April 2010 Archives
The American people need therapy. No, we're not crazy, just badly conflicted. Like most people in therapy we want to change results without changing behaviors. This is, we all know, the definition of madness.
This is not a partisan political problem. Our great desire to have a better, cleaner, freer, cheaper, lower taxed, and higher level of benefits, society is a general and pervasive delusion.
Energy issues, shown by the current catastrophic oil spill, are good examples of our internal conflict. No one, except oil companies, wants off shore oilrigs. They are unsightly and obviously subject to disaster. But no one, except oil companies and Arab nations, want us to be pouring our money into unfriendly pockets abroad, knowing that some of the money will be used to blackmail us and to arm our enemies.
On the other hand, no one really wants nuclear power plants in their neighborhood. Many don't want them anywhere on our soil. On the other hand (are we running out of hands yet?) the people who live along our beautiful coasts don't want wind farms. They are unsightly (The wind farms, that is. The people are tan, tucked and lovely). The wind-driven blades may act like Cuisinarts slicing, dicing and puréeing birds. The same complaints come forward concerning land-based wind farms. Even the attempts to build solar collectors in the desert raise passionate opposition for being (you guessed it, unsightly) and disturbing some snail, snake or lizard. Of course, we'll happily damn anyone who proposes building a dam.
We want our state and federal budgets balanced but resist cutting any programs or raising any revenue. Uh, this is a problem. We want everyone employed, the libraries open, the schools funded, the civil servants paid (and possibly even civil and of service), but we want lower property, sales and income taxes. We want less government and more service.
Me too. I want it all. I want to defend our nation without blood. I want to grow old without diminishment. I want to love without vulnerability. I want health without exercise or restraint. I want faith without commitment. I want to go to heaven but not die. And I want either to have celery taste like steak or steak to be good for me. I want to learn to live without secretly believing that these crazy contradictions are reconcilable. Yes, the American People need therapy. Me too.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Facebook's terms of use couldn't be more explicit. It reads that posting any "content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence" Any violation of this supposedly is grounds for a user to get the summary boot. A Google search found more than 13 million references to the many ways one can get banned from Facebook and the endless squeals, gripes, and protests from the countless numbers who have been banned from Facebook. There's a difference, though. None of them were banned for praying for President Obama's death. Facebook seems to have a penchant for this kind of head in the sand, see no evil hypocrisy when it comes to Obama's life. Last September, hundreds of respondents answered "yes" to a Facebook poll question: "Should Obama be killed?" Facebook yanked the poll after howls of protest.
But this time the prayer posting has stayed up and dozens are adding their post and presumably prayer to it for the president's demise. The death prayer raises these questions: Does uttering a death threat even if couched as an imprecatory prayer on Facebook cross the line between protected speech and hate speech? What exactly does Facebook consider hateful speech? What does Facebook consider as gratuitous violence? Constitutional scholars, attorneys, and civil liberty organizations, and the courts have endlessly wrestled with these questions in every context imaginable, every one that is except in the Facebook case. Though Facebook has wrestled with them too, and in more cases than not, actually taken action, and dumped users.
The bigger danger is that polls and postings that urge serious harm to President Obama fuel the climate of resonant hate and crackpotism that's deep and widespread against him. In a real sense this gives backdoor credibility to those who cavalierly think there's nothing wrong with imploring violence against a sitting president. So when a pack of fundamentalist preachers openly pray for the president's demise as Phoenix pastor Steven Anderson and Southern California pastor Wiley Drake did last year their threats (prayers) pass low under the public radar scope.
The danger flags about Obama, of course, have flown high from the moment that he announced he would seek the presidency in February 2007. He had the dubious distinction of being the earliest presidential contender to be assigned Secret Service protection on the campaign trail. This didn't ease the jitters over his safety. Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson fired off a letter to Secret Service officials practically demanding that the Secret Service provide all the resources and personnel it could to ensure Obama's and the other presidential candidates' security. Thompson heard the whispers and nervous questions from his constituents about Obama's safety.
At any other time and with any other president, the Facebook million strong and still counting posts imploring the Lord to act against the president might be shrugged off as a sick joke. But this is not another time or another president. Obama has been the butt of every dig, insult, and knock sick minds could conjure up. Apparently thinks that's OK as long as it's just a prayer.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
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Sometimes it looks like we haven't progressed beyond the caveman era where people grunted, clubbed each other and failed to practice proper dental care.
More so now that the City Council is proposing to cut animal services meaning that more animals will have to be put to sleep. They've already cut library hours. They've already cut the court system, and they've already assigned furlough days out the yin yang.
So what are they proposing next? What do those guys do now? They hit among the most vulnerable in our system, the animal population.
Well, forget about that. Although owning a pet can put a strain on the wallet, other benefits can come to the fore, like a decrease in blood pressure and a sometime overall calm and happiness. One commentator at this paper posted something about the amount that our city officials earn. This got one astute blogger to thinking.
Using my tried and true computer skills, I googled what some of those guys make, and it was a real eye opener, though it did make me think about running for office.
The mayor earns around $207,000 smackers a year and lives rent and mortgage-free in a tudor-styled mansion. I bet that he doesn't even pay property taxes or for his own pool company or lawn and gardening service. And what do we get in return? Heartache and grief, budget wise. That's what we get (notwithstanding the fact that I like him for attending the Holocaust Commemoration and giving a meaningful speech).
Then we have the Councilmen who take in around 170,000 clams a year and they even have their own pick from of a city car, that probably includes gas and insurance. And what do we get for all that? Heartaches and aggravation. That's what we get, that and potholes, furlough days and library closures while they drive around in cars that we paid for.
If the mayor does crazy things, then the Council and the City Controller should at least try and rein him in, reason with the man. But do they? Apparently, not enough.
So I now have a little proposal of my own. Let us put a fifty year hold on the cuts to the Department of Animal Services and pass a referendum where the Councilmen and other officials would be barred from giving themselves raises without prior approval from the voters and the animals. That ought to put a hitch in their get along, or at least get them to return one of those cars.
I do understand why liberals, like me, are afraid of the precedent set by Arizona mandating the police to stop people whom they believe to be here illegally. In the 60s we liberals learned to distrust a government that lied to us about the cause of a war and infiltrated both civil rights and peace organizations. I also understand how people can feel overwhelmed by illegal immigrants and the costs and consequences of their presence. I understand how some immigrants, Hispanic and non-Hispanic alike, are uncomfortable with those who jumped the line and came here while others stood in lines, some lasting for years, to gain legal entrance.
However, I don't understand how some conservatives who fear government abuse of power, who feel that their freedoms are being eroded, can believe, at the same time, that the local government should be able to stop, question and detain people for looking, sounding, or somehow feeling foreign.
I literally don't understand this. Yes, I know that often "I don't understand" is a common rhetorical trope used when someone has an understanding and point of view. But I really mean it. I don't understand how liberals, conservatives and libertarians, all of whom hold governmental power under some justified suspicion, can think that it is a good idea to vacate some of the constitutional protections designed for us all. How could we all not foresee that, as history proves, governments accrue power and then abuse both their power and their discretion?
However clear and present a group may believe the danger of immigration or drugs or organized crime or even of terrorism, throwing out our safeguards seems like a bad idea. While we can clearly agree on the problem and the need to engage it, how we act counts. We should be able to agree, across the political spectrum that freedom and due process cannot be jettisoned whenever we feel threatened. We all can be pro-Constitutionalists.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Bravo for the Arizona Immigration Law and the fact that someone, somewhere is finally showing a backbone. Although there have been problems with illegal aliens in that region nearly since the first fence went up, the law was jump started when Arizona rancher, Robert Krentz, was murdered by an illegal immigrant several weeks ago.
Briefly, it calls for those in law enforcement officials to stop and question those who are suspected of being here illegally and it requires them to show their documents. It also calls for officials who break the law to be sued.
Jelly-kneed liberals say that it is a form of racial profiling, but so what? If it is for the safety and security of all, then it is a good thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that we are going to turn into a band of marauding thugs or start goose-stepping all over the place. It just means that we are going to stop being so over-the-top nice and kind and start setting some limits. It also means that in that part of the country, at least, that we are going to stop being a free-for-all place where the line in "New Colossus," Emma Lazarus' poem inscribed at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, "...the wretched refuse of your teeming shore" will stop taking on an unintended meaning.
As could have been foreseen, the left wing is hopping mad. You'd think that their GPS navigation systems had been stolen. But it doesn't mean that we have lost our way or our guide, only that we have started to find the divining rod back to standards and values again and that being here will finally have some value.
I wouldn't mind if it happened to me. Let's say that those hightailing it over our borders had a genetic make up similar to mine and were tall, thin and utterly gorgeous, side-stepped like Astaire, had eyes the color of the Chicago sky at high noon and hair like ribbons of chocolate silk. Let's then say that they shimmied through drainpipes to get here, by rowboat or boarded a plane with a bomb.
