Recusing Elena Kagan

The following editorial was published in "The Morning Call" (circulation 90,000) on February 2, 2012. The original piece can be found here: http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-justice-kagan-health-care-law-rozsa-yv--20120201,0,6790089,print.story

As Obama's health care law reaches the Supreme Court, the clamor from conservatives and their libertarian sympathizers becomes shriller every day. From Dick Morris and Hans von Spakovsky to WorldNetDaily and The Washington Times, the call rings clear:

Justice Elena Kagan, they insist, must recuse herself from the case.

The argument against Kagan hinges on the assumption that her service as solicitor general under Barack Obama violates the U.S. Code section stating that "any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

For this to apply to Kagan, a precedent would need to exist in which other ex-solicitors general who served on the Supreme Court were compelled to recuse themselves when asked to rule on policies they had supported under their presidential bosses.

Instead the previous jurists to whom this would have indisputably applied (William Howard Taft, Stanley Reed, Robert H. Jackson, and Thurgood Marshall) had the matter left to their personal judgment. Indeed, because so many Supreme Court judges have had politically active pasts before their appointments, it would have been unrealistic to disqualify them each time a controversial issue intersected with their earlier careers.

Hence Taft, who had been solicitor general for Benjamin Harrison before being appointed to the court by Warren Harding, was around to rule on antitrust cases despite having helped draft the Sherman Antitrust Act under Harrison (as well as vigorously enforcing it during his own presidency). Similarly, Marshall was allowed to uphold regulations that prevented racial discrimination in the sale of private property even though he had supported Lyndon Johnson's Fair Housing Act while serving as his solicitor general.

Although there is no historical or legal basis supporting a Kagan recusal, the same can't be said about one of her peers. A financial disclosure form released last year revealed that Clarence Thomas' wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, received more than $150,000 from a political action committee that has been especially vocal in opposing health care reform, in addition to nearly $15,000 from a lobbying firm that has focused on that issue. What's more, between 2003-07 she received more than $600,000 from the Heritage Foundation, which has been at the forefront of the anti-health care reform movement.

When comparable financial conflicts of interest were discovered about Judge Abe Fortas in the 1960s, they ultimately ended his judicial career, first forcing him to ask President Johnson to withdraw his nomination for chief justice (after it came out that business groups with potential court interests had paid him $15,000 to deliver a series of speeches) and then leading to his
resignation (after it was discovered he had accepted a $20,000 annual retainer from a Wall Street financier who was under investigation for securities violations).

Since the precedent sorely lacking in the anti-Kagan movement actually does exist against Thomas, it would stand to reason that the people calling for her removal from the health care case would also be demanding the abstention of her conservative colleague.

They aren't demanding that, of course, because the hoopla over Kagan isn't really driven by a sincere concern about judicial ethics. The only reason right-wingers are focusing on Kagan's relationship with Obama is because they believe her recusal will increase the likelihood of the health care law being overturned. Since having Thomas step down as well would negate the advantage of removing Kagan, they dismiss his conflict of interest even as they harp on
hers.

This kind of logical inconsistency is by no means limited to the health care law and the Supreme Court. It can be seen when conservatives and libertarians denounce the so-called fiscal irresponsibility of Obama's $1.2 trillion in stimulus funds but ignore, or even support, the nearly $1.3 trillion we've spent so far for Bush's stimulus, the massive tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

Likewise, it is evident when right-wingers who speak of the need for small government support policies that expand the state's power so long as it promotes their specific ideological objectives (like stopping homosexuals from getting married or curtailing women's reproductive rights).

In short, the Recuse Kagan campaign isn't only noteworthy as a particularly egregious instance of partisanship trumping reason, but it also serves as one more example of the double standards used by the political right when trying to advance its agenda.

On Obamanomics

The following editorial was published in "The Morning Call" (circulation 90,000) on December 15, 2011. The original piece can be found here: http://articles.mcall.com/2011-12-14/opinion/mc-obama-myths-rozsa-yv-1215-20111214_1_debunking-two-myths-obamanomics-stimulus-bill

The Labor Department recently reported that 140,000 jobs were created in November, causing unemployment to fall to 8.6 percent, the lowest it has been in 21/2 years. When you add that to the nearly 3 million jobs that grew in the private sector over the past 21 months, you have to wonder whether Obamanomics is starting to work.

The answer is no. It has always worked.

Of course, statements like that run afoul of one of the far right's two cherished myths about Obamanomics. Since their usual response when contradicted is to fulminate against the nonbeliever, liberals are often advised to keep quiet and let them have fun with their myths. The problem with that strategy, though, is that it doesn't allow us to have fun with our facts.

