Matt Zeitlin

Daniel Larison flags George Will’s column of questions for Obama to come back to a favorite theme of his, that the material conditions and day-to-day security of the world’s poorest really has nothing to do with the national security of the United States, or as Larison puts it in a post from April, “[Obama] seems to have no sense of proportion of what constitutes a particularly dire threat and what poses a more long-term, manageable danger; diseased Indonesian chickens and loose Russian nukes seem to worry him equally.”

Well, Daniel, I agree.  The million or more deaths from Malaria each year, millions of people infected by preventable water borne diseases and the approximately one billion people in extreme poverty doesn’t negatively impact our national security, strictly defined, as much as say the ungoverned tribal regions of Western Pakistan being lousy with Taliban and Al-Qaida.  And, if you talk privately to most people who say that extreme poverty of “tropical diseases” are threats to America’s national security, they’ll –after enough drinks — probably admit that they’re playing fast and loose with what “national security” means.  The reason people do this, however, is that America tends to act in the international arena when it thinks that the action will make us safer — and when we do act, we act big.  This is why NGOs, activist and academics in work in the areas of development and international public health have re-tuned their message — governments are more likely to listen if you’re presenting something that’s not just killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but is a threat to the US.

Feministe discusses the rise of “Classical Christian Education“, which, in the words of Jill, is “literally looking to go medieval on your ass.”

The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”

You can read Jill if you want to know “classical Christian education” threatens everything we hold dear.  Reading this description, for me however, was one of the eeriest real world manifestations of this famous Alasdair MacIntyre quote:

“A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continutation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.”
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd Ed (1984), p. 263

Of course, Doug Wilson probably hates MacIntyre and St. Benedict for being Papists, but the spirit is the same.

Thanks to some excellent kicking by Auburn freshmen Willie Byrum to defeat number four Florida, Colorado’s last second field goal to beat number three Oklahoma, Southern Florida upsetting number five West Virginia and Desean Jackson’s 11 catches and two touchdowns, your California Golden Bears are now the consensus NUMBER THREE in the nation. That’s right, only LSU and USC are ahead of us. Just to put into focus how big a deal this is, Cal hasn’t been ranked this high since 1952 and were 1-10 only 6 years ago. Of course, we can’t have any let downs so that we’re undefeated going into the biggest game of the year — Nov 10, against USC, in Berkeley. I can smell more than roses…

Mike Tedesco-US PRESSWIRE

Garance has some fun with Gourmet‘s spread on dining in Kabul. Turns out that finding high quality cuisine in Kabul can be difficult:

the subhed to “Kabul Nights” is “Most of the restaurants in Afghanistan’s capital, where there are few named streets and no addresses, are tough to find. One clue: Look for the guards.” I love when the upscale glossies do spreads on such places.

Afghan food in the United States, however, is both delicious and can be rather upscale. Hamid Karzai’s brother is a restaurateur, with three restaurants named Helmand with locations in Baltimore, San Francisco and Cambridge. I went to the one in Cambridge about five years ago, and from what I can remember, it was fantastic. Afghan food is, not surprisingly, something of a mix between Indian/Pakistani food and Middle Eastern/Iranian food. So lots of rice, yogurts and lamb. Also, Fremont, California — a city about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco — has a very large Afghan community and has many smaller and lower scale Afghan restaurants which are also quite good.

Whew, that was a close one. Desean looked great and it was on national TV. I have to take issue with ESPN.com’s headline, “Oregon Botches Chances to Beat Cal.” Oregon didn’t botch their chance. Sure, they fumbled the ball at the one, but it wasn’t a mistake so much as a perfectly time and perfectly placed tackle by the Bears. It’s also worth noting that we had a field goal stolen from us, which would have rendered Oregon’s “chances” moot.

