Political Desperation Is Funny

Now that all the "big" newspapers here in western Idaho have finished their endorsements in the race for the 1st District Congressional seat, I find myself amused to watch Bill Sali's attempt to get at least something out of the newspaper endorsement process -- considering he got no newspaper endorsements at all. He's reduced to picking selected quotes out of the Idaho Press-Tribune's non-endorsement of either candidate; not surprisingly, he doesn't include a link to the article in question, since it contains some interesting statements about Congressman Sali:

This editorial board tends to see eye-to-eye with Sali’s positions on matters of public policy. His desire for limited government and heavily controlled federal spending rings well in the western Treasure Valley. And as we made clear two years ago, a candidate with his views could easily win an endorsement in our conservative area.
On the other hand, his combative nature, personal conduct and character remain concerns even with nearly two years of service under his belt.
His ethically debatable decision to employ a full-time congressional office staffer as his campaign spokesman, his attempt to get third-party or independent candidates to step out of the U.S. Senate race, and his sloppy campaign finance filings are all reasons to think twice before casting a Sali vote.

Maybe his staff just doesn't know how to put hyperlinks into an article on a web page. Even this post that tells readers to "click here" twice somehow doesn't include actual links.

I guess that's why most voters here in the 1st District are leaning towards voting for Walt Minnick in 8 days.

"Veterans For Sali" Group Seems To Underscore Bill Sali's Failure To Understand The Military

My Congressman, Bill Sali, recently announced the formation of a group called "Veterans For Sali", as a counterweight to the fact that his opponent, Walt Minnick, is an actual veteran himself. I'm all for Veterans speaking out in favor of the candidate of their choice, and I'm glad whenever I see a politically-active Veteran. What I find discouraging about this announcement, however, is that the press release listing the members of the new group once again displays Bill Sali and his staff's complete obliviousness to military culture.

In almost all cases, the press release (mirrored over at Right Mind, run by submariner Dale up in Northern Idaho) lists the members as "Retired". In common military usage, when you say someone is "Retired", it means that they're drawing either a retainer or retired pay, usually after completing at least 20 years of active service (or less during drawdowns), or are medically retired due to injury. It seemed surprising to me that such a large majority of the Sali supporters should have been "Retired", vice the equally honorable title "Veteran", that I checked into a few of them. One, Idaho Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney, is listed here as serving only 2 years in the Army -- granted, he may have been medically retired. Another, Jesse Dollemore, is only about 33 years old. If they're not actually "Retired" in the most commonly-used sense of the word, that doesn't make their endorsement any less important. It does, however, call into question the suitability of Bill Sali to continue serving in the U.S. Congress when he doesn't understand this important distinction in terminology.

Update 1230 10 Oct: I E-mailed Congressman Sali's spokesman to see if he wanted to comment, and also placed a call to General Doty, one of the group's co-chairs (who, like a lot of Bill Sali's most outspoken supporters, doesn't seem to actually live in the 1st District); I'll let you know if they respond. I also noticed that Commssioner Fred Tilman, listed as "Retired" on the list, actually served for three years in the Army. Once again, he may have been medically retired, but I'm thinking that it's fairly unlikely that two prominent Idaho politicians would have the same story.

Update 1456 10 Oct: I got a call back from General Doty and we had a very pleasant conversation. As I expected, he had not seen the actual list of the members of the group (he's been out enjoying Idaho's great outdoors), because otherwise I'm sure he would have caught the discrepancy. He did confirm that many of the group's members are, in fact, not retired, but served honorably as Veterans without having enough Time In Service to officially "Retire". Therefore, it appears to be simply a case of the Sali staff once again demonstrating their ineptitude.

Bill Sali: Mailing It In?

I'm starting to wonder if my Congressman, Bill Sali, has pretty much given up on even trying to win re-election this year. He's not running any commercials (despite some very effective ones his moderate opponent, Walt Minnick, has running), he's not even pretending to have local offices that are actually in the district he represents, and he's not responding at all to the tidal wave of embarrassing stories about him in the national media. A response today from his press secretary about an editorial in a local paper accusing the Congressman's congressional/campaign staff (they seem to be one in the same) of incompetence / appearances of impropriety didn't even start to address how the original editorial was wrong. (I'm guessing this wasn't discussed because there were no falsehoods in the first story.) It did, however, introduce a very memorable catchphrase: "...a sea of liberalism, filth, and innuendo". I plan on using the phrase frequently in normal conversation.

