Don't Believe the Reapportionment Hype

 

BY REID WILSON

Thursday, December 23, 2010 | 6:27 a.m.

MAX WHITTAKER/STRINGER

Nevada, a perennial battleground, is one of the western states that picked up a congressional seat in the latest reapportionment.

The decennial census has told the same story for the better part of a century--it's a story of exodus from the Northeastern and Midwestern regions and of an exploding South and West, a migration from the cold winters of industrial demise toward the bright sun of economic innovation. But although the media says the population shifts indicate a change in the partisan balance of power, the real story is far more complex. No one should believe that Democrats have had their heads handed to them this decade.

Instead, the reapportionment process foretells a changing dynamic of American politics, one in which minority voters will play an increasingly important and influential role. The eight states that will gain House seats this year appear to give Republicans an advantage, but, in truth, the redistricting playing field is far more level.

Eight states--Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington state--will gain representation when the 113th Congress convenes in 2013, figures released on Tuesday by the Census Bureau showed. On its face, those states appear to give Republicans an advantage; they hold complete control of redistricting in all but Arizona and Washington, where bipartisan commissions will draw the new lines.

The outsized growth of those eight states, however, has come largely from dramatic increases in minority populations, particularly among Hispanic voters. Although exact data on race collected by the 2010 census won't be available for a few months, trends and the American Community Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau, demonstrate that those predisposed toward voting for Democrats have constituted the bulk of the new population boosts.

Civil Rights Versus Partisan Gerrymandering

In six of the eight states, minorities now make up more than a quarter of the population. The 2000 census showed that Hispanics and African-Americans constituted 28 percent of the population in Arizona, 31 percent in Florida, 33 percent in Georgia, and a whopping 43 percent in Texas. That growth has continued; the ACS estimated that those groups now make up more than 33 percent of Arizona's population, 36 percent of Florida's, 37 percent of Georgia's, and 47 percent of Texas's. The 2010 census will certainly show those numbers growing again.

Legislators drawing boundaries will have to account for these minority populations, thanks to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision requires certain states and jurisdictions to "preclear" district boundaries with the Justice Department in order to allow for majority-minority districts. Section 5 applies to Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas (it also applies to Louisiana, which is losing a seat this year). This means that those states will have to ensure that their burgeoning Hispanic and African-American populations will have the chance to be districted together in largely Democratic areas. Although such districts already exist, larger minority populations in many cases mean that Republican-held districts will include more voters predisposed toward voting for Democrats.

It's important to note that majority-minority districts aren't always guaranteed Democratic seats. In 2010, Reps. Ciro Rodriguez and Solomon Ortiz, both Texas Democrats, lost to Republican challengers in districts in which more than 65 percent of the population is Hispanic. Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Ga., whose district has a narrowly African-American plurality, barely escaped an upset.

But it's also true that characterizing the nation's eight big-growth states as Republican misses a broader change in American politics: Minority voters and changing demographic trends mean that those states are less reliably GOP than they have been. Washington state is solidly blue, resisting even the 2010 wave toward the Republicans. Florida and Nevada are perennial battlegrounds. President Obama's 2008 campaign saw fleeting signs of hope even in Arizona, the home state of his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain. In 2012, Arizona will certainly top Democratic target lists. And with the exploding Hispanic population, some Republican strategists are worrying about their chances for maintaining their grip on Texas's Electoral College votes over the long run.

The history of reapportionment and redistricting also demonstrates that partisan control of a state's district boundaries means less than the controlling party might hope.

Drawn Into Failure

Consider the last decennial redistricting, when, as now, eight states gained seats and 10 states lost seats. In 2002, the first year in which new lines were employed, Republicans picked up eight House seats nationwide, giving then-Speaker Dennis Hastert a GOP majority of 229 seats. Some of the Republicans who entered the 108th Congress as freshmen looked safe for the long haul--Rick Renzi of Arizona, Bob Beauprez of Colorado, Max Burns of Georgia, Tom Feeney of Florida, and Jon Porter of Nevada.

None is in Congress now. Renzi was indicted on corruption charges; Beauprez lost a governor's race in humiliating fashion; and Burns, Feeney, and Porter lost reelection bids. In the 111th Congress, Democrats held all five of those seats.

