Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Rethinking Miranda rights for terror suspects?

44 Replies

There was a  heated debate over a week ago over whether the Times Square suspect should have been Mirandized. And lots of folks said absolutely, and not just the usual types on the left who think terror is about crime and not war. Conservative voices spoke up quite thoughtfully in defense of the idea that

Today, as three more are arrested, seems like a good time to revisit the issue.

Especially since the Obama administration signaled a couple of days ago that it was rethinking the wisdom of reading such suspects their rights.

Did you see that? Here’s an excerpt from a report about that:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan.

Mr. Holder proposed carving out a broad new exception to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling. It generally forbids prosecutors from using as evidence statements made before suspects have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

He said interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions….

I didn’t realize that had happened until I saw an op-ed piece today in the WSJ praising it:

… In other words, the Miranda rights to remain silent and have an attorney present during questioning would be suspended for terror suspects believed to possess information that could prevent an attack.

The administration is making a number of admissions here: Mirandizing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the underwear bomber, after only 50 minutes of questioning was a mistake; terrorists are enemies of America, not ordinary criminals; and the law-enforcement approach to combatting terrorism, which is designed to obtain evidence admissible at trial after a crime has already been committed, is not the most effective way to obtain intelligence to prevent future attacks.

This is an important step forward and a sign that, after the Manhattan subway plot, Fort Hood, Detroit, and now Times Square, the administration has become more adaptable to the realities of the war on terror. Yet the jury is out on whether the administration has a real plan or is merely improvising. Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad remains in the criminal justice system and has not been designated as an enemy combatant, though he is still eligible for such designation….

Of course, the idea that Mr. Holder is raising is based in the oft-cited nostrum that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had had any further thoughts on this point.

You mean that’s NOT a Haley campaign ad?

9 Replies

Under the headline, “Is this even legal?,” Wesley Donehue shares the above ad being paid for by ReformSC.

Which makes me wonder — surely no one’s pretending this is anything other than a Nikki Haley ad… are they?

Well, maybe there’s one difference… I’m thinking Nikki herself might be embarrassed to pour it on THIS thick. Wouldn’t she?

Shocker: Sanford’s favorite club backs Nikki

7 Replies

Chad Walldorf at the SC Club for Growth is a nice, sincere guy, and I’ve always liked Nikki Haley. But both of them are so in step with Mark Sanford that there’s not a bit of surprise in this:

The S.C. Club for Growth has endorsed the Republican gubernatorial bid of Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley. Club chairman Chad Walldorf said Haley bets fits the group’s belief in limited government and free market principles.”We have seen Representative Haley’s incredible work in the South Carolina legislature and are thrilled to have a candidate with her track record running for our state’s top office,” Walldorf said in a statement. “As our governor, Nikki Haley will continue to make South Carolina more business friendly, protect our hard-earned tax dollars, and perhaps most importantly, shine a light on the darkest corners of state bureaucracy.”…

What does Innovista success look like?

11 Replies

How will we know when Innovista is succeeding? Well, to begin with, we won’t be at the point where we can call it a complete success for many years, at best. But along the way, there will be signs.

Some of them will be big, such as the new baseball park and the Moore School moving to the geographic area that is central to the Innovista movement. Or the eventual construction of the waterfront park that makes the area more inviting. Most important will be the development of high-tech start-ups that you won’t even be aware of at first, but that will grow and feed off each other as the dynamic starts working.

But there will also be other less obvious signs. Here’s one small, but definite, sign that jumped out at me in recent days…

Have you heard the radio ads for Thirsty Fellow Pizzeria and Pub? The part that jumps out at me is when this eatery/watering hole announces that it can be found in USC’s Innovista. I’m never in a position to take notes when I hear it, but here’s what the Thirsty Fellow says on its website:

Owners Willie Durkin, Chuck Belcher, Dean Weinberger and Terry Davis want you to join the Thirsty Fellow family. Located in the USC Innovista area, we have a comfortable atmosphere, a great menu, a full bar and plenty of televisions. Open for lunch, dinner, late night and Sunday brunch, put Thirsty Fellow on your “to do” list.

“Located in the USC Innovista area.” Whether you take that as a boast — a desire to be associated with the idea of the Innovista — or merely as an acceptable way of giving directions (thereby suggesting that everyone knows where the Innovista is), this is a small-but-telling sign of the concept moving forward, taking hold in the marketplace.

Let me say that again: In the marketplace. You know, that place where Gov. Sanford and the Policy Council don’t want USC to go messin’, the place where they believe, with all the fervor of their secular anti-gummint religion, it is doomed to fail.

And yet, the place where, in this tiny way, it is taking hold…

Thoughtcrime is doubleplusungood

31 Replies

Sorry to get all heavy on y’all on the day before Thanksgiving, but some of you got to talking about “hate crimes” back on this post, and I just can’t let it pass without reciting my usual homily on the subject…

Karen said:

And Kathryn, did you notice that in this country that after race, the highest number of hate crimes concern religion? Why do I not think that Christians are the ones being picked on?

To which Kathryn replied:

I thought sexual orientation was the biggest source of hate crimes (which makes your point, I suspect).

To which I just had to say:

It depends on how you define “hate crime” … which is sort of what the whole phenomenon of “hate crimes” is about, isn’t it?

A “hate crime” is a political act, one to which Orwell assigned the term “thoughtcrime,” a.k.a. “crimethink.” And writing and defining the hate crime law is also a political act.

