Category: Politics

Patrick Ruffini’s written a whole season of plot synopses for the new TV political drama, “The Right Wing”. Very cool.

Ben has some thoughts.

Al Sharpton says:

“Democratic leadership is treating minority voters like their mistresses. We are good enough to have a little fun with around election time, but we are not good enough to meet mama and daddy.”

That’s pretty bad, but the truth is even worse. Remember when Al Gore and Bill Bradley had that little debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem during the last election, when they tried to outbid each other with social program spending to the exclusion of all other issues?

[Gore’s] hypocrisy on the subject of poverty is amazing in that he has repeatedly promised to help those left behind by our so-called ?booming economy? while, at the same time, praising the horrors that welfare reform brought to the children in the denial of health insurance for the poor and the elimination of any hope for further education or training for their single mothers who suddenly were forced to become workfare participants.

Treating blacks like mistresses instead of welfare whores would be a step up for Democrats.

Mean Mr. Mustard says:

I had what I suppose amounts to an “out-of-Berkeley” experience today.

He found a course that equates Marxism with Fascism, which is common sense in the real world, but this one is taught at Berkeley. Long but worth reading.

Writing on the American Open Technology Consortium blog, Doc Seals analyzes the Eldred case in terms of legal, political, and metaphorical impact:

The third is metaphorical. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court. Here’s how Richard Bennett puts it:

The issue here isn’t enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the conservative justices who sided with the majority is more likely the protection of property rights. In order to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright.

Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

While it’s always nice to see yourself quoted, I think this analysis is overly complex. Copyright law is simply a Congressional prerogative, according to the clear language of the Constitution. It’s an area of law in which there has been very little litigation, so case law must defer to the black-letter law emanating from Washington unless or until there’s a gross overstepping of authority in the part of Congress, and simply extending the term from n years to n + 20 doesn’t hit that mark.

The proper venue for modification of copyright law is Congress, not the courts, and it’s more than a little interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the effort spent on the Eldred case had been instead directed to lobbying Congress for the last four years.

In some sense, Hollywood benefits from a robust public domain at least as much – and probably more – than the public, as has been noted in many of the denunciations of the apparent hypocrisy of Disney building its empire largely on the backs of public domain stories.

A compromise that keeps the public domain growing by the absorption of works of little commercial value while protecting Mickey Mouse for the Disney Corp. isn’t a hard thing to work out politically, and that’s the direction that public domain advocates should be headed, according to the dissenting opinions in Eldred in particular.

The irony of this case is that the public domain advocates, to a man strong believers in democracy, chose to press the issue before the least democratic branch of government when the path to success leads through the most democratic branch, the legislative. But lobbying is a messy business, and lawsuits are crisp, clear, and final.

See Matt Welch for an account of the war between racist California Republicans, led by Bill Back and Randy Ridgel, and Shannon Reeves of Oakland.

Scum like Back and Ridgel are welcome to leave the party post haste, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and never come around here again; stupid, rotten mother fuckers like them are a disgrace to the human race.

Everybody’s a hypocrite in some way or another, so I don’t get too excited about commonplace displays of moral inconsistency. I figure it’s better to have high ideals that you don’t always live up to than to have none at all. But there are cases where hypocrisy crosses a line and becomes obscene and therefore worthy of mention. The child support story out of Washington DC presently circulating the same blogs that bashed Trent Lott recently is such a case. It appears to have started with Andrew Sullivan:

WHY D.C. IS STILL HELL: What do you do with a man who has successfully evaded paying child support to kids from two different relationships? Make him head of D.C.’s child-support enforcement agency! Colbert King has the details. The kicker: D.C. collected payments in 12 percent of its child support cases in 2000. The national average is 42 percent.

and it’s been echoed by Glenn Reynolds and Don McArthur (a fan of the racist Gene Expression site).

These folks are all upset about the story of Roscoe Grant, Deputy Director of the DC child support collection agency written by dim bulb Colby King:

For years, the mother and aunt of Octavious Williams tried to get Grant to recognize and then do right by his son, Octavious. They even went to city agencies for help but got nowhere. It wasn’t until the family filed a paternity suit against him that Grant paid attention. And even then, it took a paternity test that came back positive to make Grant own up to the claim that he was Octavious Williams’s old man. Yet it fell to a magistrate judge to force Grant to do the right thing. Last July, the judge ordered him to pay $968 every two weeks to Octavious.

That’s right, our moral leaders are upset that Roscoe Grant didn’t just automatically start giving $2000 a month to a woman who claimed he was the father of her baby without a DNA test. What gall.

King also complains that the DC office of child support only collects money in 12% of cases, compared to a national average of 42%; this statistic caught the eye of the HIV-positive, bareback riding Mr. Sullivan, exemplar of virtue in all things sexual.

So let’s understand how government child support agencies work, and whether there’s any fire underneath all this smoke. Most of the people who collect child support have court orders against the father that were obtained as part of a divorce. Each state has a formula that dictates a percentage of income that has to be paid, and as soon as custody and paternity are decided, so is support. You don’t even have to have a judge issue these orders, they’re handed out by administrative judges, pro-temp judges, and by the child support collection agency itself.

Once an order has been entered, most people pay their obligation directly to the custodial parent, usually the mother, without much fanfare. The court has the power to order the payer’s employer to garnish wages, and this is a normal part of the procedure. Going through this process of obtaining the order and ensuring compliance doesn’t brand the recipient as a gold-digger or the payer as a deadbeat: this is simply how the system works. This money doesn’t show up in the official collection rates, as it never touches the government’s hands.

