You have probably been wondering where I have been and what I have been up to. That is certainly the idea I gather from your many questions on my facebook asking just that. I have been elusive in my answer, for many reasons, the best of which is that I myself did not know where I was (in a metaphysical sense) or what I had been up to. But now, I shall give you some answer.
You know, perhaps, that I finished college. Hooray! – for now I may attach letters (besides Jr.) to the end of my name. There’s a strange paradox to college; if you’ve been to college and done your studies you know that the act of going to college does not give really give you a great boost into the next step of existence (which some people jumped straight into, avoiding for a time, or for good, any further studies than that which is compulsory). Indeed, college doesn’t provide any great educational boost forward; education is a step-by-step process. That said, to my friends still working for a degree at college – stay there! It is for the experience of education, including all its facets of leadership, late-night study, and sometimes pointless classes that you are there.
So, I finished college, and when my temporary employer, the U.S. Census Bureau needed no further work from me, I moved to Washington (state). Some of you have asked me, how can “BDole” find a job for himself in his major, political science? I have picked on some of you, my friends, for studying in school, and upon completion of a commendable degree, to have no further inspiration than to continue to work as a checker at a market. Well, how can I find something permanent in politics? Politics, and political jobs, are temporary by nature, subject to election and/or funding. There can’t be a permanent “I have found my job in politics” answer.
Politics may be a temporary job by nature, but it is a permanent game, if game I can call it. Well! – I didn’t only wander off to Washington, leaving many of you behind, to golf. I came to see what I could see, and I found some answers – in politics. I am not, contrary to belief, running against Levi (Johnston) mayor; and although that was a joking guess, you who said that know me very well, for I dropped no hints. I am, in fact, campaigning for Kevin Van De Wege, incumbent state representative running for reelection. That means, therefore, that I am also campaigning for Steve Tharinger, a current county commissioner, who is candidate to replace the retiring majority leader in the state house of representatives.
Am I just puttering around doing odd jobs for the campaign? Well, yes. The primary just ended ended here, so work is just beginning to pick up. When I come back from my next mysterious vacation, 3,000 miles from Washington, I’ll go very happily into full-time mode, working as if politics is not a temporary job, but a job upon which our collective future depends.
I hope that answers some questions. What have I been doing? Now you know.
Blagojevich (the infamous Illinoisan “Blago”) not guilty of anything but lying to the Feds? And he could get 1-5 years? That’s fine. That’s all well and good. I don’t care much in any direction regarding Blago except this: Found guilty on one of twenty-four counts, and that one count being lying to the Federal government, under oath or not under oath, what about all those others who have lied, with ample public record to prove it? I don’t mean Clinton’s quip, to define what the meaning of is is, or other small misstatements. Take Alberto Gonzalez. Bush II. Former secratary Rice. Rumsfeld. When do they get 1-5 years for a little white lie, and charged on numerous other counts besides?
There are calls I can make; there are calls I cannot make. I can call and ask you to work, to volunteer, to put forth effort on behalf of a partisan candidate. I call and I remind you to vote. I encourage you to engage in civic duty. A hundred calls a day, sans effort.
And yet, you I cannot call. I cannot call thee, to say hello; how are you; my thoughts strayed in your direction; I wish I was there for another academic year; would you dance with me? None of this I can say. It is easy to call and ask you to vote, or volunteer, or ask where to acquire information or carry out an action. But you? No, you are not easy, and it is not your fault.
I wish I had called you those three hundred times and more. And not one of those calls to you. And my solution? Because I have not called you, it becomes ever harder to call. So I shall not call, but not for lack of [unintelligible], nor for lack of thought. It is, I fear, much harder than ’tis to call a person I shall never call again, and ask them to support an action I shall never know if they supported. It is, indeed, I fear, much harder.
This too,
There are some not-altogether-disjointed thoughts that I wish to comment on. Firstly, the title of this note is taken from a coworker of my mother’s, and is a quote by Voltaire. It does not have everything to do with what follows; I’m sure that, as a sound piece of advice, it has something to do with the proceeding thoughts…. These thoughts occurred to me as I sat listening to well-played music by my friend at a wine-cellar, and I am sure that my other friends will forgive me for clearly being so lost in thought that evening; that is what happens to me not infrequently when I go places where there is a crowd.
