Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University

That Hillary Clinton–she just keep on truckin’–doing her best to make the world a better place. In a speech at Georgetown University this morning, Clinton announced a new human rights agenda for the U.S., putting the emphasis on “principled pragmatism.”putting the emphasis on what she called “principled pragmatism.”

Just days after President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize while defending the concept of a just war, Clinton outlined a human rights policy calling for people to be free from tyranny but also free to “seize the opportunities of a full life.”

Human rights experts said the speech was important, coming at a time when the Obama administration’s message on human rights had become increasingly muddied but they said the proof would be in the administration’s actions.

[....]

Clinton said a commitment to human rights started with universal principles. She noted that Obama wanted Guantanamo prison closed and had issued an executive order his second day in office prohibiting the use of torture by any U.S. official.

She said the United States would report next year on human trafficking both at home and abroad, and would participate in a U.N. review of “our own human rights record, just as we encourage other nations to do.”

Human rights advocate “Sarah Mendelson, head of the Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies” said that Clinton’s speech signaled a change from the policies of the Bush administration, but only if the Obama administration follows through.

Unfortunately, at this point we are all a little skeptical about Obama’s motives and goals, but at least he apparently approved of Clinton’s *words.* Here is a little more from the speech:

“Now, the champions of human potential have never had it easy. We may call rights inalienable, but making them so has always been hard work. And no matter how clearly we see our ideals, taking action to make them real requires tough choices. Even if everyone agrees that we should do whatever is most likely to improve the lives of people on the ground, we won’t agree on what course of action fits that description in every case. That is the nature of governing. We all know examples of good intentions that did not produce results. And we can learn from instances in which we have fallen short. Past failures are proof of how difficult progress is, but we do not accept claims that progress is impossible.”

At Vox Populi, the Georgetown blog, there was a little more detail about Clinton’s appearance. It sounds like it was a popular event even though it’s finals week:

They were reading textbooks intently in the stairwell of Gaston Hall before the event, and proofreading their essays as they waited to be let out of the Hall afterwards, but despite being in the heat of finals season, Georgetown students had packed Gaston Hall by 11:15 a.m. to hear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak about the Obama Administration’s Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century at noon.

At the end of Clinton’s speech, students were allowed three questions, and they were good ones:

Students asked about how the U.S. can protect LGBT rights in Uganda, where there is pending legislation to make homosexuality an offense punishable by death, and to balance support for Iranian protesters while pursuing a security strategy.

Clinton said the U.S. had expressed its concerns about the anti-LGBT legislation directly and indirectly, and that Iran was “a good example of a hard call.”

In that case, they “didn’t want attention to be shifted from the legitimate concerns to the United States” by speaking out too vehemently she said.

Finally, a student asked about the role of artists in the campaign for human rights, to which Clinton said, “artists are one of the most effective tools we have” for promoting human rights.

You can watch the video of the speech here.

I’m so happy that Clinton talked about both the Uganda situation and human trafficking. If only she can hold Obama’s feet to the fire and get him to go beyond “just words.” If anyone can do that, it’s Hillary!

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Today is Columbus Day. That’s an important holiday here in Massachusetts, so I don’t have to teach today. Of course that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do, but it’s still a nice break from my regular routine. But should we be honoring Christopher Columbus with a holiday?

Parades span the country from LA to Denver to Massachusetts. You can see people dressed in red, white and green – celebrating their Italian heritage. You’ll see American flags flying, people dressed as Christopher Columbus and parade floats fashioned after Columbus’ famous fleet of ships….[you may also see] people holding up signs that read “Don’t celebrate genocide” and “Columbus: America’s first terrorist”. Every year, Native Americans rally together to protest the celebration of a man who historical research has now revealed to be less than the hero we were taught about in elementary school.

The Boston Globe’s James Carroll has an interesting piece about Columbus’ religious motivations: Columbus and the American Problem.

Apparently, Columbus’ goal was “the old Crusader ambition of recapturing for Christianity the place where Jesus had walked, especially Jerusalem.”

“…banishment of both Jews and Muslims – the 1492 purification of the Christian realms. That his departure was simultaneous to the expulsion of the unbelievers had significance for Columbus, who later wrote, in his report to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, “And thus, having expelled all the Jews from all your kingdoms and dominions . . . Your Highnesses commanded me that I should go to the said parts of India.’’

The word “India’’ had an imprecise meaning in Europe, with its main connotation being the realms that lie to the east beyond those controlled by Muslims. Achieving those realms by going west defined Columbus’s purpose – and the freedom from Islamic control was the point.

[....]

For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st Century…

NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS

For the first time, the Nobel Prize for Economics goes to a woman, American Elinor Ostrom and her colleague Oliver Williamson.

Indiana University’s Ostrom and Williamson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, were awarded the prize for their work in the field of “economic governance,”

Hmmm…sounds like the Nobel committee is sending another “message.” Maybe Dakinikat can enlighten us further.

Ms. Ostrom “challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized,” the Nobel judges said. “Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, [Ms.] Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.”

Ms. Ostrom, who was interviewed by phone during the announcement press conference in Stockholm, described the prize as “an immense surprise,” and said, “I’m still a little bit in shock.”