Let's then say that someone like me in command of this complete package was driving to the grocery and was stopped. Would it bother and rankle me? Probably not, especially if I wasn't on the FBI's Most Wanted list and hadn't done anything obnoxious or wrong. I would be as polite as possible, grit my teeth and learn to grin and bare it, provided that no one was overly rough with me. And if I wanted it to stop, then I would encourage my tall, skinny, patriotic and curly haired brethren to try and behave.
And anyone who doesn't like it is always free to exit the cabin.
When historians look back Friday April 23rd 2010 will be a signal moment, an icon, a milestone marking when and where our democracy went off the rails and our fear conquered our Constitution. On this Bad Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill that made skin color, clothing and accent probable cause to be stopped and ordered to produce your papers.
Yes, there have been other such moments, such as Dred Scott Decision or the internment of American citizens of Japanese heritage. Yes, we have recovered, or partly recovered, from most of the terrible consequences of these cruel actions. Still, they leave a toxic residue on our national soul.
My sense of outrage is not driven by some desire to have open borders or declare an amnesty. Nations, including ours, have the right to protect their borders and to determine policies on immigration that are in their self-interest. Just as we have the right to control crime, to arrest lawbreakers and not allow anarchy, we can assert legal control on immigration. And just as in our pursuit of criminals we suffer some constitutional restrictions, so must we with immigration.
Fundamentally this is not about immigration. It is about the law and our Constitution. But what makes me truly crazy today is the nearly total absence of irony. The people in the streets shouting for this measure, holding signs and demonstrating, the people supporting this distortion of our Constitution are also those most distrustful of big government and who most fear governmental abuse of power; these are the people who cry that their liberty is in peril and their freedom is being taken away. These are the people who believe that FEMA is building detention/concentration camps for dissidents. So, with 17 million undocumented in our nations, if we arrest them for living with brown skin, where will be hold them before deportation? Hmmmm. Camps? These are the people giving government the power to stop, question and arrest anyone, without warrant or cause and to suspend the Constitution.
We are not allowed to stop every black person we see if one black person robbed a bank. We are not allowed to arrest any random Arab even if 19 Arabs perpetrated 9-11. We are not allowed access the private space, files or computers of every Catholic priest because we know some number were involved in the sexual abuse of children and adolescents. Our system of laws focuses on individual action, not personal attributes, nationality, or status; in fact, we have a large body of law whose purpose is to prevent discrimination on the basis of a person's attributes, rather than actions. Constitutionally we should not be able to demand that brown-skinned people prove their status based simply on skin, dress and accent.
That we profile is human, and we have to admit that we do it by race, ethnicity, religion, language and dress. But this fact of human life, this fact of how we understand the world, does not mean that we should memorialize our prejudices in law or throw out our constitution. Yes, it is human that we give greater scrutiny to Arabs at airports than to Norwegians. But that is about our eyes, our views, our fears and passions and not the law. The law and our precious Constitution are important only when they are tough to honor. When we are afraid or feel threatened is when we must choose to honor them--even with all our personal instincts and passions screaming to cut to the chase because we are sure we can recognize a foreigner or terrorist or robber by gut instinct.
What makes this a day of infamy is not the issue of immigration; it is about our ethics, racism and nativism. We must be under no illusions what this is about. Yes, uncontrolled borders are a legitimate concern, but we are cloaking a fear and antipathy towards brown-skinned people in the cloth of illegal immigration. We are not, however, talking about Canadians. Nor are we talking about English or French or Germans, Irish, Danes or Poles. Their accents are charming, and their skin is white.
Do not for a moment believe that we can single out people of Hispanic origins and not have this stain the legitimacy of legal American residents and citizens of Hispanic origin. Prejudice paints (no, it smears) with a broad and filthy brush.
I don't know if Gov. Jan Brewer is a bigot or an opportunist, and I don't know which is worse. I do know that when skin color, or perceived ethnicity, become carved into the body politic, we bleed out our core values and highest aspirations. Immigration is a problem, crime is a problem, pollution is a problem, but we have a Constitution that aspires to recognize that all are equal before the law. We cannot solve our problems if we lose what it is that makes people want to come here. Some societies build walls to keep people in. We build walls to keep people out. I'm okay with the walls. I'm not okay with our making people scapegoats for our problems and our failures to control our borders.
It is predictable that in times of relative scarcity--jobs and money--we turn against some "other," whom we find to be the cause of our problems. We have at other times found fundamental fault with Catholic immigration (and now we have 6 Catholic Supreme Court Justices!). We persecuted and marginalized Irish, Poles and Jews. We excluded Asians. We looked down on and feared Italians. We kept Africans in chains as chattel. Those were not our finest hours. Nor are these.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
President Obama wasted no time in denouncing Arizona's hard-nosed anti-immigration law. He called it misguided, irresponsible and a threat to civil liberties. Obama's right. The bill is wasteful, unenforceable, and more ominously virtually a license for police to engage in racial profiling. But it's also popular in Arizona and judging from polls and underground sentiment of millions of Americans on immigration, popular with them too.
Arizona official's claim they had to act in large part because the federal government has dithered, stalled, and back pedaled countless times on enacting comprehensive immigration reform. This in effect dumps the immigration reform issue squarely back in Obama's lap. In the coming days immigration reform leaders, Hispanic activist groups, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus almost certainly will ratchet up their demand and efforts to get Obama to get the ball rolling on a reform bill in Congress. The demand couldn't come at a worse time for Obama.
The loss of thousands of jobs, with official unemployment still nudging double digit, African-American joblessness far higher, and with low wage American workers bearing the brunt of the downturn presents a wedge for immigration foes. They will again hammer that undocumented workers snatch jobs from needy American workers. The charge has been hotly disputed but it still touches a raw nerve.
There's still the loose network of anti-immigration organizations, and the legions of right wing talk jocks, Tea Party activists, and Fox News Network talking heads who can stir the troops to oppose any reform. The stock attack charge that any immigration reform bill is a de facto reward for breaking the law still ignites anger and passion in many Americans. Arizona governor Jan Brewer tied her signing the bill into law into another issue that ignites even greater passion and anger. And that's crime. She flatly said that the law would help protect her state from crime from Mexico. The governor cited no evidence to show that immigration has bumped the state's crime rate up. But then again she didn't have to. The frightening shots of bullet riddled, hacked up bodies that have become regular news features on American TV screens from the low intensity warfare in Mexico between government forces and the drug cartels and with each other is more than enough to stir nightmare terror in many Americans that a wave of illegal immigrants flooding the country will turn America's streets into blood drenched streets.
Immigration reform also can't be separated from partisan politics. The two special elections slated in May in Hawaii and Pennsylvania are toss ups and a loss of either of the seats to Republicans would further add to Democrat's fears that the three hammer blows they suffered in losing a revered Senate seat in Massachusetts, and governorships in Virginia and New Jersey were not aberrations. With November mid-term elections fast approaching and the real danger that Democrats could lose big in them, picking a fight that's bound to be even more contentious and divisive than the health care battle is just too great a risk.
Obama has a major fight on his hands to get a financial reform bill passed. There's the risk that the concessions he and Senate Democrats made to Republicans to quickly get the bill passed could alienate many liberal and progressive Democrats who want to see the toughest possible consumer protections in place against the ravages of big banks and financial houses. They were the driving force behind his election win and the White House banks on them their numbers and passion to help blunt the momentum of Tea Party activists in the fall, and beyond.
Obama gave immigration reform short shrift in his State of the Union back in February, and this rankled immigration reform backers. They loudly protested that the president reneged on his promise to them to make comprehensive emigration reform a centerpiece of his agenda. In the months since then they have hammered at Obama to make good on the promise with the vague hint that if he doesn't, more than a few Latino voters may just be tempted to stay home in the fall and beyond.
Arizona may have taken the option of watch and wait caution off the White House table. And that puts Obama on the spot.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.
Earl, even a lamb chop would know why the city's budget is in a shambles after Mayor V's nearly eight year reign. And while I like him on a personal level, (but I like anyone who attends a Holocaust rally without goose stepping or throwing things,) there were signs that should have been heeded early on that this may not have been the person to run this city at this time.
Even as a State Assemblyman in 1996 there were signs. He lobbied to Washington for the pardon of drug trafficker Carlos Vignali, Jr. After President Clinton pardoned him, info leaked out that Hillary Clinton's brother, public defender Hugh Rodham, had received a mysterious cash settlement from someone.
Villaraigosa took over the reigns from Mayor Hahn, who lost not because there were any major catastrophes dueing his reign but because he lacked magnetism and presence and would have caused the Rockettes to fall asleep had he spoken in front of them.
Also, Villaraigosa did inherit a fiscal mess that was exacerbated by his free spending ways by buying a 4.8 billion dollar Purple Line extending to the ocean that will take twenty years to complete, if we are still here by then.
But really, what does anyone expect of a city that got its water from William Mulholland who schemed and plotted to take water from the San Owens Valley farmers and then made them buy it back? Free spending Charlie is only doing what he does best. The problem now is that too many people wound up getting pulled under into the tide.
So the great celebrity gauntlet of the Hollywood universe has started swinging the other way again. It used to be that celebrity equaled the Hermes goody bag of life.
