Commencing a Mark Steyn freakout in 3 ... 2 ...

Apparently jihadists aren't going out-baby us all into sharia law:

Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.

Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims.

“There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’m looking at all this and wondering, where is all the hysteria coming from?”

In the United States, the Muslim population might someday be as high as 1.7 percent of the population. There's this wild-eyed segment of conservatives who believe that every single American Muslim is a secret radical bent on establishing a caliphate to make all of us grow beards, wear burkhas and stop watching HBO. Even if that was true -- uh, it's not -- the numbers simply don't bode well for that proposition.

Scott Rigell, the defense budget, and a Constitutional cop-out

Near the end of the New York Times' story about the desire of some Tea Party Republicans to cut the defense budget, I came across this striking passage:

Representative Scott Rigell, a Republican newcomer from Virginia who at first sparred with the Tea Party but then signed a pledge supporting many of its positions, said that he, too, was committed to a strong military and the spending it required. In an interview after the hearing, he said that “as a very first priority, it is our constitutional duty to stand an army.”

You hear a lot of this sort of thing from hawks who want to cut Medicare but continue pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a bloated defense budget, so it might be a good idea to understand how Rigell wrongly invokes the Constitution to avoid a hard discussion about the proper size of the defense budget.

First of all, the Constitution empowers Congress to raise an army and a navy, it's true, but it doesn't actually create a duty (that is, if I'm reading Rigell properly, a requirement) to do so. In fact, it limits army appropriations to just two years at a time. Why? So that the Congress can frequently discuss whether the size and footing of that army is appropriate to the needs of the nation.In Federalist 24, after all, Alexander Hamilton writes "that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution ... will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity."

"Evident necessity."  Read, oh, Federalist 23 through 29, and the idea of "evident necessity" becomes clear: The Founders wanted the European powers to keep their mitts off the United States and its territories. (They also wanted a strong navy to protect American mercantile shipping.) Since Tea Partiers and Republicans continually raise the topic of the Founders' vision for America, it's worth emphasizing very strongly: The United States current defense posture -- one in which we have so many bases around the world that we've literally lost count -- is light years away from what the Founders articulated. They were fighting fears that the U.S. military would become so large that it could oppress the American people; they didn't even consider the idea of bestriding the entire globe.

Just for emphasis, though, let's rejoin Hamilton in Federalist 26. 

The legislature of the United States will be obliged, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. ... The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.

Finally, in Federalist 28, Hamilton suggests that Americans don't need to worry about the military getting too big for its britches. "We should recollect that the extent of the military force must, at all events, be regulated by the resources of the country. " 

The debate over defense spending doesn't end with a listing of Congress' enumerated powers, in other words. The Founders wanted us to debate that spending, vigorously. They expected that the size of military would be kept in line with the actual need to defend the (ugh) homeland, and reined in if the military was getting too large. And they expected that the size and power of the military would be constrained by our national ability to spend money on that military. There are indications on all fronts that the American government in the 21st century is running afoul of all those ideas. Congrats to Tea Partiers who are sincere enough in their vision to go down this road. And watch out for Republicans who mutter the words "Constitutional duty" in order to short-circuit a very needed debate.

 

Well, as long as I'm wading into the abortion topic anyway...

Nicholas Kristoff:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision.

I get and won't try to dispute why the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. But this incident, like similar ones before it, does somewhat perplex me: If the ethic at stake is the preservation of life, why is the life of a child considered more valuable -- as it apparently is in this case -- than the life of the mother? Or, in more abstract terms, than the lives of four other children who would have been deprived of the care of their mother?

For comparison's sake, I note that the Catholic Church more or less originated and provided the intellectual energy behind the "just war doctrine." Broadly speaking, it lets church members justify a course of action that always results in the maiming and killing of many innocent people—precisely so that greater harm, or evil, won't result from inaction. 

I, for one, don't expect Catholic hospitals to start offering abortions right and left. Certainly, I'm not a Catholic. But Catholic hospitals provide much of the care available to people in rural and poor areas of the country, and it concerns me if they're being confined by policies that don't seem to place much value on the lives of actual living women.

Another reason to transfer my baseball loyalties from the Royals to the Phillies

You know things are bad when the best press your team has received in years is when your $12 million-a-year pitcher walks away from his contract a year early rather than pitch for you again.

Another letter to a Christian friend: This time, it's abortion

Even if you don't live in Philadelphia, you've probably heard about the arrest of Kermit Gosnell, the West Philly abortion doctor arrested and charged with multiple murder charges for delivering and killing live babies -- as well as a charge in the death of one of his patients.

I haven't written about the matter publicly until now, because, well, I don't want to.

