My, what big earmarks you have . . .

"Earmark," in its Congressional sense, didn't get respectable as a term until 2009. That was the year it made the Merriam-Webster dictionary, defined as "A provision in congressional legislation that allocates a specified amount of money for a specific project, program or organization."

Given the recent attempt in the Senate to ban earmarks entirely, I think it's safe to say they are a controversial practice. I mean, who doesn't remember the furor over Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere, famously supported in 2008  by then-Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the same time her running mate, John McCain, was vigorously lambasting the practice?

Over the weekend, Tom Graham sent me a link to an editorial from fredericksburg.com, whose title is "Earmark system has its benefits."  (FYI, Virginia Senator Jim Webb voted against the ban; Virginia Senator Mark Warner, for it.)


The fredericksburg.com editorial makes some good points.

While bad earmarks get a lot of attention . . .is there such a thing as a good earmark?

It doesn't seem to be quite so black-and-white.

After all, even as members of Congress use earmarks to send money home, the projects the money pays for are often beneficial, creating jobs or infrastructure or protecting the environment.

For example, one of the earmarks Webb supported was for VRE trains and other equipment. Others were for mental health and substance-abuse programs, improvements to Interstate 95 and other roads, and to address water issues in Southwest Virginia. Webb and Warner both supported earmarks for the Dulles rail project, while both of the senators and several state congressmen all have supported earmarks for military and defense projects in Virginia.

Senator Webb makes the point (according to the editorial) that earmarks give elected officials a say in spending that would otherwise be controlled by non-elected officials.

So, is it earmarks that raise voters' ire, or simply their implied sneakiness, the lack of transparency in how they are created?

Well, if it's the seemingly opaque quality of the practice, more than the practice itself, that bugs you, Jock Friedly (pictured right) is your new best friend. He's the guy who (in 2006) launched LegiStorm , a website "dedicated to providing a variety of important information about the US Congress."


According to a 2009 article in The Washington Post about Friedly, LegiStorm . . .

 . . .offers a trove to keep the snoopiest snoop occupied for hours -- bank accounts, investment portfolios, trust funds, even information about spouses. Wondering why so-and-so cruises to work in a Beemer? Aha, that's why: His wife's a big-shot partner at a law firm. It's all there in the reports.

And LegiStorm also offers an extremely searchable database of all earmarks inserted into legislation by all members of Congress. 

It seems to me the choice re earmarks is clearer now: We can go ahead and take an uninformed stand for/against the practice of Congressional earmarks. Or we can spend some time poking around LegiStorm and see whose pockets in our state are being filled by whose earmarks.

Are the earmarks promoted by our own elected officials creating jobs? Addressing transportation problems? Or are they building expensive bridges we don't need just to make some rich bridge-building campaign contributors even richer?

And while we're at this, we can poke around other parts of LegiStorm and easily learn a whole bunch of other financial facts certain Senators and Representatives would just as soon we not know.

Thanks to the internet, and sites such as LegiStorm (and WikiLeaks?), the dirty laundry of our government doing its business is more and more visible for our personal viewing pleasure. It seems to me the ball is now squarely in the voter's court: If we don't know what's going on, it's probably because we haven't taken the time to look. If we do know what's going on, and we don't like it, what's stopping us from arming ourselves with all this available information and throwing the bums out of office?

Information is power. And there's a lot of both sitting right there in our computers!

The Cruelty of Factory Farming, an essay by Justin Van Kleeck

Martha note: It's Civic Soapbox Friday. . .

Having been an animal lover all of my life, it was not difficult to become vegan almost 12 years ago. As a vegan, I avoid inflicting suffering on animals by not using animal products.

Now, I still have a visceral, pained reaction when I see, hear about, or learn of the multitudinous ways humans intentionally harm animals.

I walk every morning through downtown Harrisonburg, and far too frequently I am passed by a poultry transport truck with dozens of white turkeys crammed into cages and stacked on top of each other. I can see the birds…and smell them…and watch their feathers float through the air as they continue on their way to one of the area processing plants. This leads me to think about the practice of animal farming and, through that, about factory farming, one of the cruelest practices in human (or animal) history.

