Turning a Lemon into Lemonade.

Yes, that H.R.589. From the Orange County Register…

Thursday’s meeting might best be described as exploratory because a large gulf remains about how to pay for the estimated $16 billion cost of the benefits.

When Lee introduced the bill in February, she argued the cost should be deemed emergency benefits and added to the deficit as has been traditional with unemployment extensions. The Republicans balked, contending the additional aid should be paid for through cuts in other programs.

Lee, in her request last month for a meeting with the House leadership, said she was open to discussing funding and “to exhausting every possible option for passing the bill.”

House Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., released a statement in response saying he looked forward to the meeting “and would like to broaden the conversation to focus on ways to grow the economy, spur investment and create jobs rather than simply extending unemployment benefits in some instance beyond the maximum of 99 weeks currently permitted.”

This is exactly right.

Lost among all of the debate about the amounts of spending to be cut and the size of the deficit has been one undeniable fact-without doing something to encourage investment, hiring and economic growth, there is no way to get a handle on said deficit. Period. We cannot grow our way to a balanced budget-but we can’t just cut spending and ignore the economy either. Both are needed and if anything, job creation is the more urgent if not important. Whatever motives Reps. Lee and Scott and their co-sponsors have for pushing this bill (a cynic might see them as cultivating a new million plus voting block for the next election by proposing a bill they have no intention of passing, but give them the benefit of the doubt) this bill is a prime opportunity to pass vital legislation (promised in the Pledge to America, BTW) that would otherwise be DOA in the senate.

To begin:

1) Since the Senate seems dead-set against allowing the rider defunding Obamacare pass in the 2011 budget, let’s throw them a bone. We add it on here instead, the 10 Billion in savings this year (not to mention the 100+billion this decade) is a good down payment on offsetting the UI costs. Of course, they’ll just have to agree to more cuts in the budget, but that’s their problem. And again, getting this economy moving is more urgent that whether they shut Washington down or not.

2) Add the EPA rider as well. Both of these measures are not only vital, but should have a direct impact on encouraging investment and growth. The other two riders-as worthy as they are-have nothing to do with growth and are insignificant budget-wise.

3) Include a 20% deduction for small business investment.

4) Make mandatory cost/benefit analysis for all new federal regulations and congressional oversight for any that cost the economy 100 million or more.

5) Reduce capital gains tax rates for the next two years.

Okay, I just added the last one, it wasn’t in the Pledge. But you get where I’m coming from-work out the details. The fact is, the million plus individuals currently on unemployment need jobs. Real jobs in the private sector (remember that, Mr. President?) that don’t currently exist. This would not only give them short term aid but the opportunity to become employed taxpayers helping our economy and voting GOP in 2012 instead of bitter impoverished Democrat victims. Keep in mind (from the same register article):

As of March, 6.1 million people nationwide had been out of work more than six months, 45.5% of all the unemployed. In California, the number of long-term unemployed has topped 1 million since last August.

The number of unemployed who have exhausted their 99 weeks of benefits continues to climb. As of March 29, more than 377,000 Californians had fallen off the unemployment rolls, according to the state Employment Development Department. It is not known how many of those have since found jobs.

And did I mention it would help reduce the deficit?

Now there has been talk from some here at RS about the ‘principled’ reasons to oppose any extensions regardless of offsets. Let’s just say at the best these arguments are well-meaning but misguided. I’ll just use the comments for a Teachable Moment to deal with them.

Presuming anyone reads this.

Of course, your colleagues in the Senate could just kill the whole thing anyway. Or President Obama could veto it. And explain to today’s unemployed and next year’s voters why they are opposed to aid to the jobless and job creation.

Again-their problem. Ours (and by ours, I mean yours) is fixing this economy.

Like you all Pledged.

