Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Have you seen the PETA billboard?

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While I disagree with the dope-legalization folks, I can at least see why they use the Michael Phelps case to promote their cause. A little more unexpected is the very local, specific way that PETA has used it to promote its agenda.

I think I mentioned before that PETA was putting up a billboard locally. Well, they say it's up now, over on the outskirts of Shandon, or Old Shandon, or whatever. I haven't seen it. Have you? That's it above, and below is the release about it:

IN WAKE OF MICHAEL PHELPS BONG INCIDENT, PETA'S NEW ANTI-POT (ROAST) BILLBOARD RISES NEAR USC

Meat Is a Bigger Health Hazard Than Marijuana, Says Group
 

Columbia, S.C. — The infamous photo of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps as he tokes a bong has now given rise to more than just a few million eyebrows—namely, a brand-new PETA billboard. The billboard—which shows a cow's face next to the tagline "Say 'No!' to Pot … Roast. Don't Be a Meathead. Kick the Habit!"—aims to warn students about a substance that can be even more hazardous to their health than marijuana: meat. Click here to view the billboard, which is located at the intersection of Millwood Avenue and King Street in Columbia.

Bongs and needles aren't the only place drugs are found; meat often is loaded with drugs — including hormones and antibiotics. Consumption of artery-clogging meat and other animal products has been linked to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and several types of cancer — not to mention other hazards, such as E. coli, salmonella, and listeria. So while smoking marijuana is illegal, eating meat can be deadly.

Not only is eating animal flesh responsible for the horrendous suffering of billions of chickens, fish, cows, and pigs, it also wreaks havoc on the planet. A recent U.N. study found that raising animals for food creates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, trains, and planes in the world combined and contributes to water pollution and land degradation.

"While Michael was busy apologizing for smoking pot, millions of Americans should have been apologizing for eating pot roast—to animals, to the planet, and to their own bodies, " says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "We want to remind USC students that while smoking pot might land them in front of the dean, eating meat burgers and chicken nuggets could land them an early date with their maker."

To view the ad, go to PETA's blog. For more information about the benefits of going vegetarian, please visit PETA.org.

            #

You know, for my part I've been eating less beef lately. I've eaten a lot of turkey burger instead, so I don't think PETA's going to be proud of me on that score.

So you can assume I am NOT sharing this with you in order to endorse the PETA agenda. But I do hope that if you pay enough attention to PETA, with its campaigns for the rights of George the Lobster and so forth, you'll turn back to me and see me as reassuringly moderate and sensible…

You know, if these folks stuck to vegetarianism as a health and environmental issue they'd gain more traction — and they're wise to emphasize those points. It's when it's all driven by a view of animals as having RIGHTS akin to those of people that they lose me.

Not only is dope illegal, it should be

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Note Cindi's column today about Sheriff Lott and Michael Phelps.

Originally (in a somewhat condensed form), it was going to be an editorial — that is, an expression of the consensus of the editorial board as a whole. Trouble is, we didn't reach consensus.

We were all in agreement that the sheriff was right to drop the case, and inadvisable to have taken it as far as he did. We agreed that the law should be applied equally, but that there was no case here, and discretion would dictate that the sheriff's department's resources would have been better spend elsewhere.

We also agreed that had Phelps been caught in the act, and in possession — say, if the cops had raided the party — he should have been prosecuted. The law is the law.

But then, we had a disagreement. Warren and I wanted to say that not only is the law the law, but it should be the law. We agree with Cindi that we don't need to have nonviolent offenders in our prisons — they need treatment and probation, not jail time. But Warren and I believe marijuana possession should still be a crime; Cindi isn't convinced of that. She's not sure what she thinks, but she is inclined to believe it should be regulated more the way alcohol is.

We didn't get deeply into WHY we thought what we did. We were too busy scrambling to rethink tomorrow's page, turning the piece into a column (as you should know, signed columns reflect the opinion of the writer; unsigned editorials the board view) and making other changes on deadline.

But I'll tell you one reason I think the way I do. And it's the classic case of personal experience shaping one's views, so be aware. You've probably read about how heavy use of marijuana can mess with the development of an adolescent brain. Well, I've seen that up close. Someone very close to me started smoking dope heavily when he was about 12. Over the next decade you could tell that something had gone wrong with a bright and engaging kid. For one thing, he didn't grow up. Up until the time he died at age 30, he still talked like a kid. He was very credulous, having trouble telling between what was likely to be true and what was not. He lost connection with the truth. He turned to petty dishonesty in pursuit of drugs (eventually going well past marijuana, of course). He never kept any job for long. He did several stretches in jail (for trying to pass forged prescriptions, not for anything violent). Eventually, his habits led to his early death.

Note that I'm not saying m.j. was a "gateway drug" for him. I'm saying that cannabis itself did something to him at a critical point in the development of his brain and personality that caused him to fail to be the adult he would otherwise have been.

So do I think that cannabis is worse than alcohol? No, I don't think so. Each is worse in different ways. But society made the decision a while back that it was NOT going to ban alcohol; it's too ingrained in our culture. So we do what we can with regulating it, taxing it (and by the way, in SC we tax it MUCH more heavily than we do tobacco, in case you were wondering) and keeping it out of the hands of kids. We do NOT have to make the same concessions for loco weed; the case just isn't nearly as strong. Maybe if Jesus had turned the water into Panama Red, dope would have the same central role in our culture that wine does. But he didn't. His very first miracle was to affirm the central role of alcohol in a sacramental celebration. And I cite that not to make a religious or theological point, but a cultural one. Humans stopped being hunter-gatherers so they could grown barley to make beer, or so I'm convinced. We just can't root it out.

Anyway, I'm meandering now. What do y'all think? Not all at once, now…

Links about S.C. and the stimulus

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Something I forgot to do with my column Sunday about Midlands efforts to steer stimulus funds this way was to link to these two items that also ran on our pages Sunday:

  1. Our editorial on what we think about Sanford's efforts against the stimulus (which you might I wrote, but I didn't). As we said in part, "Mr. Sanford has made his point about his disdain for federal borrowing
    and federal intervention. It’s time for him to return to reality and
    start acting like a governor."
  2. The governor's own arguments about the stimulus, which he wrote for the op-ed page in response to a piece we'd run earlier in the week from two Democrats, Boyd Brown and Ted Vick, headlined, "Our occasional governor."

Anyway, I think it helps to have those additional reference points.

The slowdown: What are YOU seeing?

