Morning Fog

Turning Back the Clock

Further to this past Saturday's Beckstravaganza, I think Courtland Milloy's post-game analysis is worth reading (see it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/29/AR2010082901488.html; Typepad's hyperlink button has been messed with, and isn't working).   It makes the very valid point that I've also complained of in the current Republican credo:  it's regressive.  Religiously, politically, socially, economically, regressive.

Progressive, regressive.  Which shall it be?  Personally I don't believe it's possible to hold back the clock, or to rewind it to an earlier day, let alone an earlier era.  We can have the politics of the Pleistocene, but it will be mainly the dinosaurs who follow its flag. 

Beck and King, King and Beck

The media frenzy of the week (the "ground zero mosque" having been done to death without result), is over a radio personality named Glenn Beck having tried to usurp (or not) Martin Luther King's legend by delivering a political speech to his own followers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on the same date that King did.

For the record, I think this entire controversy is spurious.  Beck has a perfect right to speak there if the National Park Service has approved it.  End of story.  Few would ever have even considered the equation Beck = King if the media hadn't played it that way.  Beck supporters ought to note that the supposedly liberal mainstream media have chosen to put Beck on the front pages in a way that could never have happened without their help.  This is normal journalistic practice these days, I'm sorry to say. 

Whatever the hype, though, I am not too worried that Beck could go down in history as another Martin Luther King.

King was a religious figure, a civic leader, and yes, informally a politican.  Few would contest that he was motivated by principle and by a moral sense of right and wrong.  Beck's main claim to fame, evidently, is that he's a "commentator"; his motivation can only be to amass a following for largely egotistical and commercial purposes.   It's easy to sit back and criticize with impunity, and perhaps even suggest simplistic solutions, but he'll never have to take responsibility for implementing his ideas, nor for dealing with the fallout when they don't pan out.  If today's extravaganza is his attempt to grow beyond that, and move in a political direction, then he's graduated from "commentator" to "demagogue." 

King was fighting an uphill battle against entrenched prejudices; his challenge was to persuade, one follower at a time.  Beck faces no such trial.  He preaches to the choir; it's easy to develop a following by pandering to the basest human instincts, and that's what Beck seems to do. 

Is Beck himself a racist, a xenophobe, or an anarchist?  Perhaps not, but he has identified the strains of those populist currents of prejudice and fear as ones that resonate with a large cross section of the public, and he is prepared to exploit them.  Are Beck's followers all racists, xenophobes, or anarchist?  No.  But the group -- the "universe of Beckites," is the current harbor of refuge for those categories of thought.   

King was struggling to make a reality of what was already in our Constitution, but largely ignored - his vision of America was expansive, positive, and optimistic.  Beck, by contrast, talks of "restoring," meaning a retrograde movement; and his vision is restrictive, negative, and ultimately pessimistic. 

That's a thread of thought I'd like to explore later but for now, suffice it to say that a big crowd on the Mall can result from many different causes.  It doesn't always mean the presence of a messiah; sometimes it just means free hot dogs. 

Elected Judges

After my comments about conflicts of interest yesterday, I'm bowled over by a Washington Post editorial that tells us 38 of our states get their (state) Supreme Court judges by electing them.  Of course, we all know that at lower levels, even more judges in this country are elected officials.

With respect to those states -- what were they thinking?  I don't need a Washington Post editorial to tell me that there's an obvious conflict here with the impartiality that we expect from our justice system, when judges have to compete for votes.  First, because the popularity of the views they espouse during an election campaign ought to have nothing to do with whether they become judges or not.  Second, because an election campaign requires money, and we all know where the big money will come from. 

Although this isn't a new problem, the increasing tendency to politicize absolutely everything, from our choice of President to our choice of a brand of beer, makes it more serious.

Can it be prevented?  After all, the U.S. Supreme Court Justices don't stand for election but even they have grown increasingly political, and recent decisions at other levels (recall the Louisiana judge with oil and gas interests who ruled against a freeze on deepwater drilling in the gulf).  Not surprisingly, some point out that election may not be so bad if the alternative is (as we all realize it will be) to have the choices made by some board composed of (say) trial lawyers or (worse) politicians. 

I think part of the answer lies in the level of the court.  It may be OK for some state district judge to run for election; the issues they deal with are often pretty basic cases of determining the facts, anyway.  But at the Supreme Court level, we ought to be able to do better. 

An appointive system would be one alternative; to dampen political machination in the process, perhaps the members of the board responsible for nominating judges should not themselves be legal professionals.   Failing that, maybe high court judges could still be elected, but strictly forbidden from expressing views publicly on judicial issues. In that sort of a race, they'd run solely on their record, their judicial training and their experience; they shouldn't need the money that special interest groups would be only too happy to provide.  

