The debt ceiling vote -- as I expected

Yesterday — after 7 pm — the House of Representatives voted to extend the debt ceiling. A moment of drama was added by having Rep. Gabrielle Giffords return to the House for the first time since she was shot last January.

It will still need to pass the Senate, which is scheduled to vote on it today — the last possible day before a threatened default. I assume it will pass.

As I said in an earlier post, the politicians involved were playing "chicken" to win political points. President Obama got the one thing he desperately wanted — an extension past the 2012 election, so the election would not be fought while the debt ceiling debate went on. The Republicans got one thing they wanted — at least short-term, no new tax increases. The Tea Party got only some of the spending cuts they wanted — but this was a bit of a victory for them, since the Democrats wanted, at first, not to make any cuts, and to do it all by tax increases.

It's a compromise. Everyone got something and gave up something. But as a Republican I have to say that the Democrats, controlling the Senate and White House, had so much in their favor, and yet gave up so much in the end. I have to think that the Republican Congressional leaders worked beyond the call of duty to make this a bill with more Republican input than you might expect with the Democrats controlling so much of the machinery.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and anyone else I forgot in the Republican Congressional leadership.

Stealing domain names and cheating

The Center for Range Voting is a group that advocates what they (and I) consider a better way of conducting elections: a method that has been called both "range voting" and "score voting." (The latter describes it better, so I prefer it.) They have their own website, with the URL rangevoting.org .

A rival group, officially named the Center for Voting and Democracy but now mostly using the name of FairVote, is similarly engaged in advocating changes in the voting system, but mostly favors a system called "instant runoff voting" or "the alternative vote," which has mainly been used in Australia, but in recent years has been tried here. (A couple of years ago it was used to elect the mayor of Burlington, Vt., with disastrous results, showing the weakness of this method, though it has worked fairly well in Australia.) These groups, both advocating different election method changes, find themselves in conflict, with CRV usually having the more logical arguments, but FairVote having the most convincing propaganda machine to many people. But now FairVote seems to have crossed the line and started playing dirty. They set up a blog, with the URL rangevoting.com . It has been set up very recently, apparently to hijack people who intend to get to rangevoting.org but get the URL wrong. (This was reported on Dale Sheldon-Hess' voting methods blog, "The Least of All Evil.")

Has FairVote no sense of ethics?

The debt ceiling debate

What I've been saying for some time, I truly believe. All the public posturing is just a bid to score points before November 2012's election. Booth sides are in a game of "chicken." But I'm sure a deal will be reached, behind the scene where we can't tell who twisted whose arm about what. It certainly makes one wonder how anyone can stand being a politician — I certainly couldn't.

Strange reasoning on DOMA

There are hearings going on in the Senate Judiciary Committee about repealing the unfortunately-named "Defense of Marriage Act." And the people opposed to this have brought forth an argument that, on its face, looks reasonable: for example, Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, cited a 1947 Supreme Court case that declared, "Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race."

If same-sex marriages are to be denied because they cannot procreate, however, why are marriages not immediately annulled when the wife gets a hysterectomy? Or when the husband gets a vasectomy? Why are postmenopausal women allowed to marry?

When the opponents of same-sex marriage explain why they oppose it, but not marriage of a man and a woman where a hysterectomy, a vasectomy, or simply menopause has occurred, then I'll believe their argument. Until then, it is clear that they are simply trying to impose their idea of morality upon others.

President Obama still doesn't get it!

President Barack Obama is quoted as having said, after another breakdown in the talks over the debt, "Can they say yes to anything?"

It is clear that he still hasn't gotten it. No, they aren't going to say yes to tax increases, particularly in the midst of a recession. And if you keep insisting on raising taxes, you will not get an agreement. The reason that John Boehner, not Nancy Pelosi, is Speaker of the House, is that the American people, last November, spoke out. And they embraced the idea that the way to fix this economy is not "tax and spend," but "give the people their own money, to spend."

Goodbye, Borders

My favorite blog (other than this one!), Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue," has in the past week done two posts on the demise of the Borders bookstore chain. I suppose if he can do so on his mostly-political blog, so can I. He comes originally from Michigan, so I suppose his contacts with Borders go way back. I first discovered them in the 1980s or 1990s, when a Borders store opened in the Washington, D. C. suburbs. I'd never seen a store with so many books on some of the topics I liked, all in one place! (Barnes & Noble, which goes back a long way and which I knew back in my college days, the late 1950s, was primarily a place to buy used textbooks; eventually, of course, they turned into the same sort of big-box general bookstore that Borders became. But that wasn't the Barnes & Noble I remember.) The Borders store in question got bigger, outgrew their original space, and moved into a big shopping mall a block or so away, and other Borders stores opened in the area until, at one point, there were 3 stores in D. C., and a fair number in the suburbs. Most of them have now already closed; the two remaining ones will close soon as the chain dies.

I could see it coming. Though I actually worked at Borders for a while in 1998, and my wife actually worked at a different Borders store for 12 years and a few months, until her store closed earlier this year, it has become clear that the wave of the future is Amazon.com. This became obvious in recent years, when I found that even though, as the spouse of an employee, I had a 33% discount on all books I bought at Borders, I could still get some cheaper on Amazon. It is just too expensive to maintain a brick-and-mortar store.

When my aunt died and left me an inheritance (she died many years ago, but the inheritance became available only last year), I put a sizable chunk of the money into Amazon stock. It has done amazingly well. Obviously, there is money to be made from selling books — but not in the type of store that Borders represents. Borders, like Tower Records a few years ago, is a store I'm sorry to see go. But you cannot expect a company to stay in business if they cannot make a profit. Goodbye — I loved you when you were here.

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

The Republican Party and the tax impasse

Both of our two major parties are broad coalitions. Cerainly it is hard to find an issue on which all Democrats agree, or an issue on which all Republicans agree. (I will speak mainly of the Republicans, because it is to that party that I belong.)

The Republican Party includes the Log Cabin Republicans and viciously anti-gay Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. It includes isolationist Ron Paul and hawkish John McCain. It includes Sarah Palin, so anti-abortion that she bore a child she knew would have Down's Syndrome, and it includes pro-abortion former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. But one thing unites most of these disparate Republicans: economic policies favoring allowing more of our nation's taxpayers to keep more of their own money. So is it such a surprise that this tax impasse is occirring?

Certainly, there are Republicans who would accept the need to raise some taxes, but when it comes down to this sort of showdown, given the other issues that divide the Republican Party, it is safer, for someone like John Boehner, whose job is to lead the party in its negotiations with President Obama, to be hard-line on taxes, and keep all the Republicans in your camp, than to concede on the issue and lose the support of many who are crucial to the success of the Republican Party.

How will this impasse be settled? Your guess is as good as mine.

Is President Obama really pro-gay-rights?

A reader named William Hart posted a comment to yesterday's post. In it he expresses the opinion that President Obama should be re-elected in 2012 to ensure progress in gay rights. I think Mr. Hart is totally misinformed, and I think that more than a response to a comment is called for, so I'm making a full post.

President Obama talks the gay rights line. But has he done anything he could to further the cause of gay rights? On Jan. 20, 2009 he became President. That very day he could have issued an executive order repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He could have done so at any time since that day — but he has not. It took a court order to repeal DADT.

True, earlier this year he (or his Attorney General, but this is really the same thing) said he will cease fighting to uphold the "Defense of Marriage Act." But it took him two years to get to this point. Why did the Obama Administration fight to uphold DOMA for the first two years of its existence?

