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

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

via nationalreview.com

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

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

Am I wrong?

Kevin Drum on Occupy Wall Street

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

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

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

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

via motherjones.com

T and the lion.

Time to videotap Philadelphia cops. Unless....

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

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

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

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

via philly.com

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

On the value of peacemakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Obama, and the assassination of an American citizen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Williamson concludes:

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

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

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

Philadelphia: The SRC just got an SRC

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

Got that?

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

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

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

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

So...

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

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

Kevin Drum on skyrocketing pay for CEOs

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

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

via motherjones.com

Michael Potemra on 'Niggerhead'

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

via nationalreview.com

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

What 'Niggerhead' means for the rest of us

Though the narrative is rarely made this explicit, I believe there's a line of thinking that goes something like this: Racism, as a force in American life, for all intents and purposes ended sometime in 1968. The civil rights bills had been passed, Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, and the work of consolidating the gains of integration was finally consolidated with President Obama's election in 2008. People who want to make a big deal of white-on-black racism are generally "race hustlers" who want to prey on our divisions for their own gain.

So while it's easy to write off Rick Perry's "Niggerhead" moment as a faint echo of a long-ago era—and echo that probably would only be heard in the South, really—I suspect there's a lesson in there for the rest of us. And it comes from this New York Times' article:

One woman said local residents had called the area by that name since long before Mr. Perry and his father had leased the property. 

“It’s a bunch of crock,” said a woman who, like other residents in Throckmorton (population 828), would identify herself by only her first name, Mary. “I’m sorry, we had nothing to do with it. Perry had nothing to do with it. It’s been there all this time. He don’t mean nothing by it, that’s just the name of it. 

She said she believed that the name could be traced back to the “slavery days,” adding, “It’s just something that’s been, long before Perry was even thought of being born.”

 As part of the "racism ended in 1968" meme, I believe, there has been a significant temptation to believe that problems that often plague black communities in America—unemployment, violence, poverty—have nothing to do with the 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow that came before the modern era. "It is what it is," to borrow a phrase, and if that leaves a lot of people who were born with advantages remaining in a position of advantage, well, that's just a coincidence, right? Anybody who really wants to work their way to prosperity—or, at least, a middle class life—can do so if they choose.

But the term "Niggerhead" apparently stuck at this Texas camp for decades past racism's apparent sell-by date in America—and nobody really seemed to give it a second thought until recent years. "It's just something that's been," we're told, without any reflection on why it's been or if it's the way it has to be. When it gets pointed out, the locals get angry and defensive. And why not? It's doubtful any of them were trying to be racist, and now it's a national issue. It's not a dynamic designed to produce thoughtful consideration.

Which is too bad. Racism clearly isn't the same force it was 60 or 70 years ago, but it's foolish to act as though it's legacy doesn't live with us still—sometimes in unexpected ways and places. When "Niggerhead" is a place where white politicians still do business, it suggests there is still work to be done.

The blessing and curse of computers in the kids' library

I was in the basement of the Philadelphia City Institute Monday afternoon—the kids' section of our neighborhood library—when I heard a mother persistently but quietly talking to her young son.

"No, you can't play on the computers," she told him, as he craned his neck toward a workstation where several other children were playing educational games. "You have a computer at home. You have computers at school. You have computers everywhere."

Shhhhhh!

I winced a bit, because I'd just had the same chat with my own 3-year-old son. I'd brought him to the library to find some fresh material for our pre-bed storytime, but he only had eyes for the computers. The same thing happened a week earlier during a visit to the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia—in that case his mother physically picked up him, carried him away from the computers and back to the books. And in both instances, I got grumpy: Why can't libraries have a computer-free zone for kids?

There's an element of hypocrisy in this, of course: I do almost all of my newspaper and magazine reading on my iPad these days, as well as a majority of my book reading. To the extent that I'm modeling reading for my son—and I think I do quite a bit—I'm largely modeling electronic reading. Is it any wonder that he is less inclined to explore a room full of paper books?

