If you care about civil liberties, can you vote for Barack Obama?

I wrote this in April. Given today's assassination of a U.S. citizen with Al Qaeda ties, it's a good time to restate it.
First, do no harm.

That's where I start with my philosophy of governance. Maybe it sounds conservative. I don't think conservatives would have me as one of their own, though, because I think it is also wise—where possible—for republican government (as the servant of the community) to provide services we can't otherwise provide for ourselves. A safety net for the poor. Universal healthcare. NPR. Stuff like that.

But a government charged with providing such services to—and on behalf of—the citizens has a basic obligation that supersedes those: Do no harm.

Do not torture people.

Do not lock away people without due process of law.

Do not eavesdrop on people without a warrant.

Do not subject people to cruel and unusual punishment.

Do not deprive people of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If a government cannot do those things, the rest—the social services, the safety net—is just a payoff. If a government cannot do those things, then it is probably no longer a government that derives its power from its citizens, but instead is (or is on its way to becoming) a government that rules its citizens. It's not always easy to tell the difference between the two, but the distinction is there—and it is important.

I have lost confidence in the ability of Barack Obama to first do no harm.

He is in charge of a government that—despite promises to end torture—is clearly trying to break the will of one of its own citizens in a military brig.

He is in charge of a government that prosecutes suspected terrorists in whichever format seems most likely to guarantee a win for prosecutors, instead of giving every suspect equal access to the law.

He is in charge of a government that seeks ever more-expansive ways to spy upon its citizens. He is in charge of a government that claims the right to kill a citizen without any kind of legal proceeding. He is in charge of a government that proclaims itself legally immune from efforts to hold it accountable for transgressions. And he is in charge of an administration that reserves to itself the right to make war without permission from Congress.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because I was mad. I was mad at George W. Bush for doing everything I've listed above, plus a few other things. I was kind of mad about Republican governance that seemed interested, mainly, in catering to the interests of the rich, but I was mostly mad about how the Bush Administration had reserved to itself unlimited, abusive wartime powers—in the name of prosecuting a war without end. Obama seemed to promise more than that.

He has delivered, on these matters, almost exactly what came before. I can no longer trust Barack Obama, or the Democratic Party, to be truly on the side of civil liberties.

Adam Serwer, a liberal, wrote: "Point is, though, if you voted for Obama in 2008 expecting a restoration of the rule of law, a rejection of the Bush national-security paradigm or even a candidate who wouldn't rush headlong into wars in Muslim countries expecting to turn back the current of history through mere force of will, then you don't have a candidate for 2012. You probably don't have a party either." He is right.

Conor Friedersdorf, a conservative, wrote: "Since his January 2009 inauguration, President Obama has embraced positions that he denounced as a candidate, presided over a War on Drugs every bit as absurd as it's always been, asserted the unchecked, unreviewable power to name American citizens enemy combatants and assassinate them, and launched a war without seeking Congressional authorization. His attorney general's efforts to live up to his boss' campaign rhetoric have been thwarted at every turn. And presiding over the disgraceful treatment of Bradley Manning, he has lost the right even to tout his record on detainee policy. On civil liberties, President Obama cannot be trusted." He is right.

For a long time, I have paused before the decision I find I must make. Democrats are awful, but Republicans are worse. They'll do all of the above—gleefully, without any pretense of a furrowed brow—and they'll do it while doing everything they can to exacerbate inequality between the very rich and the rest of us.

After the darkness of the Bush years, I came to convince myself that the lesser evil is, well, less evil. At some point, though, the lesser evil is still too evil to support. I don't believe Barack Obama is evil. I believe he is better than his opponents—but not in the critical realm where the "do no harm" rule applies. And I do not believe he is good enough.

The president has announced his re-election campaign. At this point, he will not have my vote. He has until November 2012 to earn it back. I do not expect he will.

The economy's problem? It ain't uncertainty

Another set of data also calls into question the “regulatory uncertainty” argument. If firms were nervous about hiring new employees but had immediate profitable sales opportunities (say, before new regulations are established), then they could readily increase the weekly work hours of current employees to produce more goods and services. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Dean Baker  (2011) and EPI’s Heidi Shierholz frequently point out that weekly hours are still far below their pre-recession level. Figure C depicts recent analysis by Shierholz (2011) of hours data through August 2011. It shows that weekly work hours for private-sector workers averaged 34.6 in 2007 but had fallen to 33.7 by June 2009 (the start of the recovery). Since then, weekly hours have recovered about half that loss and were at 34.2 in August. If employers restored working hours to their pre-recession level, that would be the equivalent of adding 1.2 million jobs, suggesting that a lot more staffing is readily available (without making permanent new hires) to produce output of goods and services if employers so desired. It is hard to believe that regulatory uncertainty is what is preventing employers from adding work hours to current employees to fulfill current profitable opportunities to sell goods or services. Something else must be going on: Customers and sales opportunities are simply not there.

via epi.org

Do you believe, we can't put a man on the moon?