As far as the Congressman moving his campaign office to join his Ada County Congressional office over in the 2nd District, I'm really not surprised; Mr. Sali's loudest supporters in the Idaho political tube-o-sphere -- Adam, Bryan Fischer, and Trish & Halli -- also live outside the Congressman's district. Other than fellow submariner Dale, I'm wondering if Mr. Sali has any people willing to be publicly identified as his supporters living anywhere inside his actual district. [Anyone want to volunteer? Just put a comment down below. Remember, you have to be willing to be publicly identified -- nom de blogs, like "neoroman" (who seems to be threatening violence against Walt Minnick in this post), don't cut it.]

Why Bill Sali Is #423

My congressman, Bill Sali, was recently ranked as the 423rd "most" effective Congressman (of 435) in a survey of Congressional influence. This brings up the question -- why would Idahoans want to return someone so obviously ineffective to Congress in November? This analysis has one possible explanation:

Jasper LiCalzi, a professor of political economy at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, deep in Sali's district, said one reason for the winners' success is, Idaho voters love a "standing at the breach" attitude. Chenoweth, for instance, once accused federal agents of using black helicopter gunships to harass ranchers.
"They said, 'She's a wacko. She's out of the mainstream. She's extremist,' " LiCalzi recalled. "But Idahoans love that kind of individualistic mentality. With Sali, he may be trying to be like Davy Crockett at the Alamo: He gets killed, but he stands for what he believes in."

I'm going to go on record as saying that I don't think this viewpoint really represents the Idaho of the 21st century. Sure, there are quite a few fairly loud people who espouse the "we'd rather be right than be in power" attitude, but I think there we're seeing fewer and fewer of them as the world becomes more connected. My evidence? Consider that Bill Sali won the Republican primary in 2006 with only 26% of the vote, and couldn't even pull in 50% of the vote in the general election in a year where Republicans won all the statewide offices and he enjoyed a significant campaign fundraising advantage over his opponent. While he claims to represent the wishes of the voters of the district, there's a lot of evidence that his reflexive Club For Growth-inspired dictums are out of touch with the majority of the voters; for example, while he says he's never voted for a tax increase, the voters in the 1st District routinely pass school bonds (which increase their property taxes) with substantial supermajorities.

This year, where Mr. Sali's fundraising is running well behind his moderate opponent, Walt Minnick, voters will be able to look back on Sali's record in Congress. While Sali's team hopes they'll perceive a man who's valiantly standing up for principles, I think they'll see a man who's so utterly ineffective that it's almost laughable, backed by an organization and staff who's well-publicized incompetence reflects fully on the decision-making capabilities of their boss.

Here are some examples of Mr. Sali's ineffectiveness, incompetence, and general unseriousness:

1) Announced that he was submitting a bill to repeal the Law of Gravity (complete with an amusing mis-spelling) to protest what he was as Congress' unconstitutional attempt to raise the minimum wage.(Even more amusing, he ended up voting for the minimum wage increase as part of a combined bill.)

2) Failure to properly submit required Campaign Finance Reports in a timely manner. For the most recent quarter, he was one of only 2 Congressmen who were late in filing -- and when he finally turned it in, it was still wrong.

3) Being forced to apologize for comments widely considered to be insensitive to religious minorities.

4) Making a big deal out of opposing the approval of a Mexican consulate in Boise -- only to have the Administration (of his own party) shoot him down in record time.

5) Claiming to have stopped the ATF from using a slogan they'd actually stopped using 2 months earlier -- and then further subjecting his staff to embarrassment by demanding an apology from the ATF for his staff's inability to use Google.

6) Suggesting that we can get more money than exists in the world by leasing government land for oil and mineral exploitation, and seeming to think that we can get crude oil from trees. (Congressman Sali seems like one of those Representatives you hear about sometimes who try to make the Patent Office issue a patent to someone with a perpetual motion machine.)

