John Young Column

Quoth the climate deniers: "What fires?"

2013-06-19T00:44:00.001-05:00

And so it begins again, and on cue.

Like an incendiary device on a timer, summer has turned patches of Rocky Mountain paradise into scenes of fiery hell.

The people of Colorado are beginning to wonder if for the foreseeable future they are locked into four seasons: fall, winter, spring and wildfire.

A year to the day after the state's worst cumulative fire season began — a season that stretched almost into December — the fires began again.

A year after the most destructive fire in state history, consuming 346 homes in the foothills west of Colorado Springs, a successor on the northeast outskirts of town dwarfed it. The Black Forest fire destroyed more than 500 homes. Two people died.

Much like a year ago when they burned in the Rockies from Idaho to New Mexico, wildfires have burst out in multiples.

I know this isn't what some readers want to hear, particularly if Fox News is their choice for information, but these events answer a question that by now should be beyond debate: Hell, yes, the climate is changing.

We are cautioned, and well should be, about assigning temporal events to big-picture concerns like climate change. Temperatures spike. Cold snaps snap. But what's happening in the Colorado high country isn't transitory. It's long-term and caused by fundamental changes.

The canary in this coal mine is a dead ponderosa pine — or hillsides of them killed by the mountain pine beetle.

The insect thrives because of warmer temperatures. Without a few successive days of 40 degrees below zero each winter, the beetles live to eat and breed. They then convert lush forest to brittle kindling.

In no way can one blame all these fires on said pestilence. Drought is the No. 1 villain, as Texas experienced in 2011 when 1 million acres and 2,862 homes were destroyed by fire.

Texas, of course, is one of those places where global warming and global desiccation do not exist, at least in the minds of policy makers.

It's always interesting to hear from people who clip along without these concerns, like a reader from Vero Beach, Fla., who wrote the local paper to report that "true scientific minds are saying that the earth will be cooling for the next 10 years."

Thinking I might have missed a big story, surely "breaking" on Fox News, I bounced this off someone who pays closer attention to these matters than I do.

Andrew Dessler of the Texas A&M Department of Atmospheric Sciences is co-author of The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change.

"As time goes on, climate skepticism becomes further and further divorced from reality," he told me. "If you look at the temperature record, 2005 and 2010 were tied for the two warmest years of instrumental record. I really don't understand how someone can claim that Earth has either stopped warming or is actually cooling."

Reality? Here's some:

The Associated Press calls rising sea levels "a predicament facing the entire Caribbean." Hundreds of villages are threatened.

Even the CEO of Exxon Mobile, Rex Tillerson, last June acknowledged that climate change is real. His suggestion as to what mankind should do? He said we should get used to it.

Also in the Reality Department, scientists recently confirmed carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million in the Arctic, levels harking back to the overheated Pliocene era when sea levels were 60 to 80 feet higher.

Troubling to you?

Let's just say this: Come hell or high water, some Americans are going to ignore either matter.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

'Tents' in need of revival

2013-06-12T10:38:00.001-05:00

Three words for some thoughtful young Republicans concerned about the future of their party: Save your breath.

Those worried that the GOP is losing traction with young voters know exactly who runs the party today: its most reactionary — meaning least conciliatory — faction in generations.

So the College Republican National Committee could have saved precious ink and said "the heck with" rather that issue a new report urging open minds on gay marriage, immigration, even taxes.

Forget it. Unlike the GOP that 20 years ago advertised a "big tent," today's GOP acts more like a bearded sect that chops wood, hunts squirrels and hides out in the hills.

Try sell changing times to that. You'll see no attempt here.

I am, however, going to make a stab at another American institution that stands to see its influence wane: the church.

This matter occurred to me the other day when reading that some churches now refuse to allow Boy Scout troops to use their premises after the national organization decided to admit gay scouts.

At that very time, I was reading a book about how religious leaders stepped to the fore to support civil rights in the '60s.

I have no trouble seeing gay rights as carrying the same heroic imperative.

It took one of my sons to say it just the way it needs saying:

"The bones of the church are going to break" because of anti-gay attitudes, he said.

Americans under 30, he pointed out, overwhelmingly support for gay marriage. And the issue isn't the slippery-slope "definition of marriage" word game conservatives wish to play. You know: Beware of that day when a man can marry his snake and a woman can wed her golden retriever.

No, the issue was equality.

Vast numbers of young people, he said, "don't believe in a religion that doesn't believe in equality."

Kiss that demographic goodbye. Unless . . .

Unless more churches come to see select passages in the Old Testament as rusted levers for oppressive impulses, just as in the days of lynchings and White Citizens Councils.

Let's face it. If Genesis 1:24 — "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind" — meant in the Klan's heyday that God commanded races be separate, it means that today. Does it?

Enough Bible verses here. Let's turn instead to a statement from an individual straining to justify the exclusionary policy the Boy Scouts just changed.

He said the Scouts' decision was unnecessary, because 12-year-olds don't have a clue about their sexual orientation, and because the Boy Scouts have always welcomed all boys.

What he chose not to mention is that at some point quite a few Scouts will have come to understand they have a different sexual orientation. Gay Eagle scouts were among those pressing for a change in policy.

As to that hypothetical 12-year-old: Let's say he's gay and doesn't know it, or won't know it for a couple of years. We welcomed him as a child into all things childlike. Short of misconduct that harms others, how could we possibly revoke that invitation?

This brings us back to the civil rights marches of the '60s:

Just as plentiful as were the bold church leaders who staked their reputations and risked their lives for what was right, so too were the churches committed to not upsetting the racist status quo.

Acknowledging the allure of the status quo, it would seem to be high time for more churches to step up and lead in this quest for equality.

Or, like today's GOP, they can continue to give 'em that old-time division.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email:jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

A school rebellion bubbles over

2013-06-05T00:16:00.001-05:00

We all know when a popular revolt succeeds. Someone gets overthrown. At what point, however, does a historic, full-scale rebellion take wing? Always hard to tell.

The revolt we discuss here involves bad policy and public schools. A climactic victory has yet to come. But let me fancy this notion:

What now simmes across the countryside took wing a few years ago when a certain overstressed Texas third grader of whom I know threw up on her state test.

She wasn't the first; nor will she be the last.

Let's assume for narrative's sake that this third-graders' angry parents took note, however, and made sure their state representative knew, too.

Of such matters are movements made.

Policy makers finally are coming to understand the unnecessary pressure, the costliness, the nonexistent diagnostics, the false comparisons, the lost time, the expense, the whole of the nation's pathological lap dance with standardized testing.

In recent weeks and months these things have happened:

— The Texas Legislature voted overwhelmingly to dramatically scale back a battery of high school end-of-course tests. Lawmakers also voted to exempt high-achieving students from certain state exams.

— In Seattle, a heroic teacher boycott of the Measure of Academic Progress — MAP — standardized exam influenced the district to drop it.

— Arizona, Nevada and Alabama lawmakers voted to do away with clunkily arbitrary high school exit tests and re-examine their function.

For Texas lawmakers to do what they did in this session is akin to communists taking sledge hammers to the Berlin wall. Texas is, of course, the "cradle of accountability," from whose ideological loins sprang the unenforceable "one-size-fits-y'all" No Child Left Behind policy.

Oh, and by the way, 35 states including Texas have sought exemptions from NCLB requirements.

It is in the Lone Star State that former Education Commissioner Robert Scott said the overemphasis on testing had become a "perversion" of a system originally meant to give policymakers a quick read on basic skills statewide.

The result, said State Rep. Mark Strama in the Texas Tribune, is a "culture of testing rather than learning."

A rudimentary system that began in 1979 with basic-skills tests for third-, fifth- and ninth-graders became a bovine stampede.

One of the most exciting things that Texas lawmakers did this session was vote to limit the number of benchmark tests — those given by school districts to see if lessons are linking up with state test criteria. One Texas grade-school teacher told me that adding these nuisances into the mix, she sacrificed 16 instructional days a year to testing ordered from above.

Credit parents with turning this tide. The grassroots Texans Advocating for Meaningful School Assessment — TAMSA — now offers a counterpoint to the big-money, pro-testing Texas Association of Business.

"We thought it was just Texas parents" alarmed and disgusted, TAMSA's Susan Kellner, a Houston parent and school board member told NBC News. But "across the country a similar sentiment is starting to bubble up."

Funny that she should say "bubble," because that's what it's been all about — the quest to make the whole of education fit into those little testing bubbles, a whole booklet of bubbles spoiled when said overstressed third-grader lost her lunch.

Know that the Texas Education Agency was alert to this prospect. Per procedure, her despoiled exam was bagged and shipped to the state capital like your standard crime implement.

I trust it is still in state custody.

Someday, like pieces of the Berlin wall, that little girl's book of unfilled bubbles will be a souvenir of an oppressive and counterproductive educational past.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.co

Tea party vision: an America in pieces

2013-05-29T12:54:00.001-05:00

If one could paint a portrait of America under the leadership of today's fiscal disservatives, it would be the sorry scene in the Skagit River 60 miles north of Seattle.

There, a section of the bridge conveying Interstate 5 soaks like a tea bag tossed in the brine.

I wonder how many anti-tax types are screaming that a key Northwest conduit is crippled. Give them a few seconds and they'll pin the matter on President Obama, ask for a special prosecutor.

Thousand one, thousand two . . .

If the picture of a shattered bridge is unsightly, consider this: a chart produced by the Federal Reserve Bank showing total public spending on construction. It has dipped to a 20-year low.

