Crabby, Constipated Congressman Jeff Flake's Credo: Think Small and Carry a Big Ego

Thomas L. Friedman's column in today's New York Times has an anecdote whose punch line reminds us of blow-dried, empty-headed morons like Congressman Jeff Flake, the inmates who'll soon be running the Congressional asylum:

Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is over for tea and I am telling him about what I consider to be the most exciting, moon-shot-quality, high-aspiration initiative proposed by President Obama that no one has heard of. It’s a plan to set up eight innovation hubs to solve the eight biggest energy problems in the world. But I explain that the program has not been fully funded yet because Congress, concerned about every dime we spend these days, is reluctant to appropriate the full $25 million for each center, let alone for all eight at once, so only three are moving ahead. But Kishore interrupts me midsentence.

“You mean billion,” he asks? “No,” I say. “We’re talking about $25 million.”

“Billion,” he repeats. “No. Million,” I insist.

The Singaporean is aghast. He simply can’t believe that at a time when his little city-state has invested more than a billion dollars to make Singapore a biomedical science hub and attract the world’s best talent, America is debating about spending mere millions on game-changing energy research.

Welcome to Tea Party America. Think small and carry a big ego.

That's Jeff Flake's credo. Except his petty penny-pinching -- granted, his chronic constipation would make anyone a little grumpy -- isn't about millions. He begrudges a few thousand spent on projects all over the country and ridicules them -- with sorry puns that must get a lot of laughs wherever morons congregate -- in his "Egregious Earmark of the Week."

He'll never spend a dime to do shit to help people, real people. He'll spend plenty of his political capital to make sure the Capitol adds to the national debt and balloons the deficit by cutting the taxes of his billionaire buddies/campaign doors.

To some of us, that's egregious. If you're in the tiny minority of non-moron voters in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, you probably agree.

Election Day Foretold: Backward-Looking Jeff Flake and His Right-Wing Buddies Will Attempt a Repeal of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

There's no doubt Jeff Flake will overwhelmingly win re-election against his opponents. Everyone knows that. His right-wing Republican buddies will surely take control over the House, possibly by a large margin, and they'll very likely take control of the Senate, too. Voters are angry and not very smart about whom to blame for the terrible economy. And they're fed all the crappy misinformation by Fox News and other fear-mongering, paranoid sources funded by billionaires and special interests.

Timothy Egan, in his New York Times blog on American life and politics from a Western perspective, last week wrote a post, "Election Day Foretold," which pretty much states what's going to happen.

You won! What a nice run of the House, with a big enough Republican cushion to free the more pumped-up partisans to hold investigations of Obama’s birth certificate. Let them throw steak scraps at the base, while the rest of you restore Wall Street, the insurance industry and Karl Rove to their rightful places in power.

Speaker-elect Boehner, take a bow. When health care passed, you warned of Armageddon. Now, bring it on. So many promises to keep.

But first, an apology to BP, this time without the retraction. As Congressman Joe Barton tried to say, he’s really sorry that BP is being forced to pay for the human and environmental costs of the biggest oil spill in American history. Your man Barton, a good Texan who’s received more money from the oil, coal and natural gas industry than just about any serving member of the House, is in line to become the next chairman of the committee that oversees energy. Mind you, he’s term-limited in that leadership role — in theory. Just get Boehner to bend the rules, and then gavel in the groveling, baby.

Next up, repeal the health care law. Tell those 20-something deadbeats living at home that they can no longer stay on their parents’ coverage. And give the all-clear signal to insurance companies. Whew. That was close.

With health care repeal, insurers can go back to dropping people when they get sick. Even better, they won’t have to cover those costly whiners with pre-existing conditions, as the new law mandates.

And of course, 30 million Americans who stood to get health care from the market exchanges that were to be phased in can always use the hospital emergency room, as before.

Climate change. Such a myth. A giant conspiracy. The biggest scientific hoax of our time, as Senator James Inhofe has tried to explain. Now, seize the day. You can do something about it — not the hothouse we find ourselves trapped in, but the people who are studying global warming, those elitist scientists.

