A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Anyone have a Big Brother checklist handy?

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The three biggest phone companies, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, provided the National Security Agency billions of phone records made by tens of millions of U.S. citizens. (Qwest Communications resisted the NSA records sweep.) But at least, as Doghouse Riley points out, it has yielded us all of those captured terrorists. . . or not.

Bush tried to defend the indefensible by saying:

“Al-Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans,” Bush said before heading to Mississippi to give a speech on Hurricane Katrina relief. He didn’t provide any specifics about the program, however, and walked away without responding to questions from reporters.

To which Senator Leahy replied:

“Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?” Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, railed at a morning hearing. “These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything.”

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee yet, but at the moment, I’m having trouble mustering a lot of rage at this outrageous behavior. I just expect this kind of civil liberties trampeling garbage from this administration and its Forever War. Maybe that’s the plan, just numb the populace with scandal after scandal until we simply shrug our shoulders and submit.

Camp Bayh

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I received an interesting mailer from Evan Bayh’s All America PAC. I’ll just cut and paste it as a public service announcement:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Evan Bayh will visit Indianapolis on Saturday, May 13th, to host Camp Bayh, a training session for people interested in working on political campaigns, building interest in local politics or running for office themselves. The two-and-a-half day training session will consist of a number of workshops led by Indiana and national campaign experts who will teach the nuts and bolts of organizing winning campaigns. On Saturday, Senator Bayh will meet with participants and speak with them about the importance of public service, his experiences in grassroots politics, and how he hopes Camp Bayh will help put Democrats in a position to win this fall.

The Indianapolis Camp Bayh runs from Friday, May 12th, through Sunday, May 14th, and will be held on the IUPUI campus. The Camp will include three separate training tracks, for those who want to work on a paid position in a campaign, for local party leaders and activists, and for candidates running for office this year. A second Camp Bayh will take place in South Bend from July 7th – 9th.

Portions of Camp Bayh will be open to the media, including Senator Bayh’s remarks to the Camp participants.

Saturday May 13 at 5:00 p.m. ET
IUPUI-Cavanaugh Hall, corner of Michigan St. & University Blvd.

Media interested in covering additional portions of Camp Bayh should contact the All America PAC at 202-326-0450.

This is not your father’s Republican Party

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I think Andrea Neal is engaged in some wishful thinking in this column. She suggests that the primary defeats of Senator Garton, Rep. Budak, Sen. Borst, and Sen. Johnson were cases of “voter imposed term limits.” In other words, she thinks that these legislators were removed primarily because they had served too long and lost touch with their constituency. If you look at their defeats, I think there is a different story to be told. I don’t know much about Budak, but Garton, Borst, and Johnson were all economic conservatives, but were reasonably moderate (by Indiana standards, anyway) with respect to social issues. They were taken down by social conservatives in primary fights where highly motivated and well-organized right-to-lifers can control the show.

The Republican Party in Indiana is becoming less and less friendly for social moderates and libertarians. If you are in favor of a government that stays out of your pocketbook *and* out of your bedroom, today’s Republican Party is not for you. This is not the Republican Party in which I was raised. This is not the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Rockefeller. It’s not even the Republican Party of Goldwater or Reagan. It’s something else. The theocratic wing of the party is taking over. They want an end to abortion. They want their version of Jesus Christ in the classroom, the courthouse, and the State House. If science conflicts with their preconceived notions, they want it out of the public discourse. Evolution must be diluted and placed along side Bible-friendly pseudoscience. Medical opinion on the beginnings of human life must be put aside in favor of religious dogma. Sex education must be abstinence only, even if it’s ineffective. Gays must be condemned, not tolerated, and certainly not treated as equals.

Ms. Neal’s theory that Garton, Borst, and Johnson were ousted because constituents regarded them as legislative deadwood that needed to be cut out in favor of fresher ideas ignores the politics of Walker, Waltz, and Drozda who defeated them. All of them are part of the so-called “Christian” right. (Though most of the social policies coming out of the “Christian” right seem more in line with select bits of the Old Testament than with the Sermon on the Mount.) Whereas the mantra of Goldwater  Republicans was “smaller government,” with the current batch it has morphed into “government small enough to fit into your bedroom.”

