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It’s an even numbered year, so it’s time again for leftish pundits of every shade — from Democratic blue to radical red — to warn their angrier, more fed-up friends that we must choose the lesser evil within this political system, or bear the blame for the results. Thus we have digby writing in her blog “Hullabaloo”:

Unless you believe, as some do, that we must get on with our impending dystopian nightmare so that we can rebuild from the rubble (sometimes known as destroying the village in order to save it) this is probably a useful group of articles.

The articles are from a Washington Monthly issue on the topic “What if Obama Loses?”, and they complete the arc of the argument: you just don’t get how really bad a Republican win would be.  Either that or, to paraphrase digby’s charge, you must be some kind of irresponsible nihilist itching to zippo-raid the hooches of the American political system — probably just because you like to see stuff burn.

Now it is undoubtedly true that Republican candidates up and down the 2012 ballot will generally be a bunch of pinch-souled corporate lick-spittles, pious frauds, and incoherent cranks.  In a sane world — and judging mainly by their presidential candidates — they’d be fit at most to write daily letters to the editor or mutter about the slow service at McDonald’s.  In our world, however, their political prospects are good, “thanks” in part to the diarrheal eruption of campaign cash unleashed by the Citizens United ruling.

The life cycle of the Democratic base

But “thanks” — regrets really — are also in order about the quality of their opposition.  And what’s remarkable is that if you read some of the “What if Obama Loses?” articles, that comes through just about as clearly as the intended “barbarians at the gates” message.

In what seems the most widely linked (hence presumably most persuasive) of the Washington Monthly articles, Dahlia Lithwick (whose coverage of the Supreme Court and civil liberties issues I truly admire) warns that Justice Ginsburg is 79 years old, ergo it had better be Obama who nominates her successor and not Romney.  So far, so unremarkable — but then she starts to discuss who’s manning the castle walls, as it were:

Imagine a Democratic presidential nominee running on promises to reshape, remake, make over, hog-tie, or even just refinish the federal bench. It doesn’t happen. And so, even though the most conservative Supreme Court in decades sits poised to decide cases ranging from the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care legislation to the future of affirmative action in schools, the rights to gay marriage, and the fate of the voting rights act, Republicans portray both the Supreme Court and the lower courts as a collective of lefty hippies. And Democrats mainly just look at their fingernails. If you care about the future of abortion rights, stem cell research, worker protections, the death penalty, environmental regulation, torture, presidential power, warrantless surveillance, or any number of other issues, it’s worth recalling that the last stop on the answer to each of those matters will probably be before someone in a black robe. Republicans have understood that for decades now, and that’s why the federal bench—including the Supreme Court—is almost unrecognizable to Democrats today. (emphases added)

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Race and Reunion, David Blight, 2001
Harvard University Press
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With the end of April came also the end, for this year at least, of “Confederate History Month,” unfortunately resuscitated by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell after a long dormancy under the previous two governors.  Amidst an outcry that apparently surprised the Regent University law graduate, McDonnell hastily reworded his proclamation with a grudging nod to the impropriety of slavery and the possible existence of other points of view on the matter of a rebellion leading to the country’s bloodiest war.

One might reasonably ask why there are no  “Union History Month” or “Victory over Treason and Slavery” celebrations — and that, more or less, is what David Blight did in his book “Race and Reunion,” published in 2001.  Covering the period from the Emancipation Proclamation to the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg — and the release of the notorious film “Birth of a Nation” — it’s a fascinating read.  It’s also  — still, going on ten years later — a useful, jolting reminder of just what was lost as remembering the Civil War became more about rehashing every last engagement, and about getting over it, past it, and around it, than about reflecting why it happened — let alone reflecting on the unfinished business of the human and civil rights of black Americans.

Click above to order this
book or others by Blight.

Reconciliation — on southern terms
Blight’s research led him to soldiers’ remembrances in periodicals of the time such as Century and Harper’s; to the annals and publications of the Southern Historical Society and the Confederate Veteran, and to the schedules and membership rolls of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  But he also paid attention to the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B DuBois, the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and the novels of the unjustly forgotten Albert Tourgee (”only fools forget the causes of war”) or Nelson De Forest — as well as the celebration of Klan terror by authors like Thomas Dixon, Jr, or the perhaps more insidious romanticization of the antebellum South by authors like Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris (”Uncle Remus”).