The very decision to have such a thing as a “hate crime” is a political act as well — or, at least, a political choice.

And it’s one to which I object. Such things should not exist in America. That’s one of the few points on which I agree with libertarians. Punish the act, not the thought or attitude behind it. The idea that an attitude would be deemed a crime in this country is in its way as ugly as the attitudes such crimes seek to punish. It appalls me that the concept of “hate crime” ever developed in this country…

I mean, I love Big Brother and all, but this is supposed to be a free country, which means people are free to think and feel all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly things. It’s when they do something to other people that we should be concerned, and what we should be concerned about is what they DO.

Welcome, NPR…

10 Replies

Just got a call from Carol Klinger at NPR. She wanted to know what I’d written lately about the governor. I suggested checking out the blog.

To make it easier, here are a few key riffs:

And from back in the day, before all the current mess:

Carol, enjoy…

‘The epitome of conservativeness’

30 Replies

I’ve never had much to say about Sarah Palin one way or the other, because I’ve always had trouble putting what I think of her into words, but one of her supporters does so in the video above, explaining that she is:

… the epitome of conservativeness.”

Just so. It’s not that she has any actual conservative ideas, or any ideas at all. This is not to run her down. There are different kinds of people in the world, as my late mother-in-law used to say. Most are either people people or things people. When I protested to my wife that I saw myself as neither, she said there was a third, less-mentioned, category, idea people.

Sarah Palin is not one of them. Frankly, I suspect she’s a people person, which I think is what a lot of her supporters sense. But I haven’t been able to stand to observe her long enough to tell. Just last night, I surfed past an interview she was having with one of those talking heads, and I could only listen for about five seconds, but ranted at my wife about what I heard in those five seconds for the next minute as I surfed on, which was my wife’s hint that I was feeling a lot better and could start fetching my own cups of convalescent ginger ale.

What got me was that she didn’t have ANYthing to say. She ranted against the stimulus, and when the friendly interviewer asked her what she’d do instead, she slid into vague mumblings about cutting government and returning power to individuals — incantations, rather than arguments.

She doesn’t so much have conservative thoughts as she is… conservative-y. Conservativish. Just loaded with “conservativeness,” which I take to mean the appearance, the general aura of being “conservative,” which is a quality that fewer and fewer of those who embrace the description can coherently describe (and before you liberals start feeling all smug, you have your own set of problems, and they’re not that different).

As you get farther into this clip, if you’re like me, you start to feel sorry for the subjects. I mean, it really IS mean and unfair to ask private citizens who love Sarah Palin to explain their views. I started feeling bad for them the way I felt bad for the gun nuts in “Bowling for Columbine.” Rather than getting upset over our overarmed society, I got ticked at Michael Moore for being a sneering bully.

Which of course is another secret to the Sarah Palin appeal: She generates that kind of resentment toward elites (not that Michael Moore is an elite, even though he thinks he is, even though he would claim that he’s not, and so on…). It may be THE secret of her celebrity.

You hold a microphone in front of Sarah Palin, or someone who admires Sarah Palin (for any qualities other than her undeniable pulchritude), and keep asking “Why?” or “Could you explain your view about that?” and you’re going to come across as obnoxious.

Ground Zero as an emblem of America’s dysfunction

34 Replies

ground zero

The opinion writers at the WSJ are, predictably, fulminating over the upcoming trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed et alia in NYC. Whatever you think about that, one of them made an excellent point about our nation’s fecklessness with a photograph and a sharp couple of paragraphs:

The third way to consider the trials is to look at Ground Zero itself. After eight years of deliberation, planning, money and effort, what have we got? The picture nearby is the answer.

Let me be more precise. After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we’ve got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence — of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.

By failing to quickly decide what to do at that site and then DO it, our nation has shown its weakness — the flaws that come inevitably with being a liberal democracy riven with partisan and cultural conflicts, a society that values everyone having their say more than going ahead and getting things done.

Some of these things about our country I would not change; others I would. The thing is, a liberal democracy CAN get its act together. This was a pretty great country back in 1941-45, and yet we managed to pull ourselves together after Pearl Harbor and build and operate a towering war machine that quickly eclipsed the ones that Germany and Japan had been building for two decades. Those militaristic and fascistic countries underestimated us then, thinking we were too soft and divided in our purposes to defeat nations as focused as they were.

Today, fanatics who are willing to die for their cause think we are too soft, comfort-loving, life-loving, indecisive and ineffectual to defeat them. Failing to rebuild and move on at Ground Zero — allowing their act of terror to leave us in a state of paralysis at that site for eight years — speaks volumes about our dysfunction, and makes them look right. I mean, what do you say about a country that goes into paroxysms over something as obvious as the need for health care reform — or the need to rebuild at Ground Zero?

It’s not that we don’t know how to design something and build it. We’re great at that. We just can’t decide what to build, and that is just one among many effects of the fact that, as a nation, we still haven’t been able to get together on HOW we want to respond to 9/11.

Is a nation that divided and confused capable of continuing (is it capable, for instance, of summoning the energy to overcome our economic crisis so that I can get a job, just to bring it down to the personal level)? Or are we all washed up? Or is the answer somewhere in between, and if so, precisely where?

Lay a little capitalism on me, baby

20 Replies

No matter what your political views, you’re bound to get at least a smile out of the S.C. Policy Council’s new “Unleashing Capitalism” site.

For my part, I was prepared to be bored to death when I followed the link, only to be greeted immediately with this:

“I stopped going bald because of capitalism.”