And so, a thought of mine is that humans are good. That’s it. That isn’t a revelation, and it has occurred to me and countless others before. I contend that humans do not wake up in the morning intending to do harm to other people (certainly not, in general). We mean well toward one another, I think.
I enjoy swing dancing, on occasion. I daresay I think too hard most of the time at swing dancing, both while dancing and not while dancing. Have you noticed the immunity with which the the guys dance with the guys, with which the girls dance with the girls? I do not complain, except for this, which is what crossed my mind as I listened to music that evening, and thought hard: Webb taught us to study relationships, but not to feel them. And so, you see, the complaint is not against other people, but against myself, for I did not – have not – learned to feel relationships, in the main. And that, of course, is foolish, because it is feelings, not thoughts, that create good dances and good physical connections – good relationships – with people.
We none of us understand one another, though we mean well. I can play causal game theory through a conversation (casual because I don’t really sit there and generate equations for each statement – although in some sense that’s exactly what we all do) rather well, and know some of the responses I might receive, or not receive, to any statement. But I can’t know, and no one can know, what’s on another person’s mind, or predict everything. We can’t really understand one another, certainly not completely. And yet, I contend that we mean well in our actions.
When we make decisions, are they independent decisions? What influences them? And, if they are influenced, are they independent decisions? Quite clearly, except for those of us who raised ourselves and learned to hunt and gather on our own, someone influenced our decisions growing up. They influenced our politics; they influenced our education; they influenced our decisions and our decisions were not completely independent. Does that mean we don’t have free will? No, it doesn’t. We can still have aspirations of our own, and act on them.
Do we have what it takes to act on our aspirations? Willpower. A girl asked me, sometime in my first or second year of college, how it was that I managed to not drink (alcohol). After all, there I was surrounded by an awful lot of people who drank, and when they finished drinking they would have another drink so they could forget that they were drinking. My answer was that it was easy, because it wasn’t what I wanted. When people were drinking, I had the willpower to say I’m not interested. It’s not hard, but it takes effort. Those statements aren’t contradictory; to put effort into something does not make it hard to do. Things require an input of something, of time, or energy, and it is not hard to have willpower. But it does take effort.
Why were all those people drinking their way through college? I don’t know. I do know that we don’t learn from generation to generation. That doesn’t mean we aren’t good, don’t mean well, or don’t have willpower; it doesn’t negate anything I have said thus far to say we don’t learn from generation to generation. We as a society don’t learn from generation to generation; that doesn’t mean there isn’t progress, like ending slavery or recognizing rights, but it means that we will try our same old methods to make the world function – the same energy supplies, the same economic system – because we don’t learn. And we don’t learn on an individual level either; obviously it’s harder to learn from generation to generation on an individual level because our life ends at some point, however, sitting there observing people drink wine in a wine cellar, listening to music, I could look across the generations and see those same people in a saloon in the the Wild West, or 1800’s France, or any number of places, or see them in the future. And the perception of these people, good people though they are, did not change much. There’s not much generational difference.
What responsibility do we have toward the well-being of other people? I don’t mean, what responsibility do we have to not act cruelly, but, what responsibility do we have to care about other people’s problems that are not directly our problems? Why should we solve the problems of others? If you have a politically long memory, which is hard to have in politics, the last time Obama nominated a Supreme Court justice there were ramblings about empathy. Empathy means feeling within, or the ability to understand another’s needs, emotions, or actions. A bad thing, for a judge, surely!
Among other reasons for solving problems that are not our own, we feel sorry for the person(s), and would not want the same to happen to us; and,we want there to be justice, and/or and a just solution; and, we must keep our own needs in mind, for while the problem did not begin as ours, we begin to care, and thus we absorb some of the problem; and, it is a rewarding experience to attempt to solve the problems of other people, because you feel you are doing an act of good; and many other reasons besides.
It’s no easy process, this empathy game (and it isn’t a game). It is a constant struggle to care, and concurrently understand what we are caring about, and to try to solve the problem by inferring solutions. We have to guess at the end-game, and guess at the process-game, all the while knowing what end we seek.
There are a lot of big words here. Not multisyllabic nonsense to sound important, but big words, with great meaning. Responsibility. Empathy. Inference. Experience (not mentioned, but not insignificant). These words have to do with our internal and external workings, our sensory data, and our perception of the world. They are quite important.
