“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.

Wow. Just, wow.

It’s hard to list all the things that are terrible about this idea:

A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board.

The idea is the brainchild of the board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a professor at the London School of Economics and was Tony Blair’s senior health adviser. In a paper being studied by Lord Darzi, the health minister appointed to oversee NHS reform, he says many smokers would be helped to break the habit if they had to make a decision whether to “opt in”.

The permit might cost as little as £10, but acquiring it could be made difficult if the forms were sufficiently complex, Le Grand said last night.

The people behind this idea are surprisingly aware of (some of) its potential problems. Unfortunately, they don’t really see them as problems:

“Breaking the new year’s resolution not to smoke would be costly in terms of both money and time … [This] would probably have a greater impact on poor smokers than on rich ones, hence contributing to a reduction in health inequalities.”

Sounds like a great plan to me: Reduce inequality by introducing legislation that is systematically unequal in its effects. How could this go wrong?

The paper, written by Le Grand and Divya Srivastava, an LSE researcher, acknowledges: “Administratively it would require addressing the problem of the existing black markets and smuggling in tobacco; but this should probably be done anyway.”

Translation: “Implementing this would make the black markets worse and drive more economic activity underground, causing more danger for all involved, and this will in turn require still greater militarism from our law enforcement and spending even more of the taxpayers’ money, but hey, we were going to do that anyway!”

Mark my words: They’re coming for our Krispy Kremes next.

(Full article at The Guardian)

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.

Are we a nation of laws?

For the last few years, our courts have been engaged in a titanic struggle with the president and with Congress to decide whether we are allowed to imprison people forever, without charges or trial or evidence.

It makes me heartsick that we even have a struggle over this. Our country prides itself on the fact that we aren’t run by a king or a dictator who can put us in prison on a whim, and keep us there while our bodies fall apart and our families grieve. But our leaders claim that the world is so scary now that they have to be able to lock people up forever — without saying why.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the president couldn’t have a “blank check” for doing whatever he wanted. Well, last week the president’s lawyers were back in court arguing that indeed he can.

They call it “preventative detention for the duration of hostilities.” Translated: Lock you up until we decide there is no more terrorism in the world.

This is not the country I love.

I hope he’s right…

Jim Harper over at the Cato blog thinks the anti-immigration opinions held by many in this country are in fact only “weakly held” and will fade if presented with the correct arguments.

Having watched this issue, and having heard from lots of angry people, I know that anti-immigrant views are a classic weakly held opinion. Angry as people are about the rule of law and “coming to this country the right way,” that anger melts when they learn more. Stuff like this:

“We haven’t permitted anywhere near enough legal immigration for decades. You can sit back and talk about legal channels, but the law has only allowed a smidgen of workers into the country compared to our huge demand. Getting people through legal channels at the INS has been hell.

“America, you’re going to have to get over what amounts to paperwork violations by otherwise law-abiding, honest, hard-working people. And that’s what we’re talking about - 98% honest, hard-working people who want to follow the same path our forefathers did, and who would be a credit to this country if we made it legal for them to come. Our current immigration policies are a greater threat to the rule of law than any of the people crossing the border to come here and work.”

I sincerely hope he’s right, though I fear he’s not taking full account of the fundamentally irrational nature of xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House want to add a $3.1 billion tax burden for companies looking to hire high-skilled immigrants. Is there anything holding the Republican party together right now other than shared fear? It sure as hell ain’t principles, ideas, or any respect for traditional American values.

1 in 500 Americans is a terrorist supporter?

That seems ridiculously high, doesn’t it?

Well, the GAO says the Terrorist Watch List is now up to about 800,000 names. In a nation of roughly 300 million people, that would break down to 1 in 400 Americans.

But of course, some names are duplicates or aliases. Some are non-U.S. citizens. So let’s say 1 in 500 Americans. Still — that’s an awful lot of terrorist supporters. And of course, our government won’t allow us to know why our names are being put on the list, nor is there a clear process for being taken off. Needless to say, I am not confident that this list makes us safer.

Full report (pdf). I particularly like the bit on page 11, where the researchers confide that the CIA refused to talk to them. Way to work together, guys.

(Via Wired, via ACS.)

All hail Montana!

From The Missoulian:

The State Bar of Montana passed a resolution on Friday urging President George W. Bush and Congress to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and restore prisoners’ right to due process.

The resolution received overwhelming support from Montana’s legal community….

[...] “This is not a political statement, but a statement about the rule of law,” said [Jim] Taylor [who drafted the resolution]. “I never thought I would be standing in front of a group of lawyers talking about whether or not it’s appropriate for someone to have a trial. But that’s where we are today.”

Under the “rule of law,” the government must exercise its authority in accordance with publicly disclosed, written laws.

For my money, it’s long past time we saw professional associations standing up for the standards of their professions. I’m thrilled to see Montana taking this step and will encourage my state’s lawyers to do the same.

Now, if only the American Psychological Association would face up to its responsibilities in the same way.