RiskingHemlock

Recusing Elena Kagan

2012-02-01T21:06:00.003-05:00

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

2011-12-15T18:40:00.003-05:00

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."

Feminist Musings of a Fat Man

2011-12-09T04:03:00.005-05:00

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?

2011-11-21T18:38:00.005-05:00

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

2011-10-15T14:19:00.007-04:00

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

2011-10-15T14:17:00.004-04:00

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

2011-10-15T14:16:00.005-04:00

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

2011-10-15T14:13:00.004-04:00

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

On the Tea Party

2011-10-15T14:11:00.004-04:00

This article was originally published in "The Express Times" (circulation: 40,000) on July 28, 2011 under the title "Tea Partiers acting like spoiled children in debt debate."

Even though I am hardly a fan of the disproportionate influence of big businesses in our government, the reality is that the vast majority of them don’t want a default any more than centrists, leftists and moderate conservatives.

The blame here rests entirely with the Tea Party and their enablers in Congress, all of whom stand alone in their unwillingness to compromise in the name of the greater national good.

Indeed, although I can think of plenty of financial crises that were deliberately perpetrated by specific individuals and institutions (Nicholas Biddle causing a bank panic in the summer of 1833; James Fisk and Jay Gould cornering the gold market in 1869; the Wall Street derivatives traders from the 2000s), this is the first instance in which a large political movement has deliberately sabotaged the American economy.

Please note that I’m not saying that past political movements haven’t inadvertently harmed our country in this manner. What I’m pointing out is that, in the past, the occasions in which political and financial agency was exercised to knowingly destroy our economy took place because a handful of men and women (OK, usually men) did so in the name of power and/or profit.

For the first time in American history, it is a large ideological group that is willfully causing a massive economic crisis. What’s worse, that ideology seems to be best summed up by Earl Warren’s observation about how “many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but regard the things government does for others as socialism.”

This goes a long way toward reinforcing the fact that there is something fundamentally immature about the Tea Party. Because Tea Partiers overwhelmingly tend to be white, Christian and more affluent than the average American, their claim to being victimized by the government — and specifically by regulations and taxes — is deluded at best and downright disingenuous at worst.

In that respect, they remind me of children who throw temper tantrums when their parents won’t buy them a new toy (an offense of which I was occasionally guilty — although in my defense, I was 5).

Even though they act like their plight is inconceivably terrible, and express that conviction with equal parts anger and hyperbole, their sturm und drang must never be mistaken for a valid case. If you even pay attention to them, much less cede to their demands, you grant them a legitimacy they don’t deserve … and, more important, which society can’t afford.

That is where my analogy between spoiled children and Tea Partiers falls apart. Whereas the former are merely obnoxious, the latter strive to inflict suffering on the unemployed and working poor, oppress those with cultural values that differ from their own and deliberately destroy entire economic systems when their pettiest demands aren’t granted in every way, shape and form.

All in all, I’d rather give political influence to the problem child than the Tea Party.

The original article can be found here: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/07/guest_column_tea_partiers_acti.html

Barack Obama’s Legacy

2011-09-12T16:52:00.008-04:00

This article has already been printed in the September 12th issue of The Rutgers Observer but, because that newspaper is having financial problems which prevent its archives from appearing online, I decided to also post it here.

Historians love to shed light on the present by using analogies from the past; if nothing else, it helps validate our profession. That is why, as Barack Obama’s presidency prepares to wrap up its thirty-second month, I can’t help but be reminded of where Harry Truman was thirty-two months into his own administration. For Truman it was the end of 1947, and just like Obama in 2011, he was confronted with low approval ratings, a lousy economy, a hostile Congress, lackluster support within his own party, and a growing consensus that his time in office would be viewed by history – to say nothing of the voters – as a failure.

Today Truman’s first thirty-two months are remembered for his bringing an end to World War Two, his controversial use of the atomic bomb in Japan, his work in establishing the United Nations, his setting of Cold War precedent through the Truman Doctrine’s espousal of Soviet containment, and his use of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct postwar Europe. Although Obama’s accomplishments are obviously very different from those of Truman (and, thankfully, he doesn’t have an atom bomb to mar them), their beneficial impact on his legacy is just as great:

(1) He passed two stimulus bills that helped control the damage caused by the 2008 economic meltdown. Between September 2008 (the month of the meltdown) and May 2009 (the last month before the first stimulus could start to have a meaningful effect), unemployment increased from 6.2% to 9.4%, at a catastrophic average rate of 0.4% per month. As a result of Obama’s first stimulus bill, however, unemployment stabilized, vacillating between 9.4% and 10.1% from May 2009 through the end of 2010. After he attached a second stimulus bill to the Republican increase on the Bush tax cuts, the range of unemployment fell slightly, causing it to hover between 8.8% and 9.4% since the beginning of 2011.

(2) He passed a sweeping health care reform bill that will provide coverage to more than thirty million Americans by means such as expanding Medicaid eligibility, creating health insurance exchanges in each state, and offering subsidies to help small businesses and low-income families afford insurance premiums, even as it ends many of the unjust policies commonly practiced by insurance companies (e.g., discriminating against people with preexisting conditions or placing annual and lifetime coverage caps). Although the health care reform bill is going to soon reach the Supreme Court, only one aspect of it has any realistic chance of being overturned – i.e., the individual mandate, which protects insured Americans from having their premiums increased by the medical costs of the uninsured by imposing fines on those who can afford insurance but refuse to purchase it – and even that can be replaced by a system such as auto-enrollment if necessary. Consequently, by the end of the decade, the only Americans without some form of insurance will be illegal immigrants, those who opt out of Medicaid despite being eligible, and those who opt out of private insurance despite being able to afford it.

(3) He passed legislation that addressed many of the core factors which caused the 2008 meltdown, from the exploitative practices of credit card companies (the Credit CARD Act of 2009) to chicanery in the financial sector (the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010).

(4) He made significant strides toward gay rights by repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and expanding the aegis of federal hate-crime law to cover gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.

(5) He made controversial decisions to continue the Guantanamo Bay interrogations (opposed by liberals) and shift our intelligence focus from Iraq to Pakistan (opposed by President Bush and John McCain), both of which led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden.

(6) He fulfilled the central promise of his presidential candidacy – i.e., he brought an end to the Iraq War, with combat operations in that nation ceasing in 2010 and transitional forces scheduled to leave by the end of this year.

Of course, like Truman, the fact that Obama’s achievements aren’t more widely recognized touches upon some of his major weaknesses as a political communicator. Similarly, just as Truman was too timid to stand up to Republicans on matters like red-baiting, so too did Obama’s reluctance to alienate Republicans cause him to avoid taking the right positions on issues like Planned Parenthood funding, legalizing marijuana, and withdrawing from Afghanistan. Most disastrously, it caused him to refrain from pushing for a stimulus package large enough to get us out of our $3 trillion hole when he first took office, leaving America with a bill that merely stabilized the unemployment rate instead of actually reducing it.

Fortunately, it appears that Obama is starting to learn from his mistakes. By calling an emergency session of Congress and demanding that Republicans pass the American Jobs Act, he has deftly constructed a win-win situation – if they pass something resembling his current bill, as many as one million jobs could be created, while if they refuse, he will be able to characterize them as obstructionists. Either scenario helps both the country and his political standing.

Do you know who did something like that and was reelected as a result of it? Harry Truman.

Hypnotizing Jews: Rand Paul & Co. Expose Obama's Diabolical Scheme

2011-06-07T17:59:00.005-04:00

Did you think the radical right had lost its marbles when it claimed Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?

Was it clear that things could get no wackier when they insisted his health care reform bill included death panels to extirpate the elderly and disabled?

Were you certain they’d reached a critical mass of lunacy when they hysterically declared that his back-to-school speech was really an attempt to indoctrinate America’s children with socialism?

In the words of Al Jolson… you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Apparently two Republican members of Congress and a Republican Senator-elect believe one of Obama’s secrets to winning the 2008 election was…

Hypnotizing the Jews.

I am not creative enough to make this up.

According to “The Jewish Forward”, a right-wing coalition of doctors known as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) “published an article in 2008 wondering if Obama is ‘a brilliant orator, or a hypnotist?’ The answer, according to the paper published on the group’s website, is that Obama has used in his speeches ‘covert hypnosis intended only for licensed therapists on consenting patients.’ And those most affected by Obama’s covert hypnosis were Jewish voters.”

Further research has yielded that members of AAPS include Rand Paul, the Republican Senator-elect from Kentucky, as well as his father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, and another radical conservative, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia. Given how active these men are in shaping and promoting the agenda of AAPS, they were no doubt both aware of and in agreement with the contents of the article which presented this outlandish argument.

That’s not all. According to the “professionals” at AAPS, Obama didn’t rely solely on oratory in his dastardly plot to hypnotize Hebrews. As the “Louisville Courier-Journal” reports, “the AAPS article notes that the Obama campaign logo ‘might just be the letter ‘O,’ but it also resembles a crystal ball, a favorite of hypnotists.’”

To be fair, it is true that 78% of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama in 2008. In fact, he received more votes from Jews than he did from members of any other white religious group (Protestants – 34%, Catholics – 47%, Evangelicals – 41%)* or, aside from blacks, any other ethnic group (Latinos – 67%, Asians – 62%, Whites – 43%). Considering that Obama’s overall popular vote performance was 53%, his disproportionate strength among Jews could very well be viewed as suspect – if, of course, one lacks historical perspective.

I mention historical perspective because, with it, one sees that Democrats have averaged 75% of the Jewish vote in every presidential election since 1928.

That was the year Al Smith’s nomination cemented the Democratic Party’s association with the cosmopolitan brand of liberalism that, throughout history, has tended to appeal to Jews. Since then, every Democratic presidential candidate has decisively won the Jewish vote. Indeed, with only one exception (Jimmy Carter in 1980), Democratic support among Jewish voters hasn’t fallen below 60% in that entire eighty year period.

In short, it seems reasonable to assume that the Jewish community’s historic affinity with liberalism – and as such with America’s liberal party, the Democrats – is more likely to have caused Obama’s solid Semitic support than any Svengalian code words or covert crystal balls.

Once that has been established, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Paul Broun have not only been proven wrong on this specific issue, but have lost the right to ever be taken seriously again. In part this is because society, for the sake of its collective intelligence, needs to draw a line separating the people who disseminate egregious stupidity from the ones who make meaningful contributions to our political discourse. More important, however, is the fact that an unmistakable strain of racism coils beneath the surface of the more vitriolic rumors being spread about our first black president. While there is no reason to question the motives of conservatives whose criticisms of Obama are based on legitimate ideological differences, the stench of bigotry – the kind that is fueled by sheer hatred before being made socially acceptable through the use of an indirect approach – contaminates the over-the-top asininity with which Obama is assailed today. The only thing separating AAPS’s theory from the allegations that Obama isn’t a native citizen, added death panels to his health care reform bill, or tried to spread socialism to our children is that AAPS adds a dash of anti-Semitism to the larger racist brew.

Besides, it’s ridiculous to believe that a tricked out ‘O’ could actually hypnotize Jews into voting for Barack Obama. I’m Jewish and the logo doesn’t have any effect on me…

“Aren’t I pretty, Matt?”

No! I must resist your power!

“Hope……Change…… Hope…… Change……”

I can’t support Obama! He’s a Kenyan Socialist!

“Yes you can……Yes you can……”

SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I MOBILIZE THE PROLETARIAT!

Obama and the Black Vote: Rebutting a Racist

2011-05-29T20:30:00.001-04:00

My good friend Christina asked me for help.

Her acquaintance, a man I'd never met named Leon, had made the following claim about Barack Obama and the black vote:
.

Unfortunately Obama will get over 90% of black votes as long as he runs for president. If this was being done by white voters, then blacks would have been screaming racism, and rightfully so.
.

It is interesting that, according to Islam, the child goes according to the father, so that makes Obama Muslim. His father was Muslim from Kenya, his stepfather was Muslim from Indonesia. And I also find interesting that even Christian blacks voted for black Muslim. Right Christina?

Soon another friend, Aubrey, expressed agreement with Leon's opinions while adding a few comments of his own:

I'm just saying before this election less then 45% of the African American population turned out to vote... then the minute they find out there is a BLACK man running for office more then 60% of the population ended up voting.