So I kept watching the automatic slideshow, and while none of the other assertions had quite the comic punch of the first one, the others weren’t bad:

  • I lost 70 pounds with the help of capitalism.
  • I sleep with the windows open thanks to capitalism.
  • Our marriage was saved by capitalism.
  • I don’t hate Mondays thanks to capitalism.
  • I learned algebra because of capitalism.

I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up.

I didn’t know my friends at the Policy Council (and I do have friends over there) had this much of a sense of humor. But I’ve got to hand it to them; this is a grabber. It’s cute, and enjoyable whether you agree with the Policy Council’s worldview or disagree sharply.

Of course, it’s not all sweetness and light. Far from it.

Be sure you’ve taken your antidepressants before you watch the video on the site, which paints a picture of South Carolina that makes “Corridor of Shame” look like a Chamber of Commerce production. It makes the Airstrip One of 1984 look like Disneyland. It makes South Carolina look even worse than it looks to me as a guy who’s been looking for a job for 8 months.

And of course, guess what the cause of all this misery is? Well, no, there’s not a lot of guessing to be done with an organization that would assert that capitalism, and not public education, is the best provider of algebraic knowledge.

But interestingly, the video doesn’t attack government so much as it attacks “politicians,” with assertions such as:

We gave politicians too much power…

We’ve trusted them to make decisions for us…

It’s time to take power back from politicians.

Of course, this is a direct attack on the greatest form of government ever devised — representative democracy. You know, the system in which we elect representatives to make public policy decisions. The only logical conclusion to derive from this presentation is that we should grab our pitchforks and run riot in the streets, a la France in the 1790s.

Which persuades me once again that, no matter what you may say about it, the Policy Council is certainly not a “conservative” organization.

By the way, lest you get too depressed watching the video — it gets all happy at the end. And here’s a thought to cheer you up even more — I’m guessing those bustling free-enterprise operations they’re showing (in the color, Dorothy-arrives-in-Oz part) actually exist already in this world that is supposedly crushed and oppressed by “politicians.”

One last thought, though, just to cover all my bases: Hey, if you’re going to unleash some capitalism, unleash some on me. The public sector isn’t hiring, because we live in a state run by politicians who would rather have their eyes put out with sharp sticks than raise taxes to maintain even the minimal level of services we have come to expect in South Carolina. In fact, if underfunding gummint will unleash capitalism, we should be experiencing a tsunami of private investment about now. I’ve got my surfboard, and I’m ready…

Mild-mannered demagoguery in the echo chamber

18 Replies

Just now I got an automated phone call on my land line inviting me to take part in a telephone “town hall meeting” with Jim DeMint. So I listened in.

And first, I want to say that I appreciate that Jim DeMint is mild-mannered. None of that shouting, in-your-face demagoguery for him.

But that said, I have to say that after awhile, hearing some fairly extreme ideas espoused mildly and politely starts to creep me out.

Basically, the way this thing worked was that ordinary, regular, plain, normal, average Americans in the 2nd District asked the senator question after question in a manner that was rather like T-ball. Nobody was trying to throw it past him, and he kept saying “good question” to little sermonettes from folks who are worried about that Barack Obama guy giving away “our freedoms,” on issue after issue. Whether we’re talking global warming or trade or monetary policy to crime to health care, that’s what it always boiled down to: Thank goodness we have you, senator, to stand up for our freedoms. No problem, folks, glad to do it, and be sure to sign up for my “Freedom Alert” reports…

When somebody calls in, truly worried about crime — her house has been broken into twice, she said — and says “Is it possible that they’ll be able to take away our constitutional right to bear arms?,” it seems to me that the right thing to do would be say, “Of course, not — no one is trying to do that to you.” But not Jim. In his own mild, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth way, he makes sure he gives the impression that the only reason ATF goons aren’t about to batter down your door and take your guns from your cold, dead fingers is because he’s there stopping ’em: “I’m doing all I can,” he promises, “to make sure we don’t lose our constitutional rights.”

So why am I not reassured?

Yes, I could have hit a button and tried to butt in with a “Hey, wait a minute” sort of question, but all those years of not upstaging regular folks — of not wanting to become the story — stopped me.

One guy, though, did — right at the end — ask Jim what in the world would be wrong with ordinary working Americans having the same kind of health coverage as Congress (this was the only question I heard on the subject that wasn’t about that Obama wanting to take away our Medicare and turn it over to the gummint). Jim assured him that HE wanted ordinary Americans to have good health care, which was why he provided insurance when he was an employer in the private sector, and that he thought members of Congress should be forced to sign up for whatever gummint plan it cooked up, etc., etc. — everything, of course, except to say that yes, members of Congress are in a government health care system, and it works just great for them.

Far more typical was Hazel, who wanted to know why she had worked to pay into Medicare for over 40 years, and now that Obama “wants to take it away from us.”

And of course, Jim didn’t say, “You like Medicare? So what’s wrong with having it for everybody?” That would apparently defeat his purposes.

Anyway, when it was over Jim went away feeling all that much better about his brave stances against health care reform and cap and trade and so forth.

Maybe I should have said something. You think I should have said something? I should have said something…

Mullins grabs some attention, but fails on civility

17 Replies

You may recall that I haven’t been too impressed with Mullins McLeod. I’ve generally dismissed his campaign as being… what’s the word… trite, I suppose. His campaign releases have sort of struck a generic populist pose, trying to project him as a regular guy who’s tired, just as you good people out there are, of all them blamed politicians and their shenanigans.

