Mimsy Were the Borogoves

I was on my way out for some barbecue on Saturday and checked my mailbox. Inside was an anti-DeMaio flier in the mail from “San Diegans for Nathan Fletcher”. It said something surprising:

After voting to cut workers’ pay by 6%, City Councilman Carl DeMaio refused to cut his own pay.

The same thing is on Assemblyman Fletcher’s campaign site.

I laughed when I read it, and thought, there’s a good chance the reason DeMaio didn’t cut his pay after voting for a San Diego pay cut is that DeMaio cut his pay before the vote. When I returned from lunch, I looked it up, and it turns out that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

When he took office, before the City Council vote, DeMaio chose to cut $37,059 from his pay. He declined city contributions to his pension fund; that’s $27,459 a year. He also refused a “city automobile allowance”; that’s $9,600 a year.¹

Fletcher claims that these payments don’t count as part of “his own pay”. That attitude is part of the problem and a big part of why government spending on employees has bloated enough to risk bankrupting so many cities. Businessmen know—because they’re paying it—that the money for employee benefits is part of what they pay their employees. Politicians try not to count benefits as part of spending, and they can because it doesn’t come out of their pocket.

When politicians force your employer to provide benefits, the money to cover those benefits comes out of your pay—regardless of whether the politicians refuse to let your employer say this. That $37,059 that DeMaio declined is part of what we pay councilmembers. Using the city council salary of $75,386 and those two benefits as his total pay², he cut his pay by 33% before voting to cut city worker pay by 6%.

I just received some political junk mail opposing San Diego’s Proposition A, the Fair and Open Competition act. They claim that “Prop A would cost San Diego hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Which makes no sense, because Proposition A not only reduces the immediate cost of city projects, it helps to cut the money laundering scheme where project money goes to government unions and then gets turned around again to fund the political campaigns of the politicians who voted for the project, so that they can vote for more expensive projects and repeat the process.

All Proposition A says is that:

1. City construction projects must not be required to use Project Labor Agreements, where this doesn’t jeopardize state or federal funds. They can use PLAs if they want to, but the city can’t require them to.
2. All construction contracts for more then $25,000 must be made public on the web in an easily-searchable format.

Both of those provisions are obviously good ideas, and will obviously save money. So how could the opponents of fair and open competition come up with their argument? By cheating. They got the politicians, who benefit from campaign contributions from a closed process, to rig the system. The anti-A fliers also say:

Under state law, cities such as San Diego are blocked from receiving state funds for local projects if they enact bans on project labor agreements.¹

…

If Prop A passes, San Diego would no longer be eligible to receive state grants for local construction projects.

The arguments against Proposition A are a good example of why we need to end the entire concept of “public unions”, where “union leaders” negotiate with politicians who benefit, through campaign donations, from this diversion of public funds. Government unions are a money-laundering scheme for politicians to fund their campaigns with state and local money.

The state law that the fliers mention is not a pre-existing law. It was passed specifically to block Proposition A. State politicians, fearing that the money spigot might get turned off, passed Senate Bill 829 on April 12 to cut off state funds to San Diego. Proposition A actually contains an exemption for projects that would lose state funding if subject to open competition. So Senate Bill 829 forbids state funding for any project, if any other project in the city allows open competition for bids. It’s designed purely to block any competition in San Diego public projects—and to lock in that wonderful money laundering scheme.

The government union politician asks city and state politicians for more money, the city or state politician gives it to them, and then the government union politician diverts some of that money back into city and state politician’s campaign.

And when it looks like voters are onto the scam, the politicians pass laws like the anti-fair and open competition 829.

Since drinking more didn’t cure my alcoholism, I’m going to go back to drinking more.

Looks like Italy’s “austerity problem” is shared by France and other European countries:

In France, for example, the so-called austerity largely consisted of raising taxes. There was a 3 percent surtax on incomes above €500,000, an increase of one percentage point in the top marginal tax rate (from 40 to 41 percent), and an end to the automatic indexation of tax brackets for inheritance, wealth, and income taxes. There was also a 5 percent hike in the corporate income tax on businesses with revenue of more than €250 million, as well as a hike in the capital-gains tax, and closure of several corporate tax breaks. And even though most of these tax hikes were aimed at the wealthy, the middle class did not get off free. There was an increase in the Value Added Tax (VAT) and the excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol.

True, there were some entitlement reforms and spending reductions. But they haven’t actually occurred yet. For example, France will raise its retirement age from 60 to 62, but not until 2017! A cap would also be put on government health-care spending, starting next year.

If you’re an alcoholic and you redefine “abstinence” to mean “drink more”, then sure, you’ll be able to follow that abstinence plan easily. But it’s hypocritical to then claim that since abstinence doesn’t work, you’re going to go back to drinking.

Paul Krugman is a hypocritical drunkard. If you redefine austerity as raising taxes, then sure, you’ll find it isn’t going to work.

Congratulations to Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock and Indiana. I met Mourdock at BlogCon last year in Colorado. He’s a smart guy, dedicated, and, very odd for a politician, knows how to listen and pay attention. He didn’t just show up to talk at us and leave. He arrived early and sat in the audience with us to listen to the other speakers. I thought he was just another quiet blogger until he was introduced.

It really seemed like he was there to learn as much as to campaign.

As far as the primary goes, Lugar’s appeal to Democrats to vote in the Republican Party’s primary was telling—not on Lugar, but on the biased media. Think what would happen if a tea-party candidate were to try to get Republicans to vote in a Democratic Primary to depose the incumbent Democrat. The establishment would attack them nonstop until election day and for several weeks afterward.

In Simple, obvious, and unobstructive: minimize the value-minus of taxes, I wrote, about Governor Palin’s responsibility to her state, that “it isn’t her responsibility as Governor of Alaska to hope that the rest of America suffers.”