As it seemed that this belief about Obama and the black vote was widely held, I figured I should rebut it. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to the post in which Leon made his comments, so I was only able to directly confront Aubrey. Here, unedited, is what I wrote to him:

While there was a slight uptick both in black voter turnout and black support for the Democratic Party in 2008 (i.e., between 5% and 7%), the increase was nowhere near significant enough to justify your assertion that "black people only vote based on race" (and before you complain that you never said that, you made a point of agreeing with the person who did). Here are the facts (for the sake of convenience, all of the statistics cited have been rounded):

1a. African-Americans have been a Democratic bloc for decades, thanks to a process that began during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency (when his New Deal programs helped millions of impoverished black people and received their appreciation) and reached its climax in the election of 1964 (when the Republican Party nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, a man whose opposition to civil rights legislation was the official sign that the GOP was jettisoning of black interests in an ultimately-successful effort to woo Dixiecrats and other racists). That is why, in the pair of presidential elections before the 2008 contest, the Democratic candidates received 90% and 88% of the black vote, a figure that Obama only increased to 95% in 2008. This rise, though not insignificant, is rendered less impressive when you take into account that Obama's share of the overall popular vote was 5% higher than that of the Democratic candidate from the previous election, a margin that black voters surpassed by only 2%. For more on that, see:http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2009/05/demographic-breakdown-of-presidential.html

1b. Black voter turnout rose from 60% in 2004 to 65% in 2008. While this was in contrast to overall voter turnout levels, which remained steady at 64% between 2004 and 2008, it was consistent with a pattern of higher turnout among demographics that tended to be part of the Democratic base, including Asians, Hispanics, and women. For more on that, see:http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1209/racial-ethnic-voters-presidential-election

1c. This is not to say that blacks didn't vote in larger numbers, or support the Democratic candidate at a greater percentage, than had been the case in elections when the Democrat wasn't a black man; both of those things are true. The data, however, suggests that although Obama's race was important to many black voters, it was hardly the sole or even decisive variable.

2. I'm tired of people acting as if Obama's inexperience means his supporters could have only gravitated toward him on the basis of his race. Plenty of presidential candidates have been backed by large and passionate movements despite their short resumes and/or ambiguity on the issues, from Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Willkie to John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.
.
Had I been able to respond to Leon, I would have repeated all of that before adding the following:

3. Apart from the fact that Obama's ability to be a good president wouldn't be impaired if he was a Muslim, the reality is that Islam does not pass down automatically through the father.

4. Even if being a Muslim was passed on paternally, both of Obama's parents had officially disavowed their childhood faiths by the time he was born (and atheism, I am certain, is not inherited).

5. Even if Obama had spent his childhood as a Muslim, either by default due to his father's background or because he had been deliberately raised that way, he was baptized as a member of the United Church of Christ when he was twenty-seven.

Now that I have addressed all of your points - and in a matter that is beyond reasonable dispute, since as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - I have two questions for you:

1. Why were you so quick to believe that blacks only supported Obama because of his race?

There is no way you came to this conclusion based on objectively conducted research, since all of the relevant historical and statistical information contradicts it. Once that has been established, the only explanation which makes sense is that you have a predisposition to dislike black people and, as such, was naturally inclined to believe something that depicted them in a disparaging fashion.

Is this my way of calling you a racist?

Yes. The term "racist" is a strong one, but when someone reveals a prejudice against another race (prejudice being defined in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary as "(1) a preconceived judgment or opinion, (2) an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge"), the term "racist" must be used.

2. Why were you so quick to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

That one I may just chalk up to stupidity.

Was I rude in my replies, both hypothetical and actual? Perhaps... but if our politics had more intelligent rudeness and less stupid civility, we would be a lot better off.

Liberalism vs. Conservatism

2011-05-29T13:05:00.011-04:00

Three quotes from leading economic conservatives have been posted below. Please note that these statements did not come from members of the rightist fringe or from arbitrary figures. Each individual mentioned here was/is a key thinker either in the development of right-wing economic thought or in its subsequent justification.

Alexander Hamilton when discussing the ideal structure of a democratic government:

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they therefore will ever maintain good government."

Ludwig von Mises when praising Ayn Rand's message to the working class about the wealthy:

"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you."

Rush Limbaugh on the tendency of liberals to feel sympathy for the poor:

"The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples. The poor feed off the largesse of this government and give nothing back... I'm sick and tired of the one phony game I've had to play and that is this so-called compassion for the poor. I don't have compassion for the poor."

So what are the tenets of economic liberalism? A dishonest or ill-informed conservative (and most conservatives, by the way, are neither of these things) would argue that we're socialistic (a charge that I debunk here: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/10/miltons-letter-or-my-thoughts-on-morons.html) or that we love the idea of big government (which I debunk here: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/04/debate-on-big-government.html). Someone more familiar with the origins of the economic liberal philosophy, however, would point out that our ideas were given their best articulation by the president who did the most to champion them.

Franklin Roosevelt in the "Economic Bill of Rights" section from his 1944 State of the Union:

"It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education."

Herein lies the fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism on economic questions. It is not, as pundits are wont to say, a situation in which the two sides agree as to ends but differ about the means. When right-wing leaders make their policy proposals, they draw their views on the poor from Rush Limbaugh, their views on the rich from Ludwig von Mises, and their views on the role of class in democracy from Alexander Hamilton - with, of course, massive campaign contributions from big businesses and other wealthy donors lubricating the process of persuasion when necessary. Left-wingers, on the other hand, continually strive to actualize the vision voiced by Franklin Roosevelt sixty-seven years ago.

These are the stakes. We must never forget them.

Obama's Legacy

2011-05-29T13:03:00.000-04:00

A little more than twenty-eight months into his first term, there still exists a prevailing consensus that Barack Obama doesn't have very much to show for his presidency. As one of my friends recently put it while praising Obama for his initiatives toward a Middle East peace process, "I think he's starting to get ahead of the 8-ball finally. He's been doing a lot of reacting for the first 2.5 years..."

While I have certainly been highly critical of Obama on many occasions, I realize that it is important to credit our leaders when they deserve it as well as assail them when they come up short. This is especially true of liberals, who in numerous ways have yet to recover from the 1960s "crisis of confidence" (Jimmy Carter's term) that caused them to view all "establishment" political figures - past and present alike - with rigid cynicism. That such skepticism is valuable in holding powerful men and women accountable is beyond question; at the same time, an excess of jadedness not only creates a simplistic mindset as distorted as the right-wing's unthinking adulation for its leaders (which leftists correctly lampoon), but also makes it harder for liberals to develop the kind of political solidarity which is crucial to success in a pluralistic democracy.

All of this would be irrelevant if Obama had indeed neglected to do very much during his presidency. Even a brief scan of his achievements, however, will show that this is manifestly not the case. In his first twenty-eight months as president, Obama...
- Pushed through two stimulus bills that prevented the economic meltdown of 2008-2009 from worsening and has since led to a gradual recovery.
- Ended the war in Iraq.
- Repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
- Imposed new regulations on Wall Street banks so as to prevent a repetition of the 2008 economic meltdown.
- Imposed new regulations on credit card companies so as to end exploitative practices on consumers and/or homeowners.
- Avenged the September 11th attacks by reversing Bush Administration policies and seeking Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, eventually resulting in the terrorist's assassination.
- Passed a revolutionary health care reform bill that, among other things, prevents insurance companies from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions, outlaws annual and lifetime coverage caps, provides Medicaid coverage to all families and individuals with incomes up to 133% of the poverty level, provides subsidies to low income families and individuals to help them afford health care insurance (while placing a fine on those who refuse to purchase it), and creates health insurance exchanges to help individuals and small businesses compare different plans and determine which are ideal for them.

That, by the way, is the short list.

What makes these accomplishments even more significant is how they compare with those of Obama's predecessors. On domestic policy, the last president to match or surpass Barack Obama was Lyndon Johnson, whose legacy includes most of America's major civil rights legislation, the War on Poverty measures (viz., the Job Corps, VISTA, Project Head Start, etc.), the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the implementation of programs to help individuals with low incomes afford housing, the elimination of restrictive immigration quotas that limited the number of non-white groups that could live in America, the founding of education assistance to provide financial aid to poor public school districts and low-interest loans or scholarships to working class college students, and the passage of the late-twentieth century's most important environmental protection laws (viz., the Wilderness Preservation Act, the Water Quality Act, the Air Quality Act, etc.) Similarly, the last president to equal Obama's achievements on foreign policy was Jimmy Carter, who granted amnesty to conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, crafted the first lasting peace agreement between Israel and one of its hostile Arab neighbors (Egypt), ended decades of conflict in Central America by giving the Panama Canal to Panama, and engaged in painstaking negotiations that led to the freeing of American hostages captured by Iran with a minimal loss of life.

This is not to say that one shouldn't be critical of Obama's shortcomings and errors. He should be faulted for the fact that Guantanamo Bay remains open and the Afghanistan War rages on, that the health care reform bill didn't include the public option that would have made it truly comprehensive, and that his economic stimulus bills weren't large enough to bring the economic recession to a speedier close. Like Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter before him, Obama's many successes have not been unaccompanied by important failures (e.g., Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, Carter was inept in handling America's economic and oil crises and reneged on his vow to decriminalize marijuana). At the same time, just as Johnson and Carter are viewed more kindly by today's historians than by their contemporaries, so too is it likely that Obama's presidential tenure will be lauded once it is viewed through the clear lens of hindsight rather than the haze of our current political firefight.

Of course, it would help the liberal movement if, every now and then, its leaders received their due while they still had the power to do something with it.

2012 Predictions: Romney, Cain, et al.

2011-05-29T10:35:00.015-04:00

Had Mike Huckabee decided to seek the Republican presidential nomination next year, the odds are pretty good that he would have gotten it (see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/04/election-of-2012.html). Now that Huckabee is out of the race, the Republican Party finds itself in a position that has become increasingly rare in American political history – i.e., one in which, long after political conventional wisdom has decided which candidates could be considered “frontrunners” and which should be deemed “dark horses,” that hierarchy is suddenly and drastically overhauled. When this has happened in recent history it has either been because a candidate widely considered to be a frontrunner has unexpectedly decided not to run (viz., Mario Cuomo in 1992) or because a frontrunner was unexpectedly taken down by a debilitating scandal (viz., Gary Hart in 1988). Indeed, as indicated by those last two examples, such events have traditionally occurred not to Republicans, but to their brethren on the other side of the aisle.

So who will Republicans pick to run against Obama? With Newt Gingrich compromised by his personal life, Ron Paul too radical to ever expand his base in the GOP beyond its staunch libertarian wing, Tim Pawlenty too bland to make a favorable impression, Rick Perry too prone to faux pas (viz., his arguments about Texas secession), and both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmman widely deemed to be unelectable, only two options remain:

Mitt Romney.

There can be little doubt that Mitt Romney is the undisputed frontrunner. He has many outstanding advantages, including an excellent record in the business world as a shrewd entrepreneur and fixer-upper, which will endear him to economic conservatives and independents; an image as an ideological moderate, one facilitated by his tenure as governor of Massachusetts and his refusal to cater to the GOP’s more extreme groups like the Tea Party; wide name recognition from his last bid for the Republican nomination in 2008; stalwart support among influential conservative leaders like Rush Limbaugh; strong showings in two of the Republican Party’s four earliest primaries (New Hampshire and Nevada); and, most important of all, a loyal and financially well-endowed fundraising base that contains many of the party’s richest and most powerful donors, all of whom see in Romney the type of plutocratic leadership they yearn to again find in Washington since their last champion, George W. Bush, left the White House.

That said, it cannot be denied that Romney’s candidacy has several major flaws. His support as Governor of Massachusetts of a health care reform program very similar to the one put in place by Barack Obama will undeniably hurt him among the party’s base of diehard conservatives, perhaps more so than is currently evident in the polls (surveys suggest that most Republican primary voters aren't aware of this aspect of his record and would think less of him if they knew about it). In addition, his flip-flopping on social issues like abortion and gay rights will hardly endear him to a party that has become increasingly intractable on questions of cultural policy. Finally, there is the fact that, as a Mormon, a wall of intolerance – much of it unspoken, some all too blatant – will engender suspicion among Republican primary voters, particularly those affiliated with the Christian Right.

It is important to note that none of those hurdles are insurmountable. Because Romney is considered to be ideologically and economically "safe" among the financially well-heeled contributors who serve as de facto leaders of the Republican Party, he has more than enough resources to compensate for the aforementioned deficiencies. That said, effectively dealing with them will require Romney to win the primaries by pandering to right-wingers in ways that may compromise his political viability in the general election. This could prove fatal to him if he makes the same mistake as John McCain and, in the name of uniting his party with a running mate from the hard right, winds up politically shooting himself in the foot with another Sarah Palin.

Herman Cain

There are several reasons why Herman Cain could win the Republican nod:

1. His preliminary showings in the polls are not only surprisingly strong for someone with so little name recognition (between 8% and 10% and ranked either fourth or fifth among the candidates), but show great likelihood of growing as he becomes more widely known (the same poll that gave him 8% also indicated that only 33% of Republican voters had even heard of him, with a whopping 24% of those who knew of him giving him their support).

