Sunday, October 21
Thursday, October 4
...Start the goose-stepping...
'Honk for peace' case tests limits on free speech
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."
Wednesday, October 3
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.
Sunday, September 23
Might as well move to Canada...
jokes, is poised to become more valuable than our own American dollar. On Friday, the exchange rate reached .9991, meaning that it took .9991 American dollars to buy one Canadian dollars. Most assume that by the end of Monday, the Canadians will finally pass us.We should all be ashamed...a perfect storm of overimportation of consumer goods from around the world, underexportation resulting from the debilitation of American manufacturing, our spiraling debt, and the Fed's decision to drop interest rates in the face of a housing price collapse has resulted in the plummeting of the American dollar.
Tuesday, September 18
Easterbrook Strikes Again!
Why am I finding great political articles on ESPN's webpage?
From TMQ:
"Oh Ye of Little MPG: Recently, the CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and General Motors lunched with Senate leaders, telling them the one-third vehicle mileage increase proposed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- you heard that right, Bush and Obama have offered nearly identical fuel-efficiency plans -- was impossible. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, said at a news conference after the lunch that a one-third mileage improvement "doesn't look achievable." This is exactly the kind of excuse-making that allowed Honda and Toyota to wrap their hands around the Big Three's necks in the first place! As the UAW-Detroit contracts talks heat up, the relationship between mpg and saving Chrysler, Ford and General Motors bears exploring.
The National Academy of Sciences said in 2002 that a one-third improvement in mpg is practical using existing technology, and without sacrifice of safety or passenger comfort. Now, the U.S. automakers claim a one-third improvement can't be done. It's not that Detroit cannot achieve better fuel economy -- it's that Detroit doesn't want to. What the current executive-suite suits at the Big Three want is to maximize their bonuses and stock options during their short stays at the top, then let somebody else take the blame for the next round of decline of the U.S. auto industry that is inevitable if fuel economy does not improve. And that's setting aside the national-security implications. A one-third increase in car and SUV mpg is what's needed to break U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf oil. Wouldn't it be nice if Detroit CEOs acted as though they cared about national security!
This summer, the Senate passed something that on paper seemed even better than the Bush-Obama plan, ordering a 40 percent mpg improvement by 2020; the House has yet to act. But although the Bush-Obama plan had teeth, specifying that carmakers show annual mpg improvement beginning immediately, the Senate provision contained a huge asterisk: There are no annual milestones, just a requirement that the mpg rise be accomplished by 2020. That gives Detroit the green light to spend most of the next 13 years doing nothing about petroleum waste, and there is no endeavor in which American automakers are more accomplished than doing nothing about petroleum waste. Plus, the Senate bill contains a waiver provision -- as the 2020 deadline approaches, automakers can request a waiver. Thus the Senate mpg bill, widely praised by gullible editorialists, actually is pure froth.
Now remember that little phrase, "the House has yet to act." Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who boasts about how she will take the bold steps the president will not, won't allow a floor vote on any mileage provision. Pelosi says new mpg rules can be negotiated in conference committee -- that is, in secret, with no public disclosure. And she hasn't even scheduled a conference. George W. Bush proposed a strong, binding program of immediate mpg increases, and Democrats in the House refuse to allow an up-or-down public vote. The calculus is that Pelosi wants to prevent any kind of reform from passing so that, in the 2008 presidential election, Democrats can denounce Republicans for lack of progress on mpg. Wouldn't it be nice if House Democrats acted as though they cared about national security!
While the Senate was considering mpg rules, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a mostly Detroit-run lobby group, aired radio ads that were monuments to deceit. Two women were heard discussing how new mpg regulations could "force" automakers to "put safety in the back seat." One said, "I want to keep my SUV because it makes me feel safe." Several senators speaking against the tough Bush-Obama version of the mileage rules declared that higher mpg would imperil lives by replacing safe large SUVs with small cars. But the Bush-Obama proposal would not require automakers to reduce the size or weight of passenger vehicles. Fuel economy could be improved through engineering changes including reducing horsepower, which many vehicles presently have too much of anyway; the new Acura TL has an absurd 286 horsepower in a midsized sedan, showing that even former good-guy Honda has abandoned corporate responsibility regarding horsepower. Reducing the horsepower of new vehicles would reduce crash rates, thus improving safety.
And although being in a heavy SUV might make the driver feel safer, the reality is the opposite. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety continues to find that you are more likely to die in an SUV than in a regular car. In its most recent study, "very large" SUVs had a higher occupant death rate than midsized cars -- that is, trading in your large SUV for a regular-size car makes you less likely to die. The IIHS also finds that econobox-sized cars are death traps in crashes, so don't switch to a tiny car to save fuel, switch to a midsized vehicle with a middling-horsepower engine. Here are the most recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures on fatality rates by vehicle class. They show that people in "light trucks," the class that enfolds SUVs and most pickup trucks, are roughly one-third more likely to die per mile traveled than people in regular-size cars. It was quite cynical for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers to tell consumers that SUVs will make them feel safe when statistics show that buying an SUV makes the driver more likely to die.