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Peggy Noonan had an intriguing column Saturday, about what she was seeing in Manhattan in terms of real, street-level effects of the recession. Here's an excerpt:

    This is New York five months into hard times.
    One senses it, for the first time: a shift in energy. Something new has taken hold, a new air of peace, perhaps, or tentativeness. The old hustle and bustle, the wild and daily assertion of dynamism, is calmed.
    And now Washington becomes the financial capital of the country, of the world. Oh, what a status shift. Oh, what a fact.

Here's what struck me about that: She implies that — because of the stimulus, the TARP, etc. (I guess) –  the hustle-and-bustle that's missing from the not-so-mean streets near Central Park has somehow been transferred to Washington.

And yet, weirdly enough, I had been talking to someone else last week who had made a similar observation about a loss of activity in Washington. It was USC President Harris Pastides. When he came to see us with Mayor Bob and the gang last Monday, he had just stepped off the plane coming back from D.C., and his impression was that it felt dead, deserted. Of course, he acknowledged that the contrast was particularly sharp because he had last been there for the Obama inauguration just weeks earlier, but he seemed to be suggesting that he was seeing was a loss of activity from the norm, not just from the inaugural excitement.

(I heard that with particular interest because one thing that had always struck me when I visited D.C. — and mind you, I haven't been there in years and years — was something that my libertarian friends can identify with. I thought, crowded onto a metro platform with well-dressed commuters, or walking past swanky shops, "There's too much money in this town." Of course, part of that is the sheer size of the gummint, a good bit of which should be devolved. But part of it is the amount that the private sector freely spends on lobbying. I have no idea how to separate it out. But I know that in my limited experience, the lobbyists are snappier dressers.)

I haven't been to New York in almost a year, and I last went to D.C. in 1998 (yes, more than a decade). I don't know what impression I'd have if I visited either today (although I'm pretty sure NYC won't be as busy as when I made this video). Come to think of it, I don't know what impression I have of right here in the Midlands. For instance:

About three weeks ago, I went to the Lowe's out on Garners Ferry for the first time since before Christmas. It was late on a Sunday afternoon. And I was shocked, because when I walked in, there were about a dozen or more of those carts you use to stack your lumber on — the kind that when it's busy, you've got to hunt around for — lined up in a neat row in the lumber aisle before me. So there were at least that many carts free, and an employee had had time to gather them and make that neat row. Then after I left and got to thinking about it, I thought I had seen about as many employees as customers.

I've mentioned that several times since then, and sometimes people nod their heads and sometimes they dispute it. For instance, Cindi said she's been to Lowe's (including that particular store) maybe six times in the last few weeks, and it's always been busy.

Then when she said that, I suddenly remembered that I went out to Harbison Saturday, and the traffic was the worst I'd seen in several years. I thought I'd never get there, or get home. And the stores I went into were at LEAST as busy as the norm, if not more so, so I don't think it was just a matter of my having hit the traffic at a bad time.

From where I sit, there's plenty of evidence of our economy tanking in the aggregate, from the state unemployment figures to the horrific effect that reduction in advertising has on newspapers and TV. We can quantify the cuts that have occurred already and are coming in state government, or local school districts. And I know of quite a few specific cases of people close to me — personally and professionally — who have lost their jobs or are facing the high probability of such losses.

But then we still see the anomalous things, such as all that activity out at Harbison. And not just there. Over the weekend I thought, not for the first time, that the Vista is just TOO successful. Yes, I'm being ironic, but it's frustrating when that district has become so popular that you can't park within a block of Starbuck's.

So I'm wondering — what are YOU seeing out there, as a worker, as a businessperson, as a consumer? What's the true picture of what's happening thus far in the Midlands? Maybe we can get a snapshot — or better yet, a panorama — of that right here on the blog. So how about it? What are you seeing?

Mr. President! Please pick better questions

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Someone brings to my attention, via-email, this WSJ item about Obama's news conference the other night:

About half-way through President Obama's press conference Monday
night, he had an unscripted question of his own. "All, Chuck Todd," the
President said, referring to NBC's White House correspondent. "Where's
Chuck?" He had the same strange question about Fox News's Major
Garrett: "Where's Major?"

The problem wasn't the lighting in the East Room. The President was
running down a list of reporters preselected to ask questions. The
White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the
President and who was left out.

Well, yeah, I noticed that the people who were called on had been pre-selected. That seemed obvious. What I didn't know was whether the actual questions were picked in advance, or just the questioners.

But now that I think about it, if the president's going to pick 'em ahead of time, I hope next time he picks people who ask some better questions. As I said before, many of those were embarrassing.

Obviously, he hasn’t met OUR governor

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Seeking a column for tomorrow's page, I took a look at a writer I haven't run before (near as I can recall), Dick Polman of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who had written a column headlined, "Governing in the Real World."

It was pretty standard stuff, noting a tendency that usually holds true: The more local the level of government, the more pragmatic the people who serve in it. Governors are almost always more practical and less ideological than members of Congress, and mayors even more so. To cite the cliche, there's nothing Republican or Democratic about filling potholes or picking up the garbage.

But reading this column at this moment, with our own governor on my mind, I was struck by the fact that if Mr. Polman only knew Mark Sanford, he'd rethink his premise. An excerpt from the piece:

One big difference between governors and congressmen is that governors are out there on the front lines, dealing with the real everyday needs of their citizens. Whereas members of Congress can afford to retreat into ideology, governors have no such luxury.

Which brings us to Charlie Crist, the popular Republican governor of Florida, who today may well be known nationwide for two things: (a) the deepest tan since George Hamilton, and (b) the man-hug that he shared on Tuesday with President Obama.

Crist epitomizes the gap that separates Republican governors (who are trying desperately to safeguard the welfare of their citizens), and Republican members of Congress (who are opposing the Obama stimulus package that would help the governors safeguard the welfare of their citizens). Many of the Republican governors face huge budget deficits, thanks to the recession; they would welcome the infusion of federal money, which would allow them to keep paying (among others) the teachers and the firefighters and the unemployment checks of the jobless.

In other words, governors have to be practical. They can't take refuge in right-wing talking points that play well on the cable network talkfests, where ideological conflict makes for good TV.

That last sentence sounds as though Mr. Polman were describing Mark Sanford, which reminds us that 
at heart, our governor is still that congressional hermit who slept on his futon in Washington and advanced no significant legislation. Most people who leave that environment to become governor realize, even if they didn't before, that NOW they have responsibility to run things, to lead, to make sure government does what voters expect it to do. Not this guy. I've never seen anyone so unaffected in that way. You'd think he never left the futon.

