From the Front Lines of the Culture Wars

In the August 3rd Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Jay Richards and James Robison joined the latest skirmish in the culture wars. They argued that the reaction against Chick-fil-A constitutes an “ominous attack on religious freedom,” worse even than the threat posed by Obamacare (no details here, presumably they refer to the mandate for health insurers to provide free contraceptives). 

Richards and Robison are co-authors of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late.” The title subtly hints, I think, at the authors’ position on the cultural issues of the day.

The back story is important here. If you’re familiar with it, skip the next few paragraphs.

Chick-fil-A is by all accounts a highly successful fast food restaurant chain. As you probably already know, its specialty is chicken. There’s a Walmartian feel to the restaurants. The last time I dined at one, grandmotherly women were busing the tables (which, I gotta say, was a little weird).



Dan Cathy, President and COO
of Chick-fil-A

 Chick-fil-A is owned by the Cathy family, which espouses a fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christianity. The family’s religious beliefs underpin its decision to close their restaurants on Sundays. I think it’s fair to say the family intentionally wraps its religion around the Chick-fil-A brand name. Through its nonprofit, the Winshape Foundation, the family has contributed to Exodus International and Focus on the Family, both of which see homosexuality as sinful and attempt to re-orient gay persons away from a gay lifestyle (I won’t attempt to discuss their methods). Most gay people see these groups as inherently anti-gay.

The chain of events that made Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-A’s president, a lightning rod for the same-sex marriage debate is a bit mysterious, suggesting perhaps a slow week for news. On July 16^th the Baptist Press re-posted a story about Dan Cathy that was originally published in the Biblical Recorder newspaper. Somehow it was picked up by the national media, including CNN, and then spread quickly through social media. Here are the lines from the Biblical Recorder story that caused the disturbance in the Force:

"Well, guilty as charged" said Cathy when asked about the company's position.

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”

 

Granted there are a few code words here, for instance, “biblical definition of the family unit,” but generally this is pretty tame stuff.

Then someone uncovered a June 16^th phone interview with Dan Cathy on The Ken Coleman Show, a syndicated radio show. On this date the show’s theme was Father’s Day. Dan Cathy started with some standard stuff on fatherhood, offered up a few nuggets of homespun wisdom, such as, single-parent families are “emotionally handicapped,” then culminated with this warning:

“…we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage. And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude that thinks we have the audacity to redefine what marriage is all about.”

OK, that’s more like it. Any time you bring in the wrath of God, you’re likely to ruffle a few feathers. Again, no explicit mention of same-sex marriage, but everyone understands what he was talking about.

The next thing you know several northern mayors and the odd alderman are making bombastic threats to impede Chick-fil-A’s expansion into their cities, former Governor Huckabee organizes a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” and various gay-lesbian groups attempt a national boycott of Chick-fil-A.  And, oh, a lot of same-sex couples post photos of public displays of affection with Chick-fil-A signs in the background.

Back to Richards and Robison’s WSJ editorial…their beef in this latest skirmish of the culture wars is that supporters of same-sex marriage have conspired to intimidate Dan Cathy, and by doing so infringe his freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Richards and Robison specifically call it an attack on religious speech, implying religious speech is a special and protected class of speech.  

For the record Dan Cathy is very clear that while Chick-fil-A is operated according to “biblical principles,” it is a private business, not a religious organization; so the operation of the business cannot be construed as a religious activity.

There’s not much question that the threat of the big-city mayors to deny future licenses or permits to Chick-fil-A would, if acted upon, pose a true free speech issue. As a practical matter few people seemed to take the mayors’ threats very seriously. To be generous I assume they were pandering to their political base.

Religious speech is speech, pure and simple. The Constitution does not distinguish religious speech from political speech. The 1^st Amendment specifically prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” What the 1^st Amendment does not do is protect an individual from the commercial or social repercussions of freely speaking; thus Dan Cathy’s public statements that God may punish the nation if it legalizes same-sex marriage and that proponents of same-sex marriage are prideful and arrogant is bound to lose Chick-fil-A customers. These same customers are under no obligation to differentiate Dan Cathy's personal opinions from Chick-fil-A’s corporate culture.

