Pollan on the Farm Bill--Can't Beat Something with Nothing

Michael Pollan writes at EWG on what went wrong with the farm bill. His basic answer is: his camp didn't have a constructive proposal for replacing the current system. And proponents of the current system did a good job of "logrolling", also known as co-opting people by throwing them a bone.

I suspect that's about right, although I'd add another factor: the opponents made a lot of noise, but never showed a good, big organization. You get the attention of politicians by whacking them with grassroots support, not posts on blogs, etc., or even best sellers.

Finally, the history of farm legislation is that changes occur incrementally--the institution of the Conservation Reserve Program in the 85 bill and Freedom to Farm's direct payments were, in my opinion, the two biggest changes we've had since 1965.

$4 Gas

Just filled up with my first tank of $4 gas. Long time since gas was $.30 and the stations competed for your patronage with freebies. (I guess I'm showing my age.)

When you look at Europe you find $8-$9 gas so I'm not complaining, but I understand the anger of those who have no choice but to put diesel in their 18 wheelers and tractors. As I've said, I think the high prices will dampen demand enough that prices will fall for a good while. But back in the 1970's we thought we were seeing a permanent change in our economy. Turned out that oil was below $20 for several years, before the latest rise.

How Bureaucrats Are Made--Kris Koth

One of the things I find fascinating about bureaucracy is how it is staffed. I'm going to make a generalization--for 100+ years the role of the USDA has been to provide jobs for children of farmers. Instead of farming full-time, they leave the farm and go to work for USDA, in the last 50 or so years after going to college and graduating from their state's land grant university. Sometimes they stay in their home state, sometimes they move elsewhere, to DC or Hawaii.

I don't mean that everyone who works for USDA in the field was raised on a farm, but that's the pattern. I suspect other bureaucracies have other patterns (like the Catholic church used to attract one boy from a large Irish family).

Here's a piece on someone who's following the pattern in Iowa.

The Iraq Index Today

Here's the May 29 version from Brookings. It's interesting--lots of the tables haven't been updated recently. I suspect it's because people have lost interest in the subject. (The people at Brookings just assembled data from various governments and organizations, they didn't do research themselves.)

The headline news is, of course, the 19 U.S. deaths in May are a low for the war since the first year. And there's been several optimistic articles and op-eds in the past few weeks, even though most of them don't get the attention of the past. I don't think that's liberal bias particularly--it's mostly the idea that conflict and bad news is lots more newsworthy than good news. It is true, though, that we liberals have a hard time fitting the news into our overall narrative so it's often easy to ignore.

Personally, I've a bureaucratic narrative--there's a learning curve, it's taken us 4-5 years to learn, but we're at last much improved over what we were at first. (You can see this in Vietnam, the last few years under Abrams were much more effective than the first years under Westmoreland.)

A couple factoids, without links: NYTimes had an article on the US prisons in Iraq--we're holding over 20,000 prisoners, of which about 1 percent are foreign. It's possible we killed most of the people who were willing to come to Iraq and die, or people just got tired after so many years, but it doesn't fit with a war against international terrorism. Attacks against oil infrastructure are way down this year--good news for the Iraqi economy and for our gas prices.

The Process of Certification and Proofing

I posted yesterday on the Iraqi bureaucrat whose signature is known all over. I post today on the explanation (in part) for the screwup on the farm bill. (The trade title was omitted in the version sent to the President.) This article from Politico describes the process by which a bill is sent to the President and blames Newt Gingrich for the penny-pinching which opened the loophole resulting in the problem. In brief, instead of printing two copies on parchment, proofing one, and sending the other to the President, he had them print the bill twice, once on plain paper. Somehow, between the first and second printing the title was dropped. Probably because each title was being treated as a document (or perhaps a subdocument with a master document). And the usual bureaucratic routine was being upset by the call for haste. As mom always said: "haste makes waste".

