Posted inPolitics: National

Solemn obligations

Here is how the pension "issue" is usually framed.

For the major corporations that still offer pensions, they are a drag on earnings growth. In the public sector, they are making every city into Detroit or Stockton, Calif., paving the road to bankruptcy.

Very large numbers are thrown around, often without context, sometimes outright fabrications. This column is not about the numbers. As a nation, we spend too much time under green eyeshades. Numbers, "just business," economics are supposed to provide definitive answers.

Of course it depends on whose numbers are used (liars figure) and there's a reason that the dismal science was once called political economy. Even at its most rigorous, economics is a brawl — and like the sums we are supposed to accept as gospel, the inputs matter (garbage in, garbage out). People are living longer! Well, not by much, it varies greatly among ethnic groups, and the ones that do live long tend to be very wealthy. Etc.

Nevertheless, a majority of the white working class — which is a majority of the electorate — believes that union thugs are bankrupting their cities and states by demanding that pensions be paid to takers on the public payroll. Republican politicians and judges are burnishing their popularity and "seriousness" by working to destroy the pension system.

In certain situations and moments, many of those thugs and takers are called police officers, firefighters, and teachers. Heroes.

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Labels
Posted inPolitics: National

Labels

Frustrated_Arizonans_Rejecting_Tea_Sanity_Rally
Labels in political discourse are incendiary and misleading. They are useful shorthand and inevitable. Yet today they are more challenging than ever.

Let me take a couple of examples. To label someone a racist, anti-semite, sexist, or homophobe immediately disqualifies their arguments. Some people undeniably fit those labels. Others may say something racist but they still deserve to be heard in the public square, offering positions that are more textured that the simple label would imply.

Another is the tart "limousine liberal." This was coined in the 1970s to identify, say, a liberal lawmaker who supported busing while sending his children to private schools. In other words, he was a hypocrite. This term resonated especially with the white working class, many of whom would become Reagan Democrats.

Lately on this blog we have had a debate on the admissibility of the term "sociopath." While we can argue over the precise clinical definition and the care needed to apply it to individuals, I think it's fair game.

Look at the behavior of the banksters, certain businessmen, and politicians, and they fit the bill. This is especially so in their contempt for the commons, for the public interest, and the things we do together as a civilization. Indeed, many of them not only have contempt for these things but they deny they exist at all, outside the fever dreams of bleeding-heart liberals.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Eight years of Rogue

This month marks the eighth anniversary of Rogue Columnist. That's a long time in the blog world and I couldn't do it without you — the smartest commenters (19,945 comments) on the Web and the thousands who come to read. The number of posts is 907 (!).

I tell more about why I write Rogue on top of my day job and novel-writing here. Today I want to list some of my favorite columns. The nature of column-writing is ephimeral. These stand out even after all these years. Maybe you have some you want to list in the comments field. I've opened all posts, not just the most recent, to comments.

1. Early on, I laid out some of the topics I didn't write about when I was a columnist at the Arizona Republic.

2. Speaking of newspapers, this column laid out the many less-discussed reasons for their death spiral. It holds up pretty well today.

3. Another one, close to my heart, is "Rocky Mountain Requiem," about the heartbreaking loss of the Rocky Mountain News, one of the oldest newspapers in the West and where I was fortunate to work in the great newspaper war with the Denver Post.

4. I haven't written much personal history here. One exception, and among the most popular, is "Ambulance Days," my reminiscences of my days as an EMT/paramedic in the Phoenix of the 1970s.

5. I was also blessed by the amazing fine arts program at Coronado High School, which I write about in "Friday Night Lights." And by attending Kenilworth Elementary School near downtown, which I celebrate in this column.

6. A few of the columns on national social and cultural issues have stood the test of time (cliche alert). Among them: "Rules of Engagement," "Men Don't Read," "R U Raising Stupid Children," and "A Giant Leap and Then A Long Fall."

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Aux barricades?
Posted inPolitics: National

Aux barricades?

Paris_2006-02-11_anti-caricature_protest_Coran_dsc07547
Thought exercise: Which will destroy France first — Islam or Anglo-Saxon hyper-capitalism?

