Ali Frick runs some numbers and does a little reporting and concludes that Mark Sanford’s anti-stimulus posturing could imperial the job status of as many as 7,500 South Carolina teachers:

John Cooley, deputy superintendent for finance and operations at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained that the stimulus funds would help fill a 15 percent budget cut already inflicted on the school system. Without those funds, Cooley estimated that up 7,500 teachers (15 percent of the state’s 50,000 teachers) could be negatively impacted. But he cautioned, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve reduced 7,500 teachers” or that all 7,500 will lose their jobs.

These kind of education cutbacks directly deepen the recession, by further contracting individual spending power. The teachers who see job losses or salary cuts suffer, but so do all the businesses they patronize and all those business’ suppliers. Meanwhile, in the long run the state gets a less-educated workforce, which means more inequality and lower average wages.

The other day, Kevin Drum was upset about the tawdry joke that is the Senate confirmation process:

[H]ow about doing away with Senate confirmation entirely? It wastes tons of committee time, it promotes endless grandstanding by bloviating pols, it discourages all but the hardiest from working for the government, and — most important of all — it doesn’t actually seem to produce a better class of appointees, does it? Is the country really better off with a system that confirms Alberto Gonzales but deep sixes Tom Daschle? Has the White House staff, on average, been any less competent or less honest in recent years than the Senate-confirmed cabinet staff? Does the Senate, as Ackerman would like, really make it difficult for presidents to appoint underqualified officials?

The Senate would never agree to give up its precious consent privilege, of course, but I’m frankly not sure they add much to the process these days. In the meantime, allowing the president to have a White House staff of his choosing — whether I like his choices or not — seems more important than providing yet more cannon fodder for the greatest deliberative body in the world. They’ve got plenty to chew on already.

One solution to this could be to scrap the entire American system of government and move to a parliamentary system.

Barring that, I would say that this is another good reason to rely more heavily on career civil servants and less on subcabinet political appointees. The president could have a White House of his own choosing, not subject to confirmation. Then cabinet departments and major independent agencies could have their own appointed heads with the approval of the Senate. But for the “guts” of the work of implementing White House and/or Congressional mandates, doing analysis of what program changes would entail, etc. we would do well to expand the Senior Executive Service model and rely less on Assistant Secretaries brought in from the outside. That would make it a lot more viable to reduce the number of positions requiring Senate confirmation without freaking people out about abusive or corrupt staffing decisions.

As I’ve said before, a possible model for this is the State Department where by tradition, though not by law, an administration is supposed to fill most of the “political” appointments with career foreign service officers.

Of course another possible solution to this would be for senators to stop screwing around so much with appointments. I don’t see any real evidence that grandstanding about subcabinet appointments is crucial to one’s re-election prospects.

I have no particular brief for Pakistani politician Nawaz Sharif, but the time has come once again to observe how bizarre the treatment he receives at the hands of the American establishment is. To recap, once upon a time Benazir Bhutto was running Pakistan. Then her party lost power in an election to Nawaz Sharif and his party. Subsequently, Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup and established a dictatorship. The United States quickly accommodated itself to this state of affairs, though Sharif obviously wasn’t happy. Then, when Bhutto decided after a period of years that it was time for democracy to return to Pakistan, suddenly the U.S. government became more interested in Pakistani democracy and in the American media Bhutto—rather than the democratically elected leader Musharraf had deposed—became the face of the Pakistani opposition. Then, once it was clear that Musharraf was going down, it became really important to try to manipulate the situation to bring Bhutto, rather than Sharif, to power. Then after Bhutto’s murder, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became the standard-bearer. Meanwhile, the crisis that precipitated Musharraf’s fall from power was his decision to illegally fire some judges who tried to hold his regime to account. Remarkably, upon coming to power Zardari didn’t reinstate the chief judge who Musharraf sacked.

So that’s the backdrop for this:

U.S. and other Western diplomats were trying to defuse the crisis pitting President Asif Ali Zardari — a Western ally whose popularity has plummeted amid Taliban gains and the declining economy — against former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who doesn’t hold elected office but is one of Pakistan’s most popular politicians. Mr. Sharif is viewed warily by Washington, which doesn’t consider him committed enough to battling Islamic extremists.

Mr. Sharif is pushing for the country’s chief justice, who was sacked in 2007 by a previous president, to be restored to that job. Mr. Sharif also is fighting for control of the provincial government in Punjab, where Mr. Zardari has imposed federal rule. The eastern province, Pakistan’s most populous, is Mr. Sharif’s home turf. Fearing violence, hospitals canceled leave for doctors in Punjab’s capital, Lahore. [...]

Hundreds of opposition leaders and supporters have been arrested since Wednesday, when Mr. Zardari’s government began a crackdown on the opposition. On Tuesday, the government also imposed a two-week ban on rallies ahead of days of protests expected in the run-up to a planned sit-in Monday in Islamabad in front of parliament.

Obviously, insofar as Washington continually tilts toward one Pakistani party and against the other one, the leader of one party will become “a Western ally” and we’ll develop doubts about the priorities of the other guy. But I think Americans really ought to be asking ourselves about cause and effect here. As best I can tell, we’re substantially basing our Pakistan policy on the fact that Benazir Bhutto went to Harvard and befriended many important Americans while there. But that makes no sense. We have interests in Pakistan. Interests that we’ll want to press on any Pakistani government—a Zardari government, a Sharif government, a military government, whatever. Interests that no Pakistani government is going to fully share. No matter what happens, there’ll be tensions that need to be resolved. We should be prepared to work with whoever’s in power, and clear on the fact that arresting opposition party figures is never the route to stable democracy.

At any rate, read this from Najam Sethi if you want to hear what someone who knows what he’s talking about (i.e., not me) thinks.