And there's also an element of "white people problems": We have iPhones, iPads, and computers at home—we're almost never in a place where we can't hop online. But it's a different situation for lots of Philadelphia kids—in some parts of town, it is estimated that only 25 percent of them have access to a computer and the Internet at home. The library thus provides a valuable resource to families, offering access to a tool that everybody else in American life takes for granted. It's easy for me to complain about the ubiquity of computers because in my life—and my son's life—they really are ubiquitous.

Yet...

I would love it if our local libraries could find a way to try to do something different. To provide access to computers to those who need it, while still doing what libraries have always done—provide a zone of quiet where one can escape into a story or study or one's own thoughts. Computers and the Internet are valuable, even necessary, things these days. But so is the quiet. It's tough enough for most of us to find that balance in our lives: The library could do us a valuable service by showing the way.

Four ingredients. Five kinds of yum.

Four ingredients. Five kinds of yum.

Douglas Olivant says it's time to get all the way out of Iraq

It is time for Iraq to stand on its own -- without a U.S. presence to disrupt its politics. There are significant factions within both Iraq's Kurdish and Sunni communities that would look favorably on a residual U.S. force in Iraq. They need to move on. The lingering U.S. troop presence on Iraqi soil is -- quite understandably -- perceived as an insult to Iraqi nationalism by significant portions of their fellow citizens. This is an issue that must be taken off the table so that Iraqi politics can normalize, not least with regard to Iraq-Iran relations. Ironically, it is by leaving Iraq that the United States can best let Iraq stand up to its Iranian neighbor. Ending what Iraq's neighbors perceive as its "occupation" by U.S. forces will finally permit Iraq to complete the normalization of regional relationships.

via foreignpolicy.com

On cooking, and accomplishment

I made a cassoulet last night.

Per Mark Bittman's instructions, I started by browning a length of sausage in olive oil, then set the meat aside. Into the pan went onions and zuchinni and celery, cooked a few minutes until they softened a bit. Then tomatoes and herbs, along with the sausage again, brought to a boil. Then I added cooked white beans—Jo did the prep work there. Then a simmer for 20 minutes. I pulled the sausage out, chopped it up, threw it back in the pan with some cayenne, and let it simmer a few more minutes. It was served with a side of warm multigrain bread purchased from the farmer's market (as were most of the ingredients mentioned above). There was wine.

I forgot to throw in two bay leafs. Nonetheless, a tasty, spicy stew. I am looking forward to leftovers.

Saturday's cassoulet was the result of a cooking kick I've been on in recent weeks. Part of the inspiration has been fall—often when I get adventurous in the kitchen—and part of it Bittman's new Kindle Single advocating the practice of cooking at home.

His argument is the same one you almost always hear him make: That home cooking is usually cheaper—and often faster—than ordering from restaurants. That it's usually cheaper and almost always more healthful than the processed foods we so often rely on. And that a meal well-made creates opportunties for community and bonding.

To his credit—and my benefit—Bittman isn't a "foodie," at least not in the sense that such folks attempt to dazzle you with the complexity and fanciness of their efforts. He doesn't require you to have stainless steel kitchen appliances, or spend a day laborer's weekly pay on a bottle of truffle oil. He wants to get you into the kitchen and cooking, and he offers simple-but-tasty recipes to provide you with easy entry into the world of real food. He sets the bar so low that I can leap over it.

Heretofore, my repertoire in the kitchen has (outside of a pretty mean breakfast sandwich) been largely limited to three dishes: Chili, spaghetti, and what we call "Tex-Mex"—a meat, bean, and Rotel concoction that can be wrapped in a tortilla or dumped on top of corn chips. Tasty, I guess, but limited. So with Bittman's guidance, I'm taking what I hope are my first steps into a larger world.

There's another element to all of this for me. In may, I had an emergency colostomy. In July, I had a second surgery, to remove a chunk of diseased colon that had wrapped itself around my bladder. I have diverticulitis. Sometime soon, hopefully, I will have a third surgery to reverse the colostomy and finally end  the long season of what my son has called "poop belly." I'll be able to restart my life, which has felt mostly on hold for many months now.