The exercise of free speech is not always free. Those of us who work directly with the public understand this. We generally temper what we say to avoid alienating the people whose goodwill our livelihood depends on. I’m a real estate agent. I cannot recall the last time I saw a fellow agent with a political bumper sticker on his car. We understand that no matter whose sticker we display, we’re likely to alienate half the people we meet. That’s not a good business plan.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, famous for its pink ribbon logo, learned much the same lesson earlier this year. It is (or was, I'm not sure) the largest charity dedicated to fighting women's breast cancer. In January it announced that it would no longer use Planned Parenthood clinics to provide breast cancer screening for poor and uninsured women (granted, Komen's actions were more than speech, but you get my point). Many Komen contibutors felt that defunding Planned Parenthood compromised Komen's mission in order to support the pro-life movement, which has made eradication of Planned Parenthood its priority.  Four days after it defunded Planned Parenthood, it reversed its decision. But the damage was done: Komen was no longer an unsullied champion of women's health, it was just another belligerent in the culture wars. Komen is still trying to repair the damage to both its reputation and pocket book.

Internally Chick-fil-A may have come to the conclusion that it should remain neutral in the gay marriage debate. I note that it issued the following press release on July 19^th, just as things were heating up in the media: "going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena."

Who is the Leftist of Them All?

On May 2nd Newt Gingrich finally—finally!—curtailed his presidential campaign.  It took about twenty-three minutes to say everything he wanted to say. His nth wife, Callista, stood mutely by his side.

He refused (or delayed) endorsing Mitt Romney. Instead, he asked rhetorically whether Mitt Romney was conservative enough to earn his endorsement, then attempted an answer saying it didn’t really matter because Barack Obama was “the most radical, leftist president in American history.”



Yea, I know...adolescent humor



So much for closing ranks. Don’t expect the Romney campaign to extend an olive branch to Gingrich. One month on, there is a sense that Newt’s star has permanently dipped below the horizon.

Rick Santorum was marginally more gracious in defeat than Gingrich. On May 7th he sent a late-night email to his supporters that it was now OK to sport Romney 2012 bumper stickers.


Rick Santorum, the man who put
 the "cool" back in the sweater vest

This conjures an image of Santorum at his desk at 1:30 AM, throwing back an oversized Scotch, muttering “fuck it,” and hitting send.

But back to Gingrich’s comments regarding Obama’s politics. I have been hearing the Obama is a radical-leftist-socialist from conservative sources since the last election. Still, I wonder, in a technical sense, is Gingrich correct? Is Obama, in fact, the most liberal president in history?

Rating a politician on the liberal-conservative scale is tricky business. Numerous interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union, publish their own ratings. These groups have dog in the fight, so one may reasonably question how unbiased their ratings are.

 National Journals's 2007
 "Most Liberal" Senator of the Year

The National Journal (NJ), which enjoys a reputation for neutrality, has rated Congress since 1981. NJ’s methodology involves cherry picking the key roll-call votes during a calendar year that demonstrate political ideology (and obviously introduces its own bias in the process). It stepped into a political maelstrom during the last presidential election cycle, when it rated then-Senator Obama the most liberal senator in 2007 five days before the Super Tuesday primaries. Senator John McCain jumped on this tidbit, declaiming "It's hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left."

Closer inspection reveals a more nuanced story. Obama had missed 33 of the 99 roll-call votes NJ used in its ratings system. Meanwhile McCain had missed too many votes to be rated in 2007. Obama only voted differently than Senator Hilary Clinton twice, yet she was rated the 16th most liberal while he was the 1st most liberal, a distinction without much difference. In 2005 and 2006 NJ rated Obama, respectively, the 16th and 10th most liberal senator.

Political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal partnered in the 1980s to develop a sophisticated political mapping method which today goes by the acronym DW-NOMINATE (Dynamic Weighted Nominal Three-Step Estimation). Their methodology is not for the statistically faint-of-heart. I refer those curious for background to Keith Poole’s blog Voteview. Suffice it to say that DW-NOMINATE is today’s gold standard for rating politicians.

Using DW NOMINATE Poole and Rosenthal analyzed roll-call votes from the 1st Congress onward on a 2-dimensional scale, where the x-axis represents the traditional left-right position on economic issues, and the y-axis is the position on important regional and social issues (e.g., slavery, civil rights). Poole and Rosenthal infer the position of presidents and presidential candidates from the votes of Senators and Congressman with whom they were clearly aligned.

