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
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
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
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
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
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.
IN-08: Hostettler advocates deporting 11 million
The Evansville Courier Journal article doesn’t quite make clear that Hostettler supports deporting the estimated11 million immigrants who have not complied with all of the U.S. naturalization laws, but I don’t think there is any other way to parse his advocacy of a so-called “hard line” on immigration.
He opposes the Bush and Senate immigration proposal which allows, depending on who you talk to, a “path to citizenship,” “a guest worker program,” or “amnesty.” Politically, I guess I’m content to watch the Republicans have a food fight over the issue. Personally, I don’t think it’s really our most pressing problem — but that might just have to do with being an upper-middle class professional in Indiana. I think we have more pressing problems like paying off our debt, getting out of Iraq, developing a sustainable energy policy, combatting global warming, developing a better approach to health care, securing the ports, rehabilitating our reputation as a good world citizen, and fixing trade agreements that benefit owners of capital while screwing workers. Regardless, I don’t think mass deportations are very realistic, nice as it might sound to some constituents.
He doesn’t live here anymore
Not at all related to Indiana, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a rather amusing editorial hammering on the fact that Senator Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum doesn’t live in Pennsylvania any more.
Before every election, the Post-Gazette routinely sends letters to the candidates seeking material for the Voters Guide. Back in March, as part of that process for the primary, the newspaper sent a letter to Rick Santorum at his home address, at least the one that he claims. Back from Penn Hills came the letter with a sticker from the U.S. Postal Service checked as “Not Deliverable As Addressed — Unable To Forward.”
That is all you need to know about the nasty dispute between the Republican Sen. Santorum and his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., in the November election. The whole thing is rooted in one inconvenient fact for Sen. Santorum: He doesn’t live here anymore.
The editorial repeats the sentence “He doesn’t live here anymore” at least 4 times.
The Flipping Point: An environmental skeptic believes in global warming
For those of you who think the existence of the phenomenon of global warming is debatable, Scientific American has an article by Michael Shermer entitled: “The Flipping Point: How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip.” (Quite a mouthful.)
Apparently the approach used by the environmental activists had turned him off to their message in the past. His mind was changed by, among other things, a speech by Al Gore which included before-and-after photographs of disappearing glaciers as well as Jared Diamond’s excellent book, Collapse.
He closes with:
According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants.
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
IN-09: The Debate over debates
Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has an article on the “debate over debates” in Indiana’s 9th District. Democrat Baron Hill is chiding Republican Mike Sodrel over his current reluctance to debate. Meanwhile, Libertarian Eric Schansberg is chiding Hill over his reluctance to debate him. It’s an interesting dynamic.
Says Weidenbener of Schansberg:
[I]t’s likely that neither Sodrel nor Hill will need additional publicity. The race will undoubtedly receive tremendous attention in the local and national media, and both candidates will have deep pockets to pay for whatever advertising they want.
Schansberg, though, will likely be looking for a little attention.
Sodrel’s chief of staff, Cam Savage, said the Republican wants to attend “multiple debates.” And it’s likely Hill and Schansberg will want the same.
The real question will likely be whether any debates that develop will include Schansberg.
After all, his chance of winning the race is slim to none, but his chance of affecting it is quite large.
In 2004, Sodrel had only about 1,400 more votes than Hill. So even if Schansberg takes just 2 percent or 3 percent or 4 percent of the vote, he could determine the outcome of the race.
Also, Schansberg is a professor, economist, prolific writer and articulate speaker. So it’s possible that he could hurt both of his opponents in a debate or at least stir up some issues that neither really wants to address.
I’ll be interested in Schansberg’s reaction when, presumably, the major candidates decline to include him in the debate. Will he argue that it’s in the best interest of society that all candidates be included in debates? Or will he take what I would regard to be a more libertarian approach of cheerfully agreeing that if it’s not in Hill and Sodrel’s personal best interest to debate him that they ought not agree or be compelled to agree to it?
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