Aftermath of Florida Amendment 1: We're not even seeing the worst of it yet

So far, the only response I've gotten on this blog has been my post about the Florida Amendment One proposal at the beginning of this year. Mainly, I was against it, as it 1) it wasn't going to be the answer to people's problems with their homes not selling and their mortgages getting tighter; and 2) it wasn't going to solve the revenue problems the state was facing, simply because by cutting back on the taxes that generate the revenue Florida statewide services (schools, libraries, police, fire emergency, child care, road care, health care, all care) needed it was going to cut services at the worst possible time.

The amendment happened because politicians fell in love with tax-cutting. Tax cutting made them look like they were being fiscally responsible. Tax cutting made them popular with people who kept thinking "Oh, I don't wanna pay taxes, why worry about road repairs and law enforcement and fire/emergency response times?" And because if they didn't keep pursuing tax cuts bullies like the Club For Growth Greed were going to hound them out of office.

But the problem is, tax cuts can only go so far: we're at the point now where the state can't generate any more revenue. And Florida, which relies on tourist sales taxation, millage taxation, and very little else for state revenue, is still facing a year of fewer homes owned and fewer tourists traveling (notice the cost of gas recently?). And the Florida state budget is starting to reflect the last few years of decreasing revenue.

We now have in the news that school districts are facing severe cuts to where they are laying off teachers and closing schools. Teachers that are remaining are facing a 2 percent salary cut in some districts: they are already one of the lowest-paid employees in the public sector anywhere, in a state that's routinely at the bottom of the list when it comes to education spending. Counties are looking at 15 percent cuts across the board at various service offices, with the sheriff's looking at 10 percent cuts. And do you want to know the worst part about all this?

We're not seeing the worst of it yet.

The whole nation is, let's admit it, in a recession: jobs are down, the dollar is weak and shrinking on the global market, oil and food (!!!) prices are going up on a global scale, you name it. What will happen is that more and more people are going to demand more and more help from one of the cornerstones of society, the one stable force in an unstable world. The government. BUT THERE WILL BE NO GOVERNMENT TO HELP THEM. The money's drying up, gone, we're losing it just as people are going to be needing government services to get food on their tables, to deal with health care, for city and suburban infrastructure, help to find jobs, help to keep their kids in schools and off the streets, pretty much help that they expect from an institution that's supposed to promote the general welfare of the people.

This is what constant tax cutting gets you: a government unable to help when it's needed most. We didn't need tax cuts: WE NEEDED FAIR TAXES. And we're still waiting for that.

Gregg Easterbrook: Constitutional genius?

Not only am I a political obsessive, I'm also a football obsessive. I check the sports sites such as ESPN every so often, and every Tuesday keep an eye out for Gregg Easterbrook's TMQ weekly rantings.

This week, he's working on the insanity and imbalances of the draft, but he also goes off on tangents and talks about other topics, sometimes politics. Halfway through his article for April 22nd, he goes off on the insanities of the Presidential campaign, and makes a pair of suggestions that once I read them made absolute perfect sense.

He points out how Presidential campaigners during the primary tend to be sitting elected officials (such as the current three survivors, McCain Obama and Clinton), who divide their time between campaigning and performing their elected duties. Easterbrook notes how they can't really campaign and work as Senators at the same time, and so suggests that in order to run for the office of Presidency you have to resign your current job and focus full-time on the campaign.

This makes truckloads of sense. Rather than stretching yourself thin juggling twenty things at once, you can now focus on just the campaign and juggle five things instead. Also, a resign-to-run law is honest, as you no longer get an income for a job you're not really doing (note the occasional dust-up in the press about who's absent during floor votes). Lemme quote from Easterbrook here:

States including Arizona, Florida and Georgia have in recent years passed "resign to run" laws that require an office-holder seeking higher office to resign from his or her present position. The time has come for a resign-to-run law at the federal level. Membership in the U.S. Congress should not be treated as a lifetime entitlement that pays whether you perform your sworn responsibilities or not. In 2007, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, then in the Democratic field, actually moved to Iowa and lived in the state -- yet was still taking his taxpayer-funded salary for serving the people of Connecticut, a job he was making no pretense of performing. It may be nonsense that the current political reality requires a year of round-the-clock campaigning to win a party's nomination, but taxpayers should not subsidize this nonsense.

As a back-up proposal, Easterbrook suggested that Congress goes back to a per diem salary: get paid for the days you show up to work. Given that Congress has been and will always be prone to paid vacation leaves up the wazoo, and given that members of Congress have a habit of not showing up half the time anyway, why pay them for the days they're not clocking in? Forcing a per diem salary encourages they show up and do their jobs and be held accountable. I love that idea.

Yo, Easterbrook, dude, why aren't you writing for the Washington Post or New York Times? Oh, right. They don't hire columnists who make sense.

New amendment proposal for hackers and virus spreaders

My home computer is on the fritz. Somehow, something got into my System32 folder and 'changed' the shell32, user32, and system32.dll files, as well as the ntsofldr (?sp?).exe file.

