Iowa Diatribes

I think recent events deserve some diatribing...let's go through some:

Item #1: The Obama Surge
Only 3 months ago, Hillary Clinton had pretty much wrapped up the Democratic nomination. So, what just happened? Clinton essentially had four things going against her:
1. Too far ahead too early
2. Trying to wrap up the primaries by exposure as a national candidate
3. An overrated self-sense of charisma
4. Peculiarities of the Iowa caucuses

Quite frankly, Hillary peaked too early. It's the same mistake that Dean made 4 years ago. By becoming THE candidate in October, Clinton left herself open to constant attacks for 3 months. These eventually brought her down and made her look vulnerable.

Hillary expected that her high poll numbers across the country would give her the automatic support from those essential early states, like Iowa. This was a serious blunder, because recent elections and the crunch of this primary schedule meant that early momentum was essential, especially in Iowa. Kerry and Edwards made their campaigns in Iowa 4 years ago. This year, Edwards and Obama focuses almost all of their resources in Iowa. Clinton did not meet the challenge and the tactical error could cost her the election.

Hillary, by most accounts, was exceptional in the like 300 debates the Democrats had leading up to yesterday. She, the media, and her campaign staff assumed that these skills would translate to stumping. Unfortunately, they all forgot that she has almost no grassroots political experience beyond campaigning alongside her husband. Iowa is a door-to-door type campaign. Hillary simply did not appear likeable and personable in Iowa's diners, cafes, and fairs.

The Iowa caucus is very unusual (more on that later), but one of its peculiarities is that to get votes within a caucus a candidate must get around 15% of the voters. If they do not, those voters disperse and head to other candidates. Since people voting for candidates other than Hillary were already choosing an anti-Hillary/frontrunner candidate, they were more likely to join the Edwards and Obama groups. Perhaps if a straight vote were given Hillary might have won or at least come in second as there would be more splitting of the vote. As it was, Biden, Kucinich, and Dodd had a combined one caucus vote for them (basically 0%.) If those voters were not allowed to move to other candidates, each of these candidates would probably have gotten 2-3%.

On all these issues, Obama had the advantage. He became the consensus alternative choice, he focused his energy in Iowa since he began campaigning (he only opened a California branch a couple months ago, for goodness sake), he was more likeable on a personal basis where he was given more than 30 seconds to explain his positions, and he benefited from the Iowa caucus system.

Item #2: Iowa?
To the outsider it may seem odd that Iowa, a state with a population of 3 million (1/30th of California) that is 95% white, has garnered so much attention. Those in the know will recognize that Iowa is only important because it is first. The next question is why does Iowa deserve to be first?

The quick answer is that it doesn't. Iowa by almost any measure is not representative of the nation at large. It unfairly benefits from millions of dollars being spent in the state every 4 years by politicians and media outlets. And it gives a small minority (despite everything only about 1/10 of eligible voters in Iowa actually showed up to caucus) incredible power. It also has a voting system that is as quaint as it is ridiculous: voters go to someone's house at exactly 7:00, get into groups, argue around a dinner table, and finally the entire caucus chooses one candidate. There is no anonymity, voters are encouraged to switch sides by their neighbors who just made them that delicious fruitcake for Christmas, and the chief activity of each candidate's campaign staff on this day is baking cookies.

Yet, I think it is fantastic. I just love the Iowa caucuses. Iowa forces the candidates to meet real people. Aside from the mega-weekend leading up to New Hamphire begun this morning, this will be the only time that candidates will be going to door to door, shaking hands at Denny's, or holding rallies in a family room. And I must say, Iowans, or at least those that vote, take it very seriously. It may sound incredible, but it is not uncommon or really difficult for a voter to meet EVERY candidate. Iowans do for America what realistically cannot be done after New Hampshire: they figure out if candidates are 'real.' They have real conservations with them. They get to see them outside of the glamor of tv commercials and they force the candidates to remember who they are serving and how politicians are supposed to get people's vote.

My only complaint with Iowa is that every serious candidate must endorse ethanol, despite the fact that it uses more petroleum than it saves simply because the state is the leading producer of corn in the nation.



Item #3: Hucka-who?

