Earlier today I read something by the normally-insightful KC Meesha that has been gnawing at me for a little while now. He lined up a number of position statements attributable to a major-party presidential candidate and then commented on each one in a way that at first was somewhat comforting (thank God this man doesn’t vote), but then started itching at me (too many people think like this and vote). Gotta scratch that itch.

Let’s line a couple of points up and take a closer look, shall we?

[…]I support many ideas in theory but I am not doing anything about it. Where is a plan?

Specifically on the subject of abortion rights, at the federal level there’s basically nothing to be done other than put Supreme Court justices on the bench that will strike down Roe v. Wade or pass a constitutional amendment clarifying the constitutional place of patient-doctor confidence. Neither major-party candidate is looking to put anti Roe v. Wade justices on the bench, and the president of the United States has no constitutional role in the passage of constitutional amendments. This is a non-issue in 2008, just a cultural wedge people are using to drive people to or away from their polling places.

This immigration plan is ridiculous and unworkable and the fence idea is beyond stupid. Over 5,000 people got through much shorter and much better guarded Berlin Wall, so how can anyone expect a 700-mile fence to do the job. I am all for illegal immigrants (make them legal) as long as they 1)Pay taxes, except for Social Security since they cannot collect it; 2)Do not receive any taxpayer-provided assistance no exceptions;3)Obey the law. If they still want to come here and work I don’t have a problem. On the other hand if I were Obama I’d try do make everyone forget I voted for that joke of a plan and come up with something short, loophole-proof, frugal and usable. He can use my plan above for free. Not much change here.

Both major party candidates substantially supported the immigration plan in question here. Regarding Meesha’s proposed fix, most illegal immigrants pay taxes (they submit bogus identification to their employers who withhold payroll taxes and such that the employee will never see direct benefit from). It is nearly impossible to live in an industrialized society without drawing some benefit from taxpayer funds. We have socialized sewage treatment, water supplies, state-protected power monopolies, socialized roads, postal systems, et cetera. The second condition is ludicrous on its face. Perhaps if softened to a “no direct subsidies or special programs to specifically benefit illegal immigrants” we’d be back in the realm of the reasonable. As for the third point, illegal immigrants by definition have violated a law. Remove the illegality of the original entry (or overstaying of some visa or other) and they are roughly as likely to commit actual crimes as anybody else.

[…]I am not so sure straight troop withdrawal is such a good idea[…]

This is a widely-spread misrepresentation of Barack Obama’s Iraq policy. His stated goal is to “be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” Whether you believe that or not is certainly up to you, but the only people that were arguing for a precipitous withdrawal were Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul (“We just marched on in, we can just march on out”). Attributing a straight cut-and-run disordered rout to Obama’s policy goals is ever bit as intellectually dishonest as the claims that John McCain wants to have a boiling insurgent conflict over there until the 22nd century. It just isn’t true and doesn’t match the candidates’ statements in any reasonable interpretation of their original contexts.

[…]I just don’t want it turned into something similar to the last days of Vietnam War. Someone smarter than me should devise a working plan to get out without putting American lives and property in danger.

Yes, that’s what generals are for. Tell them “Get our boys out safely, you have 18 months” and if they’re worth their stars, they get it done. If we cannot trust them to manage a withdrawal, we should not trust them to manage an occupation.

What kind of non-position is that? I don’t care about gay marriage as it is a non-issue for me.

Yes, it’s a non-position on a non-issue. So what? I don’t care whether a presidential candidate agrees with me or not on issues I don’t care about. I similarly don’t care if a candidate doesn’t care about issues I don’t care about. I’d much rather they held positions on important matters that are in their job description.

Workers of my age have been all but officially informed that were are not getting Social Security. Why not let me manage a tiny amount of my own money, mismanagement of the funds is one of the reasons Social Security is going down.

First, Social Security will still be there so long as the payroll tax is being paid by people that are still in the workforce. It will almost certainly not be able to pay out at the levels it is supposed to according to the current cost-of-living adjustment schedule. This is primarily due to the fact that the workforce is aging. The funds were only mismanaged in that the Social Security Administration has been purchasing extremely safe securities from the federal government (floating our deficits) instead of creating the incredibly touchy proposition of a government agency purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of private securities on the open market.

Second, you can manage your own money. There are entire industries dedicated to people managing their money. Stocks, CDs, bonds, real estate, baseball cards, fast food franchises. Invest your money however you like. What Meesha probably meant here is that he doesn’t like paying taxes. Yeah. People don’t like paying taxes, but we also don’t like potholes and homeless elderly people all over the place.

