I finally got off my ass and wrote a post last night and just prior to sending my laptop battery ran out, without warning, and the work disappeared. I hate it when that happens. But once more unto the breach:
- I picked up Tim Noah's new book, The Great Divergence, which deals with the growth of income inequality in American, expanding on a great series that he wrote for Slate. I have just read the first couple of chapters, but it seems quite promising. I have no doubt Tim will bring the kind of intellectual rigor and honesty that the topic demands (and I don't just say that because he quotes me at one point in the book on the impact of undocumented workers on wages in the building trades). I have some flying time this week, so I hope to finish the book and have a complete report by the end of the week.
- James Poulos, the man who taught us what women are for, had a sad post the other day in which he argues against student loan debt relief, something that would be of great help to him. Poulos clearly harbors great shame for having made what he perceives as a terrible choice to go to law school and then abandon that venture, but not before accumulating a fairly staggering debt. So deep is his guilt that he argues the government would somehow "own his future" if he and others were allowed some break with respect to their obligations. Evidently it would be preferable to Poulos to have a bank own his future, then to catch a break at the hands of his ideological foes.
- And speaking of money and the future, Joe Nocera had a good column yesterday about the fact that on the cusp of sixty he finds himself in a position where he may well never have enough money to retire, despite the fact that he has made a good income over the years and has a fair amount of expertise in matters financial. Nocera's plight is yet another illustration of the utter failure of the 401(k) to serve as an adequate replacement for traditional defined benefit pension plans. We are going to be facing a crisis with people in Nocera's age bracket on down as they cease to be able to work and lack the means to support themselves. At some point this fact is going to have to translate into some type of policy response or we will be returning to the days when retired people are going to be living in the homes of their children -- who will also seemingly still have their adult children at home who cannot find employment. I guess this can be sold as strengthening the traditional family.
- I think that the notion that China represents the country of the future is shown to be delusional by its treatment of one dissident. This is not the act of a strong and secure power, but rather one of a government that feels its very legitimacy remains in doubt. I think the U.S. remains the power of the future simply by default. For all of our weaknesses, our possible competitors all have worse problems.
Break your back to earn your pay and don't forget to grovel."
- It's nice to see the intellectual leader of the conservative judiciary showing his continued grasp of the fine points of the law. What a fucking fatuous gobshite this clown is. That he is taken seriously as a judge is a measure of just how far we have fallen. The notion that he is somehow a brilliant jurist rather than a transparently political hack really should be put to rest after this argument and the one over ACA.
- Speaking of right wing intellectual clownishness, Pierce, in brilliant fashion, finishes what Michael Sean Winters began -- the complete and utter gutting of Ross Douthat's newly minted, spectacularly ahistorical piece on America's loss of its good old fashioned religious wisdom circa 1950. Douthat, like his intellectual soul mate at the Times, David Brooks, has pretensions to being an intellectual, but, alas, possesses the withered mind and soul of the propagandist. Facts are selectively distorted or omitted to fit Ross's thesis, which is that once there was a golden age in which Protestants and Catholics of all stripes joined together and denounced sexy time and made us a better nation for it.
- And to continue picking on right wing Catholics, both the U.S. Conference of Bishops and the faculty at Georgetown University seem to have an issue with the budget proposed by Paul Ryan, the man Pierce memorably describes as the "zombie-eyed granny starver," who tried to claim that his work was consistent with Catholic notions of social justice. The Georgetown faculty begged to differ in rather stark terms:
“Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” says the letter, which the faculty members sent to Mr. Ryan along with a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church — “to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.”
That means that if we leave it to 'the market' to solve this problem, too many women here in the U.S. will have to choose between purchasing contraceptives and paying the bills. It's that simple. They will be unable to afford the relatively small upfront cost of avoiding the much, much more costly event of having a child that they can afford even less. No woman should ever have to be in this position.
And for what it's worth, this is true for married women as well as single women. Because married couples, too, are often stretched to the limit, and have no money left over to pay for contraception. So even if we buy into their abhorrent slut-shaming rhetoric, married women who supposedly have the blessing of the wingnuts for their sexytime are forced into an untenable position by the cost of contraceptives.
You'd think even wingnuts could grasp this logic. Except I'm betting they're perfectly OK with this. While they haven't yet overtly defined genital sex as a luxury good that you should only engage in if you have the time, energy, and above all the money to raise another kid, it's pretty much the direct implication of the positions they've taken in recent months.
It's just a matter of time before they say it in so many words. You can hear them now: "There is a third option: not having sex." Well, yeah. And how do we feel about this? If a couple is perpetually struggling just to pay the rent and keep food on the table, does that mean they no longer have the moral right to have sex?
Yep, that's what they're saying. The sooner they say it out loud, and can be forced to publicly own that belief, the better.
