Today - And Today Only - I Root For Fred Phelps

The gay-bashing folks of Westboro Baptist Church had their day in the Supreme Court today, contesting a lawsuit that would force them to pay millions of dollars in damages for demonstrating near a military funeral.

The church's actions are distasteful in the extreme. But it's important to note that a number of news organizations -- including the New York Times -- have weighed in on the side of the church. Limiting Fred Phelps' ugly free speech, you see, might have real consequences for the speech the rest of us express and hear.

Respondents were found liable for millions of dollars in damages for intrusion and intentional infliction of emotional distress based solely on their publication of offensive religious and political opinions -- opinions which the Petitioner encountered not at his son's funeral, but only several hours later by watching news reports, and then weeks later after conducting an online search. Imposing tort liability for such speech will chill the activities of all who speak or publish on controversial issues.

In other words, the family didn't actually encounter the Phelpses at the funeral. But they knew the Phelpses were out there, somewhere near -- 1,000 feet away, in compliance with funeral picketing laws -- being offensive. In fact, the family is claiming to have been intruded upon because they found offensive material by searching for it on Westboro's web site. With all due respect to the family, that's a really lousy foundation to start restricting free speech rights: It doesn't really punish the Phelpses for intruding on their privacy, but for expressing repugnant opinions. That's not how it is supposed to work in America.

Either you believe in the First Amendment, in other words, or you don't. Read the whole brief, and you'll get a sense of how silencing Fred Phelps might be a step down the slippery slope to silencing all of us.

John Featherman's Case for a Republican Mayor

John Featherman makes it today in the Daily News. I've previously expressed skepticism that the GOP -- which culturally seems to favor rural areas, and philosophically seems ill-suited to providing the kinds of services that a big city needs just to hang together -- is really equipped to provide municipal leadership here. But it would probably prove useful if Democrats actually had competition for city leadership.

The problem is that John Featherman -- who actually has filed papers to run as a Republican candidate for mayor -- doesn't seem to offer much in the way of competition. Most of his solutions sound familiar: Cut business taxes! Really crack down on corruption! The only problem is, we hear those kinds of promises fairly often from our politicians -- Mayor Nutter said those things when he was a candidate. Why would Featherman or any other Republican be better-positioned to make those things happen?

Featherman gets intriguing, though, with this proposal:

MAKE REAL BUDGET CUTS! Government should stick to what it does best and consider outsourcing everything else. This means bidding out trash, call centers, prisons and administrative services, among others. This means cutting wasteful government jobs, with the mayor focusing exclusively on the needs of our 1.5 million residents. And having the political courage to negotiate the three unresolved municipal contracts and fight for fair concessions - in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie-like style.

This raises a couple of questions:

* What does municipal government "do best" according to Featherman? After all, his "everything else" seems to cover a pretty wide range of necessary services.

* What does Featherman actually propose to cut? He doesn't actually name a single program or job that needs to go.

Maybe these are questions for which Featherman actually has answers. It's not easy to lay out a detailed governing platform in an 800-word op-ed, after all. Here's the problem, though: John Featherman is running for mayor, and today's piece certainly signals that the campaign has opened. But he has no online presence for his campaign that I can find -- not even a Blogger blog. It's to believe that Republicans are ready to govern Philadelphia if they're not even ready to made the case.

The ACLU and Jonah Goldberg's Assassination Straw Man

Jonah Goldberg's debating partner.

Toward the end of an otherwise-modest column on the government's plan to assassinate an American citizen affiliated with Al Qaeda, Jonah Goldberg stacks the deck:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it's plain crazy.

Perhaps "some" civil libertarians believe that, but it's not the position of the ACLU, which has brought the lawsuit challenging the government's plan. In its complaint (PDF) asking for an injunction, the organization acknowledges there are times when due process will be skipped:

Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law
prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and
imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. The summary use of force is lawful
in these narrow circumstances only because the imminence of the threat makes judicial
process infeasible.

