Sotomayor, Meet Santayana
Santayana once famously stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
CQ Politics notes that in addition to the notorious speech at the University of California (2001), Judge Sotomayor made similar references to "wise woman" or "wise Latina woman", in drafts or referenced summaries of public speeches submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in Puerto Rico (1994), the Woman's Bar Association of NY (1999), addresses at Yale and the CUNY law school (1999-2000), and Seton Hall (2003).
Tell me, President Obama, what do you think of a judge whom repeatedly makes poor choices in words? So much for the administration's prowess in vetting its nominees. Of course, if White House staffers themselves believe in identity politics, they might not have found anything wrong in what she said and how she said it... Also, President Obama, given your recent emphasis on the "rule of law", what more could undermine that concept than the idea that a wise Latina woman can find something objective in the law that other jurists, male whites or otherwise, can't?
Besides the obvious point over identity politics, I really haven't heard anyone else mention how incredibly self-serving such an assertion is... Indeed, some might wonder how a "wise" woman, Latina or otherwise, would have put herself into such an unnecessary position of finding her legal career reduced to an egotistical sound bite...
Unemployment Hits 9.4%
The highest unemployment rate in 25 years--going back to August 1983. Some are finding good news in the numbers in that the number of job losses appears to definitely be slowing down (the lowest since September), and this seems to be reflected in oil prices spurting up and interest rates climbing. The latter two are negative from one perspective: they raise business and consumer costs. However, it actually implies a long-term positive since a belief that the economy is still on a downward trend would imply lessening consumer and business demand, pushing the two above-cited indicators in the other direction.
It also brings to mind the disingenuous spin the White House is putting in pushing a nebulous statistic such as "jobs saved", which is not based on some consensus statistics referenced by economists. Without reviewing the claims in detail, I expect they are looking at things like fewer state and local public sector jobs retained because of the recent federal overspending bills passed and signed into law by Democrats. I don't believe in state and local bailouts anymore than I believed in the federal government under Bush and Obama bailing out GM and Chrysler, only deferring the date of bankruptcy reckoning at the expense of current and future taxpayers. State and local governments, particularly California, used the housing bubble and illusory property values and taxes to expand their spending initiatives, including gold-plated retirement benefits which were financially irresponsible, with no "rainy day" reserves, etc.
It is all too easy for politicians to expand spending without paying for it. Governments have to pay back loans; this money comes from tax revenues, quid pro quo budgetary offsets and/or selling assets. Of course, the government can attempt to print money, but all this does in the long term is to create inflation, a particularly perverse, regressive form of taxation. Otherwise, if you increase taxes, you do so at the expense of economic growth, as discretionary income, the basis for spending and investment, is reduced. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate need for government spending, but I am saying if that we have to be wise in our government spending. To me, what the national legislative and executive Democrats have done in setting the stage for an unprecedented $2T deficit, making nothing even remotely like the kinds of cutbacks we are seeing at the state and local level, is hypocritical and unconscionable.
Blue Dog Democrats Want To Put Limits to the National Health Care Initiative
There is another CQ Politics post that focuses on the efforts of conservative Democrats (the so-called "Blue Dog Coalition") to constrain the ill-advised Obama health care initiative. There is a disingenuous attempt by liberals to paint this initiative as little more than public "competition" to the private sector, just as, say, state universities compete with private universities. [For example, public universities, such as the University of Virginia founded by Thomas Jefferson, were not created for competitive purposes but to address an alternate market segment, i.e., secular education, and in many cases, they were created to service public sector needs, e.g., teacher training.] There are a number of issues here, because presumably a federal health care plan would provide a standard basket of mandated benefit coverages that operates across states and standard policies (e.g., waiting periods for enrollment)--but this is precisely the issue that restrict the ability of providers to operate across states. But what exactly should be the mandated benefits and policy regulations? The public plan could become the de facto standard, forcing private plans to add expensive new benefits, or the public plan could use economies of scale to undercut private plans.
The Blue Dog Democrats aren't entirely convinced there is a need for a public option. I do not know the specifics of their approach(es), but there are existing concepts advocated by conservatives, e.g., risk pools for the uninsurable which exist in over 30 states, which could be reformed and enlarged, e.g., with some means-based subsidies from the federal government. One specific aim they have is to ensure that the liberals do not allow the public plan to be a Medicare extension (where payments are declared, not negotiated); there is some evidence that private carriers end up subsidizing the costs of Medicare. They also don't link any formal link between a public plan with accepting Medicare patients, which some liberals want to do. In effect, if a doctor is forced to take below-market cost patients, it obfuscates any comparison between private and public rates. Moreover, they want to see the public plan to be an insurer of last resort.
I am encouraged that the Blue Dogs are approaching the problem from a common sense conservative perspective, and I'm sure that a coalition of Blue Dogs and the GOP will bring sanity to the consideration of health care. What we need is reform--including letting the private market compete more efficiently across states without Byzantine regulations, equal protection for tax-free basis of health care premiums, etc. We certainly need to learn from the problems that have occurred, e.g., in Massachusetts, which has found the costs of their initiative skyrocketing, even with some allowed to opt out of their system.