Myth No. 1: Obamanomics failed to address the unemployment crisis.

The facts: Do you remember when unemployment was mushrooming? It only rose gradually at first, climbing from slightly under 5 percent when the recession began in December 2007 to slightly more than 6 percent nine months later. When Wall Street crashed in September 2008, that mild swelling became an explosion, with the rate skyrocketing at a catastrophic average of 0.4 percent per month until Obama's stimulus bill took effect roughly three months after being passed. By then, the joblessness percentage had doubled in a year and a half to 9.4 percent in the month (May 2009) the stimulus began to work.

At that point the explosion stopped. Thanks to the pump-priming effect of the stimulus, unemployment stabilized at between 9.4 and 10.1 percent for the next year and a half. After Obama attached a second stimulus to the Bush tax cut extensions of December 2010, it actually fell slightly, staying within the 8.8 to 9.4 percent range for the first 10 months of 2011. Now it's at 8.6 percent — still tragically high, but nevertheless a marked improvement given the mess that existed for more than a year before this president took office.

Myth No. 2: Obamanomics is socialistic.

The facts: This assertion would be quite justified if Obama's policies adhered to the tenets of socialism, which according to Merriam-Webster involves "advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods." Obama, though, is the president who refused to nationalize the banks after the Wall Street meltdown despite widespread calls to do so, who campaigned in 2008 not for a single-payer health care system but for a public option (to protect a free market presence in medicine), and who upon being elected replaced the public option with the individual mandate, a right-wing alternative that originated from the Heritage Foundation and was originally sponsored by Republicans like Newt Gingrich.

When confronted with such information, right-wingers usually resort to claiming that while Obama's policies may not be literally socialistic, they are putting us on a slippery slope toward socialism. This ignores that slippery slope arguments are fundamentally illogical, since they commit the fallacy of asserting one event will inevitably follow another without proving that such a succession is inherent.

It also ignores that many of America's earliest leaders supported expanding the government's role in areas of the economy that had previously been private or locally-administered. Indeed, one of the main reasons delegates at the Constitutional Convention wanted to discard the Articles of Confederation was that they believed a stronger central state was required to fund adequate infrastructure projects and prevent economic bedlam.

That same mentality prompted George Washington to create the first national post office, Thomas Jefferson to propose federal funding for schools, roads and canals, Abraham Lincoln to finance state colleges and the transcontinental railroad, and Theodore Roosevelt to pass laws regulating food and drugs, as well as advocate social insurance, minimum-wage laws, and eight-hour workdays. If those spending projects and regulations were all socialistic, then Independence Hall and Mount Rushmore must be the meccas of the far left.

All of this reminds me of a memorable quip from my political hero, Adlai Stevenson, which I think liberals should use today just as he employed it nearly 60 years ago: "I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends … if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."

Ron Paul and the Millennial War on Banality

The following editorial will be printed in the December 13th issue of "The Rutgers Observer." Alas, that newspaper does not have a website, so this will be the only online forum in which this article appears.

Rumors abound that Ron Paul will run for president as a Libertarian in 2012, much as he did in 1988. While the jury is still out on how this would impact the two major parties in the general election, I am confident in making at least one prediction: Paul would do very well among the millennial generation.

Paul’s strong support among people ages 18 to 30 is hard to ignore, as can be seen from any visit to a college campus or online message board. While some believe this foreshadows a period of libertarian ascendancy in politics, that prognosis overlooks some inconvenient details. For one thing, this is the same generation that flocked to Barack Obama back in 2008, a man whose positions on scores of issues couldn't be farther removed from those preached by Paul. What’s more, anyone who has attended a Paul rally or conversed with a handful of Paul supporters can attest that his followers are quite the eclectic bunch: Ayn Rand worshipers and Occupy Wall Street hippies, Ph.D. candidates in economics and quasi-illiterate conspiracy theorists, stoners who celebrate his stance on marijuana legalization and pacifists who embrace his isolationism, topped off by a generous sprinkling of trendies who insist on showing the world that they are "independent-minded" by mimicking other self-proclaimed "independent-minded" people, among whom Paul is currently in vogue.

So what is the overall cause of Paul's disproportionate support among millennials? Simply put, millennials are rebelling against banality.