From Flickr user italian_freedom_fighter (yes,I know it’s from last years game…)

Number Four in the nation, your California Golden Bears

There’s been a lot of talk about the GOP’s troubling relationship with blacks in the post Jim Crow world, including their sometimes not so subtle deployment of pseudo-segregationist feelings to win elections. In light of  the major candidates citing “scheduling conflicts” to avoid a forum on minority issues at Morgan State University, many are criticizing the GOP for being insensitive and uninterested in minority concerns. In a large sense, this is almost banally correct, Southern white men are the most loyal GOP voters and blacks are one of the foundations of the Democratic coalition.

The timing of this meme, however, is slightly odd. George Bush has run for election twice, and besides some chicanery in South Carolina, didn’t make the same set of pseudo-racist, or at least appealing to racists, appeals that GOP presidential candidates before him have. Ken Mehlman made a point of opening up the party and trying to move past their ugly legacy. If we can remember back to 2000, Bush was the compassionate conservative who gave speeches in Spanish and won 35% of the Latino vote and then 40% in 2004. When he has focused on domestic issues besides tax cuts — increasing federal involvement in schools and faith based programs — they have been relatively minority friendly, or at least not outright hostile.  It’s only this new crop of candidates that is the deviance from the recent national-level GOP trend.

There’s also an almost retro feel to this talk about the GOP and race.  Until the last ten or so years, race in American meant black and white.  That just isn’t true anymore, blacks are a declining share of the population, while Latinos and Hispanics are becoming a much larger demographic force.  There’s also the rise in bi and multiracial coupling and children.  Much of the way Americans talk — and legislate — about race and politics is based around this black-white binary.  So it’s considered more significant when the GOP snubs debates centered around black issues than when they snubbed the Univision debate.

I don’t mean to sound callous, but black voters are basically a lost cause for the GOP.  For more than 40 years, black voters have essentially been an adjunct of the Democratic party.  The way the Voting Rights Act is implemented makes it easier for black voters to be grouped together to elect black politicians who make up the left wing of the Democratic party.  This has allowed blacks to increase their influence slightly disproportionally to their voting — since when they vote for Democrats in such overwhelming numbers, they make up a large, important part of a major political party, as opposed to being spread about among the two.

Yet when the GOP snubs the NAACP — whose Chairman Julian Bond has said very inflammatory things about the president — it’s taken to mean that the GOP is not only insensitive to blacks, but to minorities as a whole.  In light of decades of slight, as well as Katrina, blacks so thoroughly distrust the GOP that they’ll probably lose votes by trying to explicitly reach out to Black voters. For better or for worse, the Civil Rights lobby, the representatives and voters in VRA created minority-majority districts and the GOP congressmen who win because blacks are gerrymandered out of their districts all have incentives to try to freeze the framework through which we view race relations at about circa 1970.

Why do teachers get paid so little? Is it because they work for the government, and more importantly, local school districts who have a great deal of control over their funding allocation. Is it because they get two weeks for Christmas, a week for spring break, three days for Thanksgiving, three day weekends and 2.5 months for summer? Or does the job security mean that teachers are willing to accept less up front, with the implicit promise that they’ll be able to hold on to their jobs for near perpetuity? Dana Goldstein points out that up to 75 percent of teachers are female — a 40 year high, or a 40 year low, depending on how you look at it. She asserts that “. It’s no coincidence that 75 percent of teachers are female and that the average salary in the profession is $47,602…Old thinking about women’s wages — that they are supplemental instead of an integral, and often the only part of a family’s income — is a part of the problem.”

