Thursday, January 29, 2009

BYE BYE BLOGIE


NEWS ITEM CULLED FROM THE HEADLINES
Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich bounced from office


Preserved from the Associated Press
By Christopher Wills
Published: Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 4:34 p.m. MST

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS — Governor Rod Blagojevich was unanimously convicted at his impeachment trial and thrown out of office Thursday, ending a nearly two-month crisis that erupted with his arrest on charges he tried to sell Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat.

Blagojevich becomes the first U.S. governor in more than 20 years to be removed by impeachment.

After a four-day trial, the Illinois Senate voted 59-0 to convict him of abuse of power, automatically removing the second-term Democrat. Democratic Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, one of his critics, immediately became governor.

In a second 59-0 vote, the Senate further barred Blagojevich from ever holding public office in Illinois again.


RIGHT ASCENSION LEADS THE HUZZAHS

Let it be noted in history today that Illinois finally did the right thing. I can think of a number of Illinois governors in my lifetime who should have been booted out into the street, especially former governor Ryan.

In his address before the Illinois Senate this morning, the now ex-governor feigned shocked indignation, saying in effect that the Senators needed both the real facts and a clear understanding that he had been taken out of context. Fortunately the Senator saw through that claptrap in about a minute and a half. In what context is putting up for highest bid a senate seat as if it were a freakin’ valuable personal property a good thing?


MEANWHILE IN THE UTAH LEGISLATURE

I hear that some Utah legislators seriously want to approve the proposal floating about these days to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.

We should maintain with grateful gratitude the Seventeenth Amendment in all its glory.

The last two institutions that should ever ever appoint a United State Senator are governors and legislators. If anything, we should strengthen the law to require quick public elections to fill open Senate seats.

Back in the days before 1913 when state legislatures appointed U.S. senators, the whole process suffered from state level corruption from day one. Mark Twain wrote in this period of time that “I think I can say and say with pride that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” Kevin Phillips reports in Wealth and Democracy:

When U S Senate vacancies were to be filled, capital after capital became a cross between a carnival and feeding trough. Satchels were filled with crisp new currency, brothels were rented for entire weeks . . . .all for the cozening of “hapless wretches from the hamlets, fields, and backwoods, struggling against the glitter of such money as they had never seen before.”

Furthermore

Sometimes the hassle of legislative selection stretched over 60 or 85 ballots; the militia occasionally had to be called out (Kentucky in 1897), and from time to time greedy factions simply stalemated. Over a ten year span, thirteen seats in the U.S. Senate were vacant because of home-state inaction. (pp. 239, 240, 241)

In Utah, the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Orrin Hatch went unoccupied for nearly two years (4 March 1899 - 23 January1901) because the Democrats, the Silver Republicans and the Regular McKinley Republicans could not agree on a suitable senator. More-accurately stated, no one group could sufficiently bribe Utah’s legislature to elect a United States Senator.

RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY:

The Seventeenth Amendment is a good thing. We should keep it.

Hypocrisy thy name be Utah Legislature

TWO ITEMS CULLED FROM RECENT NEWS REPORTS

Ruzicka, Sutherland wage campaigns against gay rights
Backlash » Conservative groups see a common enemy: Common Ground.

Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11564827
By Rosemary Winters The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:01/27/2009 04:18:29 PM MST

Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative — a push for legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns -- has drawn hundreds of marchers to a Capitol Hill rally, thousands of petition signatures and even broad-based support in statewide opinion polls.

The initiative also has ignited a backlash, led by defenders of "traditional marriage" who want to crush the effort.

Rather than "common ground," Gayle Ruzicka and the Constitutional Defense of Marriage Alliance are touting "common sense." And a Salt Lake City-based conservative think tank, The Sutherland Institute, wants Utahns to stand on "sacred ground" instead.

"The family is the central unit of society, and so our efforts in this regard are ultimately to protect the traditional family and protect marriage," said Sutherland spokesman Jeff Reynolds, who acknowledged Equality Utah has run a "very effective" campaign.


Buttars' committee kills first gay-rights bill

Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11566435
By Rosemary Winters The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 01/27/2009 06:19:03 PM MST

The first of a series of gay-rights bills aimed at the 2009 Legislature died in the Senate judiciary committee today

Sen. Scott McCoy's SB 32 would have amended state law so that financial dependents - besides spouses, parents and children - could sue if a breadwinner suffers a wrongful death.

It is part of the four-bill Common Ground Initiative being pushed by Equality Utah to expand legal protections offered to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Utahns.

A standing-room only crowd listened to two hours of testimony for and against the bill before the committee, headed by Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, declined, in a 4-2 vote, to send the measure to the Senate floor. Only McCoy, D-Salt Lake City, and his Democratic colleague Ross Romero voted in favor of the bill.

McCoy's measure would have benefited same-sex couples but also other nontraditional households, such as one in which a grandmother relies on a grandson for financial support. Unlike spouses, parents and children, a wrongful-death designee would have to prove a financially dependent relationship with the victim to go to court.

