Entitlement: What's In A Word and Antonin Scalia

During the recent oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia said this law is the institutionalization of a "racial entitlement."  the 1965 law, last renewed about 4 years ago by a unanimous Senate and by all but six votes in the House, says that a local government cannot suddenly change the voting hours, or the voting place or the boundaries of a voting district, without first getting approval from a federal authority if that local government has been identified as one which has a history of  denying voting rights to its citizens. Historically, this was done mostly in the South, although New Hampshire has had its problems. 

So this law prevents shenanigans carried out by locals who don't want their Black folks voting, and that Mr. Scalia sees as "a racial entitlement." Which is to say, those local Black folk are entitled to vote.

And "entitlement" suggests the mentality of a person who feels "entitled." Which is to say, this suggests a person who is not deserving but demands something to which he is not really, ethically or morally entitled, but he thinks he ought to be.

The same word has been used, with the same pejorative connotation in the case of Medicare. All those citizens who feel so "entitled" to their Medicare. They don't really deserve Medicare coverage, they just feel "entitled," those welfare queen slackers.

Of course, that word is never used when a customer of Blue Cross/Blue Shield demands that insurance company cover his hospitalization or this MRI. That person deserves to be covered. He paid his premiums.  But the citizen who has paid with every pay check for thirty years into the Medicare program, well, he is an entitled , so and so, who is just willing to bleed the government dry demanding his coverage when he really ought to be ashamed to be feeding at the government trough. 

Oh, for shame.

And the same goes for all those citizens who no longer need the federal government protecting their voting rights. After all, people are no longer put through "literacy" tests at the polls, or asked to pay a "poll tax" or sent away because they are Black. Everything is clean as a whistle at the polling places throughout the land now, in the 21st century--unless you happen to be trying to vote in Florida, and you are a 102 year old black woman, on line for 6 hours, or unless you are trying to vote in Pennsylvania where--luckily--they caught the Republican local pol on tape, crowing about how he was going to steal the election from President Obama with his local malfeasance. 

Who needs a Voting Rights Act when elections nowadays are so very clean?

And Mr. Scalia complains the very name of the law is a sham; calling it a Voting Rights Act means nobody can oppose it, says Justice Scalia. Who would be against  voting rights? (Takes one to know one: Who would be for a Death Tax?)

Mr. Scalia, ever irrepressible, did not stop with questioning the lawyer presenting the  argument against the Voting Rights Act--Mr. Scalia went on to present the case against the Voting Rights Act himself, from the bench.

What he argued, essentially, is that the Congress had to be rescued from itself by the Supreme Court. No Congressman or Senator can be expected to vote against voting rights, even though the nation really does not need a voting rights law, so it's up to the Supreme Court to nullify the law. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

What Mad Dog would argue is: With the Supreme Court now poised to usurp the role of the legislature, what this country really needs is a Congress which will vote in a court packing, no let's call it a Supreme Court Reinvigoration and Rejuvenation Act, mandating that the President appoint 2 new justices each term and only the 9 most recently appointed justices get to vote. 

And while we are at it--let's be sure those new nominees vow on a stack of Bibles to overturn Florence vs the Board of Freeholders, the strip search decision. Might throw in a litmus test on Citizens United and Bong Hits for Jesus while we are at it.

The Emperor's New Clothes: Republicans Bring Down the Government with Sequester

They are still trying to sell cut-to-grow snake oil; cut spending and cut taxes , and the economy will grow because rich people will be happy and when rich people are happy they hire poor people, and then everyone's happy. 

This is the vacuous talk of politicians trying to placate people with vacation homes, not a sensible solution for people trying to purchase, or simply retain, their first homes.

--Charles M. Blow,  The New York Times Saturday, March 2, 2013.

Mr. Blow looks at the truth and sees it and says it, but people in Kentucky and South Carolina and Arizona and Texas and even California and Pennsylvania can look at the same truth and not see it.

Those willfully blind people elected the Tea Party Republicans in 2010 and returned enough of them in 2012 so these government-is-the-problem-not-the-solution types still have a strangle hold on government.

