Actually, I was pretty well done after the president gave his speech. And I don't mean I'm done commenting -- though, yeah, there's nothing new for me to say at this point. I mean: I'm done reading. I guess in some months or years, when Gabrielle Giffords has (knock on wood) recovered to the point that she can give an interview, or if the shootings prompt some significant and likely-to-be-passed legislation, I'll pay attention again. But at this point the number of Tucson stories vastly outweighs any value I can draw from them; there's more reportage than there is news to report. And I can't take it anymore. Maybe this makes me a bad journalist-citizen. (And certainly the victims and their families can't quite so easily move on; I recognize that and they have my sympathy.) But at this point, the continuing magnitude of coverage has started to feel like wallowing. I'm not interested in wallowing.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Matt Yglesias on changing the tone
I don’t think people should pretend to like people they dislike or avoid saying what they mean. But I do think people should be careful to avoid a certain kind of tendentious rhetoric. Some of the participants in our political debate are quite stupid, some are corrupt, some are dishonest, and some combine multiple unattractive qualities.
What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin. This stuff is mostly unserious, but I also think it’s potentially dangerous. If you really thought prominent American politicians were plotting to fundamentally subvert the American constitutional order tand supplant it with a totalitarian dictatorship, you’d be prepared to countenance some pretty extreme countermeasures.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The Scripps column
Glenn Beck is right.
Not about everything, mind you, or even most things. But Beck is right to lament how Americans have lost the spirit of unity that filled the nation, oh so briefly, after 9/11.
Remember those days, and remember them with some bittersweet fondness.
They may represent the final moment -- ever -- that Americans came together in the aftermath of tragedy. Nowadays, everybody retreats immediately to their ideological camps and girds for battle, no matter the facts on the ground. Despite President Obama's very nice speech Wednesday night in Tuscon, that's unlikely to change soon.
Why? Because our politics is more about denying legitimacy to the "other" side than it is about solving the problems that face the country.
It's understandable why many liberals thought the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was the work of a right-wing terrorist: the rhetoric on the right in recent years has been alarmingly militant.
But liberal commentators were wrong to publicly cast blame before we even knew Jared Lee Loughner's identity and motives; a wait-and-see silence would've been appropriate.
It's understandable why conservatives recoiled from associating their rhetoric with any kind "climate of hate" surrounding the shooting: Loughner is clearly mentally ill; Republicans aren't responsible for the vagaries of his brain chemistry. But right-wing commentators were also wrong not to pause and reconsider the appropriateness their side's recent talk of "Second Amendment remedies" in the political realm.
Nobody pauses. Nobody reflects. The only way to start trusting each other again would be to shut up and listen to each other once in awhile. But what are the chances that will happen? Non-existent, it seems. I'm right, you're wrong, and that's all anybody needs to know.
And that's my take. A bit more pox-on-both-your-houses, probably, than I feel. But man, it's hard to say anything fresh or new or insightful about stuff sometimes. Some weeks, that's pretty discouraging.
Why does Karl Rove have a newspaper column?
I don't begrudge anybody who makes the move from politics and into the realm of journalism. James Fallows and Hendrik Hertzberg both did time as speechwriters for Jimmy Carter, and I'd dare say our national discourse these days would be a bit less smart if they weren't making regular contributions. (A conservative example of this phenomenon is Bill Safire, whose language column for the New York Times was beloved by nerds everywhere.)
But I still don't understand why Karl Rove has a regular newspaper column.
Don't get me wrong: I don't object to Rove's "journalism" career here because of the quality of his analysis, or because the man can't write. The problem is that Rove is still an active participant in the political realm. And that means readers can't know if they're getting his real analysis of a situation -- something you'd normally expect on the op-ed page of a prestigious newspaper -- or his on-message analysis of a situation that might not be honest, but serves to advance the GOP's interests.
I got to thinking about this today after the final paragraph in Rove's latest contribution to the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama's best chance of success 22 months from now rests on reclaiming his image as a reasonable, bipartisan and unifying figure. It won't be easy, given his track record as president. That can't be airbrushed from history. But the selection of Mr. Daley as chief of staff indicates that Mr. Obama is willing to give it a try. It makes sense. After all, what he was doing nearly wrecked his party and has imperiled his presidency.
Now. Rove might be right that Obama abandoned his efforts to be a bipartisan and unifying figure. He might not. All I know is that in the recent mid-term election, Rove led the American Crossroads group that raised tens of millions of dollars to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress. Rove isn't just rooting for the GOP team, in other words: He's still very much trying to advance the ball up the field.
I guess you could make the case that most op-ed writers are trying to advance one party's fortunes at the expense of another. And that's true. But this seems different to me. Eugene Robinson (say) or Michael Gerson or most other writers you name don't still have skin in the game. The idea is that they may be biased, but they're free to be honest within the bounds of those biases. They don't always have to hew to the party line if their viewpoint takes them somewhere else.
But Rove's "other" job is to get Republicans elected. And we know that in the course of doing that job, his modus operandi has been to take an opponent's strength and turn it into a weakness. Ergo, President Obama -- the national leader who is still regarded as trying the hardest at bipartisan -- has "abandoned" that effort in office. And Rove says this not as somebody who is rooting against Obama, but whose "other" job is to actively defeat him. What are the chances that he'd ever call President Obama a unifying figure, no matter how much it could (hypothetically) be deserved?
And, incidentally, the "about Karl Rove" box on the WSJ page makes no mention of Rove's current activities.
This stuff happens. Bill Kristol keeps finding newspapers to let him make regular commentary, and he's in pretty much the same situation. But unless you want to know what the GOP message du jour is, I can't imagine how this situation serves readers. If you want to write about politics, write about politics. If you want to play politics, play politics. Karl Rove might benefit from his current arrangement, and so might Republicans. Do readers?
