Category Archives: Politics

Happy President’s Day

Americana, Politics

Missing bench-

When I was in college and starting to take classes in economics and government, my dad and I got in several recurring arguments. My dad was a lawyer – more specifically, a criminal defense lawyer – and he was very interested in the technicalities of the law. I thought that they were only technicalities and he thought they were the very foundation and our arguments often swirled around the spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law. I have always been a lumper and a spirit of the law kind of guy – unless it was about me and I was trying to get something, I suppose – and my dad, by training and disposition, was a letter of the law kind of guy.

One of the examples he liked to give was a case that went to the Supreme Court. As I remember it – and I may be way wrong on the details, here – in the 1930’s the Federal Government passed a tax on checks over a certain amount, I think it was $50. To get around that tax, a guy wrote twenty checks for $49.99 and one check for $.20 to pay a thousand dollar bill. The IRS taxed him anyway and the guy sued, he lost and appealed, eventually the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court where he won.

My dad’s point was that even The Supreme Court believed that technicality of the law was all that anybody could go by and there was no such thing as the spirit of the law. My position was that there was a spirit of the law and the Supreme Court was wrong. I usually defaulted to Dred Scott v. Sandford in arguments like this, saying that Dred Scott proved how wrong the court could be, and around and around we would go.

One of the requirements of the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that businesses with over 50 employees must offer health insurance to full-time employees. I keep reading about companies changing employees to part time to get away from that requirement and I wonder What kind of selfish jerk would do that?

According to an article written by Dr. Clarence Lusane, entitled Missing from Presidents’ Day: The People They Enslaved:

George Washington’s stated antislavery convictions misaligned with his actual political behavior. While professing to abhor slavery and hope for its eventual demise, as president Washington took no real steps in that direction and in fact did everything he could to ensure that not one of the more than 300 people he owned could secure their freedom. During the 10 years of construction of the White House, George Washington spent time in Philadelphia where a law called the Gradual Abolition Act passed in 1780. It stated that any slaves brought into the state were eligible to apply for their freedom if they were there for longer than six months. To get around the law, Washington rotated the people working for him in bondage so that they were there for less than six months each.

I guess the answer to that What kind of selfish jerk question is the kind of guy who might become President of the United States, the kind of guy who might even become The Father of our Nation.

 

Tunisia

Politics

Tunisia

While the world watches Egypt thrash around with a revolution, a short-lived democracy, and a new military dictatorship;  while the world watches Ukraine reignite; while the world watches Syria convulse,  Tunisia has quietly written a new Constitution. It says, among other things, that All citizens have the same rights and obligations. All are equal before the law.

I think of Tunisia as being the most European Islamic country but that is probably wrong, Turkey is probably more European Country. However, Tunisia is closer to Europe and it was a French colony (or whatever the French called it). In some ways, the new Tunisian Constitution reflects that French heritage, sounding slightly Declaration of the Rights of Man-ish with The Republic of Tunisia shall guarantee fundamental freedoms and human rights in their universality, comprehensiveness, complementarity and interdependence….The Republic of Tunisia shall be founded upon the principles of the rule of law and pluralism and shall strive to promote human dignity and to develop the human personality.

Part of that high-sounding rhetoric is blunted by other parts of the Constitution like:  The President of the Republic is the Head of State. His religion shall be Islam, but it does seem as if the Tunisians are serious about Freedom of Religion and Women’s Rights when they say The Republic of Tunisia shall guarantee the inviolability of the human person and freedom of conscience, or The state and society shall strive to entrench the values of solidarity, mutual assistance and tolerance among individuals, social categories and generations.

I hope so, it would be great to see an Islamic country protecting minorities and women and it would be good for business.

 

 

 

Drought

Photography, Politics

Cathedral -

Cathedral in the Desert 2005, exposed by low water level in Lake Powell (really a reservoir). © srstern

On January 17th, Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a drought emergency in the state. He also asked all citizens to cut back at least 20% of their water use. In typical  Jerry Brown fashion, he had lots of charts and photographs showing us how bad it is and it is very serious. Last year was the driest year that California has had since we started keeping records in 1895. The Department of Water Resources said that Gasquet Ranger Station in Del Norte County has only 43% of normal and Sacramento is even worse with 5.74 inches of rain instead of the typical 18 inches.

This is probably not news to anybody who lives here and has gone outside this year. I have never seen it this dry and I have lived here since 1940 and paid attention since about 1956, when I started backpacking. The scary thing is that we don’t really have enough water for our lifestyle even if there were no drought. The good news is that the drought, which is aggravating the problem, may actually make us think about the underlying problem.

Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus

 Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus. © srstern 

That is not something we – we meaning, probably, all Homo sapiens, maybe all mammals – are good at doing; looking at subtle, underlying, problems and correcting them before they become big emergencies. Jerry Brown was the first politician that I remember who talked about national limits, saying The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits. He got laughed off the stage as Governor Moonbeam. Jimmy Carter was the first president to really face an energy crisis, complete with gas lines. He asked everybody to turn their heat down to save energy, and he was belittled for it, losing to Reagan’s It’s morning again in America campaign.

