Va. Public Broadcasting Funds In Peril

Note from MW:  WMRA's Tom Graham forwarded this Jeff Schapiro article from Sunday's Richmond Times-Dispatch. If you have time to read them, you might find the comments interesting.
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BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Gov. Bob McDonnell is gunning for Big Bird

JEFF E. SCHAPIRO TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Published: April 18, 2010 

The Republican's proposed revisions to Virginia's pending two-year, $83 billion budget would put the state on a four-year trajectory to end aid to public radio and television stations -- long an objective of the GOP-dominated House of Delegates.

McDonnell wants the General Assembly, which returns to Richmond on Wednesday to put the finishing touches on legislation passed this winter, to eliminate $592,835 for public broadcasting in the second half of the 2010-12 spending cycle.

McDonnell, who is approaching the 100-day mark of his fledgling administration, is recommending overall spending increases of $42 million. They would be financed with reductions totaling $51 million, including nearly $10 million in cuts in services for emotionally disturbed children.

To erase a $4 billion shortfall without higher taxes, McDonnell and the legislature earlier this year slashed programs that, at the peak of the recession, had been off-limits or largely shielded from reductions.

"When you have to make those stark choices, particularly for families with loved ones with intellectual disabilities, the choice becomes much clearer," said Robert Vaughn, staff director of the House Appropriations Committee

Some of the governor's recommended tweaks to the budget could lead to a clash with the Democratic-controlled Virginia Senate.

"I'll probably oppose that," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles J. Colgan, D-Prince William, said of the McDonnell proposal on public broadcasting. "It's quite a bit of money for those stations. That's a pretty good hit."

The Senate could prove the last line of defense against McDonnell amendments.
For his revisions to be included in the budget, they require majority votes in both chambers. In the smaller body -- the Senate -- that means McDonnell may have to persuade members of the Democratic majority to break ranks on issues important to the party, such as health care and education.

McDonnell, however, may get the last word. Under Virginia's constitution, the governor has an item veto that allows him to strike features he deems offensive from the budget. Overriding a veto is difficult, requiring a two-thirds vote in each body.

Other McDonnell-written revisions that may spark debate during the one-day spring session include proposed limits on access to some mental-health drugs for new patients under Medicaid, a health-care program for low-income Virginians.

Sen. R. Edward Houck, D-Spotsylvania, who is Colgan's second-in-command on the budget-writing panel, and Del. Riley E. Ingram, R-Hopewell, a member of the Appropriations Committee, are joining mental-health groups in pressing lawmakers to reject the McDonnell proposal.

Also, there could be dust-ups over further restrictions on public financing of abortion. McDonnell also wants to prohibit coverage, under the state employee health-insurance plan, of the purchase of erectile-dysfunction drugs.

And if McDonnell gets his way, state workers -- who have gone without a pay raise since December 2006 -- may stand a better chance of getting a 3 percent bonus later this year.
McDonnell is recommending that the $82 million to finance the bonus -- the money would come from a possible surplus -- should be held in the state's general fund rather than returned to agencies. That, he said, would be an inducement to employees to save money for their agencies.

The judicial times, they are a changing . . .

 

Justice Antonin Scalia

Whether from the influence of their intellect, their religion, their life experiences, or their legal training, the conservatives on the Supreme Court, of whom Justice Scalia is generally held to be the most conservative, are beginning to be accused of judicial activism, a rather vague term defined in this way by Answers.com.

The charge that judges are going beyond their appropriate powers and engaging in making law and not merely interpreting it. Against this position is placed the ideal of judicial restraint, which counsels judges to resist the temptation to influence public policy through their decisions and decrees.

Describing a judge as "activist" is almost always meant pejoratively. For example, here is a January 2010 opinion piece published in Los Angeles Times. It was written by Erwin Chemerinsky, current and founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law  in response the the Court's recent 5 to 4 ruling on campaign finance reform.

[Judicial Activism] . . is never defined with any precision and has often been used to refer to decisions that conservatives simply don't like. But if judicial activism has any meaning, it surely refers to decisions that overturn laws and overrule precedents. In contrast, judicial restraint occurs when courts defer to the other branches of government and follow precedents.

By this definition, judicial activism can be good or bad. Brown vs. Board of Education was activist in that it declared unconstitutional laws in many states requiring the segregation of the races in education. To do so, the justices overruled a 58-year-old precedent upholding such laws. But virtually all agree today that Brown was one of the greatest moments in Supreme Court history.