Recalibrating this blog
In a few hours, Scripps Howard should release the latest column from Ben Boychuk and yours truly. We talked about the Tucson shooting, of course: It's the only thing to talk about this week. And I hope my editors at Scripps will forgive me for teasing the column with this teaser summing up my take:
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Memo to K-Lo, regarding Sarah Palin and 'blood libel'
Actually, I find it pretty easy to believe that a conservative Christian American could "love" Israel and not know (or understand) very much about the Jewish people. There are lots of conservative Christians who see a Jewish homeland as a good thing purely in terms of its value to Christian eschatology.
About Illinois' 67 percent tax increase (Or: Math is scary)
This is always the part that gets attention:
In the final hours of its lame duck session, the Illinois legislature (barely) approved a 67 percent percent increase in the state's personal income tax.
This is not:
The hike will bump personal income taxes up from 3 percent to 5 percent.
I won't argue that a bump in the tax rate from 3 to 5 percent isn't significant. But that two-point bump certainly looks a lot less significant and alarming than a 67 percent increase, doesn't it?
For what it's worth: The median household income in Illinois in 2009 was a bit more than $53,000 a year. Assuming the earners in the household get paid every two weeks, that amount comes out to $2,076 biweekly. Right now, lllinois is collecting a bit more than $62 per paycheck. After the tax increase, it'll be $104 a paycheck -- a difference of $42, more or less. That's $84 a month out of take-home pay, and for most families that's nothing to sneeze at. But these, at least, are useful numbers in understanding the magnitude of the tax increase. The nationwide headlines shouting about a 67 percent increase! tell you the scariest-sounding but least-illuminating bit of information about the story.
Haley Barbour's civil rights museum
Perhaps Sarah Palin could take some lessons from another GOP 2012 hopeful on how to respond to a P.R. nightmare. While Palin is in a defensive crouch following Saturday's attempted assassination, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offers a different model: when Barbour was accused of racism for his praise of segregationist groups, he issued a quick apology. Three weeks later, he's looking to make amends, calling for the construction of a $50 million civil rights museum in his home state. Barbour delivered his final "state of the state" address Tuesday. "The civil rights struggle is an important part of our history, and millions of people are interested in learning more about it," he said.
Including Haley Barbour!
Weird Google searches that found me
From my blog's traffic logs:
Los Angeles, California arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin" by searching for "philadelphia story" blood libel.
Huh. I'm pretty sure I know how that ended up landing on my blog. But for a minute I was whisked into a parallel universe where Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn were the authors of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I don't think it would be as witty or charming as the real movie, though.
John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin
So in the sense that the words “blood” and “libel” in sequence are to be taken solely as referring to this anti-Semitic slander, Palin’s appropriation of it was vulgar and insensitive. I guess. The problem is that I doubt Sarah Palin knew this history, because most people don’t know this history, including most of the anti-Palin hysterics screaming about it on Twitter at this very moment. She used it as shorthand for “false accusation that the right bears responsibility for the blood of the innocent.” She shouldn’t have, though she certainly had no intention of giving offense to those sensitive about it, because it would be an act of lunacy to open that can of worms for no reason.
But here’s the thing. Sarah Palin has become a very important person in the United States. Important people have to speak with great care, because their words matter more than the words of other people. If they are careless, if they are sloppy, if they are lazy about finding the right tone and setting it and holding it, they will cease, after a time, to be important people, because without the discipline necessary to modulate their words, those words will lose their power to do anything but offer a momentary thrill — either pleasurable or infuriating. And then they will just pass on into the ether.
If she doesn’t serious herself up, Palin is on the direct path to irrelevancy. She won’t be the second Ronald Reagan; she’ll be the Republican incarnation of Jesse Jackson.
Ed Kilgore on 'Second Amendment Theology'
But there is one habit of conservative rhetoric that is relevant to the events in Tucson, and it would be helpful to single it out for condemnation instead of indulging in broad discussions about the “climate of hate.” It’s the suggestion that Americans have an inherent “right of revolution” which entitles them to deploy violence when they are convinced that government officials are trammeling on their liberties, and that we are at a stage of history where such fears are legitimate.
This is the nasty underlying implication of Sharron Angle’s remark last year that “Second Amendment remedies” might be necessary to deal with policies supported by her Senate opponent, Harry Reid. And it’s been the subtext of many years of conservative rhetoric about how the Second Amendment is the crown jewel of the Constitution because it ensures a heavily armed citizenry that can take matters into its own hands if government goes too far. In combination with Tea Party militants’ open assertions that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and marginal increases in the marginal tax rate represent an intolerable tyranny, reminiscent of the British oppression that made the American Revolution necessary, this belief that Americans should be stockpiling weapons in case they have to stop voting against government officials and start shooting them is extremely dangerous.
This is part of what I was trying to get at with my first post the other day. I don't get my panties in a wad because anybody uses a metaphor, and I *try* not to get upset at an entire movement because fringe nutjobs show up at rallies with provocative signs. (Although I've been guilty of making that generalization: Apologies.) But it does seem to me that there's an ideology on the right that embraces talk of armed revolution in the face of overreaching government -- idle talk, perhaps, but not metaphorical.
That doesn't mean Jared Loughner can be blamed on the right. He can't. Guy was crazy, and crazy does what crazy does.
But like I said Sunday: Some of us on the left take that kind of talk seriously. And when violence actually happens -- even if it turns out to not be related -- we'll be looking pretty closely for tie-ins as a result. I think lots of liberal commenters overstepped in making the tie-in here, but I understand why it happened.
How many bases does America have overseas?
The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent bases! What is the United States doing with more than 560 foreign bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United States really have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?
In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which "accountability" is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there's one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.
I realize that providing for the common defense is pretty solidly a constitutional duty of American government. But I wonder what my conservative friends who believe in "limited government" think of this. Did the Founders really envision a military establishment so far-reaching that it's difficult to know how many bases our country has overseas?
