In Washington 'The game becomes more important than those for whom government should exist to help'
[Image via the World Economic Forum, Creative Commons licensed]
Opinion
CATO Institute report says poor Americans have it too good
Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find…
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New Jersey's ban on ex-gay therapy is a victory over religious nuts
As of this week, gay conversation therapy is outlawed in the state of New Jersey. Kids who are either gay or suspected of being gay cannot be forced by their parents to endure homophobic corrective therapy, which assemblyman and bill sponsor Tim Eustice correctly calls "an insidious form of child abuse".
Not only does conversion therapy fail to actually "convert" gay kids into straight ones, but, according to the American Psychological Association (which disavows the practice), it often leaves lasting scars, leading to mental health issues and substance abuse. California is the only other state in the nation that has attempted to ban conversion therapy, but that ban is caught up in ongoing legal battles.
Conversion therapists argue that their practice helps young people who are struggling with their sexuality, and that choosing the therapy is a First Amendment issue. Outlawing conversion therapy, they say, is one step on the "slippery slope of government infringing upon the First Amendment rights of counselors to provide, and patients to receive, counseling consistent with their religious beliefs".
Religious freedom is a constitutional right. But it's not the only one. Too often, the religious "freedom" of a parent comes at the expense of their children's basic human rights and rights to equal protection under the law. Kids are not simply extensions of their parents. They are individual people, and while they should be guided and directed and for the most part under the legal authority of their parents, their own rights to personal safety, health care and freedom from abuse should not be subsumed in some bizarro-world version of religious liberty.
Parents in the United States have remarkable latitude when it comes to determining how they will raise their children. There's often good reason behind that: The state doesn't actually know what's best for every family, and a diversity of individuals are going to have a diversity of needs. The overwhelming majority of parents want what's best for their kids and are in the best position to assess their own child's interests. And state interference with parenting practices has historically targeted minority groups and often violated the rights of children. Generations of Native American youth, for example, were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, often run by churches, which were explicitly purposed to impart Christian European-American ideals onto the students and strip them of their heritage and traditions. The "education" of these children went on for centuries, and was part of a broader concerted effort to culturally annihilate Native Americans. Missionaries played a handy role, and the US government also got on board, opening schools of its own and funding the cultural genocide.
This isn't ancient history. Enrollment in these schools hit its peak in the 1970s. Today, Indian children in many states are still disproportionately removed from their homes and placed in white foster care. African American children, too, are more likely to be placed in foster care than white children.
It's easy to look at governmental interference into family life and determine that it tends to be racist and harmful to kids. The underlying problem, though, isn't any state intervention at all; it's the lack of holistic advocacy for the best interests and human rights of children. The focus on parental rights obscures the rights of the children themselves, and often means that where families don't fit into a middle class, white Christian ideal, parenting is suspect.
Kids are removed from loving homes if, for example, the family is in financial straits and there are no shelter beds available one night. Homeless moms are prosecuted for placing their kids in school districts where the kids don't "belong". What would actually help kids, of course, isn't removing them from their families. It's making an effort to keep families intact and prioritizing the needs of children – making sure that they have a roof over their head, healthy food, a decent education, knowledge of their own culture and the parents who love them.
Recognizing the basic human rights of children means outlawing practices that are abusive to those children, even if such practices are done under the guise of religion, tradition or culture. Parents may have a right to raise their children in accordance with a particular set of religious beliefs, but that right ends before the point a child endures psychological or physical harm. Unfortunately, in the United States, parents (and particularly Christian parents) have far too much leeway when it comes to using religion as an excuse to harm their kids or deny them care. Extreme examples of parents who rely on "faith healing" often make the news when their children die after illnesses are not cured by prayer alone. Too often, those parents receive light sentences, like one couple who received probation after their first child died from an easily treatable illness, simply because the couple believed God told them not to ask for medical help. During the probationary period, their ten-month-old baby also got sick and died after they refused to seek out medical care for him as well. It's unconscionable.