Now, this spending level might seem prudent, public debt and all that. But if prudence is or ever was a byword for today's fiscal disservativism, be reminded: The last time public domestic construction dipped dramatically it was at the height of two wars that resulted in some $140 billion in infrastructure investment — in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I've heard the 2009 stimulus bill depicted as full of pork. Maybe it was. One thing ot say in its defense, however, was that it paid for things on these shores, rather than on locales rent to pieces by "shock and awe."

Back to our continent and the bridge over — or, now in — the Skagit:

The Federal Highway Administration last year listed it as "functionally obsolete." But, then, it is just one of tens of thousands so classified. Worse: About 66,000 are "structurally deficient."

Two years ago Obama proposed doing something about this national condition: $50 billion for infrastructure projects, $10 billion to create an infrastructure bank, under the Rebuild America Jobs Act. Did someone say jobs? In Washington state alone, where that bridge sits in the drink, the bill would have created 9,600 of them.

A Republican filibuster blocked this measure in the U.S. Senate, though it had majority support.

Would it have driven up the deficit? No. It would have been funded by a seven-tenths of a percent tax on people making over $1 million. Those dollars are so much more important, you understand, for people who have more than they need than for America to meet its needs.

"If you are locked into an ideology that government is bad and ineffective, you have a stake in proving that to be the case," writes former Sen. Gary Hart in The Huffington Post. "As always, it is up to the American people to decide what they want. But we must make up our minds. We cannot have a government that works by electing those who want it not to work."

Obama is accused of being a socialist. Some joke. Philosophically, he is more like Eisenhower than Stalin. Eisenhower knew how crucial America's infrastructure was to its future. It became his signature. Similarly, energy conservation and alternative fuels, every bit as crucial, have been one of Obama's.

Eisenhower also knew that every dollar spent on arms and armies was a dollar taken away from every other American need.

Today's deficit hawks were silent as dime-store props as the nation spent itself into a Soviet-style hole last decade in its military adventures. Then they went ballistic when a new president acted on his campaign promise to insure working-poor Americans against health catastrophe.

Fortunately, in 2012 Americans did not buy the bridge that Mitt Romney was selling which would have resulted in tea party control of all things fiscal.

Still, as Hart says, we must choose — between a society that has the resources to meet its needs or, as the anti-tax set would do, one that simply ignores them.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Didja hear what Obama did? Didja?

2013-05-22T01:27:00.001-05:00

Is that Anthony Crispino I've been hearing tell us what horrific things President Obama has done? I think so.

Crispino — Bobby Moynihan's "Saturday Night Live" "second-hand news" character — knows everything except for everything.

"Didja hear the IRS interrogated the tea party?" I hear Crispino say. "Yeah. It's true."

It doesn't phase Anthony at all when reality interjects, Seth Meyers-style: "Actually, Anthony, the IRS interviewed leaders of tea party groups that sought tax exemption."

"Oh, yeah. It was interrogation," says Crispino. "And you know how I know? The Army was involved."

How so, Anthony?

"'You heard that Obama sent in this general."

You mean the IRS inspector general?

Ah, whatever. For this news cycle, parody is sitting in for reality. Those people constructed to believe the worst about a good president will construct stories you wouldn't believe. And shouldn't.

Didja hear that the White House had the House cloak room wiretapped? Well, yeah, you read it on the Drudge Report.

Except: After Congressman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., birthed the claim on right-wing radio and it circled the globe as "truth," Nunes said he, um, misspoke.

The sad thing: The reason such scandal scavengers can get any mileage out of such baselessness at the moment is because the FBI has to defend something truly odious — subpoenaing assorted Associated Press phone records, which included the main number for the AP in the House press gallery. See? The cloak room.

That's not wiretapping. That's not even close. Still, the FBI's actions provided an opening through which pink elephants could fly.

In the same way, the Internal Revenue Service has provided a monster opening to the Anthony Crispinos of the world by having given extra scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax exemption.

Understand: Scrutiny is exactly what taxpayers demand. Tax-exempt non profits shouldn't be partisan fronts. But taxpayers demand evenhandedness, too. The IRS has disgraced itself and disserved the nation.

Did I mention pink elephants? Former Reagan speechifier Peggy Noonan let 'em fly when she used hearsay and sour grapes from a few Republicans to report that the IRS had audited them as Obama-style payback.

Leave it to The New York Times' Nate Silver, the Einstein of political probability, to analyze Noonan's claim down to raw hysteria. Statistically, he points out, it is a certainty that many in America's 1 percent will get audited. Get used to it, rich white folks.

Regardless of administration, D or R, he wrote, "The probability of being audited is highest for high-income taxpayers." He observed that 12 percent of individuals who made more than $1 million were audited last year.

But seriously, now. No joke. No pun. No giggle. This IRS stuff is a serious matter.

The fanciful claims now afloat by anti-Obama balloonists are exactly why what the IRS did was wrong and stupid. Americans should be able to trust their government to treat each of them equally. Doing anything else inflates those hot-air rigs ever-ready to launch.

In The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes, "The real scandal — is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way."

The tax code has been abused by players on both sides of the political spectrum. An aggressive, effective — and most important, credible — IRS is crucial.

The tea party claims to be nonpartisan. I will claim to have shattered the Olympic long-jump record in fourth grade. Let the tea party's spawns prove the claim if they are to be tax-exempt. I cannot prove mine, unfortunately.

As Obama has made clear, the IRS made a horrible blunder — one that makes it more difficult to do a difficult job.

What it also did was give all those Anthony Crispinos out there a reason to tell stories you wouldn't believe.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Coverup for you to probe, Senator

2013-05-13T19:59:00.001-05:00

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., says the "coverup" surrounding the tragic incidents in Benghazi is "bigger than Watergate, bigger than Iran-Contra, bigger than the Pentagon Papers."

It's interesting that Inhofe doesn't mention another matter that didn't make his top four. It involved allegations of weapons of mass destruction, talking points planted in the press and weekly news programs about a "mushroom cloud" looming.

It involved linking Saddam Hussein to a terrorist attack on America. It involved sending men and women to war.

Sen. Inhofe wants more about events that caused the deaths of four Americans.

Four-thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight Americans died in events triggered by that matter he doesn't mention.

Throw in the 2,977 killed when unheeded warnings bore out about the 9/11 attack.

We did not hear Sen. John McCain calling for a Watergate-style probe into those matters like he now does about Benghazi. I wonder why.

That said, I disagree with Democrats who say this pageant of indignation is all about tarring Obama and, of course, Hillary Clinton. That's just not true.

The truth is that Republicans are pursuing their ongoing mission in Washington: "Do everything in our power so that our government can't govern, so help us God."

Not a word above should be taken as dismissing the horrific screw-up that was Benghazi, the paucity of security despite warnings, the mixed signals from the White House afterward. Horrific. Screw-up.

Then again: A Nixonian coverup? As I recall, Watergate consumed months and years and reels and reels of White House tape. If the Obama administration was papering over something, you'd think it would have stuck with its story more than 19 days before changing its explanation and calling it a terrorist attack, as Clinton did Sept. 20.

If this was telling tales so as not to undermine Obama's re-election — the reframed explanation gave voters a month and a half to decide for themselves. But, whatever you say, senators.

While we're at it: The administration unambiguously sought $1.80 billion for embassy security, construction and maintenance for fiscal 2012. Too much, said House Republicans. They cut it by $331 million, after cutting the request by $128 million the previous year.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who sits on the House Oversight Committee on Benghazi, said the U.S. consulate didn't meet the "basic, minimum standards." Asked later, he defended putting clamps on embassy funding.

"We have to make priorities and choices in this country," he said, tough budgetary times and all.

With that in mind, Rep. Chaffetz, here is something for your committee to study, and you'll be excited to know it comes with a coverup:

A 2012 study by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service that found that while resulting in more income inequality, the Bush tax cuts didn't boost the economy. It simply increased the federal deficit.

The coverup? Republicans quashed it. Didn't want it muddying the 2012 dialogue. Didn't want Mitt Romney to have to wrap his ideas around debunked economic theory. Talking points, you know.

The GOP wanted everyone to think of the deficit as Obama's baby, even if spending in his presidency rose at a slower rate than under Bush. (That's not a Democratic talking point. That's from factcheck.org.)

Yes, Congressman, an investigation. Let's investigate how foolish fiscal policies so strapped this country that it couldn't do what you now say should have been done: protect our brave diplomats.

Let's investigate how a strategy of strangulation has worked so well that paralysis is what we call motoring in the nation's capital.

You so want to have an investigation. Give this one your best shot. It beats governing.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Unelected, untouchable, uncontested

2013-05-08T01:32:00.001-05:00

From reports, the entrance was what one imagines of a drug lord who isn't used to waiting for a table in Guadalajara. Only this was in Washington.

Stepping out of the elevator, a wedge of body guards shoved people out of the way, one pinning a cameraman against the wall.

"You don't have jurisdiction here," the cameraman protested.

But of course, the National Rifle Association sets his own rules. Mr. Big had come to lecture Congress last January. Wherever he — and you — may be, you will get out of Wayne LaPierre's way.

Doesn't matter if a vast majority of Americans don't buy what he shills. He will meet his quota on Capitol Hill.

Of course, what he does is hardly unusual. The NRA is one of any number of entities that comport themselves as their own branches of government, and whose officials govern their own protectorates. It's all about money.