That pose is tiresome enough when done well, but as I said, his populist pronouncements have been so vanilla, as that genre goes, so as to be easily forgettable five minutes later. As I said back here, Mullins just hasn’t been able to get a hit in his few at-bats.

Well, he made a concerted effort to get on base yesterday, when he told Gresham Barrett to “shove it” on the Gitmo prisoners issue. Well, Gresham certainly deserved to have someone call him on his really ugly NIMBY ploy for attention, but while it might be cool for, say, a Dick Harpootlian to say something like that (except that Dick would be more imaginative, and he’d say it in Dwight’s behalf, not Mullins’), that’s not the kind of language we need from one who would be governor.

So basically, Mullins has managed briefly to get our attention by passing first and running the basepaths, but he’s immediately alienated us by coming into seconds with sharpened spikes high, a la Ty Cobb. In other words, the first time he gets our attention, he fails the civility test.

Hey, if we wanted a guy who talks like this as governor, we could turn to Joe Wilson.

About why we invaded Iraq (here we go again, y’all…)

39 Replies

OK, I’ll bite on bud’s parenthetical back on this thread:

(As a side note, its, funny how the folks who wanted that war in the first place pretend it acutally started with the “surge”, forgetting the fabricated justifications that led to the initial invation.)

While I know I won’t get anywhere with bud (he and I have had this conversation too many times for me to entertain false hopes), I believe that every once in a while — say once a year at least — I should rise up and contest the conventional “wisdom” that we went into Iraq based on a pack of lies.

Nothing that causes me to conclude that we should go into Iraq later proved to be false. I say this with all due respect to people who didn’t think we should have gone in to start with. A legitimate case could have been made at the time that invasion at that time was not the best way to achieve our goals. But saying, after the fact, that all the reasons to go in were lies is itself a lie. I know, because I know why I believed we needed to take that action.

I also know that nothing I have ever written or thought has ever pretended that the war started with the surge. On the contrary, what you will find is that the surge was the moment when we finally started prosecuting the effort the right way, instead of the Rumsfeld way. (I know that some folks’ minds are boggled by the concept that whether we should have been in Iraq and whether we were going about it the right way are two separate questions, but I ask them to bear with me on that point.)

As for the “fabricated justifications”… first, I’ll refer you to a post on my blog from last year, headlined “Why we went to war in Iraq.” It was inspired by an opinion piece I had read in the WSJ by Doug Feith. bud’s reaction at the time was “Doug Feith is full of s***.” Perhaps you will agree, but I urge you to go back and read it.

Then, going back further, to before the invasion itself, I refer you to my column of Feb. 2, 2003. You won’t find a lot of talk about WMDs and other such distractions. You will find a lot of stuff about “draining swamps.” The need to do that, after 9/11 showed that our old strategy of maintaining the status quo in the region was extraordinarily dangerous to this county, combined with the fact that Saddam had been violating for a decade the terms of the 1991 cease-fire, constituted the argument for me.

Anyway, here’s that column in its entirety:

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WE MAY HAVE TO INVADE IRAQ
Published on: 02/02/2003
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
AMERICA SEES ITSELF, quite admirably, as a nation that doesn’t go around starting fights, but is perfectly willing and able to end them once they start.
Because of that, President Bush has a tall hill to climb when it comes to persuading the American people that, after 10 years of keeping Saddam Hussein in his box, we should now go in after him, guns blazing.
In his State of the Union address, the president gave some pretty good reasons why we need to act in Iraq, but were they good enough? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s likely that no one outside of the choir loft was converted by his preaching on the subject. And that’s a problem. Overall, while there have been moments over the last 16 months when he has set out the situation with remarkable clarity, those times have been too few and far between.
He has my sympathy on this count, though: His efforts have been hampered by the fact that the main reason we may need to invade Iraq is one that the president can’t state too clearly without creating more problems internationally than it would solve. At the same time, it’s a reason that seems so obvious that he shouldn’t have to state it. We should all be able to figure it out.
And yet, it seems, we don’t.
I hear people asking why, after all this time, we want to go after Saddam now. He was always a tyrant, so what’s changed? North Korea is probably closer to a nuclear bomb than he is, they say, so why not go after Kim Jong Il first?
We left him in power a decade ago, they ask, so why the change?
The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.
Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.
Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons — geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.
Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.
I’m far from the only one saying this. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, who has more knowledge of the region in his mustache than I’ll ever have, has said it a number of times, most recently just last week:

“What threatens Western societies today are not the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables — the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society. . . . If we don’t help transform these Arab states — which are also experiencing population explosions — to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible news media that won’t blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables.”