But every-so-often, something will happen and the seams of those bags will start to unravel. It happened when Paris Hilton went to jail for driving with a suspended license. Not one whose mission in life is "to protect, honor and serve," her debt to society should have been paid in other ways like washing towels at a women's shelter, serving grits at a soup kitchen or attempting to work the cash register at Macy's, anything to see how the other 99% of the world lives before driving off to another club in her Ferrari. Would the heiress have learned? Probably not, but it may have at least worth been worth the try to see how it might have impacted her. Never mind.
Now the moving hand having writ, the great celebrity gauntlet has swung towards Cameron Douglas, an heir apparent, too, the son of actor, Michael Douglas and his ex-wife, Diandra Luker, the stepson of Catherine Zeta Jones and the grandson of Kirk Douglas. A Hollywood lineage doesn't get much purer than that.
So what did the wanna-be actor from this acting dynasty do with his pedigree? He threw it down the loo, left it to mold and fester in the bottom of his sock drawer, probably in frustration and wounded vanity.
But that still doesn't excuse him for what he did, or the fact that he agreed to start dealing drugs after having dinner with a drug dealer he met while staying in a swanky Manhattan hotel in 2006. His dealing netted him tens of thousands of dollars but had the potential to ruin thousands of countless lives. If there was ever a definition of narcissism, this is it.
Maybe I am in no position to talk. I do not come from a long line of Hollywood royalty, or even any line, not even a sliver. My greatest claims to fame are that I had a relative who was an ambassador for the UN and another one worked on the atom bomb. Otherwise, I come from a long line of businessmen and accountants. My father was a used car dealer, for heaven's sake. Though even if I had set my sights on being an actor, like Cameron Douglas did, there were other roads I would have taken, other things I would have done so that I could at least hold my head up in pride.
His family wrote letters to the court trying to spare him from jail. Michael Douglas wrote that although Cameron "is an adult and responsible for his own actions, genes, family and peer pressure" played a part in all this. In the end that and letters from his stepmother, Catherine Zeta Jones or his grandfather, Kirk Douglas, weren't enough to spare him, nor should they have been. He did something illegal and deserves to be punished.
The question is how? Many years ago, I took a class with a woman who was given an unusual sentence for drug use. Rather than go to jail, the judge decided that she should volunteer at a facility for mentally and physically challenged adults. Once she got there and saw adults who would never have half the chances or choices she had, she began to realize how she was wasting her abilities, even the ability to move her fingers, and never used again.
Maybe Cameron Douglas needed something like that or at least a good kick in the seat of the pants when he was growing up.
Our Mayor is a shooting star that flashed incandescently across the sky and crashed to earth in little pieces. It is a shame for, as Earl points out, he had it all--charm, charisma and lots of friends. He had boundless energy and optimism. Sadly, he couldn't deliver.
I should have known the first time I met him up close and personal--on that magical night. No, I'm not implying anything untoward--other than standard political insincerity. I am not after all a pretty young news anchor or even reporter. I'm just an old straight guy.
But on this special evening I was at a VIP table, and I watched Villaragosa work the room. He was good. Then he came to us. He was introduced to my famous friend--my entrée to the VIP table--and he acted suitably impressed. Then he got to me.
He had no idea who I was, but he decided instantly, in an abundance of caution, to give me the first class greeting. He grasped my right hand in both of his strong young hands. He looked deeply and directly into my eyes. He held the gaze three seconds (but it seemed an eternity) and told me with utter sincerity how deeply, truly deeply pleased he was to meet me.
Well, I thought we had something special there--a moment, a bonding, a connection. Then, when he didn't call the next morning, well, I felt so used, so abandoned. Ah well, another politician who disappoints. He was only a shooting star flashing through my life.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Mayor Tony has just suffered the ultimate dread, nightmare, and embarrassment for any politician. He's the target of a recall campaign. In most cases, recall campaigns are take your pick: a cheap publicity stunt, a sour grapes move by the targeted official's avowed enemies, or an ego driven effort to test the water for a wanna be candidate's run for that office. This one may be all of the above. The backers of the recall are professional Tony loathers, are no stranger to a TV camera, and have run been perennial candidates. But knocking the recall campaign's messenger, doesn't cancel their message. Or the fact that untold thousands of Los Angeles residents have had it up to their gills with Tony, and would sign a dump Tony petition in a heartbeat.
Tony by any standard is a terminally damaged politician. If the election were held today an anybody but Tony candidate would score big. Here's a mayor who at one time had it all. Charm, charisma, political savvy, national name identification, the solid backing of unions and big business, a fawning media, and a campaign war chest to choke a horse. He made big sweeping promises to make L.A. into the model for the nation of a well-oiled, clean, efficient, prosperous, crime, gang and homeless reduced city, with affordable housing, unclogged streets and freeways, racial harmony, fully empowered citizens and responsive government. The promise was that he'd do one or more of these things without plunging the city into fiscal freefall.
Five years later L.A. on Tony's watch L.A. ranks at or near the top of the nation's list as the poster big city for urban and fiscal dysfunctionality. There's the perpetual gridlocked city streets and freeways, mini-Calcutta looking homeless encampments throughout the city, the wide swatches of South and East L.A. and the Valley where residents cringe in terror from gang violence, toothless neighborhood councils, and thousands of residents shut out of access to anything that even remotely looks like an affordable apartment or home.
Despite the glaring dysfunctionality voters might have cut Tony some slack and dumped the blame for the city deterioration on a lousy economy, and a horribly mismanaged state legislature. But Tony didn't leave bad enough alone. He pumped out voter initiatives that raised taxes allegedly to improve trash collection and to put legions of new cops on the streets. Neither has happened. The tax hikes came off as yet another con and hustle. He still couldn't leave worse alone. He ignored loud shouts from fiscal experts and auditors that he and city officials were burning through cash faster than a NASCAR speedway team and that there was nothing coming in. What did Tony do? He went out and burned more cash in sweetheart raises, benefits, and deals with his city employee union chums, while squandering more cash on his bloated, do little, entourage of deputy mayors, consultants, and assorted city hall hanger ons. He and they in turn squandered tens of thousands more on their endless globe trots all on the city dime. Now that the inevitable fiscal day of reckoning is here and the city teeters on the precipice of bankruptcy with massive cuts in services and employee layoffs looming, what does Tony do? He pleads in his state of city address that "mistakes" were made.
In 2009, a bell and whistle blared loudly on what voters really thought of Tony's colossal mismanagement when a pack of no-name, no funded, non-descript mayoral challengers more than forty percent of their vote in his reelection win. They gave them their vote with a voter turnout that was embarrassingly low even by L.A.'s standard embarrassingly low off year election numbers. Even at that Tony barely avoided the supreme embarrassment of a run-off against a white, Republican who is an outspoken anti-immigration, pro business attorney, in a rock solid pro labor, minority-majority, and top heavy Democratic city.
Tony's political wreckage has only continued to pile up higher since then. There's not enough miracles left in the heavens for Tony to salvage anything faintly resembling an even mediocre rating from voters on his job performance during what's left of his City Hall years.
A recall may go nowhere but it will give thousands of voters a chance to vent at a mayor who forgot why he was in City Hall and the reason voters put him there. The recall is not just an embarrassment but a deserved embarrassment for Tony.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and talk show host on KPFK and KTYM Radio and a regular contributor to insidesocal.
A recent New York Time/CBS poll confirmed the obvious. Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, lower income, and GOP leaning. Nearly all passionately believe that President Obama is shoving the country to socialism. All lambaste the federal government for giving the company store away to the poor. The poor in this case are blacks. That race lurks perilously just beneath the surface with Tea Party activists is beyond dispute. To many the equation is government programs equal hand outs to undeserving blacks and the poor and that in turn equals money snatched from the pockets of hard working whites..
This is nothing new. It's just a recycle of the media buzz depiction of the angry white male. The term was coined by political analyst and then GOP strategist Kevin Phillips during Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968. Nixon stoked the fury of blue collar, white ethnics, rural voters with his slam of the Democrats for coddling criminals, welfare cheats, and fostering a culture of anything goes permissiveness, and of course, big government Great Society pandering to the poor. The crude thinly disguised code words and racial cues worked. Nixon eked out a narrow victory over Democratic presidential opponent Hubert Humphrey. The tag of law and order and permissiveness became a staple in the GOP attack play book for the next four decades. With tweaks and refinements, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush used it to ease their path to the White House. In the mid 1990s, Newt Gingrich and ultra conservatives recycled the strategy to seize Congress, and pound out an agenda that made big government, tax and spend Democrats, and soft on crime liberals the fall guys for everything wrong with America. It touched the familiar nerve with white males.
The volatile mix of big government and economics that can whip frustrated, rebellious, angry whites (and more than a few non-whites) into a tizzy far better than crude race baiting, magnificently for a reason that goes beyond race alone. Many blue-collar white males were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation became more evident in the early 1980s when nearly 10 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls, more than half from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty has continued to expand.
