“I’d rather hang out with the liberals and argue about economics than hang out with the Republicans and argue about Darwin and stem cells.”

Reason, the best damn magazine you’re not reading (assuming, of course, that you don’t already read it), has a decent piece today about liberals and libertarians. This quotation by professor Jacob Levy from McGill University struck me as particularly important:

“If our core liberalism—if our roots in the struggle of common law against the absolutist king, or in Locke, or in Montesquieu, or in the American Revolution mean anything at all to us—then it means a four percentage-point difference in income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance with the right seem kind of silly.”

There’s a laundry list of issues on which libertarians and liberals ought to share at least some common ground: torture, war, criminal justice issues, the drug war, gay marriage, immigration, the death penalty, government transparency, privacy, reproductive rights, and free speech.

The Democrats have proven to be a miserable opposition party these last two years, and their excuse seems to have been that they couldn’t do X because the Republicans were running the show. On issue after issue, ranging from the Iraq war to FISA, they’ve proved to be not just incapable of stopping a Republican executive but all too frequently compliant. That excuse is now off the table — they’ve got commanding leads in both houses of Congress and a President with strong popular support. The questions that remain to be answered are how much the Democrats really believe in these values, and how exactly they will prioritize them.

Early results (and by that I mean yesterday’s election) are mixed. High Democratic turnouts helped pass bigoted, civil-liberties bashing state constitutional amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, while Democrats in Massachusetts decriminalized pot and Michigan voters legalized medicinal marijuana. This last issue is one on which President Obama has the potential to do some immediate good: If Obama stays good to his word and stops federal raids on legal, state-sanctioned medicinal marijuana dispensaries, perhaps we can stop ruining the lives of innocent citizens and throwing away tax dollars.

The results of half a dozen ballot initiatives clearly can’t be used as a true gauge of how the new Democratic government will run things; only time can answer that question definitively. But if President Obama decides to prioritize traditional liberal and libertarian values — equal protection under the law, social tolerance, privacy, constitutionally limited powers, and peace — the next four years will be a breath of fresh air.

The atmosphere in New York City

Less than an hour ago, walking from my office in the West Village to the Q train in Union Square, I heard constant shouts, cheers, and chants; passed a young woman singing the Star-Spangled Banner; and saw more smiling faces than I’ve ever seen on a New York street — or any street, for that matter. My wait for the train was accompanied by still more screams and yelps of joy, as each new group of people descended the stairs into the station, giddy and enthusiastic.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed “Obama!” and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

This may be short lived…

Our system worked today. The majority of the House of Representatives — which was always intended to be the branch most responsive to the will of the people — rejected what would have been a massive and disasterous government bailout.

I’m happy to say that I was wrong. Last week when I read about Paulson’s initial proposal for the bailout, I thought that the backing of the White House and the leaders of both parties, coupled with an atmosphere of fear and the need to “do something quickly,” would be more than enough to push it through. Instead, a coalition of far-left Democrats and the few remaining free-market Republicans, joined by many members of both parties worried about losing their seats in the upcoming elections, defeated the bill and came out victorious.

My gut still says the bill will resurface and will probably be passed, in some form or another. But today we won, and tomorrow, I’ll be quite happy to be wrong again.

What Henley said

Verbatim Bill Kristol:

The way you puncture euphoria is reality, or to be more blunt, fear. I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear.

Jim Henley:

[T]he thing to note here is that Kristol identifies fear and violence (he goes on to tie the fear theme to attacking Iran) with “reality.” Fear is reality in his equation. The national greatness conservatives spent the 1990s arguing that national life without a higher purpose lacked meaning. They’ve spent the Naughts settling for a low one.

My own true love

Being home in bed with the flu has allowed me to rewatch Gone With the Wind, which I first saw as a young teen. It is an incredible story, but what struck me was how much less I would enjoy it if I had seen it for the first time as an adult.

Watching it now, it’s hard to scrub your mind of the context of what was going on in the late 1930s when the movie was made. Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights leaders were trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get anti-lynching legislation passed. President Franklin Roosevelt and Senate Democrats blocked it repeatedly: too divisive an issue, and they had other priorities.

To repeat: For Congress to condemn the kidnapping, torture, and murder of U.S. citizens by gangs of vigilantes was seen as divisive.

GWTW is an apologia for slavery in the sense that it doesn’t even bother to make excuses for it. It’s as natural and accepted as pretty dresses, marriage proposals, and dozens of beaux — that is, a backdrop. Slaves are referred to by the euphemism “servants,” and despite the Academy Award-winning performance of Hattie McDaniel, there is no awareness that the black characters may have lives or histories of their own.

When Scarlett comes home to a ruined plantation and the death of her mother from typhoid, we see the sympathetic faces of the few remaning slaves. But the movie does not betray by so much as a twitch of a camera that the slaves themselves may have suffered the loss of their own parents, far earlier and in much more brutal ways.

The movie isn’t about the slaves, of course. It’s about Scarlett, and it’s a darned good story about her. But the lush romance of the music, the beautiful sweep of the camera across the land — these are seductive distractions from the fact that while millions of Depression-era moveigoers basked in the nostalgia, we were failing to live up to the sweetest, strongest promise of the American dream: Equal protection under the law.

