Opinion-Columns.com

A Constitutional Right to Thievery and Deceit

All you need do is A) be a member of Congress and B) keep all the paperwork of your misdeeds in your Senate or House office, including the computer.

The Black Hole of United States government, a legislator’s office. Perfect. Jack Abramoff’s mistake for his clients was to have an e-mail address outside those hallowed halls and thus a record of two-way communications. No more. It’s a bit more cumbersome, but selling legislation has just gone from the Internet to the back room.

Legislators are comfortable there. Back rooms most famously disappeared at National Conventions, where the guy (or gal) they committed to pretty much got there by way of State Primaries. But nearly all partisan legislation is based on midnight meetings of the select. So it’s not as if anyone in Congress has has to look very far to retrieve their talent for the clandestine.

Who would have guessed that, just when we needed it, another Jefferson would come along to uphold and support our sagging Constitution. This one is a crook, a ‘founding-father’ of another stripe, who ‘found’ a way to turn his fund of trust into a ‘trust-fund’ to support himself and his family by payoffs. This Jefferson has a freezer full of neat little packages of marked bills, marked by the FBI prior to an arranged payoff.

The discouraging side of Representative William Jefferson is that he is probably truly ‘representative’ of the House to which he was elected. Congressional moral outrage is tinged by the obvious fear of what may be found in who’s desk drawer next. Compared to the dough tossed around by Abramoff, the petty scam of which Jefferson is accused is embarrassing. Who knew that votes could be bought so cheap?

Makes it tempting for the American Public to try to buy back the legislature it has lost to private money.

Jefferson had been duly served with a subpoena some nine months ago and flat-out refused to answer it. One can excuse the FBI for concern that he used those nine months to cover whatever tracks were coverable. There is a timliness to investigation and, just like the right to a speedy trial, there is a right to an answer short of nine months.

Rep. Senseless Sensenbrenner has come to the rescue. The good Representative from Wisconsin, Chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, has risen to use that power, not in the defense of the American public to which it answers (or doesn’t), but in defense of hiding the pay-off bottle of booze snugly in the paid-off desk drawer.

The Chairman said he wants the Attorney General and FBI Director "up here to tell us how they reached the conclusion." Presumably, a lesson can be learned from that, so other malfeasant congressmen can learn to be less clumsy.

This legislative ass, sitting as Chairman on one of the most powerful congressional committees, said the raid was "profoundly disturbing" on constitutional grounds. Not generally a source of profound thought, the chairman also said that his committee

"will be working promptly" to draft legislation that would clearly prohibit wide-ranging searches of lawmakers' offices by federal officials pursuing criminal cases. (Washington Post, May 31)

Well, that’s just dandy. There isn’t even a thread of constitutional connection to this raid. The Constitution says House and Senate members "shall not be questioned for any Speech or Debate in either House." Jefferson (the current, not the original) isn’t being questioned about ‘speech or debate.’ He’s going to be grilled like a Gulf redfish about graft and corruption.

A ‘constitutional lawyer’ (sigh) testified that

"when it comes to documents, the only way you can search is to read everything. And when you read everything, you encroach on the 'Speech or Debate' clause."

Excuse me? This guy (Bruce Fein) is a constitutional attorney? No wonder we’re in such deep shit. How does reading documents, discarding the ones that are not pertinent and avoiding those that are part of ‘speech or debate’ in the Congress, bruise the Constitution?

What absolutely trashes that honored document is to pick and choose among its words to cloak legislative piracy within republican government. Jefferson is a Pirate. The man will follow Randy Cunningham into the pokey, proving once again that selling the voters down the river is a bipartisan, equal-opportunity priority within the Congress of the United States.

So, now we have another ‘gate’ to go with Watergate and Whitewatergate. The sad truth is that iGate and Jefferson’s clumsy handling of graft, shows just how cheaply government can be bought and that we’re unlikely to run out of bidders for the honor.

Stuff that in your constitutional law book.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Glacially, the New York Times Enters This Century

This is a sandwich story and it’s not flattering, so be forewarned. The editorial writers within the esteemed New York Times newspaper have taken forty year-old bread and tried to make a sandwich of it, as though it was something shocking. Gail Collins runs the editorial show at NYT. What about it, Gail?

I suppose it’s news of some value that they’ve awakened to the country's financial plight, jostled from the sleepy comfort of their easy-chairs by the fire, to finally notice.

The top slice;

“Recent stock market turmoil has been a plus for United States Treasury securities. Over the last couple of weeks, investor demand for safety has generally pushed up the price of the benchmark 10-year Treasury bond, making it cheaper for the government to borrow. But there is still plenty of reason to worry about the United States' borrowing binge.”

Harrumph! Pretty inciteful. Great god in the morning, they have found something to celebrate in the government’s ability to borrow more cheaply. Willingness, enthusiasm, stumbling over one another in a rush for the door of indebtedness, has been the hallmark of administrations and congresses since Eisenhower.

