"We Had To Destroy The Constitution In Order to Save It"

With Obama's criticism of the military coup in Honduras, a public relations wave has been launched to try to reinvent the coup as a proper exercise of judicial and military power. Although it's a bit colorful, let's turn to Johann Hari for a description of the coup itself:

On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him on to a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.

Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged on to the streets.

What brought this about? Let's turn to an apologist for the coup, Octavio Sánchez.

These are the facts: On June 26, President Zelaya issued a decree ordering all government employees to take part in the "Public Opinion Poll to convene a National Constitutional Assembly." In doing so, Zelaya triggered a constitutional provision that automatically removed him from office.

Constitutional assemblies are convened to write new constitutions. When Zelaya published that decree to initiate an "opinion poll" about the possibility of convening a national assembly, he contravened the unchangeable articles of the Constitution that deal with the prohibition of reelecting a president and of extending his term. His actions showed intent.

Our Constitution takes such intent seriously. According to Article 239: "No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years."

Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says "immediately" – as in "instant," as in "no trial required," as in "no impeachment needed."

Except nowhere in those "facts" is there a contention that Zelaya advocated a change in his term limits. Sure, we can assume that to have been his goal, but that creates two problems for his opponents: First, if all it takes to remove you from office and have you arrested at gunpoint is the belief that you intend to advocate a change in constitutional term limits as part of a constitutional convention, anybody's fair game. Why couldn't Zelaya have made a similar accusation against the Supreme Court, and removed all of its judges from office? Would he be harping on the term "immediately" or the absence of any need for trial or impeachment, had Zelaya been the one abusing that constitutional language? Second, does it follow that any call for a constitutional convention justifies the removal of an elected official from office, "just in case" they're secretly planning to amend that constitutional language?

Further, if we're going to be told that this is normal constitutional process, not a coup d'état, where in the Constitution can I find any support for this process? If I look at the constitution and search for any authority by which the Supreme Court can exercise any control over the armed forces, what will I find? Article 245, giving the President some authority over the armed forces, yes, that's there. But I see nothing giving the Supreme Court any authority to issue orders to the Armed Forces.

Imagine that the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution had a similar provision, the President (be it G.W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan) was calling for a constitutional convention, and it was feared by some in government that his actual goal was to repeal the 22nd Amendment. Would it be constitutionally defensible for the Supreme Court to instruct the U.S. Armed Forces to impound ballots to be used in a referendum testing public support for a constitutional convention? To order the military to arrest the President? To send him into exile without impeachment or trial? It would be an appalling overreach of power, unsupported by law or constitution. While the Constitution of Honduras is far less limiting of the military than is U.S. law, and I grant my Spanish is poor, I don't see any constitutional authority for the issuance of orders by the Supreme Court to the military. To the extent that it's not prohibited, I don't see anything that would compel the military to carry out such an order. (But let's be honest here - this process was collusive between the Supreme Court and the military.)

Sánchez also claims,

The Supreme Court and the attorney general ordered Zelaya's arrest for disobeying several court orders compelling him to obey the Constitution. He was detained and taken to Costa Rica. Why? Congress needed time to convene and remove him from office. With him inside the country that would have been impossible. This decision was taken by the 123 (of the 128) members of Congress present that day.

The argument, basically, is that it would have been impossible to follow constitutional process with Zelaya in the country, so they had to orchestrate his removal from office and exile so that they could follow proper procedure (albeit a trial in absentia, and again Sánchez does me no favors by failiing to point to any constitutional language making that proper, either). Except Sánchez just got through telling us that neither impeachment nor trial are required. A little internal consistency, please?

A Honduran Supreme Court Judge, Rosalinda Cruz, also attempts to defend the coup:

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Okay... And the arrest order was issued by the Supreme Court on what constitutional authority? And what trial was held that removed any doubt as to Zelaya's intentions in pushing ahead with a referendum? Let's take step back, returning to Hari - this case involves a type of power struggle pretty typical in the developing world,

In 2005, Zelaya ran promising to help the country's poor majority – and he kept his word. He increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and "the rich must pay their share".

The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country's wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them. . . .

Honduras has a constitution that was drawn up in 1982, by the oligarchy, under supervision from the outgoing military dictatorship. It states that the President can only serve only one term, while the military remains permanent and "independent" – in order to ensure they remain the real power in the land.

Zelaya believed this was a block on democracy, and proposed a referendum to see if the people wanted to elect a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution. It could curtail the power of the military, and perhaps allow the President to run for re-election. The Supreme Court, however, ruled that it is unconstitutional to hold a binding referendum within a year of a presidential election. So Zelaya proposed holding a non-binding referendum instead, just to gauge public opinion. This was perfectly legal. The military – terrified of the verdict of the people – then marched in with their guns.

Columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos takes us into the dark territory of "We had to destroy the constitution in order to save it":

Honduras is guilty of two sins: impatience and size. The rest of the world is committing two more: hubris and hypocrisy.

It is now clear that if the Honduran Supreme Court or Congress had used legal means such as impeachment before asking the army to remove President Manuel Zelaya, we would be calling events there a constitutional crisis rather than a coup d'etat.

Is that supposed to be an insight? A defense? It goes without saying that, had Zelaya's opponents acted within the confines of the law and constitution, they would be working through an uncomfortable constitutional crisis. It also goes without saying that they instead chose a coup. You can find a basis for claiming hypocrisy in pretty much any form of international condemnation over any issue. That doesn't make it hubristic to criticize the opponents of an elected leader for choosing a coup over constitutional process. And with all due respect for the west's spotty support of democracy (historically taking the form of, "We'll support it as long as the correct people win"), the defenders of the coup keep insisting that they believe in law, democracy and constitutional process. It takes some chutzpah for them and their defenders to accuse others of hypocrisy for asking, "Then why didn't you live up to those words and ideals?"

Perhaps Schumacher-Matos doesn't see himself as a hypocrite because he argues, "democracy is not the same as legitimacy", quoting a graduate student in support of his argument:

Which brings us back to Honduras. Brodi Kemp, a researcher at Harvard's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, says: "You could argue that Zelaya gave up his claim to moral legitimacy when he went outside the constitution. If you accept that, then what do the other political actors do? . . . Sometimes an act is legitimate even though it proceeded illegitimately."

