The High Sierra in Late Spring

Yesterday my wife and I got back from a whirlwind trip over Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park.  We left Sunday at noon from Visalia, taking the Wawona Road just to the beginning of iconic Yosemite Valley.  From there, instead of contesting with the Memorial Day Weekend throngs, we peeled off to the north and enjoyed the relative solitude and truly wild Sierra experience of Tioga Road.  With some stops for views, short hikes and lunch we pulled into the town of Lee Vining at the eastern base of the pass around 6:00 P.M.

I do so love the mountains.  The crystalline sky is so deep and richly blue it's almost purple.  Rushing torrents of melt water leap over cliff faces, race down boulder-strewn creek beds or meander through awakening meadows, greening now at 7,000 feet while those at 9,000 are still tawny.  Lakes such as Tenaya are so clear you can see bottom.   Snow lingers in the high scarps where pikas are emerging from their dens, ever watchful for hungry raptors circling above.  Even the firs are hunched and gnarled from their interminable struggle with wind and chill at Tioga Pass's 9945 foot summit.

In the middle elevations a riot of ferns and vines spring into ephemeral verdancy, where a keen and patient eye may spot a bear gorging on berries.  As the season warms both flora and fauna will creep upward.  Higher on the craggy slopes of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne a decent pair of binoculars may bring some mountain goats into focus.  Rarely you might spy a mountain lion crouched furtively in the granite or edging ever closer to its intended prey.

To me there is something primally compelling about these untamed expanses.  You can sense it in the people you meet who have come from all over the world to revel in creation as when it first existed.  There was the Indian family with laughing children scaling a boulder at an overlook, or the smiling young Japanese couple who took our picture at Tuolumne Meadow, or the animated group of six travelers from France recounting their adventures of the day before over breakfast at a little place in Lee Vining.      

If its national parks are not "America's Best Idea," as Ken Burns has said, they are certainly one of them.  I definitely feel spiritually refreshed amid such wonder, and grateful these places of peace have been set aside for preservation, not only so their natural inhabitants can live according to their natures, but that we humans may also reclaim some of our own. 
 

  

Romney's Economic Plan: Would it Work?

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is running for the highest office in the land mainly based on his claim that he can work wonders with the economy.  To see what he has in mind to bring this about, I went to the Romney campaign web site to see what his plans are.  There I discovered  the most remarkable characteristic about the former Massachusetts governor's platform is how strongly it resembles the formula laid out by the most recent Republican president--George W. Bush.  Yes, that's right; the very policies Bush enacted that led to financial collapse and recession are the same ones Mr. Romney wants to bring back and says will restore prosperity this time.

The first has to do with the elimination of regulations.  In particular, Romney wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations requiring oversight, transparency, shareholder involvement and consumer protections against risky secret hedge and derivative funds.   The above link will take you to an excellent synopsis of what it does.  Romney would have us go back to the unsupervised, casino-trading operations that put millions out of work and led to $1.5 trillion in bailouts for the "too big to fail" institutions.  Morgan Chase's recent $2-$3 billion debacle shows how little the giants have learned their lesson and how closely they still need to be supervised.  Romney would remove even the semblance of a brake on these high-stakes high-risk operations.  Leave these federally-insured investors free to take whatever wild ventures promise to make the highest short-term profits.  If it entails enormous long-term risk, no problem.  The taxpayer's dime will be there to bail them out.

The second part of the Romney program is a reprise and indeed an extension of the Bush tax policy.  The 2001 Bush tax cuts reduced the marginal rates about 3% for most payers, though 4.6% for the top earners.   Another round of Bush cuts in 2003 raised the brackets about 2%, effectively cutting taxes again.  See a detailed treatment of both cuts here.  Though the conservative Heritage Foundation forecast the plan would eliminate the deficit by 2010, what they actually did was turn a $230 billion yearly surplus from the Clinton years into a $450 billion deficit under Bush.  In fact, the Congressional Research Service finds that the Bush tax cuts have cost $2.9 trillion in deficits plus an additional $600 billion in debt interest payments since their enactment.  