_______________________________
*Defined as earning less than 2/3 of the median hourly wage of one's country.
"Man on Fire" - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Ah the week is done. The lawyer gig is really eating into my blogging these days. I'm finding myself a little bit worn out for writing and a little bit uninspired. Part of it is that we are heading into the election silly season and I am already finding the endless horse race crap annoying. The notion of six straight months of this is hard to take. It's going to be polls, polls, and more polls, with the media doing precious little to actually educate the public on the issues at hand. I am going to try to avoid getting sucked into this too much as it really ceases to be interesting and extremely difficult to say anything new or interesting.
- Having said that, I do think that although the recent Ann Romney kerfuffle was largely a lazy made for TV drama cynically flogged by the right, it did expose the fascinating Republican divide on the virtues of stay-at-home motherhood. The always excellent Katha Pollitt -- who would really improve any of the major op-ed pages in the U.S. -- has a great take on how the value placed on stay-at-home mothers is fraught with class and racial implications. As Pollitt puts it:
But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. Just ask Mitt Romney. In a neat catch that in a sane world would have put the Rosen gaffe to rest forever, Nation editor at large Chris Hayes aired a video clip on his weekend-morning MSNBC show displaying Romney this past January calling for parents on welfare to get jobs: “While I was governor, 85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. And I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”
Ah, work will set you free -- where have I heard that before? Any of us who have raised children know how hard the work can be. My wife, who resumed full time work in a new career four months after our son was born, and I used to laughingly say "thank God it's Monday" as we looked forward to a leisurely moment with a cup of coffee in a quiet office, enjoying the company of adult colleagues and the psychic rewards of having status. I would never deride what Ann Romney did as not being work. But I would note that she never had to worry about the decision to forego income or career, never had to grapple with the difficulty of paying the rent or a mortgage on one income, and no doubt had the wherewithal to afford just about any kind of help she ever might have needed. In that sense, she, like her husband, is hardly representative of any of us. I am pretty confident that the GOP esteem for motherhood extends only to the right kind of women -- "good girls" as Amanda describes them -- not the millions of single or lower income mothers trying to scrape by in an exceedingly harsh economy.
- I found this piece on the conflict between unions and environmentalists over the XL Pipeline in the Nation to be interesting. Although its author, Jane McAlevy, expresses sympathy with the quest for jobs motivating union leaders, she still seems to have difficulty grasping why the various building trades unions whose members will build the pipeline are angry at its opponents. Confession: I have avoided writing about the pipeline because I support it and I know this is not likely to be the most popular of positions around these parts. I support the pipeline for reasons that are simple and possibly a bit venal: 1) because it will provide thousands of really good paying jobs to people I represent for a living; 2) because the notion that not building the pipeline will somehow prevent further exploitation of the Canadian tar sands oil is hopelessly naive; 3) because I believe that the claim that the building of the pipeline itself will be environmentally destructive is largely trumped up by people who simply object to the notion of more oil being made readily available domestically -- to which I would respond that the country is covered with tens of thousands of miles of pipelines [Update: here is a link to a pipeline map] that have minimal impact on the environment and that, as noted above, this oil is going to be used by someone in the world market. The conversion to a reliance on non-petroleum based energy is just too far away to practically stop an energy source of this magnitude from being used. The union leaders that McAlevy castigates are elected by their members to help them secure work with favorable terms. Many of these unions are suffering from prodigious rates of unemployment right now. As democratically elected leaders, they see their first obligation as being to their constituents. I think that building trades leaders are also frustrated with what they perceive to be an overall indifference to job creation by environmental groups -- that even alternative energy projects involving wind and solar technologies tend to run into opposition when they get to the actual building stage.
- The Democratic Party continues to lag badly with white working class men. Although I understand that this is demographically a less and less significant group, it nonetheless pains me deeply to see this.
- Reading LeVon Helm's obituary the other day, which was really an interesting piece, -- check out the photo of The Band, who look like the living antidote to phsychedia -- I was struck by the fact that he died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, New York's world class cancer facility. (As, by the way, did Danny Federici of the E Street Band.) I am quite familiar with MS-K and can attest to its excellence. But I also know that it charges $4,000 a night for a semi-private room. It seems to me that it would make much more sense for cases like this to be handled in a much lower cost hospice setting or with home hospice care, where the expertise in pain relief would really be the essential element. We really need to look at these end of life care issues with a clearer head if we are ever going to get a handle on runaway medical costs.