Kemp offers an interesting thought exercise, but it's not one that truly supports the coup. You don't have to think very hard to realize that you're reducing government to a game of rock-paper-scissors. Rather than following the constitution, you attempt to delegitimize the other branches of government and use their "illegitimacy" as an excuse for extra-constitutional action against them. It takes us back to the earlier question - what if Zelaya had ordered the arrest of the Supreme Court? What, for that matter, if the military had received competing orders for arrest - where's the "legitimacy" in having the military choose between following the President's arrest order or the Supreme Court's? Let's take a look at how a Supreme Court Judge, Rosalinda Cruz, defends her institution's actions:

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Did she manage to make that entire statement with a straight face? The military didn't execute an arrest order - they did arrest Zelaya, but they released him into exile. Is she saying that's what the Supreme Court ordered? Where's the constitutional support for any such order? Yet if that's not what the Supreme Court ordered, her first statement is false. As for there being "no doubt" that Zelaya was planning a coup of his own... rock beats scissors? Leaving aside the question of whether there's evidence for the contention, or whether a Supreme Court Judge should be passing such strong judgment on an issue that has not come before the court, "We had to throw our own coup first" is a poor defense of either the constitution or the institutions of government.

Now I'll admit, the critics of Zelaya (and Hugo Chávez) have a point - Chávez used his public support to achieve by direct democracy what he could not achieve through the standard legislative process, and Zelaya appeared eager to follow that same model. Schumacher-Matos elaborates,

The threat growing in Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to Freedom House, is not dictatorship but what political theorists call illiberal democracy. Venezuela is the poster case in which a president, Hugo Chávez, is democratically elected and then goes about, through democratic referendums and Congress, constraining freedom by changing laws and institutions. Chávez and others like him create the "tyranny of the majority" that theorists behind the American Constitution warned was the weakness of democracy by itself, without constitutional liberalism protecting the rights of the individual.

The last thing I want to do is suggest that it would be a good thing for nations in the developing world to follow the political and constitutional model of the State of California.

Schumacher-Matos argues,

Polls and the tepid demonstrations in Zelaya's favor indicate that he has little popular support. That is not reason enough for a coup, but the many factors suggest that while his removal should have been better handled, some humility is called for in helping Honduras work through a constitutional crisis.

Actually, if Schumacher-Matos is correct on the first point, he's dead wrong on the second. If Zelaya's referendum was destined for failure, there was no need for the Supreme Court to order his arrest for "treason", let alone wink at his being exiled instead of being brought to justice. If there's little opposition to Zelaya's removal from office, there's absolutely no merit to Sánchez's claim that it was "necessary" to expel him from the country under the guise of an "arrest warrant" in order to even commence the legal process of impeachment or removal. What a lack of support would do is establish the case for letting the election take its course, letting Zelaya lose, and then having a regularly scheduled presidential election to choose his successor.

A case can be made for the removal of any elected leader in the world. It's a rare political leader whose actions don't result in criticisms that they're making power grabs, trying to weaken opposition parties, trying to manipulate the legal and political process to help themeselves or their parties in future elections.... As should go without saying, some of the cases are far more compelling than others.

What opponents of Zelaya should be doing is trying to make the case for why his actions were extreme and unusual, threatening the nation's democratic traditions. And based upon that, they should be further explaining why a coup was necessary to protect the democratic process. If, in the manner of Schumacher-Matos, their tack is instead to belittle democracy, they undermine their entire case. If democracy is not that important, how can you possibly justify a coup by alleging that it was a necessary move to defend, of all things, term limits.

Picking Only Fights You Know You'll Win?

My comments on brinksmanship probably should have been followed by an anecdote.

An experienced trial lawyer heard a younger colleague claim, "I've never lost a trial."

"You know what that means," the older lawyer asked.

"What?"

"It means that you don't try enough cases.

Being a good trial lawyer arguably makes it harder to try cases, because you're more likely to get acceptable offers of settlement before trial. The younger lawyer may well be winning some trials that less skilled lawyers would lose. If you expect to lose a trial, you should be prepared to settle. If your client prefers the bird in hand and instructs you to settle, you may end up settling a case that you would prefer to try. But whatever your skill level, there's that range of cases down the middle where things could arguably go either way - and where the client is looking to you to decide whether to settle. If you always settle those cases you will protect your perfect record, but you forego the opportunity to stretch your skills, and potentially get a more favorable verdict (or mid-trial settlement) for your client.

President Obama is a skilled but cautious lawyer. If he switched careers to trial litigator, I would not be surprised to find that he had a perfect trial record and was winning some "unwinnable" cases. But it's fair to observe that he is exceptionally cautious. It's that caution that drives some of his fiercest critics on the left to frothy anger. They want him to take up their causes now, and fully apply his skills to getting the result they desire (which may in fact be a desirable result) now. But instead he's evaluating whether he can win, and whether he should be expending political capital on that battle. If he decides that the fight isn't worth the price, he's open to compromise or putting things off.

Obama's correct to limit the issues he tackles, to set priorities, and to avoid fights that will damage his ability to advance his agenda. That's good political sense. But I do get the sense that there are some issues where he could prevail if he were willing to push them, yet nonetheless chooses inaction. Yet at the same time I think he needs to trust his political instincts. Were he to tackle a thorny issue and have to be the one who blinks, right-wing and likely also the mainstream media would happily drub him. For now I can see why that's a risk he chooses not to take.

It's Brinksmanship

When heads of state clash over big issues, the question usually becomes "who blinks first?" Jackson Diehl whines that the Obama Administration took a maximalist position when negotiating with Israel over its expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territories:

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures. But, starting with a statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in May, the administration made the mistake of insisting that an Israeli settlement "freeze" -- a term the past three administrations agreed to define loosely -- must mean a total stop to all construction in the West Bank and even East Jerusalem.

Diehl complains that expecting Israel to freeze its settlements doesn't demand enough of the Palestinians (er... demands on the Palestinians are a separate issue), that it's unobtainable due to Israel's internal political issues, and that he believes it to be unnecessary. Yet (although I grant, a temporary freeze is pretty meaningless) look who's blinking first:

Israel would be open to a complete freeze of settlement building in the West Bank for three to six months as part of a broad Middle East peace endeavor that included a Palestinian agreement to negotiate an end to the conflict and confidence-building steps by major Arab nations, senior Israeli officials said Sunday.

Odds are Obama will work with that short-term freeze (or perhaps even one that's broader), and use the six months to try to build a larger deal.

Persistent criticisms of Obama from the left are that he's often reluctant to draw a line in the sand, and that he appears too eager for bipartisan solutions and is willing to negotiate pretty much anything. But as far as I can see, since he took office, there's not yet been a time when Obama drew a solid line where he turned out to be the guy who blinked. Obama doesn't pick fights unless he expects to win.