These issues, of course, aren't always quite so clear cut. Take, for example, the Supreme Court case in which an Amish family fought for the right to remove their children from school after the 8th grade, despite a Wisconsin law requiring that children attend school until they are 16 years old. The Amish religion requires that their children are raised without "worldly influence", but attending high school would violate that precept. The court sided with the parents, yet it wasn't the parents who were attending the school and whose religious beliefs where thereby challenged; the religious right violated was, apparently, the rights of parents to have total control over the beliefs of their children and the exposure of those children to the outside world. Children have a right to education; does it not violate their rights to allow their parents to remove them from school? And on the other hand, children also have a right to be raised in their own cultures and households, barring abuse – can't compulsory education infringe upon that right?
So I don't mean to suggest that there are always easy answers when it comes to the rights of children and the rights of parents to make decisions for their children. But some cases are easier than others. There are a great many religious fundamentalist parents who homeschool their children, offering very little in the way of actual education but much indoctrination, leaving their children ill-prepared to function in the real world. The kids themselves have no say in the matter, and there's little government regulation of home-schooling to ensure that kids educated at home actually receive an education. Plenty of homeschooling parents do a great job educating their kids. But lots of others don't. Teaching your kid that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs and that they don't need to know math past simple addition may not rise to the level of abuse, but it's a violation nonetheless.
Typically, courts hold that religious freedom covers educational choices, but doesn't extend to the right to allow your child to die from lack of medical care. Bizarre interpretations of "religious freedom" do, however, sometimes mean that parents aren't prosecuted as strongly for neglecting their children or letting those children die if the neglect was motivated by a religious belief rather than malice or simple idiocy. Many states have laws on the books that give religious exemptions to parents, deeming it not actually neglect or abuse if you deny your kid medical attention and he suffers serious harm or even dies. You also probably have the right to not vaccinate your child, even though that puts him at risk and threatens others as well.
Some mainstream religious groups and leaders even promote physically assaulting children as a necessary aspect of Christian parenthood. Christian couple Michael and Debi Pearl are the authors of the best-selling book "To Train Up a Child," which advocates beating children from infancy on, using "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules". The book is widely read in homeschooling Christian communities, and has been tied to the brutal beatings and deaths of many children.
Yet it's hard to have the moral authority to say "don't hit your kid" when no state bans corporal punishment in the home. Many allow it in public schools. While children of course sometimes need to be physically restrained to keep them from being a danger to themselves or others, physically striking them as a form of punishment violates their basic right to live free from violence, and is increasingly understood to do more harm than good. We're not talking about swatting your kid's hand away to keep her from touching a hot stove. We're talking about using violence as punishment: you've been bad, so you will be intentionally and purposefully hit in physical retaliation by a person who is much larger than you and has total legal authority over you. More than 30 nations outlaw corporal punishment, and aren't exactly facing epidemics of out-of-control children or good non-abusive parents going to jail en masse. Kids in the US could use some of those same basic rights.
Too often missing from the debates of religious freedom and parental rights is the right of the child to be afforded basic protections, let alone equal ones. Children have a right, wherever possible, to be raised by their biological parents. Children have a right to be raised within their own culture, and not stolen from their families because those families don't meet the dominant-culture ideal. And children have a right to live free of violence, even where their parents believe committing acts of violence against their children is a God-given privilege.
The New Jersey law banning conversion therapy is one step in the right direction of protecting children from abuse. It will undoubtedly be challenged by those who think that kids are parental property and not human beings entitled to bodily integrity. Hopefully, though, it will serve as a model for future legislation protecting the most basic rights of children – and hopefully, the peddlers of "religious freedom" as cover for misogyny, homophobia and abuse will eventually see their schick uncovered.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Young man with Gay Pride flag via Shutterstock]
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Elmore Leonard: Master of verbal tics and black humor
Acclaimed American writer who praised plain writing achieved literary daring across 60-year publishing career
Although the death of the American writer Elmore Leonard – on Tuesday, aged 87, in Detroit, from complications from a recent stroke – is certainly a matter for sadness and regret, the writer would not want to be responsible for anyone speaking of the news "sadly" or "regretfully".
One of his much-circulated 10 Rules for Successful Writing – in which he distilled the approach that brought him six decades of bestsellerdom – was that dialogue should never have any descriptive modifier. "'Leonard is dead,' they said," is something like the way the news should be communicated, according to his stylistic strictures, which always emphasised simplicity. Another is "try to leave out the parts that readers skip".