Every move he makes — from lashing out at an Employment Security Commission that is embarrassing him by serving way to many unemployed people to jumping up and down and demanding look at me; I'm a governor who doesn't want stimulus money — is about a national audience of like-minded people, not about South Carolina and the challenges that face it. It's about the Club for Growth and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The only logical explanation for his behavior would be national ambitions that make me shudder even to contemplate, so I'm not even going to mention them.

Even when he steps out on an issue that would seem to be about something else, we return to that same concern with ideology and a national audience. Environmentalists applauded his coming out yesterday against the coal-fired plant to the Pee Dee. But he didn't do it for their reasons (even though the environment is one of the few areas where he sometimes makes common cause with folks who might call themselves progressives). He was careful to make the point that no, this was more about the cost. He didn't want this state entity, Santee Cooper, spending the money. Which sort of makes you say, huh? Until you realize, oh yeah, he's not talking to US. He's talking to like-minded Republicans outside of South Carolina who will be thinking about whom to contribute money to in a year or two…

I just shuddered again.

Happy birthday, Abe and Chuck

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So, if you were invited to simultaneous birthday parties today, for Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, and the actual honorees would be there alive and participating in the celebration, which one would you go to?

Me, I'd pick Lincoln. They say he was a lot of fun at parties. Also, I look up to him and what he did more.
Nothing against Darwin, but I suspect that if he hadn't worked out natural selection, someone else would have. But if Lincoln hadn't been president, the union would have fallen apart — nobody else would have been as single-mindedly stubborn about holding it together. I mean, why do you think so many of my fellow South Carolinians are still ticked at him? And even though all of my ancestors that I know about fought for the opposite outcome (five great-great grandaddies that I know about), this Southern boy is glad that the U.S. of A. is still around. So it all worked out well in the end.

All of which reminds me that I need to get back to reading Obama's favorite, desert-island-must-have book, Team of Rivals. I've let myself get sidetracked with re-reading O'Brian, and reading Moby Dick for the first time, so I need to buckle down and get back to Goodwin.

As for Darwin, I thought I'd share this interesting piece that I saw in The New Republic, headlined "Charles Darwin, Conservative?"

Basically, it examines the great irony of modern politics, which is that conservatives tend to snub Darwin, even though his idea of order arising from nature without a guiding plan fits THEIR ideas about how society can produce civilization without guiding government.

Meanwhile, liberals who honor Darwin act as though they don't believe in that principle one bit, since they think you need a strong guiding hand of government to have order.

George Will made much the same point in his column that we ran Sunday, but I think the point is made more clearly in the TNR piece.

By the way, I side with the modern-day liberals on this point: I don't think you can have order without
government. Take away the guiding hand, and you get Somalia — warring militias running around firing AK-47s at everybody. But you know already that I thought that. I'm a rule-of-law guy.

As for the thing that everybody fights about over Darwin… Well, I'm a Catholic, and I hear the pope made peace with Darwin awhile back.

You know what I think about evolution, and natural selection? I think that is just exactly the way God would create the world. I don't see Him doing it like Cecil B. DeMille, six days and abracadabra, here's the world. I think He'd do it the slow, majestic, complicated way. Evolution seems just His style, to me. But what do I know?

(Now watch this: The controversial part of this post won't be the Darwin stuff; it'll be that I said nice things about Lincoln.)

Not that ‘Morning in America’ hubris again…

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Just got this e-mail a little while ago from a reader (I guess it was a reader, anyway):

The headlines today said that McCain claims Obama "must" consult with the GOP on stimulus talks. That's not true, any more than saying that Ronald Reagan was required to allow Dems much input in his 1981 plans. On election eve 1980, even old democrats like me realized that the public had said no to government spending, said no to government meddling and no to more regulations. I believed the public was wrong, but also understood that Reagan's mandate was to proceed as he'd promised.
 
Thirty years later, Americans' have decided that we need government, government to stop us from dying from eating peanut butter, government to stop bankers from stealing from us, and government to provide jobs until the economy picks up. That's Obama's mandate, and to do anything else would be to back off from his promises. McCain is wrong. He and his party lost. Obama wants to be nice and extend an olive branch to the losers, but it is not necessary that he does so. What's necessary is he goes forward with his plans.

To which I felt compelled to answer as follows (slightly edited, as I read back over it):

Interesting you should mention 1981. I'm still ticked off that Democrats back then took just the attitude that you're calling for. Tip O'Neill and the rest said, well, Reagan won the election, so let's give him anything that he wants. This, after four years of that same Democratic Congress not giving Jimmy Carter ANYthing he wanted.

I'm still mad about it. I'm still mad about how the whole world just rolled over for Reagan. Much of the media was full of that "Morning in America" hoopla, and I felt like …. well, have you ever been the only person in the room who was not drunk or stoned, and everybody around you thought everything was just SO funny, and you just thought they were all very irritating? Not much fun, huh? Well, that was me in the Reagan era.

I don't feel that way this time. I sort of thought Reagan's win in 1980 was the end of the world — not because I was anti-Republican, but because I had liked Jimmy Carter so much (I don't like him as much as I did then, but I really liked him then). I don't feel that way at all about Obama. Out of all the people running for president last year, McCain and Obama were my first and second choices. So while I'm sorry McCain didn't win, I'm glad Obama didn't lose. I'm highly ambivalent on that score.

But one reason I DO like Obama so much — and liked him so much more than Hillary — is that he IS about post-partisanship. (That's one of the main things I liked about McCain, too.) He's nothing like Reagan; he's far less the ideological warrior. And if he doesn't work with McCain (something which, to his credit, he's already demonstrated a willingness to do), then he's not the guy that a LOT of people voted for. I would expect exactly the same from McCain — a willingness to work across the aisle — had he been elected.

And I have little patience for Democrats who act the way the Reaganites did in the early 80s — We won, so we'll do what we damn' well please. Unfortunately, I do hear that from some. Like "Morning in America" revisited. And I didn't like that triumphalist bull the first time, not one bit.

And if you don't care about bipartisanship, think about this: There's a good chance this stimulus will fail. There's a good chance ANY stimulus would fail. So how would you feel about it if, once the stimulus fails, the GOP recaptures Congress, and then goes around telling Obama and the world that "We won, so we don't have to listen to you?"