Her Ph.D. is in political science, but she said she considers herself a political economist.

GLBT RIGHTS

The GLBT community may finally be waking up to the reality of the candidate so many of them supported for the presidency. Now that he got what he wanted from them, he isn’t in much of a hurry to pay them back.

“Obama, I know you are listening,” pop star Lady Gaga told the crowd, before shouting, “Are you listening? We will continue to push you and your administration to bring your words of promise to a reality.”

[....]

Christine Quinn, the first openly lesbian speaker of the New York City Council, said she had one request for lawmakers at all levels across the country.

“Look me in the eye and tell me I am less of a person than you are,” she said. “Look me in the eye and tell me my family is worth less than yours. Look me in the eye and tell me I am not an American. Well you know what, not one person in any of those places can do that, not one of them.”

She continued: “So what we’re here about today is to start telling the truth and to force the lawmakers from coast to coast and in the nation’s capital to make our law books tell the truth.”

Reaction from the White House? John Aravosis: BREAKING FROM NBC: White House official calls gays part of “Internet left fringe”

NBC just did a piece about today’s gay rights march in Washington. For the political context of the gay community’s ire, NBC went to Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood. Harwood was asked if the White House was worried about “the left as a whole,” and concerns they have that the White House isn’t doing things that “the left” expected them to do. Harwood said the following:

Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.

Harwood then went on to say:

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

So the gay community, and its concerns about President Obama’s inaction, and backtracking, on DADT and DOMA, are now, according to President Obama’s White House, part of a larger “fringe” that acts like small children who play in their pajamas and need to grow up.

Firedoglake has the video and more quotes.

LESTER HOLT: John what we saw in that protest today, was it simply frustration or does it represent a serious problem the President is having with an important part of his base?

JOHN HARWOOD: As a practical matter Lester I don’t think it’s a serious problem. we’ve seen and certainly Bill Clinton learned that they Democratic President can get punished by the mainstream of the electorate for being too aggressive on social issues so for now I think the administration feels that if they take care of the big issues — health care, energy, the economy — he’s going to be just fine with this group.

What a bunch of arrogant, bigoted SOBs!

HEALTH CARE NIGHTMARE

ABC News:
Insurers Mount Attack Against Health Reform

After working for months behind the scenes to help shape health care reform, the insurance industry is now sharply attacking the emerging plan with a report that maintains Senate legislation would increase the cost of a typical policy by hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a year.

Boston Globe: Health plan’s effect on costs may be slight–Many steps are incremental

Despite repeated promises by President Obama and Democratic leaders that their health care overhaul would lower costs, the proposals before Congress would probably not cut overall US health care spending significantly anytime soon, health policy specialists say

The bills under construction…include many incremental or slowly phased-in programs designed to eliminate waste and reward quality and efficiency. But they stop short of such bold cost-cutting moves as aggressively overhauling the way care is organized and doctors and hospitals are paid, or investing intensively in finding the best treatments for diseases and tying the results to reimbursements. Nor do they give people with employer-sponsored insurance the chance to comparison-shop for the best insurance deals and pocket any savings.

Kansas City Star: Benefits still years away, even if health care passes

Under the Democratic bills, federal tax credits to help make health insurance affordable for millions of low- and middle-income households won’t start flowing until 2013 — after the next presidential election. But Medicare cuts and a sizable chunk of the tax increases to pay for the overhaul kick in as soon as it is enacted.

SECRETARY OF STATE

This is a sad story, if true. Hillary Clinton: “I’m Looking Forward to Retirement” But nothing in the text of the story supports the headline writer’s interpretation that she “designs on the White House.”

Guardian UK: Hillary Clinton starts talks in Northern Ireland

Reuters: Clinton says Afghanistan’s Karzai needs to change

BBC: Clinton warning to Afghan leader

AFP: Iran dismisses Clinton warning on nuclear drive

Guardian UK: US reassessing Taliban and al-Qaida links, says Hillary Clinton

MEDIA AND PUNDITS

Here are a couple of recent stories that I missed now that I’m so overworked.

Joe Conason says: Time for the Media to Fess Up

At this late date, it is scarcely radical to suggest that Whitewater and all the other “scandals” deployed by the Washington press corps to besiege the Clinton White House (before the Lewinsky affair) were without substance. In the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, which created and promoted those stories, even such media mandarins as Thomas Friedman and Evan Thomas now casually assure us that they were overblown, even “bogus.” And former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan today admits that the famous takedown of the Clinton healthcare reforms he published in 1994, Betsy McCaughey’s “No Exit,” was essentially a fake too.

Belated as those affirmations are, by more than a decade, they may still matter — if only because they arrive at a time when the mainstream media is just beginning to descend into some of the same bad habits that plagued us during the last Democratic presidency and the far right is already talking impeachment.

So why did you go along with the Koolaid Krew, Joe? You had to know that if the media was so gung ho for Obama, there was an underlying motive–didn’t you?

How did I miss this story? Peggy Noonan teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government? Yep, that’s right.

Peggy Noonan, Teaching at Harvard: “You Have To Let Your Freak Flag Fly.”