An American looks at the size of the French population that is Muslim (7.5 percent) and laughs. There are probably as many Muslims in metropolitan Phoenix.

And yet for all its claims to universal values — Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — France is a distinct and largely closed civilization. Had I moved to Paris at age eighteen and stayed (merveillaux!), I would still never be considered a Frenchman. The barrier is so much higher for people from France's one-time colony of Algeria and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

The United States is a credal nation, unusual in the world. Thus, the ethnic group that was so reviled more than a century ago that it provoked the largest mass lynching in American history now includes governors, senators, mayors, Supreme Court justices — even the immigrant-hating High Sheriff of Maricopa County. Pretty much only on America.

In the aftermath of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, much of France is rallying to prove its intention to remain an open society welcoming to immigrants. But not all. Marine Le Pen's right-wing party that wants to halt immigration has gained from the bloodshed. Questions are being raised elsewhere in Europe, too.

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Governor Ducey
Posted inPolitics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Governor Ducey

Doug_DuceyDoug Ducey was elected governor of Arizona with a 36.24 percent voter turnout, the lowest in recent history. It may seem unfair to judge him so soon. But, no. The days when a GOP office holder was independent-minded are gone, replaced by a party ruled by a nihilist ideology.

As Jonathan Rauch wrote in the New York Times, "America does not have a broken political system. It has a broken political party: the Republicans." This is what those Arizonans who vote continue to double-down on.

In his inauguration address, Ducey's explicit or implied comments were in the ALEC-Koch brothers "mainstream" of the party. Taxes must always be low or cut further. Government spending must be cut further. Get government "out of the lives of the people" (except, presumably, for the Social Security recipients and defense spending that prop up the state economy). Change regulation to support certain favored businesses ("deregulation"). And the all-important "economic freedom."

Ducey reprised the old Newt Gingrich meme of "opportunity," after their fashion:

Opportunity is not a government program planned and distributed by some expert class any more than personal freedom is a favor granted by those in public office. Opportunity is a new job or training for a better job. It’s the kind of school where every child can grow in knowledge and in character, the kind of neighborhoods where families feel protected, a state where enterprise is welcome and hard work is rewarded.

In other words, Arizona can expect more of the same, only perhaps even worse.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Homeland

How did we allow this sinister word to infiltrate our vernacular?

I don’t mean the television show starring the exquisite Claire Danes, who would be my pick to play Lindsey if the Mapstone Mysteries were ever made into a movie. No, I’m talking about the word now used in place of “continental United States,” “the home front” or “the nation.”

In addition to the Department of Homeland Security, the word is commonly attached to sentences and phrases, including in fine newspapers. As in “the U.S. homeland.” William Strunk says it best: omit unnecessary words. How about just “in the United States.”

Were Bill Safire alive, he would trace the exact origins. But we know it arose after 9/11, as the nation was being lied into two unnecessary wars, giving away our liberties in the so-called Patriot Act, setting up a proto-police state and enshrining torture as national policy.

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Strange fruit
Posted inPolitics: National

Strange fruit

Little_Rock_integration_protest
So this is what post-racial America looks like.

Businesses are burned and looted in a black suburb, not by white supremacists a la Tulsa's Greenwood in 1921 but apparently by some residents a la Watts in 1965, only this time in suburbia.

The spark was a grand jury declining to indict the white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man. Other outrages gained national attention. Among them, New York City police wrestling a black man to the sidewalk and his death following a "chokehold" and a Cleveland officer shooting and killing a 12-year-old black boy with a pellet gun.

All the progressive Web sites and MSNBC programs are unanimous in their verdicts: the police are at war with unarmed black men and black communities. Indeed, the police are dangerous to American society. Traffic and ratings increase with the coverage — the visuals are great, as are hashtags such as #HandsUpDon'tShoot and #ICan'tBreathe.

Protests against "police violence" repeatedly disrupt the downtowns of progressive cities. Again, great visuals. They are largely peaceful, so far. The grievance is that this injustice is obvious and intolerable. 