Hate groups, anti-Obama Web sites and bloggers, and radio talk jocks can craft this as the prime reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and, by extension, Obama while convincing themselves and the public that this has nothing to do with race. This translates to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government. The vintage blends of anti-government politics and calls defending personal freedom were the neo-libertarian war cries heard at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the tea party convention. Protests over big government dwarfed the subtle and overt race-baiting appeals that were seen and heard at both conventions.
Tea party activists hammer Obama, the Democrats, big government, the elites, and Wall Street. Yet, they also grouse about abortion, family values, gay rights, and tax cuts -- not race.
Rightwing populism, with its mix of xenophobia, loath of government as too liberal, too tax-and-spend, and too permissive, and a killer of personal freedom has been the engine that powered Reagan and Bush White House wins. Scores of GOP governors, senators and members of congress have used wedge issues to win office and maintain political dominance. The GOP grassroots brand of populism has stirred millions operating outside the confines of the mainstream Republican Party. In 2008, many of these voters stayed home. Even Sarah Palin wasn't enough to budge them. Their defection was more a personal and visceral reaction to the bumbles of George W. Bush than a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment. They were ripe for the tea party movement -- or any movement that keyed their anger and frustration into action.
The supposed proof that the tea party movement is loaded with bigots and driven by race frenzy is that tea party leaders won't denounce the racists in their ranks. That won't happen. One the movement would have to be structured, layered, and regimented with a unitary agenda and program for that to be the case. It's the disparate, disjointed and scrambled headless amoeba that makes the tea party movement potent, appealing and dangerous. But it won't happen because the for more than foru decade history of politics the dangerous blend of big government, undeserving, crime prone, poor and minorities, and put upon whites has been so deeply encoded in the political thinking of millions of whites, that it's the government not race that matters, true or not.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
We humans are Kings of the World and Masters of the Universe until Mother Nature wakes up and puts us in our place. No, I'm not anthropomorphizing and saying we're being punished for our environmental sins. I'm not going the way of the Iranian Mullahs who are blaming earthquakes on promiscuous women--although, from time to time, they may make the earth move. Nor do I think God sends hurricanes to New Orleans because of sin.
Nature is, in my view, fiercely indifferent to us. In other words, with all the earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis and now volcanoes, to quote The God Father, "It's nothing personal. It's just business," the business of Nature.
Still, it does kind of put things in perspective. We build, cut, and plow. We burn, pour and pollute. We are the top dogs on this planet, and we are also next to nothing against the forces of Nature. From meteors crashing into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago and ushering the dinosaurs into extinction, to Krakatau in the 19th century blotting out the sun, even our nuclear explosions are second-rate boils on Nature's body.
The current eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland is small stuff next to the 1783 eruption of its neighbor Laki, which sits uncomfortably close over a related, but far larger, caldron of molten lava. The smoke, particulates and plume from Laki caused a Europe to miss the summer and the harvest to fail. Some scholars believe that scarcities caused by Laki's blow-up helped stir the French Revolution.
We are no more prepared today to deal with a catastrophic eruption than we were in 1783. Arguably, we are less prepared. For all our scientific progress, there are so many more people to feed, transport, and manage waste for today. Were Laki to blow today's annoyances of people getting angry, hungry and dirty at airports would seem a springtime walk in the park.
We are getting but a small taste of what Nature is capable of. Could we be better prepared for quakes, asteroids, hurricanes and volcanoes? Sure, but could we ever be truly ready to meet the challenges? Not a chance. Sometimes, you just have to try to hang on as Nature takes you through her thrilling ride. Good luck to us all.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
My wife was right about the shoes. I should have known all along. I tease my wife, the Fair Helenkela, about all her shoes--I think this is a pretty regular trope for husbands, many of whom call their wives, unoriginally, Imelda. At last count (only a minute ago) my wife had 157 pairs of shoes. Oh, and she's probably wearing a pair even as I write this.
I am not complaining. She is a wise and frugal woman and is doing a great deal better with her investment in shoes than all my harebrained investment schemes. IndyMac stock. General Motors. Lehman Brothers. And, of course, ENRON. Who knew I should have bought shoes?
I realized this when I went into a Beverly Hills store today that happened to carry the shoes I was wearing. I had purchased them 6 years ago for around $200. Today they were on sale for $575! Had I followed my wife's prescient example and bought 157 pairs (and continued to wear my original pair), I'd be $58,875 to the good!
While my assets turned toxic, her shoes have turned to gold, pure gold. It's genius, I tell you. Genius! Anyone wanna buy some sling-back pumps? She'll never notice!
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Human Rights Watch published an Op-Ed piece about human rights abuses in Tunisia. They complained bitterly of the lack of freedom of speech and restrictions on the press. They pointed out how much of a police state Tunisia had become and how little America and Western Europe seem to notice. They gave examples of political prisoners, people restricted to internal exile in remote villages or put under house arrest without due process.
As I read the Op-Ed I thought, "Le plus ça change." Their observations are all true, but hardly breaking news. For this was also true forty-two years ago when I spent two years in Tunisia in the Peace Corps. Back then there was only one real political party, the Neo-Destour Party, and the president, Habib Bourguiba, ruled pretty much as he wished--until he was overthrown by the present president for life, Zine el-Abidene Ben Ali.
Back then we knew there were party spies in our classrooms and any subversive remarks would be cause for deportation of teachers and expulsion for students. We knew that there was one policeman in our town whose sole job was to keep track of the foreigners--and all the foreigners were working to help Tunisia develop its physical infrastructure and intellectual resources.
We were teachers, architects, doctors and engineers. So innocent of subversion were we that none of us, as far as I know, was even approached by the CIA or the Foreign Service Department to do any political reporting. Truthfully there was nothing to report. When one Tunisian colleague and friend, Salah Guez-Guez, asked me quite earnestly if I were with the CIA, my response was: "I don't want to insult you, but what am I going to steal in our village, your mother's recipe for couscous?" He got it.
But while not reporting to anyone, we knew that thieves were treated harshly, that prisoners were beaten to extract confessions, that penalties for crimes were draconian and that speaking against the government, if not a crime on the books, would be treated as criminal. I personally witnessed the mistreatment of people by the police and the torture and beating of suspected thieves.
The Neo-Destourian Party has changed its name to the Rassemblement Constitutionel Democratique. It has not changed its behavior--or rather misbehavior. Voltaire remarked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire. This Democratic Constitutional Assembly while being an assembly is neither democratic nor constitutional.
The problem with Tunisia is that it is our friend. It is relatively moderate, as Arab nations go, in its relationship with the West. While obviously pro-Arab and Palestinian, it is not a noisy militant nation. One of the reasons for its political moderation is at the heart of our dilemma. The government is threatened by Islamists and radicals who would make Tunisia into an orthodox Islamic state. The central government rationalizes spies and police brutality to control the Islamists. While partly true, this encapsulates the chicken/egg question. In repressing freedom, they encourage subversion. In making a mockery of democracy, they push the understandably discontent into the arms of the religious radicals.
We support the government, as we do in Egypt and Saudi Arabia--two other repressive regimes whose dictatorial rule will be followed by governments that will not appreciate our support of their current oppressors. What should we do? Our dilemma is to support an internationally moderate government that is brutal at home or an Islamist insurgency that, if history is a guide, will be worse--both at home and abroad? Neither the Tunisian people nor we is in an enviable position.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
It's become clear that we can't keep forcing Southerners to remain a part of an America that they just can't believe in. We must let them be "South America," as it were.
I bear no ill will to the good men and women of the South, who have fought for our nation in numbers far disproportional to the American population.
But their hearts just aren't in it anymore. Southerners have agreed in principle to let go of slavery, but they just can't let go of their fondness for the good old days, captured in Virginia's Confederate History Month and the vigorous defense of it by other Southerners.
If we let the South secede, it will no longer present a conundrum to GOP leaders who can't decide whether to bow to hard-right Southern whims or to the inexorable urbanization and minoritization of the larger US. The South is the one area that is most inclined to believe that the US president holds office illegitimately. Whites in the South are 12 percent more likely than whites in the rest of the country to join Tea Party movements claiming they've been held hostage to fascists.
Clearly this "union" just isn't working, so we should adjust. In a gesture of good will to Mexico, I propose we give Texas back to them, to do with as they please. The rest of the South should be allowed to be its own nation, and to wave its Confederate flag proudly. And since we've freed the slaves, our own duty to the citizens of that region has been discharged admirably.
A secession will require a gracious but firm foreign policy on the part of the "real" United States:
1. We will need to offer visas and asylum to minorities and pointy-headed liberals who feel threatened within the New Confederacy.
2. We will need to cede some nuclear weaponry to the New Confederacy. We must be firm in threatening massive retaliation. But we can be reasonably sure that the men and women with the know-how to deploy those weapons will leave Duke and Rice and immigrate to the U.S.
3. We may need to work with Mexico and Central American nations to keep New Confederacy imperialism in check.
4. DHS will need to screen Confederacy citizens carefully for ties to gun groups before issuing visas to allow them to visit Boston or San Francisco.
