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Anti-Flag Desecration Amendment filibustered

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A Constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration died one-vote short of overriding a filibuster. How will the nation ever survive? Oh, wait, the flag is a symbol of the country; it’s not the country itself. This bit of flag idolatry is an annoying and transparent attempt to turn the flag into a political weapon in preparation for the November elections. There have been about 7 instances of flag burning in the past 2 years, and this is how the Congress chooses to waste its time.

If anything, forbidding flag burning will make it a more attractive political statement. On the other hand, maybe if Congress is busy debating manufactured issues like this one, they’ll be too busy to cause more real problems. Nah, probably not. How long would it take to rubber stamp another war?

National convoy stops in South Bend

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The Indiana Department of Transportation issued a press release on the National Convoy’s trip across the United States to commemmorate Dwight D. Eisenhower’s historic 1919 trip across the country when he was a Lt. Colonel. The trip was historic because it was then he had a vision of what would become the Interstate Highway System.

The Indiana Dept. of Transportation annoyingly links this event with the Governor’s highway privatization plan which he calls Major Moves.

The press release states:

June 29, 1956 marks the day federal law brought America its unparalleled Interstate Highway System. Since that time the system has transformed our nation and economy. To this day the Interstate System remains one of the greatest public-works projects in history.

That’s accurate. What did the Interstate Highway System do? With tax dollars, it built a network of high quality roads available mostly for free to citizens. The roads contributed to an explosion in the economy that has more than made up for the tax dollars spent building those roads. That doesn’t sound at all like “Major Moves” to me.

Llamajockey and others around here have made the point that perhaps roads aren’t the best transportation tool available to us anymore given the increasing scarcity of oil and the diminishing returns of adding new roads to the existing ones. But still, to me the lesson of the Interstate Highway System is that government can use taxes to benefit society by building infrastructure that is accessible to all citizens.

Howey on Iraq

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Brian Howey wrote a column that was published in the June 24, 2006 News and Tribune that follows upon a previous column he had written and also discusses how the issue is playing in the 9th District.

I did not see the initial column, but apparently it drew the ire of Rose-Hulman chemistry professor, Dan Jelski.

“Sorry, but I think you’ve got the Iraq thing all wrong. From your column you’d think absolutely nothing had changed in Iraq at all. But you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.” He sees a prospering Baghdad exploding with satellite dishes instead of bombs.

Jelski suggests that Howey is proud of the insurgency or at least has great faith in its powers. Howey responds by citing a number of statistics that show things are not as rosy in Iraq as Jelski seems to think: Oil production is down, electricity production is stagnant and well below demand, unemployment is rampant. Doctors are leaving the country when they’re not being murdered, fewer kids are in school, 2,500 members of the U.S. military are dead, 30 to 40 people are kidnapped daily, 788 bombings have killed 6,800 people, and 100,000 familes have been displaced.

Jelski responds with what he doubtless thinks is the coup de grace:

Jelski observed: “The problems with the Brookings data is that you’d have to believe that life under Saddam was better than life in Iraq today. There is NO evidence to support that contention at all.”

Howey says the demons have been traded. I am reminded of Hobbes Leviathan. Hobbes suggested that Man in the State of Nature — i.e. without government — would be the war of all against all and, in such a state, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, and short.”

The social compact was an agreement whereby individuals traded a world of innumerable predators of various stature for one super-predator, the King. If the King came after you, you were screwed, and it wasn’t fair, especially, but in return most of the people got overlooked by the King and lived lives free of the petty predators they would face absent a King.

What we’re seeing in Iraq, essentially, is the aftermath of the local super-predator, Saddam Hussein. So, the people face a world filled with lesser monsters instead of a world with just the one. Neither state is particularly “good,” but depending how beneath the notice of Saddam you were under his reign, I can see where life could be worse today than it was under Hussein.

But, you may say, “why should the poor people of Iraq face either situation. Shouldn’t we give them a democracy that keeps them free of monsters both big and small?” To which I respond, “How much does it cost? and What’s in it for us?” I’m relatively selfish about how our government spends its money and am not a big fan of expensive humanitarian missions. This one has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. I think we could get more bang for our blood and treasure here at home than trying to make the world nice for Iraqis.

As for the 9th District, apparently Hill is trying to get to the right of Sodrel, apparently calling for an indefinite U.S. presence in Iraq:

“He doesn’t believe a politically set withdrawal date is good public policy,” said Mike O’Connor, a lead consultant to Democrat Baron Hill, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Mike Sodrel. “We’re committed to a path in Iraq that we have to pursue until it is resolved. There would be consequences that would come out of our withdrawal from Iraq right now that would be negative in his eyes.”

Meanwhile, last week we were treated to the spectacle of the do-nothing Republican Congress engaging in a bit of wankery by debating a non-binding resolution that gave members of Congress the opportunity to make tough noises about how resolute we were in remaining stuck in the Iraqi quagmire.

Days after that resolution, we learn that:

The top American commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September, American officials say.

According to a classified briefing at the Pentagon this week by the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the number of American combat brigades in Iraq is projected to decrease to 5 or 6 from the current level of 14 by December 2007.

The question appears to be not whether we will withdraw troops in the next year or two, but how this can be done without Bush looking weak or the Republicans looking like they were pushed into doing something the Democrats wanted to do.

Meanwhile, Senator Lugar, is skeptical that the conditions are right for a draw down of troops.