Let’s unpack that a bit, Dana supports the Hillary Clinton sponsored Paycheck Fairness Act(PDF) ,and maybe the Fair Pay Act, two pieces of legislation whose goal is to reduce the wage gap. The Paycheck Fairness Act mostly eliminates various loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, but doesn’t tread any radically different ground. Since there probably isn’t any evidence of explicity pay discrimination based on sex in the teaching profession (ie – male teachers getting paid more), the PFA wouldn’t redress the grievances Dana addresses. The Fair Pay Act, on the other hand, is a step closer to codifying the principle of “comparable worth” whereby gendered differential wages can be considered “discriminatory” even if they are in different positions or professions. For example, in a hospital, plumbers and nurses could get paid different amounts, but a court of the EEOC could determine that the work is “comparable” in experience necessary, hours, difficulty of job, intelligence required, experience needed etc, and the hospital would have to pay the nurses and plumbers equal wages, or else they’d be discriminating on the basis of sex. As the Act puts it, “equivalent jobs’ means jobs that may be dissimilar, but whose requirements are equivalent, when viewed as a composite of skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions.” I’ve lodged my issues with this legislation here, and don’t want to rehash it all, but just examine how legal wage discrimination remedies could effect teacher pay.

Comparable worth in its original, and most misguided, form whereby the government would set  wages based on the EEOC’s determination of what jobs are “equal” — would probably mandate a raise in teacher pay — since 75 percent of teachers are women, it would effectively be considered women’s work. However, just about everyone realizes the government setting wages for “equal” work is an incredibly misguided idea and is more likely to throw the labor market into limbo than actually redress sex-based discrimination. It’s also politically unfeasible. The Fair Pay Act, however, would rely on a class action suit by teachers against the state which claimed that some other class of workers was receiving higher pay than the teachers but was doing “comparable” work. Unfortunately, it’s hard to think of a class of state employees with “comparable” hours, responsibilities, abilities that is both paid significantly more than teachers and is mostly male.

But all this discussion of how various fair pay bills could affect teacher’s salaries dodges the real question, are teachers underpaid? While the average teacher income is $47,602, which seems low, their hourly wages might actually be fairly high. A Manhattan Institute study of teachers in 60 metropolitan areas — which, because of the relatively high costs of living would have the higher salaries — found that “the average public school teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005.” What is this compensation relative to other white collar professions?  From the study: “36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.”  But why then is total compensation still so low?  Well, on a per hour basis, it isn’t.  Remember all that time you didn’t have to go to school?  Well teachers get most of that time off as well. Public school teachers, according to the study, work 36.5 hours per week, during weeks in which they are working, meaning this total excludes summers and vacations.

When someone becomes a teacher, there are trade offs.  In exchange for fulfilling work with lots of vacation time, good benefits, union membership and high job security your total compensation is low, and can’t get especially high even with experience.  The real question, is not whether teachers are “underpaid” but whether good teachers are underpaid.  The answer to that question is definitely yes.

Ross Douthat is getting married.  As a long time reader of his (since the Salient!), I offer my congratulations and good wishes.  I guess the real question is, will he look anything like this on the big day?

I sure hope so.  Congrats dude.

Yglesias and Klein, reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative, both note just how damn charming and intelligent sounding Tony Blair is.  Yglesias remembers how Blair used his charm to convince sceptical left-of-center folks (like 13 year old me) that invading Iraq was  a good idea, while Klein speculates that if Blair supported conservative health care policy, “His lilt crashing into my collectivism would be like the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. I’d probably pop out of existence.”  Needless to say, Americans just love British accents.

Richard Cohen wrote a great piece for Slate  in December of 2006, detailing how Bush’s sketchy claims of “british intelligence” finding that Saddam sought uranium  were taken more credibly by the American public because of our infatuation with both James Bond and how we think that British accents necessarily make someone more intelligent.   More broadly, the entire case for war was just articulated so much better by Blair, after all, he can actually speak English.

This was truly shocking. I don’t know about you, but whatever Bush said in the run-up to the war I took with a grain of salt. After all, the man could hardly speak English. But Tony Blair was a different matter. Blair spoke perfect English, full and well-rounded sentences—subject, predicate, verb. He was Bush’s adult translator and when he stood in the Commons, placed his notes before him, and fulsomely Winstoned about the coming war and the dangers of appeasement, I paid attention. He sounded so awfully good, and behind him, seen but unseen, was all of British intelligence, never wrong and always well-dressed, heirs to a legacy dating back to the East India Company, Gordon in Khartoum, Lawrence in Arabia, Bell in Baghdad, and even George Orwell and Leonard Woolf, serving the empire (and taking notes) in far-off Asia: Bond. James Bond.