In other words, you can kill your enemy on the battlefield, when he's also trying to kill you. Not even the ACLU is against that.

That's not what the government is doing. It is reserving to itself the right to kill an American citizen who -- for all we know -- might be sitting peacefully in a kitchen somewhere in Yemen, presumably able to be captured if he's spotted. And that's where, at the very least, the government wanders into gray area. The ACLU, noting that the "right to life" is fundamental for U.S. citizens under the Constitution, wants that area to be a little less gray.

The government’s refusal to disclose the standard by which it determines
to target U.S. citizens for death independently violates the Constitution: U.S. citizens
have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their
own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of
what may cause them to be put to death by the state.

The weird thing is, that's not so different from Goldberg's own conclusion. "So, let's have Congress and the president come up with some clear, public rules," he writes. "Better to start the debate over an easy case than a hard one." Sure. So why knock people who share your position? Can there never be a cease-fire in the war against liberals?

Are the Inky and Daily News Really So Similar?

Philly's two major dailies come under new ownership on Friday, and I couldn't help but notice this quote today from the new guy in charge:

Longer term, (new CEO Gregory J. Osberg) said, he wanted to talk with the editors of the newspapers about making them "more distinct from one another."

"I think today we are asking our consumers to choose one newspaper or the other, the way we're approaching the news," Osberg said.

"If we start to separate the brands, to become more distinct in their editorial missions, there is an opportunity for us to get consumers interested in buying both of the papers on any given day.

I'd love to know what Osberg means by that, because the Inquirer and Daily News couldn't seem more different to me. The Inquirer is the suburban newspaper, with lots of coverage of New Jersey and outlying counties that I -- as a Philly resident -- don't generally find all that useful or interesting. (It also tries too hard, I think, to be a "paper of record" with national and international news, sometimes trumpeting headlines on wire service stories you could find anywhere.) The Daily News is pretty much a Philly-Philly-Philly paper, a bit sassier and more fun, but relentlessly focused on what's going on here.

Now: My residency and biases make me a bit more of a Daily News man, myself. But I also see the value, mostly, of the Inky model. By offering such distinct publications, Philadelphia Media Network is probably already reaching more of the market than it would otherwise. The challenge isn't -- and shouldn't be -- getting Philadelphians to buy two newspapers per day. It's getting them to buy one.

We Must Call Attention To Christine O'Donnell's Idiocy Because Voters Are Idiots

I'm not really comfortable with Mark Schmitt's case for mocking Christine O'Donnell's brand of goofiness:

One problem is that Tea Party extremism is so far out and obscure that it doesn't immediately register as extremism. They want to repeal the 17th Amendment! That sounds odd, but most of us don't know off-hand what the 17th Amendment is. And even after being reminded that it's the one that has to do with direct election of senators, it's still not clear why they want to repeal it, other than the fact that it was passed during the Progressive Era. It takes a lot of explaining, and I still don't quite get it, plus it seems so unlikely to happen that I can't get too worked up about it. (There's also the fact that living in Washington, D.C., without senators, I don't have a vote to lose.)

More importantly, the Tea Party movement's embrace of eccentric constitutionalism and rhetorical libertarianism has had the effect of moving social issues to the background. Most of the Tea Party activists, and all of their candidates, hold the same cluster of not-very-libertarian views on social and cultural issues as their far-right predecessors, usually several degrees more extreme. (Angle, for example, has said that a young teenager who becomes pregnant as a result of rape by her father should "make a lemon situation into lemonade.") But those views are obscured behind a confusing screen of constitutional and economic nonsense.

These social views are the positions that voters, especially the younger voters and suburbanites who turned decisively against Republicans in 2006 and 2008 and who are now wavering, understand. They don't need to find a copy of the Constitution to decipher the extremism. Remember that there were two issues during the Bush years that dramatically illustrated to voters the extremism of the Republican far right at that time. The first was the case of Terry Schiavo, in which congressional leaders sought to intervene in a family's private medical tragedy. The Schiavo intervention, opposed by 70 percent of the public, derailed Congress and the Bush presidency in the early months of 2005, contributing to the subsequent defeat of Social Security privatization.