If there was a Leonard formula, it was remarkably efficient. The publication this year of the paperback edition of Raylan, his 45th novel, means that he achieved a 60-year publishing career that began with The Bounty Hunters in 1953. It was a literary longevity approached by only a few other novelists, including Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon.
In common with them, Leonard is generally classified as a crime or mystery writer, but he began and ended his career with stories more or less belonging to the genre of the western. He was strict about the definition of that form: stories set on the frontier of the American old west, such as The Bounty Hunters and its immediate successors. However, he retained many characteristics of the western – standoffs between law officials and bounty hunters, protagonists living on geographical and moral borders – when his books moved east and into a different genre.
With The Big Bounce (1969), Leonard found his dominant voice as a writer: comic crime stories, generally set in either his main hometown of Detroit – where he moved aged nine – or Florida, where he wintered. The key to the appeal of these books was their black humour. Revealingly, Leonard commended Ernest Hemingway for the economy of his sentences, but felt that Hemingway was prone to earnestness.
Leonard's characters both made jokes and were the butt of them. In his crime novels, he satirised most aspects of the criminal justice system. A flight attendant smuggles gun-runners' profits in Rum Punch; a notoriously draconian judge is savagely anatomised in Maximum Bob; and, in Swag, an honest used car salesman turns to robbery to supplement his income, coming up with "10 rules for successful robbery", which can be read as a larcenous companion to Leonard's list of rules for writing.
The plots, though, were largely a mechanism for Leonard to get his characters talking – the literary skill at which he excelled. A man who insisted that his prose style was achieved by leaving out what fancier writers left in was notable in his dialogue for putting in the things that many novelists left out: the hesitations, repetitions, sawn-off phrases. "She's gonna be, lemme see, sitting in the Caffe Rapallo at noon. Ezra Pound Garden at three, Vesuvio's at five. What we worked out," runs a surveillance report in Pronto, where an American on the run in Italy is advised to blend in by learning to "dig architecture, history, art, different related kinds of shit. You know what I'm saying?"
This ear for speech – resembling a tape-recorder set only to capture jokes, slang and verbal tics – made Leonard a natural target for Hollywood, even though most of Hollywood's shots at his novels missed, until the glorious Get Shorty (1995), with John Travolta as loan shark Chili Palmer and Danny DeVito as a tiny, whiny movie star. Ironically, Leonard finally got the film he deserved with a story which – possibly because of his earlier experiences in film-making – drew sardonic parallels between mobsters and movie moguls.
For most of his career, Leonard was undervalued by critics, both because of his consistently high sales and his facility with dialogue: some critics distrust speech-led novels as shooting scripts for future movies. Only in his later years did he get the credit he deserved, with testimonials from writers with lit-cred, including Martin Amis, and the imprimatur of two of the coolest movie directors of our time: Quentin Tarantino, who turned Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown (1997), and Steven Soderbergh, who adapted Out of Sight (1998).
This new cultural credibility seemed to give Leonard a greater literary daring, departing far from the American crime franchise he had established in fascinating experiments including Cuba Libre (2001), a historical novel set during the Cuban wars of independence, and Pagan Babies (2000), a dark story featuring a missionary priest in Rwanda.
The fickleness of readers and reviewers means that a long literary life is often doomed to end in obscurity or at least decline. Leonard, though, remained in print with both old and new books – he was reportedly well advanced on his 46th novel when he died – and in demand. Justified, a hit American TV series about a deputy US marshal in Kentucky, was based on Pronto and other Leonard stories and encouraged the author to write what became his final published book: Raylan, fittingly, was, in atmosphere, something like the westerns that had launched his career.
As shown by his frequent praise of plain writing, Leonard disliked the idea of style. In his way, though, he was a high stylist, able to capture in around 200 pages how American low-life looked and sounded.
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For new university students, Jerry Garcia has always been dead
As professors, we realize that our students stay the same age, but we don't. Keeping up with the latest is tough
Every fall the same thing happens: I say "salvete!" (hello in Latin) to a classroom of college students. The students are roughly the same age as they were last year, the year before, and all the other years back to the 1990s when I started teaching.