The seats first created for the 2002 elections were, largely, swing seats. This year's midterms returned Republicans to four of the five seats. (Only Rep. Ed Perlmutter, the Colorado Democrat, survived.)

Republican success in the 2010 midterms extended so dramatically to state legislatures that the party now controls the redistricting process for 196 seats, four times the number of seats over which Democrats have complete control. But courts have shown an aversion to blatantly partisan gerrymandering not sanctioned by the Voting Rights Act, and if independent voters have proven anything in the last three election cycles, it is that their partisan loyalties are fickle.

In other words, reapportionment by itself is no guarantee that one party or another will reap major rewards. Instead, partisan results depend on data focusing on where minority populations have moved, and this information has yet to be released by the Census Bureau. Legislators themselves, who may hope to bolster their party's majority in Congress, will have to use their pens carefully. Draw a district that has only a small partisan advantage and run the risk of allowing a wave election to sweep a Democrat in office.

Democrats certainly could have gotten better news from the decennial reapportionment. Some of the party's stalwarts will undoubtedly be targets in states that are losing seats, such as Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. But rumors of a massive Republican sweep are misleading. In fact, in the long run, the voters who guaranteed Sun Belt states their new congressional seats will likely turn those states, slowly but surely, into promising Democratic targets.

History shows that the story of redistricting starts, not ends, with census, reapportionment, and redistricting.

Check out how difficult it is to draw your own districts, courtesy of an excellent game crafted for the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center: We could waste hours playing The ReDistricting Game.

Lawmakers seek cash during key votes

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) as the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He is a member of the committee, but not the chairman.

Political notables no longer

The 2010 midterm elections replaced a number of high-profile and influential lawmakers.