It took the entire history of the nation over a hundred-thirty years to achieve the remarkable and stunning debt of 1906. A total $2.3 billion. The equal of two days worth of current load on our grandkids. Think about that for just a moment, roll it around in your mind and gaze off into the horizon, try to get a grip on the totality of it—every two days we indebt our nation to the equal of it’s first 130 years.

The New York Times was printing in 1906, as it was in 1946. During those intervening forty years, America fought two world wars and “Fair Dealed” its way out of a devastating depression. The total debt grew a hundredfold through those multiple disasters, to $269 billion. Thirty-eight and a half weeks worth at today’s spending rate.

The New York Times snuffles and grumbles, shifts itself in the chair by the fire, orders another cognac and finds “plenty of reason to worry about the United States' borrowing binge.”  Wake me when it gets serious.

It gives me chills to hear the patriotic warning call of a great American newspaper, marshalling its readers to awareness. Not action, mind you. Action might require actually getting up from that upholstered comfort, possibly worrying an investor or two, arching a few eyebrows over on Wall Street or (god forbid) alerting the underemployed of New York.

A warning call, a hundred years late almost to the day, then back to a comfortable doze by the fire.

From 1946, during the Truman administration, America faced the turmoil of troops coming home, the country getting its feet back under itself, the massive reorganization from a wartime to peacetime industrial base and the financial consequences of the GI Bill. Truman was a big spender. By the time he left office, the National Debt had actually been reduced by $3 billion from the time he was inaugerated. Not a lot, but a reduction over seven years, something that would not be seen again in our history.

Fast-forward exactly a hundred years from 1906. Today’s National Debt stands at an astounding three thousand, two hundred-sixty times the 1906 debt. In that year, the average wage in the United States was 22 cents an hour. If that wage had grown at the rate of National Debt, the average would stand today at $717 an hour and annually the average would be nearly $1.5 million.

A nation of millionaires. Wouldn’t that be grand as MacNamarra's Band?

The bottom-slice of the NYT sandwich, 

“Of course, no one knows the future. But we can size up our present reality: America is living beyond its means, and foreigners are increasingly supporting the excess — in exchange for a government guarantee that a chunk of America's future collective income will benefit them, not the Americans who earn it.”

While I hate to interrupt the Great Newspaper Snooze, your and my slice—our personal slice of U.S. debt, multiplied by how many wives, kids an husbands in our family—our commitment to the present-and-accounted-for debt, is $27,000. Family of four? $108,000.00. A debt that grows at the rate of $694,444.44 every minute, twenty-four hours a day.

How’s that for “no one knows the future?”
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.

An Indecent Proposal From Senator Bill Frist

Ah, the pressures of election years.

From the minimum two years between getting elected to Congress and running again, to the maximum six years the Senate enjoys, it’s never-ending. The ghost of Election-Past is hardly out the door before Election-To-Come’s chains can be heard, rattling up the steps.

It’s even more complicated when you’re running for president and the levers of opportunity are slippery in the hand. Bill Frist, Senator from Tennessee, has particularly greasy hands and his bid for the nomination looks pretty bleak at the moment.

The interesting thing is that candidates seem inured to what is actually going on, listening too well and too exclusively to their supporters. Frist has shown himself to be as inept as anyone in recent memory at the job of Senate Majority Leader and yet he’s bending over for the radical right in the Republican Party, presuming they think him up to the larger and more complicated job in which George Bush has failed so completely.

Bill has a mission, which is always handy in place of a philosophy or a following. The mission is to excoriate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens for letting the House Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005 languish, as it should languish. Stevens has too much sense to lash out at an already hapless and wounded TV industry with fines ten times the already outrageously high.

But Stevens isn’t trying to become president. One wonders why anyone would aspire to that thankless job. It’s worse than working for George Steinbrenner, but Frist wants it. He sticks a finger in the media eye and expects they'll go easy on him. Go figure. You want a guy that dumb for president?

So, he’s caved to the Janet-Jackson-reactionaries, those brought the boob-tube a whole new meaning.  It’s nice timing for this little tidbit, tossed to the reactionary right. With mid-term elections five months away, what Senator is going to be seen as soft on porn? Idiotic, but hey, since when has Congress ever disregarded the idiotic, when votes were being counted.

We are a country of widely varied addictions and always have been. Since Puritan times, those who claim the right to our moral rectitude are ever vigilant on our collective behalf. Without their constancy, we’d have never enjoyed the fruits of

• Prohibition
• Stockades
• Debtors prisons and workhouses
• The war on drugs
• Back-alley abortion
• As well as the current pathological fear of nudity

None of which have added anything positive to our social fabric. No one in the actual business of law or politics has had much luck over the hundreds of years we have been a nation, curbing the addictions of our imperfect selves.

