Thomas Jefferson on Restraint

"Let us hear no more of confidence in men but bind them with the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson

Immigration: Does it Cost Americans Jobs?

"Immigrant workers 'create almost as many' jobs as they occupy, 'and maybe more,' said Madeleine Sumption, policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. See here for more:

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/05/does-immigration-cost-jobs/

I am, however, willing to concede that immigrants take jobs from native-born American teenagers.

Justice Souter's Commencement Speech

Justice Souter's 2010 Harvard commencement speech:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/05/text-of-justice-david-souters-speech/

The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches. These provisions cannot be applied like the requirement for 30-year-old senators; they call for more elaborate reasoning to show why very general language applies in some specific cases but not in others, and over time the various examples turn into rules that the Constitution does not mention...

A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well. These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good and another one. The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice. And choices like the ones that the justices envisioned in the Papers case make up much of what we call law...

The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.

Souter will be one of the most-missed Justices.

Sacramento Corruption?

Sacramento politicians gave $8.7 million to a private medical program that no longer functions. Yes, you read that right.  From Dan Walters: "The Assembly's budget writers wanted to give Drew $12.7 million, even though the Legislature's budget analyst, in a private memo, noted that Drew's medical-residency program no longer exists since its affiliated hospital, King/Drew Medical Center, lost its accreditation."

It gets better. The person in charge of the defunct medical residency program at Charles Drew University is a former Sacramento politician. Best line of the article: "the conference committee unanimously appropriated that [$8.7 million] amount this week without discussion." [italics mine]

Read more here.

[Note: this article has been updated since its original publication.  Outdated links to the Sacramento Bee were replaced.]  

John Wooden's Wisdom

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are." -- John Wooden

Are You Smarter than a 7th Grader?

Are you smarter than a 7th grader? Here is a letter from a 7th grader to the CBO, the federal budget oversight office:

http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1045

How will budget deficits affect people under the age of 18?

When the federal government borrows large amounts of money, it pushes interest rates higher, and people and businesses generally need to pay more to borrow money for themselves. As a result, they invest less in factories, office buildings, and equipment, and people in the future--including your generation--will have less income than they otherwise would. Also, the government needs to pay interest on the money it borrows, which means there will be less money available for other things that the government will spend money on in the future.

Kudos to the CBO for publishing the letter.

Downtown SJ

In City Hall, there is a model replica of the city of San Jose. I've spent most of my last eight years working in this particular slice of San Jose.