Category Archives: The Nation

Of Graham, taxes, Norquist and unicorns

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I was a bit out of the loop last week, and missed this:

As a conservative Republican, Lindsey Graham has never had a problem promising not to raise taxes.  Like almost every other Republican member of Congress, he has signed the anti-tax pledge put forth by Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform.

But now Graham says the debt crisis is so severe that the tax pledge — which says no tax loopholes can be eliminated unless every dollar raised by closing  loopholes goes to tax cuts — has got to go.

“When you eliminate a deduction, it’s okay with me to use some of that money to get us out of debt. That’s where I disagree with the pledge,” said Graham…

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But it sent Grover Norquist into orbit, ranting about unicorns:

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, is none too pleased.

“This was a brain fart, not a real idea,” he told me in a phone conversation just now. “It doesn’t scare me. I think what he was doing was answering a hypothetical question to show how hypothetically open-minded he was about something.”…

He said the Senator was making the same mistake Ronald Reagan made in 1982 and George H.W. Bush did in 1990: believing congressional Democrats who promise a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, in this case four-to-one.

“Pinocchio was told by the fox and cat that this would be” a good idea, Norquist said. He lampooned Graham for being disconnected from the reality of fiscal negotiations, comparing him to his three-year-old daughter.

“It’s like having that conversation about what color unicorn you like, while in the back of your mind you know there’s no such thing. ‘Grover, why don’t you like green ones?’ But there aren’t any ones! I have a three year old who says this a lot. She has green unicorns, but we don’t need them in the Senate.”…

I’m not sure exactly what he means, but he seems to be saying that presuming to actually deliberate with the other member of the Congress who, although of a different party, were elected just as legitimately to that body as Graham was (you know, as the Framers of the Constitution envisioned), is as fantastic and ridiculous as the existence of unicorns.

Is that how you read it?

There is the world envisioned by the Framers, and then that envisioned by Grover Norquist. In the latter, all elected representatives do exactly what Grover Norquist tells them to do. I prefer the former.

A bad idea (electing judges) gets worse in NC

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The popular election of judges has always been a terrible idea. But now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s worse:

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition is a new tax-exempt organization, known as a super PAC, supported by wealthy conservative Republicans who are determined to make this year’s race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court ideological and expensive.

This kind of influence in judicial elections is a direct result of the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and unions to make unlimited so-called independent expenditures in campaigns. In adissent in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right…

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition was set up to re-elect state Justice Paul Newby, who has opposed adoptions by same-sex couples and disallowed a lawsuit challenging alleged predatory lending. He gives conservatives a 4-to-3 advantage over liberals on the State Supreme Court and is being challenged by the more liberal state appellate judge, Sam Ervin IV, a grandson of the senator and son of a federal appeals judge…

Go read the whole editorial. Yep, it was always a bad idea — nothing like picking justices on the basis of Kulturkampf issues — but now it’s expensive, too.

Torture memo guy marvels at Obama’s ruthlessness

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Looking at Foreign Policy‘s recommendation of a book titled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” I’m reminded of something I read in the WSJ this morning.

It was an op-ed piece by John Yoo. You know, the Torture Memos guy.

It says in part:

The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them…

This is kind of like Luca Brasi saying that Michael’s even tougher than the old Don. He should know.

Of course, he goes on to criticize, likening Obama’s personal selection of enemies to kill to LBJ’s micromanagement of bombing targets in Vietnam. He also accuses the administration of politically motivated intelligence leaks way worse than those laid at Scooter Libby’s feet.

So he didn’t mean it in a nice way.

Jeb lightly tips hat to Obama, seeks return favor

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Not to be outdone by Bill Clinton in the civility department, Jeb Bush has offered some light praise for President Obama:

The brother of the Mr. Obama’s predecessor noted that Mr. Obama had chosen the head of the Chicago public school system, Arne Duncan, as his education secretary and they had worked to focus more on school children and less on the adults running the schools.

“Any time an elected official in the world we’re in today that appears so dysfunctional challenges a core constituency not of their opponent but of their own political base, I think we should pause and give them credit,” Bush said.