I've long thought that a social conservative with an economically populist message would have their way paved to the Whitehouse...if he/she were a Democrat. Unfortunately, Huckabee is in the wrong party. He's also, in my estimation, not a serious candidate. Don't get me wrong, what Huckabee did in Iowa was astonishing: the least funded Republican in the field just dominated the primary despite promising to make Steve Colbert his VP (not seriously, I assume), planning to throw out the tax system with the bath water, defending creationism, comparing Rowe vs. Wade to the holocaust, being a member of a rock band called "Capitol Offense," asking Mitt Romney in a debate if Mormons believed Jesus was the brother of Satan, and a hare-brained immigration reform scheme wherein immigrants would be required to return to the country they originated from for one day.
Even Huckabee must realize that he has little hope of competing nationally. Huckabee's economic policies will alienate the libertarian wing of the party that is already uncomfortable with his social conservatism. Huckabee won Iowa because of the support of evangelicals. This support will carry him through the South and parts of the Midwest, but without attracting swing voters that Republicans are going to need in droves, most will give up on him as they realize he has too much baggage.

Item #4: The Fair Tax
I'm amazed that the media hasn't talked about this more, but Huckabee has a clear plan to reform the tax system. It is not a new idea, but certainly is a radical one. Quite honestly, I don't know how I feel about it yet. All I can say is that it has long been the dream system for economists who specialize in the tax system.
For a more thorough description of the plan, I would recommend viewing this surprisingly good summary from wikipedia. Basically, the plan would eliminate income taxes (and with it the IRS), and just have people pay sales taxes (of about 25%). To make the tax progressive (since poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income on necessity consumption), a tax rebate would be given to poor families based on family size. I don't know if this is a good idea, but it is a different idea. It would encourage saving and investment, get rid of all the expenditures associated with the IRS, and bring in offshore accounts (which some estimates say are as high as $11 trillion.)

Obama will have my vote

This site and all its affiliates officially endorse Obama for the Democratic Nomination and the presidency.

Finally,...

The New York Times finally opened up its editorial section (the only section that matters) to their free internet website. Translation: You'll see a lot more articles from Paul Krugman on this blog.

Here's his latest about the housing crash debacle. As Krugman points out, Greenspan, who oversaw unregulated lending and then cashed in by writing one of the most inane books in history, was (and is) a super-ultra-crazy-wacko libertarian conservative in the mold of his messiah, an equally insane writer by the name of Ayn Rand. Greenspan was lucky to oversee the late 90s economic boom, but unfortunately he will not be remembered for legitimating Bush's crippling tax cuts, allowing--and ENCOURAGING--the debt to explode, and setting up the conditions for a housing collapse...enjoy

Blindly Into the Bubble

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 21, 2007

When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed’s locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

That’s quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of “innovative” home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.

But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside — that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.

I use the words “unmitigated disaster” advisedly.

Apologists for the mortgage industry claim, as Mr. Greenspan does in his new book, that “the benefits of broadened home ownership” justified the risks of unregulated lending.

But homeownership didn’t broaden. The great bulk of dubious subprime lending took place from 2004 to 2006 — yet homeownership rates are already back down to mid-2003 levels. With millions more foreclosures likely, it’s a good bet that homeownership will be lower at the Bush administration’s end than it was at the start.

Meanwhile, during the bubble years, the mortgage industry lured millions of people into borrowing more than they could afford, and simultaneously duped investors into investing vast sums in risky assets wrongly labeled AAA. Reasonable estimates suggest that more than 10 million American families will end up owing more than their homes are worth, and investors will suffer $400 billion or more in losses.

So where were the regulators as one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression unfolded? They were blinded by ideology.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

The Slow Demise of Professional Sports

Of course, the title is an exaggeration, but it gets the point across. Professional sports is and has been plagued for some time by a glaring structural problem that will probably not lead to its demise, but has and will taint athletics and I would argue become a major politico-economic problem that must be dealt with. What's the problem? MONEY. In particular, outrageous salaries to players.

I am a lifelong fan of professional sports, some would say a near fanatic especially for football and soccer. I love to pull for my teams and follow every detail with near obsession. But for as long as I fully understood it, I have been frustrated with the ridiculous salaries that professional athletes receive for less than half a year of "work" (if you can call playing a game work). Before I get to ways to change it, let me first go through why professional athletes do deserve high salaries.When I say high, I mean at most maybe 1-2 million dollars a year. That is about 20-40 times a normal salary.