Eggs And Salmonella: A Civics Lesson

The whole escalating furor over unsafe eggs being shipped even when they were known to contain salmonella strikes me as a perfect object lesson for those who think government is not worth a dime - until it's needed.

As a Republican President and a Republican majority pretty much let businesses dictate their own terms for most of the decade, one result was a considerable lessening of regulatory controls on a wide variety of American business; businesses would henceforth regulate themselves, obviating government watchdogs.  At the same time, advocates of so-called "small government" pushed tax cuts (but not war spending), hoping to "starve" government à la Reagan; this led to budget cuts in many areas, but especially in those "unnecessary" regulatory commissions and agencies.

We've seen the result in the financial and real estate markets, and in coal mining, and have been dealing with it for some time now.  But we've also begun to see it in food safety - tomatoes, nuts, jalapeno peppers, pet food.  Now eggs.  This latest case stands out because here, the media are working hard to stir outrage that salmonella was detected as early as last spring in the two companies now in the spotlight, but regulators did nothing about it.  Yet regulators at all levels, thanks in large part to budget cuts and staffing reductions, are understaffed and until July, didn't even have the power to shut down a plant producing tainted food. 

The lessons are just plain common sense, if you've ever heard the adage about the fox and the henhouse: (a)  Given the opportunity, some businesses will inevitably cut corners to reduce costs, even where public health is involved; (b) no institution can be counted on to regulate itself; (c) there is a legitimate role for government regulation; (d) like anything else, government services have to be paid for and (e) the way that's done is through taxes.  The whole conflation of small-government, no-tax, pro-business "concepts" that was so popular with the Bush crowd is nonsense.

There will, of course be compromises.  I doubt that any of us would care to pay the full costs of (say) weekly inspections of the thousands of food companies across the country.  Yet clearly, a budget that allows for only a dozen inspections a year (across the many thousands) is inadequate.  There must be balance, but overall, there's room for a good deal more to be done.

Often, regulation is best when it's preventive.  However, there's constant resistance, in many sectors of business, to any standards that raise costs.  That's why we have power lines strung through the trees, subject to interruption in every rainstorm; and it's why we have food production facilities that aren't built to keep out rats, flies, and other disease carriers.  It's not impossible, as this article regarding practices in Denmark suggests.

Currently, the advice is to avoid many common brands of eggs, or to be sure your eggs are "fully cooked."  Yet the best ways of eating eggs are those that leave the yolk runny:  soft-boiled, poached, or sunny-side up.  Should we just adapt to having our eating practices dictated by the failure of producers to work to prevent problems?   Maybe.  We've done that in many instances.  (Remember when you could eat a steak rare without worrying about dying?) But it's getting tiresome. 

(This post is also being cross-posted on The Tin Lizard .)

Obama Addresses The Mosque Issue. Why?

A few days ago President Obama ventured into the troubled waters of the Manhattan Mosque issue, first appearing to suggest that the construction of an Islamic Center two blocks from "ground zero" was not only legal but morally right.  Later, he appeared to walk that back a bit, restricting himself to the legal right only.

The victims' surrogates quickly complained that this was improper involvement by the President in a local issue.  (Which means of course that they didn't agree with what he said.) 

They were followed by (mostly Republican) members of Congress.  I don't think the latter seriously think Obama was out of line with his statement; they probably just see potential political benefit from pretending to think so.  But while they pander, as Newt Gingrich did today in likening proponents of the mosque to Nazis, they fan the embers of a culture war, and propagate purely dumb, erroneous thinking:  No, it's not the least analogous to Pearl Harbor and the Japanese; that's like blaming Pearl Harbor on the Nisei.  Evidently (to paraphrase Barry Goldwater) trampling on America's freedoms in the defense of GOP political victory is no vice. 

Some press attention has focused on why Obama would venture into such an emotion-laden maelstrom of conflict and risk alienating voters with elections already on everyone's mind.  I'd say he had to.  At its core, this is really a local matter of exactly what will be built on a certain lot in New York City.  But the argument was rising to a national level, with some ugly implications for our concept of religious freedom. 

Time, then, for the President to intervene, especially this President, who has said he wouldn't shy away from truth.  As President, he really needed to speak publicly to the issue, even at some political risk.  Michael Gerson has offered some good insights  on this point. 

And I might add, Obama, as a Democrat, needed just as urgently to address what has always been the party's strength:  an emphasis on equality of treatment under the law.  Some Democrats of late had obviously been tempted by political expediency to ignore the fundamental First Amendment issue here; prominent others have remained silent.  The President's statement may help remind them who they are. 