The comments came after Rose pointed to comments Bush had made in April praising Duncan and saying the Obama administration had done “a pretty good job” on education policy…

The former politician, who flatly ruled out a run as Mitt Romney’s running mate in the interview, noted that he now has the luxury of being able to say what he thinks and is not constrained by political ambitions.

“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama. I got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong. And I, with civility and respect, I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things that I think he’s done a good job on, I– I’m not gonna just say, ‘no, no,’ ” Bush said…

In his case, though, he’d like to see the compliment returned:

“I think it would help him politically. For example, when he was gracious at the unveiling of the portrait, you know, there’s no way not to be gracious I guess in that kind of setting,” Bush said, referring to a recent ceremony at the White House to unveil the official portrait of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush.

“But it helps,” he said, calling it “just a small acknowledgement that the guy that, you know, that you replaced isn’t the source of every problem that– and– and the excuse of why you’re not being successful I think would help him politically.”…

Actually, I think it would, too — among people like me. But he has to worry about his base.

Unfortunately, to those who are not retired from politics, the other side is the devil these days, and one is never allowed to give the devil his due.

Recall is never a good idea

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I didn’t agree with everything that E.J. Dionne said in his column about the failed Wisconsin recall effort, but I was pleased to read this part:

Perhaps the most significant exit poll finding was this one: Only about a quarter of those who went to the polls Tuesday said that a recall was appropriate for any reason. Roughly six in 10 said a recall should be used only in the case of official misconduct. And another tenth thought a recall was never appropriate. Most voters, in other words, rejected the very premise of the election in which they were casting ballots. This proved to be a hurdle too high for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), Walker’s opponent.

Voters should have to live with their bad decisions until the next election, to allow for some order in government — and to lessen the already toxic atmosphere of the perpetual campaign.

If an official does something really heinous, there’s impeachment. But this “make us mad and we’ll have another election” stuff is inimical to our system of representative democracy.

E.J.’s column was about what left and right should learn from Wisconsin. He suggests, although doesn’t say  it overtly, that it would be wrong to think the left has a losing proposition with its support for public employee unions.

But it does. I found this piece, also in the WashPost today, more to the point:

“Anybody, anybody would have been better than Scott Walker,” said Gregory J. Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents workers in more than a dozen federal agencies. Junemann commutes weekly to Washington from Milwaukee, where his union member wife is a public school employee.

Like many political observers, Junemann can point to the tremendous funding advantage Walker had over Barrett, but the union leader isn’t satisfied with that as an excuse for the mayor’s defeat.

“The people of Wisconsin said that the attack by Scott Walker and his allies on public employes and their unions was acceptable,” Junemann said. “That’s what they said with their votes. This puts us in a very uphill battle for November.”

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has a different spin: “I do not believe the results of the Wisconsin election demonstrate strong support for anti-employee policies.” Instead, “the broader long-term message,” she said, is “working men and women, and their unions, will not stand idly by while reactionary forces attempt to roll back hard-won rights.”

They might not stand idly by, but they also might lose.

They got a union just for SERGEANTS? Really?

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When I saw this headline at the Chicago Sun-Times site — “Ex-head of Chicago police sergeants union sentenced to 12 years in prison” — I thought what any ol’ Southern boy would think:

They got so many unions up there, they got a special one just for sergeants?

Apparently so.

Which means that those other parts of the country are… really different… from down here. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

As I’ve said before, I don’t hold with public employee unions. Public employees work for the people, not some separate private entity. That means they serve themselves as well as their friends and neighbors. Given that special relationship, there’s something really twisted about employer and employed being on opposite sides of a bargaining table. We should be able to rely on their being on the same side.

Fortunately, that’s one thing (one of the few) that I don’t have to worry about in South Carolina. We ain’t got none o’ that.

Unfortunately, we do get some of the negative effects of public employee unions here, with none of the dubious benefits. For instance… you know all that money that flows into our state from people trying to elect legislators who will undermine public education? They are to a great extent motivated by their animus toward “teacher unions.” Well, we don’t have any of those here, which is why it’s bitterly ironic that we should be a battleground for that issue (thanks in large part to Mark Sanford — his being governor persuaded those interests that South Carolina was fertile ground for their movement). The SCEA is a professional association, not a collective bargaining unit.

