Archive for April, 2005

‘Clean’ State Government

The campaign-finance-reform lobby — the eight liberal foundations who fund more than a dozen front groups to create an appearance of a mass movement calling for campaign-finance reform — doesn’t just operate at the federal level. It operates at the state level as well.

My latest column in The Post is a case study of how these folks misrepresent themselves as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” with the media’s help, even though they’re closely linked with liberal causes:

Anyone still clinging to the notion that campaign-finance reformers are interested in “clean government” solely for its own sake should take a look at Illinois — specifically a race for a state Supreme Court seat last year that turned into the most expensive judicial contest in U.S. history.

The race was a money magnet — with more than $9 million spent by the time the dust cleared. Why? Because tort lawyers from all over the country go to Illinois’ Madison County to file lawsuits against deep-pocketed corporations.

Money rolled in from pro- and anti-tort-reform forces around the country. And so one group appointed itself traffic cop: the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, the state’s resident good-government watchdog. The “nonpartisan” group spearheaded a Tone and Conduct Committee — organized under the aegis of the state Bar Association — aimed at keeping advertising by outside interests to a minimum.

The media bought this charade hook, line and sinker, referring to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform as “nonpartisan” and the Tone and Conduct Committee as “independent.”

In fact, the group has extensive ties to the trial-lawyer lobby.

Again, as I’ve stated many times, people should be able to lobby for whatever they want to lobby for and spend whatever money they want to spend in politics. But the campaign-finance lobby uses its speech specifically to curtail the speech of others. And they don’t do it out of an abstract commitment to “clean government.” They do it because they believe that certain kinds of restrictions on political speech will favor their liberal causes.

They should be called on it. And people should pay very close attention to where the money comes from.

(For more on this, see Cleta Mitchell’s groundbreaking report on the campaign-finance lobby from 2001: “Who’s Buying Campaign Finance Reform?” There’s a section on Arizona’s “Clean Elections” campaign, and it explains how the state-level movement works. Needless to say, George Soros is involved.)

UPDATE (5/1/05): Our friend Mark Schmitt emails in with this, a letter he wrote to The Washington Post back in 2001 regarding the ACU study I referenced (it also references a George Will column, which I did not cite):

To the Editor:

David Keene’s April 20 response to George Soros’s letter, regarding support for campaign finance reform, compounds an error by George Will by deliberately distorting publicly available facts.

Keene’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, the American Conservative Union Foundation, published a report last month encouraging legislators to oppose campaign finance reform solely because the supporters of reform included foundations that the ACUF denounces as “liberal,” such as the Open Society Institute and its chair, George Soros. Mr. Soros, as his letter states, personally contributed $100,000 in taxable funds to help a group of Arizonans seeking to place a reform option on their state’s ballot. Mr. Keene now argues that, in addition, support for the Arizona effort from national organizations that also receive support from the Open Society Institute should be attributed personally to Mr. Soros, for a total of 71% of the funds raised by the Arizona group. This is hardly normal accounting, and it is not backed up even by the ACUF report.

The ACUF’s report, citing no evidence, says only that OSI or Soros “may have” directed funds to Arizona through the intermediary organizations Keene cites, the Proteus Fund and Public Campaign, two independent and nonpartisan groups that receive support from numerous individuals and foundations. To the contrary, while not required to do so by law, OSI actually restricted its general support for these national organizations to activities other than ballot initiatives, principally research on the impact of money on politics in many states. We specifically prohibited these organizations from using OSI foundation funds for any effort to influence legislation or ballot initiatives such as Arizona’s. ACUF should have replaced the words “may have” with the words “did not.”

The ACUF report’s key point, that “there is too much money in the campaign finance reform movement,” is equally deceptive. Take Mr. Keene’s example of Arizona: The $892,000 raised for this effort was less than a third of what Arizona Senator Jon Kyl — a critic of reform — raised for his 2000 reelection campaign, even though Kyl had no major-party opponent! It is not that there is so much money supporting reform, but that Arizonans, like most Americans, will back reform whenever they are given the opportunity.

Sincerely,
Mark Schmitt
The Open Society Institute

C’mon!

Bush’s enemies will never stop misunderestimating him, will they? Take this from The American Prospect blog:

As a new conventional wisdom begins to dawn about the Democrats’ growing success as an opposition party, and an increasing number of people are raising questions about the political skills of the post-election Bush administration, it’s worth pondering some possible explanations for the (potentially temporary) shift in the political winds.

Is it possible that Bush has become so isolated inside his bubble of thoroughly pre-screened, heavily sympathetic town-halls — the only environment in which he has interacted with real Americans for more than a year now — that he has genuinely lost touch with American opinion?

Garance Franke-Ruta’s answer: Yes.