5. And we will certainly need to send Fox News packing from New York to some more suitable location.
Such a foreign policy might seem to be a difficult venture. But the other option, that the South would come into the 21st century willingly, is far more preposterous.
Jonathan, at the risk of looking like a nudge and a nagging Daily News co-blogger, I'm only going to say this once: I TOLD YOU SO. Anyone who didn't see the Obama Administration's posture towards Israel is either blind, has been hit over the head with a bat or in a medically induced coma. Obama, who is no Henry Kissinger and has all the foreign policy cred of a bat, is going to favor the Arabs. He gave hints and signals, as in red warning flags, all along. Look at his alliance with Reverend Wright. Anyone who believes that a man as smart as Barack Obama would hang out with someone for twenty years and not have some idea of his politics is either dead or in an coma.
It is a real turn about from the 70's when the Democrats were pro-Israel and the Republicans were pro country club. Now, everything has shifted, and it is the Democrats (read liberals) who have bought into all that hogwash and hooey that the Arabs are slathering us with, so they are siding with them. And now it is the Republicans, many of whom are born again Christians, that have turned pro-Israel. They think that we are going to convert, but that is another story for another time and millennia. The bottom line is not why but that this is the shift.
As for Netanyahu skipping the summit, I heard he chose not to walk into the enemy line fire, and his silence sends a stronger message than his presence ever would have.
And there you have it. Don't wait for Obama to change. Just be prepared to grumble and groan and to write more columns like this.
We reached the customer service counter at the same time last Sunday at Trader Joe's. I was there to return a basil plant that I'd bought as a gift for someone a few days earlier that was half-wilted from lack of water and got squished in my cart after I'd forgotten about it and loaded groceries on top of it.
I sensed an aggressiveness in her as she called out to the clerk first.
"Can I have a job application?" she asked him.
She was no kid and must have been years older than the average person working at that store.
"I have to do something," she told me as the customer service rep scouted around for an application. "I'll take anything."
Suddenly, she didn't seem so aggressive anymore, just desperate to eat and pay for a roof over her head and maybe buy a few nice things for herself.
I told her that the Census Bureau was looking for workers and if she didn't have a computer at home, then she could always go the library to take their online test that I had heard had fifteen or twenty questions. Her face brightened somewhat as she thanked me.
After she left, I went to the parking lot to look for her because I wanted to give her my card. I know what it's like to pound the pavement looking for a job and come up empty handed, and I would have been willing to look at some search engines for her, but it was too late. She was nowhere to be found.
Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernacke, said that the economy is improving but that joblessness would skid and grind for some time. This, unfortunately, is all too true.
Obama and our government have just committed both a blunder and an outrage against Israel. While I wrote an endorsement of Obama for the Daily News and supported him, this new and misguided policy may prevent me from voting for him again. No, I'm not a single-issue litmus test kind of person. There are many transgressions I will tolerate and disappointments I'm willing to suffer. There is however a limit and that comes when the safety, security and existence of Israel are put in peril. This is not yet the case, but our government took a frightening first step this week. What is yet more troubling is that it has bareley been noticed in our press.
While our press has covered Netanyahu's boycott of the Nuclear Security Summit, it has generally analyzed his absence as fear that he would get attacked by the Muslim countries, led by Turkey. I suspect that this is not the reason at all. Netanyahu is quite accustomed to being attacked personally and politically by Arabs and Israelis. One rare point of agreement. He has, however, the hide of a rhinoceros.
In an ill-considered attempt to get Israel to follow our priorities--and possibly as payback for the rude treatment of Biden--the United States banned workers from Israel's nuclear plant at Dimona from receiving American visas. This is reminiscent of England's refusing admission of Israeli scholars for academic conferences. It is obnoxious when done by England, but it is wholly unacceptable when we do it. This is not how you treat a friend--the only democracy and reliable ally in the region. When we offer a hand to Iran, underwrite Iraq with its Iranian connections, proffer an olive branch to Iran and coddle Karzai, who threatened to join the Taliban if we didn't do his bidding--and then do this to Israel, there is something very wrong with our policies and priorities. This becomes part of the pattern of steadily delegitimizing Israel. This is a very worrisome event when done by America.
But it gets still worse. We have also refused the sale of radiation detection technology to Israel. These instruments were to be used in detecting any radiation leaks at the nuclear plant at Dimona. This technology is clearly defensive and designed to protect civilian lives. It has no conceivable aggressive use. Why would we put Israeli civilians in peril?
Can you imagine if the circumstances were reversed? What if Israel, which has an impressive technology industry, had radiation leak instruments that we wanted in order to intercept planes or ships coming to our shores, and they refused them to us? Can you imagine if a technology that could have spotted a ship with a hidden dirty bomb 100 miles from our shores, but because Israel withheld it from us, it blew up in one of our ports? Can you imagine the noise we would be making at the withholding of the technology, not to mention if a dirty device made it to our shores? No, you can't, because it wouldn't happen. A friend would not do that to a friend.
Fortunately Israel can live without its workers or scientists coming here to share their knowledge and experience. Fortunately Israel can buy the technology from France. So all we did was insult a friend and lose a sale. If this is an isolated incident, a shot across Israel's bow, maybe we get over it. But the symbolism, more than the facts, hurt and do not advance American interests or Israeli cooperation and faith in our assurances of eternal friendship. This pushes Israel into deeper isolation without gaining anything from the Muslim World. It is a lose-lose blunder!
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
As someone who teaches a course called The Roots & Bitter Fruits of Anti-Semitism, there are some perennial questions that both Jews and non-Jews pose to me. Some want to know why we Jews "obsess" over the Holocaust. They wonder if we are not reveling in victimhood and erasing our strength and accomplishments by concentrating on this terrible but time specific horror? Are we not driving people away--Jews in embarrassment for having gone to the ovens passively (a myth, bye the way) and gentiles repelled by a sense of guilt that they did nothing to earn? My firm answer to both of these questions is: Maybe. But so be it. The truth is the truth. The story must be told, and not because it happened to my family, the Jews. It must be told because it was perpetrated by human beings against other human beings.
What makes the Holocaust stand out is not the number of Jewish dead--usually reported as 6 million. (As Roger Cohen quotes the poet Wislawa Szymborska, "History counts its skeletons in round numbers). More died in the USSR, and nearly as many die each year of preventable and treatable diseases. It is not the number but the inhumanity acted out against the interests of their own society and culture, against the values, both religious and secular, that Europe espoused. A civilized continent went mad.
As monstrous as it is, we understand war. We know that people kill for power, for land and for treasure. We know too that there are some who may kill for pleasure.
Genocide is in a different category. It is a blood lust to exterminate some "other." The lesson, the universal lesson of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by a high civilization, a nation with art and culture, universities and proud traditions. Neither church nor state staunched the blood or cooled their terrible fever.
Out of the Holocaust came great despairing questions. Religious Jews asked, "Where was God? And secular Jews wondered, "Where was humanity?" Together, without having answers, they responded with the affirmation: Never Again!
Tragically it has happened again and again and again. Not necessarily 6 million of one people, but the blood lust, the wanton extermination of people because of their race, religion or ethnicity goes on.
The steps leading to genocide are clearly illuminated by the hellfires of history. We don't normally set out to exterminate human beings. Those whom we would slaughter we first destroy in our hearts by dehumanizing them. They are no longer friends or neighbors, no longer really even people. They are dogs and pigs. They are vermin and rats. They are all the terrible epithets and slurs we can create to make them other than us--the good, the holy, the beloved of God.
Thus our enemies become mad, crazy and insane. So it must be okay to kill them. They are also morally evil; they are also often sexually perverted and deviant. They are socialists, communists or fascists. In other words not like us.
Of course, they are just like us. I am not of a different species from the guards who murdered my family at Auschwitz or Majdanek. I am not a different creature from Pol Pot or Stalin. We all share the human genome and have infinite potential to do good or evil.
We cannot step back from the brink if we do not recognize it. If we do not remember and identify both with the victims and the perpetrators, we make it harder to stop ourselves when, in the heat of passion and fear, we are drawn by the surging mob towards the moral abyss.
The Holocaust must be remembered. Of course we should not "obsess" about it, but neither can we deny the ferocity that lies beneath the surface and from time to time awakens the beast from which we have not quite yet fully evolved.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
I was in the fifth row in the back in the left at the Holocaust Commemoration ceremony. I promised myself that I would go every since my father died. I promised myself that even if I was the only left and had to stand out in the rain by myself with a sign in my hand, that I would go.
My father was a survivor. His real name was Adam Szusz, but he changed it to Allen Saunders when he came to this country. A few things saved him. One was that, at seventeen, he was young and agile. He was in a work camp, but because the Nazis were more organized in the countryside than they were in Budapest, he one day managed to blend in with the crowd, walked out and went to an uncle's apartment in the city and hid. The housekeeper let him in and risked her life sneaking him food. He knew it was safe to go out again when he saw the Russian tanks surrounding the city in January 1945.