Today in the WSJ, there was yet another screed against teacher unions — which of course has no application to South Carolina. Sadly, too few in our state understand that, based on how many times I hear public education critics in our state moan about how the “teacher unions” stand in the way of improving education here. (I actually heard it from the lips of a Rotary speaker recently.)

Anyway, these are the things I’m thinking about as voters in Wisconsin decide whether to recall their governor over a battle about public employee unions. A fight in which we do not have a dog.

Inglis on why the tribe turned against him

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Kathryn brings my attention to this interview piece with Bob Inglis on Salon.

Bob Inglis is a guy for whom I’ve always had a lot of respect — ever since he got elected to Congress in the early 90s as a fiscal (and cultural) conservative, and then voted against highway money for his own district. This was back when nobody did this. “Conservatives” like Strom Thurmond had always talked a good game, but brought home the bacon. Inglis was a trailblazer.

To listen to Bob Inglis talk is to respect him, just as he respects others — something that sets him apart.

Inglis has always been deeply conservative, and deeply committed to his principles. But the know-nothings of his party unceremoniously dumped him in the last election, basically — as near as I can tell — for not being as angry as they were.

Anyway, this is an interesting passage:

Inglis remembers campaigning door-to-door and encountering hostility for the first time.

“I’m wondering, ‘Why is this happening?’” he said. “And what I came around to is that what happens is the tribe selects you to go to Washington. You believe with the tribe, you agree with them, and you go to Washington as their representative.

“Then you get there and you mingle with these other tribes, and you come to understand their point of view – not agree with it, but understand it. So when that view is presented, you don’t have the same sort of shocked reaction that some of the tribe members at home have to hearing that view.”

He recalled getting to know John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Democratic congressman from Georgia.

“He is an incredible American,” Inglis said. “I just disagree with him on this budget thing. But back at the tribe, at the tribal meeting, it’s like, ‘He’s some kind of Communist, that John Lewis. He’s not an American.’ No! He’s an incredible American. He’s one of our heroes.

“But the tribe doesn’t see that. The tribe sees you as sort of getting too cozy with John. And then they start to doubt you, because of this betrayal response. We are hard-wired to respond very violently – as I understand it, the brain really responds to betrayal. It’s one of the strongest human emotions.”…

Inglis, a conservative Republican to his core, speaks here to a very UnParty sensibility. You have your principles and you stand up for them. But that doesn’t mean you delegitimize those with whom you disagree. If you do that, the deliberative process upon which our system of government is built collapses.

Bob understands that. Too few who still hold office do.

Hoping Obama won’t really run this way

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Maybe y’all have time to read this piece by John Heilemann in New York Magazine. I don’t, not today. If you do, please get back and tell me that things don’t really look as dark as they do at the beginning:

The contours of that contest are now plain to see—indeed, they have been for some time. Back in November, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, two fellows at the Center for American Progress, identified the prevailing dynamics: The presidential race would boil down to “demographics versus economics.” That the latter favor Mitt Romney is incontestable. From high unemployment and stagnant incomes to tepid GDP growth and a still-pervasive sense of anxiety bordering on pessimism in the body politic, every salient variable undermines the prospects of the incumbent. The subject line of an e-mail from the Romney press shop that hit my in-box last week summed up the challenger’s framing of the election concisely and precisely: “What’s This Campaign Going to Be About? The Obama Economy.”

The president begs to differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come…

Y’all know how I feel about Identity Politics. I want leaders who want to lead all of us, not this or that arbitrarily selected subset. Obama, to me, is the guy who inspired a victorious crowd in Columbia to chant, on the night of the 2008 South Carolina primary, “Race doesn’t matter!” Amen, said I. The atmosphere that night — when voters rejected the continued partisan strife that the Clinton campaign seemed to offer — was one in which we put our divisions behind us, and work toward building a better country together, as one people.