But I'm older, now the age of their parents. Sometimes I console myself that at least I'm not the age of their grandparents, but I know it's only a matter of time.
At many a training session for faculty, mention is made of the Mindset List, which seeks to reveal the world view and values of today's 18-something year olds. Tom McBride and Ron Nief, an English professor and a now-retired administrator at Wisconsin's Beloit College, started compiling the list in 1998 to gently remind ageing professors like me that saying "groovy!" probably wouldn't get us very far with students.
The list for the Class of 2017 (freshmen born in 1995) came out today. Like previous lists, this year's remarks on the ephemerality of pop culture figures, the mutability of language and the myriad of ways that technology is intertwined (entrenched) in our lives.
To students entering the class of 2017, Jerry Garcia has always been dead.
They don't hear "chicken pox" and think "extremely painful and unpleasant childhood rite of passage". But Chicken Little? Oh yeah, that kid who got knocked out of American Idol a couple years ago.
To the class of 2017, Java doesn't mean coffee but software.
GM is something eco-people say we shouldn't eat.
Lockdown drills are as routine as fire drills: these students were babies when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred and toddlers when the Columbine High shooting happened.
Their family pet has a microchip and they've had an "electronic lifeline" (a cell phone) to mom and dad since middle school.
In their lifetime, the US has, as the new list says, "always been trying to figure out which side to back in Middle East conflicts". They get their news by following the Twitter feeds of activists (and Beloit alumnae) like Maryam and Zainab al-Khawaja (who is currently in prison in Bahrain) or from their own family members in Syria.
Students in the class of 2017 know you do everything on the internet. They chat on Skype and pay via Paypal. Wikipedia has always been there to look things up on.
See a student using a smart phone in class? They may not be texting a friend in the next row or in Kathmandu but "reading the assignment they should have read last night, or ... recording every minute of their college experience".
If you are 40-something-ish like me, reading such items in the most recent Mindset List is bound to make you feel old.
As I'm heading towards middle age, I've concluded that any attempt to keep up with my students is futile. I have to face the facts that I make cultural references (Davy Crockett and the pioneers) that no students understand.
I am, though, a classicist. Studying the ancient Greeks and Romans teaches you that some things never change. Young people (the horserace-loving Pheidippides in the 5th century BC, Aristophanes' satiric comedy, Clouds; the dandy curling and perfuming his hair to increase his sex appeal in Ovid's Art of Love) have always been baffling the older generation with their newfangled pursuits.
Wanting his son to learn something useful, Strepsiades, Pheidippides' father, packs him off to the Phrontisterion ("thinking factory") where the young student learns a bit more than had been bargained for from the resident teacher, Socrates.
The class of 2017 may think "tablet" means an iPad sort of device and not "something you take in the morning" per the new Mindset List. But as I tell my students, a tabula was the wax board that Roman school boys learned their declensions on. Wiped clean it was a tabula rasa or "blank slate", a phrase that has come to signify an open mind ready to be writ on by experience.
Those entering university today know a lot. Perhaps it's my job now to teach them an old truth: everything new can be old again.
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Glenn Greenwald: Detaining my partner was a failed attempt at intimidation
Glenn Greenwald: The detention of my partner, David Miranda, by UK authorities will have the opposite effect of the one intended
At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."
David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.
At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.
I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.
Despite all that, five more hours went by and neither the Guardian's lawyers nor Brazilian officials, including the Ambassador to the UK in London, were able to obtain any information about David. We spent most of that time contemplating the charges he would likely face once the 9-hour period elapsed.
According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, "fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders" (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, "most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour." An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.
The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.
Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.
Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.
This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.
If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.
David was unable to call me because his phone and laptop are now with UK authorities. So I don't yet know what they told him. But the Guardian's lawyer was able to speak with him immediately upon his release, and told me that, while a bit distressed from the ordeal, he was in very good spirits and quite defiant, and he asked the lawyer to convey that defiance to me. I already share it, as I'm certain US and UK authorities will soon see.
