So I’m glancing through memeorandum and I glance at the picture of Hugo Chavez (below left) and briefly wonder why Vernon Robinson (below right) is on there. Then I look more closely and realize it’s Chavez, but then wonder if Chavez’s and Robinson’s pictures are really enough alike to cause that mistake…you be the judge.
Of course their politics are very similar:)
According to Capitol Advantage, Virginia Foxx has gotten $267,913 from 149 PACs for the 05-06 election cycle. The smallest amount ($200) came from the American Association for Marriage and the largest amount ($12,500) came from 21st Century Pac. Here’s her top 15 PAC contributors
Other notable PACs that contributed some grease were the Lorillard Tobacco Company Public Affairs Committee ($3,750), Dell Inc. Employee Pac ($2,500), Petroleum Marketers Association of America/Small Biz Committee ($1,500), Exxonmobil Corporation PAC ($1,000), and Tyco International Inc. Employees PAC ($500).
Given Foxx’s strong and consistent stand on immigration reform I was a little surprised to see all the agricultural organizations that gave money to her. Those include
By my count that’s over $20k from ag-related PACs. The reason that is interesting to me is that she is very strong on immigration reform and is a hard-liner on illegal aliens. On the other hand agriculture is one of the leading employers/benefactors of illegal alien labor (along with construction). Strange. **Update** Okay, so I might be an idiot. She sits on the House Agriculture committee, in which case the donations make sense. On the other hand I do wonder how the average ag-business person feels about her immigration stance?
**Update #2** In an interview in the Winston-Salem Journal Foxx denied that she had any connections to oil (her opponent Roger Sharpe said she is in the oil companies’ pocket), but she’s gotten some contributions from oil company PACs including ExxonMobil. It’s a small amount of money so I’d say Sharpe better find another bone to pick. He also better get busy with his fundraising because Foxx has a serious war-chest and as of the last election filings he has, uh, not so much.
The Raleigh News & Observer has an interesting article (found via Ed Cone) about North Carolina’s traditional part-time legislature. The basic thrust of the article is that most of the people serving North Carolina are retired, self-employed or independently wealthy due to the fact that the legislators aren’t paid much and the job requires an almost full-time commitment that precludes your average person from serving. There’s some mention of creating a “professional” legislature with full-time pay, but others argue that the legislature should remain as it is. Some of the interviewees also say that they worry that there are not enough young people in the body which might skew the body’s deliberation.
One of the points the article makes that I find to be totally irrelevant is this:
It’s noteworthy who does not serve in the legislature:
North Carolina has more than 120,000 store sales clerks and 107,000 retail cashiers — but none in the General Assembly.
There are no lawmakers who make their living as food preparers, freight haulers, assemblers, office clerks, truck drivers, registered nurses, customer service representatives or waitresses — the rest of the state’s most common jobs.
The point of a representative democracy is not that it literally have a representative from every walk of life, but that it enable people from every walk of life to choose who represents them. If the person chosen to represent them does not satisfy their needs then they are free to choose a replacement during the next election.
It is also highlighted in the article that the percentage of black and hispanic representatives is lower than their respective percentages of the population. This is an old saw in politics and feeds into the whole gerrymandering debate, but again it really is irrelevant. No matter our color our vote still counts the same whether we are black or white, rich or poor. Sure each person’s individual influence varies outside of the voting booth, but inside it we are equal and we have the same opportunity to choose our representative in the government. Does that mean we will always get what we want? No, but that’s not what a representative democracy is all about. It’s about our ability to SAY who we want not our ability to GET who we want.
BTW, I think this argument holds true with regards to age as well. I know quite a few retirees who are younger at heart than any 30-something I’ve ever met. Hell, most of us thirty-somethings are too worn out by our everyday lives (i.e. kids) to feel anything but broken-down and old. If my old-codger of a rep isn’t doing what I like I’ll just vote against her next time.
And for the record I am completely opposed to a full-time, professional legislature. There’s enough corruption with them working part time…imagine what some of these jokers could do if they had all year to do it!
I received an email from “Blake for Congress” on April 24. I didn’t know I received it because I’m just now getting around to cleaning out my email after my long trip to Orlando. What bugs me about this email is:
If this is the best they can do I don’t give this guy much of a chance against his opponent.
Rolling Stone has a long article called "God’s Senator" that is likely to scare the bejesus out of you if you’re scared of fundamentalist Christian Senators from Kansas who have aligned themselves with powerful forces like Opus Dei and something called the Fellowship. If half the stuff in this article is true it makes "The Da Vinci Code" seem downright realistic by comparison.