2. He has deftly pulled off the trick of having impeccable credentials as a bona fide conservative (which, as indicated by many of the 2010 Republican primary contests, is increasingly considered to be mandatory) without yet coming off as so extreme as to alienate independent and moderate voters. This is especially useful in a race in which the other major candidates are either viewed as ideologically suspect (e.g., Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich) or too strongly associated with right-wing radicalism to ever be elected (e.g., Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul).

3. He is extremely charismatic, as suggested by the fact that Republicans viewing a recent candidates debate in South Carolina declared Cain to be the winner. This gives him an edge over the other two solid conservatives who might otherwise supplant him for the nomination (i.e., Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty), as well as over the man who can otherwise be considered the frontrunner, Mitt Romney (more on that below).

4. His strong business background will strongly appeal to Republican base voters. As the brief Donald Trump boom and ongoing strength of Romney's candidacy both demonstrate, the conservative idealization of business success is so significant that many are quick to deem a solid corporate background as, in its own right, a qualification for higher office. For some this comes from a belief that people who have "made it" in business possess the leadership qualities necessary to perform well in any sphere; for some it comes from a notion that the business world is somehow purer and/or more efficient than the public sector; for some it's based on the belief that businessmen will best understand which policies are conducive to economic growth. Either way, this is clearly a variable that Cain will have working to his advantage.

5. His race will provide conservatives with a means of neutralizing one of the sharpest criticisms levied against them. The notion that many conservatives are motivated by racism certainly has a great deal of merit, as shown by everything from the rhetoric of Tea Party leaders and the signs at Tea Party rallies to the prevalence of racially-tinged conspiracy theories about Obama's religion and place of birth, polls that show a correlation between racism and right-wing ideas, and the very history of the modern Republican Party itself (particularly in its transformative years, 1964-1980). At the same time, those in the right-wing who are not driven by racial animus may feel especially compelled to firmly debunk such notions, while those who harbor such motivations will feel drawn to Herman Cain as an example of "one of the good ones." While that desire would not cause them to support any black candidate (it is doubtful, for example, that Colin Powell would fare well among them), it can certainly help put one with Cain's other compelling qualities over the top.

Cain's only significant drawback is his lack of political experience, mainly because it would raise questions about his capacity to serve as well as make him prone to the kinds of gaffes that more seasoned pols are trained to avoid. While the second variable could prove lethal to his ambitions, the first will be offset in the eyes of many Republicans and independents (a) by their belief that Barack Obama wasn't qualified, (b) by their ingrained suspicion of government, politicking, and "Washington insiders," and (c) by an overall dissatisfaction with Obama's performance and a desire to replace him. In short, it is not inconceivable that Hermain Cain could become the first non-political presidential candidate since Wendell Willkie in 1940.

Conclusion:

Although a great deal of verbiage has been spent here explaining the potential behind Herman Cain's candidacy, that doesn't mean I think he is most likely to walk away with the Republican Party's top prize. As I've mentioned in previous op-eds, presidential nominations are ultimately determined by the outcomes of each party's initial primaries, which for Republicans in 2012 includes four states - Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Polls strongly suggest that Mitt Romney will dominate the contests in New Hampshire (due to its proximity to Massachusetts, his strong grassroots operation and fundraising campaign there, and his overall popularity as a business whiz and moderate) and Nevada (again due both to his image as a moderate and his excellent business record, as well as that state's large Mormon population), which guarantees that he will at least be one of the finalists for the top prize. The only variables preventing him from having the nomination locked up are his relatively weak showings in Iowa and South Carolina. As such, one of two things will happen:

1. Conservatives in Iowa and South Carolina will find themselves unable to unite behind a single alternative. Since Herman Cain is the only candidate with the qualities necessary to unite the right-wing of his party, a failure on his part to do so would likely splinter conservatives amongst himself and Gingrich, Bachmann, Palin, Paul, Pawlenty, and possibly Perry. That, in turn, would cause Romney to win one or both of the other two states, and with them the nomination.

2. Conservatives will unite behind Herman Cain, thus bringing him victories in Iowa and South Carolina and putting him in a position to challenge Mitt Romney in the subsequent primary states. Of course, even then Cain's victory won't be assured; as his profile rises, more detailed attention will be paid not merely to his inexperience, but to the specifics of his political views, which will cause him to cut a more radical profile in the public eye that could improve Romney's perceived electability by contrast. Then again, should Cain weather those factors, he could also find that his conservative purism and ability to racially neutralize Obama will work to his advantage, while his strong business career will offset one of Romney's most important political assets.

In short, Mitt Romney is the favorite for the presidential nomination next year, most likely with a conservative running mate from a swing state and/or demographic bloc (Senator Marco Rubio of Florida comes to mind). If there is to be an upset, however, the underdog most likely to be responsible for it is Herman Cain.

Certainty: A Poem

2011-04-04T12:03:00.003-04:00

A quick laugh, a quick laugh, at the ones who do fight,
With a zeal, with a squeal, they just know that they're right.

When their vocal chords flap, their own spirits applaud,
For they speak truths on life, politics, art, and god.

They know of "the others" - ones who do not agree.
How can they live with them? Just one trick - certainty!

Certainty! And their facts? They'll sweep you off your feet!
Certainty! And their hearts? They'll shame you with each beat!

Certainty is the force which holds them to the ground.
Certainty is the muse which makes their words profound.

Certainty helps them see "the others" as they are:
Idiots! Hypocrites! Sinister and bizarre!

But "the others" are, well, also certain and strong,
And if certainty's truth... which poor bastard is wrong?

PS: This is a poem about myself, everyone who has ever agreed with me, and everyone who has ever disagreed with me. Indeed, the biggest fools are the ones who think this poem doesn't refer to them (I'm certain of it).

Debate on Big Government

2011-04-03T17:46:00.002-04:00

The following article was originally posted on February 17th. I'm putting it up again because of its relevance both to a recent debate in which I was engaged and to the larger political issues being discussed as the recession starts turning around.

I recently posted a status update on Facebook that said:

I know that few things make right-wingers happier than embracing their delusion about liberals loving Big Government (understanding our actual ideology would be too taxing - pun intended), but this... this is friggin' ridiculous.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/16/bachmann-targets-michelle-obama/

This prompted a lengthy debate between myself and a conservative friend of mine named Kevin. Initially it focused solely on the details of Michele Bachmann's statement; soon, however, Kevin made this comment:

Your argument about the Right's "delusion" is delusional. To say that liberals don't support greater government involvement in daily life and services is to deny the basic tenets of liberal philosophy. Your argument here is founded on one case of hyperpartisanship and overreaction.

What follows, unedited and unaltered, is my response to that assertion, which due to its length and importance I felt warranted an entirely separate blog article. For the conservation that preceded it, see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/debate-on-taxes-and-breastfeeding.html

Let's dissect each facet of your last statement:

- Social Policy: The conservative movement is constantly warring with the liberal movement because, whereas the former wants to use the power of the state to impose its personal moral convictions (i.e., the convictions of the Christian Right) on the rest of society, the latter takes a laissez-faire approach and believes that the government should stay out of people's personal lives (see gay rights, abortion rights, peripheral issues like being allowed to not say the Pledge of Allegiance or burn the flag, etc.)

- Foreign Policy: Once again, liberals are the ones who support scaling down the size of the military-industrial complex and limiting our intervention in foreign conflicts (when they don't, it is invariably because they have allied with a dominant right-wing faction, not because they are adhering to a liberal platform), while conservatives favor increasing the size of government in both of these areas.

- Economic Policy: When conservatives complain about "Big Government", it is this realm to which they are usually referring. That said, although they like to distort liberal economic ideas by depicting them as a paean to state power and a yearning for increased centralization, the reality is that the goal of mainstream American liberals is to protect what they believe to be the economic rights of all American citizens (for a list of these rights, see: http://www.fdrheritage.org/bill_of_rights.htm). Because these rights are frequently imperiled by private entities - be they large corporations that pay substandard wages and arbitrarily lay off thousands of workers when it suits their profit desires, or health insurance companies that gouge the public and thereby deny decent medical care to millions, or banks that foist predatory loans on people buying homes, or big businesses that form monopolies and thus stifle competition - liberals believe that the only way for every citizen's economic rights to be protected is for the government to step in and stop those private individuals and/or organizations that are violating them. This is not something that we support because we savor the idea of a strong central government, any more so than we would savor the idea of putting murderers and rapists in jail for the same reason. Our logic here is that, although "if men were angels, no government would be necessary" (that's a James Madison quote), the fact that men aren't angels means government is a necessary evil, one that can prevent or at least minimize the destructive effects of selfishness and downright malevolence on innocent people. Our desire to pass laws to prevent economic injustices is no more statist than our support of laws that prevent and/or punish crimes of violence.

Conservatives differ from liberals here because either (a) they don't see any problem with the economically strong exploiting the weak, viewing it as natural or even morally right, or (b) they feel that allowing the free market to go about its business unfettered is far more likely to resolve these issues. While I won't delve into why I think both of these opinions are wrong, suffice to say that it is asinine to assert that disagreeing with them, and thus believing the government can and should work to fight economic injustice, means that "liberals love Big Government" (to paraphrase the expression with which you just agreed). It simply means that we believe the government needs to exert its power to correct problems and evils that would otherwise be left unaddressed. Claiming that "Big Government" is our motive is a distortion of the liberal position, just like arguing that right-wingers who supported Bush's policies did so because they wanted to create a military state (as some wrongfully purported) is a distortion of the conservative position. Those arguments involve believing that an ideological group wants to use the power of a certain institution to solve certain problems not because they care about those problems, but merely because their ideology causes them to crave increasing the power of the institution in question. At best, this is a misinformed oversimplification; at worst, it is a deliberate straw man argument (also known as a lie).

After re-reading my rebuttal to Kevin, my only regret is that I failed to mention the other duty of government as it is perceived by economic liberals - i.e., the obligation of the state to not only protect its citizens from active economic malice, but also to provide them with a safety net in the event of economic "Acts of God," such as the recent mortgage crisis and recession.

Of course, this oversight proved irrelevant, as Kevin never bothered responding to my post. I will do him the favor of not speculating as to his motives for neglecting to do so.

On Ideologues

2011-04-03T15:17:00.008-04:00

"The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion—it is an evil government."
- Eric Hoffer

I posted this quote not only because I agree with its contents, but because it perfectly encapsulates my reason for not considering myself to be either an ideologue, either liberal or conservative. Ideologues on both sides are prone to making a terrible mistake - i.e., they start to care less about whether their policies are adequately serving important human needs than they do about the strictness with which those policies are hewing to a set of abstract philosophical concepts. At the end of the day, our government's economic policies should guarantee that all who honestly seek employment can obtain full-time jobs, work under fair and reasonable conditions, and receive compensation sufficient to support the needs of themselves and their dependents; its international policies should do whatever is necessary to protect us from foreign hostility, military and otherwise, and preserve the interests of our citizens overseas; and its domestic policies should protect its residents from being victimized by crime (with "crime" being defined as an action in which one party harms another), guarantee civil rights and social opportunity to all of its citizens, and maintain a free society by scrupulously avoiding exercising any powers aside from the ones previously mentioned.

The problem with the two major ideological movements in this country is that both tend to jettison the imperative nature of these goals as soon as they conflict with their preexisting partisan belief systems. My affiliation as a liberal is derived solely from the fact that liberals are less inclined to do this. We live in a society where the primary conservative political institution (i.e., the Republican Party) has become so obsessed with implementing a puritanically right-wing economic agenda - not only for the purpose of pleasing its wealthy backers, but also in the name of adhering to a dogma that simplistically demonizes all state economic intervenionism - that it will minimize, dismiss, misrepresent, and even justify the existence of widespread economic suffering (e.g., unemployment, working poverty, sub-par quality of life for the socioeconomically disadvantaged in areas such as housing and health care, inequitable access to means of socioeconomic mobility including affordable and decent education, etc.). What's more, the growing power of cultural reactionaries within the right-wing has caused conservative thinkers to violate many of their own avowed principles in order to violate the civil liberties of individuals who run afoul of their prejudices (e.g., homosexuals, feminists, atheists, drug-users, single parents, inner-city minorities, Muslims).

This is not to say that liberalism is free of comparable offenses against common sense and decency. By far the worst among these is a knee-jerk antipathy against America, one that causes many on the left to not only support distorted and contextually myopic interpretations of our nation's history and legacy, but also to blatantly sympathize with our country's enemies, even ones whose actions violate basic humanitarian precepts (e.g., the sympathy and/or support among many leftists for Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s, Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War, Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the Bush Era, and Hugo Chavez today). While the radical leftists who hold such views are hardly as influential within the Democratic Party as the far right remains among Republicans, they can still be seen peddling their doctrine among fringe politicians, throughout the media, and on college campuses.

