Congratulations, Minnesota. Enjoy your new senator. I suppose it’s too early for franken.senate.gov to be up just yet.

It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. Listen. Here come the drums. Here come the drums.

As you may have heard, Iran had their presidential election last Friday. This would come as a surprise to most people who base their knowledge of Iran on the news coverage they receive in the United States, because President Ahmedinejad is frequently referred to as a dictator in the press. We also get the impression that the president of Iran would be in a position to authorize military attacks against other countries. We also get the impression that Iran has been exceptionally belligerent since the 1979 islamic revolution.

None of those impressions are particularly true, but that hardly matters. When the official results were announced, the leading opposition candidate Mousavi cried foul. Credulous bloggers and tweeters around the world stood at attention and immediate cries of election fraud were echoing through the Internet. Ahmedinejad couldn’t have won! 75% of Iranians are under 27 years old! The youth hunger for reform! Mousavi is the great hope for democracy in Iran! Where is my vote! Holy shit, people got shot at the riots!

I’m a knee-jerk skeptic at heart, so I took all of this with a grain of salt and a bit of caution. When storefronts are being vandalized in the midst of a massive political protest, there’s going to be teargas. There are going to be policemen in scary riot armor. People are going to get beaten. This happens in any country over any issue. In most parts of the world, when protests of this scale and character take place, somebody gets shot. Unfortunate, but true.

The main problem I see with the outside world’s reaction to Iran’s election results, whether on blogs or Twitter or CNN or my local newspaper, is that we’re getting the same echo chamber effect I’ve seen before. This is the kind of coverage we got about Panama before we invaded to snatch up Noriega. This is the kind of coverage we got about Iraq before each time we invaded there. This is the kind of coverage we got about Serbia before we started bombing Belgrade and putting soldiers into Kosovo.

Step away from your keyboard for a second. Take a deep breath. Count to ten slowly. Exhale. Think for a second about the tone you’re adding to the public conversation of this matter. Are you being constructive? What are the foreseeable consequences of what you’re contributing to? Are you speaking to the facts, or echoing and amplifying rumor and propaganda?

“Where is my vote?” is a question asked by many in Tehran this week. It was asked by many in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 and Texas in 1960. In modern democracies we vote anonymously to avoid undue pressure, but anonymity removes accountability and requires some element of trust. Let them work it out.

related:

• Pollster uses two-year-old video (but “does it matter?”)
• A partial account of wildly-inaccurate reporting via Twitter
• and yes, the results really do look implausible. I’m not denying that.

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

Earlier this evening, the local paper reported that local congressman Mike Thompson’s office has released a list of all the earmarks he requested for the 2010 federal budget. The total dollar amount is just shy of $395,000,000.00. This was even more than what they reported in this morning’s paper about my representative, Lynn Woolsey; she only asked for $285,000,000.00. Most folks these days seem to like to complain about earmarks, so I’m going to air my complaint too.

Why so little, Mrs. Woolsey? What the heck about district 1 merits $110,000,000.00 more in earmarks than district 6? You see, I’m rather a fan of having my representatives bring home the bacon. I pay my taxes and want my area to get its fair share. I didn’t hire my US Rep to go let some pencilneck in a Virginia office building decide where all the money should go. That guy doesn’t know where Occidental is and whether it really needs wastewater treatment plant improvements. He doesn’t see what happens to south-bound traffic on 101 North of Steele Lane at 4pm on a weekday.

Earmarks are more often good than bad. Some congressmen do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff than others (Thomspon apparently got $1.2 billion in requests and pared it down to under $400 million, much of which will overlap requests from the White House), but the practice itself is fine. If we don’t like the earmarks we’re benefiting from, we can kick the bums out.

TL;DR – “all politics are local” == “fuck you, John McCain.”

Thompson’s list (PDF)
Woolsey’s list (PDF)

There’s a lot of talk about bailing out homeowners that are under water, upside-down, or otherwise looking at being totally screwed by their adjustable-rate or negative-amortization financial death traps. Some people talk about moral hazard, the risk that such action by the federal government will subsidize and therefore encourage bad behavior. This is on top of the usual arguments about it being a bad way to spend taxpayer money, about it not being the proper role of the government as imagined by the founding fathers, and so forth.

Keeping in mind that you can generally deter a behavior (like smoking) by taxing it, much as you can encourage a behavior by subsidizing it (like growing corn), let’s take a look at this from another angle. I submit to you, gentle reader, a proposed solution to the current explosion of foreclosures that doesn’t encourage bad behavior, and doesn’t cost billions in taxpayer funds.