Reason#1: Athletes can really only have a "career" in professional sports for at most 15 years, but more likely about 8-10 years. I'm perfectly comfortable allowing players to live their lives in leisure after they finish their careers (I feel this way because I realize that becoming a professional sports player usually means sacrificing the development of other marketable skills, despite what college athletic programs claim. It would be unfair to ask these athletes to work menial jobs the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than they'll be hounded by every janitor they're working with to sign autographs). Since professional athletes basically retire by age 32, they'll need enough income while they're working to cover expenses for the rest of their lives. To do that, they need pretty high salaries.

Reason #2: Jobs in the public eye demand higher salaries. The difference between an amateur olympic athlete and a professional athlete is that athletes in professional sports have to deal with ongoing public pressure and exposure. Normally, such occupations demand high salaries. Of course, there are plenty of athletes that face ongoing public pressure and don't get paid at all (Collegiate athletes, for example. These athletes do get paid in another way, though: scholarships to prestigious universities. Considering how profitable college sports are, particularly men's basketball and football, these players are actually grossly underpaid. Many of them are getting very poor educations. But that's all another diatribe...) In any case, high profile occupations generally command high salaries, so it is somewhat reasonable for players to ask for huge salaries, despite the fact they're only playing a game.

Reason #3: Professional athletes are entertainers. When you put their salaries up next to other entertainers, say in music or film, their salaries are actually relatively low.

Reason #4: Sports generate tons and tons of money. Since the players are the ones playing the game, don't they deserve to reap the benefits of their efforts? Who else deserves the money? The owners? The players drive the sports and their rare skills are what make watching them entertaining.

The above are the reasons that professional athletes deserve much higher than average salaries despite only playing about half of the year in 2-3 hour spurts. Yet, they do not deserve, nor should they receive, salaries in the range of tens of millions of dollars. After all, they are just playing a game and they are just serving a fan base. They contribute nothing particularly valuable to society (except for occasionally being good role models, which, by the way, they are not paid for being) and they are an elite few who have been given talent far beyond anyone else. No matter how hard I worked, I could never become a professional athlete. By random, these professional athletes have taken advantage of their God-given talents, which admittedly took a lot of work on their part, and are receiving ridiculous salaries because of their freak athleticism. How fast a WR can run his 40 or the wingspan of a small forward will have no corresponding change in our GDP or our standard of living. Ironically, a serious cutback in salaries will have negligible impact on how interested athletes are in joining professional sports teams. Professional sports will have plenty of applicants regardless of salary (in economics we call this an inelastic labor market). Cutting back on player salaries will not change little Johnny's boyhood dream to play for the Dodgers. Raising salaries will not attract any new entries into the sport. The continued growth of these salaries is an economic injustice.

So, how should we fix the problem. I have an easy solution. In fact it's so easy, there is no way it will ever happen. My solution calls for 2 steps:

Step 1: Packerfy all Franchise sports teams. In case you weren't aware, the Green Bay Packers are the only team in American sports that is publicly owned. The Packers are not owned by a person, but rather by the city of Green Bay. Management issues are dealt with through an advisory council, which, by the way, is the way about 90% of American sports teams are run. The big difference is that some jackass named Cuban, Steinbrenner, or Modell doesn't earn a profit on the team. All "profit" is reinvested in the team. Doing this would essentially Europeanize American Sports. This has some advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that, like I said, some jackass isn't earning a profit on your outrageously priced seats and there is no way the team could pack up and leave. The disadvantage is that there would be no flexibility in where teams are located. For example, Los Angeles, as it turns out, is a surprisingly lousy place to be a football team. If all teams were public, the Los Angeles Rams, as an example, who would have been owned by a Greater Los Angeles District would remain there forever. But, in a way that I believe offsets any negatives to making the change, by Packerfying American sports, there would no longer be the tension between awarding profits to owners vs. players. This would also eliminate price gouging as the team would be serving whom they're supposed to be serving: the fans. An alarming trend in American sports is to outprice about 85% of the population by charging ridiculous fees by building smaller, grander stadiums with absurd numbers of luxury boxes. This is the most profitable way to run a team. If an owner is not accountable to the fans, they have no reason to do otherwise. Packerfying would also eliminate ruthless bargaining by sports team owners with city officials. 'If they won't build us the stadium we want to play 8 games a year in, we'll just leave.' And they can. Economically they should. Of course, losing a sports team can cost a city tens of millions of dollars a year, not to mention public outrage. It's such an enormous incentive, that cities will actually fork over the money to build such ridiculous stadiums.