Among the people fighting to replace President Obama, the most anti-gay are probably Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Does anyone really think that Barack Obama will speed the progress of gay rights any more than Bachmann or Santorum? What might he do to help -- and why hasn't he done it already? Please answer, in specifics.

The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" -- finally!

Through the Frum Forum blog, it has come out that the military has finally complied with the court order to accept openly gay recruits. The order was issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Funny, President Obama was elected with so much gay support, but it took the judiciary to end DADT. If Obama were so pro-gay, he could have issued an executive order.

In this, as in the gay marriage controversy, the President talks as if he is sympathetic to gay equality, but look at his actions! Yet the majority of gay activists remain firmly behind him. It's not really justified, but you can't convince them.

Reliving the O. J. Simpson case

I notice that on another blog, there is a post by Marcia Clark, who was the prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial, in which she describes the Casey Anthony verdict as "Worse Than O.J.!" This, of course, implies that the O. J. Simpson verdict was wrong. Now I want to say this: I am definitely not a football fan, so in my mind O. J. Simpson was hardly the "American hero" that, to some people, he was. And I am absolutely convinced that Simpson murdered those two people. Yet, had I been on that jury, I would have had to vote to acquit. Why? Because in our legal system, the accused is presumed to be innocent, unless guilt can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And the prosecution failed to make that kind of a case. With the possibility of evidence tampering by a racist policeman, the procesution's case was definitely one that could engender doubts.

I haven't followed the Casey Anthony case that closely. I don't know whether the not-guilty verdict there made sense — what I've seen implies she was, in fact, guilty, but read what I said about Simpson above. But I think Marcia Clark, who couldn't get a conviction herself in a case where the defendant was clearly guilty, because her side botched the case, is not the one to comment!

Gregory Kane and the Kennedys

I have on several occasions referred to columns I have read in the Washington Examiner, a local edition around here of a national paper. They are a rather conservative paper, and most of their columnists are well to my right, so I sometimes find myself in agreement, and sometimes in disagreement, with the columns in the Examiner. But today I saw a column where my disagreement stemmed, not from the Examiner columnist's being too far right, but from his praise of a liberal Democrat for whom I have little but scorn.

I suppose it is a conscious decision by the Examiner, but I don't know for sure: it features a number of African-American, but well to the right of center, columnists, perhaps to show that you don't need to be liberal if you are an African-American. And one of those African-American conservative columnists, Gregory Kane, has been the author of columns I have criticized in the past as far more conservative than I consider sensible. But today's column by Gregory Kane errs in the opposite direction, as I said above. Today's Gregory Kane column was entitled, "Six heroes to visit on the Fourth." Apparently there are six people whom he considers heroes to such degree that he visits their graves, and theirs only, each Memorial Day and Independence Day. And while nobody would challenge his selection of Medgar Evers as his #1, highest ranking hero, I certainly have some qualms about some of the others.

I'm not quite sure what qualifies boxer Joe Louis as his #5 choice, or actor Lee Marvin as his #6. His other actor selection — #2 Audie Murphy — makes sense, as Murphy was, in Kane's words, "America's most decorated soldier in World War II."

But it's his third and fourth choices that give me a pain. #3 was Robert F. Kennedy, and #4 his brother John. He puts Robert above John because "it was Robert Kennedy who got on board with civil rights long before his older brother did." But he concedes that

In the early 1960s, neither Robert Kennedy nor his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was very adept at handling the nation's civil rights problems.

They completely botched the crisis at Ole Miss when rioters protested James Meredith's admission to the law school. They even acquiesced to the resegregation of an integrated military police unit in an attempt to appease racists.

So why do they deserve such heroic ratings from Kane? Of course, I have particularly bad feelings about Robert; John was a mediocre President who failed to accomplish much on his own, but got much of his program enacted into law through the skills of President Lyndon Johnson. But Robert was positively bad. First of all, it was the Robert Kennedy Attorney General's Office that sponsored more illegal wiretaps than any other administration in history, and people who criticized President Richard Nixon for illegal wiretaps usually fail to have the same animus toward RFK — because they're liberals? because RFK was the victim of an assassin's bullet, like his brother 4½ years earlier?

My biggest gripe about RFK was his coming into New York State to take a Senate seat from the man I feel represented me best of all the Senators and Representatives who have represented me in my life — Kenneth Keating. RFK had no connection with New York State (except for having spent a short time in school there) and yet, because the Constitution does not specify a minimum length of time as a resident of a State, RFK was allowed to move to Long Island in New York State a few months before the election. (This provided a precedent, decades later, for Hillary Clinton, but she actually did a reasonable job of representing New York State in the Senate!)

The reference to RFK's (and JFK's) graves at Arlington Cemetery reminds me of something that happened quite a few years ago. Two or three friends of mine from New York came down here, and wanted to go to Arlington to see the two Kennedy graves. I stayed away from those two graves, because I felt that one should show a certain amount of respect for a grave, which, in the case of the two Kennedys, I could not honestly do. So I stayed some distance away, out of sight of the graves, but one of my friends, on the way back to join me, spotted another headstone, which he called my attention to, and which did merit my respect — the name on the stone was Kenneth Barnard Keating! Oddly, Keating's and RFK's graves are not far apart.

One more step in the vetting of the health care law

A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (Cincinnati) has ruled the Obama health care law constitutional. And at least one blog post, by Eli Lehrer in the Frum Forum, predicts that the law will survive. I hope not. But a lot has to happen. Two other Circuit Courts of Appeals, the Fourth in Richmond and the Eleventh in Atlanta, still have to rule. And then, it surely will reach the Supreme Court.

The Cincinnati court was upholding a lower court ruling, in Michigan. Among the District Court rulings, two found it constitutional and two found it unconstitutional. If these courts failed to agree, why does Lehrer believe the Circuit Courts will all agree? And the Supreme Court often overrules circuit court decisions anyway. So this is just one setback for justice. In the long run, nothing has yet been decided.

An Examiner column I really liked

I've recently mentioned some columns and editorials in the Washington Examiner to which I found myself very much opposed. I should, in fairness, cite a column which appeared today, which I applaud unhesitatingly. It was done by Examiner columnist Noemie Emery. (I read it first in the paper; it is now available online as well.) She in turn was responding to a column by Michael Walsh in the National Review Online in which Walsh had said:

"After running one of the most disgraceful 'honorable' campaigns in American political history ... you'd think the least the least of the military McCains could do is to slink quietly off into the wild blue yonder with the thanks of a grateful nation trailing in his wake. But no, at age 74, he's still in the Senate ... where he can continue to reach across the aisle, poke his finger into the eyes of conservatives, hog the media spotlight, rail about Republican 'isolationists,' suck up to Fox News, and unleash his ankle-biting mini-me onto his enemies. Please, just go away."

Emery's response, after quoting this paragraph, began:

This was National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh's pique-bomb for John McCain, R-Ariz., whose behavior was clearly irking him.

But the appraisal is as short on understanding as it is long on rhetoric. McCain's "disgraceful" campaign did a remarkable job under the circumstances in staying close to Obama. He actually led him for two weeks before the financial implosion put paid to his chances.

McCain was also elected to the Senate five times, by fairly large margins. Having put away a movement conservative challenger by a two-to-one margin in the 2010 primary, he has the right and the power to do as he wants. He represents his state — not conservative pundits, to whom he owes nothing. He has the right to poke his finger in the eyes of anyone when he thinks they deserve it. He has the right to rail at "isolationists" when he thinks that they're wrong on the issues. And they, of course, have the right, and the duty, to rail back at him.