- And finally, yesterday was the hundredth birthday of Fenway Park. It's been forty-five years since I first went to a game at Fenway, during the magical 1967 season, when I was all of seven years old -- a game the Red Sox lost to the light-hitting but stingy Chicago White Sox. Last night I was running through the list of some of the players I had seen there -- Hall of Famers like Mickey Mantle (in 1968, his final season), Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Al Kaline, Luis Aparicio, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers, Rickey Henderson, Ferguson Jenkins, Tom Seaver, Orlando Cepeda, Dennis Eckersley, and, of course, Carl Yazstremski, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, and Wade Boggs -- and sadly, I fear, non-Hall of Famer Roger Clemens -- as well as guys who didn't make the Hall but burned bright for a time: Frank Howard, Freddie Lynn, Vida Blue, Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Denny McLain, and Tony Olive leap to mind and Red Sox stalwarts like Luis Tiant, Dwight Evans, Bill Lee, and Rico Petrocelli. (More recent Sox stars I've primarily seen at Camden Yards -- I've only been to Fenway once in the last decade or so.) It was kind of a fun exercise, although things have blurred a bit in my mind as to whether I saw certain teams at Fenway or since I moved down here. Update: Oh my God -- I am watching the Red Sox blow a nine run lead to the Yankees. Their bullpen is a special kind of bad. Jon Papplebon, come back, all is forgiven. I think Bobby Valentine may have an exceedingly short stay in Boston.
Levon singing Randy Newman -- a favorite of mine. Sadly, he appears to be quite ill. Just a great evocative voice and I think an underappreciated drummer.
- I've always been a little bit wary of terms like "white male privilege" and the like, probably because I've spent so much of my life representing organizations that were primarily made up of white men, where every gain represented something pretty hard fought and where those gains have long been under threat. But then I read something like this drivel by by Paul Theroux on the Trayvon Martin case in a recent issue of Newsweek, and I can't help but think in those exact terms. Theroux, in a classic example of a smart person writing nonsense, basically tries to make the case that since a cop once yelled at him during a traffic stop, black people are often simply mistaken when they perceive racism as being the cause for police brutality or, I guess, being gunned down when you are unarmed. The piece, offensively titled "If I had a son he would look like George Zimmerman," is so redolent of privileged cluelessness and weak logic that it takes one's breath away. I am sure that Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, and Michael Stewart, among others, would have sympathized with Theroux if they weren't dead.
- I have to say I have been enjoying Atrios's "Wanker of the Decade" feature. It was a potent reminder of why I started blogging in the first place. I just remember my incredible frustration in the early to middle aughts at the insipid state of media coverage in this country -- from the natterings of Ceci Connelly and MoDo during the Bush Gore election, to the ludicrous amen corner for war in Iraq, featuring Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Klein, the ridiculous centrism tropes from the likes of Friedman again, David Broder, Will Saletan, and the whole gang-wank they call the Washington Post. A number of these folks -- especially Klein and Sullivan -- have behaved better in recent years, but I think the overall state of mainstream journalism and punditry has not much improved, despite what should have been the incredibly chastening events of the decade. I remain in awe of the sheer intellectual laziness of the elite media, their arrogance, their complacency, and their shallowness. I think the thing that Atrios also hits on the head is that the problems here were not by and large the right wing pundits -- yes, they were hopelessly wrong too and were completely in bed with the Bush Administration in all of its folly -- from whom not much could be legitimately expected. But those of the allegedly sensible center, like Friedman, Klein, and Saletan, illustrated again and again the inadequacy of the centrist world view.
Update: Well, I guess it's a new decade in which to wank. Friedman strikes again today with yet another insipid what we need is a third party column. Today it is Michael Bloomberg who will be our savior. He will increase the speed of the Acela, fix Amtrak's crappy cell phone service (which I have to admit is distressingly bad), and pave the roads around Union Station (which are actually being resurfaced right now -- that's why they are bumpy) all the while magically balancing the budget. Jesus. All a Bloomberg candidacy would do is help elect Mitt Romney. I am so ashamed to share an alma mater with this guy. The fact that Friedman is a widely respected pundit says so much about the sorry state of this country's media and political elite.
- Meanwhile, the world of false equivalency journalism -- at which Friedman has set the standard -- continues to dominate in the mainstream press. Rarely a day goes by where one does not see an egregious example. Tonight's wonderful example is an article in Newsweek yet again discussing the book What Money Can't Buy by Harvard professor Michael J. Sandal, who is well known for his course on justice. Sandal is critical of the over emphasis on markets in the American world view and centers his critique on the "consumerist idea of freedom." In other words, Sandal stands for the radical notion that there are some things in life that just aren't for sale or as reviewer Michael Fitzgerald describes it, "he thinks markets shouldn't replace our moral judgment." Fitzgerald's next sentence is just amazing though: "If his talk of morals scandalizes liberals, conservatives will squirm at his assault on their easy acceptance of markets." Does Fitzgerald really think liberals are "scandalized" by talk of morals? It seems to me that liberalism, with its emphasis on fairness, justice, equality, etc. is nothing but a non-stop call to morality. How can someone who is not a right wing propagandist write this kind of sentence in good faith?