To conservatives, though, the phrase "judicial activism" has come to mean any decision with a liberal outcome. President George W. Bush declared: "The judges ought not to take the place of the legislative branch of government. . . . I don't believe in liberal activist judges. I believe in strict constructionists." The 2008 Republican platform declared that "[j]udicial activism is a grave threat to the rule of law because unaccountable federal judges are usurping democracy, ignoring the Constitution and its separation of powers, and imposing their personal opinions upon the public."

The court's campaign finance decision makes this conservative rhetoric laughable. . McCain-Feingold was a continuation of statutes that have existed since 1906 limiting corporate spending in federal election campaigns. The act was intended to prevent the enormous wealth of corporations from distorting elections and protect corporate shareholders from having their money used for purposes with which they disagree.

For years, conservatives have argued that judicial restraint requires deferring to the choices of the elected branches of government. No such deference was evident when the court's five most conservative justices struck down this provision of the McCain-Feingold law on Thursday.

This is what Nina Totenberg  had to say about judicial activism, yesterday, on Talk of the Nation. 

...for years Republicans accused or conservatives accused liberals of being activists, and now liberals accuse conservatives of being activists.

It's all in the eye of the beholder. And because our politics have become so polarized and so, frankly, poisoned, and because in particular the such an essential part of the Republican Party base are social conservatives, for whom some of the things that the court did involving gay rights, involving abortion, involving school prayer even, are loathed. And that has really galvanized a certain wing of the Republican Party.

These issues have become more and more politicized. And the whole question of court nomination and confirmation has become, as a result - and selection - has become, as a result, much more politicized. . .

Our politics, vis-a-vis judicial nominations and confirmation, have changed dramatically. They probably have changed dramatically for the worse because there's no subtlety here, and distortion is the name of the game for all sides.

This morning, on the front page of The Washington Post,  there was a Howard Kurtz column that seems to exemplify the aforementioned downward slide of our whole judicial confirmation process.

White House complains about CBS News blog post saying that possible Supreme Court nominee is gay

Kurtz's column tells how CBS news published an online column by Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staffer,  making  assertions about the sexual orientation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, widely viewed as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court. Domenech wrote

" that President Obama would "please" much of his base by picking the "first openly gay justice."

CBS initially refused to pull the posting, prompting Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director who is working with the administration on the high court vacancy, to say: "The fact that they've chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010." She said the network was giving a platform to a blogger "with a history of plagiarism" who was "applying old stereotypes to single women with successful careers."

The network deleted the posting Thursday night after Domenech said he was merely repeating a rumor.

How, I ask, with my sad head in my hands, does sexual orientation (whether rumored or true) come to be seen as relevant in the selection of a Supreme Court judge if a justice is supposed to be dispassionately applying the Constitution to legal questions?

Of Tea and Taxes . . .

I am on everyone's e-mail list. I've been made well aware that today is not only tax day, it is also the day of the Richmond Tea Party's 2nd Annual Tax Day Rally.

 

"The day has finally arrived!" the organization's website announces. "We hope you are coming and bringing all your friends, neighbors and co-workers. Please don't miss this amazing event. Don't let Congress think you have given up after 12 months of fighting. Let's show every politician we are committed for the long haul! Come hear what we are about, what we have accomplished, and what we have planned for 2010!"

There is a list of speakers of whom I've never heard, but then I don't live in Richmond. The headliner appears to be Charles Payne, of Fox Business News, who has as unusual a resume for a journalist as I do. If custom prevails, I'm sure by the time those speakers get through, the crowd of Richmond Tea Partiers will be even angrier at the government than they were when they arrived. 

Today is also the Thursday after last weekend's quadrennially held Southern Republican Leadership Conference. As Don Gonyea, NPR's National Political Reporter, put it yesterday on Talk of the Nation . . .

It was a very conservative conference. And it seemed every speaker - save Ron Paul and Rick Perry, the Texas governor - spent a good bit of time talking about President Obama as a socialist. And about - I mean, Newt Gingrich used the phrase over and over and over, that the president is running a secular socialist machine; and Sarah Palin, certainly, goes there. So the rhetoric was very, very much red meat and kind of aimed at keeping the anger up, and doing that to kind of fuel the energy that they see out there. But when you get down to debating health care, if it's going to live in the details, it's harder to portray things that way.

So who are these extremely conservative, extremely angry people? There's a fascinating new poll reported today in the The New York Times that addresses just that question. The front page (as of this moment) article begins this way:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

They hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They are also more likely to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.”

And while most Republicans say they are “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”

What, I'd like to know, what does all this anger accomplish? Where are all these angry peoples' ideas for productive policies and solutions to the difficult problems facing us? And I'd really like to know what those speakers who work so hard at keeping  other peoples' anger aroused think they are accomplishing toward the greater good?