“Given current events in Baghdad, in particular, reported on every day quite apart from Anbar province, the violence is horrific,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “So getting to the plans either of General Casey or [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki are a broad sweep. But it is good news to know that there are contingency plans.”

This post has strayed a bit from its original focus. But now I’m left to ponder who to trust on the current state of Iraq: Senator Lugar or Professor Jelski.

Bloggers for Bayh

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Maureen Groppe, writing for Gannett News Service, has a story entitled “Bloggers push Bayh for President: Senator’s following tries to create wave.”

It has this over the top quote from one blogger, a 55 year old part time school instructor in Southern California:

“I’ll never forget his strong, steel-eyed look in his eyes. Nothing
weak there,” Earl gushed in one of three online columns he posted about
the evening. “I saw the look of a president.”

The article comes back to earth with what I think is an accurate assessment:

“I don’t think bloggers are going to pick the next president,” said
David Perlmutter, a University of Kansas mass communications professor
who is writing a book on political Web logs, or blogs. But, he said,
blogs can help candidates by creating excitement for them or serving as
an “early warning system” for what’s playing well and what’s not.

A Hoosier blogger gets a mention: Confessions of a Hoosier Democrat which, upon brief review, appears to be all-Bayh, all the time (I’m sure during certain periods, my blog could have been viewed as all-DST, all the time, so I’ll add it to my RSS feed and keep an eye on it.)

You say goodbye, I say hello

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Sylvia Smith, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article on the trend of former members of Congress becoming lobbyist once they leave office. She reports that, of the 30 legislators who have left Congress through retirement, death, or election defeat, 10 of them became part of Washington’s lobbying business. 5 of them remain active in the industry.

Grandstanding on Immigration

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The Evansville Courier Press has a good editorial on the Republican strategy of grandstanding on immigration. They note that House Republicans have torpedoed the immigration bill supported by the likes of President Bush and Senator McCain and, instead, will spend the summer holding as many hearings as they can on immigration where they can hold forth on what an urgent and unmitigated evil we face.

The Courier Press puts it nicely:

The delay so that House Republicans can spend a month grandstanding on the issue means there’s a real likelihood there will be no bill at all this year, either before the lawmakers knock off to campaign for the November elections or in a lame-duck session afterward.

If that happens, everything goes back to square one in the new Congress.

The Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. If immigration is truly the urgent national problem that they say it is, failure to even try to deal with it, in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “would be to me a sign of inability to govern.”

Bayh signs on to Net Neutrality

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Well, good for Sen. Bayh. According to Talking Points Memo, the good Senator has signed on to support Net Neutrality. I’m not particularly familiar with the details, but at it’s heart, it’s a requirement that network providers can’t discriminate between the bits that pass through their networks so as to provide better service to favored people, content, or businesses.

Telecomm companies seem to be arguing that if they could only charge for preferential treatment of bits traveling along their wires, then services for customers would blossom and innovation would explode. I think I heard this one before during the Telecomm Act of 1996, and I don’t think the predictions quite panned out. (How much competition do you see in local telephone service? How much has your cable bill gone down?) So, I’m skeptical of the telecomm claims.

I think Senator Bayh is on the side of the angels on this issue.

Liberal Indiana: Summer Reading for Liberals

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Liberal Indiana has a post entitled “Summer Reading for Liberals.” Of the books with which I am familiar, LI mentions 1984; Animal Farm; Guns, Germs & Steel; Collapse; and the Bible. (The Bible was mentioned as something LI had read in an ultra-conservative high school, but in the comments, I pointed out that the bits about Jesus in the Bible tend toward the liberal, particularly those parts in the Sermon on the Mount.)

1984 and Animal Farm are good because they illustrate the dangers of unchecked government. In the comments, I suggested John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” Both of those books illustrate the dangers of an unchecked market.

Most ominous, perhaps, are Jared Diamond’s Gun’s, Germs & Steel and Collapse. They are more ominous because, as the saying goes, “Mother Nature bats last,” and she can dish out far more pain than either unchecked government or an unchecked market.

Another book I forgot to mention over at LI, is John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It’s a pretty good philosphical justification on why folks should pretty much just be left free of coercion as much as possible.

Proposed Federal Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment

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A number of Indiana’s Representatives are co-sponsors of H.J. Res. 88 proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Indiana co-sponsors are Chris Chocola (IN-02), Mark Souder (IN-03),  Dan Burton (IN-05), Mike Pence (IN-06), John Hostettler (IN-08), and Mike Sodrel (IN-09).

The substantive portions of the proposed amendment would add the following language to the United States Constitution:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

So much for states rights. This proposed amendment would not only prevent recognition of gay marriage under federal law, it woudl prohibit the people of a state from constituting their respective governments so as not to discriminate against gays.

The broadest provisions of this proposed amendment reads as follows: “The Constitution of a State shall [not] be construed to require the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.”

Potentially, that could be read to mandate that if something is a legal incident of marriage, a state cannot required it to be conferred on a non-heterosexual union.

The Constitution is too important to be trifled with in this fasion.

What he said

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Hunter has another of his inspired posts over at DailyKos. Short version: Liberals don’t and never opposed the Iraq War because they were against the (so called) War on Terror(ism/ists); rather they oppose(d) the Iraq War because it actively hurts our efforts to eliminate terrorists.

But, as ever, he says it so much better than I ever could.