In fact, I doubt the new and improved fashion-plate preaching fraternity would want to stamp out lust and addiction if they could. Where’s the profit in that? Where’s the morality rant, without moral failure? What would happen if the world actually turned out to be safe after the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast?

I saw my first photograph of a naked breast, not in Playboy, but National Geographic. Women in Africa seemed not to mind nakedness. It was a revelation to me. Countless evangelical invasions of Africa over centuries and yet, there it was. A breast. Uncovered. No more to them than a feeding device for children, one that with the help of God and Nestle, we will successfully cover and reduce to an object of curiosity and sin. How do their complicated and intricate societies maintain themselves with such blatant and unrepentant nakedness?

Mark Twain suggests that the only road to moral perfection is by facing, not hiding the sin

“As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime you learn real morals. Commit all crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by and by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.”

And he may be right. He has been right a time or two.

No price is too high, according to those who would guide us, for their protections against our weaknesses. Not Al Capone’s Roaring Twenties, nor the billions that keep an international drug trade vying to supply our national addiction. Certainly not the evil minions serving the base greed of Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC or the hundreds of lascivious cable companies. Desperate Housewives and frantic conservatives.

A half-million bucks per occurrence for broadcasting "obscene, indecent, or profane material," however one might choose to define such ambiguous wording. On top of that the FCC would be required to consider revoking the station license of any broadcaster fined three times or more. Talk about your Three-Strikes law.

Twain also said, “ It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Slap on the fines, boys. It’s an election year.
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There are lots of Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

It’s Never About What It’s About

Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives was reported to have been ‘white hot’ with President Bush on Air Force One coming back from a Chicago meeting.

The War in Iraq and its 2,600 dead doesn’t have the Speaker even mildly perturbed. A couple trillion in additional national debt hardly ruffles the Great Man’s brow. The defenestration of the Constitution and immigration policy have his attention, but he’s yet to break a sweat.

A hard man to ruffle, this leader of the leadership, but every thing and every man has a limit and six years into this administration, Dennis Hastert’s limit has finally been exceeded.

The FBI raided Rep. William J. Jefferson’s congressional office. White hot, old Dennis faced his president at 35,000 feet, (soft) drink in hand and he was white hot.

On the basis of my theory that ‘it’s never about what it’s about,’ you can bet the farm that Hastert doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to Louisiana’s Bill Jefferson. The man can go to prison (and probably will) and the Speaker is unlikely to see him off or send him a card on his birthday. Not only that, Jefferson’s a Democrat and Hastert would dearly love to see more of them indicted before November.

What it is about, is the Congress of the United States feeling what they believe to be more than their share of the wrath of the American public, particularly the voting public. Representatives and Senators have never (in my recollection, anyway) been so far down in the public esteem as to be looking up at lawyers and used car salesmen.

They’ve done a lousy job.

Republican and Democrat alike, they’ve let their nation down and they know it. It’s idiomatic that if a kid thinks he or she let their parent(s) down, they’ll strike out, get white hot when that parent criticizes the way they mowed the lawn. Congress is no different.

The FBI raid was just one more straw in a year of straws, in large part kicked off by Jack Abramoff and his never-ending shadow over never-knowing legislators. Everyone in Congress has their shoe a little bit muddied by K-Street and, like all the kids in school cheating a little bit on their tests, that knowledge, that wondering who might next be pulled into the principal’s office, makes for defensive attitudes.

Enough time living and working under the axe and white hot comes easily.

If the Justice Department and the FBI had just come galloping into Jefferson’s office without cause, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert would be justified in their screech that the inviolable separation of the three branches of government had been violated. But Justice and the Bureau got a warrant from a federal judge as they are required to do. Further, they raided on a Saturday night, when (like the other six days) Congress is mostly asleep and the raiding party’s comings and goings would be mostly unseen.

Senator Charles Schumer made a valid point in a letter to Hastert that the Republican controlled Congress pretty much looked the other way as citizens raised issues about phone records, warrantless raids on citizens and even the government’s treatment of non-citizen prisoners, adding that “as soon as someone in Congress was targeted, the whole story changed."

As Randy Cunningham so deliciously proved, being in Congress is no protection from the law. Dick Nixon solved the dilemma from the executive branch and, although we have yet to raid a Supreme Court justice, there are many who would love to see it happen. Hastert, Pelosi and Frist are wrong. Government, including its separated branches, is not ever above the law.

What all the white hot rhetoric is about, boils down to

• Senators and Representatives close to indictment
• The current high water mark of Congressional greed
• Extreme itchiness over who might be next
• Republican estrangement from a Republican administration
• Frenzied majority concern over November’s mid-term elections

Personally, I think George Bush has become so heavy-handed with his majority in Congress because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both refugees from the discredited Nixon administration, have led him there. Each of them have their own discredited histories in that Nixon failure. Each of them feels that the presidency (and by association, their particular offices) never recovered from the Nixon resignation.

