MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Dog Days Doggerel – Take 2
Some more brief observations on current developments in politics and popular culture, during these “dog days” of August:
n Ohio’s Criminal Governor Last week Ohio Governor Bob Taft became the first Ohio governor found guilty of a crime while in office, after he pleaded no contest to charges that he violated state ethics laws by failing to report golf outings and other gifts. Judge Mark Froehlich fined Taft the maximum $1000 for each of four misdemeanor counts but imposed no jail time; however, he did require Taft to issue, via e-mail, apologies to Ohio’s citizens and state government employees. In both his court appearance and in a press conference held immediately after, Taft repeatedly said, “I accept full responsibility for this mistake. I am very sorry.” Nevertheless, Taft did not resign – vowing to serve the 16 months left of his second term – even though he has insisted on the resignation of department heads and other government employees for similar or lesser offenses. This leaves him open to the charge of hypocrisy, which is why some Ohio Republicans have called for him to resign. Meanwhile, most Ohio Democrats – hoping that Taft’s political misfortunes will drag down other Republican candidates in 2006 – are happy to leave a weakened Republican in office. (Taft is precluded by term limits from running for another term; not surprisingly, the three leading GOP candidates for governor are keeping their distance from him and his ethics problems.) Failure to comply with inane ethics laws, however, is relatively minor compared to the real criminality of the Taft administration: its policies. As governor, Taft has behaved like a tax-and-spend Democrat, earning an “F” in the Cato Institute’s report card on the nation’s governors. The failure of his administration is epitomized by the “successes” lauded by Taft’s apologists: massive spending increases (especially on new buildings for the state’s failed and obsolete public school system); minor tax “reform” that fails to relieve Ohio’s most serious economic problem, its onerous tax burden on businesses; and Taft’s pet project, his so-called “Third Frontier” proposal for state-subsidized high-tech research and development. The latter proposal was wisely rejected by Ohio voters a couple years ago; but because of the stubborn insistence of the Taft administration, a scaled-back version will be offered to Ohio voters as State Issue 1 on the November ballot. (Will Ohio politicians never learn? In the early 19th-century advocates of state-subsidized development projects nearly bankrupted the state by over-committing its taxpayer dollars to roads and canals; now in the 21st century, they’re repeating that mistake, imagining that Ohio’s economy can be jump-started with government subsidies to so-called “high-tech” industries. The scheme ignores the only true path to economic recovery: reducing the size and cost of government and accordingly lowering the heavy tax burden that stifles profitability for all businesses in the state.) As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial (“No More Free Golf,” August 18), “Ohio’s real political crime is an economy listing under the burden of runaway spending and high taxes.” It should be noted that the likely Democratic candidates for governor would do nothing about that, except probably make it even worse. I’ve called Bob Taft “Boob Daft” because the man is an idiot, and I’ll continue to do so as long as he remains Ohio’s governor.
n Mr. Smith Returns from Washington This week my friend and colleague Brad Smith returns to teaching at Capital University Law School, after spending five years in Washington, D.C. as a member (including one year as chairman) of the Federal Election Commission. As Byron York notes in a recent article in National Review (“Mr. Smith Went to Washington,” July 18), the battle in the U.S. Senate over Smith’s confirmation to the FEC seat was “the hottest confirmation fight in Washington” five years ago. Smith was hated by the so-called “reform” activists – those who supported more government regulations of campaign financing and political speech, such as those embodied in the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation – because Smith dared to question the faulty assumptions behind such laws. (See Smith’s book Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform (2001), which argues in part – a point made by Smith in a 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed, quoted in the National Review article – that “when a law [like the landmark Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974] is in need of continual revision to close a series of ever-changing ‘loopholes,’ it is probably the law, and not the people, that is in error.” More fundamentally, Smith showed how the regulatory regime has abridged political speech, denying First Amendment freedoms, particularly to grassroots political groups, while at the same time protecting incumbents from challengers.) Such views were heresy to the “reform” (i.e., regulatory) crowd, who lobbied Senate Democrats to block Smith’s confirmation for months -- cutting into most of the first year of what should have been a six-year term – until a deal was struck, with the Democrats finally allowing Smith to be confirmed in exchange for Republicans allowing 16 of Clinton’s judicial nominations to go forward. (Thus, York writes in the National Review piece, “Bradley Smith became the most expensive FEC commissioner in history.”) Responding to his critics’ charge that his appointment was “an act of utter disdain and disrespect for the laws,” Smith comments in the National Review interview, “I think that it’s clearly wrong that enforcement of the law should be left to zealots.” That view, logically, would mean “no person who ever