- And speaking of right wing propaganda, another of the many things that I continue to be irritated by, is the notion that the liberal-left is suffering from its own brand of "epistemic closure" because we do not engage our right wing brethren in debate and dialogue. The question that leaps to mind is with whom would we have such a debate or discussion. It seems to me that the world of right wing journalism, whether online or of the dead tree variety, has reached a point where dialogue is virtually impossible. A case in point (to come full circle) is Obama's recent comment that if he had a son that he would have looked like Trayvon. This pretty innocuous and humanizing remark has been deemed hate speech by, among others, Glenn Reynolds and John Hindraker. Now theoretically, Reynolds and Hindraker should be people with whom one could have a discussion. Respectively a law professor and a partner at a good-sized law firm, Reynolds and Hindraker obviously possess at least the kind of intelligence necessary to do this kind of work, which presumably includes the ability to write reasoned arguments that might have appeal beyond their ideological fellow travelers. And yet, what you get from both of them is hysterical propaganda of this kind -- Obama the hate monger, Obama the enemy of freedom, Obama the destroyer of America, Obama the socialist, Obama the great apologizer, and so on. This stuff is so transparently ridiculous that addressing it beyond this kind of cursory description would be an enormous waste of time. I have a difficult time thinking of anyone presently writing political stuff on the right with whom you could have a factual, intellectually honest, policy-oriented dialogue with of any substance -- maybe Reihan Salam. Can you think of anyone?
- And here on tax day, is my tax plan. It reduces the deficit by nearly 24% in 2012. Why won't the Washington Post treat me as being even braver than Paul Ryan?
Young Conor Friedersdorf may have moved to Venice California, but his head and his heart are still firmly planted in the media village we call DC. He has produced a perfect specimen (and I choose that term deliberately) of the classic village trope -- both sides are doing X and the truth is Y, which naturally falls into the middle of where the two sides are -- why can't we all be reasonable and cut out this extreme talk, all of which we really know is merely political posturing. In this case, Friedersdorf deems silly the Democratic contention that the Republicans are engaging in a war on women and, with the fine impartiality that makes the man a future Sunday television show guest, condemns as well the Republican outrage over the Democrats alleged disrespect for motherhood. Friedersdorf does not bother to distinguish between the fact that the latter is a manufactured outrage aimed at the infelicitous remarks of an obscure Washington PR flak, while the former is a political shorthand for something quite real, a concerted attempt on a national level by the Republican Party to undermine or eliminate women's reproductive rights.
Thus, in response to a perfectly factual attack on the Blunt Amendment by Deborah Wasserman Schultz in which she objected to "bosses" being able to decide "what kind of access to health care women can have," Friedersdorf asserts that
It's perfectly legitimate to criticize the Blunt-Rubio bill and to set forth reasons why its passage would be bad for women. What's objectionable is 1) the implication that the Republicans who voted for this bill are motivated by antagonism toward women and engaged in an aggressive campaign to war on them (the truthful motivation is some mix of concern for protecting religious liberty and pandering to religious conservatives and opponents of sweeping health-care mandates). 2) The sly invocation of the phrase "access to contraception," as if what's at issue here is the ability to buy condoms or birth control as opposed to a debate about who covers their cost.
Friedersdorf is guilty of multiple sins here. First, he is typical of the libertarian boys who think of access to contraception and abortion as frills -- things that are not really "health care." This is nonsense. There are few things more important in terms of women's overall health and their sexual and economic autonomy than the ability to control fertility. The ability to avoid or terminate unwanted pregnancies or to optimally space the birth of children goes right to the very heart of a women's life for a very long period of time.
Second, although he seeks to minimize it, Republicans have consistently fought over the last several years -- especially since 2010 -- with a venomous vehemence against access to birth control. Let us count the ways: The Blunt Amendment is only the most recent battle -- think about their concerted effort against Title X, which they seeks to defund in their budget, their war -- and I think that is the only appropriate term -- against Planned Parenthood on both the federal and state level, their efforts to offer expansive "conscience" clauses to pharmacists so that they don't have to dispense contraceptives if they don't want to, and their fight against making Plan B available as an over the counter drug.
Third, in addition to these concrete policy measures, Republicans, most visibly Rick Santorum, have expressed hostility to the very constitutional underpinnings that make access to contraception a constitutionally protected right as they attack the Griswold decision and the right to privacy. The undermining of Griswold and Roe v. Wade are central planks of Republican thinking, not some marginal tendency. All of these waiting period requirements and ultrasound laws are designed to effectively destroy the right of women to have abortions or, at a minimum, to cause inconvenience and humiliation to those who dare exercise that right.