As such, I cannot log in to anything requiring ID and password. Other Internet pages, anything with PHP to them, I can't open well.

As such, I now have a wonderful new amendment proposal for those who create viruses, spyware and adware, worms, trojans, and any other form of computer malware:

• Death to all f-ckers who mess with my computer.

Kill 'em. Kill all hackers. You have no redeeming social value, you bastards. Your viruses create chaos, havoc, they ruin people's lives, innocent people, some of you steal identities, and you steal money, and for what? To indulge yourselves at others' expenses. Screw you. You die for this. Die painfully.

You may notice I'm in a bit of a mood.

Plugging a book moment, brought to you by:

Glenn Greenwald, who is offering up his new work, Great American Hypocrites, on Amazon.com now.

Why Mark Twain is still the greatest smartass ever

I must admit, I never knew Mark Twain wrote something like this, until a library patron came up and asked for a copy: an essay titled On the Decay of the Art of Lying. I found this via the Project Gutenberg website.

This was something he wrote for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford back in... hm gotta find the year. Anyway, his opening paragraph alone should put the Ann Coulters and J-Pods of the world to shame:

Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption,--no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, a Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this Club remains. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become me to criticize you, gentlemen, who are nearly all my elders--and my superiors, in this thing--and so, if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than of fault-finding; indeed if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this Club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shed a single tear. I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. [It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and give illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished me to beware of particulars and confine myself to generalities.]

A bit wordy, true, but I found it so hard to find a spot to paraphrase or edit down, as each word literally drips with sarcasm, truth (ironic uses of truth will abound regarding this), and best of all wit.

Above all, the value of Twain's essay was how Twain 'praises' the art of lying, all to highlight in Truth the sad little horror that everyone lies. The question then becomes ending the 'lazy' and 'faulty' practices of lying, those lies that do harm (the injurious lie, which to Twain was as harmful as the brutal truth), and in Twain's words that

...the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then--But am I but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot instruct this club.

I personally, stated elsewhere, prefer that we not live in a world built on lies, that I would like to see punishments inflicted on those in office who would lie. I am, however, not a fool. I know the underlying fact that people lie, that everyone does. I do too. My great objection to lying is the thing I agree with most in Twain's essay: that there are lies and then there are injurious lies, lies that do harm, and it is those lies I would like ended. Twain, of course, was not a hypocrite (well, actually he was, but he was honest about it) and so could not argue against lying at all. The brilliance of his work here is that he highlights the aspects of lying, the causes and its usefulness, and makes the proper distinctions between the 'soft' or positive lie and the 'harsh' injurious lie. The kind of injurious lies, in fact, we keep getting from the Bush administration (about 9/11, about Iraq, about torture, about wiretapping, about cronyism and incompetence and... and about nearly every thing they do).

As someone who yearns to achieve the status of Recognized Smartass, I bow to the infinite jest and wisdom of the true Master, Mark Twain, who emphasized the Smart as well as the Ass. Huzzah, sir, huzzah.

Spitzer, Vitter, Democrats, Republicans, Hypocrites All

The issue here is hypocrisy.

As I write this, sick at home, the news channels are all atwitter over New York Gov. Spitzer's pending resignation, following reports of his patronizing a high-class call-girl operation. This is a noteworthy event on several points: 1) Spitzer is a well-known public official from a large state; 2) Spitzer's earlier career as a hard-nosed prosecutor made him a figure of "reform and ethics", which is now laughable; 3) Because the Republicans are utterly gleeful at the sight of a high-ranking Democrat finally nailed in a sex scandal after years of their own getting caught with their pants down; 4) Sex sells.

To be honest, there are no heroes here, and perhaps a few victims (above all Spitzer's wife... for the love of God, will we ever see one day a wife getting medieval on their cheating bastard husband? They just stand there in the glare of the cameras and just let the whole world see the humiliation on their faces). The columnists and the bloggers are all bringing up issues of discussion (why is prostitution illegal? why can't we stop it? what the hell costs $4,000 per hour anyway?), most of them barely even relevant to the moment on hand (who cares how this affects Hillary's campaign? Unless her own cheating bastard husband used the same call girl operation...). The issue most obvious, and the most relevant, is the hypocrisy of it all.

I have no sympathy for Eliot Spitzer. None. His hypocrisy is that he spent years working as a prosecutor, even handling prostitution cases much like the one he's facing now. The evidence, the money involved, his own discussions requesting particular models... this is not entrapment, or a trick. If it were he'd be fighting it. He had to have known that what he was doing was illegal. And he did it anyway. His hypocrisy stems from what has to be a belief in his own moral superiority, his own arrogance, his own belief that he and he alone would never get caught. Join the club, Spitz.