Step #2: Of course, Europeanizing will only be half of a solution. After all, European soccer players make just as much money as American football players. But, Europeanizing will allow the second step because it will no longer favor the wildcat owner over the hard-working players: A Drastic and Heavy salary cap. A salary cap that would mean that top players make at the very most 3 million dollars a year, but more like 1-2 million dollars a year for most elite players. See, the reason that salaries have gotten so high is that teams understand that winning sells tickets. Since a couple of players can be the difference between a championship and being...the 49ers, owners are willing to pay those salaries because there is competition to do so and their team can still be profitable. If a salary that severely cut a team's payroll were enforced, and the team was Packerized, that money could be saved and reinvested, or even better...invested into the community. Since playing professional sports is so wage inelastic, one could set salaries at just about any amount and still attract sufficient (probably the same number of) applicants. As I mentioned earlier, professional athletes still should get paid a lot, but not as much as they're getting.

Placing this salary cap and Packerizing American Sports would have the following effects:
1. More investment in fan services
2. cheaper tickets
3. Less gross inequalities in our society
4. more connection between sports players and fans (which would be better for the game)
5. Less idealization of sports players. As is, professional athletics is unfortunately an inner-city African-American kid's perceived best shot at improving his lot in life (Why study in school when you could be practicing your free throws?)
6. An end to that uncomfortable situation where that creepy old guy lifts the Lombardi trophy and all your favorite players and coaches hail him for doing such a great job of making millions off of them.
7. No more blackmailing of cities by owners looking for bigger stadiums
8. More investment in the community through taxes or otherwise.
9. Better run teams (Al Davis has no idea what he's doing. He would have been voted out decades ago.)
10. A stop in the Bourgeiosefication of stadiums. Luxury Boxes could be filled with real fans, not hip yuppies looking for a seasoned Warriors game to go with their Brie and Merlot.

Honestly, sports is just one area where intense economic injustices are taking place. To truly tackle this problem and others like it, we must first rethink how he distribute wealth in our society and alter it accordingly. No matter how much A-Rod makes this year, the insanity of CEO salaries is far more egregious. Perhaps some of the strategies used to fix sports could be used to fix our society at large...I'll save that for another diatribe.

CIA sets record for worst excuse ever...

Yesterday, the Central Intelligence Agency broke the world record for worst excuse ever recorded when it claimed that it had destroyed interrogation tapes in 2005 to protect them from being leaked. They claimed they feared that keeping the tapes would result in the interrogators being vulnerable to attacks from Al Quada. The record breaking performance, which suprassed then 6 year-old Billy Johnson's 1913 claim that his dog ate his homework, ignored several obvious problems with the excuse that would have been obvious to...well a 6 year old. Among them, according to local grade schooler, Krystal Smith, was that "couldn't the CIA have destroyed all but one tape and kept that one in a safe or something...I mean you're telling me that the CIA doesn't think it can hold such a basic secret?," and "It is obvious that the tapes were destroyed because the interrogators were using illegal torture methods, as has been widely reported. There is absolutely no plausible reason to legally destroy those tapes" This is all not to mention, 3 year-old Thomas Somoza's point, "doesn't Al Quada have like a million people already on its list. It's not like the one thing stopping them from killing people is video evidence."

An outstanding performance.

From a paper I wrote in one of my classes...

As pretentious as possible:

"

My rule of thumb is to not hate the immigrant, but to criticize the illegal immigration. Although I completely agree with the thrust of all the readings: that immigrants illegal or otherwise make important contributions to our society, are just as likely to be great people, and are not the chief obstacle to economic prosperity, illegal immigration does have its down side. Employers often use illegals to break unions and because illegals are afraid of being caught they rarely report acts of exploitation. Since the importation of Chinese workers in the mid-19^th century, employers have used exploited immigrants to drive down wages. The idea that “Mexicans are doing work that Americans just won't do,” is a myth. A basic understanding of economics will tell you that this is nonsense. Americans have all kinds of crappy jobs. The reason that some jobs (migrant agricultural labor, construction, and small business service work--like restaurants--especially) are dominated by illegal immigrants is not because they are intrinsically horrible jobs. They are only horrible because, for the amount of work, they pay very little. They pay little mostly because, yes this is a circle, they have so many illegal immigrants employed in those sectors. If wages for these jobs were raised, "Americans" would be willing to do them. So, the question is, why are so many illegals in these sectors? The answer is quite simple: these sectors are almost impossible to regulate and where they could be regulated, there hasn't been much pressure to do so because labor unions in these sectors are weak (because it is so easy to find "strikebreakers," unions have no clout). Thus, despite what news anchors who don't know what they're talking about say, if we were to cut off immigration completely, we could still find people to do all sorts of dirty work. The only difference would be that wages would rise to attract more people into these sectors.

