democratic views

Sotomayor Calls Out Bedlam In The Republican Party

It's very unfortunate that Sonia Sotomayor made a comparison between a "wise Latina woman" and a "white man" in her 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley. That's the sound bite many in the Republican Party have latched onto with such indignant fervor that moderate Republicans (which may be an oxymoron) are trying to downplay the vile rhetoric coming from Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing organizations whose claims on America are as white as the sails on the Mayflower.

What's unfortunate about all this is that the text of the speech is more troubling than Sotomayor's choice of words. One might consider them unwise, playing on Sotomayor's use of the word in the sentence itself and in the sentences preceding and following the remark that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

The War About War In Cyberspace

Although the Obama administration has banned the term "war on terror" and recast the "war on drugs" into terms of social habilitation, they are now gearing up for the "war in cyberspace." With some claims by computer security vendors that 90 percent of all email is spam, much of it containing malevolent payloads that lead to identity theft, computerjacking, and other forms of organized crime, many think we're already in a cyber war and it's about time the government woke up.

Science and Humanity

The June 2009 issue of Scientific American magazine cites 10 individuals for their innovative use of science in the service of society. It's a great read and surely just the tip of the iceberg when one thinks of all the hours countless and seldom-recognized scientists spend trying to unravel mysteries and solve problems with tremendous impact on human health, the environment, and many other areas.

Three non-scientists made the cut, lead by President Obama because of his rejuvenation of science in the formulation of public policy, freeing us from ideologically-driven policies that stifled science and slowed the advancement of knowledge during the early part of the decade. Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg made the list for driving a new anti-smoking campaign on a global scale. But there are others whose names do not have celebrity status yet whose efforts are awe-inspiring.

The article is just one contribution that shows how dependent we are on the knowledge, skills, and inventions of those that have gone before us, and how valuable continued investments in education and research are to the future.

The Will to Power

If one starts with the supposition that "all men are created equal" – disregarding the strict construction that would exclude women from the intent of the author, then we can move to the question that tripped up Lawrence Summers when he blew his presidency at Harvard. Dare anyone say that women are less intelligent than men, or blacks less intelligent than whites, or any one group less innately capable than any other? I believe the research intended to prove hypotheses of that type was discredited after Hitler and his thugs started their push for world dominance based on racial characteristics.

Memorial Day: The State of Our Republic

Honoring the fallen is something that should remind us daily of the risk of defending liberty. We focus on the military today, but nearby are judges and prosecutors who have seen the number of threats against them double in the past six years. The number of violent deaths among police officers is on pace with the past few years. Meanwhile, Fred Hiatt reports that retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter said recently of the American Republic "It is being lost. It is lost if it is not understood."

So we send our military abroad to defend America and our ideals, while on the home front we face internal threats to our well-being and our future. It is not helpful to the education of citizens in a democracy when demagogues polarize public discourse, when others are demonized for holding opposing views. Sound reasoning and civil discussion of competing values and views is the cornerstone of freedom, and those who engage in verbal violence against others only diminish the very liberty they so loudly profess to admire. They either unwittingly encourage physical violence, demonstrating the failure of their education and moral upbringing, or they are inflaming others who become vigilantes in a political proxy war.

On this day of solemn reflection, surely the fallen deserve better; in fact, they deserve better every day.

Congress Forces the Marriage of Guns and Credit

President Obama should veto the legislation reforming the credit card industry's usurious practices. Not because I support the continuing financial rape of American consumers, but because curtailing the financial violence of credit card issuers should not come at the price of enabling gun violence in our national parks.

It's a priceless piece of Republican legislative maneuvering: get the Democrats to vote against sane and rational gun control measures and watch them twist in the wind as they hang during the 2010 elections. Big business, the National Rifle Association, and the Republican Party may have lost the 2008 elections, but underestimating them would be a fatal mistake by anyone.