Exercising Freedoms Responsibly

I wish Ross Douthat had taken the time to watch Idiocracy before writing his latest column, a pointless ramble about the sustainability of love and marriage. It might have given him a different perspective on this observation about the authors of the essays that inspired his column:

Their complaints about this world’s romance deficit are substantially overstated, obviously - and shot through with a dash of self-justification. (Tsing Loh had an affair; Nehring recently became an unwed mother.) But both do put their finger on a post-sexual revolution paradox - namely, that the same overclass that was once most invested in erotic experimentation ended up building the sturdiest walls against the passions it unleashed.

I was only able to read one of the essays Douthat references, Sandra Tsing Loh's Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. But with due respect to Douthat's recognition of the essay as self-justifying, I think he missed the larger point. My father has the opinion that marriages tend to continue, even if one or both partners are unhappy, until one of them finds somebody else. Then that person seeks a divorce. It's a simple point that, in my observation, largely rings true. Tsoh admits that she had a comfortable, stable marriage, so why divorce?

Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage.

She fell in love with somebody else, and chose not to surrender that passion in favor of returning to a marriage that she believed (probably correctly) would never inspire a similar level of passion. That's part of the normal progression of relationships. Perhaps the issue is that Tsoh, who doesn't "generally even enjoy men", had never before experienced "falling in love", but if she wants to live the rest of her life with a similar level of passion she must eschew long-term relationships and marriage (or at least monogamous relationships and marriage), as over time the happy, giddy, "I just fell in love", "I never want to be apart from you" moments, will inevitably change and evolve into something else.

Tsoh also describes a friend of hers, married to a husband who is a gourmet cook, remarkably neat and organized, a good carpenter, and a fitness freak. She describes her friend as also consdering divorce:

“Ian won’t have sex with me,” Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.” Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.”

The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.

I don't doubt that Ian has managed to present his wife with a list of complaints that make her unattractive to him. But it's all window dressing. I would bet good money that, like Tsoh, the reason Ian is finding so much fault in a stable marriage is that he's having an affair. Care to guess how long ago the affair started, or at least when it got serious?

Douthat appears quite uncomfortable with any departure from traditional, or should I say "Ozzie and Harriet", gender roles:

So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh’s dystopia, where everyone “works” grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to “hike the Appalachian Trail” — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?

Perhaps Douthat doesn't eat at many restaurants, but the world of the gourmet kitchen has long been dominated by men. A speculative explanation in which Douthat would probably find comfort is that women have traditionally learned to cook in order to feed their families, while men have had the opportunity to be self-indulgent, to approach cooking as art instead of sustenance. But whatever the reason, Douthat seems to find fault with the fact that a documentary filmmaker who spends most of his time at home between assignments, and who loves to cook, in fact cooks for his "chronically overworked" lawyer wife. In Douthat's "pre-feminist" world, would she (a) quit her job so she could "properly care for her family," (b) order a lot of prepared foods, take-out and delivery, or serve up frozen dinners, or (c) somehow find an extra four hours per day so she could be home to cook breakfast and dinner, and package up box lunches for the kids?

Douthat pontificates,

As Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” - or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.”

Or it could be something else, entirely. It could be that people who exercise their freedoms responsibly believe that the state has no place peering through their bedroom windows and telling them, "Your sex partner is the wrong gender. No, sorry, anything but the missionary position is 'gross indecency.'" It could be that people who intentionally postpone marriage and child rearing until they're stable in their careers don't believe the government should be restricting their access to birth control, or that Douthat's brand of moral opprobrium is appropriate should they experience an unwanted pregnancy and have to choose how to proceed. Although in what is becoming his trademark, Douthat declines to follow through with any conclusions - his editorial suggests that he disapproves of single parenthood, but he can't bring himself to say that single mothers "should get married". In fact, he seems to be internalizing the stereotypes presented in Idiocracy - an "overclass" (his word) of austere yuppies forever postponing children until the "right time" versus a population that, I guess, Douthat would describe as the underclass.

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

I get that latter part - Douthat believes that the poor and uneducated should breed less often. But what am I supposed to make of the former part? "Meritocrats" should marry earlier? Have children outside of marriage? Have more affairs? Engage in more premarital sex? Douthat's usually short on specifics but come on. That's a contention he needs to explain. And how would any of that be consistent with the "pre-feminist" world for which he pines?

Douthat seems to be suggesting that there is a world of people who act responsibly, don't need others to tell them how to behave, and don't like it when the government or moralistic preachers start trying to regulate or criminalize their available choices. He also is suggesting that there's another population - "Americans, particularly those of modest means" who don't exercise sufficient caution or seek appropriate levels of stability "in their romantic entanglements." He doesn't find it obvious that politicians and religious leaders who lack self-control are often the vanguard of those who argue for more meddling in private romantic relationships, or that many of their "incautious" followers (and, for that matter, Douthat) don't understand why people restrain themselves out of anything less than the threat of prison or eternal damnation.

Funding Priorities

Shorter Glenn Easterbrook:

The government's wrong to spend money researching their pie-in-the-sky clean energy schemes that may never bear fruit. They should be directing the money into mine.

Cost Versus Quality

The New Yorker provides an interesting essay on the cost of medical care, and how high costs don't necessarily translate into high quality, penned by surgeon and author Atul Gawande. He seemed to take the doctors he interviewed a bit off guard, particularly when he didn't buy the standard excuses they trotted out.

“It’s malpractice,” a family physician who had practiced here for thirty-three years said.

“McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere.

That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down?

“Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted.

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures.

How has technology affected practice?

I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago?

Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill.

And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

“Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly.

The essay documents the high quality, lower cost approach of clinics like the Mayo Clinic, and how they've been able to export that model into Florida, a state associated with high medical costs. There are savings to be had, but apparently not if the "market" gets its way.

In El Paso, the for-profit health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the table.’”

Dr. Gawande concludes that, more important than a public option, we must decide if we're building toward a Mayo Clinic-style future. I suspect he's right - the doctors he described are making their fortune largely off of Medicare patients.

When A Child Is A Parent's Meal Ticket

A couple of months ago my four-year-old became very interested in Michael Jackson. His "moves". She doesn't have much interest in his childhood work, but is absolutely fascinated by his dance sequences and choreography. She wanted to see him perform live. As I reflect on that, it didn't even cross my mind that Jackson was 50 years old. His changes of appearance were disturbing, saddening, but they had one of the effects he (owner of "Neverland") apparently intended. He did grow up but he became, in a sense, a man without age. Had he kept his original appearance, and become wrinkled and gray, I doubt that the public surprise at his early death would be quite the same.