China, which has invested millions of dollars in recent years into a burgeoning space programme, now has a flagship piece of hardware already off the launchpad. Nasa currently has no manned launch capability of its own for crewed vehicles following the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer.

It is a situation that rankles with prominent figures in the US space community, among them Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who last week lambasted the American programme as an embarrassment that could soon be eclipsed by the achievements of other nations.

"For a country that did so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable," he told a congressional hearing on the future of space flight. "Nasa leaders enthusiastically assured the American people that the agency was embarking on a new age of discovery. But the termination of the shuttle, the cancellation of existing rocket and spacecraft programmes, the lay-off of thousands of aerospace workers [and] the outlook for American space activity through the next decade is difficult to reconcile with agency assertions."

via guardian.co.uk

I love Neil Armstrong, and grew up idolizing astronauts. But: Who cares?

Don't get me wrong: If NASA approached and offered me a ride to the Space Station, I'd take it. My heart wants a space ship! But my head is a little colder about the issue. The Space Race—where human spaceflight is concerned—is mostly about national prestige, and almost not-at-all about solving the problems that face us on earth. It's a romantic endeavor, but in a time of belt-tightening, romance really shouldn't be the province of the government.

I know, I know: Humankind should be preparing to take a trip to the stars, getting ready for the day when our planet can no longer host us. If you believe that's really in the realm of possibility—and I'm skeptical—then we're still OK. Private industry is ready to start leading the way. The Chinese are ready to start leading the way. Humankind won't suffer because the United States government is on the sidelines for a few years.

It's official: The Obama Administration is assassinating U.S. citizens

Anwar al-Awlaki, a dual US-Yemeni citizen, is believed to have been killed at 9.55am on Friday morning at a site 90 miles (140 kilometres) east of Sana'a between the provinces of Marib and al-Jawf in what is believed to have been an air strike.

Witnesses say that Awlaqi was boarding a 2005 Toyota Hilux along with five other supporters when a US drone attack hit the vehicle. Acccording to a Associated Press report, the same team that directed the Osama bin Laden assassination was behind the strike.

The CIA and the US military have used drones to target al-Qaida officials in Yemen and had placed Awlaki near the top of a hit list. The US president, Barack Obama, authorised a request to target Awlaki in April last year, making him the first US citizen to be a legal target for assassination in the post-9/11 years.

via guardian.co.uk

I wouldn't call al-Awlaki a good guy, but that's not the point. The Obama Administration hasn't made clear the process by which a U.S. citizen can be deprived of his life via assassination. We don't know what safeguards are in place, or if any due process is involved. All we know is that the government decided he's a bad guy, and now he's dead.

Harold Meyerson: Time for tariffs on China

The news that our trade with China has been bad for the American middle class has finally reached the U.S. Senate. On Monday, the Senate will take up legislation that would impose tariffs on Chinese goods so long as China depresses the value of its currency. Despite the partisan polarization that grinds lawmaking to a halt these days, the bill’s support is thoroughly bipartisan, with sponsors ranging from such conservative Republicans as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham to liberal Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. The legislation is expected to clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle for a floor vote and move on to the House.

via washingtonpost.com

Today's class warfare update

Nearly half of all Americans say President Obama treats society’s “haves” and “have-nots” about equally, perhaps blunting Republican criticism that he is engaged in “class warfare.” Still, nearly three in 10 see the president as overly favoring the “have-nots,” according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll. Half as many see the president as favoring the “haves.”

Public opinion about Republicans is a bit harsher: almost half say Republicans in Congress are doing more to help the haves, with fewer -- under a third -- saying the GOP treats both sides of the divide about equally.

via washingtonpost.com

Jonah Goldberg, and my good faith on the death penalty

TreeHugger social media editor Chris Tackett—a friend from my Lawrence days—managed to bring my post about Jonah Goldberg and the death penalty to the attention of Goldberg himself. Goldberg tweeted a response:

And he's almost right! If you can reform death penalty jurisprudence so poor and black defendants get a good shake, or to solve any of the other huge problems that exist, it would be much more difficult to oppose the death penalty on fairness and justice grounds. The problem is: I don't think such reforms are likely—I wonder, really, if they're possible. It would take, among other things, a decision by legislatures to spend a lot more money on defense lawyers for poor defendants in capital cases—an act that would be politically tough in good times, never mind when states are tightening their belts. Abolition seems the best way to go to me.

