Delaware's war on poverty is a war on poor people!?

With today's WNJ story about the fact that Delaware flunks any reasonable standard of effective Public Defenders for our poorer citizens, we come full circle to discover the Democrats' and Republicans' plan for eliminating poverty in Delaware . . .

. . . which is to convict and incarcerate poor people.

Remember 2001, when Delaware was criticized by the ACLU for cutting the budget of the Delaware Parole Board?  More than likely you don't, because I can't find evidence that any news organization in the State picked up the story.

Remember "bail reform" last year?  It's really important to note exactly who the State bragged about as the support for this bill:

Reform efforts led by Attorney General, Rep. Keeley, Senator Henry [and] . . . the Wilmington Mayor’s Office, the Wilmington City Council, Wilmington PD, the Fraternal Order of Police and the Delaware Police Chiefs Council.

I'm sure you saw this hailed as a major "anti-violent crime" measure, but probably did not see the Delaware Center for Justice's report regarding our State's horrible record when it comes to pre-trial confinement, which is--unsurprisingly--heavily weighted toward the poor:

Pretrial detainees comprise nearly 25% of the inmates at the Howard Young Correctional Institution (also known as Gander Hill) and 40% of the inmates at the Baylor’s Women’s Correctional Institution. 

Let's not forget which groups oppose death penalty repeal in Delaware:  the Delaware Attorney General and the Delaware Police Chiefs Council.

This is followed, this year, by the adoption of a new "lax standard" by Delaware Courts regarding the use of social media as evidence in both criminal and civil trials because prosecutors whined that

This is a difficult standard because it requires much more time, effort and money ...

In all of these cases, ironically, we find that the Delaware General Assembly and the Governor have simply brushed aside the objections and reservations of the Delaware Public Defenders' Office, the Delaware ACLU, the Delaware Center for Justice, and the Delaware Death Penalty Repeal Project.

Sensing a pattern yet?

Today we discover that not only is the Public Defender's office lacking independence and unable to mount successful defenses for poor and indigent defendants, but that the Delaware Attorney General's Office routinely takes advantage of this weakness to gain convictions and incarcerations: 

The report found that though defendants are advised of their right to an attorney at their initial appearance, they often do not get to talk to an attorney unless they are incarcerated before trial.

As a result, many misdemeanor criminal defendants often appear at court proceedings without an attorney.

"There they face subtle, and often overt, pressure to discuss potential plea arrangements with the prosecution or to waive due process rights," wrote the report's authors.

The report also cited a similar failure to have adequate representation for children in delinquency proceedings in Family Court, leaving children and their parents to fare for themselves early in the process. 

What do all of these measures and deficiencies have in common (and keep this in mind as the shooting and death toll in Wilmington proves the basic inability of our law enforcement agencies to deal with violent crime)?

These are measures that are implicitly designed to increase the conviction, incarceration, and (inevitably) execution rates of Delaware's poorest citizens at the behest of the "law and order" lobby controlling not just the state government but most of the news coverage.

Individually you might be drawn into believing that the State is simply trying to keep order, but viewed collectively (along with burgeoning budgets for law enforcement and increasing surveillance of EVERYONE) you discover a pattern:

Delaware's strategy for eliminating poverty appears to hinge on eliminating them from our streets and housing them in Gander Hill.

Time to rethink this, except, uh, gee, how's that going to happen if you keep electing the same people?

Delaware Supremes set prosecutor-friendly "lax standard" for social media evidence

It is typical both of the Delaware Supreme Court and WNJ reporting to laud the new judicial rules that allow prosecutors to use social media entries against defendants without having to prove that the defendants actually wrote them.

It is equally typical that the arguments by the Delaware Public Defender's Officer are buried deep inside the story and given almost no weight: 

Attorneys with the Delaware Public Defender's Office pointed to a standard used in Maryland where one side has to convince a judge "that the social media post was not falsified or created by another user" before it can be used at trial.