Far better that we have a stimulus plan that both parties buy into. It's a little late for that, but it WOULD have been far better. It's never good to have one of the two major parties politically invested in the nation failing…

(I'll add one more thought: I would not say that Obama "must" work with McCain et al. I'm just saying that to the extent that he can, he should. This is not to say that if you've tried to bring the GOP along and they've just refused and you truly believe your plan is the right one, you don't go ahead — just as I thought it was right for us to go ahead into Iraq without France, Germany and Russia on board. But I am saying that if you can possibly swing it, bipartisan is WAY better for the country.)

When centrists are wrong

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The Paul Krugman column I picked for tomorrow's op-ed page has some things seriously wrong with it, as do most Krugman columns: He trashes Obama for seeking bipartisan support of the stimulus (Krugman HATES bipartisanship), and he demagogues like crazy:

    What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of
American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition,
undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who
flip their houses?

In its anti-UnParty sentiment, the column could be said to have precisely the opposite message of my Sunday column. But I chose it anyway, partly because one of the main missions of the op-ed page is to give you opinions other than mine, but also because he raises, in a backhanded way, a good point: Just because someone is a "centrist" doesn't mean he's right (or she's right, in the cases of Susan Collins and Olympia Snow).

In fact, one thing I ran out of room to say in my Sunday column, but had wanted to say, was that in the case of this bill, there are centrists and there are centrists. You'll recall that I ended the column thusly:

    But
if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben
Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation
would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the
only way we can recover.

When she was proofing it Friday, Cindi came into my office to object that John McCain was not a member of the gang of "centrists" negotiating over this legislation. I said yeah, that's right. Neither is Graham. I didn't intend to say they were involed in the Nelson-Collins group. I meant to say that it would have to have even broader support than what it would take to get the Nelsons and Collinses on board.

In fact, as I would have explained if I'd had a couple more inches to work with, that particular group was guided by a principle that I thought was wrong-headed: They simply wanted to cut $100 billion out of the bill, period (or that's the message I got, anyway). Since I was worried that Krugman was right when he said in a previous column that Obama's stimulus proposal wouldn't be enough, I doubted that making it LESS, on principle, was the right thing to do.

I mean, take your pick: Spend $800 billion that you don't have or $900 billion that you don't have. How is the former necessarily better than the latter? Once you've decided that massive deficit spending is what you've gotta do, in for a dime, in for a trillion…

And yet, this press release from Susan Collins seems to indicate that for her at least, reducing the amount was the point:

After days of leading bipartisan negotiations, U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Ben Nelson (D-NE) tonight announced an agreement on an amendment to the Economic Recovery Act currently before the Senate. The Nelson-Collins amendment would reduce the total cost of the package to $780 billion-$110 billion less than the bill that the Senate is currently considering.

"This deal represents a victory for the American people," said Senator Collins… "We've trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows…"

The idea that when it comes to stimulating the economy, less is more, seems unpersuasive to me. So does the DeMint position that all you need is tax cuts. So does the position that all massive spending is good.

So is the idea that just because someone is labeled a "centrist" doesn't mean they're right. (But it sure doesn't mean they're automatically wrong just because they're centrists, as Krugman believes.)

Nobody's got the monopoly on wisdom in this discussion, from what I've seen. There are certain things I think the stimulus ought to do: It should spend money as quickly as possible and spend it on things we'll have something to show for down the line — such as physical infrastructure that we needed to spend on anyway. I think the tax cuts are going to be pretty useless because they're spread too thin for anyone to feel them. But rather than cut them out, I'd direct that money to shovel-ready, needed infrastructure. I think any cost ceiling anybody tries to place on the plan is fairly arbitrary (such as Obama's own reluctance to go over the magic trillion mark).

But there's only one thing that I think is fairly non-negotiable: This thing needs to transcend the partisan spin cyle. To turn around our economy, we've got to be pulling together. This needs to be something that the overwhelming majority of Congress can go back home and sell, something that leaves the talking heads on 24/7 TV "news" little to natter about. And I believe that goal is worth spending a little more time to achieve.

The editorial I didn’t write for tomorrow

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My plans for the day had included writing an editorial on the stimulus bill currently stumbling its way through the U.S. Senate, but then I spoke to someone in Washington who said it COULD pass tonight. If I knew it were going to pass tonight, and had some idea how it would end up, I could write about how it and the House version should be reconciled. If I knew it WEREN'T going to pass tonight, I could write about what should happen to it in the Senate before it passes. Not knowing, and not having started writing (and having a bunch of other stuff I need to be doing today), we'll be going with a local piece that one of my colleagues has almost finished instead.

But here are some of the points that I would have wanted to make:

  • The House bill is a nonstarter. I thought David Broder did a good job of explaining how it got that way in his Sunday column. Nancy Pelosi has done another partisan number on the country similar to what she did on the TARP bill a couple of months back. And the Republicans were only too happy to oblige her by voting against it unanimously. That means the $300 billion or so in tax cuts that were there to garner GOP support is wasted money (they are far too small and unfocused to do the taxpapers any appreciable good, so their ONLY theoretical value was political), without even getting into the waste the Democrats added for pet projects. A mess that would prove to be an overall waste in the end. A lot spent without giving the needed boost to the economy.
  • Kudos to the moderates in both parties — Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine in particular — for working together to strip out some of the worst spending provisions. (As for our own Senate moderate — I'm thinking Lindsey Graham is supporting those efforts, based on statements I've seen, and if I were writing an editorial I would check to nail that down. But I'm not. I do know I haven't seen him mentioned in the national stories I've read.)
  • But as great as it is that we're getting rid of some of the worst spending ideas, is a SMALLER stimulus bill what we're aiming for? I don't often agree with Paul Krugman, but he IS a Nobel winner in economics, and I have found persuasive his arguments that Obama's proposed stimulus, even if all of it is properly focused, isn't big enough to give the jolt the economy needs. So rather than CUTTING stuff from it, should we not be trying to FOCUS the spending that's there into more productive channels? Such as, more shovel-ready infrastructure… In other words, it's good that the moderates want to prevent wasteful spending, but isn't the problem less the size of the stimulus (which as Krugman says, may not be large enough), but what it's being spent on?
  • The Buy American stuff — the latter-day Smoot-Hawley — should go. After a piece I read in the WSJ this morning, which sort of crystalized my half-formed thoughts on the matter, I'm more concerned about this than I was yesterday. If I had written the editorial, though, I'd have had to reach an agreement with one of my colleagues who is not as much of a free-trader as I am. Since I'm not writing the piece, we're not pausing in our work today to have that argument.