Raising taxes again. Not very smart but sure to please a lot of people. No change here, same old “tax the rich” song and dance.

Wait, doesn’t want to leave Iraq. Doesn’t want to pay Social Security taxes. Doesn’t want to raise any of the other taxes. So how do we pay the soldiers over in Iraq? With yellow ribbon car-magnets? How to we pay the people who are holding government-issued bonds? Print more money? That worked great for 1920’s Germany. It is politically infeasible to cut back our defense, Medicare, and Social Security budgets (the lion’s share of federal revenue goes to those three things) enough to cover our expenses without raising taxes. It is politically infeasible to raise taxes enough to support all the programs everybody wants. It is increasingly difficult to continue putting everything onto the national credit card. This is why we have professional bickering little sluts (legislators) duking it out all the time for us in Washington.

Cut defense spending and people will howl that we’re being irresponsible. Reduce Medicare and the health care infrastructure takes a huge hit as even more treatable conditions fall back to the emergency rooms. Touch Social Security at all and the AARP mafia will break your kneecaps (not literally, but old people vote, so politicians are afraid of ticking them off).

Raise capital gains taxes and homeowners looking to sell will cry bloody murder, investors will scream that new factories and shopping malls cannot possibly be built, no new jobs will be created, mobs of unemployed young people will rove the streets slaughtering the innocent, the gutters will run red with the blood of the innocent, chaos! Raise tariffs and prices at Wal-mart and Home Depot will skyrocket, sorely-pinched working people will be denied the affordable luxuries that keep them docile. Raise income taxes and highly-paid professionals will all decide to stay home instead of going to their quarter-million-dollar-salary jobs, and somebody will howl that a family consisting of a Firefighter and a School Teacher (capitalized because these are politically-sacred professions) will magically be in the top income-earning bracket despite their chronic representation as underpaid and under-appreciated public servants.

Taxes are touchy. The only thing you can say when running for office that is politically safe when this subject comes up is “my opponent is going to mishandle taxes terribly.” Democrats like to lean towards a policy of “we’re going to try to get the money out of the people that can best afford to pay it and have benefited the most from this country’s opportunities.” Republicans like to lean towards a policy of “we do not want to discourage the best and brightest from excelling, so everybody should pay the same.”

June 3rd, the proper primary day for California, is upon us again. There’s basically nothing to talk about on the US Representative side of things. Barring an act of God, Lynn Woolsey is getting re-elected. Heck, nobody’s even running against her in her own party. The state Senate and Assembly positions are also uncontested at the primary level. The Presidential contest has already been weighed in on back in February. Heck, we only have two ballot measures to think over, both on the same issue:

Prop 98 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Also includes lots of fun little provisions that get rid of rent control and make it practically impossible for the government to ever impose new regulations on anybody that could possibly be construed as damaging their property value somehow. Probably a bad idea.

Prop 99 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Basically like Prop 98 but with less gotchas built in. Basically a populist backlash against something the Supreme Court did a while back. I’m unaware of any actual cases of the State of California seizing property from homeowners that didn’t want to sell, then turning around and selling it to private developers. The pro-98 campaign is basically just an anti-99 effort operating on the assumption that nobody wants the government to take their land. Well, so far as we can tell, the government doesn’t actually want your land, so I’m disinclined to give this one the thumbs-up either.

So it’s looking like a “no” on both of the live propositions.

Board of Supervisors
If you live in District 3 for the County of Sonoma (like me) you’ve got a bevy of supervisory candidates available. Wright, Zane, and Smith all look like the most likely picks here, with Sharon Wright having won the notoriously lousy endorsement of the Press Democrat, our local newspaper. The endorsement was posed as a close call between her and Tim Smith. Tim Smith has the great virtue of having the exact same name (down to the middle name, identical) as the former incumbent, and further benefits from having an atrocious website. Veronica Jacobi is another Santa Rosa City Councilwoman looking to make the jump to the county level, but her curriculum vitae reads like exactly the kind of political actor better suited to represent the West end of our county, not the 3rd district. Shirlee Zane looks credible, and seems to be hitting all the right buttons to appeal to the local body politic, but suffers from an apparent endorsement from the sci-lon empire, her election signs having appeared on their local HQ’s front lawn. Not a great association there, from my perspective. Wright also suffers by association with Herb Williams, local power broker that has helped shoehorn a number of local figures into positions of power that they haven’t done a lot of good in.

