The Price of Union

"In 1896 ... a man who stood for 'No Compromise' stampeded a Convention.... 'We beg no more,' said Bryan in his 'cross-of-gold' speech, 'we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!' So did Goldwater defy them. But this was no way to hold together a continent-wide federation of varied interest, occupations, climates and habits of life. Bryan, who was at least a politician, tried to broaden his agrarian base and to capture the factoriy worker for his cause. He failed, and thus lost every northern state east of the Mississippi.

Goldwater never explained what his base was, aside from nostalgia and a bitterness against the compromises of life. So he could not broaden what he could not define, and was beaten far more cruelly than Bryan. But they were both beaten for the same reason: they both, in their rash enthusiasm, forgot that a successful American political party must be a non-ideological affair, accommodating many points of view .... Such parties should never allow themselves to feel, and preach, that the opposition is not only mistaken but wicked. Bryan did this. So did Goldwater, with his suggestion that the Democrats were sowing a form of moral decay throughout America.

The Democratic party was long handicapped by the bitterness consequent to 1896 .... Once, unhappily, both parties failed at the same time in their assuaging mission, both offering us 'a choice instead of an echo.' The result was the Civil War."

Herbert Agar, "The Price of Union"

Who's in control? The voters, or the unions?

Breaking news. Missing Wisconsin state senators found in Argentina

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You all are wrong.

1. denying employees the opportunity to bargain collectively - probably overreaching. You might not agree with what they demand, but to say they can't even negotiate collectively? That's not fair play.

2. taking the ball and leaving the court because you can't have your way (and thus preventing the game from being played at all) - that's an "assault" on our democratic system. That's not fair play.

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Once Rachel Maddow declared Wisconsin the "existential fight for the Democratic Party" is when I lumped her in the category of shrill horribles, right there with Glenn Beck.

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Nobody seems to get is this concept called Rule of Law, and the legislative process. Did everyone fall asleep in Political Science 101 - American Government? Or did they all skip the foundation course and go straight for Political Science 321 - Political Rhetoric?

Just haphazardly mixing words like "fundamental right," "middle class," "common sense solution," into any argument might make it more persuasive if only for its visceral effect, however illogical it actually is.

reverse profiling

People who rush to judge, unconditionally, the police sergeant who arrested Gates, without even hearing his side of the story first (and why Gates' own NEIGHBORS called in a burglary report) -- how is this sort of "factual" prejudice any different from actual racial profiling? Like the shaving cream commercial says ... before you criticize others, look in the mirror first.

I'm not saying Gates' story or Crowleys' story is more credible or closer to the truth. I'm just saying, there ARE two versions of what happened. Summarily dismissing one based on, for example, the fact that it comes from the white guy ... thats a pretty appalling manifestation of willful ignorance to suit one's own prejudices.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090723/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_disorderly

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incestuous amplification n. The reinforcement of set beliefs among like-minded people, leading to miscalculations and errors in judgment.

http://www.wordspy.com/words/incestuousamplification.asp

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. . . The most insidious part of any confidence game is not its outrageous claims but its appeal to the needs of its potential victims. Lustig's con was typical of many famous swindles, in which the victim ends up so humiliated — so complicit — that the crime is never reported. Once the scrap dealer let his greed overcome him and committed to paying the bribe, it became, in his mind, his very own confidence game. The dealer deceived himself.

Like any magic trick, it sounds ridiculously simple and preposterously unimpressive — but that's because the real art of deception lies in understanding how subtle touches and preconceptions can be twisted in the minds of victim or viewer.

Professional magicians are the only honest deceivers. They tell you that you're going to be fooled and then deliver on that promise. I've worked with professional magicians for years, developing deceptions for them and researching the art's lost secrets. This has led me to consider deception as a larger subject. I can assure you, any successful deception requires a cooperative audience.

It's not as simple as finding stupid people who are willing to accept what they're told or happy to overlook obvious clues. The key is finding smart people who bring a lot to the table — cultural experience, shared expectations, preconceptions. The more they bring, the more there is to work with, and the easier it is to get the audience to make allowances — to reach the "right" conclusion and unwittingly participate in the deception.

Jim Steinmeyer,"What's Up Their Sleeve? Our Eagerness to Be Gulled: Magicians, con artists and politicians enlist public's cooperation", Commentary, The Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2004.

MR. CAB DRIVER (Lenny Kravitz Song) Don't U Like the Color of my Skin?

Lenny Kravitz, who had a white dad and black mom, was raised by his mother who told him "people will see you as a black man" so get used to it. Barack Obama's mother could have told her son the same.

But then you have the Eugene Robinson's, black men themselves, who are pretty myopic themselves in seeing race. Writing on Obama (Washington Post Op Ed 3 Apr 2009):

"Not even three months have passed since President Obama's historic inauguration, and already it tends to slip the nation's collective mind that the first black president of the United States is, in fact, black. There may be hope for us after all."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/02/AR2009040203286.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

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Sir,

The fact that you (and many others) continue to think of race-based issues through black-or-white lens, e.g., Barack as the first "black president" (Tiger as a "black" pro golfer), without acknowledgment of other racial minorities or mixed-race Americans (e.g., Barack and Tiger), only proves how much further we still have to go.

You also refer, ironically, to Eric Holder's speech, in which the AG talks of how America is still de facto racially segregated. I think the AG would agree that true progress would be when we see beyond the black-or-white racial paradigm and celebrate the fact that we have elected, not the first "black" president, but a bi-racial president.