The span of his career led to my daughter asking questions about his age in various videos, as well as his evolving appearance. The best explanation I had to offer for his surgeries was that I suspected that he didn't like himself. My daughter couldn't understand why somebody wouldn't like himself, and I'm grateful for that. But then, she didn't have Joseph Jackson raising her in an atmosphere of isolation and abuse. What a lovely guy.

Something that's apparent from Jackson's childhood is how readily people will ignore the abuse and mistreatment of children if it jeopardizes the gravy train. Tell me nobody saw Joseph make threats or administer beatings to his children, when they missed a step or a note during their childhood practices and performances.

He touchingly describes his humiliation at having severe acne as a child, and the relentless teasing by his brothers and father, who called him "Big Nose." "You didn't get that ugly nose from my side of the family," says father Joe Jackson, according to Michael. He also describes throwing up at the mere sight of his father who "threw him against a wall" and beat them with "anything that was handy."

Lisa Marie Presley comments on her relationship with Michael:

"I became very ill and emotionally/ spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him," she wrote.

It's one of the strange thing people do... we develop coping skills to get us through our childhood, and have a hard time breaking out of those same patterns as adults, even when we have a "choice" and following the childhood pattern is self-destructive. It seems that Jackson was surrounding himself with versions of his father - people who would bleed him dry for their own devices. But as an adult, he could also choose people (or choose to end relationships with people) who wouldn't challenge him to break with the past and enabled his eccentric and self-destructive behaviors. I suspect that his pattern of conduct, relationships and surgeries was supposed to help him be happy, but instead provided at best brief moments of relief from the unhappiness they otherwise perpetuated. And I will not be surprise if, having expressed to Lisa Marie Presley the fear that he would "end up like" Elvis, his death involved a similar soup of pharmaceuticals - a maladaptive tool to escape from (and avoid) pain, physical and psychic, that probably ended up magnifying both.

A childhood only counts for so much. Jackson is responsible for the mistakes he made as an adult that led to his isolation in his final years. But if he's capable, I hope Joseph Jackson spends some time thinking about what he did to his children. That he's somehow able to feel shame, remorse, embarrassment for his role in the unhappiness of, dare I say, more than one of his children?
____________
Update: More on this theme from Eugene Robinson:

Jackson once said his father used to beat him, perhaps because he was the "golden child." Joe Jackson has always denied being physically abusive, but in a sense it doesn't matter. It seems to me that attaching oneself to one's young son like a leech and denying that boy any semblance of a childhood qualifies as abuse.

* * *

The worst choice, of course, was the way he frolicked with children at his Neverland ranch. Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges, but he also paid a reported eight-figure settlement to the family of one alleged victim. Let me be clear that no childhood trauma would excuse molestation. My question, though, is where were the staff members and the agents and the hangers-on - and the loving family members - who had an inkling that all might not be right at Neverland? Did they choose to look the other way?

I believe Jackson's story that he suffered from the skin disease vitiligo -- though I don't believe that vitiligo or any other infirmity was the reason for the disfiguring plastic surgery that turned his face into a pale, taut mask. It had to be self-hatred - not necessarily an attempt to make himself "white" but to make himself hideous.

I don't think Jackson was trying to make himself hideous - that seems to be the inevitable result of having too many significant cosmetic surgeries. I'm more inclined toward thinking, body dysmorphic disorder.

Healthcare "Rationing"

Michael Kinsley shares his views on healthcare and health insurance, opining,

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing.

Seriously, could he propose a less useful measure? Surprise! Every health insurance plan in the nation, from the worst to the best, is "rationing" because the President gets the undivided attention of Bethesda Naval Hospital when he gets, you know, an unexplained rash... or possibly even a splinter (there's a lot of old furniture, er, antiques, in the White House - it could happen). Certainly when he chokes on a pretzel or has a colon polyp. (And don't get me started on the "rationing" of fully staffed mansions, private jets, private helicopters, luxury retreats....)

Next, is Kinsley going to tell us that it's "rationing" that wealthy people can pay thousands of dollars to have a multi-day, multi-disciplinary physical examination at the Mayo Clinic, while most people get at best half an hour in the office of their family doctor? Sure, we can call it rationing, but even before considering costs there aren't enough doctors in the world to provide that level of care to every person in the U.S. And there's not a health insurance policy in the world that doesn't "ration" - by Kinsley's standard, severely ration.

It may seem absurd to worry about whether wealthy or well-insured people get every last test and exotic or speculative treatment when millions of Americans have no health insurance and millions more have gaping holes in their coverage. But the well-insured happen to include virtually all the people making the key decisions about health-care reform - members of Congress and their staffs, the White House staff, Washington journalists, and so on. These people's fears that they would lose the right to "choose my own doctor" (code for getting treatment with all the bells and whistles) helped kill Hillary Clinton's attempt to reform health care in the early 1990s. Fear of rationing could kill Obamacare for the same reason.

Let's assume its historical accuracy - that Kinsley and his friends got worked up at the notion that Hillary Clinton's healthcare reforms would have narrowed their coverage under their gold plated health insurance plans. Is Kinsley telling us that their narrow self-interest caused this nation's political and media leaders to lie to the public - to say, "You won't get to choose your own doctor," when they actually meant, "I would have to pay for more of my own healthcare"? And we're getting another round of deliberate lies from the same people, under the guise of "rationing"?

Another point Kinsley should make is that "rationing" under Obama's plan would only occur within the context of those who choose the public plan. You think you can do better under a private insurance plan? You want to buy supplemental insurance to cover things the public plan doesn't include? You'll have that right. So again, how is this "rationing" any different from the current system and how would it be worse to get additional choices?

The "Conservative" Solution to Healthcare Reform

Thanks to David Brooks, the secret's finally out. The "conservative" solution to healthcare reform is rationing and a tax increase. First, a tax on middle class workers who are fortunate enough to get health insurance through their jobs:

There was a long table of 13 experts, and a vast majority agreed that ending the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits should be part of a reform package.

They gave the reasons that experts - on right or left - always give for supporting this idea. The exemption is a giant subsidy to the affluent. It drives up health care costs by encouraging luxurious plans and by separating people from the consequences of their decisions. Furthermore, repealing the exemption could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be used to expand coverage to the uninsured.

