A Patriot Acts

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Air Force veteran and former: social studies teacher, college professor, and organizational consultant John Nirenberg patiently explains why he’s walking 480+ miles from Boston’s Faneuil Hall to Speaker Pelosi’s office to encourage her to put impeachment “back on the table.”

Scott Ritter, explains below why there is so little overt opposition to an attack on Iran. His words might also explain why Nirenberg decided to hit the road to get an audience with Pelosi (in December, no less):

…very few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don’t want to rock the boat. If it doesn’t have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don’t care.

There’s a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don’t. And if the people don’t care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don’t care, then those they elect to higher office won’t feel the pressure to change.

The Democrats, one would hope, would live up to their rhetoric, that is, challenging the Bush administration’s imperial aspirations. Once it became clear Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, one would have thought that when the Democrats took control of Congress they would have sought to reimpose a system of checks and balances, as the Constitution mandates. But instead the Democrats have put their focus solely on recapturing the White House, and, in doing so, will not do anything that creates a political window of opportunity for their Republican opponents.

The Democrats don’t want to be explaining to an apathetic constituency, an ignorant constituency whose ignorance is prone to be exploited because it produces fear, fear of the unknown, and the global war on terror is the ultimate fear button. The Democrats, rather than challenging the Bush administration’s position on the global war on terror, challenging the notion of these imminent threats, continues to play them up because that is the safest route toward the White House. At least that is their perception.

…They don’t have the courage of conviction to enter into that debate and stare at whoever makes that statement and say they’re a bald-faced liar. They’re not going to go that route…

I don’t know what the last straw was for Nirenberg. Meanwhile, H.R. 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act recently and quietly passed the House by 404 to 6, and is under consideration by the Senate. John Nichols of the Capital Times:

…H.R. 1955 would establish the framework for an Orwellian network charged with policing not the actions but the thoughts and statements of Americans. It would establish a commission with broad investigative powers and an official charge to propose legislation and regulatory moves to bar whatever thoughts or words the commission identifies as “homegrown terrorism.”

With its authority to call hearings and compel testimony, the commission would invite a return of the days of inquests into “thought crimes” by the likes of Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy and California Sen. Richard Nixon….

Under H.R. 1955, investigators would be authorized to examine Web sites and online communications with an eye toward controlling the free flow of ideas and information that is the lifeblood of the digital age. Indeed, the National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers warn: This legislation “will likely lead to the criminalization of beliefs, dissent and protest, and invite more draconian surveillance of Internet communications.”

…Backers of the bill claim they only want to address what they describe as “threatened” force. But what they identify as a “threat” might be nothing more than an expression of the deep frustration Americans feel with politicians…who show so little respect for freedom of speech.

This legislation suggests that a danger that must be officially addressed — “violent radicalization” — is characterized by the embrace of an “extremist belief system.” But who defines extremism? Didn’t the British label Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine extremists? Didn’t the supporters of World War I attack anti-war campaigners such as Robert M. La Follette and Eugene Victor Debs as extremists? Weren’t supporters of women’s suffrage dismissed as extremists? Weren’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin attacked because powerful figures considered their advocacy on behalf of civil rights to be extremist?…

I don’t need to remind you, that the on-air “talent” of Fox News, as well as many voices on the AM dial routinely label many of us reading and writing blogs like this one as “extremists”. Jeff Dinelli at the Left Coaster:

…The cleverly worded law would allow the government to arrest and imprison anyone who speaks out against the Bush administration, the Iraq occupation, the Department of Homeland Security or any other government agency, including the FDA….It is the latest in a long line of fear-mongering legislation that stretches back to the birth of our nation, as pointed out in a fine post by Phillip Giraldi at HuffPo.

Forget that this is going to be specifically aimed at Muslim organizations. This is the beginning of the end to Free Speech in America. If this law passes, every information source you know and trust could be shut down and its authors arrested…

Would you have believed thirty years ago that there would be Free Speech Zones in America? H.R. 1955 was co-authored by not by some far right nutcase, but by Jane Harman, a California Democrat, chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence. The fact that she’s considered mainstream, and that the bill passed while the news was occupied with massive fires in her home state, helped the bill dodge public attention. Harman’s district contains a number of defense contractors and borders the district that’s home to the RAND Corporation, which IMO would be a beneficiary of this legislation

You can feel what’s left of our democracy, “ossifying up”, as the bill’s thought police will likely chill what’s left of Free Speech in America. Its intent and vague language is a step toward putting web sites like this one out of business.