I spent yesterday at Longwood University, sitting in on 5 sections of students studying effective ways to participate as citizens of communities, states, and this country. Our conversation focused on how to have productive conversations among people who don't agree. We talked about the difference between civil discourse, where a person wants to engage others' minds; and inflammatory discourse, which aims at provoking an emotional response. And, by golly, those students seemed to really get it!

Perhaps it's a course more of us should look into.

On the road again . . .

Yesterday afternoon I drove from Harrisonburg to Farmville -- via Gordonsville and Dillwyn and points in between. It was over the mountains and through the woods of springtime Virginia, on the bluest of blue-line highways. There was not a McDonald's or a Wal-Mart or a mall around for mile after mile after mile.

My mission? To sit in on 5 classes on essay writing at Longwood University today beginning at 8 AM, so all I have time to do in this short, very early-morning post is wonder at the beauty of yesterday's getting from there to here.

It always seems to me that there is one day every spring when the new leaves are there, yet not fully out. On that one day, Virginia's trees are decked out in every imaginable shade of green. On that day, to my way of being, all we have to do to feel lucky to be alive is open our eyes.

Yesterday was that day--the annual celebration of springtime green. And, in my opinion, there was no luckier person in the world than this one who had to drive from Harrisonburg to Farmville through Virginia's springtime woods.

An accidental discovery of a brilliant idea. . .

The last time I forgot to take a book to the gym was a couple of years ago. The  result was in an essay published in The Chicago Tribune.

Yesterday I forgot my book, again. And so was facing 30 minutes on the elliptical with nothing to read.

Collegiate gym music eliminated any chance of slipping into a Zen-like aerobic trance. Watching a mute Dr. Phil or a soap opera was out for reasons of personal taste. That left reading magazines.

There were two on the racks. A year-old Forbes still had its cover.Reading the year-old Forbes was actually okay. It was interesting to see the present as the future. And just when the appeal of this was waning, a wonderful gym staff member brought me a brand new Time magazine.

Usually, I'm so pressured by the flood of available information that I flit from article to article in magazines, skimming everything, looking for what I can use for work. But since this Time magazine was all I had for the remainder of my elliptical time, I settled down and read it. From the beginning. Which meant that pretty shortly I was reading Barbara Kiviat's article, "Can Price Shopping Improve Health Care? And becoming deeply impressed, yet again, with how simple the solutions to complex problems can sometimes seem.

We all agree (don't we?) that health care costs too much. It's nice when our insurance picks up the tab, but that does not address the core problem that the bill is just too high. Ms.Kiviat (pictured left) opines that a little market transparency just might do wonders in the cost department

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article to give you an idea of her reasoning.

. . .Congress has overhauled the industry, but the revolution has largely been about increasing access to health care, not simplifying it. We are left with the same opaque system of perverse incentives--paying providers for more tests and procedures, not necessarily effective ones. And we lack even the most basic element of the free market: price information. I recently went to a doctor and asked how much my office visit and X-ray would cost. Staffers told me that they didn't know and, since I have insurance, I shouldn't care.

I should care, though. In fact, I do. There are many reasons health care costs are spiraling out of control, but the simplest one to understand is this: nobody knows what anything costs. Providers get paid through a tangle of insurance-company agreements and billing schedules that change from patient to patient. No wonder a hospital can sneak a $100 box of Kleenex onto your bill and the price of an MRI can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. If you don't know what something costs, you can't know if it costs too much.

The idea expressed in Barbara Kiviat's article is very simple and certainly not new: Hospitals and doctors would be required to post how much they charge for their services so price-conscious Americans can shop around if they wish to do so. Of course, there are other important factors besides price at play in medical decisions, but a little more price transparency would probably reduce the cost of that hospital Kleenex considerably.

Two states, Texas and Wisconsin have bills before their state legislatures to require posting the prices of medical procedures. And -- suprise! surprise!-- the U.S. Congress does, as well: H.R. 4700: Transparency in All Health Care Pricing Act of 2010.

Why has this idea never gotten legs? Why wasn't it acted on years ago? Is there any sane argument against posting medical costs? Is there any reason why H.R. 4700 should not just zip through Congress.

Yesterday, while perched high atop Mt. Elliptical, I couldn't think of a single one.

Invasive bushes and politics . . .

Ever since I discovered Buddleia davidii, a.k.a. the butterfly bush, I've planted some wherever I lived. The blooms keep the butterflies happy all summer and the seeds keep the birds fed all winter.

But  then I noticed butterfly bushes springing up, willy-nilly, in the rose garden, the vegetable garden, the perennial beds, in the middle of the lawn -- all places where they were not wanted and, in fact, did harm to those plants that were wanted. Well, low-and-behold! Over lunch one day, I learned that Buddleia davidii has officially been named an invasive species. Once installed in a garden, they tend to take over.