Sure, it was 113 degrees in Los Angeles the other day, forests in Russia were aflame all summer, and the first eight months of this year set a pace to tie 1998 as the warmest year on record. Time for an investigation: and Congressman James Sensenbrenner, the ranking Republican on the global warming committee, has one ginned up and ready to go. He wants to look at the “science,” wink, wink. So many questions; it’ll be just like when he guided the House through the impeachment of President Clinton.

Speaking of investigations, Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California, wants to make good on his promise to double the investigative staff of the government oversight committee and start trolling through the White House for minor scandals. Give that man a fistful of subpoenas and unleash him.

Issa’s committee would be a good place to park a rookie congressman who needs to shake his callow youth reputation — Ben Quayle, Republican of Arizona. The former vice president’s kid had some trouble with the fake family he used on his ads, and wrote for something called “Dirty Scottsdale.” Maybe it takes dirty to know dirty. After calling Obama “the worst president in history,” young Mr. Quayle said, “Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place.”

Along the way, don’t forget to make a run at the federal minimum wage, food and drug regulations, unemployment benefits, even Social Security. All of them are unconstitutional, as many of your candidates said on the trail.

Then, it’s on to the big enchilada, the reason to get back into power: more tax cuts. Some people think this election was a big sporting event, like Game Day on ESPN. They thought it was about rankings and scores, upsets and game-changers. Hah!

The federal deficit is approaching $1.5 trillion. But you promised to make sure that millionaire households get their extension of the Bush tax cuts, though it is likely to add another $700 billion to the deficit over the next decade. It’s in the Pledge to America. A promise is a promise.

Will bigger deficits breathe life into a still-gasping economy? Will giving another couple hundred bucks to households earning more than $250,000 allow the 20 million or so facing foreclosure to stay in their homes? Will investigating earth scientists or Obama’s political appointments make the lives of average Americans easier?

Next question. You trounced the Democrats because of the wretched economy. Voters’ financial lives are fragile, the prospects bleak. Hope turned to empty calories. Reforming Wall Street and health care did nothing to budge the unemployment numbers, a shattering reset for a bruised middle class.

If you make all those companies sitting on piles of cash start hiring people, you’ll be returned to power, perhaps rewarded in an even bigger way in two years. If not, you’ll be remembered for the sideshow: air-guitar legislative attempts to roll back the modern age.

Selfish, Small-Minded Skinflint Congressman Jeff Flake Hates America; This Petty, Penny-Pinching Panderer Wants to Destroy Our Nation's Future

In his New York Times column today rightfully excoriating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's monumentally moronic decision to cancel the second tunnel under the Hudson River, Paul Krugman discusses how America has declined because of right-wing nuts like Christie and selfish, small-minded skinflints like our own congressman, do-nothing Jeff Flake. Here's the money quote:

It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness. . .

So here’s how you should think about the decision to kill the tunnel: It’s a terrible thing in itself, but, beyond that, it’s a perfect symbol of how America has lost its way. By refusing to pay for essential investment, politicians are both perpetuating unemployment and sacrificing long-run growth. And why not? After all, this seems to be a winning electoral strategy. All vision of a better future seems to have been lost, replaced with a refusal to look beyond the narrowest, most shortsighted notion of self-interest.

That's Jeff Flake all right: petty, pandering, penny-pinching Jeff Flake, unable to see past this latest five-figure campaign donation from the billionaire Koch Brothers, his corporate masters. Jeff Flake's hatred for America knows no bounds except his own greed.

If he'd been in Congress before, we wouldn't have the Hoover Dam, Erie Canal, Interstate Highway System or much of a country. Re-elect Jeff Flake and assure that our nation will be left in the dust by the Europe, East Asia and the emerging economies of the nations more concerned about the future than today's conservative Republicans will ever be. Jeff Flake is all about the past.

Why Third Parties Like the Green Party Are Important and Why Jeff Flake Voters Will All Go Fuck Themselves

As a third-party candidate, I found today's New York Times column, "Third Party Rising," by Thomas L. Friedman relevant (emphasis ours):

A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.

I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.
President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.