Please find time to read this entire speech by Al Franken. I don’t know whether to laugh or not that one of the most astute political minds in the country has been a comedian his entire career.
Well worth the read.
Thank you, Judy, for that introduction, and for your work on behalf of working Americans.
Thank you to Caroline Fredrickson for your leadership and for inviting me to speak here tonight.
Thank you all for being here tonight, and for the good work you do to defend the Constitution and the American values it represents.
It is an honor to address this convention.
Speakers at past ACS gatherings have included Supreme Court Justices, Attorneys General, other cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and distinguished legal scholars.
So tonight I guess we’ll finally get an answer to the question: “What do Stephen Breyer, Laurence Tribe, and Al Franken have in common?”
Other than: “They were all in the front row when the Dead played the Garden back in ’71.”
Tonight, we celebrate the rise of a new generation of progressive legal scholars and jurists.
Look to your left. Look to your right.
Odds are, at least one of the three of you will someday be filibustered by Senate Republicans.
Speaking of which, I’d like to give a special shout-out to all the filibustered nominees we have here with us tonight.
The Republican obstruction that is standing between you and the work you’ve agreed to do for your country is unacceptable. And we will continue to fight it.
In particular, I want to recognize Dawn Johnsen, who should be the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. What Republicans have done to keep you from doing that important job is flat out wrong.
And I want to recognize Goodwin Liu, who should be sitting on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals right now, and who deserves an up-or-down vote.
When I joined the Senate, I was thrown right into the fire as a member of the Judiciary Committee, where, by the way, I enthusiastically voted for Goodwin.
On my fifth day in office, I found myself taking part in the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Just like I am tonight, I was one of the few non-lawyers in the room, but I didn’t mind.
You see, I did some research, and it turns out that most Minnesotans aren’t lawyers, either.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t directly affected every day by what happens on the Supreme Court, and in our legal system.
I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to recognize that the Roberts Court has, consistently and intentionally, protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans.
And you certainly don’t need to be a lawyer to understand what that means for the working people who are losing their rights, one 5-4 decision at a time.
Tonight, I’d like to talk about how we got to this sad moment in American legal history – because it didn’t happen by accident.
Conservative activists – led by the Federalist Society – have waged a remarkably successful battle to re-shape our legal discourse, and thus our legal system.
And they’re not done yet.
I should acknowledge up front that this story is kind of a downer.
But there’s good news: the ending has not yet been written. And I really believe that, if we pay attention to how things got so bad, we’ll learn how to make them better.
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Federalist Society members have long believed that, if you change the way you talk about the law, you can change the law.
They are right.
If you listen to the U.S. Senate talk about judicial nominees, you’d be forgiven for thinking that originalism was a time-honored American value, one of the things we fought the British to protect.
But ironically enough, originalism – like the designated hitter – only dates back a few decades.
Indeed, as Cass Sunstein has pointed out, it was Robert Bork who first popularized the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted according to what we believe was the “original understanding” of its authors.
Just to clarify: That’s not Robert Bork the Founding Father. That’s Robert Bork the 20th century conservative legal activist.
Originalism isn’t a pillar of our Constitutional history. It’s a talking point.
During his confirmation hearing, John Roberts broke out another conservative talking point. He said: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” And he promised: “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
How ridiculous. Judges are nothing like umpires.
You know who agrees that judges are nothing like umpires? The guy who came up with the umpire analogy in the first place.
In 1886, in State v. Crittenden, a Louisiana Supreme Court Justice ruled that “a trial is not a mere lutte” – lutte is a French term for a wrestling match, as this analogy dates back to when baseball was a just a cult phenomenon – “a trial is not a mere lutte between counsel, in which the judge sits merely as an umpire to decide disputes which may arise between them.”
So, when it comes to this analogy, I guess I’m an originalist.
But this kind of bamboozlement is effective. You hear Senators of both parties rush to condemn judges who might “legislate from the bench.”
The end result is that people like Goodwin Liu – a brilliant, thoughtful, passionate young legal mind with a terrific life story and character references from the likes of Ken Starr – get tagged as dangerous radicals.
Look, say what you will about Ken Starr, but he’s not the sort of guy who pals around with dangerous radicals.
Well. Not left-wing radicals.
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The Federalist Society has changed the way we talk about judges – and the way we talk about justice.