The thing about money is that it's fungible. If you believe that a tax break gives too big of a windfall to the affluent, you don't have to remove or limit it for the middle class. You don't even have to modify it for the affluent; you can instead, for example, bump up their marginal tax rate, or create or increase some other tax. Any significant tax increase "could raise hundreds of billions of dollars" - that doesn't of itself make one tax increase superior to another.

Given that Republicans have been happy to spin the possible planned expiration of tax cuts as a "tax increase". With a complicit, pliant Democratic Party, they giddily slashed taxes even while running up record budget deficits. By their own measure, this proposal is a tax increase - yet they're being allowed to avoid addressing their hypocrisy, or being asked to explain why this is different. We can't cut a subsidy to "Medicare Advantage" insurers that allows them to stay in business against the more efficient Medicare and we can't tax the income of hedge fund managers as income, but we can impose a massive tax increase on working Americans? And, quelle surprise, David Brooks is along for the ride.

There are some real problems to the status quo. Having health insurance tied to employment makes our nation's workers less mobile, and less likely to become entrepreneurs (particularly past 40), than they otherwise might be. The tax break has historically led some employers to offer more generous healthcare plans in lieu of pay raises. Even if you qualify for COBRA coverage, the cost of continuing health insurance after leaving a job can be prohibitive. (Even with the stimulus package subsidy, I know workers who can't afford COBRA.) There are a lot of good reasons to end or phase out the tax break. But at the same time, some people proposing eliminating the tax exemption have other goals in mind. Such as poisoning the middle class on the idea of healthcare reform on the grounds that it will cut their wages and perhaps also inspire employers to switch to less comprehensive plans. Even John McCain recognized the need for a tax credit to help balance out the effect of this tax increase, although that's not an elegant solution.

Brooks' endorsement of rationing was raised in that quoted passage - the idea that health insurance separates "people from the consequences of their decisions". It's sloppy thinking of Brooks to confuse that issue with his desired tax increase, unless he also believes that his tax increase will result in the broad loss of employment-based health insurance. The issue of utilization of healthcare is separate from the issue of how we pay for insurance. Brooks elaborates about the various health reform proposals,

But there is almost nothing that gets to the core of the problem. Under the leading approaches, health care providers would still have powerful incentives to provide more and more services and use more expensive technology.

Brooks could direct that criticism at himself. Except I think he has something in mind - a Newt Gingrich-type reform that makes people (other than himself) responsible for paying most of their own medical bills. When you're making six to seven figures a year, as Brooks does, it's not a big deal to pay a doctor $150 or so for an office visit, or to pay $50 or more for a needed medication. If you can't afford it, well, tough. I'm sure Brooks would argue that it's not rationing, because anybody who comes up with the money can still buy medical services, but that type of solution revolves around the idea that "responsible" healthcare consumers will choose to keep their money in their pockets (assuming they even have enough money to choose medical treatment over non-treatment.) His goal is to "save" money by denying care.

Brooks' conclusion is close to imbecilic:

Health care reform is important, but it is not worth bankrupting the country over. If this process goes as it has been going - with grand rhetoric and superficial cost containment - then we will be far better off killing this effort and starting over in a few years.

If healthcare inflation weren't absurdly high, with projected Medicare and Medicaid costs becoming prohibitive in the not too distant future, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Putting off reform to the future in the hope that responsible politicians will suddenly emerge from the woodwork is beyond naive - disagreements aside, and as bad as things may look, there's never been a time when we had political leaders more capable of addressing this issue with reforms more likely to pass. Brooks isn't trying to punt in the hope that future leaders will do better - he's in the role of Lucy, hoping to snatch away the ball.

Brooks also ignores two huge culprits in healthcare inflation: end of life care, and the treatment of chronic illness. It may well be that an elderly person will "choose" to die, being unable to afford treatment that would extend care, but we as a society have difficulty telling the elderly that they're on their own for their life-saving treatments. When can we expect Brooks' column on how his proposed rationing will impact the elderly? Also, people with chronic diseases often require expensive medical treatments and medications on a recurring basis. Even when the needed medications are generic, costs can add up quickly. Brooks is going to tell, for example, insulin-dependent diabetics, people with end-stage renal disease, and AIDS patients, "Sorry, if you can't afford insulin, dialysis, or anti-retrovirals on your own, you need to find some place to curl up and die, preferably where I don't have to see it happen"? These are the consequences Brooks' approach dictates;¹ when can we expect a direct, honest column addressing these issues?
__________

1. There are, of course, no easy answers. The present approach is largely, "Don't set limits, spend vast amounts of money, and hope that technology eventually produces a series of miracle cures." Even if we assume that the public is ready for a rational, painful discussion of these topics... I used the words "rational" and "painful" - do I really need to add, "Our political leaders are not"? Note, these issues are not resolved by national health care plans, although the costs seem to be better controlled. Management of chronic illness is an area that is probably also best suited for government sponsored research, as the huge profits are in managing a chronic disease, not in preventing or curing it, so that seems to be where private research dollars go.

"Help Me Lie To My Ill-Behaved Children"

(Appropriately) via lies.com, somebody who's not up for the parent of the year award.

Premise: You will be the dog walker hired by daddy (me) to walk Skittles. I will introduce you to the kids, and you will tell them you are going to help Skittles get her exercise when Daddy is too busy to walk her. At that point you will walk Skittles to your car and take her to her new family 20 minutes from my place. Then return holding just a leash. The story will be that Skittles broke free of the leash and took off. At this point prepare for crying, things being thrown at you, and possibly cursing. My kids are young and dramatic, their girls.

Are you qualified?

This job is ideal for an actor looking to diversify their role base, or someone who genuinely likes to make children cry. Acting experience is a plus, but not necessary. Please inform me of any prior experience in this kind of situation.

No mention of whether you can get SAG credit....

The Axis of Evil Revisited

As we have a flame-baiter posting irrelevant comments about North Korea's placement in "The Axis of Evil", it seems appropriate to revisit the post I made the last time this happened. (Wanna bet it's the same person?)

Due Process

In a completely unsurprising 5:4 "bad facts make bad law" case, the Supreme Court denied a defendant the right to obtain DNA evidence from the state that might disprove his involvement in a crime.

Mr. Osborne is not a sympathetic character. He was released after serving 14 years and after telling a parole board he was guilty of the rape. Not long after his release, he was charged with kidnapping, armed robbery and burglary for a home invasion in which he allegedly duct-taped and pistol-whipped four people.

