Michelle's School Lunches--a Chink in His Armor?

Just skimmed a piece about a school district banning lunches brought from home, which included a reference to kids tossing lunches mostly uneaten.  Made me wonder: if there's 10 million school children by next year who are unhappy with their lunches, does that mean there will be millions of parents who are unhappy with Obama? After all, her school lunch campaign is probably the one effort of the administration which is obvious and impacts the lives of Americans 5 days a week.  Here's a related post at Obamafoodorama.

Bureaucrat of the Day: Walt Whitman

Whitman was a clerk in DC during part of the Civil War (his day job--more famously he visited the wounded in hospitals). He was a copyist, or bureaucrat, a human copying machine and some of his output has now been discovered according to this Post piece.  The article ends:

“Honesty is the prevailing atmosphere,” Whitman, in previously discovered documents, said of his colleagues in the bureaucracy.
“I do not refer to swell officials, the men who wear the decorations, get fat salaries,” he said. “I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who, after all, run the government. They are on the square.”

Personal Lobbying and NASCOE

For some time I had kept a post in either Crooked Timber or Monkey Cage unread, because I wanted to link to it.  That's a way of saying I don't have the URL handy.  The post reported on some research into what tactics were most effective in swaying Congresspeople.  As I remember, email campaigns, even letter writing campaigns, were of little use.  At the other end of the continuum was personal lobbying by someone the Congresswoman knew.

I mention this because I just read the latest update from NASCOE, the association of FSA employees, which reported on their annual legislative session, meaning they bring in people to walk the halls of Congress and lobby the aides and members.  Included in the reports was a lament from one of the officers saying NASCOE used to have someone in every (rural) Congressional district who knew the Congressperson and could get through to them when it was time to lobby.  The lament was that retirements in recent years had depleted the ranks so they no longer have such contacts.

Now NASCOE isn't unique; I'd wager every big widespread Federal bureaucracy has employee groups with the same approach.  It's such influence which makes it hard to do things: for example, to reorganize NRCS and FSA because the rival employee groups tend to neutralize each other.  So the known present becomes the enemy of the possible future.

Good Legal Writing: Fish and Kagan

Here's the end of a Stanley Fish post discussing Justice Kagan's style:

Nothing flashy here. Just a steady unrolling of point after obvious point in a relatively tranquil and moderate prose punctuated by an occasional flaring of amiable wit — “not really,” “what ordinary people would appreciate the Court’s case law also recognizes.” (Sometimes even the Supreme Court rises to the level of common sense.) If I am right, what we are seeing here is the emergence of a powerfully understated style of argument, inexorable without being aggressive, comprehensive without claiming to be so, regnant even when it is on the losing side. I look forward to more of the same.

The Debt Limit and CCC Payments

John Phipps notes that farm program payments made through CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation) could be impacted by failure to raise the debt ceiling. 

That fits with my memory of the old days--our release of deficiency payments would be delayed until Congress got through with the debt limit. Of course, I could be misremembering; it might be the delay was in passing language giving CCC money.  CCC has statutory authority to borrow money from the Treasury for its operations.  So if CCC writes drafts on the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City up to its limit, it has to suspend payments until Congress appropriates money to reimburse the Treasury.  Complicated, I know, but that's what happens when you have both lawyers and accountants messing around in your business.

Carolyn Hax on Our Budget Problems

Carolyn Hax is the Post's advice columnist. Today's column starts with a query from a two-career, two child family, where the wife is feeling a bit overwhelmed. Her advice is appropriate, not only for the question, but also for the US Congress and political system in dealing with our budget problems:

". It’s so easy to focus on the individual items that make up your life: We need to do X for the kids, we need Y amount of money, Z is necessary for my job and I need this salary, etc. That’s because they’re small, incremental decisions, often conveniently black-and-white, so making them brings a sense of progress — all while leaving the bigger, scarier, grayer issues entirely unaddressed.

 Since semi-conservative columnist Robert Samuelson is also in the paper bemoaning ":

government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat.

[I was astonished to have Samuelson say that Rep. Ryan would "gut defense"; my impression which may be wrong is that he didn't touch defense beyond Sec. Gates' proposals.  But anyway, when we look at the big picture, as Ms Hax exhorts us to, through Ezra Klein's eyes, we find the current law will end the deficit.  (What he doesn't say is government spending increases as a percent of GDP--the point is that tax provisions on the books would raise enough, assuming the PPACA provisions are implemented.)

Unforeseen Consequences: Ebooks

The rise of ebooks may mean the decline of donations of used books to library book sales.

How Politics Works--Kaplan, the Post, and Reps

The Washington Post has a good article on their Kaplan subsidiary, which started out as a test preparation business, was purchased by the Post to diversity their business, became a for-profit education business making big money off low-income students who take government loans. Ir captures some ways our political system works:

You take a worthy cause which appeals to most, especially the left--helping people get more education, particularly people who have been in the workforce and want to improve themselves and people who couldn't go to college right out of high school.  This taps into the idealism of the left.

You implement it using a method which appeals to the right: a competitive market in for-profit educational institutions and which rewards the entrepreneur.This taps into the greed of the right.

The combination of factors  means this happens when a Republican comes to power:

"One of its [GWBush's administration] key players was Sally Stroup, assistant secretary for postsecondary education, who had been a lobbyist for the biggest for-profit education company, Apollo Group. Soon the agency eased regulations, allowing companies to reward recruiters based in part on the number of students enrolled, or as one government report later called it, “asses in classes.” Like others, Kaplan made enrollment incentives one element of employees’ compensation. Stroup did not respond to request for comment.

Congress also made a change that helped spur enrollment. In 2006, Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) — then House majority leader and a major ally of for-profit education companies — pushed through legislation that lifted federal loan restrictions for online-only schools.

Our political parties also can act as checks; the story goes on:

With the election of Democrat Barack Obama to the presidency, a new team landed at the Education Department, one that took a skeptical view of the for-profit sector.

And then the magic of the market comes into play: speculators who had successfully "shorted" the housing bubble saw another opportunity to gain:

Investors were hoping the government would tighten the spigot, a move that would jolt the entire for-profit education sector while leading to a big payday for the shorts. Today, investors have sold short — in essence, bet against — shares equal to about one-tenth of The Post Co.’s outstanding stock, about 3.8 percent of Apollo’s and 31.3 percent of Corinthian’s, according to investment Web site.

Sentence of the Day for Farmers

From Farm Policy:
The top five earnings years for farmers in the last 35 years have occurred in the last decade.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ryan is proposing a 20 percent cut in farm programs, beginning with the 2012 farm bill and implemented as the Ag committees want.

Fight Global Warming: Legalize Pot?

 A headline on a post at Treehugger says 1 percent of US electricity goes to grow pot!  So I'm waiting for the green movement to push legalization of pot as a way to move growing pot outside and save electricity for higher purposes, like maybe tanning salons.