I will defend to the death your right to burn the American flag

...but seriously, Occupy Charlotte people, you convince exactly nobody of the rightness of your cause when you do so. That's not effective dissent; it's masturbatory radicalism: It might make you feel good, but other people think it's icky and it's completely unproductive. Yeesh.

What about Ron Paul?

A libertarian friend of mine is very disappointed in me for semi-endorsing Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination over Ron Paul. After all, he points out, Paul's anti-imperialistic views of the presidency—both in war-making and in executive power, generally—are closer to my own than any other GOP candidate. Heck, on those two areas, I like his views better than President Obama.

So why can't I support Paul for the GOP nomination? Easy. I think he'd be a disaster for the country.

Put aside his dubious explanations for the racist newsletters. Put aside the fact that he'd have nearly zero support for his agenda in Congress. Let's look at the agenda itself. (I take all the following statements from his website.)

He'd cut $1 trillion in government spending in the first year of his presidency, on the way to a balanced budget by Year Three. The debt is a problem, I agree, but I believe yanking so much money out of the economy would probably deepen our the Great Recession into something more of a Depression.

He'd eliminate the income, capital gains, and inheritance taxes on his way to keeping the government in its strict Constitutional limits. (Also, to make it easier for you to buy silver and gold coins: His website actually uses that as a rationale for eliminating the capital gains tax.) Maybe that would be replaced by a single flat tax, but mostly he'd eliminate. I'm not really sure how we'd pay for the government that is left.

He'd repeal the gasoline tax. How would we pay for roads?

He'd make it harder for unions to organize.

He'd "abolish the welfare state."

He'd make it impossible to rationally deal with the illegal immigrants present in the United States. (UPDATE: Specifically, he wants "no amnesty" for such immigrants. Which sounds fine, I guess, except the U.S. isn't going to deport the 11-12 million such folks who are here. Combine that with the abolishment of birthright citizenship, below, and Paul's policy would create a permanent underclass of non-citizens doing our menial work without the protections or responsibilities of citizenship. Yuck.)

He'd abolish birthright citizenship for the sons and daughters of immigrants.

So I generally—but warily—agree with Paul's instinct to be restrained in the use of American force abroad. But my impression of his overall agenda is that it would produce a crumbling country, meaner and more Darwinian. I'm not a libertarian, even though I have those instincts in certain areas. Some of what I've described above sound like features to my libertarian friend, I'm sure; it sounds like bugs to me.

If effective, Ron Paul would be a disaster. But given the unlikelihood of cooperation with Congress, I think he'd be merely ineffectual. Either way, why would I support him?

The government can be sued for warrantless wiretapping. The telecom companies can't.

LA Times:

Residential telephone customers can sue the government for allegedly eavesdropping on their private communications in a warrantless "dragnet of ordinary Americans," a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld dismissal of other cases that sought to hold the telecommunications companies liable, citing Congress' decision to grant them retroactive immunity.

I'm kinda-sorta OK with this outcome. The telecom companies facilitated the eavesdropping at the government's behest; targeting the companies for their participation was always a way of trying to hold somebody accountable for the government's illegal actions. I'm no fan of big corporations, but if the government that has regulatory power over you prompts you to do something illegal in the name of preventing terrorist attacks—well, I imagine that prompt would be pretty difficult to ignore. The government's responsible here; let's hold the government accountable.

That said, remember: Then-Senator Obama voted to give the telecoms immunity. It was an early indication that maybe he wasn't quite as committed to the civil liberties cause as we hoped.

The Charlie Savage survey: Treaties are law

The New York Times' Charlie Savage is an essential reporter on issues of presidential power. He does us all a great service today by surveying the presidential candidates about their views of such power. (President Obama—who answered Savage's 2008 survey, declined to answer; so did Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann.) I'll be dipping in and out of the questions today with an observation or two.

Like this one. Savage asked: "Under what circumstances, if any, is the president, when operating overseas as commander-in-chief, free to disregard treaties to which the United States is a party?"