Join John Nirenberg, either in person on US Route 1, or via his website March in My Name.

Republicans and the “T” Word

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Michael Kinsley says that Fred Thompson may not have what it takes to be the Republican nominee:

The real strategy of Thompson’s plan is a familiar one from past Republican tax plans: Give large breaks to businesses and the wealthy (by, say, abolishing the estate tax), bribe the middle class to go along by offering smaller breaks to them, and don’t worry about paying for it all.

But maintaining your indifference to the size of the bill you are running up requires nerves of steel. You must never waver, never, never express the slightest concern that lost revenue may be a problem, and never, never, never even hint at where you might go to find the money. Thompson followed the script, putting out word that the explosion of economic activity after his tax reform would bring in too much money to even count, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then, unfortunately, he blinked. He revealed that he is a political amateur by making ominous noises about finding some savings through changes in Social Security benefits, which has to mean cuts in Social Security benefits or no money will be saved.

Raise your hand if you would be happy to accept lower Social Security payments in exchange for a simpler tax code.

I thought so.

Kinsley also discusses Mike Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal:

He has endorsed something called the “fair tax,” which involves repealing all federal revenue sources—the income tax, Social Security tax, estate tax, everything—and replacing them with a 23 percent sales tax on everything except education. The fair tax propaganda says, frankly, that it is intended to be “revenue-neutral.” That is, it would bring in just as much money as the taxes it replaces. No monkey business about explosions of new revenue.

This makes it easy to figure out who would win and who would lose in Huckabee’s so-called “fair” tax. It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar someone’s taxes go down is a dollar someone else’s go up. What you spend every year is the amount you earn minus the amount you save. On average, Americans save practically nothing, but wealthier people save more. Very poor people actually spend more than they earn, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn’t spend more than a small fraction of their income if they tried. So, wealthy people are going to see their taxes go down, which means that poor and middle-class people are going to see their taxes go up.

In spite of his soak-the-poor tax plan, the right-wing Club for Growth has gone to the mattresses to defeat Huckabee. Leslie Wayne writes in tomorrow’s New York Times:

As Mike Huckabee rises in the Republican presidential polls, fiscal conservatives have been raising alarms about a series of tax increases he oversaw while governor of Arkansas — new taxes on gasoline, nursing home beds and even pet groomers.

The Club for Growth, a politically influential antitax group, has dubbed Mr. Huckabee Tax Hike Mike and poured money into anti-Huckabee advertisements that were broadcast in early nominating states, with more on the way. Mr. Huckabee “spends money like a drunken sailor,” according to the group’s news releases, and it has sprinkled YouTube and the airways with videos that mock him and his policies.

Frankly, your average drunken sailor is a miser compared to most Republicans.

But the record offers a more complex and nuanced picture. While taxes did rise in the 10 years that Mr. Huckabee was governor, the portrayal of him as a wild-eyed spendthrift is hardly apt. For the most part, Mr. Huckabee’s tax initiatives had wide bipartisan support, with the small number of Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature voting for the tax increases and many maintaining that the state was better for them.

David Lightman writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

In the late 1990s, as the nation’s and Arkansas’ economies boomed, that wasn’t difficult, and Huckabee presided over substantial tax cuts. In 1997 and 1998, state lawmakers approved $97.9 million in income-tax relief, and another $14.1 million in smaller tax breaks.

About 65 of Huckabee’s 90 tax reductions were enacted from 1997 to 1999. The centerpiece was $90.6 million annually in individual income-tax breaks, but most of the cuts were small and highly specialized.

Among them: exempting residential lawn care from the gross receipts tax, a Salvation Army sales-and-use-tax exemption and an exemption for sales of biomass to produce electricity.

Huckabee came to Washington in 1999 and boasted about his record. “The big battle was no longer, ‘Which taxes will we raise and by how much?’ but ‘Which taxes will we cut and by how much?’ ” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.

Bill Clinton’s economy made being a tax cutter easy and fun.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

The State Supreme Court handed him another problem when it ruled that Arkansas’ education-funding system wasn’t meeting student’s needs and had to be revamped.