Justice Souter once said: “The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we’re in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected.”
Conservatives would like us to forget this lesson.
They’ve distorted our constitutional discourse to make it sound like the Court’s rulings don’t matter to ordinary people, but only to the undeserving riff-raff at the margins of society.
So unless you want to get a late-term abortion, burn a flag in the town square, or get federal funding for your pornographic artwork, you really don’t need to worry about what the Supreme Court is up to.
The ACLU has a long and proud history of defending the First Amendment, and while I haven’t seen polling on this, I’d bet that most Americans are fairly pro-First Amendment. But, thanks to a generation of conservative activism, the ACLU is now best known as “those guys who hate Christmas.”
By defining the terms of constitutional debate such that it doesn’t involve the lives of ordinary people, conservatives have disconnected Americans from their legal system. And that leaves room for lots of shenanigans.
—
By controlling the conversation, the Federalist Society has moved the Supreme Court sharply to the right.
“Including myself,” Justice Stevens said in an interview with the New York Times, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”
And, indeed, the Roberts Court has overturned two principles I believe are deeply ingrained in our Constitution, in our legal tradition, and in our American values.
First: Judicial restraint.
As I have noted repeatedly – and in an increasingly exasperated tone of voice – over the last few years, Justice Thomas has voted to overturn federal laws more often than Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer combined.
They haven’t just been activists in their decisions, but also in their process.
In both Citizens United and Gross, the Court answered questions it wasn’t asked, reaching beyond the scope of what they accepted for appeal to overturn federal laws the conservative wing didn’t like.
I mean, I don’t speak Latin. But unless stare decisis means “overturn stuff,” then maybe it’s time for conservatives to stop calling other people “dangerous radicals.”
Second, and more importantly: They’ve overturned the principle that the law should be a place where ordinary people can turn for relief when wronged by the powerful.
At the front entrance to the Supreme Court building here in Washington, beneath the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW,” there’s a set of 1,300-pound bronze doors.
Countless Americans have flowed through those doors to see the place where that principle is protected.
Now those doors have been locked to the public. Things have changed.
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Supreme Court jurisprudence involves weighing competing interests.
Most Americans are familiar with cases in which the Court has had to balance individual rights against some compelling state interest.
It’s easy to feel disconnected from these cases. Even though the government has awesome power – enough to take away your freedom, or even your life – the degree to which that power is deemed to supersede your individual rights doesn’t really enter into the daily lives of most Americans.
But there’s more than one kind of power.
If you have a credit card, if you watch TV, if you file insurance claims, if you work – in other words, if you participate in American daily life at all – then you interact with corporations that are more powerful than you are.
The degree to which those corporations’ rights are protected over yours, well, that’s extremely relevant to your life.
And in case after case after case, the Roberts Court has put not just a thumb, but a fist, on the scale in favor of those corporations.
A fist with brass knuckles. Which weigh a lot. Because they’re brass.
It’s important to recognize that, for some conservative legal activists, this is the whole point. Do they want to undercut abortion and immigration and Miranda rights? Sure. But those are just cherries on the sundae.
What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation’s right to profit?
And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.
More than a century ago, in Lochner, the Court held that a state cannot intervene to protect the interests of an individual entering into a work relationship with an employer.
In other words, the Court held that employees should have to fend for themselves against the same powerful corporations they rely on for a paycheck.
Last month, Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate down in Kentucky, got into some hot water for suggesting that we really shouldn’t have used the law to force private businesses to stop discriminating against African-Americans, that the market would have eventually handled it.
My question was: In what year would the market have gotten around to doing that? 1965? 1967? 1987? 1997?
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act deals with the workplace, because your rights at work are civil rights.
And without legal protection, workers would have no leverage to secure those basic rights: the right to organize and bargain for better wages, the right to a safe work environment, the right not to get fired because of who you are.
It’s a nightmare for progressives, but a dream for powerful economic elites and their legal activist allies: a return to Lochner, to a system of corporate authoritarianism where business giants hold all the cards and workers have to hope that the market will someday provide them with basic rights.
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Those elites are well on their way.
The Roberts Court has systematically dismantled the legal protections that help ordinary people find justice when wronged by the economically powerful.
In Stoneridge, it stripped shareholders of their ability to get their money back from the firms that helped defraud them.
In Conkright, it gave employers more leeway to deny workers their pension benefits.