Playing journalist, I interviewed him a few years before he passed away, but never thought about asking him the name of that woman because I would have tried to find her family and thank them and even give them some money. But by the time I thought about it, my uncle was gone, too.
Years before in Chicago on the anniversary of Krystallnacht, the November night the Germans destroyed and looted Jewish businesses, some people expected trouble. Being one of them and half-heartedly looking for adventure, we went riding around in a Jewish neighborhood looking for looters. Fortunately, we never found any.
Mayor Villaraigosa was at the commemoration. Say what you want about him and how he ran this city. Say what you want about his indiscretions. There has to be something in this man, he has enough humanity that he would make time for a commemoration like this. After all, he has nothing to gain. Like Earl said, he is termed out, so there is nothing in it for him. It was humanity and decency.
A representative from the German Consulate was there as well, seventy years too late, although I can't hold him accountable for what went before him.
My family never spoke about it. My grandmother mentioned it here and there. My uncle, never until I took it into my head to interview him.
My grandmother was in Mauthausen for about six months, and because she was forty-five years old then, I believe that part of her survival was luck because she never saw any of her four sisters again.
The other part was that even with what I believed to be a core of molten steel, she could be quite the charmer when she wanted to be. She often told me the story about how they lined the women up in a room and gave them rags to wear. My grandmother picked a jacket (or was she given?) a jacket from the ragbag, but when she looked inside the breast pocket, there was a picture of the Madonna that the Nazis overlooked. She took it as a sign that she was going to survive.
The other story was about how an Austrian Nazi interviewed her and asked her what she was.
"I am Jewish," said my grandmother.
"No you are not," said the Austrian woman. "If you tell them that, they will kill you. From now on, you are a gypsy."
Then the woman told her how she had been forced to become a Nazi but didn't want to become one. That probably saved my grandmother's life, that and the bread that some gypsies shared with her.
My grandfather, who I never met because he died almost a year to the day before I was born, went into the camp with TB and survived because he was so sick the Nazis sent him home where he somehow got medication and got better.
I can't imagine what it would be like to go through life never being able to enjoy myself or feeling guilty for each morsel of bread I put in my mouth because others had starved to death. I can't imagine what it would be like waking up each night with the same recurring nightmare. I wish I had something to ease their pain.
Maybe what we learn from this is not only never again but that we are we and other people are like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
In 2005, then Illinois Senator Barack Obama was unequivocal. He said he wanted a Supreme Court justice with a heart. By that he meant someone who was not just a top legal scholar and rendered flawless legal opinions rulings, but who had real compassion for the needs and suffering of people. In a fiery senate floor speech on September 22 that year Obama hammered Bush's high court pick John G. Roberts as being dismissive and insensitive to race and gender discrimination.
Four months later Obama went on the attack again. He lambasted Bush's next high court pick Samuel A. Alito as a shill for the powerful and uncaring about the rights and protections of the powerless, poor and minorities. He slammed Alito for backing prosecutors over the rights of defendants. He felt so strongly that Alito was not the right sort for the court that he joined in a futile and short lived filibuster against him.
He didn't stop there. At a presidential campaign appearance in 2007 he said: "We need somebody who's got the heart to recognize, the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom; the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old." There was that reference to heart again.
Obama wanted and expected a Supreme Court justice to be a guardian of the people's interests, to be cut squarely in the proud tradition of Hugo Black, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, and yes, on his best days John Paul Stevens. Obama saw absolutely nothing wrong with a justice being a legal scholar, judicial expert and an activist. He firmly rejected the GOP's and conservative judicial watchdog group's phony, politically self-serving strict constitutional constructionist litmus test for judges. Court ultra conservatives Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and William Rehnquist were unabashed judicial activists and ideologues, and conservatives heap praise on them, and abuse on any jurist that doesn't agree with them.
Four years later and a second Supreme Court judge pick in the waiting, nothing has changed. And since it hasn't, Obama has the enviable chance of a president's lifetime to do what he proclaimed in his attacks on and senate votes against confirming Alito and Roberts. That's the chance to follow his heart and pick the kind of judge he made clear that both Bush picks weren't and pick a judge who will protect the rights of the powerless, minorities, and women. He has absolutely nothing to lose. GOP senators, Tea Party leaders, Rush Limbaugh, the pack of shrill rightwing radio talk jocks, Fox News Network, and the hodge-podge of conservative judicial watchdog groups will stick to their hit plan on him no matter who he picks to replace Stevens.
His pick will be too liberal, too activist, too pro victim's rights, affirmative action, civil liberties, and for the more rabid, a closet identity politics baiter. The GOP tactics in pounding Obama's pick is unchanged. They will scream, shout, bully, cow, and badger the court pick on the same tired hit points. The goal is unchanged and that's to insure that she or he toes the conservative legal constructionist line not solely before the Senate Judiciary panel, but more importantly on the bench.
A slip or a too confrontational pose by the pick during the hearings will instantly be pounced on and held up by conservative attackers as proof that he or she doesn't have the right stuff to be a fair and impartial judge.
He or she will be under tremendous pressure to assure senators that they'll play it strictly by the moderate and conservative playbook on any and all decisions that even remotely touch on race and class issues on the bench, as well as abortion and other issues that are traditional conservative causes.
None of the attack points about Obama's pick as too liberal, activist, and therefore judicially suspect will be true. He or she will have played it close to the vest in their decisions, rulings and opinions in their stints on the various appellate courts; so close that not one of the picks will likely raise a whimper of criticism or protest from any impartial legal or judicial organization.
Obama's pick won't alter the still suffocating conservative tilt on the court. But a stand tough progressive can go toe to toe with the very judges who Obama felt did not embody the true spirit of what the Supreme Court should be about. That's empathy and sympathy for the downtrodden, poor and minorities. A solid progressive pick would be a model for the type of law and justice the court in time can and should represent. Best of all, it would show that when he had the chance Obama dared put a judge on the high court with the heart that he wants.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How Obama Governed.
This is the Los Angeles Conundrum: What makes this place an exciting and open and progressive place to live is what makes it so poorly run. It's pretty much a regional distillation of the California Conundrum.
Many regions of the US demonstrate a greater combination of civic-mindedness and community cohesion than LA. Think of, say, Cincinnati. Yet those regions typically foster less innovation, less of the progressive spirit that fuels creativity and cultural and economic growth. LA people are independent spirits and less willing to see themselves as personally invested in the identity of their larger community. That's why they left places like Cincinnati.
The damaging irony is that, because LA and California people are more progressive than citizens of most other states, we have a tendency during salad days to come up with costly utopian programs and stifling utopian regulations that compromise our competitiveness over the long haul. So Jonathan's right: our giving up some "non-essential" service now may teach us a thing or two about what's really essential.
Jonathan, I don't know if the current budget crisis will be a turning point in LA or if we will even be here in twenty years because it seems that we are going to do ourselves in in one of two ways: by the pollution or by a fault line is going to divide the city in two where we will have the regular liberals on one side and the ultra liberals on the other.
We don't need to close city services two days per week to balance the budget because even a fifth grader would know that that is dumb. Although being gnarly about forking over the loot during a bail out, the DWP isn't doing anything new because they've been acting up all along, and while they did find some money, it is only a finger-in-the-dam measure. So what we need in the long run is a committee.
It would first consist of PTA members because they have navigated the treacherous waters of committee meetings. They are also known to be honest, trustworthy, concerned about their children and probably know something about shopping and managing money.
Marathon runners would also serve on this committee because they are in good shape and know how to manage time and resources and potholes. They are also in tiptop shape and since the Zen masters and doctors know that there is a mind-body connection, they may be able to work on the committee's health, too.
Lastly because she's one of the few people who have presented a clear-headed vision, Wendy Gruel would be in charge while Warren Buffet and I would work as consultants. His money management skills are legendary, and I am honest, trustworthy, kind and brave and have an outstanding credit rating.
Years from now historians may see this as the turning point in the great debate about the role of government in our lives. Today our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, announced that he would close non-necessary departments and have city employees take two furlough days off per week. The money saved might bring us part way through the crisis he caused with his reckless brinkmanship.
The great issue is not who governs Los Angeles, the elected representatives on the City Council or the appointed lackeys of the Department of Water and Power. The great question is not if DWP made a promise to give us our money (they did), or if they are blackmailing us. They are. Their motto seems to be: Après nous pas de deluge, in fact no water at all.
The real question, the real battle of Los Angeles is what catastrophe may befall us if we close down half of our government and cut back employee time by 20% and we are no worse off? Here is the petri dish that will determine who wins the great political argument of our time--liberals who believe in the efficacy of government or conservatives who want to "starve the beast." If we follow Villaraigosa's threat and it is a disaster, liberals win. If we muddle through at less than half-speed, the conservatives will be proven right.
One more question does trouble me. In closing down bureaus that are non-necessary, we must ask why they exist at all?