Please, please, please give me a break. Bush’s strategy may or may not be way off on Social Security. He may not get the bill he wants — though he’s surprised us in the past — but he’s at least already moved the issue to center stage and made the Democrats look obstructionist.

What’s beyond stupid is to think that Bush is somehow so brain damaged as to not understand heavily scripted and screened town-hall meetings as what they are. I mean, I know these people think the president’s not all that bright, but he’s not a child, he’s not senile and he’s not an actual chimp — despite the occasional unfortunate facial expression.

The Bush White House is fully aware of the political hill it’s climbing. The Bushies may not surmount it, but they’re not trying to walk through it.

At Amistad

Here’s a piece of mine from the Spring 2005 City Journal. It’s about the remarkable Amistad Academy charter school in New Haven, Connecticut.

I’ll excerpt at some length:

“Who are we proud to be?”

“Amistad Academy!”

“And why are we here?”

“To push ourselves, to learn, to achieve our very best.”

“And who is responsible for your success?”

“We are responsible for our actions; we control our destinies.”

“And what will it take to succeed?”

“Work, hard work!”

This encouraging scene—the “circle chant,” it’s called—is taking place in “morning circle” in the gym of what has swiftly become New Haven’s superstar middle school. The six-year-old Amistad Academy is a charter school, meaning that it’s publicly funded but privately run, so it’s free from some of the centrally imposed strictures, such as union work rules and curricular requirements, that stunt the city’s traditional public schools. Amistad has won national acclaim for blasting the test scores of some of Connecticut’s neediest kids through the roof. While state testing in 2003 showed that only 23 percent of New Haven’s traditional public school eighth-graders achieved mastery in math and that 31 percent mastered English, Amistad had 66 percent of its eighth-graders demonstrating math mastery and 71 percent English mastery—beating even the statewide averages.

First come the “apologies” and “recognitions.” On this morning, no apologies are necessary. But Amistad kids routinely must ask forgiveness from the school community for misbehavior: disrupting class, talking back to teachers, failing to do homework. As tough as Amistad is in its behavioral standards, however, it uses recognitions to lavish praise on accomplishments, even relatively minor ones. One teacher recognizes her class for showing enthusiasm for a guest speaker. Another recognizes a student for getting a good score on a grammar test. Toll, who teaches a writing class, recognizes several of her students for volunteering to read their work aloud in class. This practice of communal praising and shaming—all but unthinkable in regular public schools, with their self-esteem fixation and “child-centered” classrooms—tells students that their actions have meaningful consequences.

My favorite thing from my trip up to Amistad, however, was this. Far and away:

Amistad doesn’t just place demands on students; it also requires a lot of educators. But they seem happy to give their all. Sue Walling, Amistad’s young academic dean, bubbles over with energy. “One of my favorite things was when Dacia gave me a key to the school,” she enthuses. Why? Because it made it easier to work late.

At Walling’s old job, in a suburban Connecticut public school district, where she worked for four years, putting in long hours got her into trouble with her union. The union rep told her that working so much set a bad precedent—management could start asking all the teachers to work late. If she absolutely had to work extra, the rep went on, then she should at least hide her car. “I got the whole speech that this is a marathon, not a sprint,” Walling recalls. “I could never go back.”

You got that? Working too hard sets a bad precedent. If you must, please hide it. This is what teachers unions are: disgusting.

Remember that story the next time anybody from a teachers union talks about how hard public school teachers work. Some of them do work quite hard — but only despite the people who pretend to be their advocates.

The View From Brooklyn

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There’s been beautiful weather, so far, for my semi-vacation to Brooklyn Heights — where I live. So, in this time, I’ve taken up jogging. It’s pretty easy to motivate when the reward is getting to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which looks out over the city.

These pictures are from Tuesday the 19th, the day after my birthday (I’m 26 now — a year closer to death is how I like to look at it). Since my girlfriend got me a photo printer, now I’ll be wasting immense amounts of paper printing things like these out.

But the promenade’s gorgeous, and this sunset was particularly nice, so I thought I’d share.

Back to my not-at-all-a vacation…

Left and Right Making Common Cause Against CFR???

Amazing… The Left figures out that campaign-finance reform can be dangerous to its First Amendment health:

Protect Your Right to ACT – Contact Your Senator Now

Between the Tom DeLay ethics scandals in the House to Bill Frist’s “nuclear” assault on the Senate filibuster, it’s really good to be in the Majority. If you don’t like the rules, change them. But they still have more power-grabbing moves up their sleeves.

The U.S. Senate is considering legislation (S. 271 and H.R. 513 - “527 Reform Act of 2005″) that would severely limit your ability to have a voice and an impact on the political debate.

ACT needs your attention now.

Last year, you helped ACT empower millions of voters in the most important election cycle of a generation. We made history and, together, built the foundation for a new kind of political campaign—one based on conversations with neighbors, not television sound bites.
Over 101,000 individual contributors gave generously seeking change—not political access. You helped us revitalize community politics and train the next generation of political organizers throughout the battleground states.