Will Saletan on Sarah Palin
That's what Palin believes. Each person is solely accountable for his actions. Acts of monstrous criminality "begin and end with the criminals who commit them." It's wrong to hold others of the same nationality, ethnicity, or religion "collectively" responsible for mass murders.
Unless, of course, you're talking about Muslims. In that case, Palin is fine with collective blame. In fact, she's enthusiastic about it.
Me @Macworld: Posterous Review
The era of insta- and micro-blogging has been notable for its proliferation of options—from Twitter to Tumblr to everything in between, there’s no shortage of ways to publish your thoughts online. Posterous stands out in the crowded field because of its simplicity and easy of use. The company’s free Posterous app for Apple’s iOS devices emulates those great qualities.
It was writing this review that actually persuaded me to move most of my blogging activity to Posterous. Working for Macworld is changing my habits.
Michael Chabon on the 'n-word' and Huck Finn
Great punchline to Michael Chabon's story of how he dealt with the n-word while reading "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" to his children last summer:
"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."
"Because I'm an ass," I said. Only I didn't say "ass."Jonah Goldberg is right about 'blood libel'
I should have said this a few days ago, when my friend Glenn Reynolds introduced the term to this debate. But I think that the use of this particular term in this context isn’t ideal. Historically, the term is almost invariably used to describe anti-Semitic myths about how Jews use blood — usually from children — in their rituals. I agree entirely with Glenn’s, and now Palin’s, larger point. But I’m not sure either of them intended to redefine the phrase, or that they should have.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Today in Philadelphia police ickiness
Philadelphia Police officer was arrested today on charges of drinking and driving on the job, police said.Officer William Haviland, 42, a seven-year veteran of the force, was suspended in November for 30 days with the intent to dismiss, said Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.
Today in Glenn Beck screen shots
I do wonder how many people quote Martin Luther King while dressed up as a faux facist.
Monday, January 10, 2011
A pox on both their houses?
My post yesterday on the rhetoric of violence brought some pushback from some of my conservative friends -- as I expected. I don't want to be some lily-livered simp who doesn't have the courage of his own convictions, but I'm not interested in clinging to my convictions despite all relevant evidence, either.
My core argument revolved around this set of propositions:
* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.
* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.
And I concluded: "We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it."
Of course, some responses are more substantive than others. Here's Emaw, from my old Kansas stomping grounds:
This is one of the best rationalizations for your own prejudice I've read yet. Good job!
This one got under my skin the quickest, until I realized that Emaw hadn't bothered to make an argument for why I'm wrong.
More substantively came this response from namefromthepast, a high school friend of mine whose anonymity I'll respect. He posted this link of anti-Bush death threats, and commented: "Just a little reminder. Confusing how you quite innocently nearly skipped over the moonbat left and their history of violence and threats of violence. "
And no doubt, those pictures are ugly, stupid stuff. I repudiate it--and I repudiate other lefty hints of violence that a conservative friend privately relayed to me. There are undoubtedly idiots throughout the political spectrum. I make no excuses, and I condemn them fully and wholeheartedly.
But I look at this -- and at Michelle Malkin's very, very long list of liberals who crossed lines, both rhetorical and otherwise -- and I have a couple of thoughts:
* All of the links in Malkin's post go back to years of posts she's done, documenting "the left's" outrages. Everybody tries to police the lines of acceptable discourse and action, and for conservatives to suggest that liberals are somehow uniquely cynical in this effort is, well, cynical. (There. Nyah-nyah-nyah! You guys do it too! That's how we're playing this, right? That makes it ok, right?)
* But ok, so I was wrong to say that the rhetoric of violence occurs "exclusively on the right." Clearly, that was an overstatement.
A more accurate way of saying it is that the rhetoric of violence -- language that seems to indicate a desire for action, instead of just colorful use of metaphors -- is embraced more fully by thought leaders, candidates and elected officials on the right.
I realize major media outlets feel contractually obligated to embrace the false equivalency, but folks should know better. Remember the Senate candidate who recommended "Second Amendment remedies"? How about the congressional candidate who fired shots at a silhouette with his opponent's initials on it? Or maybe the congressional candidate who declared, "If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd"? Or how about the congressional candidate who said he considered the violent overthrow of the United States to government an "option" and added that political violence is "on the table"?
All four of these examples came from 2010 -- and all came from Republican candidates for federal elected office. And this doesn't even get into Republican activists and media personalities.
Salon's Alex Pareene adds similar examples from Red State blogger (and CNN contributor) Erick Erickson and Fox News' Dick Morris, among others. I've tried to limit myself to examples where commentators seem to me to have strayed beyond the bounds of metaphor into concrete calls for or musings about the possibilities of political violence.
Now: I don't know if we just went through an unusual cycle where grassroots-slash-fringey Tea Partiers managed to obtain high-profile candidacies that they wouldn't normally, and thus bring fringe views-slash-rhetoric to the table, or if this really is the elite of the GOP and and prominent allied commenters signalling to the rest of the party what kind of norms are acceptable in discourse. But it's there, and it's happening.
And in my view, it's bad. Do both sides do it? Undoubtedly.
Do both sides' elites do it to the same degree? Not from what I can tell; this really does look to me like it is primarily (though not exclusively, perhaps) a practice of the right.
But I might be wrong. Perhaps it's simply a function of who is in power and who feels disempowered as a result.
For what it's worth, I don't blame the actions of Mr. Loughner on this rhetoric. He's crazy. I still wish a lot of commentators would have (ahem) held their fire before launching this debate. They didn't. My purpose here is to explain why I find the rhetoric coming from across the aisle so alarming. That's all. Perhaps it is merely rationalizing my own prejudice, but my prejudice in this case isn't against conservatives, but against those who employ the threat or promise of violence as a means of rallying political support or otherwise achieving political ends.