And then Emery went on to make it clear that the Republican Party has an identity separate from its conservative wing. And one of Emery's best remarks in that column is:

The Republican Party is conservative in the relative sense that it is the more conservative of the two major parties, and home to everyone in the country to the right of the center, by one degree or by one hundred: to Olympia Snowe and Michele Bachmann, to Jim DeMint and Jon Huntsman, to Rand Paul and Marco Rubio; to Scott Brown and Rick Perry.

There are no "Republicans in Name Only"; only different kinds of Republicans.

Bravo, Ms. Emery. I couldn't have said it better.

Voting methods

Recently I made a post on another blog in which I've expressed some of the same thoughts I'd earlier expressed about open primaries. A subsequent commenter made a posting in which he advocated a system that was originally called "the alternative vote" and is now often called "instant runoff voting." I once liked IRV, but unfortunately it can often lead to a siituation in which centrist candidates are rejected in favor of extremists. So it's particularly unfortunate that someone trying to form a centrist party is pushing IRV.

Readers are encouraged to read the links I've made in this post, also an article on a better system, Bucklin voting, and the best system in my opinion, score (or range) voting. Don't make up your minds untill you are familiar with all the options.

Perhaps people's minds are changing

The New York State Senate passed a gay-marriage bill yesterday. Though the chamber is controlled by Republicans, it was mostly Democratic votes that passed it; four Republicans joined all but one of the Democrats. But it is the first time a Republican-controlled legislative chamber has passed a gay-marriage bill. (See also my posting of May 15, entitled "New York State, conservatives, and gay marriage.")

But the most interesting point in this was a Republican senator representing a Buffalo-area district, Senator Mark J. Grisanti. Although he had campaigned on an anti-gay-marriage platform, the discriminatory features of the current law's permitting only straight couples to marry eventually got to him. He was quoted as saying:

I apologize for those who feel offended. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.

Obviously, he gets it. Hopefully, others are going to realize what Sen. Grisanti has.

New York State, unlike California, has no initiative/referendum process. Once the bill is signed by Gov. Cuomo, it will become law in 30 days, and no "Prop. 8" type movement can kill it. So New York is about to become the largest State in the U. S. to permit gay marriage.

Not a good idea, even if bipartisan

A bill has been proposed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul to legalize marijuana. I think it's a terrible idea.

The plus on the bill is it would hand back to the States the right to decide whether the drug should be legal; I think that generally that sort of thing is a good thing, but not in the case of a dangerous drug which (for some reason) has lost its stigma among some people.

Some people argue that it's safer than alcohol and tobacco; I'm not so sure. People have been using those two for centuries; in the case of alcohol, for millennia. People have some idea of the effects of these two drugs, they know the risks, as well as the positive effects. Cannabis, by contrast, is a fairly new drug. On top of all this, it's usually smoked rather than ingested, so the dosage is harder to control than alcohol (though the same as tobacco). I will always say to anyone that claims that cannabis is safer than alcohol and tobacco: "Prove it." Until then, I say, keep it illegal. Let's not give people too many ways to curdle their brains. Alcohol is enough.

Yes, criticize Pres. Obama when he deserves it. But this isn't such a case!

There is a family of newspapers all called "The Examiner," published in various places around the nation, under a common ownership. One of those places is Washington, D. C., and since I live in the Washington suburbs, I get to see that edition of the Examiner regularly, without going online, though the columns appearing there do appear online, so I can link to them. The paper is pretty uniformly conservative, which means I usually agree with them on economic issues and disagree with them on social issues. And today, I saw a column on one of those social issues, and I feel I need to comment on it.

One of their regular columnists is Hugh Hewitt, and his column appeared today, under the title: "Time for government attorneys to stand up to Obama". And although some of the points that Hewitt made have some merit, Hewitt, annoyingly, said:

This president told his DOJ to refuse to defend a federal statute that has never been questioned by any federal appellate court, much less by the Supreme Court, the Defense of Marriage Act.

Now, the way I understand our Constitutional system, when no court has even ruled on a law, and perhaps even up until the Supreme Court rules on it, anyone, certainly including the President, has a right to decide whether he believes that law is constitutional. And Hewitt specifically states that DOMA "has never been questioned by any federal appellate court, much less by the Supreme Court." The way I read the Constitution, this means its constitutionality is open to each American's interpretation. And, since President Obama has sworn to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," if he deems some act of Congress to be unconstitutional, it is acting within the spirit and letter of that oath to refuse to defend it.

I am sure Mr. Hewitt does not read this blog. I wish he did, so I could ask him pointblank: Suppose you were President of the United States, and Congress passed a bill you thought unconstitutional. Would you feel bound to defend it in court?

Are there any readers of this blog whe can make a case for Hewitt having any case there? Does anyone feel there is any compulsion under the Constitution for a President to try to defend an act that he believes to be unconstitutional? I'd really love to see any reason that Hewitt might consider to justify his condemnation of President Obama on these grounds.

Jon Huntsman

I notice a lot of publicity about Jon Huntsman recently. It's not surprising to find two posts in a row over at Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue" blog — he's shown a great liking for Huntsman for some time. But his name is appearing in a lot of places, treated as a serious rival to Mitt Romney, unlike such as Herman Cain (who has about as much chance of nomination as I do) or Fred Karger (who might as well have never declared his candidacy, for all the attention he's getting). So I should weigh in on him. I don't know very much about him, of course. But one newspaper described him as "the only moderate" in the race; that alone tends to incline me favorably toward him, though the comment comes from a paper tht is hardly itself describable as moderate. And the simple fact that Dennis Sanders likes him has to count in his favor, as Sanders' positions and mine tend to be pretty close on a lot of issues.

That's probably enough to say that Huntsman gets a positive rating — if he becomes well-enough known that it looks like he can beat Obama in November of next year, I could easily support him.

The Judiciary: guardian of freedom

Just like the days of the African-American civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s, it seems that when the more bigoted elements of our populace want to take away rights and freedoms from some group (currently, gay Americans), it takes a judicial decision to rule in favor of those rights and freedoms. As I posted in this blog last August, bigots trying to kill gay marriage rights in California challenged Judge Vaughn Walker's decision because he was gay and could himself be benefited by a ruling for gay marriage. As I said in that posting, perhaps Judge Walker should have recused himself because this was bound to happen, but the ruling itself was a good one. And so it came to another United States District Court judge, James Ware, who was asked to vacate Judge Walker's decision. (Walker has retired, but this does not figure in any of the discussions here.) And, showing the good sense required of his office, Judge Ware refused to listen to the bigots' pleas. Judge Walker's decision stands — at least unless the voices of bigotry can get an appellate judge to reverse it, which hopefully will not happen

But will he really do it?

Newt Gingrich is supposed to make a speech tonight to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Beverly Hills, California. In it, he "will pledge that, if elected president, he would sign an executive order on his first day in office moving the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv."

I wish I could believe it. But of course, Gingrich is not too likely to be nominated, let alone elected, so he won't get a chance to prove his sincerity.

Not a single President, not even the most pro-Israel of them, has been willing to do this, despite the fact that it is simple courtesy to put your embassy in the capital city of the country it is accredited to. But (perhaps because of Arab oil money), no President has been willing to do this. Because the so-called "Palestinians" want to put their capital there.

