Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

What a Disaster!

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Policemen police. Runners run. Writers write. And we all look over our own shoulders now and then.

This week I write about what I missed. And what I didn’t.

I cherish a few beliefs about myownself. This blog isn’t about me. These columns are what Faux News calls fair and balanced. And I AM™ never w-r-r-rong.

OK. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Last month, in writing about millionaires, I admitted that I’d rather be a millionaire than not. I’m not going to increase my personal wealth much by putting a Paypal button on this site. The week before that, I confessed that I now understand why liberals don’t geddit. And just two weeks before, I told the story of my mom at the corner of High and Gay.

This is my 333 entry since I started blogging in 2008. 220 of them have been in the op-ed category I call Random Access. Many of those (151) fell in the Politics and News category. I imagine you can figure out what topics I covered.

“Politics is like the weather,” I wrote in 2008. “Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the weather. Or change it.”

The pieces that had more impact were more personal. 2010 was a busy year. Liz Arden sent me a family picture of herself with her parents and I riffed that into a story about my mom as an elderly woman who could have been slain by a taxi. We learned that “full” in a small town parking lot is different than “full” in Miami or New York. gekko and I wrote an ongoing series together.

My family didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. We had a boat but not a lot of cash. My dad’s job was the typical junior exec and we shared the homestead with my grandfather; we all had to work for what we did have. I came out of that feeling depraved but not deprived.

Rufus missed [bleep]ing Asbestos Dust back in May. He was amazed. The rest of us about died. A week earlier, I had written that “Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.” Number One daughter had been banned from classes because she wore a t-shirt to school.

I did spend some time wondering why my friend Swampy Swamtek, with all his brainpower, with all his education, with all his belief in conservation, can’t remember to turn out the lights when he leaves a room. I remembered that, since the heady days of Apollo 13 forty years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. According to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

And I took some time off from worrying about the claim that women’s hot flashes are responsible for Global Warming to reminisce about my sports car races in the 70s.

I somehow missed the fact that the Mets did not make the World Series. I didn’t once write about the United/Continental airline’s merger that brought together 700 planes, dropped employment from 88,000 to 77,000, and shared 7 bags of 2003 peanuts among us. Airlines put fares up $20 across the board. I never once mentioned Christine O’Donnell’s Rhodes Scholarship in comedy which is at least as credible as her candidacy turned out to be.

I’ll keep hammering the small town politicians who want you to believe that paying twice as much for half as many police officers in your town is a way to save you (tax) money. And when Congress acts on H.R.6907, a measure to ban further activity at Eyjafjallajökull, you’ll hear about it here first. Most important, in the spirit of WikiLeaks, pretty much everything personal rattling around between my ears will sooner or later fall out on these pages.

Politics is like the climate. Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the climate. Or change it.

Plus Ca Change?

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Only 14 of the 60 Vermont school districts and supervisory unions have met the spending cuts required by the Legislature and the Department of Education.

Vermont Act 68, the “Challenges for Change” law: “It is hereby enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Vermont:
“In fiscal year 2011, the secretary shall reduce the general fund appropriation and transfer to the education fund by $3,966,375.00. It is expected that … total local education spending … will be reduced by $13,332,500.” As amended, the Vermont program to increase efficiency and cut budgets across most of Vermont government, requires all schools across the state to reduce the amount they raised by taxes by $23.3 million.

They didn’t.

46 school districts and supervisory unions appear to be breaking the law.

Australian site whyshouldi.com tell us “When someone doesn’t obey the law, we say that they have broken the law. Sometimes, people get hurt or suffer when laws are broken. Injured people are called victims. When some laws are broken, everyone feels afraid. Not just the victim.

“We call these things crimes and the people who commit these crimes are criminals. We also believe that criminals must be punished. There are many types of crime, such as assault, stealing, or murder.”

Australia apparently expects people, businesses, and governmental units to obey the law.

Not Vermont.

Back to whyshouldi.com: “One of your property rights is for you to lend your belongings to somebody, or share them with your friends and family. Do they have to ask you first, or pay you for the use of something? That is up to you – it’s your property.

“Some cultures have a different view. In many Indigenous communities, families and friends may use or borrow each other’s property without getting permission every time. Many people around the world think that land belongs to a group or tribe, rather than one person.”

Ahh. That would apparently be Vermont.

Under Challenges for Change, schools reported last week that they had achieved cuts of $7.5 million, $15.8 million short.