7) Being on the losing end of so many lopsided votes, including many that go against the district's best interests, that it's almost comical.

The list goes on and on. Feel free to add more in the comments, or on your own blogs.

I can usually admire a man who stands on principle, even when I don't agree with his principles. When it reaches the point where an entire congressional district is left without effective, competent representation, however, I have to draw the line. I think most people in this district probably don't support many (or most) of the more extreme proposals put forth by the Democratic leadership in Congress -- I'm one of those people. Here's the thing: when Speaker Pelosi is putting together her legislative strategy, she doesn't spend a second thinking about Bill Sali -- she's not going to get his vote no matter what she does on anything controversial. You know who she does worry about? It's the conservative and moderate Democrats who she needs to maintain her majority -- especially those in traditionally Republican districts. If she tries to go too far, these men and women will let her know, in no uncertain terms, that they can't support her proposals; if they did, they'd probably find themselves out on the street at the next election. This small group of about 45-50 Democrats (including the "Blue Dog Coalition") are the people who really control what's going to pass in the House. Bill Sali can never hope to have this kind of influence that Walt Minnick will have. And since Walt's moderate values and policy proposals align quite well with all but the most extreme voters in the district, it'll be an easy choice for 1st District residents to make in November.

Update 0707 08 Aug: Adam responds to my post here. Also, I edited one really ungrammatical sentence above.

Idaho's Dogmatists -- A Day Late And A Dollar Short

My congressman, Bill Sali, is in the news again this week, for a couple of things. Idaho evangelical leader Bryan Fischer reports that the Family Resource Council on Wednesday thanked Congressman Sali for "exposing" taxpayer subsidies of Planned Parenthood. The "exposure" seemingly happened during a special orders speech in front of about 10 people on the House floor earlier this month. So was Congressman Sali the first to "expose" this funding? Of course not... it was all over the 'net a few months ago, including in a blog post from the Republican Study Committee of which Congressman Sali is a member. In general, it seems that Congressman Sali is normally about 3 months late; remember his announcement that he had stopped the ATF from handing out Leatherman tools with an "Always Think Forfeiture" engraving, when it turns out that the agency had stopped using the slogan months earlier in response to complaints from others -- a fact that even the simplest Google search would have revealed.

Speaking of "late", Congressman Sali is also one of only 2 Congresspeople who still hasn't filed his campaign finance report, now 9 days late. This brings up an interesting question -- are Idaho's dogmatists just incompetent? Or do they actually skew data and just assume their supporters don't bother to check their sources? Check out a post from Adam's Blog yesterday; I happen to know that Adam isn't an idiot, and that he just cherry-picks data to suit his causes. He's trying to make a big deal out of the "fact" that the Democratic nominee for Congress in my district has gotten 71% of his contributions from out of state. While he allows that "these reports are not complete", he utterly fails to mention that the methodology of the report he uses is skewed heavily: "The numbers on this page are calculated from contributions of more than $200 from individuals, as reported to the Federal Election Commission. PAC dollars are not included." (If you go to the page that has the PAC dollars, which one can assume are mostly from out of state, you'll see that Sali has outraised Minnick in that category, as of June 30th, by $381K to $45.5K.)

A quick look at Minnick's most recent campaign finance report shows that the vast majority of his contributors are people making small (under $200) donations from here in Idaho. Adam, to his credit, did report that the data he used was not complete. Adam also allows comments, and is very good about responding to readers who question his tactics. Bryan Fischer is another case altogether.

In his post today, Fischer gets really excited about Adam's post, but doesn't think to put in any qualifiers. (He also doesn't link back to Adam's post, so his readers can't easily see the comments on Adam's sites from those with dissenting views. From my point of view, quoting a blogger without linking to them is pretty weak.) Fischer says:

The non-partisan Open Secrets website reports that an astonishing 71% of Minnick’s campaign funds have come from out of state. Minnick has raised more money in New York City than in Boise.

