The Strickland Administration Orchestrates the Departure of the Plumbergate Three

Helen Jones-Kelley quit the Strickland Administration yesterday over the “Joe the Plumber” scandal. She still did not apologize or admit that she did anything remotely wrong.

She will be joined in unemployment by two of her lieutenants who participated in the snooping.

According to the Associated Press, Jones-Kelley issued a statement, but did not respond to interview requests.

"This decision comes after a time of pause, in which I realize that I continue to be used as a political postscript, providing a distraction from urgent state priorities," she said in her statement.

That’s a remarkable sentence. It explains why it took her so long to respond (she took a “time of pause.”) It paints her as a victim, not Joe the Plumber. (She’s being “used.”) This issue is not one of citizen’s privacy and her abuse of power – it’s merely a “political postscript.” (That is, her favored candidate, President-elect Obama triumphed, so get over it, already.) And, her foremost concern is “urgent state priorities.”

Does anyone think that highly crafted statement was produced by Jones-Kelley, whose native language is bureaucratese?

The two lieutenants involved in the scandal are also leaving. Fred Williams will resign effective Jan 31, and Doug Thompson’s position is being “revoked” according to an agency spokesperson.

The departures were all announced on the same day. Make no mistake: these were resignations only in the sense that Marie Antoinette committed suicide. It would have been nice if the Governor could have engineered an apology as part of the package from at least one of them. But he soon will have another chance to go on the record and side with the people of his state instead of his political cronies.

Substitute House Bill 648, which makes unauthorized access of government databases a first-degree misdemeanor, was approved by the Senate yesterday and goes to the House for concurrence. Gov. Strickland should sign the bill.

Doesn't Anybody at the Governor's Office Own a Calculator? Stupid Government Tricks, Part 3

Gov. Ted Strickland last week announced that tuition could rise $2,000 per student if he’s forced to balance the state budget by spending cuts. He may need to take a little closer look at how he’s spending money for higher education, and what his Board of Regents is telling him.

Gov. Strickland asked the agencies to assume they needed to make a 25% cut. According to its web site, the Ohio Board of Regents – think of it as “the Department of Colleges” – has a budget of $1.96 billion for 2008. A 25% cut would be about $500 million.

The Board of Regents told Gov. Strickland their 25% cut would result in a college tuition hike of $2,000 per student. He repeated it publicly.

Now, Ohio has about 478,000 students, who are hopefully paying more attention than I did in undergrad. At $2 grand a pop – that’s almost a billion dollars. Set that off against the budget cut and… the Board of Regents makes a half billion dollar profit.

Doesn’t anybody in the Governor’s office own a calculator?

But that’s the trouble with asking bureaucrats how to cut the budget. They can’t. State bureaucrats are not motivated by what’s best for the public – they are motivated by what’s best for the way their agency serves the public. Put another way, they are self-interested – their mission is the most important of all government missions.

Instead of letting the directors decide where those cuts happen, Gov. Strickland and his staff need to find out exactly what goes on in the vast state government, and set its priorities. What does government do, and why and how does it do it? They decide, not the bureaucrats.

It’s hard work to do it that way. It might require leaving the 30th floor of the Riffe Tower -- but some things can't be delegated. It's not smart to ask the foxes to design the henhouse security.

Recommended reading: Bureacracy, by James Q. Wilson

Tipping the Scales of Justice: The difference between a Strickland appointee and an FBI agent

Former FBI Agent Mark Rossini pleaded guilty Monday for doing what Helen Jones-Kelley did – using a government database for a private purpose. Not only did Rossini lose his job, he faces five years in prison.

Jones-Kelley received a 30-day suspension, and will return to her $140,000-a-year job directing Gov. Ted Strickland’s largest agency later this month. Jones-Kelley was disciplined for ordering her subordinates to snoop in government databases for damning information on “Joe the Plumber,” who had caused her favored presidential candidate embarrassment.

Rossini, a sworn law enforcement officer, arguably has a greater duty of fidelity than a mere political appointee. Rossini clearly has a greater sense of honor: He admitted his wrongdoing, and resigned his position of trust -- although, it must be said, the FBI has absolutely no sense of humor about these things.