And if there’s anything more distressing in my book than Identity Politics, it’s Kulturkampf. Those couple of paragraphs are enough to push me toward political despair on that count. The next two grafs are worse:

But if the Obama 2012 strategy in this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will represent a striking deviation. Though the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This [f*@#ing] guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”

Yeah, that’s all we need. A campaign that sees itself as an army of indignant minorities, feminists, gays and young people up against a coalition of self-interested white males, Ayn Randers, birthers and nativists, with both sides convinced that it is at war with the other. And each subset being motivated not by what’s good for the country, but by what it sees as advantageous to itself as a group.

So much for the United States.

All that’s left to me at this point is to hope the campaign plays out differently from the way this writer envisions it.

Then, suddenly, the economy got worse faster than you can say ‘Polish death camp’

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This hasn’t been a good week for Mr. Obama. First there was the “Polish death camp” thing that wouldn’t go away. (Hey, I understood what he meant, didn’t you? But just try explaining it to the Poles…)

Today, there’s this:

Worst U.S. Job Data in a Year Signals Stalling Recovery

A dismal job market report Friday gave a resounding confirmation to fears that the United States recovery has markedly slowed, reflecting mounting evidence of a global slowdown.

The report, which showed the smallest net job growth in a year and an unemployment rate moving in the wrong direction, was a political game-changer that bodes ill for President Obama as he faces re-election.

It provided traction for his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, at a time when politicians have been deeply divided over the most effective way to strengthen the economy. And it put increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to take further action to stimulate growth.

The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 in April, largely because more people began looking for work. And there was more unexpected bad news: job gains that had been reported in March and April were revised downward…

Yow. Now the president knows how John McCain felt when the economy got shot out from under him. OK, not that bad. But still not good.

What do y’all think? Is it a blip, or a negative trend? Because I remain convinced that the health of the economy depends in large part on what y’all — all 300 million or so of y’all — think about it. Yeah, there are some things we can’t help, like the Euro mess, but largely we have the ability to stimulate the economy by ourselves. Hey, that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not how I meant it. Or maybe I did. Talking about money stuff makes my mind wander…

Sympathy for the Devil: Clinton defends Romney

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I liked learning about this today:

Bill Clinton predicted Thursday that President Obama will win reelection this fall “by five or six points,” but the former president’s half-full look at the general election contest was overshadowed by his somewhat unexpected praise of Mitt Romney’s “sterling business career” as chief executive of Bain Capital.

“I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say ‘This is bad work. This is good work,'” Clinton said of the private equity industry during an interview on CNN, later adding that Romney’s time in both the private and public sector leaves no doubt he’d be capable of performing the “essential functions of the office.”…

Good for Bill. It’s nice to see someone depart from the SOP tactic of demonizing everything about the opposition.

You don’t have to think private equity managers — or, say, community organizers — are inherently a bad thing to prefer the other candidate.

As Republicans do to the president, too many Democrats want to portray their opponent as the devil. I appreciate Bill Clinton taking the time to run against that grain.

‘Hindsight’ has nothing to do with it

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Kathryn calls my attention to a piece at Salon written by a former Edwards campaign worker, which says in part:

It’s become customary in politically obsessed circles for observers to preen about how they knew that Edwards was bad news all along. His lawyerly ways! His sentimental stories about growing up working class! His hair! How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?

Of course, a quick perusal of the John Edwards of 2007 demonstrates that this sort of hindsight owes more to revisionist wishful thinking than a correct assessment of the evidence at the time….

Sorry, Amanda. You’ve got that wrong. There were no halcyon days when Edwards was great. Certain not in 2007. Here’s what I wrote about him then.

But you’ve pegged what I’ve thought going back to the 2004 campaign: “How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?” How, indeed? I used to wonder at it, and worry over it a good bit.

And I may agree with her that his trial was a waste of time and money. Justice was done with regard to John Edwards some time back. All the nation needs to know is that he’ll never hold high public office again, and that’s assured.

The piece ends:

Even those who’ll never be able to forgive Edwards for nearly destroying his legacy should be grateful for the good sense shown by the jury today. Let’s hope the Justice Department takes their lead and lets this one go.