Our bewigged silk stocking'd sometimes slave owning or slave trading forefathers distrusted government enough to build into ours enough levers to pull to bring this train to a halt whenever a bare minimum of dissenters become unhappy.

Trouble is, in the case of the sequester, even Mad Dog cannot actually see exactly which programs and  which people are getting the rug pulled out from under them. So far, the media has reported on the examples which the media presumes are the most moving and tear jerking, and Mad Dog has to admit,, actually, much as Mad Dog might love extra teaching aides in elementary schools, this does not sound like a critical loss of essential government workers. Mad Dog loves the National Parks, but if they close down, it's not like the power going off in dowtown Manchester and Portsmouth.

The problem for President Obama is the Republicans have said, "Okay, screw you, screw the government, we're going home," and for Mad Dog and his neighbors, life here in New Hampshire hasn't changed. 

Mad Dog's father traveled to Spain when the vicious dictator, Franco, was still in power.  People were sitting around cafes, enjoying the sun, the beaches, looking happy, which disturbed Mad Dog's father because here were people who were under the yoke of tyranny, still enjoying life. Nobody looked depressed, despite an oppressive government. It was as if it didn't matter the scoundrels were in charge. Government did not seem to affect people, at least not visibly, to a tourist.

Here and now, we have government being brought to a grinding halt and life goes on. It is as if the Tea Party anarchists have proven their point: We really don't need government, after all.

Of course, there is another metaphor.  How many times have you had a friend or relative, who was walking around, looking quite healthy, only to keel over dead, or collapse and be dragged off to the hospital and found to be riddled with cancer, beyond hope?

Another image might be more vivid:  You can jump off a cliff and spread your arms and enjoy the sense of flying freely through the air, and feel just fine, exhilarated even,  until you hit the ground.

That's what President Obama is warning us about--we are not going to get acute chest pain, start choking today, but the harm is being done, inside, the unforgiving hard ground is still there, awaiting us. 

It's just a matter of time.

But, as the three stooges might echo that great philosopher: What, me worry?

Sequester: Where The Money Goes

Mad Dog is still trying to track down where we allocate our funds as a people.
These charts are from different websites, government, conservative think tanks, Mother Jones. They seem to reflect subtle differences in how conservatives and liberals see the same numbers. Creative accounting.

Double click on them to make them more readable.

Notable, is how little defense spending takes up compared to other programs in some charts--as low as 14% in some and as large as 19% in others and even in those where it is 19% Veterans benefits are separated from defense spending, which of course is a little irrational. The cost of a soldier's prosthetic leg is a cost of war, not a social security benefit. With all the money we can see spent at the Portsmouth Naval Yard and in Norfolk Virginia and in the districts of the Tea Party Republicans from California to Pennsylvania, it is surprising that slice of the pie isn't bigger. Agriculture and farm subsidies look surprisingly small. "Education" is surprisingly, gratifyingly, large. I wonder what that includes. 

What is included in "protection" is not clear. Is terrorism, the CIA, the NSA in "defense" or in "protection?" Should Veteran's Administration be in "Health" for the VA hospitals or in "Defense?"  Or should it be in" pensions?" If you added up "defense" "veterans" "protection" then the defense slice would be bigger than Medicare.  Presumably, the Republican/Tea party/ Conservative Think Tank types split off anything they can from "defense" to make that slice of the pie look smaller. And they add whatever they can to Medicare and Social Security to make that look larger.

Before we can really understand the debate about whether we need to cut spending or increase income, Mad Dog suspects, we need to actually see what we are spending and on what.

Creative accounting likely plays a subterranean role here.

Wars For All the Wrong Reasons

The war we fought among ourselves from 1861-1865 was a war we had to fight. No avoiding it, and the fact it was as long and destructive as it was was important because we had to exhaust ourselves and realize no institution or States Right notion was worth that cost. Had the Union won quickly, as it could have but for the incompetence of various generals, in 1862 or 1863, the South would not have been as exhausted or convinced of its defeat. That was a war which expunged the bad blood.

