It might surprise you to know that I have great sympathy for Bob McDonnell who was just sentenced to two years in prison. Some people are scoffing at the sentence, but I’d like to see them do two years in federal prison. But more than that, I’ve always seen his crime as indicative of our broken political system. Generally, only rich people become governors of large states. So McDonnell and his wife found themselves in this sea of rich people and they felt like they were out of their depth. Bob McDonnell was governor, after all. And I’m sympathetic to that. What he did was wrong and he shouldn’t have done it. But I’m far more concerned about the fact everyone swimming around our governors are rich. That is the problem we should all be concerned about.

Barring people like the gunmen who murdered the people at Charlie Hebdo, I generally feel sorry for people who go away to prison. People who think of it as “easy” or a “vacation” are completely ignorant of the situation. But that doesn’t mean that I will brook the kind of nonsense that Ruth Marcus dished out last night, For Bob McDonnell, Justice Was Served. It’s not that I necessarily agree or disagree with her conclusion. The problem is her logic.

She noted that Bob McDonnell’s “promising career” is now over. Is that not enough of a punishment?! She went back on this later, claiming that, well, if you follow this logic to its natural conclusion that “prison is never justified in cases of public corruption.” And that can’t be the case. But the truth is that McDonnell’s promising career is not over. He may yet have a career in politics. If not, I’m sure he has enough connections to get a good lobbying job. And at the absolute worst, someone will get him a job in upper management at some corporation. He’ll be fine.

What most definitely will not happen to McDonnell is that he will be working as a busboy at Denny’s or forced into a life of crime because no one will hire him. This, of course, is the fate of most people who do two years in federal prison. In fact, this is what happens to most people who get convicted of felonies and don’t have to serve any time at all. The prison time is, in the long-term, the least of the punishment meted out to convicted felons. Bob McDonnell is far luckier than the Ruth Marcuses of the world could ever know.

Marcus wrote something else that almost gave me a stroke:

Let’s leave aside the preposterous idea that “pillars of the community” cannot also be violent criminals. Apparently, she’s never heard of John Wayne Gacy. And let’s leave aside the implicit plea for leniency for the “right kind of people.” What does Ruth Marcus think are the crimes of people in federal prison? As of 29 November 2014, almost 75% of the people in federal prison were there for clearly non-violent crimes. Almost half (48.7%) where there for drug offenses.

But it all goes together. The people in jail for drug crimes are primarily poor. They are by definition not the “right kind of people.” So it doesn’t matter that they are going to be sentenced to at least three years and often far longer. On the state level, it can be much worse. In Kentucky, “For simple possession, first offenders in Kentucky get two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.”

I’m allowed to say, “For Bob McDonnell, justice was served.” But Ruth Marcus is not. I’ve spent the last two decades of my life pushing for an end to drug criminalization. Ruth Marcus occasionally mentions that mandatory minimum sentences are a bad thing — when it occurs to her. But I can’t find her arguing that the “chief rationale for incarceration — incapacitating the dangerous offender to protect society — does not apply” when it comes to drug “criminals.” Because I’m sure she doesn’t believe that. Growing up in the upper class and studying at Yale didn’t exactly prepare her to empathize with “those kind of people.” She shows a little pity occasionally, but never empathy.

Previously, I’ve been concerned about what the Republicans were doing to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It has long been known that they wanted to turn the nonpartisan organization into something akin to the Heritage Foundation — something that would simply parrot back to them whatever they wanted to hear. And mostly what they wanted to hear was that if you cut taxes on the rich, they will act like the Great Pumpkin and reward the economy with loads of jobs. So in December, I wrote, How Republicans Intend to Destroy Congress. That was in reference to the effective firing of the CBO chief Doug Elmendorf.

Now, Jonathan Chait sounds the next alarm, Why the Republican Congress’s First Act Was to Declare War on Math. The Republicans changed the rules of CBO analysis so that “dynamic scoring” must be used in the analysis of budgetary proposals that are larger than one quarter of a percent of the size of the GDP. Chait is correct that the Republicans are just turning the CBO into a partisan organization. Its good reputation for nonpartisan analysis will be destroyed. And who then will Congress and the rest of the country look to for “the straight dope” on matters economic?

