Author: Tom Sullivan

Playing Washington for a sucker
by Tom Sullivan

Nicholas Kristof offers a reverie this morning on “our extraordinary national inheritance, one of the greatest gifts of our ancestors — our public lands.” Visionaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot fought to preserve them for the enjoyment of all:

Their vision reflected a deep belief at the time, among Republicans as well as Democrats, in public services that transcended class. The result was the world’s best public school system at the time, networks of public libraries, public parks and beaches, and later a broad system of public universities and community colleges.

Those are at risk today in a venal culture driven more by bottom lines than common goods. One half expects any day to hear a plan to sell off Yellowstone or Yosemite as “weekend homes for Internet tycoons,” as Kristof suggests. The Midas cult has not yet taken drills and sledgehammers to our heritage the way ISIS has to the cradle of civilization. But while our financial cult’s methods are more subtle, its goals are similar: to erase the very memory of a culture. Here, monuments to collective achievements dim the gleam of personal shrines erected to Self.

Public universities accessible to all are under threat from the cult’s policy drills and sledgehammers. Washington Monthly  profiles LSU Chancellor F. King Alexander, whose fight to preserve public higher education puts him at odds with efforts to remove the public from higher education. At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing this summer chaired by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, LSU’s King Alexander argued for more federal regulation:

The “greatest challenge facing public universities,” King Alexander explains, is that states today spend about half as much on higher education on a per capita income basis as they did in 1981. This is a direct result, he says, of a regulatory failure built into federal law. In other areas of federal policy, such as transportation and health care, federal dollars come with strings attached—states have to pitch in a set amount of money too. That’s not the case for higher education, where money follows the student to private and public colleges alike, and states have no requirements to fund public universities at a certain (or indeed any) level. The result is that when states are under budget pressure, as they have been in the years since the financial crisis, they slash spending on higher ed. The burden of those cuts then gets shifted to students, in the form of higher tuition, and to the federal government, in greater spending on grants, tax credits, and subsidized student loans.

Pouring more money into federal higher education support, argued Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, will do no good so long as states keep disinvesting in it. Freshman Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana reluctantly agreed, “I’m against states being mandated to do something, but it appears unless states are mandated to do something they’re not going to do so.” The hearing did not go in the direction Lamar Alexander had wanted. He hopes to rewrite the Higher Education Act (HEA) to remove “costly and burdensome federal red tape imposed on states and colleges.”

To that end, King Alexander wants federal dollars to come with strings requiring states to live up to their obligation to provide adequate public funding as so many state constitutions (and statehood enabling acts) require. He believes “that as a condition of federal higher education aid, states should be required to provide a minimum amount of their revenues to their public colleges and universities.” King succeeded in getting a “maintenance of effort” provision into a piece of 2008 federal legislation that set a floor for state funding as a qualification for federal support. While many states cut their funding to within 1 percent of the floor, they did not go below it. Not until the law expired.

The disagreement over maintenance of effort is one over the proper role of the federal government. Lamar Alexander reflected the Republican Party’s view on states’ rights when he told me that maintenance of effort “usurp[s] the prerogative of the constitutional authority of governors and legislators to decide how to spend state dollars by, in effect, being coercive.” King, for his part, describes himself as a “federalist” when it comes to education policy and says “states’ rights is George Wallace standing in front of the Alabama admissions office not letting anybody in.” To King, the debate over maintenance of effort is nothing less than a battle over whether Americans of modest birth will have anything like the same opportunities as the affluent to better themselves through higher education. Spend enough time around King, and you get the sense that he became a public university president less because he wants to run a school than because it provides him a parapet from which to fend off the hordes trying to destroy public higher education.

King has been making his arguments for twenty years, but until recently Democrats were more focused on expanding the direct student aid program to help poor and middle-class students by increasing Pell Grants and middle-class tax credits, and creating generous repayment plans for student loans. But as student loan debt has risen and governors like Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker in Wisconsin cut higher education budgets, Democrats are increasingly realizing that their unquestioning advocacy of federal direct aid has allowed states to play Washington for a sucker. That’s why they chose King Alexander as their witness.