Some Prosecutors Are Persecutors

Vindictiveness is shameful. Fair-minded justice and respect for the dignity of all individuals is fundamental to American ideals, which we struggle to achieve. Anything less than giving individuals accused of crimes every possible opportunity to prove their innocence tarnishes our foundation and diminishes our ability to speak from a principled and moral position. It breeds cynicism toward government and contempt for the rule of law.

Yet many prosecutors across the United States persist in denying DNA tests that might exonerate individuals who have been convicted and imprisoned for crimes they may not have committed. They use a variety of excuses. Sometimes they argue that eyewitness testimony is enough, despite mounting evidence that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Sometimes they argue that other physical evidence is sufficient. Prosecutors in Illinois seem to have forgotten that they are dealing with people – they argued that DNA testing was not necessary because the number of overturned convictions was "statistically insignificant."

The Graduate

Imagine a Bergmanesque remake of the iconic movie with a young Barack Obama being singled out by the aging, cynical cougar Politics even though he's in love with her naïve and soon to be estranged daughter, Justice. There's a hip-hop soundtrack relieving us of chronic Swedish gloom, but bringing its own sharp-edged commentary on the state of affairs. We don't see the commencement address, conferring of degrees, or protests. We just know that he's done with all that, and now playing in the big leagues.

The young lad is caught between the cigar-chomping old guard who have lost their edge but not their power, and the hapless domestic partners who want the best for him but can neither agree on what that is, hear what he wants, or understand his moods. He plunges into the deep end of the pool wearing scuba gear, knowing nothing of waterboarding except through the metaphor of the bed in which he lies with Politics while Justice, his true love, slips away.

Republicans, Democrats, and Aliens

NASA recently launched its Kepler space probe, which is designed to find planets that could support life. At least, life as we define it. Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats continue to reveal that they come from different solar systems and are determined to keep it that way, despite President Obama's call for bipartisanship.

Finding life on another planet could be a risky proposition, a bit like Goldilocks discovering the Three Bears' cabin in the woods. Would life elsewhere in the universe be less developed, equally developed, or more developed than life on earth? That, of course, is a trick question; no one can look at the unending misery humans continue to visit upon each other and presume that we are intelligently developed. At least politics in the United States, while a blood sport, is not usually a murderous one, unless you count in the anti-abortion fringe, Scientologists, and the neo-Nazi skinhead homophobes.

The Financial Funnies: A Ghoul’s View

Ariana Huffington thinks that the financial crowd has got it wrong when they want to break out champagne to celebrate the economy being "on track to be back on track." Meanwhile, President Obama joked at last week's White House Correspondence Dinner that one of his goals for the next 100 days is to have their dog Bo housetrained "because the last thing Tim Geithner needs is someone else treating him like a fire hydrant." After listening to Wanda Sykes's sometimes hilarious and sometimes blistering humor, I thought Obama might say something about Geithner stepping in it.

Meanwhile, the current New Yorker cartoon slide show starts off with a few views on the state of affairs in finance. Over at The Atlantic, Megan McCardle's article on bankruptcy in America is subtitled "Bankruptcy helps the undeserving—and that's the way it should be" as she observes in her lead sentence that "America is the most bankrupt nation on Earth."

It's all gallows humor or a mixture of anger, despair, and outrage, as one would expect under the circumstances. For another cartoon take, see CartoonBank's results of a query on "financial." The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer tonight announced that Medicare will run out of money in 2017, two years earlier than projected. Kathleen Sebelius, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, observed that in part the early death of Medicare is due to the fact that fewer people are working, so fewer are paying into the fund. Social Security got a similar treatment; the fund is now projected to run out of money in 2037, four years earlier than projected a while back.

So without healthcare reform it works like this: Medicare will soon run out of money, so more people, denied adequate health care, will die. That will take some pressure off of Social Security, because there will be fewer people alive to collect Social Security payments (except, of course, the dead voters in Chicago). The life insurance firms won't worry about early deaths because along with being unable to pay health insurance premiums, the uninsured will not have life insurance either. So the risk pool shrinks considerably, and, well, gee, maybe if you're on Wall Street, it is time to break out the champagne.