Passage of this legislation could change all of this. The 527 Bill would force independent Section 527 organizations like ACT, unions, advocacy groups, and other non-profit Section 501(c) organizations to use highly regulated and restricted federal PACs for much of their public advocacy and voter mobilization activity, even if non-partisan.

Essentially, this would limit the involvement of millions of individuals and organizations who work to mobilize, educate, and empower voters on the federal, state, and local levels. Help fight this aggressive assault on political free speech.

This legislation will skew federal election law more in favor of big business, stalwart backers of the GOP political agenda by allowing them to continue to spend for political purposes with no tax consequences, while non-profits risk both being taxed at the highest corporate rate on their political spending, and a loss of their tax exemption privileges.

The proposed 527 legislation goes far beyond the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act often known as “McCain-Feingold”. McCain-Feingold had a clear, necessary, and praiseworthy purpose: it took members of Congress out of the business of asking lobbyists and special interest fat cats for large unregulated donations, while preserving the free speech rights of American citizens to come together and express their views to Congress. This new bill overreaches and misdirects new and complex regulation against the already disclosed and independent activities of non-profit organizations, unions, and advocacy groups that pose none of the dangers that federal campaign finance law is designed to address.

Former Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign manager (now RNC Chairman) Ken Mehlman has credited – “ACT’s turnout prowess with helping keep Kerry within 119,000 Ohio votes of winning, and with the ability to keep future Democrats within striking range. We take their competitiveness very seriously.” (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/04.

Clearly they do, indeed, take us seriously.

It’s easy to point to an example like the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack ads as something we can all agree is unseemly. But this legislation is not really about “cleaning up politics” as they say. There’s more to it. For example, co-sponsor Trent Lott, who is leading the charge for a speedy passage, has never been a fan of reform until now. In fact, in 2002 he voted against McCain-Feingold at every turn! The New York Times noted in one editorial that Lott had spent years “using every parliamentary trick to block a fair vote on campaign finance reform.” The New York Times, 2/27/02

This bill is about silencing your progressive voice. Please don’t let that happen.

Contact your Senators today. Urge them to stand up for your right to ACT.

We can’t wage this fight without you.

Of course, as Byron York recently pointed out, now the 527 money is flowing to 501(c)(4)s.

Also: I told you so.

Go CT!

My home state of Connecticut has become the first state to adopt civil unions for gay couples without the interference of a court — in other words, through an entirely democratic process.

I couldn’t be more pleased. I hope this model — legislating not litigating — catches on elsewhere. It gives the usual suspects (National Review, etc.) very little to object to, other than the substance of the matter. And about that, their opinions are wildly unconvincing.

Judges

Posting’s going to be a little light, because I’m on a semi-vacation this week. But here’s my latest Tech Central Station column. It’s on judges:

The American people treat their court system a little bit like an IQ test: When they get the result they want, the verdict is just; when they don’t like the outcome, the whole thing is suspect.

That’s why Republicans have been saying such stupid things about judges recently.

I Hear This Is Old…

…But I love it:

Penguin

Penguins. Are. Funny.

(You may have to click on the picture to see the animation.)

Online Speech and Off-Line Restrictions

Red State highlights the Online Freedom of Speech Act:

Today in the House of Representatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced a companion piece of legislation to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s bill (S.678) to exclude the Internet from the definition of “public communication” in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002.

This is a bill that deserves bipartisan support, and it’s exciting to see it off to a good start.

In short - if this bill passes both houses and becomes law in the next 50 or-so days, the disastrous FEC rulemaking process will be rendered moot. Remember, the FEC is only creating regulations for Internet activity because Congress didn’t specifically mention the Internet at all, and a federal judge ruled that even in the absence of specific direction of Congress, the FEC had to do so anyway.

This bill provides that direction, and creates that exclusion. It might not solve *all* the problems of regulation, but it’s miles and away the best solution right now. I’ve already heard from some liberal colleagues in the blogosphere, and we’re going to push this bill - and hard.

The blogosophere has proven extraordinary aptitude when it comes to attacking or stopping something, let’s prove that we can be just as much a powerful influence when it comes to creating and moving something forward.

Of course, I’d like to see some off-line freedom of speech. But, baby steps…

Wal-Mart’s Workers

There’s a great article in The Washington Post about the store Wal-Mart closed in Quebec when some workers there tried to unionize.

No one believes it when The New York Post writes that workers are the ones who get hurt by pushing Wal-Mart out of business or out of town, but maybe they’ll believe it from a traditionally liberal paper.