But a Christian friend, from my older and churchier days, has written to inquire on my take. So here it goes. I don't expect it to satisfy anyone.*

My initial take is that I try to avoid public discussions of abortion whenever possible. On an instinctive level, I generally find abortion to be personally repellent. As a legal matter, I'm unable to bring myself to the place of believing it should be prohibited - in the first trimester at least. (Why? Because I've come to believe that there are real issues of women's health, economic well-being and freedom that are involved in the matter.)

But given that I don't possess much certitude or expertise on the topic, I've decided I can't add much of substance to any public discussion of the matter. So I refrain.

And it's possible that makes me a coward. I acknowledge that.

On the Kermit Gosnell arrest: It sounds like the man was a monster and his actions horrifiying. My conscience is troubled, by what I've read, and I haven't mustered the courage to actually read the grand jury report that goes into some detail on the matter.

That said, I'm fairly sure that was Gosnell is accused of doing is in not the way legalized abortion is supposed to be carried out. In fact, I can say that with some confidence because abortion IS generally legal in the first trimester, and yet the Democratic district attorney in this very Democratic city is talking about the death penalty for the doctor. Legal abortion isn't supposed to kill the women who seek it. And the officials who failed to meet their regulatory duties in ensuring the safety of Gosnell's clinic need to be held to account, so that women who do have abortions don't have to risk their lives, health, or dignity in doing so.

But like I say, I'm ambivalent -- at best -- about the whole topic, and I'll probably not let myself be drawn into an intricate conversation about the topic. I'm certain my take on this disappoints you, and that saddens me. I've tried to be honest, however, about a topic I'd rather not engage at all.

I only post this publicly, because I suspect that many Americans feel like I do: They don't really like abortion, but they don't want access to it prohibited. Those folks, I think, try to keep their heads down and avoid the discussion. Somebody might as well say something.

* To the extent there are comments on this post, incidentally -- either here or on my Facebook page -- I'm going to ask people to be respectful to each other. I'll have no problem deleting comments that I think cross a line into abusiveness, even if you're a friend of mine.

Bill Keller on revealing government secrets in a time of war

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

via nytimes.com

Matt Yglesias: We're No. 2! (Or will be soon.)

I don’t begrudge a president making a formal speech the chance to engage in some meaningless nationalism, but something I thought was really striking about Barack Obama’s speech last night was how utterly unprepared American political culture is for the idea of a world in which we’re not Top Nation. And yet the reality is that while we’re the world’s largest economy today, and will continue to be so tomorrow, we really just won’t be forever. The Economist predicts that China will pass us in 2019. Maybe it’ll be 2018 or maybe it’ll be 2022.

But it will happen. And fairly soon. And it’ll happen whether or not we reform education or invest in high speed rail or whatever. And the country doesn’t seem prepared to deal with it.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Congress.org - News : More troops lost to suicide

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The reasons are complicated and the accounting uncertain — for instance, should returning soldiers who take their own lives after being mustered out be included?

But the suicide rate is a further indication of the stress that military personnel live under after nearly a decade of war.

via congress.org

With his grandaddy.

Should civil libertarians vote for Obama in 2012? Or is there a good GOP challenger in the offing?

Conor Friedersdorf:

Our last two presidents are unlike one another in most ways. It so happens that what they have in common is tremendously consequential. Both presidents needlessly undermined civil liberties, the separation of powers, and the rule of law in the course of fighting the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Had President Obama merely lived up to his own pre-election rhetoric on civil liberties, I'd be here arguing for his second term. As it is, I'm very much hoping for a change of leadership.

So why haven't I pledged my support to his eventual opponent? The way I see it, my vote is the GOP's to lose, and they may well do it, because several contenders for the nomination would be even worse than President Obama. Put simply, I won't vote for any Republican who thinks that our current leadership is excessively solicitous of civil liberties in the war on terror, or whose main foreign policy critique is that our leaders are insufficiently bellicose. It isn't much to say that the current administration hasn't tortured anyone, or launched any unwinnable foreign wars, but one couldn't say it about its predecessor.

Let's hope that America doesn't suffer a terrorist attack between 2012 and 2016. But level with yourself. It's a possibility. It isn't unthinkable for it to be worse than 9/11. How will the man or woman in the White House respond? That's one question I'll be asking myself as I evaluate the candidates in the next election. In such a scenario, do I trust Barack Obama to avoid overreacting in a way that hurts America? To refrain from using an attack as a pretext to seize greater power for the executive branch? Or to launch an ill-advised war?

I trust him more than Bush/Cheney or McCain/Palin. I trust him less than Bush/Quayle or Clinton/Gore.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

Deep thought

The weird military stencil font on the Pauline Kael book in the last post made me realize something: You can't judge a book by its cover. But you CAN judge a book's cover—and, probably, the publisher—designer by its cover.