Not only has it been nearly two decades since the average fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States improved -- the sad story is here -- but the EPA continues to publish Pollyannaish statistics that make it seem as though American vehicles burn less fuel than they actually do. According to the EPA figures used to enforce the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, this year's new cars average 27.5 miles per gallon and new SUVs average 21.6. Is there one single person in the United States whose SUV gets 21.6 mpg? There can't be many regular cars that actually get 27.5 mpg, either. Researchers have long complained that claimed EPA averages are unrealistic -- vehicles tested using gentle acceleration with air conditioners off, with no weight onboard, and employing other gimmicks to make fuel consumption appear lower. Surely government-issued unrealistic mpg figures are a leading reason for years of national complacency about petroleum use. People go into auto showrooms and see impressive-looking government window stickers declaring that cars get 28 mpg and SUVs get 22 mpg. People think, "That's pretty good." They don't worry, buy something huge, then find themselves lucky to record 15 mpg.
Beginning with the 2008 model year, the EPA is switching to what it asserts is a realistic method of computing fuel economy; the agency's estimates of actual mpg performance have fallen about 10 percent as a result, although still seem on the high side to me. Good luck actually getting 17 mpg in the city driving your 4,090-pound, all-wheel-drive Lexus RX350! But although EPA estimates of fuel use are being adjusted for realism as regards individual vehicles, the big overall number has not been adjusted. The EPA still claims that new cars average 27.5 mpg and new SUVs average 21.6 mpg, which is plainly absurd.
Fuel note: In policy-wonk slang, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law is shortened to CAFE. If you type CAFE using Word, the AutoCorrect feature changes what you typed to CAFÉ, the correct uppercase spelling for a place to meet someone for a glass of wine. Watch carefully -- I've seen The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal refer to "the CAFÉ standard" in automobile stories recently.
California note: for two generations, California has been ahead of the nation both in car-culture trendsetting -- Toyota and Honda cracked the U.S. market partly by moving their design studios to California in the mid-1970s and listening closely to what high school kids were saying about cars -- and in auto-emission reductions. The strict anti-air-pollution rules enacted by California in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to spectacular smog reductions throughout the state, gradually were matched in the Northeast, then by federal rules. Two years ago, California mandated a one-third increase in auto and SUV fuel economy beginning in 2010. Instead of racing to meet the rule, American automakers are suing to block it -- Detroit, get your heads out of the sand and get your engineers to work solving the problem! This month California officials also proposed standards for proper tire inflation. Merely keeping America's tires at proper pressure would cut vehicle petroleum consumption 5 to 10 percent -- which is important in the big scheme. Yet most people never bother to check tire pressure, and states don't require filling stations to have working, free-of-charge air pumps. The president of the United States and the Congress of the United States are wringing their hands in public about petroleum waste, yet we don't even have the national resolve to pump a little air into our tires!"
Wednesday, August 29
You guys suck
I posted my brilliant Tax diatribe here almost a month ago and received 1 comment.
I posted the same article on Daily Kos and received...53 comments within 24 hours. You guys suck.
As such, I'm retiring this blog. Anything new I post on DailyKos will appear on this blog, but I will no longer continue posting for it. (That means no more Monthly Machiavellis or Forwarded Articles--unless it's one I really like.) You should all be ashamed of yourself.
Sunday, August 26
Monthly Machiavelli: August
...and the award for 'Outstanding Political Acumen' goes to:
Hillary Clinton!
Why she won: There are several reasons why Hillary deserves the award this month.For one, a little over a month ago, I declared that I would never vote for Mrs. Clinton no matter what party nominated her. Since that time, her poise in debates, a recalculation on my part on her possibilities of winning, sound political maneuvers, and some self-destructions by rival candidates have moved me from considering voting for her and even leaning towards a vote for her.
In debates, and there have been many of them, Hillary has shined as a politician with skills above the rest. I was surprised by this considering that she had never engaged in a competitive debate previously. She is now the obvious front runner among both parties and is accumulating a small fortune in campaign donations...
The next president?
Tuesday, August 21
Welfare in America
A couple paragraphs from another one of my heroes, author of the weekly ESPN magazine articles entitled "Tuesday Morning Quarterback", Gregg Easterbrook:
<< Wealthy ex-presidents reach into your pockets: Recently, the Congressional Research Service announced the federal subsidies requested for the coming fiscal year by ex-presidents Jimmy Carter, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton. Globe-trotting Carter asked for only $2,000 for travel; Bush and Clinton, both millionaires, wanted $50,000 from taxpayers for travel. Bush said he needed $69,000 for "equipment" and $13,000 for postage. Is Bush planning to mail 32,000 thank-you notes next year?