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Obama has not delivered on May's promise of transparency on drones
An escalation of drone strikes in Yemen highlights the fact that the US public is still in the dark about this use of lethal force
The past two weeks have seen an escalation in drone strikes more dramatic than any since 2009.
The media estimate that more than 37 people have died in a series of strikes in Yemen. The US government has refused to officially acknowledge the strikes surge or reports of potentially unlawful deaths – just as it did, for years, refuse to confirm reports of the more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan. On drones, secrecy is business as usual – and it carries on.
Earlier this summer, however, there was hope for a different way forward. In late May, the White House released more information about US drone strikes than it ever had before. Following a major address on national security by President Obama, the government pledged to keep sharing "as much information as possible".
In fact, since May, the White House has not officially released any new information on drone strikes (though leaks still abound). While NSA surveillance has taken center-stage, the government's policy of secrecy and obfuscation on drones persists, too. Past critics of the drone program – ranging from Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) to Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) – should take notice. It is time to renew and expand the demand for answers about who is being killed.
Instead of acknowledging the new strikes and describing a coherent policy and legal approach, the government has again chosen to selectively disclose information that raises more questions than it answers. Thus, an unattributed leak to the New York Times on Monday served up a major policy change in the form of a morsel, with little elaboration, that a recent terrorist threat has "expanded the scope of people we could go after".
So, the question of whom the United States believes it can kill in drone strikes remains, as it ever was, full of unknowns. A handful of bullet-points on the government's "policy standards" for using lethal force, which the White House released in May concurrently with the president's national security speech, initially appeared to provide some guidance. But it expressly does not apply in "extraordinary circumstances", and since the embassy closures of earlier this month could be interpreted as providing such justification, the memorandum may not be relevant to the latest spate of strikes in Yemen.
The White House could clarify this issue; better yet, it could move beyond conveniently malleable policy standards and describe how the government applies existing international law. Instead, the White House has again chosen to operate secretly and under rules of its own creation, which may permit killing individuals under a concept of "imminence" (of threat) that departs radically from all conventional interpretations of the law.
Even more damning is that, in the absence of any commitment to investigating credible allegations of unlawful deaths, the United States appears indifferent to the question of who is actually dying in drone strikes. President Obama admitted in May that four US citizens had been killed, three of whom – including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Aal-Awlaki – he admitted were not intended targets. But the president did not define the identities of the more than 4,000 other people killed, or specifically address reports that a significant number of the dead – in assessments varying between 400 and nearly 1,000, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – were civilians.
When the president acknowledges four deaths of US citizens, but not 4,000 deaths of non-Americans, he signals to the world a callous and discriminatory disregard for human life. Perhaps only a fraction of these 4,000 deaths were unlawful. But acknowledging and investigating these deaths is a matter of dignity and justice – for the survivors of strikes, their communities and their countrymen.
When deaths are found to be unlawful, victims' families and survivors have a right to reparation. Refusing to investigate deaths is a matter of disrespect both for international law and for the public's right to know the full truth.
Many critics, before President Obama's May address, feared that foreign governments would follow the US to lead and conduct secret drone strikes without regard for international law. They should still be concerned about the precedent the US government is setting: refusing to investigate or be held accountable for wrongful deaths.
The risk now is not just that the late May reforms on drone strikes were half-measures, but that they were calibrated to merely reassure the public, defuse criticism, and avert longer, harder scrutiny of whether the government's actions are lawful and right. A token dose of transparency may remove the sting of government secrecy, but it does not cure the disease.
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Should cops wear Google Glass?
Over at The Kernel, staff writer Greg Stevens wonders whether police departments around the world should outfit their officers with Google Glass. There’s some logic behind the idea. A cop with wearable electronics constantly streaming audio and video…
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Why Republican lawmakers are dodging the town halls' 'Days of Rage'
In 2010, GOP politicians were keen to channel Tea Party fervor. Now, backed into a corner by the base, they're looking for an exit
Looking forward to the midterm elections, the Republican party is seeking to repeat the dramatic performance of 2010 that ushered in a freshman class of Tea Party activists and reinforced for the GOP establishment the notion that their best hope for growing the party was to stop everything else in its tracks. They had no animating principle besides blanket opposition.