There has been a lot written here recently on the current situation with the budget passed by the House- 60 billion vs 100 billion vs 2 trillion, weather the leadership is breaking the Pledge to America or not, are they corrupt or just stupid. Let me start by saying I’m cool with the 60 Billion for now. The real test is what they do when the Senate adds another 10-20 billion in the package and sends it back. My suggestion- if they add 10 billion in spending, take away 20 and send it back. If they want to shut down the government, fine. This isn’t 1994 (or 1983 when they did the same thing only it was Reagan’s fault, not Congress). We have the new media, sites like this, talk radio Fox news-the left does not control the debate anymore unless we let them. Enough of that. On to more important things…

The focus has been on one section of the pledge-namely the sixth paragraph. The first one was either taken care of or betrayed in December, depending on who you ask. That leaves 2-5 up in the air-and unlikely to get any support in the Donkey controlled Senate. To quote the text…

• Permanently Stop All Job-Killing Tax Hikes: We will help the economy by permanently stopping all tax increases, currently scheduled to take effect January 1, 2011. That means protecting middle-class families, seniors worried about their retirement, and the entrepreneurs and family-owned small businesses on which we depend to create jobs in America.

• Give Small Businesses a Tax Deduction: We will allow small business owners to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their business income. This will provide entrepreneurs with a much-needed infusion of capital for investment and new hiring.

• Rein In the Red Tape Factory in Washington, DC: Excessive federal regulation is a de facto tax on employers and consumers that stifles job creation, hampers innovation and postpones investment in the economy. When the game is always changing, small businesses cannot properly plan for the future. To provide stability, we will require congressional approval of any new federal regulation that has an annual cost to our economy of $100 million or more. This is the threshold at which the government deems a regulation “economically significant.” If a regulation is so “significant” and costly that it may harm job creation, Congress should vote on it first.

• Repeal Job-Killing Small Business Mandates: One of the most controversial mandates of the Democrats’ government takeover of health care requires small businesses to report to the Internal Revenue Service any purchases that run more than $600. This 1099 reporting mandate is so overbearing that the IRS ombudsman has determined that the agency is ill-equipped to handle all the resulting paperwork.. We will repeal this job-killing small business mandate.

• Act Immediately to Reduce Spending: There is no reason to wait to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. Congress should move immediately to cancel unspent “stimulus” funds, and block any attempts to extend the timeline for spending “stimulus” funds. Throwing more money at a stimulus plan that is not working only wastes taxpayer money and puts us further in debt.

• Cut Government Spending to Pre-Stimulus, Pre-Bailout Levels: With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to begin paying down the debt, balancing the budget, and ending the spending spree in Washington that threatens our children’s future.

More on this later. But first, I don’t know how many have heard the Left’s latest talking point-that taxes now are lower than ever. Well the truth behind the lie is that revenues are at the lowest they have been in years precisely because of the magic Pelosi and Reid have worked on our economy (with the help and/or acquiescence of the two guys in the White House) over the last four years. As much as we were overspending the last decade, from 2003 to 2007 the deficit was steadily decreasing-because the economy was increasing. No amount of cuts is going to manage the deficit without first and more importantly growing the economy. And in order to do that, we have to get by the Senate and Obama’s veto. Speaking of Obama…

It has been noted that Iowa Rep.Steve King’s attempt to defund Obamacare and save $105 Billion was shot down by a procedural rule. Interestingly enough, the same rule was used to kill H.R.589, which would have added 14 weeks of unemployment payments accross the board. Speaker Boener for one said he would favor this measure if paid for-so of course it wasn’t. The Left doesn’t really care about the long term unemployed except to see as many of them at the polls every other November. In case anyone can’t see where I’m going with this…

I think the GOP should embrace H.R.589 and call it their own. Adding on Rep. King’s amendment should pay for it and then some. Of course, in addition to short term help for the jobless, we want to help them actually find work. Which is why we tack on the 20% small buissness deduction, the elimination of the small buisness mandates and the Congressional regulatory oversite. If it actually passed, it would do more to improve the economy that 100 or 200 billion in tax cuts.

Of course, if Reid and Obama think that protecting Obamacare and Federal Regulators is more important that helping the million plus unemployed that have exausted benefits, let them explain that. Either they piss of a member of their costituancy or they help the economy recover in spite of themselves.

Either way, it’s a win.

One of my guiding principles come election time was summed up best By Robert Heinlein- There’s not always someone to vote for, but there’s always someone to vote against.