The fact that he confessed and expressed remorse in order to obtain parole is anything but surprising - had he denied responsibility and insisted upon his innocence, he very likely would have been denied parole. But the rest of it? The justices can protest all they want about their goal being to uphold the law, but it's anything but unusual for a nasty set of facts to presage a narrowing of defendants' rights. People like Osborne don't inspire a lot of public sympathy, and very often inspire a response to the effect of, "Even if he didn't do that crime, he still deserves to be in prison."

Blogger commentary tends to lean toward viewing this as a manifestation of "tough on crime" conservatism. I see it a bit differently - as part of the tension between those who believe in "substantive due process" and those who believe that there's no such thing. In simple terms, procedural due process asks, "Did the court follow the rules"? If all the i's were dotted and t's crossed along the way, then the defendant's procedural due process rights were respected and the conviction can be deemed sound. Substantive due process asks, "Was the correct result achieved?" At the extreme end, this can mean ignoring all of the procedural issues and looking only at the outcome on a case-by-case basis. And some, like Justice Scalia, are skeptical of the notion that there's any constitutional right to substantive due process:

There is no text in the Constitution that you could reinterpret to create a right to abortion, for example. So you need something else. The something else is called the doctrine of "Substantive Due Process." Only lawyers can walk around talking about substantive process, in as much as it's a contradiction in terms. If you referred to substantive process or procedural substance at a cocktail party, people would look at you funny. But, lawyers talk this way all the time.

What substantive due process is is quite simple - the Constitution has a Due Process Clause, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Now, what does this guarantee? Does it guarantee life, liberty or property? No, indeed! All three can be taken away. You can be fined, you can be incarcerated, you can even be executed, but not without due process of law. It's a procedural guarantee. But the Court said, and this goes way back, in the 1920s at least, in fact the first case to do it was Dred Scott. But it became more popular in the 1920s. The Court said there are some liberties that are so important, that no process will suffice to take them away. Hence, substantive due process.

Now, what liberties are they? The Court will tell you. Be patient. When the doctrine of substantive due process was initially announced, it was limited in this way, the Court said it embraces only those liberties that are fundamental to a democratic society and rooted in the traditions of the American people.

Then we come to step three. Step three: that limitation is eliminated. Within the last 20 years, we have found to be covered by due process the right to abortion, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years; the right to homosexual sodomy, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years. So it is literally true, and I don't think this is an exaggeration, that the Court has essentially liberated itself from the text of the Constitution, from the text and even from the traditions of the American people. It is up to the Court to say what is covered by substantive due process.

There's another way to look at this "division". You could create a system of courts that had clear, easy-to-follow rules that lead inexorably to conviction. Even acknowledging his acceptance that the innocent will sometimes be convicted and imprisoned, I doubt that even Scalia would regard such a system as satisfying the constitution's requirement of granting due process. So it's not simply about procedure, but whether the procedures are likely to lead to a just outcome. At the furthest end, you could argue that the fiercest advocates of substantive due process aren't so much arguing for courts to ignore procedural rules as they are arguing that procedure should not prevent claims of innocence, or block a court from reviewing evidence of actual innocence.

If we approach this as originalists, if Scalia were to ask the framers of the Constitution if they were comfortable with a sovereign who was in possession of evidence that would clearly and unambiguously establish a defendant's factual guilt or innocence, but would not let the defendant access that evidence, do you really think they would respond, "No, we believe the sovereign should be able to withhold the evidence"? If so, but you don't want that outcome, or if you spurn the notion that we should even try to discern what the framers of the Constitution intended as opposed to what they put into writing, we can instead approach the issue as textualists, and decide that "due process" means that the court follows procedures sufficient to satisfy Scalia, even though innocent people will be convicted, but that we should ignore the namby-pamby Justices who would argue that nobody should be incarcerated for life or executed because the state won't let them access evidence that might establish their innocence of the crimes for which they were convicted? How is Scalia's position better supported by the text than the position of those who say, "When evidence is available that could quickly and easily establish guilt or innocence, it should be made available for testing"?

Scalia's not drawing a line based upon the text of the Constitution - it's based upon his personal political beliefs and his personal views of judicial economy and expediency. That's not to say that those on the other side of the issue are any better supported by the text of the Constitution; but it's a fair response that some of the language of the constitution was deliberately left broad or vague - and it's more than fair to point out that the idea that you can always infer objective meaning from text (let alone a text that is centuries old and includes broad, vague, and general provisions) is absurd. Scalia's correct to argue that the Constitution should not be subject to interpretation that rises to the level of de facto amendment, but some of the language has to be applied based upon factual contexts unknown to and unknowable by those who wrote the Constitution. But let's be honest - the biggest difference between Scalia and those he criticizes is that he's more consistent in his application of his favored rules of interpretation - but in my view that's more by happenstance than by either the superiority of textualism to other forms of interpretation or Scalia's actual desire to adhere to a single approach to interpretation. Scalia rapidly departs from textualism (as in the case of sovereign immunity) when it would lead to an outcome inconsistent with his personal philosophy of the Constitution.

No Justice on the Supreme Court would argue that procedure is irrelevant, and all that matters is getting the correct outcome. They're all going to recognize boundaries where judicial economy calls for finality, even if additional proceedings might eventually lead to a different outcome. But some aren't as comfortable as Scalia with deference to state power, and to a state's decision that DNA evidence should not be tested to establish guilt or innocence, even though the techniques available for testing at the time of the original trial were weak or non-existent. A fair question for Scalia: What's the state's interest in denying DNA testing under these circumstances? Were he less sympathetic to state power, Scalia would direct his trademark caustic questions at a lawyer who argued that it would be unduly burdensome for the state to be mandated to permit DNA testing at the defendant's expense in all cases where such evidence existed and had not been adequately tested.

Were this a "cold case", the state would not hesitate to conduct DNA testing to try to match old evidence to a DNA database of known sex offenders. This is different because, rightly or wrongly, somebody has been convicted? So it's more important to the state to have "finality" than it is to assure itself that, in the event that the defendant is telling the truth, a dangerous rapist is off the streets? What if the state's concern is actually that it will look bad - incompetent, unjust, corrupt - when DNA evidence proves a wrongful conviction and somebody takes a look at the processes by which the wrong man ended in in prison? Is it that we are to assume that the state's motives are pure - and if so, where can I find that presumption in the text of the Constitution? If it's not in the text then, once again, what makes Scalia and the other textualists any better than those they criticize?

What if a School Principal Acted Like This

Rhee apparently won't talk to the Washington Post reporter who is primarily responsible for reporting on school issues.