McCoy said he plans to introduce the bill again in the 2010 session.


RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY

I find the hypocrisy exhibited in by Utah legislature on the subject of "protecting family values" utterly breathtaking.

It believes it is good and therefore does good in sustained family interests by picking on homosexuals. They confuse bullying with protecting.

Heterosexuals have done the most damage to marriage. In particular, wide government support of low wages, creation of simple divorce laws, tolerance of polygamy and mistresses.

If the Utah legislature really wants to protect marriage and the family, then it should mandate smaller gaps between the salaries of workers and employers, it should stiffen divorce laws, it should stop tolerating multiple simultaneous sex partners.

My family actually has a history of committed same gender couples, and our experience has been that they posed less threat to traditional family values than did certain of our multi-marrying, multi-divorcing, sexual multitasking heterosexual members.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The damage done to America marriage and traditional family life happened years ago. Unless American culture undergoes a massive cultural repentance, we cannot repair the the damage. Americans have accepted for far too long too many kinky heterosexual domestic arrangements as on a par with real marriage.

Ultimately, people will judge the concept of same-gender marriage on who they like best

Do they like their gay relatives best?

Or do they like best all the leaders who make strict legalistic definitions of what marriage is and is not, who tell gay couples that heterosexuals may do what they want, who tell gay couples that morality and decency requires separate but unequal domestic partnerships for all others?

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE UTAH LEGISLATURE: WHERE ARE YOU NOW THAT WE NEED YOU?

BACKGROUND:

Our preoccupation with current financial capital crises causes leaders to overlook the bigger crisis in America's human capital. Leaders commit hundreds of billions of tax dollars to various and dubious financial / banking enterprises. Meanwhile, state legislatures cut outlays for public education.

Robert Reich put it this way in a recent Marketplace editorial:

“Education is largely funded by state and local governments whose revenues are plummeting. As consumers cut back, state sales taxes are shrinking, and as home values decline local property taxes are taking a hit. Three-quarters of our states are facing budget crises. As a result, schools are being closed, teachers laid off, after-school programs cut, so-called ‘noncritical’ subjects like history eliminated, and tuition hiked at state colleges.”

Our actions resemble bad absurdist theater. We bail out every major bank to get financial capital flowing again. And it has not work yet. Simultaneously, we squeeze the main sources of our human capital.

America’s future competitiveness and living standards depend on our peoples' skills, their capacities to communicate, write, solve problems, and innovate — not their ability to borrow money.

Human capital has its roots here. Financial capital moves around the globe at the speed of an electronic blip. Although banks froze global capital markets, Asia’s big money, the MiddleEast’s big moolah will return eventually, whether or not our government bails out.

Without adequate public funding, our supply of human capital will shrink further. Funding is everything whether public or private: without it, we will not attract talented people into teaching, keep classrooms small or help our youngins learn well-rounded curriculums.

In the 1970s, when I attended university, any bright kid could get funding for college. The federal government sent me checks with monotonous regularly year in, year out, year in, year out. Thanks in large part to the plutocratic attitudes of the Bush Administration, no child of a millionaire will get left behind, no matter how stupid he or she might be.


MY FIRST POINT:

Explain to me for the record why we bail out Wall Street and not our nation's public schools and colleges.

Utah needs to create a central banker for Utah’s human capital -- someone who warns us (as loudly as Ben Bernanke did) of the dire consequences to people and the local work force if we don't come up with the dough.



SECOND BACKGROUND

The Regents approved the creation of a state-sponsored Utah Valley University on 1 July. Now just when UVU needs funding at this crucial delicate point in its development, legislators prepare to bail out emotionally and financially.

We Utahns dutifully paid our taxes year in and year out. Now when the crisis comes and we really need state resources as backup, the legislature says to us, “Too bad, we don’t have the money. Tough luck. Tough it out.”

Legislators should not hide behind the lame excuse of mathematics to reduce funding higher education. Legislators have traditionally found it easy to cut here, because people generally dislike teachers and equate education with bloated bureaucracy.

Rumors abound in my UVU English department of 15-plus percent budget cuts. I have seen the legislature play this game before; I for one will not fall for it this year. When the legislature cuts “only” 9 percent, it tells teachers that it has been generous and good. No educator or teacher should accept any sort of cut with rejoicing or thankfulness.

UVU students have been good. I seriously doubt if any of our students created bogus financial products. Nor did they as a group make bad loans. The students deserve bailouts as much as the lenders. Students need all the services they can get in this crisis.


MY SECOND POINT:

Legislators must find ways to keep UVU financed, even if this means lobbying the Obama Administration and Congressional representatives for funding.


MY THIRD POINT:

The legislature should not hide behind the laws of mathematics as an excuse for downsizing government just as the poor need resources and backup. In this crisis, the legislature should increase funds for the programs that help the poor and needy.

The governor and the legislature should start lobbying Congress and the Obama Administration. We have bailed out people who behaved badly and dishonestly in the financial institutions. Now its time to protect and bail out the needy of human capital.