In Leegin, it made it harder for small business owners to stop price fixing under the Sherman Act. Now, the burden is on them–small business owners–to show that price fixing will hurt competition.
In Iqbal, it made it harder for everybody to get their day in court.
In Exxon, it capped punitive damages resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill because, get this, having to own up to your mistakes creates “unpredictability” for corporations. Which, by the way, means that BP’s liability may be capped because the Court doesn’t want to cause an unpredictable impact on its future profitability.
In Rapanos, it cut huge swaths of wetlands out of the Clean Water Act. Wetlands that had been covered for 30 years.
You know what has a lot of wetlands? Minnesota. No, really. You know what else has a lot of wetlands? The Gulf Coast.
I could spend a long time talking about how these cases were wrongly decided. But I’m not an academic – and these aren’t academic issues.
These decisions affect real people. They hurt real people.
Jamie Leigh Jones is a real person who went to work for KBR, then a Halliburton subsidiary. When she arrived in Iraq in July of 2005, she immediately complained to her supervisors about sexual harassment in her barracks, which housed over 400 men and only a handful of women.
KBR just mocked her. Then, four days after she got to Iraq, she was drugged and gang-raped by several of her co-workers. When she woke up, she struggled to the infirmary and had a doctor administer a rape kit, which KBR promptly lost.
Then, Jamie was locked in a shipping container under armed guard and prohibited from any contact with the outside world.
Because of the Court’s decision in Circuit City, KBR had been able to force new employees like Jamie to sign a contract requiring that any future disputes be arbitrated in secret and not in open court.
So Jamie Leigh Jones spent four years fighting for her right just to get her day in court after her employer put her in a dangerous situation, ignored her concerns, and kept her hostage in a shipping container after she was gang-raped.
Lilly Ledbetter is a real person who worked as a manager at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama. Towards the end of 20 years of service there, she noticed that her male co-workers had gotten more and better raises. By 1998, when she took early retirement, she was earning several hundred dollars less per month than her male counterparts. So she sued.
But the Court decided to give Goodyear maximum leeway to avoid responsibility for pay discrimination, thanks to the most unbelievable loophole you can imagine. The law requires that discrimination claims be brought within 180 days. The Court decided that this meant within 180 days – from the time Goodyear started discriminating against Lilly, not the most recent discriminatory check.
And Lilly lost out on a chance to recoup years of wage increases that were illegally withheld just because she’s a woman.
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Now, the judiciary is just one branch of our system. I was proud to pass legislation giving victims like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. And I was thrilled to see that the very first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
But even as it has closed the door on ordinary Americans looking for justice in the legal system, this Court has made it harder for the political system to address these injustices.
In Citizens United, the Roberts Court overstepped its procedural bounds so that it could graciously provide corporations with First Amendment rights and, by the way, open the door to foreign entities deciding our elections.
But, again, as bad a piece of jurisprudence as that decision was, even worse could be the ramifications it will have on the lives of real people.
Well into the 1960s, oil companies didn’t want to stop putting lead in gasoline despite the fact that they knew how dangerous it was.
But Congress passed the Clean Air Act anyway. And the percentage of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood dropped 84 per cent over the next quarter century.
And around that same time, our car companies still didn’t want to put seat belts in cars, even though they knew it would save lives.
But Congress passed the Motor Vehicle Safety Act anyway. And by the year 2000, the fatality rate from car accidents had dropped 71 per cent.
Both laws passed just a couple of months before midterm elections.
Does anybody think either would have stood a chance if Standard Oil and GM had been able to spend millions of dollars in those campaigns?
In Citizens United, the Court didn’t just abdicate its duty to subject efforts to impair our political process to strict scrutiny. It served as an accomplice to such an effort.
Not satisfied with giving corporations a leg up on individuals under the law, the Roberts Court is trying to prevent the American people from fighting back.
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Bummed out yet? Well, we’re finally in a good position to fight back.
It took the conservative legal movement decades to produce this activist Supreme Court. We’re still in our first decade. But already the American Constitution Society has established itself as a major force in our legal system.
And while we often continue to struggle to get our nominees confirmed and our message heard, we have a President who understands that our legal system is broken when it favors the powerful over the powerless, and I know for a fact that I’m not the only Senator ready to take action.
So let’s talk about what we can do.