Speaking of acronyms: More and more Americans are coming to know GEO, as in GEO Group Inc., the Florida company that runs more than 111 for-profit prisons and penal facilities.

Recently a GEO executive, Thomas Wierdsma, was found civilly liable for "outrageous behavior," including attempts to pressure U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials to deport his immigrant daughter-in-law when her marriage to his son soured.

You know: "Half of our prisoners are federal. I'll get ICE on the phone."

Don't expect these developments to hurt GEO's business. With $1.48 billion in revenues last year, it has reached Halliburton-esque critical mass, profit- and power-wise.

So much liquidity has the company that it offered to plunk down $6 million for naming rights to Florida Atlantic University's new football stadium.

That idea was nixed after a public backlash. Rest assured, GEO will find good ways to spend that money, possibly convincing state and federal lawmakers that prison cells are good for the economy.

Nobody elected GEO, but know that it has power beyond the founders' imagining, even that of Thomas Jefferson, who warned about the "aristocracy of our monied corporations." Power? GEO has power over thousands of prisoners' every breath.

Maybe it makes sense to privatize trash hauling, or streetlight repair. It doesn't make sense to privatize life-or-death matters (See Hurricane Katrina). But when bigness is next to godliness, too many policy-makers simply bow to the GEOs of the world and proclaim, "At your service."

Big oil, the pharmaceutical industry, big insurance, all have managed to engorge themselves while blunting the public interest when it comes to policy. For one, Americans would be paying less for over-the-counter drugs if pharmaceutical makers hadn't prevented the government from negotiating prices under Medicare reforms.

Each of these players serves much like Russia or China in the U.N. Security Council. Whatever a body might wish to achieve, they carry a one-vote veto.

Unelected. Unaccountable. Grover Norquist has the pledges of most Republican members of Congress, along with governors and state lawmakers, to do what he says, which is to never raise revenue for any purpose.

How did Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform gain its power? Silly question. As a lobbying arm funded by corporate interests like big tobacco and big oil, it spends millions to elect candidates who kiss Norquist's ring and to smite anyone who backs away from the no-new-revenue pledge. The group spent $16 million on the last election.

"Conservatism, my foot," said Bill Moyers about Norquist's hold on politicians' souls. "It's all about the money."

And so we return to the unelected sheiks of the gun cartel, their flowing gowns, their gusher-style fiscal resources. As in the sand-blown Third World, politically they control whole provinces. They are the law, because they have the guns, and the money. And who will stand in their way?

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Call it reproductive justice

2013-04-30T22:15:00.001-05:00

Harold Lloyd had nothing on today's forces of regression.

In iconic black-and-white on a silent screen, the bumbling comic grappled with the big hand of a clock. The year was 1923.

Today, in Arkansas, North Dakota and wherever they can summon the votes, political forces seek to turn the hands of time back at least that far on reproductive rights.

President Obama observed this syndrome last week in a speech to Planned Parenthood. Points to you, Mr. President. However, you need to follow up that "turn back the clock" analogy with one for those of us on the side of modern times.

It's time to turn the clock forward — to 2013. Let's stop living in 1973.

That was when Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land and women no longer were at the mercy of people who made Bible verses statutory.

The time is right to move forward, not just because of the threat pervasive in certain states, but because the 2012 elections carried an encouraging message that should be translated in a new rallying phrase: reproductive justice.

The term comes from African-American feminists in the 1990s who, according to Time magazine's Kate Pickert, "wanted to broaden the appeal of reproductive rights" beyond simply keeping abortion legal and accessible. Increasingly it is being adopted as an alternative to "pro-choice."

Simply put: Unwanted pregnancies are a principal harbinger of poverty and distress. Abortion is an option for which no one wishes, but is something a majority of Americans wouldn't foreclose by law.

Reproductive justice is about exactly that. It's about "choice," but in a broader sense

The anti-choice movement not only seeks to ban abortion but to blunt policies that promote holistic women's health, including birth control.

Observe legislation in Texas that diverted millions of dollars from family planning. Bill sponsor Randy Weber, R-Pearland, cited "research" showing that women who used contraceptives had higher rates of abortions than those who didn't. In fact, the study he cited showed just the opposite.

Ah, what the heck. Facts be damned, and those who use them as well.

For those who consider themselves pro-choice, this is the kind of policy debate they should be winning, because the nation is receptive.

The other side wants to focus on abortion. The side supporting reproductive justice focuses on prevention through contraception and sex education.

To stand for the latter, Obama was the first sitting president to take a dais before Planned Parenthood, the one entity that does more than any other to help low-income women prevent unwanted pregnancies.

The forces of regression in recent weeks have sought to score propaganda points in light of the horrors associated with Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell, facing a murder rap for illegal late-term abortions and literal infanticide.

Prosecuting Kermit Gosnell is a matter of reproductive justice. The last thing most Americans should want is for women to be so desperate again as to turn to people like him when abortion can be early and safe, and pregnancy can be averted so many ways.

The next time you encounter an abortion foe picketing a Planned Parenthood clinic, ask that person. "So, you oppose birth control, eh? Congratulations. You are part of the problem."

The next time someone brings up the case of Kermit Gosnell, ask: "So, do you oppose agencies that provide birth control? Congratulations. You are Dr. Gosnell's accessory."

Reproductive justice. Preach it. Pursue it.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com

Government is evil, until . . .

2013-04-23T22:49:00.001-05:00

It's easy to deride Sen. Ted Cruz's double standard. In fact, he is only observing a tradition of great duration.

Former Sen. Phil Gramm was truly a mythical bird, decrying federal spending at every stop, then racing at the speed of an arclight to the nearest microphone to take credit for any federal dollars trickling Texas' way. Such a phenom was he that the tactic earned its own term: Grammstanding.

Now, a new term of similar feather: hypocruzy.

Cruze is a tea party darlin', he who in one of his first votes in Washington opposed federal emergency aid after Hurricane Sandy. Now he stands before you now as Sen. Two-Face, saying he'll pursue: "all available resources" to assist after the explosion that struck the Texas town of West.

Was Cruz careful not to mention the word "federal" when speaking of said resources? One angry observer from New York presumed so. He said Cruz and his Texas fiscal disservatives "should ask the NRA" for disaster funds.

(Won't happen, of course. NRA funds are committed to keeping an obstructionist bloc in Congress. That investment grows pricier each year when 10 times more Americans die from gun violence than perished on 9/11.)

This commentary could be all about the two faces of Cruz, and the principle it takes to toss one's principles out the limo window. Actually, it's about the thing that he and fellow tea partiers assail daily: that evil thing called government.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a fine fiddler to that tune. Just the other day he was in Chicago beckoning businesses to Texas, where the regulatory climate is as barren as a gila monster's habitat.

But let's be honest, because Perry won't be: While many companies would be drawn to "less government," more are interested in good schools for employees and effective public services, like highways that work. Each of those involves government. Texas lawmakers have dedicated themselves to less of that.

As a presidential hopeful, Perry said he would eliminate up to three federal agencies, one of which he could not name. That comment makes him the embodiment of fiscal disservatism — making sport of cutting government first, and figuring out how it affects people later.

Perry says that a lack of regulation didn't contribute to the West explosion. So, we can assume he and "anti-gummint''" Texas policymakers will do nothing to prevent the next disaster.

To that end, let's think of another disaster that affected the region in many ways, Hurricane Katrina.

When almost nothing went right with the response to Katrina. we were to assume it to be an indictment of bungling government. In fact, it was an indictment of bunglers who didn't believe in government.

Katrina was a test-run, for instance, of a wholly privatized Federal Emergency Management Agency. Talk about system failure. A chain of featherbedding good ol' boys assigned to be responsive to human needs turned over in bed and hit "snooze" when the alarm sounded.

Now we have the disaster in West, at a fertilizer plant that, reports the Houston Chronicle, contained substances that would have brought federal inspectors if state agencies had notified them.

In the aftermath, Republican Congressman Bill Flores, in whose district the disaster occurred, has asked for federal help. Like Cruz, to earn his own tea party merit badge, Flores also opposed Hurricane Sandy relief.

So Texas' junior senator isn't the only one guilty of hypocruzy.

Without question, the taxpayers of Texas and West deserve the help. They pay federal taxes. Unfortunately, they are represented by a breed of posers and posturers who denounce and despise government, until they need it.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Big tragedy in a small town

2013-04-18T23:58:00.001-05:00

They say everything's bigger in Texas. But most things that make it big are small.

West, Texas, for instance.

The name confuses. Named after a banker and sodbuster, West is in Central Texas, 25 miles north of Waco, where I spent a long time as a newsman.

As everyone knows by now, West is small, 2,800 people. That makes the wound it nurses one of unimaginable scope.

When I heard of the explosion that did so much damage to West, the first thing I thought of was utterly ironic.

I thought of proximity.

The assumption about people who live in "the country" is that they go there to be away from other people, to spread out.

The tragic irony was that the deaths and destruction attached to the event in West had to do with homes, apartments, two schools and a nursing home being too close to the site of a great explosion.

Then again, downtown West was seriously damaged as well, and it wasn't that close.

That happens with a concussion some likened to a nuclear blast, a mushroom cloud visible at 100 miles.

Back to that matter of closeness: I've observed that it's what makes places special. It's what makes New York New York, Chicago Chicago, Boston Boston.