The Clinton Global Initiative has been having some get together in New York – err plenary meeting – and decided to give a bunch of bloggers I read press passed (Yglesias, Ezra, GFR, Brian Beutler to name a few).  Needless to say, I’ve been reading a lot about the Clinton Global Initiative.  Much more than I would have if it were just being covered in the traditional media.  But it’s odd, those bloggers aren’t in any specialists in philanthropy, development policy or even many of the specific issues th CGI was addressing, like climate change.  So I guess their gambit worked — the CGI is getting a lot more attention among people that read blogs.  But it brings up an interesting question, for people whose primary output is their blog and thus have a lot of time on their hands, could any organization or event get a bunch of bloggers to cover it?  What otherwise obscure event could get days of coverage and dozens of blog posts if they just offered press passes, wifi and some beer?

Verizon is taking heat for rejecting a text message program by NARAL as being too controversial:

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

Not surprisingly, net neutrality advocates are using this as just another example of what happens in a non net neutral world.   And it’s true, the spirit of net neutrality regulation would certainly prohibit this type of selective allowance of Verizon’s network.  But the thing is, for voice transmissions, Verizon’s behavior would be illegal — and would have been for decades.  Common voice carriers — like Verizon’s phone service — can’t block voice data they transmit on the basis of its content.  For some reason, this regulatory structure hasn’t caught up with text messaging.   It wouldn’t require some new regulatory apparatus to ensure that Verizon couldn’t engage in this behavior, the government just has to extend the common carrier protection for voice transmission to text, and voila, political groups can use SMS to get their message out.  Pretty simple stuff.

Reuters reports that Burma’s junta is starting to crack down on the monks who have been protesting the regime in ever increasing numbers, with reports of 100,000 people taking the streets in Yangoon. While it stirred my heart to see so many bravely — and peacefully — protest such an odious regime, I have to wonder why they did it. Surely everyone in Burma knows that the chance of a large scale uprising getting brutally repressed is very, very high (it’s happened before, and the junta has only gotten worse) and the chances of success are correspondingly low.

Could it be that life under a junta is just so bad, that someone isn’t risking much by joining a protest and risking arrest or death? I doubt this hypothesis — everyday life for most people under an authoritarian regime needn’t be that bad, if you can feed your family and enjoy time with your friends, risking that by engaging in a risky maneuver like protesting seems to be unlikely. What makes authoritarian regimes bad is the inability to organize and voice your political opinions in the public square. Most people aren’t that interested in doing so And even if one is quite idealistic, what’s the possible benefit to being the 95,412 protester? Surely the marginal value of one more protester is quite low especially compared to the risk of reprisal, imprisonment or death — which doesn’t diminish at the same rate as the value of one marginal protester does.

Surely the fact that Buddhist monks were the instigators of these protests is signifigant. Could it be that Buddhist ideas about the self and valuing the present could imply a “personal discount rate” of nearly 100% — or at least one much higher than the average person. The ascetic lifestyle would seem to encourage people to take extreme risks in the name of their beliefs — if one has removed themselves from society and gains most of their social pleasure from other ascetics or from spiritual exercises and practices, what difference does it make to get beaten up by the police?

These are just some quick, preliminary thoughts. I’d be fascinated by what people with more familiarity with the relevant economic, psychological, anthropological and sociological data and models have to say.

Jill Filipovic doesn’t think that DA Reed Walters’s NY Times op-ed explaining his actions in Jena is up to snuff:

I don’t think anyone is defending the attacks on Justin Barker. But the DA obscures the point of the protesters in this article — they’re objecting to the lack of consideration of the greater context; the non-punishment leveled on the noose-hangers by the school; and the disproportionate punishments given to the black students.