It's not uncommon for public officials to temporarily slam the door on reporters who upset them. But this is unusual. Rhee's effort to transform the public schools is arguably the biggest story in the District and has gained national attention. Her pique has lasted months. Turque is the only reporter who covers her full time. And he works for a powerful hometown newspaper whose coverage is essential to taxpaying readers with a stake in the issue.

"Basically, she just stopped talking to me," Turque said. "She never gave me a direct explanation. I've had to sort of piece it together indirectly."

How does Rhee explain the brush off?

I e-mailed Rhee and asked her to specify her complaints about Turque. I also asked whether she wants Turque replaced on the education beat and why she would talk with Mathews and not him. She referred me to her spokeswoman, Jennifer Calloway, who said Rhee doesn't want to "rehash" the past.

The Post's ombudsman observes,

Rhee's reaction to The Post's coverage strikes me as petty and thin-skinned -- and perhaps calculated. She has been uncommonly cooperative with national media reporters who parachute in for big-picture profiles. But she has been overly sensitive when Turque, and Post education reporters before him, have pursued more granular coverage that is so essential to local readers.

But it also seems to me to be a fair question, would Rhee tolerate this kind of behavior if it were directed at her?

...But Can They Afford to Post Bail?

It would have made for an interesting entry on the customs declaration form:

Japan is investigating reports two of its citizens were detained in Italy after allegedly attempting to take $134 billion worth of U.S. bonds over the border into Switzerland.

They were nabbed by Italian authorities, and (if the bonds are real) could be fined up to 40% of the bonds' value.

Rove's Dissembling on Health Care

Karl rove shares this anecdote:

It was a sobering breakfast with one of the smartest Republicans on Capitol Hill. We can fix a lot of bad stuff President Barack Obama might do, he told me. But if Mr. Obama signs into law a "public option," government-run insurance program as part of health-care reform we won't be able to undo the damage.

Anonymous? I don't think Rove's making the story up, nor do I think he's such a pariah that the politician at issue doesn't want people to know he still breaks bread with Rove. So the most likely reasons for the anonymity are:

• The politician at issue doesn't want to have to defend his comments on the merits; or

• The politician at issue was speaking of "bad stuff" in a very different way than Rove suggests. That is, he's using the term to mean the implementation of policies, no matter how sound, that make it more difficult for the Republican Party to regain power.

If Rove were an honest man, beyond naming his breakfast guest he would admit the following: It would be easy to kill a public plan that people found unsatisfactory. What scares him is not that it will work or be ineffective, but that it will be better, cheaper and more efficient than private health insurance plans and decades of fear mongering about "socialized medicine" will have been for naught. (Not to mention, $millions in health insurance industry lobbying dollars would disappear from Republican coffers.)

I'd go the Republican member of Congress one further: If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.

"European-style welfare state"? I guess that's the new term for "socialist", that particular epithet having lost its traction. Perhaps Mr. Rove will elucidate: Which European countries are not "welfare states"? And which nations in the world are clamoring to imitate the U.S. model? (I might quip, why does Rove have so little faith in America that he believes we can't create a national health care plan as good as those people in countries like France and Canada have absolutely no interest trade for a U.S.-style scheme of insurance.)

Rove offers a number of flimsy arguments against a public option. For example he claims that "Advocates say a government-run insurance program is needed to provide competition for private health insurance. But 1,300 companies sell health insurance plans. That's competition enough." Except as he fully knows, the market for health insurance is not a normal market. The principal buyers are employers who, in the absence of a CBA mandating a minimum level of benefits, seek to minimize their expenditures. They look for the cheapest plan they can successfully foist on their employees. Most employees don't have a choice of plans, or at best get to choose from a handful of plans within their employer's price bracket. If they're not employed, the market's a near failure - individual plans tend to offer a glorious mix of extremely high cost, high deductibles, and poor coverage.

Rove speaks of savings brought on by competition in the Medicare drug plan, using high projected costs to spin the illusion that competition has reduced cost to the government, but neglects to mention that the Republicans deliberately excluded Medicare from using its market position to negotiate discounted drug prices - that is, they knew full well that without their legislative hamstringing, Medicare would have outcompeted the private plans. You don't believe me? Ask him to put his money where his mouth is, remove all restrictions on the government's ability to negotiate drug discounts, and prove that private plans are cheaper. He'll no doubt stammer out an excuse about how it's not fair for a government plan to be able to negotiate for discounts even though private plans are free to do so, but it will be a smokescreen.

Rove all but admits his deceit, arguing, "government-run health insurance would crater the private insurance market, forcing most Americans onto the government plan." His reasoning is that employers would see the government plan as, you guessed it, the cheapest option. And despite his regurgitation of the standard parade of horribles, about how doctors and hospitals won't get adequate payment for services (yet apparently would still participate), government bureaucrats will choose your doctor, and the cost will be higher than that of private plans (ostensibly because any government plan would be subsidized, but he's barely trying for internal consistency), people will voluntarily sign up with the government plan. Uh, yeah....

Health care desperately needs far-reaching reforms that put patients and their doctors in charge, bring the benefits of competition and market forces to bear, and ensure access to affordable and portable health care for every American. Republicans have plans to achieve this, and they must make their case for reform in every available forum.

Great, Karl. How about sharing those plans right here and right now? Or naming a single country where a public plan, in competition with private plans, has led to the outcome you describe? Oh, out of space? Why does that always seem to happen right when the discussion might become substantive.

As Rove obviously understands, its easier to run for election while claiming to have a "secret plan" than it is to do so while admitting that you don't actually have an answer. And, of course, that a lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Craving Coolidge

Well, at least he's not hankerin' for Hoover, but George Will is apparently smitten with the wit and wisdom of Calvin Coolidge. Will's in full-scale "angry old man" mode, shaking his stick angrily at all the whippersnappers who make irresponsible choices. His editorial is largely "stream of consciousness" - "things that bother me, right now" - rather than a coherent expression of anything (other than, perhaps, his appreciation for Coolidge).

One of Will's complaints is about the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 (darn you, Herbert Hoover!), I mean, cap-and-trade:

The Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 ignited reciprocal protectionism that suffocated global trade and deepened the Depression. The cap-and-trade legislation passed recently by a House committee is Smoot-Hawley in drag: It contains provisions for tariffs on imports designated "carbon-intensive" - goods manufactured under less carbon-restrictive rules than those of the proposed U.S. cap-and-trade regime. Eco-protectionism is a recipe for reciprocity.