By Carol D. Leonnig and T.W. Farnam
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 26, 2010; 12:00 AM 
Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers' actions.
For three weeks in June, for instance, the members of a joint House and Senate committee worked to draft final rules for regulating the financial industry in the wake of its 2008 meltdown. During that time, the 35 members of the drafting committee collected $440,000 in donations from that same industry, which was then lobbying heavily for looser rules.
Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser - on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks to wealthy citizens and business interests.
Members of Congress contacted for this article declined to answer questions about ethics rules and the possible appearance of impropriety. Instead, they stressed that their votes can't be bought.
"Money has no influence on how Senator Baucus makes his decisions," Baucus spokeswoman Kate Downen said. "The only factor that determines Senator Baucus's votes is whether a policy is right for Montana and right for our country."
But ethics watchdogs complain that, in a race for money to help them win reelection, lawmakers routinely ignore congressional ethics rules that urge them to avoid fundraising around the same time that they are making key lawmaking decisions. The rules say that such sensitive timing could give the appearance that donors are improperly influencing decisions.
The Washington Post found that the pattern of crunch-time fundraising has continued this year, even after a congressional investigative office warned this summer that it could violate ethics rules. The Post analysis - using data from two nonprofit organizations, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation - scrutinized lawmakers involved in pushing key legislation and donations made to them by interested parties.
"Citizens generally feel this kind of thing falls between the bookends of 'icky' and 'bribery,' " said David Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, which charts campaign donations and special interest influence. "It makes people wonder: Is the donor making the donation because they are trying to get a particular legislative action? Or is the member soliciting the donation because they feel they have a whole bunch of special interests over a barrel at that moment and can profit from that?"
Members of Congress say that donations close to key votes are often coincidental. Some argue that because legislative action and fundraising happen all the time on Capitol Hill, it is impossible to know when the two are connected.
Ethics watchdogs say that instead of protesting their innocence, members should write clearer rules, disclose all fundraisers or both, in order to address public concern that monied donors are able to buy access at critical stages in lawmaking.
"What this reveals is just how much this is general operating procedure on Capitol Hill, raising money around key legislative decisions," said Nancy Watzman, who oversees analysis of political fundraisers for the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for government transparency. "This hits right to the core of how lawmakers get and keep their jobs. And they complain when you show the public how it works."
A test case
The issue of the timing of donations came up this summer when reports surfaced that eight members were under investigation by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. They had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from financial firms just before a critical House vote last December on new regulations for Wall Street. The ethics office was looking at whether they should have avoided those donations because of the potential for or appearance of impropriety.
Three cases, involving Reps. John Campbell (R-Calif.), Tom Price (R-Ga.) and Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), were referred to the House ethics committee, which last week asked for more time to investigate. All three have said that they complied with House ethics rules.
But just as the public learned of the ethics office's probe in June, a conference committee of House members and senators met to draft a compromise bill on landmark Wall Street reform. The measure would force firms to follow new rules for previously secret and risky transactions that were blamed for the 2008 market meltdown. Over the course of three weeks in June, the 35 conference committee members collected $440,000 in donations from the financial industry. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate banking committee and a powerful conferee, collected the most that month - about $90,000 from financial interests.
Executives of accounting giant Ernst & Young contributed the lion's share of that amount for Schumer: $49,000 in all of June, including $2,000 from chief executive James Turley. Ernst & Young works for some of the biggest firms on Wall Street. This week, New York state sued the company, accusing it of using a paperwork shuffle to help Lehman Brothers hide billions of dollars in debt before that firm's 2008 collapse.
Schumer's staff declined to discuss the ethics rules' advice on forgoing some donations, but said the timing is not relevant.
"During this period, Senator Schumer was actively fighting for some of the proposals most opposed by the banking industry, including a strong consumer watchdog agency and greater oversight on derivatives," spokesman Brian Fallon said.
Conference members also were busy on the party circuit that month. There were 54 fundraisers held to benefit the reelection campaigns of committee members, or featuring one of those members as a VIP guest.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was mentioned as the VIP guest for a Florida lawmaker's fundraiser 48 hours before the committee officially began work. The party host was DLA Piper, a law firm registered to lobby on the bill for several financial clients, including Discover Financial Services, Experian and Charles Schwab. Frank's committee office did not respond to a request for comment, but Frank has previously said that he follows all ethics rules carefully.
Business generosity
In September, the Senate voted on what it considered one of the year's most important pieces of legislation, the Small Business Job Creation Act. The bill, which later became law, created a $30 billion loan fund for community banks and gave them incentives to lend the money to small businesses. Hundreds of lobbyists were registered to lobby on this legislation, in part because it meant more business for banks.
Senators collected $469,000 from the financial industry the day before, the day of and the day after that key Sept. 16 vote, a Post review of donations shows. The biggest recipient was Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who shepherded the legislation and faced a tight reelection race.
Reid spokesman Zac Petkanas said the timing was not of Reid's making. The vote was supposed to come months earlier but was delayed by Republican obstruction, Petkanas said.
"Senator Reid's sole consideration on any piece of legislation is always how it will benefit Nevada's families and small businesses," Petkanas said. "He will not apologize for working for months to pass the Small Business Job Creation Act, which is now helping Nevada small businesses during these difficult economic times by opening up otherwise unavailable lines of credit to help them grow, strengthen our economy and put people back to work."
Birthday surprise
Early this month, when Baucus held his birthday fundraiser, Democrats that same day sent to the floor a $858 billion tax cut package. The bill, which has since become law, extends tax cuts passed during George W. Bush's presidency, but also provides huge breaks for wealthy Americans and niche business interests. The invitation to Baucus's event solicited money from lobbyists and executives with major stakes in the package.
Baucus's office said that the bill that passed was not his and that his fundraiser - which included an event for donors of at least $5,000, held at a location that was not made public - was scheduled months before the legislation went to the floor.
leonnigc@washpost.com farnamt@washpost.com
Research editor Alice Crites and staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.

Oops! Fox & Friends Accidentally Identifies Elie Wiesel As “Holocaust Winner”

Elie Wiesel is a winner for shoah!

David Pescovitz at 10:48 AM Thursday, Dec 23, 2010 

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was a guest on Fox & Friends last week. Ooops! However, I guess you could say that having survived the death camps, he "won" in some sense. Mediaite has the video. (via @dailygrail, thanks Rob B for the headline)

There’s really nothing else you can say about this. It was a mistake and they fixed it quickly. But, seriously, you could not have picked a worse moment to screw up.
Watch the video of the segment below. The typo occurs around the 0:50 mark.

Wow. We all make mistakes and typos. There will probably be at least one in this post alone. However, some typos are worse than others. This is one of those typos. Last week, Fox & Friends had on Elie Wiesel to talk about human rights injustices. However, eagle-eyed viewer Young Manhattanite was rewatching the clip online and noticed that they accidentally combined “Holocaust Survivor” and “Nobel Prize Winner” in the chyron so as to identify Weisel as a “Holocaust Winner.” Again, wow.