Journalists can say these things, and some do. But if the president does, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians and just about everybody else in the region will go nuts. In European capitals, and even in certain circles here at home, he will be denounced as the worst sort of imperialist. Osama bin Laden’s followers will seize upon such words as proof that the West has embarked upon another Crusade — not for Christ this time, but for secular Western culture.
None of which changes the fact that the current state of affairs in Arab countries and Iran is a deadly threat to the United States. So we have to do something about it. We’ve seen what doing nothing gets us — Sept. 11. Action is very risky. But we’ve reached the point at which inaction is at least as dangerous.
Should we go in as conquerors, lord it over the people of Iraq and force them to be like us? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work, anyway. We have to create conditions under which Iraqis — all Iraqis, including women — can choose their own course. We did that in Germany and Japan, and it worked wonderfully (not that Iraq is Germany or Japan, but those are the examples at hand). And no one can say the Germans are under the American thumb.
But that brings us to a problem. The recalcitrance of the Germans, the French and others undermines the international coalition that would be necessary to nation-building in Iraq. It causes another problem as well:
Maybe we could accomplish our goal without invading Iraq — which of course would be preferable. By merely threatening to do so, we could embolden elements within the country to overthrow him, which might provide us with certain opportunities.
But the irony is that people aren’t going to rise up against Saddam as long as Europeans and so many people in this country fail to support the president’s goal of going after him. As long as they see all this dissension, they’ll likely believe (rightly) that Saddam might just hang on yet again.
If the United Nations, or at least the West, presented a united front, the possibility of Saddam collapsing without our firing a shot would be much greater. But for some reason, too many folks in Europe and in this country don’t see that. Or just don’t want to.
Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Argue that we could have pursued other courses to achieve our legitimate goals. Fine. But don’t tell me the reasons I was persuaded we should invade were lies. I know better.

Delleney sounds (almost) like my kind of conservative

1 Reply

Not really knowing Greg Delleney, I took some interest in this mini-profile John O’Connor included in his story today:

Often quiet and funny, Delleney is a member of a loose-knit – and often low-brow – lawmaker lunch group, the House Bi-Partisan Eatin’ Caucus.

Prior to this year, Delleney was not among Sanford’s chief critics. “I agreed with him more than I disagreed with him.”

Chester County GOP chairwoman Sandra Stroman said she has known Delleney, who served in the Navy for three years, for 15 years.

“He’s generally a very quiet person,” she said. “He listens a lot.”

Though many South Carolinians are tired of hearing about Sanford, Stroman thinks Chester Republicans support Delleney.

“I don’t think it’s personal,” Stroman said. “Greg Delleney is a man who believes in right and wrong, and I think he comes down on the side of right every time.”

Delleney is among the strongest right-to-life supporters in the Legislature, typically introducing a new bill each year to limit access to abortions.

This year, Delleney successfully shepherded through the House a bill that requires a 24-hour wait before a woman can receive an abortion. He also scuttled a bill that would have provided dating violence counseling for teens by adding an amendment restricting the counseling to heterosexual couples.

Delleney has critics.

“I like Greg. He is very passionate about what he believes,” said state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg. “My problem is he is foisting his moral beliefs on public policy. I’m not surprised he’s pushing this, particularly when sex is involved.”

That makes him sound, in general terms, like the kind of conservative I like — as opposed to the Sanford hyperlibertarian type, or the type that gets extremely worked up over illegal immigration. I much prefer the Brownbacks and the Huckabees to the Sanfords and the DeMints.

Not that I would do everything he does. I don’t think I would have adding the hetero clause to the violence counseling thing. That’s the kind of making-an-issue-of-something-that-isn’t-an-issue stuff where social conservatives lose me (at least, that’s the impression I remember having at the time).

So he’s not exactly the kind of conservative I’d be were I to consent to being called a conservative (or a liberal, or any of those oversimplifications). I’m still more the John McCain type.

Graham, DeMint and the Angry White Guy Divide

47 Replies

Lindsey Graham, normally one of the most articulate members of the U.S. Senate, apparently misspoke when he said this, quoted today in The State:

“We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys.”

Obviously, he forgot the last two words, “… any more.”

Just joshing, Republican friends. While you may be the party of white guys, you haven’t all been angry, all of the time. Some are pretty ticked off nowadays, though, so much so that they’ll pay good money to hear one of their own shout insults at the other side.

The question the senator raises is, will the party continue to be that way in the future? And the debate over that has broken down on familiar lines. No, not racial lines. And not “statism vs. freedom,” as much as the Sanford wing would like to define the world that way.

The divide is one that I’ve struggled with myself a good bit over the years — whether to be right, or be effective.

Set aside for the moment the fact that Jim DeMint is wrong about many things. He believes he’s right — believes it with a great deal more certainty than you and I believe we’re right (you have to, to be such a committed ideologue) — and he believes in shaping his party so that it includes only those who are “right” as he sees the right. He said that about as clearly as it can be said here:

“I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs,” DeMint told The (Washington) Examiner in a comment that has been widely quoted.

Sen. Graham, by contrast, would rather get some things done. That means working with, and supporting, people who don’t bow down to the same gods with the same ritual intensity. Work with Democrats (such as John Kerry) when that helps. Support Republicans (such as Bob Inglis) who are willing to think for themselves (even though they are sometimes wrong, as Inglis was on the Surge). And finally, bring in enough voters to make a majority rather than a minority.

And no matter what ideologues may claim sometimes about the ubiquity of their beliefs, you will never, ever have a majority if you only let in people who think exactly the way you do.

As for the “right vs. effective” dichotomy. I have written several times about my own struggles with that choice (which I don’t like being a choice any more than anyone else does; in a fairer world you could be both). And you’ll see if you follow that link that I’ve had a tendency to choose “right” when forced to choose. Part of that, though, was that that was what my former job was all about — determining the right answer to the best of your ability, and advocating it as strongly as you can. And I should also point out that my sense of rightness has been very different from Sen. DeMint’s. With me, it was about identifying the best answer on a specific issue under specific circumstances. You would never catch me falling into the absurd error of insisting a certain side or faction was by definition always right, by virtue of its ideological purity.

Similarly, Lindsey Graham has been willing to go down in flames trying to do the right thing — whether it’s comprehensive immigration reform, or the Surge, or reversing man-made climate change.