Rather than massive and faceless, each is in fact a collection of small towns, shoulder to shoulder, packed into distinct blocks, sectors and boroughs.

West has considerably more elbow room but the same closeness.

It is predominated by Czech heritage. It is renowned for its kolaches — cream cheese or fruit or sausage — and for its West Fest celebration each Labor Day, when polka bands and beer-bread sandwiches make 100-plus degrees bearable.

Now West is known around the country for something else. For tragedy. For loss. For questions.

Texas is where something of comparable magnitude happened once with the very same combustible substance that has caused so much sorrow in West.

In 1947 two ships carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer outside the port of Texas City caught fire and exploded, killing 581. How were so many in harm's way?

The people of West had no idea what dread loomed down the block. It's unclear to what extent, if any, inspection had provided assurance that the property next door — and in place long before anyone moved nearby — was a ticking time bomb.

Such questions are for another day. On this day we remark on neighbors acting as neighbors in the truest sense — rushing to a danger scene as volunteer fire fighters, helping fish seniors out of a nursing home's rubble.

As in Boston on Patriot's Day, out of the worst of scenarios we come to expect the best of people, and they seem to deliver.

The phoniest of concerns, it seems to me, is about what becomes of West and, dare one say, its reputation as a quiet and peaceable, even blessed town. Its reputation is secure; its blessings, too. It's all in the bonding that often comes with a death in the family, when kin grow closer to make up for the void left by the departed

Like many towns its size, West owes its origins to a swatch of railroad track. Without it, and I-35 streaming its way generations later, it would be a vacant patch of blackland prairie.

But through the years, and the generations, it has more than justified its existence with much that is life.

In a small town, any loss is a big loss. In this one, the loss is bigger.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Pot and redefining crime

2013-04-17T14:17:00.001-05:00

How about some good news today? This year, reports Time magazine, drug cartels in Mexico stand to lose $1.4 billion.

Why? Because Colorado and Washington decriminalized recreational marijuana in November.

American taxpayers have been financing a drug war with costs past comprehending, and without measurable gains. Now here come voters in two states who have hit organized crime where it really hurts.

Not long after decriminalization of an ounce of pot became law in Colorado, a friend called, curious to know if all hell had broken loose. It took me a moment to realize that, in fact, it hadn't.

I had to acknowledge that almost nothing had changed, except for most assuredly the state's police blotters. To voters' immense credit — 55 percent in both states — what had changed was their definition of crime.

The real crime, they said, was that in 2011, marijuana arrests approached 1 million nationwide — most involving incarceration, each with its court case. Summon the attorneys.

The real crime was diverting police attention from offenses with actual victims to these, which had none. The real crime was shoving more coal into the blast furnace of a criminal justice system voracious for public dollars.

If you like to think only in money terms, something on which many Americans insist, this sounds like a slam dunk.

Back to that friend's inquiry: Lest anyone assume that Colorado was awash in a fog of THC in the dawning of a new criminal justice day: It wasn't. It hasn't been.

For one thing, it's still illegal to smoke pot in public, and illegal to possess it under age 21. Marijuana remains a very controlled substance, though Colorado and Washington aren't entirely sure yet how they will control it. In Colorado, people are able to grow as many as six plants. In Washington state, users will have to buy their marijuana from licensed providers.

Up next: how to regulate that, and tax it: more revenue for the states.

Opponents of these measures raised the specter of generations of hop heads. They probably needed to concentrate instead on the hops and barley that make beer so appealing. Intoxication is intoxication.

But when it comes to dependency, let's acknowledge two kinds that serve almost no one: the narco dollars that make drug cartels so wealthy in Mexico and Central America, and the insatiable demand for resources by the American criminal justice system. Anything that tightens the spigot feeding either is serving humanity.

For a long time Americans have bought into the appeal that marijuana serves as a gateway drug for harder and more dangerous substances. Of course, it is exactly that when coming from the same illegal pipeline. Take that business away from the connection, remove the cartels and pushers from the transaction, and pot is a gateway drug no more.

Of course, many serious questions remain in these trailblazing states. First is how to operate under two sets of law, state and federal, which behold pot differently.

Colorado Congressman Jared Polis has authored a bill to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act. It would to shift control over the substance from the Drug Enforcement Administration and to put it under the purview of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, with "Marijuana" making the acronym ATFM.

Meanwhile, other considerations loom, such as the fact that under federal regulations banks can't handle money obtained from drug deals. This means that even enterprises created by voters in the 18 states that allow medicinal marijuana don't have a place to put their money.

Some will call Colorado's and Washington's dilemma a legal morass. So be it. It's a better investment of legal minds than more arrests, packed jail cells and criminal court dates.

As a Coloradan, I'm proud to say that's where my tax dollars go now rather than to manufacturing more felons and puffing the Medellin Cartel up into a presence on a par with General Motors.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Tin-can plinkers vs. public safety

2013-04-10T01:00:00.001-05:00

"Many people like to get larger capacity magazines simply to save time reloading while they're at the range.

"When you're paying by the hour for range time, a lot of people do feel the need to stock up as much as possible."

America wouldn't want to infringe on anyone's range time. That costs a pretty penny. So of course Republicans in Congress will fight to the death a limit on the capacities of killing machines.

The above quote from a Virginia gun dealer is contained in Lethal Passage, Erik Larson's penetrating 1994 examination of the firearms industry and the culture that makes it click.

For his book, Larson followed the path of the Cobray M-11/9 which ended up in the hands of a 16-year-old who killed a teacher at school. He would have killed dozens if the gun hadn't malfunctioned.

Faulty merchandise. What an embarrassment for the makers. But they got their money, and their middle man did, too. So all was well ultimately.

Talk about embarrassments: In Larson's reporting you read all about people who make carnage their most important product.

Consider the gun dealer who advertised a "Whitman Arsenal": a seven-piece set of the exact weapon models Charles Whitman took up into the University of Texas tower in 1966 when he killed 16 and wounded 32.

Larson demonstrates that what the gun lobby calls a grand struggle against oppression actually is a battle over profit margins. And don't forget that range time.

Second Amendment rights? Nah. Sum it up with two "C"s — commerce and convenience.

"Gun manufacturers have little interest in saving lives," writes Larson, "although they struggle to convey the image that they are the last defenders of hearth and home."

Parents everywhere should have appreciated what American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the other day when the National Rifle Association, intoning to a trumpet chorus, said the best route to safer schools was for each to train and arm a volunteer among the staff or faculty.

Said Weingarten, "We must leave those decisions to the people who know our schools best — not those acting as a proxy for gun manufacturers."

That's you, National Rifle Association.

Now we see the merchants of death — sorry, folks, but you make it too easy — fighting reasonable steps like those taken by Colorado and Connecticut lawmakers who voted to limit magazines on firearms.

For guns that can fire blindingly excessive rounds and easily can be converted from semiautomatic to automatic, Larson has a term he prefers instead of "assault weapons."

He calls them "spree weapons" — as in, "The 20-year-old went on a killing spree inside the elementary school."

"Spree" is a more sporting term, more in keeping with what guns are about — plinking cans, obliterating targets, imagining federal agents at the door out to take away one's spittoon.

It was telling that in both Connecticut and Colorado, the key issue wielded by the gun lobby wasn't public safety at all but good ol' commerce. In Colorado, Magpul Industries, which manufacturers large-capacity magazines, has said it will leave the state. The same with gun manufacturers who've threatened to flee Connecticut.

What a thrill to hear policymakers say to these players: "Hasta la vista, baby."

Both legislatures voted for universal background checks. The gun lobby's chief argument against that is that they don't work. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research has multiple studies to demonstrate that they do.

But let's face it. The whole argument comes down to our partners in crime — convenience and commerce — and Uncle Jed having a right to sell his AR-15 in the driveway without "gummint" interfering.

Just so we understand what this is all about.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Worst investment of the century

2013-04-03T00:39:00.001-05:00

It never ceases to amaze — the breathtaking lack of proportionality some people have when they have it out for President Obama.

Hear the screams about what it costs to protect him on a golf outing or Malia and Sasha when going anywhere. Too much. You've got that right. But my reading of history — yours may differ — is that this president isn't the first to have children, or to go mulligan-ing.

Worse than this, consider the jet-engine decibels used to decry the few bad bets, among many exceptional ones, this administration has made in a green initiative that Time magazine called "the most ambitious energy policy in history."

Those dollars were used to invest in renewables of many stripes, as well as a smart grid, smart meters, and more energy-efficient federal buildings.

Every one of these initiatives does more toward "energy independence" and "energy security" than does drilling for oil or warring for it. Simply put and beyond debate: Energy savings are forever. Oil is not.

Back to the point about proportionality, however:

If every penny of the $90 billion devoted to clean energy in the stimulus bill went into a rat hole of corruption and featherbedding, with no trace of return, it would be a speck on the scale of scandal compared to the worst fiscal mistake of the 21st century.

That would be the venture launched 10 years ago on outrageously false pretenses, and yet saluted by flag-waving tea party and Fox News types: the invasion of Iraq.

A Harvard study finds that our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan combined will cost Americans $4 trillion to $6 trillion over time, with the biggest costs to come at home with care for 1.56 million discharged veterans. "The big, big cost comes 30 or 40 years out," Harvard's Linda Bilmes told the Los Angeles Times.

Profligate spending? The president who brought these people home struck the biggest blow imaginable on behalf of budget austerity.

Note that in the 2008 election, Republican nominee John McCain, as with the neoconservatives in the White House, was set on extending this kind of duty as far into the future as calendars could be printed.