Meanwhile, progressives are dealt their most devastating electoral defeat since the 1920s. From the U.S. Congress to most statehouses, political control is even more in the hands of those who see none of the above as serious problems.

At the risk of being crass and reductive, many are supporters of a new Jim Crow. What is undeniable is that the new entirely reactionary Republican Party's "platform" was opposition to the nation's first black president. It succeeded largely because of an irrational but instinctive backlash against him in the majority white electorate. The same happened in 2010.

Welcome to post-racial America.

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Police, race and misconceptions
Posted inPolitics: National

Police, race and misconceptions

Ferguson,_Day_4,_Photo_26
By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

The recent string of well-publicized police killings of unarmed blacks and the nationwide wave of mass protests by young, multi-ethnic crowds, has once again brought the issue of police and race from the backburner of ethnic-studies classes to the forefront of public debate.

Some incidents triggering the protests are controversial (Ferguson); others, such as the shooting death of a 12-year old boy with a pellet pistol or the death of a sidewalk cigarette salesman from a banned choke-hold appear as unmistakable tragedies to those who have seen the video evidence.

Instead of dissecting these cases on an individual basis, I want to examine the push-back from conservative pundits, whose talking-points and rhetoric mirror police attitudes, including prominent and influential men like Rudy Giuliani, who is widely credited with amazing reductions in crime during his tenure as mayor of New York City, and whose policing models (most notably "broken windows") have been widely emulated.

The rhetoric from law and order conservatives is important because police tactics can best be changed through reforms in police attitudes and in the attitudes of politicians presiding over law enforcement communities. That rhetoric is filled with fictions, half-truths, faulty inferences, and misused statistics. Several prominent talking points deserve scrutiny:

1. "Ninety-three percent of black murder victims in the United States are killed by other blacks" — the "black on black crime" thesis. This comes from a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the period from 1980 through 2008.

The fly in the ointment is that the report also says 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. Yet nobody is talking about "white on white crime" as a means of distracting the conversation whenever a white is the victim of police abuse. Do we really believe that murderers politely decline to kill the members of other races, or is this simply a statistical artifact of demographic segregation and concentration?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Obama’s world of troubles

One of the most questionable propositions of our political journalism is that President Obama is to blame for trouble in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, the rise of Russian aggressiveness and poor relations with Israel.

The trouble is, I have yet to find anyone questioning it.

One can blame Mr. Obama for many missteps and blunders. Chuck Hagel was a poor choice for Secretary of Defense. The inner circle of the White House probably does micromanage too often, and does so from a blinkered perspective.

Blame the ignorance of Americans and the self-interest of defense contractors for the conceit that we have control of a messy world. We do not.

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Posted inPolitics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Obama and immigration

Some initial impressions on President Obama's immigration plan:

1. We have become so cynical that the talking heads, especially, can't imagine a leader doing something mostly for the decency of it. Yet this is likely Mr. Obama's prime motivation. Whites make up 75 percent of the electorate and anti-"amnesty" Anglos vote while too many potentially Democratic Hispanics don't. So it's a political loser.

2. Despite similar precedents set by Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Republicans will try to impeach Obama or otherwise act out. They can't stop themselves.

I moderated a panel of eminent China experts last night. One of the consistent themes is how our dysfunctional government sends the message to Beijing to not take us seriously, or to make a dangerous miscalculation.

3. Mr. Obama's limited overhaul doesn't address the core problems: Our appetite for cheap labor; the way trade agreements disrupted traditional economies and drew workers el norte; bad governance in Mexico and much of central America, and the fact that too many American employers and even average Americans are satisfied with the status quo.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Democrats are stupid

When Barack Obama was elected president, the nation was facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For all its flaws — a too-small-stimulus, lack of enough relief for average mortgage holders, etc. — Obama, with the help of Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve, averted a second Great Depression.