As you see, it would have been a fairly complicated editorial, pulling in many different directions, reflecting the complexity of the legislation and the lack of clear sense — on my part, on the Senators' part, on the House's part, on everybody's part (except for the ideologues who SAY they know what to do, but don't) — of exactly what will cure what ails the nation's economy.

Increasingly, I am pessimistic that what finally emerges and gets signed by the president will lead in any obvious way to the kind of dramatic improvement in economic activity that we need. That can further a crisis of confidence in everything from the new president to our ability to effect our own recovery in any way. And that can lead to depression, in more than one sense of the word.

(Oh, and before you comment that my thoughts on this are half-baked and incomplete — well, duh. I told you, this is the editorial I didn't write, so I haven't gone the extra mile of refining and reconciling these various points, as I made very clear above. Having done a bunch of reading and thinking about it, though, I thought I'd toss these points out for y'all to discuss. In case that's not obvious.)

The private sector (a tiny part of it, that is) meets accountability (sorta kinda)

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Let me call your attention to the David Brooks column (what, him again?) that I chose for tomorrow's op-ed page, in which he chronicles the relatively new phenomenon in which honchos in the private sector are held publicly accountable for the kind of wasteful foolishness that they normally get away with completely and utterly:

    Then there are the Wall Street executives who were suddenly attacked from the White House for giving out the same sort of bonuses they’ve been giving out for years. Now there is Tom Daschle, who is being criticized for making $5 million off his Senate prestige.
    I’m afraid there are rich people all around the country who are about to suffer similar social self-immolation because they don’t understand that the rules of privileged society have undergone a radical transformation.
    The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.
    But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

Mr. Brooks goes on to poke fun at the bureaucrats and others (who live in Ward Three in D.C.) who suddenly are in a position to pass judgment on the Fat Cats…

… thereby missing the larger point that what is happening here is that for once, the denizens of the private boardroom are being held accountable — in the manner to which gummint is accustomed to being held accountable — to people with a differing world view.

One of the great ironies is that the anti-gummint types I argue with here on the blog all the time largely hold the views that they do because we in the sin-stained MSM spend so much of our time telling them about the outrageous waste and foolishness in the public sector, whereas almost no one ever tells them about the equal foolishness and waste that is normally shrouded in the private sector. And why is that? Because we see it as our mission to hold the public sector accountable. But when the private sector wants a bailout, it needs to understand it will have to play by the same rules for once.

Once you go public, you don't get to make up the rules any more.

Thank you, Simone… (No problem whatsoever!)

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Apparently, someone at Vermont University didn't want Ben Stein there talking about "the great What?…. Depression," or anything else:

    In other venues, Stein has expressed opinions critical of evolutionary theory and in favor of intelligent design, for which he has been sharply criticized in academic circles. He has also offered views on the role of science in the Holocaust that some have found offensive. Fogel said he had been only "vaguely aware" of these controversial views.
    After UVM announced Stein's selection Thursday, Fogel said in a written statement, "profound concerns have been expressed to me by persons both internal and external to the university about his selection." Fogel said he received hundreds of e-mails beginning Saturday — including only about a half-dozen from people at UVM — contending, generally, that Stein's views of science were "affronts to the basic tenets of the academy."
    "Once I apprised Mr. Stein of these communications, he immediately and most graciously declined his commencement invitation," Fogel's statement said.

And the culture wars go on and on and on… Bueller? Bueller?

Letter II: Writer gets it about DHEC

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While I'm at it, allow me to call your attention to another letter on today's page, which makes a good point worth considering about the crying need to restructure government on the state level:

Aughtry big fan of current DHEC setup

I applaud Bo Aughtry’s call for a discussion on the structure of the Department of Health and Environmental Control (“DHEC professionals, board don’t bend to politics,” Sunday).

But it looks as if he doesn’t want to lead it, since all involved in it are very good and adept at what they do. Everyone is doing their best — considering they don’t get paid (as we’re reminded).

But I was wondering: How would the votes fall when developers are wanting to build, build, build, and taxpayers want to attach conditions to building permits to protect their community? The “home builder/developer,” “the attorney in the land business,” the one in “the land business” and the “real estate developer” might be conflicted — it’s only human. (Remember we are not paying them, so why would they hamper the very industry that is providing them a paycheck?)

I could be accused of being cynical, but it seems that lately those in positions of power and responsibility are simply saying, “Mistakes were made, but don’t quote me.” Who can say, “The buck stops here”?

NELIDA CABALLERO
Columbia

Excellent point about the makeup of that board. Allow me to elaborate: The DHEC board could well be as wonderful and public-spirited and as interested in protecting our health and environment as Mr. Aughtry maintains, in spite of the appearances raised by their lines of work.

But we don't know that. Why? Because we don't know them, and had no role in choosing them, much less any chance to vet them. Quick, name the members of the DHEC board. Yeah, some smart-aleck will do so, either by virtue of being an insider or having cheated by going to the Web site. But most of you don't know, and couldn't begin to tell me or anyone else how they have voted on issues or what overall influence each of them has had on policy, for good or ill.

The fix is to put someone we know and have elected in charge. No, that doesn't guarantee that things will be hunky-dory. But it at least gives the electorate a chance to demand results, and have some hope of being heeded.

Letter I: Riley a stumbling block to reform opponents

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One point I'd like to make with regard to this letter on today's page, which takes exception with our advocacy of a strong-mayor system for Columbia, most recently articulated in our Sunday editorial:

City’s government should remain as is

I read
The State’s Sunday editorial, “City should change system, not hire
another manager,” with dismay concerning your recommendation that
Columbia change its form of government.

Choosing a strong-mayor
form over the council-manager system could have dangerous consequences
for the city. These involve the likely emergence of a cult of
personality and abuse of power by individual council members.

Early
in the 20th century, the council-manager system was formulated (some
say for the first time in Sumter) to bring professionalism to city
administration and to distance politics from the daily operation of
municipal functions.

Overall, the hiring of professional managers
to carry out council policy has been successful. Even cities as large
as Dallas have city managers. Philadelphia has a strong-mayor form of
government.

Selecting the strong-mayor form would be ill-advised
because a less-than-stellar mayor (after all, how many Joe Rileys are
there in South Carolina?) could make matters much worse.

Columbia
is now seeking a professional manager and then should work to ensure
that he implements goals of efficient and effective government while
letting council set policy.

JOHN A. HUFFMAN
West Columbia

There is one thing that opponents of strong-mayor always have to confront when they try to dismiss the idea: Joe Riley. They always have to say, "There's only one Joe Riley," or "Joe Rileys don't grow on trees," or "Joe Riley isn't going to move to Columbia."