But is it really such a big deal? I’ve really been questioning that. Chait is right that the CBO analyses are “necessarily imperfect” but “arrived at fairly.” But he downplays just now imperfect the CBO is. Here’s an example from his own article:

So with dynamic scoring, the CBO would have been even further off. But given that it was off by 27%, does it really matter? Would being off by 35% have been significantly worse? I think what this illustrates is that the CBO already has a conservative bias — a much bigger one than dynamic scoring. So the status quo has been that Democrats have dutifully followed the conservative analyses of the CBO, which has forced them to create worse legislation than they normally would have. I’m thinking specifically of the stimulus. If the Democrats had changed the way the CBO operated, we would have gotten a bill with more infrastructure spending and less tax cutting. But because of the way the “objective” CBO scores things, tax cuts for the rich and highway building improve the economy equally. And that’s dead wrong.

The problem with the very notion of anything “nonpartisan” is that people think it means that it is objective. But clearly that is never the case. The CBO is biased in ways that I think are demonstrably wrong. This change by the Republican Congress will make the work of the CBO even worse. But at least everyone will recognize that. People won’t talk about the CBO as though it were some hallowed organization. And it means when the Democrats have control of the CBO, they can change it to something that does a better job of analyzing than it did in the “good old days” when it simply assumed (against all evidence) that infrastructure spending didn’t stimulate growth.

Meet Kirby Delauter. He’s a Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County, Maryland. It’s a decent sized place with a population density slightly larger than my own home of Sonoma County, California. I mention this because I don’t want you to get the idea that Delauter is representing some tiny county with a thousand people. His position is one with a fair amount of power. And he could certainly go onto state government directly from this post. Or at least he could if he were smarter than he seems to be.

Meet Bethany Rodgers. She’s a reporter for The Frederick News-Post. She had apparently written an article about Delauter last year that he didn’t like. So, according to a recent post on his Facebook page, “I had let her know after her hit piece during the election where she embellished, twisted and downright lied about what we discussed for that article, that she was never to contact me again since she has absolutely no morals or journalistic ability.” I assumed he also un-friended her and refused to eat lunch at the same table as Rodgers and the other mean girls.

Things got very bad last Saturday when Rodgers wrote, Shreve Raises Staffing, Parking Concerns. The article is about parking for the new council members. It has two references to Delauter in an 1,100 word article. Other than the fact Shreve and Delauter come off as self-important, there isn’t much to complain about. After all, it’s about how various people in the local government will share parking!

But Delauter was hopping mad. On his Facebook post he continued (suddenly addressing Rodgers directly):

If only Nixon had come up with this idea, he could have shut down all those Watergate articles. It’s brilliant! “I’m a councilman, but you can’t mention my name anymore!” I have to wonder if it would be okay to describe him, “The silly and petulant Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County”? Rodgers doubtless loves this. She replied:

Not to be outdone, Delauter threatened legal action, “Use my name again unauthorized and you’ll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start.” The managing editor of the newspaper, Terry Headlee, said, “[T]o threaten to sue a reporter for publishing his name is so ridiculously stupid that I’m speechless.” But apparently, she didn’t remain speechless.

Yesterday, The Frederick News-Post editorial board published, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter. Mostly, it is just an exercise in not using a pronoun when talking about the councilman:

You should read the whole thing. It includes a discussion of how they might refer to this nitwit. My favorite was, “The Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter.” There is also quite a bit of serious discussion about the issue. A good picture of Kirby Delauter — and the American conservative movement generally — comes through in this whole episode.

Update (8 January 2015 10:22 am)

From The Frederick News-Post, Delauter: Statement to The News-Post Threatening Legal Action Was “Wrong and Inappropriate”:

Mr Delauter, that was a fine apology. I’m impressed.