Newspapers: Ass-Backwards

There's not a day that goes by without someone lamenting the decline of newspapers and the impending fall of democracy. Just today, Maureen Dowd plays fey in her quirky way with Star Trek metaphors and Frank Rich does a nice chronology of What Went Wrong. That's The New York Times: two high-powered opinion columnists worrying about their jobs. That's OK – in the current economic climate everyone is worried about their job, and the independently wealthy are worried that taxes are coming after them.

Newspaper Death Watch is a good site to start with if you're interested in a larger sampling of what's going on with funeral preparations for print journalism. This week's announcement of Amazon's Kindle DX is being touted as the savior of newspapers, although electronic ink and digital delivery make the term "newspaper" quaint. Sounds like a horseless carriage.

The Wall Street Journal has a great map showing adverse events at the country's 100 largest papers during the past several years. You don't have to be a subscriber to view the map, although you do have to subscribe to get to the article that contains the graphic. As papers wrestle with Amazon, digital delivery, and online subscription prices, I'm happy to pay the WSJ $59 per year for their "we want you back" offer, sweetened by a $20 Amazon gift card. If at the end of the year they want more than $59 to renew, I'll probably fire them as a news source; if the renewal subscription is reasonably near the current price, I'll probably continue.

What papers don't appear to get is that the value is content. All this discussion about Kindles and e-readers and other devices is focuses on distribution, not content. Well, wake up in the board rooms: great distribution systems are worthless unless you have content to distribute. Sounds so obvious. But faced by financial losses, newspapers continue to shrink coverage, cutting their own throats. The Washington Post is already a bit pale as it combines and recombines sections, slashing features and looking for ways to genetically engineer readership. If you want to see outrage, take a look at the reader comments when the Post cut coverage of the Baltimore Orioles from its sport section. They could write ten editorials in favor of abortion, gay marriage, war crimes trials for the Bush administration, nationalizing the banks, a true single-payer national health insurance system, and other culture-war issues and not get one-tenth the bile they got from sports fans irate at losing coverage of one of the two MLB teams in the Washington metropolitan area. The Post lost a good share of readers' good will when they made those cuts.

What papers need money for is coverage: hard news coverage. What's going on with police hiring and enforcement activities; local government issues; national and international issues. Ok, and some fluff. I enjoy reading the opinion columnists, especially when they take positions with which I agree, but they are expendable (I might have a different take on that issue if someone hired me). Papers should be paying good salaries for good journalists to dig at and into issues related to the public good, and charging every reader for that content. Tell Google and other news aggregators to take a hike unless they fork over.

If you want to help news coverage, kill advertising. The flaw in Google's model is the assumption, based on the history of print journalism (and television, and radio) that advertising commands the ship. Well, to spit in the face of the billion-dollar behemoth that is Google, to dismantle the fortunes made on Madison Avenue, to be an unheralded prophet, and a pariah in the news business, I've got news: advertising is dead. Sooner or later that will become obvious to everyone. Thank me later after you're done laughing. However, what Google has exactly right is that search is supreme.

I don't pay any attention to online ads, on any web site, and when they are interposed between my drive to get to content I both click through them as quickly as possible and resent the company who thinks they are so important that I should spend 15, 20, or 30 seconds on them before I get to read or see what I'm after, whether it's geopolitics, technology news, a film review, or a YouTube video. In other words, online advertising builds some brand recognition with me because I can't avoid the exposure – but it also breeds negative good will. On the other hand, when I search for something, I appreciate Google's quick return of results and increasingly targeted selection of possible answers to my query.