To get a sense of the party dynamics within the U.S. Congress, watch Voteview's video The History of American Politics in Two Minutes. Note that in the past thirty years the overlap between Republican and Democratic members of Congress has disappeared. The parties have grown further apart and more cohesive. The just-published 2012 values survey by the Pew Research Center reports the same widening gap between registered Republican and Democatic voters.


The smoothed histogram below illustrates the distribution of Senators and Congressmen along the traditional left-right economic scale in 2007. By the way the DW-NOMINATE score represents a poltician's cumulative voting record. Senators Clinton and Obama effectively fell on top of each other. Their score of -0.43 puts them slightly to the left of the typical Democrat. Senator McCain with a score of +0.33 was slightly to the left of a typical Republican. Nonetheless, in the year these three Senators ran for president, each represented the political mainstream for his/her respective party. On the other hand President George W. Bush's score of +0.76 put him on the far-right of the Republican Party.



DW-NOMINATE scores for 2007 Congress on the
 traditional liberal-conservative economic scale

 With the success of Tea Party candidates in 2010, the Republican Party has undoubtedly shifted towards Bush, which makes it all the more curious that the current Republican Party largely repudiates its last and most conservative president.


Poole and Rosenthal used the DW-NOMINATE method to score the political position of presidents from World War II forward (shown below). The remarkable observation here is that Obama's presidency so far has proved to be the least liberal of any Democratic president since and including Harry Truman. He is still liberal, but as the chief executive he has governed more moderately than he previously legislated as a senator. Meanwhile the Republican presidents starting with Eisenhower have moved steadily to the right.




DW-NOMINATE scores for presidents from 1945 to present
 (based on roll-call votes on which a president clearly articulated his position)

 There's an old saw that if you repeat something often enough, it must be true. This seems to apply to Republican claims regarding Obama's politics. As a political tactic, it has a long and disreputable history. But undoubtedly it can be effective. For historical perspective here's Lyndon Johnson's infamous "Daisy" attack ad from 1964. It was part of a concerted effort to convince voters that the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

There is considerable irony in this whole Obama-leftist-socialist thing: the Republican Party moves away from the political center, then complains that the Democratic president is too far from the political center, and, thus, not truly American. Ah, such is poilitcs. This is why we need the occasional reality check.

Whatever you think about President Obama's leadership quaities, he is clearly not the closet socialist his opponents would have us believe. He continues the moderate liberal tradition of Democratic presidents going back to Harry Truman.

Does America Need A DREAM Act?

Lady Liberty

What is this land America, so many travel there.
I'm going now while I'm still young, my darling meet me there.
Wish me luck my lovely, I'll send for you when I can;
And we'll make our home in the American land

American Land, Verse 1 by Bruce Springsteen

DREAM Act = Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act

If the DREAM Act has a poster child, Staff Sergeant Luis Lopez is probably it. The Wall Street Journal published his story in February 2011. In brief, his parents brought him to the U.S. as an eight year old in 1990. They overstayed their tourist visa. He grew up in Los Angeles. After high school he used fake documents to enlist in the U.S. Army, eventually serving ten years, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. By all accounts he was a brave and competent soldier. In December 2010 Sergeant Lopez told his army superiors that he was an illegal alien and was applying for U.S. citizenship. When an army official referenced his fake enlistment documents as evidence that he had not served honorably, it put his citizenship application in jeopardy.  Fortunately for Sergeant Lopez, his commanding officer went to bat for him, and he was eventually granted citizenship.


Sergeant Luis Lopez

Sergeant Lopez’s story is far from unique. Out of an illegal immigrant population of 11 million, there are about 765,000 who came to the U.S. before the age of sixteen and effectively grew up “American.” Approximately 65,000 young adults in this category graduate from high school each year. They inhabit a kind of legal-cultural limbo: they identify as American, yet they cannot legally work in the U.S. Furthermore, current immigration policy makes it almost impossible for them to ever live and work legally in the U.S.


[Note: Posted population estimates for illegal immigrants vary considerably, so these statistics are a bit fuzzy, but adequate for this discussion]


It was to help people like Sergeant Lopez that the DREAM Act was first proposed in 2001. It provides a path to U.S. citizenship for this subgroup of illegal immigrants. There are conditions. They must have entered the U.S. before age sixteen, lived continuously in the U.S. for five years, graduate from high school, possess good moral character, and either serve in the military or attend a four-year college for two years. Do all this and they earn six years of conditional legal residency; successfully complete their degree program or military service, and they may apply for permanent legal status. Bottom line: the DREAM Act is not an easy road to citizenship.