Here’s one worker who’s not happy with what the union folks accomplished — i.e., doing away with a decent-paying job:

“I never had a job as good as this before,” said Lynn Morissette, 44, who tracks inventory in the store. “I worked in the daytime. I thought I had a good wage, and I was a shareholder, too, so I could save up some money. I was going to retire here.”

Interesting… Doesn’t Morissette know she’s an oppressed worker working for slave wages? I guess it must be that false consciousness stuff I’m always hearing about.

And, so, who was intimidating whom, anyway? Wal-Mart is the big, bad wolf, right?

No?:

Those who did not want a union say organizers harassed them to join. “People signed the cards just to get some peace” from the union organizers, said Noella Langlois, 53, who works in the clothing department. “They thought they would vote against it in a secret vote.”

In fact, there was a vote last April that rejected the union. But under Quebec labor laws, the organizers could try again. When they collected signed union cards from 51 percent of the employees, the law declared the Jonquiere Wal-Mart a union shop.

Pelletier, the Wal-Mart spokesman, says the Quebec laws are unfair, and only a secret ballot would show the true feelings of the workers.

“Signing a union card, when there’s someone on your doorstep at night saying, ‘Sign this card,’ should not be the last word,” he said. “A democratic, secret vote is the only way to avoid intimidation by either the union or an employer.”

Interesting. So, it was the union harassing people.

Those who liked their jobs and said they were happy at Wal-Mart are bitter at the union for its tactics, which they blame for the store closure.

“We were duped by the union. There was absolutely no need to unionize,” said Rejan Lavoie, 40, a single father who took a job as a department manager at Wal-Mart to be home in the evenings with his 8-year-old son. He fears he will not find another job with a workable schedule.

Does this mean, perhaps, that people should be allowed to make their own decisions in the free market? That even if they take a job that rich college kids think is inhumane, they’re doing it for a reason — such as that it’s better than the alternative: unemployment?

Maybe these people who used to have jobs even thought of Wal-Mart as a positive force in their lives, a great opportunity.

Fascinating.

Without End

Another slam dunk by Democratic campaign-finance lawyer Bob Bauer.

Here, he explains how the logic behind new campaign-finance regulations — let’s call them speech restrictions, shall we? — speech restrictions morphed from stopping “corruption” to stopping the “appearance of corruption” to stopping “circumvention” of the previous regulations to stopping the “appearance of circumvention.”

The logic is self-sustaining and has no endpoint. People have to remember this.

There is no end point to what the “clean-government” folks want. Reform isn’t a goal, it’s a never-ending process. After all, what would the people in the campaign-finance-reform industry do if their goals were ever achieved? They’d be out of business. So they call for more and more and tighter and tighter restrictions until the First Amendment as we used to know it is a distant memory.

Yes, Blame Me, I Voted for Kang

It seems I’ve shocked one or two people — particularly Karol of Alarming News — by revealing that I voted for Bush in 2004.

Well, I voted on one issue: Iraq/War on Terror. There were a lot of people like me.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think Bush — or more accurately, Karl Rove — isn’t pushing the Republican Party toward becoming something truly… well, not to sound too overblown, but… evil.

Connect the Dots

Democracy Project has a great post up on Pewgate:

Here’s one example of how Pew money was used to produce the kind of reports that Pew’s bosses knew they could expect, complete with foregone conclusions on the issue at hand, in order to pass legislation sponsored by a man (McCain) they honored, who in turn benefits from loopholes that he wrote into the law.

Read the whole thing. The Web of connections here is immense. This is not a transparent network that “everyone already knows about,” as some would claim. It’s a well-orchestrated and well-hidden campaign to deprive you of your right to advocate political opinions that are opposed to those of the Pew Charitable Trusts and other major donors.

No one cares about clean elections for the sake of clean elections — outside of a few academics. This movement is, and always has been, about achieving liberal policy goals through supposedly policy-neutral election reform.

Wal-Mart Catches Up

This Slate piece totally misses why Wal-Mart is trying to cozy up to the press. It’s not trying to gloss over poor earnings or any other financial problems. It’s trying to gear up for a political fight.

This isn’t tough stuff, if the reporter had any idea what he was writing about. Wal-Mart is trying to build stores in major urban centers, and it is meeting tremendous union opposition. In a political fight, it helps if the press doesn’t hate you.

Since reporters have only been hearing the Wal-Mart-sucks side of the story for years — especially in towns like New York and Los Angeles — the company is playing some desperate catch-up.

Bus Tripping

Bucknell, my parents’ alma mater (and apparently Evan Coyne Maloney’s), seems to be having some problems with political correctness:

Last year, Bucknell’s Women’s Resource Center sponsored a bus trip so students could attend a political rally in Washington, D.C. to protest the Bush Administration.

When some female students saw that the WRC was in the business of arranging trips to political protests, they asked for similar help setting up a trip to a rally with a different political philosophy. The students were turned down.

Not surprising, I’m afraid. But still annoying.

