a coherent response to globalization. Even a failed attempt is better than none at all.

Increases in poverty, the beginning of the end for the blue collar middle class, increasing numbers of workers who are without adequate health care coverage, a quagmire in Iraq, absurd debt accumulated while slashing taxes for the rich, record prices for energy (with record profits for energy companies, who nonetheless receive billions of dollars in new subsidies) which may even bring back stagflation.... Well, you tell me - what you you think the history books will have to say?

Sovereign Immunity

Oren Kerr makes a funny.