The committee to save the Senate

Economic and Domestic Policy

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Remember "The Committee to Save the World"? That was Time's memorable sobriquet for Larry Summers, Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan, who, in 1999, had been fighting to dodge, contain or end a series of financial crises across the globe that were threatening the American economy.

The next decade wasn't as kind to the committee's reputation - or to the economy. The worst threats, we now realize, had been here at home, and policymakers hadn't done nearly enough about them. Median wages were stagnant even as the incomes of the rich rocketed upward. A giant credit bubble fueled a giant housing bubble, which in turn fueled a giant buildup of risk at the center of the American financial system. The economic collapse revealed a dysfunctional political system incapable of mounting a sustained policy response to joblessness and weak demand.
And we're not done: Debt, health-care costs, an underperforming education system, a warming planet and crumbling infrastructure all threaten our long-term prospects. The good news is that all of these problems can be solved. The question is whether our political system is capable of doing so.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) gave an interview to Politico in which he sounded more like a Bond villain than a legislator. "There's much for them to be angst-ridden about," McConnell said of the Democrats. "If they think it's bad now, wait till next year." Politico noted that he said all this "with a chuckle," and for good reason: McConnell will return in January with 47 Republicans, making it even easier for him to grind the Senate to a halt.

SenSen. Tom Udall says the Senate has the means to revise its rules.(Matthew Staver). Tom Udall says the Senate has the means to revise its rules.(Matthew Staver)

We saw what that might look like this week when Senate Republicans effectively filibustered the federal government's 2011 budget. To avoid a government shutdown on the eve of the new year, the Democrats hastily passed a "continuing resolution," one that just extends the 2010 budget. That means it doesn't include the changes needed to implement the financial regulation bill, the health-care bill or any other accomplishment of the past year. It's no way to run a government.
Enter Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). Both were elected in 2008, which meant both entered the modern Senate without having spent years slowly getting used to its absurdities and dysfunction. And both have made the unusual decision to do something about it. Together, they are the Committee to Save the Senate.

Sen. Jeff Merkley says abuse of the filibuster is the Senate's most pressing problem. (Brendan Smialowski)

Their partnership is a tag-team effort. Udall is first in the ring. His argument is simple: The Senate must be able to decide, and continually revise, its rule book. It has the power to do this: On the first day of a new session of Congress - which for the 112th Congress will fall on Jan. 5 - a simple majority can vote in whatever rules it chooses. Udall wants to see that power exerted.
Rules that are never changed are abused, he argues. That's why we've had more filibusters in the last session of Congress than in the 1950s and '60s combined. That's why Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) felt comfortable putting a hold on all nominations simultaneously because he was upset over some pork that Alabama wasn't getting. Udall wants that to end. "If you look at rules every two years," he says, "you bring accountability to the process."
Merkley, who worked on the Hill in the 1970s and '80s, sees the filibuster as the most pressing problem facing the Senate. "The social contract is broken," he says, "the contract that said, 'I understand that only under the most pressing, important circumstances will I utilize my privilege to delay the Senate and demand a supermajority vote.' If that social contract is gone, then we need to adjust the rules."
When Merkley says "adjust," he means it. He doesn't want to get rid of the filibuster. He just wants to bring it closer in line with what Americans believe the filibuster is there to do: protect minority viewpoints and encourage debate.
Under Merkley's proposal, you could no longer filibuster the "motion to proceed to debate," as that means you're filibustering the debate itself. Similarly, amendments would be protected. You could only begin filibustering when a bill was complete and the Senate was considering a final vote on it.
In that case, the filibuster would have to be what most Americans think the filibuster is: an ongoing debate. Currently, filibusters are usually private communications between the leadership offices of the two parties. Under Merkley's bill, a sustained filibuster would need 20 filibustering members on the floor at all times and continued discussion. If the numbers fell or the talking stopped, the filibuster would end.
Would this fix the Senate? Not necessarily. Although Merkley's proposal would be an improvement, it wouldn't reverse the Senate's transformation into a supermajoritarian body in which the minority has both the procedural power and the electoral incentives to make the majority fail. More promising is Udall's proposal, which would institute a process for making future changes and might make the minority a little more cautious about a relentless campaign of obstruction.
So maybe Udall and Merkley are merely the Committee to Start Saving the Senate. The real question - the one that will matter Jan. 5 - is how many of their colleagues are ready to join them. And we may already know the answer. This week, every returning Senate Democrat signed a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) calling for filibuster reform.
The Committee to Start Saving the Senate, it seems, is now in session.