9-11 was their chance to rewind the tape and rewrite presidential power.

George Bush may have come late to the party, but all else has come from that rewriting. The emasculation of the Congress derives from the perceived emasculation of the presidency itself. There are many collisions in government, it’s part of what politics is all about, but this may be the first time in American history that an administration came so quickly to butt heads with its own majority.

What is that old line? Absolute power corrupts absolutely?
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Taxes Are No Longer About Income For Government

The myth is that taxes support government’s ability to provide essential services. Further, the myth would have us believe that tax burdens are distributed equitably, everyone doing their share.

The fact is that taxes are Congress’ tool with which to fiddle. Our Senators and Representatives use their ability to write tax law the same way bees use flowers. To make honey. The incredibly bloated K-Street conglomeration of lawyers and lobbyists exists almost entirely for the purpose of fiddling taxes on their clients’ behalf. Each self or industry-interest buys their own professional fiddler and that same interest provides funding to individual legislators so they will listen to the music.

Music, honey, bees, fiddlers, flowers—all convenient metaphors for graft. But the fact is (there's that fact again) that you and I don't have our own personal-interest fiddler. We're not supposed to need one.

There are those who rant that business and the rich don’t pay their fair share and an opposite bunch, equally sure of themselves, who insist that tax breaks are the growth stimulant for both jobs and economic stability. Each is an argument inspiring passion to the point of blows and neither is about money to run government.

Because taxes no longer support government. The engine of government is debt.

I’m going to make the point that Congressman John Linder, Republican of Georgia has made, eloquently, in his Fair Tax Bill (HR 25). You can check out Linder’s proposal in detail (http://www.fairtax.org) and I hope you will, because it quiets the inflamed rhetoric with good sense.

If I were trying to catch your attention (and who could possibly accuse me of that?), I would point out that Fair Tax eliminates, does away with entirely,

• Individual income taxes
• Alternative minimum taxes (AMT)
• Corporate taxes
• Business taxes
• Capital gains taxes
• Social Security taxes
• Medicare taxes (along with all other federal payroll taxes)
• The self-employment tax
• Estate taxes
• Gift taxes   

Which is a lot of fiddling taken from the hands of Congressional fiddlers.

It also negates the embarrassment of the $350 billion annually that the IRS is unable to collect and makes unnecessary numerous offshore tax havens for businesses and wealthy individuals. Sorry 'bout that, Cayman Islands. Welcome home, American business.

A good many benefits will accrue from the drying up of K-Street and the removal of individual Senators and Representatives from the messy and addictive intra-venous drip of campaign contributions. Notably,

• There will actually be time to legislate
• Bipartisanship will no longer be penalized by money-interests
• Competitive campaigns for national office will flourish instead of continuing to wither
• The ratio of listening and deliberating vs posturing may be improved

All of which would be positive influences on a national government that is increasingly polarized and isolated from the interests of its various constituencies. Namely, you and me.

The Fair Tax does entirely away with the Internal Revenue Code. It’s not an improvement or a modification of an effort at messing with distribution or emphasis, not a political effort to do away with this in order to save that. The whole thing is out. Over. Drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub. Send the tens of thousands of IRS employees home, close the hundreds of regional offices, sell off the computers, re-lease the office space, nail the doors shut and call it a day.

We will, each of us, pay a 23% tax on retail purchases. That floats the whole boat.

Before you go ballistic, thinking that your new Mercedes or a bag of oranges (both, actually) will cost 23% more and ‘how much of this are you actually supposed to take in this unfair world,’ be aware of a single salient and unavoidable fact. The ‘imbedded’ and hidden costs of various taxes already in our goods and services, along with the private individual and industry costs of administering them, amount to approximately 20-22%. That imbedded cost will be gone. How will we be sure it goes? Competition will take it. Competition always takes relieved costs and returns them through price reduction.

So, essentially, Fair Tax is tax neutral, replacing 40,000 pages of arcane tax code with a simple and ‘one time’ retail tax.

‘One time’ means a new car or home will be taxed once, when it is delivered and never taxed again as a used product. Congress isn’t going to like this fiddling with their fiddling, even though Linder has steadily increasing support for his bill. Democrats particularly don’t like it, because it’s a Republican sponsored bill (HR 25).

But you’re going to love it.

Check it out and tell your friends. Ask them to tell their friends. That's how the Grass Roots grow. First thing you know, something may actually happen in Washington that makes things better and who knows where that might lead? FAIR TAX
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

A Leak in Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In

A tip of the hat toward Leonard Cohen for his line, “There is a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard writes of many truths and that is among the great ones.