Why do they have to say that? Because, when they look around for examples to support their point, if they were to say, "Why, look at the only other major city in South Carolina that has a strong mayor," they would immediately have to say, "No, DON'T look at the only other major city in S.C. with a strong mayor," because in that city, the system is a generally acknowledge success. And by generally acknowledged, I mean that Charleston gets all sort of national recognition for being a well-run, well-led city. And while Mr. Riley always has opposition (which you would expect a Democrat to have in a city with so very many Republicans in it), he wins re-election time and again with about three-fourths of the vote.

No, Joe Riley is NOT going to move to Columbia (he decided that for good when he decided not to run for governor in 1998, which was a terrible shame for our state). But let me tell you something just about as certain — if there is another Joe Riley out there, he isn't going to run for mayor of Columbia unless we make the job worth running for. And right now, it isn't.

Yes, folks, I know that council-manager was considered a "reform" when it came along, an alternative to bossism and the like. So was, in its day, the city commission form, which I had the opportunity of studying up close and personal in Jackson, TN, long ago.

But look around you: This system is NOT WORKING, and it has not worked under the last several city managers. The city is a mess, and no one can be held accountable for fixing it. Each member of the council (including the mayor, who has no more say than any other member) can point to the other six and claim, quite truthfully, that he or she lacks the power to do anything without a majority.

So everybody skates when we have the kind of mess we have now, except for the city managers that come and go.

This needs to change. And the first step is putting someone accountable to the voters in charge.

Oops, it’s Brooks again — this time with a squitchy-good communitarian column

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OK, I promise to try not to overuse "squitchy." Or at least, not to misuse it. I've coined a new use with my "squitchy good" thing, whereas Melville meant something else by it. (I actually use it correctly, as Melville intended, in a comment on this post).

Where was I? Oh, yes… A few days ago, Cindi shared with me a laugh at herself. Somehow, she had gotten the impression that I had chosen a George Will column for the next day's op-ed page, and when she read her proof, started into it without noticing whose picture was on it. And she thought, "Wow, I can't believe Will wrote this! This is really a departure for him!" That was because it was written by David Brooks. (OK, so maybe that's not much of a laugh to you — too esoteric. Think of how, in "Amadeus," all those people at the party laughed at Mozart playing "in the style of" various other composers. Not very funny unless you lived and breathed that music, his comical mugging aside. So to us, seeing a "Will" column "in the style of Brooks" is a real knee-slapper. It takes all kinds.)

Anyway, I had just grabbed a bunch of columns off the wire — a George Will, a Trudy Rubin, a Bob Herbert, a Cal Thomas and a David Brooks — and then called them up again in quick succession to read further and try to pick one.

Well, I was doing this in a hurry the way I have to do everything these days, and I THOUGHT I had clicked on the Herbert column, and as I read it I was amazed. It wasn't his usual partisan rant that turns me off in the first paragraph. It was really different. It was really thoughtful. And best of all for me, it was really communitarian — overtly and obviously so. Hey, I was going to enjoy running the first Herbert column I had run in a while.

I got all the way to the bottom before realizing I had NOT clicked on the Herbert column, but on … yes, another David Brooks, which happened to be right next to it the Herbert. A slip of the mouse. Oh, well — hey, maybe the Herbert column would be good, too. But here's how it started:

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies
have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so
divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly
believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other
forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to
this deplorable state?

Yes, another flat, two-dimensional partisan rant, nothing original, nothing to appeal to an UnPartisan. Hey, if I wanted that kind of nonsense, I could run the Cal Thomas piece, which said in part:

   The president has commendably met with Republican congressional leaders during the early stages of his push for an economic “stimulus'' plan, but now comes the hard part. There remain two distinct and possibly irreconcilable differences between traditional Republicans and traditional Democrats. Republicans once believed and encouraged doing for one's self and approaching government — if at all — as a last resort. Democrats see government as a first resource and people as an expanding pool of victims who are incapable of independently bettering their lives (and if they do, they are to be taxed to subsidize those who don't).

Unfortunately, you can too often summarize Thomas by saying "Republicans good, Democrats bad." And you can definitely summarize Herbert by the opposite.

So guess what I'm picking for tomorrow?

Now, before you accuse me of picking it because I agree with it, think: Seriously, I pick columns every day, and when was the last time I even had the opportunity to choose one that was so overtly communitarian? Like, practically never. No, the reason to pick this one is going by the same standard that I try to apply every single day: It says something that might help people think thoughts they haven't thought before. The communitarian thing on this one is just a bonus for me, this one day.

And yeah, I always lean toward the columns that are NOT all about "Republicans good, Democrats bad," or the opposite. You can read that junk anywhere; I'm looking for something that goes beyond that.

Why is it so hard to say ‘abortion?’

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There's nothing unusual about this, but about the thousandth time this morning, in reading an editorial from the weekend in The New York Times, I marveled at how long it took to get past all the pro-choice euphemisms ("women's health," "reproductive health and freedom," "safeguard women's lives," "free speech") and get to the one operative word upon which the issue turns:

Women’s Health, Ungagged
    President Obama on Friday began dismantling his predecessor’s broad and damaging assault on women’s reproductive health and freedom. He lifted the odious gag rule that President George W. Bush imposed on international family planning groups and began trying to restore financing to the United Nations Population Fund.
    It was a reassuring message that Mr. Obama takes seriously his duty to safeguard women’s lives and basic rights, including free speech and the choice of whether to bear a child.
    The gag rule was first imposed by President Ronald Reagan. It barred any health care provider receiving American family planning assistance from counseling women on abortion, engaging in political speech on abortion or providing abortions, even with its own money…

By my count (actually, by Microsoft Word's count — what, you think I've got time to sit and count them?), it took 113 words to get to "abortion." Which actually isn't all that bad, I guess, compared to some instances I've seen. But it strikes me as about 100 words, or two paragraphs, late, by any reasonable standard of getting to the point.

But then, I'm a word guy — and specifically, an editorial guy — so I probably notice stuff like that more than most people do. Also, I disagree with the NYT on the issue, so I'm that much more likely to notice how much they feel compelled to dress up the concept, with layer upon layer of rhetorical clothing, before bringing it out.