I wish people would recognize the facts: there has never been such a nationality as "Palestinian." Before 1948, in fact, the only people living in the area who referred to British Palestine by the name of Palestine were the Jews. The Arabs wanted it considered as part of "Greater Syria." And in 1948, the Arabs were offered a state in the area by the United Nations, but refused it; they wanted all of British Palestine, not just a share of it. When the Jews took the UN up on its offer, the Arabs immediately attacked, but were defeated in the ensuing war, and Israel began its existence with a larger share of the territory than the UN had offered (but still a very hard-to-defend area, with a narrow neck of land in the middle).

But the Arabs never acknowledged their defeat, and still wanted to eliminate the Israeli nation completely. After two more wars, in 1967 and 1982, some Arabs (not yet all, even now!) are willing to accept an Israeli nation, if they go back to the 1948-1967 boundaries! It would be like Mexico wanting to recognize the US only if it gave back the Southwest and went back to the pre-1850 boundaries — this just isn't going to happen.

The only way to settle the Arab-Israeli question is if the Arabs are willing to accept Israel's existence and negotiate with them to determine what portion of the territories won by Israel in 1967 will Israel willingly return, in exchange for a true cessation of hostilities. The Arabs have no case: they must realize that, like Japan in 1945, they have to rely on Israel's good will. They cannot keep acting as if they can dictate terms to Israel.

But I don't think they are ready to do that. How many more wars will it take?

And why can't a US President do what Newt Gingrich says he'll do?

Looks like these judges get it!

According to the Associated Press,

Judges on a federal appeals court panel on Wednesday repeatedly raised questions about President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, expressing unease with the requirement that virtually all Americans carry health insurance or face penalties.

All three judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel questioned whether upholding the landmark law could open the door to Congress adopting other sweeping economic mandates.

And later on in the same story:

...the pointed questions about the so-called individual mandate during almost three hours of oral arguments suggests the appeals court panel is considering whether to rule against at least part of the federal law to expand health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans.

It is absolutely clear to me: the individual mandate is unconstitutional. And now, even some Democratic-appointed judges are feeling that way. (Two of the three judges on the 11th Circuit Court panel are Clinton appointees.)

It won't be finally decided until the Supreme Court gets to rule. But more and more, the unconstitutionality of this is being recognized by the Federal judiciary.

The cure is worse than the disease, but then, he doesn't believe there is a disease.

Gregory Kane is a columnist whose column appears in (among others) the Washington Examiner, a newspaper I regularly read. He's one of those rare individuals who is African-American, but politically conservative, and he recently wrote a column that made me gag — not the first I've seen out of him, but one of the worst.

The column is also on the Web, under the title "Worried gays should check out the Pink Pistols." It starts off making a number of anti-gay-rights comments, not horribly surprising since Kane usually agrees with "social conservatives" on the issues where I differ strongly with them, such as gay rights, separation of church and state, etc. (He particularly does not like the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," thinking it's going to lead to lascivious behavior of gay servicemen towards other servicemen, rather a predictable attitude, as ridiculous as that seems.)

But then comes the kicker: He transitions from his anti-gay rhetoric to the following:

What's needed is ... more Pink Pistols chapters nationwide. The Pink Pistols are, far and away, my favorite LGBT organization.

Pink Pistols members don't wait for presidential proclamations or congressional statutes for their protection. Their goal is to protect themselves.

In short, they carry firearms for "self-defense." Just what we need — more gun-toting people who feel they are at risk (sarcasm intentional). I don't know about you, but I don't want to see anyone carrying a gun around (other than a policeman or a military person who needs it to do his/her job) — but anyone who might feel they aren't gaining enough respect? He/she might shoot because of a perceived slight that wasn't real, and aim poorly, and I might be hit just because I'm passing by, even if I have nothing to do with what's going on.

But Kane doesn't think of such things. He just wants the NRA's version of the Second Amendment to apply (his post, on the Web, is even tagged "nra"!) And he doesn't care about danger from guns — he just thinks that as little as he likes gay people, if they can help him make a case for an armed society, he'll use them. To him, guns aren't dangerous. To me, they are. And even though he doesn't seem to care about the discrimination that inheres in "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" he thinks that anti-gay discrimination is just another thing that will go away if people are free to shoot other people on the slightest provocation.

Sorry, Mr. Kane, but this column is a poster case of ideas that meet with my disapproval up and down the line: you're wrong on gay rights, wrong on guns, WRONG!

Not conservative enough? Rick Santorum? Weird...

As I said yesterday, Rick Santorum is probably the candidate I like least, now that Mike Huckabee has taken himself out of contention. But this is because I think he is too far to the right, particularly on social issues. So I was ill prepared to see a column in today's Washington Examiner chastising Santorum for not being conservative enough!

It seems that what Examiner columnist Timothy Carney finds objectionable is that, back in 2004, Santorum and Pres. George W. Bush backed the re-election campaign of Arlen Specter.

In that year, Specter represented the GOP's best hope to retain that seat in Pennsylvania. Any good Republican should have backed Specter, given that nominating a more conservative candidate risked giving that seat to the Democrats. (Sure, six years later, Specter, tiring of fighting arch-conservatives in Republican primaries, switched to the Democrats. And Pat Toomey, the same man who had challenged Specter in the GOP primary six years earlier, actually won the Senate seat! But 2010 was a different thing from 2004. And it is very unlikely that Toomey would have won in 2004.)

But Carney is so enamored of ideological purity that he considers Rick Santorum insufficiently conservative. This sort of weirdness amazes me. And it's the kind of thing that makes it hard for me to stay a Republican — but, of course, it's the extremism of the Democrats in the opposite direction that keeps me in the GOP.

Another not-so-good choice

Well, as of this past weekend, Rick Santorum has declared his candidacy. And while he's not as bad as Huckabee, he's someone I really hope cannot get the nomination.

Santorum is one of the most extreme of the "social conservatives," with strong opinions against homosexuals, and other far-right positions. As I've stated in previous posts, the "social conservatives" are what are making it hard to be a Republican these days, with positions I cannot accept on many such issues, from abortion to gay rights. And so Santorum is, to me, one of the least preferred of the candidates for the nomination.

A local straw poll

I just received an e-mail notifying me of the result of a straw poll that was taken locally in my county. It said:

Romney Wins Montgomery County Republican Straw Poll

Former Massachusetts' Governor Romney edged Christie, Giuliani and Pawlenty in voting by Maryland Republicans Former Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney was the winner of a straw poll conducted by the Montgomery County Republican Party on May 28 and 29 at the Hometown Holidays Festival in Rockville, Maryland.

Of the twelve Republican candidates on the ballot, Romney captured 17 percent of the vote, narrowly edging New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who received 15 percent of the vote and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with 13 percent of the vote. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty received 11 percent of the vote.

Candidate	Percent of Vote
Mitt Romney	17%
Chris Christie	15%
Rudy Giuliani	13%
Tim Pawlenty	11%
Michelle Bachmann	8%
Ron Paul	7%
Herman Cain	6%
Newt Gingrich	6%
Sarah Palin	6%
Jon Huntsman	4%
Rick Santorum	4%
Other Candidates/No Preference	3%

I took part in this straw poll, and mine is among those counted for Mitt Romney. BUT...of course, Chris Christie was not really running, and Rudy Giuliani (who is actually the person I'd love to vote for) hasn't a chance at the nomination. (I spoke to the person who was collecting the ballots, and he agreed with me: Giuliani is the best of the candidates, but he's not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination.)

