Month: February 2002

From Dan Walters: Legislature’s bipartisan gerrymander generates intraparty battles this story on the dynastic and identity-politics battles for legislative seats in California.

In the 80th Assembly District, which sprawls over the vast Southern California desert, meanwhile, Gregory Pettis, a gay Cathedral City councilman, and a once-close friend, construction supervisor Joey Acuna Jr., are locked in what has become a bitter tussle. Pettis entered the race first and former Assemblywoman Denise Ducheny recruited Acuna because she considered the 80th to be a designated Latino district.

This is what term-limits does for you, and nothing more: a slew of rookie politicians beholden to the machines that finance them, clueless in the face of lobbyists. It was a bad idea, and it needs to be repealed.

Wendy McElroy links this article from the Christian Science Monitor on child support: ‘Deadbeat’ dads – or just ‘dead broke’?

Most divorced or never-married fathers with an outstanding child-support understand the high cost of falling behind. Those who don’t pay up often face repercussions such as paycheck withholding, automobile-license suspension, even jail time.

Such aggressive pursuit of child-support dollars has not been without its problems – or critics. And perhaps surprisingly, the list of critics now includes more child-welfare advocates.

Organizations including the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) maintain that child-support policies need to recognize economic realities and be more flexible, particularly where low-income, noncustodial fathers are concerned.

“States are frequently not doing enough to help low-income fathers get employment so that they can pay child support,” says Deborah Weinstein, director of CDF’s Family Income Division.

“What we’ve found is that there’s a fundamental tension here between what the fathers can actually financially contribute to their children and the children’s needs,” says Paula Roberts, senior staff attorney at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) in Washington.

This is awfully funny. In 1998, the California Legislature invited a group of child support experts to provide them with advice on reforming the state’s child support system, including Paula Roberts and yours truly. I presented statistics showing that states with high child support guidelines (high percentage of income) have low rates of collection. Paula disagreed with my analysis, and said California merely needed to reorganize its system to track down deadbeats more effectively. The legislature took Paula’s advice, and collections are the same as before.

Maybe you can teach a old dog, or an old feminist, new tricks. The key seems to be to give them time.

Finally, somebody in Washington is “getting” the Enron deal: The Nando Times: Congressmen say Enron investigation points to ‘securities fraud’

WASHINGTON (February 3, 2002 1:28 p.m. EST) – Two lawmakers pointed to possible criminality in the Enron scandal Sunday, saying the company manufactured income out of its clandestine partnership deals that led to financial disaster.

“We’re finding what may clearly be securities fraud,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin.
Sen. Byron Dorgan said that in a failed deal for Blockbuster Video, an Enron partnership named Braveheart borrowed $110 million from a Canadian bank and the company booked the money as income.

The Enron scam wasn’t about the journalists and it wasn’t about the polticians: it was a scheme to defraud investors out of their money by pushing the stock price up through false reporting. The principal watchdogs who should have been on the case were all paid-off, of course, and that was primarily through investment banking fees and commissions.

The analysis of the PoMo Left in: Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle is worth printing and framing. In essence, he says that the Old Left used a reasoned, scientific analysis of poltical economy to arrive at the position that socialism is more just than capitalism. As this analysis was disproved by mounting historical evidence to the contrary, it became necessary to either discard reason or to discard socialism. And we know which tack the PoMos have taken.

It seems that I have to scoop the un-scoopable Andrew Sullivan on his appearance on Washington Journal with Christopher Hitchens. The boys were clearly the worse for wear owing to the unseemly hour at which the show is shot, but they managed to keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. The most significant event was Hitch’s admission that he’s no longer a socialist, a question that host Brian Lamb has been taunting him with for some ten years now. He equivocated a bit, declaring that it’s not really possible for anyone to be a socialist these days since there’s no world-wide socialist movement, no prospect of one in the future, and no coherent socialist critique of capitalism, so it’s not really a personal choice.

The only areas of disagreement between the two were religion and health care; Sully’s a Roman Catholic and Hitch is an “anti-theist.” They traded the standard strawmen on this question in a particularly amusing way. Sully’s big on the free-market system of health care we have in the United States, and credits it for the anti-HIV drugs that are keeping him alive, while Hitch is nostalgic for the National Health, which was working fine twenty years ago when he left England.

Finally, the call-in audience was true to form for Complaint-Span: loony as all get-out. It was a fun show.

Fed Status for Fetus Spurs Debate

Abortion rights supporters said the change could help lay legal groundwork establishing the rights of a fetus and lead to a reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade (news – web sites) decision that legalized abortion.

“It undermines the whole premise of Roe v. Wade by giving legal status to a fetus from the moment of conception,” said Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center.

The left’s position on abortion is inconsistent with its position on capital punishment and its alleged concern “for the children,” as their outrage over pre-natal care and punishment of fetal murder clearly shows. Tommy Thompson and the administration have brought these inconsistencies to the surface, and helped the poor at the same time.