Special Session, Sales tax, and Robin Capehart's new course schedule.

Well, we see the long awaited special legislative session has begun. I'm almost half afraid to start wading into this cesspool.

Let's go with the big issue first.

State employee pay raises. After judges, magistrates, and family court judges just got nice FAT raises (some in the neighborhood of 50% of their previous salary) last spring, the rest of the state employees get to pick over the leftover scraps of the state budget, for their first raise, since a gallon of gas was half the price is it now (roughly five years ago, if I remember correctly). Papa Joe Cheerleader has come forth with a whopping 900 dollar per year raise. Wow. That will ALMOST cover the public employees' raises in health care premiums that are set to rise TWICE in the next 10 months, AND the increased cost of utilities, and gas. If a state employee manages to come out of the next 10 months, with the same, or more, take-home pay in their paycheck than they have today, they should count themselves extremely lucky. Forgetting the increased deductions on the immediate horizon, that 900 bucks will equal about an extra 25 bucks per paycheck that goes into the employee's pocket (after withholding). That's a 31 cent per hour raise. Once every five years. That equals a 6 cents per hour raise, per year (if I'm incorrect, and they had a raise four years ago, it would be about 8 cents per hour - but we'll just continue to use 5 as the basis). It would take 17 years to raise your salary by a dollar an hour. Just think, by the time a state employee's kid is almost ready to graduate from high school, Daddy will be taking home a whole dollar per hour MORE than he did when Junior was born.

Hell, I worked at a grocery store as a kid, doing a job that a brain dead monkey can do, and got more of a regular raise than 6 cents per year. And that was a loooooooooooong time ago. Hell, if my employer offered me an extra 25 bucks per check, after my first five years of work, I'd just tell him "No thanks. If that's all you can afford to give me as a raise, once every five years, you need it more than I do." 25 bucks a paycheck once every five years, is in a word, insulting.

Only in West Virginia, can the politicians slap themselves silly on their backs and call a small deduction a "raise," in the sense that it wasn't actually a bigger deduction. And on top of that, Senator John Unger and the other eastern panhandle jackasses, want to ram through locality pay for the eastern panhandle employees next regular session? You have GOT to be kidding me.

Sure, teachers, troopers, prison guards, and child case workers got a 1350$ per year raise. And the teachers got some increased longevity pay scale. According to Papa Joe, all this is because he did a full evaluation of all the salaries, and determined that those positions were more underpaid. Or something. And, the teachers got some sort of mythical promise or something, about future raises. Yay. Whoopee. Call out the Brink's trucks. The state employees will have to use them to lug their one extra roll of quarters and one extra roll of dimes home every 2 weeks.

Ok, on to the next topic. And it won't be near as long. Sales tax on food.

Papa Joe wants to roll it on back to 5% so he can say he lowered the food tax, supposedly with the idea that it can gradually be phased out. The republicans, like Slick Vic Sprouse, want to eliminate it. Like yesterday. Because its regressive. Oh, the horror. They are right. It is regressive. It hits the poor, the people the least able to afford food in the first place, the hardest. Please, let's do away with this horrible, horrible, regressive tax. You've heard that non-stop from every republican (and some democrats, who actually are republicans, if the truth were known). Slick Vic, Robin Capehart (more about him below), Charlie "Cokeglasses" Trump, and a plethora of others have done nothing but harp on the sales tax's horrendous regressive nature for the last 2 weeks as the chief reason to kill it.

Fine. Do away with it. Kill it dead. And since it was so regressive, and republicans are obviously against regressive taxes, let's jack the personal income rates up on the highest income earners. That certainly would be the epitome of the anti-regressive tax. You make more, therefore you can afford to pay at an even higher rate than now. So, I'm guessing Slick Vic and company would be first in line to sign on the dotted line for that bill, right?

Unless all their harping about the food tax being regressive was simple demagoguery. Sadly, when any of these bozos are on Hoppy's show (MetroNews Talkline), or Chicago Furlip's show (58Live), neither of hosts are smart enough (or honest enough, or both) to ask them about that, and most of them are too chicken to even go on Jerry Waters' show.

The only thing more disgusting than the republicans' demagoguery on this issue, is the democrats' fear of being voted out of office for showing some spine and standing up to them.

Last item. Back in the spring, I posted about Robin (I refuse to call him "Rob") Capehart and his new job as head of the republican party. I also posted about how he seemed to be on the talk radio circuit when he should have been teaching his classes at Marshall University. Well, he was on the talk show circuit again today, and with classes back in session, I did a little check. It appears all his classes, except one (a 2:30 to 3:45pm M-W class or something like that), are now night classes. He can now pretty much blabber on the airwaves with impunity, and not be accused of snatching a state paycheck while he's out being the chief republican mouthpiece. Good for him. It will now be interesting to see how many Republican meetings and dinners and parties and gatherings he manages to make it to in the evenings, though.