In today’s Indianapolis Star we see one of Senator Drozda’s efforts at social engineering cropping up again:  prohibit orphans from being adopted if they’re being adopted by the wrong sort of caring, competent parents, i.e. unmarried and/or gay ones.  Advance Indiana’s Gary Welsh was featured prominently in the Star article:

Gary Welsh, a family law attorney and Republican who worked in the 1980s for the Illinois House speaker, said the adoption issue could become politically charged if the case ends up before the Indiana Supreme Court and justices issue an opinion before the election.

Impact: While preventing gays from adopting is important to many in the “Christian right” and would spur them to vote, he said, other, more moderate Republicans might be turned off.

Comment: “A lot of people just see it as mean-spirited,” he said, “particularly if they know of a (gay) couple raising a child. Gay couples often are adopting very hard-to-adopt children. Often they are children no one else wants.”

So many of these social policies seem counterproductive to me. They steadfastly oppose abortion, and they discourage informing young women about birth control. Inevitably this is going to lead to more unwanted pregnancies and, presumably, children in need of adoption. Then they turn around and actively try to reduce the number of potential qualified adopting parents.

This is part and parcel with a “right to life” agenda that seems to envision only a right to life without rights except before birth and after brain death but not in between. That may explain why the United States has an infant mortality rate almost three times as high as Japan’s and on par with Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Judging from the comparative efforts of the Christian right to improve access to healthcare for citizens or improve the lot of impoverished citizens generally versus efforts to make sure they don’t get accurate reproduction information from their doctors or have the ability to obtain an abortion, the theory seems to be that it’s important to get them out of the womb alive (even if only just barely) and the heck with them after that.

There are more angles and links to this issue that I’d like to add, so I may end up updating it, but for now, suffice it to say that Andrea Neal’s suggestion that the victory of Walker, Waltz, and Drozda over Garton, Borst, and Johnson is merely a sign of “voter imposed term limits” is to miss the big story, in my opinion. This is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. More and more, the Republican Party is the party of the social conservative with economic conservatism being an afterthought instead of vice-versa as it used to be.

Atrios – Liberal Agenda

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Atrios comes up with a pretty good laundry list of liberal objectives if Democrats take power. I can get on board with most of this:

  1. Undo the bankruptcy bill enacted by this administration
  2. Repeal the estate tax repeal
  3. Increase the minimum wage and index it to the CPI
  4. Universal health care (obviously the devil is in the details on this one)
  5. Increase CAFE standards. Some other environment-related regulation
  6. Pro-reproductive rights, getting rid of abstinence-only education, improving education about and access to contraception including the morning after pill, and supporting choice. On the last one there’s probably some disagreement around the edges (parental notification, for example), but otherwise.
  7. Simplify and increase the progressivity of the tax code
  8. Kill faith-based funding. Certainly kill federal funding of anything that engages in religious discrimination.
  9. Reduce corporate giveaways
  10. Have Medicare run the Medicare drug plan
  11. Force companies to stop underfunding their pensions. Change corporate bankruptcy law to put workers and retirees at the head of the line with respect to their pensions.
  12. Leave the states alone on issues like medical marijuana. Generally move towards “more decriminalization” of drugs, though the details complicated there too.
  13. Paper ballots
  14. Improve access to daycare and other pro-family policies. Obiously details matter.
  15. Raise the cap on wages covered by FICA taxes.
  16. Marriage rights for all, which includes “gay marriage” and quicker transition to citizenship for the foreign spouses of citizens.

And things that ought to be obvious, but aren’t anymore:

  1. Torture is bad
  2. Imprisoning citizens without charges is bad
  3. Playing Calvinball with the Geneva Conventions and treaties generally is bad
  4. Imprisoning anyone indefinitely without charges is bad
  5. Stating that the president can break any law he wants any time “just because” is bad

Courier Press misses the point on Spy Games editorial

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The Evansville Courier Press offered an editorial that was mildly critical of the President’s choices with respect to Porter Goss and the CIA. Mainly they went after Goss’s attempts to reward political loyalty over intelligence compentence, which is all well and good. They glossed over the objection that the proposed CIA replacement was a member of the military rather than a civilian. I think that’s a serious concern that merits more attention, but that’s not my beef with the editorial.

What surprises me is that the Courier Press managed an editorial on the abrupt Goss resignation with nary a mention of the criminal investigation into his 3rd in command, Dusty Foggo, a man promoted unexpectedly by Goss to the lofty post. Foggo is the childhood friend of Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who is at the center of a Congressional bribery scandal that has already lead to the conviction of one Congressman, Duke Cunningham who pleaded guilty last fall to taking $2.4 million in bribes from Wilkes and others in return for federal contracts. The Congressional bribery scandal seems likely to lead to Congresswoman Katherine Harris, and Porter Goss is suspected of being connected to “poker” parties where Wilkes plied government officials with hookers.