As an aside, Carter had several firsts as a president; he was the first president born in a hospital, he was the first president to wear jeans in the White House, he was the only president – so far – to have lived in subsidized public housing, and he was the only President to have been interviewed by Playboy. End aside. My friend Ed Cooney is in love with Jimmy Carter, Ed is an amateur presidential historian and smart enough to know that, in many ways, Jimmy Carter was not an especially effective president but enough in love to want to overlook these Presidential flaws. However, I think that he is actually in love with Carter because of Carter’s political flaws.

What hurt Carter as a president, is partially what made him admirable. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Annapolis and later did graduate work in atomic reactor technology and nuclear physics; he was a rational man more than a political man. He knew we weren’t going to solve our energy and resource problems by ignoring them, and we haven’t.

I am not sure if I have become more or less cynical over the years. I used to think that we would know when we really have a water problem when they stop watering the golf courses, now I am not so sure. Now I think that water flows towards money more than downhill and we can be in a very serious drought with very green golf courses.

Silverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srsternSilverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srstern

Strong Tea parties and weak tea

Politics

Protest-5934

A day or so ago, I got an email requesting that I sign an online petition. Like most people, I suspect, I get these alot . It seems so much like petitioning  the choir that I often just delete them and move on. But, I read an interesting article in The Economist that started me thinking about that petition and other ones like it. The article shows the results of Tea Party rallies over April 15th, 2010.

new research suggests that the people whom left-wing pundits once dismissed as “teabaggers” made a big difference in the mid-term elections of 2010, when Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives….When it rained, attendance at rallies halved….Dry rallies created momentum…and the rallies a year later were twice as large. Such enthusiasm translated into a 7% rise in the Republican vote in 2010, compared with wet areas. If the Tea Party merely expressed voters’ frustrations rather than inflaming them, one would expect no difference between wet and dry districts. The authors conclude that protests can indeed shape policy.

In a way, this is what I expect, it is why I walked precincts for Obama and turned out for Occupy protests. But, often, when I am doing that, my mind tells me that what I am doing is not going to change anybody’s mind and I didn’t walk as many precincts as I had time for, I didn’t go to most of the Occupy and Move-On protests I was invited to, and I haven’t signed most of the petitions I believe in.

It is nice to see that rallies have effects, and scary because it means that not doing anything has an effect, even if it is negative. Liberals seem to concentrate on Presidential elections and Conservatives on local and down ticket elections. I think the conservatives are right. Having a school Board that is in agreement with  their basic beliefs is more germane to their daily lives than having a President that is. We Liberals scream like scalded cats when the School Board wants to buy books that say Intelligent Design is a real theory but the best way to stop that is to get people on the School Board that don’t believe in that nonsense in the first place.

The article ended with Watery tea may be weak, but the strong stuff makes lawmakers sit up and take notice, which reminded me that Courtney Gonzales brought over some green tea on Christmas Eve and showed us how to make it weak. I – we – think of tea as a way to administer caffeine but  for hundreds if not thousands of years, it has been a way to make water safe to drink.

To stretch my ramblings on The Economist’s article a little further, I would say that the same is true in politics. The strong tea of presidential politics gets the headlines but it is the weak tea of down ticket politics that, eventually, makes the water safe to drink. It is state and local policies that determine if family planning clinics stay open and determine the boundaries of electoral districts. It is easy for me to fall back on the belief that politics is a way to shock the system into change every four years, but I am starting to believe that politics is the almost daily work of signing protests, the daily work of trying to be heard.

Occupy-5923

 

Well, I guess it is Governmental Transparency

Politics

US-intelligence-seal-Nothing-Is-Beyond-Our-Reach

Close to a couple of weeks ago, the National Reconnaissance Office – that’s NRO to the cognoscenti –  launched a new spy satellite.  The NRO was founded in 1961 – but the government didn’t get around to telling anybody until 1992 – and, according to its website,  is in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining… America’s spy satellites. The logo for the latest spy satellite is a malevolent octopus humping the earth. For the dense among us, they provided the tag line Nothing is beyond our reach.

At first look, it seemed sort of off-putting – Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, tweeted, You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now. This logo isn’t helping. and that is a mean looking octopus – but I think he is wrong and the logo is brilliant. In its own way, the Defense department – I think the NRO must work for Defense, they wouldn’t be under State would they?  – is doing the same thing as Edward Snowden. The logo is designed to stop terrorists more than to catch them.

The thing that stops me from driving faster than traffic on The 280 coming back from San Francisco at 11:30 Saturday night is that I don’t want to get a ticket and, going into San Francisco at 5:30, I saw several black and white Highway Patrol cars that, I am worried, are still around. Edward Snowden is like the guy flashing his lights at me, saying Slow down, there is a cop ahead. The logo is like painting the Highway Patrol cars black and white so I will know they are at work. The presence of the Highway Patrol stops me from speeding and the presence of NRO satellites keeps terrorists from using emails. Sure, not all the terrorist, but most.