You’ve got to go read the quotes at Gawker!

Actually, she’s leading a study group, not teaching a class. Here she is on video talking about the project.

And here is her syllabus. It’s a riot-and-a-half!

And here is a dramatic reading of the syllabus by Chris Lehman (husband of Ana Marie Cox)

At Political Animal: Steve Benen on the new White House media strategy (basically it comes down to attacking Fox News).

NY Daily News: White House: Fox News ‘a wing of the Republican Party’

It’s war.

The Obama administration declared Fox News – and its owner, reporters and commentators – shills for the President’s Republican opponents Sunday.

“Let’s not pretend they’re a news network,” White House communications director Anita Dunn said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” firing the latest salvo in the long-simmering feud.

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn said.

“What I think is fair to say about Fox, and certainly the way we view it, is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” she added.

HAVE A MARVELOUS MONDAY!!!!!!!!!

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This is one of those stories I offer up not because I really know much about the subject at hand but because what’s

From a Time Magazine article saying Zazi had a Senior al-Quaida Contact

being talked about doesn’t pass the smell test for me.   Policy on terrorism was one of those issues where we were supposed to see a distinct difference between the Dubya/vpResident Evil administration and the Obama/Biden Dog and Pony Show.  I’m not getting any signals of substantive difference.  I’m just sensing another charm offensive wrapped up with no real explanation or details.  It also seems the press is failing to do its job again.  I’m not sure what has gotten into WaPo, but they can’t seem to figure out what serious journalism is about any more. Their reporters seemed captured by their subjects.

Washington Post Staff writer Ann Kornblut wrote about the Zazi case here and basically buys a list of what seems like empty talking points to me about how the policy for terrorism is now ‘more balanced’.  Again, I’m no expert, but the article seemed weak and I just felt like a lot was missing.

I have to say I was quite relieved to see Glenn Greenwald deconstruct the article over at Salon and put some substance to my gut feelings.   Howard Kurtz should have something to add to this as should Media Matters and I’m waiting for their response too.

The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut today produces an extreme piece of government-serving, stenographic “journalism,” publishing a dubious administration press release masquerading as a lengthy news article on Obama’s approach to Terrorism and civil liberties.  The Post depicts Obama as heavily and heroically engaged in disrupting the alleged Najibullah Zazi domestic terrorist plot and — repeatedly highlighting that success — claims ”the White House has been charting a delicate course as it attempts to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies,” whereby “the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country.”  Here are all of Kornblut’s cited sources for the article — every last one of them — in the order she cites them:

Obama aides pointed . . . administration officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . senior Obama officials stressed . . . a senior administration official said . . . aides said . . . officials said . . . one senior administration official said. . . . one senior official said. . . . The official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . administration officials said . . . . a senior official said.

Not a single named person is cited, and there’s not a syllable of quoted dissent in any of it.  Virtually every sentence in the long article does nothing but praise Obama and depict him as stalwartly safeguarding America’s civil liberties (unlike Bush did) even as he protects us from the dangerous Terrorists, so why is anonymity needed for that?  It’s nothing more than what Robert Gibbs is eager to say every day.  Nor is there a hint of who these officials are, what the basis is of their knowledge, or why The Post granted anonymity, all of which are flagrant violations of the Post’s own so-called “anonymity rules,” which its own Ombudsman — just six weeks ago — complained are “routinely ignored” …

Anyway, go read some of the links and see if you come up with anything different then me.  I’m really interested in hearing your take on all of this because I don’t want another 9/11 but I’m not really happy to see any more of my constitutional rights disappear either.

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America isn’t easy

Building and sustaining a diverse community is not easy.

What should we celebrate?

Celebrate: to perform (a sacrament or ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites; to honor by solemn ceremonies and refraining from ordinary business; to hold up or play for public notice.

What should we tolerate?

Tolerate: to endure or resist the action of without grave or lasting injury; to suffer to be or to be done without prohibition, hindrance, or contradiction.

What should we not tolerate?

Freedom of Speech: speech as a celebratory, tolerable, or non-tolerable moral action

The right to free speech celebrates the toleration of alternative views and the expression of those views.

“Monsieur l’abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write” – Voltaire (potential misattribution)

The right to free speech, however, does not create an obvious corresponding duty – at least, linguistically it does not. American free speech law creates no duty to listen, no duty to repeat, no duty to comprehend; it only creates a duty not to silence a speaker in the majority of situations. But the “duty” not to silence is cumbersome, and it is much clearer to legislate a right to free expression for the speaker rather than finding a way to create a duty not to silence others

.

The benefit of celebrating toleration is educationally obvious.

A liberal education depends upon—presupposes—unfettered thought, inquiry, and expression.1 This is necessary not only for the production of knowledge but also for the preparation of citizens in a diverse democracy. A vital campus is one where ideas meet, mix, conflict, engage, and emerge changed by the interaction. But genuine dialogue is a difficult, even fragile, human endeavor. It entails both speaking and listening, articulating one’s views and earnestly considering those of others. Campus communities need both to protect the rights of all members to think and speak freely and to foster the conditions that make dialogue possible

.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17

What is not obvious, however, is the place in the grey area where either that which should not be tolerated enters or where that which should be tolerated is barred from entry.