But for the sake of this discussion, the one raised in the piece in The State this morning, the contrast between the two senators breaks down pretty neatly along right-vs.-effective lines, with Sen. Graham on the pragmatic side, the one where not everyone has to be an angry white guy.

Hey, where are all my yes-men?

19 Replies

There were those who said that if I went back to moderating comments, you’d only find those who agree with me.

That was, of course, patently ridiculous — nothing in my background would suggest that (I mean, have you EVER read the letters to the editor?) — but people said it as a way of trying to get me to back off. It’s the sort of wild, slashing insult that’s supposed to rock me on my heels and let the bad actors stay.

Not even I had expected the degree to which folks who used to defend me against the screamers now take me to task. Have you noticed it? I mean, I can’t seem to say anything right. Look back through the threads, and see if I’m right.

But the difference is, it’s civil. And that encourages people to step out and disagree, knowing they won’t be subjected to unwarranted hostility, that their disagreement will be respected — even when they disagree with me and are, therefore, wrong. (People even give me the room to kid around, but of course I won’t abuse the opportunity.)

It’s lively, and it’s constructive. In other words, it’s working. Have you noticed?

And, for a less nuanced view, here’s Jon Stewart

7 Replies

Earlier today, I set forth a morally ambiguous view of the Franken amendment. For the simpler, this-is-such-a-slam-dunk-it’s-funny view, I share with you the way the matter was presented by Jon Stewart.

You can’t say you don’t get all sorts of views here. And there’s no question, this whole gang-rape issue is funnier the way Jon Stewart tells it than the way I do, but… oops — is the way I just put that prejudicial? (Could it be I’m one of those fogeys who is offended by the idea that so many college-educated young people rely on this guy for their news?)

Whatever. Just go ahead and make up your own minds.

Graham and his vote on the Franken amendment

28 Replies

Randy suggested a couple of days back that we have a string on the Franken amendment vote, which, according to some of my friends here on the blog, can be summarized as, “Graham and DeMint were among 30 Republicans who sided against rape victims.”

Personally, I still don’t know who was right about this. But I had, and still do, a suspicion over a vote that allows one side to paint the other that black. The world isn’t that simple. And I know Lindsey Graham — he’s not a guy to vote for “pure evil” over good, particularly not for the sake of party solidarity. This is a guy who breaks with his side when he thinks it’s wrong.

The idea that he had suddenly become a different sort of guy just didn’t smell right to me. What it smelled like was one of these deals where one side or the other sets up a vote on something just to get the other side to vote against it, so the party of the first part can use it against the party of the second part politically.

This is going to drive Kathryn and others crazy (they hate it that I sometimes base my initial impressions on things on the degree to which the people doing the advocating have or have not earned my trust over time, but you know what? our entire system of representative democracy is based on that, to a huge degree), but just as I have come to trust Graham over time to have a good reason for his vote (even when he’s wrong, as on health care), I do not have a similar level of trust with Al Franken. Maybe I’ll get to the point where I do, but so far he’s still the guy with the “Al Franken Decade,” the guy who started a radio network because he thought the left needed its own Rush Limbaugh — in other words, just the sort of guy who likes to strike poses, whether for laughs or for partisan advantage.

And folks, this initially started as a discussion about character. I called Roman Polansky a perv, that got us on the subject of rape, and next we were talking about how horrible those Republicans were to vote against this measure.

So, in the process of trying to make up my mind on this so I could post something, I e-mailed Kevin Bishop in Graham’s office yesterday to ask whether they had any releases or written position on the subject. In other words, what did the senator have to say for himself? Kevin responded promptly (probably thinking I was about to post), but I got too tied up to blog yesterday, so I’m just sharing this now:

We did not send out a release….here is some background information on the Franken Amendment.

It’s also important to note the Department of Defense—ie the Obama Administration — opposed the Franken Amendment:

DoD Position

Proposed Franken Amendment (# 2588) re: H.R. 3326 Prohibition against requiring arbitration of any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment.

  • The DoD opposes the proposed amendment.

  • The proposed amendment effectively would require debarment of any contractor or subcontractor or would require termination of any contract if the contractor or a subcontractor, at any tier, compels an employee or independent contractor, as a condition of employment, to agree to the use of arbitration to resolve sexual harassment claims of all sorts.  The Department of Defense, the prime contractor, and higher tier subcontractors may not be in a position to know about such things. Enforcement would be problematic, especially in cases where privity of contract does not exist between parties within the supply chain that supports a contract.

  • It may be more effective to seek a statutory prohibition of all such arrangements in any business transaction entered into within the jurisdiction of the United States, if these arrangements are deemed to pose an unacceptable method of recourse

Here is some additional background on the amendment from the Senate Republican Policy Committee:

As you recall, Franken amendment 2588 to the defense appropriations bill banned the Department of Defense from using any funds to pay for an existing defense contract if the contractor decides with its employees to agree to arbitration of certain civil rights claims and torts.  In effect, it bans the Department from doing business with any defense contractor with an arbitration clause with its employees.  This would have an enormous negative impact on any state with any sort of defense contractor presence, or any state with a military base for which contractors perform support services.  It is our understanding that many offices that opposed the Franken amendment are the subject of ridiculous media campaigns attacking the offices for favoring Halliburton over rape victims, amongst other scurrilous charges.  As an after action report, we pass along the following points:

  • First and foremost, the Obama Department of Defense opposed the amendment.

