Category: Politics

— Here’s your update on Assemblyman Rod Wright’s DNA bill: the chair asked him to “hold it over” for two weeks before taking a vote. This kind of delaying tactic is common when the chair knows people are watching. She doesn’t know the half of it.

— A couple of days ago, I blogged Assemblyman Rod Wright’s Paternity Fraud bill, AB 2240. Today the bill comes up for its first hearing in the Assembly Judiciary Committee, and I’d like to take you on a field trip behind the scenes to look at its progress. This will take a couple of posts to complete.

First off, the committee system: Democrats dominate the Assembly by an almost 2:1 margin, so all committee chairs are Dems. Since term-limits, members of the Assembly can only serve 6 years, the last of which is generally consumed with an election bid to the Senate during which they check out of committee duties. Effectively, the chairs control a majority of votes in each committee, and they direct members how to vote through the committee analysis of each bill. The chair of the Judiciary Committee, Ellen Corbett of San Leandro, is a divorced mother who depends on child support to maintain her lifestyle. Historically, she’s been hostile to fathers. She assigned the task of writing the analysis of Wright’s DNA bill to Kathy Sher, daughter of state Senator Byron Sher, a Willie Brown crony and Stanford law professor from Palo Alto. Before Kathy landed this job, she was a lobbyist with the ACLU, in which capacity she argued in favor of legislation where DNA evidence exonerates falsely-convicted prisoners. Her moral flexibility in adapting to her chair’s agenda is evident in the committee analysis:

This controversial bill pits several compelling interests against each other: the interest of a man in not paying child support for someone who is not his biological child; the interest of the child, the child’s mother, and the state in having that child continue to receive support; and the interest of all parties in knowing that the matter of paternity has been resolved with finality.

Supporters and opponents of legislation explain their positions in letters to the author of the committee. Letters of support for this bill were received from several organizations and individuals, listed in the analysis at the end. If this bill is controversial, why then does the analysis admit: “Opposition: None on file?” Because it’s not genuinely controversial.

Regardless, the analysis signals a hard fight ahead; I’ll report on that after the votes are final, but my prediction is the bill will either be gutted to allow something to pass, or it will hit the wall and go down. Mr. Wright has worked this issue before, so most likely he’ll amend the bill down to get it out of the Assembly, and then take up the issues again in the Senate, on the committee where Kathy Sher’s father is a member. More to come.

Assemblyman Rod Wright is trying to do something about paternity fraud, the practice whereby someone other than the father is designated as the child support obligor. Here’s the bill he proposes, and one letter of support.

— What if Elian Gonzales’ father requested asylum and was turned down by the INS? It may have happened according to this in Transterrestrial Musings

I’m seeing some reports from people on the ground in Florida that a story’s going to break tomorrow that Juan Gonzales (remember, Elian’s poppa?) requested asylum three times from Janet “Roast the Waco Kids” Reno while he was holed up in the Cuban embassy in DC, and was repeatedly denied.

Surprised that Janet Reno would be callous to the welfare of a child after building a career prosecuting men falsely charged with sexual abuse of children? Naw, it’s too perfect, and even Reno’s not that dumb. My guess is Juan waffled on asylum and finally decided against it because of the reprisals Castro threatened to bring down on his parents. The INS destroyed the evidence of his waffling, probably, in hopes of avoiding a November surprise.

— Exceptionally talented blogger Ben Domenech landed a job with the White House speech-writing office this summer, which confirms the President’s good judgment. Let’s send him off with some choice lines. What would you like to hear the President say? That Saddam Hussein is a no count, shiftless hound dog? It’s late and I’m fresh out of cleverness, but I know some of the wags among the warbloggers can come up with some gems. Remember, it’s about the fate of the Free World.

— Tony Blair is going to have a chance to sample Texas cuisine at its finest this weekend in Crawford:

Times Online:
[Ms. Pomerenke] has received minor national fame as the creator of the “all the way” cheeseburger — consisting of mustard, tomato, mayonnaise, pickles and onions — that Mr Bush has, on occasion, enjoyed and praised.
The word around town yesterday was that Mr Bush was planning to introduce Mr Blair to its greasy charms over the weekend.