There are many reasons why this problem exists within ideological movements: Egos can become so invested in an ideology's correctness that, even after an idea has been discredited, steadfastness becomes an emotional need based on pride rather than an intelligent opinion based on reason. Political battles can reach such a fevered pitch that partisans lose sight of larger issues and bigger pictures. Hatreds and irrational biases that cannot be openly expressed without receiving widespread condemnation take on more socially respectable forms and integrate themselves into mainstream belief systems. People can make honest mistakes.

Regardless of why it happens, however, there are two simple questions you can ask yourself to determine when it is happening. Would a given ideology, if implemented, promote the welfare and guarantee the rights of all people, support common decency, and value the inherent integrity of every human being? Does it work to avoid breeding irrational suspicion, prejudice, and maliciousness? I am under no illusions as to the fact that no ideological movement can ever honestly answer each of those questions with a resounding "Yes!" - but this is one of those unattainable goals toward which all should nevertheless strive. Until the unlikely day arrives when one of them reaches it, I will maintain a healthy skepticism not merely toward all ideologies, but toward all ideologues.

Mitt Romney and the Liberal Test

2011-04-03T15:14:00.000-04:00

If you look at the men whose presidential or vice presidential candidacies broke through long-standing barriers of religious prejudice, it is hard to avoid noticing that all of them were Democrats:

- Al Smith, the New York Governor who became the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party in 1928.

- John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Senator who became the first Catholic actually elected to the presidency in 1960.

- Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts Governor who became the first Eastern Orthodox adherent nominated by a major party in 1988 (if he'd been elected, his wife would have also become the first Jewish First Lady).

- Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Senator who became the first Jew nominated for vice president by a major party in 2000, after being selected by Albert Gore.

I mention all of this because, while liberals feel justifiable pride in our movement’s role in defending these men from hate-based attacks, we also benefited on those occasions from the knowledge that the individuals in question happened to be “on our side.” It is in this way that the 2012 presidential election may provide us with one of our greatest tests:

Can we stand firm in our opposition to religious bigotry when its target is a right-wing Republican?

Before you dismiss this question as merely hypothetical, bear in mind that one of the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination is Mitt Romney, a staunch conservative best known as the scion of a Michigan political dynasty, a competent former Massachusetts governor, a renowned business whiz/corporate fixer-upper… and a Mormon.

If you think this last detail has no effect on whether Romney is qualified to be president, you are absolutely right. If, however, you believe that the rest of the nation is bound to feel the same way, you are tragically mistaken. Early signs of what may await Romney if he is nominated can be found from the 2008 election, when his first bid for the GOP’s top prize brought anti-Mormon sentiment to the fore.

“God cannot be identified… with the Mormon religion’s notion of god,” declared a faith guide issued by Focus on the Family, a powerful institutional organ of the Christian Right.

“Can Mitt Romney Serve Two Masters? The Mormon Church vs. the United States of America” blared the heading of an eight-page e-mail sent to radio talk show hosts throughout the country by Christian Right-wingers Tricia Erickson and Donna Rice (the latter of Gary Hart sex scandal fame).

“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” joked Mike Huckabee, one of Romney’s chief rivals for the nomination (then and now).

Of course, because all of these incidents involve conservatives, some liberals who read about them may assume that their movement has no need to fear being infected with such venom. Right-wingers have an inherent intolerant streak anyway, they feel (inaccurately, I might add). Liberals would never say or do anything so hateful.

Of course, such an assumption requires that its bearers not notice the remarks of Reverend Al Sharpton, who said he wasn’t worried about a Romney presidency because “those that really believe in God will defeat him anyway.”

It involves overlooking the diatribe of left-wing political analyst Larry O’Donnell, who referred to Mormonism as “demented”, “ridiculous”, and “based on the work of a lying, fraudulent criminal."

It insists on finding some other explanation as to why progressive activist Ryan J. Davis defended O’Donnell’s tirade in a Huffington Post editorial while adding some insults of his own, such as referring to “Mormon doctrine” as a “swampland” through which he had to “dredge” to write his article.

Finally, it doesn’t account for the fact that – given how 29% of Americans have said that they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate – the sheer laws of statistical probability suggest that there are liberals as well as conservatives making up that forbidding number.

There are plenty of excellent reasons to oppose Mitt Romney. His economic policies are skewed too heavily toward big business and the wealthy, which would further exacerbate the catastrophic income disparity existing today between the rich and middle class; his insistence on slashing government spending will hobble our efforts to reverse this recession’s unemployment crisis; his conservatism on social issues ranging from gay rights to marijuana legalization would prolong antiquated injustices; and his support, until recently, of increasing our troop presence in Iraq suggests that he hasn’t learned from the mistakes of Bush’s neoconservative agenda.

Liberals can and should wage a campaign against Romney based on the merits of our positions and the weaknesses in his. That said, we must also jump to his defense whenever his religious background is attacked – not only because his faith has no relevance to his ability to be a good president, although it doesn't, but because silence in the face of such attacks will disgrace us in the eyes of history.

The Election of 2012

2011-04-01T12:02:00.002-04:00

The following article offers my thoughts on the upcoming presidential election in 2012. It combines two of my previous blog articles ("Election 2012: My Predictions" and "My Thoughts on Mike Huckabee") and includes an addenda that I wrote today.

2012: The Republican Nomination

First, you must remember that presidential nominations are determined not by how the candidates fare in national polls of their party's voters, but rather by how they perform in the earlier primaries. After all, if the national standings of each candidate were the determining variable, then the election of 2008 would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani instead of Barack Obama and John McCain, much as Edmund Muskie would have been the Democratic nominee in 1972 and Howard Dean the candidate in 2004.

Once this is born in mind, you come to some interesting conclusions as to the situation facing Republicans in 2012:

- The first primary (technically a caucus, although that makes little difference insofar as the vital task of establishing perceived political momentum is concerned) will be held in Iowa on January 16th. Early polls have consistently shown Mike Huckabee with a solid lead there, and there is little reason to think he won't be able to keep it over the next year, given that (a) he won that state in 2008 and (b) he is considered to be the most electable of the candidates who appeal to that ideological section of the GOP (which dominates the Iowa Republican party), making it unlikely that potential alternatives like Palin or Gingrich will be able to cut into his support. Should he win, it will automatically give him much-needed national attention and establish his status as one of his party's chief contenders for the nomination. Meanwhile, Romney will probably place a reasonably successful second (which is perfectly fine for him, since he isn't expected to win that state anyway) and thus continue to be in a position of strength, while Palin, Gingrich, and the other far right candidates will find themselves in considerable trouble, as the desire of their movement to unite around one candidate (and ideally the strongest one) will cause much of their support to leak over to Huckabee.

- The second primary will be held in New Hampshire on January 24th. Early polls here have shown Romney winning by an overwhelming margin, with all of the other candidates posting returns so small as to be politically inconsequential. Once again, the chances are strong that Romney will able to keep this lead, given both the Granite State GOP's comparatively moderate character and Romney's own geographic proximity to its borders. This victory will prove extremely significant for Romney, as it will (a) establish him as a viable political contender on par with Huckabee for the GOP nomination and (b) solidify his status as the candidate for Republican moderates. Huckabee is unlikely to be hurt by his poor showing in New Hampshire for much the same reason that Romney won't be hurt by Iowa (i.e., he isn't expected to do well there), although it is likely that this state will deal a death blow to the chances of every other prominent Republican contender. Even if candidates like Palin and Gingrich don't drop out after this state, it is unlikely that they will be major factors in the primary process after this point.

- This is where things get tricky. Once the nomination contest has effectively narrowed down to a battle between Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, supporters of the other candidates will begin flocking to one of the two camps en masse, something that has to be taken into account when looking at polls for the remaining states. My suspicion is that Huckabee will try to win the remaining primary voters by appealing to them as a champion of the Christian Right, as someone who has actively courted the Tea Party (unlike Romney, which I will get to in a moment), and as a more reliable conservative than Romney, whose support of an Obamacare-esque health care reform program in Massachusetts, flip-flopping on abortion, coldness toward the Tea Party, and Mormon faith will all be liabilities among much of his party's right-wing base (the last variable will be less explicitly stated, of course). Romney, on the other hand, will try to present himself to these voters as being both sufficiently conservative to deserve a Republican nomination (primarily by citing his fiscal record as Governor of Massachusetts) and yet better equipped to win the general election than Huckabee. This latter claim will be backed up by Romney's biography (which, given his career as an extremely successful business fixer-upper, will be very appealing in an election that focuses on economic issues), his superior standing in match-offs against Obama in polls, and his overall image as a moderate whose distance from the party's controversial groups (mainly the Tea Party and the Christian Right) will make him more palatable to swing voters in the general election

How will Republican voters decide? Some may cite a recent poll which found that 68% of Republicans feel it is more important that they choose a candidate who can beat Obama, compared to only 29% who place a priority on having one who "agrees (with them) on every issue." While that seems to bode well for Romney, it's important to note that the people surveyed were only asked this question on an abstract level, which makes the likelihood of them choosing pragmatism much greater than it would be if they had concrete examples of ideological incompatibility in front of them (viz., Romney's record on health care reform or abortion rights).

More telling is the fact that the primary voters who didn't initially support either Huckabee or Romney - i.e., the ones who Romney and Huckabee will have to actively court - didn't lean toward candidates like Tim Pawlenty or Mitch Daniels before their options were whittled down, which would suggest moderate inclinations on their part; instead they leaned toward candidates like Palin and Gingrich, thus suggesting a radical bent in their leanings. This is significant because it means that their ideological sympathies are much more closely aligned with Huckabee than Romney, suggesting that their votes (which, when combined, are considerable enough to put him over the top in most of the remaining primary states) would be most likely to go to him.

At the same time, Republicans are well versed enough in history to know the dangers of nominating an unelectable radical, be it with Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964 or with a flurry of Tea Party candidates in the 2010 midterms who lost states that had otherwise been in the bag (viz., Christine O' Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller). The question will thus ultimately boil down to this: Will the doubts that the remaining GOP primary voters have about Huckabee's be strong enough to prompt them to support a candidate for whom they are at best lukewarm and at worst downright suspicious?

There are numerous variables that will come into play as that question is resolved. My suspicion is that, although Huckabee doesn't fare as well as Romney in polls against Obama, his comparative standing isn't so poor that it will become the decisive factor. This, combined with Romney's aforementioned weaknesses among grassroots conservatives, will probably move the key bulk of Palin and Gingrich supporters to Huckabee, delivering him the next two primary states (South Carolina on January 28th and Florida on January 31st) as well as a critical mass of the Super Tuesday states on February 7th. While Romney may win enough Super Tuesday states to stay in the game for a little longer, I doubt it will do more than put his campaign on life support. Republicans have a long history of closing ranks around the perceived winner once he has built enough momentum (the last time they didn't do this, not coincidentally, was with Goldwater in 1964), and I suspect Huckabee would be a similar beneficiary of this.

In the end, I thus foresee an election in which Barack Obama and Joe Biden (who, despite rumors that he will be dropped from the ticket, is likely to be retained in the name of political expedience) run against Mike Huckabee and Jon Huntsman, a former Governor of Utah and Ambassador to China who will be chosen by Huckabee because (a) his resume can balance out Huckabee's inexperience in foreign policy, (b) his image as a moderate and bi-partisan record (thanks to working for Obama) can help win over moderate swing voters wary of Huckabee's extremism, and (c) and his Mormonism can help Huckabee win back voters from that faith who rightfully resent Huckabee for his bigoted comments about their religion. In lieu of Huntsman, the next most likely choice would be Marco Rubio, chosen due to the esteem in which he is held by the Tea Party, his ability to appeal to Latino voters, and his being from the swing state of Florida. That said, my suspicion is that his inexperience and strong right-wing views will cause Huckabee to veer for a safer choice, Huntsman.

2012: The General Election

First, I see Obama keeping Joe Biden on his ticket in 2012. For one thing, no incumbent vice president has been removed from a major ticket since 1944, even potentially harmful ones like Richard Nixon in 1956 and Dan Quayle in 1992; for another, Biden would almost certainly make a fuss if it became clear that he might be removed, one that would cause far more trouble for Obama's candidacy than any possible replacement would be worth.

From there, I believe that Obama-Biden would resoundingly defeat Huckabee-Huntsman in 2012.

There are plenty of reasons why this is the case. We can start with Wayne DuMond, an Arkansas man who was sentenced to thirty-nine years in prison (reduced from an initial life plus twenty years) after he brutally raped a seventeen-year-old girl. Because the evidence that he had committed this crime was irrefutable, normally his case wouldn’t have attracted any special attention.