It’s hard to see exactly what DA Reed is supposed to do here.  The hanging the nooses just isn’t a crime in Louisiana.  The US attorney investigated it and didn’t think he had a case under any federal law.  If the main complaint in Jena is prosecutorial overreach (charging the six with attempted murder), it hardly seems like even more egregious prosecutorial overreach is the answer.

I also disagree with Jill’s first assertion, that no one is “defending the attacks on Justin Barker.”  The motto of many of the protesters is “Free the Jena 6.”  Why aren’t the Jena 6 free?  Because they attacked Justin Barker.  Surely “Increase the sentences of others who committed similar crimes in a racially charged and unjust atmosphere or reduce the sentences of the black students so that they are comparable to the white ones” isn’t exactly the best rallying cry, but the price of simplicity is endorsing a highly suspect idea.

Dana Goldstein has responded to my post about male bloggers and identity crusades. I just want to clear up what I thought were some misunderstandings about the voice the post was written in and the language that was used. It’s all below the fold

Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Perlstein has written a great description of Krushchev’s state visit to the US in 1959.  In short, there wasn’t this bizarre feeling of trepidation.  Instead, he got to go to LA, have a white tie dinner with the President Eisenhower, recieved a 21 gun salute, hung out with the CIA, talked to a bunch of business leaders, went to the National Press Club and a whole host of treats that we probably wouldn’t even dole out to Tony Blair these days.  What gives?

Ezra diagnoses the problem as being massive American insecurity due to not being popular in the world anymore — so we now fear tinpot dictators instead of trying to impress them.  But the comparison between Ahmadinejad and Khruschev isn’t very instructive, because Ahmadinejad isn’t even the head of a state middling regional power.  Khruschev, on the other hand, was in charge of the world’s other super power and thus deserved the attention of the American government for his UN visit.

The more instructive comparison would he Hu Jintao’s visit in April of 2006.  As Dana Milbank recounted, Hu Jintao got a similar reception to Khrushchev:

He got the 21-gun salute, the review of the troops and the Colonial fife-and-drum corps. He got the exchange of toasts and a meal of wild-caught Alaskan halibut with mushroom essence, $50 chardonnay and live bluegrass music. And he got an Oval Office photo op with President Bush, who nodded and smiled as if he understood Chinese while Hu spoke.

Of course, even during that visit, the White House called China the “Republic of China” which is Taiwan’s official name, allowed a Falun Gong journalist to heckle Hu for three minutes and Dick Cheney wearing sunglasses for a ceremony (apparently that isn’t cool in China).  The real issue was not giving Hu Jintao a state dinner, and instead a “luncheon”.   That could probably be chalked up to Bush’s distaste for such events, but the comparison is still there.  In the 50s, with Khrushchev, it didn’t matter if the President didn’t like state dinners, when the leader of the second most important country in the world came over for a visit, that’s just what you did.  And you didn’t freak out when someone like Ahmadinejad soiled your shores.

Garance Franke-Ruta lays out all the connections among bloggers who discussed Ezra Klein’s now-retracted lament that DC wasn’t doing enough to attract young, educated professionals to their city.  In a way, it’s funny that this group really is so connected, and GFR laments it:

If you’re wondering why such an insular group couldn’t resolve something like this over a couple of phone calls and instead had to spill all this ink on it today, well, good question. You’d think at the very least Matt and Ezra could have worked this out over breakfast, but no, that’s not how the blogosphere works. I blame technology. Sometimes it’s good for everyone involved to hash everything out in public, and sometimes…well, it isn’t.

As someone who’s firmly outside the entire liberal/libertarian Adams Morgan DC blogger scene, let me say that I love the insularity.  Surely, on balance, this openness in discussing issues, and being able to publicly work things is better than the alternative — having all the bloggers of similar political persuasion and location meet up (or IM, text, cell etc) and “work out” their disagreements so they can present a united front to the us, their readers.  Surely discussion of DC’s urban policy shouldn’t be limited to those Garance mentions.  Would we have had bloggers who aren’t in that social group talk about a subject that otherwise would have a very low probability of coming up in the regular run of what political bloggers talk about?