Further, the difficulty of seeking balance necessarily places those who are generally in close alignment, at stark departure points on drivingly emotive questions concerning what conduct transcends the bounds where tolerance should be upheld. In other words, small differences of opinion are dramatically magnified when they sit on either side of the fulcrum of a significant moral issue.

Such situations are inflamed even more when the discussion involves competing primary moral claims concerning intolerable conduct by more than one party in a multiparty situation? For example, imagine that the perpetrator of a heinous crime might have been denied a fair trial by agents of the state. To what extent is someone who defends the perpetrator’s right to a fair trial guilty of supporting committing crimes against the victim or potential victims and to what extent are those who support the victim’s right to justice guilty of supporting misconduct by agents of the state that deny the perpetrator’s right to a fair trial and the right to a fair trial in general?

Given such cases where justice and injustice have more than one face, what duties to listen and understand do we owe each other and where is the point where the duty to understand is superseded by the duty to reject what should not be tolerated?

Balance in the Blogosphere

Blogs are not nations and do not have a responsibility to cater to competing worldviews to the extent that they do not adopt the mantle of doing so. Blogs are free to practise worldview exclusivity.

Exclusivity, however, tends to require adherence to a code of conduct among the included. Questions of conduct, specifically those that relate to what should be celebrated, tolerated, and not tolerated, appear to be the driving forces behind the siginficant fluctuations in readership, contributorship, and authorship that are occurring throughout the blogosphere as blogs decline, ascend, emerge and submerge.

Given this state of flux in the blogosphere, what duties to listen and understand do the included owe to each other and where is the point where the duty to understand is superseded by the duty to banish what and who should not be tolerated?

What do you think?

This is an open thread for civil tongues,

which means he is banished!

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Gay-Lussac

The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.

This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of a liquid increases as its pressure increases. High pressure and high heat can result in delectable dishes.

Cooking under pressure can be also dangerous because as liquids change phase into gases their volume expands greatly. For example, at atmospheric pressure the volume of steam is about 1700 times greater than the volume of water. To prevent pressure cookers from becoming bombs, relief devices (pop safety valves) are employed that are capable of relieving all of the steam the vessel is capable of producing.

America the Beautiful Pressure Cooker

The political pressure cooker is beginning to heat up. The power brokers and institutions that drive the nation have arrived unannounced on the doorsteps of America like a gaggle of unwanted, high maintenance relatives that demand hospitality for an unforeseeable time and that won’t take no for answer. Furthermore, they’ve announced that more relatives are on the way. Whatever plans America’s householders had, they’ve just gone out the window, with their household budgie and the relatives’ cat in hot pursuit.

People are justifiably angry with this incursion. Their budgie might not have been much, but it was “their budgie”, nurtured from birth into what it had become. Justifiably angry householders are trying to work out why the relatives arrived on their doorsteps and why they brought their fucking cat.

Common Sense

Common sense, in everyday use, is thought of as something that everyone ought to know. Will Rogers notes the problem with this view.

I dont know why they call it common sense. If it was so common more people would have it. (h/t Tom in Paine)

Rogers knew, like most of us, that common sense notions have to be learned and, often, taught. For example, that most flames burn we can learn by experiencing being burnt. We learn morals by having our families and communities teach us, by calibration, how we ought to act.

Sometimes we encounter others that do not share our moral view. How ought we to treat those who do not share our common sense?

The sensus communis

Acknowledging that there are different ways of seeing a thing, broadly conceived, is a first step in allowing that some of those other ways of seeing might have legitimacy. This acknowledgment is embodied in the Roman notion of the sensus communis (there is more than one notion). In the Roman notion, common sense is seen as the sense of the commons, which means that the sensus communis encorporates every view on every thing that each member of the community holds. It is like the opposite of how we use common sense because our use means there is only one right way to view a thing. Their view is like a warehouse or a purse, where everyview is stored because it might become useful some day.

This Roman notion is conservative in bold letters. It is practical because it recognizes that the vast majority of us can see something the same way and be wrong. If everyone held only one view, then what options would we have if we find we’ve got it wrong? (Nature abhors monocultures, for the most part.) By conserving alternate views we have a ready set of options to try, if our accepted wisdom turns out to be unwise.

The sensus communis and the pressure cooker

How does this relate to the pressure cooker? Somehow the power brokers and institutions that drive the nation, through their understanding and manipulation of the relatives/variables in the formulae by which they mathematically model the world, got some things wrong. They sent these relatives to the nation’s doorsteps. The relatives are eating the householders out of the hold they have on the house. The householders want the power brokers and institutions to do their jobs and send the relatives on their way.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done because it’s difficult to sort out all of the causes of the problems and the likely solutions. It’s made worse by those who are trying to cover the tracks of the relatives on their way to the households. It’s made even worse by those who are trying to say that it’s the neighbors who are the problem, not the relatives.

All in all, there is a nation full of justifiably angry householders using their received wisdom to make sense of the information they are given, contrary interpretations abound, and the temperature and pressure are building as the opposing views run into each other at ever increasing pace while the larders getting smaller, and so on. What can be done to turn down the heat before the pop safety valve is tested and/or fails?