Now the process does get somewhat more complicated in the case where the child is born out of wedlock and the mother is on welfare, a very common scenario in Washington DC and in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. In order to collect welfare, the mother has to identify the father and sign her child support rights over to the state. The state then obtains a judgment of paternity and a child support order, and begins collecting money. It keeps the money it collects if it’s less than mom’s welfare; if it’s more, it kicks her off welfare and gives her the child support. Hence there is a certain symmetry between child support and welfare.

In many cases – roughly half – the man identified as the father by the welfare mother either can’t be found or is not, in fact, the father of the welfare child. Hence, it’s wise for any man presented with a child support order for an out-of-wedlock child to seek a paternity test. You wouldn’t want to have a legal obligation to pay $2000 a month for 20 years if you didn’t have to, would you? Of course you wouldn’t.

This is exactly what Roscoe Grant did, and it doesn’t make him a deadbeat, it makes him prudent. King makes it sound like the mother of Octavious [sic] Grant had to shell out money from her own pocket for a paternity suit, but these proceedings are actually paid for by the state, with the father picking up the tab for the DNA test if its positive. It’s also common for fathers to pay welfare mothers under-the-table while all these proceedings are pending, and we don’t know that Grant didn’t do this himself.

Now some men will sign a voluntary declaration of paternity without the DNA test, so perhaps King is angry with Grant for not doing this. I would take issue with him on that point as well, because the alleged father really has no way of knowing if he’s the real father without a DNA test, and if he signs up for a child that’s not his, he’s just cheated the real father and a the child out of the relationship they deserve.

The collection rate statistic that Sullivan’s so impressed with is also not what it appears to be. States play all sorts of games with this figure, mainly by keeping people in the state collection system after they have no need for it. To understand this, take this example: State A obtains child support orders, begins collecting, and then allows the woman to exit the state system and collect directly from the man’s employer. She gets all her money every month without the delay of up to a month while the state holds the money, collects interest, and cuts her a check. State B, however, requires the mother to remain in the state program as long as she’s collecting support. They all get federal incentive dollars for the money they collect, and this approach maximizes them, even though it inconveniences mother and child.

State A will have a low rate of collection, since most of the cases in its system are pending paternity tests, while state B will have a high rate of collection owing to the large number of cases in its system where paternity has been established. DC apparently follows the A model, more friendly to mothers, than the B model, more friendly to the government.

Collection rates also reflect the underlying ability to pay of the local population. In California, half of unpaid child support is owed by people too poor to file an income tax return; given the high rates of unemployment among black men in DC, that figure is probably around 80%.

But the larger issue is the $2000 a month child support order that King tries to diminish by dividing it into a bi-weekly sum when all orders are monthly. Dad’s contribution is supposed to be matched by a comparable one from mom — this is what all that “equality” stuff is about — so that young Octavious should be supported to the tune of $4000 a month. Will everybody who thinks it takes $4000 a month — or even $2000 — to raise an infant please get in touch with me? I’d like to sell you this fine bridge I’ve got over the Frisco Bay.

But let’s suppose that I’m all wet and this Roscoe Grant character is a scumbag would should be fired from his job in the DC government; what happens to young Octavious and his momma when Roscoe no longer has a paycheck? That’s what I mean about the hypocrisy.
Continue reading “Bandwagon du jour”

Gov. Davis seeks an $8.3-billion tax hike to balance the out-of-whack California budget; he wants to increase the sales tax, increase the income tax on high-earners, and increase the cigarette tax. Along the way, he wants to shift unpopular programs such as welfare to the counties.

This approach to solving the budget deficit is, in a word, insane. While it may play well politically to soak the rich, consumers, and smokers, this approach ends up making the perennial budget problem much, much worse, and the Republicans in Sacramento aren’t going for it. Even key members of the Administration are skeptical:

It’s unclear whether Davis will win support in the Legislature for the income tax hike, even from all Democrats. His incoming finance director, Democratic former state Sen. Steve Peace, has expressed skepticism about raising the income tax on high earners, noting that their income is notoriously volatile. To pass, at least some Republicans would have to support it.

So let’s back up and look at the big picture. California’s budget is always out of whack: we either collect too much in taxes, or too little. This is because the state derives too much of its revenue from high earners, and the incomes of high earners are volatile. So in the surplus years, the Legislature spends like a drunken sailor on new programs, and in the deficit years it shifts the funding of these programs to the counties who rely inordinately on sales taxes to pay their way. Consequently, cities and counties have a never-ending hunger for sales taxes, and they make deals with big-box retailers for rate reductions and property tax holidays to entice them in. Meanwhile, neighborhoods and wholesale businesses suffer.

These problems are aggravated by Prop 13, which prohibits fair assessment of property taxes, by Prop 98, which forces the state to pay too much for education in lean years, and the balanced budget provision in the state constitution that prohibits deficit spending in lean years.

The solutions to these problems are obvious: repeal Prop 13 and Prop 98 and the balanced budget amendment, add an amendment to the constitution prohibiting runaway growth in state spending, and broaden the base of the income tax. Taken together, these reforms would constitute a tax fairness plan that might just pass a ballot prop if it were presented in a bi-partisan manner.

The Davis proposals will make the long-term budget problem worse, and should be rejected.

The Kolkata Libertarian points out that India is confused about GM corn.

Andrew Sullivan says the Bush Economic Plan succeeds on one important count:

But politically, it seems to me that Bush has again completely outwitted his opponents.

But he’s not sure about its merit as policy, and neither am I.

You know your hippie friends don’t have enough to worry about when they complain about things like this on Joi Ito’s Web:

DELAY: John, we’re no longer a superpower. We’re a super-duperpower

DeLay simply echoed Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, and others who’ve said:

Even the mightiest nation on earth – what Ray Seitz, the former American ambassador in London, has called the “super-duper-power” – cannot do everything on its own.

As the world’s only super-power, we do have special status, like it or not.

Via Jeff Jarvis.