On the larger question, is that corner of the blogosphere too insular, too interconnected?  Well, it may be, but we only know the extent of this interconnectedness because of how blogging works — it encourages, or at least allows, bloggers to write about their friends, and to acknowledge that the people whose work they’re writing about are their friends.  In the traditional media, however, this is discouraged.  I don’t know who David Brooks or EJ Dionne socialize with.  Do I want to? Well, the social lives of middle aged journalists aren’t all that interesting, but I’m sure it influences what they write about and how they write about it.  And I’d rather have all that business up front, and if that means occasionally reading descriptions of parties or seeing pictures of trap shooting expeditions, then so be it.

First of all, on the subject of race in politics since civil rights, read Steven White, he knows quite a good deal about the subject…way more than me anyway…

Frank Bob Herbert’s most recent column attempts to explain the GOP rise since the 70s using as a function of one thing — racism. In many ways he’s right, Reagan’s opening his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi and talking about states rights was nothing more than signaling to racism. I can’t endorse this wholesale revaluation of history, and the implicit message to Democrats. Herbert’s analysis has the worrying side effect of telling liberals that there was nothing wrong with American liberalism from 1972-1992, just that Americans were too racist. The big structural changes — taking marginal tax rates down from 70%, welfare reform — weren’t a necessary correction to paleoliberalism that had become too entrenched, but instead were part of the racist reaction. So why not jack up taxes on the rich and get rid of welfare reform? Those weren’t good ideas, just racist ones.

Surely some racists or at least racially resentful voters supported these policies, but that doesn’t taint their overall necessity. Was Daniel Patrick Moynihan just part of this white reaction? What about Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and the early 90s DLC? So yes, the GOP got a lot of votes appealing to racism, but that doesn’t excuse Democrats who really were out to lunch in the 70s and 80s.

This may sound cynical, but it’s hard to see how this alignment — where the GOP peels away formerly Democratic voters by appealing to segregation area concerns in coded language — couldn’t have happened. One of the weird effects of Jim Crow was that Southern whites would vote for Democrats whose main support in the North were urban workers and ethnics. In exchange, Jim Crow wasn’t seriously challenged by Democrats until the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. When Johnson finally pushed through civil rights, he started the slow process of cutting loose a large part of the Democratic coalition. But contrary to popular mythology, this realignment didn’t happen instantly. In 1968, which was supposed to be the first year during which the Southern Strategy was implemented, Nixon didn’t win any Deep South states besides South Carolina — George Wallace did instead. In 1972, Nixon won everywhere except Massachusetts. It’s pretty obvious he didn’t win just by getting the pro-segregation Deep South voting for him.

Herbert sees the GOP supporting the continuing disenfranchisement of black-majority DC as just this racism renewed. And maybe it is, but it’s more obviously just ugly partisanship. One thing that’s missing from this narrative of the GOP getting the racists to vote for them is how Democrats got blacks to be like trial lawyers or teacher unions — essentially a wing of the party. It’s hard to see how it could of been any other way. With black people being allowed to vote and segregationists getting basically kicked out of the Democratic party, the chips were only going to fall in so many ways. And so white southerners who wanted to practice heavily racialized politics were able to, as the other race (blacks) were all active in one party.

But let’s get back to Lee Atwater for a second and his infamous quote:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Yes, Lee Atwater said that and that sentiment was a large part of GOP strategy post Jim Crow, but the message it sends to Democrats is just awful. Especially today, when the GOP won elections largely based on being perceived as the stronger party of terrorism (2002 and 2004), not largely racial attitudes. Atwater’s strategy can’t explain how Nixon won every state except Massachusetts in 72 or how Reagan swept the table minus Minnesota in 84. The Democrats had some major issues between 1972 and 1992, and the GOP relied on racist instincts to put the South in their column. We shouldn’t let one of these facts obscure the other.