If we come back four years from now, when Sarah Palin is president, and you have Democratic members of Congress and prominent liberals talking about overthrowing the government through violent means, I hope and believe you'll find me castigating them in unequivocal terms. (You might find me reminding you of the current debates, as well; I'm only human.) Suggesting that your political rivals need to be shot is wrong, no matter how cutely or coyly phrased -- and no matter who does it.
Matt Yglesias on national security and defense spending
Another way of looking at this is that we don’t really know what the world will look like in 25 years. But it’s predictable that whatever military challenges we face, they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a better-educated crop of twenty-somethings rather than a worse-educated one. That they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a productive economy with a modern infrastructure than if we don’t. And it’s predictable that the more we spend on the military in the next ten years the fewer resources will be available for non-military purposes. But it’s the civilian side that ultimately supplies the capacity to engage in military activities over the long run. Obviously the long run does you no good if your country can’t defend itself in the short-term, but a strategy based on perpetually higher commitments to defense spending is self-defeating over time.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Bad idea, Bob Brady
It's legitimate -- and right -- to call out vitriolic and violent speech and name it for what is. But this seems a step down a road we'd rather not go down:
Representative Bob Brady of Pennsylvania told The Caucus he plans to introduce a bill that would ban symbols like that now-infamous campaign crosshair map.
"You can't threaten the president with a bullseye or a crosshair," Mr. Brady, a Democrat, said, and his measure would make it a crime to do so to a member of Congress or federal employee, as well.
Asked if he believed the map incited the gunman in Tucson, he replied, "I don't know what's in that nut's head. I would rather be safe than sorry."
He continued, "This is not a wakeup call. This is a major alarm going off. We need to be more civil with each other. We need to tone down this rhetoric."
I'm always leery of any idea to restrain speech -- bad speech is generally best met with more and better speech. Threats aren't free speech, of course, and graphic-design bullseyes and crosshairs can definitely be used to signal that certain individuals are marked for death. But the reason I didn't make a big deal of Sarah Palin's infamous crosshairs graphic in my earlier post today is because I didn't think she was really trying to send assassins after members of Congress. And I think Bob Brady's proposal is a step (possibly inadvertent) towards the prohibition of, well, metaphor.
If you want to prohibit threats against Congress, prohibit threats against Congress. But it's a bad idea to simply ban potentially ambiguous symbolism irrespective of context. (And it's maybe less-than-egalitarian to ban the use of those symbols when they're associated with federal officials while leaving the rest of us at the mercy of a crosshair-laden world.) I understand nerves are frayed right now; that's precisely why everybody should step back and take a deep breath before passing any laws we might regret someday.
That doesn't mean that the rhetoric of violence is somehow a good or productive thing. I still think it's a problem for the right, and for our politics. I'm not convinced, however, that banning speech is the right response.
Having your cake of violent rhetoric and eating it too
Except for an initial intemperate Tweet, I stayed largely silent -- on the Internets, at least -- during the early hours of the Gabrielle Giffords saga on Saturday afternoon. I don't think myself exceptionally wise or laudable for the silence: I was covering my butt. There's nothing like holding forth on What It All Means in the early aftermath of an event, only to find out the story is completely different. I didn't want to completely embarrass myself.
But I had my suspicions. I thought a Tea Partier did it.
I'm glad I kept those suspicions to myself, though. Turns out the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is just plumb crazy. Unless he had an accomplice, trying to suss out some larger meaning from this story is going to turn out to be a fool's errand. Sometimes, crazy is just crazy. It's tragic and awful and stupid. Period. No bigger lesson to be learned.
As I say, though, I spend the first hour or two of the unfolding story convinced -- and deeply angered by that conviction -- a Tea Partier (or somebody influenced by the Tea Party) had committed the awful crime.
I don't think it was unreasonable for that to be my instinctive reaction. I do think many of my fellow liberals would've been better served by waiting for facts to emerge, but I also don't think their assumptions were entirely unreasonable either.
Why?
Because we take Tea Party rhetoric seriously.
Let's back up, and let me see if I can frame this in a way my conservative and TP-inclined friends understand. Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995? I'll bet you assumed Arab-Muslim terrorists committed that awful act in the first hours of that unfolding story. Lots of people did. Why? Well, because of the track record. America had been through the first World Trade Center bombing a couple of years earlier, the Beirut barracks bombing a decade before that, and we'd generally been conditioned to understand that there was one likely source of big, bombastic violence against Americans. Turned out we were all wrong, though.
Well, Tea Partiers, I hate to tell you this, but that's how a lot of liberals see you these days.
Why?
Because we take Tea Party -- and Republican -- rhetoric seriously.
And that rhetoric has been liberal, to say the least, in its use of language deploying terms of violence and revolution.
* "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." A Jefferson quote that found great currency at Tea Party rallies.
* "I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. They're saying: My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Sharron Angle, 2010's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, in her campaign against Harry Reid.
* "I'm not saying the Democrats are fascists. I'm saying the government under Bush and under Obama and under all of the presidents that we've seen or at least most of the presidents that we've seen for quite some time are slowly but surely moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism." Glenn Beck, sounding off on a theme he has pursued tenaciously over the last two years.
* "This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I've seen in the 19 years I've been in Washington." Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, upon passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.
I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. But I won't. Some of these folks are at the fringe of respectable discourse, but a remarkable number of them are well within the mainstream of our country's dialogue. The message from both elected officials and Tea Partiers in the street has been clear and consistent:
* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.
* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.
All this comes from a movement that cherishes the Second Amendment -- not just because folks want to go hunting and keep their families safe, but in large part because they believe that the threat of armed rebellion will keep the government in line.
As Matt Yglesias says: "If you believed, as Beck purports to, that progressive agenda is a form of totalitarianism wouldn't violent remedies be appropriate?"