The book tells stories you’ve still almost certainly never heard before: the first Memorial  Day (that is, “Decoration” Day) — held by black Charlestonians to honor and restore the graveyard of Union prisoners of war on the site of the city’s “Race Course,” now Hampton Park; the unveiling of Richmond memorials to Robert E. Lee in 1896, and to Stonewall Jackson in 1875; the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895, when Booker T. Washington gave his “Atlanta Compromise” speech — widely acclaimed at the time, but half wishful thinking, half sadly understandable surrender; the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, but with blacks in attendance only as blanket distributors and latrine cleaners.*  The Washington Post — apparently already a runaway gusher of idiotic political commentary –  marked that occasion by noting that slavery and secession were “no longer discussed argumentatively,” but were “disposed of for all time“; moreover, slavery was something for which “no particular part of the people was responsible unless, indeed, the burden of responsibility should be shouldered by the North for its introduction” (emphasis added by Blight.)

What had happened by 1913 was a “Lost Cause” regional movement as potent, committed, and persistent as the abolition movement had been.  What’s more, it arguably had a greater reach (at least within the U.S.), in that ex-Confederates could and did safely peddle their redefinition — for that’s what it was — of the causes and legacy of the Civil War throughout the country, for good money and to plentiful applause.

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On Monday, the online whistleblower site Wikileaks.org released 

…a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. [...] The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The video is provided at a separate address, collateralmurder.com, along with a timeline, photos, resources such as relevant military policy documents, and a transcript of the talk within the helicopter and radio traffic with other units on the ground and in the air.

The video below is the so-called “full,” 39 minute version.*  Even when zoomed, the grainy black and white view — one of the views the helicopter personnel relied on — is such that individuals on the ground can’t be easily distinguished from eachother.  Perhaps crucially, it’s also nearly impossible to distinguish a telephoto lens from an RPG (rocket propelled grenade launcher), when its cameraman is carefully pointing it around a corner to photograph an arriving American ground unit. But the visual quality is still high enough for a nauseating impression of the carnage high-caliber machine gun fire can wreak.

My view after watching it, looking at official reports (published by the Pentagon at a dedicated site in the wake of the leak), and reading online reactions by military personnel, was that a tragedy was followed by wrongdoing — wrongdoing even in the context of combat in Baghdad, July 12, 2007.

References in this posting to actions in this video will give the approximate video time,
by adding 25 seconds to the time given in the transcript.  Currently, that transcript fails
to account for the Wikileaks.org introduction.

The first attack
To me, a military engagement means a situation where both sides are shooting at each other.  That didn’t happen here.  Indeed, one of the disquieting aspects of the first attack is how quickly the option of engaging the Iraqis came up, given how little effort the alleged insurgents made to avoid harm, let alone cause any.

If the group (besides the two Reuters employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh) really was composed of active insurgents, they were breathtakingly nonchalant about it: sauntering down the middle of a street; a total of maybe three or four AK-47s and one RPG among a group of a dozen or so (what are the rest of the men there for then?); the men standing around and bunched together in their final moments, in plain view of two deadly American helicopters. **  “Positive identification” (PID) is a fundamental prequisite to engagement; identification here seemed to be quite a lot less than positive.

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I got one of the health care e-mails that have been ricocheting around the Internet yesterday.  It was forwarded by a dear relative of mine, with the subject line “FW: SENIOR DEATH WARRANTS.” I’ve posted it on my Google Docs site — of course, without any identifying information, and without editing.  I want to respond to various claims made in that e-mail.

Throughout the discussion below, I’ll link to relevant parts of proposed legislation to back up what I’m saying.  I’ll usually be referring to the text of H.R.3200, also known as “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ — this is one of the main House bills.  The link leads to an “all about H.R.3200″ web page at govtrack.us that enables links to very specific parts of the bill.  However, readers with slow browsers or older computers may be better off consulting the text version of the bill.

Discussion
The email begins by recounting a conversation with a doctor:

REPLY: FALSE. This and other parts of the e-mail appear to misconstrue Section 1233 (”Advance care planning consultation”) of the bill.  As a fact sheet by Rep. Blumenauer summarizes,

The provision merely provides coverage under Medicare to have a conversation once every five years if – and only if – a patient wants to make his or her wishes known to a doctor. If desired, patients may have consultations more frequently if they are chronically ill or if their health status changes.