That’s why they rallied behind Obama in 2008. For all the attention paid to how his candidacy made history by breaking racial barriers, the real catalyst behind Obama’s appeal to millennials is that he was a throwback, offering the thoughtfulness, gravitas, and eloquence of John Kennedy after nearly eight years of the callow faltering of George W. Bush. In contrast, Paul’s appeal comes from the fact that he's perceived as refreshingly novel. Despite his claim that he’s simply preaching old-fashioned Constitutional ideals (which most historians identify as fallacy, since it rests on the myth that our founding fathers developed a consensus on how to interpret that document), Paul is adored as a gleeful slayer of sacred cows, from the military-industrial complex and the Federal Reserve to the DEA and WTO. More important, millennials believe he is motivated not merely by iconoclasm, but by an actual philosophy. At a time when politicians regularly inundate the public with platitudes, Paul stands out because he articulates provocative ideas.

The bad news is that, while the millennial war on banality is healthy, the consequent idolization of individual political figures is not.

In the case of Obama it has led to disillusionment, since like Kennedy, Obama’s luster has faded now that the abstract art of inspiration has started to clashed with the grubby realities of governing (Kennedy’s image didn’t recover until his brand was sanctified by assassination). The Paul boom, meanwhile, risks breeding dogmatism. Because millennials have been ill-served by an education system that skimps on American history and political theory, far too many mistake Paul’s presence as a prominent politician offering unorthodox ideas for a belief that those ideas are the only meaningful ones in the ideological marketplace. What those millennials fail to understand is that, in the past, men who purveyed Paul’s philosophy were joined by intellectuals advocating other perspectives. For a contrast, just look back to 1952, the last year when Paul’s political hero, Robert Taft, competed for the Republican presidential nomination. His chief opponent was Dwight Eisenhower, a centrist well-versed in the scholarship of Eric Hoffer, and the winner of that battle went on to face Adlai Stevenson, a cerebral progressive whose policy innovations were appropriated by the next two Democratic presidents.

While our era has an analog to Taft in Paul, we don’t have any Eisenhowers or Stevensons, and this is what Paul illuminates – not that his views are (or are not) the correct ones to adopt in today’s debate, but rather that a substantive debate isn’t even taking place. The millennials who fail to recognize this crucial distinction run the risk of becoming dogmatic in their libertarianism, which would make them no better than dogmatic liberals, dogmatic conservatives, or dogmatists from any other ideological group. What they must remember is that such dogmatism, combined with our politicians’ unending love of platitudes, is what put us in this age of banality in the first place.

Feminist Musings of a Fat Man

Author's Note: When I wrote this piece back in February 2010, I was at least sixty pounds heavier than I am at present. Either way, I'm posting this old article because I recently discovered (thanks to this website's statistics section) that "Feminist Musings of a Fat Man," is by a sizable amount the most frequently visited editorial at RiskingHemlock.

I like to eat and I don't like to move.

In a nation plagued by a worsening obesity epidemic, excuses have become as common as credit card debt, and I for one am sick of people talking about "glandular disorders" and "eating to dull the pain." While I do not deny that it is unacceptable for a 24-year-old male to be at my current weight, I at the very least have the self-respect - and the sense of personal accountability - to acknowledge that my corpulence is due not to circumstances that were thrust upon me, but rather to my own tendency to thrust large quantities of junk food into my mouth. Hence when people ask me why I'm fat, I bluntly admit to them: "I'm fat because I like to eat and I don't like to move."

Of course, whenever I glance around at the wide world of pop culture, I realize that - if one has to live life as a fat person - it is far more advantageous to do so as a man than as a woman. This point was rammed home for me as I saw the following news story about ex-supermodel Gemma Ward:
.

While I don't doubt that Ms. Ward's weight is not ideal for a fashion model, calling her a "Roll Model" seems not only cruel, but misleading. Whatever the ramifications of her weight gain may be for her career, Gemma Ward is certainly not "fat." In fact, I consider it a safe bet that nineteen-out-of-twenty heterosexual males would still find her to be extremely attractive with her current physique, and to state otherwise is not only mean-spirited, but inaccurate.

This reminded me of an old comedy skit I saw on Will Ferrell's website "funnyordie.com". In it, two young men at a beach decide to pretend that they're drowning so a "perfect 10" lifeguard can come and give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The punchline? When the lifeguard shows up - gamely played by former Baywatch starlet Nicole Eggert - the men are disgusted at her "fat" physique and decide that they don't really want to be saved. Although poetic justice of a sort is delivered unto them at the very end, the message of the video clip is still quite clear: If women let themselves go, their value to men will diminish accordingly. What makes it all the more disturbing is that the "fat" version of Nicole Eggert is not fat at all - she is simply an out-of-shape woman who, though no longer at her "perfect 10" peak, is still attractive enough to turn heads (in a positive way).