For his part, Romney's site advocates another 20% income tax cut, across the board, along with the elimination of the estate tax.  The corporation tax on profits would fall, after expenses and deductions, by 29%.  Once again the wealthy would reap the lion's share of the reduction, while the middle class and poor would suffer the bulk of the pain.  That is because of the third facet of the Romney plan.

The third part is the spending side of the ledger.  Again, as with Bush, domestic spending would be slashed while military spending would skyrocket.  Romney would accelerate military spending even though we have disengaged from one war and are winding down another.  His plan calls for cutting $500 billion a year, though that would be greater for domestic priorities because of the augmentation for defense.  I was only able to identify $264 billion of cuts from the web site.  But much of it would come from enacting the "House Republican (Ryan) Budget" which would privatize Medicare.  Another part of the plan would make Social Security recipients wait until they are older to collect benefits. 

As usual, average people would be asked to do without so richer people could be given lower taxes, under the view that this would encourage growth and balance the budget.  The persistence of this ideology is rather astonishing, given its failure to produce either a balanced budget or increased broad-based prosperity any of the times it has been tried in past economic downturns, whether under Hoover, Reagan or either Bush.  Yet this is precisely what Romney would try again if he is given the chance.  Among other things, the success of the Romney campaign hinges on the American people having extremely short memories. 





     

Obama's Historic Statement on Gay Rights

President Obama's announcement this week in an ABC New interview that he personally favors marriage equality is one of the most courageous statements any major politician has made in some time.  It is reminiscent of President Kennedy's statement on civil rights in 1963,  when JFK's introduction of a strong civil rights bill threatened to cost him the votes of a Southern electorate that was still voting Democratic at the time. 

This week's lopsided vote in favor of marriage restrictions in North Carolina underscores the political risk President Obama is taking.  While current Gallup polling shows support for marriage equality is now nationally in the majority for the first time (51% to 48%), it is quite likely to hurt the President in some swing states in the fall.  You can't forget that the presidential election is not a national poll but 51 separate winner-take-all elections held in the states and the District of Columbia.  Obama only won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, and the margin in favor of the North Carolina measure to ban same-sex marriage was greater than twenty percent.

The President's statement is anything but what a calculating politician would have done.  Such an operator would have stuck with the safe bet and kept his views muddled, not wanting to alienate those opposed to gay rights in battleground states. 

Instead, he staked out a position in keeping with the groundbreaking figure he is: the first African-American President, the exemplar of the nation's progress along the path of overcoming bigotry by race, is now on record as the first to publicly stand against bigotry by sexual orientation.  May 9, 2012 will go down as one of those important dates in American history, when a President took a stand against the last legalized discrimination remaining in the fabric of American society.  As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no major extension of rights proposed by any American president has failed to eventually be enacted.  Though it may take some time, I do not expect this to be an exception.

I don't mind admitting my gratitude as a history teacher to have personally seen, as a child, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and as an adult the election of our first black president and the first presidential enunciation of true equality for LGBT citizens.  There is no doubt in my mind that the day will come when people will scratch their heads that there ever was a controversy over equality for gays, much as younger people today are perplexed that there ever was a controversy over equality by race. 

I am proud of our president today, regardless of how this plays out electorally.  He has done that which is the right thing to do, and having done so places Barack Obama for all time on the right side of human rights and of history itself on this groundbreaking issue. 

2012 Endorsement: Re-Elect President Obama

The Presidential nominating contests are now over.  In the past few days President Barack Obama has officially kicked off his re-election campaign with rallies in the battleground states of Virginia and Ohio, and challenger Mitt Romney has seen his last serious opponent withdraw from the Republican race.  With both nominations now assured at the respective major party conventions, it is time to go ahead and make my endorsement.  The choice for 2012 is clear: President Obama deserves a second term and should be re-elected President of the United States. 

The president who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2013 will confront a host of problems.  Domestic policy, including the economy, will be at the forefront of these.  Yet the nation also faces serious challenges in foreign policy.  Beyond this, the next administration will also be called upon to navigate a number of serious and inherently divisive social issues as well.   On all three counts, President Obama is the best choice for the American people.