Vermont Governor-elect Peter Shumlin has a plan.
Mr. Shumlin will urge lawmakers to transfer $19 million in federal funds to the schools to cover the $15.8 million shortfall. (Congress had approved that “stimulus” money to prevent teacher layoffs.)

Ya gotta love Mr. Shumlin’s arithmetic.

Law < ——————————————– > Short

In a typical (liberal) political move, the guv-to-be lets 46 lawbreakers off by throwing more money we don’t have at them. It’s OK, though. He got the money from the Feds.

And here I thought Vermont was supposed to stand for self-reliance.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

How Many Millionaires?

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“Rich politicians take care of their own,” Fred Grimm wrote in the Miami Herald yesterday. “The rich are different from you and me. Well, me anyway. And they’re damn well positioned to keep it that way.”

Here’s his proof: Florida has a fabulously wealthy governor-elect who spent $73 million of his own money to get elected and a Legislature “laden with millionaires.” 18 millionaires will be “slumming in the state Senate. That’s 18 out of 40 senators.” 34 millionaires vote in the House. Out of 120 state reps. “Rich reps are forced to mingle with the unwashed rabble,” Mr. Grimm wrote.

“The U.S. Congress wallows in even more disproportionate affluence than our elected moneybags in Tallahassee.” He used the Center for Responsive Politics to find that 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million. Median wealth in the Senate rose from $2.27 million to $2.38 million last year.

I apologize in advance. I tried to make this funny. It isn’t.

This kind of writing irks me. My neighbor Stan is a millionaire. He doesn’t feel rich. In fact, he complains about anything but rich. A Texas friend, Billy Bob, is just about on the median wealth of the Senate. He feels richer than I do, but he ain’t buying jet airplanes. Not many other millionaires are, either. So the Herald columnist who wants grimly to stick it to we fabulously wealthy types mingling with the unwashed rabble seems to have left out a fact or two.

Let’s look at some real figures, albeit from 2009 before the electoral shakeup. Only about 17% of Congress Critters are women although 51% of Americans are. 178 representatives and 58 senators are lawyers although only .3% of Americans are. 400 representatives and all but two senators have earned college degrees; many have advanced degrees although only 27% of Americans do. The average age in the House is about 56 and in the Senate, almost 62 although the average age in America is 37.

So, it looks as if our Congress critters are mostly rich, white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64, and the general population isn’t.

The general population is about 37 years old, and a mixed bag of ethnicities and schooling. Just .7% of them overall are millionaires. Zero point seven percent.

So what happens when we compare Congress critters to mostly white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64? Or even just to college-educated Americans?

The Federal Reserve Bank looks at the median value of financial assets for most folks in America, primarily so banks can sell us checking accounts. The median is the “middle number” of a sorted list of numbers so half the numbers in the list will be less and half the numbers will be greater. The smaller numbers can be a lot smaller or just a little bit smaller but, in this case can never be less than zero. The bigger numbers can be just a teeny bit greater or can be hugely larger.

The Fed reported on those median values. It turns out that households of people aged 55-64 had about $95,200 in cash and stocks in 2007 (college graduates of all ages held slightly more at $99,400). Household median “nonfinancial assets” like your house and your car was $347,000 for the Congressional age group and $435,400 for college graduates of all ages. So the mid-line for college grads of any age is to be half a millionaire.

Half the college educated households are worth more than half a million?

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that.

27% of Americans have a college degree. 5% of Americans are “rich” millionaires. That means that about a fifth of Americans with a college degree are probably millionaires.

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that either.

Perhaps Mr. Grimm spent Thanksgiving with a can of Spam so he wants us to swallow his turkey.

Perhaps we need more college educated households although that offers no guarantees. The BLS reports that more than 482,000 college-educated Americans are customer service reps. Over 100,000 college-educated Americans are maids and janitors; 5% of those have a Ph.D.

And perhaps, as Mr. Shakespear reminds us, our bigger problem with Congress is the number of lawyers rather than the number of rich lawyers.

Mr. Grimm irks me because he trotted out an abundance of ogre words and a sparse few facts to back them up. I guar-an-damn-tee you that being a millionaire ain’t what it used to be.

I searched for a biography of Mr. Grimm who says “the way [the rich] see things . . . well, they’re different from you and me.” No joy. He was a general assignment reporter at the Herald after working for other newspapers. He has been a columnist there for about 20 years. I’m going out on a limb here without giving you the data I wanted him to give us, but I’m thinking Mr. Grimm is a limousine lib. He probably has a college degree. He certainly rubs elbows with the very same kind of folks lounging around Tallahassee and Washington that he excoriated yesterday. After all, the BLS also reports that the top 10% of news analysts, reporters, and columnists (meaning senior staff at major metro dailies) earned more than $77,480 per year.