.

At the core of all this is a very serious social problem:

.

In America, a woman's intrinsic value is determined by her appearance.

.

No sooner do I make observations such as this before I hear multiple friends denounce me as being a feminist extremist:

"Think of all the progress women have made since the 1960s!"

"You can't blame men for being attracted to one type of woman instead of another!"

"Men are judged by their appearance too!"

Each of these arguments can be rebutted quite easily:

1) Yes, the feminist movement has done wonders in improving the social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances of American women - not only since the 1960s, but since the days of Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes - but it is foolish to look at the progress that has been made and extrapolate from that the conclusion that all remnants of sexism in this country have been eradicated. Examples of systemic societal sexism abound, as I pointed out in a blog article last October:

There was the massacre of women at a Pennsylvania gym by an outspoken online misogynist earlier this year, a terrible hate crime against women that New York Times columnist Bob Herbert accurately observed would have been plastered all over the news had it been perpetrated on the basis of race or religion, but was given a remarkably small amount of coverage when the victims were determined by gender. Our pop culture is full of sexism, blatant and subtle alike, from the rampant denigration of women in rap music to the sexualization of female roles in movies and television - why is it, for example, that only female superheroes are required to show as much skin as a PG-13 rating will allow, or that female movie stars fail to serve as high box office draws as much as males do?

The world of politics isn't much better. One can look to Congress, where only 17% of all Senators and House members are women even though more than 50% of our nation's population is female, and where America's first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had to have the photo op of her swearing in take place while she was surrounded by children. Nor is this sexism limited to our legislative branch. One of our Supreme Court judges, Clarence Thomas, was confirmed despite being notorious for sexually harassing his female law clerks, with the social stigma falling on the women who came forward to testify against him rather than on the man himself (one such woman, Anita Hill, was famously branded with the description "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" for daring to discuss her experiences). Even the Obama Administration isn't free from the taint of sexism - Lawrence Summers, the Director of the National Economic Council, was confirmed by the Senate despite having lost his job as President of Harvard University in 2006 after suggesting that women aren't as intelligent as men in mathematics and the sciences.

These are only the most prominent examples of this problem. In the workplace, women are still paid less to perform the same jobs as men. In the business world, they remain grossly outnumbered by men as CEOs and corporate boards of directors. Many areas of the arts remain out of reach for the vast majority of women, from film directing to stand-up comedy. Even as epithets against blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities have become taboo in our vernacular, few take umbrage when a woman is harassed on the basis of their sexuality or gender, as indicated by the common use of epithets like "ho", "skank", "slut", and "cunt."

There are plenty of examples that I neglected to mention even in that article: How there are dozens of tabloid stories about the latest female celebrities who have packed on the pounds - Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson, Tyra Banks, Britney Spears - with the few token "male weight gain" stories clearly existing only as a half-hearted attempt to disarm those who try to point out the gender imbalance in how that type of fare is reported; how when sitcom star Kirstie Alley gained weight, the media obsession over it caused her to launch an indulgently self-pitying TV show called "Fat Actress"; how people assume that professional titles like "doctor", "professor", and "attorney" are automatically male in nature, so that women who occupy these roles frequently need to have their vocation prefaced by their gender identity; how conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, when derisively dismissing the feminist movement, claimed that “feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.”

2) I agree that you can't fault men for preferring one type of woman over another - nor, for that matter, can you blame women when they express revulsion for men who lack ambition, engage in immature antics, or spend the better part of their days smoking pot and playing video games, even though I know some guys who resent women when they do precisely that. Sexual predilections are rarely a matter of personal choice, so it is indeed unfair to blame men when they gravitate toward one female body type over another.

At the same time, it is extremely problematic that overweight and/or unattractive women will routinely find themselves defined by their appearance EVEN IN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT ARE NEITHER SEXUAL NOR ROMANTIC IN NATURE. This brings me to my rebuttal for the third point...

3) While men are also judged by how they look, at the end of the day, it is rarely their defining attribute. Because we live in a world where virtually every avenue of professional advancement is controlled by men, an unattractive man is far less likely to find that his appearance has hindered his career goals than is an unattractive woman. Even in casual settings, people have found that women who gain weight are more likely to be treated with maliciousness - or, even worse, as if they were invisible - then are their more physically attractive counterparts, often without any regard to the content of their characters. Likewise, although weight and attractiveness based epithets are employed against both genders, a woman is far more likely to find her social standing plummet if she puts on a few pounds than is a man in a comparable situation.