wanted to deregulate would ever serve on a commission. It would be a one-way ratchet,” leading to regulation on top of regulation – pretty much what the FEC would be like today, if Smith had not been a commissioner. Indeed, it could be argued that a healthy skepticism about government regulation – and certainly a healthy regard and respect for the limits that the Constitution imposes on governmental power – should be considered a prerequisite for members of administrative agencies, in which a handful of unelected bureaucrats wield a dangerous blend of legislative, executive, and judicial powers that affect the daily lives of virtually every American. At the end of his interview, Smith notes, “I think we would benefit by thinking of the First Amendment less as a sort of bizarre, libertarian impediment to badly needed regulation than as a well-thought-out approach to how political activity ought to work. And the basic premise is: It is very dangerous to give the government the power to determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t.” It is a sad – but telling – commentary on the political culture in Washington that someone who takes the Constitution seriously (including the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech) is regarded as an “extremist,” outside of the “mainstream.” Expect more of the same nonsense next month when the Senate considers the confirmation of Judge John Roberts as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s hope that Senate Republicans don’t cut another Faustian deal with those damn Democrats.
n Tinkering with Time As I reported in my previous entry earlier this month (“Time Travails”), the massive energy bill passed by Congress at the end of July included a provision that, starting in 2007, will extend Daylight-Saving Time (DST). Congress’s new mandate would have DST begin three weeks earlier and end a week later; in other words, everyone will have to set their clocks one hour forward the second Sunday in March and then reset their clocks one hour back the first Sunday in November. Now that the American people have had a chance to consider what their idiotic representatives in Congress have mandated, some have begun to question the wisdom of the change. Ostensibly done to “save energy” (based on estimates from a study – no doubt, a flawed study – done in 1975 by the U.S. Department of Transportation that claimed a savings of 100,000 barrels of oil per day during DST), DST imposes many costs on Americans that the policy-makers have failed to take into account, not the least of which is the inconvenience of having to reset all our clocks in order to comply with Congress’s gimmick. Now, parent groups are beginning to worry about schoolchildren walking to school or waiting for the bus in the dark. Orthodox Jews and Muslims, who base their prayer times on the position of the sun, are concerned about how the changes in DST would affect their believers’ ability to get to work on time after morning prayers. The airline industry (which, as I noted in my previous entry, would be hardest hit by the change) is concerned about the devastating effects of having the U.S. even further out of sync with international time changes. (For example, because of the way airlines reserve spots at airports for rigidly-scheduled international flights, some carriers could lose their sports to other airlines if they arrive an hour later.) And Americans who hate programming their VCR, DVD, or computer clocks might have to change them manually, if they have older models that do not match the new calendar or do not get a satellite time signal. All these problems, of course, ought to have been considered by Congress before it further tinkered with our clocks. The fact that members of Congress rushed through the energy bill, giving such concerns only scant attention at best, unfortunately is just par for the course.
n The NCAA “PC” Police Also as I reported in a previous entry earlier this month (“Indian Givers – and Takers”), the NCAA has banned American Indian imagery and nicknames by schools at postseason tournaments starting in February 2006. Appeals are already anticipated for this controversial rule. One of the schools that has been most vocal in criticizing the ban, Florida State, may benefit from a recent decision made by the NCAA with regard to the rules process: on August 19, the NCAA announced that approval by American Indian tribes would be “a primary factor” in deciding the appeals. Both the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma have OKed Florida State’s use of the nickname Seminole, even though some lesser tribes – and, no doubt, other “Native American” activists – might still find it offensive. “We’re encouraged by the executive board’s decision to set up the administration of the appeal process,” Florida State T.K. Wetherell recently said. But what about the other 17 schools on the NCAA’s list of schools with “offensive” Indian nicknames – schools that might not be as fortunate as Florida State in maneuvering through the NCAA’s appeals process? As I noted in my previous entry, the basic problem is an out-of-control NCAA exceeding the legitimate scope of its authority, trying to dictate to member schools something that has nothing to do with athletic competition. What a college or university chooses to adopt as its nickname, mascot, or symbol is no more the business of the NCAA as schools’ choice of school colors, songs, or anything else that’s, properly speaking, within the prerogatives of each school. The NCAA should have nothing to do with such matters. So long as the organization continues to try to abuse its power in the name of regulating athletics, however, I continue to think that people ought to call it the “NPCAA” – the “National Political Correctness Athletic Association” – because, apparently, that’s what it has become.