Obama gets it

An endorsement from David Rees, the man behind the satirical comic Get Your War On:

Cluster bombs and landmines are particularly terrifying weapons that wreak havoc on communities trying to recover from war. They are fatal impediments to reconstruction and rehabilitation of agricultural land; they destroy valuable livestock; they disable otherwise productive members of society; they maim or kill children trying to salvage them for scrap metal.

Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. It pains me that our great nation has not. But in the autumn of 2006, there was a chance to take a step in the right direction: Senate Amendment No. 4882, an amendment to a Pentagon appropriations bill that would have banned the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas.

Senator Obama of Illinois voted IN FAVOR of the ban.

[...] As is so often the case, there was no political cost to doing the wrong thing. And there was no political reward for doing the right thing. But Senator Obama did the right thing.

Read the whole thing.

Don’t worry your pretty little head

Once upon a time, we fought a war over taxation without representation. The idea that a faraway king could just take our money, and not let us have a voice in how that money was spent, made a lot of people angry.

Today, we still have taxation without representation. If you’re 14, 15, 16, or 17 years old, you are legally allowed to work, but you’re not allowed to vote. You may earn money, and if so you will pay taxes, but you cannot vote for the representatives who will decide how that money is spent.

There is no good reason for this. Young people are no more likely to make dumb decisions than adults. (Yes, their brains are still maturing, but our brains are changing all the time. Does anyone seriously propose that we should bar people with traumatic brain injury, or mental illness, or Alzheimer’s from voting?)

No, the usual arguments are that young people’s political interests can be represented by their parents, that they aren’t responsible enough, that not very many of them will bother to vote, that they don’t understand how government works, that they will be swayed by politicians’ promises.

These are insulting and paternalistic arguments, ones that have been used in the past against women and racial minorities. They are no more (and no less) true of teenagers than of their parents. If a politician promises a special benefit to teens, is that different from a benefit for the AARP?

At some future day, people will look back on the voting age of 18 as flatly discriminatory, even quaintly incomprehensible. But to get to that day, a lot of us will have to stand up and say what should be clear: Everyone who contributes to a society should have a say in how that society is run.

(Inspired by this rather lame op-ed.)

The question I most want to ask

To the Presidential candidates:

What executive powers will you relinquish on your first day in office? And how, precisely, will you go about relinquishing them?

The abandonment of habeas corpus and related rights is to me one of the most horrific and shameful developments in American history. Restoring those critical rights may be the single most important issue for our new president. That’s why I was heartened to see this endorsement from Habeas Lawyers for Obama:

When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.

It’s not perfect, and who knows whether Obama will even be the nominee, much less our next president. But that’s the kind of executive power I’d like to see.

If I should die…

One of the clearest and best military bloggers I’ve read during this war is Andrew Olmsted. A true citizen-soldier, Andrew’s beliefs and actions came from deep conviction and careful thought. He did not take lightly his decision to volunteer for active service, and he knew he would almost certainly be sent to Iraq.

He was killed there two days ago.

I still can’t believe how shocked and saddened I am. This is the way of war: People die. Thousands and tens of thousands of them, but each one makes it new again. I am a stranger who simply admired his writing; I can’t imagine the pain and grief his family must feel.

Andy left a blog post to be published in the event of his death. It’s typical Andy: Blunt, funny, geeky, and opinionated. You gotta love a man who can quote Wedding Crashers, The Princess Bride, and Babylon 5 in his self-obituary.

It must be an amazingly strange thing to write your farewell letter. Andy’s ranged from the personal to the worldly, with time for jokes and admonitions:

But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war.

Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.

This may be a contradiction of my above call to keep politics out of my death, but I hope not. Sometimes going to war is the right idea. I think we’ve drawn that line too far in the direction of war rather than peace, but I’m a soldier and I know that sometimes you have to fight if you’re to hold onto what you hold dear.

But in making that decision, I believe we understate the costs of war; when we make the decision to fight, we make the decision to kill, and that means lives and families destroyed. Mine now falls into that category; the next time the question of war or peace comes up, if you knew me at least you can understand a bit more just what it is you’re deciding to do, and whether or not those costs are worth it.

No, you can’t live there

Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight? I do. It’s clean, safe, and well heated. If your place is too, we’re both lucky.

But for other folks, the ripple effects of the Katrina catastrophe just keep on spreading. I can’t pretend to be able to give you a full recap, but this holiday season, 4000 homes and apartments are being demolished. Here’s the deal (Terrific short video, with music, at that link).

Get daily updates at Justice for New Orleans. And listen to presidential candidate John Edwards:

Edwards said there is a lack of affordable housing in New Orleans and that the crisis is a result of government policies that have failed Gulf Coast residents since Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

“Rents have doubled,” he said in a statement. “Families are being evicted from FEMA trailers and now the administration is trying to make a bad situation worse.”

Edwards said the demolition should be halted until replacement housing is ready to be inhabited.

We failed our fellow citizens miserably when the hurricane came. That’s no excuse for failing them again by letting our government officials treat people unfairly. Right now in New Orleans, the message is that if you’re black and poor, you’re not allowed home. That’s not right.

Please go watch that video. And then pick up the phone, send a donation, or get yourself on a bus.