But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

The Arizona Green Party's incompetent and small-minded bosses, of course, have made the party a laughingstock with their poor planning and Keystone Kops strategies, but it's still a valuable vehicle for candidates like myself as a ballot line alternative for progressives dissatisfied with Democrats and Republicans.

As Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party has stated,

Most days of the year, money triumphs over all things in our society. Except on Election Day, when we're all citizens and we get to vote. There are two conceptions wrestling with each other in America right now: The tea party is saying government is a waste, or evil, even. Our view is that government will be as good as we make it, by electing people who stand for a certain set of values we all share about decency and equality and opportunity...

America had the first great middle-class society, and it was made by two things: unions pushing up and high marginal tax rates pushing down, from the fifties through the seventies. That was a great thing, [but] we’ve abandoned that for, "You need rich people to be really happy so they’ll invest and maybe good things will happen!"...There’s been a growth in low-wage jobs and a growth in extremely high-wage stuff. So the middle is being squeezed.

Millionaire free-market fanatic Jeff Flake is contemptuous of or indifferent to the struggles of those in-the-middle struggling working families. He's done nothing for you in eight years and now he wants to eliminate Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, student loans and every other federal program that lends a helping hand not just to the poor but to the middle class.

When you re-elect Jeff Flake, you're cutting your own throats. But since most of you in the East Valley are dumber than posts, you'll do it, won't you? You Jeff Flake voters can all go fuck yourselves, and on Election Day, you will.

Congressional Democrats, Profiles in Timidity, Need to Let Tax Cuts for Jeff Flake's Billionaire Buddies Expire

Today's lead editorial in the New York Times rightfully calls out the Congressional Democrats on their timidity in not doing the right thing:

We are starting to wonder whether Congressional Democrats lack the courage of their convictions, or simply lack convictions.

Last week, Senate Democrats did not even bother to schedule a debate, let alone a vote, on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This week, House Democrats appear poised to follow suit. The idea is to spare incumbents from having to vote before Nov. 2 on whether to let the rich go on paying less taxes than the nation needs them to pay.

This particular failure to act was not about Republican obstructionism, of which there has been plenty. This was about Democrats failing to seize an opportunity to do the right thing and at the same time draw a sharp distinction between themselves and the Republicans.

President Obama has been steadfast — and basically correct — in calling to extend the Bush tax cuts for 98 percent of taxpayers and to let them expire for the top 2 percent. But by postponing a vote on the cuts, Democrats are increasing the likelihood of an eventual cave-in to Republicans, who are pushing for an extension of all the tax cuts, including the high-end ones.

We presume that Democrats, especially those in more conservative districts, are doing this in response to the anti-Washington insurgency on the right. But it’s hard to imagine that conservative voters will confuse them for Republicans, and punting on the tax cuts won’t score them any points with the Democratic base.

As the politics of the tax-cut fight move to center stage, far more important issues are being pushed into the background. Letting the high-end tax cuts expire, for instance, is a crucial step in the long process of reducing the federal budget deficit. Extending them will add $700 billion more to the debt over the next decade than under the Obama administration’s tax proposal — and for what? To bolster the weak economy, the money would be better spent in any of several more demonstrably effective ways, like payroll tax cuts, infrastructure spending or state aid to hire more teachers and police.

Letting the high-end cuts expire would also be a strong signal to the nation’s creditors that Congress has the political will to cut deficits and, by extension, to prudently service debts. Delaying a vote on the tax cuts leaves that message hopelessly muddled.

To their credit, 46 House Democrats sent a letter recently urging Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on the tax cuts before the election. But 31 other Democrats — many of them self-described deficit hawks — also sent a letter urging that the high-end tax cuts be extended.

The American public is right to be confused and distrustful of its elected representatives.

Their focus on the well-being of the richest Americans is eclipsing the needs and concerns of vulnerable Americans. A roughly $1 billion pro-work program in last year’s stimulus law that has provided jobs to 250,000 low-income workers is scheduled to expire at the end of September. But with less than a week to go before adjourning, Democrats have been unable to get Republican support to extend the program or, it seems, to make the Republicans pay a political price for being the Party of No.