The article is a feature on Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who has been ordained as the presidential front runner by the fundamentalist Christian movement. Normally I’d write the guy off as a quack, but the article also explores his leadership positions in groups like the Fellowship. Here’s how the article describes the fellowship:
Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide
founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and
generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that
the cells — God’s chosen, appointed to power — could construct a
Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would
do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a
hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to
say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were
known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they
were not known at all.
The Senator also converted to Catholocism through Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic group that could probably be described using many of the same adjectives as those used to describe The Fellowship. Then there’s the "Values Action Team" which the article describes this way:
Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer
brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell — one explicitly
dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action
Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading
organizations on the religious right. James Dobson’s Focus on the
Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the
Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values
Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the
Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the
record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from
discussing the proceedings. It’s a little "cloak-and-dagger," says
a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the
enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure
groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights
against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime
legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win
passage of Brownback’s broadcast decency bill and made the
president’s tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting
policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to
day, the VAT is instrumental."
This guy is a player and he’s tapped into some powerful and monied networks and that makes the author’s analysis that "Brownback seeks something far more radical: not
faith-based politics but faith in place of politics" very frightening indeed if it’s true.
I took a little test at www.politicalcompass.org and it scored me this way:
Economic Left/Right: -1.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.67
They also provide a sample chart showing where some notable people would fall. Here it is:
To give you an idea, the axis is 0,0 so if you’re a negative/negative you fall in the lower left hand quadrant with Gandhi (that’s me). If you’re a negative/positive then you’re up there with Stalin, if you’re a positive/positive you’re in with Thatcher and positive/negative puts you in the company of Friedman. Personally I don’t think that examples like Hitler and Stalin because quite simply I think they were sub-human and they don’t belong on any chart that tracks normal human behavior/beliefs. I also think it unnecessarily offends people who might legitimately fall into those sectors but don’t believe in wholesale killing.
If you go to the site you’ll see an overview of what this
means.
Thanks to David Boyd for pointing to this.
Update: Potato Stew put together a plot that shows all the scores for local bloggers that took the test. I’m thinking that it would be interesting to do one for my family.
Not that anyone gives a damn, but if I were a big-name politician like Al Bore I wouldn’t run for anything for the next couple of years. That’s the ultimate sucker bet: take leadership just when things are ready to come-a-crapper.
I thought that the Bush administration got a bum rap for not catching Osama’s boys before 9-11 (didn’t most of the lead-up happen during Clinton’s administration) and I think that the next administration is going to be left holding the bag for what’s developed under Bush. Residual effects of Iraq and crappy economic policies are going to doom the next administration no matter which party it comes from.
But who am I? I don’t know s— about s— so it doesn’t really matter what I think. Unless of course there are tens of millions of American voters who think like me, which of course means the country has much bigger problems than picking a decent President.
My strategy? Sit it out until ’12 and then play Roosevelt (Franklin or Teddy, take your pick).
There’s an interesting item you can find here about a blog that was started for a public agency in Orlando, Florida. The blog had a brief life until it was ordered shut down by the powers-that-be, apparently because they didn’t like the criticism they were getting. Imagine that; public officials that don’t like criticism.
Once again you’re going to be shocked – shocked I tell you! – by the apparent genius of our elected officials. According to this article in the New Yorker a professor in Georgia has done a detailed study of over 6,000 stock transactions made by US Senators between 1993-1998 and has found that the Senators outperformed the market by an average of 12% annually. As the author says:
Over that time, senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per
cent annually. Since a mutual-fund manager who beats the market by two
or three per cent a year is considered a genius, the politicians’
ability to foresee the future seems practically divine. They did an
especially good job of picking up stocks at just the right time; their
buys were typically flat before they bought them, but beat the market
by thirty per cent, on average, in the year after.
To further enhance our grasp of the obvious the author writes:
Are senators really that smart? The authors of the study suggest a more
likely explanation: at least some senators must have been trading
“based on information that is unavailable to the public”—in other
words, they were engaged in some form of insider trading. It’s
impossible to pin down exactly how it happened, but it’s easy to
imagine senators getting occasional stock tips from corporate
supplicants, and their own work in Congress often deals with
confidential matters that have a direct impact on particular companies.
I wonder how many of them are heavily invested in energy companies these days? Come to think of it how many are heavily invested in defense contracting companies?
Just asking.
Today’s generation of grassroots political commentators may not have its marches on Washington ala the Vietnam era, but it does have its own unique form of commentary which has been enabled by all the cheap audio and video editing software that’s out there and the ability to distribute the resulting product via the internet.
A great example is what a guy who’s dubbed himself DJ RX has done with a mix or "mashup" of President Bush singing U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, which you can listen to here.
Genius.
Befuddled 