* Oh well, Antonio called off the big test and backed down. Now he's willing to keep LA open if the DWP would pretty please hand over 20 million of the 70 million they owe. And why is DWP stiffing us? Well, because we offered them a 6 cent increase instead of 7. Both DWP and mayor look very bad here. It takes a lot to make the city council look good, but between Villaraigosa and Freeman, the council is looking exemplary.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The day after the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine, the headline read, "West Virginia mine owner accused of putting safety second." There's a basic understatement.
With 1,342 safety violations over the past five years cited by the US Mine Safety and Health Administration against the Massey Energy Company, Monday's explosion was the accident waiting to happen. Being uber-conscientious, their lawyers contested 422 of those violations and reduced their fine from 1.89 million dollars to $784.830. But little changed after that.
That they would have had to contest anything does not bode well for the company whose executives' bedrooms are probably larger than many of the miners' houses. As recently as March 30, the company, whose mines are operated by the Performance Coal Company, was cited for inadequate ventilation among other safety violations that most likely led to Monday's methane gas explosion. Rescuers reported that the impact, that killed twenty-five men, was so strong that the underground railroad tracks were "twisted like pretzels."
Had the head honchos at both companies treated their employees, dare I say, normally with adequate ventilation and working conditions, then Benny Willingham and all those other men would be alive today. Set to retire in five weeks, the 62 year-old miner was going take his wife on a cruise to the Virgin Islands.
I hope that the families sue both companies and that their executives have to testify before a senate subcommittee before being consigned to those mines and the dangers they helped create. It will never bring anyone back, but it may provide some form of justice and relief.
As a certified--and possibly certifiable--pundit, I've had my share of hits and misses. As most, I am far better at analyzing and explaining what has happened than in predicting what will happen.
In the 60s, when I was doing my degree in International Relations, we all knew that China would be the power with which we would have to contend. We were somewhat rueful about this and the joke was that for languages, the optimists studied Russian and the pessimists Chinese. Score one for common wisdom. On the other hand, no one foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union. Well, that's not quite true. Only some fringe right-wingers saw it coming. Score one for the "fringe."
Most of us agreed that the other major conflict coming was between the north and the south. No, not the Confederacy against the Yankees, but the Southern Hemisphere of developing nations against the rich countries north of the equator. To some limited extent this is coming to pass. But it is not yet our greatest challenge.
The Middle East was, as usual, a mess, and most of us counted on it remaining a mess. But we thought that this would involve only the frontline states--Israel versus Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Most did not see the religious ethnic split between the Shiite Persians and the mostly Sunni Arabs. No one saw what the, then unimaginable, Internet would do to make virtually every Muslim state a frontline state.
There is a saying, for the most part true, that Americans learn geography by going to war. Few non-specialists thought much about Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Almost no one thought about their north south conflicts and how the northern territories in all three would be breakaways and not willingly be under the control of the capitals located to their south.
We missed so much in the 60s. Now we seem to be missing the importance of what is going on in Mexico. This is the most important north south split. Instead of nuance most seem to see all Mexico as some kind of failed narco-state. This is not quite true. While there is certainly failure to create a peaceful and safe environment in Mexico City and many of their other urban areas, the greatest chaos in the north. The area within a hundred miles of the American border is like the northern territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan and not under the control of the federal government.
Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private intelligence analysis service, estimates that some 40 billion dollars flow annually through Mexico from illegal drugs. Along the border we have a classic supply-side versus demand-side conflict. Americans demand the drugs, which as long as they remain illegal will be hugely profitable, while Mexico needs the dollars. As much as the internecine violence spills over and wrecks tourism (revenues have fallen from 13 to 11 billion in the last year), 40 billion is a lot of cash flow--adumbrating even the money sent home by immigrants in the United States--estimated at only some 16 billion dollars a year.
Mexico may truly deplore the violence, but they need the money. We may deplore the drugs, but we cannot, or will not, stop either the smuggling of drugs up north or the smuggling of arms south.
This paradox and dilemma presents a great question for pundits: What would happen to Mexico if they lost the 40 billion from drugs and the 16 billion from immigrants living up north? I'll break the first law of punditry and say, "I don't know." This is an issue with great social and security import to all of us. Let's not either miss it or get hysterical.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Our foreign policy is morally incoherent--starting but not ending with Israel and the Middle East. But more about that at the end.
Not all our problems are inherited. Some have been chosen. We do not have moral standing to go after the despicable Ahmadinejad regime and his stolen election, when we support (for the moment) President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and his stolen election. Our credibility is not helped by our passive acceptance by President Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq as he busily steals the election from Ayad Alawi by disqualifying candidates both before and after the election.
Behind the issue of our moral standing are the pragmatic issues, and they look pretty bad for our national interests. Our man Maliki, besides being an election thief and clearly not committed to democracy, is also very much in bed with Iran and Ahmadinejad. The party and coalition he fronts is Shiite based, and not simply Shiite by tradition but also religiously. Alawi, also a Shiite, is far less allied with Iran and has put together a clearly more secular coalition that actually offers some hope of survival for the Sunni. This is important because if the Sunni have no hope (which is pretty much their view of life and death under Maliki's government) the civil war will reignite and Al Qaeda in Iraq will grow. So what are we doing?
Afghanistan is yet worse. Our good friend Karzai, after stealing the election, made a coalition with war lords, opium dealers and is now threatening not simply to talk to the Taliban (which makes sense) but to join the Taliban. So, what are we doing there? Why are our children dying there? Why do we think we can create either a decent government or a bulwark against Al Qaeda out of such a traditionally xenophobic and chaotic country--if it qualifies as a country at all?
Meanwhile we re-enforce our incoherence by calling the latest Honduran election illegitimate, while supporting the former president who tried to keep his presidency in perpetuity by changing term limits and ignoring the constitution, the supreme court and the parliament. Since he is an ally of Hugo Chavez, our principles seem to be based neither on our national interest nor international legal opinion. There is one exception and that is our feeble opposition to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. We rightly object to his presidency both out of our national interest and the corrupt process by which he maintains his power.
Then there is the Middle East. Egypt is on the brink of chaos--and promises to go over the brink when Mubarak leaves power. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are killing each other in Gaza. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are committed to destroying Israel and actively arming and launching rockets. But is our greatest challenge all the violence and destruction? Of course not. Killing seems to be more acceptable than building apartments. As I said, moral incoherence.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
President Obama unequivocally and unhesitatingly made it official: he's African-American. That may sound silly and facile to say that but his checking the box "African-American" on his census form did two things. It made meaningless the incessant chatter of whether Obama should be called mixed race or African-American. It recognized the hard and unchanging reality that race relations and conflict in America are still framed in black and white. The one-drop rule in America renders anyone with even a trace of African ancestry in their genealogy as black. The delusion that calling oneself mixed race, no matter how light complexioned they are, will not earn them a pass from the lash of racial persecution.
Obama has never gotten a pass despite having one of the world's most recognizable names and faces and power positions. As other blacks, he could fume at being bypassed by taxis, racially profiled by police on street corners, refused being showed an apartment by landlords, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home purchase, confined to living in a segregated neighborhood, or passed over for a corporate management position.
The roughly six million or 2 percent of Americans who checked the biracial census box may take comfort trying to be racially precise, but most also tell of their own bitter experience in feeling the sting of racial bigotry in the streets and workplace. Obama has related his racial awakening in his best selling bare-the-soul autobiography "Dreams from My Father." He self-designated himself as African-American, and took pride in that then, and that hasn't changed.
A mere check of the biracial designation on his census form would not spare Obama from any of the routine petty racial harassments and annoyances - the subtle and outright forms of discrimination. The biracial box is a feel-good, paper designation that has no validity in the hard world of American race politics. The venom and relentless, vile that From the moment The instant that Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring in February 2007, and through his relentless, hyper pressurized presidential battles, the vile, venomous, racial pounding has been non-stop. The Joker Posters, the Confederate and Texas Lone Star flags, the racial taunts, digs, cracks, insults, and slurs, the ape and monkey depictions of he and First Lady Michelle on tens of thousands of web sites is horrid testament that even a president is not exempt from racial loathing, bi-racial or not.
Despite the real and feigned color-blindness of many voters, nearly 60 percent of whites still did not vote for him. Most based their opposition to him on Republican political loyalties, ties, regional and personal preferences. But a significant minority of white voters did not for him because he's black, and they did not hide their feelings about that in exit polls in the Democratic primaries and the general election. Tagging him as multiracial or biracial made absolutely no difference to them, let alone changes their perception that he was black.
Even though Obama has never called himself anything but African-American, and now has made it official on the census form, the sideshow debate over whether Obama is the black president or the biracial president still creeps up. The debate is even more nonsensical since science has long since debunked the notion of a pure racial type. In America, race has never been a scientific or genealogical designation, but a political and social designation. Anyone with the faintest trace of African ancestry was and still is considered black and treated accordingly.
Blacks were ecstatic over Obama's candidacy and his presidential win. They were unabashed in saying that they backed him with passion and fervor because he is black. Many would not have cheered him with the same passion if he touted himself as a mixed race candidate.