Impeach Nino!

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy they’re making the argument for impeaching Justice Scalia.

Sounds pretty damning.

Robert A. Blogger

Fellow Post editorial page person Robert George is now blogging.

So, is this some sort of shadow editorial page we’ve got going? Is it more or less radically conservative than the real editorial page?

Well, I know I voted for the president. That’s more than some other Post-related bloggers can say.

Love Letter for a Jew Hater

“ingratiating, not intimidating”

“The perfect host, perfectly attired, right down to the opalescent links binding his French cuffs”

“a politically pugnacious professor”

“a metrosexual”

“his eyes telegraphing hurt and anger behind black-framed glasses”

“His demibeard is neatly sculptured”

“His Continental accent is more soothing than strident”

“single”

Profile of notorious anti-Semite or mash note to potential sexual partner?

Well, here’s a hint: It’s from The New York Times. It could be both!

Squirrel Pope

Pope

Enjoy.

(via Reason)

18 More Months

18 more months of the Mars rovers. Count me impressed beyond more articulate words.

More on Columbia

I have a column up at Tech Central Station:

Inopportune comments by Harvard President Lawrence Summers back in January about possible innate differences between men and women were enough to set off a national firestorm that raged for weeks and is still smoldering today. So why is the bullying and carpet-sweeping being perpetrated by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger with regard to student complaints of intimidation in the classroom by anti-Israel professors being ignored?

If Summers’ remarks were unfortunate, Bollinger’s conduct has been downright unethical — and it has done far more lasting damage to the reputation of the institution he serves.

Last week, Columbia finally released the highly anticipated report of an “ad hoc” faculty committee set up in December of 2004 to look into complaints from students — mostly Jewish and largely pro-Israel — who have reported incidents of verbal abuse from professors in the university’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department.

And, surprise: It’s the whitest of whitewashes.

The report’s pretty poor. But don’t expect to hear it from the Times.

Times Humiliation

DO NOT miss the editor’s note from The New York Times today, in which the paper admits that it got an early look at Columbia’s internal report on intimidation of students by pro-Palestinian professors, in its own words, “on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.”

Specifically, those “other interested parties” were the students who had brought the complaints — and whose complaints were whitewashed by the report.

This is a real humiliation for the Times, and a big victory for my friend and former colleague at The New York Sun, Jacob Gershman, who exposed the unethical Times “deal” the day after it occurred. (Jacob and the Sun are also the subjects of the Village Voice’s cover story this week, in which the lefty rag tries to cast aspersions on the Sun’s coverage of the Columbia affair. The impact of the Voice’s attack is lessened, however, by the fact that the Voice itself has taken largely the same view of the Columbia story in its coverage.)

Here’s the Times’ editor’s note in full:

A front-page article on Thursday described a report by a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors. The report found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic,” but it did say that one professor “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians.

The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.

Under The Times’s policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. The Times insisted, however, on getting a response from the professor accused of unacceptable behavior, and Columbia agreed.

Last Wednesday night, after the article had been published on The Times’s Web site, the reporter exchanged messages with one of the students who had lodged the original complaints. The student was expecting to read the report shortly. But because of the lateness of the hour, and concern about not having response from other interested parties, the reporter did not wait for a comment for later versions, including the printed one, after the student had read the report.

Without a response from the complainants, the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form. The response was included in an article on Friday.

Doesn’t make one trust anything the Times OR Columbia is saying about the university’s anti-Semitism problem, does it?

Political Impotence

Patrick Hynes has this to add to the debate over the relationship between conservatives and libertarians: “If we are all agreed that the libertarians need the conservatives a whole lot more than the conservatives need the libertarians, the question then becomes, and I mean this with all respect: Shouldn’t the libertarians just sit down and shut up?”

Well, because some of us actually care about our political principles more than the Republican Party’s electoral success, I’d say the answer is no.

Now, Hynes could argue that this is foolish, that since the Republican Party’s success is most likely to bring about policies in line with our principles we should — yes, sit down and shut up.

But the current direction of the Republican Party doesn’t give libertarians any reason to believe that their principles are best served by the GOP. In fact, by contributing to its continued political success, we may well be aiding and abetting Big Government Conservatism — a “God-and-gubmint” coalition — in taking over the country.

Now is not the time for silence, as the statist elements in the Republican Party work to consolidate power.

Also, both David Brooks and James Taranto make the point that the Republican Party is succeeding because it’s a big tent, whereas the Democrats want to purge undesirables. The point here seems to be that no one should worry about a “conservative crack up” because there have always been, should be, always will be tensions within the conservative coalition.

Again, fine. But no one’s arguing for a purge. People are arguing about the proper direction for the Republican Party to move in — and some of us are disturbed by what we see.