There are some bullshit evasions. (Rick Perry: “'Disregard' is a vague and subjective term.") Outside of Ron Paul—who will get his own blog post on this matter—Mitt Romney offers the most cogent answer:

The president’s most important obligation is to protect the United States in a manner consistent with the Constitution and U.S. law. The president should also heed binding international agreements, so long as those agreements do not impinge upon the president’s constitutional duties or authorities granted by applicable statute.

The suggestion here is that the United States' international treaties are subordinate to domestic law. Which sounds reasonable, except for one thing: The United States treaties are binding law.

That's what the Constitution says, in Article VI:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Treaties aren't lesser-than, under the Constitution: They're the "supreme law of the land." It's possible for both laws to conflict, or to be un-Constitutional. But for a president to disregard a treaty means that he's ignoring the judgement of (probably) both a predecessor president and two-thirds of the Senate that the treaty was constitutional and appropriate. To quietly ignore a treaty—as the Bush Administration did when it tortured terrorist suspects—is to quietly break the law. Romney's answer elides that important truth.

The payroll tax cut really worries me

For the first time in the program’s history, tens of billions of dollars from the government’s general pool of revenue are being funneled to the Social Security trust fund to make up for the revenue lost to the tax cut. Roughly $110 billion will be automatically shifted from the Treasury to the trust fund to cover this year’s cut, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees. An additional $19 billion, it is estimated, will be necessary to pay for the two-month extension.

The tax cut is supposed to be temporary. But as squabbles over this issue and the Bush tax cuts have revealed, short-term tax cuts in Washington have a way of sticking around longer than planned, especially as economic growth remains slow and lawmakers are wary of raising anyone’s tax bill.

The prospect of policymakers continually turning to the payroll tax as a way of providing economic stimulus troubles experts, some lawmakers and both public trustees of the Social Security trust fund. Their concern: that Social Security will lose its status as a protected benefit owed to every working American and instead become politically vulnerable, just like any other government program.

via washingtonpost.com

Hey, I'm really glad to have the extra money, I won't lie. But I will be very, very, very sad if there's no Social Security someday. More sad then, I think, than glad now. So I'm willing to accept the pay cut.

Today in Philadelphia police corruption

ANTHONY MAGSAM, a Philadelphia police officer who has been at the center of a long-running Internal Affairs investigation, resigned from the force earlier this week.

The Daily News first reported in August that Magsam, 30, had allegedly stolen automatic weapon parts from the department's Firearms Identification Unit while he was working in the unit in 2009.

Numerous police sources with direct knowledge of the incident said Magsam had confessed when he was confronted by colleagues and returned the parts.

The alleged crime was never reported to higher-ups, however.

via philly.com

When did Matt Taibbi start writing for National Review?

He hasn't. But Kevin Williamson's piece on the nexus of Wall Street and Washington is devastatingly reminiscent of Taibbi's Rolling Stone reportage, albeit from a right-of-center point of view. Here's a sample slice:

When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.

#ad#Barack Obama (Nasdaq: bho) has been a pretty good buy for Goldman Sachs et al. Sure, the Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill is going to be a sharp pain in Wall Street’s pinstriped posterior, and it’s going to cost some moneymen some money, but not enough that anybody’s going to be out a champagne saber. Mostly, Big Business has got just what it wanted from the Big Government guys in the Obama administration: Frank-Dodd did not do much of anything to lift the cloud of opacity over the world of structured finance, which is what the investment bankers feared most. President Obama has made some noises about ending the carried-interest treatment that allows the fine fellows who run private-equity funds to pay 15 percent in taxes on their gazillion-dollar take-homes instead of 35 percent, but the private-equity guys know that isn’t going to happen, mostly because they’ve heard this story before, from Senator Schumer, and they recognize it for what it is: an inelegant appeal for campaign donations. Beyond Wall Street proper, your Fortune 500 types are looking at the many-splendored tax credits and subsidies and grants and stimulus dollars lavished upon firms such as the now-defunct Solyndra and the really-should-have-been-defunct General Electric and wondering: How do I get me some of that?