I wonder how the result would be if this straw poll had been conducted with everyone voting for the one they would really like, and especially if something like "approval voting" were used, so one could choose more than one. For my real favorite (if the likelihood of winning the nomination were excluded from consideration) is, as you might gather from my earlier posts, Giuliani, and I would also rank Christie high, perhaps above Romney. I suspest there are others in that poll who feel like me.

The ridiculousness of COBRA

My wife, until very recently, worked at a store in the Borders chain, and became unemployed when they closed the store (as well as about ¹/₃ of the stores in the U. S., but about ½ of the stores in this area.) This weekend, she received a letter from Aetna, which runs the health insurance plans at Borders. She was offered the chance to continue her health insurance under COBRA, for about $400 a month.

How anyone could expect anyone to opt into this amazes me. Her unemployment compensation comes to a bit over $200 a week. That means she'd have to spend ½ of her income to get health insurance!

COBRA may have been devised as a way to provide health insurance for the unemployed, but it is a joke. You have only about ½ of the income, but you have to cover the employer's share as well, meaning you'd have to pay double the amount you did as an employed person on half the income. This legislation makes no sense. It does not really serve its purpose, but solely serves to give the illusion that health insurance for the unemployed exists.

It's issues like this that need to be addressed.

The field thins out

This weekend, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said he's not running for the Presidency next year. I regret his decision — he was one of the best choices for a candidate to run against Pres. Obama. More and more, it's Mitt Romney that I have to favor, despite some negative vibes.

Of course, Dennis Sanders of the Big Tent Review blog has another favorite: former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah. The fact that Sanders — whose opinions often come close to my own — is so sold on Huntsman means I could probably support him. But he is very poorly known by the American people. Since people don't generally vote for someone they've never heard of, unless Huntsman can show he can get support from enough independent voters to elect him, I retain my skepticism of him. If he does succeed in getting some public recognition, I'd probably support him. But now I can only say that Romney is my favorite, with some misgivings, and Huntsman warrants looking at.

Israel's borders

President Obama is showing, once more, his pro-Arab bias. His administration is trying to push Israel to go back to its 1967 borders, giving up, for example, the Old City of Jerusalem, which is holy to Jews. And this only on the hope that it might get peace from the Arabs.

Our neighbor, Canada, makes a lot more sense. The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, understands the situation. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports:

The Harper government is refusing to join the United States in calling for a return to 1967 borders as a starting point for Mideast peace, a position that has drawn sharp criticism from Canada’s staunch ally Israel.

At a briefing ahead of the upcoming G8 summit in France, federal officials said the basis for the negotiations must be mutually agreed upon.

It's a fine kettle of fish when the U. S., usually Israel's staunchest ally, takes a position that, compared to Canada's, is hostile. But what can be expected of a man named "Barack Hussein Obama"?

More and more, I really dig Chris Christie!

The Fox Nation blog has the following quote:

JERSEY CITY - Gov. Chris Christie refused to comment when asked if he believes in evolution or the theory of creationism when asked at a press conference earlier today.

"That's none of your business," Christie said.

I wish more of our politicians would give answers like that. A governor (or a President) should not be judged on his position on evolution vs. creationism (See Art. VI, paragraph 3 of the Constitution, in the case of the Presidency!)

I wish he were running for the Presidency in next year's election; I'd support him in a heartbeat! Meanwhile, hats off to the voters of New Jersey for electing this man as their Governor.

Mike Huckabee opts out

Apparently, Mike Huckabee has opted out of a 2012 run for the Presidency. And I am overjoyed. Former Governor Huckabee is probably one of a small number of Republicans I could not support next year, if he ran against President Obama. His nomination would guarantee my voting for a third-party candidate, who had no chance of winning, as a "plague-on-both-your-houses" vote.

Another blogger, who uses the name "Booker Rising," says in his blog post,

Yes, I'm happy about his decision. The former Arkansas governor isn't a fiscal conservative, and he's too socially conservative for my taste.

I would totally agree.

New York State, conservatives, and gay marriage

Politics in New York State is different from what it is elsewhere. When the "one-man, one-vote" decisions in the Supreme Court came out a few decades ago, New York State happened to have a Republican State Senate and a Democratic Assembly. Both houses have managed to control their own redistricting in the follow-ups to the subsequent decennial censuses, so even now, with the State trending more and more Democratic, the State Senate is still narrowly Republican most of the time. And New York State's electoral fusion laws mean that extremists of the left and right do not necessarily stay in the two major parties, but form smaller parties that aim to swing the major parties in their directions.

It has always puzzled me that the term "conservative" is normally used to encompass both people who (as I mostly do) favor low-tax, more laissez-faire, economic policies (more individualistically oriented) and those who favor moralistic, even bigoted social policies (exactly the opposite of individualistic orientation). But in many states, the Republican Party has linked itself with both groups of people. And "conservatives," similarly, have tried to embrace both (to me opposed) sets of ideas. Barry Goldwater, who was an extreme conservative of the first kind, but very open to gay rights, would roll in his grave to hear the bigoted positions taken by many "conservatives" who revere him.

But in New York State, an interesting development has occurred. Prominent economic conservatives, rich ones who have supported the Republican Party with monetary contributions, are coming out for a gay-marriage proposal by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Hopefully, this (like Theodore Olson's defending gay marriage in California) may help disentangle the economic and social conservatives. They really have little in common, and I see no reason for them to share the "conservative" tag.

Religious extremism and anti-feminism

There are a number of extremely conservative religious groups that refuse to allow women to be treated as equals. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive a car or share a classroom with male students; male professors can address them only via closed circuit television.

I would like not to think of my own religion, Judaism, as harboring such ideas, but there are ultra-orthodox strains in Judaism that are just as bad. One group operated a bus line in New York City with women segregated to one part of the bus. Still, I never expected them to go as far as the latest thing I read of.

It seems that an ultra-orthodox paper called "Di Tzeitung" (a Yiddish-language weekly published in Brooklyn) does not publish images of women in its pages. And when a photograph of members of the executive branch of the government being briefed on the killing of Osama bin Laden was sent to the news media, "Di Tzeitung" edited out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and another woman from the picture! Obviously, anything that might hint that a female could be in a "men's" position is taboo to this paper.

How far will religious extremists go?

A "debate" that wasn't significant

The Republican candidates were invited to a debate recently. Five showed up. With the exception of Ron Paul (who really has little chance to be nominated) none of the candidates is even well known to the people; one (Herman Cain) lost in the primary of the only election he has contested. Another (Rick Santorum) was a Senator, but got rejected after the voters in his home state of Pennsylvania saw how he conducted himself in two terms. The other two, Tim Pawlenty and Gary Johnson, are qualified, each having served two terms as a state governor, but the fact is that hardly anyone has any knowledge of who they are! So either would need a lot of work on building a public image.

Seems to me this debate will have little effect on the nomination process.

One plus for Pres. Obama

Although, as in my post of yesterday, I hope that I have sufficiently often made it clear that we need to get rid of the Democratic Party and President Obama, because of their stand on economic issues like labor/management relations, this does not mean that we will not give credit where credit is due. Unlike President Jimmy Carter, whose micromanagement caused us to lose the opportunity to free our hostages, Pres. Obama succeeded in getting our military into a position to dispatch the terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden. And this will stand out as one of the few truly positive accomplishments of a President who has mostly hurt the U. S. by his actions.