Obama has the right prescription for what ails the American economy.  He entered office during the worst recession in 80 years, a downturn caused by the reckless irresponsibilities of a financial industry that in creating a housing bubble and risky investment instruments, brought the global financial structure to the edge of collapse.  This had been abetted in government by a diffident philosophy that gave irresponsible fast buck operators free rein to operate without serious regulatory accountability.  President Obama acted on that with Wall Street Regulatory Reform and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  He also stopped the free-falling economy with a $787 billion stimulus package that stopped the job losses and has produced job gains every month for over two years now.  See these graphs. 

In contrast, Romney wants to return to the lax regulatory stance of the Bush years and supports the Paul Ryan budget plan of tax cuts for the wealthy and budget cuts to the infrastructure and human needs of the rest of society.  Analysis shows that the Romney budget would actually increase the deficit by cutting revenues so sharply.  Beyond that, its cuts in domestic spending would follow the "austerity" path the European nations adopted and that now is leading them into a double-dip recession.  Spending cuts are working no better for them in a recession than they did for Herbert Hoover, and for the same reason.  Yet Romney hews to the discredited party line.

Obama has also excelled in foreign policy, ending the Iraq War and now in the process of successfully winding down the Afghan War.  His drone strikes despite Pakistani protests have eliminated two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leadership and his decisive action in ordering the Bin Laden raid rid the world of its greatest terrorist menace.  He demonstrated admirable deftness in dealing with the Arab Spring, including the insurgency against Libya's Qaddafi.  He is handling the Korean and Iranian situations with the perfect balance of diplomatic incentives and sanctions.  As a result, under Obama's leadership the U.S. is once again respected and even liked in the world. 

In Romney's case, on world affairs he appears disengaged and uninformed.  He relies on many of the same interventionist neocon advisers left over from the ruinous Bush-Cheney administration.  He is still living in the Cold War, saying that "Russia is public enemy number one" in one memorable statement.  As if we haven't had enough problems with open-ended wars, he joined the rest of the Republican candidates in advocating starting a new war against Iran.  He is clearly out of his depth in foreign affairs, a shortcoming that could be highly damaging were he to become the leader of the free world.  

Obama is similarly the better of the two on social issues by far.  In supporting the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, ending Don't Ask Don't Tell in the military, supporting the Violence Against Women Act, leaving women's questions such as abortion and contraception up to them, supporting the DREAM Act and standing strong for college Pell Grants and low student loan interest rates, the President continues to serve the causes of fairness and equality in society.  Romney, on the other hand, has stood with the extreme right-wingers in his party on all these issues except for his belated support for the student loan interest rate matter.  He campaigned on being the most opposed to comprehensive immigration reform, is against gay rights and has supported all the recent restrictions Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted against permitting women to make their own choices.  It is no coincidence Romney trails the President 70-14 with Latinos and 55-39 among women.

Let's Stop Distracted Driving

As I drive around I'm seeing enough distracted drivers that it's got me genuinely concerned.  It's a real safety hazard and I'd like to see some very stringent enforcement before too many more are injured and killed.  Thirty years ago drunk driving was fairly prevalent and more or less accepted by many.  Mothers Against Drunk Driving was formed, public attention was focused, and those attitudes all changed.  Now it's treated as a serious offense.  Distracted driving, especially texting, is the contemporary equivalent: a driver is twenty-three times more likely to cause an accident while texting.

California made talking on handheld phones and sending and receiving text messages while driving illegal in 2008.  A first offense got you a ticket for $20 and subsequent violations dinged you for $50.  The amounts are now up to $159 and $279 respectively.  These are steps in the right direction, but more is needed.

Research shows that driving while texting increases the risk of accident and death equivalent to driving above the legal limit for alcohol.  This is serious stuff.  Statistics from the Transportation Department  found that 5,474 deaths and 448,000 injuries were linked to distracted driving in 2009.  Ominously, they also show that especially among younger drivers, the practice is becoming highly common, perhaps even prevalent. 

A survey of 5000 San Diego area college students released this month found that 50% reported texting while driving on the freeway, 60% while in city traffic, and 87% while at red lights.  Only 12% marked that they "never" text while driving.   