Skin in the game

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

December 24th, 2010

by Harold Pollack

George Will’s column today(see below)_ concerns Representative David Camp of Michigan, incoming Republican chairman of Ways and Means. Camp says:

Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard — incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.
“I believe,” Camp says, “you’ve got to have some responsibility for the government you have.” People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should similarly have some “skin in the game” under the income tax system.

It’s hard to know what to make of such arguments. It includes the standard Republican move of noting progressive federal income taxes without noting that low-income people pay significant payroll taxes to the federal government, not to mention the state and local sales taxes these lucky free-riders pay every time they buy a toothbrush or a stick of gum. This “skin in the game” argument is also applied rather selectively. These days, anyway, few conservatives argue that everyone who might get hit by a car should have skin in the game by remaining insured. Maybe more people should pay estate taxes, for that matter. Very few us have skin in that game, which abets continued persecution of the dynastically wealthy.
Snark aside, though, Camp has a real point. Only he should apply it more broadly. Two hundred million Americans with decent health coverage have no skin in the game when they consider the millions of poor people who need to wait 12 hours in a cruddy public hospital emergency room or some overcrowded safety-net clinic. Most Americans have no skin in the game when Arizona Medicaid recipients find out that their heart, lung, or liver transplants will no longer be covered, when South Carolinians find out that Medicaid will not cover hospice care and will cut its weekly meals on wheels deliveries from fourteen to ten, when California Medicaid no longer cover routine dental care but at least still covers the eventual tooth extractions. Few of us rely on AIDS drug assistance programs, which are turning people away or placing them on waiting lists. To take an example at random, most Americans do not have to sit in a south Chicago welfare office with a disabled brother, waiting for hours under happy-talk posters say: “Work makes sense!”
Most of us lament from a distance the failing schools and unsafe streets of our inner-cities. Few of us are gay, or are college students who lack proper immigrant papers. We have no personal stake when Congress debates whether to extend benefits to the chronically unemployed. Few of us are uninsured people with preexisting conditions. Few of us depend on Food Stamps or TANF. Few of us are frightened young women dealing with unplanned pregnancies. (Few of us, for that matter, are National Guardsmen doing repeat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq.)
Will rightly notes: “Serious arguments about taxes are never just about taxes. They are about government’s proper size and purposes.” That’s for sure. Republicans assume the House majority with the general promise of austerity and retrenchment during a deep economic crisis. When influential constituencies have direct stakes in the resulting fight—as in the case of Medicare—we have a good idea how these arguments will be resolved.
I’m more worried about other matters, which affect the most politically and economically vulnerable people who depend on federal and state government. If more of us who politically matter had real skin in that game, we would see better and different public policies.