All of this I know because, as a fat man, my life has not changed considerably from what it had been when I was thinner. Sure, I am occasionally the butt of jokes, and obviously I have new enemies that used to be my friends (old pairs of blue jeans and long flights of stairs are especially vicious to me). At the same time, who I am and how I am viewed by the rest of the world hasn't been substantively altered as a result of my extra body mass. It deeply disturbs me to know that, if I was a woman, the situation would be very different. The rest of society should be bothered by this as well.

Will GOP learn from Democrats' mistakes?

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" website (circulation: 90,000) on November 21, 2011 under the title "Will GOP learn from Democrats' mistakes?" The link can be found here:
http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-newt-gingrich-rozsa-yv--20111121,0,4120825.story

If I were a Republican, I would be very concerned right now about the future of my party.

Allow me to explain. As of the moment, President Barack Obama is an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Unemployment remains chronically high, his approval ratings are mired in the low 40s, and he has done a horrendous job of selling his signature achievements to the public. While other geese have been in far hotter water than this and still managed to escape uncooked, it's clear that the Republicans can walk away with this thing if they nominate the right candidate.

That candidate is Mitt Romney. He is articulate, intelligent, squeaky-clean. His policy proposals are conservative enough to meet the basic economic, social, and foreign policy requirements of any Reaganite with realistic expectations (emphasis on the word "realistic") and his strong business record is perfect for a political market defined by economic hardship.

He is, in short, the kind of inoffensive moderate conservative who is capable of swaying independents while remaining acceptable to party regulars (the latter quality being sorely absent from this year's only other Republican moderate, Jon Huntsman). This is exactly what the GOP needs to win elections. If historical precedent wasn't enough to illustrate that point, current polls consistently back it up.

And yet …

And yet because the word "moderate" appears before "conservative" in Romney's ideological label, hard-line right-wingers are determined to find someone else. Hence the slew of month-and-a-half-long love affairs we've seen with a series of fad candidates. From late March through the end of April, the beau ideal was Donald Trump. They went through a lag period after he was deflated by his humiliation at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but in mid-July they flocked to Michele Bachmann, where they remained until the end of August. Rick Perry took her spot in the beginning of September, and there he stayed until mid-October, when it suddenly became Herman Cain's time to shine. Now his four-to-six weeks are up, and Newt Gingrich is the latest craze.

Since the Iowa caucus is being held on Jan. 3, it's unclear whether Gingrich will still be on top when it matters most, since the recent past suggests he'll be right near the end of his month-and-a-half expiration date by that time. Barring any major gaffes on his part (not inconceivable given his track record), it's entirely possible that he'll be able to stay fresh just long enough to pull it off in Iowa and then take the whole thing. That said, it is equally conceivable that he'll fizzle out shortly beforehand and thus either give the nomination to whichever lucky rebound candidate replaces him or, as happened post-Trump, cause a lag in the Anyone But Romney movement, allowing Mitt to emerge triumphant while the hard right scrambles for a suitable replacement.

This latter scenario is obviously in the best short-term interests of the party, but it doesn't address its deeper problem. As groups like the tea party become increasingly powerful in the Republican organization, they keep knocking out moderate conservatives who would have been elected and replacing them with zealots who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In 2010 this cost them the Senate, as the tea party spurned moderate conservatives four times in favor of extremists (Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware) and, in turn, lost general elections which by all indications Republicans could have otherwise won. Now this same habit threatens to cost them the presidency, for while Romney may still lose to Obama, it is delusional to believe that a Gingrich, Cain, Perry, Bachmann, or Trump could ever beat him.

It is this delusional quality that would make me a very concerned partisan indeed if I were a Republican. When the Democrats went through a comparable phase in the 1970s and 1980s, they nominated a series of liberal stalwarts — George McGovern in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988 — who were beaten even in elections that data showed could have been won had they gone with a more moderate alternative (Ed Muskie instead of McGovern, Al Gore instead of Dukakis). Republicans would be well advised to learn from this recent historical lesson.

On Occupy Wall Street

This article was originally published on the "Newark Star-Ledger" website (circulation: 300,000) on October 14, 2011 under the title "Agenda for Occupy Wall Street: A Rutgers grad student's proposal."

The pundits are claiming that Occupy Wall Street lacks a coherent agenda. I have one for them that can be summed up in two words: Rebuild America.

