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Earmark Requests Going Online — In Wrong Formats
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same.
So, great. You can go line-by-line and figure out what requests your member of Congress has put in. But what’s the total number of your members’ requests? What’s the total amount of his or her requests? Who requested the most earmarks, in dollars or in number? Where in your district is the money supposed to go?
HTML pages and PDF documents are very hard to work with and don’t allow us to answer these questions. The Earmarkdata.org project is asking Congress to produce information about what it’s doing in formats that are useful for public oversight. Cato’s December 2008 policy forum on this topic was called “Just Give Us the Data!”
The Earmarkdata.org site has a petition people can sign to ask their representatives to produce good earmark data.
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Diversity in the Newsroom
The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, is very concerned that “journalists of color” make up only 24 percent of the Post’s reporters and editors. That might seem like a lot to some observers, but Alexander notes that minorities are 43 percent of the people in the Washington area, and it’s essential that the newsroom staff mirror the community the paper is serving.
Well, maybe. As a longtime Post reader, I don’t really know which of the editors and reporters are nonwhite, and I don’t really care. I would hope that the Post would hire the best reporters and editors, in order to put out the best possible paper — with the best possible reporting, writing, copyediting, proofreading, and analysis.
But if reflecting the community is essential, why are race and gender the only categories to be considered? Alexander doesn’t mention sexual orientation. Does the Post have gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender and questioning…) journalists in the correct proportions?
And how about ideological diversity? In the 2008 exit polls, 23 percent of voters described themselves as white, Protestant, born-again or evangelical Christians. A survey of American religion said that 34 percent of Americans describe themselves as evangelical or born-again. How many editors and reporters at the Post would describe themselves that way? I’ll bet that born-again Christians are the most underrepresented group in elite newsrooms. But they weren’t mentioned in Alexander’s column. A CBS/New York Times poll in December found that 18 percent of respondents described themselves as supporters of the Tea Party movement. How many Post journalists are? The Post has recently assigned reporter Amy Gardner to “train her sights on the emerging Tea Party movement and developments inside the Republican Party.” Is she a Tea Party Republican? If not, isn’t that sort of like hiring a white person to “train her sights on African-American politics and developments in the black community”? Cato’s studies on the libertarian vote classify about 15 percent of Americans as libertarian. How many Post journalists would be categorized as libertarian?
Slate, the online magazine owned by the Washington Post Co., which shares some content with the Post, reported in 2008 that 55 of its 57 staff and contributors would be voting for Barack Obama, with 1 for John McCain and one for Libertarian Bob Barr. I’m not going to look up the details, but I’m pretty sure that’s unrepresentative of the country as a whole and even of the Washington area.
If newspapers are going to move beyond strict merit hiring to hire reporters and editors who “reflect the community,” then they shouldn’t stop at race and gender. Let’s see some ideological diversity in elite newsrooms.
Celebrate Human Achievement Tonight
Environmentalist groups and celebrities are celebrating “Earth Hour” tonight. They ask that you turn your lights out for an hour, to call attention to global warming. Folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggest that “this sends the wrong message — to plunge us all into darkness as a rejection of technology and human achievement.” In fact, they point out that it’s Earth Hour every night in North Korea, where people lack basic freedoms, as well as affordable, reliable access to many human achievements, such as electricity. Check out this famous photo of environmentally conscious North Koreans observing Earth Hour all night, every night.
CEI rejects the rejection of technology. They have declared the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 tonight to be “Human Achievement Hour.” To join the celebration, just turn your lights on tonight and enjoy the human achievement of light when we want it. And watch CEI’s short video history of human achievement here.
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Watch It Here: 10 Rules for Dealing with Police
10 Rules for Dealing with Police, the new film from Flex Your Rights, premiered at Cato earlier this week. If you’re interested in knowing more about how to defend your rights during encounters with law enforcement, this is a must-see. You can watch the whole thing below, which includes discussion and commentary after the film.
Order the DVD at FlexYourRights.com.
Plus, don’t miss the exclusive interview with the star of the film, Baltimore trial attorney Billy Murphy (from HBO’s The Wire).
Fidel Castro Endorses ObamaCare
As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.
Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the Western Hemisphere’s last unreconstructed communist dictator endorsed President Obama’s new health care law:
HAVANA (AP) — It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.
“We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama’s) government,” Castro wrote in an essay published in state media, adding that it would strengthen the president’s hand against lobbyists and “mercenaries.”…
“It is really incredible that 234 years after the Declaration of Independence … the government of that country has approved medical attention for the majority of its citizens, something that Cuba was able to do half a century ago,” Castro wrote…
Cuba provides free health care and education to all its citizens, and heavily subsidizes food, housing, utilities and transportation, policies that have earned it global praise. The government has warned that some of those benefits are no longer sustainable given Cuba’s ever-struggling economy, though it has so far not made major changes.
In recent speeches, Raul Castro has singled out medicine as an area where the government needs to be spending less, but he has not elaborated.
I’m sure the Obama administration and its echo chamber will nonetheless continue to claim that this is not socialized medicine.
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Stunner: Strip-Search Machine Used to Ogle
An airport security staffer faces discipline after using a whole-body imaging machine to ogle a co-worker, according to this report. It’s another signal of what’s to come when the machines are in regular use. (In a previous post, I aired my doubts about the veracity of reports that a famous Indian movie star had been exposed, but the story foretells the future all the same.)
I’ve written before that whole-body imaging machines in airports create risks to privacy despite TSA’s efforts to minimize those risks with carefully designed rules and practices.
Rules, of course, were made to be broken, and it’s only a matter of time — federal law or not — before TSA agents without proper supervision find a way to capture images contrary to policy. (Agent in secure area guides Hollywood starlet to strip search machine, sends SMS message to image reviewer, who takes camera-phone snap. TMZ devotes a week to the story, and the ensuing investigation reveals that this has been happening at airports throughout the country to hundreds of women travelers.)
Rules against misuse of whole-body imaging are fine, but they are not a long-term, effective protection against abuse of “strip-search machines.”