Obama’s inaugural speech

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This morning, I got a phone message from an acquaintance who thought my column today was great, which struck me as a little surprising since I know the caller to be of libertarian persuasion. Especially since it was about Obama's inauguration, and the WSJ reported this morning that — as I read it — his speech today will be of a communitarian bent (yes! thought I). Yes, I know libertarians claim "responsibility" as a theme as well, but they mean something very different from communitarians when they use the word. With Obama, it's more like:

"Given the crisis that we're in and the hardships that so many people
are going through, we can't allow any idle hands," Mr. Obama said,
taking a break from painting a dormitory at Sasha Bruce House, a
shelter for homeless teens. "Everybody's got to be involved.
Everybody's going to have to pitch in, and I think the American people
are ready for that."

As I said, the communitarian sense of responsibility. And to that I say, amen.

Anyway, the speech itself is beginning now, and I thought y'all might want a place to comment on it. So here you go.

Excuse me for getting all earnest, but how can we interact more meaningfully here?

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And yes, I mean "earnest" and not "Ernest" like in my last post, although if you'd like you can attribute the seriousness of my message here to the influence of my serious new notebook.

Anyway, I wrote the following as a followup comment on my otherwise silly, fun post on Tina Fey, and it occurred to me I should elevate it to a separate post and see if we can get a good dialogue going on the subject here. Rather than rewrite it, I repeat myself:

Funny thing is, I used to not like Tina Fey — or Jimmy Fallon, or,
going way back before them, Dennis Miller — in their Weekend Update
days.

As y'all know, I like to have fun and kid around, but I do
take the news and the issues of the day seriously, and at some point I
get turned off by people who day in and day out sneer and make jokes of
serious issues. I mean, let's have fun and kid around, but when one's
entire diet of commentary consists of such junk food, and it's all
about mocking and never taking anything seriously, I think it has a
corrosive effect on society. Taken at it's extreme, I think it has
helped raise a generation that has trouble respecting anyone and
anything in politics. The constant drip, drip of smarmy satire adds to
all the partisan attack politics and tactics of personal destruction to
prevent us from coming together to solve the problems we have in common
— which is what representative democracy can be all about.

Needless
to say, I have NO appreciation for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. And
while I enjoyed meeting and kidding around with Stephen Colbert (see video), I can't get into his shtick, either.

But
even though the Palin gag was pretty hard-hitting satire, it was so
enjoyable that it caused me to have a soft spot for Tina I didn't have
before.

I should also mention that I revised my opinion of Dennis Miller just from the couple of brief spots I've done on his radio show.
I had always thought of him as just too much of a wise guy, too
impressed with his own snarky cleverness, to be borne. But he's
actually deeper than that, and pleasant to talk to.

Of
course, this is just a corollary to something I've found about life —
almost anyone is a more likable, admirable person once you get past the
shorthand, bumper-sticker version of that person. To know a person is
to appreciate him or her more. Maybe this sounds trite, but in our 24/7
headline news/blog world, we increasingly go by the bumper sticker, and
don't get into people deeply enough to appreciate them.

And just
to get WAY philosophical on you…. One of my great disappointments
with this blog is that I had hoped, by having this forum for going way
beyond what I'm able to say and explore in the paper, I could forge
some avenues where I could have more meaningful exchanges with my
readers and fellow citizens about the important issues of the day —
and the people who are important players in those issues.

Unfortunately,
the resistance to that is just tremendous. So much of what passes for
dialogue here remains on the superficial, partisan, shorthand,
bumper-sticker simplistic level. I try to say something to provoke
thought, and somebody gives some standard, boilerplate ideological
response, and someone else shouts the established bumper-sticker
counter to THAT, and off we go on the kind of pointless partisan
merry-go-round that you can read or hear anywhere in the blogosphere or
on 24/7 talking head "news." And what is the point in that?

I
draw hope from the fact that occasionally, we get to the point where
some actual,  mutually respectful dialogue occurs between people who
HAVE gotten to know each other beyond the surface here. I see this
particularly with Phillip and Herb and Karen and a handful of others —
and in the past (although, unfortunately, not so much lately) from you,
Randy. I even get an encouraging word now and then from bud or Doug.

I just wish I knew how to build on that. I'm open to suggestions.

Maybe I need to make this a separate post…

… which I just did.

How about it? Do you see any way we can start having conversations here that matter?

In praise of good ideas, starting with school district consolidation

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You know, I sort of damned the good news about the growing DHEC consensus with unfairly faint praise earlier today. (Or darned it, at the very least.)

I need to start looking more at the bright side. I don't spend enough time looking at things that way these days. We're all so overwhelmed by the economic situation — and if you are in the newspaper business, you are steeped in it (nothing is more sensitive to a slowing economy than an already-troubled industry that is built on advertising revenues). It's very easy to dwell on such facts as this one that has stuck in my head since last week: That not only did the U.S. economy lose 2.5 million jobs in 2008, the worst since 1945, but 524,000 of those jobs lost were in December alone. To do the math for you, if the whole year had been as bad as the last month, the total would have been over 6.29 million. And there's no particular reason to think January won't be worse than December.

I'm not a big Paul Krugman fan, but stats like that make me worry that he was right in his column, which we ran on Sunday, saying that the Barack Obama stimulus plan, overwhelming huge as it is, won't be nearly big enough.

And these are not cheery thoughts. Nor is it cheery to reflect, as I did in my Sunday column, about how resistant policy makers in South Carolina are to policies that make sense — even the more obvious policies, such as increasing the cigarette tax to the national average, or restructuring government to increase accountability, or comprehensive tax reform.

That's what we do in this business. We harp. Year in, year out. We can be tiresome. We can, as I suggested Sunday, get tired of it ourselves. But little victories such as this emerging consensus on DHEC, or the signs that we saw last year that even some of the stauncher opponents of restructuring in the Black Caucus are coming around on the issue (which is a real sea change) are worth celebrating, and encouraging — like putting extra oxygen on an ember.

So it is that I applaud Cindi today for, instead of doing her usual thing of mocking the stupider ideas among the prefiled bills, giving a boost to the better ideas. There were some good ones on her list.

In fact, I was inspired to do a little followup on one of them:

H.3102 by Reps. Ted Pitts and Joan Brady would shut off state funds to
school districts with fewer than 10,000 students, in an attempt to make
inefficient little districts merge.

Now that's the beginning of a good idea. Like most obviously good ideas, it isn't new. We've been pushing for school district consolidation as long as we've been pushing restructuring and comprehensive tax reform, etc., and with even less success. Everybody says they're for it in the abstract; no one lifts a finger to make it happen. Even Mark Sanford gives lip service to it (but won't work to make it happen, preferring to waste his energy on ideological dead-ends such as vouchers).