In retrospect, the failure of that attitude seems written into its foundations. At a retreat for freshmen congressmen sponsored by Freedom Works (whose money and organization has kept the increasingly unpopular Tea Party afloat), one aspiring legislator freely admitted that the gathering lacked the key component of, you know, legislation:
We didn't get so much into the issues … I think what we're all taking away from this is how we can continue the momentum of the movement.
Today, the party is publicly scrabbling for another program of action, even as their congressional members surrender to inertia over and over again. Clearly, something must feel good about voting to repeal Affordable Care Act if they're going to do it 42 times in a row – but it suggests the kind of solitary pursuit our mothers once warned would make us go blind.
Whatever the cause, congressional Republicans do not seem clear-eyed about the way forward. Indeed, their plan seems to still be coming together in negative terms – in terms of what not to do: don't alienate women, don't alienate Latinos and immigrants, don't bash gays, don't cater to the wealthy. The party is having difficulty sticking to this nascent plan, to say the least.
But this summer, as the denizens of Capitol Hill retreat back to their districts, there is one clear change, one solid piece of evidence that the GOP is going to do things differently: they're avoiding town halls, the cauldron of Tea Party activism that helped convince congressmen that "no" could be a complete answer. (A mantra that works well in therapeutic environments but hinders leadership in the real world.)
The New York Times reports that the events are not on congressional schedules, and that members have taken to making what few do take place hard-to-find and even harder to use as a springboard for theatrics: small venues scheduled on short notice. Looking back at how activists actually used those events, again the dismal future is inscribed on the past. A 2010 Freedom Works memo (pdf) that advised activists to use tactics to artificially inflate their presence seems especially poignant: they were, literally, fooling only themselves. Today, just a tiny fraction of the nation's voters, 8%, identify as members, with about 24% expressing "support".
The Obamacare-phobia, which the town halls thrived on, has proven unsustainable in light of the lack of near-term catastrophe. And with the administration's very canny, perhaps necessary tactic of slowing down implementation, the town hall organizers cannot count on it as a rallying point today. Other hot-button issues have already proven to be either more fodder for Democratic ads and energy than for Republican ones (restricting immigration and reproductive rights), or simply uninteresting to the average voter (Benghazi).
Even the allegations that the White House directed the IRS to target conservative groups (a charge that testimony has cast into doubt) has failed to rally more voters to the Tea Party – despite polls showing that voters do believe the conservative narrative. Indeed, some polls show Obama's support growing despite the scandal.
Analysts argue that Obama's popularity in the face of these scandals, "phony" or not, is due to an economy that has steadied, if not dramatically improved. Less important, but key to the White House's ability to navigate congressional gridlock, is the president's persistent ability to telegraph leadership and personal likability: respondents to a July Gallup poll gave him an astounding 76% in personal likability, his highest-rated personal characteristic, with "good judgment in a crisis" (58%), "understands problems Americans face" (56%), "honest and trustworthy" (55%), and "is a strong and decisive leader" (53%) rounding out the top five.
I should note that even I don't believe these descriptions are necessarily related to Obama's actual policies, beliefs and actions. I'm not even sure what all of those policies, beliefs and actions are! And if the administration continues to avoid full compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, we may never know. I do know this: Obama is an extraordinarily disciplined, lucky and charismatic man. What's more, this poll was taken before the revelations of domestic spy programs – though, frustratingly, this information doesn't seem to outrage as many people as civil libertarians (and/or Republicans) might hope.
Given the limits of anger and refusal as political strategies for the GOP, it's no wonder that town halls produced base voter turnout – but not the kind of conservative leadership that could challenge Obama's nonstick personality. (Is it Teflon, like Reagan's? Or some new technology unknown outside of infomercials and labs?)
Town halls were never going to be a good venue to find that leader, depending as they did on confrontation and bombast. Americans like fireworks as a sideshow, and a revolutionary can rile people who are already angry. Indeed, within the subset of Republican voters who consider themselves Tea Party members, the recent NSA leaks have propelled an unprecedented upswing in concern for civil rights. (To echo an internet truism: "It's not OK if Obama does it." See here.) In 2010, self-identified Tea Party members placed national security above civil liberties concerns by a margin of 63 to 20%. Last month, that finding flipped, reported The Fix:
By 55 to 31%, more Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party movement say civil liberties are the bigger concern.