Pop Safety Quiz

Ralph B might say something like we ought to be ready to do more listening and less talking at. He’s right. Myiq might say we ought not to suffer fools lightly. He’s right. SoD might say we ought to stop mooning idiots. She’s right. Dakinikat, in her role as the Cajun Quincy of finance, will do the economic forensic work and reveal the culprits, and then say we ought to challenge our assumptions about what’s right. She’s right. Riverdaughter might say it’s time to unwind and tend to soothing thyself for a while. She’s right.

I think we are all right. Booman’s right. Cannon’s right. Lambert’s right. Jeralyn’s right. kevin k is r.. r.. right. Murphy is right. Paul Lukasiak is right. Lawnguylander is wrong.

We are also wrong because our remedies are unlikely to be suitable for each and every situation. That’s not a matter of fault; it’s simply a matter of fact because none of us has a God’s eye view. In other words, our degree of rightness and wrongness depends on the fit of our imperfect knowledge to the situation at hand.

That we are fallible should make us act with more humility, however, in the real world humility tends to suffer under power. This is one of the reasons I like to humble power. It’s why I’m often humbled. This said, it’s easy to misidentify the problem or choose the wrong solution. It is the human condition.

What should we do if the heat is too high and we’re overcooking the dish?

What ought we to do to lower the pressure? If you think lowering the pressure is what we ought to do, and you are not sure of how to act, then I recommend searching the sensus communis for whatever answers you think best explain the situation, especially those that appear to offer effective prescriptions. This said, to make a tasty dish out of the “goods” we’ve been given is going to take some heat and some pressure. If we can get the temperature and pressure right, hopefully we can create a dish that is suited for most diets and palates.

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O’Keefe and Giles, in their portrayal of pimp and prostitute, reek of puerile classism. Were it not for the overwhelmingly noxious fumes emanating from the handful of ACORN employees who were apparently willing to enable a child prostitution ring exploiting illegal immigrants, the stink of the ill-informed moral superiority of O’Keefe and Giles would drive evolutionarily advanced members of our species to avoid contact.

Let’s cut to the chase. The child prostitution enablement shown in the videos is beyond the pale. It is wholly unacceptable. Giles and O’Keefe deserve credit for exposing this potential for promoting abuse with ACORN’s structure.

For ACORN to continue doing the good they do for the community, they must clean their house. This said, many houses and streets in the U.S. are in need of a good cleaning.

Credit granted where it is due, I am discomforted by the prurient form of Puritanism implicit in the method O’Keefe and Giles chose to expose ACORN’s illness. Their sting starts with a young female sex worker trying to buy a home, before it lures the ACORN workers into the ugliness of underage sexual exploitation. My issue with O’Keefe and Giles is that they appear to believe that people engaged in the sex trade should not be able to have normal life dreams.

Life in the Sex Trade

Life circumstances lead some people to prostitution. In our culture, it is rarely a profession of choice. This is something our political class should be well aware of, given the large number of personally undertaken, hobby social science, in-depth probes they have engaged in over the years.

There are volumes of research on the various factors and dynamics that create the participants in the world’s oldest profession. In our culture, an experience of sexual abuse and economic vulnerability are common themes in the dynamic of becoming a prostitute.

Should being a sex worker be a barrier to living as other citizens live?

If a sex worker wants to buy a home, and she meets all of the relevant requirements for obtaining a mortgage, other than that she cannot state her profession on the mortgage application because her form of employ is illegal, what is she to do, other than lie? If that sex worker wants to do the proper thing as a citizen and pay her taxes as a self-employed person, what is she to do, other than lie?

The simple answer is that citizens who want to pay taxes and buy homes should not choose to live the lifestyle of a prostitute. This is the type of answer one expects from those who are ignorant of the dynamics that create prostitution, especially in the underage realm. For example, leaving is often not merely a personal decision and few pimps are as non-threatening as the one portrayed by James O’Keefe. Accordingly, it fits that such an answer would come from those who choose to disregard how the practice of their political philosophy enhances the conditions that create the sex trade.

In this regard, Ms. Giles words to Sean Hannity on how she conceived the project:

It’s amazing what girls think about when they are jogging. And that was just something that popped into my head. I had never seen an ACORN office, I really didn’t even know that they existed and I jogged into the wrong part of town, saw some homeless people and street ladies and I put two and two together when I turned around to get back into a safe neighborhood. And it’s like — what if these people went into ACORN — a prostitute and what would come from that? No bills, no nothing — would they get a house? Could they start a business? So we put it to the test.

It is telling that Giles was interested in whether or not ACORN would help a street lady buy a home and, apparently, not so interested in what caused the women to become street ladies. Then again, perhaps that’s simply a feature of rarely running into the “wrong part of town?” Regardless, Giles began her project with two targets, ACORN and street ladies who wanted to buy a home.