In this case, they argued, the prosecution should have been required to provide proof either from Facebook itself or from evidence from a computer hard drive associated with Parker to connect Parker to the posts.

Delaware Public Defender Brendan O'Neill said it is all about proving if someone made a statement. "That is where the fight is," he said, adding that "in our practice we would prefer a strict standard."

DiBianca said this is a difficult standard because it requires much more time, effort and money and sets a higher standard for the admissibility of social media evidence compared to other similar types of evidence – like handwritten letters. She added it is also particularly difficult in civil cases where attorneys are not as likely to get information from a social network operator as a criminal prosecutor.

Remember the good old days, when the point of the American criminal justice system was to protect the rights of the innocent, even at the expense of the prosecutor's "time, effort, and money"?

Apparently, if the Delaware Supreme Court rules stand, that's a thing of the past.

And how could those rules NOT stand?  Simple--if the General Assembly found the courage to enact the Maryland standard into law.

Oh, wait.  That would require . . . .

Never mind.

Delaware public education: you are getting what you voted for

There is an old saying, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

This is pretty similar to what various Delaware educrats and (unfortunately) union leaders are saying about the new Smarter Balanced Assessment and Common Core Standards.

To wit:

"The reality is that our 15-year-olds are below average on mathematics, and they're average in reading," Michael Watson, the state's chief academic officer, told a gathering of school leaders last week. "These higher standards mean our students will be more competitive, and it means they will be more ready for college and careers."

This is in fact such an idiotic argument that in an culture run by common sense (as opposed to Common Core), Mr. Watson would have been required to quit his position in abject shame.

Think about this:  "Higher standards mean our students will be more competitive."

What they don't want you to look behind the curtain and see is that this is the old "standards drive instruction" mantra that has failed miserably since the 1990s to improve American public education, especially for students from poorer areas of the country.

This is the bizarre idea that writing harder tests will result in teachers teaching "better," and that those who can't move their students toward "better" will be removed and replaced with others who can.

Forget for a moment that the Common Core standards have absolutely nothing exceptionally meritorious about them to distinguish them from any of the other standards that have come into existence since the early 1990s, and will themselves be replaced in about five years when this current reform fad doesn't pan out.

Forget for a moment that the "getting better teachers" meme is a ridiculous delusion.  Like desegregation in Delaware, the high-stakes testing movement is forcing a whole generation of experienced teachers out of public education, and the people who are replacing them are less well-qualified and unlikely to stay in the field.

Forget for a moment that the Delaware State Education Association at the state level has completely lost all moral authority to even pretend to be representing the interests of public school teachers, which is pretty much to be expected when your state president is a full-time employee of the Delaware Department of Education.

Here's what you need to remember:  our legislators have a twenty-year history (that's 20 YEARS) of simply signing the checks for the ponzi scheme that has been high-stakes testing in Delaware.  They allocated millions to designing "world-class" standards between 1992-1995; TENS of millions to design, field-test, and administer the DSTP for about 12 years; additional TENS of millions to replace the DSTP with DCAS just 5 years ago; and now the Governor (who is, after all, functionally the Secretary of Education) wants to dump DCAS and spend TENS of millions more on Smarter Balanced Assessment.  Because doing this the first two times worked so well . . .

Here's what you need to remember:  by my best rough count going back to look through Delaware budgets during that time, taxpayers (many of whom are parents) have been asked to cough up as much as ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS just to pay for state testing during the last decade.  That's direct expenditure, and doesn't count the salaries of teachers giving the tests, or the cost of lost instructional time.

And it has all been--just ask Governor Markell or any of the flaks from DOE--a failure to this point.

A failure, by the way, that has to be blamed NOT on the people who came up with one ill-conceived reform after another and conned the willing patsies in the General Assembly to vote for it, but a failure that has to be blamed on Delaware teachers who have been asked to shoot at a moving target for two decades without any demonstrable increase in resources in their classrooms.