Although Occupy Wall Street’s anger has been targeted at the American plutocracy (a term best defined by Theodore Roosevelt as “government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the ‘money touch,’ but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers”), it would be a mistake to assume, as many right-wingers have done, that this movement is driven by a desire to wage war against a particular class. People are taking to the streets not because they wish to punish the wealthy for being successful, but because the working class is being deprived of the opportunity to achieve similar success.

Millions of Americans are struggling desperately to obtain full-time work at a living wage, finding again and again that the jobs they need don’t exist. The argument that putting more money in the pockets of big business and the wealthy creates jobs has been discredited by the fact that both groups are richer than ever before while unemployment remains chronically high. At a time when so much of our infrastructure is crumbling and so many nascent industries are calling out for cultivation, the obvious answer is an ambitious government program that invests money in developing our nation while simultaneously putting people back to work. Because such an endeavor would cost a great deal and America can’t afford to further increase its dangerously large deficit, the only fiscally sound way for this to happen would be to raise taxes on the wealthy. Unfortunately, a seemingly impenetrable coalition of libertarians and conservatives, buttressed by the strong financial backing of plutocrats like the Koch brothers, is preventing such tax increases from being implemented.

This is where Occupy Wall Street has stepped in, and this is why I propose that their agenda consist of three parts:

1) They should define their cause around the passage of the American Jobs Act. For one thing, it is far more difficult to propose new measures than it is to exert pressure behind initiatives that already exist. What’s more, this is a bill that would actually go a long way toward fulfilling many of America’s needs. It would invest billions in construction projects and infrastructure improvements, thus strengthening our society while lowering unemployment, as well as protect the jobs of our teachers, police officers, and firefighters and expand the private sector workforce by making it illegal for businesses to discriminate against the unemployed.

2) Republicans and tea party members claim that infrastructural programs are both socialistic and fail to create jobs. Because history proves the lie to such assertions, it is vital for Occupy Wall Street to wield this tool to its advantage. It must be pointed out that programs such as the ones they propose have a distinguished history in America, tracing back to the origins of our republic and being supported by presidents like George Washington (the Post Office Act of 1792), Abraham Lincoln (the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862), Franklin Roosevelt (the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935), and Dwight Eisenhower (the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956). On each occasion these programs were remarkably successful at not only employing large swathes of the population, but at developing our nation and increasing its prestige in the world community. Even Obama's stimulus bills accomplished more than their critics wish to acknowledge. Although unemployment had been rising at a catastrophic rate of 0.4 percent per month between the month of the Wall Street meltdown (September 2008, when it was at 6.2 percent) and the month Obama's policies could take effect (May 2009, when it reached 9.4 percent), it stabilized between 9.4 and 10.1 percent as a result of the first stimulus bill. After Obama attached a second stimulus to the Bush tax cut extensions, it fell to between 8.8 and 9.4 percent, where it has remained ever since.

3) They must work to reelect Barack Obama. While many of the criticisms of his presidency are legitimate, it is clear that he is trying to define the election of 2012 around the American Jobs Act. If he is defeated, there can be no doubt that whichever Republican replaces him – be it Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, or anyone else – will oppose not only that specific bill but all other internal improvement measures that follow the tradition of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. If Obama wins, on the other hand, the fact that his victory will have been built around job-creating internal improvements will compel him to push for that agenda. This is a rare perfect storm of political opportunity, and Occupy Wall Street should take advantage of it.

Because we live in a culture that focuses on sound bytes instead of sophisticated arguments, even a movement as admirably diverse as Occupy Wall Street needs to find a simple way of summing up its position. While many of the current slogans are effective, there is one that truly captures not only the spirit of the movement, but the policies which it should support.

That slogan, once again, can be summed up in two words: Rebuild America.

The original article can be found here: http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/10/agenda_for_occupy_wall_street.html

On Civil Rights

This article was originally published in "The Express Times" (circulation: 40,000) on October 3, 2011 under the title "Public schools in Pa., N.J., flunk civil-rights teaching test."

Can you identify the source of this quote?

“We conclude that in the field of public education separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

If you can’t, don’t worry. Not even today’s high school students are expected to know that it came from the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In fact, when 12,000 12-graders last year took the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam, all they were asked to do was identify school segregation as the problem being addressed in that passage.

It didn’t matter. Even after being given several hints (including extra sentences from the excerpt and the detail that it had been written in 1954), only 2 percent of the test-takers could provide a correct answer.

Unfortunately, a recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center made it clear that this is hardly an isolated instance of historical ignorance. As the report points out, “across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.”