  • The Franken amendment was marketed as providing protections to victims of sexual assault.  Groups have then denigrated those who voted against the Franken Amendment as seeking to deny rape victims their day in court.
  • The Franken Amendment seems particularly to be an overreaction given that Jamie Leigh Jones, the main case to which Senator Franken cites as demonstrating that his amendment is necessary, has not been denied her day in court.

o       A federal appellate court recently found that her employment arbitration agreement does not cover claims of (1) assault and battery; (2) intentional infliction of emotional distress arising out of the alleged assault; (3) negligent hiring, retention, and supervision of employees involved in the alleged assault; and (4) false imprisonment.

o       This means that the arbitration agreement Ms. Jones signed does not foreclose her from bringing these causes of action against her employer in a federal court.

  • Proponents of the amendment have argued that it was necessary so that justice is done in cases of crimes and serious civil rights violations.  They fail to note that arbitration clauses only bind the parties, and thus cannot prohibit prosecution of crimes.  Crimes and civil rights violations can still be prosecuted by the government through criminal and other means.

o       The Franken anti-arbitration amendment is less directed at rape or assault and more designed to prohibit the Department of Defense from paying for a contract with a contractor who chooses with its employees in employment contracts to have a clause pertaining to arbitration as alternative dispute resolution.

  • Since the Franken amendment applies to existing contracts, it would disallow the use of federal funds to pay a federal contractor, for example, to provide protective services for American personnel in Iraq if that contractor has an arbitration agreement in its contract with its employees. 

o       This raises substantial risk of disruption of services to troops in the field, as the existing contracts would have to be stopped and some substitute contract negotiated and agreed to. 

o       Moreover, to the extent this amendment forces the Department to default on existing contracts, even where the contractors are providing exceptional results, this would likely place the Department at great risk for substantial liability grounded in breach of contract.

  • The real motivation behind this amendment is, of course, Democrat hostility to all things arbitration, on behalf of trial lawyers.  This is exemplified by the last sentence of DOD’s opposition to the amendment, which suggests that all arbitration agreements be prohibited, stating “it may be more effective to seek a statutory prohibition of all such arrangements in any business transaction entered into within the jurisdiction of the United States, if these arrangements are deemed to pose an unacceptable method of recourse.”

o       Providing further evidence of this interest is Senator Feingold’s so-called Arbitration Fairness Act (S. 931), which would invalidate all arbitration agreements related to employment, consumer, franchise, and civil rights disputes.

  • This is contrary to long-standing federal law and policy, as the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 seeks to ensure the enforcement of arbitration agreements, and, as the non-partisan Congressional Research Service describes, the “FAA evidences a national policy favoring arbitration.”  CRS Rpt. RL30934.

o       The FAA specifically contemplates mandatory arbitration clauses, providing that “A written provision in any . . . contract evidencing a transaction involving commerce to settle by arbitration . . . shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.”  9 U.S.C. § 2.

  • The Federal Arbitration Act includes provisions to ensure that proceedings are fair.  Additionally, arbitration clauses will not be enforced if the contract itself or its arbitration provisions are entered into unlawfully.

  • To the extent there are jurisdictional problems making it difficult to prosecute some of the cases animating the Franken amendment, more targeted responses are in order rather than the wholesale jettisoning of arbitration clauses in employment agreements.

o       For example, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) was initially intended to provide extraterritorial federal jurisdiction for certain crimes over U.S. defense contractors working overseas. A Republican-led Congress in 2004 expanded MEJA to cover other U.S. government contractors working overseas where their employment relates to supporting the mission of the Department of Defense overseas.

Conservative Heritage Foundation

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/10/16/the-truth-about-the-franken-amendment/

As I said, I still don’t know what to think, but I think it’s more complex than Lindsey Graham voting against rape victims. What do y’all think?

Goys will be goys

11 Replies

There is a saying that negroes like watermelon because…

No, that doesn’t quite capture it, does it? By comparison, it’s pretty innocuous. After all, you could end the sentence, “everyone does.” What’s the harm in liking watermelon? Rather insensitive, not the sort of thing you’d go around saying if you had half a brain and cared anything about other people’s feelings, but it’s not in the same league with Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr. invoking the myth of the rich, avaricious Jew, a stereotype that helped feed the resentments that led to the Holocaust.

No, for an analogy, you’d have to reach to something that actually resulted in the murders of black people, something like, “There is a saying that black men lust after white women because…”

Where did the GOP find these guys? In case you missed it, these two geniuses Merwin and Ulmer — Republican Party chairmen in Bamberg and Orangeburg counties, respectively — wrote the following in an opinion piece published in The (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I find myself wondering, What saying? Who says it?

These guys actually could make a guy sympathetic toward earmarks, which one assumes was not their aim.

Karen Floyd says they’ve apologized, and that’s that. What do y’all think?

Failing to appreciate what you’ve got

3 Replies

This passage, from a book review in The Wall Street Journal today of a book about a small town in Iowa, rang some bells for me:

Whether by choice or inertia, “stayers” eschew college and remain in Ellis to marry, have children, and work mostly at low-paid factory and service jobs. This route may seem “dead end” to achievers, but the supposed dead-enders find that it has its rewards. The primary reason many stay rather than stray is “that they simply like the town. They’re comfortable there and cannot really imagine living anywhere else.” This loyalty is unappreciated by Iowa’s leaders, who run campaigns to lure back yuppie achievers while ignoring the blue-collar stayers who are the heart of places like Ellis.