But it applies to the current spate of corporate and governmental leaks and leakers, over which there seems to be such energetic controversy. The president is in a twit, the CIA tearing itself apart and the Department of Justice continues to unjustly threaten, Alberto Gonzales clawing his way back to 1918 to dust off arcane supporting legislation. The Attorney General cherry-picks later laws, ducking inconvenient judicial opinion to accommodate a lawless president.

It’s an age-old profession, turning in the boss. But we are seldom personally allied with the turners-in, because most of us are fully booked by the day-to-day responsibilities of our own lives and jobs. It’s not so easy to know (let alone understand) what goes on within the inner-sanctum of government or the ‘corporate floor’ of a Fortune 500 company.

Well, we’d better get personally allied, because we’re personally at risk.

For openers, there’s a lot to lose in exposing those environments. On the government side, it’s a civil-service climb for most and, once booted, once tarred with the onerous brush of tipster, you may as well look for work in the private sector. The private sector isn’t all that enamored with truth-tellers, so consider yourself pretty much permanently out of work.

It takes courage or insanity or a combination of both to finally dial that number, carried in a pocket, looked at daily, measured off against a mortgage, a kid still in school and walking away from full-coverage health insurance. That’s on the government side, which sounds like there’s a corporate side that’s different, but it’s really another side of the same coin.

Making a stand means standing alone. Bringing down an errant manager, a corrupt system or a fraudulent department head, first means casting your career into the sewer. That’s as personal as it gets. That’s for a lifetime. Those consequences live on in brilliant Technicolor, long after the headlines have faded to sepia, enforcing a personal cost not many are inclined to pay. Anyone in that position needs to check out www.whistleblowers.org.

Personally, I’m tired of Ken Lay and George Bush controlling the conversation, denigrating those who have the guts to put it all on the line. The business climate has been so warm, humid and inviting to the fruits of fraud that we’re harvesting a bumper crop. Federal government is infused with fraud, feeds on lies and then lies to cover the lies, then sells down the river every promise made and puts the blame on terrorists in foreign lands.

We have become a foreign land.

Perhaps Alberto Gonzales can explain just how this nation was to know that our private telephone calls were being monitored? Marine General Peter Pace might let us in on the Pentagon prescription for finding out our military was, in our name, torturing foreign nationals or prisoners of war or whatever Donald Rumsfeld cared to call them.

We still have a government that flat-out refuses to tell us who was invited into Dick Cheney’s ‘undisclosed location’ to carve up the spoils of our national energy. John Snow, our Treasury Secretary presided over the wholesale looting of the nation’s treasury. Our treasury. Not the treasury of the rich or the treasury belonging to compassionate conservatives. Your money. My money.

The national press and the TV stations are so concentrated in ownership, that when Rush Limbaugh spreads his venom, it’s carried on 500 stations. Pat Robertson calls for the assassination of a foreign, democratically elected, president and he’s not locked up as a nut-case, he’s revered. Adored by a religious right conservative cabal that has forgotten all about charity and humility, giving itself over to the un-Christian motives of hubris, grandiosity and self-indulgence.

Lesser luminaries than Robertson, Muslims all, are in prison for smaller (sometimes infinitely smaller) threats.

Investigative reporting has devolved to coverage of the shocking, as long as it is unimportant and the unimportant, so long as it is shocking. My speech is not as free as your speech, if you have more money, because our highest court has decreed that the ability to buy a larger audience is a more important constitutional freedom than the ability to be heard equally.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it precisely when he said 

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered.”

If you think I make a long complaint, show me where I am in error. In times like these the whistleblowers and the leakers are all that stand between us and tyranny. We presently have a government that tends toward tyranny, that leans in its direction, that thirsts for the opportunity to do what they can, not for the national interest but for the narrowest of self-interests.

We are required, each of us, to protect and honor those who, at great personal risk and cost to their families, allow the light to come in.
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

No Fly—No Work--No Damned Good

The Department of Homeland Security’s No Fly Program worked so well that Senator Ted Kennedy was grounded. No matter that he was standing right there in front of the airline personnel, white mane flowing, recognizably liberal, the computer said he was another Ted Kennedy on a terrorist-suspect list. The good senator has connections, yet it still took him nearly two weeks to get off the damned list.

Now here’s a thought. Maybe al Qaeda should stop calling their members Muhammad this or Saddam that and name their terrorist brothers after prominent Americans. Start with the House and Senate, then Hollywood stars, then run right down through the rock and country-western and hip-hop bunch. Tom Cruise al-Zarqawi or Willie Nelson al Aziz Awda. That ought to screw up the boarding arrangements across various American air carriers.

My point is that the Senate, in its wisdom, is recommending that the DHS ‘Basic Pilot Program’ should be expanded. In effect, Basic Pilot is a ‘No-Work’ instead of a No Fly program. True to bureau-speak, Basic Pilot hasn’t a thing to do with pilots. I don’t know why, you’d have to ask Michael Chertoff about that. Basic Pilot encourages employers to electronically verify the work eligibility of new-hires who are non-citizens directly with the appropriate federal agencies using the Internet.

