Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Asked three weeks ago if he would like to run for president, Mitch Daniels replied, "What sane person would like to?" His decision against running, following Haley Barbour's and Mike Huckabee's decisions, illuminates a political asymmetry: Liberals think government, and hence politics, should be life's epicenter; conservatives do not.
SACRAMENTO -- In 1967, five years after California became the most populous state, novelist Wallace Stegner said California -- energetic, innovative, hedonistic -- was America, "only more so." Today, this state's budget crisis is like the nation's, only more so. Bob Dutton is an island of calm in the eye of the storm -- which should agitate Gov. Jerry Brown. Dutton came to California from Nebraska at age 19 in 1969 and now is leader of Republicans in the state Senate. He contentedly says his caucus is "almost like a Chamber of Commerce board of directors." Its members are mostly from small businesses, as he is. Because they are term-limited, they cannot make a career here, so they might as well follow their small -- well, smaller -- government inclinations.
SACRAMENTO -- Pausing in his struggle to solve, or to get others to solve, today's iteration of California's recurring fiscal crisis, Jerry Brown, the recurring governor, recently approved a new contract for the prison guards union. Henceforth, guards can cash out at retirement an unlimited number of unused vacation days. Most California employees can monetize only 80 accrued days. Many guards will receive lump sums exceeding $100,000. The Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that guards possess time worth $600 million. The union contributed almost $2 million to Brown's 2010 campaign. In 1980, according to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 10 percent of the state's general fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and 7.5 percent to higher education. The national average incarceration cost is $29,000 per inmate per year. California's cost is $49,000, about $7,000 more than a year's tuition at Dartmouth.
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. -- This summer, the huge Boeing assembly plant here will begin producing 787 Dreamliners -- up to three a month, priced at $185 million apiece. It will, unless the National Labor Relations Board, controlled by Democrats and encouraged by Barack Obama's reverberating silence, gets its way. Last month -- 17 months after Boeing announced plans to build here, and with the $2 billion plant nearing completion -- the NLRB, collaborating with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, charged that Boeing's decision violated the rights of its unionized workers in Washington state, where some Dreamliners are assembled and still will be even after the plant here is operational. The NLRB has read a 76-year-old statute (the 1935 Wagner Act) perversely, disregarded almost half a century of NLRB and Supreme Court rulings, and patently misrepresented statements by Boeing officials.
WASHINGTON -- Outside the venue where Rep. Paul Ryan recently spoke in Madison, Wis., a university town never lacking protesters, one product of America's education system shouted that Ryan's budget proposal would return America to the bad old days of the "18th-century robber barons." The young man, full of zeal and destitute of information, does not know that those capitalists of whom he disapproves -- the ones who built the railroads and other sinews of the nation's industrial might -- operated in the second half of the 19th century, not in 18th-century agrarian America.
WASHINGTON -- In 1960, after the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the New York Yankees in an electrifying seven-game World Series, the Yankees fired manager Casey Stengel, who had turned 70 in July. The Yankees said he was too old. He said, "I'll never make the mistake of being 70 again." It is, however, a coveted mistake, considering the alternative, and remembering how recently it was that passing this milestone became unremarkable. The Bible, with the thumping certitude for which it is famous and sometimes tiresome, asserts that "the days of our years are threescore years and ten." If so, after turning 70, one has, ever after, the pleasure of playing, as it were, with house money. For what, exactly, would one now give up red meat and dry martinis?
WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death was announced by the president on May 1, a date that once had worldwide significance on the revolutionary calendar of communism, which was America's absorbing national security preoccupation prior to Islamic terrorism. Times change. Barack Obama, in his pitch-perfect address informing the nation that bin Laden is as dead as communism -- never mind the cadaverous Cuban and North Korean regimes -- rightly stressed that this is "the most significant achievement to date" against al-Qaeda, but that it "does not mark the end of" our effort to defeat that amorphous entity. Perhaps, however, America can use this occasion to draw a deep breath and some pertinent conclusions.
WASHINGTON -- Tim Storm, an Illinois businessman until a few weeks ago, is now a Wisconsin businessman. Herewith a story about how states can reduce revenues by trying to increase them, and about the economic benefits of federalism. Storm, 42, is founder and CEO of FatWallet.com. The company, until recently one of about 9,000 Illinois "affiliates" of Amazon.com, directs online shoppers to online retailers, which often pay affiliates commissions for referrals that result in sales. Storm's company, which has 54 employees, used to be located in Rockton, Ill., but now is five miles up the road in Beloit, Wis.
WASHINGTON -- Memo to Democratic senators eager to vote themselves campaign subsidies in the name of combating corruption: You really should not cloak your self-serving crusade in a claim that could be called intellectual corruption. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, recently held a hearing -- only Democrats attended -- on his legislation to provide government funding for Senate campaigns. Durbin's website advertised the bill as "a comprehensive response to Citizens United," a reference to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case with that title. But Durbin first introduced essentially this bill (with companion House bills to fund congressional campaigns) almost three years before the court decision to which it supposedly responds.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- John Covington hesitated before becoming this city's 26th school superintendent in 40 years. A blunt-talking African-American from Alabama, he attended the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles, which prepares leaders for urban school districts, and when he asked people there if he should come here, their response, he says, was: "Not 'no,' but 'Hell no!'" He says they suggested that when flying across the country he should take a flight that does not pass through this city's airspace. How did this pleasant place become so problematic? Remember the destination of the road paved with good intentions.