For O’Keefe and Giles, having to live with the danger, and adopt the stigma, attached to selling sexual services does not seem to be enough punishment. They appear to think there is something improper about a prostitute wanting to own a home, which, if she worked there, would also be a brothel. They seem unable to see that owning a home might serve as a base upon which to leave the sex trade. Thankfully, many ACORN employees are not afflicted by the anti-New Testament immorality that informs that type of thinking.

ACORN: The Bad and the Good

ACORN has problems at a variety of levels. It is reasonable to call for a proper audit of the organization, given their government funding. A good time for the audit might be immediately after a full accounting of every dollar of TARP funding is released to the public.

Notwithstanding ACORN’s many problems, it provides valuable community services. ACORN employees work to bring a better life to many citizens and many of these citizens reside in the underclass. Working with people in the underclass requires empathy for their circumstance and a pragmatic attitude that involves working with limited resources to bring about optimal results, which will necessarily be modest at best. To me, it is entirely appropriate for an ACORN accountant to bend a category to find a way for a sex worker to pay her taxes so she can buy a home. (Perhaps the idea of a citizen wanting to pay taxes is outside the worldview of the young Republican film makers?)

O’Keefe and Giles have done a community service by exposing rot in the structure of ACORN. Unfortunately, their methodology lacks the discipline of the precautionary principle. As a tool for the healing of the body politic, therefore, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is flawed, because they are willing to worsen the lives of sex workers to achieve their aim of disarming ACORN. Accordingly, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is unethical because it causes a wholly unnecessary amputation, where a good anti-biotic would have done the job. For this reason, I reject the pseudo-Puritanism implicit in their methodology for its lack of empathy and wisdom.

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Is it beyond our ken to maintain a noble purpose as we guide our battered ships of state through the dark shadows of this mild squall of an economic crisis? Whom of us will risk life and limb to keep the ships afloat? Who will cast away possessions for the same purpose? Who will act to subvert these sacrifices? How will the storm weather us, as we weather the storm?

I ask these question because these darkling foreshadows are pallid compared to those that will attend the forthcoming Category Six typhoon of environmental collapse. How will that storm weather us, if we weather the storm? Given the tendency of people to adopt default positions in crisis situations, how we perform now, should give us some indication of how we’ll perform in much more dire circumstances.

Curiously, given the introduction, the point of this post is not to delve into the ugliness which portends. The point of this post is to ask the question, “How should we behave when faced with the absurdity that the cultural virtues that we cherish undermine the existential preconditions of our culture?” In other words, what does a wine-inspired poet do, when he finds that greater amounts of drink are fueling his muse, but not curing his cirrhosis and, in fact, killing him?

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You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. – Abraham Lincoln

There’s a sucker born every minute. – P.T. Barnum

We, the People, are born every minute. The last ten years provides ample evidence about the regularity to which Lincoln alludes.

Geese are but Geese tho’ we may think ‘em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho’ it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful. – Benjamin Franklin

The Constitution of the United States is like a manual for building a nation of equals before the law. It embodies the wisdom that some people gain power and freedom by stealing the power and freedom of others. It enacts principles to thwart those who conduct such thefts. “Liberty” is a common code word for describing the nation’s promise of power and freedom to its citizens.

Interestingly, the founders were all too aware that the apparatus they made to uphold the liberty of the nation’s citizens, i.e. the government, could also fall under the influence of those who would thieve the liberty of others. Accordingly, citizens must be mindful of what they, and others, ask of their government, while using the government as a tool to promote liberty, and other Constitutional and DOI objectives, and thwart liberty thieves. Unfortunately, some citizens are so focused on defending their liberty from the government that they lose sight of the reason that the government was created, i.e. they lose sight of the enemies of liberty. They are so focussed on the tree, that they lose sight of the forest that is being clearcut all around them.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech. - Soren Kierkegaard

Curiously, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who feel the government is the greatest threat prevent the government from regulating those who would usurp liberty. For example, imagine that some of the nation’s elected representatives are concerned about the undue influence received by some people and groups who donate significant amounts of money to other elected representatives. The concerned representatives draft legislation to prevent the money donors from gaining powers and freedoms before the law that those who do not donate do not receive. Those who feel the government is the greatest threat to their liberty, use their power to thwart the legislation because they see it as government overreach. “People should be able to free to spend their money any way they want.” After years of unsuccessful regulatory efforts, government becomes beholden to the money donors in ways that impinge upon the liberties of those who see government as the greatest threat. They take this impingement to be evidence that they were right from the beginning.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. – George Orwell, Animal Farm

The healthcare debate offers a particularly delicious irony of this sort, given that the choices it offers deny more than simply less liberty. Both choices involve denying people the liberty to choose other than private insurance, if they have the means. The Republicans offer the status quo, which says much about their moral character. Obamacare forces everyone with means to buy private insurance.

How is it that forcing people to pay for more expensive, less effective and less efficient healthcare through private insurance companies is more liberty enhancing than using superior models that involve greater government participation?

Admittedly, this is not deliciously ironic. Take heart. It is ready to be served.

Insurance Companies: Founding Members of the Order of Frater Magnus

Insurance companies, like most businesses, have the reasonable aim of making profits and improving upon these profits. Doing so, involves finding capital sources or activity sources of premiums and avoiding paying claims. Interestingly, pursuing these aims causes insurance companies to become the largest corporate drivers of anti-liberty activities in society.