Then again—addressing Goldberg's good faith question*—let me make myself plain: I'd still oppose the death penalty on moral grounds even if it were pristinely administered. But it's not pristinely administered, and short of abolition I would take reform. Right now, we're getting neither.

*An entirely reasonable question from one standpoint: I insulted Goldberg on Twitter recently. It was (I hope) uncharacteristically unkind and ungenerous of me. I have apologized, but to the extent I'm on his radar at all, I wouldn't blame him for holding a grudge.

Discriminating against the unemployed

President Obama's new jobs bill would make it illegal for employers to turn away job applicants just because they're not currently employed. That's the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week. My take:

Workers have rights, too. 

So much of the political discussion in recent years has focused on the liberty of businesses -- usually huge corporations -- to dominate our politics, be free from burdensome regulations, and avoid the entanglements of unions. 

Even in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008, Republicans have been unceasing in the efforts to ensure that businesses can do whatever they want to do to turn a profit. If those companies have any responsibility to the broader American community, you'd never know it from GOP rhetoric. 

Obama's proposed law does nothing to reverse that tide. It doesn't keep corporations from spending tons of money on campaigns. It doesn't force them to reduce their own profits in order to clean the air or water. It doesn't require them to accept unions. It makes one demand -- a small demand, all things considered: That companies not overlook smart, hard-working applicants who might benefit their business. 

Understand: The law wouldn't require businesses to hire unemployed workers. And it wouldn't require companies to overlook the fact, say, that Joe Jobseeker is unemployed because he was lousy at his last job. 

It only requires that they not discard Joe's resume because he's unemployed right now -- they have to decide on the merits of his actual job experience. 

There are 14 million unemployed Americans -- and that number doesn't count the jobless citizens who've given up hope. There are four jobseekers for every available position. Obama's proposal gives them almost nothing, except this: A small bit of hope that they don't have to be unemployed forever. Whatever burdens the law imposes on businesses is more than outweighed by the load it lifts off the shoulders of workers. Congress should pass the law. 

A fair break. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Ben says employers would stop hiring because they're afraid of lawsuits.

Serwer responds to Turley

There's nothing particularly unusual about Democrats' silence on matters of civil liberties and national security, which is easily attributable to mere partisanship. Declaring it the function of a kind of mental affirmative action is silly. The same civil libertarian groups who were fighting Bush, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, are doing so now. What they lack is the support or amplification provided by prominent Democrats in Congress when the president was a Republican. Turley also lets the GOP entirely off the hook, as though there's nothing unusual about a party whose mantra is "small government" offering no opposition whatsoever to the expansion of the national security state. Perhaps it's just that Turley's expectations for Republicans are so low that he doesn't even see the contradiction as worth noting. 

via motherjones.com

A Wall Street protest I understand

Like a lot of people, I find myself vaguely sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street protesters—but only vaguely, since the protesters themselves are somewhat vague on their purposes and goals. Rage is a warning, but it isn't an agenda.

Lots of my lefty friends today are lumping this Wall Street protest with Occupy Wall Street—and heck, it makes a great, even cinematic photo. But two problems with the conflation of the pilots and the rest of the protesters:

• I see no evidence that the pilots were trying to link up with the OWS protesters in a show of anti-corporate solidarity. Even the Daily Mail story hints as such: "The demonstration coincided with the 11th straight day the Occupy Wall Street encampment, which has seen thousands of demonstrators descend onto downtown Manhattan - and hundreds arrested." (Emphasis added.) Now, that's fine, because two separate protests aimed at Wall Street might suggest a growing discontent, but the fact of separateness doesn't really indicate—as my friends seem to suggest—that Occupy Wall Street is achieving some kind of critical mass.

• On the other hand, it's easy to see that the pilots are expressing something more than inchoate rage. They're looking for a new collective bargaining agreement that covers all pilots swept up in the merger of United and Continental airlines, and they're haggling over things like seniority, pay, and benefits. They have an end result in mind, and the protest is a means of achieving that goal.

The Occupy Wall Streeters, on the other hand, don't seem to have an end result in mind. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. I get that, and I sympathise with it. But if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there. 

