• A very good editorial on Bloomberg​.com on farm subsidies, and why the “let’s swap direct payments for crop insurance” proposal is a bad deal for taxpayers.
• American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman isn’t exactly a poster child for the farm program reform movement, but here he writes something I didn’t think would ever flow from his pen: “Not only would [“shallow loss”] programs be a nightmare for local Farm Service Agency offices to administer, but farmers would have the ability to cherry-pick which program works best for them. Because of distortions in price, we’d have a system of farmers deciding what to produce based on government payments rather than market signals.” [emphasis added] Uh, ok, but doesn’t that happen already, Mr Stallman?
• I’m not quite sure the LA Times gets the concept of federalism.
• United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk complains that “countries need to do a better job of explaining the benefits of trade in order to help sell ambitious trade deals to a skeptical public” [$]. I must have missed the part when Obama gave a detailed, principled endorsement of free trade in his SOTU address last week. Or, you know, ever.

Panama is in turmoil due to the efforts of President Ricardo Martinelli to resurrect a defunct specialized court within the Supreme Court that would allow him to pack that body and possibly pave the way for his reelection.

First, some context: The nine-Justice Panamanian Supreme Court is divided in four specialized courts dealing with specific areas of the law (civil, criminal, administrative and general government business). The first three specialized courts have 3 justices each, while the fourth one (dealing with general government business) is formed by the presidents of each of the three other specialized courts.

There used to be a Fifth Court dealing with constitutional issues. However, in 1999 Congress passed a law that abolished that body. Now, constitutional cases are dealt by the nine-Justice Supreme Court as a whole.

Last year the Supreme Court, whose chief justice is a close associate of Martinelli, ruled that the law abolishing the Fifth Court was illegal. This created a legal vacuum since nobody knows for sure whether that means that the old Fifth Court should be reinstated or a new one should be created.

Martinelli seized on the controversial ruling by the Supreme Court and introduced a bill in Congress that would create a Fifth Court. If approved, the new court would have three new justices (appointed by Martinelli) and would deal with constitutional issues, one of them being the constitutionality of presidential term limits. The Panamanian Constitution currently bars a sitting president from running for a consecutive term. The president has to step out for two terms before running again for office. Many in Panama fear that Martinelli’s ultimate goal with the Fifth Court is to get rid of term limits.

Let’s not forget that a similar ploy was recently used by Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to run for reelection despite the Constitution explicitly barring him from doing it. There, a friendly Supreme Court ruled that presidential term limits were unconstitutional and thus enabled Ortega to run again (and win the election).

Despite enjoying a large majority in Congress, where Martinelli has bought off many lawmakers, the opposition was able to filibuster the bill creating the Fifth Court. However, thanks to the nebulous ruling by the Supreme Court last year, Martinelli is now threatening with appointing the 3 new justices even without a law passed by Congress. A constitutional crisis seems inevitable.

A recent poll published by the daily La Prensa showed that 70 percent of Panamanians regarded Martinelli as “authoritarian” and 73 percent were concerned for the future of democracy their country. Amid strong criticism for his autocratic tendencies, for his attacks against freedom of speech, and for using tax audits to persecute his political opponents, the Fifth Court affair certainly shows that Ricardo Martinelli is the most dangerous man for democracy and rule of law in Central America after Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.

One of the first things you learn when you start to study the comparative performance of school systems is this: on average, Catholic schools are much more educationally effective and vastly more efficient than state-run schools. And then you learn that their impact goes beyond the three R’s. I wrote a little about these facts a few years ago, while I was with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and my Mackinac friends have resurrected the post for Catholic Schools Week. I’ve appended an excerpt below, but you can read the whole thing here.

When state-run public schooling was first championed in Massachusetts in the early 1800s, it was under the banner of “the common school,” and it was touted more for its predicted social benefits than its impact on mathematical or literary skills. The leading common school reformer of the time, Horace Mann, promised, “Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”

Having experienced more than a century-and-a-half of a vigorously expanding public school system, Americans are no longer quite as sanguine about the institution’s capabilities. Nevertheless, there is still a widespread belief that government schools promote the common good in a way independent private schools never could.

Is that belief justified? Scores of researchers have compared the social characteristics and effects of public and private schooling. They have found little evidence of any public-sector advantage. On the contrary, private schools almost always demonstrate comparable or superior contributions to political tolerance, civic knowledge and civic engagement. One group of private schools stands out as particularly effective in this regard: those run by the Catholic Church.

Home schooling is the most dynamic and innovative segment of K‑12 education. But even with technological advances, co-ops and hybrid schooling, taking on that level of individual responsibility for a child’s education is difficult.

One particularly difficult problem for home school families in Virginia and elsewhere is competitive sports, particularly in high school.

A private non-profit organization, the Virginia High School League, governs high school sports for public schools in Virginia and determines eligibility for participation. Home-school and private-school parents pay taxes for the public schools, but their kids are banned from participating in local high school sports run through the government schools.