Reduce the occurence of foreclosures by removing the tax incentive to do so. If you get a mortgage for $200,000 and default on it, the bank auctions it off for almost always less that it was worth when purchased. They write off the difference as a loss and reduce their net profit (and thus their tax burden) to suit. So don’t allow them to write off losses resulting from residential foreclosures.

One change in the tax code and the banks would have to change the formulae by which they decide whether to kick you out of your house or renegotiate your loan or let you slide for a little while longer. If your bank can’t handle the risk, maybe they can sell off your note to a financial institution that can (and write off that loss).

I like the idea of a dog-eat-dog market. The bold and the strong succeed. The foolish and the weak perish. Let the market sort it out, but take the tax-man’s thumb off the scale.

Sorry, this isn’t about mamma cooking breakfast with no hog (today was a good day). I just didn’t want to completely monopolize kcmeesha’s comment section.

There has been a lot of talk going back and forth about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka “the stimulus bill”). On paper, having a public discussion of a bill before our representatives and senators vote on it is a good thing. A great thing. Precisely what the founding fathers were hoping would happen. Well, most of them (but that would be a subject for another time).

Alas, the quality of the public discussion has been exceedingly poor. Rather than actually hashing out what the mix and nature of tax cuts and government spending will be, we instead hear about honeybee insurance and tennis courts. This serves the double purpose of making the bill look wasteful and corrupt to anybody predisposed to think everything the government does is bad while making fiscal conservatives look small and mean.

So we get references to Chuck Schumer talking about the “chattering class” as though that were somehow incriminating. The “chattering class” would be people who make their living by chattering. The professionally-outraged. Just like the “working class” makes their living by working and the “investing class” make their living through investments. If you were Nancy Grace or Kieth Olbermann, you should be rather insulted by such a statement. He’s insulting you, and you deserve to be insulted.

Rather than speak to the substance of the bill, such professional crisis-identifiers pick out something that sounds silly (like subsidies for bee insurance) and rail against them without ever considering why somebody might have thought bee insurance was a good thing. Or even important. Or even critical to real people out there busting their asses for a living and helping keep our standard of living going. If you don’t rely on bees directly, it sounds stupid. Scientific studies are frequent scapegoats in these soft-shoe routines, dressed up as frivolous expenditure without any examination as to the merits of the programs themselves.

This isn’t to say that every government program is needed. Nor to say that every good government program is free of waste. Or even to say that very important government programs aren’t often bogged down by waste and corruption. I’m not that naive. The solution to government corruption and waste isn’t to cut off the funding, but to ramp up oversight and investigation. Shine a little sunlight on that crap.

CBO Summary since the actual bill is TL;DR

So rather than just bitch about it, let’s take a little peek under the hood:

• Not all of the money gets spent immediately. This is a somewhat frequent complaint about the stimulus package: a great deal of it gets spent in 2010 or later, not Next Saturday. The thing is that even “shovel-ready” projects take time. After the engineering and zoning and such is all set and done, the various regulatory agencies have been satisfied that the project should be allowed to proceed, there are steps that take some time. We haven’t nationalized the construction industry, so there’s a bidding process. Somebody has to do the cost analysis and draft up bids. Some period of time must be allowed for this, as we can’t reasonably expect a bidding process to open up until there’s a commitment for funding. Once the bids are in, some jerk is going to demand that they be fairly evaluated, so that takes time. Once somebody’s selected, the work can actually start. Bridges don’t pop up overnight unless you’re talking about those chincy wartime things that the army will straddle a river with temporarily. If it’s going to take two years to finish a construction project, there’s no need to push all the money out up front.

  Other items like the supplemental nutrition money get split out over four years, in chunks of $4,859m, $6,056m, $4,317m, $3,115m, and $1,639m from 2009 through 2013. I don’t see anything unreasonable with that. Others include highway construction weighing in at $27.5 billion stretched over seven years. I also don’t think it’s unreasonable for highway projects to take about that long.

• Not enough of it is tax cuts. OK. The CBO report linked above indicates that this bill reflects a $211.8 billion dollar reduction in revenue to the federal government. How big of a tax cut were you looking for, specifically? $250 billion? $300 billion? A five-year suspension of all taxes, fees, and tarrifs by the federal government? I really have no counter-argument to this other than a general impression that some people will never be satisfied. They want their big armies and highways and prisons and don’t want to pay for any of it. I understand it in the same way that I understand that children don’t want to eat their vegetables.
• Too much pork! In regards to tax cuts, I ask “how much is enough,” so for pork I ask “how much is too much?” Can we get rid of those pork-barrel military bases dotting the midwest and deep south, where we have little to no credible need for military presence (nobody’s invading us through Kansas, so we probably don’t need forts there)? Do we really need separate naval facilities in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia when we don’t have a single naval station between Monterey and Washington State? Pork is not the villain folks have made it out to be, it’s just easy to make somebody else’s targeted spending look wasteful.

