Category: Politics

— Patio Pundit Martin Devon is one of the more interesting sources of RoboPundit summaries, and a regular read who’s not too wedded to an ideology to see the truth. He said some nice things about me the other day regarding my former activism on behalf of divorced dads and kids, and in the course of it speculated:

I’ll tell you what, if a legislator decides to take up the banner on behalf of divorced dads and their kids they’d had far more support than most people realize.

There have been a couple in the California legislature, first Sen. Chuck Calderon, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and then Asm. Rod Wright, former chairman of Utilities and Commerce. Both men are Democrats, and both found their political careers harmed by their support for dads, children, and civil rights.

The other side, lead by some fairly open anti-male activists, such as lesbian rights crusader Sheila Kuehl, really aren’t satisfied with winning the debates and passing their laws — they’re vengeful. Stories that support this are abundant, and I can post some if anybody’s interested, and the victims of these vendettas haven’t always been male legislators. Fathers’ rights is something you advocate at your own risk in California, but the tide is slowly turning.

— Pinko liberal commie Marxist Michael Kinsley isn’t fooled by the Washington circus around stock options:

In short the abuses these reforms address, if anything, drove stock prices up, but what really bothers people is that they came back down again. Politicians promising to solve that problem are making the same mistake they purport to correct: grabbing a short-term advantage that will cost them dearly in the longer run.

So why is Kinsley so clear when Great Authorities Greenspan and Buffett (Warren, not Jimmy) are so confused? Kaus has one answer, and I have another: Greenspan is a political animal, who knows which way the wind is blowing, and Buffett has similar predilections for different reasons: he has to explain why Berkshire Hathaway, his pricey holding company, bit the big one throughout the Tech Bubble. He was robbed by cheating CEOs, of course.

Give me a break: even the most ardent proponents of draconian accounting for stock options don’t really believe this issue has squat to do with restoring investor faith in the market.

— The Washington Post reports that stock options survived efforts by Democrat Carl Levin and the emotionally disturbed sometime Republican John McCain to severely restrict or eliminate them as part of the Sarbanes accounting fraud bill:

Stock options were a major topic of the debate in the final afternoon of action on the bill. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) described stock options as “stealth compensation” that serves as a “driving force behind the deceptive accounting practices that have bedeviled this nation.”

Levin proposed that the Financial Accounting Standards Board, an industry group that writes accounting rules, be directed to study how to properly account for stock options and act on its findings within a year.

But Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) objected to Levin’s proposal, saying it was akin to ordering “a fair trial and then a hanging,” meaning that it was aimed at requiring companies to record stock options as expenses. He said it should be considered at another time in connection with other proposals dealing with stock options. Under rules in effect as the debate ended, a single senator could block a vote on any amendment, and Gramm’s objection effectively killed Levin’s proposal.

Silicon Valley voters would be wise to note who’s trying to kill stock options, and who saved them, at least for now.

— PoMo fops love to beat up on colonialism, making it synonymous with oppression and dodging the question of how the Evil West was able to dominate the unwashed masses of the Third World in the first place. Dinesh D’Souza explains the source of western power in Two cheers for colonialism

The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy and capitalism. All these institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization.

He goes on to explain that while colonialism may have been bad for older generations of Indians, those of his generation have benefited from it handily. The unbalanced teaching of the colonial period is one of the major defects of our government run schools. It’s not touchy-feely to talk about how colonialism modernized the primitives, but it’s true.

Perhaps a little colonialism is the solution to Saudi Arabia’s evident load of problems.

— More Than Zero trackbacks Rand’s post on Arthur Andersen, and says my connection of Andersen’s creative accounting with Clinton-era market exuberance is a stretch. Fair enough, the connection is less than obvious, until we look at a couple of things: Clinton’s SEC turned a blind eye to accounting shenanigans, failing to examine Enron’s books for three years running despite obvious irregularities. The booming economy of the Clinton years was at least in part a market-driven phenomenon, and Clinton had as much of a stake as anyone in creating the illusion of a super-robust economy. Aggressive examination of high-fliers would have dampened market enthusiasm, which would have dampened the real economy, which would have been bad for Clinton. One can argue that the Microsoft suit was the proximate cause of the deflation of the tech bubble (which would have happened anyway, but later,) but that happened so late in Clinton’s second term that it didn’t matter to him politically.

The point is that Clinton had more to do with Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Global Crossing than Bush did, and you don’t read that quite everywhere.

— This article on California’a Greenhouse Gas Bill is Dan Walters at his best:

Is political hot air a greenhouse gas? This impertinent question flows from the overblown rhetoric that has accompanied the Legislature’s enactment of Assembly Bill 1493, which purports to do something important about “greenhouse gases” and global warming, although exactly what it does is as murky as the skies over Riverside on a hot summer day.

Read the whole thing.

— California’s legislators are diet-crazy (Personal Fat Trimming Preoccupies Lawmakers,) a big change from the good ole days:

Tony Beard, the Senate’s chief sergeant at arms, has seen many trends in his 21 years on the job. In the old days, he recalled, there was an ashtray on every desk, and the only jogging legislators did was “over to the Hotel Senator for a Scotch at 4 o’clock.”

Now it’s surgery, high-protein diets, and carrot sticks. What is the world coming to?

— Speaking of Bush-bashing, protein wisdom does a nice re-write on the latest piece of silliness from Tom Tomorrow and the day after:

Not the drawings so much. To be honest, I kinda like the drawings. But the commentary needed a little bit of tweaking, that’s for sure…

Check it out, and the original as well.

— Writing in the National Post, Matt Welch examines Bush’s eroding popularity, here and abroad:

The rest of the world is understandably more concerned with Washington’s expansion of external power — whether it be Bush’s new vague doctrine of pre-emption, his recent order authorizing CIA agents to kill Saddam Hussein (in self-defence), or his overt pressure on past and upcoming elections in Nicaragua, Slovakia, the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere. And the very real U.S. unilateralism — illustrated this week by its threat to withdraw from UN peacekeeping missions unless Americans receive an exemption from the new International Criminal Court — continues to annoy our long-time allies.

The administration – especially the Justice Department – does seem to be in state of disarray, as we’ve seen by the FBI’s bizarre statements on terrorist Hadayet, the LAX shooter.

— David Broder reflects on voucher implications in Lines Dividing Vouchers:

…I had to concede that the evident failure of many urban bureaucracies — the old welfare system being one notable example and the school system another — might well require traditional liberals to open their minds to the possibility of redrawing the lines between church and state. As I said to him, it was not just Republicans but smart Democrats like Bill Bradley and Joe Lieberman who saw that urban churches with their own day care, anti-drug programs, job training and housing assistance were often achieving greater success than the public agencies that were supposed to serve the same neighborhoods.

Voucher programs are opposed by suburban voters, most Republican, because they stand to erase the distinction between better-performing suburban public schools and worse-performing urban ones. That some public schools are better than others – radically – is the issue that neither these voters nor the teachers’ unions want to talk about. The Bush support for vouchers is politically dangerous, then, because they appeal only to a constituency that the Reps have by default, religious people, and to one they’ll never have, urban Blacks. The voters in play are in the suburbs, where vouchers are, and will remain, poison. So the Bush support for vouchers is either a matter of stupidity or of principle, and given the evident intelligence of Karl Rove, it must be the latter.

Link courtesy of PatioPundit on the RoboPundit feed.