Speaking of San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore…

I think either Duffy or LaSeur would be a good vote. I’m going with LeSeur.

In the ‘non-partisan’ race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, it is currently a three way race between the bureaucrats’ candidate Larry Aceves, the CTA candidate Tom Torlakson and State Senator Gloria Romero. All three are Democrats-the GOP doesn’t have a serious candidate in this race. Romero has shown a willingness to annoy the unions in the past (both on education and the corrections system) and seems genuinely interested in reform. And by reform, I mean improving the educational system, not Leftist ‘reform’ which translates to increased bureaucracy and governmental control. Plus the CTA hates her.

I’m voting for Romero. She’ll be the second Democrat I’ve voted for since I’ve been old enough to do so.

Since it seems this isn’t going away, and I don’t feel like waiting for yesterdays 200 some post link to load, let’s try again. (Besides, some said this deserved it’s own diary).The best account of the BP case case I’ve found (for those who prefer facts and evenhandedness over WND spin) is a Pamela Colloff piece in Texas Monthly called Badges of Dishonor (pdf file). It’s rather long (about 9 or 10 pages, still shorter than the transcripts) but worth the read. Some excerpts…

So began a Department of Homeland Security internal investigation that uncovered what appeared to be a straightforward case of two federal agents shooting at a man as he ran away and then concealing their actions. Investigators found that Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila had put his hands in the air and tried to surrender, but Compean—instead of apprehending him—had swung at him with the butt of his shotgun. Aldrete-Davila had bolted, and as he ran, Compean and Ramos had
fired at him fifteen times, with Compean stopping to reload his Beretta as he tried to hit his mark. Neither agent announced the shooting over the radio or informed his supervisor of what had happened; the official report about the pursuit made no mention of their firing their weapons. And rather than secure the area so that evidence could be preserved, Compean had retrieved most of his spent shell casings and tossed them into a ditch. Only when questioned by investigators a month later did he offer the explanation that he and Ramos had acted in self-defense; Aldrete-Davila had been “pointing something shiny” that “looked like a gun.” A federal jury, which heard both agents’ testimony, rejected their version of events and convicted them on five out of six criminal charges, including assault, obstruction of justice, and civil rights violations.

That might have been the last word on the case, except that when talk radio shows, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, and conservative blogs picked up the story, they glossed over nearly all of the most damning facts presented at trial. Set against the backdrop of the national debate over immigration, a new narrative emerged, one in which Ramos and Compean were recast as American heroes,” unjustly persecuted by a government that cared more about amnesty for illegal immigrants than about border security. The story line advanced by pundits and bloggers focused on Aldrete-Davila’s own illegal activity, since he had been ferrying a large load of marijuana when he had crossed paths with Ramos and Compean. (The agents had not known this when they fired their weapons; the marijuana was discovered only after the shooting, in a van Aldrete-Davila had abandoned when he fled.) The jury had taken this into consideration and had still chosen to hand down guilty verdicts. But the stark contrast between Aldrete-Davila’s fate and that of Ramos and Compean’s inspired outrage. Two Border Patrol agents were being sent to prison, while a dope smuggler—who had been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for his testimony—walked free.

Ramos knew the protocol: A Border Patrol agent who fires his weapon is required to inform a supervisor within an hour. (Border Patrol agents are trained to shoot to kill, not to maim.) Yet as he talked to Richards, he never mentioned that he and Compean had just shot at a suspect fifteen times. Ramos said only that Compean had fallen while he was trying to apprehend the van’s driver and had gotten dirt thrown in his eyes. Richards called out to Compean, who was standing at a distance on the levee, and asked if he was all right. The agent assured him that he was, except for a few cuts on his hand and face, and said nothing about the shooting. Before leaving the area, Compean stooped down to pick up nine of his spent shell casings and tossed them in the ditch.

On his way to the station to write his report, Compean stopped to talk to Arturo Vasquez, a more junior agent, who asked what had happened. “That little bitch took me to the ground and threw dirt on my face,” Vasquez recalled Compean saying. Providing no further explanation, Compean added: “I had to fire some rounds.” He asked Vasquez, who was headed back to the levee, to look for the five remaining spent shell casings—which Compean had been unable to find—since he needed to return to the station. Vasquez knew that the scene of a shooting was supposed to be left undisturbed for the Sector Evidence Team, but in deference to his superior, he agreed.