And it was a good we joined the  battle against Hitler in 1942. As racist and exploitative as England and France and even the United States were, they could  not hold a candle to what Germany had degenerated into. We were a force for good in the world, even if most of the men who fought in that war did not  know it when they joined. 

They found out later just what monster they had brought down.

But since the end of World War II, we have been in more or less continuous war--with a brief hiatus during the Clinton years.

But in most of the wars since WWII, we found  ourselves in quagmires, unable to even say what winning is. 

President Obama has vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and Mad Dog believes he wants to do this, if for no other reason than its effect on our economy. His administration has voiced, through Vice President Biden, our excuse for leaving--we are not running out on the Afghans; we are handing their country back to an Afghan government which is stepping up to take our place, to keep order and to lay justice on the Afghan people.

Of course, as Americans, we understand a  lie when we hear one. There is no Afghan government. There are only some police who rape young boys, hold unfortunate citizens for ransom, sell American weapons and gasoline on the black market, traffic in heroin.  It's a nasty bunch we are handing the country over to, but then again, we never had it in hand.  It's all "Dope on the Table."  We claim victory and clear out.

As far as Mad Dog is concerned, it cannot happen fast enough. After us, the place collapses, and there is not a thing anyone can do about it. 

It's not even clear there is such a thing as an "Afghan people." As with so many failed states, Somolia, and other African "nations" there is no real nation, just a geographic area populated by warring tribes and religious fanatics. 

The lives we lost  were not in vain, if we believe all that was necessary to track down Osama Bin Laden, and without Afghanistan, without a launching pad into Pakistan, we  would likely never have got him. After the Twin Towers came down, a lot of young American men and women were willing to go to Afghanistan to help track him down and kill him. 

Now we've done it. And now we ought to get out of that part of the world  and we ought to  close Gitmo prison, a cesspool of torture which some Americans have justified because we are not torturing or unjustly imprisoning men on American soil. As if committing a crime off shore is no crime. It's the old, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. If we don't misbehave at home, well then there is no crime.

We ought to Bring 'Em Home, from Afghanistan, from Germany, from Japan, from all those bases overseas and build our economy right here. And we ought to set about the work of shutting down those huge weapons systems communities in hundreds of Congressional districts, where Americans have good, high paying jobs building weapons systems we do not need and cannot afford.  These defense workers have served us well, but as was true after World War II, it is time to study war no more and to close down the death factories. 

Mr. Obama may realize this. If he does not, we might be able to educate him.

Sequester: Do We Really Need Government, Anyway?

Driving over the fiscal cliff would stall government programs, but for the Republican Tea Party, this will come as welcome news. 
It is not clear to Mad Dog  how many of the listed losses would be permanent and how many temporary, but here is a partial list of what New Hampshire would lose:
1. Teachers and schools: >$1 million for education aides
2. Clean Air Clean Water: $1.5 million for hazardous waste and pesticide contamination programs
3. Defense: 1,000 civilian employees furloughed--presumably the shipyard or is that only in Maine?
4. Army base funding $1 million
5. Law enforcement: courts, prosecution, police 
6. Public Health: $126,000 upgrading state programs in infectious diseases and natural disasters
7. Stop Violence Against Women program: $28,000.

Comments from citizens suggest there are at least some vocal citizens who say, "Good Riddance" to these programs and expenditures.

From Mad Dog's point of view, the impact on "civilian employees," of the military in this state-- if we are talking about ship yard workers who are hard working, well trained people who re furbish submarines--is the most worrisome. But, truth be told, at some point, America has to shift from a wartime nation to a nation which concentrates on defending against terrorism. Nuclear submarines would not appear to offer much protection against the next Al Qaeda attack. Our shipyard, like so many other defense installations around the country is part of our eternal war machine.  Newport, Rhode Island lost the Navy base there  in the 1970's, and there was a painful transition from military to civilian economy, but it happened,  and ultimately, it was tough love and it worked out better for Rhode Island in the long run. 

