Don't blame cities for rural violence

A New York Times story about the dangers of being a park ranger:

Two recent shootings of wildlife officers — one killed in Pennsylvania while confronting an illegal hunter, the other seriously wounded after a traffic stop in southern Utah — have highlighted what rangers and wildlife managers say is an increasingly unavoidable fact. As more and more people live in proximity to forests, parks and other wild-land playgrounds, the human animal, not the wild variety, is the one to watch out for.

“We’re seeing a little bit more of the urban spill into the wild spaces — city violence in the country,” said John Evans, an assistant branch chief of law enforcement operations at the National Park Service.

Cities surely have their problems with violence. But it's not Philadelphians (say) who are traipsing through the woods in the off-season, killing wildlife officers because they got caught poaching. Rural areas can -- and do -- generate their own violence. It's misleading for them to blame it on the cities.

Alan Cumming is pretty awesome

And he gives a pretty awesome interview to the AV Club

I think even though it is Shakespeare, it should be light. I always try to remember, if Shakespeare were around today, he would be writing The Good Wife, you know what I mean? He would be writing for television, he’d be writing for HBO or something. He was a populist writer, and I think people forget that.

 

Welcome back to the Cold War!

Washington and its western allies have for the first time since the end of the cold war drawn up classified military plans to defend the most vulnerable parts of eastern Europe against Russian threats, according to confidential US diplomatic cables.

The US state department ordered an information blackout when the decision was taken earlier this year. Since January the blueprint has been refined.

Nine Nato divisions – US, British, German, and Polish – have been identified for combat operations in the event of armed aggression against Poland or the three Baltic states. North Polish and German ports have been listed for the receipt of naval assault forces and British and US warships. The first Nato exercises under the plan are to take place in the Baltic next year, according to informed sources.

via guardian.co.uk

Julian Assange arrested in London

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Tuesday in London on a Swedish warrant, London's Metropolitan Police said.

Assange was arrested at a London police station at 9:30 a.m. (4:30 a.m. ET) and will appear at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day, police said.

Swedish authorities had issued the warrant for Assange so they can talk to him about sex-crime allegations unrelated to WikiLeaks' recent disclosure of secret U.S. documents.

via cnn.com

I don't know what to say. The conspiracy-minded part of me wants to think this is a snow job. The feminist part of me never wants to downplay sex crime allegations. So all I'll do is note this development, and reserve judgment pending a greater knowledge of the facts.

What liberal anger on the tax cuts is all about

I remember when the first Bush tax cuts were passed back in 2001. It was a political masterstroke for Republicans because -- unlike President Obama's stimulus tax cuts -- they made damn sure everybody knew their taxes were lower. How? They had the federal government send big checks to nearly every taxpayer in the country. Lots of people tucked the money into their bank accounts or went out and bought TVs, but at the largely lefty Mennonite church I was attending at the time, there was a fair amount of hand-wringing.

It wasn't that my fellow congregants were fans of high taxes. And it's not as though they were fans of every part of government -- it was a lefty Mennonite church, after all, with a pretty strong pro-peace stance. But the churchgoers recognized that there were things that government does that they not only like, but think are necessary to the just and proper functioning of society: social services, retirement income, medical care for the poor, that kind of thing. And they believed the tax cuts were likely to diminish financial support for those very worthy efforts. As a result, some church members talked openly -- and advocated -- sending the Bush tax cut checks to various charities. The money, they suspected, was going to be needed.

And that's what the liberal anger about Obama's tax cut deal is all about. For the last 30 years, Democrats have been derided by the GOP as "tax and spend liberals." It's supposed to be slur, but in a sense it's a badge of honor: Liberals were trying to actually pay for what they were buying, instead of putting it on a credit card. They even tried to make the health reform law into a deficit reduction measure; you can argue (as conservatives do) that there' some hocus-pocus going on with that effort -- but it's notable that Dems even make the effort. Republicans certainly don't: In the last decade they've given us two wars and the Medicare drug benefit financed pretty much entirely with borrowing from China. They have been for bigger government, in other words, but they haven't been willing to pay for it. Only one of the parties has been adult about the balance between spending and resources, but somehow it's the GOP parades around as the party of fiscal conservatism. It's ... galling.

And that's what it boils down to. Liberals think there are some services that government is uniquely well-positioned to provide. Extending the Bush tax cuts more than likely hastens the day those services are cut or eliminated, because the money we use to pay for them now will probably be redirected towards debt payments instead. (It's not like the Pentagon budget ever goes down.) Extending the tax cuts -- and, like the continuing fixes to the Alternative Minimum Tax, I'm willing to bet we've entered an era of permanent temporary extensions of the Bush cuts -- plunges us more fully into becoming a debt-laden country with a shredded safety net. It's difficult to discern an upside to this.

Republicans run their own party exactly the way they've always run the country

Thanks to lackluster fundraising and bungled money management, the Republican National Committee is expected to enter the 2012 presidential election season between $20 and $25 million in debt, the Washington Times reports. In an e-mail over the weekend, RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen said that "going into 2011, the RNC should have about $20.5 million of debt carried over." But taking operating costs into account, former RNC General Counsel David Norcross estimates that this could be several million shy of the final cost.

via slatest.slate.com

I wonder how they'll blame Obama for this.

Earl Reum, RIP

Word comes that Earl Reum has passed, and it saddens me.

Most people, I hope, have a moment in their lives when all of a sudden they can glimpse the wonderful possibilities that life holds for them. For me, the moment happened 20 years ago in Emporia, Kan., at the state's annual camp for high school student council leaders. I attended because I was going to be the vice president of my school's student council -- an honor earned not because I was particularly popular, but because I got up in front of the student body and did a series of impressions based on then-popular Saturday Night Live characters. (Yes: It's possible I wouldn't be the man I am today without Dana Carvey.)

Earl was the keynote speaker at the camp that year, as he was every year for decades -- in Kansas, and at workshops around the country. And he was a force of nature -- a Patch Adams kind of guy, frankly, in an era that was already increasingly irony-saturated. (I carried around a piece of plastic he gave me in my wallet for a decade: It was printed with "Major Credit Card" on one side and "Some Other Form Of Identification" on the other. He gave these away like candy.) He played us Kermit the Frog's "Rainbow Connection." He led the campers in rounds of making rain sounds my snapping and stamping their feet. And over the course of the week, he got hundreds of teen-agers to think seriously about leadership -- and whether the popularity contests that had brought them to this moment offered them an opportunity not only for leadership, but for service. 

For related reasons, that week was the week I realized that writing didn't make me a wimp or a weirdo: It made me somebody who could communicate with other people effectively -- could communicate ideas and visions and even, on occasion, a piece of my heart. So much about that week is hazy for me after two decades, but I do know that I am largely the man I am today because of how that week helped me see myself. And I know that Earl Reum was an integral part of that experience.

I know I'm not the only person who had that experience. Multiply me by the thousands of Kansans who experienced Earl over the decades at the student council workshops, then again by all the states where he did similar work, and you start to guess and the depth and breadth of his impact. All those student council leaders have grown up to become bankers and farmers and deacons and other types of leaders in their communities across the nation. Amazing. He will be missed.