Me @ Macworld: Thunderbolt peripherals are on the way. Really.

Seven months after Apple and Intel announced that the newest MacBook Pros would ship with Thunderbolt, peripheral-connection devices that take advantage of the new feature are making their way to consumers quite slowly.

via macworld.com

Jonathan Turley: Obama a disaster for civil liberties

It's almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama's position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse. However, realism alone cannot explain the utter absence of a push for an alternative Democratic candidate or organized opposition to Obama's policies on civil liberties in Congress during his term. It looks more like a cult of personality. Obama's policies have become secondary to his persona. 

Ironically, had Obama been defeated in 2008, it is likely that an alliance for civil liberties might have coalesced and effectively fought the government's burgeoning police powers. A Gallup poll released this week shows 49% of Americans, a record since the poll began asking this question in 2003, believe that "the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals' rights and freedoms." Yet the Obama administration long ago made a cynical calculation that it already had such voters in the bag and tacked to the right on this issue to show Obama was not "soft" on terror. He assumed that, yet again, civil libertarians might grumble and gripe but, come election day, they would not dare stay home.

via latimes.com

On immigration and Big Government, I was wrong. Unfortunately.

The other day I suggested that conservatives who really want to beef up enforcement against illegal immigration would have to live with a bigger and more expensive federal bureaucracy. I've been proven wrong by this morning's New York Times story about private companies that basically do the work of immigration enforcement for countries around the world.

The really infuriating parts of the story will be familiar to anyone who has critiqued the privatizing of prisons in the United States: The illegal immigrants who are placed in the care of these private companies are often treated like cattle—with the problem being that ranchers generally want their herd to survive. The Times documents a number of cases where immigrants died or were badly injured while in the custody of the private companies. When that happens, companies are punished by ... losing contracts. The problem: Contracts are plentiful, and companies find it easy to replace the lost income. The profit motive works only to attract big companies to profit—not to ensure that they do the job correctly. We should ask ourselves about whether society benefits when the people carrying out the work of the taxpayers are more accountable to their shareholders.

Also disturbing, to me at least, is the way the story illustrates a bizarre disconnect. While workers are largely confined to their countries of origin—or face life-threatening detention—the companies that imprison them can span the globe. The Times: "G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security." 

Not to sound all Marxist about it, but: There are no borders for Big Business. Only for people. That should trouble lovers of individual liberty—if not the corporate shills who masquerade as such.

Happiest in the dirt.

Taken at Fitler Square

Jonah Goldberg is certain about the death penalty

Jonah Goldberg doesn't think that the potential execution of innocent people is any reason to halt the death penalty, because, well, stuff happens:

If anything, I’m even more opposed to police accidentally shooting bystanders or shop clerks mistaken for robbers. Well we know that happens. And yet, I’m still in favor of cops carrying guns. I’m against — absolutely against — all sorts of accidental deaths that are the direct result of government messing something up. I’m against Air Traffic Controller errors that lead to deaths, but I’m still in favor of flying and air traffic controllers. It is a scandal, given how much we spend on the death penalty and all the endless appeals, for any mistake to go as far as it has. But why is it that the death penalty is the only government function that must be abolished after a single error?

The examples Goldberg cites are situations where split-second judgments are called for—and sometimes go awry. But the death penalty, of course, takes years and even decades to carry out. We've made a considered judgement to do it badly.

If you're poor and accused of capital murder, you're screwed. If you're black and accused of capital murder, you're screwed. If your lawyer falls asleep during the trial, you're screwed. And if evidence later emerges that you might well be innocent, well ... you may well be screwed.

This isn't a split-second judgment. This is a system riddled with structural problems guaranteed to produce unjust and unfair outcomes. It's a system that lawmakers have tried, over the years, to stack the deck in favor of those unjust and unfair outcomes.

Put it this way: If this was the EPA rulemaking process we were talking about here, Goldberg would be screaming bloody murder. Or, to borrow Goldberg's analogy: If police training seemed designed to produce the shootings of innocent bystanders on a regular basis, and if Congress had acted to make it easier to shoot innocent bystanders efficiently, we'd be alarmed. We'd be talking about changing that system, certainly.

It's not a single error that's the problem—though that error, if ever conclusively proven, will likely become a focal point of the death penalty debate. It's that the whole system is rickety. We shouldn't trust it with our lives.