I don’t think this is about Goss sacrificing intelligence competence for party loyalty. That appears to be the very reason he was sent to the CIA by the Bush administration. This looks to be like Goss getting his hands caught in one cookie jar or another.

Hostettler against anti-price gouging law

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John Hostettler is an odd duck. There are plenty of policies he is for that I’m against. But every so often, he does something politically tone deaf with which I sympathize on the policy level.

A month or two before the big tornado that hit the Evansville area, Hostettler voted against Katrina relief (citing, I believe, inadequate cost oversight and possibly rebuilding in flood prone areas). Today’s example is the anti-price gouging law considered by the House. As I understand it, the bill is mainly symbolic and ineffective as well as possibly redundant.

Hostettler likens the bill to price controls and claims it would lead to gas shortages and gas lines like in the 70s. His opponent, Brad Ellsworth took the opportunity to label Hostettler as a defender of Big Oil profits. I don’t think Hostettler is particularly concerned with Big Oil. I think he’s an idealogue who thinks that the “free” market is infallible. Of course, there is very little about the oil industry that resembles a free market.

Ellsworth takes the politically expedient route, given his district, of endorsing ethanol and biodiesel. Personally, I think we’re going to have to have a Manahattan Project/Apollo Program level commitment to developing effective hydrogen fuel cells.

Democrats: Not always so bright

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Congressional Democrats are making a stupid choice:

Dems Won’t Call on Jefferson to Resign Democratic insiders said that everyone from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on down would love to see Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) resign from Congress, “although they won’t make an open declaration about Jefferson because of internal party politics.”

The guy is crooked. Throw him out.

Bush: historically unpopular

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Chris Bowers at MyDD has some analysis of Bush’s latest poll numbers. Gallup has Bush’s disapproval rating of 63% — which is the same as Nixon’s disapproval rating at the height of Watergate (July 15, 1974.) Though I believe Bush’s approval rating of 34% is a bit higher than Nixon’s was. The gap between approval and disapproval (-29%) is within spitting distance of the all time worst held by Carter and Bush Sr (-31%).

Just, for what it’s worth, I’d happily replace George W. with Bush Sr., Carter, or Nixon. Incompetence *and* bad policy is a toxic brew. Dubya’s predecessors mostly seemed to suffer from one or the other but not both.

Immigration rallies

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Taking Down Words requested feedback on the immigration rallies. I left a comment there that seemed like the good basis for a post. In particular, TDW asked whether it seemed like a good political move or whether it would simply “motivate the right-wing conservative base that wants to build a wall around our country.” A couple of commenters noted that illegal immigrants had, by definition, broken the law and that appeared to end the discussion. One noted the political ineptness of the folks who flew foreign flags during the rally.

I responded:

I’m impressed that these other commenters have enough faith in our lawmakers to regard technical compliance with the law as the end-all-be-all of decision making. As for myself, I do not know enough about immigration law to know whether I should regard noncompliance with that law as more like raping a nun or more like straying over the speed limit.

As for the flags — I suppose it was politically foolish. But there is certainly a double standard going on. When right-wingers fly the Confederate flag, while we question whether they’re racist, they usually get off the hook by claiming that it’s a sign of their support for their heritage. We don’t question their patriotism. But we should. After all, the Confederate Flag is the flag of traitors. The flag of Americans who took up arms of against their government. The same can’t be said of the foreign flags at the rallies.

As for whether it will serve to motivate the right-wing Republican base, I think that’s something we have to stop caring about. Some emotional wedge issue will always be found to get those folks into a lather. Democrats have to resist the impulse to be quiet because they’re afraid Republicans might complain. The Democratic Party has become like a battered wife, walking on egg shells for fear of setting off her drunken lout of a husband.

Personally, I don’t know whether the rallies were a good move politically or not. In my opinion, the main immigration reform we need is with respect to wages and conditions of employment. I don’t have any real problem with the immigrants who come here seeking a better life. I think ultimately they give more than they get resource wise. They pay sales tax. Many of them overpay income tax and can’t claim a return. However, their inability to enforce legal rights mean that employers can underpay them with impunity. Absent employers’ ability to underpay illegal immigrants without fear of consequence, perhaps we would not have seen the steady decline of median wages over the past 25 years. But, in that debate, immigration is but one of many issues.