However, there was a catch – unbeknownst to DuMond, the girl he’d raped was the third cousin of Bill Clinton.

Normally this wouldn’t have made any difference. However, several right-wing extremists decided to spread rumors that DuMond was innocent, a claim that – despite its absolute and obvious falsehood – was fervently embraced by those who hated Clinton as president.

Foremost among them was Mike Huckabee, who not only commuted DuMond’s sentence less than ten weeks after becoming governor, but even skirted federal law by tampering with the parole board (which had twice voted to deny DuMond parole) so that it would decide in his favor.

Less than a year after DuMond was released, he raped another woman. This time, he also murdered her.

This may be the most abhorrent thing Huckabee has done, but it certainly isn’t the only one. He also has a history of sexism (1998 – he signs a full-page advertisement in USA Today saying that women should “submit graciously” to their husbands), racism (1993 – he speaks before a white supremacist group known as the Council of Conservative Citizens), and bigotry against Mormons (2008 – he claims that Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers). The group for which he has reserved his worst bile are homosexuals, whose sexual orientation he has compared with incest, who he has claimed are committing moral sins comparable with lying and stealing, and who he partially blamed for the spate of school shootings in the ‘90s in his book Kids Who Kill. He has even argued that allowing gay marriage would threaten the survival of civilization.

Finally, there is the threat that Huckabee poses to one of America’s most basic and important liberties – religious freedom, as protected by the separation of church and state.

From a speech delivered in his 2008 presidential campaign:

I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards…

All of these things are relevant for two reasons:

1. Americans have a historic habit of voting against major party candidates they perceive as being ideologically extreme, from Barry Goldwater on the right (1964) to George McGovern on the left (1972). Despite the popular claims by right-wing pundits that Obama is a left-wing radical, the reality is that most Americans - while indeed viewing him as liberal - do not see anything inherently threatening about the degree of his liberalism. The same, however, is not likely to be true of Huckabee, in light of his hardcore Christian Right positions.

2. While Americans are willing to overlook a politician's scandals if they fall within the confines of what prevailing cynical notions dictate is common within that profession (viz., the corruption among close presidential advisers that hurt Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the emerging Watergate chicanery that hurt Richard Nixon in 1972, the sexual sordidness that hurt Bill Clinton in 1992), they tend to be much harsher on scandals that are (a) outside the norm of what the jaded public expects of politicians and (b) reflect poorly on the candidate's character in a manner that seems beyond redemption. The best example of this was the Willie Horton scandal that helped bring down Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988. Huckabee's scandal with Wayne DuMond appears comparable to that one in many respects, and is likely to have a similar impact on his political fortunes.

There is a third and final factor to be taken into account - the economy. Here, there are two contingencies, either one of which seems to favor Obama:

3a. The Economy Improves:

Unemployment has dropped by nearly one full percentage point in the last three months (from 9.8% in November 2010 to 8.9% in February 2011), an average of a little more than 0.3% per month. If it continues to decline at even half that rate for the next ten months and, if nothing else, levels off for the period after that, it will be at 7.4% when it comes time for Obama to seek reelection. While such a figure would still be unusually high, it is identical to the rate at which Ronald Reagan was reelected in 1984; to the extent that economic conditions impact the reelection prospects of incumbent presidents, they do so based not merely on the actual state of the economy, but also on whether it has been perceived as improving since the current president took office. In Ronald Reagan's case, although the economy hadn't actually improved in any meaningful sense since he was inaugurated (unemployment was 7.5% when he took office in January 1981 and 7.4% when he was reelected in November 1984), it had declined considerably from the peak of between 10% and 11% that it had reached near the middle of his first term, giving the impression of a turnaround. Similarly, although a 7.4% unemployment rate would only constitute a marginal improvement from when Obama took office (it had been 7.7% in January 2009), that would still be a considerable fall from the 9-10% rate at which it has hovered for the past year. In short, so long as the current recovery continues at even a reasonably moderate pace, Obama's reelection prospects seem strong.

3b. The Economy Doesn't Improve:

Although conventional wisdom dictates that a president who has presided over an economic decline doesn't get reelected, two presidents in recent history have bucked that trend - Richard Nixon, who saw unemployment rise 2.2% between the time he was inaugurated (January 1969, at which it had been at 3.4%) and the time he was reelected (November 1972, by which time it had reached 5.6%), and George W. Bush, who saw unemployment rise 1.6% between the time he was inaugurated (January 2001, at which it had been at 3.9%) and the time he was reelected (November 2004, at which it had been at 5.5%).

On both occasions, these presidents benefited from the fact that other issues took attention away from the state of the economy. While the one that benefited George W. Bush (a terrorist attack that caused a mass rallying behind the president) is unlikely to benefit Obama, since a terrorist attack would likely be blamed on him, the one that benefited Richard Nixon - i.e., the nomination of an opposing candidate whose ideological radicalism turned off the vast bulk of the public - is very likely to fall into place for Obama if Huckabee is the nominee.

So to repeat what I wrote earlier:

I believe that Obama-Biden would resoundingly defeat Huckabee-Huntsman in 2012.

Debate on Big Government

2011-03-24T14:20:00.005-04:00

The following article was originally posted on February 17th. I'm putting it up again because of its relevance both to a recent debate in which I was engaged and to the larger political issues being discussed as the recession starts turning around.

I recently posted a status update on Facebook that said:

I know that few things make right-wingers happier than embracing their delusion about liberals loving Big Government (understanding our actual ideology would be too taxing - pun intended), but this... this is friggin' ridiculous.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/16/bachmann-targets-michelle-obama/

This prompted a lengthy debate between myself and a conservative friend of mine named Kevin. Initially it focused solely on the details of Michele Bachmann's statement; soon, however, Kevin made this comment:

Your argument about the Right's "delusion" is delusional. To say that liberals don't support greater government involvement in daily life and services is to deny the basic tenets of liberal philosophy. Your argument here is founded on one case of hyperpartisanship and overreaction.

What follows, unedited and unaltered, is my response to that assertion, which due to its length and importance I felt warranted an entirely separate blog article. For the conservation that preceded it, see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/debate-on-taxes-and-breastfeeding.html

Let's dissect each facet of your last statement:

- Social Policy: The conservative movement is constantly warring with the liberal movement because, whereas the former wants to use the power of the state to impose its personal moral convictions (i.e., the convictions of the Christian Right) on the rest of society, the latter takes a laissez-faire approach and believes that the government should stay out of people's personal lives (see gay rights, abortion rights, peripheral issues like being allowed to not say the Pledge of Allegiance or burn the flag, etc.)

- Foreign Policy: Once again, liberals are the ones who support scaling down the size of the military-industrial complex and limiting our intervention in foreign conflicts (when they don't, it is invariably because they have allied with a dominant right-wing faction, not because they are adhering to a liberal platform), while conservatives favor increasing the size of government in both of these areas.

- Economic Policy: When conservatives complain about "Big Government", it is this realm to which they are usually referring. That said, although they like to distort liberal economic ideas by depicting them as a paean to state power and a yearning for increased centralization, the reality is that the goal of mainstream American liberals is to protect what they believe to be the economic rights of all American citizens (for a list of these rights, see: http://www.fdrheritage.org/bill_of_rights.htm). Because these rights are frequently imperiled by private entities - be they large corporations that pay substandard wages and arbitrarily lay off thousands of workers when it suits their profit desires, or health insurance companies that gouge the public and thereby deny decent medical care to millions, or banks that foist predatory loans on people buying homes, or big businesses that form monopolies and thus stifle competition - liberals believe that the only way for every citizen's economic rights to be protected is for the government to step in and stop those private individuals and/or organizations that are violating them. This is not something that we support because we savor the idea of a strong central government, any more so than we would savor the idea of putting murderers and rapists in jail for the same reason. Our logic here is that, although "if men were angels, no government would be necessary" (that's a James Madison quote), the fact that men aren't angels means government is a necessary evil, one that can prevent or at least minimize the destructive effects of selfishness and downright malevolence on innocent people. Our desire to pass laws to prevent economic injustices is no more statist than our support of laws that prevent and/or punish crimes of violence.

Conservatives differ from liberals here because either (a) they don't see any problem with the economically strong exploiting the weak, viewing it as natural or even morally right, or (b) they feel that allowing the free market to go about its business unfettered is far more likely to resolve these issues. While I won't delve into why I think both of these opinions are wrong, suffice to say that it is asinine to assert that disagreeing with them, and thus believing the government can and should work to fight economic injustice, means that "liberals love Big Government" (to paraphrase the expression with which you just agreed). It simply means that we believe the government needs to exert its power to correct problems and evils that would otherwise be left unaddressed. Claiming that "Big Government" is our motive is a distortion of the liberal position, just like arguing that right-wingers who supported Bush's policies did so because they wanted to create a military state (as some wrongfully purported) is a distortion of the conservative position. Those arguments involve believing that an ideological group wants to use the power of a certain institution to solve certain problems not because they care about those problems, but merely because their ideology causes them to crave increasing the power of the institution in question. At best, this is a misinformed oversimplification; at worst, it is a deliberate straw man argument (also known as a lie).

After re-reading my rebuttal to Kevin, my only regret is that I failed to mention the other duty of government as it is perceived by economic liberals - i.e., the obligation of the state to not only protect its citizens from active economic malice, but also to provide them with a safety net in the event of "Acts of God." Just as the government should assist people who lose their homes or businesses after a natural disaster or a foreign attack, so too should it help them get back on their feet after a recession or depression causes them to lose their jobs, homes, savings, or other economic necessities.

Of course, this oversight proved irrelevant, as Kevin never bothered responding to my post.

Review of "Life Stinks"

2011-03-24T13:58:00.008-04:00

This is an article I wrote back in September 2009. Although I've made some revisions for grammar and flow, it is essentially the same.

A montage of images depicting urban blight (in this case culled from downtown Los Angeles) greets the audience. In the background one can hear news reports discussing matters of great consequence to and about individuals of great consequence. The indigent shuffle about their daily lives, indifferent to the voices that are responsible for reporting the human story, since it is well-known that those voices are already indifferent to them. As if to punctuate this point, a limousine carrying an important man - the kind of human being about whom those voices do care - whisks past a bum sleeping on a sidewalk curb, drenching him with water and mud.

Life Stinks! is my favorite Mel Brooks movie, and one of my all-time favorite films, because it insists on telling us what would happen if a man of consequence (the one in the limousine) had his story dovetail with the millions of human beings whose stories are often dismissed as being inconsequential. Goddard Bolt, a billionaire industrialist with a penthouse office in a Los Angeles skyscraper, wants to destroy a decaying neighborhood in his own city so that he can build a massive shopping complex on its ruins. Another corporate nabob, the deliciously unctuous Vance Crasswell (Brooks has a real knack for finding names for his characters so perfect that they're practically onomatopoeias), also has his eyes on the real estate prize. Soon a wager is made - Bolt bets that he could survive for thirty days among society's most economically misfortunate while Crasswell places odds that he cannot. The winner gets to destroy the neighborhood.

The idea of forcing one of society's privileged to see what it's like on the other side is hardly original to Brooks's film. Its literary origins can be traced as far back as Arthurian legend, and even its comic potential has been mined before, most famously in Mark Twain's 1881 classic The Prince and the Pauper. Yet Life Stinks! stands out as a particularly special entry within this genre for three reasons:

1) It has a compelling story and tells it well.

Movie critics, in their unending quest for the original and innovative, sometimes fail to appreciate that which is old-fashioned but, on the sheer strength of its execution, manages to remain powerful, effective, and even fresh. Although Life Stinks! does tread on ideological and narrative terrain that has been visited before, it does so with vivid and fleshed out characters, a story that remains interesting from start to finish, and the ability to seamlessly transition in tone between the comic and the dramatic, without at any time allowing one to cheapen the other. The fact that it is very funny, considering that Mel Brooks is its auteur, isn't particularly noteworthy (although the humor in this film doesn't quite measure up to Brooks's comic masterpieces, particularly The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein). On the other hand, the simple power of Brooks's story is quite surprising. While Brooks was never a slouch when it came to the art of telling a tale, none of his other movies have ever reached the level of Life Stinks! in either socio-political prescience or sheer poignance.

2) The comedy is an endearing blend of fundamentally innocent vaudevillian hijinks and biting satire.