For private school kids, that’s not typically a major problem; they have enough students to field teams and schools for their own league. But home-schoolers, especially in rural areas, don’t have those numbers. And that means they are out of luck.

There’s a bill being heard today (HB 947) that would prohibit public schools from joining an association with a blanket ban on home school student participation, and let each school district decide whether to allow them to try out for a team.

The Virginia PTA seems horrified that the home-school rabble might be included, proclaiming that “participation on athletic teams is a privilege that should be reserved for the public school students.” They have told members to call their representatives to say, “public school is your choice and team sports are a privilege you earned and expect them to protect.” Funny, I thought government school were supposed to be open to everyone … we certainly all pay a lot of money for them.

It’s always messy when the government runs things they shouldn’t – there is never a perfect solution – but it does seem odd and unfair for a private organization to ban a segment of Virginia’s children from joining a team in the local public school their parents support with their taxes.

Team sports shouldn’t be run through government schools in the first place, but if they are, they shouldn’t exclude children because their parents have taken full responsibility for their child’s education and shouldered its full cost.

…on the Google privacy policy change.

The idea that people should be able to opt out of a company’s privacy policy strikes me as ludicrous.

Plus she embeds a valuable discussion among her Xtranormal friends. Highlight:

“Well, members of Congress don’t send angry letters about privacy issues very often.”

“Oh, well, actually, they do.”

Read the whole thing. Watch the whole thing. And, if you actually care, take some initiative to protect your privacy from Google, a thing you are well-empowered to do by the browser and computer you are using to view this post.

In this podcast, I discuss the flap between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum over RomneyCare’s effect on free riding. I also talk about how some fact checkers misfired when looking into the issue.

The House of Representatives is poised to make great strides forward in transparency, and our work over the last year aims to help them do that. Here’s how this spreadsheet (.xls) will do that.

In December, the House Administration Committee announced a plan to improve the publication of House documents. In January, a new site—docs​.house​.gov—went live. (It’s attractive looking, but still bare-bones.) On Thursday this week, the Committee is hosting a “Legislative Data and Transparency Conference” to examine what data is out there and what data should be out there. Little information is on the Web yet, but you can sign up to attend at the link just above.

I’ll be speaking on the last panel of the day, which deals with measuring transparency success. Likely, they chose me for this panel because I’ve already been grading the government on its publication practices.

Last September, you see, we graded Congress on how well it publishes data that would assist the public in computer-aided oversight. The summary blog post is called “Needs Improvement.” And then in December, we graded the government on publication of budget, appropriations, and spending data. That’s a joint legislative-executive responsibility, but mostly executive. The message was: “ ‘Needs Improvement’ is Understatement.”

How do you grade Congress and the government on their data publication?

You start out by modeling the data government should publish. We put together a data model for legislative process, for example, and then a data model for budgeting, appropriating, and spending. We got a great deal of help from folks at the Sunlight Foundation, OMB Watch, and others such as the National Priorities Project, as well as data guru Josh Tauberer, whose latest project is PopVox.

Even with all this help, these models won’t be the last word—there is much to learn yet about the data structure that will serve every use the public may want to make of information. But it’s a strong start.

Then we compared the data that’s actually out there to the practices described in my paper, “Publication Practices for Transparent Government,” and out popped the grades! They were pretty bad…

The House of Representatives aims to fix that—for its part, at least.

Now to this spreadsheet: it’s a list of the things that should be identified in congressional documents so that computers can find the most salient information in them. It also indicates the “vocabularies” that already exist for identifying many of them: members of Congress, bills, laws, statutes, committees, agencies, programs, and so on. We’ve talked about how to identify “budget authority” and appropriations (spending) so that computers can capture that information from bills and committee reports. Locations, state and foreign governments, times, meetings—all these things can be put into electronic versions of documents to allow computer-aided public oversight.

Once documents contain data like this in the proper structures, literally thousands of questions about Congress will be answered instantly.

• How much new budget authority has each member of Congress proposed? Voted for? Voted against? Allowed to go through on voice vote or unanimous consent? How about this same information by state? By region? Or by seniority?
• What title of the U.S. code do members of Congress most often propose to amend? What title do they actually amend the most?
• What bills affect my state specifically, such as by naming buildings, creating wilderness areas, changing boundaries on parks, or giving land to localities?
• How often do my member of Congress and senators break with their party?

These are just a few examples. In the hands of varied users, the data will be converted to hundreds or thousands of uses. It will go into studies performed by political scientists and it will supercharge news reporting. But more importantly, it will go into services that inform people directly and quickly about how their own representatives in Congress are acting and what they’re saying.

It will give people insight into where the money goes—from the moment new spending is proposed all the way through to when Congress spends it—or declines to spend.

Credit is due to the leadership in the House of Representative for starting this work. There is a lot to do before they show clear success. But they are way ahead of President Obama, whose Sunlight Before Signing transparency promise lags badly, and who has yet to put together a machine-readable organization chart for the executive branch of the federal government. He can easily do the latter, and coordination with Congress is essential for transparency success. The sooner that happens the better.