Just as you had reports from Egypt that the Jews/Zionists/America infiltrated the protests at Tahrir Square, the state media of Libya have been doing the same, as Kathryn mentioned earlier. The official Friday sermon this past week on Al-Jamahiriya TV on February 18 accused the U.S. and Zionists of instigating all the protests in the Middle East. View the sermon here:
Some of the notable excerpts from the sermon include:
Preacher: Oh Muslims, may Allah preserve the safety of your country. May Allah preserve your own safety, and the safety of your women and your children. Beware that they not be led astray, like our fellow Arabs, who share the same language with us. They were drawn by the deceiving media, and they took to the streets to sow corruption, thus assuming the character of the Jews, who spread corruption upon the land.
[...]
Oh worshippers of Allah, see the slogan of the outlaws – I won’t call them people who revolted against the regime – in Egypt, in Tunisia, and elsewhere. They chant a loathsome Zionist slogan: “Topple the regime.” Is it appropriate for a Muslim to revolt against the regime?
[...]
We call upon all noble Arabs and all free Muslims to remove the evil Al-Jazeera TV channel from the Arab satellites, because it does not want any good to happen to the Arabs. We call to remove Qatar, which sponsors Al-Jazeera TV, from the Arab League.
[...]
In conclusion, oh Muslims, may Allah protect our country, Libya, which is too great to be left prey to the hateful Zionists and tyrannical Americans.
MEMRI’s Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor just finished a review of what the online forums and websites of Islamist organizations are saying about the situation in Libya. The main jihadi forums such as Shumukh Al-Islam include comments and responses in various forms:
1. Members commenting on news from various news channels — for example, a member reposting news from Al-Arabiyya about European forces moving on to the shores of Libya. Other members responded by saying that NATO is planning to get involved in containing the situation.
2. A constantly updated topic, where a member, for example, starts a thread under the name of “situation in Libya”: Such threads provide members the opportunity to give “live” feedback about the situation, either from being personally in Libya or via contacts, friends, and family members from that region. A similar thread that was opened two days ago has already generated 67 entire pages of responses (in comparison, a typical Osama bin Laden video generates about 15 to 20 pages of responses/comments).
3. Threats to countries attempting to get involved in Libya (in support of Gaddafi). One example would be a member threatening retaliation against Italy, if it decides to get involved in what’s happening in Libya, and another suggesting that a call for help be directed to their Egyptian brothers, who recently had their own successful uprising.
4. Calls to various jihadi organizations to take action on Libya — for example, a call by a member to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) to get “involved.” Members responding to the topic said that LIFG had already declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda (meaning, it should be an AQ involvement). Other members called for jihad in Libya.
The general sentiment is anti-Gaddafi and against the current Libyan regime. There are numerous calls to overthrow Gaddafi, and to support those who died so far during the protests. There are also suggestions on how to overcome the general media blackout in Libya, including the use of certain Internet servers that are not being blocked and censored by the government.
Madison, Wis. — Gov. Scott Walker ratcheted up the pressure on senate Democrats this afternoon, urging the 14 lawmakers, who are on the lam in Illinois, to return and vote on his budget-repair bill.
“This an incredibly important moment,” Walker told reporters in a press conference at the capitol. The on-the-run pols, he warned, better come back quick. “You had your time, now it’s time to come home.”
Senate Republicans, he added, are ready to legislate tomorrow, with or without the Democrats, and will bring hot-button bills to the floor. “The time is up,” Walker said, speaking directly to the cameras and klieg lights. “Come back home, come to the state senate, make your case.”
Walker also pushed back against any possible deal, including a “sunset clause,” that would see collective bargaining eliminated, only to reappear in 2013. This proposal has been bandied about by at least one moderate GOP state senator. “It’s another non-starter,” he said, flatly.
Dan, Jonah: Reports out of Libya are horrifying, but I think we want to be careful about stumbling into policing Libya. I’m guessing more people are being killed by machine guns on the ground than from the air. Are you going to bomb those machine guns and the ground forces wielding them, too? If not, you’ll look ineffectual. If so, you’re probably in for a full-blown humanitarian intervention. And remember: There will be accidents, and tribes aren’t good at forgiving and forgetting, no matter how pure your intentions.
In my weekend column, I argued that the democracy project has failed in Afghanistan, and that — far from taking the battle to the Taliban and America’s other enemies — our military’s main job there has become building a sharia state while the Obama State Department pleads with the Taliban to negotiate and join the sharia state regime.
I also noted Steve Coll’s reporting, and State Department confirmation, that negotiations with the Taliban are, in fact, underway.
Now, at the Weekly Standard, Tom Joscelyn is reporting that, with apparent State Department cooperation, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s “peace council,” in furtherance of its outreach to the Taliban, is sending a delegation to Gitmo to request the release of some 20 Taliban commanders and leaders who are still being held there because it is a ripe dead certainty that, if released, they would go straight back to the anti-American jihad, as we well know 40 percent or more of the released detainees do — some, as Tom points out, going right back to the Taliban.
I’d mentioned last week that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has tried to avoid weighing in on a tough new immigration bill making its way through his state’s legislature, despite freely dispensing his views on a variety of other issues of national importance. The Indianapolis Star had more on the topic yesterday, quoting people on both sides expressing their hope that Daniels will come down on their side:
“We would absolutely love to hear what he says about this bill. It’s one of our top priorities in the tea party movement,” said Monica Boyer, a leader of Kosciusko Silent No More. “It will show courage. It will show strength. Silence is never good on an issue like that.”
Particularly not for a presidential prospect.
Lisa Deaton, a tea party activist from Columbus, said if Daniels “is even thinking remotely about being president, that puts him in a different arena than he was as governor.”
“He needs to step up to the plate and say what he really thinks, and he might be able to influence it for the positive.”
Likewise from opponents:
Daniels, Fong said, “is a man of vision and tolerance. What I think the bill represents is, at the very least, a lack of understanding of what it would do to our state economically.”
And, he added, it will hurt Indiana’s hospitable image.
“The bill goes, I think, contrary to what we want to believe is the best about Hoosiers,” Fong said.
Daniels will eventually have to do or say something, because, as the Star reporter noted, “Democrats no longer control the House, so they can’t be counted on to stop this legislation.” But this kind of weaselly equivocation is at least understandable from a guy like Daniels — a corporate Republican, downplaying social issues (though immigration is very much a fiscal issue as well), and former chief of staff for Dick Lugar.
What mystifies me is Georgia governor Nathan Deal’s weaselly equivocation on his state legislature’s immigration legislation. Deal earned an A+ from Numbers USA during his 17 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, checked off all the right boxes when running for governor, and campaigned on bringing an Arizona-style law to Georgia.
Is it just me, or are any of my fellow baby boomers having an acid flashback to the 1960s while watching the Madison protests? I could swear I saw a sign that said “The Whole World Is Watching,” which immediately sent me skylarking back to the glory days of Obama buddies Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and the Chicago riots of 1968.
Good times, good times.
Then there’s the old standby, “Hey, hey/ho, ho” chant, an all-purpose ditty student radicals have been using for decades. About the only thing that’s missing is: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” But today’s protesters are not as ecumenical in their political scorn as they used to be.
It’s great to drag out these oldies but goodies, but can’t a new generation of over-privileged and under-worked layabouts come up with something new? Everything about liberalism is tired these days, including its slogans.
Madison, Wis. — Greetings from the state capitol, where thousands of labor activists continue to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill. Most of them are huddling indoors, chanting beneath the rotunda. Things are sweaty, red, and loud; lots of posters, banners, and homemade T-shirts, with anti-Walker or pro-union messages scrawled in marker. Outside, the air is bitter cold and the sidewalks icy, but a few souls are marching. The schools are still closed. Business is booming, at least at the local cafes and slice shops.