The slapstick, stomach churning gags, and nyuk nyuk-inducing misunderstandings that one would expect from a man who cut his comic teeth working as a writer for The Sid Caesar Show are all here, and perfectly unapologetic about the fact that they constitute a throwback to an era when comedy didn't rely on shock value and chic in order to receive approval. Yet the more important throwback is the way in which Brooks satirizes his subjects. At a time when too many filmmakers believe that the only way to make a movie socially relevant is to become as savvy and sophisticated as possible, it is refreshing to watch Life Stinks! express the confidence to make its point through the tried-and-true technique of simply allowing the absurdities of life to overtly display themselves, rather than by piling layers upon layers of irony or taking that which is already ridiculous and exaggerating it until it bears little resemblance to its original target. For one example, look at the scene when the now destitute and desperate Goddard Bolt pleads for food and shelter outside a church, only to be turned away by a nun (voiced to perfection by the late Bea Arthur) whose refusal to open the door denies him not only Christian charity, but even the most basic dignity of being able to talk to a human face:

BOLT knocks on the door. NUN's voice can be heard from inside.
Nun: Kindly. Who is it?
Bolt: Desperate but maintaining a semblance of composure. Please let me in. I need shelter.
Nun: Regretfully. I'm sorry. We're closed... my son.
Bolt: Slightly more agitated. But I haven't eaten all day. I need food!
Nun: Regretfully. We'll be open in the morning... my son.
Bolt: Hysterical. You don't understand! I don't have a place to sleep. I'm tired, very tired, very... Please! Please let me in! Please let me in!
Nun: Shouting. Now listen! You're wakin' everybody up! You get out of here or I'm callin' the police! Beat. My son.

3) The movie has the courage to buck the prevailing socioeconomic, political, and cultural assumptions of its time.

Although Life Stinks! takes aim at many targets in its survey of poverty in America - the prevalance of drug use in slums, the degree to which facilities available to the indigent can be exploited at the whims of the powerful, the inhumane ineptitude and neglect that marks the health care received by those without money or insurance, the ways in which our society dismisses its suffering citizens as mere nuisances, and even small touches such as how the ashes of the cremated rich are placed in urns while the poor have to settle for shoeboxes - its greatest value lies in the comic eloquence with which it dispenses one of the central ideological convictions of its time. It is important to bear in mind that, when Life Stinks! was released in 1991, the era of Ronald Reagan (at the time presided over by President George H. W. Bush) was in full swing. Despite the growing disparity in the quality of life between the rich and the poor, as well as the ever-shrinking middle-class, entertainment as well as news media insisted on reflecting the popular notion that times were good, opportunities for socioeconomic advancement were available to all, and that those who were in distress had only themselves to blame. To this mentality, Life Stinks! had - and still has - a powerful rebuttal. As Roger Ebert noted at the time:

It's easy to sit inside an air-conditioned car and feel scorn for some poor wretch who is trying to earn a quarter for wiping a rag across the windshield. But if we were out there on the streets without a home or money, what bright ideas would we come up with? Donald Trump can make millions selling condos to other millionaires, but could he make 10 bucks in a day if he had to start from scratch? The conventional wisdom in these situations is that the poor and homeless should get a grip on themselves, should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But if they have no boots, what then? Wasn't it Anatole France who said that the Law, in its magnificent equality, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges and begging in the streets?

Unfortunately, Life Stinks! marks a nadir in Mel Brooks' career, at least financially - this socially conscious satire became the first Brooks movie to ever bomb both among critics and at the box office. That said, it has in many ways aged better than any of his other films. At a time when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to "solve" his homeless problem by buying them one-way tickets out of town, when popular pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh can denounce tax increases on those who make more than a quarter-million dollars as "punishing our most productive citizens", when the de-regulation and laissez-faire philosophy of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes can be directly traced to the current economic crisis, when the growing gap between rich and poor has made it so that the rich (much to their befuddlement) can't sell their goods and services to the poor (who lack the income to afford them), and when despite all of this, the ideological right (and the big businesses that control them) have convinced the intellectually deficient, paranoid, and hateful all across the land that they should shout down and bully liberal congressmen and labor unions who want to increase taxes on the wealthy, use taxpayer dollars to create more jobs and raise wages, and provide high quality healthcare for all ... at a time like this, Life Stinks rings as true as ever.

PS: In a special feature "Making of the Movie" documentary on the Life Stinks! DVD, the question is posed to Rudy DeLuca, one of the writers, "Does life actually stink?" His response makes for a fitting close to this article:

"You have to weigh what stinks and what doesn't. You know, when you're out of work, life stinks. When your girlfriend or your wife gives you a hard time, life stinks. When you have a bad meal, life stinks. When you're out of money, life stinks. When you're in traffic, life stinks. When you're in heavier traffic, it REALLY stinks. And when you don't get along and have fights with your friends, it REALLY STINKS! And other times, there are times... when you just can't stand it."

Actually, as an incorrigible optimist, I much prefer the answer given by Mel Brooks:

"We should just enjoy whatever life we have, and pop around and jump around and eat spaghetti and dance as much as we can. If we're capable of dancing, we should dance."

Debate on the Minimum Wage: Part Two

2011-03-23T17:03:00.001-04:00

For Part One, see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/03/debate-on-minimum-wage.html

Matthew Rozsa

Santini's response to my post is pasted below. Incidentally, despite his reference to knowing me in high school, I still have no idea who the hell he is:

"Your response is incredibly ignorant, juvenile, and conceited. I can see you haven't changed at all since high school.

As for my cowardice, I sent you a private message because your privacy settings didn't allow me to respond on your wall.

I entertained the idea that you might enjoy discussing the economics of interventionist policy but you are clearly more interested in grandstanding and hurtling personal insults. I thought about "friending" you for the sake of your audience but have now chosen not to since we were never friends then and certainly aren't now.

As for your attempted arguments, I haven't the time nor desire to rebut them. I can see that you have fallen for the conceipts to all forseeable knowledge, central economic planning, and coercive redistribution of wealth. These are often uncurable maladies the unforseen consequences of which humanity has lived with for as long as pin headed wannabe planners like yourself have struggled to use government force for economic intervention. How well did price controls work in ancient Egypt or tarriffs for the nationalist parties of europe? Hint hint they didn't. The sooner you realize that the laws of economics cannot be repealed by politicians, the sooner you will understand the faults in your current logic.

Btw. I am not a conservative, but an Anarchist so fuck off. It absolutely takes cajones to oppose all government intervention and none to go with the statist status quo."

Here was my reply:

"I can't help but notice that, in the midst of all the insults you threw at me, not one of them addressed any of the arguments I presented in my rebuttal. While I'm not going to criticize you for insulting me - your insults may be wrong, but I can't fault you for doing something that I did in my previous letter - I am definitely going to hold you accountable for failing to address any of my arguments in your reply. While being a dick doesn't discredit someone's position, being intellectually incapable of responding to a rebuttal - or being too cowardly to do so - doesn't only discredit your position, but your individual merit as a debater. While intellectuals like Bill Maher on the left and William F. Buckley on the right are/were pompous asses, they have earned respect because they use logic to substantiate their positions and are rigorous in rebutting whatever anyone else says to them. If any of them had used your cowardly "I haven't the time nor desire to rebut them" cop out in public, they would have become the laughingstocks of their own movements. That's why, even though I absolutely did "hurl personal insults" at you, I also made a point of meticulously addressing every one of the points you made. Apparently you didn't like being debunked in a public forum, given the temper tantrum you just threw.

You say that the privacy settings on my profile wouldn't let you post a response? I'm not sure I buy that, since I'm pretty certain non-friends have posted there before, but just to be on the safe side I'll friend you, so that way you won't be able to hide behind that excuse any further.

Incidentally, the notion that libertarians and anarchists are "fighters against the status quo" is absurd. Libertarian theorists have dominated the economics wing of the Republican Party for decades now, and anarchists are so popular on college campuses that they vie with latter-day hippies for intellectual attention. If you want to masturbate your ego by believing that you're somehow brave or a freedom fighter, you might want to find another groundless basis on which to do so.

Three final points:

1. It's "conceit", not "conceipt."

2. As a graduate student in history, I urge you to not cite examples from the past, as you did ancient Egypt and nationalist parties in Europe. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, and even if people nod at you and act like they're impressed when you do it in public, I assure you that anyone with an IQ above 110 will be snickering behind your back as soon as you walk away.

3. As I mentioned in my blog post and in my last rebuttal to you, moronic conservatives like you love insisting that liberals are "statist" and advocate "central economic planning" and "coercive redistribution of wealth" because - without those lies to fall back on - they'd have no means of rebutting anything liberals say. The fact that you have no means of proving that this is what liberals believe, but insist on it nonetheless, just further demonstrates why intellectually lacking blowhards like you are the lowest forms of life in today's political ecosystem.

PS: Any additional letters you write to me will be deleted, unread. If you want a response, post it on the thread. I'm not going to waste my time copy-and-pasting your idiocies because you're too lacking in testicular fortitude to post them in a public forum."

Debate on the Minimum Wage: Part One

2011-03-23T16:56:00.005-04:00

The following transcript chronicles, complete and unabridged, the first half of a recent Facebook debate on the minimum wage.

Matthew Rozsa

Hypocrite - a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

Example - a person who says he/she supports "family values" but then opposes raising the minimum wage or providing free daycare for working single parents

Kevin Brettell

I support both of those things. However, I'm not really certain that that not supporting them is inconsistent with supporting "family values."

Kevin Brettell

Actually, I take that back. I support raising the minimum wage. I support public daycares, but not necessarily free.

Matthew Rozsa

If you support "family values", then presumably it is because you believe that strong families are the building block of a healthy society. As anyone who has either experienced or witnessed the ramifications of poverty can tell you, it's pretty hard to raise children in an emotionally, psychologically, and morally healthy environment when the parents (a) are incapable of effectively providing for their needs, as is inevitably the case on a minimum wage (or even slightly above minimum wage) salary and (b) are unable to find a reliable, safe, and affordable place to deposit their children during workdays when they aren't in school.

In short, this is just one more example of how conservatives claim to support an abstract ideal but then oppose the concrete steps that would need to be taken to make it a realistic possibility.

Max Price

lots of folks in my town cant get a minimum wage job to support their children because the first half of their day is spent in high school. damn those family values! seriously though, this is such a loaded subject, matt. you can't just apply certain elements in order to shame conservatives.

Lacey A. Sparks

I think "family values" needs a definition here. Many conservatives probably believe that if parents just worked hard enough, they could provide adequately for their families without sucking the teat of the nanny state. This model does not account for race, class, and/ or gender, etc, obstacles such as work place discrimination, but instead believes everyone, in true American Dream fashion, can go from rags to riches with some hard work. Additionally, single working mothers, who are most in need of affordable day care, have already opted out of the "family values" club according to many conservatives, because single motherhood is not itself considered a family value. Basically, conservatives may not see the contradictions because to them, the definition of "family values" may not include the poor or single parents because "family values" only refer to providing a financially comfortable lifestyle with two opposite-sex parents.

Matthew Rozsa

A man I've never met named James Santini somehow saw this status update and saw fit to reply to it although, as is often the case with conservatives, he preferred to do so in a private letter, rather than in a public forum where he would be forced to accept accountability for his opinions (right-wingers apparently love the concept of accountability only insofar as it doesn't apply to themselves).

Here is what he wrote:

"Minimum wages create institutional unemployment by raising the costs of businesses requiring unskilled labor. If I could hire 3 people at 5 dollars an hour, now I can only afford 2 at 7.50 per hour.

This incentivizes outsourcing or the employment of capital improvements to further reduce staffing requirements.

Low skilled jobs are often the best opportunity for uneducated single parents to enter the workforce and build skills and experience needed to improve their conditions. These jobs are the first rung on the corporate ladder. You are supporting policies designed to eliminate or raise this rung.

For these reasons, minimum wage price controls are in fact antithetical to the alleged economic ends aimed at.

Of course, as a New Deal Democrat you probably don't know this and or if you do, support this effect as it drives more of the huddled masses into your redistributive welfare web. If these are Family Values than I want none of them.

Rethink your stance please."

Here is my rebuttal:

1. Conservatives will often cite the ridiculous belief that raising the minimum wage causes business to cut jobs. This is an assertion that they tend to insist upon even after well-respected economists have refuted it (see http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5632.html), and even after it is pointed out that all of the downsides they identify as existing with raising the minimum wage - such as an increased cost of operations for small businesses and a consequent tendency to outsource jobs - can easily be rectified by additional policies that won't insist on paying the average worker substandard wages (i.e., creating tax cuts and financial subsidies to small businesses to cover the cost of wage increases, raising tariffs on foreign goods so as to make it more difficult for companies that ship jobs overseas to continue selling their products to consumers in the United States).

2. The argument in the third paragraph (i.e., the one beginning with the phrase "Low skilled jobs...") is perhaps the most ridiculous one of all, since there isn't any reason to believe that entry-level positions would be any less "entry-level" if they were paid $8 or $10 an hour than they are at the current wage. After all, plenty of jobs in hiring paying industries DO have entry-level positions at these or higher rates; it is only the businesses that have gotten away with either preventing their employees from unionizing or crippling the bargaining power of their unions (see retail outlets, manufacturing jobs) that force their entry-level workers to subsist on such inadequate incomes.

