Can A Muslim Be A Good American? Kansas Legislator Says No

This is in the neighborhood of where I grew up:

State Rep. Joe Seiwert, R-Pretty Prairie, recently forwarded an e-mail essay titled "Can a good Muslim be a good American?" to about 40 of his e-mail contacts, including people in government and business.
The essay concluded:

"Perhaps we should be very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both 'good' Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you wish it's still the truth. You had better believe it. The more who understand this, the better it will be for our country and our future."

Seiwert's defense just makes it worse:

When it was pointed out that Muslims live in Reno County, Seiwert replied, "Sure, there's murderers, there's tax evasion people, there's all kinds of people live in my district.

"There are people who make negative comments about farmers all the time. I don't get upset about that," said Seiwert, a farmer.

To be fair, people rarely equate farming with murder -- PETA excepted, perhaps -- or suggest that farming in antithetical to being American. How sad.

Bush, Obama, Bipartisanship

Adam Serwer: "Bush was a more bipartisan president than Barack Obama. But that has to do less with him being ideologically heterodox than it does with the quality of his opposition. Democrats were willing to work with Bush. Republicans simply don't think anyone else should be allowed to govern and have taken to opposing Obama even when he proposes things they once supported."

Bomb Was Philly-Bound

Inky: "Philadelphia was the next destination of the plane that was carrying a toner-cartridge bomb discovered in England last month. The explosive device - which almost went undetected - was set to detonate at 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 29, when the plane could have been over the U.S. East Coast, British police announced Wednesday."

Sometimes, I wonder if it was the wisest thing to move from the Midwest to a major East Coast city that, statistically, has a much higher chance of being targeted by terrorist bombs. Mostly, I try not to think about it.

It's OK To Repeal DADT

Washington Post: "A Pentagon study group has concluded that the military can lift the ban on gays serving openly in uniform with only minimal and isolated incidents of risk to the current war efforts, according to two people familiar with a draft of the report, which is due to President Obama on Dec. 1."

The Only Thing I'll Say About the Debt Commission For Now

Everybody's already had a chance to beat their breasts about the big headline-making cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The only thing I'd add is that the cuts actually have a chance A) to undermine the economy and B) shift big costs to state governments that, for now at least, aren't really well-equipped to bear them.

On the second front, it's worth looking at the proposed $100 billion in cuts to defense spending. That's a nice, big, round number, and one I initially found encouraging. But what to cut? Well, $1.1 billion of those savings would be from getting the Department of Defense out of the business of schooling the children of our soldiers, sailors and marines and dumping those kids on local school districts where those families are based. It doesn't eliminate the cost of that education of course, but it does dump it on state taxpayers. This is a small budget item in the scheme of things, but it does hint at something pernicious about the proposed cuts.

Back to the first front: It's time we had a frank national discussion about backdoor Keynesianism, whereby our government has propped up the economy for decades by buying and maintaining equipment for a military that is twice as expensive as the rest of the world's forces combined. (It is, frankly, the way that Republicans have been able to use government for economic ends while shouting about free markets.) A substantial portion of the proposed defense cuts come from reduced contracting and procurement costs. That's going to mean less work for companies like Boeing; that in turn will mean fewer jobs in places like Seattle and Wichita; and that in turn will weaken those communities through a variety of second-order effects.

This is a pain that is probably inevitable: The U.S. really can't afford to do twice as much, defensively, as everybody else in perpetuity. But a right-sized military will mean some pain, at least in the short-term, for private-sector workers whose jobs support and supply the defense establishment. We need to be honest about that.

Dominic Tierney's Army of Nation Builders

As I mentioned before, I'm reading Dominic Tierney's "How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War.” Today, Tierney has an op-ed in the New York Times, expanding on one of the book's central themes: That our military should be better constructed for nation-building missions because that's what the Founding Fathers intended:

American troops also helped to survey and map the West. In the most famous expedition, from 1804 to 1806, Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Second Lt. William Clark led a party of nearly 30 men, including three sergeants and 22 enlisted soldiers, to the Pacific Ocean. The United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, or “topogs,” became a major locus of American science, collecting flora, fauna and geological specimens, and publishing their findings in prestigious journals.

This is interesting stuff, but there's a huge difference between the Army of 1804 and the Army of 2010: Today's Army does most of its work abroad. Without getting into the injustices done to American Indians, the job of the Army of 1804 wasn't nation-building as a general task: It was building our nation, tasked with leading and defending white settlers in the long westward expansion across the American continent. The Army of today isn't really tasked with nation-building, either, when you think about it: It's charged with nation re-building. Some of the skills involved may be virtually identical, despite the passage of time, but the strategic purposes are different enough as to make the comparison an uneasy fit.

And of course, I say all that while attempting to get Tierney on the podcast. Hope it works!

Philly Police: The Beating of Bernard

Ronnie Polaneczky:

"'They screamed at him multiple times to get his hands behind his back, get on the ground,' recalls Landgren. 'The man cowered. He never spoke. I told them, 'Officer, he doesn't understand you! Please, he's mentally ill!' They kept screaming. It seemed to make him more agitated.

'One of the officers could only get one cuff on the man. He said, 'OK, that's it, you f---er,' and hit him hard with a billy club. The man fell and covered his face with his hands. Then all three officers were on him.

'He was curled in a ball. They pulled his hands from his face and maced him multiple times. They Tasered him over and over. He was like a cornered animal.'"

The police are silent about their view of things. Interestingly, the police report cites Bernard for "aggravated assault" on an officer ... even though nobody else saw such a thing.

Which takes me back to something I meant to write about a week ago. The Daily News ran a feature story about a crisis-intervention program that is training Philadelphia officers to distinguish between criminal behavior and mental illness that requires help -- the better not to end up Tasering or abusing somebody who isn't really in full control of their actions. Great idea! There's only one problem: Only 800 cops out of a force of 6,500 have received the training. And not nearly all of them will get it:

Ultimately, Healy said, 25 to 30 percent of patrol cops will receive the training.

There are no plans to make the training mandatory, Healy said, because police brass believe that the training is more effective when it's offered voluntarily.

I'm not sure what to make of this: Two-thirds of Philly police officers think it's ok to blow off training that can help them serve their community better? (One in 10 police encounters involve someone with mental illness.) Police brass are conceding that most of their force would rather use billy clubs and Tasers than deal in a nuanced way with a nuanced situation? It's good that the training is being offered to officers who want it; the fact that not all officers are getting it is troubling.

And even with the training, it's important to realize that encounters like Bernard's, above, will probably still happen from time-to-time. But maybe it doesn't have to happen as often as it does.