How so? Increasing profit margins involves controlling costs. How does one control Fate, such as that manifest in natural disasters?

Every crowd has a silver lining. – P.T. Barnum

The answer is that one does not. Insurance runs on the Serenity Prayer without the moral underpinnings. It uses its’ army of actuaries and lobbyists to control what is controllable and the one thing it can control is people’s behaviors. Accordingly, it works through government to create legislation that controls people’s actions by controlling their choices through sanctions. If insurance companies can gain government sanctions on an activity, people are less likely to make choices that result in claims. Furthermore, if people make those choices, their claims can be denied. In doing so, insurance companies feed on people’s liberties to fatten their profits.

So, is it not a delicious irony, that those who are working so hard to protect their fellow citizens from a government that might compromise their liberty by offering a public alternative to private insurance healthcare, are effectively advocating like lobbyists for the strongest anti-liberty corporatists in society?

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There’s a great answer to that question and the main question of David Rothkopf’s article at WaPo entitled It’s 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Hillary Clinton Is? His answer is:  She’s not answering those crisis calls at the White House. But she’s quietly revolutionizing American foreign policy. It’s nice to know at least some of our policy approaches are on the mend since the devastating Bush/Cheney Years.  It’s also even nicer to see the article couched in terms of the blatant sexism that has dogged SOS Clinton since she first started her public service career.

…during her first seven months in office, the former first lady, erstwhile presidential candidate and eternal lightning rod has drawn more attention for her moods, looks, outtakes and (of course) relationship with her husband than for, well, her work revamping the nation’s foreign policy.

Even venerable publications — such as one to which I regularly contribute, Foreign Policy — have woven into their all-Hillary-all-the-time coverage odd discussions of Clinton’s handbag and scarf choices. Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, while depicting herself as a Clinton supporter, has been scathing and small-minded in discussing such things as Clinton’s weight and hair, while her “defense” of Hillary in her essay “Obama’s Other Wife” was as sexist as the title suggests.

Indeed, sexism has followed Clinton from the campaign trail to Foggy Bottom, as seen most recently in the posturing outrage surrounding the exchange in Congo when Clinton reacted with understandable frustration to the now-infamous question regarding her husband’s views. Major media outlets have joined the gossipfest, whether the New York Times, which covered Clinton’s first big policy speech by discussing whether she was in or out with the White House, or The Washington Post, where a couple of reporters mused about whether a brew called Mad Bitch would be the beer of choice for the secretary of state.

Wow, did some one at WaPo finally look up from their cappuccino and finally understand that Clinton’s uphill battle with their peers has been an over-the-top distraction from her service and her accomplishments?  Could this be the start of something big?  As you read through the article, you will note that much of its contents are carefully couched to refrain from pulling any thunder from the domestically preoccupied and addled POTUS.  The narrative is framed in context of an Obama administration even though the headline and examples seem to play up the Clinton contribution.

… Clinton is leaving behind old doctrines and labels. She outlined her new thinking in a recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she revealed stark differences between the new administration’s worldview and those of its predecessors: The recurring themes include “partnership” and “engagement” and “common interests.” Clearly, Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable nation” has recognized the indispensability of collaborating with others.

Who those “others” are is the area in which change has been greatest and most rapid. “We will put,” Clinton said, “special emphasis on encouraging major and emerging global powers — China, India, Russia and Brazil, as well as Turkey, Indonesia and South Africa — to be full partners in tackling the global agenda.” This is the death knell for the G-8 as the head table of the global community; the administration has an effort underway to determine whether the successor to the G-8 will be the G-20, or perhaps some other grouping. Though the move away from the G-8 began in the waning days of the Bush era, that administration viewed the world through a different lens, a perception that evolved from a traditional great-power view to a pre-Galilean notion that everything revolved around the world’s sole superpower.

Perhaps the most interesting narrative is the new approach to the emerging power of countries earning places at the power table by something more modern than their positions during last century’s world wars.  Her emphasis on China, India, and Russia cannot be missed.  Also, there is mention of her emphasis on the rights of women in African and Middle East countries; places where religion frequently places women as chattel and violent abuse is common place.

Additionally, the article comes up with names and ways that SOS Clinton is shaping not only diplomacy but the State department, itself.  Her appointments and budget priorities are demonstrably in step with her goals.

Even just a few months in, it’s clear that these appointments are far from window dressing. Lew, Slaughter and the acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development are leading an effort to rethink foreign aid with the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, an initiative modeled on the Pentagon’s strategic assessments and designed to review State’s priorities. Stern has conducted high-level discussions on climate change around the world, notably with China. Clinton made women’s issues a centerpiece of her recent 11-day trip to Africa, where she stressed that “the social, political and economic marginalization of women across Africa has left a void in this continent that undermines progress and prosperity.”