Williamson points out—to his credit—that the same dynamic would exist under a Mitt Romney administration. He doesn't name a GOP candidate who might change things.

Ralph Nader rose to spoiler status in 2000 because many liberals believed Bill Clinton had dragged the party into an alliance with Wall Street at the expense of workers and the poor. Twelve years later, not much has changed in that regard: President Obama's Kansas speech was remarkable both for its populist rhetoric and its absence of any specific measures to make good on the rhetoric. If you don't trust the parties not to sell you out, and if you think the Occupy Wall Streeters are too stinky or radical, where do you go? What do you do? Who represents your interests?

Mitt Romney for president. Sort of.

The Iowa caucuses are around the corner. In this week's Scripps Howard column, Ben and I try to weigh which candidate would be best for America. My take:

Asking a liberal which Republican they favor in 2012 is like choosing one's favorite flavor of arsenic: You have options, but none will go down very well. Nobody in the field seems likely to attract many Democratic votes in November.

As an American, though, I want to see the GOP put its best and most-qualified candidate forward to challenge President Barack Obama. And that candidate is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas might be appealing on civil liberties, but he also appeals too much to racists and conspiracy-mongers. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann are so retrograde on social issues they don't deserve consideration. Texas Gov. Rick Perry isn't bright, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is Newt Gingrich. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is Romney without the electoral support. So that leaves us with Romney.

Understand: Liberals aren't -- and shouldn't be -- happy with the way that Romney has distorted Obama's record on the issues. The former Massachusetts governor has suggested the president has been on an "apology tour," asking forgiveness for the country's sins. Romney has shifted right on issues like gay civil liberties and abortion rights, in a transparent act of pandering to the GOP base. As a politician, there's not much to like.

But the presidency isn't merely politics. It's governance. Romney probably wouldn't govern the country in a manner that liberals like, but his record suggests that -- unlike the Tea Party Movement activists who comprise much of the Republican base -- Romney actually believes that government can occasionally solve problems. More broadly, his own history suggests that he is a problem solver.

That's how he passed Massachusetts' health care law -- once a model for conservatives, until Obama emulated it. And it's an approach likely to produce better results for the American people than all the "government is the problem" bumper stickers the rest of the GOP field can supply. Romney, then, is the least-bad choice.

Ben weighs in for Rick Perry. Which, honestly, I find too disappointing for words.

Thank you, readers

Sometime overnight, December 2011 became the highest-trafficked month in the history of this blog. That's even though the last week of the month has been a holiday period, in which my writing and your readership inevitably decline. I'll skip numbers: Suffice it to say the blog is still small—I'm not doing Andrew Sullivan numbers, clearly—but that it's not tiny anymore. And it continues to grow.

I'll keep doing what I do in 2012: Read, try to learn, and occasionally embarrass myself with wrongheaded opining. Thanks for reading.

Gay rights, Catholic rights, and adoption

Big battle brewing in Illinois:

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

Catholic bishops say they're fighting for their religious rights. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” said one official, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

And if it were just about beliefs, I'd agree. But this is about practices. And the Catholic Church doesn't believe it can offer services in accordance with the rules and practices of the state that it ostensibly serves in providing adoption services. So Iowa is left with two choices: Adapt state policy to serve the Catholic Church's beliefs. Or let the Catholic Church withdraw and preserve its conscience.

That's a legitimate choice for the Catholic Church: It shouldn't do anything it considers evil. But I do find it sad that the church apparently believes that the lesser evil is to let a young child be without loving parents if those parents are gay. In the long run, maybe it's better that the church withdraw from this arena.

Why aren't men going back to school?