The original DREAM Act did not pass in 2001. An amended version passed the House during the lame duck session of Congress in 2010, however, it could not muster sixty Senate votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. While the bill’s sponsors tried to narrow the scope of the DREAM Act, and so keep it apart from the larger questions regarding immigration and border policy, it seems the two cannot be easily separated.


Polling data suggests the country is split on immigration policy. According to Pew Research Center, 29% of Americans think the highest priority is better border security, 24% think it is a path to citizenship, and 48% think border security and a path to citizenship are equal priorities. 

 

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona),
former presidential candidate
 and well-known maverick


Originally the DREAM Act had sponsors on both sides of the political aisle. Today support for the act closely follows party line, with Republicans, especially those associated with the Tea Party, opposing the act, and Democrats supporting it. It is noteworthy that such Republican stalwarts as Senators McCain (R-AZ), Kyl (R-AZ), and Graham (R-SC) recently changed their position on the DREAM Act, most likely in response to pressure from the Tea Party wing. John McCain had co-sponsored the DREAM Act in 2007.

Fundamentally the DREAM Act is about American values. It forces us to ask What do we think about immigrants? and Do illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. as children merit special consideration for citizenship?

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama),
leading opponent of the DREAM Act

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) lead the Senate opposition against the DREAM Act, declaiming in late 2010, “This bill is a law that at its fundamental core is a reward for illegal activity.” It is noteworthy that Session’s home state, Alabama, recently passed the most draconian anti-immigrant legislation. Prior to the last vote on the DREAM Act, he circulated a memo outlining reasons to oppose the act. He argued that the act would encourage more illegal immigration, lead to mass chain immigration, and saddle taxpayers with more federal debt. In his worldview illegal immigrants enter the U.S. to pursue criminal activity, such as running guns or drugs, and to suck on the public teat. Session’s unspoken goal, and the goal of the recent Alabama legislation, is to create conditions so noxious and restrictive that illegal immigrants will self deport, a term that recently surfaced in Mitt Romney's  presidential primary campaign.

Missing entirely from Senator Session’s calculus is the long term economic value of immigrants and the moral question posed by people like Sergeant Lopez. The famous line inscribed on the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,”

The 1920's revival of the KKK
migrated north and introduced
the quaint tradition of crossburning

carries no significance or weight. And whether a child raised in the U.S. has the language skills, cultural understanding, and social network to survive in his/her country of origin is a question apparently not worthy of consideration. Context is important, so it should not be forgotten that the drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives, and being deported to that country is not like being deported to Sweden.

For the student of history the current anti-immigration fever is reminiscent of the nativist movement of the early 20^th century, which culminated in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. It capped immigration of what many Americans then thought of as less-than-desirable Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe. It was closely associated with the 1920s revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

I docked at Ellis Island in the city of light and spire.
I wandered to the valley of red-hot steel and fire.
We made the steel that built the cities with the sweat of our two hands.
We made our home in the American land.

American Land, Verse 4 by Bruce Springsteen

President Ronald Reagan believed
immigrants represent an essential
American value

What is perhaps most ironic in all this is that a political generation ago President Reagan, the conservative’s conservative, championed a path to citizenship through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.  Speaking in a 1984 debate, President Reagan said “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” He appreciated that people who immigrate to the U.S. overwhelmingly seek personal liberty and economic opportunity. He understood that the passion and energy of new immigrants helps grow the economy. He also saw the large illegal immigrant population as rife for exploitation, which greatly troubled him.



Many of those who knew and worked with Reagan have expressed their belief that Reagan would strongly endorse today’s DREAM Act. For him it would embody the American values represented by the Statue of Liberty. It would provide the most worthy subgroup of illegal immigrants with an opportunity to share the American dream. It would chip away at the population of easily exploited illegal immigrants. Finally, he would see the future contributions of DREAM Act children as both strengthening our economy and reinforcing traditional American values.

So, yes America, we need a DREAM Act.

The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too*,
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews,
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below.

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin;
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind; They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now;
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out.

American Land, Verses 4 and 5 by Bruce Springsteen


* Bruce Springsteen's mother's maiden name was Zerilli.


Here's Springsteen and the E Street Band playing a footstomping, kickass rendition of American Land.