Jones-Kelley, a "maxed out" contributor to the President-elect, has yet to even apologize for her conduct. Her most recent statement tried to make the case that her conduct was righteous -- she claimed that she snooped on Joe the Plumber as part of a routine inquiry for people who were suddenly thrust into the spotlight. She offered scant evidence to support the routine nature of her act, and the Inspector General found neither her claim nor her act justified.

In the law, this is called a lack of remorse, and it is a factor judges are to take into account to support a harsher sentence. Even after the public rebuke of the Inspector General -- and the mild disappointment expressed by the Governor -- Jones-Kelley has yet to so much as offer the shallow mea culpa of the wrongdoer who got caught.

When she returns to work, the media should demand an answer to the question: Do you feel you did anything wrong?

And, they could ask Gov. Strickland why she deserves much better treatment than a career FBI agent.

A lifetime of preparation to save the auto industry: Sen. Chris Dodd for Car Czar

Sen. Chris Dodd. D-Conn., Sunday demanded the head of General Motors CEO Rick Waggoner as a condition for giving GM wagonloads of tax money. That Sen. Dodd felt free to make the demand, and that it failed to provoke outrage, is a sign of how badly the framework of our nation has been bent.

Sen. Dodd was elected to Congress in 1974, at the age of 30, and has been there ever since. Prior to his life in politics, Dodd served a term in the Peace Corps, served in the National Guard, and practiced law for two years. There seems to be no connection whatsoever between the auto industry and the three occupations of his youth.

It must be his lifetime in Congress that qualifies him to make firing decisions for a private sector corporation.

Except, of course, GM is no longer really a private sector corporation. It is about to be nationalized -- the taxpayers are being forced by law to purchase an “equity stake” in the Detroit Three that we declined to purchase freely in the stock market.

Sen. Dodd’s demand for Waggoner’s head is an inevitable consequence of the government invasion of the market. It is a short and slippery slope to the point that politicians demand patronage spots at GM, or require that a certain percentage of its fleet be made up of “affordable” vehicles for low-income people.

Won’t happen? Look at what happened on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Among the other ideas careening about Washington is the appointment of a “car czar” who will force the auto makers to restructure and cut costs. It is unclear where this wise, all-knowing bureaucrat will come from, or why he or she will know more than all the people who have spent their lives competing in the industry. Nor is it clear why the automakers will bow to this person’s authority when they have been unwilling to bow to the crush of the marketplace.

Here’s an idea: Chris Dodd for Car Czar. After 36 years in Congress, he’s eminently qualified – to know how to get more money out of Washington, which will become necessary by March or April of next year.

Sen. Dodd is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Surely he will do for the auto industry what his committee's oversight did for the banking industry,

America can do better. In the early 1980s, the U.S. steel industry was pronounced dead. It went through a very painful period of consolidation – but it survived, and regained profitability. Newsweek has an excellent short essay on allowing the market to work to produce a Big One automaker to compete against Toyota. Let’s shake out the excess production capacity, pare the dealer network and let the best workers in the world – the Americans – build the cars the world is waiting to buy.

Getting the story straight: The scandal widens

Vanessa Niekamp, a 15-year state employee, wants to know why she was ordered by political appointees to dig for dirt on Joe the Plumber in government databases, and then cover it up. She told an Ohio House committee yesterday that she doesn’t understand.

The dirt, as it turns out, is in the Strickland Administration. The Columbus Dispatch has done a great job covering this story, and reports new details that came out during Niekamp’s testimony Thursday before the House State Government and Elections Committee. Those details provide the answer to the question of “why?”

The political appointee who actually conveyed the order to snoop in the database is named Carri Brown. Doug Thompson was the one who dictated the cover-up email that the Inspector General described as deceptive. But here’s the odd thing: Niekamp told the committee that both of them had access to the databases, and could have conducted the search themselves.

So, why order a lower level employee to do the search?

Because most government databases track who accesses them. And although political appointees have access, they do not spend their days and nights toiling over individual case files. It sticks out like sneakers at a wedding when a top bureaucrat accesses a file.