What legacy?

Gallup: Veterans are cause of the gender gap

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Here’s an interesting fact I didn’t know before.

Turns out that the “gender gap” that has Mitt Romney doing better among men and Barack Obama doing better among women (the usual pattern for a generation, at least) is less a gender thing, and more a matter of whether men have served in the military or not. According to Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — U.S. veterans, about 13% of the adult population and consisting mostly of older men, support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama for president by 58% to 34%, while nonveterans give Obama a four-percentage-point edge.

These data, from an analysis of Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted April 11-May 24, show that 24% of all adult men are veterans, compared with 2% of adult women.

Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points. It turns out that the male skew for Romney is driven almost entirely by veterans. Romney leads by one point among nonveteran men, contrasted with the 28-point edge Romney receives among male veterans.

The small percentage of female veterans in the U.S., in contrast to their male counterparts, do not differ significantly in their presidential vote choice from the vast majority of women who are not veterans…

Here’s a graph:

Interesting. I wonder what the long-term implications of this will be. Most of the men who have served in the military are older than I am. Twenty years from now, will much of the gender gap have disappeared, in favor of Democrats? I don’t know. I’d need to understand better why this veteran gap exists to be able to answer that.

Whites not the majority? Nothing new in that…

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Did y’all see the “news” the other day — ironically, the day before my grandson was born — that white babies are no longer the majority? I first heard it on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Quoth Neal Conan:

We’ve known for years this day would come, but here it is. The Census Bureau announced today that nonwhite births now make up a majority in the United States. Data gathered in 2011 show that nonwhite, Hispanic, African-American, Asian, Native American, mixed race and others combined for 50.4 percent. That’s the first time that white births were not a majority in U.S. history, and that raises some questions about policy – from education to social services programs – and about how we see ourselves as a nation….

Perhaps this is a good time to inject a bit of historical perspective…

I’m still off-and-on gradually making my way through Charles C. Mann’s 1493, while reading several other books at varying rates, and every time I read a stretch in it, I learn something startling. For instance, I refer you to the fact that for most of the history of Europeans in the Americas — up to the mid-nineteenth century — there were far more people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere than there were white. Way more. An excerpt (I hope the publishers will excuse the length of this quote. I share it within the context of urging you to run out and buy this book; there are many other things in it that will surprise you, and enlarge your understanding of our world.):

This was surprising to me for a couple of reasons. For instance, I had long known that before and after the Civil War, South Carolina had a larger black population than white. Which means that before 1860, most of the state’s population was enslaved.

I used to think of that as anomalous. I thought of it as helping explain the fact that South Carolina slaveholders were more fanatically devoted to their Peculiar Institution that the white elites anywhere else. Hence that firing on Fort Sumter thing.

But as it turns out, if you look at ALL post-Columbian immigration across the hemisphere, not just English, you see that far, far more were brought here as slaves from African than came here, either free or indentured, from all Europe. By 1860, this balance had changed in many places (thereby making SC somewhat anomalous), but for most of the time from 1492 until then, a larger black population had been the norm. (Of course, for that same period, there remained more Indians than whites or blacks, in spite of the way native populations had been decimated by European and African diseases.)

I also found it surprising because I spent part of my childhood in Latin America, and it did not prepare me for this statistic — even though I studied history in Spanish in school (Mann’s references to Columbus as Cristóbal Colón seem very natural to me). In Ecuador, where I lived for two-and-a-half years, it was very unusual to see anyone who looked at all African. I knew that Brazil had imported vast numbers of slaves during the colonial period, and that you could see the results on the streets of Rio. I would have said the same of the islands of the Caribbean.

But for there to be that many more blacks than whites across all the Americas? I had no idea. We all are aware that black labor largely built this country, but I guess I thought that was because those workers were owned by a white majority. I was wrong. At least from a hemispherewide perspective.

In any case… whites not being the majority? Nothing new about that on this side of the world.

Are women fed up with Democratic pandering?

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Tom Edsall makes some interesting observations in this piece in The New York Times from over the weekend. If you haven’t read it, you should.