Lucky devil – when Clinton visited Steve Jobs, he had to go vegan.

— Wellstone’s Folly – The dead rat on campaign finance reform’s kitchen floor. By Mickey?Kaus kicks ass:

The New York Times has decided that the Wellstone Amendment “does not unduly burden free speech.” Easy for them to say! That’s because, as the Washington Post notes, free speech by writers for press organizations like the New York Times is conveniently exempted from the campaign finance laws.

It’s unconstitutional, it polarizes the debate, and it makes candidates powerless to respond to media attacks – hey, what’s not to like about the Wellstone Amendment?

— Blogger Eve Tushnet (sounds like a porn site, doesn’t it?) writes sagely on welfare reform for her day job:

National Catholic Register —
Eloise Anderson, director of the Program for the American Family at the Claremont Institute, former food-stamp recipient, and former welfare administrator in Wisconsin and California, noted that many people on welfare have a complex set of problems that existing programs are not equipped to handle. Such people, she said, belong in “child protection or mental health or alcohol and drug programs,” not in a welfare office.

Like many observers, Anderson believes the 1996 reforms focused on mothers but not neglected fathers. “There’s a whole slew of programs that are designed to help the custodial parent go to work,” she said. “Those same programs should go the non-custodial parents.”

The next phase of welfare reform will focus on undoing the damage to family structure the system has done for the past three generations, which means we’re just getting started. Link courtesy Ben the Mug Man.

— Following-up on yesterday’s item on the reparations shakedown, check Kathryn Jean Lopez on Slavery on National Review:

“Once the record is fleshed out and made fully available to the American people, I think companies will feel some obligation” to settle, Randall Robinson has told USA Today. So long as the reparations activists can build up enough public pressure, we can expect companies to eventually buckle and reach for their wallets.

and Megan McArdle at Live from the WTC:

Bankrupting companies with class action suits, 100 years later, for something that was legal at the time — yessirree, that’s a recipe for economic success.

The emerging consensus is that this is a meritless legal action aimed at embarassing companies into paying Jesse Jackson-style shakedowns to civil rights groups with no legitimate mandate. The disturbing thing is that most blacks favor cash reparations, according to a poll cited by Lopez. Robinson, et. al., are apparently hoping to slide settlements beneath the radar while the nation is focused on the war and the economy is weak.

The stonger case for reparations is for Jim Crow rather than slavery, since Jim Crow victims are still alive. So the slavery salvo is phase one of the scam that the scam artists hope will gain strength in the second, Jim Crow phase.

— Newsday (my pick for the worst newspaper in America) columnist Sheryl McCarthy writes a bizarre column on reparations for slavery. First she ticks off some of the reasons that reparations would be counter-productive, such as backlash and fraud. But she then changes her tune and says reparations would be hunky-dory as long as they’re paid by private companies and not the government. Her reasoning, if you can call it that:

With This New Suit, Reparations Start Making Sense.

A colleague of mine made a convincing argument that these and others companies should be made to pay up. The U.S. economy is like Enron, she said, a structure that in its reliance on slavery first and on the devaluing of black labor later is an economy built on business gimickry, accounting fraud and illusion. And at last the whole scam is being exposed.

There’s an illusion here alright, but its not that we live in an Enron economy, or even that slavery was ever a significant factor in the development of the American economy; the illusion is that most Americans are as addicted to class jealousy as McCarthy and the reparations demagogues (Sharpton, Gates, Jackson, et. al.) Americans are no more eager to be taken to the cleaners by a band of flim-flam artists raiding our 401K’s than our federal treasury, so we aren’t going to suddenly drop critical judgment on the belief that they’ve found the Money Tree. Secondly, there’s no way of helping people who are dead, no matter how hard their lives were. And thirdly, most descendents of African-American slaves are embarrassed by the opportunistic reparations movement and rightly fear the division and backlash that can be its only legacy.

Reparations paid by the taxpayers as a whole make no sense because the victims are dead; reparations paid by stockholders and other retirees fail for the same reason.