Dave Camp's plan: Taxes made simple

By George Will
10:41 AM CST, December 23, 2010Many parents have heard FICA Screams. Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay.
FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.
Dave Camp was 14, working for his father's garage in central Michigan, when he made the acquaintance of FICA. Now 57 and about to begin his 11th term in Congress, he will chair the House Ways and Means Committee, where he will try to implement the implications of his complaint that "the tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news."
His aim is "fundamental" tax reform, understood the usual way — broadening the base (eliminating loopholes) to make lower rates possible. He would like a top rate of 25 percent - three points lower than Ronald Reagan achieved in 1986, with what proved to be perishable simplification.
In George W. Bush's 2004 speech to the Republican convention, he denounced the tax code as "a complicated mess" that annually requires "6 billion hours of paperwork" — now estimated at 7.6 billion. He vowed to "simplify" it. The audience cheered. Then he promised new complexities. There would be "opportunity zones" — tax relief for depressed areas — and a tax credit to encourage businesses to establish health savings accounts. The audience cheered.
This is perennial mischief — using the tax code not simply to raise revenue efficiently (with minimal distortion of economic behavior) but to pamper pet causes, appease muscular interests and make social policy. Since 1986, the tax code has acquired more than 15,000 complications.
"Targeted" tax cuts are popular complexities because they serve a bossy government's agenda of behavior modification: You can keep more of your money if you do what Washington wants. The tax code, says Camp, "should not be a tool of industrial policy" or of "crony capitalism": "Politicians should not pick the industry of the day."
One of Camp's objections to the health-care law is its obvious design to cripple health savings accounts. With HSAs, an individual who buys high-deductible health insurance becomes eligible for tax-preferred savings out of which he or she pays routine health expenses. (No one expects auto insurance to pay for oil changes or new windshield wipers.) This gives consumers of health care an incentive to shop wisely for it. Camp says the health-care law will make HSAs less attractive because "a qualified plan will be defined by the government rather than the market." And government will make HSAs unnecessarily expensive by requiring them to have "all the bells and whistles."
Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard — incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.
"I believe," Camp says, "you've got to have some responsibility for the government you have." People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should similarly have some "skin in the game" under the income tax system.
In addition to the one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns. The bottom two quintiles of earners have negative income tax liabilities — they receive cash payments from the government via refundable tax credits.
Camp remains amazed by the slipshod practices by which banks and other financial institutions made mortgage loans without due diligence. He remembers that "the president of the bank approved my first Visa card." Other things have changed, too. "I used to do my own taxes," Camp says, "until I got on Ways and Means." No more. The tax code is so complex that the chairman of the tax-writing committee, like many millions of Americans, cannot be confident he can properly perform, unassisted, the duty of paying taxes.
If Barack Obama is accurately reported to be considering serious tax simplification and lower rates, he will have an ally in Camp — up to a point. Serious arguments about taxes are never just about taxes. They are about government's proper size and purposes. Concerning that, Obama differs with Camp, who says: "Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem."
Washington Post Writers Group
George Will is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.
georgewill@washpost.com

Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

Schieffer: 'Twas the Day after Christmas

Dec. 26, 2010

Bob Schieffer Closes 2010 with Some (Political) Holiday Verse

By Bob Schieffer

• Play CBS VideoVIDEOBob Schieffer's Holiday Verse
  Bob Schieffer tries to find rhyme and reason with a holiday poem over how certain political figures are spending their day after Christmas.

• 
  Bob Schieffer closes 2010 with some political holiday verse.  (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

• STORIES
• 111th Congress Ends Term as One to Remember
• GOP Congress to Take Harder Line on Immigration

(CBS)  'Twas the day after Christmas 'neath the Capitol dome 
It was quiet for a change, Congress finally went home. 
They stayed longer than usual, and actually found 
Not a lot to be sure, but SOME common ground. 
The Tea Party hollered, Sarah Palin went huntin' 
The Left Wing cried foul, said she didn't know nuttin'. 
POTUS and FLOTUS were gone with the breeze 
To Hawaii they went, why not if they please? 
With no stories, reporters adjourned to the bars 
The newscasting subs sat in for the stars. 
I was just sleepy--needed rest for my brain 
And what happened next, I still can't explain 
In my dreaming I saw, on the Capitol lawn 
A man cracking a whip by first light of dawn. 
He was trying to herd some wacky reindeer 
Running every which way, first there and then here. 
His face was bright orange, a suntan hall-of-famer. 
I knew in a flash it must be John Boehner 
He hollered, cajoled, oh how he did plead 
But the deer wouldn't listen. Each wanted to lead. 
Stop Cantor! Quiet Bachmann! Sit down Mr. Pence! 
Line up like a team. Please don't jump the fence. 
You're feeling your oats and already feel cozy. 
But so did that lady named Nancy Pelosi. 
She reached for the sky … and wound up in the soup 
So these days she's herding a much smaller group. 
Her reindeer still snort that it wasn't their fault 
Whatever it was, they were brought to a halt. 
As that scene faded out, Boehner lit up a smoke 
Then I could see Waikiki and this is no joke. 
POTUS was out running hard in the tropical sand. 
Birth certificate clutched, real tight, in his hand, 
"Can't be too careful," he told his wife's mother 
"Arizona police may be here under cover. 
"It's been a tough year, a difficult trip 
"Then wouldn't you know? I busted my lip 
"My own party against me, will that be my fate? 
"Or can Ole Clinton teach me to tri-ang-u-late?" 
My dream got confusing, I really was torn 
The old bulls still fought locking horn against horn. 
The way they were acting it was sure easy enough 
To see no good thing coming from this kind of stuff. 
Then I thought of this year and for all the bad talk. 

