John Hood

Just in case your Monday isn't off to a good start, I found some happy talk this morning from Stagemanager John Hood over at the Art Pope Puppetshow. What's the subject of Mr. Hood's latest column? Why it's health care! Now that's something we can all laugh about!

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play on TV. But my teenage nickname was “Doc,” one of my online-superhero alter egos is name after another famous “Doc,” and I have just successfully bandaged my son’s foot. So I’m taking the liberty today of prescribing a course of treatment for those suffering from Health Issues Confusion Courting Unwise Policy Syndrome (HICCUPS).

When the Stagemanager at the John Locke Foundation isn't running his "multi-million-dollar opinion-manufacturing machine," he sometimes dabbles on other stages like this one where he tries to make the case that neocon pundits don't pay any attention to their patrons.

These pundits, he argues, are intellectually honest and would NEVER be bought or paid for by big donors.

At issue is a New York Times article that took rightwing opinionators to task for failing to disclose financial relationships with big-time contributors like WalMart. Hood's piece doesn't make much sense on its face, but on second reading, it's clear as a bell.

You know it's a sad day in Puppetland when John Hood has nothing better to do than whine about the mean old News and Observer and the bullies at BlueNC. But whining he is, and it's one of the funniest things I've read in a long, long time.

Let's take it apart.

RALEIGH – I’d like to be able to claim credit for a colossal, unprecedented feat of public-relations hocus pocus. That would be quite a rush. Unfortunately, the facts would not bear out such a claim.

Not that facts are an impediment to some. Which brings me to Jim Protzman and his allegation that the Raleigh News & Observer has become a mouthpiece for conservatism in general and the John Locke Foundation in particular. Protzman, a former member of the Chapel Hill Town Council and strategic director for the Raleigh public-relations firm CapStrat, is the main founder of a blog site, BlueNC, for progressive Democrats. While the site itself is worth an occasional glance, for those wanting a sense of what some North Carolina Democratic activists are thinking about and working on, Protzman’s contributions (under the nom de plume “Anglico”) border on self-parody.

Anglico linked to this strange article by everyone's favorite arch-conservative John Hood that decries public transportation because it is not proven to lower obesity levels. (WTF: I guess he just needed some strawman today) But I only had to read his openning sentence to see his true uncaring character:

Because we have taxpayer-financed programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, obesity is a major public-policy issue.

You see John Hood, and others on the extreme far right with him, only thinks that the health of citizens is important when it somehow affects their personal pocketbook. To me working for the common good, including good health, is a fundamental public policy position that should be pursued regardless of whether I personally see a benefit from it or not.

Imagine that: John Hood, Stagemanager at the John Locke Puppetshow, writes a whole column today about the Starling-LaRoque debacle in NC House District 10 - and not once mentions his boss's role in influencing the outcome of the election. Nary a peep.

I didn’t hear the attorneys for LaRoque and Starling make the case before the elections board, so perhaps I have missed a critical argument or piece of information that would change my mind. But at first glance it appears that a do-over is the right choice. To allow Starling to claim victory by a margin of only seven votes, with more than that many voters complaining about how elections officials ran the balloting, would not have been in the public interest.

In his column today, John Hood of the John Locke Foundation is calling for term limits, and I'm inclined to support the idea.

The first argument to dismiss, right off the bat, is the silly suggestion that term limits are a violation of popular sovereignty because they deprive voters of the representation of their choice. Popular sovereignty, democracy, republicanism – whatever your preferred term for the principle of representative government, it is difficult to argue that term limits are antithetical to it because the vast majority of voters, of every persuasion, support term limits. It is rational and consistent to vote for your incumbent within the current electoral structure and support term limits to ensure rotation in office, including your incumbent and all the rest.

When I think about the many threats to the quality of our democracy, the growing influence of corporations in public policy always tops my list. Up until last fall, I naively assumed that influence was mostly contaminating national politics. But as my focus shifted to North Carolina and BlueNC, I have been stunned by the role corporate money plays in how our state government operates. On one hand, you have the Puppetmaster, illegally buying and selling elections with corporate money. And on the other hand, you have Chuck Taylor, running campaign commercials fully funded by the US Chamber of Commerce. And in between, you have a swirl of corporate contributions to politicians that is absolutely mind-boggling.

How did this happen? How did we allow our democracy to be hijacked by corporate interests? And what can we do about it?

If you track the rhetoric of government haters at the John Locke Foundation, you know that one of the things they hate most is planning. Just ask their "expert" from Houses R Us, an objective group of homebuilders who think nothing should stand in the way of them throwing up more houses wherever they want. These folks are fundamentally opposed to smart growth because it costs more than stupid growth. Imagine that! Well, hold on to your hat, because stupid-growth advocates are also hot and bothered about transporation planning. Consider John Hood's silly column today.

