Time to videotap Philadelphia cops. Unless....

PHILADELPHIA'S top cop has issued a memorandum to eliminate any confusion about a civilian's right to record, videotape or photograph officers in a public space.

The two-page memo by Commissioner Charles Ramsey circulated throughout the department on Sept. 23, roughly two weeks after the Daily News reported on several incidents involving cops who had wrongly arrested bystanders for using their cellphones to record what they considered violent arrests and who later emerged from police custody with smashed phones and no footage.

"It is not illegal to videotape a police officer," Ramsey said in a phone interview.

"Cameras are everywhere. [Officers] need to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner. If someone wants to videotape, they have the right to do so."

via philly.com

But: "However, if an officer believes that the device contains evidence of a crime and fears that it may be destroyed, the officer can confiscate it without a warrant." Yeah, that provision will never, ever, ever be abused.

On the value of peacemakers

Though I'm not ethnically Mennonite, and though I'm lapsed, I was tribalistically pleased this morning to discover that one of this year's recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Leymah Gbowee, is a grad of Eastern Mennonite University. And the announcement took me all the way back to August, when discussion heated up about another Mennonite college—Goshen—and its decision not to play the "Star Spangled Banner" before games, citing its warlike nature.

Reasonable people can disagree on that topic, I think, but all too often the negative reaction was simply smug:

NBC Sports' Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: "I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket."

That quote has stuck in my craw for two months now. But what Chandler—what a lot of people—don't understand is that Mennonite pacifism isn't about "fleeing" conflict, necessarily, but bringing nonviolent tools to act of resolving injustice and conflict. It's a belief that you don't have to shoot your way out of every bad situation or bomb every evil person—that, in fact, doing so can make injustices and conflicts worse. I was once a pure pacifist; I'm not anymore, but I still think there's a great deal of wisdom to be found in that approach.

And Gbowee exemplifies that approach. Here's the relevant portion of her Wikipedia biography:

In 2002, Leymah Gbowee was a social worker who organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. The peace movement started with local women praying and singing in a fish market.[6] She organized the Christian and Muslim women of Monrovia, Liberia to pray for peace and to hold nonviolence protests.

Under Leymah Gbowee's leadership, the women managed to force a meeting with President Charles Taylor and extract a promise from him to attend peace talks in Ghana.[7] Gbowee then led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process.[8] They staged a silent protest outside the Presidential Palace, Accra, bringing about an agreement during the stalled peace talks.

Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman, presidents of two different Lutheran churches, organized the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), and issued a statement of intent to the President: "In the past we were silent, but after being killed, raped, dehumanized, and infected with diseases, and watching our children and families destroyed, war has taught us that the future lies in saying NO to violence and YES to peace! We will not relent until peace prevails."[9]

Their movement brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003 and led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president,

Lest I take too much Mennonite pride in this: All this occurred before Gbowee's time at EMU. But it's not an accident that a Mennonite university is where she decided to further her studies into the approach she was already taking.

And contra Rick Chandler and his ilk, it was Gbowee's nonviolent—but active—approach that helped end a civil war in Liberia. I don't know that pacifism is always the answer to the world's problems, but I do know that violence isn't—and that it's often used when a nonviolent approach might produce better results. Gbowee didn't flee: She confronted a problem. She just didn't use weapons to do it.

So, thank God for Leymah Gbowee. And thank God for the peacemakers. We could use a few more of them.

President Obama, and the assassination of an American citizen

Ben and I talk about the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in this week's Scripps Howard column. Rather than do our usual point-counterpoint thing we did something new and rare for us: We agreed, and combined a single column explaining our shared civil liberties concerns. An excerpt:

How was al-Awlaki marked for death? According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of al-Awlaki. Reuters reports that al-Awlaki was then targeted by a secret White House committee -- and that the president's role in ordering the decision is "fuzzy."

If killing al-Awlaki was justified, then why is both the process and the justification for this killing secret? As the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf observed, "Obama hasn't just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set."

There is a precedent for letting the government operate quietly on matters of national security, while ensuring a minimal level of due process. In 1978, Congress -- reacting to Watergate-era scandals -- established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, empowering the judicial branch to monitor and approve of wiretapping against suspected foreign intelligence agents in the United States. That court has rarely denied a wiretapping warrant, but it has served as the public's check against executive branch overreach. That's an example Congress might contemplate anew.

Perhaps al-Awlaki deserved to die. But the best way to ensure the government doesn't abuse its power -- or use it later on merely to silent inconvenient critics -- is to provide checks, balances, and some level of transparency.

Steve Jobs was capitalism at its best. Let's not make him the champion of capitalism at its worst.