Back at the station, Compean washed up and ran into Richards as he was coming out of the restroom. He had a cut on his hand that had drawn blood. Richards asked him if he had been assaulted by the driver, and Compean denied that he had. “No, I’m okay. Nothing happened,” the agent said. “I just hurt my hand when I fell down, that’s all.”

This left the U.S. attorney’s office with two bad options: grant immunity to a drug smuggler, or allow Border Patrol agents who had shot at a man while he was running away and then concealed their conduct to go unpunished. Although Aldrete-Davila admitted to driving the load of marijuana, federal prosecutors did not think they had a viable case against him. No evidence tied him to the crime, and his phone conversation with Sanchez would not have been admissible at trial. Without a suspect in custody, the case had never been treated as an active investigation; the van had not initially been analyzed for fingerprints, and the marijuana had been destroyed. Any case brought against him—if he could be extradited from Mexico—would have to rely on the testimony of the two agents, who the prosecution’s own evidence showed were hardly credible witnesses. So on March 16, Sanchez presented paperwork to Aldrete-Davila at the American consulate in Juárez, granting him immunity to testify about his actions on the day of the shooting. (“When you cast a play in hell, you don’t get angels as witnesses,” assistant U.S. attorney Debra Kanof later warned the jury.)

The bullet was removed by Army doctors at Fort Bliss, and ballistics tests showed that it had been fired from Ramos’s handgun, which investigators had taken under the guise of performing a firearms audit. That night, federal agents arrested Ramos and Compean at their homes on assault charges.

Not until his arrest, a month after the shooting, did Compean claim that Aldrete-Davila had had a gun. He had never mentioned the weapon before—not when he stopped to talk to Vasquez about his missing shell casings and not when he confided in another agent, David Jacquez, that he had fired at the van’s driver. Yet when he sat down to talk to investigators, he said that he had acted in self-defense. (Ramos requested a lawyer and invoked his right to remain silent.) “We tumbled and wrestled for a little bit,” Compean wrote in a sworn statement. “I got some dirt in my eyes and he got up and started running back south towards Mexico. When he was running south he was pointing something shiny with his left hand. It looked like a gun. This is when I started shooting.” He had suspected that the driver had been injured: “Nacho might have hit him . . . When we saw him climbing out of the river on the Mexican side, the alien looked like he was limping.” But he had not reported the shooting, he wrote, because he was afraid he “was going to get in trouble.” Before signing the statement, he added that he was unsure if the driver had actually been armed: “My intent was to kill the alien because I thought he had a gun, but I never really saw for certain that he had a gun.”

. Three agents—Juarez, Vasquez, and Jacquez—accepted proffer letters, which shielded them from prosecution, in exchange for their testimony. The trial revealed that the defendants had not tried to take cover during the shooting or warned other agents who arrived at the scene afterward not to stand out in the open. Luis Barker, the former chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, described a meeting with Compean in which he had protested his suspension after his arrest; the agent had given a detailed account of the shooting but never mentioned a gun. And while the defense’s theory rested on the notion that Aldrete-Davila had been pointing something shiny with his left hand, as both agents claimed, prosecutors showed that he was right-handed.

Prosecutors had offered plea deals to the defendants before trial, including an 18-month term for Ramos and 21 months for Compean, if they would plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges. It was a package deal that both men had to take and which they had declined. “It was simply the principle of the whole thing,” Ramos wrote to me. “I could have never lived that down.” (Compean, as well as Aldrete-Davila, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Ramos’s wife, Monica, put it more bluntly: “My husband was facing forty years, and they offered him eighteen months. Wouldn’t a guilty person take that?”

A female juror, who agreed to talk to me on condition of anonymity, saw things differently. “We didn’t believe they had acted in self-defense,” she said. “I think Compean got mad and started shooting.” As for Ramos: “He was a marksman, and I think he knew he hit the alien. That’s why he only fired once.” During deliberations, she said, the jury had weighed the fact that the victim had been transporting a large load of marijuana. “We agreed that we weren’t trying the alien for what he did,” she recalled. “That wasn’t the case we were given.”