His topic is the impact of Barack Obama’s rather overt bids for the renewed affections for key Democratic constituencies and interest groups defined by demographic identity. Unsurprisingly, Edsall finds that the voting public at large is suspicious of such moves. For instance, while the public is evenly split on the subject of gay “marriage,” there is widespread cynicism toward the president’s embrace of the notion:

Some evidence that Obama must walk a fine line as he seeks majority backing can be found in the May 15 CBS News/New York Times poll, which showed that 67 percent of respondents said Obama came out for same-sex marriage “mostly for political reasons,” while just 24 percent said he made the decision “mostly because he thinks it is right.”

But the really surprising thing he finds is the way, after all the gyrations Democrats have gone through in recent months, including the “war on women” and other absurd rhetoric, the president has lost ground among women:

In an equally troublesome finding for Obama, the Times poll recorded a dramatic drop in the level of support for Obama among women, with Romney actually pulling ahead, 46-44. Obama’s support among female voters has fallen from 49 to 44 percent over the past two months, while Romney’s rose three points.

Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager of the Obama campaign, has challenged the accuracy of the Times poll, arguing that the methodology – calling people who have been previously surveyed,  known as a “panel back” — resulted in “a biased sample.”

But even if the poll findings can be reasonably disputed, they still suggest that Obama’s aggressive bid to strengthen his support among women may be backfiring. Separate polling by Marquette Law School in Wisconsin shows Obama holding a strong, but declining advantage among women voters. In February, Obama had a 21 percentage point lead among women, 56-35; by mid-May, his margin among women had fallen to 9 points, 49-40….

Could it be that you just can’t go past a certain point in pandering to women without insulting their collective intelligence? It would appear so…

Glendon on why Catholic institutions are suing

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I read with interest this piece in The Wall Street Journal today by Mary Ann Glendon, headlined “Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government,” partly because she is someone I’ve suggested in the past as a potential speaker in the Cardinal Bernardin lecture series (remember, last year we brought E.J. Dionne).

I first became interested in her a couple of decades back, when I was reading a lot of communitarian literature. I was interested in her study of how nations in Europe had found it easier to come to accommodations over abortion, because unlike Americans, they didn’t frame the issue as a clash between absolute “rights.”

Anyway, here are some excerpts from her piece today:

This week Catholic bishops are heading to federal courts across the country to defend religious liberty. On Monday they filed 12 lawsuits on behalf of a diverse group of 43 Catholic entities that are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) sterilization, abortifacient and birth-control insurance mandate.

Like most Americans, the bishops have long taken for granted the religious freedom that has enabled this nation’s diverse religions to flourish in relative harmony. But over the past year they have become increasingly concerned about the erosion of conscience protections for church-related individuals and institutions. Their top-rated program for assistance to human trafficking victims was denied funding for refusing to provide “the full range of reproductive services,” including abortion. For a time, Catholic Relief Services faced a similar threat to its international relief programs. The bishops fear religious liberty is becoming a second-class right…

The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.

The media have implied all along that the dispute is mainly of concern to a Catholic minority with peculiar views about human sexuality. But religious leaders of all faiths have been quick to see that what is involved is a flagrant violation of religious freedom. That’s why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, declared, “We’re all Catholics now.”…

Religious freedom is subject to necessary limitations in the interests of public health and safety. The HHS regulations do not fall into that category. The world has gotten along fine without this mandate—the services in question are widely and cheaply available, and most employers will provide coverage for them.

But if the regulations are not reversed, they threaten to demote religious liberty from its prominent place among this country’s most cherished freedoms. That is why Cardinal Dolan told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on April 8: “We didn’t ask for this fight, but we won’t back away from it.”

When did truckers become so law-abiding?

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Over the weekend, I was a passenger in my wife’s car when I saw the following amazing sight, and reported it on Twitter:

Just saw a tractor-trailer do a U-turn at Gervais and Huger. Really. Brown Trucking Co. of Lithonia, Ga.