Enough about dollars and cents, however.

America lost 4,804 lives in Iraq, and to this point, 3,274 have died in Afghanistan. These, however, are people who enlisted to put their lives on the line. At the same time between 112,000 and 122,000 Iraqi civilians died in our deigning to "liberate" them (iraqbodycount.org). In Afghanistan, the civilian toll is more than 19,000 (costsofwar.org).

The United States needs to end its combat involvement in Afghanistan, pull the drones out of the sky and let people figure out what life is like without our war-making machines in their faces, stirring blood oaths.

From the start of our war-making, every Iraqi or Afghan we killed made it harder for us to pull out, as it meant two Iraqis or Afghans resolved to fight back.

At some point in the last decade a lot of Americans came to realize that we had put too much stock in the power of war. But that realization came most of a decade too late.

The so-called reconstruction of the countries we shattered, the "nation building" so derided by George W. Bush when he first solicited your vote for president, has been as much of a disaster as the war itself. It has been a boon only to private contractors who were in it for themselves, not for the victims.

War, though mankind's worst invention and investment, is always good for the war business, and that's been our business for too long.

It's time, as Laura Nyro sang, to "study war no more."

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Gay rights are like Dad's sideburns

2013-03-26T23:06:00.001-05:00

Anyone who experienced the '60s will know this: that there actually were two '60s.

The first is routinely illustrated in film — flower power, long hair, Age of Aquarius, protests, all that.

The second Sixties — what most of us experienced — wasn't any of that.

Protest was as foreign as borscht. Long hair, too. Bell bottoms? Nope. Most everyone, including the average teen, was straight-legged and short-cropped.

If you want to see how people dressed and comported themselves in "the '60s," look at what was happening in the '70s, principally with Dad's sideburns. They were growing long.

Don't believe me? Haul a few snapshots out of the shoe box.

The '70s were when so many of us came around to the '60s, the styles, the sensibilities, the rightness of key causes — antiwar, civil rights, environmentalism.

The '70s was when bigotry truly became marginalized, for instance. It didn't happen in the '60s with bloodied heads on a bridge in Selma or the slaying of Dr. King in Memphis. It took time, like those sideburns.

So it is in 2013 with this increasing marginalization of bigotry: the surge behind gay rights.

Speaking of decades: America has done a complete turnaround on this matter in 10 years.

In 2003 only 37 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, with 55 percent opposed. Now? Fifty-five percent support it according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, while 36 percent say it should be illegal.

Hence, either the Colorado Legislature just made a bold affirmation of equal rights by legalizing civil unions, or it is whimping out in stopping short of legalizing gay marriage.

Then again, that will come, like Dad's sideburns, as have equal treatment in the military, and the elevation of high-profile gay and lesbian policy makers like Minnesota Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

President Obama put it rightly, that this is simply the Constitution speaking — the document that tea party types say they so venerate. Ah, but they were absolutely slobberknockered by the announcement of Republican leading light, Sen. Rob Portman, that he now sees the 14th Amendment as supporting his gay son's right to marry whom he pleases.

Hillary Clinton said it, that homosexuals deserve the "rights of citizenship . . . personally and as a matter of law."

The Boy Scouts pledge duty to country. What about the basic tenet of equality that underpins it? Interestingly, the effort to overturn the Scouts' ban on homosexual members was sparked by gay Eagle Scouts who've had to live a lie about who they are.

The Scouts' resistance to this basic principle of fairness and inclusiveness will fall, as have so many other barriers in our nation's existence.

It's true; not everyone's dad grew his sideburns out and wore flared slacks in the '70s as the social contributions of the '60s became a part of us. Some people would never give an inch below the ear.

Enough dads eventually did, however, to be a follicular referendum that became a rout one decade later. The same thing is happening today on rights for gays and lesbians. Simply put, more and more people are realizing it is right.

Welcome to this side of history.

Longtime newspaper editor John Young lives in Fort Collins. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Big, bad talk-show audition

2013-03-19T17:41:00.001-05:00

Listen to Dan Patrick destroy his guests. Try to get a word in edgewise; he'll not only cut you off, he'll slice you into cold cuts.

Patrick is a Houston radio talk-show host. To catch his act, however, you don't have to give his AM ratings a bump, something I'll not facilitate. Just catch his act as he cuts the legs off citizens at the Lege — the Texas Legislature.

I don't know if on the radio he is the same samurai seen on a recent video. Surely not.

Surely if "goon" is one's day job, one puts on different clothes before heading off to serve as a state senator, which Patrick is.

In a hearing on his bill to prevent school districts' enlisting Planned Parenthood for sex education, Patrick, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, was beyond abrupt — unless someone came to agree with him.

Patrick's bill is typical off-the-deep-end stuff from one who wouldn't dare acknowledge the holistic scope of what Planned Parenthod does to help women avoid the very thing — abortion — he uses to demonize the agency. The bill is propaganda incarnate.

Video on rhrealitycheck.org shows that the last thing Patrick wanted at his hearing was such a point to be raised, much less any actual discussion of his bill's merits. He had already decided those.

You might think of such behavior as unusual and unseemly. I see it as too usual, also known as a trend.

A whole bunch of people in public office these days want a talk show. They want to be Rush Limbaugh. They want to be Sean Hannity. They want a time slot on Fox.

They aren't interested in parsing truth. Their target audience doesn't parse.

Sen. Rand Paul, for example. He held up confirmation of CIA Director John Brennan for many hours to hear the chime of his own voice.

Paul's stated concern was the use of drones, one I share — except that in no time he was talking about U.S. drones shooting citizens in the streets and burger bars of America. Senator, if that ever happens, please hand me the Bushmaster with the high-capacity clip. We have a government to overthrow.

Ted Cruz. Fox News. They rhyme. Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, now MSNBC morning host, expressed disdain that the Republican freshman senator comes across as "willfully ignorant" in his absolutism about gun rights. This, though Cruz himself testified on behalf of gun restrictions as Texas solicitor general.

But, Joe, Cruz won the tea party's casting call in winning his office. He is not going to disappoint his public.

Allen West. Now there's a Fox News darling.

West became a tea party super hero by claiming that bunches of Democrats in Congress are Communists. No facts; no evidence; no nothing. It didn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Speaking of the fair-and-balanced folks. David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt, in their book, The Fox Effect, point out that Fox News put so many Republican presidential aspirants on its payroll that it might have stunted the anti-Obama field when people like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin had to decide whether they wanted to give up show biz for a run.

You see, everyone wants a talk show. Everyone wants to be Limbaugh, and Hannity and Dan Patrick. They're not so interested in governing as in talking, and interrupting if necessary, and having their audience say, "Amen."

"If you combine a lack of a sense of humor with an absence of humility and then stir in a cup of self-righteousness, you are definitely not working on a recipe for cooperative achievement," writes The New York Times' Gail Collins. She is talking about Ted Cruz, but could be referring as well to all those who've answered the tea party's call for auditions.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Fiscal disservatives, designer deficits

2013-03-12T23:10:00.001-05:00

You wondered if tea party Republicans cared about the little people. You should have heard those in Washington plead for victims of a federal austerity horror.

White House tours: canceled.

Colorado's three GOP congressmen were voice-raw over this. They had promised tours to vacationing constituents. Sequestration squelched that.

Oh, the humanity.

Understandably, and subsequently, these caring lawmakers have no larynx left for truly desperate people in their snowy state. In the face of sequestration, agencies that serve homeless families are poised for cuts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for domicile assistance. Laryngitis aside, this is of no concern to fitfully ensconced tea party constituents.

Observe the magic of "across the board" cuts so blithely and regularly recommended by those who think government can do only wrong (unless it is invading other countries).

Speaking of blithe: That word described most fiscal disservatives as the sequester arrived. Eighty-five billion dollars in automatic, indiscriminate cuts? No biggie.

A great howl came up, however, with the now-halted release of illegal immigrants from federal facilities. Then again, just what does "across the board" conjure to you? Does it not involve Immigrations and Customs? And if not, why?

Would you, Mr. or Ms. Lawmaker, like your "I Am Utterly, Totally Irresponsible" T-shirt in XL or XXL?

Of course, almost from the word "go" for sequestration, the Republican House was quickly trying to figure out a way to feed the military beast, for we know not a shred of fat lies within.

But enough about the absurdity of automatic cuts of any kind. Let us focus on the insanity of one party's fighting with all its might to defend the nation's most comfortable citizens while the nation's least comfortable try to keep their fingers from freezing.

Let's also reflect on tax policies that consciously painted the nation into a corner of red ink, the architects' knowing that at some point those designer deficits would be, or would appear to be, untenable.

And since no one likes to raise taxes, even if federal revenue as a share of GDP is the lowest since the days of "Howdy Doody" and Roy Rogers — well, the fiscal disservatives pledge to fight any revenue enhancement to the death.

What's amazing is that President Obama is simply playing off the tax recommendations of his 2012 rival. Mitt Romney, you'll recall, wanted to close tax loopholes that unnecessarily benefited the super-wealthy. Oddly, though he railed against the deficit like a good Republican should (now that Republians don't hold the White House), he didn't intend to use so much as a dime of the revenue raised to cut the deficit. He and Paul Ryan would use the difference to lower tax rates.

That old voodoo. Then again, for some it never gets old.