Where would all those New Hampshire shipyard workers find work? We ought to be figuring that out right now, before the hammer comes down on that shipyard, as it inevitably will. Working on nuclear submarines must be a specialized career, but maybe some of these men and women could take skills used in boats and sell them elsewhere. It would be wrenching and an upheaval, but if we are ever to shift to a real peacetime economy, it will happen eventually.

Our defense spending, Mad Dog suspects, is not about defense or about making America stronger or safer. It is a substantial government welfare program for the defense workers at the plants and shipyards, and a boondoggle for the corporations who profit from it. Not that we ought to bring home all the submarines and aircraft carriers next week, but we ought to bring them home over a well defined timespan. 

Most of the other  things on this list sound  like programs which may be worthwhile, but, truth be told, they sound less than essential. You know how when there is a really big snowstorm and there is an announcement on the radio that only essential government workers have to report for duty. Well, none of these sound like essential government workers. 
We may love the educational aides who help with disabled children at the public elementary school, but are they essential? Just ask Rush Limbaugh. 

The state and the towns fund education and clean air and water and police and the courts. So why do we need these federal funds?

If air traffic controllers cannot go to work, if we cannot fly out of New Hampshire, that hits home.  

Really, the Democrats have to state clearly exactly what would be lost which is convincing to the average New Hampshire voter on this point: If the federal government shuts down, even partially, you will lose things you really like. What are these things?

If Medicare, Social Security or the Center for Disease Control start shutting down, that's a problem. But we are told these will not be falling off the fiscal cliff.

 If the University of New Hampshire has to cut teachers, if Route 95 and Route 93 cannot be plowed, if national parks close, if security lines at Manchester Airport and Logan slow to a crawl, then we got trouble in New Hampshire.  If Obamacare falters in New Hampshire so people here cannot get medical insurance coverage because of the fiscal cliff, that is a problem.

Of course, in the long run, if we go back into recession and all those little factories in the Granite State have no customers, that will hurt. 

But the Republican Tea Party makes one simply argument: We do not need the federal government. The Democrats have to say why we do need the government.

Mad dog awaits the answer eagerly. He knows it's out there. He just hasn't got it yet.

Fiscal Cliff Follies: What, Me Govern?

Why does no one listen to this man?

Troika: Three Stooges

"House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that's bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America's neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice."

--Paul Krugman

"I've cut spending, reduced debt and made government more accountable. More recently, I've experienced how none of us go through life without mistakes. But in their wake, we can learn a lot about grace, a God of second chances and be the better for it. In that light, I humbly step forward and ask your help in changing Washington."
--Television ad by Mark Sanford, for governor of South Carolina. (Mad Dog kids you not. You cannot make this stuff up.)

When you think about defense spending, if you are a Republican, you can think, "Let's keep America safe. Keep our military second to none."  Of course, we spend more on airplanes, soldiers, ships and weapons systems than the next ten countries in the world's combined, so one might ask, "To whom could we possibly be second?" We are so historically first that for the first time in the history of the world, all the other countries, including Germany, have decided they do not need any real military--just let the Americans do it.

The bald fact is defense spending has nothing to do with defense any more. It is a moderately large federal welfare program for the states of Congressmen who have a lot of defense programs in their state. New Hampshire has the Portsmouth naval yard, which keeps nuclear submarines working. It is difficult to imagine the seacoast without the shipyard, and every Congresswoman and Senator has fought to keep it open.  There is never any real thought about whether or not we need nuclear submarines any more. 

From Mad Dog's uninformed point of view, submarines have always seemed smarter weapons than surface ships, but what does Mad Dog know?

Newport, Rhode Island once had a huge naval base which Richard Nixon closed because Rhode Island was a deeply Democratic state and he took special pleasure in sticking his finger in its eye. Rhode Island had spent millions to build the Newport Bridge across the Narragansett Bay tall enough so aircraft carriers could pass under it, and then--poof! No more aircraft carriers. Shortly thereafter the Americans lost the America's cup race which brought millions to the Rhode Island economy. 

Rhode Island should have withered and blown away. But somehow, Newport did just fine without the Navy and the state actually rebounded smartly.

