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April 21, 2005

Hypocrisy 101

"The time has come that the American people know exactly what their Representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know...I say the best disinfectant is full disclosure, not isolation."

-- Tom Delay, November 16, 1995 on the floor of the House

You're kidding me, right?
- Aaron

Posted by amahler at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2005

Will "The Hammer" drive a nail into Frederick's Political Coffin?

By Barnie K. Day

Just when I was about to get myself worked up into a good let-fly, Ross Mackenzie and the editorial gang at the Richmond Times Dispatch beat me to it Wednesday, showing House Majority Tom "The Hammer" Delay, (R-Texas) the door in an editorial titled "Delay Must Go."

Hey, it was just a matter of time anyway. The dead giveaway? The President has started bragging on him in public. This line led an Associated Press story Monday: "President Bush considers House Majority Leader Tom DeLay a friend and hopes to keep working with him, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday."

For you un-initiated in the Alice-in-Wonderland high-level doublespeak required at times like this, just know that when you're in trouble and the President starts saying in public what a good job you're doing that it is a universally recognized "all clear" sign. The next step you take will be through the trap door to political oblivion.

Here's the real question: Will "The Hammer" resign before or after he holds a fund-raiser for Woodbridge Delegate Jeff Frederick? That's scheduled for April 19 in Washington. The smart money says Delay won't make it until then.

So what's a Texas congressman under fire for a series of ethics lapses and facing resignation calls, even from leading national Republicans, doing raising money for a Virginia House of Delegates candidate? Well, I called the number listed for the invite. Spoke to "Ted." "Ted" didn't seem to know. Actually, "Ted" seemed to be deep into training for the World Stuttering Championship. I'd say "Ted" is favored in that one.

Said the Times Dispatch Wednesday: "Congressional Republicans would be wise to strip DeLay of his leadership position. Stories about ethical questions have become a drumbeat; the latest involve payments to DeLay's wife and daughter by his political and campaign committees, and a six-day junket to Moscow funded by lobbyists."

I guess Delegate Frederick somehow missed that drumbeat. The invitation he sent for the Delay soiree asks for donations of $250, $500, $1000, or $2000. It lists a number of "host" names. The only one I recognized was my friend Paul Jost. Of course, I pinged him with an email. Nothing back on that yet. Remind me to ask somebody what the Virginia Automobile and Truck Dealers Political Action Committee is doing in cahoots with a Tom DeLay fundraiser. It was listed too.

In October of last year the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct admonished DeLay, saying he had gone too far and violated rules on three separate occasions. Just the sort of individual you want raising money for you if you're running for re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates?

Actually, the Times Dispatch sold DeLay's troubles a little short Wednesday. He's got a long list of them. My favorite is an oldie-goldie-hoo-doing the Indians. These allegations involve messy casino deals with the Choctaws down in Mississippi that you can easily read about elsewhere. Just know here that DeLay and company have done more for Indian relations in this country than anyone since George Custer.

Enron-yeah, that Enron-gave DeLay his real start to national stardom, hosting the first fundraiser for his "leadership" PAC and raising $280,000 for him at that event. Along the way he got into all kinds of questionable situations, none more so than the recent role he played in politicizing the Terri Schiavo case. That judgment probably has him in more trouble with his Republican colleagues than anything else. The polls went south-waaay south-for national Republicans on that one.

Congressman Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) has called on DeLay to resign from his leadership position and the number three Senate Republican, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, has called on DeLay to answer questions about his ethics.

Too bad Virginia Republicans don't have the same concern. They might save one of their own some trouble. "The Hammer" could stick around just long enough to put a nail into Delegate Frederick's political coffin on the 19th.

Posted by amahler at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2005

Barnie Day: Remarks to Young Democrats at their State Convention

College of William and Mary - Williamsburg, Virginia - April 9, 2005
Barnie K. Day

I turned 16 in 1968. It was the year I began paying attention politically. Richard Nixon was elected President that year. It was the year I became a Democrat. And not because of Nixon. I later remember as a student in Chapel Hill seeing a piece of graffiti that said "Nixon was one in '68. He'll be a bigger one on '72." But Richard Nixon didn't make me a Democrat. Cam Johnson made me a Democrat. I'm going to tell you about him in a minute.