The Democratic Party (and President Obama), a tool of organized labor

As I have said in a previous posting, one reason I hate the Democratic Party is because it is a tool of organized labor. And this was clearly demonstrated by recent actions of the National Labor Relations Board. They have actually sued the Boeing Corporation because it wants to set up a new assembly line in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, rather than expanding operations in the more union-friendly state of Washington.

Some Republican Senators are going to try to retaliate — and I say Good for them! — by holding up some NLRB nominations to the NLRB board, including Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who is leading the suit. Unfortunately, until (hopefully by next year's election!) Pres. Obama is removed, it is unlikely that we will see any appointees to the NLRB who are not stooges of the organized labor movement.

Bin Laden is dead? Let us hope so!

According to Al-Jazeera, Osama bin Laden has been killed in a firefight in Pakistan. I don't know whether to believe it, but if so, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy!

Rand Paul, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party

I can't say that Sen. Rand Paul is my idea of the perfect representative of the Republican Party, but I think his comment regarding Donald Trump was right on target. He is quoted as saying, in a New Hampshire fundraiser,

"I want to see the original long form certificate, with embossed seal, of Donald Trump's Republican registration."

Trump, by bringing up the "birther" question, has deflected people from the true question, "Has Barack Obama been a good President of the United States?" There is no real reason to doubt that he is constitutionally eligible; there is no likelihood that he will be removed from office on that ground. What is more important is to have the American voting public remove him from office in November 2012. One wonders: Trump has in the past contributed more money to Democrats than to Republicans. Could this be, in fact, a move to guarantee another term to President Obama, by making it less likely that the GOP can come up with a credible 2012 candidate?

The problem with the legal profession

The legal profession is the only one where people have to be on the side of evil. A man may be accused of a crime, and until his trial is over, he deserves a defense and the State deserves a prosecution, regardless of what the truth is; even if the prosecutor seriously believes the accused is innocent, it is his job to try to prove him guilty, and even if the defense attorney is truly convinced of his client's guilt, it is incumbent on him to try to convince the judge and jury of the opposite. Among other things, that is why I could never be a lawyer; you really need to be able to persuade a court that black is white, whether you believe it or not.

And this view of the legal profession is one thing that colors the story about Paul Clement and the "Defense of Marriage Act." While I think that Speaker of the House John Boehner is mistaken in hiring Clement to defend the constitutionality of the act, there is a presumption that if you need a lawyer, you should be able to get one, to defend any proposition. And in that sense, Paul Clement was, as Attorney General Eric Holder himself said, "doing what lawyers do." And so Clement cannot really be criticized for taking on the case.

But the law firm that Clement had been working in, King & Spalding, felt, justifiably, that the case was one with which they did not wish to be associated. Thus, King & Spalding withdrew from the case, and Clement resigned from King & Spalding, joining another law firm so he could continue to serve as Boehner's attorney in this case.

In a sense, the whole problem is the nature of the legal profession. King & Spalding did not want to be considered anti-gay-rights, but Clement felt that the pro-DOMA side needed to have his services as an attorney, and thus the result. One can deeply hope Clement loses his case, without criticizing him for acting as he did. And that it qualifies as "doing what lawyers do" is why I think that lawyers are people that have just a whiff of evil about them as a profession.

Another obscure seeker of the GOP nomination

Gary Johnson, a former Governor of New Mexico, has just announced his candidacy for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Another candidate that I never heard of (see my earlier post from March 23). But the Big Tent Revue blog's Dennis Sanders likes him — at least I assume that this is the Johnson about whom Sanders said "my heart leans towards a Huntsman or Johnson" — and Dennis Sanders seems to hold a lot of similar views to my own, which makes Johnson someone to look at. And the articles which talk of Johnson's entry describe him as "libertarian," which could be taken for favorable to my ideas, but after all Ron Paul is a libertarian par excellence, and yet I could not endorse him.

So as of now, I don't want to say much about Johnson beyond that, like Huntsman, he's someone I want to know more about.

The shutdown that wasn't

Well, the shutdown that threatened to happen Friday didn't. And how you want to classify the result depends on whether you're a "glass half-full" or "glass half-empty" type.

The Republicans started off trying to cut over $60 billion. The Democrats responded with $33 billion, and they ended up with about $40 billion. Looks like the Republicans caved. But look at the other side. The Republicans had only the House of Representatives. The Dems had both the Senate and the White House. There was just no way the Republicans could have won a total victory against those odds. And it's pretty likely that the Dems would not have cut anything if they hadn't been prodded by Republican "tea party" types. So in a sense, the Republicans got about ²/₃ of what they wanted. That's not so bad.

From my point of view, there was another thing I liked. The "social conservative" wing of the GOP wanted to use this budget process to push their anti-abortion agenda. And that totally failed. Using the threat of shutting down the government to advance a "social conservative" agenda is, fortunately, a non-starter.

But this process has only pushed the thing forward another six months. So let us see what happens then. Stay tuned for the next episode of "The Perils of Pauline and the Federal Budget."

The health care question and an interesting book (which, however, I think is flawed)

Recently, I have been reading the book, "The Healing of America: a Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," by T. R. Reid. The book makes interesting reading, but there are several points where I do not agree with him, and this prompted me to make this post.

The book compares our health care financing system with those in a number of other countries, such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada. And the conclusion is that we should borrow features from some of these, as they provide more universal health care for less money than our U. S. system (really a multiplicity of systems, as Reid points out that for seniors, our system is much like Canada's, while for some other groups of people it resembles other countries' systems).

One of the things he points to and views with favor, however, is something I have argued against for this country: all of the countries that provide universal health care have in common an "individual mandate." And he defends the individual mandate with points like the fact that we actually do already have many things the government requires you to buy. For example, we cannot go naked in the street, which he construes as a mandate to buy clothes. But it is emphatically not that. If we want to make our own clothes, the government does not prevent us. And there is where he goes astray.

But perhaps the question is this: Is it really necessary to provide universal health care, in the sense that everyone has it whether they want to or not? I think perhaps the answer is no. Perhaps a better goal is to provide a universal opportunity to have health insurance, making it possible for everyone who wants it to have affordable coverage. This would be a better goal.

Some people argue that people who are young and healthy will opt out if they can, and then, if there is no ability for insurance companies to deny coverage for preexisting conditions, sign up when they get older and more likely to need medical care. Well, I think there are better ways than an individual mandate to prevent this. First of all, rates can be made good enough that the young and healthy can see it as valuable, like the system for life insurance. We do not have an individual mandate for life insurance, and yet, people do not generally wait until they are about to die to buy it. Somehow, the life insurance companies manage to sell policies, even to relatively young people. Secondly, we can use a rule similar to that we now use for the Medicare Part D (prescription drug) plans. You are supposed to sign up when you become eligible. If you do not, but wait till later to sign up, you will have to pay a higher premium than if you had signed up at first eligibility, and this extra premium is charged for the rest if your life. With rules like that, you might be able to encourage the young people you want to lower the actuarial cost, without compelling it.

There are some useful ideas in Reid's book, though. For example, the German insurance plans are privately run, but nonprofit, and similar things can be said of several other countries in Europe, as well as Japan. Perhaps this might be an important change. There are, as I said, some good ideas, but I think the whole issue needs to be studied with an eye on preserving freedom as well as "better, cheaper, and fairer health care." Reid only looks at part of the picture, because he doesn't recognize the intrusiveness of the individual mandate.