Wednesday night, my Twitter feed—after the Phillies game ended—was primarily concerned with two things: Occupy Wall Street, and the death of Steve Jobs. It's terribly dangerous to mash up two wildly disparate news stories and find a Common Meaning in them, but I was struck nonetheless. And so I Tweeted my thoughts: That while capitalism has real, sometimes huge flaws, it is also capable—uniquely so, in my opinion—of offering us goods and services that help us survive, thrive, and extend our abilities. I think it's also largely true, as Rod Dreher said—and he, incidentally, is no fan of Big Corporatism—"socialism just doesn’t produce a Steve Jobs."

But I think National Review's Kevin D. Williamson takes the Jobs-as-awesome-capitalist meme too far:

Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

That phrase—that profits are "the real measure of the social value a firm creates"—strikes me as a bridge too far. Profits are one indicator, a significant one, but the real measure? There's no other good way to assess a firm's social value? No.

Porn is hugely profitable. For that matter, so is selling meth. So is housing speculation—at least, until it isn't. And even Jobs' record on the front of "social value" isn't uncomplicated—witness the debate over working conditions at Apple's China factories.

The point here is not that Steve Jobs should be lumped in with flesh peddlers and junk dealers. He shouldn't. But Williamson writes that "economic answers can only satisfy economic questions"—and it's simply obvious that sometimes the answer is wrong. And sometimes, it can be very difficult to see that because of the profits involved. We are, in 2011—on the apparent cusp of a double-dip recession—living with proof of that.

Williamson concludes:

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

Well, no question: I'd rather live in the Apple Store. But I can't. The Apple Store is an advertisement, really, for Apple products specifically and the Apple ethos more generally. It's not a place I can live—advertising exists outside the realm of reality. Mistaking it for reality, as Williamson does here, doesn't do much to advance the cause of capitalism. Apple Stores are nice in part because poor people, generally, don't go in. That's not the case in the subway. But many of us need the subway to get to work—rat infestations and all—so that we can make the money we use to buy Steve Jobs' great products. That's a huge social good—it is an answer to an economic question, as Williamson says—and yet transit systems are pretty much never profitable.

As my headline says: Steve Jobs is an example of capitalism at its finest. Conservatives like Williamson should take that example for what it's worth, instead of using it to argue for a fairy tale version of reality. There are flaws, and Jobs—for all his genius—wasn't completely exempt from them.

Philadelphia: The SRC just got an SRC

The governance of Philadelphia schools is a tricky thing. A few years back, the state took over the city's schools and put them under the guidance of the five-member School Reform Commission. The governor appoints three SRC members; Philadelphia's mayor appoints the other two.

Got that?

Given recent controversies about the district, there's been a new reform movement afoot. Mayor Nutter and Ed Secretary Ron Tomalis responded Tuesday with their own plan:

Speaking at a news conference at district headquarters, Nutter and Tomalis announced the appointment of two "executive advisers" to work directly with district leadership and the School Reform Commission until a permanent superintendent is chosen to replace Arlene C. Ackerman.

They also said a working group of business experts is being formed to advise the SRC on changes in matters of operations and administration.

Nutter chose Lori Shorr, his top education official, for one of the adviser jobs; Tomalis picked Edward Williams, a retired district chief academic officer. The two will have offices inside district headquarters and officially began work Tuesday.

So...

The city and the state will each appoint an "adviser" to monitor a body of officials already appointed by the city and the state. The School Reform Commission, in essence, just got its own School Reform Commission.

Maybe this is a "this time we really mean it" move. But if the joint state-city oversight of the schools isn't working out satisfactorily, why would adding another layer of joint state-city oversight improve things? And if it fails—who, really, wants to bet on success when it comes to the Philadelphia school district—will Nutter and Tomalis appoint an SRC to monitor the SRC that monitors the SRC? At some point you've got to stop fiddling with the administrative structure and just get down to the hard task of educating children.

Kevin Drum on skyrocketing pay for CEOs

Adjusted for inflation, cash compensation for line workers has actually decreased over the past few decades, and even when you include healthcare compensation it's grown only about 30% or so. In contrast, executive compensation over the same period has more than quadrupled.

Do they deserve this? Almost certainly not. There's simply no good reason that a CEO of 2011 is worth 4x more than a CEO of 1970. The reason their pay has gone up is simple: for all practical purposes, CEOs set each others' pay. And they keep raising each others' pay because they can. It's a pretty nice racket.

via motherjones.com

Michael Potemra on 'Niggerhead'

If Perry left an old sign unchanged because it was an old sign, that’s one thing. If he left it unchanged because he approves of the social attitudes that existed in the days of institutionalized and socially empowered white racism, that’s quite another. In either case, it’s not the word on the rock that is really what we should be talking about. What does Rick Perry believe about black people? That’s the important question, and I have yet to see any evidence that his opinions on this question are racist or otherwise discreditable.

via nationalreview.com

I think Michael Potemra is generally thoughtful, but I don't entirely agree. If Perry could walk or drive past an "old sign" for several decades, it is—at the very least—a sign that he's content to let the inertia of evil win out over the need to do something affirmatively good. Then again: Most of us are guilty of that most days.