n Cindy Sheehan, Traitor This summer, Cindy Sheehan has made headlines by camping outside President Bush’s ranch in Texas for almost two weeks, ostensibly seeking a meeting with Bush to discuss the death of her son, Casey, a U.S. soldier who was killed last year in Iraq. As national media sources such as USA Today have been reporting, Cindy Sheehan’s modest anti-war protest along the road to President Bush’s ranch has evolved into a headline-grabbing national movement – one in which Sheehan has been championed and financially underwritten by various left-liberal groups, including MoveOn Political Action, Democracy for America, and TrueMajority (a group founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). “What started out as a grieving mom that we all sympathized with has now turned into . . . an orchestrated far-left campaign,” noted Greg Mueller, a public-relations executive in Washington who works for conservative groups (“Escalation unnerves mom in protest vigil,” USA Today, August 17). Left-wing (and anti-Bush) commentator Maureen Dowd wrote of Sheehan in The New York Times that “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.” As Jonah Goldberg noted in a recent op-ed (“Many war critics err in claiming authenticity,” August 18), Dowd’s statement is “either a sincere but meaningless platitude or it’s a charge made in grotesquely bad faith.” As Goldberg notes, there are a great many mothers of fallen soldiers who believe the war to be worthwhile. “Is their moral authority absolute, too? If so, then moral authority can’t really be very relevant to public debates. Or does Dowd claim that only those moms-of-the-fallen who say things critical of Bush have absolute moral authority?” Ronald R. Griffin, who lost his son in Iraq, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed spoke out on behalf of himself and many other parents of fallen soldiers who continue to support the mission for which they gave their lives, and for whom Mrs. Sheehan – or Ms. Dowd – emphatically do not speak. Ms. Dowd’s claim that Cindy Sheehan has “absolute moral authority,” writes Mr. Griffin, is a characterization that “epitomizes the arrogance and condescension of anyone who would presume to understand and speak for all of us” (“`Cindy Sheehan Does Not Speak For Me’,” August 18). Others in her family bitterly oppose Cindy’s stance. In a statement, her sister-in-law (Casey Sheehan’s aunt) said that “the rest of the Sheehan family supports the troops, our country, and our president.” Even setting aside such concerns, the “moral authority” of Cindy Sheehan has become something of a liability, even for those who agree with her opposition to the war, as more information about Mrs. Sheehan is revealed. (The problem of being a “public figure” is that all the details of one’s life become public – especially if someone, like Sheehan, is exploiting her own emotions in order to aid a political cause.) For example, it turns out that Mrs. Sheehan, along with her now-estranged husband, Patrick Sheehan, already has met with President Bush – on June 17, 2004, less than two months after their son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by terrorists in Baghdad. Following their meeting, Cindy Sheehan remarked, "I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith." She said he brought her family the "gift of happiness." Five months later, Cindy Sheehan claimed that President Bush's policies "murdered [her] child." Just one year after meeting with the President, Sheehan called the meeting "one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had." In addition to criticizing President Bush and the war in Iraq, she also has criticized the government of Israel in its conflict with Palestinian terrorists.