Right now, I’m co-sponsoring legislation called the DISCLOSE Act that would force the heads of corporate-sponsored advocacy groups to appear in their ads, require corporations to tell their shareholders what they’re spending political dollars on, prohibit corporations from who receive taxpayer dollars from telling taxpayers how to vote, and keep foreign-controlled corporations out of our elections.
It’s a start.
But it’s important to recognize that Citizens United is really the first major shot fired in a coming battle over information, a battle that extends beyond paid political advertising.
For instance, I’m very concerned about media consolidation. If we care about public debate, then it matters who runs our media companies.
The trend is towards vertical integration of the companies who produce the programs Americans rely on for information, and the companies who run the pipes through which Americans receive those programs.
Executives at both Comcast and NBC Universal swear that they’re not interested in corporate control of programming. I used to work at NBC; I know better. And I’m very worried about this merger.
We should also be very worried about efforts to undermine the free flow of information on the Internet.
Right now, a blog loads just as quickly as a corporate webpage. An email from your mother comes through just as smoothly as a bill notification from your bank. An independent bookstore can process your order as quickly as Barnes and Noble.
But top telecommunications companies have declared their interest in offering “prioritized” Internet service for companies who can pay for it. This could lead to the creation of a high-speed lane for wealthy corporations and transform the Internet from an open playing field into yet another place where powerful economic elites have a bigger megaphone than the rest of us.
Some of the same people who were instrumental in the Federalist Society’s effort to change our legal system are now working to help corporations increase their control over the flow of information.
If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues. If you can control the conversation, you can change this country.
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But we can’t be satisfied with stopping conservatives and their corporate clients from controlling the narrative when it comes to our legal system.
We have to fight back with our own.
In our narrative, the legal system doesn’t exist to help the powerful grow more powerful – it exists to guarantee that every American is entitled to justice.
In our narrative, we defend our individual rights and liberties against corporate encroachment just as fiercely as we defend them against government overreach.
In our narrative, judicial restraint actually means something – for starters, how about ruling only on the case you’re presented?
In our narrative, even if those big bronze doors have to remain closed for security reasons, the door to our legal system should be open to everyone, because what happens in our legal system matters to everyone.
If you followed my career before I got to the Senate, you know that I’m a big believer in speaking truth to power, and in the power of telling the truth.
To legal scholars and lovers of our constitution, the truth about what’s happened over the last 30 years is at the heart of our struggle to restore balance to our courts and wisdom to our laws.
But I gotta be honest with you: That’s not why I’m here tonight. And I think you know that, or you would have invited a lawyer.
I’m here tonight because, for the people I represent in Minnesota and for regular working people all over the country, that truth is at the heart of their struggle, too.
Their struggle to earn a fair wage at a job that treats them well. Their struggle to live their lives free of corporate intrusions into their privacy. Their struggle to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Their struggle to find justice when they’re wronged.
I know how important it is that our legal system support individuals in that struggle. And so do you. But most people don’t. And we have to change that.
The American Constitution Society has a role to play in the national conversation around our Constitution and our laws. And not just within the walls of a debating society.
Ordinary Americans have to understand what’s at stake for them in all this. And that means someone has to bring them into the debate.
It is my hope that you will. And it is my great honor to stand with you in that fight.
Thank you.
It was requested that I give an opinion on this article, which describes “The attack on the USS Liberty is one of the great enigmas of US-Israel relations. On June 8, 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War, Israeli planes attacked an American spy ship, the Liberty, that was in international waters off the coast of Egypt,” and I shall do here because I think the length shall be long. I have been asked, what can’t Israel get away with, especially in regards to U.S. relations?
America was designed to have an ineffective central government. Congress was intentionally designed so that there would be roadblocks and impasse, which indeed have (almost always) happened. The president has control over the armed forces, but there was never meant to be a standing army. America was designed to have an ineffective central government.
Is our government designed to be so ineffective that we can’t make good military decisions, including a diplomatic response to an ally that (probably intentionally) sank a ship of ours and killed our citizens? Yes, we are designed to be that ineffective. Even in the Bush II years, when ‘hawks’ had their greatest advantage, our government had an ineffective military with unclear goals. We’re a giant ship of state that is slow to turn and does not deviate from our inefficient course.