Does this mean libertarians should leave the party? I don’t know. I don’t think they’ve done all they can yet to try to exert influence from within the party. The existence of the Libertarian Party is a failure in this regard — the party’s a joke, and just drains resources away from our becoming a stronger wing of the GOP. I’ve also argued repeatedly that libertarians have brought discredit upon themselves by not seriously engaging the War on Terror, leaving themselves isolated along with the MoveOn left.

The libertarians are to blame for their own political impotence. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t now find a way to assert themselves.

The Right and the Right to Die

Sullivan is right about this. A significant faction on the right wants to deny people the right to die — to decide their own fate should they become incapacitated.

Dissecting a recent piece in The Weekly Standard about the Schiavo case, he concludes:

They want an end to the “autonomy regime.” They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom - autonomy over one’s own physical body - is now under attack. And if a theocon government won’t allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?

Now, not everyone who was against the Schiavo decision is in this camp. But a lot of people in the Republican Party would deny you the right to control your own destiny because of their personal belief in God. A lot of scorn is heaped on Sullivan for using the word “theocon” — and I try to avoid the word myself, because I don’t want to throw it around loosely — but what other word is there for this wedding of church and state?

Name Calling From the Campaign Finance Lobby

Having not one substantive criticism to make of my reporting on the campaign-finance reform lobby (on where the money behind the lobby comes from and how it set out to deceive the American people and Congress), the lobby has fired back by… calling me names.

I’m flattered, I assure you, but it really is a bit childish — and it should embarrass them that they’re reduced to hurling insults and innuendo at a 25-year-old.

The latest response to my reporting in this vein comes from Mark Schmitt, director of policy and research at the Open Society Institute. In a blog post, he twice references my youth — as if this were somehow relevant to the accuracy of my reporting — stating at the top of his post that I am “a young product of the conservative quasi-journalism training system.”

Schmitt also writes: “A junior editorial writer at the New York Post didn’t just happen to ‘unearth’ a video made a year ago. A decision has been made to discredit campaign finance reform and the groups involved in it.”

Now, let me get this straight. I transcribe a video where a former program director of the Pew Charitable Trusts explains how his foundation set out to mislead Congress — remember, the facts of this story have not once been questioned — and I’m a quasi-journalist? And then Schmitt accuses me of being part of a right-wing conspiracy to discredit campaign-finance reform — based on not one scrap of evidence — and he’s an arbiter of journalistic ethics?

This truly puzzles me.

Schmitt also makes one other mistake. He writes: “What’s the real agenda behind these attacks? It’s probably not to repeal McCain-Feingold.”

Let me be clear: My agenda is absolutely to see McCain-Feingold repealed. And, yes, I’m quite interested in “discrediting” campaign-finance reform — because I believe it to be a crime against the Constitution and have publicly expressed this view for years.

Oh, and by the way: Are the folks over at The American Prospect, which accepted undisclosed money to flak for campaign-finance reform, quasi journalists in Schmitt’s opinion? How about the folks over at NPR who took more than $1 million to do the same thing?

Maybe Schmitt has some choice words for them.

UPDATE: Schmitt seems to have taken down his post.

This is the version that was sent to me:

The Post editorial was written by Ryan Sager, a young product of the conservative quasi-journalism training system who takes credit for “unearthing” the “bombshell” Treglia video, all of which is posted on his blog.

Good commentary on all this is linked on Professor Rick Hasen’s indispensable Election Law Blog. Hasen’s own comments are helpful, as are the more critical thoughts of Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer and notable campaign finance reform skeptic.

Bill Allison of the Center for Public Integrity has also joined this debate and deserves a special prize for attempting to engage with Sager as if they were both responsible adult professionals.

I offer my own thoughts as an expert witness.

First, let’s be clear, this is all part of something bigger.

A junior editorial writer at the New York Post didn’t just happen to “unearth” a video made a year ago. A decision has been made to discredit campaign finance reform and the groups involved in it. The scare-mongering about the Federal Election Commission being required to regulate bloggers was the first hit, this is the second. Republican attacks on the watchdog groups that have been critical of Tom DeLay is a third.

What’s the real agenda behind these attacks?

It’s probably not to repeal McCain-Feingold, a regime that both parties have learned to live within and that probably still hurts Democrats slightly more than Republicans. It could be to discredit McCain as a potential 2008 candidate or as a gadfly. Or it could be to discredit the critics of DeLay, or just to change the subject and put the groups on the defensive.

That’s the last I’ll say about that, though, because just as the sources of support for campaign finance groups has little bearing on their arguments, the provenance of these charges has little to do with whether they are valid or not.

I generally agree with Hasen that this is much ado about nothing, although I have to admit that Treglia sure makes it seem otherwise, and there are some very real concerns.