So in 2003, Huckabee had a very different message. In his State of the State speech that year, he warned lawmakers that, “If you deem that all new revenue sources, your proposals or mine, are indeed dead on arrival, then you’ll be saying that teacher pay increases are dead, scholarships are dead, medicine for the elderly is dead, that long sentences are dead and that we’ll have a massive early release of thousands of inmates from the (prison) system.”

Unlike the bleepheads of the Club for Growth, Gov. Huckabee actually had to govern a state. But in GOP Land, facing reality is heresy, and as a candidate Huckabee has to prove he can still be oblivious. Back to Kinsley:

Neither Thompson nor Huckabee has anything useful to say about the real problem, which is the huge gap between revenues and spending that George W. Bush, having inherited a surplus, is leaving behind. Thompson’s willingness to take on Social Security would earn him some points for courage if he were planning to use the money to reduce the deficit or address the entitlements problem. But he wants to pour the money into new tax cuts for business, which is not just a bad idea but an incredibly lazy one. There’s more to running for president than buying a round of drinks at the country club and asking what’s on people’s minds.

At least Huckabee’s revenue neutrality would not make the problem worse. For this, the business wing of the Republican Party is hysterically labeling him a “fiscal liberal.”

A what? For Republicans, the epithet liberal used to mean someone who wanted the government to spend a lot of money that it didn’t have. Then it meant someone who wanted the government to spend what it had, but no more. Now, apparently, you are a “liberal” if you only want the government to spend a few hundred billion dollars a year more than it has.

Actually, the spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.

But if you peer into the abyss of debt and say that what this country needs is another tax cut, that makes you a good conservative.

What really makes you a good conservative is to believe you can have something for nothing. All their elaborate theories about supply-side economics and “fair” taxes are fiscal alchemy. If we can just find the right formula, they think, government revenue will appear magically, and fairies will provide the government services we want without our having to pay for them.

Tar Pits

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Speaking of tar pits and the critters who sink into them, I just saw this head and blurb on the Los Angeles Times site:

Props to Pax Americana

Jonah Goldberg: Does being the leader of the free world make the U.S. an empire? Who cares?

I can’t bring myself to actually read it. You can, if you have the courage. I just want to ask … Has he not noticed that “Pax Americana” turned into “Bellum Americana” (excuse my Latin) some time back? Does he not realize that the “free world” would not follow Dear Leader even to a buffet table? Does he not know what an empire is? And does Goldberg make a bag of hammers look brilliant, or what?

Well, don’t get me started.

And then there are Democrats. Bob Herbert has a gloomy assessment of the current field of presidential candidates.

A friend of mine, talking about the Democratic presidential candidates, tossed out a wonderful mixed metaphor: “This is awfully weak tea to have to hang your hat on.”

The notion that Bush & Co. had fouled things up so badly for Republicans that just about any Democrat could romp to victory in 2008 was never realistic. What’s interesting now, with the first contests just weeks away, is the extent to which Democratic voters are worried about the possibility that none of their candidates have the stuff to take the White House.

This election, the most important in decades, cries out for strong leadership. The electorate is upset, anxious and hungry for change. But “weak tea” is as good a term as any to describe what the Democrats are offering.

I can’t say I disagree.

Bush-bashing is not enough. Unless one of the Democratic candidates finds the courage to step up and offer a vision of an American future so compelling that voters head to the polls with a sense of excitement and great expectation, the Republican Party could once again capture the White House (despite its awful performance over the past eight years) with its patented mixture of snake oil and demagoguery.

The G.O.P. game plan is already being pieced together. The White House hopes to inoculate Republican candidates on the Iraq war issue by bringing home a significant number of combat troops in the middle of the general election. And the demagogic issue of choice for 2008 is immigration.

The Willie Horton ugliness of 1988 will be like nothing compared with the concerted attack to be unleashed by the G.O.P. on illegal immigrants next year.

The Democrats will have to figure out a way to counter that with an appeal to the better angels of our nature, and that will require courage.

Of the current field, I think Barack Obama is the one most likely to catch fire with the vision thing. When he’s on his game, he’s electrifying. But his campaign so far hasn’t shown as much spark as I anticipated it would. Maybe he’s pacing himself.