Rod Dreher on American exceptionalism

Rod Dreher » Is Obama ashamed of America?: "American exceptionalism is so deep within our national psyche, and has been since the beginning, that it will never be eliminated. James Kurth was correct to say that the realist tradition in American foreign policy “is not only rarely in America, it is un-American.” (N.B., Kurth, a conservative, is by no means saying that’s a good thing; read his brilliant essay/speech on the role a secularized Protestantism has played in shaping American foreign policy.) If we believe that we, as Americans, have been especially blessed, and have a special responsibility among the nations to be a light, then I agree. But that too often expresses itself not as humility — as holding ourselves to a higher standard, and striving to live by it — but rather as arrogance: believing that we are a kind of chosen people, and that that status gives us the right and even the obligation to impose ourselves on the rest of the world, and to think of ourselves as doing them a favor.
"

'via Blog this'

Commentary's continuing lack of self-awareness

Max Boot hasn't done me the favor of sounding like Paul Krugman for a couple of days, but lucky for me his Commentary colleague Ted Bromund is stepping up to the plate:

The Economist reports two researchers from Columbia and Cornell have been studying the personalities of individuals who, in surveys, express a willingness to personally kill one human in the hope of saving more. Their conclusion is there is “a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas . . . and personalities that were psychopathic.” TheEconomist’s conclusion, in its usual slightly tongue-in-cheek style, is utilitarianism is a “plausible framework” for producing legislation, and the best legislators are therefore psychopathic misanthropes.

 This would seem to be an indictment of governance generally—there's always a weighing of costs and benefits in decision-making, or there should be—but for Bromund it's an indictment of progressive governance. He writes: "But the problem with applying utilitarianism to legislation ... is someone has to decide which ends serve the greater good, just as the Ivy League experiments require someone to decide who lives and who dies, and just as top-down legislation in the progressive tradition requires wisdom that no single person possesses."

But to me, this psychopathic framework reminds me strongly of the decision to start a pre-emptive war. Like, say, accusing a country of possessing weapons of mass destruction and then invading or bombing that country to prevent the—entirely hypothetical—use of those weapons. In that case, a country's leaders are willing to see hundreds or thousands of people die so that many more people might be spared a horrible death. At least, I think that's the logic.

Is that psychopathic? By the standards advanced here, I'd say it is. And yet Bromund's colleagues at Commentary can reliably be counted on to cheerlead any proposed U.S. military intervention, anywhere, for nearly any reason. Our debacle in Iraq has suggested that Bromund is correct: Our leaders aren't really wise enough to balance decisions of life and death very well. Yet his magazine would almost always give our government carte blanche to make those decisions in the military arena. EPA regulations are pretty small potatoes compared to that.

John Hinderaker: Democrats would like to commit genocide

John Hinderaker at Power Line: "How many Democrats are National Socialists at heart? Quite a few, I suspect, and every now and then the Democrats’ totalitarian urges break through to the surface. Thus, we have the Governor of North Carolina, Bev Perdue, suggesting that we “ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years.” The press assures us that she was just kidding. I would modestly submit that suspending elections is not something an elected executive should kid about."

Sure. Because one Democratic governor said something unwise—granted—off-the-cuff, I think that merits painting the American left as a bunch of genocidal tyrants in waiting. We'll leave alone, for the moment, Hinderaker's revisionist take that Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon. (The brown shirts beating up Communists was apparently left-wing intramural sport. Right.) The truth is you can't summon up Nazism without summoning up 6 million slaughtered Jews. Ever. Hinderaker surely knows that. Which makes his casual Nazi analogy cynical and despicable. 

Before Solyndra before they were against it

Solyndra isn’t the best poster child for what’s wrong with President Obama - The Washington Post: "What McConnell neglected to mention is that Solyndra was cleared to participate in this loan-guarantee program by President George W. Bush’s administration. He also did not mention that the legislation creating the loan-guarantee program, approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2005, received yes votes from — wait for it — DeMint, Hatch and McConnell.

This doesn’t mean that Bush is to blame for Solyndra or that the Obama administration should be absolved. Obama, whose administration gave the company the loan guarantee, deserves the black eye that Republicans have given him over the half a billion dollars squandered on the company. But the Republican paternity of the program that birthed Solyndra suggests some skepticism is in order when many of those same Republicans use Solyndra as an example of all that is wrong with Obama’s governance."

'via Blog this'

Vote Michael Untermeyer for Philadelphia City Council. Because otherwise, black dudes will try to have sex with white women.

I dunno. Is there another message I'm supposed to take from this?

 (Hat tip: Hickey)