The thrill and pride for them was that a black man could beat the racial odds and climb to the political top; substituting biracial for black would not have had the same meaning or significance to blacks. The talk about Obama being anything other than black infuriates many blacks. Their anger is legitimate. If Obama doesn't run from his black identity then the biracial card appears as a naked effort to snatch Obama's history-making presidency from them. It's also an implicit denial that an African American can have the right stuff - the smarts, talent and ability to excel in any arena.
Obama's presidency was and still is a significant step forward for black and white relations in America, not mixed-race relations. The nagging racial slights and indignities that many African Americans suffer, and the racial ridicule that Obama is routinely subjected too, is an eternal reminder that race still does matter, and matters a lot to many Americans. Obama's self-designation of himself as African-American made what's painfully obvious official.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.
Jonathan Dobrer is one of my favorite writers on this planet. But I've never disagreed more vehemently than with his suggestion that pilots who need prozac should be grounded.
For better or worse, this is the Age of Meds. Many of us use them to function at a higher rate, especially those under the age of the Boomer demographic, because less stigma has been involved in recent decades.
If a pilot is operating under hallicinations and nausea, I think the crew will know soon enough if he or she has a problem that endangers passengers. If he or she is operating under depression or generalized anxiety disorder, with no medical recourse, good luck when his or her nerves are just impaired enough to cause the whole plane to crash.
But what strikes me as insulting is where Jonathan's ban would end. Just pilots, or with anyone else who has to operate a car or make a judgment call or raise a child?
The FAA has now cleared pilots on Prozac for take off. Their reasoning is very clear. They hold that many pilots are already taking the drug to fight depression and the ban only makes them "less candid" about it. Oh boy.
So we will go the extra mile to hunt down professional athletes who use banned drugs. We'll hold congressional hearings and put both professional and amateur jocks through random drug tests to make sure their levels of hormones, caffeine or hemoglobin are not too high. But testing depressed pilots for drugs that may have life and death consequences for hundreds of people is just too hard. Huh?
Never mind if want depressed people flying passenger jets filled with hundred of innocent travelers over cities filled with millions of innocent civilians. Let's just look at the common side effects of Prozac as listed on Drugs.com and Emedtv.com:
Hallucinations, insomnia, nausea, headache, diarrhea, anxiety, loss of coordination, dizziness, tremor and my personal favorite, suicidal thoughts.
I am somewhat concerned that is seems okay to some people in high places (or high people in some places) to operate the heaviest of heavy machinery while, anxious, nauseated, depressed, hallucinating and suicidal. I'm worried about what drugs they're taking at the FAA. Somehow they must have put the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson in charge of drug policy. Uh, what could possibly go wrong here?
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Oh socialism where is thy sting? Yes, Earl is correct that the Republicans are trying to smear Obama by labeling him as a socialist. This is a very traditional tactic and has been employed for so long and so often that it has become tired and vitiated of its once powerful potency.
Since many who dislike Obama dislike him for being a Democrat, some for being African-American and others for being smart, socialist is just an empty all-purpose pejorative without any real meaning. The truth is that most of his critics wouldn't know socialism from capitalism and don't realize that we live in a mixed economy that is neither wholly private, free-market law of the jungle, nor government-owned and controlled. Few people actually believe that Obama or any Democrats, want to own the means of production. Well, to tell you the truth that "means of production" ship already sailed, since we hardly produce anything except fast-food, agricultural products and services.
Still if the Republicans want to scare the masses, socialism might not be their most effective ploy. Who is the out of the closet face of socialism? Who is the creepy threat to our nation making strong men cringe and children cry? Senator Bernie Sanders! It is just so hard to have a boogeyman named Bernie.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The GOP is playing its tattered Obama is a closet socialist trump card again. The aim is to tar President Obama as a radical out to soak the rich, hamstring private business, and radically redistribute wealth downward to the poor. In quick succession, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, GOP congressional leaders, rightside talk jocks, and any and every tea bagger groping for something, anything, to blast Obama with following their crushing defeat on health care reform law, claim the rich will bear the burden of paying for the reform. The law marginally hikes taxes on higher income earners, and even that is phased in over several years. Even if upper income earners had to pay much more, they would still come nowhere close to the paying the top tax rate of ninety percent the upper income paid in the 1960s. Prior to the Reagan tax cuts in 1986, the rich paid upwards of fifty percent in taxes.
The knock that Obama hammers businesses, especially small businesses, is no more credible. Obama proposes no increase in the estate tax in 2011. Even then only a minuscule number of smaller businesses are big enough to pay this tax. The Bush tax hikes that are set to expire this year will have no impact on the overwhelming majority of small businesses. There is absolutely no evidence that the marginally higher tax rates are inherent business killers.
But facts be darned, branding Obama a socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, and wealth hater is a set piece in the GOP arsenal, mostly because it works. A recent Harris poll found that 40 percent of Americans say he's a socialist. And even if there's much to dispute in the poll sampling and methodology, the ugly truth is that a lot of Americans believe the smear. They aren't just the usual suspect fringe right-wing bloggers, chatters, talk radio gabbers, and tea baggers but they also include some who should know better. The Harris poll found that a small percentage of Democrats and a slightly number of self-described liberals buy into the Obama the socialist lie.
There are millions of references, quotes, quips, comments, and notations on Obama as a socialist on Google. And there are a million more references and comments on Google to the dopey Obama as Joker poster. The sheer mass of anti-Obama slanders from the right, the fringe and the GOP opponents has forced much of the mainstream media and respected commentators, analysts and bloggers who also should know better to spend time and space arguing the cons of the claim and refuting it. This just gives back-door credence to the absurd charge.
Painting Obama as a socialist is not done simply out of fury over the health care reform defeat, or out of a desperate search for any slander to toss at him. It's a loaded term that always touches a raw nerve with most Americans who are clueless on what socialism is and how it works as a system. To many a socialist is someone who is pro-union, pro-increased government spending on health and education programs, and pro-civil liberties and especially civil rights. This always drew fire from the right.
The mildest criticism of big business and the wealthy, though, is a surefire way to raise the hackles of many Americans. The American economic sacred cow is that laissez faire wealth is tantamount to a divine right of kings, and any attempt to touch it is economic heresy. Politicians know that's it is a kiss of death to be seen as an advocate for tax and income fairness. That invites being plastered with the socialist tag.
GOP presidents and presidential candidates ritually play the 'tax and spend' card to brand their Democratic rivals as dangers to middle-class wage earners. This stokes fear that underneath the Democrat's supposed taxing and spending the rich will be slammed and the poor will be the beneficiaries. The wealth taking scare has worked in the past precisely because wealth and income iniquities are so great, and the notion that there's nothing wrong with those iniquities is so deeply entrenched in tax policy, philosophy and politics.
It has worked to the extent that it has because millions of middle and working class wage earners dream that they will be rich someday and are horrified that they can have their imagined wealth downsized by a tax and spend Democrat or worse a Democrat who's branded as socialist leaning.
The Socialist slur of Obama taps into the deeply held belief--and even fear--that Obama can and will actually mug the rich and by extension those who fantasize about being rich. The small tax bump up for the well-to-do in the health care reform law gave the GOP attack dogs just enough of an opening to again scream socialism and sow more doubt and create havoc among far too many Americans about the law, and worse still, Obama.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.
Obama's got his mojo back a la FDR? But what really has changed with all that recaptured mojo because we are still in the hole, only more so.
People said that George W. spent with reckless abandon. Well, this guy's got nothing on him. Take the inauguration. George W. spent $42.3 million on his, but Obama's $170 million makes Bush look miserly by comparison. Even though some of it was for security and outdoor facilities for the larger crowds, it was still a whopper of a bill for one lousy party.
Since then, Diamond Jim Obama has been on a spending spree with the new health care plan. I am all for reigning in the behemoth insurance companies and for cutting costs, though how this is going to be done remains a mystery. One part of the provision calls for the funding of the public option to come from the payment of premiums and provisions of those using it. But they probably wouldn't have opted for it to begin with if payment wasn't an issue.
One way he is like FDR is in how he is handling Israel and the Middle East, meaning that he has turned a blind eye to justice just as his predecessor did. And he may be more like Bush than some think. Yesterday he lifted the ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas, which ought to be just great for the environment. My overall grade for him is a C, and that is being generous.
Is today's LA Times an April Fools edition? The reason I ask is that there is no actual news on the front page. There are stories on some interesting subjects. There is analysis of various social and demographic trends. There is a look at the problems of public transportation and the closing of a bus route in Atlanta Georgia! But no breaking news--not local, not national and not international.
Yes, I know late breaking news is supposed to be in the new LATEXTRA section, but even there, breaking news can be something that happened yesterday morning, and, of course, more human interest and analysis.
Here is what wasn't on the front page: Some of Bush's NSA wiretaps ruled illegal by court. Problems in supplying our military in Afghanistan. Moscow and Chechen reaction to subway bombings. Vatican asserts papal immunity as head of state. DWP rate rise controversy and Villaraigosa setback. Investigation of LA police shooting of escaping suspect in crowded Universal City.
This can't be the once respected LA Times. No. Really. It has to be joke.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
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