And yet, Friedersdorf blithely asserts that
the life prospects of my fiance, my sister, my mother, and my female friends and acquaintances, I can only conclude that they're mostly unaffected by whether President Obama wins the White House or Mitt Romney manages to unseat him. Were my preferred candidate, Gary Johnson, to improbably be elected, Muslims, innocents accused of terrorism, and folks proximate to the drug trade would be better off. But I doubt he'd do much to make the lives of women appreciably better. It's one of the many privileges of living in this country: daily life goes on largely unaffected by the whims of the man or woman who inhabits the White House. Unlike in Saudi Arabia or Iran, women as a class aren't vulnerable to gendered oppression.
Spoken like a privileged, clueless, complacent, sheltered, glib white man. In case Friedersdorf hasn't noticed, the president has any number of powers that have real daily relevance to women's lives -- and yes, since women are the only ones who get pregnant, they are quite vulnerable to gendered oppression in this country. Indeed, the Republican Party seems dedicated to such oppression -- and no, the fact that there are women in the GOP like Jan Brewer who will joyfully go along with the oppression, does not make it any less oppressive. President Obama has drawn a line in the sand to protect Title X, his administration has fought measures to defund Planned Parenthood, and has sought to assure that family planning be a part of the basic health care services offered under all health plans in the United States. Most importantly of all, Obama has appointed two women to the Supreme Court who will assuredly uphold Roe v. Wade.
Romney, by contrast, has endorsed the Ryan budget, which will defund Title X, has enthusiastically claimed that he would "defund" Planned Parenthood, has indicated that he opposes the contraception mandate, and, in fact, would seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act altogether. And, of course, he will seek to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade.
If Friedersdorf thinks that these policy differences would leave most women "unaffected" he simply has no idea of the centrality of reproductive rights in women's lives. And that is a reflection, not of the trivialities of these issues, but of the callowness of Friedersdorf's world view.
Personally, I think all of the Bush tax cuts should be phased out in all income levels and that a couple of higher brackets -- a 45% and a 50% bracket -- should be added to kick in when incomes reach $750,000 and $1.5 million.
I fully agree with this, and then some.
The reality is that some people have annual incomes that dwarf $1.5 million. And it's my belief that they should hit new brackets all the way up. The brackets should be spread far apart so that there's no question of 1970s-style 'bracket creep', but if someone made $600 million in a year, he should pay a higher rate on his last dollar of income than someone who made 'only' $100 million. And if someone were to have income of $5 billion in a year, he should pay a higher rate on his top dollar than the $600 million guy.
So I think there should be additional brackets at, say, $5 million (55% tax rate), $10 million (60%), $40 million (65%), $100 million (70%), $400 million (75%), $1 billion (80%), $5 billion (85%), and even $10 billion (90%). Someday someone will have that much annual income, if they haven't already.
I'd argue that this principle should apply even more so to the Federal estate tax, which after a certain point should become all but confiscatory.
Currently, the first $5 million of the value of a decedent's estate is exempt from tax. I'm OK with that part, because it mostly shuts up the nincompoops who claim that the tax is going to force the breakup of a family farm or the sale of a family business. (It wouldn't be true anyway: the tax from such an estate can be spread out over 15 years.) But the tax is only 35% on the excess, so someone who dies with an estate of $50 billion can pass $32.5 billion to the kids.
Nobody should get that sort of money just for having chosen the right set of parents. And this year, we've seen the downside of individuals having so much money that they can dump tens of millions of dollars into a political campaign that even they know is probably going nowhere. It can't hurt to reduce the number of people who've gotten that sort of money without having had to do anything to get it.
If the Bush tax cuts were to lapse at the end of this year (and the Democratic position should be to let them all lapse, then negotiate an "Obama tax cut" targeted more at the lower brackets), the Federal estate tax rate would return to 55%, with the first $1 million exempted.
Like I said, I'm OK with keeping that at the current $5 million. But the 55% rate shouldn't be dropped; in fact, the same brackets that apply to income above that number should apply to the estate tax too, only with additional brackets at $40 billion (95%) and $100 billion (99%).
It isn't like the heirs to billionaires would be hurting under this plan. Persons leaving $1 billion in their estates under such a tax regime could pass $280 million to their heirs; they'd be able to get by somehow.
I realize, of course, that none of this is anywhere close to politically feasible as things stand. But it won't ever get any closer to feasible if we never propose the idea in the first place. So I'm proposing it: tax brackets ought to go all the way up.