We are the country that entered World War One three quarters of the way through. We are the country that looked the other way for even longer than the British did in hopes of appeasing Hitler and attempting to avoid reality. We are the country that says Communism is a threat because we say it is. We are also the country of Teddy Roosevelt.
America was designed to be inefficient. We were designed to be isolationists without an army. And so, when we have become a superpower with many satellites (specifically, in this case, Israel), there is nothing for us to turn to in order to comprehend what role we have. The world of Europe came to be with power fighting equal power, alliances being brokered, and generations understanding the geopolitical struggles against particular neighbors that came before them. America has none of that. That is an accidental inefficient design. America has no history to look back to to understand alliances, control of friendly alliances, or struggles against equal neighboring powers.
So, what can’t Israel get away with? With the United States, unfortunately, they can get away with anything, because the U.S. was designed to be inefficient, and has not had the historical experience to make them capable of having a satellite alliance.
Hey California! Hey what?
Remember Meg Whitman? You might, because so far she has invested $80 million ($80,000,000) of her own money into her candidacy for California Governor, and we’re not out of primary season yet. So, if you watch listen to the radio, or watch tv, you might have heard of Meg. For instance,
“You haven’t seen an ad [on television] from me with the border fence,” Whitman said in an interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin. “That has been Steve’s campaign,” she said, referring to her GOP primary opponent, Steve Poizner.
However, as her press secretary corrected for her — I guess $80 million doesn’t buy intelligence — she actually has run ads promoting a border fence.
Frankly, I don’t watch much television and I don’t listen to radio. So, as far as television is concerned I have no idea what ads Whitman is running, unless I see them online (and, for that matter, I’m an enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau and have no idea that ads are running on the televisions about the census). …But today, instead of hearing jazz on the radio I heard Whitman was attacking her opponent, Steve Poizner (he’s only invested $22 million of his own money into the primary for criticizing Prop 13. Not the CA Prop 13 about state officer salary increases, although that would have been a great ad. The CA Prop 13 about property taxation.
Prop 13 (the one about taxation) has devastated California since it was passed in 1978. It limited the tax rate (which sounds awesome, but isn’t because that’s how localities fund things like schools and other socialist — I mean socialized– services), among the many other problems it created.
So, Meg Whitman is attacking Steve Poizner for objecting to the Proposition That Destroyed California? Just in case you forgot, this is the Meg Whitman who doesn’t vote.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
That’s the ending from the second inaugural address of President Lincoln. Read the whole address, it’s shorter than most newspaper articles. Without naming names, consider current politics. With Malice toward none, with charity for all. Current politics could refer to the 1950’s, the 2010’s, or the 2070’s. The result is the same.
With Malice toward none, with charity for all. That is a beautiful, brilliant, hopeful, political doctrine. Is it a doctrine that works? We have, at present, a president that exemplifies this idea, and a national political scene that abhors it.
Choose your path.
Actually, although the topic is Miranda, it’s not the case that I want to talk about. However, HuffingtonPost will be happy to elaborate on why and how the Republicans don’t like Miranda when it doesn’t suit them. Rather, the part that leads me to comment is the lastof the blurbs by HuffPo. This in particular struck a nerve:
(in relation to the case in Times Square last weekend)
I don’t think you call it victory. I think victory would be being able to prevent these before they get to that point where you have a loaded van in Times Square,” he said. “I think it’s more a question of lucky. The fact that the van started to smoke and we had a courageous individual who went out and notified the police and then we have a great police and fire department that reacted brilliantly.
No, it’s not a victory. As Dumbledore would remind us we must fight the battle, and if we win, get up and fight again, and there will always be some Dark Wizard that must be fought. But, back to politics….I wonder if Pataki ever figured out why police exist. I’m guessing not, because there are very few classes on the subject, and it’s not a dinner table discussion. You have to think about these things, which is something many politicians don’t realize. There’s a circulo-linear path to this, as there is to most of politics, and many other things besides. Citizens go about their daily business, earning money or looking for ways to earn money; in order to protect themselves from losing their property (including money); the citizens hire police, with common money (taxes, anyone?); the citizen that is self-interested — that is, cares about his, or his community’s, property — does not only expect police to provide protection — the citizen looks out for himself. I don’t know, but that seems pretty simple to me. That’s a not a bad thing, but it’s a thing that a former governor should be able to wrap his brain around.
The Dole Blog 