It's not as though we haven't been down this road before. Those of us on the left remember the Clinton Administration for many unhappy events, but chief among them was (coming full circle) Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government radical who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. We remember G. Gordon Liddy telling listeners to take "head shots" at ATF agents and somehow remaining a member in good standing on conservative talk radio to this day.
I know a number of my conservative friends believe that political point-scoring was behind the left's immediate effort to blame the Giffords shooting on right-wing rhetoric. I have no doubt there was some of that. We all know how the cycle works by now.
But Tea Partiers and conservatives have spent two years employing the rhetoric of violence and revolt. Yes, there are occasional similar efforts on the left -- but really, the phenomenon belongs almost exclusively to the right. Some of us take the rhetoric seriously. We're meant to take the rhetoric seriously, I think.
So while I think it was wrong for my friends on the left to jump to conclusions, I have frankly little pity for conservatives who are indignant about that jumping. You've spent the last two years crying wolf. Are we to be blamed for believing you believe what you say? And if we believe that you believe what you say, can you blame us for making certain assumptions when a Democratic congresswoman ends up with a bullet in her brain?
If you don't like those assumptions, friends, there's something you can do: Stop playing make-believe with the language of armed revolt. We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Philly police corruption watch
"A 21-year veteran Philadelphia police officer has been arrested and charged with falsely claiming he was assaulted while making an arrest last year, the department said this morning.
Aleksande Shwarz, 54, who was assigned to the 2nd District, also has been charged with simple assault stemming from the arrest on March 4.
He was arrested Wednesday, the department said in a statement."
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Slashing the defense budget
"Defense Secretary Robert Gates presented his proposed defense budget Thursday, unveiling the most significant proposed cuts to military spending since Sept. 11. Gates called for the military to cut $78 billion in program spending and reduce personnel by 70,000 over the next five years. Most of those cuts wouldn't be felt for years, and the reduction in troop size (a loss of about 49,000 Army soldiers and 20,000 Marines) wouldn't begin until the U.S. starts to draw down its presence in Afghanistan next year. At a press conference Thursday, Gates cast the cuts as a matter of national security: 'This country's dire fiscal situation and the threat it poses to American influence and credibility around the world will only get worse unless the U.S. government gets its finances in order,' he said. 'My hope is what had been a culture of endless money will become a culture of savings and restraint.'"
And we'll still have the scariest, most-expensive armed forces in the world.
Is ObamaCare a losing issue for Democrats?
Two possible answers:
* There have been similar conservative freak-outs over the decades about previous entitlement programs. We've all heard Ronald Reagan's 1960s speech about the socialistic perils of Medicare; it blew over, and is a relatively uncontroversial part of the American fabric. History has tended to be on the side of Democrats on these issues.
* There's also the possibility that a lot of Democrats simply think that universal health insurance is the right thing to do, for a host of reasons. My impression on the day of the big vote was that a number of Democratic congressmen knew they were throwing away their career with their vote. They did it anyway -- and despite some real flaws in the bill itself -- hopeful that history will one day judge them the ultimate winners.
Huck Finn and the 'n word'
Anyway, here goes. You know where to send your angry e-mail:
You can't pray a lie. And you can't have Huck Finn -- not the real Huck Finn, anyway -- without his frequent and casual use of the racial slur known as "the n-word." Mark Twain's novel is a document of a brutal time and place in American history, and the depths of that era's brutality to African-Americans cannot be fully contemplated apart from the constant, almost banal repetition of the term throughout the book.
Rather than remove the word from "Huckleberry Finn," though, there's another option that English teachers should consider: Maybe it is time to remove the book from high school curricula and leave it to be taught entirely at the college level.
That seems counterintuitive. "Huckleberry Finn," after all is perhaps the greatest American novel of all. Who can argue with the message of a book in which a young Southern boy grows from seeing a black man as a piece of property to recognizing their shared humanity? That argument is easy to make -- if you are white.
If you are a black reader, though, it is possible a book that makes the case that "African Americans are people too!" seems silly, perhaps even offensively obvious. Wrap that message inside a blanket of racial slurs, and it's easy to see why many readers could care less about context and instead find "Huckleberry Finn" to be almost purely hurtful.
Understand: "Finn" is a great novel. It is not necessarily a novel best read by the youngsters who are the intended audience for Gribben's bowdlerization. You can't take sex scenes out of "Tropic of Cancer" or the sadism from the Marquis de Sade's novels and have them make sense. We let readers discover the unexpurgated texts on their own, and save the classroom discussions for college. Perhaps it's time for "Huckleberry Finn" to join them on the shelf of classics that require careful handling and mature readers.
Test.
My son's gun obsession is becoming increasingly complex and alarming
The angled part to the right? That's what he was using for the stock of the block rifle he built for himself. That's the grip on the left. Kind of an extended Uzi thing going on. He came up to me brandishing it like you'd expect, making shooting noises. The kid is clever.
Harry Reid: 'The American people love government.'
I don't know if I'd go as far as Harry Reid does here:
“The American people love government, but they don’t like too much politics in government,” he said.
I don't think the American people "love" government. I think they even like it, in a generalized and monolithic sense. But I think they like having roads to drive on. An Internet to use. Education for their kids. Social Security and Medicare for their parents. I think they like that Hawaii isn't under Japanese control. I think they like having national parks to visit, and local libraries to aid their learning and reading. I think they like these things -- and a lot more services they receive or use all the time -- but don't always contemplate that it's government doing these things. This is why Republicans frequently talk in a general way about cutting government, but even now seem hesitant to name what, precisely, they would cut. (Paul Ryan, perhaps, being a notable exception.)
And I furthermore don't think they always remember that the idea of governance in the United States is that it derives its power from the citizens. It's not this other thing over there: It's us, either through our cheering support or passive assent. Those things government provides? It's because lots and lots of citizens want government to provide them. Lots of other folks don't. And politics is the process of engaging in and trying to resolve those disputes. Get rid of that, and you've gotten rid of self-governance.