Can you imagine how that money could have transformed Delaware education had it been placed directly under the control of schools and teachers.

Yeah, Jack, you're right.  They'd probably have bought cakes and cookies and just put the kids on a sugar high as an excuse not to teach them.  And the DSEA President wouldn't have a cushy job in Dover from which she could pretend to be looking out for those same teachers while assuring everyone in Washington and Dover that they won't get any serious pushback from the teachers as they funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaign contributions for rubber-stamp politicians.

Reality check:  Tens of millions of tax dollars have been allocated and spent over the past decade not to teach children but to test them.

Because testing.

Time for some change.  Oh, wait, Democrats--as they have for years--control the State government, and Republicans vote with them on education about 90% of the time.

Never mind.  Walt Kelly (revised):  "We have met the enemy and he is who we keep voting for."

Senator Carper takes a stand, and Delaware Democrats need to do the same

A lot of people have asked me why, if I intended to be a serious candidate for the Delaware General Assembly, I didn't bite the bullet and run as a Democrat.

Here's a major reason why I can't do that:

Senator Thomas Carper (D-Fortune 500) has taken a firm stand as one of only three US Senators voting against the restoration of Cost of Living Allowances for retired military veterans.

Senator Carper is, of course, a former Naval aviator, who receives $1,400/month in retirement pay.

He says,

“We‘re making some progress on def­icit reduction in this country, but our def­icit is still a half-trillion dollars this year, and that's huge," he said.  "If we are serious about making progress, all of us who are able to do something to help out need to do that.  I think Americans are willing to do their part if asked, and I think they look to people like me to try to provide some leadership and set an example."

No, Senator Carper, we're not looking to you for any sort of leadership any more, unless we happen to work in the executive offices of a bank or a Fortune 500 company.

Despite being able to find a trio of retired general officers to call the military pension system "over-generous"--the reality is that military retirement is one of the fundamental agreements that the United States government makes on behalf of its citizenry with the people who bear arms in our defense.

Perhaps "people like me [Senator Carper]"--former officers who have led privileged careers as well-paid politicians with cadillac State and Federal benefits--cannot understand the future facing the men and women who volunteer for military service in this country today.

They face multiple overseas deployments into active combat, with all the included stresses of rampant sexual assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, military suicides, divorce, depression, family stresses, life-altering wounds, and the ever-present possibility of a nasty death alone in a ditch somewhere in a foreign land.  When they get home, they find that the part of the deal that included things like Veterans benefits in education or medical care is far too often not what they were promised.  They have difficulty finding jobs, finding counseling, finishing their education, or breaking out of the nightmares and drug habits acquired in service.

For far too many retirees (especially enlisted), that military pension is the difference between making it (just barely) and not making it at all.  You may not know, Senator Carper, about all the military retirees who are also on the SNAP benefits you voted to cut, or who rely on the stateside commissaries (that the Pentagon is contemplating closing) to feed their families.

Senator Carper has portrayed this as a vote of principle and leadership.

Principle and leadership would be demanding that our imperialistic military structure, bloated Pentagon budget, and militarized foreign policy be rethought.

So here's the deal:  as long as Delaware Democrats continue to support a man who thinks that military retirement benefits are overly generous, who won't challenge the defense contractors and financial institutions that fund his campaigns, and who believes that "people like me" (which means other Democrats, apparently) support cutting benefits for the junior officers and enlisted people who put their lives and body parts on the line . . . .

. . . you won't find me calling myself a Democrat.

Tell me, somewhere, that there's an elected Democrat in Delaware willing to challenge this man's callous grandstanding . . .

Democrat and Republican parties owe Delaware over $288,000 for 2012 alone

Every two years the citizens of Delaware take part in taxpayer-funded elections, choosing between the ballot-qualified candidates of two "major" and three "alternate" or "minor" parties.