And before you go about laying the blame below the Mason-Dixon Line, the reality is that the South far surpasses any other section of the country when it comes to this subject, with nine of the 12 states that scored the highest in civil rights history coming from the former Confederacy. New Jersey, on the other hand, received a score of 15 percent on civil rights topics, earning it an ‘F.’ Pennsylvania’s ‘F’ was even more embarrassing, as it came with an abysmal score of zero.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with this widespread ignorance of civil rights history is that it neglects to recognize a large and important segment of the American community. With more than one-eighth of our population either wholly or partially of African ancestry, it is inexcusable for such a critical aspect of the black experience to be so inadequately taught.

What’s worse, a lack of understanding about the civil rights movement ultimately devalues the importance of race in other areas of our history.

For example, race impacted the debates at the Constitutional Convention (causing slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person when assigning congressmen), shaped regional economies during the antebellum period (causing the South to remain agrarian while the North was industrialized), gave birth to the Republican Party (as a vehicle for opposing the expansion of slavery), and, more than a century later, helped the GOP win social conservatives by nominating candidates who opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, including Barry Goldwater (who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional) and Ronald Reagan (who denounced the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South”).

This dearth of historical knowledge also has far deeper social implications. In the absence of a more sophisticated understanding of civil rights history, Americans have been left with a simplistic “Hollywood” fairy tale, one in which the racists of the past are so blatant in their villainy that most of us can rest comfortably with the knowledge that no one outside of a fringe group could hold similar views today.

When the word “racist” is used to conjure up grotesque caricatures instead of flesh-and-blood human beings, then it becomes all too easy for people to insist that the term for such a bogeyman can’t possibly apply to police officers who racially profile African-Americans, shopkeepers who instruct their employees to trail black customers, and tea partyers whose intense hatred for our first black president is unusual even for the normally superheated world of American politics.

Until we remember that the racists of the past were men and women who – though willing to picket a desegregated school, cast a ballot for George Wallace, or raise hell when a black family moved into their neighborhood – were for the most part no better or worse than the rest of us, we will always be susceptible to repeating their mistakes.

Of course, this isn’t to say that race is the only area of history in which the public’s knowledge is woefully limited. From the religious right-wingers who claim America was founded as a Christian nation (and thus ignore Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists and Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, as well as James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments) to the radicals of all stripes who wear the Guy Fawkes mask from “V for Vendetta” (without knowing that Fawkes’s goal was to create a Catholic theocracy in England), ignorance of the past can be seen in almost every aspect of our political life.

That said, because racism remains such a serious problem in America today, improving our knowledge of the civil rights movement seems like a particularly good place to begin correcting this deficiency.

The original article can be found here: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/10/guest_column_public_schools_in.html

On Gay Rights

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" (circulation: 90,000) on October 2, 2011 under the title "Santorum complaints hypocritical."

In a recent interview with Politico, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum issued a scathing denunciation of Google. "If you're a responsible business," he remarked, "you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country."

One might expect such strong words to be reserved for the greatest rascals of American capitalism – you know, like the Wall Street firms whose chicanery plunged our nation into its current economic mess, or perhaps the corporate executives who throw hardworking employees onto the unemployment rolls instead of accepting modest cuts to their own massive salaries. What could Google have done to provoke such a condemnation from the erstwhile senator?

To answer that question, one must look back to 2003, when an Associated Press reporter asked Santorum why he opposed gay rights:

"We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now (a reference to Lawrence v. Texas), that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they (homosexuals) undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery."

And again:

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

While Santorum may think saying he only wants to protect family and marriage conceals the hatefulness of his views, history reveals that most advocates of oppression have come up with excuses for their prejudices. When Grover Cleveland spoke out against the right of women to vote, he claimed that he was motivated not by sexism, but by a desire to protect "the characters of the wives and mothers of our land." Similarly, when George Wallace fought against integration, he spoke for millions of segregationists when he dismissed charges of racism as "fantasy" and insisted that they opposed civil rights measures because they would lead to "the destruction of the Constitution and our nation."

In other words, Santorum wasn't fooling anyone, least of all prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activist Dan Savage, who decided that it was time to strike back against the bullies. Using humor as his weapon, he declared "Santorum" to be a new word and held a contest to see who could come up with the funniest definition. Thousands of submissions were considered, and when a winner was finally selected, a website was created to solidify its place in the American lexicon.

Because of its unprintable nature, I can't tell you what definition Savage ultimately chose. Suffice to say that it became very popular, was viewed by millions of people, and has thus became the No. 1 hit whenever a Google search is conducted for "Santorum."