REPLY: NOT RESPONSIVE. It’s true that the AMA has endorsed a health care reform plan; given the organization’s opposition to health care reform in the past, that’s big news.  The main reason, according to reporter Jeffrey Young of The Hill, is that the bill envisions a “permanent fix to a Medicare payment system that annually calls for doctors fees to be cut.”

This was potentially an expensive gift to doctors; so if the doctor is advocating keeping annual fee cuts intact, I’m right there with him.

REPLY: FALSE. First, while it’s too bad, no major health care reform bill advocates a health care system anything like England’s.  But second, the statement is flatly wrong. Factcheck.org actually contacted the U.K. Department of Health and and an English nonprofit group advocating for older persons about this claim:

[A spokesman] said medical procedures in the U.K. are not routinely denied for older people. The National Health Service, the U.K.’s public health care service, has a constitution which prohibits discrimination on the basis of age and other factors. “The NHS Constitution states that the NHS provides a ‘comprehensive service, available to all irrespective of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief,’ “ the spokesman said.

We also contacted a nonprofit group, England’s Age Concern and Help the Aged, which works to stop age discrimination in various facets of life, including employment and health care. Age Concern’s press office had never heard of any kind of prohibition on heart surgery for those 60 and older.

REPLY: SADLY, NO. First, it would be impossible to have a healthcare system “just like Canada’s and England’s” because they have different systems.  Canada has a “single payer” health care system, in which health care costs are negotiated between health care providers and the government or an independent agency — a kind of “Medicare for all” instead just for older persons.  Another country with a successful kind of single payer health care system is France — according to that left wing magazine Business Week.

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The “beer summit” is history; were Obama’s hopes of the Gates-Crowley incident becoming a “teachable moment” realized?  I think it’s unlikely — and whatever small amount of worthwhile learning occurred was despite Obama’s intercession and retreat, not because of it.

The incident
In my view, Obama was right the first time in saying that Cambridge PD officer Mark Crowley “acted stupidly” in arresting Henry Gates.  Of course it was also right and reasonable for a passerby seeing an apparent break-in to report that, and it was reasonable for the Cambridge PD to investigate that report — and it was unreasonable of the Harvard professor to object to that, if that’s what Gates was objecting to.  Despite all that, however, Crowley’s own incident report shows he believed early on that Gates was lawfully in the residence:

While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me. I asked Gates to provide me with photo identification  [...] Gates initially refused, demanding that I show him identification but then did supply me with a Harvard University identification card.

Once Gates presented ID sufficient to establish he was a rightful occupant of the house, that should have been the end of the story; instead, when Gates followed Crowley out onto the porch — likely still yelling, though accounts differ — he was arrested with the arch comment,“Thank you for accommodating my earlier request.”

Yet it was Gates’s home and his porch; while there — actually, while anywhere, but certainly on his own property — he could be rude to and shout at whomever he likes,  including police officers, by the ancient principle of “my home is my castle,” by the First and Fourth Amendments, and even by specific Massachusetts case law.**  In one of her typically excellent analyses, digby of “Hullabaloo” sums up (emphasis added):

“Henry Louis Gates may have acted like a jackass in his house that day. But Sergeant Crowley arresting him for being “tumultuous” was an abuse of his discretion, a fact which is backed up by the fact that the District Attorney used his discretion to decline to prosecute. Racially motivated or not he behaved “stupidly” and the president was right to say so. “

Race as red herring, citizen as peon
It’s possible that Crowley was more likely to arrest an ‘uppity’ black man than an ‘uppity’ white one under the same circumstances; we’ll never know.  But I think it would have been a much more interesting discussion to take Crowley’s own documented (some would say alleged) anti-profiling expertise and/or the testimonials of his black colleagues at face value — because that would have led directly to the question why Crowley felt entitled to arrest anyone under the circumstances he described.  Unfortunately, that discussion was short-circuited first by Gates and then by Obama, both describing the case as an incident of “racial profiling” when it never really fit that label per se.

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French immersion, Jerry Weast, and the future of the Montgomery County Public School System

Our little girl is not so little any more: she just finished fifth grade in June.  Soon after, like many kids at the end of their elementary school years, she and her classmates went on a class trip.  Unlike most fifth graders, however, this trip was to Quebec, Canada, and my daughter and her classmates conversed in fluent French with the tour guide, hotel staff, and assorted other Quebecois.

To the right is a video Maddie took while on a guided bus tour of the city.  I took a few years of French way back in junior high school and high school.  But even back then, I think I’d have had next to no idea what the tour guide was jabbering on about.  The kids, by contrast, are understanding the tour guide, answering questions, and likely joking with and about each other — all in French.