Libya and Iraq

President Obama is getting a lot of criticism, from both the Left and the Right, for his actions in Iraq. I'm going to be different: I think he's basically doing the right thing, but I'm going to criticize him for being inconsistent. Barack Obama was elected to the Presidency, in part, because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. And yet I see little difference between Iraq and Libya:

1. Both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi posed little direct threat to the United States,
2. Both, however, were vicious dictators who killed large numbers of their own people, and
3. Both were significant threats to their neighbors and to the stability of the Middle East.

The only differences I can see are that

1. French Presidant Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be firmly supporting action against Libya, but France was not willing to act against Iraq, and
2. Obama was the beneficiary of money from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He has no connection to Qaddafi. That seems, to me, to be the main difference.

Whether Obama is simply refusing to accept that the US should act in its own interests and we must only do what the French will accept, or it's Saddam Hussein's money, in either case, it does not put Barack Obama in a good light.

The (partial) reversal of the parties

When I was a child, the South was the most solidly Democratic part of the country. In fact, one State, Georgia, had never voted Republican in a Presidential election, and most of the Southern States were solidly in the Democratic column at least since the end of Reconstruction. The most solidly Republican part of the country was New England, and in fact Vermont had been solidly Republican as long as Georgia had been Democratic. Vermont was also one of the only two States that had voted Republican in the 1936 Roosevelt landslide (the other, Maine, was also in New England).

How different the electoral map looks today. New England is heavily Democratic, perhaps the most solidly Democratic part of the country, though it elects some Republicans (like Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins to the Senate, and a string of Republicans to the Massachusetts Governorship — though Massachusetts currently has a Democratic Governor, Deval Patrick.) And the South is the most reliably Republican part of the nation, except possibly for the Mountain West.

It would seem that the end of segregation is partly responsible for the South's transformation — without the racism that characterized Southern Democratic politics, the South, more conservative than the rest of the country, found its proper home in the GOP. And Barry Goldwater, though his vote against civil rights legislation was due to libertarian principles rather than racism, attracted some of the Southern racists — it is clear from the fact that, except for his home State of Arizona, Goldwater's only State victories in 1964 were in the South.

It is harder to see why New England has moved the other way. But in the mid-20^th century, New England Republicans were more libertarian than conservative, and the influx of Southerners into the Republican party, and the persistence of Westerners there (both being very conservative socially), has made the Republican party less attractive to New Englanders whose Republicanism meant something less conservative. (I would say that the Democratic Party was not really a great fit for them, but in an electoral system in which only two parties can compete, perhaps that did it.)

A great example of what has happened is in the State of Virginia. In the mid-1960s, I was in that State for educational reasons, and I saw a Governorship election in which the two candidates were Democrat Mills Godwin and Republican A. Linwood Holton. Godwin won, but four years later Holton became the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction. A number of years later, Godwin had become a Republican, and won the Governorship again for that party. (He is the only person in U. S. history to win Governorships under both the Democratic and Republican label!) In another election, I was working for the election of Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey, and calling people for the Republican Party; most of the people who answered were happy to support Nixon but we could not get them to abandon the local Democratic Congressman, John O. Marsh. Like Godwin, Marsh also became a Republican, serving in a sub-cabinet position in the Noxon administration.

I do not know of many New England Republicans who have become Democrats in the same way — they have generally become Independents supporting Democratic candidates instead (examples are James Jeffords, Lowell Weicker, and Lincoln Chafee).

But the parties have not totally reversed. Organized labor is still heavily Democratic, and (despite such Democratic supporters as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) businessmen are mostly Republican. That is part of what keeps me in the GOP — I am still repelled by the influence of organized labor in the Democratic Party, as I stated in an earlier post. But I have to admit, I'm not very happy with what the GOP is now; I felt a lot more comfortable in the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller then I do now in the party of Mike Huckabbee and Rick Santorum.

Who should be allowed to vote?

Shortly after I posted my piece on Fred Karger, I looked him up on Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, the biggest piece on his opinions given in the article referred to his positions on gay rights, but there were two other things given: his stance on Israel, which seems not too far from my own, and his advocacy of an amendment to grant the vote to sixteen-year-olds, the most radical of his positions I've seen so far. My own position on that point is ambivalent. When I grew up, you had to be twenty-one to vote, and I was a big advocate of lowering it to eighteen. By the time that it happened, I was too old to benefit; I was already older than 21. But is 16 too young? I'm not sure. I am aware that I had mostly formed my political opinions by the age of fourteen, so I could have voted intelligently at 16. But I'm not typical. I really don't know. The few places that I've seen that give the vote to under-18s are not very likely to inspire confidence. Two if them are Iran (with a fifteen-year-old voting age) and the former Italian neo-Fascist party which allowed twelve-year-olds to vote in party questions! (On the other hand, the only other party I know of to have such a rule was the Canadian Liberals, certainly a democratic enough organization. I don't know if this is still the rule, but at one time their rules allowed fourteen-year-olds to vote. At least some of their local organizations still do.) For me, the jury is still out.

It is interesting that States are no longer permitted to require literacy tests; when I was growing up, my then-home-state of New York did, but because some Southern states used literacy tests unfairly administered to disenfranchise nonwhites, the Voting Rights Act prevented all states from using literacy tests. I cannot see a justification for allowing illiterates to vote. If they cannot read the campaign materials, and they cannot read the ballots, they have no right to be allowed to vote, in my opinion. But because some Southern states used the tests in a way that deprived college professors of their votes, the Feds made it impossible to use literacy tests. That, I think, is a shame.

The biggest variation in the voting rules of different States is how criminal backgrounds are handled. In the State where I now live, Maryland, because two different laws which were passed at different times are involved, criminals with only one serious conviction can vote as soon as they are released from any parole/probation obligations, but criminals with more than one serious conviction can only vote after a three-year waiting period. This is a middle-of-the-road rule; on the one hand, in Maine, criminals can still vote while serving time; on the other hand, in Virginia and Florida, one conviction on a felony charge means no vote ever, unless you get the governor to restore your rights. Both of these seem pretty extreme, though I'm not sure whether Maryland's is the best compromise.

There are even some places (the city of Takoma Park, not far from where I live in Maryland, for example) that don't even require you to be a citizen to vote in local elections. Now that is going too far, though.

Fred Who???

On another blog, "Race 4 2012," I see that yet another person has introduced himself into the 2012 race: Fred Karger.

You will undoubtedly ask: "Fred Who????" I certainly never heard of him. But the post says:

Openly gay, Republican Presidential candidate Fred Karger to formally file the documentation necessary to be a Presidential candidate. Here’s an excerpt from his press release:

Today is a very significant day for my community and me. I have just submitted my papers to the Federal Election Commission, making me the first candidate to file for the 2012 Republican nomination for President.

I am also the first openly gay person, in a major political party, to ever run for President of the United States...

Well, you've got to give him credit for courage. I would be surprised for an openly gay candidate to have much of a chance in the Democratic Party for the Presidency. In the Republican Party, the religious Right has so much influence that it's unbelievable that anyone would try.

But the big question is: who is he, other than being gay? What does he stand for? What are his qualifications? Until I hear more about him, I will not say that I can support him, or that I can't. I would not let sexual orientation dictate my position on a candidate; all I can say is, it's an interesting development.