Forgive my enthusiasm for this detail--but it recalls the days when my office had to certify true and correct copies of regulations to be published in the Federal Register.

DC Gets Organic Fast Food

One of the interesting developments since the 1950's when mom first subscribed to Organic Gardening is all the cross-cutting currents in this area. There's the development of big food chains like Whole Foods that focus on the organic area, there's the development of Community supported agriculture chains, there's the "locavore" movement that would seem to reject organic food shipped in from abroad and accept hothouse food grown locally, there's the infighting among the various elements of the organic community over what the term means, there's the possibility of genetically modified organic food. And now, coming to DC, is organic fast food.

(I recognize this is an oversimplified summary. The bottom line is folks should be happy at the confusion and conflict--it all means people see a bandwagon passing by and they're jumping on.)

A Faceless Iraqi Bureaucrat

The Post has a fascinating (to me) article on an Iraqi bureaucrat:

The looped and dotted script of Abdul Ghani's signature is etched in rubber and slicked with ink. His signature is the final stamp of approval for many foreign matters involving Iraqi citizens.

"Every embassy in the world has a record of my signature," says Abdul, 28, leaning forward on his thick arms.

Apparently, he and other "authorizers" have to sign documents, like high school diplomas being used to apply to college abroad.

What's fascinating? Well, he is a faceless bureaucrat, but as he says, his signature is known. And before bureaucrats had signatures, they had seals, authenticating a document (i.e., like the Great Seal of the U.S. or the "signet" ring which was a more personal seal). Some movies make a big deal of the application of seals--like the warrant for execution of someone in British politics (Queen Mary, Cromwell, whoever). So on the one hand you have the anonymity of the bureaucrat, the document stating a bureaucratic rule without a hint of the author, but on the other hand you have the authentication, tracing the document back to some process with legitimacy.

There's Always Tradeoffs

From Saturday's LA Times:

Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as 1,000 of the 7,500 homes in this Humboldt County community are being used to cultivate marijuana, slashing into the housing stock, spreading building-safety problems and sowing neighborhood discord.

Indoor pot farms proliferated in recent years as California communities implemented Proposition 215, the statewide medical marijuana measure passed overwhelmingly a dozen years ago. A backlash over the effects and abuses of legally sanctioned marijuana growing has emerged in some of the most liberal parts of the state.

For example, in neighboring Mendocino County, a measure on Tuesday's election ballot seeks to repeal a local proposition passed eight years ago that decriminalized cultivation of as many as 25 pot plants.

The experience of Arcata, a bastion of cannabis culture, reveals the unintended consequences of the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, designed to provide relief to AIDS patients, cancer victims and others.

Why We Have Fast Food

This excerpt from 100 years ago says it all, via a Christian Science Monitor article on alternet:

"In 1907, Laura Clarke Rockwood wrote poignantly in The Craftsman magazine about the need to simplify housekeeping: "This mother of to-day hurries from kitchen to nursery and over the other parts of the house, performing as best she can the many home duties of our times. But she is so overwearied in the doing of it all that the deep well of mother love which should overflow, flooding the world with happiness and cheer, runs well nigh dry at times."

As one solution, Mrs. Rockwood proposed moving meal preparation out of the home: "There should be food kitchens easily accessible to every home where cooked foods can be bought cheaply because of consolidation, and delivered hot to our homes with promptness and regularity in pneumatic tubes perhaps, or by whatever means the master mind shall decide is the cheapest and the best.

A quote such as this tends to discredit ideas that fast food has been foisted on an unwilling populace.

High Gas Costs Hurt Rural Areas

This story about a rural district going to 4 days a week because of high fuel costs reminds us of tradeoffs. (If you remember, back in 1993 the new Clinton/Gore administration was pushing a carbon tax, then a gasoline tax, for environmental reasons. Their big opposition came from Western Democrats whose constituents need to drive long distances. Particularly on the High Plains you have to drive distances incredible to an Eastern city dweller.)