Don Blankenship. Whatta guy!!!

I'm sure we've all heard the now proliferating ads from Blankenship advocating all forms of tax relief. Reduce the sales tax on food. Reduce the gas tax. If he has his way, he's going to give the average West Virginian about an extra 200 bucks per year.

But he doesn't mention, he also wants an additional 500 million bucks for him and his friends, including refunds (and don't forget the interest).

Why do I feel the need to scrub msyelf with Chlorox every time I hear Blankenship talk?

The Anti-9/11.

I haven't blogged for a while, mainly because life has been, well, life. And this won't be WV related. Of course over the last week, like many Americans, I've been glued to the TV trying to get a grip on the Katrina stuff. I've listened to a lot of spin, a lot of shucking and jiving. A lot of conflicting reports on this and that. A lot of begging and pleading about this and that. A lot of statistics about how many bottles of water are being sent by so and so and how many tractor trailer loads of food and diapers have been sent to the ravaged region.

In reality, all of that is really just noise. I'm not going to rant about the pictures coming out of New Orleans, or the other places affected. We can all see them, and anyone with half a brain understands what they mean. There is something deeper going on here, and we haven't even begun to realize it. Kind of like how we haven't even begun to understand the true economic impact Katrina will have on our economy for potentially years to come.

We have to come to grips with the reality, that our government, the one thing we like to hold over everyone else's heads in the world as the epitome of how to run a country, failed miserably in its chief responsibility, and that is its duty to protect its citizens. As humans forming a social contract, we give up some of our basic natural rights in favor of society and government. Our founding fathers recognized these natural rights are not something to be taken lightly. In fact, to the founding fathers, they were the very essence of man.

The term "social contract" isn't just some random word picked to describe this institution. It truly is a contract in the most basic sense of the (legal) word. Both sides have to give consideration. Some of our natural rights are relinquished in exchange of allowing the government to provide certain services we could otherwise provide for ourselves in the absence of a government. And when citizens are voluntarily giving up something as precious as their natural rights, the government better damn well hold up its end of the bargain. The first, and by far, most important service, is the protection of its citizens. If citizens can not be certain of security, the rest of our rights are pretty much irrelevant. Winston Churchill once stated: "The responsibility of government for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is the prime object for which governments come into existence."

David Brooks, one of the chief apologizers for Bush at the NYTimes, came out with an amazing editorial yesterday, and at the risk of simply violating copyright laws, I'll reprint it here (because after a time, you have to pay to read it at the Times, plus you have to register to even read it for free for the first 2 weeks or whatever). Brooks gets the anti-9/11 moniker from Ross Douthat's blog, The American Scene. Brooks goes into the political analysis about conservativsm and neoconservatism and he goes into a bit about how this tragedy will affect the political winds of the country and what effect it will have on those ideologies as they shape the political realities of the post-Katrina US. Douthat goes into even more detail about conservatism, neoconservatism, and even now, paleoconservatism and the Katrina tragedy.

But a simpler version of it without all the political pontificating and postulating, is Hurricane Katrina was the Anti-9/11.

As Ross Douthat oberserved on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.

Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.

Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.

Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.

The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.

Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."

Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.

Today, and for the foreseeable future, while hundreds of thousands are without homes, jobs, money, and essentially, lives, I really don't care who said what to whom on what day (although, I'm keeping mental notes on a few key potential players to watch over the next few months). I don't care what official fumbled what job. There'll be plenty (and I do mean plenty) of time for headhunting, the likes of which this country hasn't seen since god knows when (I've got a feeling the headhunting we saw during Watergate will be child's play compared to this). That will all come in due time. And I'll be right there with my hand happily on the rope of the guillotine's blade. And if the blame should go right on up the chain to Bush himself, that's fine with me. Right now, we have to fix the immediate problems. Food. Water. Shelter. Mecial treatment. Fix levees and pump water out of New Orleans. Cleanup the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Begin tallying up the damage and begin reconstruction.

All of that is going to take enormous amounts of generosity that only the American public can provide, and I have no doubt we'll rise to the challenge. It is in our nature, and I urge everyone to donate whatever they can to one of the reputable charities involved in straightening this whole thing out.

But when that is all well underway, the political establishment (on both sides) better look the hell out.

This horrible disaster may very well have presented us with our last best chance for a while (at least since Ross Perot had the political establishment freaking out in 1992) to really put not the fear of God, but the fear of the People back into our elected officials. Like Brooks said above, we rallied around our elected officials during and immediately after 9/11.

This time, we may demand a few of them for human sacrifices.