Of course, there are several solutions to these problems, ranging from complete open borders to complete closed borders. Actually, I think these are both band-aid solutions. A real answer must be larger: the real problem here is poverty and outrageous wealth inequality. Immigrants will come to this wealthier country because they are so much poorer in their own country. There are several ways to combat poverty, but I’ll suggest two that would have immediate and dramatic impact and could be done by American alone:

Eliminate hunger: Hunger is not a production problem, it is a economic distribution problem. According to the United Nations Development Program, it would take about $13 billion dollars to feed all of the hungry people in the world (about 850 million people). Just to make some comparisons: the United States spends about $41 billion on pet food every year and the War in Iraq costs about $12 billion every month and a half. Ted Turner alone has offered $8 billion to this cause if an organization can solve the distribution issues and come up with the remaining $5 billion dollars.

Enact a Worker’s Bill of Rights: If the United States declared that it would not trade with anyone who did not provide its workers with basic rights( minimum wage, working conditions, collective bargaining, etc.), it would immediately halt the exploitative practices of multinational corporations across the globe. Of course, there would be some hardships: a decline in production and investment in poorer countries, more expensive consumer goods here, for example. Yet, the benefits would be far better: eventually, developing economies would be able to produce for themselves and cannibalize their wealth rather than shipping it out to Wal-Mart. This is not to mention the benefits of no longer having workers exploited across the world. In this way, the benefits of trade could be enjoyed by everyone, not just the wealthy corporations.

Excuse the digression. Regardless of our failure to follow through on basic common sense proposals, as a teacher (especially in the Bay Area) I will be interacting with immigrants, illegal and legal, on a daily basis. I look forward to this. My father was an immigrant and my mother was the daughter of an immigrant whose father was from Spain and mother was from Mexico. I have a lot of respect for immigrants and attending an inner-city school in San Jose exposed me to the hardships of immigrants from Mexico, in particular. Unfortunately, too much of our politics (especially in this state) center around paranoid xenophobia disguised as an attempt to institute law and order. Immigrants have amazing stories, captivating experiences, and I would be thrilled to have as many of them as possible in my classroom. My task should be to make them feel safe, secure, part of a community, and, if they are comfortable doing so, allow them to bring their experiences into the classroom."

Another kudos to TMQ

From this week's TMQ, Greg Easterbrook:

"Those Hollywood Searchlights Around Gore's Home Sure Eat Power: Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change in obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.

An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer.) When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

After news of Gore's personal energy consumption broke, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told The Associated Press the utility bill was justified because "Al and Tipper both work out of their home." This raises the question -- what kind of work are they doing? Perhaps reanimating Frankenstein; in Frankenstein movies, there is always a lot of electricity crackling wastefully about. Here are other possible reasons the Gores' home requires so much energy:

• Gore is building a time machine to return to Palm Beach, Fla., in October 2000.

• The former vice president is doing everything he personally can to cause global warming, so he can claim is predictions came true.

• Gore is growing marijuana in his basement. [Note from the corporate legal department: This is strictly a joke, ESPN is not accusing Al Gore of growing marijuana. We stand by our allegation that he is a sinister kingpin of international rare-bird smuggling.]

• Members of Gore's species require high power levels to maintain human form.

• Al and Tipper don't just leave the lights on when they make out, they leave the lights on all over the house."

Look at these smug jackasses

...Start the goose-stepping...

'Honk for peace' case tests limits on free speech

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

When one of Deborah Mayer's elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, "I honk for peace."

Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn't have any.

As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary." The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.

The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney's office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.

But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.

As far as the courts are concerned, "public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and ... its employees are the mouthpieces of the government," said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is "much, much less" in public schools, he said.

A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress of grievances. The school's administrators forbade seventh-graders from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem "A Wreath for Emmett Till," about a black teenager beaten to death by white men in 1955.

In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up, publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till's alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest written by students at the largely African American school, both teachers were fired.

The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. For the last decade, he said, federal courts "have not been receptive to arguments that teachers, both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom."