This may seem a little far afield, but last sentence reminds me of my last 20 years in the newspaper business. The failing to appreciate the people who like you just as you are part.

As a senior manager — first, as an editor in the newsroom, later as a vice president of the company — I saw a lot of fads come and go, all of them designed to “save newspapers” (something we fretted about even back when, in retrospect, newspapers were doing just fine). For awhile, we were all aflutter over the fact that not as many women as men read newspapers. So that led to pushes to downplay “macho” stuff like politics and play up stories about personal health, what to do with the kids during the summer, etc.

Later, we obsessed about young readers, who were not reading newspapers as much, as they aged, as their elders. So we ran all sorts of stuff that looked as lame as any attempt by grownups to be “with it” (to use a phrase that seemed impossibly square when I was a kid) in kids’ eyes is doomed to be. Embarrassing, for the most part.

Then, we decided to make newspapers more like television or the Web — you may have noticed the ridiculously large color photos and painfully short stories that some newspapers (actually, most newspapers) turned to even before the news hole shrank.

I use “we” rather loosely here. Since I was the governmental affairs editor when I was in the newsroom, and since I ran the editorial page when I was a vice president (and had similar jobs at other papers where I worked), I was always the old stick-in-the-mud who continued to be devoted to substance, in the traditional sense. Not because I was smarter or better than the trendier sorts, or had no enthusiasm for new things (after all, I was the only member of senior staff with a blog), but because that was my job. I was paid to do serious. That is, I was paid to do serious until March 20.

I had nothing against bringing in new readers. New readers are great. What got me during those years — and I frequently made this point at the time (which didn’t always make me popular) — was that our industry never seemed to do anything to show we appreciated the readers who appreciated newspapers just as they were. And increasingly, those readers came to feel like we were giving them the back of our hand. I heard it all the time.

Anyway, that’s what I saw over the last couple of decades in the business — a lot of painting, in garish colors, of the deck chairs on the Titanic…

Go co-op, or remain a lone gunman?

6 Replies

Back on this post, remy enlarged upon the subject of participation on the blog with this perfectly good suggestion:

Perhaps you should broaden your blog to include entries from others (eg. some of your former colleagues…those who are employed, but would like having a forum without the hassle of creating their own blog (the blogsphere is already splintered enough) and those who are still looking for gainful employment).
It might expand the dialog, and perhaps bring even more readers (who will comment). More readers may lead to an interest from advertisers…

And then I answered him at such length that I decided to make it a separate post:

I’ve thought about it (having co-authors), but I always run into several objections, aside from my own inertia…

– First, my whole orientation toward blogging is toward the personal blog, both as a writer and as a reader. Those co-op blogs out there don’t do much for me. I like a consistent voice, a particular person whom I can picture (at least, in an abstract sort of way, not like actually picturing a face or something) when I read their thoughts. Otherwise, I have that sense of dislocation I’ve gotten in reading an op-ed proof when the person doing page design absent-mindedly put the wrong sig on the column, and I read three-fourths of it, the whole time thinking “this is really a departure for Thomas Friedman,” and sure enough it turns out to be George Will, and finally things fall into place — but I feel almost like I have to read it over again with that in mind.
– (This is actually a continuation of the first bullet, but I felt it was time for a bullet) Also, when I started the blog, it was sort of an alternative form of expression to the cooperative, consensus-based process of publishing an editorial page. Even in my columns, I was very aware of being the editorial page editor and needing to be somewhat consistent with what we said in editorials (not entirely, but somewhat), and part of blogging was to be liberated from that.
– It would be a lot of work, it seems like. Coordinating something with other people is always more complex and energy-consuming than just doing something yourself as the mood strikes you. And as it stands, I always feel like I don’t devote enough to the blog to make it as good as it should be (what with job-hunting, which really IS kind of like having a job, as the cliche has it, in terms of time and energy; and family obligations and such).
– Then there’s the problem of what do I do if I really don’t like what someone has written, at my request, to contribute. No, it’s not as bad as asking someone to write an op-ed and it’s substandard when it comes in, because you’re not dealing with finite space, but still, things are going to come in that I’d prefer not to have. Say, a conventional take on an issue from either a “liberal” or “conservative” viewpoint, when I’d prefer a little outside-the-spectrum detachment, since fostering that is sort of an aim of the blog. It’s not that I have a definite idea of what should go on the blog, but I think I’d react to something from someone else that I DIDN’T want on the blog, because it didn’t have the right feel, and then what do I do? Hurt the feelings of this person who was trying to help? Or let the blog gradually become something else…
– To varying degrees, the other out-of-work journalists who want to publish online are doing so. Robert Ariail’s got his site, and so does Jeffrey Day, to name two such friends. If I started trying to line them up to join MY blog (and I’ve thought of it for the very reason you cite, that it would make it a product more attractive to advertising), I’d feel sort of like the Dan Akroyd character in “Grosse Pointe Blank” — you know, the hit man who wanted to organize all the other hit men — when I’d rather be the John Cusack character (”Loner; lone gunman — get it? That’s the whole point. I like the lifestyle, the image. Look at the way I dress.”).

Now, all of that said, I still might try to do it, but not yet — I hope to have an idea what sort of job I’ll be doing in the future pretty soon, and what I’ll be doing will have an impact on whether I blog at all, or if I do, what sort of blog it is in the future. So why get a lot of people started on something I would just have to drop?

I just listed those bullets to explain why I haven’t done it already…

… and still probably won’t. But the thought is worth airing.