Millennium Challenge Corporate Welfare

The Citizens Against Government Waste monthly publication, Wastewatcher, has been posted online. My piece is a discussion of the failure of Bush’s foreign aid pet project, the Millennium Challenge Corporation:

Of the 17 countries initially made eligible for MCC grant money in 2004, only four have improved their scores in the Index of Economic Freedom by more than a point, while nine have seen their scores decrease. This new form of direct foreign aid by the MCC has done seemingly little except allow ruling political groups in these countries to consolidate power, pointing to the new roads and irrigation systems that American taxpayers have provided as their chief accomplishments.

Read the whole thing here.

Kennedy: (Flawed) Libertarian Hero

That, of course, would be Justice Anthony Kennedy. There’s been a lot of hoopla about Kennedy being the “swing” vote in the Supreme Court, as though he were an erratic voting constituency in the Midwest that needed to be wooed for victory. Yet lost in the talk over swing votes is the fact that there is a cogent philosophy underlining his decisions. Consider:

- In DC v. Heller, Kennedy was the swing vote that gave gun rights’ advocates a victory. Furthermore, by not releasing a concurrence, he implicitly endorsed the strongly worded majority opinion by Justice Scalia.

- In Boumediene v. Bush, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion asserting the right of habeus corpus for enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay.

- In Kennedy v. Louisiana, Kennedy (I’m surprised no one jumped on some “conflict of interest” joke) wrote the opinion holding that the death penalty can only be used in cases involving murder and crimes against the state.

- In Davis v. Federal Election Commission, Kennedy joined the four conservative judges in scuttling the “Millionaire’s Amendment.”

This was all in the 2007-08 term, which is a pretty impressive record. Arguably, no one has done more to advance the cause of liberty in recent memory. He has single-handedly skewed the court in a broadly libertarian direction.

This makes his concurrence in the Kelo v. City of New London decision all the more puzzling. From the concurrence:

This taking occurred in the context of a comprehensive development plan meant to address a serious city-wide depression, and the projected economic benefits of the project cannot be characterized as de minimus. . . . The city complied with elaborate procedural requirements that facilitate review of the record and inquiry into the city’s purposes. In sum, while there may be categories of cases in which the transfers are so suspicious, or the procedures employed so prone to abuse, or the purported benefits are so trivial or implausible, that courts should presume an impermissible private purpose, no such circumstances are present in this case.

What differentiates the “errors” resulting from eminent abuse from the “errors” in military kangaroo courts or the “errors” in death penalty judgements? Why is the right to one form of property (handguns) more valuable than another (a house)? Still, Kennedy has made this recent Court session one of the more liberty-friendly, and is criminally underrated among certain circles.

Gonzobama

The Obama-as-Carter-repeated meme had its shining moment in the campaign sun, used as ammunition on the right, and mocked by the left as historically inaccurate. This back-and-forth was pretty tired, focused more on biographies (“They’re both inexperienced state legislators!”) and policy (“They’re both appeasement pinko bastards!”), which is really a bit ridiculous — the national environments may have a few commonalities, but to call Obama the next Carter ignores the fact that policy choices simply are not the same from year to year, let alone term to term or decade to decade. Society is dynamic.
What is more relevant is the political environment, which is more concerned with perception than reality. With that, let’s turn to Hunter Thompson, the great political shaman of the 1970s:

I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians – usually against my will and for generally the same reasons I got trapped into hearing this one – but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974.

Compare this, briefly, to Charles Murray at the National Review on Obama’s race speech:

“Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I’m concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we’re used to from our pols…. But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.

The common thread between these perspectives lies in the fact that both of these men have no love for the respective candidates. Dr. Thompson distrusts all politicians by reflex, and yet falls in love with Carter’s oratory, printing in its entirety the aforementioned Law Day Speech in his work The Great Shark Hunt. Murray, a National Review guy, is essentially being paid to bring Obama down.
Yet the idealistic rhetoric resonates. America still stirs upon hearing JFK’s famous self-sacrifical edict, ignoring his steroids-fueled-sexscapades and his blundering foreign policy. A silver tongue, it seems, can satiate all but the most fervent critics.

Hunter goes on:

I have never thought the problem with Carter is that he is two-faced in the sense of a two-headed coin. . . . But he is definitely a politician above all else right now, and that is the only way anybody gets into the White House. If Carter has two faces, my own feeling is that they are mounted one behind the other, but both looking in the same direction, instead of both ways at once, as the friends of Hubert Humphrey keep saying. . .

And a lot of the people who accuse of lying, dissembling, waffling, and being “hazy” have never bothered to listen very carefully to what he says. . .

Meanwhile, McCain and Ford were both perceived as good men. McCain may be shrill and occasionally offensive, but whether true or not, he is seen as an honorable man. Ford, meanwhile, was the leader dealt the bad hand, who made the wrong choice (at the time) with regards to Nixon, and paid the price. McCain is being successfully drawn into the poisoned circle of the Bush Administration, and isn’t helping himself with his foreign policy.

In fact, Sen. Clinton even played a pretty decent Hubert Humphrey, especially when she became the self-styled queen of West Virginia/Byrdistan. History doesn’t repeat itself, but as Mark Twain says, it certainly rhymes. This year, it seems, hints more strongly towards 1976 than anything else.

It’s inane to suggest that Obama is unqualified or should be opposed simply because of his resonance to a fairly unsuccessful president. Yet as he is already beginning to hint at less-than-Messiah behavior with his vote on the FISA compromise, Obama’s fervent hero-worshippers should (and will) start firing up their skepticism. On the other side, the right might want to avoid bemoaning the death of the market economy; after all, it was Carter who deregulated the airlines and repealed Nixon’s price controls.

Letter in the Washington Post

The Washington Post published this letter I sent in on the budget deficit:

Regarding the June 21 front-page story “Big Promises Bump Into Budget Realities”:

Focusing on the budget deficit obscures the magnitude of the federal government’s fiscal recklessness. Although $400 billion seems like a large number, it is dwarfed by two far larger numbers: spending and tax revenue. In fiscal 2007, the government spent more than $9,000 per citizen. Meanwhile, Americans fork over $8,500 per person to finance this increasingly expensive boondoggle. To suggest that Americans should fork over even more of their hard-earned money to finance Congress’s spending habits is insulting.

The only way to improve the situation is for one of the presidential candidates to get serious about reducing government spending. Unfortunately, given the nature of electoral politics, this seems exceedingly unlikely.

EVAN LISULL

Washington

The writer is a researcher at Citizens Against Government Waste.

The original article can be read here.

Irony, thy name is marriage defense?

Via Andrew Sullivan, the Constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union “only between a man and a woman” includes as cosponsors Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter. All such causes should be so lucky as to have such shining crusaders on the front lines.

And while the chortling heard ’round the blogosphere might be merited, it’s not that hard to see how their sponsorship would be genuine, more than mere posturing. This might be called the Al Green Effect — by swinging so far to one end of the hedonism spectrum, Vitter and Craig feel that truth can only be found by going to the completely opposite end. If you will, Newton’s laws of morality – or hypocrisy.

Ideally, like a pendulum, their undulations would decrease as time goes on, and would eventually find a reasonable position in the middle ground. Unfortunately, they are career politicians; their jobs simply don’t allow for such thoughtful consideration.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!