We all know how well ‘appropriate federal agencies’ work, having watched them stumble over one another trying to find Mike Chertoff’s cell phone number.

And the Internet as a link to these appropriate federal agencies, what a breakthrough vision. The Internet is rife with Russian keyloggers and nearly every month breaks another story about identity theft (the latest just this week at Veterans Affairs), but we’re going to be able to tell an employer in Hardscrabble, Montana that this particular Juan Vargas is not any of thousands of other Juan Vargases. I can hardly wait.

Extending Basic Pilot Program from its current status as a voluntary platform to a requirement prior to employment will (sigh)

• Burden employers with yet another paper-chase.
• Threaten companies with huge fines for non-compliance
• Slide another layer of emotional trauma under immigrants
• Expose a job and the family security that goes with a job to the whim of software failure, human error and/or the power of yet another bureaucrat to mess with people’s lives

It’ll also cost a billion bucks. But be calmed by the fact that ‘many lawmakers’ think the program is worth the expense. These are the same lawmakers who gave FEMA a blank check to go out and buy a hundred thousand house-trailers that turned out to be absolutely useless.

One of them is Jim Sensenbrenner, a House Republican. The House of Representatives is particularly rabid on the subject of immigration because they’re terrified of what may happen to them individually and collectively in November. What on earth they hope to achieve by pandering to a ‘conservative’ base by selling out 43 million Hispanic-Americans is anyone’s guess. But Congress is a strange disorganization of the self-interested, masquerading as public servants.

Getting back to Sensenbrenner, he’s stated that

“People will keep trying to enter illegally if they believe an employer will hire them. Making the Basic Pilot Program mandatory will shut off this magnet.”

C’mon, Jim, you can’t possibly believe that. You may as well say,

“People will keep trying to sell drugs if they believe a user will buy from them. Making ‘Just Say No’ mandatory will shut off this magnet.”

Illegal immigrants have been working black in the American economy for a hundred years. Zeroing in on Wal-Mart is not going to make the shadow-employment go away, it’s just going to drive it yet further underground, something we’re desperate to keep from happening again and again and again. You can’t cut off jobs when employers want to hire and workers want work to do.

Like drugs, two forces are at work and Basic Pilot Program doesn’t address either of them. 1) There are illegal border crossers who will come no matter the law and no matter the risk, because they need work to feed their families. 2) There are (mostly) unscrupulous ranchers, farmers, Congressman’s wives and lawn-care businesses who need workers at wages unattractive to Americans. Those combined pressures put the lie to Sensenbrenner’s lack of sense.

Mike Chertoff, who’s never run a business with a need for undocumented workers, chirps that enlarging the program

“would give us the ability for the first time to say to employers--all employers, not just a small group--now you have a tool that will allow you to check the status of your employees."

I hate to be the one to break this to you, Mike, but employers don’t want a tool to check the status of anybody, much less their underpaid, mostly undocumented workers. What is it about these dynamics that Congressmen and Cabinet Secretaries don’t understand? Somehow they presume because they sponsor a law, against all reasonable judgement, it will solve a problem.

Giving workers more protections and making the process less burdensome for businesses is not an acceptable goal. That hasn’t worked in the drug intervention game, never worked during prohibition and will not work now.

One thing about computers, when they go down everybody understands that ‘the computer is down, don’t expect anything to happen until it is back up and running.’ Congress, on the other hand, is constantly down or out of town or on the make and seems to feel if they just make a noise, any kind of noise, we won’t notice.

We have noticed. We don’t like it, Messrs. Chertoff and Sensenbrenner, but we have noticed.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Trying to Get My Mind Around Barbaro

The colt’s racing career is over, his crushing injury witnessed by a crowd dressed for a wedding instead of a funeral. The stunning picture of jockey Edgar Prado, standing on the racetrack, leaning into and supporting a horse that had given himself over to his rider’s care. The rest of the Preakness field was long gone and unaware.

It’s late on Monday now and the surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania, after five and a half hours of surgery, say the colt’s life is still ‘a coin toss.’ But he’s standing on the leg that suffered a shattering injury and he’s eating. The feeling is, unless something goes terribly wrong, he’ll be okay.

Terribly wrong is not always controllable. Unless something went terribly wrong, he was a strong favorite to win the Preakness and go on to a shot at the Triple Crown.

Like many of you, I spent what was left of my weekend, the Saturday night and Sunday part, with Barbaro never far from the edges of my mind. I walked my Labrador and thought about him, ate dinner, showered, brushed my teeth and went to bed, all with the image in my mind of the colt and his jockey, leaning into one another, holding each other up. The power of loss. We’ve lost so much these past years in America.