Politically, not much is happening. GOP state senators will return to the chamber Tuesday and 14 Democratic state senators remain on the lam in Illinois. Stand-off, stalemate, face-off — these are the words floating around the press room. Still, Senate Republicans hope to pressure Democrats to come back to the Badger State by bringing up numerous bills tomorrow. Walker pledges not to budge. He told NRO on Sunday that he expects his plan to pass by the end of this week. Democrats may be in a corner: The part of Walker’s proposal that refinances the state’s debt must be completed by Friday in order for the bonds to be refinanced this fiscal year.
Beyond politics, there is a little buzz, of the musical sort. At noon, the shivering lefty crowd was ecstatic to hear from Tom Morello, an axe-wielding rocker, who played a couple tunes on Capitol Square after speaking with NRO about the Tea Party:
Rev. Jesse Jackson, who rallied in Madison last week, plans to return to the the capital on Tuesday. The vast majority of protesters, however, are not political figures — it’s mostly government workers, teachers, and their friends. To get a sense of the crowd, here’s some NRO footage of the protesters entering the capitol this morning:
Music is a big part of labor’s effort. When the assembled take a break from chanting, or blasting Walker on a bullhorn, they usually break out in song. Here, union backers sing Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid”:
If you’re interested, I’m posting snapshots from around Madison on Twitter.
There is a lot of waste in the federal government: It is documented, Congress holds hearings about it, and each year the GAO issues a list of programs that are the most at risk for it. But very little changes — in fact, the waste might be getting worse. Take a look at the trend in improper payments in the funding of federal programs and activities. As this chart shows, since the implementation of the Improper Payments Information Act of 2002 (the main objective of which was to enhance the accuracy and integrity of federal payments), reported wasteful payments have increased, which could mean that the amount of waste in the federal government has exploded or simply that federal reviewers have become more adept at documenting it. Either way, overt waste in the federal government represents a significant problem.
As we see, in FY 2010, according to the Financial Statement of the United States, $ 2.3 billion in outlays were reviewed by federal-executive-branch entities for improper payments; 5.5 percent of these payments, or $125.4 billion, were found to be improper. That’s a significant increase over the FY 2002 level.
Of course, that waste pales in comparison to the waste that exists in current congressional spending patterns, and in the economic damage caused by the misallocation of capital and the creation of perverse incentives. Federal spending on functions that should be left to the states (e.g., education), federal spending on functions that should be left to the private sector (e.g., Amtrak, air-traffic control), and federal spending on things that government has no business doing in the first place (e.g., the stimulus bill’s shovel-ready projects) — all of that is waste, too. That’s the case I made to Congress last Thursday during my testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
What does the question of the proper role of the federal government have to do with oversight? A lot, actually. When lawmakers are busy running state, local, and private affairs, they have less time to focus on critical national issues. Also, they have less time to conduct proper oversight of federal programs.
The bottom line is that the federal government cannot and should not be the solution to every one of our problems. There are things that only the federal government can do, but when the federal government gets involved where it shouldn’t be, it wastes capital, time, and taxpayers’ money. Shrinking the size of the federal government would reduce wasteful spending dramatically, and shrinking the federal government will make oversight easier and more effective.
I’m inclined to agree with Dan. It’s a tough call and you can come up with sound arguments on both sides. But stopping the slaughter is the right thing to do and that’s the tie-breaker for me.
I suspect that a simple threat, combined with a show of force, would be enough. It would be better if it was a UN-sanctioned, Nato-led effort.
Folks who have been in Washington for a while are used to how slow the Senate can be. House freshmen haven’t been and aren’t. And Ann Marie Buerkle is issuing a call to the Senate to get back to work now:
Last week the U.S. House of Representatives spent 90 hours debating and amending the Continuing Resolution to ensure that we keep our government operational beyond March 4, 2011. It was not always pretty, but it was an open exercise in democracy that resulted in meaningful savings for taxpayers. We are shrinking Washington to grow the United States.
As I watched the Sunday talk shows yesterday, everyone seemed to be talking about the possibility of a government shutdown. I have only been here 40 days and may be new to the process, but I must wonder why the Senate is taking this week off if they are so concerned about a shutdown on March 4th.I understand that today is Presidents’ Day, but why not start work this Tuesday instead of waiting another week to get the Continuing Resolution enacted. We are about to hit the “fiscal wall”, yet the Senate is in recess.
It is now up to the Senate to work on an agreement that cuts spending, as a first step in growing the economy and creating jobs.
Given the economic state of the country, this is no time for business as usual. I urge the United States Senate to apply the same diligence the House did in executing passage of a fiscally responsible leaner Continuing Resolution.
With reports that the Gaddafi regime — or what’s left of it — has effected the indiscriminate massacre of Libyan civilians, up to and including air strikes in Tripoli and the planned carpet-bombing of Benghazi, the suggestion that President Obama establish a “no-fly zone” above Libya has begun popping up on social media.
I don’t say this lightly, but I think POTUS must so act. U.S. Sixth Fleet under AFRICOM may or may not have a carrier “chopped” (that is, assigned) to it at the moment (Ed Morrissey has a good post on why it’s so hard to pin down where our carriers are at a given moment), but it appears that one or several aircraft carriers are within striking distance.
Gaddafi’s bombers must be grounded.
UPDATE: As of the latest (admittedly dated) stratfor update, CVN-65 is just south of the Suez Canal, and CVN-70 is in the Arabian Sea and could conceivably be maneuvered into range in a matter of hours. Also, probably a coincidence, but CVN-65 has shut down outgoing e-mail messages from crewmen, according to Facebook.
Conservatives revile Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president, for his massive expansion of federal power and the welfare state. But he deserves credit in my book for two important accomplishments of his five years in office. After becoming president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Johnson used his considerable influence with his former colleagues in the U.S. Senate (he had been majority leader before Kennedy tapped him for vice president) to secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law transformed the country, largely bringing to an end nearly 200 years of state-supported discrimination on the basis race. Without Johnson’s support — a former opponent of civil-rights laws — the bill would never have passed in its current form and the nation might have endured decades more struggle to realize the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
But Johnson also deserves credit for his willingness to fight the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia. Historians can argue with his tactics and his micromanagement of the Vietnam battlefield from the Oval Office, but he was a fierce opponent of communist tyranny, something that cannot be said of many liberals in his era and after. The disgraceful scenes of Americans fleeing South Vietnam on helicopters, abandoning their allies on the ground, occurred not during LBJ’s tenure, but during his successor’s, Richard M. Nixon.
See the homepage for a complete gallery of U.S. presidents.
Al Aribiya is reporting from multiple sources that Libyan aircraft could begin bombing the city of Benghazi within hours. Benghazi is the second largest city in Libya behind Tripoli, and is now believed to be more or less under the control of protesters, after an army unit joined forces with citizens to push Gaddafi’s forces out.
Benghazi has a population of some 600,000-plus. Hundreds — and according to some sources, thousands — of anti-Gaddafi protesters have already been killed, some by aircraft fire.
The United States has a large military presence in the Mediterranean. Unlike neighboring Egypt which falls under CENTCOM, Libya is in the area of responsibility of AFRICOM, which counts the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet and attached Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) among its assets, as well as the Seventeenth Air Force out of Germany.
UPDATE: Witnesses on the ground describe an indiscriminate “massacre” of civilians in two districts of Tripoli:
Residents of Tripoli said on Monday there had been “a massacre” in the Tajura and Fashlum districts of the Libyan capital, with indiscriminate shooting and air strikes and women among the dead. “What happened today in Tajura was a massacre,” one resident of the district said. “Armed men were firing indiscriminately. There are even women among the dead,” adding that mosque loudspeakers were putting out appeals for help. Another witness in Fashlum said that helicopters had landed what he called armed African mercenaries in the neighbourhood, and that the gunmen then opened fire on anyone in the street, causing a large number of deaths. Both Fashlum and Tajura are suburbs of the Libyan capital.