So it's encouraging that Ted Pitts and Joan Brady (and Bill Wylie and Dan Hamilton) want to at least set a starting place — a numerical threshold, a line that the state can draw and say, "We won't waste precious resources paying to run districts smaller than this."

Mind you, I'm not sure it's the RIGHT threshold. I've always thought that the most logical goal should get us down from the 85 districts we have now to about one per county — which would be 46. The 10,000 student threshold overshoots that goal, as I discovered today. I asked Jim Foster over at the state department of ed to give me a list of the sizes of districts. The latest list that he had handy that had districts ranked was this spreadsheet
(see the "TABLE 1-N" tab), which showed that as of 2006, only 18 districts in the state had more than 10,000 pupils. One of those — Kershaw County — has since risen over the magic mark, so that makes it 19.

Maybe we should have only 19 districts in the state, although I worry that a district that had to aggregate multiple counties to be big enough might be a little unwieldy.

But hey, it's a starting point for discussion on an actual reform that would help us eliminate ACTUAL waste in our education system, and provide more professional direction to some of our most troubled schools (which tend to be in those rural districts that just aren't big enough to BE districts to start with).

So way to go, Ted and Joan (and Bill and Dan).

I was particularly struck that Ted was willing to put forth an idea that would have an impact in his own county (although perhaps not, I suspected, in his actual district). That's the standard reason why district consolidation gets nowhere — lawmakers balk at messing with their home folks districts, because voters tend to be about this the way they are about other things; a reform is great until if affects them.

I suspected, and Jim's spreadsheet confirmed, that while Lexington 1 and District 5 were big enough to retain state funding under this proposal, Lexington 3 and 4 were not. More than that, Lexington 2 falls below the threshold, and at least part of Ted's district is in Lexington 2. (Unless I'm very mistaken. Ted is MY House member, and my children all attended Lexington 2 schools.) As for Joan Brady — I think her district would be unaffected, as Richland 1 and 2 would be untouched (even though they shouldn't be — they should be merged). But I still applaud her involvement.

Anyway, way to get the ball rolling on this, folks. Let's keep talking about this one.

DeMint stars in Moyers report on how Dems killed earmark reform

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Here's something that will jar a few of your preconceived notions (at least, among those who were so dismissive of Bill Moyers a while back as a liberal shill): It's a Bill Moyers report on PBS that calls Democratic leaders to task for double-crossing Jim DeMint and deep-sixing earmark reform.

Remember when everyone was so impressed that Nancy Pelosi was working with Sen. DeMint on this issue? Well, this report tells the rest of the story, of how the promise was undone.

An excerpt from the transcript:

SYLVIA CHASE: But what Senator Reid wasn't saying was that the reform measure contained a caveat. Senators wouldn't have to disclose any earmarks that went to federal entities.
But in the Defense Bill, almost all the earmarks first go to federal entities before being passed along to private contractors. In effect, senators would be able to hide almost every earmark. And that prompted a challenge from Senator Jim DeMint — a champion of earmark transparency. The South Carolina Republican made a startling admission.
JIM DEMINT: Many in this Chamber know I don't often agree with Speaker Pelosi, but Speaker Pelosi has the right idea.
SYLVIA CHASE: And a stunning proposal.As an amendment to the Ethics Bill, the staunchly conservative Republican DeMint proposed that the Senate adopt word-for-word the House version of earmark reform marshaled through by the liberal Democrat Nancy Pelosi
JIM DEMINT: We proposed the DeMint-Pelosi Amendment. And I presented it on the floor. And the place was quiet.
JIM DEMINT: This is the language which the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has put in this lobbying reform bill in order to make it more honest and transparent.
SYLVIA CHASE: It was a brilliant tactical move. If the Democratic majority was to reject DeMint's amendment it would mean rejecting the much stronger earmark disclosure rules crafted under their own party's high profile Speaker of the House.
JIM DEMINT: Harry Reid did not want this to come for a vote. He made a motion to table it, which gives the members some cover because you're not really voting against the amendment. You're just voting to table it.
SYLVIA CHASE: "Tabling" the so-called DeMint-Pelosi Amendment would mean removing it from consideration — effectively, killing it.
HARRY REID: I would appeal to my friend from South Carolina. I repeat: I know you are doing this because you think it is the right thing to do. But take the opportunity to look at what is here. It is better than the House version – so much better.
JIM DEMINT: And Senator Reid assumed as most people did including me that he would get fifty-one votes to table it. And we had a few heroes on the Democrat side that joined us, Barack Obama, relatively new senator, bucked his party and voted with us.
SENATE PRESIDING OFFICER: On this vote the ayes are 46, the nays are 51. The motion to table is not agreed to.
JIM DEMINT: And we defeated the tabling motion. Well once the tabling motion failed by a vote or two, everyone knew they were going to have to vote on the real thing and it was like 98 to nothing. I mean this is the kind of thing that if, if senators know America can see what they're voting on, they were afraid not to vote for it.
SYLVIA CHASE: Indeed, with all eyes watching — 98 senators voted in favor of the artfully crafted DeMint-Pelosi Amendment; not one opposed it.
The junior senator from South Carolina had taken on the powerful Senate Majority Leader and won. Or so it appeared. Remember: this was an amendment to a wide-ranging ethics bill. And before a bill becomes a law, its final language must be worked out between both houses of Congress. Steve Ellis, a leading earmark reform advocate in Washington, explains how the game works.
STEVE ELLIS: So rather than doing what the House did which was simply change their rules. You're done the next day. Everything is changed and you have to abide by earmark reform, people could still modify it before it actually ended up becoming the rules of the Senate.
SYLVIA CHASE: Which is precisely what happened.

You can watch the video here (sorry, I couldn't find imbed code).

By the way, Barack Obama — whom DeMint had occasion to praise back at the start of this tale ("And we had a few heroes on the Democrat side that joined us, Barack Obama, relatively new senator, bucked his party and voted with us.") — does not escape Moyers' skepticism. Near the top, he notes:

BILL MOYERS: No earmarks will be allowed and if you thought you hadn't heard him correctly, he repeated it in his big speech on Thursday. None of those hidden pet projects with multi-million dollar price tags that individual members of Congress sneak into bills for special interests or campaign contributors. Can it be true? Have we really crossed the bridge to nowhere for the last time?
Don't hold your breath. As a senator, Barack Obama himself was no slouch when it came to passing out earmarks. And many of the people in his incoming administration are accomplished practitioners…