Mitt Romney: We're No. 1! We're No. 1!

But I am here today to tell you that I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.

via nationalreview.com

Let's leave aside the question of whether that's really a sustainable vision or not, at least in the details. I guess my question is: Why is being No. 1 the goal?

For all the talk—mostly from the right—about honoring the Founders and their vision, I don't really find much in the Federalists about trying to have the biggest military or trying to lead the entire world. What I *do* see is talk about trying to create a country of liberty and a government of responsibility. The Founders were revolutionary, but it strikes me that they were also rather modest: They wanted to create a country that worked well. And for the most part, they did. The rest sort of fell into place. I suspect that always trying to be Top Dog, however, is a sure way to undermine the rest of it.

Am I wrong?

Kevin Drum on Occupy Wall Street

If you go to any tea party event, you'll hear some crackpot stuff and see some people dressed up in crackpot costumes (tricorner hats etc.). By "crackpot," I mean stuff so outré that even movement conservatives know it's crazy and want nothing to do with it. Of course, it gets reported in the media occasionally, and when it does, snarky liberals have a field day with it.

But does this scare off anyone on the right? It does not. They ignore it, or dismiss it, or try to explain it away, and then continue praising the overall movement. The fact that liberals have found some hook to deliver a blast of well-timed mockery just doesn't faze them. They know whose side they're on.

So Krugman is right: liberals need to take the same attitude. Are there some crackpots at the Occupy Wall Street protests who will be gleefully quoted by Fox News? Sure. Are some of the organizers anarchists or socialists or whatnot? Sure. Is it sometimes hard to discern a real set of grievances from the protesters? Sure.

But so what. Ignore it. Dismiss it. Explain it away. Do whatever strikes your fancy. But don't let any of this scare you off.

via motherjones.com

T and the lion.

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.