- I haven't written much at all about the Trayvon Martin case -- I feel like a lot of what has gone on has just added a whole lot of noise and little light to the process -- but I was happy to hear the announcement that his killer George Zimmernan will be prosecuted. I am not sure that the prosecution can make its case stick, but I am confident that had Trayvon been a white 17-year old that this case would have been handled rather differently from the outset. I hope now -- however futilely -- that everyone can take a step back and let the facts of the case unfold in the criminal justice process. I know I have my own strong gut feelings, but these should never be confused with facts, evidence, meeting burdens of proof, etc. I wanted an arrest and a prosecution because it seems to me the few facts one could ascertain in the media seemed to warrant it. Having crossed that important threshold, I'd like to see the rest left to the attorneys, the judge and the jury.
- Has anyone else been troubled by the dual role of Al Sharpton in the Trayvon affair and the fact that MSNBC has let him play both advocate and journalist in the process? I am not a fan of false journalistic neutrality - too often it comes with its own built in biases that obscure rather than highlight truth. But it seems awfully strange to have a guy both handling a press conference with a rather vehement point of view and then have that press conference broadcast on his daily show. I have to confess I am not and never have been a big Sharpton fan. He will always be a bit of a charlatan in my eyes and I think he is a horrible television host in terms of his skills. It's hard to exaggerate how much of an improvement it would be to have Chris Hayes get a nightly show in his stead. And if MSNBC would like to have an African-American host -- which I support -- it has a couple of very talented and telegenic women who would do a far better job than Sharpton. Indeed, I'd like to see Sharpton and Ed Schultz sent to the showers and have Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry or Alex Wagner pick up their slots.
- Speaking of prosecutions, Nancy pointed out this disturbing case in comments below -- about a poor woman in Idaho who is being threatened with imprisonment for inducing her own abortion with Mifepristone. I am hoping that some people in the reproductive rights community will come to her defense. There are some astonishingly good legal minds in the pro-choice legal community -- I've had the pleasure of reading some of their briefs before and they are truly first rate -- and I am sure that they could be of great assistance to this poor, isolated woman.
- Ezra points out the degree to which the Democrats have been shifted to the right by the Bush tax cuts, such that the strategic electoral tactic of focusing on raising taxes on only the highest earners has now become a policy position. Personally, I think all of the Bush tax cuts should be phased out in all income levels and that a couple of higher brackets -- a 45% and a 50% bracket -- should be added to kick in when incomes reach $750,000 and $1.5 million. I would also phase in a 28% tax on capital gains, dividends and interest. We need substantially more revenue than we currently have to do all of the things that need to be done, including getting the long term fiscal house in order.
So what do you all think? And I was encouraged by one frequent commenter to try to lure the lurkers out there to join in the fray. We would love to have a few more voices join in the mix.
I guess John Derbyshire just wasn't able to muster the strength to engage in suitable euphemism. I mean, shit, it isn't hard to do the minimum necessary to avoid NRO shutting you down for racism -- Christ, look at Victor Davis Maximulist Assholacist Hanson, who weekly and weakly gets to denounce those with darker skin hues for their crimes against the white race (and chainsaw owners), without drawing the ire of Rich Lowry. But long self-admitted racist Derbyshire evidently did not see the need to keep the pasties of respectabilty on any longer.
What is in its own way more remarkable is that even when the author admits he is a racist, even when he claims that whites are inherently smarter than blacks, and exhorts his children to avoid black neighborhoods or any gathering at which blacks might be a substantial part of those in attendance, or even living in cities run by black politicians, there is still outrage on the right that some dare call the man a racist, something he unabashedly calls himself.
I read quite a lot of the comments -- the type of hazmat work I usually leave to Edroso -- and found it fascinating how many of them think Derb just spoke the common sense that we all understand, including we phony liberals. How do you explain to these fearful ignoramuses that this is just not the case? That many of us have long lived in places with large, even majority, black populations, that we do so without spending every day cringing in fear or clinging to our guns, that we walk the streets and ride the subways and go to bars and restaurants and clubs without becoming paralyzed by fear that "they" are out amongst us.
I am coming up on thirty years in DC (my first three were spent in heavily racially mixed cheap suburbs) and have somehow miraculously avoided being victimized by crime. When I first lived here -- in Prince Georges County, the first majority black suburban area in the U.S. -- I spent a great deal of my free time playing basketball, which was the ultimate in cheap entertainment. I was often the only white guy on the court -- I was certainly the only one going to law school -- and yet, I was not subject to hostility or ill treatment of any kind. I think I was viewed as a bit of a curiosity for a while, but after a couple of weeks of steadily enduring the stunning heat of a DC summer, I pretty much blended in. Thereafter, I lived in a variety of gentrifying or marginal neighborhoods in the District itself. This was from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s -- not exactly the city's golden age in terms of crime -- but again, I did not feel like I was living under a state of siege. I kept my wits about me and probably enjoyed some degree of luck, but I just didn't experience the supposed wanton criminality of my neighbors.