The latest reports from Libya, as of the end of the day there on Monday, suggest a full-scale civil war. Gaddafi appears to be fighting for his life — literally, not just his political life — by ordering security forces to fire on unarmed demonstrators and ordering his military to attack certain military bases. This suggests that the military has already split, perhaps along the tribal lines that remain critical in Libya. Libya is a serious oil producer and, predictably, world oil prices have spiked, going to $105 a barrel as I write — the highest price in three years. Meanwhile, a number of Libyan officials and ambassadors abroad have already defected, condemning Gaddafi’s use of murderous force.
This is the end of the Gaddafi regime, after an astonishing 42 years. It is hard to see how he and his sons can survive the next few weeks. If he uses enough force to prevail, the death toll (already in the hundreds) assures that further rebellions will be planned and will occur sooner rather than later.
The United States treated Gaddafi as an enemy due to his support for terrorism against us, until a rapprochement of sorts began under Pres. George W. Bush at the very end of 2003. Gaddafi, apparently scared by the American victory in Iraq, agreed to abandon terrorism and handed over his nuclear and missile programs (which now reside at a U.S. military base). He kept his part of bargain, and so did we — opening an embassy and after a few years sending an actual ambassador. (The ambassador has been out of Libya for a month, since WikiLeaks cables showed him telling the truth about Gaddafi’s rule.)
This has meant that American criticism of Gaddafi’s horrendous human-rights practices has been muted for the last eight years. But it’s time now to tell the whole truth, for the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators was not what we bargained for. The administration should call for his replacement and for a new government dedicated to using those oil revenues for the people of Libya rather than for Gaddafi’s bizarre and useless economic policies. Moreover, it should call for the isolation of the country and for immediate sanctions. Gaddafi must become an instant pariah for this continuing and unlimited use of deadly force against his people.
Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government. The sooner he falls, the better for Libyans. But he will leave behind a shattered land with no alternative government, no real political parties, and no experience with free elections, a free press, independent courts, or any of the building blocks of democracy. The one great asset, due to all that oil, is about $100 billion and perhaps more in financial reserves, so Libya — with a population of only about 6.5 million — need not have a future of underdevelopment and oppression. And that suggests another step the Obama administration should take right now: acting to keep Gaddafi’s bloody hands off those accounts.
One of the most surreal experiences of my life — even apart from having a ruptured appendix and emergency surgery in a Gaddafi-government clinic — was a spring assignment in Libya to lecture on the Roman ruins there (which are quite impressive, since the neglect and ensuing 40 years of sand have, in counterintuitive fashion, been a protective cocoon from Gaddafi’s far greater ravages).
It was like no other country I have ever visited: wet garbage and sewage in the streets; an oil-exporter with massive pot-holes and no asphalt to fix them; almost every room, office, or hallway in Tripoli with peeling paint, exposed wiring, and something broken; the airport a disaster; almost every human action a possible violation of some government statute.
And, of course, Gaddafi’s picture was everywhere — sometimes as the protector of Islam, sometimes a sort of new-age Stalin, sometimes as the spiritual leader of black Africa, always presented with a nauseating green backdrop. In fact, books, shirts, even simple packaging was green. Citizens were terrified and talked in whispers, often relating some of the strangest rumors imaginable: past calls to burn all violins, past calls for every citizen to raise chickens, past calls for bonuses for marrying black African nationals. I arrived the day Lionel Ritchie was playing a 20th-anniversary anti-American concert commemorating Gaddafi’s heroic resistance to the Reagan bombing.
In sum, Gaddafi seems to have managed to destroy almost everything he touched: infrastructure, normal human interaction, the energy industry, the media — every aspect of life bore his destructive handprint.
So what does his apparent departure portend? Some random thoughts:
1) This is the first totalitarian, collectivist terror state to topple in this period of Middle Eastern unrest, which raises the question of whether others (e.g., Syria, Iran) might also face the same fate as Tunisia and Egypt, despite their willingness to shoot and kill indiscriminately and ban the international press.
2) Gaddafi hated the United States. Anti-American propaganda was spoon-fed to the population hourly (I remember watching the evenings newsreels’ ad nauseam depictions of U.S. “crimes” in Iraq). We are disliked by some countries’ protesters for cozying up to Saudi, Tunisian, Egyptian, and Pakistani authoritarians; does it necessarily follow that we will be liked by the opponents of anti-American authoritarians? Does anti-anti-Americanism translate into pro-Americanism?
I doubt it. In 2006, I heard constantly from my minders and others that Gaddafi was installed through some sort of U.S./Zionist plot to impoverish Libya. In general, if the Middle East becomes more ‘democratic’ (as in plebiscites without constitutions), we should brace, at least in the beginning, for a grassroots outpouring of anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic venom, given what we have seen in various polls of popular opinion.
3) We were far less culpable than the Europeans in dealing with this monster — especially the British and Italians, who simply overlooked Libyans’ virtual imprisonment and looked for profits wherever possible.
4) The country has great natural beauty, a stunning coastline, a central location, untapped gas and oil reserves (Gaddafi’s incompetence often meant that oil was not so easy to extract and squander), incredible antiquities — and unlimited tourist and commercial potential should it ever embrace constitutional government.
5) Libyans seemed to me terrified of Egyptians, including the tens of thousands of illegal-alien Egyptians in their country. The oil fields in their lightly populated country are a little too near for their comfort to the border of the oil-needy, overpopulated Egyptian powerhouse. The oil-rich border regions between the two countries will be of interest in the days ahead.
6) What is the U.S. official policy in all this? Is there a consistent one? When it came to encouraging anti-theocratic protesters in Iran, our policy was not to meddle; then we meddled quite a lot in anti-authoritarian protests in Egypt. Cannot the administration at last state that it supports non-violent, gradual transitions to consensual government, institutionalized secular human rights, and an independent judiciary — regardless of whether the overthrown government was hard-right authoritarian or hard-left totalitarian or theocratic Islamist? Since all governments and figures in the Middle East seem transitory, it would be far better to establish a policy that is principled and constant, no matter the ideologies and authoritarians involved.
In other words, I think the Obama administration’s “reset” outreach to countries like Iran and Syria is moribund — as it should be. Oppressed peoples in nightmarish states do not care to hear of our efforts to reach out to their oppressors, multiculturalism or no multiculturalism.
VICTORIA, BC, Fri Feb 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Robert Latimer, who was convicted of second-degree murder for killing his disabled daughter Tracy, says he has no regrets about the murder and in retrospect would do it again.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French language service, Latimer said, “I know I was right,” to kill 12-year-old Tracy, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
According to the CBC, this interview is the first public statement Latimer has made since he was granted full parole on Dec. 8, 2010.
Latimer has never expressed remorse for killing his 12-year-old daughter, and has maintained that he had acted “out of love” and that he had no choice but to kill her.
He told the CBC’s Anne-Marie Dussault that the decision to kill her was hard, “but it was not sad.”
“She’d had enough. That was it. We were done,” Latimer told Dussault.
When Tracy’s death was discovered, Latimer at first lied to police, saying that she had died in her sleep. He later confessed to police, who had done an autopsy, that he had killed his daughter by placing her in the cab of his truck and connecting a hose from the cab to the truck’s exhaust pipe. He also confessed to having considered other methods of killing Tracy, including Valium overdose and “shooting her in the head.”
Karl Rove and George W. Bush were right to look to William McKinley and his campaign manager Mark Hanna for inspiration. In their two winning campaigns against the charismatic and populist “boy orator,” William Jennings Bryan, the two pioneered many of the techniques political consultants and their clients have employed ever since. As president, McKinley introduced them into the art of governance.