Even more, Sheehan is a traitor to her son’s memory. In protesting against U.S. military involvement in Iraq – against our continuing war against Islamic terrorists in that country – Sheehan is protesting the very thing her son believed in and died for. As Ronald Griffin observed in his Journal op-ed, “By all accounts Spc. Casey Sheehan, Mrs. Sheehan’s son, was a soldier by choice and by the strength of his character. . . . In August 2003, five months into Operation Iraqi Freedom and after three years of service, Casey Sheehan re-enlisted in the Army with the full knowledge there was a war going on, and with the high probability he would be assigned to a combat area. . . . Like so many of the individuals who have given their lives in service to our country, Casey was a very special young man. How do you decry that which someone has chosen to do with his life? How does a mother dishonor the sacrifice of her own son?” More and more, anti-Iraq war activists are suggesting parallels to the war in Vietnam, another war in which, arguably, the U.S. never should have been involved. But the tragedy of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was compounded by the fact that anti-war activists and the political enemies of Richard M. Nixon prevented him from waging the war to a successful conclusion – dooming the people of Vietnam to Communism and making futile the loss of tens of thousands of American lives. Let’s not repeat that same mistake in Iraq.
n Borderline Lunacy Anti-immigration activists have become increasingly shrill about the problem of America’s “porous” borders, especially along the four U.S. states that border Mexico. The recent announcement by the governors of two of those states, Arizona and New Mexico – coincidentally, both of them Democrats – of a “state of emergency” due to the costs that illegal Mexican immigrants have imposed on Medicaid, public schools, and other taxpayer-financed state “welfare” programs, has given more ammunition to those who want, somehow, to “close” America’s borders against illegal immigrants. Emulating eastern European Communists’ “Iron Curtain” of the 1950s – the model that some anti-immigration activists actually embrace, wanting us to build the equivalent of the Berlin Wall, with its concrete barriers and armed guards with shoot-to-kill orders – isn’t the answer. Indeed, if the problem with illegal immigrants is that they tax too heavily the welfare system, perhaps what we ought to do is reform the welfare system: its basic evil is that it takes wealth that is produced and therefore earned by some people and uses the coercive power of government to forcibly redistribute it to others, who have not earned it. Does it really matter whether the looters are U.S. citizens or not, or if they are immigrants, whether they are in the U.S. legally or not? The problem is the welfare system, not the border. Historically, the United States has been “the land of immigrants,” a place of opportunity for millions of people who want to earn wealth through economic freedom, at least a greater degree of economic freedom than in their home countries (whether in Europe, Asia, or the Americas). We shouldn’t let paranoia about Islamic terrorists – or worse, anti-Mexican bigotry – blind us to this noble tradition. In the long run, the United States – if it remains the free, open society that it ought to be – will always be an attractive destination for Mexicans seeking greater economic opportunity, as long as Mexico remains economically stagnant. The real, long-term solution to the problem of illegal Mexican immigrants is political and economic reform in Mexico: abolishing the political corruption and statism that’s denying economic freedom to so many Mexicans. In other words, until Mexico is as open to capitalism as the United States, Mexicans will always think of the U.S. as the land of freedom and opportunity. What’s so wrong with that?
n Kill the Death Tax! The August 22 Letters to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal have an interesting exchange over the proposal to abolish the federal estate tax, or “death tax,” which is among the matters that Congress will consider after its members return from their summer recess. The “death tax” is a tax on inherited wealth and can amount to more than 50% of one’s estate. One letter writer, Senator Frank “the Lout” Lautenberg (D.-N.J.) maintains, “The choices on the estate tax are stark.” He’s right – but not exactly in the sense he suggests. He continues, “We could eliminate the tax for one wealthy heir, or we could provide health insurance for 281 uninsured children. We could eliminate the tax for one wealthy heir, or send 91 kids to college who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity. We could eliminate the tax for one wealthy heir, or give 469 middle-class families a $1000 tax cut.” Lautenberg is making the same mistake that many members of Congress make: he imagines that the revenues “lost” to the federal government through abolition of the death tax are public property, which our representatives in Congress may chose to spend as they think best for the “public” welfare. But of course, they’re not: they are private property, earned by the individuals who produced them. To do all those wonderful things Lautenberg would like Congress to do with that money – provide health insurance for 281 children (read that as: 281 future Democratic voters), send to college 91 “kids” (91 future Democratic voters), or give a tax cut to 469 “middle-class families” (hundreds more Democratic voters) – requires that the government confiscate the property of that one “wealthy heir,” wealth that didn’t magically appear out of thin air but which had to be created by the productive wealth of the person who earned it. That wealth, if it truly belongs to the person who earned it, ought to be freely inheritable by that person’s heirs, or whomever the wealth-earner designates to receive it after his death. It’s his property – it’s not the government’s. To say that the creators of wealth are entitled to keep their property only while they’re alive, but that they’re dead, the government may seize it and redistribute it – which is what many opponents of the death-tax repeal argue – is to say, in effect, that those who create wealth really don’t own it, fully, at all because full ownership of property includes the ability to dispose of it as one wishes after one’s death. As noted by the other Journal letter-writer, Edwin A. Locke (a senior writer at the Ayn Rand Institute), inherited wealth – the property subjected to the death tax – is “money someone has earned through a lifetime of work and has already paid taxes on.” The only rationale for a second tax at death is “egalitarianism” (not to be confused with equality before the law) – the theory that it’s not “just” that some people give their children financial “advantages” in life that others “lack” – a theory that is “incompatible with freedom,” as Dr. Locke points out. “In a free country, not everyone ends up with the same rewards, because not everyone is equally able, equally rational or equally hard working. With respect to earned wealth, justice means you deserve what you earn and may use it as you see fit. With respect to inheritance, since the producer’s wealth belongs to him, he has the right to will it to whomever he pleases. The death tax should be repealed now and forever in the name of freedom and justice.” Amen.