So newspapers need to give up on the advertising model, and the quicker they do so for digital versions the better. They can walk away from Google in an instant, and just start charging for content. They can achieve device independence so that the Kindle isn't necessary but is only another digital delivery platform. The New York Times already does a great job of rendering articles for smartphones so that the relatively stupid web browsers on phones don't cripple the reading experience. The Times could do better, but they're off to a good start.

Once papers charge for digital content, and price subscriptions for the global audience they could have rather than trying to get a local audiences in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Boston to foot the entire bill, they will be on the way to solving their problem. I won't pay the Wall Street Journal their asking price of well over $100 annually for a digital subscription; but $60, something around $1 per week, is fine. When newspapers want a mass audience and want reach beyond their traditional print markets, they have to realize that pricing needs to come down. Apple figured that out with iTunes long ago. So, to the newspaper industry, the message is simple: give us content and we will pay. Give us advertising, and you can get lost.

Insurgency: Defeating Stronger Opponents

Malcolm Gladwell has a charming piece with sinister overtones in the current New Yorker (see How David Beats Goliath). It's about the strategies weaker opponents use to defeat their stronger enemies, and though the tale centers around a girl's youth basketball team in California, one of its critical tenets points to research showing that over the past two hundred years wars have been won by the underdog nearly one-third of the time, and that the frequency of the lesser opponent defeating the stronger is increasing.

This does not bode well for the continued U.S. patronage of regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we must rely on governments that are both weak and often lessened in the eyes of the local peoples by their continued association with the United States. One hopes we will move to a war-by-proxy strategy so that indigenous militaries kill the insurgents (and have responsibility for civilian "collateral damage"). I'm not sure that President Obama and the conventional military wisdom of putting thousands more troops into Afghanistan will prove a long-term success. It is also not clear that billions in U.S. aid to these two countries will be employed to any great effect and not redirected by political and military elites to their own purposes.

One thing in our favor is that offsetting the outrage expressed by leaders such as Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai when U.S. drones and military incursions result in civilian deaths is the over-reaching by the Taliban, whose extremism seems only to grow as they achieve more power. The Taliban, in the end, may prove to be their own worst enemy; no matter how much they brand the U.S. as infidels, when they brutalize their own, it will circumscribe their ability to maintain control.

The basketball coach featured in Gladwell's tale understands the change in kind when complex systems move from batch processing to real-time; it's how he made his money. It's also how he came upon the idea of using a full-court press for the entire game, so that his less-talented team could disrupt the expectations and patterns of stronger opponents. To the extent that the Taliban are intent on controlling territory and establishing a fundamentalist Muslim Caliphate, they will have some of the same weaknesses any territorial power has. But should they realize that we are increasingly dependent on real-time systems and that they can wreak far greater damage on us by avoiding the obvious insults such as suicide bombings in favor of more subtle and sinister attacks on infrastructure that disrupt entire sectors of our economy, no amount of surveillance, torture, or direct military force will be sufficient.

Forget the Bank Stress Test: What about the Rest of Us?

Opinions are divided about the bank stress tests and whether our banks have enough wherewithal to survive should the economy take a darker turn. Paul Krugman thinks the Obama administration is muddling through, hoping that things don't get worse. Tim Geithner argues that the tests were arduous and provide a good foundation for managing our financial system through this crisis. Bankers complain at having to open their books but are relieved that only a few will have to take significant action to shore up their reserves, leaving them largely intact to continue plundering the public till for all they can get in the way of guarantees and free money.

President Roosevelt had this to say in 1937: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." Unemployment continues to rise as the American economy sheds jobs and work flows offshore, including automaking jobs at a still-breathing General Motors. Of course, this results in our ability to consume goods at low, low prices, even if many cannot afford them. The good news as reported this week is that the growth in unemployment is slowing: but no one is talking about when companies will begin hiring again and employment figures will rise. No one is talking about how many years it will take to add back the three million jobs that have been lost, or the inflationary pressures that will result if the economy grows too fast and competition for labor pushes wages, and then prices, up too quickly.