I wonder at the fact that in the prop-wash of terrible news emanating from a terrible world, piped into our consciousness on a daily basis, the crippling of a two-year-old thoroughbred colt grabs so tightly at our collective gut. It may be that this is a heartache we can get our minds around, the destruction of a young horse’s career, come apart so nakedly in front of a hundred thousand screaming fans, caught in mid-scream.

The rest is too big. We are vulnerable and likely to compartmentalize the young men continually shot to bloody pieces in as unloved a war as this nation has ever fought. Embracing that loss too closely is dangerous territory, a place we mostly dare not go. Tens of thousands raped and murdered in Darfur, a planet in critical condition, whales grounding, immigrants chased down in American deserts, the wheels coming off our government, it’s all too much, too constant, too impossibly out of reach.

So we love the colt.

And why not? We need something clean and pure, gallant and untarnished to hold dear. God love him for that, he never let anyone down. Nor have his doctors, his trainer, owners or the weeping jockey who held up a half-ton horse with his hundred-ten pound body.

Barbaro will recover, because it’s his destiny to achieve that one final miracle for us. With any luck at all, and it’s his turn for luck, he’ll live another twenty-five years. He has no knowledge of what he’s missed, no understanding of careers or trophies or world recognition. Possibly, that’s another touchstone for those of us too closely tied to careers and trophies.

A life at pasture. A new career making expensive little thoroughbred babies. Someone to scratch his nose, find an apple in their pocket and lean into him when he needs it.

What’s not to like?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Shooting the Horse They Rode In On

I can only presume, after watching the Republicans these past six years, that they have chosen to achieve their goal of small government by shooting it. There is no other rational explanation.

The aggrieved portion of this country that has even the smallest tendencies toward liberalism has been in a constant state of buzz. Six years of buzziness, preaching to the choir, assuring themselves that George W. Bush and his accomplices are nuts.

Not true.

The man has trouble with syntax. Trouble with syntax is not trouble with focus and seldom has an administration been as focused as this one. They want, as Grover Norquist has so eloquently put it, 'to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.’ Norquist, who in certain other incarnations has actually made some sense, must not like horses. He prefers drowning the levers of electoral government to shooting kind-eyed animals.

Either way, make no mistake, they’re doing a damned fine job of it.

I’m not sure that Americans are aware of that goal. If they are, they (we) are not doing much beside standing around, iPods in ears, watching it happen. In six short years, Republicans have given two trillion dollars to the already rich in this country and they put it on a credit-card. The latest $70 billion installment was signed by the president on Friday.

Republicans have spent another trillion (and it will no doubt be two by the time they limp home) from Iraq. That went on the credit-card as well. There are two and a half years left and, unless the November mid-term elections take their majority from them, we can expect and additional couple trillion before our next chance.

I know you’re tired of all this harping about deficits. Unless you are among the top 2% who carry off all the gravy from Dubya’s inspired gravy-train, your deficits are growing as well. Consumer debt has never been so high as it is now in America and it’s not because we are undisciplined and out there buying a second Mercedes.

We’re strapped for our kids college, groceries and maybe (but only maybe) two weeks at Yellowstone.

A nation’s currency is as good a barometer of it’s health as any other, probably better, because people who deal in currencies are hard-eyed and hard to con. When Japan got in financial trouble, the world watched its currency tumble. Now Japan has straightened out its banks, written off some bad loans and the yen is climbing back.

The American dollar is in the toilet. Americans, for the most part, aren’t aware of that because they don’t travel abroad and, except for a smidge of inflation, the buck hasn’t changed much in what it will buy stateside. If you are American and live abroad, it’s a different matter.

An American, retired in Europe and getting $1,000 a month in Social Security payments, has lost $480 in the last six years. Any dollar he earns, steals or has given to him is worth 48% less than it was when this president sailed into office, promising to be a uniter and not a divider.

The world outside our shores has reason to believe we are 48% less credit-worthy and confirms that opinion with their discount of our currency. Nor does our Congress care all that much, because the ten-year financial instruments they foisted-off on China and other investors in 1996 are being paid off now at a 48% discount.

I am not a conspiracy-theorist, but if Grover Norquist and his neocons want to drown American government in the bathtub, there are two ways to do it.

• Make the government so small that it fits
• Make the bathtub overflow to drown everything

Unable throughout the Reagan-Bush-Bush administrations to control the size of government, mostly because of the unmanageable growth of Social Security and Medicare, Norquist and the neocons have opted to overflow the tub.

If it can't be reformed to their taste, they'd rather drown the whole miserable business in red ink. Shoot the horse they rode in on.