How, before it was over, the lame duck did walk.. 
The START Treaty was finally beginning to jell, 
Taxes stayed even, we can ask and yes, tell. 
That's why I can close this holiday letter 
With Happy New Year to all! It's bound to get better! 

The Big (Military) Taboo

December 25, 2010

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:

• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says thatwe spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

This is the one area where elections scarcely matter. President Obama, a Democrat who symbolized new directions, requested about 6 percent more for the military this year than at the peak of the Bush administration.

“Republicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don’t chime in, they’ll lose votes,” said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University. He is author of a thoughtful recent book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.”

The costs of excessive reliance on military force are not just financial, of course, as Professor Bacevich knows well. His son, Andrew Jr., an Army first lieutenant, was killed in Iraq in 2007.

Let me be clear: I’m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

What’s more, if you’re carrying an armload of hammers, every problem looks like a nail. The truth is that military power often isn’t very effective at solving modern problems, like a nuclear North Korea or an Iran that is on the nuclear path. Indeed, in an age of nationalism, our military force is often counterproductive.

After the first gulf war, the United States retained bases in Saudi Arabia on the assumption that they would enhance American security. Instead, they appear to have provoked fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden into attacking the U.S. In other words, hugely expensive bases undermined American security (and we later closed them anyway). Wouldn’t our money have been better spent helping American kids get a college education?

Paradoxically, it’s often people with experience in the military who lead the way in warning against overinvestment in arms. It was President Dwight Eisenhower who gave the strongest warning: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And in the Obama administration, it is Defense Secretary Robert Gates who has argued that military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny; it is Secretary Gates who has argued most eloquently for more investment in diplomacy and development aid.

American troops in Afghanistan are among the strongest advocates of investing more in schools there because they see firsthand that education fights extremism far more effectively than bombs. And here’s the trade-off: For the cost of one American soldier in Afghanistan for one year, you could build about 20 schools.

There are a few signs of hope in the air. The Simpson-Bowles deficit commission proposes cutting money for armaments, along with other spending. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled a signature project, the quadrennial diplomacy and development review, which calls for more emphasis on aid and diplomacy in foreign policy.

“Leading through civilian power saves lives and money,” Mrs. Clinton noted, and she’s exactly right. The review is a great document, but we’ll see if it can be implemented — especially because House Republicans are proposing cuts in the State Department budget.

They should remind themselves that in the 21st century, our government can protect its citizens in many ways: financing research against disease, providing early childhood programs that reduce crime later, boosting support for community colleges, investing in diplomacy that prevents costly wars.

As we cut budgets, let’s remember that these steps would, on balance, do far more for the security of Americans than a military base in Germany.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power

December 24, 2010

BEYOND FOSSIL FUELS

Ed Ou/The New York Times

Thanks to this solar panel, Sara Ruto no longer takes a three-hour taxi ride to a town with electricity to recharge her cellphone

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.

Ed Ou/The New York Times

Solar power for Ms. Ruto’s hut in Kiptusuri, Kenya, means her toddlers no longer risk burns from a smoky kerosene lamp

Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.

Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.

That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.

“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.

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As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.

Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.

In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.

“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”

The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.

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There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.

But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.

With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.

In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.

In addition to these small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and “mini” hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village.

Yet while these off-grid systems have proved their worth, the lack of an effective distribution network or a reliable way of financing the start-up costs has prevented them from becoming more widespread.

“The big problem for us now is there is no business model yet,” said John Maina, executive coordinator of Sustainable Community Development Services, or Scode, a nongovernmental organization based in Nakuru, Kenya, that is devoted to bringing power to rural areas.

Just a few years ago, Mr. Maina said, “solar lights” were merely basic lanterns, dim and unreliable.

“Finally, these products exist, people are asking for them and are willing to pay,” he said. “But we can’t get supply.” He said small African organizations like his do not have the purchasing power or connections to place bulk orders themselves from distant manufacturers, forcing them to scramble for items each time a shipment happens to come into the country.