3. In the final paragraph, Mr. Santini then resorts to the standard smear against New Deal Democrats, i.e., that we want to "drive... the huddles masses" into a "redistributive welfare web." This boils down to a formula that I have recently deduced exists within the conservative community whenever they address a liberal opponent (usually one they can't rebut using actual fact and logic):

X + Accusation of supporting "socialism" or "big government" = Shut the fuck up!

Unfortunately for Santini, I have encountered this imbecile approach so many times that I've already written a blog article thoroughly debunking it, one that I'm ready to whip out whenever the occasion calls for it.

http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/debate-on-big-government.html

In conclusion, I hope that Mr. Santini will post his future replies on this thread, rather than being a coward about it.

Matthew Rozsa

To Max:

I'm not sure what you meant by your post, but I believe my response to James Santini addresses the points you raised (minus the accusations of cowardice, which do not apply to you since you did have the integrity to post your thought...s on my wall). That said, if I inadvertently did leave one of your major arguments unaddressed (which is entirely possible, since I'm a little confused as to what you were trying to articulate), please let me know so I can fix that.

For Part Two, see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/03/debate-on-minimum-wage-part-two.html

Anti-Semitism and the Conflict in Israel

2011-03-14T09:51:00.003-04:00

I submitted the following article to "The Rutgers Observer" a couple of weeks ago. However, after they kept requesting that I modify its contents (basically insisting that I change it from a personal opinion piece to a survey of the views of faculty members), I decided that I would (a) withdraw it and (b) no longer contribute to their newspaper. While I respect the right of editors to make legitimate adjustments to op-ed pieces (i.e., cutting down on length so that they abide by a predetermined word limit, removing profanity and other offensive language), some become so wrapped up in their own egos and personal ideological agendas that they stop being editors and instead become tiny tyrants within their self-proclaimed literary fiefdoms.

It's a shame, too, since I actually thought this piece was pretty good.

Sometimes a point can be best illustrated, or at least introduced, by starting with an anecdote.

While attending a history department luncheon, I was involved in a conversation in which a casual reference was made to the fact that I’m Jewish. Almost immediately, a stranger who overheard my comment sauntered over to our corner of the room and asked, with a polite but unmistakably accusing tone, “So you’re Jewish? What do you have to say for Israel?”

To better understand the implications of this challenge, imagine some comparable situations:

What if someone walked up to a random Arab and demanded to know, “What do you have to say for the PLO?”

Or approached a random Muslim and queried, “What do you have to say for the Ground Zero Mosque?”

Or confronted a random black person with the question, “What do you have to say for Barack Obama?”

If you think that only a bigot would ask those questions of someone simply because he or she is Arab, Muslim, and/or black, you are absolutely right. It is bigoted to assume that an entire group of people is directly or indirectly answerable for, or at least in some way connected to, individuals and institutions that share their ethnic or religious background. Unfortunately, many of the people I know who agree with that conclusion for other groups believe an exception should be made for Jews. In their minds, Jews are different.

How exactly are they different? Some say it’s because Jews are disproportionately supportive of Israel, and as such can be held answerable for Israel’s human rights violations – but, of course, Arabs and Muslims in this country are just as disproportionately supportive of anti-Zionist causes, and yet the “Jews are different” crowd would rightly protest if it was claimed that all or most Arabs and Muslims could be connected with the words and deeds of the various terrorist groups in the Middle East. Others assert it’s because Jews have a great deal of sway in Washington, given the presence of several dozen Jewish congressmen and powerful lobbies like AIPAC – yet, once again, even though the president is black, and lobbying groups like the NAACP remain well-funded and influential, the people I know who believe “Jews are different” would never argue that all or most African-Americans can be connected to the policies of those people and groups.

No, ultimately, the “Jews are different” argument is rooted in one source alone: anti-Semitism.

This isn’t to say that anyone who speaks out against Israel or its Jewish supporters is anti-Semitic. Indeed, when the label “anti-Semite” is affixed to critics of Israel and Zionism who haven’t displayed prejudice in their motives, from liberals like Jimmy Carter to conservatives like Ron Paul, it serves to intimidate thoughtful dissent and stifle public debate. Just as it is wrong to accuse everyone who opposes Obama or Park51 of being a racist, it is also wrong to brand all opponents of Israeli and Zionist policy as anti-Semitic.

At the same time, a binaristic oversimplification has now emerged, one which holds that either all detractors of Israel are anti-Semitic or else none of them are. The reality is much more complex. While many of the people who speak out against Israel aren’t prejudiced, others use criticism of Israel as a vehicle for hate which they eventually extend to the larger Jewish community. In the last decade alone, this has resulted in anti-Semitic outbursts from England, France, and Sweden to Canada, Argentina, and New Zealand.

So what do I have to say for Israel? Here is a better question: Why do you ask?

The Platitudinous Mitt Romney

2011-02-17T13:57:00.003-05:00

Back in April I picked up a copy of No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, a new book by Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Flipping it over so that I could read the description on the back of the jacket, I found that the publishers had printed the following excerpt from the text:

It is time for America to pursue the difficult course ahead, to confront the looming problems, to strengthen the foundations of our prosperity, and to secure the sources of our liberty and safety. The sacrifice and hard work will not sap our national energy; they will restore it. I'm one of those who believe that America is destined to remain as it has been since the birth of the republic - the brightest hope of the world. And for that belief, I do not apologize.

Listen, I am not naive. I understand that the writing of politicians - regardless of party, ideological faction, gender, race, creed, or country - tends to suck. As a rule of thumb, one can expect the literature churned out by humanity's would-be leaders to be shackled by slavish adherence to social convention, asphyxiated in anemic and turgid prose, and hopelessly contaminated with platitudes and lesser cliches (after all, anything more stimulating might scare off potential voters). I understand this and, to the greatest extent that I can, have made my peace with it.

That doesn't mean I won't ridicule the hell out of it.

What kind of person does Romney think would actually be inspired by this rhetoric? More disturbingly, to what set of opinions do supporters of the erstwhile governor believe he is acting as a foil? Does anyone really believe that Romney is rebutting the back of some other hypothetical book jacket?

It is time for America to retreat from the difficult course ahead, to ignore the looming problems, to weaken the foundations of our prosperity, and to needlessly imperil our liberty and safety. National energy be damned, we should settle into a culture of self-absorption and laziness. I'm one of those who believe America is doomed to never recapture its early glory - and am convinced that the rest of the world will mock us, and possibly post sticky notes on our backs when we aren't looking. But you shouldn't listen to me anyway, because I don't really have confidence in my own convictions.

Mitt Romney is the kind of man who proves that we need the likes of Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Jon Stewart to mock our public servants. There can be little doubt that if our national brain subsisted on nothing but the flaccid words of politicians, it would shrivel up and die.

Hypnotizing Jews: Rand Paul & Co. Expose Obama's Diabolical Scheme

2011-02-17T13:47:00.003-05:00

As published in "The Rutgers Observer" on November 9th.

Did you think the radical right had lost its marbles when it claimed Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?

Was it clear that things could get no wackier when they insisted his health care reform bill included death panels to extirpate the elderly and disabled?

Were you certain they’d reached a critical mass of lunacy when they hysterically declared that his back-to-school speech was really an attempt to indoctrinate America’s children with socialism?

In the words of Al Jolson… you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Apparently two Republican members of Congress and a Republican Senator-elect believe one of Obama’s secrets to winning the 2008 election was…

Hypnotizing the Jews.

I am not creative enough to make this up.

I mention historical perspective because, with it, one sees that Democrats have averaged 75% of the Jewish vote in every presidential election since 1928.

Besides, it’s ridiculous to believe that a tricked out ‘O’ could actually hypnotize Jews into voting for Barack Obama. I’m Jewish and the logo doesn’t have any effect on me…

“Aren’t I pretty, Matt?”

No! I must resist your power!

“Hope……Change…… Hope…… Change……”

I can’t support Obama! He’s a Kenyan Socialist!

“Yes you can……Yes you can……”

SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I MOBILIZE THE PROLETARIAT!

My "Thoughts" on Mike Huckabee

2011-02-17T13:34:00.007-05:00

Last December, I posted an article on my blog about Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who is widely considered to be a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. After explaining why Huckabee is likely to win his party's top prize (a theme on which I elaborate here: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/election-2012-my-predictions.html), the piece goes on to explore the candidate's dark past, one that arguably disqualifies him from serving as president.

In response to this, I found this comment on my message board from a "Gary Walter":

Yours "thoughts" do not change my view at all. I will support Huckabee for President.

Here is a reposting of those "thoughts" for you to enjoy. The sections involving why I believe Huckabee will be nominated have been omitted due to their contextual irrelevance here. A superior verson of them can be found in the aforementioned link, although those who want to read the original article in its entirety can find it here (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/12/republican-presidential-candidate-in.html).

My question to you... do you think these facts are important?

While polls vary as to whether Barack Obama can defeat him, there is no question as to the fact that Barack Obama must defeat him.

There are plenty of reasons why this is the case. We can start with Wayne DuMond, an Arkansas man who was sentenced to thirty-nine years in prison (reduced from an initial life plus twenty years) after he brutally raped a seventeen-year-old girl. Because the evidence that he had committed this crime was irrefutable, normally his case wouldn’t have attracted any special attention.

However, there was a catch – unbeknownst to DuMond, the girl he’d raped was the third cousin of Bill Clinton.
.
Normally this wouldn’t have made any difference. However, several right-wing extremists decided to spread rumors that DuMond was innocent, a claim that – despite its absolute and obvious falsehood – was fervently embraced by those who hated Clinton as president.

Foremost among them was Mike Huckabee, who not only commuted DuMond’s sentence less than ten weeks after becoming governor, but even skirted federal law by tampering with the parole board (which had twice voted to deny DuMond parole) so that it would decide in his favor.

Less than a year after DuMond was released, he raped another woman. This time, he also murdered her.
.
This may be the most abhorrent thing Huckabee has done, but it certainly isn’t the only one. He also has a history of sexism (1998 – he signs a full-page advertisement in USA Today saying that women should “submit graciously” to their husbands), racism (1993 – he speaks before a white supremacist group known as the Council of Conservative Citizens), and bigotry against Mormons (2008 – he claims that Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers). The group for which he has reserved his worst bile are homosexuals, whose sexual orientation he has compared with incest, who he has claimed are committing moral sins comparable with lying and stealing, and who he partially blamed for the spate of school shootings in the ‘90s in his book Kids Who Kill. He has even argued that allowing gay marriage would threaten the survival of civilization.

Finally, there is the threat that Huckabee poses to one of America’s most basic and important liberties – religious freedom, as protected by the separation of church and state.

From a speech delivered in his 2008 presidential campaign:

I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards…

As a Jew, I know from personal experience the danger that exists when people hold such opinions. I can still remember being the child who was victimized by anti-Semitism – who had quarters thrown at his head and swastikas drawn on his textbooks, who was told by his friends that Jews worshipped the devil and were responsible for the death of Christ. I even remember being dragged into a lake by a group of my peers, although the part where they held my head under water and chanted “Drown the Jew” has, mercifully, been blotted from my memory.

Hence I know how to respond to Huckabee’s support of theocracy:

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights.

That line isn’t mine, by the way. It was written by Thomas Jefferson.

Now that we know what the Sage of Monticello would think of Mike Huckabee, only one question remains – what do you think of him? To anyone who has considered supporting him for president, have these facts changed your opinion?

This isn’t my challenge to you. This is America’s challenge to you.

Election 2012: My Predictions

2011-02-17T13:31:00.007-05:00

When you bear in mind that presidential nominations are determined not by how the candidates fare in national polls of their party's voters, but rather by how they perform in the earlier primaries, you come to some interesting conclusions as to the situation facing Republicans in 2012:

In this contest, I see Obama-Biden resoundingly defeating Huckabee-Huntsman. For more on that, see the article preceding this one:

http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-thoughts-on-mike-huckabee.html

Debate on Big Government

2011-02-17T11:35:00.006-05:00

I recently posted a status update on Facebook that said:

I know that few things make right-wingers happier than embracing their delusion about liberals loving Big Government (understanding our actual ideology would be too taxing - pun intended), but this... this is friggin' ridiculous.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/16/bachmann-targets-michelle-obama/

This prompted a lengthy debate between myself and a conservative friend of mine named Kevin. Initially it focused solely on the details of Michele Bachmann's statement; soon, however, Kevin made this comment:

Your argument about the Right's "delusion" is delusional. To say that liberals don't support greater government involvement in daily life and services is to deny the basic tenets of liberal philosophy. Your argument here is founded on one case of hyperpartisanship and overreaction.