If it’s just business, then checking a file is no big deal. But the datadive on Joe the Plumber wasn’t business – it was pure political dirty tricks. To keep the search under the radar, it had to be done by someone who wouldn’t look like an Obama supporter. Let’s see, 15 years ago, when Niekamp was hired, the governor was… George Voinoich, a Republican.

And both Thomson and Brown knew what they were doing was wrong. Niekamp said that Brown claimed Joe the Plumber had contacted the child support agency about a dispute about how much child support he owed. (He didn’t, and Director Jones-Kelley later claimed she ordered the search because it was routine practice for the suddenly famous – which the Inspector General found was also untrue.)

And Thompson, Niekamp said Thursday, was “shaking,” and his neck was “bright red,” and he closed the door before dictating the cover-up email to her.

According to Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper:

"He then told me that we needed to make sure that we answer questions about what happened the same way, so that our versions were not different from each other. Before he said that, he reminded me that I was an unclassified employee -- which, as you may know, is someone who can be fired without cause."

On the street, it’s called getting your story straight. Ohio deserves better than this.

Changing the World, One life at a time: Part 2

There is a woman, a 34-year old war refugee in southern Azerbaijan. Her story will give you hope, and maybe will remind us all of the possibilities in each of us.

Her name is Shakhla Bayishova. To get to where she lives, head toward where the trouble is – Azerbaijan is tucked in between Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Iran. Only 7% of the land there can be farmed.

When she fled her home, she began washing and fluffing fleeces for making mattresses. Eventually, she learned to sew and moved up from processing and started manufacturing her own mattresses. She sewed the mattresses by hand, which is, to say the very least, a slow and labor-intensive process.

Sewing machines are wonderful. A $400 machine would geometrically increase her productivity. But capital is difficult to find for a refugee in the mountains in that inconvenient corner of the world.

Microbanks have sprung up in some of these places, and loan very small amounts of money to people who have no collateral except their own will to work and thrive. Shakhla received her $400 loan in December 2007, and now – less than a year later – she has repaid more than two-thirds of the loan.

A portion of the money that was pooled by the microbank for Shakla’s loan was raised by students, including Julia Blyth, at Ohio Wesleyan University here in Delaware. Their group is called Student Initiative for International Development, and I have no idea what their politics may be, nor does not matter -- they have changed the world, in at least one place, and for one family.

That loaned capital, soon to be repaid, will be loaned again, and wealth again will be created. And they will have changed the world again.

(For more information about microlending, visit http://www.kiva.org/.)

Audaciously Hoping for the TInkerbell: Gov. Strickland's plan to balance Ohio's budget

Gov. Ted Strickland Monday unveiled his executive plan for Ohio’s yawning budget deficit: hope for a good Christmas shopping season or a federal bailout. The audacity of his hope is a poor substitute for coherence.

Mr. Strickland’s comments came during an emergency press conference Monday. He wants, among other things, a $100 billion package of federal “block grants” to the states. “Block grants” are what bureaucrats call great wads of cash given away with no strings attached.

Ohio is required to balance its budget by law, although Washington is famously free of such unfashionable fetters. So, Mr. Strickland wants the federal government to run his deficit for him. Or, failing that, if Santa will bring him a robust Christmas shopping season, there might be enough sales tax revenue to see us through.

The governor joined the lengthening line of failed executives demanding cash so they continue doing more of what they have been doing. It is interesting that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is not among them – he’s insisting that his state government actually balance the budget by doing things like slowing the runaway monster of Medicare spending.

A true leader sees opportunity in trouble. In ordinary times, it’s impossible to create big change in government. In these unordinary times, the Governor has a chance to truly change state government from top to bottom.

More than two-thirds of the 50 states spend less in state and local money than we do. Ohio ranks 15th among the 50 states in state and local spending – more than $8,500 for every man, woman and child in Ohio, according to the Tax Foundation. More than $21,000 per household.

Like the domestic auto industry, Ohio needs to junk its 20th-century business model and re-egineer. It remains to be seen whether the aging men at the helms of any of these enterprises has the vision, courage and energy to do it.