He concludes: "In an ideal world, it would be as easy to show just that the economic views of the new Republican stars are as extreme and unhinged as their social views. But it's probably too late to start that now."

In other words: Governance is hard and complicated! Rather than make our case to the voters based on the substance of our views and actions, let's do the culture war thing instead so we can signal to them that the other guys are out-of-touch with our "values" in ways that don't have very much to do with governance!

Which, basically, is the left-wing version of this:



I'm not naive: Value-signaling always will be part of democratic politics. But the Schiavo Affair turned off voters because it signaled to them that Republicans had embraced culture-war issues to the exclusion of effective governance. Obsessing about Christine O'Donnell's views of masturbation might do the same thing to Democrats.

Kristol, Fuelner and Brooks' Somewhat Misleading Op-Ed On Defense Spending

Arthur Brooks, Edwin Fuelner and Bill Kristol have an op-ed in today's WSJ, warning fiscal conservatives not to rein in Pentagon spending because, well, defense spending isn't really the reason America is in its current debt-laden state. They make some of the usual arguments -- that defense spending as a share of GDP is actually lower now than it was during the Cold War -- that are fine as far as they go.

The problem is that in making the case that domestic entitlements are the real cause of the deficit, the trio pulls a bit of apples-and-oranges sleight of hand. Here's the offending bit:

Defense spending has increased at a much lower rate than domestic spending in recent years and is not the cause of soaring deficits. Even as the United States has fought two wars, the core defense budget has increased by approximately $220 billion since 2001, about a tenth as much as the government devotes each year to "mandatory" spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, lesser entitlements such as food stamps and cash assistance, and interest payments on the debt. These expenditures continue automatically, year after year, without congressional debate.

The comparison here is confusing to the point of misleading. The Trio (as I'll refer to the collective) has to make it seem as though the defense budget is somehow relatively anemic so they compare just the increases in defense spending to the total yearly budgets of the entitlement programs. That's a comparison that makes no sense.*

*And without footnotes, it's hard to be sure what comparison they're making, but it's worth noting that the "core defense budget" has generally not included Afghanistan and Iraq war expenses, which have largely been appropriated through supplemental bills.

It's not easy to track down easy-for-a-layman-such-as-myself-to-understand budget information over time; the best I can find is this Congressional Budget Office table (PDF). What it shows:

* Defense spending more than doubled between 2001 and 2009 -- from $306 billion to $655 billion. (Best I can interpret the CBO data, this includes war-fighting expenses.)The defense budget as a share of GDP rose from 3 percent to 4.6 percent.

* "Mandatory" spending -- including entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- also doubled during this time, from $1.007 trillion to $2.093 trillion. As a collective group, the percentage of the GDP rose from 9.9 percent of GDP to 14.7 percent. That sounds much bigger, but when you break it down by program, you see the increases are generally in line with the Pentagon's: Social Security's share of GDP rose by just 0.6 percent; Medicare rose by 1.2 percent of the GDP; Medicaid rose by 0.5 percent of GDP.

Now you can argue that the costs of those entitlements is still going to prove a drag, and I won't try to counter-argue in this post. But it's clear that -- despite the picture painted by The Trio -- Pentagon spending has been growing, along with the rest of government over the last decade, in robust fashion. It might not be the source of America's deficit issues, but it is certainly a source.

Plus, there's always this chart:

The United States spends 46.5 percent of the world's total military spending. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent.

Now, depending on your vision of America's role in the world, maybe that's entirely appropriate. (I'm ... dubious.) Our military bestrides the world; China, at this point, seems to want to dominate the Pacific. What that chart suggests, however, is that the American defense establishment is hardly underresourced. Let's figure out the proper balance of America's defense needs and America's resources and go from there.

Why Am I A Liberal?

I talk about that in the latest Ben and Joel Podcast.