Over and over and over again since the days of Reagan, Republican-inspired tax cuts served to facilitate growth — in the national debt. All along that path, the fiscal disservatives yawned. Didn't matter if we were waging wars — plural. Didn't matter if times were good or bad or in-between. It was always time to cut taxes.

Under Reagan, a certifiably ambitious revamp of the tax code could have raised sufficient revenue to wipe out the deficit. Not a chance. It had to be revenue-neutral.

So, here we are, trillions in the red, and of course this is the fault of the Democrat in office — for whom deficit spending was the only option to confront one of the saggiest economies since the Pilgrims landed.

The economy is dramatically better. The stock market is putting up Miami Heat-like numbers. The jobs picture is improving. And now? Sequestration and forever fiscal crises endanger middle-class public-service jobs like those of teachers, first-responders and more.

But don't forget those hurt worst: Americans, out in the cold, tour maps in hand.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

The $750 billion rip-off

2013-03-05T20:47:00.001-06:00

What the March 4 Time lacks in its explosive expose about the hospital industry is a face.

A perspiring face. A blinking, flinching face.

Dear do-nothing Congress: You say you care about things that affect everyday Americans. Well, then, find us such a face.

We need someone on whose thieving visage we can focus, like that of Charles Van Doren, paraded before a sensational congressional investigation in 1959.

His crime? Being fed the answers that kept him winning on TV quiz show "Twenty-One."

Scandalous? Oh, yeah. Van Doren had achieved great wealth and fame — $100,000 in winnings — even appearing on Time's cover.

So what about the scoundrels and cheats now the focus of the news magazine? We have no faces to attach to writer Stephen Brill's assertion that hospitals overcharge Americans $750 billion per year. We need them.

Until we know the perpetrators, they will continue to do exactly what they do — rip people off.

Brill and Time have done the nation a service, dissecting the add-ons and overcharges faced by uninsured or underinsured individuals who, once they got the bill, wished they were dead.

Take the cancer patient who lived just long enough to see his widow-to-be face a $142,000 bill, this after paying $30,000 toward the total.

The overcharges are too numerous and outrageous to mention, but just consider the $25 one hospital charged for a 500 milligram niacin tablet, sold for a nickel apiece in drug stores. Or the $7 apiece that MD Anderson charged for cotton swabs used to disinfect prior to injections. A box of them can be had for $1.91.

The hospitals say these aren't the actual costs that patients pay, only a starting point for negotiations with insurers. However, when one has no insurance, or when one's insurance is capped and can't keep up with catastrophic costs, these charges are the ending point, unless a smart and resourceful advocate can argue the bill down.

An irony welling up in Brill's report is that nonprofit hospitals are among the worst offenders. Hence, they are swimming in cash they use to make executives millionaires, to build gleaming towers, and to buy out competitors.

Another irony is how that evil thing called government comes up smelling like a rose in contrast to how the "free market" handles medical costs. Medicare, writes Brill, isn't just efficient, it's "ruthlessly efficient" controlling costs.

We need hearings. We need to hear from the faceless "chargemasters" who set such scandalous prices. We need red faces and sweaty lips. Then we need to bring the hammer down on institutions that do what they do with government's involvement and hefty subsidies.

Points out Brill, "This is not about interfering in a free market. It's about facing the reality that our largest consumer product by far — one fifth of our economy — does not operate in a free market."

Largely because Congress caved to industry demands, the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — with the good it will do for those lacking insurance, performs little cost control. The condition is a continuation of industry-sculpted Medicare Part D, for which the government can't negotiate drug prices.

At a time when efforts are afoot to clamp down on Medicare, Brill makes the fascinating assertion that the best thing for health care would be to expand it — to lower, not raise, the eligibility age, with higher copays based on income. Many of the most tragic victims of this system were people just on the cusp of Medicare and age 65.

Points out Brill, "The health care market isn't a market at all. It's a crap shoot. People fare differently according to circumstances they can neither control nor predict."

So true. Now, to attach this scandal to a face.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

For education, against the test

2013-02-27T13:26:00.001-06:00

Jesse Hagopian is doing more than teaching history. He is answering history's call.

With Hagopian in the lead, most of the teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School have made recent history's most important statement about what drags down public education in 2013.

They have refused to give the test.

In this case it is MAP, the Measure of Academic Progress. The teachers say it is time-consuming, costly and serves no true diagnostic purpose.

Since Garfield teachers declared their boycott weeks ago, other Seattle teachers have joined the protest. The school district has threatened them with their jobs. Tellingly, however, it also has said it might re-examine the test.

For all who value public education, let these teachers win their battle.

As one who was educated in public schools, and whose children were as well, I cannot express sufficiently my impression that those who are most gung-ho about testing are least interested in true quality public schools.

To the contrary, they are most interested in assailing those schools based on false comparisons, then promoting schemes like school vouchers and for-profit charters.

In truth, and in their heart of hearts, these people don't buy into the whole concept of public education, and certainly not education in a classical, Jeffersonian sense. They want to treat schools like factories that dispense facts and spit out workers. It's all about keeping up with the smoke-belchers of China and Taiwan.

Or maybe it's about stoking the burners of some of the most profitable factories on our shores: those dispensing standardized tests and curricula and test-prep materials.

The test in question in Seattle is developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association. It uses interactive computer software to supposedly demonstrate student readiness. Seattle teachers don't get to see the results, but they are evaluated, in part, based on them.

Administered in addition to Washington's mandated state test, MAP is different from many state tests because it is low-stakes, at least for the students. Their grades are not affected by the results, and they often give half-hearted efforts, though teaching careers may hang on them.

Beyond that matter, what is affected, say the teachers, is the "astounding" amount of instructional time lost — five hours per school year for each student.

Ah, yes. Time. How often have we heard policymakers talk about the need for longer school days, or more of them? How about less time spent on tests and test prep?

A Texas grade school teacher told me that she lost the equivalent of 16 instructional days each year to state tests, locally mandated test-prep drills and benchmark tests.

Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers did readers a service by focusing on the time and cost of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test — FCAT.

It reported on how school districts spend untold time and thousands of dollars on benchmark tests, called "testing of the test" — students as guinea pigs to see if the state's demands are or can be met by overtaxed teachers. On top of $62 million spent by Florida are unfunded demands school districts assume to administer FCAT.

Dollars and instructional times lost: None dare call it waste.

The sad thing is that so many citizens salute this toilet-paper banner under the guise of "achievement" and "excellence." The fact is that no standardized test meant for everyone of every imaginable learning level can deliver on such pretenses. Is that so hard to understand?

The teachers of Garfield High understand. They understand that what they are trying hard to achieve — true education – is being filleted with a long sword on the altar of standardization.

So, horrors, instead of playing along, they have said, "We will remain at our posts and teach." What say, America? Off with their heads?

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Casting call: America's next McCarthy

2013-02-19T21:48:00.001-06:00

America needs to know:

Whether Chuck Hagel has sold nuclear secrets on E-Bay.

Whether he has a secret time-share sauna with Vladimir Putin.

Whether he's been a broker for toxic Chinese trinkets.

Whether he deals in marked-up black-market Persian rugs.

Don't stop now, Sen. Ted Cruz. So many beyond-the-pale, beyond-belief, totally shameless questions for you to raise about the defense secretary nominee. And so little time.

None of the above is even a shred more "beyond" what the freshman Texas senator has trotted out in reality. He suggested without a whiff of evidence that Hagel might have received big bucks from "enemies of America." North Korea, perhaps? Iran? Al Qaida?The Galactic Empire? What true American worth his official Sarah Palin Tea Party Decoder Ring would blame Cruz for asking?

Even John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both bent on putting Hagel on the rack for ritual partisan gratification, expressed mortification.

Cruz has emerged quickly to claim the reputation as the least deliberative in the most deliberative body in the free world.

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wasn't the only one comparing Cruz to Joe McCarthy: "He doesn't have the right to smear Hagel, with no supporting evidence, with insinuations." Indeed, Cruz doesn't need Marcus's testimonial. He appears to have earned the McCarthy parallel by acclimation, and is proud of it.

But of course, he'll point out, he didn't say Hagel was on the take from America's enemies. He was just asking extremely leading and loaded questions based on the fact that Hagel worked in firms doing foreign business. Say what?

It's the formula that kept Joe McCarthy in the spotlight in the '50s and now keeps Fox News in its lofty ratings perch. Choose your cable-ready GOP tempest: "Death panels." Black Panthers. ACORN. "We insinuate. You decide." Right, Senator?

Cruz voted against Hagel, as he did against John Kerry for secretary of state, saying he didn't trust their commitment to America's defense. Funny thing: Both men were sufficiently commited to shed actual blood — Purple Heart recipients — in Vietnam. Cruz, by contrast, studied these matters at the Dick Cheney Academy of Hands-off Militance.

Now, Cruz, whose upset of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the GOP primary affirmed the fact that the tea party is the life force of a not-so-vibrant party, stands to be a national standard-bearer for recklessness.

This may thrill citizens suckled on Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories and Palin's tweets, but it should frighten the GOP as an institution.

A walking grenade like Cruz is just what the Democratic Party needs to regain legitimacy in a red state like Texas.

Heady though his ascendance may be, he is vulnerability personified, along with the likes of failed tea party-backed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. Were it not for these candidates, each flaunting hard-right ideologies, each losing, the GOP would have captured the Senate in 2010. Add Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri in 2012; in their extremism they helped the Democrats add to their hold on the Senate.