But, no, Americans don't love government. They just like what government does.
The Philadelphia Inquirer comes home
There's apparently confusion over whether Philly.com is about to suddenly and unexpectedly erect a paywall, but this part of Phawker's report about the Inquirer is good news if it's true: "Also, expect less national and international wire stories and more local news inside the A section of the weekday edition of the Inquirer."
I've mentioned a few times that the Inquirer's front page -- and, really, it's entire A section -- is a relic of older days when A) the Inky had reporting assets to spread around the world and B) when readers couldn't easily get worldwide news from other sources. If I want to read reporting that originated in the LA Times or New York Times, I can read those papers! But the Inky has continued to fill its front section with stories from those organizations. I expect I'll retain a slight bias for the Daily News, just because I live in Philly and I expect the Inquirer will remain largely suburban in its outlook. But this decision is overdue for the Inquirer, and I welcome it.
Does Obama believe a $172,000-per-year salary is modest?
That's the incredulous question posed, in passing, over at The Weekly Standard's blog. And it's a good question! After all, Robert Gibbs' salary is more than three times the median household income of an American family.
On the other hand, the Standard has a bit of a history of poo-poohing the idea that households with yearly incomes of $250,000 or more could be reasonably defined as "rich." So the Standard's standard is clear: If you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you're middle class -- unless you're a Democrat.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Slow blogging today
Swamped with other work. But trust me when I tell you that I've got a take on the whole "Huckleberry Finn" thing that's going to make nobody happy.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Mitch McConnell on filibuster reform
A change in the rules by a bare majority aimed at benefiting Democrats today could just as easily be used to benefit Republicans tomorrow. Do Democrats really want to create a situation where, two or four or six years from now, they are suddenly powerless to prevent Republicans from overturning legislation they themselves worked so hard to enact?
Here's the thing: the proposed reforms don't leave the minority party in the Senate "powerless."
Instead, they make the minority party actually work to obstruct the passage of legislation: If you want to filibuster, you actually have to take the floor of the Senate and filibuster. Right now, all Mitch McConnell has to do, essentially, is utter the word "filibuster" and the obstruction is passed. That's simply too low a bar -- one that presumes the minority has veto power over legislation unless proved otherwise.
Old-time filibustering actually worked once upon a time. It's why civil rights legislation was delayed. Filibuster reform is not filibuster removal. If you want to mount a filibuster, Sen. McConnell, be my guest. Stand up, make a speech, and drag out the cots for your colleagues.
Is America in your soul?
The New York Times adds to its coverage of efforts to repeal birthright citizenship, and includes this mind-boggling comment from Rep. Duncan Hunter:
In April, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, one of those pushing for Congressional action on the citizenship issue, stirred controversy when he suggested that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants should be deported with their parents until the birthright citizenship policy is changed. “And we’re not being mean,” he told a Tea Party rally in Southern California. “We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”
If America is in the "soul" of anybody, it's probably somebody who fought to come here--crossing deserts, dealing with smugglers, and yes, breaking laws--so that they could partake in the freedom and opportunity this country supposedly offers. Beyond that, though, I wonder how Hunter proposes to do a soul-based citizenship test.
Mr. Mom Chronicles: A nice moment
A scene in the Craft-Mathis household:
Me: Tobias, I love you.
T: I lahv you!
Me (ratcheting it up): Tobias ... I LOVE you.
T: I lahv YOU! (Giggles.)
ME: I love YOU!
T: I lahv YOU! (Laughs maniacally.) Gufbaw.
He's right. I am a goofball.
House GOP to cut $100 billion?
Incoming House Majority Leader John Boehner is leading the charge to cut $100 billion from the domestic budget this year, reports the New York Times. The question is, where would the budget cuts come from? Military, domestic security, and veterans would be spared, but under the Republican plan, remaining federal programs would face savage cuts of about 20 percent this fiscal year. The $100 billion diet was part of a House GOP campaign pledge, but even Senate Republicans have backed away from such drastic cuts. Like many impending House Republican initiatives, its bark is worse than its bite – with the Senate still in the hands of Democrats and Obama retaining veto power, the budget-cutting vote is largely an act of political theater. The vote could give Republicans more bargaining power in their budget showdown with the White House this winter, however. For Democrats, the move to cut funding from education, transportation and scientific research could provide ammunition against Republicans in swing districts.
You know: I'm looking forward to this, actually. Maybe the House GOP can come up with $100 billion in cuts that won't be painful or set off an angry reaction. I doubt it. But if they do, more power to them. And coming up with an actual list of cuts will be useful: It's easy to campaign against spending when you're not talking about specifics. Showing your hand is a little more difficult.
Antonin Scalia: A woman isn't a person, or a citizen
An interview with Antonin Scalia:
In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.
The text of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Emphasis mine.
Three cheers for filibuster reform
It looks like Democrats in the Senate might force reform of the filibuster. This makes Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander mad:
In a speech prepared for a Tuesday appearance at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Alexander reiterated his position that Democrats would be making a mistake. “Voters who turned out in November are going to be pretty disappointed when they learn the first thing Democrats want to do is cut off the right of the people they elected to make their voices heard on the floor of the U.S. Senate,” he said in his planned remarks.
Which is why Dems should make the entirely correct case that their proposed reforms actually help newly elected senators make their voices heard on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
After all, the changes -- as I understand them -- won't do away entirely with the filibuster: Democrats can clearly see the day, two years ago, when they'll be in the minority: they'll want to have the tool available for themselves at that point. But right now, all a senator has to do to conduct a filibuster is say the word "filibuster." He or she doesn't have to take the floor, Mr. Smith style, and hold it until it can't be held anymore: they just have to indicate they might. That merest gesture triggers a supermajority requirement to get any legislation passed.