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered in 1968. The war still raged in Vietnam. We were a long ay from civil rights for all Americans in 1968-and to a certain extent still are. When I was a kid, discrimination was openly expressed in public signs that read "White Only" or "Colored Only". Today it is expressed in terms of 'gay' and 'straight.' In 1968, women were not admitted to the University of Virginia. That didn't come about until 1970-largely due to the efforts of Alan Diamonstein who served in the House of Delegates from Newport News for 33 years.

1968 was the year my mom and dad divorced and I got my first job, after school, working second shift, loading trucks at a factory that made aluminum siding. Cam Johnson was a black man who worked on the loading dock with me. He was about 40, but he looked 65-from doing hard, manual labor his whole life. He had worked second shift on that dock for eleven years. In fact, he had helped build that factory. He had carried bricks and mortar to the bricklayers building that factory. And when they got it built, Cam got a job there.

In eleven years he had never missed a day of work. Cam Johnson couldn't afford to miss a day of work. He had six children to feed and clothe. He was a gentle man. Not educated. Not militant. He didn't know politics from theoretical physics. Cam Johnson just worked. I was a white boy, just a kid, and Cam Johnson was a black man with a wife and six children and we worked on the dock together.

We did exactly the same job. We loaded boxes of aluminum siding onto trucks, Cam on one end of the box, me on the other. The only real difference was our age, the color of our skin, the responsibility we had for other people and how much money we were paid. They hired me at $1.85 an hour. Cam Johnson, with six children, who hadn't missed a day of work in 11 years was making $1.80 an hour. I couldn't believe it. He showed me his pay stub.

It was then that I understood about the food Cam brought for his supper every night. Half the time it was a pig ear sandwich. Two slices of bread, with mustard, and a boiled pig's ear. Cam didn't eat pig's ears because he preferred them over ham and pork chops. A pig's ear was all Cam could afford. They cost about six or seven cents a pound.

So what to do? I did the only thing I thought I could do. It was the way my mother raised me. I went to our boss, a beer-bellied, red-necked cracker named Harold, and I put it to Harold like this. You either give Cam a raise or cut my pay-I'm not working for more than he's making. Harold looked at me like I'd spoken to him in Egyptian. And I said it again. And here's what he said to me: "You must be one of them goddamned Democrats!" and I smiled at him and said "I must be." I became a Democrat at that instant and I have been one every day since.

And, by the way, they gave Cam a raise. Ten cents an hour. It was in his next check. And until the day he died that old man would have killed for me. Cam Johnson made me a Democrat-not Roosevelt, not Truman, not Kennedy. For me it was Cam Johnson.

I want to back up and tell you this little story about my mother. Her name was Nancy. When she was fifty, she put all of her furniture and things in storage, rented out her house and enrolled as a freshman at Longwood College in Farmville-the same place they closed the schools from 1959-1964. She was practically disabled with rheumatoid arthritis by then-I'm not going to go into all of that-but physically, she just had a horrible life. Her hands were gnarled up like this.

So, anyway, she enrolls in school at Longwood and she moves into an old dowager's house there on Main Street-one of these big old antebellum mansions in downtown Farmville. Well, she hadn't been there no time before she calls me up. She's moving out. I've got to come back. She'd gotten into it with the old lady who owned the house over how my mother allowed the old lady's black domestic help to address her.

My mother insisted that the maid just call her 'Nancy,' but the old lady wouldn't hear of it. She insisted that none of the black domestics be allowed to address white folks by their first name. You see, this mindset that closed the schools in 1968 was still there.

So I borrow a truck and go to Farmville to move Mama out of this old biddy's house. It's a beautiful day. I get the truck loaded-it takes me all morning--and get mama in it-she's moving into a freshman dorm-and as we're pulling away the old lady is standing on the porch and my mother, with he gnarled up hand is trying to give her the finger. But her hand won't work. She can't get her middle finger up. She finally has to hold it up with her other hand. I'm sure that old lady had no idea what that two handed signal was that my mother was doing her best to give her through the truck window.