At the Washington Post, Andrés Martinez makes an interesting observation:

I remember being in Europe on the eve of the 2000 election and seeing polls that showed about 85 percent of the people in Holland favored Al Gore. And that was back when Bush was known as a compassionate conservative who worked well with Democrats and talked about a “humble” foreign policy. His “popularity” in Holland has taken quite a hit since then.

There is no way around it: Bush’s departure will be a good day for the U.S. “brand” around the world. And while wanting to be liked isn’t the sole criterion on which to base your vote, it’s hard to deny that the election of a Democrat would result in a a bigger boost to America’s international brand. …

… On the whole, change will likely be welcomed around the world. And setting aside any other merits or demerits of Barack Obama’s candidacy, given his life story I do think the conventional wisdom is right: His taking the oath of office on Inauguration Day would count as a massive propaganda coup for the United States.

That’s the single biggest reason I’m rooting for Obama. That does not count as an endorsement, however. Presidential candidates always should have caveat emptor stamped on their foreheads. In past history, many sparkling candidates proved to be disappointing presidents, but a few have exceeded expectations.

I’m actually not too worried. Our guys may be a pack of mutts, but theirs are … well, you know.

Twilight of the Would-Be Gods

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Their dreams of empire dropped about their ankles, righties today look gloomily ahead to a non-imperialist future. For example, Don Surber laments,

We need our Tony Blair, our Nicolas Sarkozy.

While Democrats select a presidential candidate, Republicans seek a president. There are a bunch of Jimmy Carters on the other side who are willing to apologize for America’s greatness. Forget about finding the next Reagan. America can settle for another Tony Blair or Nicolas Sarkozy.

It’s not clear to me if the “bunch of Jimmy Carters” are the Dem or GOP candidates. Or, indeed, how the first sentence of that paragraph connects to the rest of it.

Wouldn’t it be delightful to hear Mitt Romney say: “Sept. 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue, Iraq another act, and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it’s over. There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary …”

Wouldn’t it be great to hear Rudy Giuliani say: “There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. … ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. “

Surber goes on to lament those and other straw men missing (he says) from the campaigns so far. You don’t want to parse Surber’s prose too closely.

If you consider the subsequent terrorist acts that took place in Bali, Madrid, and London, and the ongoing threat of international terrorism, then certainly the 9/11 attacks were not isolated. But by now anyone whose head is actually screwed on must have realized that the real long-term damage of 9/11 is not the result of the attacks themselves but of our response to them. I fear that historians will look back at 9/11 and call it the day that America began to self-destruct.

There’s a difference between strength and toughness. There’s a difference between courage and swagger. There’s a difference between results and spin. There’s a difference between resolve and stubbornness. There’s a difference between action and ideology. But try to explain any of that to a rightie.

The enormous majority of Americans realize that something has gone horribly wrong with America. A majority realize that the economy is not, in fact, peachy. Although news stories say the situation in Iraq is improving, the fact remains that the invasion itself was a colossal mistake and that no result we could possibly obtain there could come close to being worth the blood and treasure it cost.

Righties depend on that sugar high of vicarious vainglory mixed with loathing of others to give their lives meaning. But most Americans are sick to death of junk politics and policy. They want real leaders, not the strutting tin soldiers righties mistake for leaders.

For years, righties were certain that “movement conservatism” held the answers to everything. Today they are struggling to define what the word conservatism means. For example, Bob “the Reptile” Novak complains in today’s Washington Post that GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is not a real conservative.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem. …

…The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own?

In other words, “real” conservatives were fine with evangelicals as long as they stayed in their place.

Huckabee simply does not fit within normal boundaries of economic conservatism, such as when he criticized President Bush’s veto of a Democratic expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Calling global warming a “moral issue” mandating “a biblical duty” to prevent climate change, he has endorsed a cap-and-trade system that is anathema to the free market.

Paul Krugman:

Ah yes. True conservatism means denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is a problem, and rejecting even the most market-friendly solutions to the problem.

Thanks for clearing that up, Bob.