So if you’re on board with the nay-sayers, what should have been removed? What vital clause was left out? Please be specific.

Something I’ve been hearing recently that used to just never come up in polite conversation is a constitutional convention to overhaul California’s founding legal document. The Golden State’s constitution has been so severely modified over the 130 or so years since its last overhaul that it requires a search engine to consume the darned thing.

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 18 AMENDING AND REVISING THE CONSTITUTION

SEC. 4. A proposed amendment or revision shall be submitted to the
electors and if approved by a majority of votes thereon takes effect
the day after the election unless the measure provides otherwise. If
provisions of 2 or more measures approved at the same election
conflict, those of the measure receiving the highest affirmative vote
shall prevail.

This means that 50% plus one voters during a primary election (when very few people show up to the polls) can trump the Governor, Assembly, Senate, and State Supreme Court. This is all very democratic, of course, but also leaves a nasty situation when a poorly-conceived proposition goes through that seemed like a good idea at the time. Compare this process to that used for the United States Constitution, which sets a much higher bar, and has only resulted in a couple of totally boneheaded revisions.

Our legislators complain that their hands are tied by too many spending formulae, leaving only a handful of big-ticket items in the budget to fiddle with. A couple of examples of government reveue sources that are strictly limited in their reallocation off the top of my head:

• Property taxes
• Tobacco taxes
• Vehicle licensing fees
• Gasoline taxes
• Lottery revenue

I propose that we cut them loose. Drop the restrictions on what kinds of government revenue can be put to what purposes and let our legislators legislate. If they do poorly, their challengers in the next election have a stronger argument that we should kick the bums out.

Since we can’t count on the critters in Sacramento to call for a constitutional convention on a 2/3rds vote as currently required, we introduce a ballot proposition to introduce a provision allowing for constitutional convention by popular referrendum. Put said popular refferendum on the same ballot as a separate measure and let the ad war begin!

Who’s with me?

Got to see the first returns come in while having dinner at Old Ebbitt, a bar and grill across the street from the Treasury building. After dessert we went back to the Hotel Harrington (more on that later). it had been a long day. We’d buried my Nana at Arlington in the morning and gone to Maryland for a party at her nephew’s house. My sister was bumming a bed from us for the night before heading back to California, and we were all just about ready to get some sleep. I was the last holdout, leaving the television on to wait for the west coast returns. The moment the polls closed back home, CNN called the election for Barack Obama (it was certainly no surprise at that point).

Moments later we heard cheers from eleven floors down. The crowd at Harry’s got the word and were out on the sidewalk celebrating. Car horns erupted up and down the street. Rebecca, Sharon, and I got up, put on some street clothes, and headed down to check it out. The streets of Washington, DC are pretty mellow at night. Not many people out and about. We saw small groups of people, maybe three or four walking together, jubilant. We were tempted to head back up, then we heard some commotion down E street, towards the White House. Let’s check it out, why not?

As we walked, we passed by dozens of people who would pump their hands in the air and shout “Obama!” or “Yes, we can!” and an occasional “President of the United States!” I can only assume the McCain supporters were just not interested in staying up or going out for a defeat. Everybody we saw was ecstatic until we got to a group of nicely-dressed people exiting a hotel to their valet parking. Never found out who they were.

The next not-terribly-happy group we ran into were the White House security people on Executive Avenue. Apparently they were a bit edgy. The sidewalk nearest the southern end of the White House, which had been open to the public the night before, was off-limits. We had to cross the street to follow some college-age kids that were hooting and hollering. Once we got around to Lafayette Square and saw the stream of young people coming in from George Washington University to celebrate the election results, I understood why.

Everybody was positive, but nearly everybody was young, partisan, and energetic. It was invigorating to see people smiling and laughing and singing and chanting (and even dancing in the streets a bit). But get that many excited young people in the same place at the same time, and you start looking for you nearest exit. Everything was positive. Everybody was well-behaved. There were no problems. But that didn’t mean I needed my pregnant wife on hand if anybody did something stupid and brought the Feds down on us.

We cheered along for a bit, never quite going to the center of the action, and headed back to our room. On the way, we stopped off at the Elephant & Castle to listen to the President Elect’s acceptance speech and tip back a drink just before last call. The yelling and honking continued into the night, keeping us up off and on till three in the morning. I should probably ask one of the locals if this happens every time a new president in selected. I bet our waiter at Old Ebbitt knows; his mother is an undersecretary at the State Department.

Neat town.

Damned commies and their communism…