AP Photo
Hi, we're rich, give us your money.
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Monday, August 20
Another forwarded post...
This one comes from Robert Reich's Blog. Reich was my professor for one day and he is one of few economists who actually knows what he's talking about. You may notice that he was inspired by my other blog, but I can't really blame him for copying me, considering my immense popularity. Without
further delay--Bailing Out the Speculators:<<
Bailing Out the Speculators
Last night the Federal Reserve Board, acting as America’s central bank, sliced half a percentage point off the discount rate it charges banks for loans. The move was designed to give banks, in turn, more money to lend to their customers. But its primary purpose was to lift the confidence of investors and consumers in the United States and around the world that America’s central bank would do whatever necessary to keep the American economy going.Ordinarily, central banks shouldn’t bail out speculators. It’s not their job to protect investors from themselves. In particular, it’s bad policy to make money cheaper – and investments thereby less risky – after investors have been hoisted on the petards of their own foolishness. That only invites more foolishness next time around.
Yet there’s precedent: In August of 1998, despite growing evidence of inflation, the Federal Reserve Board lowered interest rates in order to forestall a global credit crisis after Russia defaulted on its loans (many of which had been underwritten, foolishly, by several large Wall Street investment banks that assumed Russia would never default). Weeks later the Fed pressured banks to reschedule the debts of a giant hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, for fear that if the hedge fund went belly up, it would cause a crisis in credit markets.
In other words, ordinary rules don’t apply in extraordinary circumstances. That several thousand lower-income Americans inability to meet their mortgage payments set off a chain reaction leading to a worldwide credit crunch is an another such extraordinary circumstance. This one may require even more intervention by the Fed and other central banks around the world than we’ve witnessed already, in order to avoid a global financial meltdown. How much more? We’ll know more this coming week.
But what exactly happened to set this off? The story isn’t simple, but I’ll try to state it as simply as I can. In recent years, with so much money sloshing around the global economy, American banks and other mortgage lenders found themselves with lots of cash. They thought they could make a tidy profit by pushing home loans – not only on average Americans (whose eagerness to own a home or two thereby bid up housing prices) but also on poorer Americans who wanted to own a house but normally couldn’t afford the interest on the loans. Oddly, private credit-rating agencies judged these “sub-prime” loans to be relatively good risks. The loans were then sliced up and sold to other financial institutions where they were repackaged with other loans. Meanwhile, hedge funds created what can only be described as giant betting pools – huge amalgamations of money from pension funds, university endowments, rich individuals, and corporations – whose assumptions about risk were derived from the assumed low risks of the home loans (hence, the term, “derivatives”). Investors in these hedge funds had little or no understanding of what they were actually buying because hedge funds don’t have to disclose much of anything.
It was not just a housing bubble but a financial house of cards that would tumble when central bankers tightened up on the global money supply in order to fight inflation, as they inevitably would, and when the home loans were thereby revealed to be far riskier than thought. Because the bad loans are so widely dispersed and because so much additional credit is connected to them through derivatives, a contagion of fear has spread through financial markets. The credibility of the whole financial system has become shaky. Large numbers of stocks and bonds appear riskier than before, which is why Wall Street is taking a beating.
Americans are understandably nervous. Most American households have invested their savings in stocks and bonds. Most have also relied on the rising values of their homes as “nest-eggs” when they retire. The fact that the housing bubble has burst while stocks and bonds have lost ground is likely to cause American consumers to tighten their belts and cut their spending. Given that consumers comprise 70 percent of the economy, this could push America economy into a recession.
Europe and Asia are feeling the effects. The global financial market is now one big pool of money with spigots and drains all over the world. A loss of confidence on Wall Street is felt almost instantly in other financial capitals. Moreover, American consumers are the “energizer bunnies” of the global economy. Their purchases have maintained global demand even when other economies have sagged. The possibility that they won’t or can’t continue to buy is rocking all global corporations that sell them goods or services.
In other words, the Fed has to bail out the speculators because we’ll all suffer if it doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the irresponsibilities now so clearly revealed in American financial markets should be excused or forgotten when the crisis ends. Wall Street has been living in an anything-goes world for too long. It has been widely – and wrongly – assumed that investors, creditors, and borrowers are smart enough to take care of themselves, especially if they’re big. That’s wrong.