Andy Sullivan:

Memo to Novak: have you heard of George W. Bush? Barely a government program he hasn’t expanded; barely a soul he doesn’t want to heal. Nation-building where there is no nation; borrowing when there is no more money. And all wrapped up in a theological bundle of conservative “compassion”. The main difference between Bush and Huckabee is that Huckabee once actually raised the money he wanted to spend, instead of borrowing it from the Chinese. And Huckabee’s resort to left-liberal criticism of conservatism – that’s it’s heartless and greedy – has been deployed by Bush as well. Heroic Christianism – with its certainty about everything and moral imperative to intervene wherever “evil” strikes – is not compatible with any sense of limited government. It’s pretty amazing to me that it has taken Huckabee to wake some up to this somewhat obvious fact.

George Will discusses Michael Gerson’s new book Heroic Conservatism. Will begins his column thus —

… the health of a political persuasion can be inversely proportional to the amount of time its adherents spend expelling heretics from the one true (and steadily smaller) church. Today’s arguments about conservatism are, however, evidence of healthy introspection.

From there, Will marches on to expel Gerson and others from the church.

Conservatism is a political philosophy concerned with (BEG ITAL)collective(END ITAL) aspirations and actions. But conservatism teaches that benevolent government is not always a benefactor.

Conservatism’s task is to distinguish between what government can and cannot do, and between what it can do but should not.

Will is famous for thinking that one of the things government should do is criminalize abortion.

Gerson’s call for “idealism” is not an informative exhortation: Huey Long and Calvin Coolidge both had ideals. Gerson’s “heroic conservatism” is, however, a variant of what has been called “national greatness conservatism.” The very name suggests that America will be great if it undertakes this or that great exertion abroad. This grates on conservatives who think America is great, not least because it rarely and usually reluctantly conscripts people into vast collective undertakings.

And I would argue that government itself is a vast collective undertaking, which may be why conservatives suck at it. But compare/contrast what Will says here to what Surber says, above. If Surber isn’t stuck in national greatness mode I will eat my mousepad. So who’s the “real” conservative — Will, or Surber?

Libertarianism also seems to be facing an identity crisis. Patrick Ruffini writes,

If it’s possible to be known as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping libertarian, then sign me up.

without pausing even for a second to consider that criminalization of abortion, endless war, and warrantless wiretapping are all directly at odds with liberty. Essentially, he wants government that isn’t restricting him but through which he can control others. “Libertarianism is no longer aligned with libertine stances on abortion and gay rights,” says Ruffini. Which begs the question, what the hell is it aligned with? What makes “pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping” libertarianism one iota different from big-government authoritarianism? And does language mean absolutely nothing to righties?

William Buckley told an interviewer that “movement conservatism” peaked in 1980, when Reagan became president. One might infer that it’s been dying a long, slow death since, even as its disciples gained more power. Whatever.

BTW, in this interview, Buckley provided an illuminating definition of conservatism:

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

I’d rather just live in the plain ol’ real world, thanks. But this does tell us a lot about why so many are so keen on labeling themselves “conservative” even if they can’t agree on what it means. They are loyal to an idea of conservatism. They like the sound of “limited government” even as they promote warrantless wiretapping and state control of reproduction. They believe in the “rule of law” even if they don’t practice it. They honor “democracy” even as they don’t trust it.

And I say they’re all sinking into the tar pit of irrelevance, and they don’t realize it.

Fire Sale Nation

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The weak dollar has drawn hoards of bargain hunters to America, the Associated Press reports:

Many shoppers go to great lengths to find Black Friday bargains, and some are even crossing the ocean this year.

A weak dollar is bringing in overseas visitors looking to take advantage of holiday weekend sales.

The dollar hit a new low against the euro today, while the British pound is valued at more than two dollars.

The CEO of toy store FAO Schwarz estimates foreigners will make up about one-third of customers at its flagship New York location this holiday season.

One European says he may spend $2,000 dollars or more on an American shopping spree. Another Northern Ireland resident says the effect of the weak dollar is, as he puts it, that “everything is half price for us.”

Great. We’re the new Hong Kong.

See also Michael Hirsh, “In the Realm of the Dying Dollar“:

In a blistering essay in the current Vanity Fair, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a former World Bank economist, notes that Bush took a nation with a budget surplus upon assuming office and turned it into a global debtor, and he has underinvested in education and alternative energy. “In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous ‘war of choice’ in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II,” Stiglitz writes. “Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle ‘worst president’ when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.”