It's always amusing to see Republicans, who are all about free enterprise, the private sector and small government doing back flips to keep those federal dollars flowing to the military bases in their districts. They are all about small government until it means losing government dollars in their own pockets. 

If Mad Dog reads those pie charts correctly, the military is actually not even that big a slice of the federal spending budget--agriculture subsidies are far larger, and you know just how grateful those big agriculture states are to the tax and spend Democrats.  It's really amazing how Democrats cannot even buy the love of rural voters. 

Many Republicans, like the former governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford,are great anti government men, who have never had a real job in the private sector. They have been on the government dole, oh, excuse me, they have been "in government service" all their lives. Sanford had to resign, after he skipped town to hike the Appalachian trial with his Argentine mistress. Now, he is humbly asking the blessing of the God of second chances. Literally, that's in his new advertisements. He is favored to win in South Carolina, where he who eats the most humble pie typically does win. As Francis Underwood has told us in "House of Cards," humility is the coin of the realm in South Carolina, if you are a politician.

So, the government will shut down March 1. That's what the Republicans/Tea Party want. They want to humble the arrogant federal government. 

And the Democrats have not been able to articulate what harm that will do. 

I guess we'll find out.

Mark Sanford Humbly Asks for Your Vote

American Education, Sputnik and New Ideas

Sputnik, 10/4/1957

Soviet Sputnik Stamp

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
  It's a wonder I can think at all."
--Paul Simon, "Kodachrome"


Recently, comparative data among various nations have placed the United States somewhere in the middle of all nations with respect to the performance by students  on math exams and on other exams intended to measure the quality of education in various countries.
The usual sub rosa response to this is "Oh, well, if you exclude the scores of the inner city kids and the recent immigrants, America would be right up there on top."
In fact, analysis of the data shows that even students from the richest, best public American schools place just below the upper 1/3 of all nations, with Singapore, Korea, Finland, Norway, England and Germany all ahead of us.
Of course, we want to know more about the exams, how meaningful they are, what biases may be built into them. The last thing we want American schools doing is "teaching to the test."
In an intuitive way, Mad Dog is prepared to believe American education is simply not competitive, that it ranges from really dismal, if not worthless, in the inner city schools to just mediocre in the best public schools. It may be better in the really elite private schools--Phillips Exeter Academy, Sidwell Friends School, Georgetown Day school, but these schools cannot provide the numbers to lift and sustain our economy and innovative edge.
No better examination of the troubles besetting the lowest level of public education, the inner city schools of Washington, DC, Baltimore, New Orleans and of dozens of big cities exists than the detailed, sophisticated examination provided by the television series The Wire. Conceived and written by a Baltimore policeman who retired and then taught in the Baltimore inner city schools, this thorough going docu/drama revealed the interactions between the various dysfunctional institutions and community forces which ensure the failure of the school system in the inner city: The street culture of drugs and violence which shape the students, the absence of family, the political structure from the mayor's office to the city council to the state assembly, the competition for funds from police, public works and other governmental services which deprive schools of funding, the nature of the type of people available as teachers--all combine to make public education in these deprived, depressed places a farce.

There was a time when this was not true in the economically challenged inner cities. During the 1930's to 1940's the job of a public school teacher was a plum: It provided a reliable income at a level which placed teachers in the upper middle class when unemployment was high, and it came with pensions and benefits which were the envy of the working class. Teachers were smart, respected, on a par with engineers. And they were teaching students who had challenges, for whom English was a second language, but the culture which formed these students had strong families and parents who pressed their children to succeed in school.

As the economy changed in the 1950's, there were better jobs to be had than teaching, and the public schools slipped into complacency.

Until--October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the setting of the cold war and this was successfully sold to the American public as the first knock on the door of American  undoing. The Soviets were graduating ten times the number of engineers churned out by the United States. Something had to be done about our dumb kids! Money and thought and urgency were focused on education and that single event did more for public education than any set of test scores could ever have done.  Of course, cynics said all Sputnik meant was the Soviets had captured more German rocket scientists than we had, but that got lost in the hysteria. The Soviets had engineers and those engineers knew how to make rockets and rockets could carry bombs and the Soviets would launch nuclear attack from the moon.

