The death of George Tiller

I grew up and spent most of my adult life in Kansas. The shooting death of abortion Doctor George Tiller stuns me, but it doesn’t really surprise me, unfortunately. Tiller had been a signal feature of my home state’s political landscape for as long as I can remember — a person around whom political careers were sometimes made or broken — and I can only assume angry recriminations will be echoing in the Statehouse and at the polls for a little while to come.

I do not believe that one crazed gunman represents the whole of the pro-life movement — unlike Andrew Sullivan, I’m not tempted to pin this on Bill O’Reilly. But I also note that no doctor or pharmacist ever gets shot for refusing to perform an abortion or denying women access to birth control pills.

Justice Department drops voter intimidation charges against the Black Panthers. Fox News is very angry. Again.

Hey, remember these guys from Election Day? The Black Panthers who were out front of a polling place on Fairmount looking menacing? Thanks to Fox News, they briefly became the most famous Panthers since Huey Newton:

Apparently, a voter intimidation lawsuit was brought against them after the election. And now, The Philadelphia Bulletin reports, the Obama Administration has quietly dropped the suit — mostly, it seems, because defendants Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson never responded to it. This, of course, has lead to all sorts of outrage from the right — including (yay!) Bill O’Reilly.

Amusingly, the Bulletin quotes Hans von Spakovsky, “a former career Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights,” saying that the Obama Administration’s action is “unprecedented.” I say “amusingly,” because Spakovsky in that role somewhat famously overrode career Justice Department officials to support a Georgia voter ID law that the officials agreed would disproportionately keep poor, elderly and minority voters — Democrats in other words — away from the polling places on Election Day. Look into Spakovsky’s record and you’ll discover that his concern for making sure all eligible voters have access to the ballot appears to be a very recent development.

Here’s the thing: The Panthers you see in the video above were acting like jackasses. If the Justice Department dropped the suit because Shabazz and Jackson simply couldn’t be bothered, that’s more than a little lazy.

But I also can’t help but suspect that the Fox News-driven reaction to the Panthers was worse than what the Panthers did.

For one thing, I’ve never heard of any actual voters who were kept from voting on Fairmount Avenue on Election Day because of their fear of the Panthers. Perhaps there were; I’ve never heard of them. Fox reporter Rick Leventhal even admitted as much during his breathless live coverage of the matter:

“There’s been no disturbances that I’m aware of, except what we’ve encountered here. But again, I want to make very clear, we don’t know that any voters were denied entrance to this polling facility. We don’t know that anyone was intimidated to the point that they decided not to vote here, but that was what some people were concerned might be happening with two Black Panthers, one of them holding a nightstick, out front.”

Right. The problem is that two Black Panthers at one polling place in Philly quickly morphed into … well, I think this screen grab of a YouTube video description I captured on Election Day shows what the story became:

Riiiiiiight.

So we have a couple of equations in play here.

• Two Panthers + Fox News = Suggestions that somehow the election was stolen by black radicals for Obama.

• Dropped charges + Fox News and a few other crazies = Suggestions Obama is giving special treatment to black radicals.

It’s late on a Friday night. I’d like to dig deeper into the court files and get a better eyeball on the details of the case against Shabazz and Jackson. But from this vantage point, the story looks a lot more mundane — conservatives blowing up a small incident into a big case to make Obama look bad — than the play it’s getting. Go figure.

To quote Sun Ra: “Nuclear war. It’s a motherf***er.”

I’m more pessimistic than usual in this week’s Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk:

North Korea has the bomb. It is keeping the bomb. And there is nothing we can do about it.

This is bad, of course, but probably also inevitable: Over the past two decades, American presidents have offered carrots, then sticks, then carrots again in an attempt to get North Korea to drop its nuclear weapons program. Nothing worked. We could’ve gone to war, perhaps, but Seoul would’ve been destroyed and the devastation of a new Korean War was nearly as horrifying to contemplate as a North Korean nuke.

Rather than point fingers, American policymakers and pundits should work on dissuading Pyongyang from ever using its new weapon.

Because, let’s face it, the real Atomic Age is just beginning. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 kept wannabe nuclear powers at bay for decades, but its day is over. Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb. Absent a devastating war, Iran will soon join the club. Syria is clearly on the market. The list goes on.

Can you blame these countries? Nuclear weapons offer their possessor a certain invulnerability to attack, after all — does anybody think the United States would’ve gone into Iraq if Saddam Hussein had an actual nuclear weapon to use against the invaders? No. We would’ve found a way to grudgingly live with it.