Miraculum Texanum

What the federal government should (or should not) do to stimulate job growth is shaping up to be the major political issue of the 2012 presidential election. Given the stakes we need to examine critically all claims from candidates that he or she knows how to do it. Governor Perry proposes that the nation model itself after Texas. This is my "take" on his proposal

With much fanfare Governor Rick Perry announced for the 2012 presidential race in mid-August. Along with his announcement came much commentary about the wonders of Texas, and, notably, its economic success since June 2009.

What’s special about June 2009? Officially that’s the month the Great Recession ended, i.e., the economy registered a statistical uptick. This is mostly of academic interest. With persistent 9% national unemployment most Americans believe we are still in the recession that started in December 2007.

Assuming there’s some validity to June 2009 as a starting point, Texas leads all states in the post-recession jobs race. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Texas added 262,700 non-farm jobs from the end of the recession through April 2011. This works out to about 55% of the nation’s job growth. Pretty impressive.

Naturally Governor Perry takes credit for this (I would in his shoes). Among the factors Perry and his supporters cite: low state taxes, tort reform (under Perry’s watch), no housing bust (due to regulations put into effect after the 1980’s S & L crisis), right-to-work laws, pro-business regulatory environment (except possibly the aforementioned mortgage regulations), and a commitment to small government.

Here’s a sampler from Governor Perry on this subject…

“The fact is government doesn’t create jobs, otherwise the last 2½ years of stimulus would have worked.”

“My message Mr. President (a rhetorical device, President Obama was not in the room), set the people free, set the people free to get back to work, set the people free from these regulations.”

Few things in life are black & white, and the same can be said about economics. Yes, Texas created jobs, but its unemployment stood at 8.5% this past August: not much better than the national average of 9.2%, slightly worse than 8.2% in Pennsylvania (my home state), and significantly worse than the 7.4% rate in ex-Governor Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts.

Pennsylvania, in fact, was the #3 job creator since the recession’s end. Its 93,200 new jobs is well behind Texas, but its population is roughly half of Texas. Correct for population difference and Pennsylvania theoretically would have produced 184,500 jobs to Texas’s 262,700—not too shabby.

Pennsylvania is no one’s first choice for small government. The Pennsylvania governor’s office changes from Democrat to Republican every eight years like clockwork. So what gives? Thanks to the much-ballyhooed Marcellus Shale formation and the new hydraulic fracturing techniques, Pennsylvania is now an energy producer. The Harrisburg Patriot News reported in May 2011 that Marcellus Shale accounted for 48,000 new hires in the year prior, which pretty much explains where the growth has come from.

Subsequently there has been much quibbling in the press over the "real" contribution of Marcellus Shale on Pennsylvania's economy. This is a separate discussion. Suffice it to say most Pennsylvanians see plenty of signs that Marcellus Shale has created a boom in the mostly rural areas where the drilling takes place.

Back to Texas…it has long been an oil producer, until recently in decline; now, like Pennsylvania, it’s enjoying a re-birth thanks in large part to drilling in its Barnett and Eagle Ford shale formations. With robust prices, the oil & gas industry is once again bery, bery good for the state of Texas (West Texas Intermediate crude is  currently $83.5 per barrel, down from $114 in May, but up from $25 when Perry first took office). Jobs in the oil & gas industry are growing 16%-18% annually. The NY Times reports that tax receipts from oil & gas alone run about $13 billion per year or 20% of the state budget. Considering this sector comprises only about 3% of the Texas workforce this is a remarkable number. Undoubtedly the prosperity of the oil & gas industry spills over into other sectors of the Texas economy.

Interestingly government employment grew by 35,800 during the post-recession period or 14% of total jobs created, second only behind oil & gas (mining). In itself not particularly remarkable but remember Governor Perry is head cheerleader for small government, which ultimately translates into how many people depend on government for their paycheck. Public employees constitute nearly 18% of the non-farm workforce in Texas, whereas they are only 13% in Pennsylvania.

Outside of the energy sector Texas job growth seems directly tied to population growth. Texas grew 20.6% in the first decade of this century, whereas Pennsylvania grew a mere 3.4%. Population growth goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. This raises a chicken or egg question: in the case of Texas, did population growth create new jobs or did new jobs bring population growth?

Texas vs US Unemployment From Start of the Great Recession

The short answer is population growth has driven job growth. There are two parts to the supporting argument.