I was writing about oil prices; Palin had called for policies that would reduce the price of oil, and some were saying that “Sarah Palin prefers her state poor” because she didn’t want the rest of the country to suffer for her political benefit.

It was something that most politicians don’t understand. Turns out it isn’t the first time that Palin considered the needs of the nation over the needs of her own political future. In the emails Alaska released from her time as governor, she writes about the comparative need for an Alaskan bridge or a Minnesota bridge:

So ironic—I told Leo, Tibbles, etc just yesterday that we MUST come out with a strong position against AK’s perceived “Bridge to Nowhere” so we quit looking clueless and selfish across the nation and can clear up the perception that the Gravina project is the state’s priority. The $350m bridge is not our priority.

The nation needs to be spending $ on fixing what we have—Minnesota needs “bridge money” today more than we need a few Alaskans to perpetuate the notion that our Gravina earmark is more important than fixing aged infrastructure.

We would gain so much if we get that message out there—that the nation can pull, and work, together and make wise decisions on federal priorities… we should see that earmark redirected to Minnesota’s tragedy bc the Gravina bridge isn’t going to happen on our watch anyway.

“The Gravina bridge” was the infamous bridge to nowhere; it was a waste of money, according to her, but rather than have the money diverted to somewhere else in Alaska, she wanted it diverted to Minnesota.

That email is dated August 2, 2007. On August 1, Minnesota’s I-35W bridge had collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 145. I’m sure that Minnesotans would have appreciated the gesture, but (a) she didn’t publicize it, and (b) Minnesotans don’t have any say in who Alaska elects anyway.

A real politician would have realized that and just taken the money.

Little known fact: at the dawn of printing, monks bought printing presses but limited them to one book per year. This is why abbeys are the premier publishing houses today.

My girlfriend put an ebook on Amazon on Sunday, and was able to do it very easily. I was there to help her because she’s not very tech-savvy, but she didn’t need my help.

Monday she started panicking because she read about the publisher complaints, and began to worry that making her book part of the lending library meant that every person borrowing the book was a book that someone else couldn’t buy.

That is, that when Amazon “loaned” an ebook via the lending library, there was one less ebook for sale, and that this meant she’d be losing sales.

First I told her that it couldn’t possibly be true. It’s an ebook, there is no physical copy to disappear. But then I read the articles that had her panicking. And it turns out to be true—not for her book, but for some publishers.

As far as I can tell—and I still think I must be misunderstanding it—some publishers are so afraid of the future that they’re trying to force the physical warehouse model on ebooks. Rather than give Amazon the right to sell ebooks, they sell a limited number of ebooks to Amazon at wholesale prices. Just like they do with physical books. And then Amazon resells the ebooks that they now own, until they run out and have to go to the warehouse and buy more.

But this means that Amazon legitimately thinks they can use those ebooks they’ve already bought in other ways, such as a lending library, just as they could with physical books. So while my girlfriend had to opt-in to the lending library, some of the major publishers are in the lending library even though they don’t want to be. Because they tried to treat ebooks as physical books, Amazon thinks they own those ebooks, and Amazon is lending them out as if Amazon owns them.

I have no idea who is right there. It probably depends on how deeply the warehouse analogy goes. It’s never been illegal for warehouses or bookstores to operate lending programs. It‘s just been too much work with physical books. What Amazon is showing an understanding of that the affected publishers aren’t is that ebooks open up possibilities for getting books in the hands of readers that were impossible or highly impractical with books that wear out, get lost, or gather dust if purchased in too high a quantity. The potential of ebooks is to open up new markets and find new ways of making money. New technology always has that potential, even as it destroys the artificial business model based on lack of access.

The Wisconsin recall is an important election. At the moment, it looks like Governor Walker will win, though with the margin of fraud he can definitely use some help. But the left in Wisconsin is panicking, and using “arguments” that are likely to backfire. For example, did you know that one of Walker’s aides worked through college? My god, at a Hooters.

They even use a photo of her that shows a happy, very attractive college-age woman. And they think it reflects poorly on Walker’s administration that one of his aides worked through college as a waitress.

This is not the first time I’ve seen the left using images in ways that betray a very alien worldview.

In the 2006 California governor’s race, the Teacher and Firefighters unions sent out a campaign flyer that had me goggling in cognitive dissonance. First glance said it was a pro-Schwarzenegger ad. Governor Schwarzenegger’s photo showed a determined, thoughtful, strong man looking to the future.¹ Whereas the photo of Lou Paulson, the union leader, was a man I would never buy a used car from. The photo was of a glad-hander. They assumed strength was weakness and weakness, strength. (And lost—to a governor who had been heavily rebuked by the voters just a year before.)

And then in a university magazine, a photo of a girl working at a fast food restaurant, and the caption, life’s too important to ask, “would you like fries with that?” The advertisement was trying to convince alumni to donate to scholarship programs. It’s laughable that students would work through college.

The comments on Jezebel are also funny if you dare follow through. About half the posters get that this photo is in Ciala’s favor. It shows a young woman working her way through college. Is this the left’s campaign slogan? Recall Walker because his team understands what it means to work menial jobs to get ahead?

But some of the ones that think the photo is a campaign-buster are very telling. One person even compares working as a waitress to get through college to be as bad (or as good) as needing a thousand dollars of contraceptives every year.

Ick. Time to start blogging about national politics. This is not an election year I’m looking forward to. The national media has already started outright lying about racial politics, arguing that truth is false, and spinning a poor economy.

By the time November rolls around, we’ll be celebrating the wonders of funemployment again, believing that dog is as American as apple pie, and, if the media manages to really be successful, recovering from race wars in major cities across the nation.