Cruz needs to make rhetorical hay while he can. Based on his performance thus far, he'll be on the Senate's "most beatable" list when next he appears before voters.

As for the senator's assault on Hagel based on nothing more than a desire for his clanging voice to be heard, it's a shame that Joseph Welch could not be there to say what he famously said to Joe McCarthy in 1954:

"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

To which Cruz could have uttered the word that most personifies the politics he and his brand have brought to the nation's capital:

"No."

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Prevention — brother, can you spare an ounce of it?

2013-02-13T15:14:00.001-06:00

Nehemiah Griego was angry. He got angrier, and angrier, and then he got a gun. Or two.

On Jan. 19, a day when firearms advocates staged "Guns Across America" events, the 15-year-old Albuquerque boy shot dead all five members of his family.

Horrific, yes. But one thing: It could have been worse. Reportedly the teen contemplated shooting up a nearby Wal-Mart.

Something happened. Maybe his girlfriend convinced him to confess. Maybe a kind word outside his family's church did it. It has a skate park, and in the hours after the shootings it provided hospitably familiar faces including a friendly security guard who spoke to the teen.

Whatever the reason, he took authorities to his home, showed them the bodies, then showed them the murder weapons — owned by his parents — including a fully loaded .223-caliber semiautomatic.

In the weeks since the Sandy Hook horrors, Americans haven't been able to agree about much. Wait. That's not true.

Some conservatives and gun lovers have turned veritably evangelical about mental health.

The same people who would look the other way at the dime's being saved when services are cut from mental health services now say, "This is where we should be looking for answers, not blaming guns."

It's time for progressives, who have always urged more proactive approaches to crime prevention, to take them up on that.

Let's say that when he was in middle school Nehemiah Griego had been in a program aimed at helping rein in adolescent anger, one that showed good success in helping at-risk teens, and he was one of those. Would it have been worth it?

More than we could ever imagine.

Well, some good people have been imagining this across our land, and getting good results. And people ought to start listening, particularly policy makers who make budget decisions.

Consider one player in Austin, the Council for At-Risk Youth — CARY. It works to get to angry kids just like Nehemiah Griego. It has a program called ART — Aggression Replacement Training — at five middle schools for disciplinary referrals, most commonly for bullying.

After a two-semester program that involves service projects, parental involvement and a lot of anger management, it has shown pretty dramatic improvement in students' grades, attendance and discipline.

A study found that 60 percent of middle-school bullies are destined to have criminal convictions by age 24.

CARY didn't invent any magic it plies. Others know what works. Intervention does. What CARY does have is support from a city — Austin — and a county — Travis County — both pitching in $200,000 apiece annually.

CARY estimates that ART costs $750 per student. It cites a study estimating it costs Texas $125,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile.

These advocates for at-risk students are calling on the Texas Legislature to set aside 1 percent of the $20 billion the state spends on juvenile and criminal justice and to replicate programs in schools that help young people manage their anger.

Mental health? CARY has found that 20 percent of these children have emotional disabilities. School accountability? (Nothing seems to stir lawmakers like "school accountability.") These are our most likely dropouts, most likely classroom disruptions — oh, yes, and most likely killers.

Amid the discussions about gun control and whatever else society might do to avoid more Sandy Hooks, more Auroras, more Nehemiah Griegos, CARY executive director Adrian Moore wrote President Obama urging a new look at intervention programs aimed at juvenile delinquency and anger management.

"Too much of our direction fixates on capacity-building to 'help strengthen the juvenile justice system,' while not adequately addressing prevention and early intervention programs," he wrote.

No truer words could be spoken. With all the verbiage sprayed in the air about preventing deeds like those in Newtown, Aurora and Albuquerque, surely we can agree on something like this, and find a few pennies to do it better.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado: Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

United States’ new separatists

2013-02-05T21:59:00.001-06:00

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of — ah, the hell with it."

"My country tis of thee; sweet land of — Obamacare? I'm walking."

It's been nearly a century and a half since, in a courthouse beside a bloody battlefield, a severed union was stitched whole. If I read things correctly, in 2013 part of that whole has grown tired of cohabitation. It wants its own generals again.

A few weeks on the heels of petitions to secede from the union after Barack Obama's re-election, we are awash in warlike threats. Has someone secured Fort Sumter?

It didn't seem like a wartime speech the other day when our president, at his second inauguration, talked about the promise of the 21st century, calling for the nation to bridge the meaning of the founders' words about equality "with the realities of our time."

Unacknowledged by President Obama, however, was a threat to the space-time continuum: an opposition bitterly pining for a return to the '50s — the 1850s.

Those were the good old days before Lincoln and the Union Army stepped in to enforce the founders' intentions for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice even for slaves.

And here we are in 2013, and in various points around the country, including statehouses, with rumblings that the union has grown untenable.

Indeed, some state lawmakers have issued calls to turn the time machine back to 1832. That's when South Carolina announced it would obey federal law no more. The Ordinance of Nullification it was called. Before cannon balls flew, it was the Civil War's first shot.

We know who won.

The latest separatist retort is proposed legislation in states from Texas to Wyoming to Montana to Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina and Indiana, initiating efforts to "nullify" any attempts by federal authorities to enforce new gun restrictions.

Before that: nullification-style efforts aimed at ignoring federal health care reforms such as health insurance exchanges to lower the cost health coverage, and federal assistance to expand Medicaid.

In the meantime, we have a disconcerting split forming between two separate brands of law enforcement. On one hand, we have largely urban police organizations supporting steps to tamp down the proliferation of military-style guns and massive clips. On the other hand, we have mostly rural sheriffs saying they will refuse to enforce new gun-control laws.

Epitomizing that brand of petulance in Texas is McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara. The Waco Republican said he would enforce no law "I feel to be unconstitutional."

Newly elected, McNamara apparently doesn't understand that courts decide those matters. His job is to follow what they dictate. But you know what a shiny badge and a horse not made of two-by-fours will do to one's sense of stature.

One sheriff who isn't marching to that tune is Grayson Robinson. His jurisdiction is Colorado's Arapahoe County. In a recent letter, he compared statements like McNamara's to the actions of long-ago lawmen who served as judge and jury, with ropes and nooses.

Robinson could also have mentioned the individual who, in his jurisdiction, took the law into his own hands in an Aurora theater last year and, after firing a spray of bullets, left 12 people dead and 58 wounded. Judge. Jury. Executioner.

You tell me the difference ultimately between that one man, and another, albeit an elected sheriff, announcing, "I am the law."

Once again, we reflect in wonder at the contrast: such a hopeful, uplifting presidential inauguration, and such militant resistance to what, based on the voters' wishes, shall emanate for four more years from the nation's capital.

You're right, Sheriff. Maybe one country isn't big enough for the both of us.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Suddenly, bookkeeping is their thing?

2013-01-30T00:09:00.001-06:00

If you're like me, it's difficult acclimating to the new Republican role as The Party That Wants the Numbers to Add Up.

Forgive me, but when I see John Boehner, Eric Cantor and the rest striking the virginal pose, halos overhead signifying "zero dollars more than revenues allow," I can't help but see a whole other group.

I see the Republicans of the Bush-era fiscal rave — the all-night spending party that barely blinked at the nightclub tab, nodding to the beat of Dick Cheney's rapping, "Deficits don't matter."

I did see one Republican at the time, Sen. John McCain, blasting his party for authorizing off-the-books expenditures for simultaneous wars. Response? Damn the deficits; full speed ahead with more tax cuts.

Now, of course, we're supposed to believe things have changed — the tea party and all.

However, reading these words from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, I want to ask him, "Are you blind?" He said:

"Today's conservatism is completely wrapped up in solving the hideous mess that is the federal budget, the burgeoning deficits . . . We seem to have an obsession with government bookkeeping."

Sorry, but the new GOP breed is less interested in reducing the deficit than never having to pay a dime more in taxes for all the government that was bought in the years since the budget surplus under Bill Clinton.

Exhibit A to depict reality is this from the New York Times about Senate Democrats calling Republicans' deficit-bluster bluff:

"The House Republican demand that the Senate produce a budget by mid-April could set in motion a Senate effort to overhaul the tax code to raise more revenue, contrary to Republican vows to stand against any more tax increases."

Recall that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan wanted to reform taxes as well, close loopholes, but to reduce the deficit not at all. Revenue-neutral, baby.

See? The New Party of Bookkeeping isn't so much interested in making things add up as it is avoiding further embarrassing Grover Norquist, who has threatened with a martini skewer any Republican in Congress who voted for the "fiscal cliff" bill that let some tax cuts lapse.

Today's GOP is less interested in deficits than what motivates Norquist: starving government.

If the GOP truly were motivated by bookkeeping and deficits, it would acknowledge that the nation has maintained 21st-century spending levels with (as a percent of GDP) 1950s tax levels.

If it were truly the Bookkeeping Party, the GOP would be amenable, per Simpson-Bowles, to significant cuts in military spending. It's not.

Parallels can be seen in states strapped to Republican desires to cut taxes, and to strangle human services and education. In Texas, amid the Great Recession, a rough fiscal time was made much rougher because of a property tax cut presented as "school finance reform." A new business tax didn't come close to making up for revenue lost.

This resulted in an enormous fiscal hole for schools. Even though Texas balanced its budget as state law requires, its Republican leadership acted, and continues to act, irresponsibly. Instead of storing grain for hard times, it was making corn cakes with its seed corn.