Both statements are flat-out lies; Minnick's "campaign funds" include individual contributions of all amounts, personal donations from the candidate, and PAC donations, among other things. Also, when contributions of less than $200 are included, Minnick has raised way more money in Boise than in NYC. (Plus, the CPR report didn't include the last reporting period.) Does Fischer know that he's lying, or is he really that ignorant? To be honest, I'm not sure in his case. He doesn't allow comments on his website, so you can't really get into a real back-and-forth with him to determine if he's shady, or just not too bright. There are some clues in his previous posts, however:

1) Yesterday, he posted that "Tax Freedom Day" was on July 17 this year. This directly contradicts the link he provided, which says that Tax Freedom Day was on April 23. (He apparently got it confused with "Cost Of Government Day", which calculates the "costs" of things like the Pure Food and Drug Act.)

2) I reported earlier that he changed the verb tense of his linked post to make it look like people he was writing about were still facing charges.

So, is Bryan Fischer intentionally dishonest? Or does he generally just not have a clue? At this point, I'm really not sure which one it is.

Town Hall Meeting With Congressman Bill Sali

I went to a hurriedly-scheduled "town hall" meeting today with my Congressman, Bill Sali. Long-time readers will remember that I'm not a big fan of Bill Sali; I feel that our district deserves a Congressman who is able to work with people to get things done, rather than just embarrass himself with insensitive gaffes and be on the losing end of a bunch of 403-18 votes.

The meeting started about 10 minutes after the scheduled noon start time; here's who was there:

We ended up with a few people showing up late, so overall attendence was about 30 people -- probably 90% of them Sali supporters. Congressman Sali has always been very personable when I've seen him before, and today was no exception. He opened the meeting by apologizing for the short notice, and explained that he had planned to go to ANWR this weekend; unfortunately, he was unable to arrange for transportation. He said the reason for that was that the "Democrat Congress" had passed an ethics bill that made it so that Congressmen couldn't get free airplane rides from lobbyists anymore -- apparently, he's against that restriction.

He started off talking about high energy prices, and said that our problems are caused by the "Democrat Congress" not allowing us to drill off the coast and in ANWR. Never mentioned was the fact that it would take years for any of this oil to get into the marketplace, and it would have no real effect on prices for a long time. While I personally don't have a big problem with drilling for oil where we can in an environmentally-conscious manner, I do know that it's neither a short-term nor a long-term solution to our problems by itself -- ANWR would provide maybe 1% of world oil production by 2030.

He then moved on to attacking entitlements, including problems with Social Security. I asked him about his campaign promise in 2006 to reveal his plan that would "protect Medicare and Social Security for all generations" by reducing payroll taxes. Amazingly, he flat-out admitted that he was wrong; he claimed he "had" a plan, but when people with an actual clue looked at the numbers, they convinced him it wouldn't work. Then an older woman mentioned how her Social Security check wasn't going very far, and the crowd started getting ugly. While Congresman Sali responded to the woman with comforting words, I heard people snidely whispering behind me that "I bet she hasn't paid into Social Security as much as she's getting out." Congressman Sali, who had attacked opponent Larry Grant in 2006 over his admission that we'd have to balance intakes and outlays of the program (either by increasing payroll taxes or pushing back the retirement age sometime in the next 30 years), basically admitted that the math just doesn't add up -- by 2040, you'll have 2 contributors for every recipient under the current rules. While he's a canny enough politician not to come out and say that you'd have to reduce or delay benefits to get it to work, it was clear he thought that was the only option if we want to keep Social Security solvent.

The overall tenor of Congressman Sali and his supporters was that "people screwed it up in the past" and that had people only followed their principles, we wouldn't be having these problems. They might be right. That being said, it doesn't help us now to only provide "we told you so" as a solution. Any possible solution they offered was either patently absurd, against the laws of physics, or (most often) politically impossible. (One person suggested President Bush declare a "National Emergency" and rule by decree. Congressman Sali said the President should "keep that option on the table.")