Columnists are supposed to make waves. I do.

But Miami columnists ought not complain about how cold it is in South Florida when the fact show it is 60° colder in North Puffin. We do better making waves with facts that stand up to daylight scrutiny.

Warning: Unexpected transition ahead. Follow along and be careful where you step.

I will address the question, Is Liberalism really Liberalislam another time.

The Herald column does what so many limousine liberals and fundamentalist Muslims alike want to do: drag down the rich so everyone is poor and scrabbling in the dirt.

Me? I’d rather be a millionaire so here’s my proposal. If you are so apologetic for your personal wealth, give me your fortune. I guarantee I will hire a dungeon master to help you feel really ashamed.

You libs want something worth groaning about? Mr. Grimm could have offered a couple of valid statistics:

  • In about 40 years, the average U.S. CEO pay has grown by an order of magnitude. Mine hasn’t.
  • Congress critters upped their average wealth by 16% in 2009, a year the rest of us took a hit.

Americans should celebrate that some of us can become wealthy. Want to do better? The answer is not to tear down those who have but rather to improve the odds for the have nots.

A Nation of Suggestions

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The immigration debate moves to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday in a challenge to the Arizona law that punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Court watchers expect that this action will signal how the court might handle the more expansive Arizona immigration enforcement law SB1070.

The governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down a commencement address in Arizona last May because “with his accent, he was afraid they would try to deport him back to Austria.”

I suggested then that we should, perhaps, boycott Los Angeles since that whole city had lined up to encourage blatantly illegal behavior.

Arizona’s law requires employers to verify the eligibility of new workers through a federal database. Arizonans hoped it would shrink their status as the center of immigrant smuggling.

“Immigrants can’t ‘steal jobs’ nobody else wants,” my friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl suggested. “If it weren’t for the guest workers, all those jobs would go to Mexico or someplace else overseas.”

Huh?

“And don’t even get me started on the so-called ‘economic burden’ of immigrants,” he continued. “The reverse is actually true. They receive less health care, less welfare, less public schooling than our own downtrodden do. Immigration actually improves economic conditions, because those so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants spend money on the same things everybody else does.”

Yeppers. Like coyotes. And sending money back to the economy of Mexico.

Um, Lee? Hello, Lee? Earth to Lee?

Congress has jinkered with how aliens may cross the border and with immigration policy since the Naturalization Act of 1790. Back then, only “free white persons” of “good moral character” could become naturalized. Fortunately for them, most of today’s Congressmen are native born. Congress increased the residency requirement to five years in 1795, a requirement remains the law of the land to this day.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 has been amended many times and is contained in the United States Code as the basic body of immigration law. That law defines who is an alien and delineates the rights, duties, and obligations of aliens in the United States. The alien must establish that he is admissible to the United States as an immigrant. It’s the law.

“That doesn’t matter,” Lee said. “These people are here now.”

Ignorance can be fixed.
Stupidity is forever.

“Our border with Canada is the longest nonmilitarized border in the world,” INS Executive Associate Commissioner Michael A. Pearson told Congress in 1999. “This border, however, is not unmonitored or uncontrolled. The INS maintains 114 Ports-of-Entry (POEs), 8 Border Patrol Sectors, and 44 Patrol stations along the 3,987 miles of border with Canada (excluding Alaska).” The INS maintains another 43 Ports-of-Entry along our 1,969 miles of border with Mexico.

Perhaps Lee would like those Ports of Entry emptied so people guest workers can simply walk across anywhere.

I understand why liberals like Lee don’t geddit.

Laws are only advisory.If your Congress decrees that an evil, dirty, dark business must or a nasty, rich Republican baron must give up property or starve Mexicans by increasing ethanol in gasoline, why then those laws must be enforced.

On the other hand, if the other Congress, the one made up of evil, dirty, dark businesses and nasty, rich Republican barons decrees that crossing the border is illegal, why those laws are safe to ignore.

By George, I geddit now.

Spanked

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In any other universe, when one breaks the law, one generally goes to jail. Instead, Charlie Rangel had to endure standing up while Nancy Pelosi somberly intoned “you are a bad man. Bad. Really bad. Really.”

The news calls it a “staggering fall for Mr. Rangel.” Even Faux News thought this “punishment” nearly capital. A staggering fall? Ms. Pelosi didn’t even rap his nose with a newspaper.