A strong “sound money” and high-tariff man, McKinley helped make the United States a world power. The Spanish-American War, commenced and ended upon his own terms, proved a trial run for American participation in World War I. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency might have ended on a better note had he followed McKinley’s example of including the opposition party in the peace negotiations. Had he gone on reading, George W. Bush might have drawn some lessons from McKinley’s experience with the occupation of the Philippines. Unprepared for the insurrection that followed and unwilling to pay the price in manpower, money, and loss of standing in the world, Theodore Roosevelt put the archipelago on its path to independence.
See the homepage for a complete gallery of U.S. presidents.
Reports to the contrary, Florida governor Rick Scott still doesn’t want high-speed rail for Florida.
He issued a firm statement today, after reports circulated that he’d told U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson over the weekend that he’d reconsider his decision to turn down $2.4 billion in federal cash. Nelson and other supporters said they were looking at a number of schemes that would let the state off the hook for additional spending, including deficits. The main idea being circulated is a so-called “non-recourse entity,” possibly a public-private authority, which would issue tax-exempt bonds and finance the state’s share. A similar financing system was used for the Las Vegas monorail, currently in bankruptcy. Investors may get back about 33 cents on the dollar, and can’t go after the city, county, or state for the difference.
“I am absolutely not changing anything I believe in with regard to high-speed rail,” he was quoted as saying by First Coast News. “The high-speed rail is a project that we cannot afford as taxpayers. … I’m not willing to have our taxpayers take the risk of cost overruns for operating costs that we know won’t be covered by the fares, and then if it ever gets shut down we have to give the money back to the federal government. … I cannot imagine why we would ever pursue that.”
Local support for high-speed rail looks increasingly dim in other states as well. Freight-rail companies in North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington State are objecting to the expropriation of their trackage by planned rail service. Like Scott, Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio have turned down federal funds. In California, which originally looked like a sure thing, some municipalities are objecting to costs and mismanagement as the price tag grows, and commuter-rail users in the Bay Area fear its being built at the expense of current transit. According to Fred Frailey of Trains magazine, the only major high-speed-rail project actually under way is “in Illinois, where Union Pacific is upgrading track to permit three 110-mph round trips between Chicago and St. Louis, reducing travel time by as many as 48 minutes from the current schedules of roughly 5 hours 30 minutes. Federal grants will finance almost all of this $1.1 billion undertaking.”
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton will oversee the National Institute for Civil Discourse in Arizona, sparked by the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. But history shows it faces an uphill battle.
What’s so civil about the red-faced, rage-filled Bill Clinton? The guy tried to blame Oklahoma City on Rush Limbaugh. Using both the bully pulpit and his proxies, he constantly implied that his critics were either racists, sexual deviants, corrupt, or all three. His minions brought us such gems of civil discourse as: “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, and you never know what you’ll find.” Clinton had the gall to subsequently tout his own “moral fiber” while denouncing his critics as “sleazy,” telling Peter Jennings: “You never had to live in a time when people you knew and cared about were being indicted, carted off to jail, bankrupted, ruined, because they were Democrats and because they would not lie. So, I think we showed a lot of moral fiber to stand up to that.”
Of course, they were lying. Lying — wagging one’s finger and flat-out lying – also is not traditionally considered part of civil discourse.
That GHW Bush is willing to lend his name and credibility to such an exercise illustrates why the kind of prep-school Republicanism he stands for is dead and unmourned.
Jefferson’s is a double legacy: one living, the other dead. The apostle of liberty lives: The words of the man who, Lincoln said, worked out “the definitions and axioms of free society” will last as long as freedom does.
But the other Jefferson, the sage of Enlightenment, is now a curiosity: In his own lifetime, Burke and the French Revolution revealed the flaw in his brave-new-world rejection of tradition. Yet Jefferson’s belief that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and that “the dead have neither powers nor rights over it” still does much harm, for it encourages the temporal provinciality that disfigures the modern democracies. Jefferson’s futurism — which curiously enough was at odds with his own practice in the spheres of manners and the arts — begets the sort of culture which, being too little nourished by the soils of the past, made Tocqueville say that “among democratic nations each generation is a new people.”
See the homepage for a complete gallery of U.S. presidents.
— Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal.
Bernard Nathanson, M.D., a co-founder of what is now NARAL ProChoice America, has died at age 84. He famously had a change of heart. R.I.P. — thank you for what you revealed.
Madison, Wis. — Tom Morello, the Grammy Award–winning guitarist best known for his work with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, tells National Review Online that he is ready to tangle with the Tea Party as Gov. Scott Walker (R., Wis.) battles the public-sector unions.
“This is not about the Tea Party,” Morello says in an interview on the steps of the state capitol, where he plans to lead an afternoon rally. “There were more people walking their dogs around the capitol then there were Tea Party people here the other day, and they got half the news. It’s ridiculous.” He adds, jokingly: “Put up your dukes, Tea Party!”
“My message [to Walker] is, look in the streets,” Morello says. “There are tens of thousands of working people here every day saying that they are not going to be shafted.”
Joel Kotkin at Forbespoints out that users of cash-strapped commuter transit in California are voicing opposition to high-speed rail:
One can of course expect that anti-spending conservatives will be the biggest cheerleaders for high-speed rail’s decline.
But transit advocates may be forced to join the chorus of opposition, in order to steer transit spending towards more basic priorities as buses in Los Angeles, subways in New York or commuter rail in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More opposition is emerging in the legislature, where a bill has been proposed that would, if signed into law, fire the people currently in charge of the project:
All nine board members of the controversial California High-Speed Rail Authority may have to find new jobs if a bill introduced Friday by state Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) is signed into law.
The bill, SB 517, would disband the beleaguered group and replace it with members who have specific expertise, and who agree to new ethical requirements and are subject to more administrative accountability.
This past Friday, the Washington Postreported that the Obama administration has rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect health-care providers who refuse to provide care they find morally objectionable. Specifically, the regulation would have cut off federal funding to health-care providers that fail to accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they feel violates their religious beliefs. Now, the only part of the regulation left intact is the conscience protection for doctors and nurses who do not want to directly perform surgical abortions or sterilizations.
This move is unsurprising. Many Democrats strongly opposed these regulations when President Bush put them in place in 2008. They claimed the regulations would make contraceptives less available by providing legal protection to federal employees and grant recipients with moral objections to contraceptive use. Shortly after President Obama took office, administration officials said they felt the regulation was too broad and announced plans to rescind it.
However, the timing is interesting. It is well known that supporters of legal abortion have had a rough few weeks: First Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell was charged with eight counts of murder for using scissors to kill babies delivered alive in his abortion mill; then Live Action Films released a series of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood employees eagerly assisting a pimp seeking care for underage prostitutes — in some cases as young as 14. And on Friday, of course, the House voted 240–185 to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.
This decision to rescind the Bush-era conscience regulations might be an attempt by President Obama to shift focus from abortion to contraception as the effort to defund Planned Parenthood works its way through the Senate. This is a strategy that has been pushed by Cristina Page and a number of other pro-choice activists. Planned Parenthood’s supporters in the mainstream media have done something similar in response to the past few weeks’ bad publicity, emphasizing Planned Parenthood’s role in dispensing contraceptive to low-income earners.
Regardless, the administration’s decision is disappointing. In recent years, medical professionals have had to confront a wider range of sanctity-of-life issues, and conscience laws needed to be updated to reflect this. For instance, conscience laws protect health-care workers who do not wish to participate in surgical abortions, but pharmacists who do not wish to dispense abortifacients, which trigger early-term abortions, have little in the way of protection. The passage of Obamacare, which will increase the amount of federal control over the health-care industry, makes conscience protections even more important.
House Republicans have introduced several pieces of legislation containing provisions that would replicate many of the effects of these Bush era regulations, which is a welcome development, but right now Republicans should focus on Planned Parenthood funding, where they have more leverage — for Planned Parenthood to receive federal funding, a Republican-controlled Congress must first appropriate funds.