“If they had come forward and said, ‘A dope dealer just pointed a gun at us, and we shot at him fifteen times,’ no grand jury in America would ever have indicted them for that,” Sutton observed one afternoon as we talked at the U.S. attorney’s office in Austin, overlooking the Capitol. “But we don’t hear about a ‘shiny object’ until a month later. They knew they had shot him, and they knew he was unarmed. So instead of reporting the shooting, they covered it up, destroyed evidence, lied about it, and filed a false report. A prosecutor can’t say, ‘That’s acceptable behavior,’ and look the other way.” “The evidence is overwhelming that these guys committed a very serious crime,” Sutton said. Sutton, who served as Bush’s criminal justice policy director when he was governor and worked on his transition team at the Department of Justice after the 2000 election, was an unlikely target for conservatives. He had been devastated by the letter from Schlafly, whom he described as “a conservative icon.” He insisted that he was not soft on drug crimes, as his detractors had made him out to be, pointing out that his office led the nation last year in narcotics prosecutions and was second in illegal immigration cases. Yet he has received death threats for his role in the case, and his e-mail and voice mail are often filled with irate messages. “All people have heard is that two American heroes are in prison for doing their job and that a drug dealer has been set free,” he said. “If those were the facts, I’d be furious too. But the evidence is overwhelming that these guys committed a very serious crime.” If anyone was at fault for the fact that Aldrete-Davila was not in prison, he said, it was the agents. “They didn’t put handcuffs on him when they had the chance,” he explained. “They had him at gunpoint, at the bottom of a steep ditch, with his hands in the air. Instead of apprehending him, Compean tried to hit him over the head with the butt of a shotgun. Even after they shot him, they holstered their weapons and walked away.”

Sitting beneath half a dozen framed photos of himself with the president over the years, Sutton marveled at how media coverage had allowed the case to take on a life of its own. Lou Dobbs and others “with big microphones,” he noted, had repeatedly reminded viewers that Ramos had been nominated by his co-workers in 2005 for Border Patrol Agent of the Year. Yet they never mentioned that he had been arrested two times for domestic violence, in 1996 and 2002, and suspended from the Border Patrol, in 2003, for not reporting what had happened. (The charges were dropped, but Ramos was required to take a court-mandated anger management class.) More frustrating, he said, were the allegations that he was eager to lock up Border Patrol agents for doing their jobs. “Agents have shot their weapons at least fourteen times in the El Paso sector since I’ve been U.S. attorney,” Sutton said. “On three occasions, they killed the suspect. Every time, the agents came forward and explained why they had used deadly force. And in every instance—except this one—it was ruled justifiable.”

Some thoughts on all of this:

1) There is a lot of emotion on this issue coming from the defenders of the shooters. Illegal immigration. Drugs. Wanting to believe in those who are sworn to protect the law. None of these are relevant to the facts in the case. And some of this is starting to sound a tad Grassy Knollish (bladed stance! bladed stance!)

2) Was the sentence too stiff? Yes. But that was what the statute dictated, and it is common for prosecutors to throw in the max in order to encourage the defense to plea bargain. They were offered to have everything but obstruction tossed out. They chose to throw the dice, and lost.

3) They lied. They filed false reports. They removed evidence. They never mentioned a ‘shiny object’ until after they were arrested.

They had zero credibility. And BTW, they already lost on appeal.

4) I have seen no actual evidence that this was a political prosecution, that the US Attorney was taking marching orders from Mexico, or that anyone actually wanted anything except for this case to go away. And the whole agents v. drug dealer credibility test misses the fact that you also have to disbelieve four other BP agants, the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department on the say-so of Lou Dobbs and WND. Paging Fox Mulder…

And Sutton in particular doesn’t deserve the mindless abuse he’s had to endure.

5) Ramos got a raw deal, having a worthless menace for a partner, and covering for him. I’m sure that he thought that Compean was in danger when he fired (one shot, one hit as opposed to Compean who couldn’t hit a barn with a bazooka). I would have no problem with commutation (as opposed to pardon) in his case.