  

A Mosque At Ground Zero? Why Not?

It's hard for me to understand the reasons some people and groups are objecting to the presence of a mosque (or "Muslim center") in proximity to ground zero of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Let's start with the obvious:   In the United States of America, the owner of a plot of land has the right to build pretty much anything he wants on it.  Our Constitution is founded on property rights.  Further, the "free exercise of religion" is guaranteed by the First Amendment.  In short:  Can Muslims build an Islamic Center on this property?  Yes they can.  If President Obama and the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer can agree on this point (and they do!) then surely it's beyond political dispute.

End of story.  Yet the debate goes on. 

Emotion enters in.  The distraught and overwrought group who lost family members to the violence that day assert that any institution of the Muslim religion anywhere near ground zero is inappropriate because ... well, just because it IS.  Their argument runs that it's an insult/outrage/obscenity/mistake (choose your term) for the religion that they view as "responsible" for the attack and for taking all those innocent lives, to establish a presence so close by.  (Never mind that Muslims were already praying there before without being noticed.) 

I don't concede the victims' survivors' right to make Ground Zero their personal project.  It belongs to a much wider group:  The people of New York (listen to your Mayor!) and more generally, the people of the U.S. in general, for we all lost something that day.  So they're entitled to their opinion, but it's not the only opinion and perhaps should be considered less seriously than others. 

Maybe if they were less distraught they could think better, because their emotional appeal depends on the assumption that "Islam" is somehow "responsible."  That's factually incorrect.  The attacks were organized and carried out by a fanatic group of terrorists who were motivated by religion ... a distorted and anachronistic view of it -- and by being cleverly brainwashed by a handful of extremists.  

Individuals and small groups of religious "leaders" of all garb have from time to time been seized by an excess of fervor, carrying their faith over into violence.  Christianity has not been immune.  Check out the Crusades; look at the nearly 400 years of the Spanish inquisition.   It's an interesting coincidence that Islam is currently just about the same age (give or take a hundred years) that Christianity was when the Spanish Inquisition cranked up.  (If developing humans reach a peak of irresponsibility in their teen years, maybe religions do so too, in their teen-centuries.)

I'm sure many of the opponents of the mosque consider themselves good and faithful practitioners of the Judeo-Christian ethic.  Yet if they were, I'd expect them to welcome this Islamic Center, and the avowed intentions of its planners/leaders to demonstrate that Islam can be a force for good.  Any other attitude is more than a little hypocritical.

How will this non-issue be resolved?  The key, once again, is in a point that both Obama and Krauthammer agree on:  While there is an inalienable right to build an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, that doesn't speak to the moral and social issue of whether it should be built.  As CK notes: 

 "Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign." 

Unfortunately Muslims don't have an omniscient czar who can necessarily bend the faithful to his will.  In the years before the new Islamic facility gets built, however, there will be plenty of time for discussion of the pros and cons (if the victim families will settle down and permit it).  Who knows what decisions may be reached?  Still, discouraging the mosque by making clear the intensity of feeling about it is a harder sell.  While Auschwitz might arguably be considered to "belong" to Jews, it belongs also to Poles and Germans as a part of their history and a moral lesson.  In the same way, doesn't the World Trade Center site belong also to Muslims, just as these particular Muslims are suggesting?  Besides, it's very difficult to make a "sole custody" case for prime real estate in the heart of a major, multiethnic metropolis. 

So, an Islamic Center at Ground Zero? Why not, if it comes to that?

How Oil Men Protect Polar Bears

If only there were an award for the most inane published opinion article every week!  There are so many potential candidates these days. They flock to expose themselves to public ridicule in the same way that those contestants on American Idol do; and their chances of hitting it big, being judged a serious success, are about the same.

I'm pretty sure that Sean Parnell's piece, "Habitat Designation Won't Help Polar Bears but Will Destroy Alaska's Jobs," would be a hands-down winner of an Inanity Award any week of the year. 

Parnell is the Governor of Alaska, the guy that stepped up from being second-banana to Sarah Palin when the latter resigned.  He epitomizes the cozy relationship between big oil and government in states (like Alaska, but also like Louisiana) where oil is a major industry.  Besides occasionally dabbling in politics, Parnell has been a lobbyist and legal advisor for ExxonMobil (back in the Valdez days), an executive and lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, and Deputy Director of the Alaska state Division of Oil and Gas.