This weekend, while cutting back my current stock of intended butterfly bushes (pictured left from some recent summer) and yanking up dozens of intruders, I found my self thinking about the retirement of Justice Stevens from the United States Supreme Court and what it means to our American system of government.

There have been many articles in many newspapers since Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement last Friday. But one in Friday's The New York Times struck me, personally, as perhaps the most telling. It begins this way:

WASHINGTON — Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Supreme Court on Friday after 34 years, may be the last justice from a time when ability and independence, rather than perceived ideology, were viewed as the crucial qualifications for a seat on the court.

Justice Stevens, a Republican appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975, has never been one to tout adherence to the supposed original meaning of the constitutional text. In a newly published, 1992 private memorandum to Justice Blackmun, Stevens expressed his thoughts on the subject this way. “Traditions — especially traditions in the law — are as likely to codify the preferences of those in power as they are to reflect necessity or proven wisdom.”

Yet Stevens retained respect for legal precedent, as pointed out in the same NYTimes article:

He grew disillusioned with the death penalty over the years, announcing in 2008 his conclusion that it violated the Eighth Amendment. But he went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”

Justice Stevens recently excoriated the majority of his colleagues over their decision to allow corporations to spend freely in elections, writing:

“Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

But it is, perhaps, his decenting opinion in Bush v, Gore, the 2000 decision that made George W. Bush our country's president that, for me, marks Justice Stevens grasp of today's American reality; that the steady invasion of politics into our legal system is undermining our system of government.

“Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

In other words, in Justice Stevens opinion, even President Bush's supporters lost much, much more than they won through that particular Supreme Court decision.

I think it is remarkably telling that Justice Stevens' confirmation hearing was the last one not to be televised. It seems to me that our ability, as private citizens, to watch almost everything as it's happening has given a lot of us the mistaken impressions that we are well-informed and that our opinion should always be taken into account.

Most of us know nothing about Constitutional law, yet we energetically pressure Senators to confirm someone to the Supreme Court based on splinter political issues, rather than  the nominees actual "ability and independence." Without even a thought to the sad fact that, when we do this, we are actively working to undermine the health and strength of American Democracy.

Is it any wonder I found myself thinking about able and independent Justice Steven's retirement while yanking butterfly bushes out of the rose garden. Politics and Buddleia davidii are both invasive species. Unrestrained, they do great harm.

Now that the height of Everest is settled, what's next ?

I'm not really sure how I ended up on the website of The Kathmandu Post, Nepal's largest-selling English language newspaper, but late yesterday afternoon, there I was. Not only there, but reading an article dated today, Friday, April 9th, which, given that I was still deep in Thursday, provoked a momentary feeling that I'd passed into the Twilight Zone.

Anyone else old enough to remember talking about the Twilight Zone? Where time tilts and wiggles, and the perceived immutable and immovable limitations of the universe no longer apply? Where things happen that we mere plodding mortals never thought were possible?

But then perhaps I had gone to the Twilight Zone. Or we all have. For there on the front page of The Kathmandu Post was astonishing news. China and Nepal had resolved their decades long dispute about the height of Mount Everest.

According to a senior official at Nepal's Department of  Surveys, "The Chinese side -- led by Li Qingyuan -- accepted Nepal's claim that the snow height of Mount Everest is 8,848 metres, while the Nepali side recognized the Chinese claim that the rock height of the mountain is 8,844.43 metres."

Reading this on the front page of The Kathmandu Post, I experienced the unbearable lightness of hope. If China and Nepal had figured out how to settle the height of Mount Everest, they had obviously changed the way they went at settling disputes. Perhaps they can be induced to share their new ways with the rest of us, among whom it's become more fashionable to fan a dispute's flames than to settle it. Who knows? If these new ways can work out the height of Everest today; tomorrow they might work out world peace!

Of course nothing lasts forever, even the agree-upon height of Mount Everest. The further articles I read yesterday about this momentous settlement often went on to anticipate that future complications to the Everest situation could be expected in a few million (or was it billion?) years. Complications, sadly, that that are beyond China's and Nepal's control

It is my understanding that the the Himalayan Mountains, of which Everest is a part, formed as tectonic forces drove two continental plates (the Eurasian and the Indian) toward each other.When these plates collided, up popped the Himalayas. Interestingly, it seems that these plates are still having at each other, geologically speaking, and so Everest is still probably growing.

Which means the rock of the world's tallest mountain is mostly likely getting taller.

In contrast, however, the snow side is probably getting shorter. Temperatures on Everest, like most places, seem to be warming.

Life just never sits still, does it?