 

Today's deliveries from Amazon

I'm going to (mostly) do my informational reading on the iPad and pleasure reading in the old way. Mostly. The updated McSweeney's app is pretty good.

Today's deliveries from Amazon

I'm going to (mostly) do my informational reading on the iPad and pleasure reading in the old way. Mostly. The updated McSweeney's app is pretty good.

Adam Serwer on Keith Ellison

The Islamophobic right's renewed focus on Ellison is reminder of how divorced from anything resembling a legitimate government interest their agenda is. As co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, Ellison's social liberal views are about as far from Taliban-style Sharia as possible. Ellison has also very publicly called on Muslims to do more to counter radicalism, saying at an appearance in July that "As American Muslims, we have to tackle the moral logic that some Muslims use to justify violence in the name of religion...To say glibly Islam is a religion of peace ignores the reality that there are some Muslims, to our horror, who distort Islam and advocate violence. We have to be at the forefront of correcting the record."

The Islamophobic right though, isn't so much interested in national security or even preserving the secular rule of law as it is about preventing American Muslims from having any role in American public and political life. So it doesn't matter how much of an antithesis to radicalism Ellison represents through is political views or the very fact of his participation in American democracy, because he identifies as a Muslim, he is an enemy. 

via prospect.org

Income inequality reading: The Onion

PARIS—At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," describing the global wealth divide as the "most colossal and enduring of mankind's creations."

"Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing than the Gap Between Rich and Poor," committee chairman Henri Jean-Baptiste said. "It is a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility."

"And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe," Jean- Baptiste added.

via theonion.com

Why I don't care that Keith Olbermann has left TV

Let me put it to you this way. You're talking to a recent immigrant at jury duty. He is telling you how determined he is to be a good citizen and civic role model for his kid. a) "So I've been trying to read Tocqueville in the evenings after work." b) "So I try to attend an occasional City Council meeting." c) "So I've been volunteering as a precinct captain during elections." d) "So I keep up with the Supreme Court by reading the most significant opinions each session. e) "So I keep up with what Congress is doing by reading The New York Times." f) "So I read the blogs of a few political scientists each day." e) "So I watch Keith Olbermann every night."

Is there any doubt that "e" is the worst option?

With very few exceptions, the retirement of a popular political talking head is great news: it's likely to result in fewer people watching political television.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

Sounds right. Also, I don't have a television, so there's that. But most days, I'm not sure that the blogosphere is a vast improvement over the shouting heads on TV. In some ways it's worse: TV at least has to go to commercial every 15 minutes or so.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: My toddler is a smart-aleck

The scene: Boy is in his high chair. He has finished lunch and wants down:

BOY: Done. Done! DONE!

ME: (Looking to teach him to be polite and say "please.") I'm sorry, but I didn't hear the word I needed to hear.

BOY: Done ... now!

The enemy of my enemy is ... what's that again?

President Obama’s decision to make GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt chair of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competiveness has come under attack from FreedomWorks and the Free Enterprise Project, which are calling for Immelt to be fired.

The groups, which have launched an online ad and a petition, say that Immelt’s leadership will lead to more “crony capitalism,” with the government helping a specific business or industry. They are also concerned that Immelt, who will remain CEO, will use his position to help GE specifically.

via nationalreview.com

I dunno. This is speculation on my part, but I'm going to guess that the real aim here is to keep Obama isolated with the "anti-business" tag. Rather than try to pull the president in the direction of their favored policies, groups like FreedomWorks aim to make it illegitimate for business figures to do, um, business with the president. This seems more about winning elections than trumped-up concerns about "crony capitalism."

The politics of the individual mandate

For the last year, Republicans have been arguing that the individual mandate is a threat to liberty so horrifying that it would make Stalin jealous of its diabolical power. Democrats shouldn't be afraid to invite them to come up with their own alternative to the mandate, then we could discuss it -- so long as they agree that any solution is in the service of universal coverage. Get them to agree to that, and the question of whether we should be moving toward universal coverage will be set aside. We should get to the point where any time a Republican criticizes the mandate, they will be asked how they would get everyone into the system. That would be a discussion on Democrats' terms.

via prospect.org

Glenn Beck in June: 'You're Gonna Have to Shoot Them in the Head'

"Tea parties believe in small government. We believe in returning to the principles of our Founding Fathers. We respect them. We revere them. Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.

"I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

"You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

"They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they're revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

"Here is my advice when you're dealing with people who believe in something that strongly — you take them seriously. You listen to their words and you believe that they will follow up with what they say."

via bradblog.com

I don't pay a ton of attention to Glenn Beck. But a lot of people do. And that really depresses me.