Not surprising, then, that his argument about protecting polar bears runs like this:  Polar bears' habitat, currently endangered by global warming trends, to which our fossil-fuel addiction contributes, should not be protected by setting aside a federally designated endangered-species area.  No, it should be protected by putting more Alaskans to work discovering and producing more fossil fuels that could be burned to speed up the climate change that is destroying the bears' habitat.  

If people get the government they want in a democracy, there is reason to be concerned about the people of Alaska:  First Palin (who, thanks to the intervention of John McCain of Arizona, another state with a high incidence of deranged politicians, has now been palmed off on the rest of us) and now this guy.

The Washington Post (and other papers) ought to be ashamed to print this circularly-reasoned advocacy piece, which one way or another was assuredly paid for, and probably written by, the oil industry.  And the editors have been further remiss in identifying Parnell only as "Governor of Alaska," without mention of his stronger credentials as a hireling of oil companies.

Citizenship: Should We Change the Constitution?

Who knew that citizenship-by-place-of-birth was not just some wacky administrative ruling placed on us by a handful of politicians when someone wasn't looking, but a full-blown constitutional provision of the Fourteenth Amendment?   Well, I confess, I didn't when I suggested that it might be changed fairly easily.

Now helpful Republicans like Mitch McConnell have reminded us of that fact, by telling us they favor abandoning the current definition of U.S. citizenship as anyone who is "born or naturalized" in the U.S.  They haven't said what they would put in its place, exactly, though probably any alternate means of defining citizenship would depend on the citizenship of at least one parent.

The U.S. is one of few, if not perhaps the only, countries that define citizenship strictly by place of birth.  Most other countries require at least one parent to have held citizenship at the time of birth.  Our definition derives, as so much does in this country, from the history of slavery.  As that "peculiar institution" was abolished, the Fourteenth Amendment was, with admirable foresight, devised to deal with the issues that might arise regarding the rights, privileges, and duties of freed slaves after Emancipation.  Place of birth was, in those circumstances, a practical way to grant citizenship to a class of people who otherwise might have remained in a different form of slavery.

That said, it's ridiculous for Sen. Jeff Sessions to say, as he did, that he is not sure what the drafters of the amendment had in mind.  He is right to suggest, though, that it probably wasn't (I'd say, very clearlywasn't) their intention to allow non-citizens to arrive in the U.S., have a baby who would be granted U.S. citizenship, and then disappear back to their homeland again.   And since the question of the citizenship status of former slaves has long since been settled, that part of the 14th Amendment is an anachronism.  We can keep it if it suits our purposes, but it's also ridiculous to suggest that we could not change it.  I see no inherent benefit, no actual human right, that would be denied if we decided to alter the basis for determining U.S. citizenship.

Practically speaking, though, the numbers of the "baby-droppers" who are causing such concern is tiny - by one report I saw, less than two-tenths of one percent.  I'm sure that any change in our method of bestowing citizenship would inconvenience as many "real" citizens as it did discourage would-be "fake" ones.  And politicians also well know the near impossibility of changing the Constitution, a holy grail of laws even though many ignore it when it suits their purpose (anyone remember the "militia" part of the Second Amendment?).

All of which leads to the conclusion, not a surprising one, that this whole issue is more of a politically expedient way of feeding the right-wing populist beast, pandering to the extremes of the Republican base.     

Bush League

I offer two bits of recommended reading for those interested in the current state of the U.S. economy, and the political responsibility for it. 

The first is "To Deal with the Deficit, Let the Tax Cuts Expire," by Fareed Zakaria.  He points up the stupidity (he doesn't use exactly that word) of Republicans who chose to cut taxes while expanding government, who refuse even now to consider even minor rollbacks of those cuts, and the lack of political courage on the Democratic side now by not proposing to allow all of them expire. 

The second is "GOP Shows Historic Amnesia on Spending Cuts" by Anne Applebaum.  She describes Republican lawmakers' failure to deal honestly with the legacy of the Bush years which was far from being the small-government, lower deficit utopia they now remember it as.  In fact, the Bush years created the largest deficit the country had seen up to then, and did so beginning from a budget surplus.   Applebaum's error is to claim that Obama's deficit is even larger without mentioning that it's larger only because the Bush excesses had to be paid for and remedied; but otherwise she's on target. 

Alas, neither of these entirely sensible commentaries from different sides of the political columnist spectrum is likely to win over many of those with entrenched views.  We're all paying the piper for these mistakes now.  

It's little wonder that we are hearing Obama and the Democrats will be running "against Bush" again this year.  Bush is gone, but nearly all the members of Congress who heartily approved his chosen path to ruin are still in office.   There's no indication that they have learned any lesson, are willing to admit to a mistake, or even realize that one was made.  In a perfect world, they'd be very easy to run against, and to defeat.