On the same point, I have no desire to side myself with those in the Republican party that had been screaming for Spitzer's resignation, like the state GOP demands that he resign office or face impeachment. These Republican leaders are the same ones who routinely ignored their fellow party members' indiscretions (Mark Foley text messaging, anyone? Can we get some more pictures of Larry Craig's bathroom stall in that Minneapolis airport?), and are still ignoring the indiscretions of Senator David Vitter, a Republican who got caught soliciting a call-girl service in much the same way Spitzer did. Compounding the issue with Vitter is that he was one of the more vocal speakers against Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal for Slick Willie's sexual indiscretions. Anyone noticing the circular/spiral pattern starting to form here...? As for the Republicans, I can't be the only one who wants to stand in front of them and denounce their openly forgiving Vitter for sins they've openly accused Clinton and now Spitzer of doing.

What we are seeing here are levels of hypocrisy piled upon layers of desperation, two political parties that have essentially become mirror images of each other right down to the constant need to spin and lie and excuse their way out of disasters, the constant need to protect their own even when the lawbreakers are so clearly in the wrong, the constant refusal to recognize issues in the real world in lieu of ideological talking points, the constant push to win win win at all costs. We are now faced with a political world in perpetual Damage Control Mode, where every action and statement is going to come back around to bite everyone's ass.

Is there any solution to this? Well for one thing, and I think I've suggested this amendment idea before:

• Lying is not protected speech.
• Any elected official, or staffer, or public servant found to have made false or misleading statements in any way shall be suspended from duty without pay pending full investigation. If found guilty by the law, that person is to be removed from duty and barred for life from holding any office or civil service position and also barred from any job that may have direct dealings with any level of government.
• And I would like to add to this amendment this idea: Hypocrisy is now a felony. Punishable by however Congress sets the law, but personally I'd like to see tar and feathering make a comeback.

If you're worried about this amendment causing a chilling effect, well you're right it does cause a chilling effect: IT'S GONNA STOP PEOPLE FROM LYING. The amendment allows for someone to defend their statements, and the best defense is the TRUTH. If what they said is the truth, they don't get punished. THE ONLY ONES WHO SHOULD GET PUNISHED BY THIS LAW ARE THE LIARS. And for those screaming "Free speech!" or "slippery slope" let me just note that you are essentially defending a right for a person to lie, to bear false witness, to basically go against the truth that should really be protected. Are you also saying that people should lie in court? After all, we have laws for Perjury, for Obstruction, and for making False Statements (even though SOME Presidents also ignore that as well, to their shame). It's just we should apply such enforcement to the political world, to ensure that the citizenry are properly and correctly informed. And if you're worried about forcing politicians and their staffers to tell the truth might compromise National Security, relax. There's an easy out: JUST SAY NO COMMENT. It's still truthful, after all.

One last thing to say. It might surprise people to note that lying (outside of paid advertising of products) is not only currently protected but is some ways encouraged and nurtured. This is the political world we've built, where lying is the coin of the realm, and reality is basically ignored to the suffering of all. That's what I'm watching as Spitzer resigns, as the media elites bicker and crow according to their ideologies, and as the world keeps getting worse. Welcome to 2008, where it turns out Orwell was an optimist.

Florida vote... take 2

Every time I try to get out the vote... they keep pulling me back in! Hey, it's either that or quoting from Pacino's Scarface. Which would you prefer? Scarface??? Oh, okay: Rule number two, don't get high on your own supply.

Actually, this is a post about reports that Democrats want to get the two states they punished for improper primary timing - Michigan and Florida - to recast their votes. The primary slugfest between She Who Must Be Obeyed and the Boy King of Destiny is looking to go down to the last wire, and legally even though both Michigan and Florida voted anyway their delegates can't participate in the convention.

Hillary, who won both states (rather underhandedly in Michigan too), is petitioning to get those states re-admitted as is. Head of the DNC Howard Dean passed judgment on that yesterday making re-voting the only viable solution (there are other solutions, but most of them are questionable and confrontational).

Should the states re-vote? Part of me wants the voters of these states to be able to have representation within their party, as it wasn't entirely their fault their state governments tried to move up their primaries in order to be more relevant to the election cycle. This is what happens when you have states voting in stages, and the earlier states have a greater say in who stays in the race. The other part of me worries about the do-over aspect of this, that voters with buyers' remorse the first time around will switch around and we'll end up with a different result than before, and if Hillary suffers because of it (as she won the first time around) I am certain that she will unleash her flying demon monkey horde on us to wreak vengeance across the land.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

I'm for the re-vote plan, as long as 1) the vote is only for the Democrats, as the Republican party still allowed some delegates from Florida and Michigan to represent and as the Republicans have settled the issue on who won (a clone of Dick Cheney... John McCain), and as long as 2) all the names on the original ballot get listed. If people still want to vote for Edwards, even though he's dropped out, they should. If the ballot shifts to reflect only Clinton and Obama, people can argue that the re-vote isn't exactly the same and will gripe/moan/bitch/unleash freaking flying monkeys over it.

In the meantime, there is one great grand solution to this whole mess that would work if only the parties were compelled by law to do it (because they won't do it otherwise): HAVE ALL THE PRIMARIES ON THE SAME DAY, AND HAVE THE PRIMARIES COUNT THEIR VOTES THE SAME WAY! Sheesh! Christ on a Harley! (headthump noises)