The U.S. and other countries should continue non-proliferation efforts, but we should also expect to fail. America and the Soviet Union kept the Cold War peace for 40 years by promising each other utter destruction in the event of nuclear war. In coming decades, we may have to replicate that arrangement dozens of times over — and augment such understandings with a healthy dose of prayer. In the new Atomic Age, that may be the best we can do.

Is Obama going to make you drive a Yugo?

That was the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week, dealing with the fuel efficiency standards the president is mandating for car companies by 2016. My take:

The freedom to swing your fists, an old saying tells us, ends where my nose begins. By that standard, the owners of Hummers, Escalades and other slightly less offensive SUVs have been punching all of us in the face for years.

All of us pay, after all, for America’s love of gas-guzzlers. We pay taxes for a formidable military tasked, in part, with keeping global oil supplies flowing freely out of the Middle East. And we pay for the health and environmental consequences that result from all those billions tons of carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere.

Americans aren’t being asked to abandon their cars and trucks: They are being asked to drive slightly more sensible vehicles in order to mitigate those burdens somewhat. Is that a limitation of freedom? Sure. Is it unconscionable? Hardly.

What’s more, the new standards are bipartisan. The original legislation to raise the fuel standards was signed by then-President George W. Bush. Yes, he intended the standards to be met by 2020; Obama’s announcement moves that date up to 2016 – which is still seven long years from now. So Americans are being asked to drive slightly more sensible vehicles slightly ahead of schedule. This is hardly the stuff of tyranny.

At the dawn of the auto industry, Henry Ford legendarily said his customers could have any color of Model T they wanted so long as it was black. It was during these years, mostly in Ford’s cars, that America’s car culture was born. In a few years, car buyers will still be able to purchase whichever vehicle they want – so long as it gets 35 mpg. That might not be as much fun as buying a Hummer. But it’s a lot more fun than a punch in the face.

That column brought me a nice letter from Tamara Vaught, who believes the mileage standards will impose an undue burden on farmers and other folks who actually need big vehicles.

Mr. Mathis, I agree that this country needs to increase it’s enery efficiency.  However, there are several areas where “slightly more sensible vehicles” are not practical.  I will only rant about the two areas where I have a very intimate knowledge.

The first is agriculture.  A pickup capable of carrying or pulling large loads is a basic tool for farmers and ranchers.  Show me a pickup that will pull a fully loaded gooseneck trailer and get 35 MPG and I will be the first in line to get one.  Even if someone could come up with such a vehicle, the cost would probably be so prohibitive that the average family farm would never be able to afford it.  I might add, farmers use their pickups for evrything from farm work to going to church , to taking the kids to soccer practice, to grocery shopping.  That is because they can’t afford to buy multiple vehicles to serve each indiidual activity they participate in.

The second group that could be hurt by requiring people to drive more fuel efficient vehicles is the handicaped.  Large vans with wheel chair lifts are not exactly fuel friendly.  The average one probably gets about 12 MPG on a good day.  Are you aware of how much an electric wheel chair weighs?  If a van is not used, there is a very limited number of vehicles that can carry one.  Large, heavy sedans, SUVs, and pickups are about the only ones that work.  None of these are known for fuel efficiency.  Requiring everyone to meet a 35 MPG standard would in essence sentence wheelchair bound individuals o public transportation, liscensed van services, or staying at home.

(Snip.)

The problem I have with liberals is that they tend impose cookie-cutter solutions to complex problems, then scramble to put band-aids on to stop the bleeding from the thousands of tiny cuts from the sharp edges of the cookie-cutter. We do need to increase fuel efficiency, no doubt. I’m all for fuel cells, electric powered vehicles, hybrids, etc. But don’t punish those who have a legitimate need for large, heavy vehicles by making them unavailable by making them so expensive that no one can afford them.

For what it’s worth, the fuel-efficiency standards don’t require that every single car and truck manufactured for sale in America get 35 miles per gallon — only that the fleet (that is, the total of all the cars and trucks built) average 35 mpg. That means some vehicles, even a significant number, will get lower mileage. The farmer will still be able to buy the Ford F-250 to carry hay bales out to cattle in the pasture. But it’s probably less likely that soccer moms will be loading their children into small tanks 10 years from now. The soccer moms probably won’t like that — I think, actually, that most will barely notice it — but it’s probably worth the tradeoff.

Give Brendan Skwire a column at the Inquirer

Brendan Skwire has written an open letter to the Philadelphia Newspapers bosses, asking for his shot at a column in the Inquirer or Daily News. I say the Inquirer because that paper’s op-ed pages could use the livening up. But in any case, I think he’s spot-on in making the case.

