Author Archives: Sheila

I Really Have to Stop Reading the News…

It isn’t even light yet, and I’ve already read stories that make me want to crawl back into my bed and pull the covers up over my head.

In national news, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released a new study showing a dramatic rise in hate groups–especially anti-government, “patriot” groups. And closer to home, Mother Jones reports that

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn’t end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: “Use live ammunition.”

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were “political enemies” and “thugs” who were “physically threatening legally elected officials.” In response to such behavior, he said, “You’re damned right I advocate deadly force.” He later called me a “typical leftist,” adding, “liberals hate police.“

Only later did the reporter realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.

Apparently, this Deputy AG–one Jeff Cox–has been communicating similar messages for most of the ten years he has been employed by the people of Indiana to uphold the rule of law. The Mother Jones article contains more quotations, along with his defense that he has a First Amendment right to express his opinions.

I don’t debate his right to voice opinions (although a semanticist might quibble on the grounds that infantile name-calling can hardly be dignified by the term “opinion”). I do wonder what sort of “logic” fails to recognize that the protesters also have First Amendment rights, or that he is one of the “public workers” being vilified by people like Governor Walker and…Jeff Cox.

I also wonder what kind of job performance the people of Indiana have been getting from someone so intemperate and lacking in judgment. Those aren’t exactly the qualities that make for good lawyering.

Perhaps he would be better suited to a job defending some of those “patriots” the Poverty Law Center identified.

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Beyond Redemption

According to Political Animal , a few weeks ago, former senator and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth (R) expressed some concern about the direction of his party. “If Dick Lugar,” Danforth said, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

I think we’ve crossed that threshhold.

Only in an alternative universe would Dick Lugar be considered liberal, or Richard Mourdock–the troglodyte running against him–be considered credible.

When Lugar was Mayor of Indianapolis, he governed from the middle, but since his first term in the Senate, he has moved steadily to the right. He has routinely voted against equal rights for gay people, including most recently against repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and he has been on the wrong side (in my view) on health care reform. He carried a lot of water for the  Bush Administration, despite the fact that he had to know how misguided its foreign policies were.   If he seems “liberal,” it is only by comparison to people who are certifiably insane–the people who want to build fences along the (southern) border, want to put women back in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant), and want the U.S. to withdraw from all international treaties.

Mourdock is best known for an embarrassing lawsuit arising out of the Chrysler bankruptcy. After making an ill-advised investment in Chrysler stock, he was Indiana’s representative to the creditors committee–the group of creditors who negotiate in the bankruptcy proceedings on behalf of those owed money. Mourdock signed an agreement to abide by whatever agreement the committee reached; nevertheless, he made a lot of noise objecting to the agreement after the court approved it, and he brought a lawsuit to overturn it. The suit was thrown out, as any first-year law student would have anticipated, but the most ironic aspect of the whole mess was that Indiana would have received less had his lawsuit been successful than it received under the creditors’ agreement. Now this clown is playing to the Tea Party wing of the party–where he clearly belongs.

In a sane world, Lugar would have no problem winning a Republican primary, but this isn’t a sane world. There are a lot of frightened, angry voters out there, and most of them are members of the GOP. Plus, friends who are privy to the party’s powers-that-be tell me that the once-vaunted Lugar office staff no longer responds to constituent contacts or party requests the way they used to. (The words “insulated” and “arrogant” come up fairly routinely.)

I hope the Democrats field a strong candidate–something they haven’t done for quite a while–because we are witnessing the implosion of a once-powerful political party that may indeed be beyond redemption.

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Debt and Taxes

It doesn’t take long for my students to learn that “it depends” is almost always the right answer to policy questions. The world is complicated, and questions about how government should operate are rarely black or white.

In an excellent column about debt and taxes, Morton Marcus makes precisely that point. Debt incurred in order to make investments in the future is good; borrowing in order to shift costs properly paid for with current tax dollars–is bad. Borrowing to invest in education, transportation and communications will make life better for our children and grandchildren, and will increase their ability to pay that debt. Borrowing in order to avoid raising taxes to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan does not make life better for future generations; it merely saddles those generations with bills that we didn’t want to pay.

The issue isn’t whether debt is good or bad. It isn’t even whether it is too big. The issue is whether the borrowed dollars were used to make wise investments, or were used instead to allow current generations to say “charge it” to the future.

With debt, as with so much else, it depends.

What Part of “Everyone” Doesn’t Sarah Palin Understand?

According to the Huffington Post, Sarah Palin weighed in on the Wisconsin protests in a Friday night posting on her Facebook page. In the posting addressed to “union brothers and sisters” (cough, cough), Palin says Wisconsin taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for benefits “that are not sustainable.” She says “real solidarity means everyone being willing to sacrifice.”

In Palin-speak, apparently, “everyone” means middle-class public servants. It clearly doesn’t mean those Americans in the richest 2%–the ones whose tax breaks Palin and her Tea Party buddies are so anxious to protect.

The Yiddish word for this is “chutzpah.” (Look it up.)

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Reaganism Triumphant

This morning, I made my usual mistake, and listened to the news.

The protests in Wisconsin–and to a lesser extent, Ohio–triggered by efforts to blame fiscal shortages on people who work for government. A story about a southern town that has stopped making pension payments to retired police officers and firefighters, because the town “ran out of money.” Various congresspersons of the Republican persuasion demanding ever-more draconian cuts in social programs we can no longer “afford” (while failing to explain why we can still afford all manner of military expenditures, including the Pentagon’s practice of sponsoring NASCAR races). You all know the drill–it’s drearily familiar.

So here’s my question: why, in all of these discussions, do we never hear anyone suggest raising taxes?

Now, I will grant that taxes can be a double-edged sword: depending upon who and what we tax, we can cause economic distortions. Tax policies can provide perverse incentives, or reduce incentives for behaviors we want to encourage. But that recognition hardly justifies taking taxes off the table, and that seems to be what we’ve done. Taxes have become a dirty word, rather than a revenue source.

The result is that we are strangling government’s ability to invest in the future of the country. When governors refuse federal dollars to built high-speed rail, they are not only refusing to create temporary construction jobs, they are ensuring that America will be less competitive for a generation. When they choose to “balance” budgets on the backs of pensioners and public servants, they are opting to weaken government’s ability to provide services and undermining the public’s trust in that government.

Ronald Reagan famously said that government is the problem, not the solution. Then he set in motion a political ideology that embraced a very selective version of Reagan’s Presidency and made that statement into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Those who subscribe to “Reaganism” conveniently forget that even the Gipper raised taxes when necessary.

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