Now: My surgeon has never told me that 38 years of lazy, irresponsible eating created my medical condition. It could be genetics. But it could also be my 38 years of lazy, irresponsible eating. Making a real effort to cook—aside from actually being cheaper and faster than ordering from my beloved GrubHub.com—seems to be a real investment in my future health.

More to the current point, I am a stay-at-home dad and freelance writer. My surgical recovery has depleted my energy—and, at times, my spirits—to the point that I often feel I do neither job very well. Making a new meal, as I've done several times in recent weeks, gives me a sense of accomplishment that's pretty much been missing from my life lately. I browned the sausage. I chopped the vegetables. I stood over the stove. And I made something that wouldn't have existed without my initiative or efforts. This is, I imagine how amateur woodworkers feel, and with roughly the same odds of losing a finger to blade mishap. This is, I imagine, why my wife knits.

So much of my day, every day, is spent in front of a computer. To make something tangible and useful—not that the manufacture of words can't be useful—is a good and necessary thing. My next Bittman recipe combines just three building blocks: Noodles, butter, and parmesan cheese. It won't be difficult. But it will be something I made.

My first cassoulet.

Spencer Ackerman on al-Awlaki

We know that Anwar al-Awlaki (and Samir Khan) are noxious propagandists who are obviously guilty of incitement to murder. We know this because of their public writings and videos. Is that enough to warrant assassination?

I refuse to accept the word of any member of the Obama administration that they are worse than that. When any member of the administration shows me evidence that they are, then I will consider that they are. But the stakes of killing an American citizen on the say-so of the government are, in my non-lawyer perspectively, simply the gravest of all Constitutional questions.

Something must guard against President Whomever saying, "Oh, yeah, that guy's a dangerous terrorist. Order me up a double-tap." There must be evidence presented for that proposition. And then there must be a consideration of what the standards are for how great a threat a U.S. citizen represents.

via spencerackerman.typepad.com

Anita Hill in the New York Times

When Clarence Thomas called the proceedings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves,” he seemed to create a racial brier patch that no white senator would want to venture into.
I absolutely agree. After all, none of those historical lynchings that he is referring to involved a lynching on behalf of a black woman’s accusation. So that was sort of a twist. But the specter of racism loomed so large that he was able to get away with it, and it was as though my own race really didn’t matter.

via nytimes.com

Politics in the pulpit? Fine. Just give up your tax break.

This weekend, hundreds of pastors, including some of the nation’s evangelical leaders, will climb into their pulpits to preach about American politics, flouting a decades-old law that prohibits tax-exempt churches and other charities from campaigning on election issues.

The sermons, on what is called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, essentially represent a form of biblical bait, an effort by some churches to goad the Internal Revenue Service into court battles over the divide between religion and politics.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal defense group whose founders include James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, sponsors the annual event, which started with 33 pastors in 2008. This year, Glenn Beck has been promoting it, calling for 1,000 religious leaders to sign on and generating additional interest at the beginning of a presidential election cycle.

“There should be no government intrusion in the pulpit,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., who led preachers in the battle to pass California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what they want to say.”

via nytimes.com

Here's the thing: If preachers want to endorse candidates from the pulpit, I have no problem with that. All I ask is that they give up their tax break.

That's what the debate—to the extent there is one—is about. Churches, as a general rule, don't pay taxes. We can discuss the merits of that, but one of the rules that go along with that special status is that they can't advocate for particular candidates. (They can—and do—advocate for particular causes.) And that's not a restriction on churches alone. Nonprofit organizations of all stripes—including very political stripes, like the Center for American Progress—give up the right to advocate for candidates in exchange for the official designation as a "nonprofit" and all the advantages that brings.

Nobody's keeping James Garlow from speaking his mind, in other words. But the tax-exempt status means, essentially, that the rest of us are already subsidizing his religious efforts. There's no reason we should have to subsidize his political efforts, as well.