The basic story, stripped of hyperbole, is just this: some foundations ranging from the fairly liberal (OSI, Ford) to the moderate (Carnegie Corporation, Pew) to the conservative (Smith-Richardson) funded a number of organizations from the mid-1990s and continuing into the present that were working on issues related to money in politics at the state and federal level.

The McCain-Feingold law was a small part of that effort for most of these foundations, though a bigger component for Pew. All of it is public, on both ends — the foundations make their grants public and the organizations make their funders public.

Again, the best way to clear this up is to have the report be public. There’s a lot more to say, but let me quickly comment on point that I think is legitimately taken by Sager and others. The role of foundations in campaign finance reform, as in other issues, should be covered more thoroughly by the press.

I think most foundations could deal with the scrutiny and many would welcome it and find it a healthy challenge. Apart from this issue, foundations are simply an important sector in our public policy because we long ago made a decision that many of the things that government does in other countries would be done in the U.S. through private initiative with a tax advantage. Foundations are semi-public institutions and should be treated and studied as such.

Treglia’s speech was addressed to an audience of journalists at a seminar on how to cover philanthropy, which helps me understand what he was trying to do: he was basically telling them, here was a huge story you overlooked. But the reason that the role of foundations in campaign finance reform was overlooked is absolutely not, as Bob Bauer argues, that the press favors campaign finance reform. It was overlooked because the press has no idea how to cover foundations at all. The role of foundations in the school voucher movement, noted above, is equally unknown, the role of conservative foundations in promoting radical legal doctrines is unknown, the role of liberal foundations in voter registration projects is unknown, the role of liberal foundations in, say, establishing after-school programs is unknown.

There are always stories about George Soros, the individual, but virtually nothing about the foundation that he founded but which is managed by others. There is occasionally coverage of the Ford Foundation, the best known of all major U.S. Foundations, very little of its almost as large brethren such as Pew, the Carnegie Corporation, the Hewlett and Packard Foundations, MacArthur (apart from the fellowships), etc. is not And there are real scandals to be unearthed at foundations, of which this is not one. Stephanie Strom of the New York Times is the first reporter I’ve seen to really develop this beat; let’s hope she remains on the philanthropy beat long enough to really master it, unlike her predecessors.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Schmitt has this to say in the comments:

Ryan,

I absolutely did post that by accident (I had transfered it between several computers and had line breaks in it that I needed to fix, and posted it as a “draft” to typepad so I could edit it, which apparently didn’t work. That’s the only reason I took it down.

I do intend to repost it in an edited form, shortly. One of the edits will be to remove any reference to your motivations or experience. You obviously did interesting work here.

In the meantime, I would appreciate your pulling down your post. I will let you know immediately when a version that’s for public consumption is ready.

I’ll certainly link a new version, but it’s not my habit to “disappear” posts for almost any reason.

FINAL UPDATE: Here is a link to Schmitt’s updated post. It certainly is toned down.

If there’s one point on which I agree with Schmitt, it’s that I’d like to see the Political Money Line report on the money behind campaign-finance reform made available for free. But PML is a for-profit company, and they’ve so far decided not to do that.

PS: Knowing how the TypePad software works, I certainly accept Mr. Schmitt’s explanation that he meant to post a draft, not for public consumption. I accept his apology. But I still find that draft revealing.

Free Speech in San Fran

I don’t know how serious this bill in San Francisco is, but it’s a bit horrifying. According to Personal Democracy Forum:

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

The entire Board is set to vote on the measure on April 5th, 2005.

That such ideas can even be proposed scares me. Yesterday’s insane campaign-finance pipe dream routinely becomes tomorrow’s insane campaign-finance regulation.

And thus we strip away our own freedoms piece by piece.

(via Instapundit)

Ownership Jottings

John Weidner of Random Jottings responds to my response to his response to my article (gotta love blogs) in the comments and at his blog. I’ll post the main part out here:

I will be interested if you return to the subject. My point (probably not expressed well) is not that the Ownership Society is a sure thing, but that people like you need to address it if you are going to criticize the Administration for over-spending.

Burden of proof? I can’t prove anything; the proof will only be whether it works. But it might be useful criticism if we were to establish some metrics. I would suggest for instance, that you could call HSA’s a failure if they remain a mere niche in the health care world. And a success, or trending that way, if they continue to grow in popularity, start to be offered to employees instead of insurance, and start changing people’s perceptions of how they pay for care.

It might be fair to say that Private Accounts will be a failure unless they grow due to popular demand, and unless they trend over time to something like the status of 401-K’s, which are de facto things you own, although de jure they are gifts of the government, and could be regulated out of existence.

Also, I’m not advocating huge spending increases as a usual trade–I think (hope) that that was what happened in the first few years of the administration, when it was almost impossible to get anything out of Congress without big concessions. Remember, when Bush was first elected, a lot of people thought he would be unable to accomplish ANYTHING, due to the disputed election and a closely divided Congress….