I think this poll actually illustrates the fragility of the Tea Party movement; it is too mercurial to be the basis of policy. In fact, given the choice between "more of a Tea Party member" or "more of a Republican", three quarters of Freedom Works members said "Tea Party". And of course, that's true: how can a Republican congressmen elected in 2010 with the (perceived) mandate to protect the nation at all costs safely flip-flop his position as cleanly as a small but vocal minority of his constituents?
No wonder that this summer, Freedom Works is hoping to use town halls to punish wayward Republicans and not Democrats. They're hoping to pressure GOP politicians into shutting down the government if funding for Obamacare is not pulled from the federal budget. Because targeting Obamacare and government shutdowns have both worked so well for them in the past.
Americans in general don't want an angry leader. Women, acknowledged as a shrinking source of GOP support, shy away from the anger-for-anger's sake style favored by Tea Party activists in droves: among independent-identified women, the Washington Post found that 50% said "the more I hear about the Tea Party, the less I like it."
But fury and agitation is all that the GOP has offered thus far: Cruz, Christie, Santorum, Trump (God help us) continue to drive their own media coverage with outbursts and non-solutions. Marco Rubio is the only GOP varsity player to embody a more deliberate style … and even he seems to be tacking rightward, expressing decreasing support for the immigration bill he helped craft and backing the plan to hold the government hostage over Obamacare.
Conservatives are appropriately exasperated when progressives presume to tell them how to gain support or whom to elect: "Why would you want us to win?" And, it's true, my dream of a Palin-Trump 2016 ticket is not actually in the spirit of making America a more cohesive and less ideologically-divided country. But I am not encouraging Republicans to do anything, and I'm not sure who they could elect.
What I'd like is a conversation. At least, we all now know that town halls are not the place to have them.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[American conservative tea party voters, fighting mad. Isolated on white via Shutterstock.com]
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Republicans' big problem with crazy
The GOP establishment pandered to Tea Party extremism to win the 2010 midterm elections. Now, it's reaping the whirlwind
If you're looking for a Republican congressman who truly embodies the ethos of the Tea Party, Maryland Representative Andy Harris is a pretty good pick.
Harris, you see, is no fan of "big government" and he's definitely not a fan of Rinos ("Republicans in name only").
Harris made a national name for himself in 2008, when he successfully launched a primary campaign against insufficiently conservative 18-year congressional veteran Wayne Gilchrest. Although Harris lost in the general election, he was more successful two years later, joining his Tea Party contingent in the House of Representatives.
As a congressman, Harris has had a difficult time finding a single government program or legislative initiative he doesn't hate. He opposed the debt limit deal in the summer of 2011; he was one of the handful of Republicans to vote against the fiscal cliff deal in January 2013; he's against immigration reform, foreign aid, more money for Pell grants, and even the Violence Against Women Act.
And, of course, he hates Obamacare.
This record of conservative allegiance would, you might imagine, inoculate Harris from Tea Party criticism. Yet, earlier this month, in a town hall meeting in his home district, he was assailed by his constituents – for not being strident and uncompromising enough.
"You guys are being nice guys" and "I want to see more defiance!" were just some of the accusations hurled at the congressman in a heated session that included questions about the supposed IRS scandal and the current lodestar of conservative lunacy – Benghazi.
Harris is not alone.
Blake Farenthold, another Tea Party Republican from Texas, who voted against the fiscal cliff deal as well, and told constituents "there are several [cabinet] departments we could completely get rid of", was assailed by "birthers" for the GOP's failure to impeach President Obama. (His defense was not that impeachment would be insane, but that it would be infeasible.) Tea Partiers in North Carolina pummeled Congressman Robert Pittenger for refusing to support defunding Obamacare even thought he has supported a number of bills repealing Obamacare.
Indeed, across the nation, Republican senators and congressmen are finding themselves under withering assault from Tea Party critics.