It seems far less unusual to me that there are enough Americans today willing to vote into the Presidency an intelligent charismatic guy who happens to look black (and is half-black), than it is that decades ago a white woman would, despite stereotypes or social pressure, marry a Kenyan.

Californication

Rather than stopping at gay marriage, Perez Hilton should have asked Carrie Prejean whether or not she believes in equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, and if so, how she reconciles that with her stance on gay marriage. That would have been the real money question. But Perez Hilton was too busy being the embodiment of liberal intolerance.

If only there was an active, political demographic, called the "middle way," to bump aside the fanatics in both the liberal left and conservative right who continue to hijack and distort issues, engage the country in culture wars, and seek total ideological victory over pragmatic solutions to real problems.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525716,00.html

Miss California Carrie Prejean Loses Her Crown
Thursday, June 11, 2009



"Prejean came under fire for her answer to a question about gay marriage two months ago in the Trump-owned Miss USA pageant, in which she was the runner-up. After the pageant, Prejean was continuously attacked as she defended her belief that gays and lesbians should not be given the right to marry in California."

the American Dream, or just politics

Commentary: GOP plays identity politics, too
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/05/navarrette.estrada/index.html
updated 8:59 a.m. EDT, Fri June 5, 2009

Editor's note: Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board and a nationally syndicated columnist. Read his column here.

SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- By nominating U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama made history. Meanwhile, conservatives -- by invoking the name of Miguel Estrada -- are coming close to rewriting it.

Trying to find a way to oppose Sotomayor without further enraging Latinos, those on the right are trying to change the subject by reaching back to 2002 and recalling what happened to Estrada, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

As conservatives point out, Democrats treated Estrada dreadfully. It was the first time in U.S. history that a minority in the Senate used a filibuster to kill an appeals court nomination. Eventually, Estrada asked Bush to withdraw his name. Today, he is still one of the best, most highly regarded lawyers in Washington. And why did Democrats go after this nominee so aggressively? It's because -- like Sotomayor -- Estrada was a threat. The only difference is who feels threatened. Back then, it was Democrats. Now it's Republicans.

... Born in Honduras, Estrada came to the United States at 17, taught himself English and went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was also an editor of the law review. Estrada then served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, and later as an assistant U.S. solicitor general, where he argued 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won 10.

Unable to challenge his qualifications, Democrats did to Estrada what Republicans are trying to do to Sotomayor: They drew a caricature. Whereas Sotomayor has been criticized by conservatives for being too quick to identify herself as Hispanic, Estrada was accused by liberals of not being "Hispanic enough."

The stakes were high. Had Estrada taken his seat on the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court, it would have left him within striking distance of going on to become the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now that honor may well go to Sotomayor. So, conservatives ask, given how Estrada was treated, why should they treat Sotomayor any better?

At first, you think what in the world does one story have to do with the other. Besides, weren't these folks taught that two wrongs don't make a right? But there is a point in there somewhere -- about double standards and hypocrisy and how Democrats and the media only respect minority success stories when the person succeeding is liberal and not conservative.

All true. Yet, that is only part of the story. And it's the missing piece that conservatives aren't interested in telling. By speaking to people who were close to the process, including someone charged by the White House to help shepherd the nomination, I confirmed what I remember from those days: Republicans in the Senate, even though they were in the majority, did a lousy job of defending Estrada. And this was after they made a huge deal about Estrada's story and how it represented the American Dream. Yada, yada.

That kind of billing got the Democrats' attention, and they came at Estrada with both barrels, fearing a potential Estrada appointment to the Supreme Court would pay huge dividends for the GOP with Hispanic voters for a generation or more. But the Republicans never finished what they started. Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose party had only a bare majority in the Senate, was disastrously weak, allowing himself to be bullied and manipulated by Democrats Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy.

As majority leader, Frist had a number of procedural tools at his disposal to force the issue, but he was reluctant to use them. The Republican members were likewise missing in action. There were different reasons for that, according to those close to the proceedings. Some were distracted by other issues and didn't really care one way or another whether Estrada got his hearing. Others were -- as opponents of policies such as affirmative action -- a little queasy about the race-conscious way the nomination was pitched by the White House.

In the end, Senate Republicans abandoned Miguel Estrada and let the Democrats smear him, although it's hard to find anyone on the right who will admit to that now. The moral: as eager as the political parties are to climb onto a high horse, both dabble in identity politics. Democrats just do it more effectively than Republicans.

If conservatives are going to tell the story of what happened to Miguel Estrada, they ought to tell it right. And, whatever they do, they shouldn't use one debacle as an excuse for creating another.

Tragedies less tragic

On facebook status updates noting the tragedy of the Kansas abortion doctor's slaying 

the slaying of the abortion doc, dr tiller, reminded me of an email the day after 911, from my supervising attorney when i interned at the DC Public Defender:

"Yesterday was truly a black day. Along with all the terrorist tragedies, our client Jermaine Jackson died. He was shot early Saturday and they pulled the plugs yesterday. His stepdad thinks it was a robbery gone bad.I feel very bad for his family."

I've kept this email all these years. I remember thinking - the individual mothers of sons whose lives are taken in the american ghetto every day grieve no less than the individual mothers and families of those who lost their lives to terrorist attack.

Here's my question to you, now -

Is a tragedy less tragic because there isn't a political spin to it?

These tragedies are telling, not only in each respective story in and of itself, but also of our character as a people - through those whom we choose to remember, and also those whom we choose to ignore.

Sean Taylor. Heath Ledger. Jermaine Jackson.


Its been said, that "a people is judged not by the successful whom we celebrate but by those along the fault lines for whom we care."