Again, there’s a lot of emphasis in the article about Clinton’s relationship to Obama and ‘his agenda’ .  There is also so much made of the prevailing air of harmony and compatibility that I personally wondered that if it wasn’t more about Clinton operating so independently and efficiently that Obama could basically leave well enough alone and focus on all the domestic squabbles and state dinners.  My belief is that he’d rather by more of a constitutional monarch and marketeer-in-chief and leave the actual work to the underlings.  It appears he has the luxury given the efficient and effective state of the State Department under Hillary Clinton.  Thank goodness some one noticed that instead of the color of her pantsuit choice today.

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In difficult circumstances, such as the current economic crisis, it’s normal to work out how one got there as a means to avoid repeating the process. In the current situation, the discussion seems to range between those who feel that the situation is already working itself out, to those who feel that structural dangers remain and proper regulation is required, to those who feel that the problems were the result of regulation and government programs in the first place.

Count me somewhat on the side of the last group. I say somewhat because I think that the problem has to with the inappropriateness of the regulations that were employed, but unlike them I do not think that the problem is humans using morals and reason to regulate the marketplace. In other, more localized, words, I reject the notion that the Tenth Amendment prohibits spending programs and regulations.

My sense is that the regulations that were deployed to prevent economic disaster were structurally and functionally inadequate because they half-heartedly represented the Great American Project as manifest in the Constitution of the United States. The problem with the regulations wasn’t that they were half-hearted. That half-heartedness is symptom of the larger problem. They were structurally and functionally inadequate because the US can no longer afford to provide its citizens the rights and freedoms guaranteed in its Constitution. The regulations failed because they had a relationship to expectations that are suited to an America that does not exist, in an economic sense. The problems with the public education system, illegal immigration, crime and punishment, and social security, to name a few, are all relatively easy to solve, once the very costly, burdensomeness of the Constitution is overcome. It’s time for America to wake up and downsize its’ dream, the dreams of its citizens, and smell the aroma of the box store, bulk size, generic coffee reality that its best and its brightest have packaged for Uncle Sam’s future.

Downsizing America

Given the economic realities of the new US of A, what aspects of the American vision should no longer be seen as part of the covenant between the citizens and their government? A quick look at some fundamentals of democracy should provide some context about what avenues should be open to being cut. Then the process of contracting out the bureaucratics to the private sector can begin. This said, these are preliminary thoughts, so all that I will provide is a rough and general sketch.

Democracy is expensive and inefficient, even when it’s practised by politicians who are not neo-conservative Republicans. This is unsurprising by design. After all, it’s said that, in an ideal democracy, the populace is educated, they have access to all of the information they need to make a good decision, and they are free to make that decision. How does this ideal fare when it faces the real world?

Immediately, one is struck by the gross redundancy in the ideal system. Providing that much information to so many amounts to an excessive effort for minuscule return. The set of possible decisions for any question is extremely limited, given the options for action, and polling research has already proven that we only need small sample populations to get the gist of what people want. In fact, given the history of their wants, and given the nature of the question, there is probably no need to poll them further because it should be derivable from past decisions. The cost savings to be gained by dismantling the information network should be substantial. Mainstream media can remain as is.

The efficacy of sampling also suggests a direction for schooling provision. Once again, the system is entirely redundant. Imagine, though it’s a laughable thought, that a university degree was all the education one needed to be capable of making good decisions. What do you think it would cost to bring the 71% of Americans who do not have a degree, into the range of democratic competence? How could it possibly be worth the cost? In fact, apart from the decreasing number of specialty jobs that actually require a well-schooled employee, there is no good reason to maintain anything, but a shell of the existing system, apart from creating athletes for the circus part of social diversion. This is because we can use the same polling methodology and randomly choose children from the masses to receive schooling similar to the one that is provided today, and then poll them to find what the rest would have wanted, if they had the schooling.

Given the earlier recommendation of using past polling to extrapolate their wants, this process is admittedly redundant, but it does double duty in terms of providing training for the small percentage of jobs that actually require advanced schooling. Then again, perhaps it is wasteful to randomly select children, as this disregards the advantages of choosing children who are more likely to do well at university, based on their family background. Given past polling, it’s probably best to err on the side of efficiency. The point to take here is that there is no value in giving people more schooling than they need to do the small range of relatively unskilled jobs that await them. Furthermore, think of the dissatisfaction that is avoided when people don’t have enough education to be hired below their level of training.

If the vast majority of people are no longer making decisions, then there’s no reason to prop up the facade that they actually are involved in decision-making. If voter turnout is any indication, many will appreciate avoiding the exercise. To be fair, eternal vigilance is an unwieldy burden to bear, if the only benefits people accrue is to not have decisions made for them by their betters.

In fact, if they are not needed for decision-making, their representatives are redundant for the same structural reasons. The cash to be gained, by trading in the clunker of a public decision-making structure, should be sigificant.

All of these actions would save the economy trillions and once again put America front and center as an economic powerhouse, through the tax dollars it would free up and save. At the same time, it would give Americans a leg up on the rest of the developed/undeveloping world, by readying its citizens for a life of diminished possibilities long before the others face the challenge, should they.

The Constitution is in the way of progress in the US, to the extent it promotes the values of the ideal democracy. Perhaps it was prescient to send home Churchhill’s bust because his notion that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”, seems to have gone bust for America.

This is “a frayed thread” in honor of GW’s administration crying wolf at election time.

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