Strangely enough, the Animal Welfare Act, which is the primary legislation to protect animals from abuse and needless suffering, covers only dogs, cats, and animals used for research. This leaves farmed animals, who are not explicitly covered by the AWA, with almost no protection or legal guarantee that they will be treated humanely, with the consideration they are due as living, feeling beings.

Here in the Valley, we are lucky to be surrounded by farms that are not run like the worst factory farms in the rest of the world. Sadly, however, much more harshly operated factory farms provide most of the animal products we buy. In the worst of the worst of these farms, animals are mostly kept in tiny cages or noxious, warehouse-like buildings without access to the outdoors, in conditions so unhealthy that farmers have to pump them full of antibiotics. Male chicks of laying hens are ground up because they cannot produce eggs, and young dairy calves are quickly whisked away to a short life in a crate to become veal. In slaughterhouses, poultry and sometimes other animals can still be conscious while they are skinned, butchered, and processed.

Despite these and other cruel industry standards, America lacks humane legislation, reliable labeling for how animals were raised, or significant support for ethical alternatives. Only a few states like California and Ohio are taking steps to phase out these practices.

The lack of widespread, reliable protection for farmed animals makes it an ethical imperative that we become conscientious consumers of animal products. Unless we buy direct from the farmer, how can we be sure we are not paying for factory-farmed animals. Even if we don’t opt for the most humane step of going vegan, and so refusing to turn animals into mere commodities, we can become vegetarian. Or if we do use animal products, we can shop compassionately, researching the producers of them. And we can speak out against farmed-animal abuse, telling our legislators and company executives that we care about farmed animals, too…not just our dogs and cats.

Yes, taking steps to reform the agricultural industry will be difficult, not to mention immediately suspect in a time of economic hardship. Still, it is the only way to protect our farmed-animal friends from cruelty. All we need to do is make the connection between the food in our grocery stores and the animals on farms. Then, it will be easy for us to see that farmed animals deserve consideration and a life without intentional, unnecessary harm… that we owe them more than a miserable life in a factory.

--Justin Van Kleeck is a writer and editor who lives in Harrisonburg 

The sky may not be falling, but Norfolk really does appear to be drowning . . .

I write this blog most mornings at home, settling down to my computer with a cup of coffee about 7:30. This means I'm usually not in my car, heading into the studio, and actually listening to WMRA until sometime during On Point. 

Driving in yesterday, I listened to one of the most "on point" (I couldn't resist) discussions of climate change I've ever heard. It revolved around one coastal city's attempts to cope with rising water. The city was Norfolk; the rising water is the Atlantic.

The impetus for the show appeared to come from Leslie Kaufman's excellent article in last Thursday's New York Times, "Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rising Sea."

Coastal waters are rising – by between 15 and 17 inches over the past century – making shoreline areas more susceptible to storms, flooding and tidal surges. In this photo: Norfolk's Colonial Place neighborhood as high tide approaches during a nor'easter Friday, Nov. 13, 2009.

Ms. Kaufman begins in Hazel Peck's front yard. Mrs. Peck has lived for forty years in a section of Norfolk known as Larchmont, which is "built in a sharp 'u' around a bay off the Lafayette River."

Here in Larchmont, according to Ms. Kaufman,

residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

Tidal flooding used to happen only occasionally, Ms. Kaufman quotes Mrs. Peck as saying, but  last month "there were eight or nine days when the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive." 

Like many other cities, [Ms. Kaufman writes], Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.

Imagine, injecting reality into a conversation about climate change!


On Point's discussion of the situation in Norfolk, hosted by Tom Ashbrook,  included Ms. Kaufman (who covers national environmental  issues for the New York Times), William “Skip” Stiles (executive director of Wetlands Watch), Theresa Whibley (Norfolk city councillor representing Ward 2, which contains some of the areas of Norfolk hardest hit by flooding) and Orrin Pilkey (professor emeritus of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University, and co-author of The Rising Sea). There wasn't a Richmond politician in sound! It was just informed people talking about their first-hand observations of a very real problem and making suggestions for ways to deal with it. Their conversation was sensible and civil.