Part I…Texas’s unemployment rate has closely tracked the national unemployment rate both before and after the recession (see chart). This suggests that the fortunes of its economy are still largely subject to the same macroeconomic forces buffeting the whole country. Yes, Texas is creating new jobs during the post recession but not fast enough to sop up the influx of new workers, hence persistently high unemployment. In short there’s not much evidence that “small government” politics in & of itself has created an economic miracle in Texas: a lot of Texans are still out of work.

Part II…While Texas has experienced rapid population growth, over half of this growth is natural, i.e., more births than deaths. Turns out Texas’s birth rate (number of births per 1000) is significantly higher than the U.S. as a whole and most of this can be attributed to Texas’s Hispanic population for whom large families are the norm. According to the Texas Department of Health Services the 2006 Hispanic birth rate of 23.3 was almost twice the "white" birth rate of 12.7. International immigration, mostly from Mexico and Central America, makes up another quarter of the population growth. The remainder is due to migration from other parts of the U.S. This last number is significant—by itself it represents more growth than my state of Pennsylvania sees from all sources—on the other hand it doesn’t suggest that the rest of the U.S. is rushing pell-mell to work in Texas.

Sources of Texas Population Growth 2000-2010
 (from presentation by The Office of the State (Texas) Demographer)

As the NY Times reported in February 2011, the real story here is the rise of the Hispanic population, which comprised roughly two-thirds of Texas’s growth during the last decade. Hispanics continue to cross the border in large numbers (I must presume mostly illegally) and have more kids than “whites.” Texas is now 38% Hispanic, which some say is a tipping point both culturally and politically.

Texas has taken a relatively accommodating stand towards illegal immigration (witness the heat Perry has taken on this subject in the recent GOP debates). In combination with the critical mass of Hispanic people already in the state, it creates a powerful dynamic that draws people, especially Hispanics, to the state. In short, Texas is a “happening place.”

Those that want to see a miracle in the performance of the Texas economy will likely find it. To my mind it’s much more complicated. Texas likely is more overtly business friendly in terms of tax policy and regulations than many other states, but it’s also blessed with natural resources and a unique set of circumstances that has created a Hispanic population boom. Without energy and population boom it’s not clear that Texas as an economic model has anything to offer the rest of the country.

Notes: 

• The source of the jobs and population data is either the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the U.S. Census; in some cases my figures came from a secondary source, such as the NY Times, that referenced the primary source.
• There has been much commentary on jobs growth and the so-called Texas miracle. I note that different reporters used different time periods for counting post-recession job growth. Unless otherwise noted I used June 2009 to April 2011.
• I used non-farm employment figures and so has most everyone who has reported on this issue. I'm not expert enough on employment statistics to explain why. Here I'm just following the crowd.
• Finally there are two ways reporters have "measured" Texas job growth. They reported the jobs increase in Texas as a percentage of a) the net jobs increase for the entire nation, or b) the sum of the  jobs figures only for those states which registered positive job growth. I used a) and frankly don't understand the significance of b). In both cases Texas comes out smelling like the proverbial rose.

The Sword of Injustice

As reported by this morning's Wall Street Journal, an Indonesian maid working in Saudi Arabia was executed for murdering her employer with a kitchen knife. There aren't many details available. In a separate article the BBC News mentions the woman committed the purported crime "after suffering abuse," suggesting that the trial  uncovered mitigating circumstances (I assume there was a trial of some kind...am I being naive?).

The woman's name was Ruyati binti Sapubi. Apparently the court gave little weight to the abuse the woman likely had suffered or the possibility that she was defending herself from further abuse. The Saudi authorities determined that justice would be served and the world made safer with this woman's execution. She was beheaded with a sword in the city of Mecca. It is not known whether her head was then put on a pike and paraded through the city as a warning to other foreign domestics. We can only hope that her executioner was more skilled than the murderer of Daniel Pearl in 2002.

This morning I learned that there are upwards of 1.5 million Indonesians working in Saudi Arabia, the majority of whom are women working as maids. On the face of it their condition of employment seems hardly better than indentured servitude. Given Saudi Arabia's patriarchal state and creepy brand of puritanical Islam, this situation seems ripe for the exploitation of women.

Indonesia is complicit in this unseemly arrangement as it enjoys the money this army of maids sends home to bolster its economy. The Wiki entry also suggests that Indonesia was hesitant to demand greater accountability from the Saudis for fear they might restrict the number of Indonesians it allows to make the hajj, the annual pilgrammage to Mecca. However, the public dismemberment of Ruyati binti Sapubi appears to have crossed a line and Indonesia has now announced a moratorium on sending more of its women to cook the Saudis' meals starting August 1st.