WASHINGTON -- During 25 years in the Marine Corps, including flying helicopters in Vietnam, Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican, developed the skill of maintaining small-unit cohesion. He will need this skill in his new job. Half the Republican members of the committee he now chairs are in their first term, and he laughingly guesses that in 2010 "about half of them campaigned on abolishing the Education Department." Ronald Reagan was an abolitionist, and Kline has proposed legislation to replace Ulysses Grant's visage with Reagan's on the $50 bill.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The morning Tom Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve's regional bank here, announced that he would retire Oct. 1, newspapers nationwide reported that henceforth the Fed's chairmen will hold quarterly news conferences. This is probably both regrettable and inevitable. The Fed is called "independent" because it was created to insulate monetary policy from political pressures. But it was created by Congress, which can do what it wants with the Fed. Also, for more than three decades the Fed has had a "dual mandate" -- to protect the currency as a store of value (restraining inflation) and to promote "maximum employment." The latter inserts the Fed into inherently political calculations and decisions.
ANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank building here contains a money museum where a sign offers visitors "Free Money." It is an amusing anomaly, considering the views of the man in charge of the building. The free money in the lobby consists of shredded currency in small plastic bags. The free money that distresses Tom Hoenig, in his 20th and final year as president of one of the Federal Reserve's 12 regional banks, is being pumped into the economy by two policies of the Federal Reserve in Washington -- very low interest rates and a second "quantitative easing" (printing money).
PHOENIX -- Suburban Glendale is less a community with professional sports facilities than a sports enterprise with a community held hostage to previous improvident decisions. Now Glendale's government may multiply its follies -- unless Arizona's Constitution saves the city from itself. Taxes provided $346 million of the $455 million cost of the huge (up to 72,200 seats) retractable-roof NFL stadium where the Arizona Cardinals will play 10 times this season, if there is a season. (The NFL is having labor problems.) But Glendale (population 253,000) has a more immediate problem with its hockey team, the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes.
WASHINGTON -- Several weeks ago, when President Obama reportedly assured congressional leaders that America's intervention in Libya would involve "days, not weeks," skeptics mistakenly worried about mission creep. They should have feared mission gallop. Or perhaps mission meander. At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today's question is: What was Plan A? When Obama inserted America into what was, and ostensibly still is, a pre-emptive war to protect Libyan civilians from Libya's government, he neglected to clarify a few things, such as: Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?
WASHINGTON -- A dialectic of judicial deference and political arrogance is on display in St. Louis. When excessively deferential courts permit governmental arrogance, additional arrogance results as government explores the limits of judicial deference. As Jim Roos knows. He formed a nonprofit housing and community development corporation that provides residences for low-income people. Several times its properties have been seized by the city government, using "blight" as an excuse for transferring property to developers who can pay more taxes to the seizing government.
WASHINGTON -- For many families, this is March madness -- the moment of high anxiety concerning higher education as many colleges announce their admittance decisions. It is the culmination of a protracted mating dance between selective institutions and anxious students. Part agony, part situation comedy, it has provoked Andrew Ferguson to write a laugh-until-your-ribs-squeak book -- "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College." He begins in Greenwich, Conn. -- a hedge fund habitat -- watching Katherine Cohen, an "independent college admissions counselor," market her $40,000 "platinum package" of strategies for bewitching Ivy League admissions officers. "Everyone in the room," writes Ferguson, "was on full alert, with that feral look of parental ambition. They swiveled their tail-gunning eyes toward Kat when she was introduced." Kat introduced them to terror:
WASHINGTON -- The missile strikes that inaugurated America's latest attempt at regime change were launched 29 days before the 50th anniversary of another such -- the Bay of Pigs of April 17, 1961. Then the hubris of American planners was proportional to their ignorance of everything relevant, from Cuban sentiment to Cuba's geography. The fiasco was a singularly feckless investment of American power. Does practice make perfect? In today's episode, America has intervened in a civil war in a tribal society, the dynamics of which America does not understand. And America is supporting one faction, the nature of which it does not know. "We are standing with the people of Libya," says Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, evidently confident that "the" people are a harmonious unit. Many in the media call Moammar Gaddafi's opponents "freedom fighters," and perhaps they are, but no one calling them that really knows how the insurgents regard one another, or understand freedom, or if freedom, however understood, is their priority.
NEWPORT, R.I. -- When some Chinese naval officers crossed the Pacific to visit the Naval War College here on an Atlantic-lapped island, they gazed reverently at a desk used by Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914). This compliment to America's pre-eminent naval strategist has scholars here wondering whether Mahan's Chinese readers are taking from him lessons similar to those Theodore Roosevelt derived. How could they not? Mahan did not make TR bellicose; nature did that, immoderately. But Mahan supplied a theory for Roosevelt's metabolic urge to throw around his nation's rapidly growing weight.