I try to answer this question, in about 1460 words. This will sound self serving, but I’d really like if other bloggers read this post — especially my fellow liberals. I think about this topic quite a bit and I feel it should be discussed openly and honestly. My thoughts here are provisional and I really just want to talk about this entire issue, so please comment and blog away in response. Check it out after the flip.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Lemieux comments on Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on Justice Stevens, noting that Stevens — who was appointed by Ford — is, in temperament, a Rockefeller Republican/moderate, is now a liberal compared to the likes of Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas:

It is a measure of how not only how much the Court has changed but how much the Republican Party has changed that Rockefeller Republicans now seem like liberals on the Supreme Court. There’s no Brennan, Marshall or Douglas on the modern Court. It is a measure of how not only how much the Court has changed but how much the Republican Party has changed that Rockefeller Republicans now seem like liberals on the Supreme Court. There’s no Brennan, Marshall or Douglas on the modern Court. There have been some liberal advances, but that have been mostly modest expansions of existing doctrines agreeable to moderate northern Republicans…

Well sure, the court has moved to the right, if your frame of reference is the last 10 or so years. What Scott is excluding is that from the Warren courts through the early 80s, there were huge advancements for liberals. After decades, if not hundreds of years, of judicial stasis, Warren carved out brave new doctrines, systems and rights under a liberal judicial framework. But the Court is more influenced by Marbury than Trotsky, so we shouldn’t expect it to be in a state of near-permanent liberal revolution. So yes, the conservative wing is hallowing out and poking holes in some cherished bits of liberal jurisprudence, but there is little indication that a wholesale overturning of Roe or Miranda is going to happen soon.

It’s also interesting that the jurisprudential revolution conservatives actually tried to foment is now in the dustbin of failed ideas — the overturning of the New Deal regulatory state. What scared many about Thomas wasn’t so much his social conservatism or overly doctrinaire originalism, but his admiration for Richard Epstein. The closest the”constitution in exil”e folks have gotten was Lopez and Morrison, and while they addressed the commerce clause, there were more federalism that regulation cases. The court has backslided on the Rehnquist-O’Connor federalism mini-revolution with Raich and Kelo while it’s unlikely Kennedy would sign on for a major deregulatory decision. The New Deal, at least on a legal level, appears to remain intact.

So yes, the court is getting more conservative and it’s probably tracking the direction of America’s politics, except with maybe a 15-25 year delay, because the court is an august institution. But the court is getting conservative because the liberals won. The right wingers on the court are playing on liberal ground, and so maybe liberals should get used to and welcome becoming the new conservatives. It’s always nice to switch things up for a change.

Marc Ambinder gives us this look into Obama’s brain:

 In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America’s original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and … you get the idea.

Well, it’s nice that Obama believes that and all, but if he really thinks that, I’m worried.  What pisses off Muslims and allows for radical Islam’s propaganda gains is not that our president is a hawkish buffoon, per se, it’s the policies he enacts.  It (was) troops in Saudi Arabia, support for various Arab dictators, support for Israel, invading Iraq, occupying Iraq etc.  The mere act of electing Barack won’t magically make all that go away.  It’s not all that clear if Obama supports a full withdrawal with no residual troops and he certainly doesn’t support abandoning Israel.

I don’t know if Marc or Obama picked Lahore as their sample Muslim city that would appreciate Obama, but it’s a poor choice.  Obama, in case any one forgot, supports strikes on the sovereign nation of Pakistan without the approval of Congress and regardless of whatever our “ally” Mubarak says. Now, this policy may or may not be good on the merits, but a young boy from Lahore isn’t going to see the great healer who he loves if Obama takes office — he’ll see the man that tried to make himself look “tough” on national security by cavalierly saying that he would bomb that boy’s country.

Does America really need another president who thinks that he’s god’s gift to the world?