As of yet, the penalties do not seem to be having much effect among young people.  The California Highway Patrol issued 168,000 citations in 2011.  The same survey earlier cited found that majorities of the young drivers said they would curtail their proclivities if heavier penalties were imposed, such as a 3-month license revocation, adding a point to one's driving violations record, or exempting insurers from having to cover accidents in which their insured was engaged in distracted driving behavior.

I hope to see more strict enforcement of these rules and much heavier punishments for violating them.  I don't know about you, but I feel quite unsafe when I'm on the road around people who are looking down at their hands rather than paying attention to me and the other cars around them.  I hope soon to see the cops nailing people left and right and the violators seeing their insurance rates go through the roof.  Then it will become "not ok" to text, tweet, or even chat with one hand holding a phone to one's ear while behind the wheel.  Until then, I can report that I have never driven more defensively than I now do.  I hope it's enough.

BP Spill Two Years Later

We have just passed the two-year anniversary of the BP Deep Horizon oil rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.  Despite the upbeat "Come on Down!" BP advertising blitz you may have seen recently on television, indications abound that the accident that killed 11 men and introduced an estimated 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf is apparently a long way from being cleaned up.  Recent reports by ABC and CBS News detail alarming abnormalities in fish, shrimp, coral, dolphins and in the mangroves that anchor the Gulf shoreline. 

Fish are being found with strange sores and lesions that have never been seen by fishermen before.  Some have patches of skin missing, others have bizarre skin pigmentations and others have tested positive for concentrations of napthalene in their bile.  As you can read in the linked reports, commercial fishermen say incidences of the deformed and diseased animals increases as one approaches the site of the spill.

Oil that coated barrier islands remains in the sand and shore, killing off reeds and mangroves.  The denuded and unprotected shoreline is thus eroding at four times the normal rate, and whole islands are rapidly disappearing beneath the waves. 

BP has reportedly spent the substantial sum of $14 billion in the cleanup and as compensation for businesses and residents adversely affected by the catastrophe.  Even so, the recent news would seem to indicate many billions more might need be committed to the effort, and even then numerous long-term effects would almost certainly still remain.

These findings, coming in the same month as the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, serve to remind us how quickly and dramatically human hubris can be given its comeuppance.  Assurances about "foolproof" safety precautions or the blithe dismissal of the possibility of serious negative consequences for inherently risky and dangerous activities are time and again humbled by nature, the unforeseen, or simple human error.

A rational policy would be directed toward ending reliance on such an energy source as rapidly as possible.  In many advanced nations, including Israel, with a project underway to go to 100% electric cars, Brazil, converting to running all vehicles on ethanol from sugar cane, and Germany, which is in the process of installing solar panels on every roof in the country, vigorous efforts are in progress.
Yet here, President Obama's measured steps to encourage greener domestic sources are met with furious opposition.  But then, none of the aforementioned nations has a powerful and influential
domestic oil industry to contend with.

Earth Day Cleanup

Yesterday I participated in the Visalia City Earth Day Mill Creek cleanup activity.  For those of you who know Visalia, the meetup was at the corner of Lovers Lane and Mill Creek.  A good turnout of probably 150 people showed up. 

I got to see my good friends Louie Campos, Mary Ann Bringhurst and City Councilman Greg Collins, among others, and work with them for a good cause.  We pulled many tons of detritus out of the creek bed, including mattresses, shopping carts, a satellite dish, bottles, PVC pipe, lumber, a good heavy chain, and lots of tires.  Nearly a mile of the creek was cleared.  Meanwhile, others were busy spreading mulch, clearing out invasive plant species such as bamboo, and going to another location on Riggin St. near the St. Johns River to plant trees and shrubs. 

The city had commemorative green shirts for participants, as well as water, gloves and plenty of tools.  There were even sandwiches, contributed by Subway, for those who stayed until noon.  Click here to read a story on Visalia conservation programs. 

At one point I remarked to Louie how surprising it was to find so much trash and junk thrown into a natural watercourse.  He said that what amazed him was how quickly a group of concerned citizens could restore a natural setting to attractiveness when they showed up in force with a readiness to work.

It felt good to be a part of this activity.  I felt like I did something wholesome and worthwhile on my Sunday morning after church.  I guess it's representative of life in general.  A lot of people each doing a little can make a difference and the world a better place!