You see, almost from the beginning, it has been easy for me to be a Democrat.

Are there differences? Are there differences between Democrats and Republicans? You bet your life there are differences. Republicans have the misguided notion that they become stronger, that they somehow benefit when they can take strength away from those around them, when they can keep down the Cam Johnsons of the world. Democrats reject that view. We understand that you become stronger when you raise up the folks around you. My mother understood that. And she made me understand it.

Republicans wrap themselves in God and the Bible. Or think they do. We'd all be better off if they'd bray about it less and read it more. Read the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the Book of Mathew, in the New Testament. Read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me about cutting aid programs to the poor and the hungry, about throwing children off of insurance programs, about cutting funding to Head Start. Read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me about cutting prescription drug benefits. The Jerry Falwells of the world, the Pat Robertsons, thunder from the right that God is Republican, but I know better than that. The Bible tells me so.

Republicans make this great hue and cry about smaller government. They want government "off our backs." But they want the government peeping into our bedroom windows. They want the government looking over our shoulders to see what we're reading. They want the government in Terri Shiavo's hospital room.

You see, they have always talked one game and played another.

Politics does matter. Politics makes such a difference in our lives-for good and bad. It is so critical that you stay engaged. I want to tell you briefly about a man named Frank Porter Graham. You see, the forces of good and light do not always win.

Let me take you back to May 27, 1950. No, let's go back a little further. Let us go back to 1930. In North Carolina. Chapel Hill, to be exact. That was the year the trustees of the university there decided to make Frank Porter Graham, the diminutive, 43-year-old son of a Methodist minister, the University of North Carolina's next president. It's where I later went to school.

Graham came with good credentials. He had been Mr. UNC as a student. President of this, that, and the other. He had successfully led a statewide drive to raise badly needed capital for the school. He was an accomplished teacher and historian. And he was a non-confrontational sort, a gentle man with an easy way about him. Just what the university needed. And he paid off. Over the course of 19 years he drove a mediocre school to university greatness.

Time magazine labeled him the "ablest" state university president in America. He chaired the Roosevelt commission that led to passage of the Social Security Act.

You can't imagine now what life was like for some people in this country before Social Security

Frank Graham was a man of conscience, with a Biblical view of government, a man who believed and practiced the tenets laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. If you believed the Sermon on the Mount, you opposed segregation. If you believed the Sermon on the Mount you had this radical idea that we all are equal in the eyes of God and should be treated as such.

By 1949, that view was rubbing some folks a little raw down in North Carolina, particularly members of the legislature, and some of the trustees. The question was, what to do about it? Luck intervened. J. Melville Broughton, United States senator from North Carolina, died in office, and Gov. W. Kerr Scott appointed the greatest liberal in the South to fill the unexpired term. Frank Porter Graham, a small, gentle man left the University of North Carolina and went to the United States Senate.

The story could have ended there, but the 1950 election was coming up and the political apparatus in North Carolina-a big part of it anyway-was making plans to savage a gentle man.

You have to understand that by "political apparatus" I mean the Democratic machine in North Carolina. Republicans didn't play a role in anything in North Carolina. Not in 1950.

Frank Graham, this desegregationist, this liberal, was going to be challenged by his own party. In a four-way race, Graham led the balloting but he didn't win a majority. He didn't win by enough to avoid a run-off. Willis Smith, who finished second, beat Graham for the Democratic nomination on May 27, 1950 in what is generally acknowledged to have been the nastiest, vilest, race-baitingest political campaign in this nation's history.

A kid in Raleigh engineered that win for Smith, a kid still in his twenties. And he went with Smith to Washington as his administrative aide. That's how he got a toe-hold there.

What was his name?

He was a mean, race-baiting son of a bitch named Jesse Helms.