When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent on its way to 10 percent. Last month it was 5.8 percent…

…The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion or almost 10 percent of gross domestic product. Now it’s about $483 billion or 3.3 percent of GDP. The deficit has fallen faster than any time since the end of World War II…

…America's GDP was $14.4 trillion. In the third quarter of this year it had risen $17.5 trillion, despite the headwinds of a slow recovery. It is the best performance among advanced nations…

…Corporate profits after taxes were about $1 trillion in January 2009. In the second quarter of this year, the most recent data available, they hit a record $1.84 trillion…

…The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7,949 the day he took office. Today it is above 17,652…

…And the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to millions of Americans, and would have included millions more if not for the cruel obstruction of Republican governors.

In the hands of Ronald Reagan's ad men, this would have been Morning in America. For Democrats this election, it was something from which to run (hat tip to Emil's comment in the previous post). They deserved the destruction that befell them.

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Posted inPolitics: National

What next?

The Republican wave last Tuesday is truly stunning, as this New York Times map shows.

I was talking to a friend — smart, college-educated, a former-Republican-turned-progressive — who recalled the great hope she had when Barack Obama was elected. "But we've been losing ever since."

Her answer is to go off the grid. Keep subscribing to newspapers to help support them, but not read them. No more politics on the Internet. No more Rachel Maddow, however smart she is. What's the point?

She already doesn't own a car and uses transit and trains wherever possible. Shops locally and has a tiny carbon footprint with a downtown condo. She will continue to vote in every election, for Democrats (progressive where possible), for every transit, parks and school funding initiative.

But she's done with living so close to the heartache of constant defeat, of the nation's astounding retrograde move. Where one of our two great political parties doesn't even believe in science. Sorry, legalized pot and same-sex marriage aren't enough.

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Posted inPolitics: National

National suicide…really?

[UPDATE] The answer is yes. Join the open thread on the comments to discuss the election results.

Are you really going to do it, America? Give control of the Senate to The Party That Wrecked America?

If the polls are to be believed, the answer is "yes." It is true that polling undercounts Democratic votes. But the indications are not good. Consider that in Colorado, incumbent Gov. John Hickenlooper is trailing a full bore Krackpot who claims the IUD is an abortion device.

Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting post on the midterms. Among his comments:

Republican candidates have made this election about (President Obama), while most Democrats (as is their wont) are running fast away; the GOP itself remains, however, also deeply unpopular; wrong-direction numbers are at a high. No great policy debate has defined these races, and when such issues have risen – such as illegal immigration or the ACA – they tend to be virulent reactions to existing law or proposed changes, rather than a constructive, positive agenda. I see no triumph for conservative or liberal ideas here, no positive coalition forming, no set of policies that will be vindicated by this election.

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Posted inPolitics: National

J’accuse…!

The headline in Salon reads, "Baby Boomers Ruined America: Why Blaming Millennials is Misguided and Annoying." The column by Alexander S. Balkin that follows is no less shy:

From the time the baby boomers took over, the United States has experienced an economic environment plagued with unfounded asset and real-estate bubbles and collapses. The bubbles were caused by blind greed on the part of investors, and a blind eye on the part of regulators. The baby boomers forced the financial and banking system out of relative security to high-risk systems.

The perfect example of this was the 2008 collapse of the toxic housing debt market. In government, baby boomers ballooned the defense budget beyond the point of reason. They then raided government programs to pay for their mistakes…

You get the gist. Now, back when this boomer was starting as a journalist, there were these creatures called editors. If one existed today, she might point out to Mr. Balkin that the granddaddy of financial bubbles was Alan Greenspan, born 1926. Blinding and rolling back regulators was among the many anti-middle-class goals of the Powell Memorandum, written in 1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, b. 1907, and carried into the public square with such success by Ronald Reagan, b. 1911.

Dick Cheney (b. 1941) and Donald Rumsfeld (b. 1932) led the "balloon(ing) of the defense budget beyond the point of reason" (An editor would also help the writer avoid cliches). Among those in politics and media who robustly supported both unfortunate turns are Rep. Paul Ryan (b. 1970), Sen. Ted Cruz (b. 1970), Michelle Malkin (b. 1970), and Jonah Goldberg (b. 1969). The algorithms that helped bring on the Great Recession and now cheat average investors in the stock market likely were written by X-ers or millennials.

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