Yes, that could happen, whether as a result of cap-and-trade or any other tax on carbon emissions, although one hopes that the international trade organizations that have come into being since Hoover's era will help mitigate the imposition of tariffs and retaliation. But (other than ignoring science and pretending that global warming doesn't exist) what's Will's solution? No, wait, I think that is Will's solution.

You gotta love this, as well:

Trillions of dollars of capital are being allocated sub-optimally, by politically tainted government calculations rather than by the economic rationality of markets. Hence the nation's prospects for long-term robust growth - and for funding its teetering architecture of entitlements - are rapidly diminishing.

I recognize that those who worship at the altar of the free market will always find a way to blame the government for bubbles, inflation, recessions, whatever. But the Chrysler and GM bailouts hardly register in relation to the financial industry meltdown. Will may be correct that the better approach would have been for G.W. Bush to simply let market forces prevail, and for AIG, Citigroup, and others to go through bankruptcy, but if that's what he believes, why does he focus on the auto industry bailout? And if it's not what he believes, what business does he have focusing on the auto industry bailout, beyond the fact that the specifics of that bailout were defined by Obama's administration instead of Bush's? Is his answer, once again, that when faced with a global crisis the government should do nothing?

As for Will's swipes at entitlements and Social Security, I'm wondering... is he true to his convictions, or is he channeling Grandpa Simpson? That is, is he turning down Medicare and Social Security benefits, or protesting, I didn't earn it, I don't need it, but if they miss one payment I'll raise hell!"

Looking Away in Horror

Way back during my high school days, the biology teachers shared a small office between two classrooms. There, they kept a number of old biology texts that were available to all students, but which were primarily for their own reference and mostly disregarded by the student body. One of the texts was a reprint of an early 20th century book on fetal abnormalities. The text focused on severe, mostly lethal abnormalities, and each entry was accompanied by a photograph of a stillborn baby illustrating the abnormality. Some of the pictures looked scarcely human, some looked like the babies had been the victims of torture, and a few weren't even recognizably human.

Sensitivities have changed since the original publication, which described the babies it depicted as "monsters". At the time of its publication, you might have seen babies (real or fake) with similar deformities preserved in formaldehyde and presented at "freak shows". Historically, in much of the Christian world, a child with this type of deformity who survived (or even one with far lesser deformity or genetic abnormality) might have been shuttered away from the world, their parents and siblings keeping their very existence a secret, or institutionalized.

Ross Douthat's latest essay on abortion rights is mostly a restatement of what he's said before, and a lot of people have taken issue with the points he makes. But I have yet to see this addressed:

Over the last week, there’s been an outpouring of testimonials, across the Internet, from women (and some men) who lived through these hard cases. They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord’s work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn’t hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed. They help explain why so many Americans defend his right to do it.

Why, then, did Douthat's Catholic forbears accept the labeling of such children as "monsters" and "grotesques"? Why did it countenance the keeping of their births and existence a secret? Why did it help perpetuate a culture of shame around having a child with a birth defect? What's its explanation for why God would create a baby, destined to struggle for life for minutes, days, weeks, or perhaps even a few excruciatingly pain-filled years, before inevitably succumbing to a congenital or genetic abnormality? A baby who might inspire somebody, not prepared to see it, to avert her eyes in horror? How is this consistent with God's infallibility? I don't mean to single out Catholicism in this regard; but that's the prism through which Douthat sees the world.

As usual, instead of stating a clear position, Douthat waffles and begs the question. Following up on the straw man proposition that the "argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule", Douthat proclaims,

As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense. Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn’t. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn’t enter into the equation.

It wouldn't take much courage for Douthat to state what his arguments, present and historic, suggest that he believes: That a fetus has a claim to life without regard to the circumstances of its conception and the state of its health. I'm not sure whether Douthat chooses not to do so out of some sense that he can depict himself as unbiased on these issues, or simply because he lacks courage. Instead of taking a position he lectures,

But the law is a not a philosophy seminar. It’s the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense. And it can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons.

Douthat confuses law with politics. It's very simple to draft a law that says "Abortion is illegal under all circumstances" - perhaps Douthat should consult his Priest about something called "canon law". The fact is, if you deviate from the dogmatic line that abortion should be prohibited in all circumstances - whether it be to allow "abortions on women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on 'women' who were really girls of 10" - you're pro-choice. The only difference between you and somebody who favors few (or even no) restrictions on access to abortion is where you choose to draw the line.

If Douthat were interested in that debate, he would spend less time building straw men or making statements so absurdly false (e.g., "Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate") that the most charitable interpretation is that they betray a level of ignorance that should disqualify him from writing on this issue.

It's About Time?

The Washington Post is concerned about negotiations between D.C. teachers union and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. It asserts,

Maybe it's time for parents to get a look what's going on in these closed-door talks. More than pay scales are at stake. Every aspect of classroom life - from the size of bulletin boards to teacher planning times to when principals can ask to look at lesson plans - is being decided. Given that secrecy hasn't helped Ms. Rhee and Ms. Weingarten work out their differences, why not give the public more than a glimpse and some sound bites about the competing proposals? Each side claims to have a plan that will further the interests of students. Let them prove it.

Well, great.... Except why didn't this matter to the Post during the many times in the past it advocated strongly in favor of Rhee's secret package of reforms?

Given it's history, the Post may well hope that the details of the discussion - class planning time, equipment to be provided to classrooms, etc. - overwhelms the big picture. I suspect they're hoping that disclosure will enable Rhee's supporters to try to hide the forest by pointing to trees, real or imagined - "Look, they want to have a contractual right to a large bulletin board" - rather than on the issues central to the negotiation. The devil may be in the details, but what would be most beneficial would be a point-counterpoint on the issues Rhee deems most necessary to effecting her reforms. If a dispute over the size of bulletin boards is on the list, or is even competitive for last place, I won't be left with much faith in Rhee. (But it won't be.)

What Would Freud Say?

I thought the days of comparing Obama to starlets were over. Apparently Pat Buchanan didn't get the memo:

Obama, however - like some Hollywood actress seeking sympathy and public approbation with her tell-all biography detailing how she was abused by her father - trolls for popularity with America’s adversaries by reciting for the benefit of the world all the sins his country has allegedly committed.

I mean, seriously, don't most people outgrow "You're a girl" as an insult somewhere around adolescence?

Testifying Before Congress

I'm not reassured....

If you're an inspector general, called before Congress to testify, you might do well to understand the scope of your job and responsibilities.