Seriously. We were several cars back from the light on Gervais, waiting to proceed eastward (with the McDonald’s on our right) and this truck, which was going the way we were, pulled out into the intersection, cut way left and swung across several lanes to turn all the way around within the intersection, and head back toward the bridge over the river. Cars converging on the intersection from four directions just froze — probably in amazement. He did it on the first try, which makes me think it wasn’t his first time.

And this got me to thinking of something. I got to thinking about how you seldom see truckers do really crazy stuff anymore.

I mean, compared to back in the ’70s, about the time of the CB radio craze. Back then, it was seemingly an outlaw culture. Driving on an interstate in a normal car (much less my Volkswagen Rabbit I had back then), was truly taking your life in your hands, with kamikaze behemoths hurtling down upon you at ungodly speeds.

If you saw a trucker doing less than 80 in those days, it meant he was climbing a steep grade and hadn’t gotten as much of a running start as he’d like.

It was SOP for truckers to bear down upon you from the rear (especially if you dared to get into the left lane to pass somebody), closing at speeds that would ensure that it was all over if you tapped your brakes. You had to veer out of their way the first chance you got; it was imperative to survival.

Then, suddenly, just a few years ago (I want to say it was the middle of the last decade), I noticed something — truckers were almost all driving at or below the speed limit. They were no longer aggressive, much less homicidal. Cars passed them, instead of the other way around. The interstate seemed much less dangerous than it had been.

Anybody else notice this? And does anyone know why it happened? Was it:

  • Rising fuel prices, which made it imperative that they drive in a more economical fashion?
  • Tougher enforcement? (If it was this, it happened in multiple states at once.)
  • Those “How Safe is My Driving” signs with the phone numbers?
  • A change in trucker culture, a maturation beyond the “Smoky and the Bandit” stage?

Or something else I’m not thinking of?

Theories are welcomed. Anyone who actually knows something from within the industry would be even more so.

The execution of the wrong Carlos

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The Guardian has a fascinating story about the Columbia Human Rights Law Review‘s expose of a case in which, its exhaustive research indicates, an innocent man was executed in Texas.

Some excerpts:

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn’t committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez’s lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna’s sister Rose…

At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police had looked for a “Carlos Hernandez” after his name had been passed to them by DeLuna’s lawyers, without success. They had concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication, a “phantom” who simply did not exist. The chief prosecutor said in summing up that Hernandez was a “figment of DeLuna’s imagination”.

Four years after DeLuna was executed, Liebman decided to look into the DeLuna case as part of a project he was undertaking into the fallibility of the death penalty. He asked a private investigator to spend one day – just one day – looking for signs of the elusive Carlos Hernandez.

By the end of that single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna’s arrest and execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.

Liebman’s investigator tracked down within a few hours a woman who was related to both the Carloses. She supplied Hernandez’s date of birth, which in turn allowed the unlocking of Hernandez’s criminal past as the case rapidly unravelled…

You should just go read the whole thing. Or for that matter, the original study.

This, of course, is one of the main reasons I oppose the death penalty. There are others, but this one is enough for a lengthy discussion…

Thoughts on what’s been done to this poor kid?

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A little motherhood controversy for Mother’s Day.

It would of course be startling enough to hear that a woman is nursing an almost 4-year-old. What’s shocking is the photograph, in which the kid looks big enough (compared to apparently petite mom) to be about 7.

But the worst thing, to me, are his eyes looking at the camera — looking out at America, in the photo that will dog him the rest of his life.

Am I saying that in high school, bullies will be pinning him down and cutting his hair against his will? I don’t know about that. I’m sort of worried about him surviving 1st grade.

A really cruel thing has been done to this boy, and at this point he has no idea. I feel bad for him.

Carefully, artfully, Obama shifts to support for same-sex ‘marriage’

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Perhaps some of y’all will want to discuss this. For that purpose, I give you this post.

Basically, in a fairly transparent series of steps designed to test the waters, two people in the administration stepped out and said they now support same-sex marriage. From the time they did so, it seemed highly likely that they were doing so to see if the world exploded in their faces, ahead of the president making this statement. (Excuse the mixed metaphors; I’m having a busy and harried day.)