In addition to leverage, the Republicans have a strong case to make. Just last summer, a GAO audit could account for only $657.1 million out of $2.3 billion in federal funds that Planned Parenthood received between 2002 and 2009. Live Action’s undercover videos have shown a consistent and nationwide pattern of illegal activity — indeed, Planned Parenthood employees have appeared willing to ignore parental-involvement laws, have failed to report instances of statutory rape, and have refused to report sex trafficking of minors. Republicans should not allow their opponents to recast this debate as one about contraception — after all, Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider. The Senate would do well to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. House and vote to defund Planned Parenthood.
— Michael New is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.
The most neglected virtue in modern life is thrift. Coolidge, however, understood that thrift gives us the miracle of plenty. An old-fashioned Vermonter, he also understood that thrift took devotion. What I’ve come to discover in researching a biography of Coolidge is that he made a religion of thrift and became its prophet. As a result, Coolidge achieved something Reagan did not: Coolidge left office in 1929 with a smaller budget than the one that greeted him when he came in.
For Coolidge, no savings was too small to overlook. Recently William Jenney, the archivist for the state of Vermont at the Coolidge homestead, pulled out for me an old looseleaf notebook. It contained the White House housekeeper’s journal of outlays for White House entertainment. The White House, even then, received tens of thousands of visitors a year; the Coolidges hosted Col. Charles Lindbergh and Ignacy Padereweski, the pianist and politician. There were many days when Coolidge shook 2,000 hands. But he also kept an eye on the budget. For 1926, the housekeeper itemized each purchase for each event; the total was $11,667.10. For 1927 she managed to get the amount down to $9,116.39. The president reviewed this and wrote her a note: “To Miss Riley, very fine improvement.”
See the homepage for a complete gallery of U.S. presidents.
— Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man, is at work on a forthcoming biography of Calvin Coolidge.
Wisconsin has emerged as the latest battleground over which policies are best for the nation’s future. Who will determine the size of government? What will control the explosion of debt that threatens the foundations of prosperity and freedom?
Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation would, among other things, change the nature of collective bargaining for government employees:
· In the absence of a referendum, any general employee (non–public safety) is limited to bargaining over a percentage increase in total base wages no greater than Consumer Price Index inflation.
· Elections for union representation take place annually, with the effect that a union is decertified at the end of the collective-bargaining-agreement term unless it is reelected as the bargaining representative for the bargaining unit.
· In addition, no collective-bargaining agreement may be for longer than one year and no agreement may be extended.
· For non–public safety employees, automatic payment of dues is eliminated and no one may lose his job for non-payment of union dues.
Walker’s legislation would also require greater (but still well below private-sector-level) employee contributions to retirement systems and health benefits.
The bill simultaneously addresses two key issues: ensuring that voters determine the size of the government that they must fund, and addressing the debt that threatens the state’s future. These same issues are central to the federal debate in Washington and in many other states:
Reforming collective bargaining is crucial because it does not work well in the public sector. Unlike the private sector, there are not naturally opposed interests. Instead, elected officials have proven to be too willing to trade increased wages and benefits for union political support. Voters’ interests should not be trumped by political incentives and union payoffs.
Fixing incentives requires aligning political terms and collective-bargaining agreements. Benefits are often not paid for until years after they have accrued, making it too easy for elected officials to grant benefits and kick the can down the road. Collective bargaining should be limited to that which is visible now (wages), and no increase should exceed the change in the cost of living. (Unlike private-sector bargaining, there is no pool of increasing profits to share with employees who may have helped secure them; there are only increased taxes.) Further, it balances the ease of electing a union and that of decertifying a union. The governor’s approach turns the two processes into one annual event and keeps agreements short so that they cannot overlap elected terms of office.
Controlling the debt explosion requires getting pension and health benefits under control — exactly the same issues that face the federal government:
· According to the Pew Foundation, Wisconsin has the fourth-largest unfunded pension liability per resident. The unfunded pension liabilities are over $77 billion.
· According to the Tax Foundation, for the past three decades Wisconsin’s state and local tax burden has consistently ranked among the nation’s highest. The state and local tax burden (as a percentage of income) currently ranks ninth nationally.
· It would take a 326 percent increase in the current $4,194 taxpayer burden per capita to eliminate the $13,690 unfunded liability per resident — making the overall tax burden 41.3 percent of income.
· Alternatively, to immediately close the shortfall would require raising the sales tax from 5 percent to 99.8 percent!
Of course, not all the current shortfall would need to be eliminated in the first year. But unless future growth in the shortfall is eliminated, no feasible plan for controlling the state budget can emerge.
From afar, the issues that have generated so much attention in Wisconsin may appear unique to that state. Upon review, they are the same issues that dominated the November election and the debate in Washington: What is the right size and scope of government, and how can the debt be brought under control?
The protests in Wisconsin pose a challenge to President Obama. On the one hand, he’s long wanted to kick-start a movement of the left that would power his transformative agenda. On the other hand, Obama never meant that movement to foreground an unsympathetic protagonist like public employee unions. Obama could benefit from taking open leadership of this new left-populist movement, thus steering it in a more advantageous direction. Yet that would strip away his “post-partisan pragmatist” veneer and foreground his leftism instead. If Obama keeps the new movement at arms length, however, its direction is liable to harm him.
Obama’s ideal would have been to steer (from a distance) an anti-business populist movement of the left. In a 2009 interview with Business Week, Obama defended himself against charges of being an “anti-business radical” by saying that his job was to “channel” the “populist energy” of Americans “cynical” about business in a constructive direction. In other words, in the wake of the financial crisis, Obama was hoping to have a populist anti-business movement of the left at his back. That would allow him to present himself to America’s businesses as the good cop who would save them from the rabble’s wrath, if only they would play ball with his proposed restructuring of the economy. That dynamic enabled Obama to pass his financial reform bill, and to coopt the insurance companies into his health-care reform plan as well. Despite Obama’s efforts to stir up yet more wrath against Wall Street “fat cats,” however, a genuine anti-business movement never took off. Instead, Obama’s own policies were marked as anti-business, and he took the blame for the bad economy.
Now Obama’s got his populist movement of the left, but it’s not one focused on anger at American business. It’s heroes instead are pampered public employee unions, and that is not the way to appeal to a broad swathe of the American public. Obama’s huge stimulus bill was tailored to help these public employee unions, but that was never openly emphasized. Now the stimulus has given birth to the Tea Party, which has blocked more state bailouts and moved to pare back out-of-control public unions. And this, in turn, has created a counter-movement among one of the least popular segments of Obama’s core constituency.
So Obama is in an awkward position. He wants and needs a movement of the left, to bring out his voters and to power his transformative agenda. But to be effective, that movement has got to be broader-based than what we’re seeing in Wisconsin. One solution would be for the president to step out in front of the movement and gather every element of the left’s fragmented spectrum together under the same banner. Obama could take the focus off of Wisconsin and put it back on planned Republican spending cuts in Washington. For example, Obama could rally women’s groups alarmed at proposed GOP cuts to Planned Parenthood to join with public employee unions and other elements of the left in a grand movement against alleged Republican cruelty. But if Obama were to take the lead in such a campaign, it would turn him into a polarizing figure of the left, exactly what got him shellacked in 2010.
On the other hand, if Obama stays quiet and lets things take their own course, he could wind up being dragged down by the unsympathetic public employee unions now taking de facto control of his side’s message.
What Obama is hoping for now, I think, is a shut-down of the federal government. That would help him put Wisconsin into a broader context of battles against Republican ambitions to shrink government. The best GOP counter to this would be continuing resolutions in Washington that avoid a shut-down and keep the focus on the battle over public employee unions in the states.