Part of the problem is that the new systems buck the traditional mold, in which power is generated by a very small number of huge government-owned companies that gradually extend the grid into rural areas. Investors are reluctant to pour money into products that serve a dispersed market of poor rural consumers because they see the risk as too high.

“There are many small islands of success, but they need to go to scale,” said Minoru Takada, chief of the United Nations Development Program’s sustainable energy program. “Off-grid is the answer for the poor. But people who control funding need to see this as a viable option.”

Even United Nations programs and United States government funds that promote climate-friendly energy in developing countries hew to large projects like giant wind farms or industrial-scale solar plants that feed into the grid. A $300 million solar project is much easier to finance and monitor than 10 million home-scale solar systems in mud huts spread across a continent.

As a result, money does not flow to the poorest areas. Of the $162 billion invested in renewable energy last year, according to the United Nations, experts estimate that $44 billion was spent in China, India and Brazil collectively, and $7.5 billion in the many poorer countries.

Only 6 to 7 percent of solar panels are manufactured to produce electricity that does not feed into the grid; that includes systems like Ms. Ruto’s and solar panels that light American parking lots and football stadiums.

Still, some new models are emerging. Husk Power Systems, a young company supported by a mix of private investment and nonprofit funds, has built 60 village power plants in rural India that make electricity from rice husks for 250 hamlets since 2007.

In Nepal and Indonesia, the United Nations Development Program has helped finance the construction of very small hydroelectric plants that have brought electricity to remote mountain communities. Morocco provides subsidized solar home systems at a cost of $100 each to remote rural areas where expanding the national grid is not cost-effective.

What has most surprised some experts in the field is the recent emergence of a true market in Africa for home-scale renewable energy and for appliances that consume less energy. As the cost of reliable equipment decreases, families have proved ever more willing to buy it by selling a goat or borrowing money from a relative overseas, for example.

The explosion of cellphone use in rural Africa has been an enormous motivating factor. Because rural regions of many African countries lack banks, the cellphone has been embraced as a tool for commercial transactions as well as personal communications, adding an incentive to electrify for the sake of recharging.

M-Pesa, Kenya’s largest mobile phone money transfer service, handles an annual cash flow equivalent to more than 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, most in tiny transactions that rarely exceed $20.

The cheap renewable energy systems also allow the rural poor to save money on candles, charcoal, batteries, wood and kerosene. “So there is an ability to pay and a willingness to pay,” said Mr. Younger of the International Finance Corporation.

In another Kenyan village, Lochorai, Alice Wangui, 45, and Agnes Mwaforo, 35, formerly subsistence farmers, now operate a booming business selling and installing energy-efficient wood-burning cooking stoves made of clay and metal for a cost of $5. Wearing matching bright orange tops and skirts, they walk down rutted dirt paths with cellphones ever at their ears, edging past goats and dogs to visit customers and to calm those on the waiting list.

Hunched over her new stove as she stirred a stew of potatoes and beans, Naomi Muriuki, 58, volunteered that the appliance had more than halved her use of firewood. Wood has become harder to find and expensive to buy as the government tries to limit deforestation, she added.

In Tumsifu, a slightly more prosperous village of dairy farmers, Virginia Wairimu, 35, is benefiting from an underground tank in which the manure from her three cows is converted to biogas, which is then pumped through a rubber tube to a gas burner.

“I can just get up and make breakfast," Ms. Wairimu said. The system was financed with a $400 loan from a demonstration project that has since expired.

In Kiptusuri, the Firefly LED system purchased by Ms. Ruto is this year’s must-have item. The smallest one, which costs $12, consists of a solar panel that can be placed in a window or on a roof and is connected to a desk lamp and a phone charger. Slightly larger units can run radios and black-and-white television sets.

Of course, such systems cannot compare with a grid connection in the industrialized world. A week of rain can mean no lights. And items like refrigerators need more, and more consistent, power than a panel provides.

Still, in Kenya, even grid-based electricity is intermittent and expensive: families must pay more than $350 just to have their homes hooked up.

“With this system, you get a real light for what you spend on kerosene in a few months,” said Mr. Maina, of Sustainable Community Development Services. “When you can light your home and charge your phone, that is very valuable.”