This program is a model of the welfare-to-work initiatives long championed by the Republican Party. But Republican lawmakers would prefer to end it than to let the Obama stimulus package be seen as helpful. So deep is their desire to thwart Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are ignoring Republican governors who have called for the program’s continuation. And they have indicated they would vote down a must-pass spending bill and other last-minute legislation if Democrats attach a provision to extend the program to those bills.

That is pure obstructionism, but it leaves Democrats still struggling to challenge the Republicans’ ability to define the terms of the political debate this election season, while Americans who really need the help go without.

As Roger Cohen in London wrote in the International Herald Tribune, comparing the U.S. to other nations moving ahead [italics in original]:

Britain has similar post-binge economic problems — of personal and national debt and spiraling deficits. But Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat partners have actually put bipartisanship to work — did any Republicans notice? They are looking to lock in five years of stability through a new law and push through painful cuts across government departments.

Five years is a decent stretch. In America today, quarter-to-quarter concerns hem in even a visionary chief executive.

The policy debate in the United States is head-spinning. Nobody knows if there’s going to be more fiscal stimulus, after the first $787 billion, or how a row over taxes will end. Under an Obama proposal, Bush-era tax cuts are due to expire at year-end for affluent couples and small business owners earning over $250,000. Republicans are digging in, saying it’s crazy to raise taxes in a faltering economy.

It’s not crazy. Ending the tax cuts for the rich is a minimum signal for a divided land, a statement that the two Americas are acquainted with each other.

But with Obama facing a stinging midterm defeat, it looks like a long shot. What is needed above all is some clarity and sense of direction — the kind Cameron has given in London and booming China consistently applies.

Why the Fanatic Free-Market Fundamentalism of Jeff Flake and the Tea Party Is a Global Laughingstock

Anatole Kaletsky, the chief economist of a Hong Kong-based investment advisory fim and the author of Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis, has a compelling op-ed piece in today's New York Times, "Blaming China Won't Help the Economy."

After discussing why Japan last week chose to ignore U.S. pleas and decided, like China, to manipulate its currency -- the value of the yen fell drastically after Japanese government market intervention -- Kaletsky goes on to say [emphasis ours]:

Japan’s action suggests that, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the dominance of free-market thinking in international economic management is over. Washington must understand this, or find itself constantly outmaneuvered in dealings with the rest of the world. Instead of obsessing over China’s currency manipulation as if it were a unique exception in a world of untrammeled market forces, the United States must adapt to an environment where exchange rates and trade imbalances are managed consciously and have become a legitimate subject for debate in international forums like the Group of 20.

Market fundamentalists [this means you, Jeff Flake] who feel that government interference with free markets is anathema should be reminded that, by today’s dogmatic standards, Ronald Reagan is one of the great manipulators of all time. He presided over two of the biggest currency interventions in history: the Plaza agreement, which devalued the dollar in 1985, and the Louvre accord of 1987, which brought this devaluation to an end.

The fact is that the rules of global capitalism have changed irrevocably since Lehman Brothers collapsed two years ago — and if the United States refuses to accept this, it will find its global leadership slipping away. The near collapse of the financial system was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of revelation.

In this climate, the market fundamentalism now represented by the Tea Party, based on instinctive aversion to government and a faith that “the market is always right,” is a global laughingstock. Yet more moderate figures from both parties largely hold the same view: a measure to punish China over its currency passed the House Ways and Means committee on Friday with bipartisan support.

Outside America, however, a strong conviction now exists that some new version of global capitalism must evolve to replace what the economist John Williamson coined the “Washington consensus.”

If market forces cannot do something as simple as financing home mortgages, can markets be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment and prepare for a future without fossil fuels? This is the question that policymakers outside America, especially in Asia, are now asking. And the answer, as so often in economics, is “yes and no.”

Yes, because markets are the best mechanism for allocating scarce resources. No, because market investors are often short-sighted, fail to reflect widely held social objectives and sometimes make catastrophic mistakes. There are times, therefore, when governments must deliberately shape market incentives to achieve objectives that are determined by politics and not by the markets themselves, including financial stability, environmental protection, energy independence and poverty relief.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that governments get bigger. The new model of capitalism evolving in Asia and parts of Europe generally requires government to be smaller, but more effective. Many activities taken for granted in America as prerogatives of government have long since been privatized in foreign nations — even in what so many Americans view as socialistic Europe.