There’s not a single economist out there, including the self-serving and now-retired Alan Greenspan, who thinks this nation can outrun its debt. We simply face national and global financial ruin, yet this administration

• happily runs (you can’t fairly say ‘fights’) an unfunded war
• feeds voraciously at the earmark and lobbyist trough
• watches with impunity as sector after sector of the economy faces bankruptcy
• further unbalances the budget at every turn
• and gives what is left and whatever may exist in future to the super-rich.

Thus far, the Norquist tub runneth over.

Drowned in the backwash, we find at every possible turn another unfunded or underfunded program for the poor, the middle class, the environment, the schools, and all other government agencies from Amtrak to Voice of America.

Unable to shrink government sufficiently to drown our republic and its historic ideals in the bathtub, we are irretrievably casting it adrift in an ocean of debt. None but the wealthy get swimming lessons. None but the super-rich have life-preservers.

Grover must be pleased.
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

Make Mine Extra Crispy

There are a thousand stories from the back-barns of Kentucky and ten thousand more of Revenue Agents and moonshiners trying to outwit one another, but there’s only one Representative Harold Rogers. One might be enough. A single Huey Long was enough for Louisiana.

Empire-builders are extraordinary men. They are either made from heroic egos and messianic vision or they are crafted of the darker components, greed and a thirst for power. Those who know him better than I (who knows him not at all) and the electorate of the state that is home to the Kentucky Derby will have to judge this man.

That judgement is only five months and a few weeks off. But there is something off-color in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the environs in and around Corbin, Kentucky.

In between junkets to Hawaii (a state where Rogers has no constituents, but loves the cut of the greens) and setting up his son, John, in a start-up company (to which he has directed federal business), Hal comes off as an ordinary guy. Family man. There is a wry, Eastern European ex-communist saying that goes, “He who doesn’t steal from the state, steals from his family.”

In his 26th year on Capitol Hill, Rogers is the longest serving Kentucky Republican ever elected to federal office. Those before him were apparently caught sooner.

(From his web site)

In January of 2003, Rogers' colleagues selected him to serve as the first chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which is responsible for funding and oversight of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  

On the funding side, Corbin, Kentucky’s greatest benefactor has shoveled DHS money into his own version of homeland security, meaning Corbin. He's done that mostly by the insertion of what is called in the trade, ‘intervening language’ into legislation. My dictionary defines intervening as 'get involved, so as to alter or hinder an action, or through force or threat of force.' By that definition, Hal Rogers is a 'get involved' kind of guy.

In an Eric Lipton article from the NYTimes, Lipton quotes a security analyst,

"Something stinks in Corbin," said Jay M. Meier, senior securities analyst at MJSK Equity Research in Minneapolis, which follows the identification card industry, referring to the Kentucky community of 8,000 that has perhaps benefited the most from Mr. Rogers's interventions. "And it is the sickest example of what is wrong with our homeland security agenda that I can find."

On the oversight side of Rogers’ chairmanship, he seems to have stood idly by as DHS screwed up every single opportunity if found to be tested. The revolving door of composite ineptitude and leadership by political-hack, hit everyone in the ass but Rogers. Probably because his interests lay elsewhere. Overseeing is a tough business, when you can smell the bacon frying on the appropriation side.

Frying, by the way, isn’t an unknown process in Corbin. Col. Sanders did his first chicken recipe there in the 1930’s, but it was sixty years later that prosperity finally came to stay. Rogers, as one of those anointed by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, found chairing committees that oversaw huge appropriations to be equally ‘finger-lickin’ good.’

He has been known (I hear, but cannot confirm) to answer, when asked what it will take to pass some particularly thorny piece of legislation, “Make mine extra-crispy.”  The Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader last year called Rogers, “the Prince of Pork.”

One can only guess how far their tongue might have been in cheek.

Representative Rogers has made it his personal mission to create a new growth industry in Corbin and he states that growth will be defined by domestic security. But, in a cautionary tale for Corbin, Hal has shown himself to be available to other bidders for his services. Harold Rogers is no one-trick-pony, not by a long shot. Again, from the Lipton piece,

“Yet while the debate over card technology and printing (in Corbin) dragged on, a separate fight involving Mr. Rogers was playing out. Starting in 2004, his staff repeatedly pressed the Transportation Security Administration to hire a nonprofit Virginia-based trade association, the American Association of Airport Executives, to help handle background checks that transportation workers had to undergo to get identification cards. The trade association had no connection to Corbin, but it had longstanding ties to Mr. Rogers.

Since 2000, it has paid for trips by Mr. Rogers and his wife worth more than $75,000, including the six visits to Hawaii, four to California and one to Ireland, financial disclosure records show. Last year alone, Mr. Rogers spent a total of two weeks traveling on the association's tab."

And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we say goodbye to a man for all seasons, this purveyor of government largesse, keeper of the solemn pledge to take what can be taken and bring it home . . . your man in the pocket of each and every lobbyist . . . Harold Rogers.

Your vote in November will say far more about you than him.
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.