He’s right. There’s little you can prove about whether a policy or strategy will work before it’s been implemented, unless there are good analogies from the past. I can’t think of any good analogies — though that could be a function of a temporary lack of imagination.

My judgment is just that so far the concessions that have been made to gain small pieces of the “Ownership Society” have been fairly large. And these haven’t just been increases in spending on existing programs — they have been concessions that in and of themselves increase the number of functions the federal government performs and, thus, upon which people will grow accustomed to depending on the government for.

If we were just, say (for an example at the city level), increasing money spent on teacher salaries to get a voucher program, that would seem like a decent trade off to me. That’s kind of what the Bushies did to get the D.C. pilot voucher program — and I support that wholeheartedly.

But we’ve gotten much worse deals so far on things like No Child Left Behind and Medicare, and I fear we’ll get a really bad bill, if we get anything, on Social Security (like, say, some kind of add-on accounts that are essentially just a tax increase).

Pew and You

Martin Morse Wooster, a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to give some much needed context regarding the Pew Charitable Trusts political activism (he’s following here off of Sean Treglia’s revelations regarding campaign-finance reform, first reported by me in The Post):

What is striking about this confession has less to do with campaign-finance reform–a bust anyway–than with the stealth politics of Pew and foundations like it. There are certain do-good entities, and Pew is one of them, that enjoy a charmed life: On NPR and in David Broder columns, to take a couple of leading indicators, they are treated as benign truth-tellers, so high-minded as to be beyond politics. But they are, naturally, as partisan as any “special interest” could be.

Campaign-finance reform hasn’t been Pew’s only grasp at political influence. In 2004, the charity poured $9 million into the New Voters Project to register 18- to 24-year-old voters in six “battleground states.” Though the drive was allegedly nonpartisan, the project was a joint venture of George Washington University and the Nader-created State Public Interest Research Groups, a nonprofit openly hostile to the GOP. It is safe to say that few of the project’s boosters expected those new young voters to favor Mr. Bush.

Pew’s most recent evolution makes explicit what was long implicit: In 2004, it transformed itself from a foundation into a giant nonprofit. It can now use 20% of its budget for lobbying. Last fall, Pew combined seven of its public-policy shops into the Pew Research Center–Washington’s third-largest liberal think tank, after Brookings and the Center for American Progress. Clearly Pew intends to be a major player in Washington political debates, even as it pretends to nonpartisanship.

There is no reason that Pew should not do all it can to encourage the castor-oil liberalism that it so loves. But it might help if the rest of us took note of Mr. Treglia’s belated honesty and treated Pew as something other than neutrality incarnate. And it might help if, out of simple fairness, the trust dropped the name Pew in the same way it has dropped the principles that guided its founders.

I think he’s got it right. The problem isn’t so much the tax status of these liberal foundations. It’s that they are treated as neutral truth tellers when they have a very transparent agenda.

Ownership Lust

This fella, over at Random Jottings, thinks I’ve never heard of the Ownership Society. Well, I have. But I just don’t find the argument that “We’re giving away the $1.2 trillion store on the Medicare prescription drug benefit to get tiny health savings accounts” terribly persuasive.

Social Security reform would obviously be a little more substantial. But even then I’m not sure that giving people “ownership” of forced savings accounts is all that big a win for small government.

I admit this is miles away from a full engagement of the Ownership Society argument. I’ll return to it.

But it seems to me that the burden of proof here is on those who are advocating huge increases in the size of government as a trade for potential poison pills that will supposedly someday infect the body politic with an uncontrollable lust for “ownership.”

(The metaphors in that last sentence are terrible, but I’m far to preoccupied with other work this afternoon to go fussing with them.)

God-and-Gubmint Conservatism

And… it’s up. My column on fusionism gone cold:

While some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan’s deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture. Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan’s other famous lines, sans irony: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.

Now, to be clear: What’s most disturbing to libertarians about all of this is not that the shift in the traditional alignment will hurt the Republican Party at the polls — at least in the short term. What’s disturbing is just how powerful the idea of a “God-and-government” coalition could be.

What if Karl Rove’s idea for a permanent majority actually worked? The GOP could convince soccer moms that it’s not so hard-hearted by implementing national health care piece by piece. It could pick up the votes of blue-collar union members by appealing to them on “values” issues that the Democrats can’t talk about without choking on their own bile. And the GOP could even pick up votes from socially conservative black and Hispanic voters who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage.

The electoral logic of Big Government Conservatism, in fact, is virtually inescapable. Where the logic falls apart, however, is in why we would continue to call this new edifice “conservative” at all.

This is what I — and I think other libertarians — mean when I talk about a conservative split. It’s not the libertarians leaving the Republicans (though that could happen, and to some extent did happen in 2004). It’s the Republicans leaving themselves.




 

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