It’s all thanks to one of the hidden gems — all too well-hidden, perhaps — of Montgomery County, Maryland’s public schools (MCPS): a French immersion program that comprises about half of the student body at Sligo Creek Elementary School in Silver Spring.  The program is one of seven K-5 language immersion programs in the system. *

Language immersion programs are exactly what they sound like: kids are dropped into a kindergarten setting in which the teacher speaks only French from the time the kids walk into the room until the time they leave for home.  By the end of kindergarten — much sooner, really — they’re doing all the things any kindergartener does: lining up for lunch, singing songs, drawing pictures, starting to read stories — all while instructed in French.  And by the end of fifth grade, they’re doing much more sophisticated projects; for her part, Maddie did one on “la lutte pour le vote des femmes americaines” – a nicely written, five page poster history of American women’s struggle for the vote.

The case of the missing half time teacher
While looking over the MCPS web site one evening in January, my wife came across a “Q&A” exchange (between school board members and MCPS staff about the 2010 budget.  Question 10 read: “Will the reduction of 8.7 elementary special program teacher positions impact the French Immersion classes at Sligo Creek Elementary School?” The answer — unbeknownst to the school administration until my wife told them about it — was yes, but don’t worry about it too much:

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A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) that read, in part:

Thanks to your hard work, the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed 219-212 in last Friday’s historic vote. Although, as we’ve said, key features of the bill fall short of what scientists say is urgently needed, there were several members of Congress who emerged as true climate leaders — including Congressman Van Hollen. Congressman Van Hollen is on a well-deserved recess until July 6th but I want to make sure he hears from his constituents when he gets back. That’s why on Tuesday, July 7th, I plan to hand-deliver a giant thank you card to his office. (Care to join me? Just email me)…

I decided against joining in on the giant thank you card. But I think the story of just how Congressman Van Hollen got the “climate leader” accolades and “climate hero” gala festivities CCAN has been bestowing on him is worth telling.

Gordon Clark, the 2008 election, and “cap and dividend”
In last fall’s election, Representative Van Hollen was opposed by (among others) Green Party candidate Gordon Clark — whom I supported. Van Hollen is a personally popular liberal Democrat elected in something of an uprising against local moderate Republican Connie Morella in 2002; he’s not hurting for campaign funds, and many in the area are proud he’s chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — despite Van Hollen’s association with the disappointing Democratic “opposition” to Bush between 2002 and 2008.

Clark, a long time activist in and director of peace and environmental movements,  campaigned hard and turned in a strong debate performance — which Van Hollen couldn’t attend due to the emergency bailout vote the same evening.  On Election Day Van Hollen easily outdistanced both Clark and his Republican challenger.

But the Clark/Green Party campaign was influential nonetheless; as often happens with third parties, they peel off some activists, they serve as an important source of ideas, and they can win some important skirmishes even if they wind up losing the contest. In this case, the skirmish Clark won was one for the endorsement of an influential local political group, Progressive Neighbors. In a very surprising development (covered on this site), Clark tied with Van Hollen after a kind of “mail-in debate” — the only debate of any kind between the two candidates in the campaign. Clark had parried Van Hollen’s less coolly composed letter with point after point detailing Van Hollen’s lack of leadership, especially on the financial crisis, peace, and environmental issues.

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We have, in my view, a fairly simple set of connected propositions:

1. Torture is illegal under United States law and international law.*
2. The United States of America knows of Americans who have committed torture, as well as of Americans who have conspired to commit torture.**
3. The United States of America is required by U.S. statute and international treaty to prosecute such crimes when it becomes aware of them.***

It’s really all over but the shouting and denials when you set these propositions next to each other.

Of course, shouting and denials there will be.  But while I’d expect it from borderline psychopaths like Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and Dick Cheney, it remains unsettling to see it from David Broder, who this weekend penned the most shameful editorial of a once illustrious career. Broder’s Sunday “Stop Scapegoating” piece is a kind of negative Gettysburg Address: a radical downward redefinition of the American creed.  His lazy, deeply dangerous argument against prosecution boils down to one irrelevant canard, one telling assertion, and one pitiful abdication of what it means to be an American citizen.

Accountability cloaks vengeance - so no accountability
Broder’s irrelevant canard comes early in the piece in guessing at the motives of those who want prosecution, and pretending that should matter:

Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations. Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.