As I show in Radical-in-Chief, the dream of Obama’s community organizing mentors was to jump-start a populist anti-business movement of the left that could be quietly guided from behind by socialists. At one point Obama’s mentors even sponsored a “Big Business Day” designed to launch a permanent anti-business movement, in the same way that Earth Day launched the ecology movement. The reform plans Obama’s mentors had in mind were very much like the ones that he himself has proposed today. Obama’s strategy, I argue, has always been a “movement strategy.” But the longed-for anti-business movement never materialized, and we’re faced now with an unattractive and defensive public-labor-based movement instead. That puts Obama in a bind. Either he steers the movement toward more broad-based left-goals and constituencies (at the cost of his “moderate pragmatist” persona), or he risks being pulled down by an unsympathetic movement he effectively created, but cannot control.
Unsurprisingly, Israel is to blame, according to the government in Tripoli. From Al Jazeera:
On top of its military response, the Gaddafi regime is trying to paint the revolt as a foreign plot to destabilise the country – a tool used by many other Arab regimes. After a long history of colonisation by Western powers and by Israel in the Palestinian territories, Arab people are deeply mistrustful of foreign interference.
The official Libyan News Agency (JANA) reported Sunday that the government was fighting an Israeli-inspired scheme to create anarchy in the country. It said that there were no genuine popular grievances behind the protests.
Israel is financing “separation” forces in the Arab region, JANA added.
Al-Shams newspaper, which is controlled by an arm of the information ministry in Tripoli, reported online that the government has exposed “foreign network elements” in several Libyan cities.
Reuters has a flash report quoting British foreign minister William Hague, who says he has seen intelligence that suggests Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has already fled the capital in Tripoli and is en route to Venezuela. The New York Times had previously reported that Qaddafi’s grip on power was slipping:
The 40-year-rule of Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi appeared to teeter Monday as his security forces retreated to a few buildings in the Libyan capital of Tripoli where fires burned unchecked, senior government officials and diplomats announced defections, and the country’s second-largest city remained under the control of rebels.
Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi defended a handful of strategic locations, including the state television headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses reported from Tripoli. Fires from the previous night’s rioting burned at many intersections, most stores were shuttered, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas.
In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials — including members of the the Libyan mission to the United Nations — announced their resignations. And protesters in Benghazi, the city where the revolt began, issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.
Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi waved green flags as they rallied in Tripoli’s central Green Square Monday under the protection of a handful of police, these witnesses said. But they constituted one of the few visible signs of government authority around the capital.
Meanwhile Al-Jazeera is reporting that Libyan protesters are now being bombed by military jets.
Stay tuned at Egypt Watch for the latest on protests around the Middle East.
Drew Ryun from America’s Majority e-mails as he waits for his connecting flight to Madison:
On Thursday of last week, local tea parties in Wisconsin asked if American Majority could help organize a counter rally in Madison. We said yes and 48 hours later, the American Majority “I Stand With Walker” rally was held. We were hoping for 5,000 people on such short notice. Over 10,000 people showed to let Governor Walker know that they stand with him in his fight against the public sector unions. We also launched a petition website in support of Scott Walker, www.IStandWithWalker.com. In a matter of hours we gathered thousands of signatures from across the United States. In the midst of all this, the narrative written by the local media, Fox News, CNN, ABC News and other outlets has been: it’s American Majority and the tea party versus the public sector unions. We accept the challenge and like the odds. We know the American Taxpayer is with us and we’ve already launched efforts to beat the public sector unions in other states.
Drew and his brother Ned — sons of former Kansas congressman Jim Ryun, Christians with a real passion for and commitment to politics — started America’s Majority three years ago as a grassroots training organization. According to Drew: “Having held 360 trainings in 44 states the past 18 months, we have ID’d, trained, and filed to run 1,200 candidates, from school board to the federal level.” He says they have also trained over 13,000 activists.
About Wisconsin, Drew e-mails: “Make no mistake. This is the opening salvo of the 2012 election season. It’s the public-sector unions versus the grassroots strength of the Tea Party.”
As I mentioned, Massachusetts Republican senator (still odd to write) Scott Brown’s new book, Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances, is in bookstores today. In it, as you may have heard, Brown describes being sexually abused by a camp counselor and preyed on by an older kid. But Scott Brown is not a pity-me guy, and this is not a pity-me book. He sums up the moral of his story: “The life I have led has, I hope, given me perspective, shown me the value of a second chance, of working for a greater good. Like those gossamer links of the spiderweb, each facet strengthens and reinforces the other.”
In no particular order, here are some outtakes from the new book by Senator Brown of Massachusetts:
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTER: Scott Brown got Joe Biden’s endorsement — well, after the election, anyway. Days after the vice president’s infamous off-color hot-mic incident, Biden gave Brown a tour of the White House. “Scotter” (what Biden called the senator-elect when he called him election night) made an off-color joke playing on it in return, and Biden announced: “You’re a wise guy, senator. I like that. We’re going to get along just fine.”
PRIMETIME LIVE: American Idol “has not been the same without Paula.” (Brown’s daughter competed in season five of the show. Brown writes that “Paula in particular was wonderful to Ayla.”)
TOTAL RECALL: In a potentially awkward encounter at the Palm with the Shriver family, Brown was much more excited to meet the Terminator than the governor of California.
MORAL ISSUE: Our current “level of government spending, where the taxpayers are stuck with the bill, is immoral.”
FATHER’S DAY: “Please measure me by my family. I can’t take the credit, but I couldn’t be more proud.”
CALL OF DUTY: He writes about being a JAG lawyer: “Some of the most difficult days I had were the mobilization exercises: I had to prepare men and women, some young and some no longer young, to go overseas, and after 9/11, to go overseas to war. … For myself, and for other of my friends in the Guard, there’s a feeling of somehow not doing our part because we have not been called to extended active duty. For years, I’ve wished that I too could go over and serve, but, like all soldiers, I go where I am ordered.”
SERVING TEA: “I am proud that the January 2010 Massachusetts special election inspired candidates around the country to run for seats the following November. Would-be candidates and volunteers who might otherwise have sat on the sidelines got involved in the process. That is what we need to have a vibrant democracy. If my run for the U.S. Senate helped to motivate them, I am deeply proud of that.”
HOT STUFF: His first meeting in Washington, D.C., as a candidate for Senate was with John Bolton.
DIAL IN: A call into The Laura Ingraham Show in late November 2009 brought in $12,000 to his campaign.
DOWN TO THE WIRE: The morning after he won his state senate race in 2004, his wife’s television news station was reporting that he lost. “Well, that’s not what the Associated Press is reporting,” her editor protested. “I’m here with my husband,” the well-sourced reporter countered. “He won.”
It is no coincidence that the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government, a non-standing member of the U.N. Security Council and an Iranian subsidiary, sponsored a resolution last Friday condemning Israeli housing construction in the disputed territories. The anti-Israel-resolution activity diverted the U.N. Security Council from passing resolutions against such authoritarian regimes as Iran and Libya for shooting their citizens and suppressing pro-democracy efforts.
Arab despots — and Iran’s regime — have a tried-and-true method for deflecting attention from their profoundly anti-democratic and repressive political systems: Formulate a U.N. resolution to condemn the Jewish State and its vibrant democracy. The fact that EU countries — for example Germany, which asserts that Israel’s national security is integral to German interests — joined the diplomatic assault on Israel is nothing short of a major body blow to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
The resolution placed the Obama administration in a bind, especially in light of its having made the U.N. the cornerstone of its foreign policy, notwithstanding the organization’s inability to define terrorism or stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and its anti-Israel obsession. But in the end, the president knew that the resolution would be a death knell to the peace process — because instead of negotiating over what are clearly final-status issues, like settlements, the U.N. would have decided outcomes in advance — so the administration vetoed the resolution (with “regret”) over the votes of the 14 remaining council members. But the mere fact that the resolution got this far is a stark indication of the Obama administration’s foreign-policy impotence.