The city of Norfolk, Va., is spending a lot of money to raise Richmond Crescent by 18 inches to avert routine flooding at high tide. Matthew Eich for The New York Times

There are other east coast cities threatened by rising Atlantic Ocean tides, among them New York. But Norfolk appears to be out front in recognizing and addressing the problem. Today, in fact, Old Dominion University will announce its plans to create a national center for studying all things related to rising sea levels resulting from climate change.

But back to On Point . . .

I loved the absence of politics in yesterday's discussion. Sadly and alarmingly, we've all but lost the ability to face reality without injecting politics into our view of it. And this more than anything, it seems to me, holds us back from addressing our country's very real problems.

I can't help but think it would be difficult for even our Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, who's by way of being the poster boy for those who would turn aside from addressing issues related to climate change, to argue against Mrs. Peck's forty years of first-hand observation of Norfolk's rising tides.

So who gets to keep secrets in America?

 

A lot of government officials seem to think the old 1963 Crystals' song perfectly describes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel 'cause he never ever does what he should

Whatever Assange's faults are, he certainly is the darling of the 24-hour news cycle. We've never had such a cyber bad boy to talk about. The question for us all to address, however, is does this rebel have a legitimate cause? Or is he just being disruptive because he can.

Julian Assange's attraction to disruption is certainly understandable. This is not a guy raised among the Cleavers or the Waltons or anything approaching a stable, nuclear family. And it is what we feel in childhood that feels comfortable to us as adults.

I lifted these "fast facts" from Time Magazine's "2-minute bio"  of the founder of WikiLeaks.

Bad Boy?

•Assange was reportedly born in 1971 in the city of Townsville, northeastern Australia. He was mostly homeschooled as a child, thanks in large part to his already peripatetic existence: by the time he was 14, he and his mother had reportedly moved 37 times.

•After his mother's relationship with a musician turned violent, Assange lived on the run between the ages of 11 and 16.

•When Assange turned 16, he began hacking computers, reportedly assuming the name Mendax — from the Latin splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful."

•In 1991, at the age of 20, Assange and some fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecom company. He was caught and pleaded guilty to 25 charges; six other charges were dropped. Citing Assange's "intelligent inquisitiveness," the judge sentenced him only to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

•Assange studied math and physics at the University of Melbourne, though he dropped out when he became convinced that work by others in the department was being applied by defense contractors and militaries.

•In 2006, Assange decided to found WikiLeaks in the belief that the free exchange of information would put an end to illegitimate governance. The website publishes material from sources, and houses its main server in Sweden, which has strong laws protecting whistle-blowers. Assange and others at WikiLeaks also occasionally hack into secure systems to find documents to expose. In December 2006, the website published its first document: a decision by the Somali Islamic Courts Union that called for the execution of government officials. WikiLeaks published a disclaimer that the document may not be authentic but "a clever smear by U.S. intelligence."

Okay, so Julian Assange had an unstable introduction to life. But does that give him the right to try his highly-intelligent damnedest to destabilize the world for the rest of us?

David Brooks, writing yesterday in The New York Times thinks it does not.

. . . Some people argue that this diplomatic conversation is based on mechanical calculations about national self-interest, and it won’t be affected by public exposure. But this conversation, like all conversations, is built on relationships. The quality of the conversation is determined by the level of trust. Its direction is influenced by persuasion and by feelings about friends and enemies.

The quality of the conversation is damaged by exposure, just as our relationships with our neighbors would be damaged if every private assessment were brought to the light of day. We’ve seen what happens when conversations deteriorate (look at the U.S. Congress), and it’s ugly . . .

Tacoma's News Tribune also breaks very bad on Assange, beginning an editorial today by stating that

Julian Assange, the chief of WikiLeaks, is a pirate willing to endanger people’s lives with mass releases of secret U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic documents.

The U.S. government is also Officially Alarmed. The Washington Post reports today that Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act.