In the meantime, politicians with pensions and first-class health benefits dither about the costs of universal health care. Energy companies invested in coal and oil have learned the rhetoric of ecology but when serious investments in alternative energy systems are discussed, they insist that going green will raise the cost of energy tremendously, further damaging the economy and risking inflation. Want to know why the Bush administration raised the cap on arsenic in drinking water? Because arsenic is a key pollutant in coal ash retaining ponds, and it seeps into the water table, poisoning the water wells and aquifers from which thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans get their drinking water. The coal industry is now worried that a revived Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama will declare coal ash a toxic element and set more stringent standards for arsenic. Imagine the renewal of faith when a government agency charged with protecting the environment and public health once more begins developing policies based on science rather than politics.

Roosevelt also said "Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest
extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order." Lack of education is proven to be a huge barrier to employment and earning potential. Even though many are out of work, learning is always valuable, and providing opportunities ranging from job training to re-skilling to liberal education can only benefit our future. Leave us with a well-armed, poorly educated citizenry, and then see what may happen? That may the design of the National Rifle Association's social experiment, aided by the Supreme Court's recent decision; but I am not eager to sample the results.

Politicians will always have plenty, and bankers are going to retain their "too big to fail" salaries and bonuses. But what about the rest of Americans? Where is their health care? Where is their educational opportunity? Where are the investments in infrastructure such as water mains, bridges, railroads, and energy independence that will put them to work today, lowering our long-term costs, so that when jobs return a more educated, healthy, and motivated population will be ready to produce goods and services that are world-class, and prove the value of American ideals?

Education: Three Thoughts from James Madison

There has been some questioning of President Obama's education goals, with criticism directed at growth in entitlements and the ensuing costs. Everyone is concerned with how much spending we can endure, given the financial mess we're in. Seeing education as a cost and not an investment is short-sighted. Once education is seen as an investment in our future, and to the extent that America remains a great power with a significant role in humanity's future, the issue of cost melts away and we begin the discussion of benefits.

Enshrined on the walls of the Library of Congress's James Madison building are a few quotes that reveal how much he valued education. Madison wrote: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." These are strong words from a man who considered the union of the United States a wonder, the Constitution a miracle, and the results an example of "the hope of liberty throughout the world."

We are on solid ground to condemn the Taliban for destroying schools, mutilating young girls seeking an education, and various other offenses. We cannot defend ourselves against charges of hypocrisy and failure to live up to our own ideals when we have an economic system that makes educational opportunity dependent upon wealth and privilege. It is a shame when someone is denied learning, no matter how hard they are willing to work or how much innate intelligence they bring, simply because they cannot afford it. Beyond shame, it is an incalculable loss to our country, and to the future.

Madison believed in the power of education to sustain liberty. He asked the question "What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of liberty & learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?" Learning leads to liberty – and a profound respect for equality and equal rights – and liberty returns the favor by encouraging yet more learning, to ensure that all values are given fair and reasoned consideration. Nothing is more dangerous to freedom than a lack of reason; nothing threatens liberty more than opinions based on belief without recourse to rational discussion.

I had occasion to be in the Madison building reading these precious words after hearing the current U.S. Poet Laureate read at the conclusion of the current literary season. Madison's words were the highlight of the evening; there is no season ending the pursuit of liberty. The final quote from our founding father says "Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty." Given the abuses of liberty undertaken in the name of national security and Republican hegemony during the years of the Bush administration, we can only hope that an enlargement of public policy goals to make education at all levels not only possible but a right to which every resident of the United States is entitled will succeed.

Torturing Education

I was going to write about education, with the lead being the expansion of educational opportunity that the Obama administration is putting forward. It seemed like a meaty subject, a piece on universal education and entitlements, how much it could benefit the country if done right.