In many cases there clashes within the Democratic and Republican parties--primaries--to determine who will be the candidate in the General Election.  These are purely partisan contests that benefit only the parties themselves, and yet taxpayers--including non-affiliated and alternate party voters who comprise about 35% of the electorate--pay for them.

Moreover, these primary elections are expensive.  A recent Pew study concluded in March 2013 that, across the nation, Democratic and Republican primaries cost American taxpayers over $400 million.  The "per voter" cost of such elections varies wildly, from $1,57/voter in Tennessee and Texas to over $11/voter in New York.  A reasonable average cost (since I cannot find specifics on Delaware costs) would be about $3.93/voter.

Given that statistic, we can determine that at least 73,400 people voted in the Delaware 2012 primaries for Statewide and local offices (probably the number was at least 25% higher, but I can't break it down in individual races without spending about six hours in calculations).

At $3.93/voter, that means our primaries costs the Delaware Department of Elections over $288,000 in 2012.

This is not inconsequential, as the entire budget for the Department of Elections is just a hair over $4 million annually, meaning that our partisan primaries account for about 7% of that budget.

You have to ask yourself:  we can't, apparently, afford door locks for schools, or infrastructure spending, or to clean up our polluted waterways . . . but we can afford--year in and year out--to subsidize partisan primaries for Democrats and Republicans!?

Ironically, we already have a mechanism in place that could easily pay for said primaries.

The Democratic and Republican parties are allowed to set filing fees (up to 1% of the total compensation for the office under consideration) for all candidates.  Of course, while the Delaware Department of Elections collects these fees, it sees none of the money--the checks are even required by statute to be made out to the parties themselves.

How much are these fees?  How about $10,440 for US Senator, $4,124 for Insurance Commissioner, $1,744 for State Senator, $872 for State Representative.

By my (very rough) count, the filing fees paid by the 100 candidates who ran in primaries in 2012 would have covered the cost of the primaries about twice over . . . had the money stayed in the Department of Elections.

So it's real simple:  let's just change Title 15 Section 3103 of the Delaware Code to mandate that checks for filing fees shall be made out to the Delaware Department of Elections, and that the Department of Elections will remit the balance to each party organization after deducting the actual costs of conducting the primary elections.

Simple?  Saves the State an easy quarter million without raising anybody's taxes.  Requires about two lines to be changed in the Delaware Code.

Except, uh, there are only Democrats and Republicans in the Delaware General Assembly, and if you expect any of them to even talk about this, much less introduce and enact legislation (which would have to be gotten past a gubernatorial veto) you're delusional.

Unless, of course, there happened to be a Libertarian sitting in the General Assembly to at least bring up uncomfortable questions like this.  Hint, hint.

Look to the far right and contribute today.

It's official: the News Journal thinks you're stupid

In today's editorial about Governor Jack Markell's "realistic" plan to fix Delaware's infrastructure via $250 million in new taxes (highlighted by 10 cents per gallon gas tax increase) and $250 million in borrowing, the WNJ editorial board finds four reasons that such a plan is probably going nowhere.

And, guess what?

All four reasons boil down to the idea that YOU--the voter--are too stupid to support a plan that's good for you.

Lest you think I'm making this up, let's look:

Guess what? That realistic plan appears to be going nowhere. 

There are four reasons the proposal is in trouble: 

First, this is an election year and members of the Legislature are afraid of raising taxes in an election year.

Translation:  Delaware legislators believe that Delaware voters are too stupid to ever vote for them again after they voted for a tax increase, no matter how necessary.

Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the facts.  It would be difficult to find a Democratic lawmaker whose seat would be seriously jeopardized by voting for this tax, because it would be difficult to find too many Democratic lawmakers facing credible challenges from Republicans anywhere.  Moreover, the track record of Delaware voters punishing politicians for their transgressions--real or perceived--is damn near non-existent.  Delaware state employee unions continued to support the Democrats even after a pay cut and the repeated year-by-year refusal of Democratic politicians to vote them pay raises.