Okay, so the establishment press and the establishment, itself, are pretty much freaked out about WikiLeaks. But I'm not as sure that the rest of us are.

Listening with half an ear (I do have work to do, you know) to On Point and Talk of the Nation yesterday, I heard many people rejoicing (is that too strong a descriptive?) that the ragged underbelly of high-level diplomacy was now slightly more visible.

I was talking about all this with Charlie this morning and he casually made an interesting, and I think germane, point. "There would be a lot less hoopla about this," my husband said, "if the government had not made everything it does secret, while actively rooting about in the personal business of American citizens."

Of course, saying the government has made everything secret except our business is at least a slight exaggeration, but I do think Charlie makes a valid point. There's a certain nah-nah-nah quality about WikiLeaks that appeals.

But is that enough to make Julian Assange a rebel with a justifiable cause?

Your thoughts, please?

Big Hits: The Reality of Football . . .a personal essay by Jason Barr

Martha note: There's a tremendous amount of news coverage these days (including on NPR)   about devastating head injuries incurred while playing football. I'm with Jason; I'm a football fan, both college and pro. But his essay made me think hard about what being a football fan really means.

It’s that time of year again: football season. I enjoy watching the NFL as much as the next person, and in our household, a Thanksgiving without the distant cheers of a stadium in the background is just plain, well, weird.


Even so, I have a different reaction to football. More and more, it seems, players are going for the “big hit,” the crushing blow of the opponent that will end up on the highlight reels, increase their name recognition, increase their marketability, and even their monetary value.

If I speak in business terms, I do that on purpose: football, like any other sport, is a business, and, perhaps more than any American sport, the players are very aware of the business of selling themselves. When we see replay after replay, or go onto YouTube and watch, in slow motion, a brutal collision, we remember the player’s name. Some of us will cheer for him just a little more loudly; others will buy his jersey after his reputation as a “hard hitter” is established.

When there is a hard hit, though, I have the opposite reaction from many others: while they are cheering and high fiving and watching replay after replay, I can’t help but look away.

As a child, I was fascinated by football. I would sit in one chair, my father in the one beside me, and we would watch the players. I basically discerned the rules on my own about downs and penalties and the line of scrimmage and so on—you simply didn’t interrupt my father during a football game.

I would check out books from the library and read about the great football players: Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, Knute Rockne, Jim Brown, Raymond Berry, Johnny Unitas. These players seemed larger than life: people who went out on the field, and gave it everything they had. It was a sport. Though football at the time was a far more brutal sport, it was highly glamorized and sterilized for the consumption of a child.

As a result, I decided to put my gangly, six foot four, one hundred and fifty pound frame to the test: I joined the junior varsity football squad at a local high school. I quickly discovered that football was far less than fun to play, when I managed to play at all.

Most of my brief two-year football career consisted of seeing or experiencing hazing, bullying, and sometimes sexual harassment, on both the part of the coaches and the players. I still clearly remember one coach stomping on my hand and pushing into the mud—it had rained all day that day—during stretching exercises. When I told him I’d rather quit the team, he poured a cup of Gatorade over my head. Stupidly, I stayed on the team and earned myself a few concussions along the way.

This isn’t sour grapes, though, this is reality. Go to a high school football game. Watch the players closely: many of them aren’t playing the sport of football; rather, they are doing the same thing their modern idols are doing: looking for the big hit. With the current emphasis in the NFL on preventing concussions, I have to wonder how we managed to get into this situation to begin with: one of the first rules players should be taught is to look at the person you’re tackling. It may not be the glamorous, pad cracking, jaw dropping hit, but it keeps your head up so you don’t get a concussion making the tackle. With our current spate of famous (or infamous) players in the NFL, I wonder if coaches in high schools and colleges have simply stopped teaching this simple rule, and themselves, congratulate the “big hits.”

Again, I continue to be a big fan of football, and I still enjoy watching the game on the big screen, especially when snow is falling outside and something is cooking in the oven. It’s classic Americana, and I’m not immune to it.