I've also now experienced five different black mayors since I've lived here and, what do you know, I feel rather differently about each of them -- Marion Barry is a scumbag and racist, who I despise about as much as I have any politician I've ever known. Tony Williams was a remarkably effective chief executive who did great things for the city. Adrain Fenti was both admirable and infuriating -- he too did a lot of good, but unnecessarily burned a whole lot of bridges and lost office. I don't know what to think of Vince Grey at the moment. Sharon Pratt Kelly was sadly in over her head. In other words, each of them was an individual in his or her own right, with a sum of strengths and weaknesses that made them succeed or fail or fall somewhere in between.
As for Derbyshire's notion that black politicians are uniquely corrupt, well this was news to me. When I was a kid, I recall a pretty steady stream of politicians making their way to the slammer for feathering their own nests. Not a one was black -- they were almost always Irish or Italian, the yeomanry of graft in the Bay State, with the odd Greek thrown in for good measure. The attainment of power will always be for some -- and here race is truly unimportant -- the opportunity to take a little money that isnt' legitimately theirs. This is now new.
The IQ stuff remains startlingly offensive and Sullivan and Murray should do penance for giving this kind of crap the veneer of respectability.
Ulitmately, I think Derbyshire's world view is held by a pretty signficant swath of the right, but most of them under the age of 60 understand that they cannot express this in such unabashed terms. But, and this is the subject for another day, those who are clamoring for an unabashed economic politics of the left better understand that this is read in many quarters as a call to give money to undeserving black people. And that remains, something that can be said and treated with respect in large swaths of the country, with only a minimal amount of camoflauge.
What do you all have to say? (Sorry for the slowness in posting -- both work and home have been quite busy.)
I strongly recommend the video for the sheer pleasure of the performance. Men having fun and not worrying about being cool.
- Impending Signs of the Apocalypse Dept. - Maureen Dowd wrote the perfect column yesterday in response to the Village fainting couch set who criticized President Obama for pushing back at the Supreme Court. As Dowd notes, the right wing of the Court continue to act like partisan hacks, with their intellectual leader and purported great legal mind sounding like a Fox anchor, invoking the "Cornhusker Kickback" in oral argument and complaining about the burden of having to read the law in its entirety. Really, Dowd said pretty much all that I have to say on the subject. Even if Obama were the biggest disappointment to liberalism who ever lived -- and he isn't -- he needs to be reelected solely to keep any more right wing ideologues from getting on the Court. This is matter of profound, generational concern.
- Speaking of outrageous judicial behavior, I was just stunned by Judge Jerry Smith on the United States Court of Appeals confronting a Justice Department lawyer during oral argument about President Obama's criticism of the Court, using the term "Obamacare," and assigning her homework to get a three page single spaced letter specifically addressing whether the Attorney General and the Department of Justice "recognize the authority of the federal courts, through unelected judges, to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases." Now I've done quite a few oral arguments in my day, but I have to admit I would have been totally floored by such a question. I would like to think that I would have responded by asking the judge to recuse himself from the case given the obviously inappropriate nature of his conduct, but you know those robes are pretty daunting some times. If Judge Smith thinks he struck a mighty blow for the legitimacy of America's courts, he is sadly mistaken.
- The always excellent Linda Greenhouse, truly one of the finest reporters of this or any other generation, lends some more light than heat to the goings on in the Supreme Court with respect to both the ACA and the recent strip search decision. It's well worth reading. Greenhouse seems to be implying that when the dust settles that the ACA is more likely to be upheld than not. Let's hope so.
- Tim Noah, whose book on income inequality will be out in a couple of weeks, has a useful corrective to those who continue to suggest that low income people bear no tax burden.
One of the more tiresome features of the New York Times Op-Ed pages is those days when its house conservatives, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, play moralist. Although there are differences between the two in age and religion, they both share a disquieting tendency to extol the virtues of sacrifice without ever conveying the depth of what they ask. In their world, people should stay in marriages that make them unhappy, give birth to children that they feel they cannot raise, and endure lives that are bereft of hope or pleasure. Never is there a sense conveyed of the true meaning of such sacrifice, of the fact that our lives are quite finite, and that there is often a kind of permanence in these sacrifices, that happiness foregone is frequently lost for good.
This is not to argue against a sense of duty in life and of an understanding that there are things bigger than ourselves in the universe. However, I'd like to see people like Brooks and Douthat actually acknowledge the weight of sacrifice and what it means and how sometimes it taxes people beyond endurance.