So the idea that Delaware voters--especially Democratic voters--are going to punish their politicians for a gas tax hike is so much pandering on the News Journal's part to the whining of the politicians.

How about this one?

Second, much of the public believes roads come with no cost. They don’t care about future projections of need. They want the service without the cost.

Aside from the fact that this is an assertion without evidence (you get to do that on an editorial page), it amounts to an assertion that the people of Delaware are TOO STUPID to believe that roads and bridges cost money, and that they--not a state government that has squandered an mismanaged their tax money for years--are responsible for the present state of our infrastructure.

After all, it was apparently (just ask the News Journal) the voters and not the politicians who "invested" in Fisker and Bloom; who routinely throw away tens of millions in corporate welfare; who fund pet projects at the expense of the general good . . . .

In fact, I routinely hear motorists (with their windows open and seat belts off) shouting into their cell phones as they drive through the toll booth:  "Thank God I live in Delaware where the roads are free!"

Or this one:

Third, the public is suspicious of government in general and the Department of Transportation in particular. Not too many months ago Delawareans were fed up with election campaign “play-for-pay” schemes that involved special favors through DelDOT. They also remember the enormous and costly screw-ups with the Indian River Bridge. And, going back further, they remember the cozy deals some landlords cooked up with DelDOT to buy excess land. Current DelDOT officials deserve credit for working hard to clean up the problems and to reduce the department’s enormous debt.

In other words, we are all stupid because we don't think a decade's worth of corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence in DelDOT has disappeared overnight?

As to why we're suspicious of government in general, let's not forget the Veasey report, the Treasurer's office, secret AG opinions, government trying to "out" bloggers/social media writers via subpoena, a shredded Coastal Zone Act, Fisker, Bloom, the charter school slush fund . . .

I could go on, but it seems to me that if we are suspicious of government in Delaware it's not because we're stupid, but because the government in Delaware is corrupt, inept, and totally consumed with "Delaware Way" party politics instead of looking out for the interests of our citizens.

To the extent that we keep voting these people in--guilty as charged.

And the final WNJ argument that we're stupid?

Finally, the governor’s plan is weak because he actually did what politicians are supposed to do, but rarely do. He told the truth. He put a price tag on the proposal. 

It is at that point the public debate should begin. Do we really need these repairs? Does the governor have the projects in the right order? Should he have included all of them? Are some weaker than others? Is borrowing $250 million the right thing to do? Can we afford the tax? Are there alternatives? Is the governor right? Or is he wrong?

Uh, hello?  Some of us out there have been trying to do exactly that--have a debate over the merits of the policy, over the priorities, and over the funding mechanisms.

But not the News Journal.

The News Journal has only been interested in sound-byte coverage of politicians weighing in on the gasoline tax.  The News Journal has not run an article on the relative merits of the proposed infrastructure projects, has not consulted experts about their execution, has not stimulated a dialogue about possible funding strategies.

That's because the News Journal editorial staff apparently thinks you are too stupid to deal with all that.

Cue Jack Nicholson:  "You can't handle the truth!"

That's what the News Journal--and most Delaware politicians--think of you.

Time to address the marijuana issue in Delaware

Colorado got it.

Washington State got it.

Missouri is getting it.

Eugene Robinson (with whom I normally agree about once a year) gets it.

Early estimates suggested that Colorado would raise $67 million in new tax dollars per year on Marijuana sales; people seem to be revising that estimate upward due to strong early sales.

If Delaware taxed legal weed at the same rate as Colorado, we'd be raising at least an addition $13 million per year, not even counting the savings from reduced incarceration and treating real drug addiction as a medical rather than criminal problem.

People currently serving in the General Assembly know this.

So why isn't there a bill or series of bills to first decriminalize marijuana, then legalize it on the Colorado model, and finally to pardon/expunge records for those convicted of only non-violent drug offenses?

Send me there.  I'll introduce it, and I'll keep fighting until the job gets done.