Then I ran into coverage of Condoleeza Rice, now safely ensconced back at Stanford as a university professor, trying to defend the indefensible when asked about torture and American credibility by a university student. Her answer, which you can watch on YouTube, shows how much she and others will torture logic to justify their abysmal conduct. As Maureen Dowd observed, even Churchill during the height of German bombings of London during World War II wouldn't lower British dignity by resorting to torture. Thank goodness for the fourth-grader who persisted in asking Professor Rice about torture at a separate event here in the Washington area – there is hope yet that the young will grow up with decent values despite the conduct of their elders.

Douglas Feith plays a seminal role in one of America's most ill-conceived and then poorly executed wars, but he goes back to Georgetown University (although the relationship didn't work out, and he's moved on); John Yoo is back educating future lawyers on how to torture the Constitution and justify anything an Imperial America wants to do; and now Condi Rice is crossing her arms, pointing her fingers, and hectoring students with "you had to be there" as a justification for cheapening two centuries of hard-won American liberties and civil rights by saying "If President Bush said it was legal, it wasn't torture." I think King George may have said something similar about the rebellion of the American colonies and the fate of traitors back in the late 1700s. How arrogant, how naïve, how exceptional: Rice and her colleagues act as though America was the only country in the world to have endured such attacks, and had nothing to learn from other countries where insurrections and terrorism have been much more common, and who still abide by international norms of decency, and the treaties and laws that govern civilized behavior.

It's not a question of how unscrupulous and unprincipled the enemy is. We understand the rage of a parent or a lover doing anything to defend their loved ones against harm. Sometimes police and prosecutors decline to issue charges against murderers who are acting in defense of their beloved, and we accept that. But that rage is not appropriate for world politics. We may not expect our leaders to be rational when we are under attack – but we need them to be reasonable at precisely those moments, in order to avoid doing greater damage to our principles and ideals than any attack could.

The inability to hew to reason as the redeeming power against our passions and the baser instincts of our nature is the real crime here. It's enough to make one agree with Mark C. Taylor, who recently wrote a piece calling for an end to tenure. The discussion about tenure is worthy of some nuance and subtlety. We'll have that discussion another day. Letting university faculty with tenure step onto the public stage, create foreign policy nightmares for the country and dress our history up in the Emperor's clothes before returning to comfortable sinecures with influence over the lives and careers of young students is, if not a crime against humanity, certainly an argument against tenure.

Appreciation: Justice Souter

For two decades we have watched a man of impeccable integrity, quiet dignity, and piercing intellect do his best to guide the administration of justice in these United States. For two decades he has responded to the call given him by a president who thought, along with many of the conservative Republicans in power at the time of his appointment, that he would lend a voice to Republican policies when choices came before the Supreme Court. He surprised everyone; everyone, except perhaps himself.

It's now part of his story that he's hiked to the peaks of all 47 mountains in his beloved New Hampshire that go above 4,000 feet. Nothing there is an Everest, K2, or Annapurna; but he has held fast to his internal compass and climbed them all. He has been openly critical of Washington, D.C. and its often crass political culture, and rightly so. It is difficult to live in this region, with the great privileges of affluence and access that it brings to its residents, and remain hopeful about the future of, well, anything. Thank goodness every year more young graduates come here to try to change things, despite the logrolling that typifies most whose livelihood depends on maintaining power at all costs, principles be damned.

For Justice Souter, there was no showboating or grandstanding along the lines of Justice Scalia's public speeches or remarks before audiences here and abroad. He challenged lawyers and fellow justices alike, kept counsel, cast his vote and wrote his opinions. There is much that many of his colleagues in the legal profession could learn from his comportment , were they inclined to follow a good example.

So home he goes to his beloved New Hampshire, on to other projects and works that will fulfill his personal goals. His service has been exemplary, and high praise is his due. We will be diminished by his absence from the Supreme Court, and the seat he leaves empty will present a challenge to his successor, who will, we hope, fill it with the same integrity, intelligence, compassion, and modest yet principled jurisprudence that is Justice Souter's legacy.