Open primaries, "top two" primaries, and other ballot reforms

Last month I made a post in which I indicated my objections to "top two" primaries, as well as to the more traditional type of "open" primary used in states like Virginia. In this, I differ from Solomon Kleinsmith, who likes open primaries, though agreeing with me about "top two" primaries. Now again I see a posting — by Dale Sheldon-Hess — which points out the problems with "top two" primaries, a point with which I concur, but makes other suggestions I cannot endorse.

Dale Sheldon-Hess makes one point of terminology that needs making: open primaries are not necessarily top two, though some people seem to conflate them. And one of his suggested reforms in his post is one I like as well: score voting. But in the same sentence in which he proposes score voting as a way to improve our voting methods, he groups with it approval voting — a system that can be viewed as a simplified version of score voting, but without its good points and with some serious bad points. (I'll get on to my objections to approval voting in another post.)

A response to a comment

Normally, when a comment is made to a post of mine, I reply to the comment directly. But this comment, posted by Solomon Kleinsmith to my post on centrism and term limits deserves more attention than just a comment-on-a-comment:

Term Limits don't have anything to do with ideology. There is no conservative, liberal or centrist position on term limits...

And there is a actually quite a bit of cohesion on the issues among centrists. The defining characteristics of centrists is NOT that they take from both sides, its that they stand between the two sides. People can be liberal on some issues, and conservative on others... that doesn't make them a centrist. For example libertarians are more conservative than most conservatives on government spending, and are more liberal than most liberals on keeping government out of our personal lives... and they are in no way shape or form at all centrist.

First, on the first paragraph, while I agree that "[t]here is no conservative, liberal or centrist position on term limits," there does seem to be more support for term limits among "Tea Party" type conservatives than anyone else. That being said, of course Kleinsmith himself is one big exception.

Now to the second. Certainly, I do not maintain that everyone who takes ideas from both the left and right is a centrist — the implication of Kleinsmith's example of the libertarians. But he is refuting the converse of my claim. Not everyone who takes ideas from both the left and right is a centrist, but everyone who is a centrist, of necessity, takes ideas from both the left and right. That is not the same thing. And my point in my original post is that there are people who call themselves "centrists" who still differ greatly on which ideas of the left and which ideas of the right they favor. I do not think that Kleinsmith can make a good case that I'm wrong.

There is no single "centrism."

Sometimes I see the argument that the Left is united and the Right is also, and centrists are weak because they do not support each other. But "centrism" cannot be a united movement. The only thing that unites centrists is that they are willing to take ideas from both left and right. But you can have two people who both call themselves centrists, and wherever one has a "right" position, the other could have a "left" position, and vice versa. They would both be "centrists," but scarcely allies.

Of course, the differences do not need to be as complete and total as that. There is a blog I have sometimes followed called "CenterMovement.org" which is now called Americans United to Rebuild Democracy. One of the first things they have done now is to come out in favor of Congressional term limits. Well, as I have stated, I think term limits — Congressional or otherwise — are a terrible idea. So while I generally like a lot of the "centrist" ideas of that blog, here is one I feel is really bad. I think that as a step to "rebuild democracy," it is totally backwards, and in fact it is desctructive of democracy. So here is an example of two "centrists" with diametrically opposed opinions on an important issue.

And that's an example of why there can not be a single "centrism."

Don't kill the elephant!

A Rasmussen poll shows that Scott Brown is hugely popular in Massachusetts. But Olympia Snowe might lose a Republican primary, although she would win as an Independent next year in Maine. Of course, Lisa Murkowski had that very scenario in Alaska last year. The nomination of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada last year gave those two Senate seats to the Democrats; polls showed that in both cases, a moderate Republican could have won. It would seem that conservative ideological purists are willing to sacrifice the Republican Party rather than defeat Democrats. Somehow this needs to be stopped.

It is eminently obvious that the way for the Republicans to win elections is to run moderate candidates, not ideological purist extremists. So don't let them kill the elephant!

A tale of two lands in the Eastern Mediterranean

This posting refers to two areas which, at the start of the 20^th century, were both parts of the Ottoman Empire. They were both taken from the Ottoman Turks at the end of World War I by the British, but their subsequent history is rather different.

The first is the island of Cyprus. Because it is an island, there is no question as to what its boundaries are, so there will be no question as to what area I am talking about. It is populated with a mixed population: one group, the majority, speaks Greek and belongs to the Greek Orthodox Christian religion; the other group is Turkish-speaking and Moslem by religion. After World War II, both groups agitated to get the British colonizers out, but with very different goals: the Greek speakers wanted the island to be transferred to Greece: their cry was "Enosis (union [with Greece])!" The Turkish speakers wanted a partition ("taksim") into Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking areas, though I'm not certain whether they contemplated union of each part with Greece and Turkey respectively, or separate independence of two states. Neither got their way, but an independent Cyprus, whole (except for a few military areas that Britain retained) and unattached to Greece or Turkey, was created. The Greek-speaking majority showed their power: the first president chosen for Cyprus was not just a Greek-speaker, which might be expected, but an archbishop of the Orthodox Christian church, Makarios. The Turkish speakers were, not surprisingly, not too happy with the situation where they would be outvoted on every important issue; they had a revolt and established an area in the northeast part of the island that they call the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. They now govern themselves peacefully, but pressure by Greece has led to a situation where no country in the world, except only Turkey, recognizes TRNC as an independent state.

The second area I am about to describe is harder to name. It was once called Judea, but after the Romans conquered the area, they named it Palæstina, which we Anglicize to Palestine. It eventually, like Cyprus, came under the control of the Ottoman Turks, who never considered it one single unit, so they did not give it a specific name, but divided it into a number of administrative districts, and, after World War I, the British and French divided up the territory in that part of the Middle East and Britain took it over, restoring the Roman name of Palestine. The League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to govern it, with the ultimate goal of giving it to the Jewish people as a homeland, but about 60% of the territory was given to an Arab king in the 1920s and established as the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1948, the United Nations approved a plan whereby the Jewish people would have one state, and the Arabs another, in the 40% that was left, though both proposed states were a patchwork of disconnected lands; the Jews accepted this but the Arabs did not, and a war began. In 1949, when fighting temporarily ceased, an armistice line was created, similar to that now existing in Cyprus, though, unlike the one in Cyprus, the world generally decided to recognize this one as an international boundary. No Arab state was ever created in the remainder of the former Palestine Mandate; Jordan took the eastern part (sometimes called the "West Bank," though Israelis tend to call it by the historical name of "Judæa and Samaria"), and Egypt the much smaller part around the city of Gaza (the "Gaza strip"). Subsequent fighting in 1967 and 1982, however, gave the Israelis control of the entire area and even a bit more. (A large area to the southwest, the Sinai Peninsula, was also taken from Egypt in the wars, but as part of a treaty agreement with Egypt, they returned it. Egypt did not, however, include the Gaza strip in the area they took back.)

After many years, many of the Arabs in the area decided they did want an Arab state in the area, though to this day there are others who insist that the whole area, including all of Israel, must be an Arab state. The rest of the world, which was so indifferent to the cause of the Turkish Cypriots, is clamoring to have the 1949 armistice line declared the boundary between Israel and an Arab state of "Palestine," though such a state has no historical basis. There never has been one, the Arabs rejected the idea in 1948, and the Israeli army took the territory only after the Arabs attacked Israel in 1967 and 1982.

I don't know. It seems to me the Turkish Cypriots have more of a claim to a state than the Arab "Palestinians." Yet the world denies them recognition as a state, and pushes for an Arab "Palestine." Can anyone explain this to me?