Month: July 2002

— The California Legislature does some pretty despicable things, but this (Lawmaker loses post after running Oracle probe / Assembly speaker installs committee chair who is more sympathetic to governor) takes the cake:

Sacramento — The Democratic chairman of a committee that probed the state’s questionable Oracle Corp. contract and embarrassed Gov. Gray Davis was removed from his job Tuesday and replaced with a lawmaker who has been less hostile to the governor.

Dean Florez, the Democrat Assemblyman who blew the whistle on the stinky Oracle deal, was replaced by Fred Keeley, the wimp who made a name for himself in the Quackenbush investigation only to be aced-out of a State Senate seat by redistricting. Fred’s trying to prove he’s a Party Faithful so they’ll throw him a bone when he’s termed-out later this year. What a punk.

— My old buddy Mike Honda was on O’Reilly’s Fox News show tonight, opining about school prayer, and he made a perfect fool of himself. This former schoolteacher declared that only Christians use the term “God,” that the words “under God” were added to the Pledge through constitutional amendment, and that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution (he wasn’t even at the Convention.) Honda is as nice a guy as you’ll ever want to meet, and he was very good to me when he was in the Assembly, but he’s clearly dumber than a pile of rocks, poor dude. At least he isn’t teaching school any more, just hanging out in Washington where nobody much notices his mental deficiencies. If we could send more of his former colleagues to DC, maybe we wouldn’t need school vouchers, but there’s only space for 535 of them.

— Live from the WTC has some interesting remarks in the accounting scandals:

A brief survey of left and right accounting-savvy people I know shows that every single one of them wants reform, and none of them have the faintest clue as to how to implement it.

I’ve now heard Democrats blaming Bush’s allegiance to his fat-cat oil company buddies for all of this, as well as Republicans blaming Clinton’s flimsy morals. Let’s get real: these things happened on Clinton’s watch, and he had the same incentives working for him that the accountants had working for them, a need to create the illusion of a strong economy. My take on all of this is that we need to enforce existing law, which should be obvious. If we do that, and it doesn’t work, then we can look for more onerous remedies.

The odd part of this business is that it makes bean-counters look kind of glamorous, like the dope dealers of the 21st Century, living large outside the law. Who woulda thought?

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a name for herself in Bush v. Gore by writing “I dissent” instead of “I respectfully dissent,” but many gave her a pass owing to the short time she had to write a polite and polished dissent. In the recent REPUBLICAN PARTY OF MINNESOTA ET AL. v. WHITE, CHAIRPERSON, MINNESOTA BOARD OF JUDICIAL STANDARDS, ET AL. she shows her bitchy and mean-spirited nature again, this time using out-of-context quotations from public statements made by Justices Scalia and Rehnquist to show them up as hypocrites on the issue of muzzling judges. These statements don’t address any underlying legal principles, and simply serve to show that she’s a harpy and not a team player. The woman is threat to our democracy.

— Why the Voucher Issue Really Could Hurt the Dems – A dissent?from last week’s instant contrarianism By Mickey?Kaus takes apart hard-line Democrat fantasies comparing school choice to abortion, on the political side:

What commentators did say was that the voucher decision was a boost for vouchers, which seems undeniably true. (Even if vouchers don’t spread very rapidly, it has to help that they are now a constitutional possibility. Roe may have hurt liberals, but it’s hard to argue it didn’t increase abortions.)

Democrats are indeed vulnerable on school choice, as soon as voters understand the issue, which they don’t yet, as a whole. Inner-city blacks and rural religious whites do, because they face the hard, entrenched incompetence of the teachers’ union, but most middle-class, urban whites are blissfully ignorant of the declining quality of the schools. Democrats are wholly-owned by the teachers’ union, and they can’t afford to alienate them, while the children getting sub-standard education don’t vote.

Education in America is so bad we’d be in an economic tailspin if it weren’t for the first-generation immigrants who make our tech sector work; as soon as the “Occupied” sign goes on over our immigration policy, we’ll see that.