In France, Germany, Japan and Sweden, water supplies, highways, airports and even postal services are increasingly run by the private sector. For home mortgages to be backed by government guarantees would be unthinkable anywhere in Asia or Europe. Tax systems, too, are in some ways less redistributionist in Europe and Asia than they are in the United States. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the proportion of income tax raised from the richest tenth of the population is 45 percent in America, compared with only 28 percent in France and 27 percent in Sweden. These countries raise money for public services mainly from middle-class voters, through consumption and energy taxes, not by soaking the rich.

AS a result, these nations’ budgets are more stable and their governments have more ability to support their economies in times of crisis. They are also better positioned to manage their currencies and their trade relations, subsidize long-term investment in nuclear and solar energy, and spend money on infrastructure, job retraining and education. In America, by contrast, the tax system’s dependence on revenues from the richest citizens means that the social safety net and long-term goals like energy independence can be achieved only if the rich keep getting richer.

Which brings us back to Delaware. What if America decides to ignore the global reinvention of capitalism and opts instead for a nostalgic rerun of the experiment in market fundamentalism? This would not prevent the rest of the world from changing course.

Rather, it would make it likely that the newly dominant economic model will not be a product of democratic capitalism, based on Western values and American leadership. Instead, it will be an authoritarian state-led capitalism inspired by Asian values. If America opts, for the first time in history, for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, then the new model of capitalism will probably be made in China, like so much else in the world these days.

The free market is not the solution to our problems. Neither is government - as a twenty-first century liberal, I know that. However, effectively using government to manage the market when necessary, as is being done so well by China - a country that is also leading the world in green technology as well as a state-of-the-art national infrastructure - is what we need after the collapse of our financial system two years ago.

But Jeff Flake is partying like it's still 1979.

Out-of-touch, living-in-the-past Jeff Flake will do all he can to put China ahead of the United States by the time his thirty or forty years in Congress are finally over.

China couldn't ask for a better American congressman than free-market fanatic Jeff Flake. He's doing a lot more for Guangdong and Shanghai than he's ever done -- or ever will do -- for Mesa and Gilbert.

Why Anti-Government Fanatics Like Jeff Flake Will Ruin America If They Get in Charge of Things

Even conservative columnist David Brooks, writing today at the New York Times, scolds the kind of anti-government, vote-no-on-everything fanaticism of Jeff Flake and his nutty ideological soulmates:

Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.

Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America’s essential nature. These forces would replace America’s traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.

These statist forces are more powerful than ever in the age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the traditional American system to stand up and defend the Constitution. There is no middle ground. Every small new government program puts us on the slippery slope toward a smothering nanny state.

As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”

Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.

Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.

The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.

Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.

Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.

If the current Republican Party regards every new bit of government action as a step on the road to serfdom, then the party will be taking this long, mainstream American tradition and exiling it from the G.O.P.

That will be a political tragedy. There are millions of voters who, while alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending, still look to government to play some positive role. They fled the G.O.P. after the government shutdown of 1995, and they would do so again.

It would be a fiscal tragedy. Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases. If Republicans decide that even the smallest tax increases put us on the road to serfdom, then there will never be a deal, and the country will careen toward bankruptcy.

It would also be a policy tragedy. Republicans are right to oppose the current concentration of power in Washington. But once that is halted, America faces a series of problems that can’t be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.

Most important, it would be an intellectual tragedy. Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.

Republicans are riding a wave of revulsion about what is happening in Washington. But it is also time to start talking about the day after tomorrow, after the centralizing forces are thwarted. I hope that as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan lead a resurgent conservatism, they’ll think about the limited-but-energetic government tradition, which stands between Barry Goldwater and François Mitterrand, but at the heart of the American experience.

Jeff Flake's anti-government fanaticism will make sure he takes away everything good that the federal government has ever done. He'll end your Social Security, Medicare, and even support for interstate highways. He's a menace to America, a threat to our way of life. Jeff Flake's plans to destroy the America he so despises must be opposed by all patriots.