As hilzoy writes, “First, who died and made David Broder Sigmund Freud? How on earth does he presume to know what the actually motivates those of us who think that the people who authorized torture should be investigated?” But also: “So what? Suppose our “plausible-sounding argument” is actually true: “without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations.” In that case, by not investigating torture now, we would be setting ourselves up for future government lawbreaking. Isn’t it obvious that preventing this matters more than anyone’s motives?”

Everything was done properly
But Broder’s most telling assertion — and, in the context of the rest of his opinion piece, the most deeply shameful one — comes next:

The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places — the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department — by the proper officials.

Let’s assume Broder was right (although he isn’t****).  Would that be sufficient?
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Another point of view about license plate scanners, followed by my response.

You’re going to have to come up with something better than the Fourth Amendment if you want the Constitution to support your position. Unreasonable search and seizure? I’m sure you’re not referring to “seizure” so “search” must be the issue. You want to try to craft a definition of “search” that fits here? I can’t.

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From my perspective, the license plate scanner issue is one of surveillance and data protection.  Those issues are not just about what is and is not narrowly permissible to the police and the state, but about what our rights should be. Those rights were not exhaustively described by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights — how could they have been, by people who had no inkling of computers, video surveillance, GPS systems, etc.

I believe that the plain spirit of the Fourth Amendment and the Bill of Rights supports my view that license plate scanners represent an unreasonable search or seizure of information.

But whether I’m right about that or not, we still have the right to choose a less-surveilled, less abuse-prone society over a more heavily surveilled one. We can decide what kind of community we want. And I should think the burden ought to be on those who want more surveillance, not those who want less of it.

I’m not a legal expert (obviously, many will snort). I just try to reason out how my fundamental rights are or are not protected by what I see happening. I understand the counterarguments — you won’t need to repeat them — but the “search” or “seizure” of my “effects” that I see happening takes place at the time my license plate identification is compared to a database, for no reason other than that a squad car rolled past my car. (I use both words only because while it seems more like a “search” to me, some legally trained people I’ve talked to say it’s perhaps more of a “seizure”.)

But even if license plate scanning is permissible under the 4th amendment, as narrowly understood and adjudicated today, I’m more concerned with the anti-surveillance spirit that caused that amendment to be written. We fought a revolution once, among other things to be rid of unwarranted intrusions and chilling oversight, to be able to stand up and say we’re a free people, secure in the knowledge that we control and monitor our police and our government, not the other way around.

I like that spirit better than one seeking to justify “security” measures of little value. I hold out hope that we’ll either reject this particular security measure, or very, very strongly regulate its use.

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EDIT, 9/22/10: ‘that amendment’ for ‘them’.

Last month I happened to open an email on a neighborhood listserv I follow.  It was a Takoma Park Police Department press release titled “Takoma Park Police to Acquire License Plate Recognition Scanner.”  The announcement was as follows:

Chief Ricucci is pleased to announce that the Takoma Park Police Department has been granted funding in FY2009, through the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP), for a “License Plate Recognition Scanner (LETC).”

LETC is attached to a police cruiser. It works by capturing digital license plate images as they pass a camera, whether mobile or fixed. The plates are automatically cross-checked in real time against multiple local, regional, statewide and, if appropriate, national databases to identify vehicles that are of interest to the authorities. In fact, LETC can access multiple databases simultaneously and report not only matches but which database contained the vehicle of interest. Vehicle matches are reported instantly, allowing the officer to take appropriate action. [...]

Research has shown that patrol officers equipped with the technology can have arrest rates significantly higher than officers working without it. This will deliver reductions in crime, enhanced community safety and safer roads.”

It turns out that “LETC” is not a technical acronym, but merely a funding source — it stands for “Law Enforcement and Corrections Tech Center” (and is therefore sometimes abbreviated LECTC), which is a federal funding mechanism (via the Department of Justice) for law enforcement technology grants such as this one.  The Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP) receives LETC funds and disburses them to grant applicants deemed worthy of support; I’ll return to that in a moment.

This kind of program is something security expert Bruce Schneier calls “wholesale surveillance,” and it’s spreading fast.  Possibly the best known example is New York City’s “Operation Sentinel” scanning license plates coming into Manhattan via bridges and tunnels; in August 2008, WJZ (Baltimore) reported that a $4.5 million Homeland Security grant will pay for about 200 of the devices (either fixed or in squad cars) in the Maryland/DC area.

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