6) Yes, those are just excerpts. It’s longer, but still worth the time if you’re interested.

7) And we can agree to disagree. At least I can.

One theme that rightfully seems to keep coming up lately here and among the GOP as a whole is the problems with the election process. The number of subjects include:

Early primaries in states not representative of the party as a whole
Leapfrogging primaries
Lack of a 50 state strategy
Apathy among supporters of underdog candidates
Depressed turnout in western states
Open primaries with crossover voters
Financial disclosure in campaign contributions
Voter fraud

Okay, I might have added some. But the fact is that there is a serious set of problems-and also an opportunity. One of the worst ‘reforms’ instituted by our late-not-so-great candidate was his Campaign Finance ‘reform’. And for the record, whenever a Democrat or one of their allies use the word reform, the quotation marks are required. They are and have been what they claim to be-the party of change. Of course, the Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Fascists were pretty much all about change as well. The thing that has historically given the GOP success is not change, or conservatism, or persuasion, but Reform. From Reagan’s tax cuts to Gingrich’s Contract With America, if we run as the Party of Reform, we win. And there is no better issue right now than this one.

First principles:

I tend to believe that we live in a center/right nation, that all things being equal, would respond to a dynamic center/right party over an elitist leftist party addicted to power and non-mainstream dogma. And the way to do this is to focus on issues and solutions that unify our party, that speak to the electorate as a whole, and that divide them and us from the party in power. It worked for Gingrich, and for Reagan before him. What I propose would hopefully not only expand and strengthen our party internally, but also attract switch voters, uncommiteds, and even third parties.

Financial disclosure in campaign contributions
Voter fraud

If there is one thing that the last election showed it was the idiocy of thinking that the Democrats’ (and that other guy’s) finance ‘reform’ would take money out of politics. Leaving aside the rise of the Soroses of the world, the fact that The One could essentially buy the election with donations from totally unknown sources shows the need for Congressional action. The GOP leadership needs to press for a bill to mandate full disclosure in real time of any and all contributions, especially over the Internet. They should also press for hearings over the systemic vote fraud attempted by ACORN. Whether this is successful or not, it would set the tone for the 2010 elections.

Open primaries with crossover voters

On the open primaries-there is little to be done about crossover voting. The best we can do is set a time limit on how soon before said primaries you can change party affiliation. Possibly the RNC can pressure the state parties to do so, but this will have to be a local matter.

Early primaries in states not representative of the party as a whole
Leapfrogging primaries
Lack of a 50 state strategy
Apathy among supporters of underdog candidates
Depressed turnout in western states

On these problems, there may be a solution-proportional voting with instant runoffs. The early Iowa caucuses and primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, etc. may give a certain candidate momentum, but it wouldn’t be that much of a long run problem with proportional representation. And if states like Michigan and Florida wish to move their primaries up, let them as long as the votes are broken down proportionally. Proportional representation also would encourage western states like Kali where a voter’s preferred candidate wouldn’t already be eliminated on Super Tuesday before the polls even close. As far as instant runoffs- Let’s say you are a Fredhead who REALLY hates McCain. Or a Romney supporter who can’t STAND McCain. Or a Huckabee supporter who despises Mormons (just kidding). With instant runoffs, you vote for your preferred candidate, and a second choice. If your preferred candidate gets less than a certain percentage (15%, whatever the equivalent of two delegates is, or something like that) he is eliminated and your second choice vote is counted. This would encourage supporters of underdog candidate to vote their hearts AND their heads. And it would strengthen the efforts of superior candidates who are being triangulated out of the race.

As far as the general election, putting proportional voting and instant runoffs into effect instantly turn it into a 50 state battle. It also gives reason for Republicans on the west coast to get out and vote even if they know their guy isn’t going to carry the state. On top of that, it encourages third parties to get out and do their thing-and tells them who is fighting for the right to do so.

I believe if the GOP adopted this it would be effective both politically and electoraly. Like I said, go back to being what has always won for us.

The Party of Reform.