At this point, a Sali supporter asked him if Congressman Sali ever gets down-hearted by all the people saying bad things about him; specifically mentioned was the new "Bill Sali Hates Idaho" website. Bill Sali said basically that he's OK with himself standing by his principles, and if the people elect someone else, he'll take it with good grace. I followed up by asking him, in the manner of Bob Slydell from "Office Space", a variation on "What exactly is it that you do here?" [Long version of the question: I first thanked him for getting the PUC for VO-67, and then pointed out that he really hasn't accomplished anything else tangible during his tenure, other than be on the losing end of a bunch of lopsided votes. I mentioned that his much-hyped "Always Think Freedom" bill wouldn't even get a hearing (he didn't disagree), postulated that his "Simplify the Tax Forms" amendment would probably get dropped in conference (he said he thinks it will survive, so I'll believe him for now, even though he didn't disagree with my characterization of it as "without metrics" and therefore basically meaningless), and pointed out that his co-sponsorship of bills like Rep. Ron Paul's "U.S. Out Of The UN" H. R. 1146 was completely pointless, since there's no chance that any of these bills will even get a committee hearing. I concluded that the only tangible effect of having him in Congress seemed to be that our district got less federal money than we would have had we elected a Democrat in 2006.] He chose to focus on why he signed on to co-sponsor the UN Bill, and fell back on "American sovereignty" -- he didn't mention why he wasn't supporting a "U.S. Out Of NATO" bill, since that organization actually would force us to go to war when we might not want to, which seems like a bigger threat to our sovereignty than the UN would ever be. He then went on to claim, bizarrely, that he doesn't think the House leadership would have given more money (in the form of earmarks) to a freshman Democrat in an unsafe district; instead, he claimed that he'd gotten more earmarks than "most" of the freshman Democrats. Other than my amazement at seeing a supposedly fiscally-conservative Congressman claiming as his main achievement a whole bunch of earmarks, I really doubt that he had more than "most" freshman Democrats (since that group got $237 million in earmarks, and freshman Republicans got only $36 million) -- maybe he did, though, because the district has so much land. Hopefully Mountain Goat has the research on that tucked away somewhere.

At this point the meeting got a little uglier. One woman behind us complained about everyone having an "entitlement mentality" and wondering why the government had to help people at all, especially people who were hit by natural disasters. Congressman Sali admitted that he thought that there were things the federal government probably should do to help people in that situation. (He didn't mention the actual unspoken reason that the elites decided long ago to help people down on their luck -- that it's much better to make sure everyone has enough to eat than to drive them to desperation, where they end up robbing people like the woman who complained about her tax dollars going to help "undeserving" people.) Another woman in the row behind us then started to quiz Sali about his salary and benefits; her point seemed to be that people who work for the government shouldn't have pensions or health care. Poor Congressman Sali tried to protect himself from the onslaught, and I felt so sorry for him that I spoke up and said that I thought I had earned my government pension. The woman was gathering herself up to keep going when SubBasket turned and asked the woman if she thought that having to go through 4 six-month separations didn't maybe mean I'd earned something. The woman behind us didn't say another word. After that, a woman complained about the state of education in the country; Congressman Sali replied that one of the problems is that we can't even hire all of the foreign students who get advanced degrees here. Apparently, he supports the granting of more H-1B visas; interestingly, he doesn't mention that on his campaign website.

Towards the end, Congressman Sali got philosophical, and admitted that he hadn't really understood when he took office how complicated things like foreign relations were. He also said that he doesn't want to be an "alarmist", but he's worried that our economy could get much, much worse by the end of the year, even worse than during the Great Depression. He seemed much more honest to me than he has in the past; I think he's starting to realize that he really is in over his head. I can admire a man who stands by his beliefs; I just don't want him as my Congressman if he's completely useless. Hopefully, by early next January, Bill Sali will be able to return home -- although he did say that, if he lost, he didn't know where "home" might be, since he didn't want to live someplace that didn't vote for someone like him. I'm thinking ANWR might be a good place for him to put down roots...

Update 2051 13 July: When I was at work today, I remembered an additional piece of information from the meeting. Congressman Sali did seem to suggest that Social Security could be "saved" by the government getting $60 trillion (say it like Dr. Evil for full effect) by having all energy in government lands extracted -- here's another Congressman talking about that. I put this under both the "patently absurd" and "against the laws of physics" categories, in that most of the energy can't be extracted with any current or planned technology, our current GDP is only about $13.3 trillion (so who's going to pay all this money that doesn't exist?), and when you've collected all the money (if it was even possible) you now have no energy supplies left in the country.