The Saudis for their part have apologized profusely and promised not to behead any more maids for awhile.

My Tea Party Rant

“…I find cheap populism oddly arousing.” Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

As we stumble down the home stretch to the mid-term elections, it’s Tea Party this, and Tea Party that...maybe it’s time we take a close look at this political movement and its various (mostly) self-identified candidates. 

Exactly what do these folks represent?  Are they your standard issue libertarians—low taxes, small government, no foreign entanglements, and legalized marijuana—folks who typically disdain both of the established political parties?  Are they Republicans on steroids—an arch conservative social agenda married to laissez faire economics?  Or, fundamentally, are they an expression of the national id--angry people shouting to an indifferent heaven, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” (quote from the 1976 film Network)?

For those who didn’t see Network during its original theatrical release, Howard Beale is a fictional evening news anchor who is fired for poor ratings.  He doesn’t take it well. During one of his final broadcasts he threatens to kill himself on air.  Immediately pulled by the network, he is given a reprieve to make a dignified farewell.  Instead he uses his last evening on air to declaim that life is “bullshit.”  Ratings go through the roof.  Suddenly Beale is a marketable commodity and he keeps his job.  Later when he broadcasts “I’m mad as hell…,” it becomes a rallying cry for the discontented all over America.

...which gets us to this weird connect between the event credited with igniting the Tea Party phenomenon and the Howard “I’m mad as hell…” Beale character.  On February 19, 2009 Rick Santelli, a CNBC analyst and former derivatives trader, is asked on air what he thinks about the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan.  This was the Obama administration’s attempt to keep financially-strapped subprime borrowers in their homes.   Santelli, reporting from the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, was waiting for this pitch.  He jumped into a tirade during which he called foreclosed homeowners “losers,” complained that he and the good people on the trading floor with him would be paying their (irresponsible) neighbor’s mortgage, compared the present USA to Cuba, and threatened to organize a Chicago Tea Party.  It was good TV and generally a lot of fun to watch (see below). 

Before you know it Santelli’s 5-minute rant, as it became know, went viral. White, irate, middle-aged Americans began decrying Obama’s creeping socialism and buying “Don’t Tread on Me” paraphernalia.  There is some question as to whether this was a staged event, what is known in lobbying circles as “astroturfing,” i.e., faking a grass roots event, but I’ll give Santelli the benefit of the doubt that he was genuinely venting his frustrations. 

Still, there’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy when a Wallstreet insider, like Santelli, berates overextended homeowners and conveniently ignores the Wallstreet institutions that primarily benefitted (to the tune of $700 billion) from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). 

Jon Stewart brought some balance to the debate when he aired his counter-rant on March 5^th.  As political satire it deserves an A+, simultaneously deflating Santelli’s balloon and making CNBC reporting team ("the best of the best") out to be a bunch of smug journalistic hacks.

But I digress…not many white, irate, middle-aged Americans are likely to give The Daily Show much credence, or, for that matter, watch it.

As it stands now, 19 months or so after the Santelli rant, the Tea Party movement has divided the Republican Party into candidates who owe everything to the movement, e.g., Christine O’Donnell, and “establishment” candidates who had viable campaigns whether or not they garnered Tea Party support.  If the former have success in November, we’re likely to see more of the same…so let’s look at what they stand for beyond the anti-tax rhetoric.

Rand Paul--Tea Party candidate for
U.S. Senate in Kentucky

Of the better known names, Christine O’Donnell, the GOP Senate nominee in Delaware, is a prima facie flake, or, to quote Karl Rove, “There were a lot of nutty things she has been saying that don’t add up.”  Let’s invoke the mercy rule and move on.

Rand Paul is seemingly a more substantive Senate candidate in Kentucky.  His dad, Congressman Ron Paul, is probably the best-known libertarian politician in the country.  It’s pretty clear Rand is a chip off the old block.  In the world of Ayn Randian libertarians, which presumably Rand would count himself among, the free market solves all ills.  Any use of government power to regulate markets and restrict personal freedom is a step towards socialism, which may explain why Tea Partiers throw this word around so casually. It goes without saying, then, that taxes should be low, so as not to feed the government “beast.”