I probably should have done a series of posts on these folks, but I know that most of the people who comment on this blog don’t actually live in the 3rd district. Of course, I also figured I’d decide who I was voting for earlier than this, and I’m still fence-sitting. Bad burrowowl, you should be a better voter!

There has been a lot of talk recently about possible vice-presidential picks for the likely Democratic nominee for the office of the president of the United States. At some point, Barack Obama has to make his choice. Much of the talk has been focused on notables such as senator Hillary Clinton as a form of bridge-building reconciliation between the two warring tribes that the Democratic party has fractured into during the nominating process. Others have proposed senator John Edwards as a possible pick, citing working-class appeal, a southern appeal, and a general reinforcement and amplification of senator Obama’s core message of change. Other names like Biden and Dodd have been raised as possible bulwarks against accusations of naïvité on foreign policy issues. This is just among the other contenders for the nomination. Kathleen Sebelius is another name I keep hearing, as is Jim Webb. Each have certain regional or topical strengths.

But people don’t vote for the vice president when they show up to the polls in November. The name will be on the ballot, but it’s the top of the ticket that draws the greatest scrutiny and consideration. As an opportunity to help secure the election, the choice of a running-mate has more to do with the news cycle during which it is announced, a minimal bump or hit in the polls after any vice presidential debates, and fundraising. As for the actual duties of the office, the vice president is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and be available for tiebreaker votes in the Senate.

I just don’t know who would be truly useful for fundraising. Presumably Clinton would be strong in this area, as she has already raised and spent a stupendous amount in pursuing the nomination herself. For amplifying a message of change and a new direction unifying the country and setting aside the divisive politics of the past twenty years, though, I humbly suggest an alternative that may be mentioned frequently as a possibility for John McCain: governor Mike Huckabee.

That’s right, the Arkansas Baptist minister turned cultural-conservative second-place contender for the Republican nomination. Let us consider the upside:

• He has executive office experience as governor. This could help offset potential claims that the ticket lacks leadership experience.
• His public service experience includes working together with a Democratic-controlled state legislature. We know he can function when surrounded by crazy left-wingers.
• His conservative credentials are centered almost entirely around cultural wedge issues. These are the major symptoms of the cancer that Barack Obama claims to be seeking a cure for before it kills our body politic. Inviting him onto the ticket is a major gesture towards spanning a multi-decade political divide.
• His record on the actual operation of government is quite moderate, having implemented government programs and tax policies in a pragmatic manner that makes led many fiscal conservatives to turn their back on him. This man can work with Democrats on their key issues of trade, education, infrastructure, and health care.
• He’s got a band. They’re not that great, really, but they do a passable cover of “Freebird,” and could save the campaign a few shekels on campaign-stop entertainment expenses.
• Dude is seriously charming. Actually listen to him for more than six seconds and you may have diametrically-opposed policy views with him but probably won’t dislike him. Not a lot of people can do that any more.

These are all positives. I also suspect that inviting this specific man to be a running-mate would result in roughly three quarters of the Washington media punditocracy to crap their drawers and run screaming into the woods. Experts that once forecast a Clinton vs. Giuliani main event would likely spend no less than a month huddled up in a fetal position, rocking themselves an sobbing into empty Jack Daniels bottles. Multiple fire and brimstone preachers and vociferous atheists would wander the streets in a muddled daze. Very little could happen for several days that could knock this off the forefront of the political news cycle short of a foreign invasion.

The negatives are all too obvious:

• He is a Republican. This means he is likely to no accept the position, and many Democratic party insiders would get their panties in a bunch over this gesture.
• He has endorsed John McCain. This almost certainly means he would not accept the position at first blush. Senator Obama is a persuasive man. Get the two in a room together and let some magic happen.
• He is strongly against abortion. He does not want Roe vs. Wade overturned, he wants a constitutional amendment. This isn’t really an issue, as it isn’t the purview of the vice president to revise the constitution.
• He joked about somebody pointing a gun at senator Obama. Considering that being his veep would put him a bullet away from the presidency, this would be especially tasteless and probably require him to commit seppuku should something of the sort actually happen.

I don’t think that the negatives outweigh the benefits here. Every right-wing claim that Obama is some kind of radical Islamic Secularist Leftist (if such a worldview is even possible) would ring hollow to even the most credulous audience. An Obama-Huckabee ticket would win in New York and California, in Illinois and Arkansas, in Iowa, Virginia, and the Carolinas. It would beat McCain in most of the South, and force him to fight hard to keep even Utah and Texas on board.

TL;DR: we should let the funny southern guy back into the political limelight.