I bring a perspective that none of the current conservative writers at the Inquirer (or for that matter the Daily News) can offer: not only am I a fire-breating lefty community activist who’s unafraid to take controversial stances, I’m a member of the working poor, and I dish it out to Democrats as well as Republicans. When was the last time any of your current columnists (collectively, a right wing lawyer, a right wing lawyer, and a right wing lawyer) had to choose between “heat or eat”, as I have done almost every winter for the past 4 years? Do any of these well-heeled writers really represent the views of the millions of working people (most of them Democrats) who live in Philadelphia? I think not. John Yoo’s taste for torture cheesesteaks when he visits the city is immaterial, and of all three, only Flowers lives and works in the city.

Philadelphians deserve a “true, outspoken and unapologetic liberal” as an alternative to your current stable of unapologetic conservatives, not just “career journalists who may tilt leftward on some issues but aren’t really “movement liberals”. And while I think many of the names Will Bunch offered are superb writers (especially Susie Madrak), it’s my blog so I’m making my pitch: hire me, and pay me what you pay Rick Santorum. I won’t let you down: as it stands I already generate more columns, of higher quality, and with better fact-checking, than Rick, John, and Christine put together (not to mention your other right-wing pundits Kevin Ferris and Michael Smerconish).

Brendan can be just a touch over-the-top for my tastes at times, but he’s a good writer, cares passionately about the community and he does actual reporting once in awhile. Plus he’d get people talking. The Inquirer could do a lot worse.

Is Sonia Sotomayor qualified for the bench?

My sympathies for J.D.’s malaise notwithstanding, I’ve got to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this one:

I really hope these fools listen to Pat Buchanan. I’d love to see them push  the argument that a Latina who goes from the the South Bronx to Princeton summa cum laude, who has more time on the bench than of the people serving had when they were nominated, who was nominated to the bench by a Republican, is an unqualified Affirmative Action pick.

It’s not just racist loonies like Pat Buchanan who are making the case. And while I don’t deny that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity had something to do with her pick — in fact, I’m fine with that! — everything I’ve read suggest she first had to demonstrate minimal judicial competence before the other political factors came into play.

But here’s a quick question for my conservative friends: Is there a female or non-white judge on the left side of the spectrum — you know, the side that Obama’s picking from — who wouldn’t have been depicted as a probably-unqualified “affirmative action” hire? If not, what should we believe: That there are no qualified women or minority Supreme Court candidates out there? Or that Republicans consistently poor-mouth the qualifications of women and minority candidates?

Are we tired of the Supreme Court fight already?

Back in Kansas, my friend J.D. opines:

Guess who hates torture and wants to close Gitmo?

Gen. David Petraeus, that’s who:

“With respect to Guantanamo,” Petraeus added, “I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice — I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary — again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees.”

The difference between Gen. Petraeus and your garden-variety Republican on issues like these, of course, is that it’s Gen. Petraeus’ job to actually try to win America’s wars instead of figuring out how to use them as a wedge issue in the next election campaign. In wars of counterinsurgency — as Petraeus wrote in his counterinsurgency manual — trying to out-tough your opponent can actually cause you to lose the war. The smart counterinsurgent works to avoid creating new enemies even as he eliminates the old ones. Which means that torture and Gitmo are counterproductive. Real life is not a Rambo movie, no matter what Republicans think.

In California, the Supreme Court upholds Prop 8

LA Times:

The California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriage but also ruled that gay couples who wed before the election will continue to be married under state law.

The decision virtually ensures another fight at the ballot box over marriage rights for gays. Gay rights activists said they may ask voters to repeal the marriage ban as early as next year, and opponents have pledged to fight any such effort. Proposition 8 passed with 52% of the vote.

While I hate it that gay people are denied the right to marry in California, this is probably the correct decision: It’s rare that a court would or could overturn a Constitutional amendment approved by a vote of the electorate.

But all is not lost. This issue will be on the ballot again in California. And eventually, the supporters of inclusive marriage rights will win. That day has just been delayed a little bit, is all.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I’m for gay marriage. My only point was that — as a narrow legal matter — courts don’t overturn state constitutional amendments approved by a vote of the people unless they clearly conflict with rights granted under the federal constitution. That’s not the case in this case. But I believe Prop 8 will be overturned at the ballot box, probably sooner than later.

The Bush Administration was much scarier than you thought

Via Rod Dreher, a heartwarming story about President Bush’s evident belief that it was his job to help bring about the Apocalypse.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

You know, I was just about to get fed up with President Obama and go cast my lot with the Green Party or something. And then I read this. And then I remembered: Obama doesn’t do what I want all — or even most — of the time. But at least he’s not as insane as some of the people the Republican Party want to put in charge of the country. I can live with the lesser of the two evils when the greater evil is this bad.