The Maverick Tribe

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) adopts the Maverick Tribe position on releasing nonviolent prisoners.

And you thought this blog didn't have any influence in Washington.  I got juice, baby!  Juice!

Conservative columnist Debra Saunders agrees that we should wave the white flag of surrender on the War on Drugs.

"It's a little incredible that prostitutes weren't involved"

- John Dickerson, on Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's wide-ranging corruption indictment

Ok, so the economy is tanking, everyone wants the government to spend, spend, spend, and the nation's bean counters are predicting that we'll soon need to dispense with the "b"  and start using the "tr" to describe how many -illions of dollars the federal budget will be in the hole next year.

But whether you're a Keynesian or not, not all spending is good spending.  Tough economic choices are coming and we'd better start thinking about them.  I'm in favor an aggressive initiative for infrastructure spending, here are three suggestions for cuts that could partially offset that spending:

1.  Surrender in the war on drugs.  It's time to admit to ourselves that as a society we suck at fighting wars against common nouns - drugs, poverty, terror - to name a few.  Billions to hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the war on drugs - in police work, border patrol, judicial process, and incarceration.  Are Americans using them any less?  This does not mean legalization of every illicit substance, but it does mean taking an honest look at what measures are effective in cutting drug use and which ones are a waste of money.  Nonviolent drug offenders currently serving time should be released from prison.  A pothead might move into your neighborhood.  Deal with it.

2.  Weaken national security.  Even more politically suicidal than #1, but we simply can't afford the amount of money we spend in this country to make us think we're safe.  We're not safe.  Any rational observer understands that much of what the TSA does to the travelling public is little more than aesthetics, directly expensive to taxpayers and indirectly expensive from reduced productivity in the economy.  Some cutbacks may slightly increase the risk of terrorist attacks.  So be it.  If it costs $100 billion to avert death by terrorism of an expected 10 people, while that same $100 billion would save an expected 10,000 people from dying of leukemia, which would you choose?  Obama also needs to be ruthless about wasteful spending in the Pentagon, the discussion of which has been virtually off-limits for the past eight years.

3.  Increase unemployment.  Cuts to our whack-a-mole drug policy and the rituals of our "security theater" will uproot a lot of entrenched economies, public and private.  Prison guards, TSA officials, military contracters will be out of work.  Not to worry, though.  Some construction jobs should be opening up.

This fierce-ass broad is our first lady!  Yeah!!!

(Yup, it's Annie Liebowitz.)

My friend Philip floats the idea of conditional campaign donations (from thismodernworld.com)

Has anyone been discussing starting to put donations for Obama’s 2012 run in escrow, to be released upon the accomplishment of certain goals—eg, on Iraq, health care, energy, etc.?

It would take a ton of effort and wrangling to set up. And I haven’t thought it through at all, particularly the various legalities involved. Just off the top of my head, I think you’d have to set up a vote on whether he’d succeeded and the money could be released. I’d also guess you’d might have to require each person to specify a second choice organization for the money to go if Obama fails, so they wouldn’t just get it back and be able send it to the campaign anyway.

Interesting thought experiment but I don't think much more than that.  Accepting campaign donations contingent upon accomplishing certain goals amounts to making a pledge.  ("I take a pledge not to raise taxes", "I pledge to guarantee health care to every American", and so on.)  Perhaps they'd be even more coercive than mere pledges, since politicians tend to value cold, hard cash above that fluid, airy-fairy currency known as integrity.

So if conditional campaign donations are like pledges, only more effective, what's wrong with them?  They're a bad idea for the same reason that pledges are almost always a bad idea in politics.  A politician taking a pledge is performing an act of ideological hubris.  If elected, the politician needs to face changing real world conditions.  Fine, so you're a lefty that wants to ensure that America gets out of Iraq in X months.  But what about constantly changing facts on the ground over just the last year?  Do you really want to enforce such rigidity in foreign policy?  Foreign policy needs to be flexible and adaptive to be effective.  And if that doesn't bother you, imagine what the Republican activists would do with their conditional donations.  Republicans who wanted to get through the primary would undoubtedly need to pledge not to raise taxes.  (Many already do this, but don't currently have to put their money where their mouth is.)  But sometimes taxes need to be raised, no matter your ideology.  If George H.W. Bush had been beholden to a large sum of campaign cash in addition to that famous fiscal promise that rolled off his lips in 1988, would he still have raised taxes?  And if he hadn't, would the country be better or worse off?

Barack Obama faced a similar dilemma in the run up to this year's election.  Back in his days of ideological purity on campaign finance, he made a pretty clear promise to accept public funds in the general election if his Republican counterpart agreed to as well.  Then he built a staggering fundraising machine based on mostly small, grassroots internet donors.  The whole premise of public financing (preventing disproportionate power by a few moneyed interests) had been largely obviated.  But to carry this remarkably democratic donor base into the general election, Obama had to break his promise.  (His explanation for doing so, that the campaign finance system was "broken", was pretty lame.)  It was, in my view, the lowest point in his campaign.

It is understandable that the extremes of each party would welcome the opportunity to have a money-back guarantee.  Indeed, it's always a bit tragic watching our leaders have to voice squarely partisan views during the primary and then tack to the center in the general.  But the problem is not that elected leaders are insufficiently beholden to their base - it's that they're too beholden.  Just because the far-left/far-right position is articulated before the centrist position does not make it the more legitimate one.  It just makes it the first one. 

I'm working on a passenger rail project for the urban planning think tank SPUR, and I came across this promotional video for the California high speed rail proposal, funding for which is on this November's ballot:

Not because it's judicial activism - because it's likely to win a popular vote in California.  Not because it's bad for children - because that has been disproven by the facts.  Not because it's an extension of the sexual revolution - because marriage of any kind discourages promiscuity and self-centeredness.  Not because marriage has a consistent definition historically - because the Mormons, Warren Jeffs and old European aristocracy say otherwise.

Same sex marriage is wrong - just because.

The majority Republican California Supreme Court has just ruled that the state's ban on same-sex marriages is unconstiutional.  A backlash constitutional amendment is in the works for this November.  Six months away - a long six months.

Barack Obama loves to say he's running for president because of what Martin Luther King called the "fierce urgency of now."  Guess he didn't know we already have a president who already embodies it.  According to Michael Gerson, his former speechwriter:

[Bush] views both meditation on the past and speculation about his legacy with equal suspicion, preferring to live in the urgency of the now.

Dude you're a speechwriter.  You're supposed to be original.