After three and a half years of legislative hostage-taking and policy nihilism and unceasing, uncompromising obstructionism of President Obama's agenda, the message from the Tea Party is a simple one: we want more crazy.
So what's going on here? Quite simply, Republicans are being destroyed by the rightwing monster they created.
Although, once upon a time, the divide in the GOP was between moderates and conservatives; today, the intra-party cleavage is between the Republican establishment and the lunatic fringe. And the fringe is not so fringe-y.
For years, the GOP establishment mined this wellspring of racial and economic anxiety. They railed against gay marriage and abortion; attacked big government and out-of-control federal spending and demonized welfare and social programs.
But once in office, Republicans had a funny way of never really carrying through with their tough rhetoric. Rather than do away with social security or Medicare – they strengthened it and expanded it. Rather than slash government spending or the size of the federal bureaucracy – they increased it. The more visceral imperative for Republican officeholders was to provide tax breaks for their wealthy supporters, weaken regulation (be it financial, environmental or workplace) and, above all, hold on to their political power. Going after sacred cows like social insurance programs or popular spending programs, or working to enact abortion restrictions, were political nonstarters (or were quickly shelved once they became political liabilities).
Then, in 2009, things began to take a turn. With the election of Barack Obama, Republicans found themselves with a new political adversary uniquely capable of upsetting the far right – and the GOP made sure this was exactly what happened. Playing on fears of social change, racial anxiety and expanding big government, Republican leaders inveighed against the evils of Obamacare and the president's alleged profligate spending.
They pulled out every stop to thwart Obama's legislative agenda, and even went far down the political rabbit hole as they flirted with "birtherism", charges of socialism, and allegations that the president was a secret Muslim. In the process, they both enraged and energized the party's most radical followers.
The result was a short-term political victory (control of the House of Representatives, won in the 2010 midterms) – but an increasingly long-term political headache, like the one playing out in GOP town hall meetings across America right now. The establishment players in Congress found themselves with a host of new Tea Partier colleagues little interested in following the usual GOP script of compromise in the name of political necessity. They were willing to undermine the full faith and credit of the US government in order to force draconian spending cuts upon the White House. They've continued their assault on Obamacare, voting to repeal it 40 times, and now, one of the group's biggest bomb-throwers, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is talking about shutting down the government in order to defund it. They've allowed sequestration – and its devastating affect on communities across the country – to continue. And they have resisted any and all effort to moderate the party's image, dragging the Republican establishment under the bus with them.
On immigration reform, the Tea Party contingent has made clear that the Senate immigration bill is dead-in-the-water – thus, gravely undermining national GOP efforts to improve the party's image among Hispanic voters. On abortion rights, state legislatures filled with ultra-conservatives continue to pass legislation restricting access to reproductive health services and, in the process, further devastated the party's already poor relationship with women voters. In the struggle between those who want to moderate the party (albeit only slightly) and those who want to ride the train straight to crazy-ville, the latter are winning.
Finally, they've turned their guns on their own leaders and, in the process, driven the party more and more toward their uncompromising positions.
With deadlines coming soon on a possible government shutdown and an extension of the debt limit, Republican leaders like Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is facing a Tea Party primary challenge are under growing pressure to not get off the politically suicidal path on which they find themselves – but instead to stay the course.
The result of all this is more dysfunction, more budgetary shutdowns and more political black eyes for a Republican party unable to reason with its most ideologically fervent followers. None of this should really be unexpected. If you're going to tell radical conservatives that Obamacare is the worst thing to ever happen to America, is it really a surprise that those same extremists are not going to meekly nod when you tell them that it's now a fact of life? If you're going to tell voters that government debt is destroying the country, is it really a surprise when those voters demand that every step must be taken to reduce it?
Any hope that the defeat of Mitt Romney in November 2012 would begin to drain the GOP's fever swamp has gone by the wayside – and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. In nurturing and radicalizing its extremist fringe – in pursuit of short-term gain – the Republican establishment created a political Frankenstein. Increasingly, however, it looks as though the monster's first victim is going to be them.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Why does America have such a big prison population?
“TOO many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason.” The person who said that was neither a defence lawyer, nor a prisoners’-rights advocate, nor a European looking down his nose across the…
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