New York Times Covers Arizona Green Party Write-In Candidates

As we wait for today's canvass of the primary election two weeks ago to see if we made the November ballot as the Green Party candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, we felt a moment of pride when we picked up the New York Times from our stoop early this morning and saw that the national newspaper of record is covering us Arizona Green Party write-in candidates:

Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket

By Marc Lacey

TEMPE, Ariz. — Benjamin Pearcy, a candidate for statewide office in Arizona, lists his campaign office as a Starbucks. The small business he refers to in his campaign statement is him strumming his guitar on the street. The internal debate he is having in advance of his coming televised debate is whether he ought to gel his hair into his trademark faux Mohawk.

[We say go with the faux, Benjamin!]

Mr. Pearcy, 20, is running for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees public utilities, railroad safety and securities regulation. Although Mr. Pearcy says he is taking his first run for public office seriously, the political establishment here views him as nothing more than a political dirty trick.

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates.

[Note: We are not homeless and in fact have more than one home: a ranch house in Apache Junction and a townhouse in fashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from where we are writing this.]

“These are people who are not serious and who were recruited as part of a cynical manipulation of the process,” said Paul Eckstein, a lawyer representing the Democrats. “They don’t know Green from red.”

[We bet if you test them trying to walk across Mill Avenue, it will be readily apparent that this last charge is false.]

But Steve May, the Republican operative who signed up some of the candidates along Mill Avenue, a bohemian commercial strip next to Arizona State University, insists that a real political movement has been stirred up that has nothing to do with subterfuge.

“Did I recruit candidates? Yes,” said Mr. May, who is himself a candidate for the State Legislature, on the Republican ticket.

[Steve, the one thing gay people like you and me have never done is recruit, but your Republican buddies are the ones that keep charging this.]

“Are they fake candidates? No way.”

To make his point, Mr. May went by Starbucks, the gathering spot of the Mill Rats, as the frequenters of Mill Avenue are known.

“Are you fake, Benjamin?” he yelled out to Mr. Pearcy, who cried out “No,” with an expletive attached.

“Are you fake, Thomas?” Mr. May shouted in the direction of Thomas Meadows, 27, a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name who is running for state treasurer. He similarly disagreed.

“Are you fake, Grandpa?” he said to Anthony Goshorn, 53, a candidate for the State Senate whose bushy white beard and paternal manner have earned him that nickname on the streets. “I’m real,” he replied.

[He proved his point to our satisfaction. These are not fictional characters. Neither are we, though we've created many.]

Gathered around was a motley crew of people who were down on their luck, including a one-armed pregnant woman named Roxie whom Mr. May befriended sometime back and who introduced him to the rest.

The Democratic Party is fuming over Mr. May’s tactics and those of at least two other Republicans who helped recruit candidates to the Green Party, which does not have the resources to put candidates on ballots around the state and thus creates the opportunity for write-in contenders like the Mill Rats to easily win primaries and get their names on the ballot for November. Complaints about spurious candidates have cropped up often before, though never involving an entire roster of candidates drawn from a group of street people.

[Disclaimer: our candidacy is entirely unspurious. But for some reason, we are just as not endorsed by the fiasco-creating Arizona Green Party poohbahs as these guys. Maybe it's that we have a sense of Yuma?]

“It’s unbelievable. It’s not right. It’s deceitful,” said Jackie Thrasher, a former Democratic legislator in northwest Phoenix who lost re-election in 2008 after a Green Party candidate with possible links to the Republicans joined the race. “If these candidates were interested in the democratic process, they should connect with the party they are interested in. What’s happening here just doesn’t wash. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Arizona, where Democrats, Republicans and independents each represent about a third of the populace, is known for its political hardball. Challenging nominating petitions is common. Election-related lawsuits are filed with regularity. This is not the first election in which a party has accused another of putting forth candidates to hoodwink voters.

[There was one in the Republican primary, too. By the name of McCain, we think.]

Besides the Mill Rat candidates, the Democrats smell a rat in other races, including one in which a roommate of a Republican legislator’s daughter ran as a Green Party candidate in a competitive contest for the State Senate. They cite a variety of state and federal election laws that the Republicans may have violated in putting forward “sham” candidates for the Green Party.