We have seen this week a look back at the life a remarkable man. Pope John Paul changed the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. changed it. If you never read anything else in your life, read his 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' Nelson Mandela changed it. Some of you will change it. Some of you will go to the legislature. You may go to the Congress or to the Senate. There may well be a future president among us this evening. Some of you will contribute in other ways. You will be good and productive citizens who will serve quietly just by going about your business. I hope part of your business will be this election we have coming up.

This is a critical, pivotal time for Virginia. We will continue to recover, continue to come back to truth and light with this election, or we will again lose our way and veer into the wilderness. It is so important that we put the reins of Virginia into the steady hands of Tim Kaine and the Democratic ticket in Novemberl. I wish you Godspeed in your lives and in your endeavors. Remember who you are. And remember the words of John Paul. Be not afraid as you go forward.

God bless and keep you. Thank you very much.

Posted by amahler at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2005

Kilgore on Education: Readin', 'Ritin' and Recklessness

By Barnie K. Day

At least you can understand Jerry Kilgore these days. He's gone to campaign charm school somewhere and traded in that nasal twang for a store-bought accent. The ad taglines sound good. Almost too good. Too deep. Too sonorous. Sort of like the later Orson Wells wine commercials. But these campaign makeovers have downsides, too. Tradeoffs. Back home in Gate City nowadays he has to travel with an interpreter, I'd say. All of this, though, is just window dressing. Let's get to the meat, to the substance of this campaign.

Rut row. There is no meat. No substance. Where Jerry Kilgore is concerned, window dressing will have to do.

Kilgore's a good guy. He comes from a good family, from a good part of the state. He just needs to get in an honest line of work. When I consider his education proposals I visualize him standing on a street corner. I can't help it. That's how I visualize him. He has a little table set up. On the table are three shells and a pea. He's working his tail off at this little table and the whole time talking jive to the people of Virginia.

Kilgore calls his education program "the three Rs" for teachers. He says his administration will recruit top graduates into the profession, retain the best, and reward them for excellence. And "those little shells are moving now" and he's going to do this without money, without raising taxes, without cutting core services somewhere else. Just dip into the General Fund.

That's a bottomless pit of money, right, Jerry? What's another billion or two dollars out of that? It's how you propose to fund highway construction, and build prisons and pay our law enforcement officers and look after our state employees and keep up our colleges and universities and care for our elderly and buy mental health services, and pay the Medicaid increases and fund the forestry and recreation and the environmental programs and everything else. Why not the General Fund?

Just reach in there Jerry, and grab you up a big wad of cash and throw it in every direction you think you can find a vote. I'm sorry. Need. I meant to say "need". Throw that General Fund cash in every direction you think you can find a need.

Did I forget the Kilgore program for school construction? How he's going to help local governments build schools for these good teachers to work in? You'd better sit down on this one. You might get dizzy. On this one, those shells move to warp speed. The first thing he's going to do to help local governments is to handcuff every local government and every local school board in Virginia by taking away their revenue options.

And he's going to set up, he says, an "Education Investment Trust Fund." Details to follow. Hey, that raises my comfort level.

There is a critical teacher shortage in Virginia. For one thing, we ran them off by the thousands with the last little game that came along, that teach-the-test initiative called the Standards of Learning. But, hey, what's a generation of kids and a few thousand teachers when politics hangs in the balance?

Jerry, I think education in Virginia is part of my responsibility, too. So I'm going to help you out here. Slow down. Watching you work that street corner is making me tired. You can drop all that jive stuff. You can go back to talking like plain ol' Jerry. You don't have to keep hustling yourself into a lather keeping that little pea hid.

If you want to improve education in Virginia, if you want to recruit, reward, and retain the best teachers for our children, here's what you do:

Commit to fully funding Virginia's standards of quality. Commit today to raising the pay of Virginia's teachers to at least the national average. Commit to letting teachers teach. Hire school nurses to do the school nursing. Hire paper pushers to push the paper. Hire disciplinarians to do the refereeing. This is not complicated. Just let the teachers teach, Jerry, and they'll come back.

You don't have to thank me. Just do your part. Show us that your education proposals really are more than Readin', 'Ritin' and Recklessness.

Posted by amahler at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)