Samizdata

I am in San Francisco right now with Adriana, who will be speaking on net neutrality at Vloggercon tomorrow with her Samizdata co-editor hat firmly affixed. Today, we will be attending Techdirt Greenhouse with fellow Samizdatista Hillary Johnson.

Upon arrival yesterday, Adriana and I went for a wander and took in the, er, sights. We passed by UN Plaza, where I snapped this nauseating image:

On the same pole, there is a sign warning vagrants not to peddle without a permit. Still, I would have loved to have taken a snap of the sign that Perry de Havilland and I spotted while driving around in San Francisco last year, which featured a beaming Asian-American woman with the following in bold letters:

Paying taxes really pays off!

Whenever I am in San Francisco, I cannot help but think of the great Ken Layne, who wrote in 1998:

San Francisco is truly the foulest place on earth. The nation’s most expensive city features $2,000 moldy little apartments, a filthy broken-down transit system, tens of thousands of bums on the dole, the nation’s worst newspapers, year-round crappy weather, and a local government that’s truly of and for the people. That’s because the people here are total idiots.

We are actually quite enjoying the weather, but the rest sounds about right to me.

Some inconvenient facts surfaced in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries. I will let the good folks from the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription only) tell the tale.

Over a dozen Pennsylvania legislators lost party primaries yesterday in the biggest bloodbath in 40 years. Among the casualties were the top two GOP leaders in the state senate. “We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” concluded Senate President Bob Jubilirer, who lost his bid for a ninth four-year term in a landslide. Because of the public mood, he says, his election “frankly just was not winnable.”

“The pay raise was the fuse that lit this whole explosion we are beginning to see,” former Lt. Gov. Mark Singel told reporters. Indeed, as an act of legislative chutzpah the pay raise had few equals. Last July, the GOP-controlled legislature, in cahoots with Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, raised legislative salaries by between 16% and 54% without public debate, notice or review. They passed the raise in a 2 a.m. vote and evaded a constitutional ban on midterm pay raises by pocketing much of the increase immediately as “unvouchered expenses.”

Voters furious with the “Harrisburg Hogs” forced the legislature to repeal the raise with only a single dissenting vote. In the resulting turmoil, 61 challengers filed to run against incumbents in their party primaries — the highest number in a quarter century.

The incumbents fought back. Mr. Jubilirer and his allies raised nearly $1.5 million to defend his seat, versus the $200,000 that challenger John Eichelberger was able to collect. Similarly, Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill outspent his challenger, Mike Folmer, by some ten to one. It didn’t help. Both leaders wound up winning only 36% of the vote, a crushing defeat.

So for whom are these facts inconvenient? Proponents of campaign finance reform, that’s who. State controls on campaign finance are premised (or at least sold) on the idea that money distorts elections, that without state controls elections will be bought by the candidate with the most money, that the gentle hand of the state is needed to ensure a level playing field and a fair outcome.

Yet here we see well-connected machine politicians, who raised between 8 and 10 times as much as their opponents, turned out. Not the outcome one would expect from the campaign finance reformers, is it?

Damn bottom-up facts. So inconvenient to grand top-down theories.

I would love to know if this is the result of some nefarious power play or just some good old fashioned ‘hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ naughtiness that got discovered.

Even at the CIA I tend to assume venal cock-ups explain most things rather than dark conspiracies… but I will follow this with interest.

of Lew Rothman and JR Cigars. Don’t ask me how I found this, but what’s not to like about the following?

Tobacco Crusader Waxman `Outed’ As Closet Smoker

SELMA, NC (AP): Lew Rothman, flamboyant president of the popular J.R. Cigar mail order tobacco house, today announced that Congressman Henry Waxman (D,CA) has been a steady customer for years.

“He usually buys a box of cigars about once a month,” Rothman said in a telephone interview yesterday. “But he’s a real cheapskate. Always buys the ten-dollar-a-box factory seconds, the real stinkeroos. And he never pays on time.”

Waxman, as chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, had conducted a highly publicized campaign against the tobacco industry last year, which included televised grilling of industry executives. Thomas Bliley (R,PA), a pipe smoker, replaced Waxman as chairman of the committee in the current Congress.

Rothman says that he made the announcement now because “I’ve had it with that dried-out little creep. He owes me six hundred dollars in unpaid bills, and wants me to write it off. Called me at my home about it. At eleven at night. Woke up LaVonda [Rothman’s wife] and the kids.”

Rothman stated that Waxman “…said to make [the unpaid balance] a campaign contribution. Like I’d give a nickel to see that humorless little goniff re-elected. I’ll send a bushel of Avo pyramids to whoever beats him.”

Rothman continued, “I tried to be nice to that little hypocrite, because he is a customer and a Congressman. I even sat still while he put on that monkey trial in Washington. But this is too much. The nerve of the guy!”

Reliable sources at other mail-order cigar retailers confirmed that Waxman had been “a regular buyer, if not a particularly desirable one.”

Congressman Bliley declined to make a statement for the record, but was overheard to say, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Congressman Waxman could not be reached for comment.

From the Trenton Courier-Ledger, April 1, 1995, p. 5 col. 1