The proposed reform would require, more or less, that senators who want to filibuster a piece of legislation actually filibuster a piece of legislation. They'd have to hold the floor in front of God and the voters -- and, presumably, they'd use some of that time to explain why they were taking such extreme measures. Filibuster reform doesn't stifle senators' voices; it forces them to use them instead of hiding behind a wall of procedural rules. Democrats should be able to win this fight in the court of public opinion.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Is your library 'big government liberalism' in action?
Bill Kristol chortles over cuts at a Maryland library, which includes the loss of a subscription to his own Weekly Standard:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD knows that government spending at all levels must be reduced. And TWS puts the country first! So to all our readers who are offering to write in protest, to organize petitions, and to gin up denunciations of Montgomery County officials: No. We'll do our part for the greater good. Unjust and unwise as it is to deprive Bethesdans of TWS in their public libraries, we're willing to say: As long as public sector unions, politically correct county activities, foolish and unnecessary programs, and bloated government payrolls are also cut—we'll take the hit, too.
So Bethesdans who've been reading TWS in the library will have to subscribe (it's a good deal!). And we'll have done our part to help put the nation on the path to recovery from big government liberalism.
I don't know. It's true that libraries can sometimes become ambitious and opulent on the taxpayer dime, but it had never occured to me to think of the library as "big government liberalism" in action. Even Glenn Beck uses libraries! But it does make me wonder what kind of community-based social service programming Bill Kristol finds reasonable. Meals on Wheels? A socialist plot.
Today in inequality reading: The negative income tax
Cato's Facebook page points me to this new National Affairs article by Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron, who proposes scrapping pretty much all U.S. entitlement programs and creating a "negative income tax:"
A negative income tax — an idea advocated by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman — would have two key components: a minimum, guaranteed level of income, and a flat tax rate that is applied to the total amount of income (if any) that a person earns. The net tax owed by any taxpayer would equal his gross tax liability — that is, his earned income multiplied by the tax rate — minus the guaranteed minimum income. If the gross liability were to exceed the guaranteed minimum, the taxpayer would owe the difference. If the gross liability were to fall short of the guaranteed minimum, the government would pay the difference to the taxpayer.
To illustrate, consider a negative tax-rate structure under which the guaranteed minimum is $5,000 and the tax rate is 10%. In this situation, a person earning no income would get a transfer from the government of $5,000 and have a total income of $5,000. A person earning $100,000 would have a gross tax liability of $10,000 and a net tax liability of $5,000, for a total after-tax income of $95,000. A person earning $10,000 of income would have a gross liability of $1,000 and a net liability of negative $4,000 (that is, this person would get a check from the government for $4,000), for a total after-tax income of $14,000.
The chief appeal of this proposal, according to Miron himself, is simplicity: One program to rule them all, instead of a hodge-podge of agencies that disburse various types of aid. Make sure everybody has a minimum level of cash in their pocket and send them on their way. It reduces admininistrative costs, and it frees entrepreneurs and big businesses to get on with the business of creating wealth. And that is enticing.
But I've got a couple of quibbles with Miron's piece -- one being the premise, the other in the proposal itself:
* The premise is that the welfare state is a huge drag on wealth producers. Maybe, but I'm not certain he makes the case. Part of his case is a table showing that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans pays 28.1 percent of all federal taxes. That does seem disproportionate until you realize that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own 42.7 percent of the country's entire wealth. Sounds like America's richest citizens are kind of getting off easy, actually.
Look closer at the charts: The top 20 percent of Americans pay 68.9 percent of federal taxes, but control 85.1 percent of the wealth. The least-wealthy 80 percent of America owns 7 percent of the wealth -- and pay 30.9 percent of taxes. The burden of government, then, already falls disproportionately on the people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country.
* And that situation would probably get worse under Miron's proposal. Why? The flat tax that Miron says is a key part of the proposal. Everybody above Miron's minimum income rate would pay the exact same rate in taxes. But let's be honest: 10 percent out of a $10,000-a-year income is more burdensome in all sorts of ways than $10,000 out of a $100,000-a-year-income. The proportion of taxes might be more evenly amongst income groups, but it would feel heaviest to the people on the bottom. And as Miron himself suggests, there might be incentives for people right above the poverty line to abandon work and go on the dole. That's a problem with any program, but it seems likely to be a bigger problem if abandoning a progressive tax rate unduly burdens the lowest-income workers.
And to be honest, I'm not certain why a flat tax is a necessary component of the negative income tax. You can get the clarity Miron looks for, I think, by retaining a progressive tax system but reforming it to get rid of a ton of loopholes. That would allow tax rates to go down, even at the high end.
2011
The arrival of 2011 is just a touch bittersweet for me: It marks 20 years since I graduated from high school. Basically, I've been an adult now for longer than I was a kid, and yet I still feel like a kid. And I'm no longer even at the beginning of my adult journey, now: I'm approaching the middle somewhere. My feet and knees feel creeky, making sure that I understand that the youth inside my head is imprisoned there.
Other reasons to feel old. 2011 is...
* The 20th anniversary of "Terminator 2."
* The 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
* The 30th anniversary of Reagan's presidency. He'll be as much a historical figure to my 2-year-old son as FDR was to me.
I can't remember 1976 too clearly. It was the year I turned 3, and I think I remember it mainly as the year my father introduced me to the "Captain Kangaroo" television show.
Counterinsurgency: You're doing it wrong
General David Petraeus has his work cut out for him: Civilian casualties are at record levels in Afghanistan, with more than 2,000 having died in 2010. According to the Afghan Interior Ministry, 2,043 civilians, 1.292 policeman, 821 Afghan soldiers, and 5,225 insurgents were killed in 2010, plus many thousand more wounded. The U.N.’s number is even higher, estimating that 2,412 civilians died in 2010, up 20 percent from 2009. The 711 foreign troops killed in 2010 were also a record. Nearly two-thirds were American.