The view, though, is different along Mill Avenue, where the first-time candidates appear to have been emboldened by the exercise, as Mr. Pearcy’s street corner campaign speech last Thursday night attests. Dressed up spiffily, he described himself as the illegitimate son of a stripper who had had run-ins with the law and a tough childhood but who had pulled his life together.

“I’ve been homeless,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth. “I got a place. Anyone can do it. We’re all good enough.”

[The first of the Ten Key Values of the Arizona Green Party is Grassroots Democracy, which begins, "Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another."]

There was nodding all around, more than when he went into his pitch to solve the budget deficit through the installation of solar panels. As Mr. Pearcy went on, Mr. May whispered “focus, focus, focus” into his ear to get him back on track and help prepare him for a debate in early October, which will be televised across the state.

Reading tarot cards has taught Mr. Meadows, who is known for his purple and green jester hat, to talk a good game. “This is not the land of the free,” he told the loungers on the sidewalk, pitching himself for treasurer. “It’s the land of what’s for sale.”

Grandpa, widely known in the area through the pedicab he drives for hire, is against higher taxes and for God in the classroom. The other night, he was supposed to debate his Democratic and Republican rivals in the race but after seeing only the Democrat on stage, he decided to watch from the back. “I got a bad vibe,” he said.

[We got the same bad vibe watching Gov. Jan Brewer debate.]

Mr. May, who served as a Republican legislator from 1998 to 2002, said, “Even if I wanted to control these guys, they’re uncontrollable.”

[Steve strikes us as more into submission than dominance, anyway.]

We are proud to be a member of the Arizona Green Party, providing lots of laughs and chuckles to all Americans in an otherwise bleak election year.

Why We Need a Second Stimulus - and Why Radical Laissez-Faire Conservatives Like Jeff Flake Were Wrong About the First One

Today we'd like to reprint today's New York Times op-ed by Laura Tyson, the Berkeley economics prof and former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council. We agree with her totally as to "Why We Need a Second Stimulus" (emphasis ours):

OUR national debate about fiscal policy has become skewed, with far too much focus on the deficit and far too little on unemployment. There is too much worry about the size of government, and too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth. By focusing on the wrong things, we are in serious danger of failing to do the right things to help the economy recover from its worst labor market crisis since the Great Depression.

The primary cause of the labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand — the same problem that bedeviled the economy in the 1930s. In the wake of the financial shocks at the end of 2008, spending by American households and businesses plummeted, and companies responded by curbing production and shedding workers. By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent, according to a government estimate issued Friday. Clearly, the pace of recovery is far slower than what is needed to restore the millions of jobs that have been lost.

Households and businesses are on a saving spree to rebuild their balance sheets. Their spending relative to income has fallen more than at any time since the end of World War II. So there is now a substantial gap between the supply of goods and services the economy is capable of producing and the demand for them. This gap is starkly reflected by the 23 million Americans who are looking for full-time jobs and the millions more who have left the labor force because they could not find one.

The situation would be even worse without the $787 billion fiscal stimulus package passed in 2009. The conventional wisdom about the stimulus package is wrong: it has not failed. It is working as intended. Its spending increases and tax cuts have boosted demand and added about three million more jobs than the economy otherwise would have. Without it, the unemployment rate would be about 11.5 percent. Because about 36 percent of the money remains to be spent, more jobs will be created — about 500,000 by the end of the year.

But by next year, the stimulus will end, and the flip from fiscal support to fiscal contraction could shave one to two percentage points off the growth rate at a time when the unemployment rate is still well above 9 percent. Under these circumstances, the economic case for additional government spending and tax relief is compelling. Sadly, polls indicate that the political case is not.

Two forms of spending with the biggest and quickest bang for the buck are unemployment benefits and aid to state governments. The federal government should pledge generous financing increases for both programs through 2011.