It was the classic example of the event which could be spun as a new perception, probably on spurious assumption. But it worked for a good outcome: American education became a priority in the 1960's. 

After Sputnik, new thinking about science education probably improved science teaching, at least marginally, and it may have refocused career ambitions of some talented students, and more money flowed to education. 
But money proved to be the least important factor in improvement, probably because it went to the wrong places. What would really have made a difference would have been if enough money were spent on teacher salaries. That's what attracted good minds during hard economic times.
 The best and the brightest did not seek jobs as teachers--some did, but not enough--there was simply more money and more prestige to be had elsewhere. 

So the moment was lost.  The inner city schools, bled dry by white flight, sunk beneath the waves. 
And even the rich suburban schools did not rise to the level of say, English or German schools; they just got more attention. Mad Dog attended public schools in the Washington, DC suburbs, some of the most affluent suburbs in the nation, with parents who wanted their kids going to Ivy League colleges. The problem was the teachers were simply not up to the task. There were some extraordinary teachers, to be sure, but the percentages were against excellence.  And the kids were smart enough to perceive their teachers were only one chapter ahead of them in the textbook. 

The moral of this story is simply that pouring money into schools, whether they are inner city schools or rich suburban schools is not enough. Schools do not exist in a vacuum.  For all his good intentions, President Obama has bought into some pretty unhealthy misconceptions about education, like the idea of judging teachers faced with inner city students by the test scores of their students.  You can judge students who have demanding parents by test scores, but you cannot apply that test to the teachers in inner city schools.
In fact, the test scores of the highly motivated children of tiger mothers likely reflects the efforts of the mothers more than the proficiency of the teachers.

The solutions for inner city schools, or for schools in places like Gaithersburg, Maryland, or Seabrook, New Hampshire will be different. In places like these, the problems are those of the immigrant, or of  parents working two jobs, who have no academic background themselves. The solutions for these schools will have to be very different from the solutions for the rich suburban schools or the solutions for the bombed out inner city schools.

In schools where money is not a problem, the public schools of Beverly Hills, California,  Chevy Chase, Maryland, Winiketa, Illinois, Shaker Heights, Ohio, Westchester County, New York, the problem will be finding academically gifted teachers and keeping the top heavy bureaucracy from getting in their way.

Too much money can actually be a problem in rich counties. In Montgomery County, Maryland dumbed down curricula from a central county education department bureaucracy are forced on teachers who could teach more sophisticated, better and smarter material, if they were allowed to do so. The huge education budget of this rich county supports a gargantuan, bloated administration of non classroom teachers, churning out lowest common denominator lessons sent out from the county seat.

Mr. Obama is right about one thing: It's easier to see the value of a new bridge or a new building than a new and better education.  One is concrete, the other is in the minds of children. But the GI Bill which sent returning veterans to college after WWII, and the support for public education after Sputnik, were investments which paid off, which created not just a middle class but upper classes of doctors, engineers, lawyers and businessmen.  You could not drive a car over it; you could not take an elevator ride to the top of it; you could not move your furniture into it, but the fact you could not see it did not mean it did not matter.

There will never be a perfect school, and certainly not a perfect high school, not in America, where hormones thwart some of the best efforts of teachers. 
But there could be improvements, if the right people were involved.

One last thought: Some years ago Mad Dog gave a presentation at a very spiffy, elite private school for an introductory biology course. The teachers were very attentive and they were very smart and picked up on all the things Mad Dog thought they would miss for sure. But they informed Mad Dog his course could be an "enrichment" course for seniors, not an introductory course for freshman. Mad Dog slunk out of the school, embarrassed he did not know more about teaching. But on reflection, he thought, maybe he was not as wrong and they were not as right as it seemed. Maybe even the best teachers could benefit from hearing thoughts  from outside the education world. If medicine is too important to be left in the hands of doctors, is education not too important to be left solely in the hands of teachers?