The New York Times has an interesting story this morning about how women are using the recession* to leave work, go back to school, and bulk up their credentials for the job market. Men, on the other hand, are working lousy jobs. (Probably, the story suggests, because men still feel a need to be familial breadwinners in ways that women don't.) Once the recession lifts, though, the newly educated women are going to have an advantage over their grind-it-out male counterparts for new jobs.

When I lost my job, nearly two years ago, I thought ever-so-briefly about going back to school. Time off from career seemed attractive, as did the opportunity to formally upgrade my skills. It was a short consideration, though. I was stopped by two thoughts:

• Debt. Going to school would've cost a lot of money I didn't have. I couldn't see adding graduate-level debt to my financial burdens unless there was a likelihood of employment—improved employment, financially—on the other side of that degree.

• And I couldn't necessarily see that. A master's degree in journalism (for example) would've been useless—those degrees are mostly for people who spent their undergrad years majoring in philosophy, and who wanted to pick up some useful skills for the job market after all. Besides, job opportunities in the field aren't exactly expanding: I felt—and feel—my resumé is strong enough that I don't need to add an academic degree to bulk it up.

Anything else I would've felt suited for or interested in—English, American Studies, political science—all seemed to be on a path to academia. A doctorate would've been required. Assuming I even had the patience and time for that kind of work, the sad truth is that finding a job in academia after earning a doctorate is still terrifically difficult: It's like being drafted by the NBA after playing college ball—you can be very, very good at something and still not be good enough to make the pros.

The Times gets at this glancingly, in the last couple of paragraphs of the piece:

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”

I didn't have that faith. That made graduate school a losing proposition.

* I know: Technically the recession is over. It doesn't feel like it.

A quick note about e-reading "The Federalist Papers"

I didn't plan to take a year-and-a-half to read "The Federalist Papers," but I got distracted along the way. But I finished them tonight on my brand-new Kindle. In fact, I read the entirety of them using the Kindle app on a variety of machines. For the record, these are the devices upon which I read the book:

• An HP netbook.
• An iMac desktop computer.
• My iPhone.
• An iPad 1.
• An iPad 2.
• The Kindle.

Remember when we used to pick up a book and just read the book? I love today's flexibility, though, and I use it.

What kind of president would Ron Paul be?

This year, for instance, Paul has sponsored 47 bills, including measures to withdraw from the United Nations, repeal the federal law banning guns in school zones and let private groups coin their own money.
None has moved, and 32 have failed to attract a single co-sponsor.
“He’s somewhat of an introvert [and] a little quirky, so he doesn’t work the legislative process like most do,” said former congressman Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who served with Paul from 1997 to 2010. But Wamp said Paul, as president, might succeed where Paul the legislator had not.
“When you’re president, they can’t just ignore you,” Wamp said. “Because you have a mandate.”

via washingtonpost.com

I had a period of about four hours a few weeks ago in which I considered whether supporting Ron Paul was the right way to go: The performance of the president on civil liberties issues has frustrated me that much.

But Paul has too easily lent his name—if not his mind—to racist sentiments and crank conspiracy theorizing. And as the above article suggests, he's wholly ineffectual at operating within the system. And that's probably for the best! But the president *runs the system.* He's not quite Lyndon LaRouche with a portfolio, but he's not far off that mark either.

UPDATE: My Philly Post column is about Ron Paul's appeal to racist voters.

Congress is getting wealthier, faster than you

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

via washingtonpost.com

The death of public universities

At the University of Virginia, state support has dwindled in two decades from 26 percent of the operating budget to 7 percent. At the University of Michigan, it has declined from 48 percent to 17 percent.

Not even the nation’s finest public university is immune. The University of California at Berkeley — birthplace of the free-speech movement, home to nine living Nobel laureates — subsists now in perpetual austerity. Star faculty take mandatory furloughs. Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones.

Behind these indignities lie deeper problems. The state share of Berkeley’s operating budget has slipped since 1991 from 47 percent to 11 percent. Tuition has doubled in six years, and the university is admitting more students from out of state willing to pay a premium for a Berkeley degree. This year, for the first time, the university collected more money from students than from California.

via washingtonpost.com

As an individual matter, I despair of getting my son a top-flight college education some 15 or so years from now.

