'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
No CommentsForgive me if I take a holiday from some of the liberal and progressive hysteria over the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a firearm. But, then, I am a Westerner and a gun owner.
The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government and specifying some of the rights of individuals (indeed, some of the Framers opposed the Bill of Rights because they feared individual rights would be seen as limited to those amendments). If the Framers intended to discuss state militias, the Bill of Rights seems an odd place to do it. It’s meaningful that the amendment is No. 2 behind that wellspring of recognizing individual rights, the First Amendment. One could see how the Framers said, the people have these rights, and here’s how will they be ensured of protecting them.
Remember, these men rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world, and many believed the people should always have the unalienable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government or leave a voluntary union of sovereign states. The Whiskey Rebellion and, most cataclysmically, the Civil War, settled some of those issues. Others were left to the courts.
Yet the ambiguity of the amendment has long been contested. And extreme measures on both sides brought matters to a head, and make the future even more contentious.
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1The New York Times is a fine newspaper, but it has its blind spots. Its reporting on energy is often incomplete or downright wrong. The latter sin was not in evidence when it finally reported on the popularity of Amtrak. What’s frustrating is what the article left out or left unsaid, which makes it harder to achieve some results beyond our transportation system frozen in 1965 (and we had more trains then).
From the article:
Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it
carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May
is not usually a strong travel month.
But the railroad, and its
suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial
constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet
the demand.
And:
The problem is that rail has shriveled. The number of “passenger miles”
traveled on intercity rail has dropped by about two-thirds since 1960,
and the companies that build rail cars and locomotives have also
shrunk, making it hard to expand.
Only late in the story is a glancing reference made to Amtrak’s fate being tied to the whims of the federal government, and late late in the story the Times admits their boy crush President-elect McCain "was a staunch opponent of subsidies to Amtrak when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee." Indeed he wants to abolish it.
Let’s fill in some of the blanks so Americans might have some options beyond expensive and congested driving, and airlines that treat passengers like cattle.
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No CommentsIt’s clear that President-elect McCain will run with this major theme: Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he didn’t serve in the military. For example, when Obama praised McCain’s service and wondered why he refused to support the new GI Bill, McCain shot back, "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his
responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my
regard for those who did."
The "religious test" prohibited by the Constitution has been seriously eroded by modern politics. But what McCain implies is more dangerous still to the future of the nation: that only soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are really qualified to lead the nation, particularly in wartime.
So many contradictions and hypocrisies here. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt were veterans, yet they led the nation in the two world wars. And where was McCain’s outrage over the neo-con chicken-hawks who took draft deferments during Vietnam, notably Dick Cheney (five deferments). Obama was a child during Vietnam. And what of the swift-boated John Kerry?
But the biggest concerns cut to the core of the American republic. They could reveal McCain not merely as a misinformed and misguided candidate, but a potentially dangerous one.
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No CommentsThe McCain campaign "released" the president-elect’s long awaited, long promised, health records in classic fashion: on the edge of a holiday weekend, when they would be guaranteed to get little attention. Not only that, but the records were made available to only 20 reporters hand-picked by the campaign.
Those journalists were given three hours to view more than 1,000 pages of often highly technical records; they were not allowed to make copies or remove them. McCain’s doctors were made available for 90 minutes — or so the newspeople were told. The questions were cut short after 45 minutes.
America’s increasingly lapdog media did not report much about this odd, not to mention suspicious, situation, made more compelling given McCain’s age and cancer history. The headlines were essentially "McCain is healthy…robust…takes a baby aspirin…no cancer recurrence."
Tellingly, the McCain campaign excluded the New York Times’ Lawrence K. Altman, a reporter and a medical doctor. Even so, Dr. Altman’s examination of the pool report made the real news, which Rogue Columnist will start your week with and keep up.
1On page A-21 of today’s New York Times and deep inside its Website is the day’s most consequential story: Karl Rove being subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about his involvement in the political prosecution of Alabama’s former Democratic governor and the firings of U.S. attorneys.
The onetime Bush political boss appears to have been deeply involved in the illegal and unethical acts. And of course he is refusing to testify. He may be held in contempt of Congress like his former colleague Harriet Meirs. The Bush Justice Department will refuse to prosecute the case. And the clock runs out.
Indeed, the clock is running out on American democracy. The United States Congress has only a little time to reassert its constitutional powers or the America we once knew is dead.
Unfortunately most of the media treat this as a minor tit-for-tat political story, which is exactly what the radical right wants.
2No doubt, the fetching Lisa Graham Keegan will play well on television as an education adviser to President-elect McCain. It will be instructive to see if the national media look beyond the blond good looks and quick mind to see that Keegan represents everything that voters want to get away from in Republican education policy.
As a legislator and then as superintendent of public instruction in Arizona — the equivalent of education secretary — she aggressively embraced the "charter school movement" and made Arizona into a national leader as an education "marketplace," where charters became as ubiquitous as Circle K stores. Properly constituted and regulated, individual charter schools have turned in impressive results nationally. These individual charters can be studied for best practices, but, there’s little evidence they can handle the job of public schools on a massive scale. Evidence mounts that many fail to ourperform public schools, yet are more costly and prone to financial abuse.
The results of Keegan’s crusade in Arizona were nothing short of tragic. Acting as if Arizona public schools were overfed, union-wrecked systems seen in a few big cities back east, she pushed for "school choice" in the form of charters. Few appear to perform well. Some are prime business ventures for well-connected right-wingers. Many are fly-by-night storefronts with no playgrounds, libraries or cafeterias. I recall seeing one where a roach coach would stop by at noon and toot the horn, as if it were a construction site. I guess the school owners were preparing the pupils for their future careers. Meanwhile, the costs of a school library — a given when I was in Arizona public schools — are foisted on the city library.
8The Arizona Republic’s Chad Graham traveled to Austin and Seattle to report on some lessons recession-slammed Phoenix might learn. Numerous Rogue Columnist readers have asked for my reactions. Chad is a fine journalist and a friend. His story fits into a continuum of sometime efforts by the newspaper to educate the public and policy makers about the real world — this goes back at least to the 1980s. These efforts are ignored as population growth resumes and the nation’s last big factory town returns to churning out suburban tract houses.
The editors tip their hands by, I would assume, inserting this sentence to make defensive "Valley residents" feel better: "Phoenix will never have a gateway seaport to Asia that hums with
activity. Seattle will never have the potential solar power of Phoenix." The sad reality is that the center of solar research, entrepreneurship and use is cloudy Germany. Phoenix literally started the solar power movement in the 1950s and let it get away — therein lies the tale of the town.
Graham’s important point is that Seattle and Austin "have learned the lesson that Phoenix is now being taught: Economic
downturns hit harder when you are overly reliant on one industry."
Rather than go through the story, or even rehash my years of "controversial" efforts to raise these issues, I’d rather make a few key points among dozens that could be discussed. My perspective is as a Phoenician who has lived in Seattle for nearly a year and has seen both close up.
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