That's unacceptable, said Mayer, 57, who now teaches seventh-graders in Haines City, Fla. She said she's scraped up enough money, by selling her car, to appeal her case to the Supreme Court, though she doubts the justices will review it.

"If a teacher can be fired for saying those four little words -- 'I honk for peace' -- who's going to want to teach?" she asked. "They're taking away free speech at school. ... You might just as well get a big television and set it in front of the children and have them watch, (using) the curriculum the school board has."

On the other hand, said Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government demands for accountability.

"Teachers bring their creativity, their energy, their skill in teaching the curriculum, but ... a teacher in K-12 is really not at liberty to design a curriculum," said Negrón, who filed arguments with the court in Mayer's case supporting the Bloomington school district. "That's the function of the school board."

The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches arose during a discussion of an article in the children's edition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq.

When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington, that she blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace" sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war.

A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal, who canceled the school's annual "Peace Month" observance and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class.

Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance, but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments and said the school had acted legally.

"Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay," a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. "The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials."

Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach about the war "as long as she kept her opinions to herself." Like the Los Angeles district attorney's employee whose demotion led to the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said, Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that conflicted with her employer's policy.

Mayer's lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student's question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment.

Mayer, who had taught for more than 20 years, couldn't afford to keep her Indiana home after being fired and left the state. She got another teaching job in Florida, but lost it after disclosing her previous dismissal, and didn't get another position until last fall.

As all parties to Mayer's case recognize, her statements would have been constitutionally protected and beyond the government's power to suppress if she had been speaking on a street corner or at a public hearing.

But in the classroom, as in the workplace, courts have upheld limits on speech. In both settings, past rulings have taken into account the institution's need to function efficiently and keep order, and the rights of co-workers and students not to be subjected to unwanted diatribes.

In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld a high school student's right to wear a black armband as a silent protest against the Vietnam War and barred schools from stifling student expression unless it was disruptive or interfered with education. The court retreated from that standard somewhat in a 1988 ruling upholding censorship of student newspapers, and will revisit the issue in a pending case involving an Alaskan student who was suspended for unfurling a banner outside the school grounds that read, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

The Supreme Court has never ruled on teachers' free speech. In lower courts, teachers have won cases by showing they were punished for violating policies that school officials never explained to them beforehand or invented after the fact. A federal appeals court in 2001 ruled in favor of a fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky who was fired for bringing actor Woody Harrelson to her class to discuss the benefits of industrial hemp, an appearance that school officials had approved.

But teachers who were on notice of school policies they transgressed have usually lost their cases. In one Bay Area case, in August 2005, a federal judge in San Jose rejected arguments by Cupertino elementary school teacher Stephen Williams that his principal had violated his freedom of speech by prohibiting him from using outside religious materials in history lessons.

Unless the Supreme Court takes up Mayer's case, its legal effect is limited to federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, the three states in the Seventh Circuit. But Amar, the Hastings law professor, and others said the ruling could be influential elsewhere because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative jurist.

"Very few schools are going to be that harsh in muzzling or silencing their teachers," but the ruling indicates they would be free to do so, Amar said.

Simpson, the National Education Association's lawyer, said the ruling, though within the legal mainstream, was bad for education because teachers are not "hired to read a script." The case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably file a brief in support of Mayer's appeal should the justices take the case, he said.

Beverly Tucker, chief counsel of the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association, said she doubts that federal courts in California would take as conservative a position as the court in Mayer's case. But she expects school districts to cite the ruling in the next case that arises.

"If I were a public school teacher, I would live in fear that some innocuous remark made in the classroom in response to a question from a pupil would lead to me being terminated" under such a ruling, Tucker said.

As for Mayer, she isn't sure what rankles her most -- the impact on her life, the stigma of being branded a rogue teacher, or the court's assertion that a teacher's speech is a commodity purchased by the government.

"My free speech," she said, "is not for sale at any price."

He Vetoed That?

After not vetoing a single bill for 6 years as president, Bush has had a string of vetoes since the Democrats took both houses. Today, Bush vetoed a bill that would CONTINUE health care coverage to uninsured children. Now, there will be a "donut" of health care coverage for children: impoverished children are entitled to healthcare through Medicaid and those with parents lucky enough will be covered by their parents' HMO. Without the extension of the program called SCHIP, uninsured families with children will no longer receive any assistance in giving their children basic health coverage.

How very conservative of you, Mr. Bush.