Today Brooks scolds Charles Darwin Snelling, an 81-year old man who killed his wife, who had suffered for years with Alzheimer's disease, and then committed suicide. This same man had written an uplifting essay for Brooks about the redemptive nature of having spent the last six years of his sixty-one year marriage caring for his wife as she slipped away from him. Four months after the essay was published, Snelling committed the murder/suicide. Brooks is offended that Snelling failed to "respect the future" (and, one senses, annoyed that one of his star essay writers failed to live up to his uplifting words). I guess it doesn't occur to Brooks that perhaps Snelling saw the future all too clearly and that it led to a cul de sac of harrowing decline, death, and aloneness. I wouldn't presume to speak for Snelling, but I can certainly imagine that he might well have felt unending pain and exhaustion, that his struggle of so many years may have seemed futile, that the disappearance of his companion of six decades, even as her heart still beat, was unbearable.
When I was reading this sad tale, I was reminded of this passage from one of Camus' Notebooks: "One must love life before loving its meaning Dostoevsky said. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it."
It is perhaps unfair to expect profundity in daily newspaper columns (or blog posts for that matter). But it seems to me that if one is going to venture into territory like this, one should possess a tad more gravitas than does Mr. Brooks.
(A band for whom I have a big soft spot -- they remind me of a Scottish Ramones -- every song sounds more or less the same, but it's a song I really like -- dark and poppy at the same time.)
- I opened the Sunday Review section of the New York Times in bleary-eyed fashion (curse you NCAA)and was treated to two columns devoted to sexual matters in popular culture, one by Maureen Dowd and one by Frank Bruni. I wish this was an April Fool's Day joke, but it does not appear to be. Dowd, ever the ingenue -- she really should be banned from writing about sex -- seems stunned and titillated that sadomasochism exists (despite having perused her brother's copy of the Story of O back in the 70s) and that it is the subject of a popular novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. It seems beyond Dowd's imagination that in the world of S&M a large number (if not a majority) of submissives are men. Bruni, possibly the only person in the world less qualified to write about heterosexual sex than Dowd, (well maybe Rick Santorum too), weighs in as well on women's bleak sexual prospects as evidenced by a new HBO series Girls and, of course, Fifty Shades of Grey.Nicholas Kristof rounds out the day with yet another installment in his 5,000 part series of sexual trafficking, in this case his crusade against ads in the Village Voice for prostitution. (I knew I was desperate when I found myself seeking solace in a halfway sensible Thomas Friedman article.) All of this seems to me to part and parcel of a certain kind of middle-aged elite hysteria against sexual freedom for women -- this would be the liberal side of the hysteria. For the right wing side of this hysteria I invite you to read the comments to a sex and feminism-positive piece by Hannah Rosin in the Wall Street Journal. Amazing stuff if you can get through it.
- On the other hand, I quite liked this piece in the Baffler by Thomas Frank in which he notes the amazing fact that a decade of unmitigated folly by Washington elites -- in both the media and in policy circles -- has prompted virtually no recriminations. The hideous mistakes and blinkered ideology behind the twin stock market collapses of the decade, the bubbles in high tech and real estate and their consequences, the disaster of financial deregulation, and, for variety, the debacle of the Iraq war, have cost no one their slots on the Sunday talk shows or their column spaces or quotes. Frank, who is at his best in this kind of writing, attributes this outcome to an ethic of perverse solidarity and ideologically like-mindedness among those who form the narrow segment of political and economic thought deemed acceptable in Washington. (Big tip o' the hat by the way to Kathleen Geier who is back and really lighting it up on the weekends at the Washington Monthly.)
- Coincidentally, Scott LeMieux had a piece at LG&M yesterday in which he sagely states the same argument regarding the ACA that I was asserting in comments the other day -- that the law was inherently constrained by the policy prescriptions that would be acceptable to senators like Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanch Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman, and that no bully pulpit in the world was going to give Barack Obama significant leverage with respect to these lawmakers.
- Speaking of the ACA, Suliivan had a piece the other day in which conservatives were arguing that people on the left were surprised by the hostility of questions from the Supreme Court on the mandate because we live arrogantly inside an ideological bubble. Jonathan Chait has a great, albeit depressing, rejoinder to this. Those of us with legal expertise have generally been most optimistic about the law's prospects because we understand that ample precedent strongly suggests that the law falls comfortably within mainstream commerce clause jurisprudence. Those on the left who view the Republican Supreme Court members as just more right wing politicians in robes have been warning us -- using Bush v. Gore and Citizens United as cautionary examples -- that the conservative (a true misnomer) members of the Court are largely committed right wing ideologues, loyal first and foremost to the cause not the Constitution. I'd like to think this is not the case, but I do worry.
- And just to remind everyone the kinds of things that are at stake. The notion that enormous asshole John Podhoretz, who owes his entire living to his cosmically scummy parents, thinks that covering children up to age 26 is a laughing matter is yet further testament to the fact self-awareness apparently doesn't exist on the right.
Time to do house work -- those goddamned clothes aren't going to fold themselves nor the rugs vacuum themselves. If I only had a slave.
It's open to your thoughts and concerns as always.
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