While I appreciate the libertarian world view as a sometimes useful counterweight to solving all societal problems through legislation; in the mind of true believers, like Rand, the logic of undiluted libertarianism has profound consequences.  Name a large federal program, federal institution, or international organization and Rand probably wants it abolished, including the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security, Medicare, Federal Reserve, IRS, NATO, UN, WTO…you get the point. 

Lester Maddox autographing
ax handles

To cite specific examples of his thinking…Rand Paul sees environmental issues as essentially questions of private property, i.e., own a mountaintop in western KY and want to extract coal by lopping the top off and dumping it in the valley—it ain’t nobody’s business if I do.  Government action to restrict greenhouse gases is a leftist conspiracy against capitalism. Obama was too tough on BP Oil—in Rand’s own words “maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

On civil rights Rand channels the ghost of Lester Maddox, the Georgian restaurateur who won notoriety and eventually the governor’s office by brandishing ax handles at the door of his Pickrick Cafe to keep out would-be black patrons. Rand contends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies only to publicly funded institutions, not to private businesses like the former Pickrick Cafe. He would apply the same logic to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership."       from Louisville Courier-Journal interview with Rand Paul

Rand Paul advocates open carrying of firearms and is endorsed by the Gun Owners of America.  I cite this group as it's goes quite a bit beyond the NRA, believing that gun ownership is a Christian duty in order to resist an “unconstitutional” federal government.  Needless to say, this group has much in common with the militia-survivalist crowd.   



A creepy Brownshirt wannabe
at a Kentucky Rand Paul rally

 

[Writing these lines I recall Meleanie Hain, the mom in central PA who garnered 15 minutes of fame toting a pistol to her daughter’s soccer game.  The other parents as well as local law enforcement didn’t take well to this.  A legal brouhaha ensued.  About a year later her husband murdered her with a handgun and then killed himself.]

Rand Paul declares himself “100% pro life,” and opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest.  It follows that he’s no fan of embryonic stem cell research.  By the way, neither of these positions is particularly libertarian. 

In fact, on a host of other social issues Rand Paul is more arch conservative than libertarian.  He wants to construct some sort of underground electric fence across our southern border and rescind the portion of the 14^th amendment granting citizenship to persons born in the United States (this is the Citizenship Clause, the purpose of which was to overturn the Dred Scott decision which held that black people could not become U.S. citizens). He insists on characterizing illegal Latino immigrants as criminals.  While technically true—obviously they’re breaking a law by crossing the border—their motivation for entering the country is the same as every immigrant group that has preceded them: to build a better life for themselves and their family.
  

Apparently he once favored legalizing medical marijuana, a common libertarian position, but more recently changed his mind (maybe his original position doesn’t sell well in Kentucky). 

No big surprise, Rand opposes any kind of gay marriage. And I'm not even going to look up his position on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.



Sharron Angle--Tea Party candidate
for U.S. Senate from Nevada

 Moving westward we find Sharron Angle, like Rand Paul a pure product of the Tea Party movement, now neck-in-neck with Harry Reid for his U.S. Senate seat.  Her positions on economic and social issues are substantially the same as Rand Paul's.  Her public words and past affiliations suggest the roots of her politics come from the Christian Reconstructionist movement, the fundamental tenet of which is that present day American government does not conform with biblical law....Yea, I don't get it either, but apparently the bible prohibits such things as Social Security, education policy, property taxes, etc. Here's Sharron explaining it all in an April 2010 interview:

“And these programs that you mentioned — that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward — are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country, is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Rick Santelli probably cherishes his footnote in history as the standard bearer of the Tea Party movement, but what he got for his money, so-to-speak, is a bunch of wacko candidates for high office in places as disparate as Delaware, Kentucky, and Nevada.  These candidates share a quasi religion-inspired antipathy towards modern government.  And their solution, essentially, is tear it all apart. 

A NY Times survey of Tea Party backers showed most want smaller government. But here's the headscratcher: in follow-up interviews this same group rejected cuts in Medicare and Social Security, the two largest entitlement programs.  So how then do you make government smaller?  Here's the thought process of Jodine White, a 62-year old Californian, one of the survey participants:

"That's a conundrum, isn't it?  I don't know what to say.  Maybe I don't want smaller government.  I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.  I didn't look at it from the perspective of losing the things I need. I think I've changed my mind." 

Well, Jodine, this is grown-up thinking and it's what the rest of the Tea Partiers need to do.