Federal aid to the states is especially important because they finance education. Although the jobs crisis is primarily a crisis of demand, it also reflects a mismatch between the education of the work force and the education required for jobs in today’s economy. Consider how the unemployment rate varies by education level: it’s more than 14 percent for those without a high school degree, under 10 percent for those with one, only about 5 percent for those with a college degree and even lower for those with advanced degrees. The supply of college graduates is not keeping pace with demand. Therefore, more investment in education could reduce both the cyclical unemployment rate, as more Americans stay in school, and the structural unemployment rate, as they graduate into the job market.

An increase in government investment in roads, airports and other kinds of public infrastructure would be cost-effective, too, as measured by the number of jobs created per dollar of spending. And it would help reduce the road congestion, airport delays and freight bottlenecks that reduce productivity and make the United States a less attractive place to do business. The American Society of Engineers has identified more than $2.2 trillion in public infrastructure needs nationwide, and a 2008 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that, on strict cost-benefit grounds, it would make sense to increase annual spending on transportation projects alone by 74 percent.

Over the next five years, the federal government should work with state and local governments and the private sector to finance $1 trillion worth of additional investment in infrastructure. It should extend the Build America Bonds stimulus program, which in the past year has helped states finance $120 billion in infrastructure improvement.

The federal government should also create and capitalize a National Infrastructure Bank that would provide greater certainty about the level of infrastructure financing over several years, select projects based on rigorous cost-benefit analysis, invest in things like interstate high-speed rail that require coordination among states and attract private co-investors in projects like toll roads and airports that generate dedicated future revenue streams.

But can the government afford this additional spending? The answer is yes. Despite the large federal deficit, global savers, including savings-hungry American households, are snapping up United States government securities at very low interest rates. And they will continue to do so as long as there is ample slack in the economy and inflation remains subdued. Over the next few years, there is little risk that federal deficits will crowd out private investment or precipitate a crisis of confidence in the American government, a spike in American interest rates or a sudden drop in the dollar.

On the other hand, as long as private demand remains weak, the risk is uncomfortably high that trying to reduce the deficit — by cutting spending or increasing taxes — will tip the economy back into recession or condemn it to years of faltering growth and debilitating unemployment. In fact, either outcome would depress tax revenue and could mean larger deficits.

Faced with these risks, as long as the economy is operating far below potential, policy makers should do two seemingly contradictory things. First, they should provide additional fiscal support for job creation and growth. And, second, they should enact a credible multiyear plan now to stabilize the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product gradually as the economy recovers.

By easing capital market concerns about the government’s future borrowing needs, such a plan would permit larger deficits and slower debt reduction while unemployment is still high. The long-run debt problem — the result of imprudent fiscal decisions before the recession, escalating health care costs and an aging population — must be addressed once the economy has recovered. But for now the priorities of fiscal policy should be jobs and investment.

That's not going to happen with laissez-faire out-of-touch corporate lackeys like Jeff Flake controlling Congress.

But most of you in the East Valley - even if you're out of work or your house is underwater or in danger of being foreclosed - are just too stupid to realize it, and that's why you vote Republican against your own interests. East Valley voters are largely the stupidest people on the planet Earth. (They're ugly, too.)

Linda Greenhouse: Arizona a "Police State," Calls on Everyone to Identify as Illegal Alien

Linda Greenhouse, the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter - when I taught U.S. constitutional history and political & civil rights courses at Nova Southeastern University, I used to tell my college students to read her reporting on the the justices' opinions - has an op-ed column today on Arizona's immigration law that ends with the suggestion that everyone in Arizona identify as an illegal alien, as in our campaign's T-shirts. Excerpts:

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa? . . .

I’ll offer a reflection on how, a generation ago, another of the country’s periodic anti-immigrant spasms was handled by the Supreme Court. In 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children — a good number of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then — faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future.

The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case, Plyler v. Doe, reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major debate within his administration over whether to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the admirable solicitor general, refused to do so.

In June 1982, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. The law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents,” he wrote.

I have no doubt that but for that ruling, public school systems all over the country would be checking papers and tossing away their undocumented students like so much playground litter. Blocked from that approach, local governments now try others. The city of Hazleton, Pa., passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal district judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government, not of Hazleton, Pa.

Indeed, federal pre-emption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.

My confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case, a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.

So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.