But it was artful the way they did it. By having Joe Biden, the famous loose cannon, be the first one to step out, it was possible to disown the statement completely if there was too much of a negative reaction. There wasn’t — at least, not particularly (something that reflects the fact that most people, whether they are pro- or anti-, simply don’t care as much about this as the portion of Obama’s base that cares deeply) — and that made it safe for the next soldier to step into the minefield (sorry! sorry! there’s another metaphor). And when Arne Duncan didn’t get blown up, that made everyone go, Arne Duncan — he’s no loose cannon. And he’s Obama’s longtime basketball buddy!

The next step was for the president himself to say the words that would calm down a significant portion of his fund-raising base. And to do it early enough in the campaign that most of us will have mostly forgotten it by November, since there are so many other things we care so much more about.

The calculated nature of this move was reflected in the language used by one “LGBT advocate” quoted by the WashPost: “The conversation is, what can and should we do to quiet the uproar and to get donors back on board.”

Well, that’s done, and now the Obama campaign will be ready to move on, having brought this up and dispensed with it during the dead time in the campaign between the effective end of the GOP contest and the party conventions just before Labor Day. There was no other time that the president could have done this that would have made less of a political splash.

As I say, deftly done. If there was anything about it unartful, it was perhaps this part:

And he said he wanted to be “sensitive” to the fact that for many Americans, the word “marriage” evokes “very powerful positions, religious beliefs and so forth.”

That somewhat bemused characterization of religious traditionalists is somewhat reminiscent of his “God and guns” misstep of four years ago, making people with traditional values sound a bit like critters in the zoo or something — as something out there that one understands only with great effort. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as that earlier faux pas. And after all, how is he supposed to characterize people whose entire worldview he is rejecting?

So the thing was done about as skillfully as it could be done. If one is determined to do it.

Happy V-E Day, and can you keep a secret?

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The P.M. flashes his famous V-for-Victory sign. We can't tell, from this photograph, whether he was flashing an "E" sign with the other hand.

After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration’s claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not “why publish?” but “why would we withhold information of significance?” We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.

— Bill Keller, then-executive editor
The New York Times
June 2006

Germany surrendered to the Allies 67 years ago today. A few days ago, we saw a little footnote to that milestone. The Associated Press apologized for firing correspondent Ed Kennedy in 1945 over one of the biggest scoops in AP history. Kennedy reported the unconditional surrender a full day ahead of the competition, defying military censors to do so. The AP publicly rebuked him, and quietly canned him.

The apology came a bit late for Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963.

This is not to confuse him with another Kennedy who also died in 1963, and had earlier persuaded The New York Times to back off the Bay of Pigs story for national security reasons. (See Keller quote above.)

The icing on this tale came today, when we learned that the AP knew last week that the United States was closing in on Underwear Bomber II in Yemen — but withheld the news at the request of the government. That’s what the WSJ reported this morning, anyway:

U.S. officials had known about the plot for about a month, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the plot in April. White House officials had persuaded the Associated Press, which had an account of the plot in hand as early as last week, to hold off on publishing because the intelligence operation was still under way.

This is fascinating. It was one thing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with government censors in 1945, when the entire country was united in the all-out effort to win WWII, and cooperation with the censors was reflexive.

But today? When it is fashionable to call the War on Terror the “so-called War on Terror”? When, as Keller mentions above, the leftward side of the political spectrum persists in excoriating the media for not being skeptical enough prior to the Iraq invasion? For a major media entity to respond with a snappy salute to a government request to be discrete is decidedly remarkable.

This will no doubt spark dark rumblings — and probably already has; I’m not bothering to look — among Republicans about whether the AP would have agreed to this request if it had come from the Bush administration.

Interesting question.

What do you think about all of this? Oh, you want to know what I think. Well, I don’t know enough to have an opinion yet. I’d like to know what the AP knew, and what it was told before it made the decision to hold back on the story. The default position for a journalist is to report a story when you know it’s true, as Keller reported. But this sounds like it’s one of those rare cases in which lives may have been saved by holding back — which would justify the decision to wait.