n Six Feet Under – R.I.P. The series finale of Six Feet Under aired on HBO Sunday night, August 21. Like The Sopranos, the series was one of the “groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed” programs for which HBO (in its own advertising, at least) has become famous. And like Queer as Folk, another series that this summer concluded its five-year run on HBO’s rival cable channel, Showtime (see my discussion of “Queer Endings” in my previous entry), Six Feet Under also made television history, with its unabashed portrayal of the funeral business and its all-around grim quirkiness. (By de-mystifying mortuaries, the series helped many viewers cope with deaths in their own families – myself included, after the deaths of both my parents in recent years.) Like Queer as Folk, this season’s Six Feet Under featured one story line involving a same-sex couple, David and Keith, who were not only “married” but also anxious to be parents. Unfortunately, just as in the Showtime series, this particular portrayal of a same-sex couple arguably hurt rather than help the cause of equal rights for homosexual persons. Both David’s and Keith’s characters are presented as persons who are not emotionally mature enough to be in a relationship with each other, let alone to be parents, particularly to the two troubled black youths for whom they become foster parents. Keith has a serious anger-management problem, and David is weak and still traumatized from his experience as a mugging victim in season four. Not surprisingly, David’s whining aggravates Keith’s anger even more. Ironically, though, Six Feet Under may unintentionally advance the cause of gay rights: for as pathetic as these two homosexual characters are, the heterosexual characters are even worse! As parents, David and Keith seem far more responsible than Brenda, Nate’s emotionally-troubled second wife, who is unable to care for her young step-daughter after her husband’s death because she’s so angry about his infidelity; or even Ruth, matriarch of the whole dysfunctional family, whose emotional troubles are so numerous and incapacitating that they can’t be easily summed up in a sentence or two. Indeed, virtually all the principal characters were so troubled, unhappy, and depressed over so many problems this season that each episode seemed a real downer. The black humor that enlivened the show in previous seasons seemed absent this year. When one of the leading characters, Nate (played ably by actor Peter Krause) died in the third-from-last episode, it seemed almost a relief – his character had become so annoyingly whiney – except for the fact that his character continued to appear, as a ghost haunting the other principal characters, for the last few episodes. (That’s not surprising for a series in which the family patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher, Sr., died in the very first episode in season one but who managed to reappear, as a ghost, throughout the series – right up to the finale.) Someone wrote a book called “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Perhaps a fitting description of Six Feet Under, particularly during this final season, would be, “When Bad Things Happen to Whiney, Pathetic People.” The concluding episode of the series was fitting: all the lead characters died – but over a period of years, extending well into the latter part of the 21st century. I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it (for the finale will air in repeats throughout the week), except to say that a final dream sequence looks ahead into the future to show the time and manner of deaths of the principal characters. (That’s especially fitting for the show, given its signature opening, with the demise of a stranger, a future client of the Fisher family mortuary.) Unlike other television series which end with viewers wondering, “What will happen to so-and-so?” the writers and producers of Six Feet Under – appropriately, and literally – finished them all off.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 | Copyright David N. Mayer |
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