President Obama consumed an hour on the telephone in an attempt to convince Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw the anti-Israel resolution, but was snubbed, in what will surely be one of the more humiliating memories he takes from office. And the Palestinian leader isn’t finished. The veto in the Security Council now opens the door for a so-called resumed emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly. That would be almost the 20th time that the “10th” emergency session has been “resumed” since 1997. In all those years, there has never been a U.N. General Assembly emergency session on any other subject, genocides and horrors around the world notwithstanding. Abbas wants another one, which he will probably get, about Israeli construction.
The explanation U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice gave to the Security Council after casting her negative vote neatly captured the Obama administration’s Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde approach to the Jewish State. Instead of taking the opportunity to mention the critical problems unfolding in the Middle East — the agenda item was called “The Situation in the Middle East, Including The Palestinian Question” — she labeled Israel’s home-building “folly and illegitimacy” and castigated our only democratic ally in the region as “devastat[ing] trust . . . and threaten[ing] the prospects for peace.” Make no mistake, Iran, Libya, Algeria, and the rest of the thugs brutalizing their populations took notice. After all, this took place in the U.N. body with ultimate responsibility for protecting international peace and security.
The U.N.’s pathological obsession with turning Israel into a diplomatic punching bag was well known before the vote. But there is no excuse for the United States, or Britain, France, and Germany, to legitimize the spectacle.
“I was angry, angry all the time,” Massachusetts Republican senator Scott Brown writes in his new book, Against All Odds. “I was the kid looking for a fight, and if I wasn’t looking, I certainly wouldn’t shrink from one.”
He was angry for a host of legitimate, traumatic reasons, as he tells in the story of his youth. Abandoned by his father. Stuck living with a series of his mother’s husbands, none of them pleased by the instant family that came with her — when not sent away as a charity case, to live with cousins. Mental abuse. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse.
The latter was at a Christian camp, of all places, perhaps an insight into why Brown writes, “I’ve never felt that I needed a church,” despite a closeness to God and reliance on prayer.
But his book, released this week, isn’t the story of anger. It’s the story of overcoming it, getting beyond it, rejecting victimhood.
And it’s the story of gratitude. During his 60 Minutes interview Sunday, Leslie Stahl glossed over one of the most powerful testimonies in his 325-page book: the impact of invested teachers, a judge, and a coach.
He could have been a juvenile delinquent, and almost became one: Brown wound up in the Salem, Mass., courthouse, in front of Judge Samuel Zoll, a Korean War veteran, after being caught stealing records.
When Judge Zoll, who took an interest in him, learned that Brown was a show-off basketball player, he asked him if his sister and other half-siblings ever watched him play. It was all more complicated than the young Brown wanted to explain, but Brown told him, “A lot of times they try to.”
Zoll asked: “Do they look up to you?” Brown told him: “Yeah, they look up to me. I’m the guy who tries to keep everybody together.”
“Wow. That’s great,” Zoll told Brown. “How do you think they will like seeing you play basketball at the local house of correction? Because that’s where you’re going. You’re on your way to jail right now, as evidenced by the way you went in and stole those records. You really didn’t care about the businesses that had to work hard to pay their employees and the fact that you took something that wasn’t yours.”
Bingo.
“It was as simple as that,” Brown writes. “I know now how I seemed to Judge Zoll on that morning: lost, poised to go horribly wrong, but with potential. And in those moments he decided that I was worthy of help.”
The sentence the judge gave Brown was to write a 1,500-word essay on “How I disappointed my brother and sisters and how I think they would like to see me play basketball in jail.”
Brown writes: “I slaved over that essay with the same determination that I pounded my baseball into the concrete wall or my basketball against the backboard. I sat in my room on Salem Street and wrote and recopied, wrote and recopied. … It gave me time to think abut my coaches, about Brad and Judy, and how I had disappointed them.”
Judge Zoll spent half an hour reviewing the essay with Brown, who recalls being in the judge’s chambers when he said, “This is very, very good. And I’m going to give you a break.” But, he sternly warned: “This is the only break you’ll get from me in your life.”
“He verbally kicked my butt,” Brown remembers.
Zoll clearly made an impact. When Brown found a stapler he mistakenly hadn’t paid for when buying Senate-campaign supplies at a Staples, he went back in and insisted it be rung up and paid for. He knew he owed a debt, in more ways than one.
The Brad and Judy he mentions were a coach and an eighth-grade social-studies teacher who literally invested in him, paying for him to go to basketball camp. Miss Patterson “was not afraid to rein me in,” he writes. One day, he was rotten to an unpopular girl at school, and she “grabbed me by my long hair, pulled me into her classroom, and slammed the door shut,” he remembers. And she let him have it, as they say. “You’ve got everything in the world going for you. You’re tall, you’re good-looking, you’re athletic. You could be smart if you put your mind to it. But you’re a jerk. How dare you say that to that poor girl? How do you think she’s going to feel now for the rest of her life?”
That teacher had got to him, much like the judge would. “I was the kid who always felt like a loser,” he remembers. And “she was the first person in a long time who actually cared.”
Brown goes on to write about Brad, who modeled what he could be — a happy, responsible, upstanding family man (Brad and Judy would subsequently get married), “so full of life and enthusiasm.” Senator Brown also writes about Brad’s assistant coach, who “expected everything from me — rebounding, passing, scoring. He drilled us all, every day, and he took no crap from anyone. Instead, he goaded me with possibilities.”
The challenge, the vote of confidence, the loving investment. Some Wisconsin public-school teachers may be giving teachers a bad name these days, but teachers can save lives. True servants can and do — in the classroom, on the court, in the courtroom.
And after Judge Zoll was done with Scott Brown, Brown got a sensible haircut, too.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters agree more with the Republican governor in his dispute with union workers. Thirty-eight percent (38%) agree more with the unionized public employees, while 14% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
One of the most underreported stories about the pro-democracy movement in Egypt was the role of labor unions in the demonstrations, many of which were protesting against neoliberal right-wing economic policies just as much as they were protesting against the Mubarak dictatorship. During the uprising in that country, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka praised the role of organized labor, saying, “The people’s movement for democracy in Egypt and the role unions are playing for freedom and worker rights inspires us and will not be forgotten.”
Now, as tens of thousands of union members and other Wisconsin residents are taking to the streets to protest against Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attempt to abolish collective bargaining rights for most public workers, a leader of Egypt’s largest umbrella group of independent labor unions is praising the Wisconsin movement. In a videotaped statement, Kamal Abbas, the General Coordinator of the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services, tells the Wisconsin protesters, “We stand with you as you stood with us.” He says “no one believed” that the revolution against the Mubarak regime would succeed, yet they were able to bring the dictator down within 18 days. He encourages demonstrators to stay strong, saying, “Don’t give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights” …
Last week, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said there are “similarities” between the movements in Egypt and Wisconsin, in that “that people are wanting to be heard, and they are taking direct action.” Additionally, Ian’s on State Street, a pizza place near the Wisconsin capitol building, has been taking orders from Egypt for Wisconsin activists. While the actions that Walker and Mubarak are taking are far from directly analogous, many demonstrators have taken to drawing satirical comparisons. Following Walker’s threat to call in the National Guard to deal with a labor strike, activists launched the site Mini Mubarak, humorously comparing the governor’s threat to the actions of the now-resigned Egyptian autocrat.
It’s amusing to read how Mr. Jilani takes care to note that such comparisons are “satirical” or “humorous.” Such jibes may not always be in good taste, but they are a natural part of vigorous political debate. They are indeed nothing to fret about.Nevertheless, how, uh, interesting that the folks at Think Progress chose this particular moment to remember that fact.