That brings me back to the recent interview, in which Santorum demanded that Google exempt him from its search engine's algorithm so that attention might be drawn away from Savage's website. There is a comic irony in seeing a man who — though quick to brandish a laissez-faire philosophy when opposing regulations on businesses that would protect workers and consumers — doesn't hesitate to call for interfering with the practices of one particular business because it is allowing him to be ridiculed.

In a way, this symbolizes one of the defining hypocrisies of the modern Republican Party, which supports the principle of "small government" when it is politically beneficial (such as by serving the financial self-interests of the base of rich donors referred to by George W. Bush as the "have mores") but abandons it as soon as that is no longer the case (like when it angers homophobes). While Santorum may be unusually obnoxious, the sad truth is that his views on gay rights aren't far removed from those held by most of his fellow GOPers. Even as we celebrate the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Santorum incident is a sobering reminder that we still have a long way to go.

The original article can be found here: http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-santorum-rozsa-yv-20111002,0,2282411.story

On the Constitution

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" (circulation: 90,000) on August 15, 2011 under the title "Constitution was born of compromise."

When reviewing "Atlas Shrugged," the magnum opus of libertarian paladin Ayn Rand, famed anti-communist Whittaker Chambers made this observation about her philosophy: "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal."

Unfortunately, this mentality is all too prevalent among tea partyers today. While they may not share Rand's views on religion (she was a militant atheist while tea partyers are often Christian right-wingers) and social morality (she supported the rights of homosexuals and others with nontraditional lifestyles, whereas the tea party tends to favor their repression), they certainly ape her claim to having cornered all understanding of the Founding Fathers' will. This is a most unfortunate development.

Take, as an example, the brouhaha over President Barack Obama's health care reform legislation. As one of the critics of the health care law, the tea party claims that the 10th Amendment, which declares all powers not expressly enumerated to the federal government as belonging to the states and/or the people, renders the health care law unconstitutional.

Liberals and others who support the law point out how the commerce clause of the Constitution allows the government to regulate interstate commerce, while the general welfare clause permits the state to create new taxes and spending programs so long as their objective is to promote the overall well-being of society. They further add that not only do both of these criteria apply to the issue of health care reform, but that also arguing against them on 10th Amendment grounds would nullify virtually every important progressive social reform since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, from federal spending on education and transportation to the passage of Medicare and the outlawing of child labor.

Right-wingers, naturally, respond with points of their own, from citing James Madison's restrictive interpretation of the general welfare clause (and ignoring Alexander Hamilton's rebuttal) to claiming that excessive regulation impedes economic growth.

And each side ultimately expounds at length about the ideological and historical arguments that can buttress their respective positions. This is both natural and healthy, as reflected by the ongoing legal battle that has taken Obamacare to the federal district courts -- where jurists have so far issued wildly divergent rulings -- and will, inevitably, bring it to the Supreme Court.

Where tea partyers add an unhealthy element to these debates is that they insist not merely that they are right but that their opinions are the only ones capable of being legitimate. They don't view liberals and centrists as having different interpretations of the Founding Fathers' intent, but of deliberately wishing to subvert it. What's worse, they depict all modern Democratic presidents -- from the bold social liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to the center-leftists like Bill Clinton and Obama -- as being not merely incorrect, which can be reasonably argued, but as being sinister and radical, which cannot.

The irony here is that the men whose ideas tea partyers embrace as immutable gospel were hardly monolithic in their views. Individuals like Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Pickney, Paterson, Randolph and Franklin disagreed so frequently and dramatically that ideologies from across the political spectrum can use their writings for support.

Indeed, when reading the Federalist Papers or the transcripts of the Constitutional Convention, it is the very contentiousness of those proceedings that makes the document produced in Philadelphia and ratified by the 13 states, from Delaware to Rhode Island, so magnificent.

While it is easy to craft a charter or manifesto when the individuals involved in composing it are of one mind, it is quite another to do so when disagreements fly as thick and fast as insects in the summer heat. The beauty of the Constitution lies in the fact that it was the product not of divine ordinances dispensed from a higher power, but of a series of courageous compromises agreed upon by imperfect men.

Tragically, this is one reality that tea partyers, in the name of their self-proclaimed crusade, refuse to accept.

The original article can be found here: http://articles.mcall.com/2011-08-15/opinion/mc-tea-party-constitution-rozsa-yv-0820110815_1_tea-partyers-health-care-constitution