As a societal matter, two points:

First, a lot of parents are going to despair of getting top-flight educations for their children. The death of public universities is going to mean the death of opportunity for a lot of smart kids—and, to some extent, the death of merit in this country. Talent will still out, on occasion, but this exacerbates income inequality by robbing young people of proving grounds where they could demonstrate their ability to climb the social ladder. If you can afford a great public university, good for you. And if not, too bad.

Second: The research done at those public universities has helped spur innovation that, in turn, has helped drive the American economy. We're robbing ourselves of our future.

Holiday homophobia

Somebody took part of their Christmas Day to post these comments to my blog, and I thought the were worth sharing with the wider community, without comment:

Dude you and your article on gay rights is a total load of crap. The backlash against Gay Filth in AMERICA is building daily, The people of Hawaii will have a Statewide Day of Shame to show their anger and disgust for allowing civil rights to be allowed by a wacko governor in direct opposition to the 70% of voters who are opposed to the encroachment of homosexual perversion.

What type of article will you write when the first homosexual military member is brought up on charges for sexually harassing a straight fellow soldier or when a straight soldier kills a homosexual that can't take no for an answer. Then we will see if you are so elated over the end of DADT

Christmas in the country has begun.

Taken at Valley Township

Don't trade away unemployment benefits, Mr. President

This inability to connect economic policy to the larger problem of joblessness is a real problem with the debate over the payroll tax cut. This disconnect explains why the unemployment insurance extension bundled with the payroll tax cut have attracted so much less attention. After all, if all that matters is the first tranche of money, the payroll tax cut will affect many more households than the UI extension. But all serious economists agree that the extension of unemployment insurance is a far more efficient fiscal support – providing about 50 to 100 percent more jobs per dollar added to the deficit.

What makes unemployment insurance so much more efficient? It is laser-targeted at families in genuine distress, meaning that the recipients will spend every marginal dollar that comes in the door. This also makes the extension better targeted at alleviating actual economic misery.

via epi.org

Read the whole thing.

2011: A great year for gay rights

The advancement of gay civil rights is the best thing that happened this year, I argue in the Scripps Howard column.

The best event of 2011? The gains made for gay civil rights.

Other good things happened -- most notably, the Iraq war came to a close for the United States, ending a disastrously dumb conflict that never should have happened. But the end of a huge negative isn't really a positive. So instead, it was in the arena of gay rights where two big events took place that could wonderfully alter the landscape for future generations.

First was repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The law itself passed late last year as Congress was closing out its session, but the law was implemented this year. Despite the hysterical cries of opposition from anti-gay forces, the military seems to have weathered the transition pretty well.

Second was the legalization, in New York State, of gay marriage. This was important for two reasons: New York is one of the most populated states, and the law was passed by an act of the state legislature. There were no "judicial activists" imposing a "gay agenda" on the state; the representatives of the people did the people's business.

Simply put: In 2011, gay Americans took a huge step toward attaining full citizenship in this country.

There is much work to be done, and some of it may be done in 2012: There are court challenges both to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing those legal marriages in New York, and to California's Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal there. And outside the courtroom, support for gay rights continues to spread among the citizenry.

There will always be opponents to gay equality. Time, however, is on the side of those who favor civil rights. In 2011, we found out we might not have to wait much longer.

Ben's favorite development? The emergence of Occupy Wall Street. Yes, he's being cynical.

How did the guy who was president in 1979 end up doing?

Throughout 2011, an average of 17% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. That is the second-lowest annual average in the more than 30-year history of the question, after the 15% from 2008. Satisfaction has averaged as high as 60% in 1986, 1998, and 2000.

via gallup.com

1979 was a comparable year, according to Gallup. But Jimmy Carter fared pretty well in the next year's election, right?