Foolish or dishonest advocates of transit argue that there is a huge pent-up demand for bus or rail just waiting to be tapped if only those skinflint conservatives would get out of the way. More sensible advocates realize that building transit must be only part of a far-larger agenda of transforming the way most of us live, work, shop, and recreate.

What Hood doesn't understand - on purpose I assume - is that no "responsible advocate" has a far-larger agenda of transforming jack shit. "Responsible advocates" understand that the path we're on is leading over a cliff. From global warming to dependence of foreign oil to the massive loss of productivity resulting from poor transportation systems, the costs of our current development model are unsustainable. And we can't wait until the the problem is acutely destructive before we act.

In Governing Magazine. Alan Ehrenhalt slices and dices America’s inexorable drift toward right wing extremism dispassionately and completely.

RIVALS ON THE RIGHT

What we're seeing is moderate Republicans being picked off by organized conservative opposition.

Halfway through the 2006 primary season, it's pretty clear that something unusual is happening: Lots of state legislators are losing their bids for renomination -17 of them in the "Pennsylvania massacre" in May, for example, and 11 more on June 6. The total for the year so far is over 40. With two dozen primaries still to come, it's possible the ranks of the rejected could grow to nearly 100 before the general election takes place.

One annoying thing about the fright wing pundits is that once in a great while they make good points. Which means we have to sift through all their predictable rhetoric to find those few things worth considering. John Hood of the John Locke Foundation today recaps the conservative agenda for the 2006 NC Legislature. Let’s talk about it.

Focus taxpayer dollars on core governmental functions, eliminating whole functions and categories of spending (such as corporate welfare) that lie outside the proper scope of constitutional government. Reorganize state government to reduce the number of major administrative departments to 13, down from the current 26.

I guess when your name is John Hood and your job is to hate government on behalf of Puppetmaster Pope, you shouldn't be surprised to find pure idiocy spilling from your keyboard. But it's still ironic that Hood has this to say in an era where local governments are squeezed under the thumb of anti-tax free-marketeers.

The Charlotte Observer reports that community organizations in Mecklenburg County are seeking to attract public dollars to park improvements by offering to put up some private money as part of the deal. One group wants a lighted soccer field. Another desires a lacrosse complex. A third seeks to make playing-field improvements for its Little League programs. While it’s good to see private money mingled in with the taxpayer dollars, it’s not good to see county officials spending time and resources on these programs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, like many other fast-growing urban districts, faces major challenges in accommodating traffic growth and surging school enrollment. Schools and roads surely top the list of priorities (along with, in the Queen City, crime-fighting). Scarce taxpayer dollars need to be expended first on these priorities, and only after sufficiency directed (if ever) to recreation.

  

John Hood is back from vacation, but the rest didn't do much good. Today he's decided that the world of public education can't survive with his brilliant insights. At least in this particular case, he acknowledges that his opinions are uninformed and biased.

RALEIGH – Just about everyone has an opinion about how to improve education, and it’s usually an opinion passionately held and forcefully argued. Schools are the single-largest expenditure of state taxpayers’ funds. Educational mediocrity is the common denominator of many other social maladies. Most folks have spouses, siblings, parents, or other family members in the teaching profession. And everyone has been a student.

John Hood of the Carolina Journal has been away for a few days, and from the smarmy quality of today's column, he's probably been out groveling at the knee of Art "the Puppetmaster" Pope. Why else would he devote 600 words to the issue of fair and honest elections, without once mentioning how the Puppetmaster is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the North Carolina Legislature? It's Dishonest John at his best and worst - misdirecting and double-talking all the way home. First off, of course, Hood hits us with a red herring about the issue of public financing for elections . . .

For one thing, voters and taxpayers are not synonymous. Many taxpayers don’t vote. Some voters have essentially no net tax liability, when you compare what they pay to what they receive in government transfer payments. Unless the proposal is to charge people for the privilege of voting, and use the proceeds to finance campaigns, it is improperly named (and, of course, such a policy would be unconstitutional and absurd).

I’ve been laying off John Hood, stage manager at the John Lock Foundation Puppetshow, for the past few weeks because he hasn’t had anything interesting or relevant to say. But today he’s back to his usual form, this time flacking a CATO Institute Report on the wisdom of Health Savings Accounts. As you would expect from a free-market Libertarian think thank, this particular report has all the earmarks of a Puppetshow “report:” foregone conclusions based on ideological bias, sketchy data, weasel words and false choices.

I don't often agree with what John Hood has to say in his role as Stage Manager of the Art Pope Puppetshow, but I have to hand it to him today. He's written a good piece on the deplorable state of North Carolina education.

RALEIGH – It’s happened again. I wrote a piece just last week about our state’s shameful record of setting low academic standards that mislead rather than lead. Now, according to a new study commissioned for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, North Carolina ranks in the bottom tier of states nationally in its expectations for student mastery of world history.