I was also relieved to read that Zaid Jilani believes “that the actions that Walker and Mubarak are taking are far from directly analogous.” I’d have preferred something on the lines of them “having absolutely nothing in common,” but I guess I’ll take what [Think] Progress I can …
Public employees in Wisconsin are paid and pensioned far better than their counterparts in the private sector. The state is facing multi-billion-dollar deficits. The old calculus that employees in the public sector are paid a bit less since they have job security and work for the community at large seems topsy-turvy: Now they are paid more and are fraudulently calling in sick to go on strike, apparently in the belief that lay-offs or higher taxes for others are preferable to themselves paying modest increases for their most generous benefits. In response, the protesters, in the new age of civility, carry signs comparing the governor to Nazis, along with the usual Hitler motifs. And finally, the President of the United States, after running up in his first three years the largest deficits in American history, now weighs in on a local matter — both to chastise the governor for doing the sort of tough cutting the president will not (given that he can print money and Americans do not have the option of fleeing to lower-tax states to avoid increased federal tax “fees”), and to show solidarity with the protesters who are engaging in just the uncivil “get in their face,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” and “punish” their “enemies” modes of expression that the president in his Tucson speech warned against.
Niall Ferguson writes in Newsweek that the federal government needs to begin selling assets to pay off its massive debt, as some state governments have done (such as Indiana selling one of its highways) to help balance their budgets. Ferguson points to land and other physical assets the federal government might sell, but I’ve always thought the fiscal crisis would eventually lead to the expanded production of oil and gas in the U.S., such as on the “sacred” space of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Some economists estimate that the federal government would collect more than $1 trillion in royalties from expanded oil and gas production on public lands. At some point, even liberals will have to decide whether they want to continue to backstop environmentalists, or preserve the welfare state from complete collapse. Faced with such a choice, I think the welfare state will win.
Governor Scott Walker has already achieved something significant in Wisconsin—by focusing on both the level of government-worker benefits and their power to bargain collectively for those benefits, he has brought union officials and (apparently) many public employees in his state to say that they would accept benefit cuts. They are taking their stand, instead, on the power to bargain collectively for future benefits (rather than only for wages). This, union officials (as well as many observers around the country, including President Obama) insist is a basic right, and the effort to curtail it is (in Obama’s words) “an assault on unions” that would leave workers unprotected. And anyway, they argue, collective-bargaining rights have nothing to do with the problems confronting Wisconsin and other states.
But this ignores the crucial differences between public and private workers—differences that give public employees enormous advantages over both their employers and their private-sector counterparts, and that argue against collective bargaining in the public sector. Daniel DiSalvo very ably and thoroughly explains some of those differences here.
Put simply, public employees (even when they are not organized, let alone able to bargain collectively) have some major advantages over their private-sector counterparts. They are guarded by generous civil-service protections—the most significant of which predate public-sector unionism, having been put in place, ironically, to combat the inclination of urban political machines to use the public sector as a powerbase. And most government employees work in non-competitive fields where their employer has a monopoly, so their jobs are not threatened by competitors, and are not dependent on their ability to work efficiently and so keep their employer competitive.
When they organize—merely as an interest group, quite apart from formal collective bargaining—they have several more immense advantages. By leveraging their numbers and resources, their organizations can become major players in politics. At election time, public employees can therefore play a large role in choosing their own employers or bosses (by getting certain people elected and not others), which of course no private-sector union can do. At all levels of government today, public-worker unions are among the biggest political donors. Between elections, they can use that political power to influence those elected officials and the political process more generally to improve their pay, benefits, or conditions, and also to increase demand for their services through legislation that increases the size or role of government (as the California prison guards union was instrumental in passing the state’s three-strikes law, for instance) or that prevents competition (as the teachers’ unions do in opposing school-choice programs). In all these ways, public workers have enormous powers that private workers could not dream of, and all without actual formal collective bargaining.
When you add collective bargaining to that mix, the unions gain the power to make in private negotiations decisions that should be made in public deliberations—decisions about public priorities and public budgets. And they turn public employees into a formal procedural adversary of the public they serve. This presents some serious problems to our democratic system, problems that traditionally kept even the biggest advocates of unionism from supporting collective bargaining with the government. This is why Franklin Roosevelt said that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” It is why George Meany (the first president of the AFL-CIO) said it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
Public employees in many states (and to a limited extent also at the federal level) are nonetheless permitted to bargain collectively for precisely the reasons above: they gained that permission as their unions gained political power over the years. And they have often used their collective bargaining powers to increase not only their members’ pay (an increase which shows up rather directly and immediately in public budgets) but also their benefits, and especially retirement benefits (which often do not show up on the books for years and so are easier to get from cash-strapped public officials). As DiSalvo notes in his essay:
since 2002, for every $1-an-hour pay increase, public employees have gotten $1.17 in new benefits; private-sector workers, meanwhile, have received just 58 cents in added benefits. Of special interest to the unions has been health care: Across the nation, 86% of state- and local-government workers have access to employer-provided health insurance, while only 45% of private-sector workers do. In many cases, these plans involve meager contributions from employees, or none at all — in New Jersey, for instance, 88% of public-school teachers pay nothing toward their insurance premiums.
And many of these benefits continue to be provided to retired employees, not only current ones. This is why many governors eager to get their finances under control have had to start by confronting public employees, and it is why Wisconsin’s governor has targeted his efforts on one important cause of the problem—collective bargaining for benefits. Walker would not even strip state employees of the power to bargain collectively for wages, only for benefits which are easier to hide from the public. And he would not, of course, strip them of their other great advantages over private-sector workers, which are functions of their rights as citizens who also happen to be employed by the government they elect, and so could not be taken from them.
The notion that this involves an assault on some inalienable right to collective bargaining with the public is preposterous. Such collective bargaining is a privilege public workers have obtained by exercising their political muscle, and state officials around the country are right to try to roll it back to the extent they can.
In the long run, the real solution to the growing conflict between public employees and the public they work for is to limit the government’s size and reach and to contract out more of its remaining functions to the private sector, so as not only to increase the government’s efficiency but also to minimize the conflict between its obligations to the people it serves and its obligations to the people it employs. But in the meantime, it is also necessary and appropriate to pare back some of the enormous power built up by public workers over the past few decades.
Over at Developing, Katrina Trinko notes that Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican, is trying to craft a deal with the public-sector unions that would temporarily eliminate collective bargaining. On MSNBC’s Daily Rundown this morning, Gov. Scott Walker (R., Wis.) rejected the idea. “No,” he said. “We can’t do a short-term fix.” GOP senators, he added, remain supportive of his budget plan.
Even if moderate Republicans did move to support Mr. Schultz’s proposal, it is not clear that Democrats would accept it. On Sunday, Democratic senators emphasized that the elimination of bargaining rights should be taken off the table all together since the state’s public sector unions have accepted the governor’s concessions on increase pension and healthcare contributions to repair the current budget addressed by Mr. Walker’s bill.
Several senators also said a compromise on the bill that would sunset the collective bargaining provisions in 2013 would not be acceptable to Democrats. One reason is that Republicans will likely still be in control of both the state senate and assembly and simply extend the provisions. But a bigger reason, according to several senators, is that unions have already agreed to fix the fiscal issues.
UPDATE: In an interview with ABC News, Walker tells George Stephanopoulos that if the 14 state senators return, “we’d gladly talk to them.” But he is not ready to give an inch. “The bottom line is we are trying to balance our budget and there really is no room to negotiate on that because we’re broke,” he says.
The Corner Re: The Jews Are Doing It
Just as you had reports from Egypt that the Jews/Zionists/America infiltrated the protests at Tahrir Square, the state media of Libya . . .Go
The Feed Disgusting
Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.
"Racist!" . . .Go
Exchequer 50 Wisconsins
There are 49 more Wisconsins waiting to erupt. At least half the states are positioned to be bankrupted by their . . .Go