Needless to say, widespread civilian deaths are a pretty clear sign you're losing a counterinsurgency. Either you're doing the killing, and thus creating a backlash, or you're failing to prevent the killing -- in which case there's precious little reason for the population to support you.
BREAKING: Hugh Hefner is a gross, icky old man
When Hugh Hefner announced on Twitter that he was engaged to a woman who could be his great-granddaughter, it marked another instance of the Playboy tycoon living up to his reputation. A key part of that image involves the Playboy Mansion, the enviable setting of star-studded parties. But some of Hefner's so-called girlfriends have started talking about the inner workings of the place, revealing it to be more like a prison than a palace of love, reports the Daily Mail. At least for the women. That Hefner would treat women like property hardly seems surprising. Yet beyond that, it turns out the mansion is a disgusting mess that constantly smells like dog urine. They also had to put up with nightly curfews that would only be lifted when they accompanied Hefner to a club, where he would constantly check his watch to time his Viagra just right so that he could later enjoy the sex parties where he "just lay there like a dead fish," according to one of the disenchanted women.
A conservative friend of mine commented that this news wasn't surprising to people who run in social conservative circles. My reply? This story isn't really surprising to people who run in feminist circles, either.
What does the Tea Party stand for, exactly?
Just a month ago, Tea Party leaders were celebrating their movement’s victories in the midterm elections. But as Congress wrapped up an unusually productive lame-duck session last month, those same Tea Party leaders were lamenting that Washington behaved as if it barely noticed that American voters had repudiated the political establishment.
In their final days controlling the House, Democrats succeeded in passing legislation that Tea Party leaders opposed, including a bill to cover the cost of medical care for rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center attacks, an arms-control treaty with Russia, a food safety bill and a repeal of the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.
“Do I think that they’ve recognized what happened on Election Day? I would say decisively no,” said Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which sent its members an alert last month urging them to call their representatives to urge them to “stop now and go home!!”
I'm a little perplexed by the Tea Party anger over some of the items in that second paragraph. I've always understood the Tea Party's focus to be primarily on economic issues and budgetary issues. So why would they oppose medical care for 9/11 rescue workers? Or an arms-control treaty? Or repealing DADT?
E.J. Dionne and the sacred Constitution
From its inception, the Tea Party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.
Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. . . . They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."
An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.
I think Dionne makes some good points here. We do tend to revere the Founders on the level of demigods, but they were politicians and operators who made compromises.
On the other hand: the Constitution deserves respect and adherence not just because the dudes who created it were super-awesome, but *because it's the law of the land.* I think it grants the national government more power -- and, weirdly, the people more rights -- than Tea Partiers seem to think. It's a good debate to have!
Sunday, January 2, 2011
My gun-loving son
Today in inequality reading: A sick society
There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.
That’s the argument of an important book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that gross inequality tears at the human psyche, creating anxiety, distrust and an array of mental and physical ailments — and they cite mountains of data to support their argument.
“If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they assert. “You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.” They explore these issues in their book, “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.”
I'm about halfway through reading Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal," and like today's Nicholas Kristof column (above) it's raising more questions for me than it answers.
Conservatives cast a low-tax low-regulation structure, often, in terms of freedom. And that's appealing: We all want to be free, right? But there's just a ton of evidence that the way the United States does capitalism isn't leading to income or social mobility -- and if the researchers Kristof cites above are correct, that it's not helping us create a healthy society.
The conservative era that began in 1980, then, appears to be one in which the rich get richer -- and everybody else gets sicker. It's a good deal for the rich, I suppose, but I wonder why the rest of us should go along with it.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Kris Kobach tries to ruin every state I live in
The newest initiative is a joint effort among lawmakers from states including Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Pennsylvania to pass laws based on a single model that would deny American citizenship to children born in those states to illegal immigrants. The legislators were to announce the campaign in Washington on Wednesday.
A leader of that effort is Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican state representative from Pennsylvania. At a recent news conference, Mr. Metcalfe said his goal was to eliminate “an anchor baby status, in which an illegal alien invader comes into our country and has a child on our soil that is granted citizenship automatically.”
The campaign is certain to run into legal obstacles. Courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment as guaranteeing birthright citizenship. Even among those who seek its repeal, debate has hinged on whether that would require a constitutional amendment, an act of Congress or a decision by the Supreme Court.
The newly elected Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is a mover and shaker behind the initiative, and I wish he'd stick to screwing up his own state. I understand concerns about illegal immigration, to some extent, but -- and I'm just going to be unfair here, conservative friends -- I can't help but think the above-described measures indicate that *some* conservatives let their dislike of Latinos override their fidelity to the Constitution -- which has long, long, long been understood to grant citizenship to people born on American soil. It's a lousy measure, which probably means it stands an excellent chance at passage.
The myth of Boomer self-absorption
The New York Times leads off with a lazy New Year's story about how Baby Boomers are turning 65 this year, and gives an overview of the landscape thusly:
Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.
There are other hints throughout the story that Boomers are uncommonly shallow and narcissistic, but the problem is that the photo leading the story is of this guy, Aloysius Nachreiner, a 65-year-old who made his career at a folding box company and, by the looks of things, has had nothing to do with Botox at any point in his life.
Point being, sweeping generalizations about whole generational cohorts are kind of stupid. The kind of shallow narcissism that the Times describes as being typical of Baby Boomers is a more accurate description of upper- and upper-middle-class Americans who happen to be demographically similar to, ahem, the Times' editors and writers. But such critiques would be doubtless just as accurate for any generation of upper- and upper-middle-class Americans. Nobody likes to get old. Only some of us have the power to spend time and money fighting it, and those happen to be the same people inclined to document it.
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