In his just-released cover story on Paul Krugman's status as Obama critic, Newsweek's Evan Thomas includes these observations:
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.
Thomas then acknowledges what is glaringly obvious not only about himself but also most of his media-star colleagues: "If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am) . . ."
One day in the near future, Thomas should have a luncheon or perhaps a nice Sunday brunch at his home, invite over all of his journalist friends who work in the media divisions of our largest corporations, and they should spend 15 minutes or so assembling these sentences together, and then examine what these facts mean for the actual role played by establishment journalists, the functions they fulfill, whose interests they serve, and the vast, vast disparities between (a) those answers and (b) the pretenses about their profession and themselves which they continue, ludicrously, to maintain. To make the discussion less strenuous on the guests' brains, Thomas, as a good host, could provide visual illustrations such as this and this.
Also, in the name of consumer protection, television news shows and the largest newspapers ought to place that above-excerpted paragraph by Thomas as a warning at the top of every product they produce.
Blue Texan: Creationists on Texas School Board Prevail: Watered-Down Science Coming to Your Kids’ Textbooks
The flat-earthers win.
The State Board of Education on Friday passed science curriculum standards that members described as a compromise between those who are critical of teaching evolutionary theories without scrutiny and those who feared attacks on evolution would lead to the teaching of creationism in Texas schools...The new standards remove current requirements that students be taught the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. Instead, teachers will be required to have students scrutinize "all sides" of the theories.
...
The Discovery Institute, which encourages teaching that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer, called the vote "a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution."
It could've been even worse. And again, this is why you should care.
Because of its size, Texas could influence what publishers print in books used in other states.
And it's not just evolution that's rebuked.
The State Board of Education on Friday adopted standards on the teaching of global warming that appear to both question its existence and prod students to explore its implications.
...
The chairman of the state board, Don McLeroy, called the standards "perfectly good."
"Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey," McLeroy said.
What does the analysis of scientific evidence have to do with politics? For theocrats like McLeroy, everything.
Clemons: Obama Should Read up On How Roman General Pompey Dealt with Terrorists
Barack Obama is having America up the ante on its investment in rolling back the Taliban and those who follow them in Afghanistan. We are sending more troops and trainers, and are committing to civil reconstruction programs whose outlines are unclear.But Obama and his advisers should read this bit on Roman General Pompey's efforts to deal with the terrorists of the day at the height (and near end) of the Roman republic.
Pompey gave the pirates he quelled an alternative life -- and I just don't see that yet in the rhetoric or strategic game plan that is unfolding for America's now seven year plus military engagement in Afghanistan.
I first saw this clip on Richard Vague's Delancey Place:
Terror in Rome
In today's excerpt -- terror in Rome. In 67 BC, Pompey, early in a meteoric career as a Ro
man politician and general that includes conquering the East and joining with Caesar in a Triumvirate to rule Rome, is asked to overcome the pirates that have been terrorizing Rome for decades:"Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. ... However, kidnapping was only a sideline for the pirates. Calculated acts of intimidation ensured that they could extort and rob almost at will, inland as well as at sea. . .The shadowiness of the pirate's organization, and their diffuse operations, made them a foe unlike any other. 'The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone,' Cicero complained. 'There can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties.' How could such an adversary be pinned down, let alone eradicated? To make the attempt would be to fight against phantoms. 'It would be an unprecedented war, fought without rules, in a fog'; a war that appeared without promise of an end. . .
"Only once, in 102 BC, had the Romans been provoked into tackling the menace head on. The great orator Marcus Antonius, Cicero's hero, had been dispatched to Cilicia with an army and a fleet. The pirates had quickly fled their strongholds, Antonius had proclaimed a decisive victory, and the Senate had duly awarded him a triumph. But the pirates had merely regrouped on Crete, and they soon returned to their old haunts, as predatory as before. ... Bandits, like their prey, were most likely to be fugitives from the misery of the times, from extortion, warfare, and social breakdown. ...
"The pirate's growing command of the sea enabled them to throttle the shipping lanes. The supply of everything, from slaves to grain, duly dried to a trickle, and Rome began to starve. . .
The grip of famine tightened around Rome. Starving citizens took to the Forum, demanding action on the crises and the appointment of a proconsul to resolve it. ... It was a tribune, in 67 BC, who proposed the people's hero [Pompey] be given a sweeping license to deal with the pirates. ... Pompey was granted an unprecedented force of 500 ships and 120,000 men together with the right to levy more, should he decide that they were needed. ...
"As it proved, to sweep the seas clear of pirates, storm their last stronghold, and end a menace that had been tormenting the Republic for decades took the new proconsul a mere three months. It was a brilliant victory, a triumph for Pompey himself and an eye-opening demonstration of the reserves of force available to Rome.
Even the Romans themselves appear to have been a little stunned. ... Campaigns of terror were containable. Rome remained a superpower.
"Even though Pompey's victory had demonstrated once again that the Republic could pretty much as it pleased, there was none of the savagery that had been traditionally been used to drive that lesson home. In a display of clemency quite as startling as his victory, Pompey not merely refrained from crucifying his captives, but bought them plots of land and helped set them up as farmers.
Brigandage, he had clearly recognized, was bred of rootlessness and social upheaval. For as long as the Republic was held responsible for these conditions, there would continue to be a hatred of Rome. Yet it hardly needs emphasizing that the rehabilitation of criminals was not standard policy. . .
The town where [Pompey] settled them was titled Pompeiopolis: his mercy and munificence were to contribute eternally to the greatness of his name."
-- Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, Anchor Books, Copyright 2003 by Tom Holland, pp. 164-171.
(updated below)
There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."
What's most notable about Webb's decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn't just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America's oppressive prison state. His critique of what we're doing is fundamental, not incremental. And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we're not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama's adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed "pathetic." Here are just a few excerpts from Webb's Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:
Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .
The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .
In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .
Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.
Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?
And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?
Webb added that "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail."
It's hard to overstate how politically thankless, and risky, is Webb's pursuit of this issue -- both in general and particularly for Webb. Though there has been some evolution of public opinion on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being "soft on crime" has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask Michael Dukakis). Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.
Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he's not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he's a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the "toughest" "anti-crime" states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen's macaca-driven implosion. As Ezra Klein wrote, with understatement: "Lots of politicians make their name being anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name being pro-prison reform."
For a Senator like Webb to spend his time trumpeting the evils of excessive prison rates, racial disparities in sentencing, the unjust effects of the Drug War, and disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons is precisely the opposite of what every single political consultant would recommend that he do. There's just no plausible explanation for what Webb's actions other than the fact that he's engaged in the noblest and rarest of conduct: advocating a position and pursuing an outcome because he actually believes in it and believes that, with reasoned argument, he can convince his fellow citizens to see the validity of his cause. And he is doing this despite the fact that it potentially poses substantial risks to his political self-interest and offers almost no prospect for political reward. Webb is far from perfect -- he's cast some truly bad votes since being elected -- but, in this instance, not only his conduct but also his motives are highly commendable.
* * * * *
Webb's actions here underscore a broader point. Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders. When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications: well, they have to take that position because it's too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it's the smart thing to do. ....
....
(2) An angry emailer chides me for calling Webb's proposal one of "prison reform," as that actually diminishes the scope of what Webb is doing, and says instead that Webb's proposal is really one to reform the entire criminal justice system. Prison reform is just one of several critical (and politically difficult) issues Webb is addressing. It's a fair point, as Webb's own website -- which describes his bill as one to "overhaul America's criminal justice system -- makes clear.
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