But there is something darker lurking in the background that makes football a more problematical pleasure for me these days: There are thousands of children watching the same game. For them, it is less a sport and more of a celebrity show. I hope, somewhere along the way, their parents or guardians or siblings balance out the glamour of the game with a heavy dose of the reality that exists away from the camera.

--Jason Barr, who won First Place in WMRA's Short, Short Story Contest, teaches at Blue Ridge Community College.

Henry David and Newt, birds of similiar rhetorical feathers?

I am a boomer, a child of the sixties, an unabashed survivor of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and a penchant for self-importance and self-destruction.

In my late teens and early twenties, back when I was busy loading myself down with hippie-dippy affectations, I used to read Walden as regularly as some Christians read the Bible. Being increasingly pretentious myself and increasingly uncomfortable in my own head and skin, I suppose I was looking for guidance on how to live a more authentic life, and believed Mr. Thoreau’s book could help. Then someone told me his mother cooked his Sunday dinner and did his laundry, and he regularly took a break from his famous solitude to go gadding about with the Concord Transcendentalist crowd. I immediately pegged Mr. Thoreau as just another poseur like myself.

Mr. Thoreau’s most famous words (I say this because they’re posted at the tourist trap Waldon Pond has become) are: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

From what I know of the Concord Transcendentalists, they were an impractical bunch, who made philosophy rather than necessity and reality the basis of action. Mr. Thoreau seems to be saying he took himself off to the woods because of an idea. If he’d had another idea, he might have moved to New York City instead. So, Mr. Thoreau wasn't so much poor and free-spirited, as he was opinionated.

I just finished a really lovely Thanksgiving break, and hope you have as well. My contact with the Real World was officially re-established this morning with an on-line look at newspapers. Two articles particularly caught my eye. The first one is by Karen Tumulty in this morning's Washington Post on the concept of American exceptionalism; in which she writes:

The proposition of American exceptionalism, which goes at least as far back as the writing of French aristocrat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, asserts that this country has a unique character.

It is also rooted in religious belief. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: "God has granted America a special role in human history."

[Newt] Gingrich says Obama fails to understand that "American exceptionalism refers directly to the grant of rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence," and that it is a term "which relates directly to our unique assertion of an unprecedented set of rights granted by God."

 The other was an editorial in yesterday's New York Times ( I had some catching up to do) titled "The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again," which begins:

It is hard to believe, as the holidays approach yet again amid economic hard times, but Congress looks as if it may let federal unemployment benefits lapse for the fourth time this year.

Lame duck lawmakers will have only one day when they return to work on Monday to renew the expiring benefits. If they don’t, two million people will be cut off in December alone. This lack of regard for working Americans is shocking. Last summer, benefits were blocked for 51 days, as senators in both parties focused on preserving tax breaks for wealthy money managers and other affluent constituents.

This time, tax cuts for the rich are bound to drive and distort the debate again. Republicans and Democrats will almost certainly link the renewal of jobless benefits to an extension of the high-end Bush-era tax cuts. That would be a travesty. There is no good argument for letting jobless benefits expire, or for extending those cuts.

What struck me while reading these two articles is what poseurs American politicians are; how easily they can flee from the real problems of real people into comfortable flights of rhetorical fancy. Can those two million unemployed people who are set to lose their benefits in December eat "American Exceptionalism," or use it to pay the rent?

SillyBill.com

I wonder if Mr. Gingrich, who seems to have an in with the Almighty, would let us know what God thinks about keeping tax cuts for the wealthy in place while cutting off unemployment benefits? And as for those Democratic lame ducks, they may be lame ducks, but they're not dead ducks, are they? At least not for today. So, I'd like to know from them what they really think is the right thing to do for the American people, as opposed to the right thing to do for their political futures.

To me, Mr. Thoreau's Walden is a literary classic in which rhetoric trumps reality. And it does seem to me we've taken Mr. Thoreau's literary license a bit too much to heart when our politicians dare to claim God-given "exceptionalism" for a country that leaves its unemployed to founder.

Your thoughts?

Back at it on Monday . . .

Martha note: Happy Thanksgiving! See you back here on Monday, with a thankful heart, a rested head and a full tummy.