Nationally, the GOP did much the same under Bush with reckless tax cuts. And when hard winter hit — the worst recession in generations — when the federal government had to spend to stimulate the economy, Republicans flung, and continue to fling, accusations of unnecessary hyper-spending at Barack Obama.

"Obsessed with bookkeeping?" That's hilarious. Deficits by design? Bingo. The better to strangle government.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Bring the fire, Mr. President

2013-01-22T21:42:00.001-06:00

When fighting a fire, one strategy is to start another one.

When a wildfire is chewing up acreage, setting a fire in its path and letting the intentionally set flames burn away available ground cover can dramatically slow the foe.

That's all we can ask in the face of America's gun-death inferno. That's what the president did last week. Bring the fire.

President Obama knows what's coming. If the first salvo — National Rifle Association buying TV ads pulling his daughters into the debate — is any indication, it's going to be beyond vicious, even if every proposal Obama makes is reasoned and reasonable.

It's got to happen. Bring the fire.

Vice President Biden said, "We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good." We must do what is possible in the face of the expected blister of flame and fury.

One bogus assertion is that to prevent tragedies like Newtown, Aurora and Tucson, Obama is focused only on guns. Those who claim this either aren't listening or haven't been wearing their ear protection at the target range. In his Jan. 16 speech, he addressed addressing mental health issues. He talked of helping schools beef up security if they desire. He mentioned entertainment's influence on violence. Each is a concern worth examining. And what are we doing to understand what's happening?

Since 1996, for instance, legislation put forth by the gun lobby has meant that the Centers for Disease Control cannot study gun violence as a health issue. That year a bill sponsored by Congressman Jay Dickey, R-Ark., forbade money's going "to advocate or promote gun control." This stopped statistical and forensic studies by the CDC focused on guns' role in so many deaths, for instance — how do these weapons typically flow into the wrong hands?

Among President Obama's new directives is one to ease such research restrictions. (Interestingly, in the wake of so much gun carnage, Congressman Dickey has modified his views and supports new research.) What Congress did in '96 had the ideological markings of what has happened under the Bush administration to stifle research that would confirm man's role in climate change. And don't forget restrictions on embryonic stem cell research which blocked crucial lifesaving developments. All are know-nothing directives from the do-nothing set.

As for actual restrictions on sales of weapons, the most ridiculous argument is that such laws will be ignored by criminals. Name a law with which a criminal will abide. Does that obviate the need for any limits on human behavior?

High-capacity clips have no business in anyone's hands unless that person is hired by us to protect us. The reason Arizona gunman Jared Lee Loughner didn't kill more people is that after shooting off more than 30 rounds he had to reload, and bystanders tackled him.

Anyone who asserts that he or she needs 30-round clips for self-protection or sport will also make the claim that he needs surface-to-air missiles for bringing down pheasants and a bazooka to ward off door-to-door solicitors. And watch, they will.

Bring the fire, Mr. President. Benefit from the gun lobby's broadsides, as when your opposition tried to make you out to look like something other than an American, something other than a lover of country, something alien and dangerous. The voters saw what you are: a reasoned, reasonable, sometimes too moderate, often too conciliatory leader.

Nothing Obama has proposed would take away a single gun now in possession. But that's what we're told by those who would wish that we do nothing in the face of flames that have consumed so many lives, blackening in grief so many parcels of this land.

Let the NRA belch flames. Let its overstatements and carnal rage clear the ground around a vital public health issue, and then let's fight this fire.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

The people vs. buckets of money

2013-01-15T16:48:00.001-06:00

Self-evident.

It's what the founders called a certain assertion: All persons are created equal.

This, too, is self-evident — or should be: A corporation is not a person.

A corporation has no fundamental rights. It is a legal construct, like a parade license. A parade and a corporation both involve people. Neither has constitutional rights. If either of them did, a dogfighting ring would merit due process as an enterprise.

Or maybe dogfighting would be protected as free speech.

Someone should try the latter argument on the wing of the Supreme Court that ruled three years ago this month in Citzens United vs. the FEC that political spending is protected speech under the First Amendment. For the same reason, the court scrambled or negated a host of state restrictions on corporate political contributions.

All of which motivates a growing movement to amend the Constitution and insert among other things: "The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only," and for the purposes of influencing elections, "Money is not speech."

Eleven states and 500 local governments have sided with the effort to overturn Citizens United by amending the Constitution. Find the proposed amendment and sign a petition on movetoamend.org.

Hear acolytes of the court's Scalia-Thomas-Alito wing rail against "judicial activism," when in Citizens United the court ignored the people's reasoned determination that unchecked political contributions are a golden key to graft.

"Corporations as people" was one egregious result of the ruling. The other was the germination of super PACs that could dish out unlimited campaign funds.

Hence, though the founders said we are all equal, it's not true at all — not when when comparing us to Dallas chemical titan Harold Simmons. His holding company Contran donated $18 million to Republican super PACs focused on the 2012 elections. He was one of the pace setters in a campaign on which a record $6 billion was spent, the lion's share from carnivorous corporate interests.

What can be done? The first objective is to take up the Supreme Court on its dare and change the Constitution as movetoamend.org urges. Another objective is to elevate the role of small individual contributions.

Admittedly, the Obama campaign did a good job of that by itself (again) in 2012 by harvesting small contributions at a historic pace — $690 million of Obama's $1 billion in donations coming online.

However, more needs to be done.

The Brennan Center for Justice, carrying on the legacy of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan to promote a more representative democracy, is one of the nation's biggest advocates of public campaign financing.

The most doable approach of which I know has served New York City for 25 years now: a small-donor matching program.

Simply put, under the national program advanced by the Brennan Center, the taxpayers agree to a 5-to-1 match of all in-state donations of up to $250 from individuals. Hence, for candidates who consent to participate, a $100 donation would yield $500.

Under the Brennan Center's proposal, those candidates who consented would have the present $2,500 federal individual limit sliced in half. Those who didn't would get no matching dollars.

Sounds like liberal (Democrat) do-goodism, right? Well, the idea has been embraced by Republican Rudy Giuliani, as well as Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who advocates a similar program statewide.

Truly, nothing is more fundamental to restoring the representative concept the founders first put on that far-off easel (an era before before dry-erase boards) than to X-out, or at least carve away at, the enormous power of big money.

Otherwise, those of us with modest means will always be subordinated to the Harold Simmonses and Contrans of the world. If you're OK with that, please disregard that "created equal" jive.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Cuffed to trickle-down myth no more

2013-01-08T12:52:00.001-06:00

It's called Chinese handcuffs, a trick that perfectly illustrates why America's in a fiscal pickle. The thing is, it's not tricky at all.

Stick two fingers into opposing ends of the tight wicker tube. If they pull in opposite directions, the tube contracts and won't release them. But if the fingers stop resisting and move slightly toward each other, the tube relaxes and releases them.

Say what you will about the result of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. They showed that we can wiggle out of a stalemate that threatens America's future.

With their free hands, majorities of senators and congressmen held their noses and voted for something that both cut spending and raised taxes. They moved ever so slightly toward each other.

This happened despite screams against tax hikes by tea party fantasists, not to mention the most frightening words for all elected Republicans: "Grover Norquist is on Line 1." At the same time, some lawmakers on the left like Sen. Tom Harkin thought the measure was too kind to the wealthy.

The fact is, however, something was very right about the fiscal cliff resolution, stopgap and threadbare though it may be. For one, it raised taxes for every person who earns a pay check.

That's right: every one. That's as it should have been.

The measure let lapse the 2 percent payroll tax cut contained in economic stimulus legislation. This means that people paying $20,000 will pay $425 more this year. Those paying $40,000 will pay $747 more, and so on. And so be it.

So much for the ignorance behind the Romney-esque claim that 47 percent of Americans are tax freeloaders. They pay payroll, property, sales, motor fuels and utility taxes, to name just a few.

Well, everyone should pay more, because it was under our watch, all of us, that public policy put the nation so deeply in the red. That includes the wars for which some, including many who tout "less government, lower taxes" so avidly beat drums.

You might feel in your heart that you're being taxed too much, but your national credit card account, 10-year wars included, says you're not.

Despite what the tea party may say, taxes as a portion of Gross Domestic Product are at historic lows.

Cut spending? It's self-evident that we need to, and dramatically. By the way, name the president under whose watch government employees declined most significantly — ever. That would be Barack Obama, for all those who believe he just can't spend enough. Obama also imposed a two-year freeze on federal pay.

Only those swimming in anti-Obama bile will fail to acknowledge that he has made major spending concessions, and will make more. He has to.

On the other side? Most congressional Republicans signed, and this time broke, a no-new-taxes pledge for lobbyist Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform has the resources to punish any who defy.

Because of such a threat, though Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan talked about closing tax loopholes, their intent was not to raise revenue so much as a dime. It was to lower tax rates — that old voodoo.

Well, consider Obama's re-election and the fiscal cliff resolution the sounding of "Taps" for trickle-down economics. Enough of the fantasy that lower taxes result in lower deficits.

If we are serious about debt reduction we are going to have to abide by the two-sided nature of the Simpson-Bowles recommendations. We are going to have to cut military spending just as well as domestic spending. We are going to have to raise revenue, and not just through hoped-for economic activity. That spells taxes (and possibly Norquist immolating himself in the public square).

Something has to give. In the fiscal cliff negotiations, both sides gave. Trickle-down economics is dead. Fiscal responsibility now has a chance to live.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.