What follows, unedited and unaltered, is my response to that assertion, which due to its length and importance I felt warranted an entirely separate blog article. For the conservation that preceded it, see: http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/debate-on-taxes-and-breastfeeding.html

Let's dissect each facet of your last statement:

- Social Policy: The conservative movement is constantly warring with the liberal movement because, whereas the former wants to use the power of the state to impose its personal moral convictions (i.e., the convictions of the Christian Right) on the rest of society, the latter takes a laissez-faire approach and believes that the government should stay out of people's personal lives (see gay rights, abortion rights, peripheral issues like being allowed to not say the Pledge of Allegiance or burn the flag, etc.)

- Foreign Policy: Once again, liberals are the ones who support scaling down the size of the military-industrial complex and limiting our intervention in foreign conflicts (when they don't, it is invariably because they have allied with a dominant right-wing faction, not because they are adhering to a liberal platform), while conservatives favor increasing the size of government in both of these areas.

- Economic Policy: When conservatives complain about "Big Government", it is this realm to which they are usually referring. That said, although they like to distort liberal economic ideas by depicting them as a paean to state power and a yearning for increased centralization, the reality is that the goal of mainstream American liberals is to protect what they believe to be the economic rights of all American citizens (for a list of these rights, see: http://www.fdrheritage.org/bill_of_rights.htm). Because these rights are frequently imperiled by private entities - be they large corporations that pay substandard wages and arbitrarily lay off thousands of workers when it suits their profit desires, or health insurance companies that gouge the public and thereby deny decent medical care to millions, or banks that foist predatory loans on people buying homes, or big businesses that form monopolies and thus stifle competition - liberals believe that the only way for every citizen's economic rights to be protected is for the government to step in and stop those private individuals and/or organizations that are violating them. This is not something that we support because we savor the idea of a strong central government, any more so than we would savor the idea of putting murderers and rapists in jail for the same reason. Our logic here is that, although "if men were angels, no government would be necessary" (that's a James Madison quote), the fact that men aren't angels means government is a necessary evil, one that can prevent or at least minimize the destructive effects of selfishness and downright malevolence on innocent people. Our desire to pass laws to prevent economic injustices is no more statist than our support of laws that prevent and/or punish crimes of violence.

Conservatives differ from liberals here because either (a) they don't see any problem with the economically strong exploiting the weak, viewing it as natural or even morally right, or (b) they feel that allowing the free market to go about its business unfettered is far more likely to resolve these issues. While I won't delve into why I think both of these opinions are wrong, suffice to say that it is asinine to assert that disagreeing with them, and thus believing the government can and should work to fight economic injustice, means that "liberals love Big Government" (to paraphrase the expression with which you just agreed). It simply means that we believe the government needs to exert its power to correct problems and evils that would otherwise be left unaddressed. Claiming that "Big Government" is our motive is a distortion of the liberal position, just like arguing that right-wingers who supported Bush's policies did so because they wanted to create a military state (as some wrongfully purported) is a distortion of the conservative position. Those arguments involve believing that an ideological group wants to use the power of a certain institution to solve certain problems not because they care about those problems, but merely because their ideology causes them to crave increasing the power of the institution in question. At best, this is a misinformed oversimplification; at worst, it is a deliberate straw man argument (also known as a lie).

Kevin never responded to this post.

Debate on Taxes and Breastfeeding

2011-02-17T10:15:00.006-05:00

It all started when I posted this status update on Facebook:

I know that few things make right-wingers happier than embracing their delusion about liberals loving Big Government (understanding our actual ideology would be too taxing - pun intended), but this... this is friggin' ridiculous.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/16/bachmann-targets-michelle-obama/

The following transcript captures the debate which followed. It has not been edited or altered in any way:

Kevin
Well, she does have a partial point. When it comes to personal choices in child rearing, (with the lone exception being education) I don't think the government should make any easier or any harder to choose a certain path.

Matthew

‎(1) The problem is that Bachmann assumes that the IRS is including tax deductions from breastfeeding nursing supplies for the explicit purpose of encouraging that practice, as opposed to doing this so as to offer financial relief for families who just added a new member.

(2) Even if the IRS was motivated by a desire to promote certain lifestyles, how would this be any different from policies like offering tax breaks to married individuals or couples who have just had children, both of which seem to encourage Americans to live in traditional nuclear families by rewarding those who do (and, implicitly, punishing those who don't)?

(3) Even though Michelle Obama is encouraging new mothers to breastfeed, is that any different from campaigns waged by other prominent political figures (including First Ladies) to promote what they perceive to be healthier lifestyles, from Obama's anti-obesity campaign to Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" effort?

(4) Based on your logic, you should also agree that it is wrong for so many obstacles to exist for homosexual couples who want to raise children.

Kevin

‎1) By that logic, where do you draw the line? Tax credits for diapers and cribs too?

2) Because it's offering discounts on physical products related to the lifestyle choices, not the choice itself. See point number 1.

3) It's not any different in that respect, and in this arena, Bachmann is definitely overreacting.

4) Perhaps. As I've said before, the government doesn't have much legal recourse there... Of course, in my opinion, it's wrong for homosexual couples to be raising children anyway...

Matthew

‎(1) I wouldn't oppose tax credits for cribs and diapers. These things are necessities, not luxuries, and since people who are less economically advantaged have just as much right to them as those who are better off, I fail to see the problem with lending them a helping hand.

(2) The basis of your agreement with Bachmann wasn't that the government was offering unfair discounts on products, but that you "don't think the government should make (it) any easier or harder to choose a certain (child rearing) path." If this is your position, I fail to see how it makes any difference whether the government achieves that goal by offering discounts on products or rewarding certain lifestyle choices. The distinction you've identified is a red herring.

(3) Agreed.

(4) While you are entitled to your opinions on whether homosexuals should raise children (even though I must say I am personally repulsed by the prejudice in your views), the reality is that that is one scenario in which the government IS imposing personal lifestyle choices on people. Although you acknowledge this point (albeit with a distinct lack of enthusiasm), Bachmann and similar right-wingers have no problem with policies that discriminate against would-be gay parents. It seems that they are very selective in how they apply their "small government" philosophy.

Incidentally, you didn't address the main point I raised, i.e., that Bachmann and her supporters assume the IRS is doing this to promote a larger lifestyle agenda, as opposed to actually having a substantial factual case for believing that that is so. This traces back to a much larger problem; the right-wing is so zealous in embracing their delusion about liberals supporting "Big Government" that they jettison common sense.

Kevin

‎1) At the same time, you have to acknowledge that the line between "necessities" and "luxuries" is nowhere close to being clear-cut and by expanding recognition of material items like that, it DOES open the door to what Bachmann is calling the "nanny state."

2) Of course it was. The basis of my agreement was that the government shouldn't be offering unfair discounts on products like that BECAUSE the government should not determine child-rearing paths.

3) You're right that Bachmann is ignoring any possible arguments for IRS actions being other than promoting lifestyle agendas. However, your argument about the Right's "delusion" is delusional. To say that liberals don't support greater government involvement in daily life and services is to deny the basic tenets of liberal philosophy. Your argument here is founded on one case of hyperpartisanship and overreaction.

Matthew

‎(1a) While I agree that the line between necessities and luxuries can be ambiguous, I don't see how that applies in this case.

(1b) Even if that did apply in this case, I don't see how it could be argued to lead to a "nanny state." At worse, it would simply mean that the government is wasting money, which sounds a lot more like fiscal irresponsibility than the existence of a "nanny state."

Once again, the key issue is NOT whether you like or dislike certain policies, but rather whether a logically sound link can be established between those policies and an allegation you wish to make about them. For example, even though I oppose school vouchers, I'm not going to say that they're "fascistic", since I can't draw a causal link between the policy itself and the disparaging term which I wish to associate with it. Bachmann clearly doesn't like the tax credit on breastfeeding aides, which is her right, but she then claims that this could entail the first step toward the creation of a nanny state, even though she has not provided any reasonable proof to back up that assertion.

(2) When I asked how the IRS's tax policies favoring married couples and nuclear families (which Bachmann doesn't decry) are any different from the IRS tax breaks on breastfeeding aides (which she does decry), you said the key difference was that the latter involved discounts on products while the former only rewards lifestyles. Since the whole basis of your defense of Bachmann is that you "don't think the government should make (it) any easier or any harder to choose a certain path (for child rearing)", my response to that argument was to say that "if this is your position, I fail to see how it makes any difference whether the government achieves that goal by offering discounts on products or rewarding certain lifestyle choices." Your latest comment did not address that point.

(3a) Thank you for making that concession (in the first sentence).

I responded to the last three sentences of Kevin's post in a much longer and separate rebuttal. Since it detaches from the subject of this conversation and begins an entirely new one, I have created a second article entirely dedicated to it (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2011/02/debate-on-big-government.html).

Here is the remainder of the breastfeeding debate:

Kevin B.

In this case, I'd have to say that Michele Bachmann is off her rocker. Study after study has shown that breastfeeding is beneficial to children. Giving a small tax incentive to do so is a good policy.

Lacey

If Republicans want to keep women in their place, they could at least provide the odd incentive to do so. Plus, I mean, Bachmann paid for her own breast pumps and stuff. Why can't everyone just be rich and make the same choices she did? Come on.

!~*~FOR GOD'S SAKE THE LAST COMMENT WAS SARCASM~*~!

Andrew

Bachmann has no idea what it's like for struggling families. You know how doctors say things like, "Our country doesn't have healthcare, it has SICK care"? You know how they talk about how Americans don't impliment a simple ounce of prevention, and we pay for it with a pound of cure? The debate between formula and breast-feeding is among the greatest examples of that. Bachmann cares about fetuses but she doesn't give a crap about the baby. It's as though babies can defend themselves; it makes no logical sense. I could sympathize with an antichoicer's point of view if they still had concern for life in general, but anyone supporting Bachmann's statements clearly does not fall into that category.

On Quotes and Economic Conservatism

2011-01-05T02:04:00.016-05:00

"I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own."
- John Bartlett, publisher and editor of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations"

Some men collect baseball cards. Others collect comic books. I collect quotes.

It's hard for me to pinpoint the exact reason behind this affinity for aphorisms. Perhaps it can be traced back to my longstanding love of the English language, and particularly for the countless ways words can be used to capture human thought. Maybe its roots are found in my desire to find a relatively easy way to intellectually engage myself when bored. There is even the possibility that it stems from a subconscious recognition of my own innate verbosity, one that causes me to better appreciate thinkers who are capable of succinctness.

Most likely, however, my love of quotes comes from the simple fact that they are so damn useful.

Take my frustration with conservatives. On economic issues, right-wing pundits love to concoct all sorts of convoluted moral justifications for policies that benefit the wealthy and big business at the expense of the working class and poor. As one attempts to slog through the quagmire of platitudes, prevarications, and downright distortions that are the natural bi-products of these efforts, it is easy to lose sight of a simple truth that cuts all of their rationales to ribbons. Fortunately, economist John Kenneth Galbraith can help with that:

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

When the falseness of their moral arguments becomes too blatant to be ignored, economic conservatives will often assert that they support policies which are morally wrong not because they feel doing so is in their best interest (that, they claim, is merely incidental), but rather because they are following fundamental economic laws which can never be violated. As this line of reasoning goes, conservatives are actually pained to see that economic policy cannot be carried out in a fashion that emphasizes human rights; at the same time, they have no choice, for the sheer notion that one can break the laws of the marketplace makes about as much sense as arguing that one can defy Newton's Laws of Motion.

For a response to this, I turn to President Franklin Roosevelt:

"While they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."

Another common defense used by economist rightists, ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Ron Paul, is that the rich deserve policies which favor their interests, since their ability to spread capital around makes them America's "most productive citizens." Here I simply cite the first Republican president himself, Abraham Lincoln:

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

At this, economic conservatives will sneer that liberals and other critics of pro-plutocratic policies simply lack the expertise to really know what they're talking about. That always brings me to philosopher Nicholas Butler:

"An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing."

After all of this baloney has failed to hold up, conservatives fall back on their classic stand-by, one culled directly from the McCarthy Era - i.e., the idea that economic liberalism is "socialist" and/or "un-American." Fortunately, there are two quotes from prominent American statesmen, both of whom served before socialist ideology was even created, that easily disprove this claim. The first is from the Jeffersonian intellectual John Taylor...

"Wealth, like suffrage, must be considerably distributed to sustain a democratick republic; and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must either have wealth or lose power."

... and the second is none other than the president whose face appears on the twenty dollar bill, Andrew Jackson:

"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."
:
To conclude, I usually bear in mind the axiomatic truth about government articulated by the author Anatole France:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

Aren't quotes fantastic?