The system has become so fast and so loose that many of the fancy financial instruments now in use, and the mathematical models on which they’re based, are too complicated for anyone except a computer to understand. Fortunes have been made exploiting tiny opportunities for arbitrage or devising new derivatives on the basis of data and risk assessments far less certain than they’re assumed to be.
Hedge funds have been operating huge financial casinos without having to disclose what they’re betting on, or why. Credit-rating agencies have cut corners or averted their eyes, unwilling to require the proof they need. They’ve been too eager to make money off underwriting of the new loans and other financial gimmicks on which they’re passing judgment. Banks and other mortgage lenders have been allowed to strong-arm people into taking on financial obligations they have no business taking on.
In order for the financial market to work well – to ensure fair dealing and to prevent speculative excess – government must oversee it. This mess occurred because no one was watching. The Fed and other central banks now have to clean it up. But regulators in American, Europe, and Asia have to make sure it stays clean. Hedge funds have to be more transparent. Credit-rating agencies must not have any relationship with underwriters. Banks and other mortgage lenders should be better supervised. Finance is too important to be left to the speculators.
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Thursday, August 16
Bush Legacy Article
<<
If one had to sum up the legacy of Karl Rove as political adviser to the 43rd president, it could probably be done in four words: tactical brilliance, strategic blindness.
Though George Bush was not given the natural gifts of a Ronald Reagan, his victories in Texas, followed by successive victories in the presidential contests in 2000 and 2004, put him in the history books alongside Reagan, who won California and the presidency twice.
None of Bush's wins were nearly so impressive as the Reagan landslides in the Golden State and the nation. But it is a testament to Rove that he and Bush never lost a statewide or national election in the four they contested from 1994 to 2004. Rove has two Super Bowl rings. How many political advisers can say as much?
But if Rove's contribution to the career of George Bush will put him in the Hall of Fame, the Bush-Rove legacy for their party is worse than mixed. Rove wanted to be the architect of a new Republican majority. Instead, he and Bush presided over the loss of the Reagan Democrats and both houses of Congress.
The house Nixon and Reagan built, Bush and Rove tore down, leaving rubble in its place. Rove's failure was a failure of vision. He and Bush believed the future of the party lay in adding to the Republican base the Latino vote, now the nation's largest minority at nearly 15 percent of the population.
They went about it the wrong way.
Pandering to that voting bloc, Bush stopped enforcing the immigration laws and offered amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and the businesses that hired them. Bush and Rove were going to lure the Latino vote away from the Democratic Party by putting illegals on a path to citizenship.
But as we saw in June, when the nation rose up in rage against the Bush amnesty, the pair did indeed unite the GOP - against themselves, and they severed themselves from the Reagan Democrats and the country.
It was cynical politics, and it backfired, crippling the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain in the process.
But even before the disastrous immigration reform bill, Bush had become a zealot of NAFTA, GATT and most-favored-nation status for China. These have left his country with the worst trade deficits in history, put the United States $2 trillion in debt to Beijing and Tokyo, cost Middle America 3 million manufacturing jobs and arrested the income rise of the middle class as our capitalist pigs and hedge-fund hogs have happily gorged themselves at the capital gains tax trough.
Bush's original idea of "compassionate conservatism" was a fine one. But under him and Rove, compassionate conservative turned out to be code for a cocktail of Great Society Liberalism and Big Government Conservatism. How could professed admirers of Ronald Reagan think that by doubling the budget of the Department of Education the tests scores of schoolchildren would inexorably rise?
Even earlier in the Bush years, the president, after the trauma of Sept. 11, had a Damascene conversion to neoconservatism, a neo-Wilsonian ideology and secular religion. Among its tenets: that we are a providential nation whose mission on Earth is to liberate mankind and democratize the planet; that we are in a world-historic struggle between good and evil; that our triumph is to be accomplished by the robust use of U.S. military power - beginning with the benighted nations of the Islamic Middle East that represent an existential threat to America, democracy and Israel.
Sometime between Sept. 11 and his axis-of-evil address, Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney. Consuming it, he got up and committed the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history by ordering the invasion of a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us.
The Bush-Rove rationale: For our survival, we had to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that we now know it did not have.
The great political architects of the 20th century are FDR and Nixon. After the three Republican landslides of the 1920s, FDR put together a New Deal coalition that controlled the White House for 36 years, with the exception of two terms for Eisenhower.
After the rout of the Republicans in 1964, Nixon pulled together a New Majority that held the White House for 20 of 24 years, racking up two 49-state landslides for Nixon and Reagan, as FDR had won 46 states in 1936. In his re-election bid, Bush won 31 states.
In seeking a new GOP majority, Bush and Rove rejected the Nixon-Reagan model. Instead, they embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base.
Now, Rove walks away like some subprime borrower abandoning the house on which he can no longer make the payments. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job."
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I couldn't have said it better myself.