There is a cost to maintaining a country and its character. Not just in blood, but in treasure. Too many of our leaders quick to spend the former are more miserly when it comes to the latter.

Respect mah accountabilitah!
by Tom Sullivan

Accountability. It’s not just for teachers anymore. Media Matters caught this yesterday morning. So did I:

Fox’s Tucker Carlson declared that a new mandate requiring New York City police officers to provide written justification for stop-and-frisk encounters is “an attack on police practices that have worked.”

NYPD officers will soon be “required to inform some suspects why they’re being stopped and frisked” after a federal judge approved a mandate proposed by the federal monitor tasked with addressing the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. “The form would explain that officers are authorized to make stops in some circumstances and spell out what might have prompted the stop, including suspicion of concealing or possessing a weapon, engaging in a drug transaction or acting as a lookout,” The Wall Street Journal explained, noting how the move comes after a federal judge found “the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional and ordered an overhaul of the department’s procedures.”

Countering Carlson’s assertion that this is just “another layer of bureaucracy” impeding police from protecting the public from criminals, Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore cop was on message in defense of the new regulation:

“It’s a ‘best practice.’ Many police departments are already doing this across the nation. This is a very important issue regarding the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, where we should be free from unreasonable search and seizure. We should be secure among our persons, our places, and effects. Something this serious warrants documentation.”

John Rafferty, a retired NYPD lieutenant who runs a private security service, called it a “tactical nightmare,” explaining:

“You have minutes to search for people who have committed crimes, many times. And if you stop the wrong person, you’re going to spend time to have this officer fill out a form rather than continuing to look for the actual perpetrators. It’s ridiculous.”

Ridiculous, that is, if arresting dangerous criminals is what you actually spend most of your time doing. There is some debate about that. Right now, “one in seven New Yorkers have a warrant out for their arrest.” That’s 1.2 million people:

Commissioner Bratton and NYPD officials insist they are merely enforcing the law in areas with the highest rates of crime, which happen to be predominantly minority communities in the outer boroughs. Still, the sheer scale of the effort is remarkable: In stark contrast to the annual rate of only a few thousand criminal cases a year, the NYPD issued 458,000 quality of life summons in 2014. The list of summonsable offenses is staggering. You can be fined for walking between subway cars, putting a backpack on a subway seat, or using a friend’s MetroCard to enter the subway. Loitering (even in front of your own building), being in a park after 1 a.m., and jaywalking can all result in court summons, depending on the officer’s discretion.

By misusing their discretion, a handful of officers might account for a high percentage of a department’s annual arrests, and those discretionary arrests across the country seem to include disproportionately high numbers of minority citizens, and not just in New York City. This report is from last October:

The report, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, said that blacks are 11.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though advocates say that white and black people use the drug at similar rates.

The research also showed that blacks are nearly nine times more likely to be arrested for disorderly conduct in Minneapolis than whites. The racial disparities for the rates of arrest for vagrancy (7.54 times more likely) and for minors violating curfew or loitering (16.39) are equally stark, according to the report that was based on arrest data from the Minneapolis Police Department.

“What might be viewed as a noisy argument between two white people, might become disorderly conduct when it’s between two black people,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director for the ACLU’s local chapter.

And we mustn’t forget Ferguson, where the U.S. Department of Justice found:

* African Americans account for 95 percent of Manner of Walking charges; 94 percent of all Fail to Comply charges; 92 percent of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92 percent of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89 percent of all Failure to Obey charges.

* African Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the Municipal Judge, and in 2013 African Americans accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.

* African Americans account for 96 percent of known arrests made exclusively because of an outstanding municipal warrant.

Getting back to New York:

Amid the debate over increasingly dangerous, and in some cases lethal, police tactics, a recent report by WNYC has discovered a disturbing reality about the way that New York’s police officers operate.

According to their findings, just 15% of New York Police Department arresting officers generate over 50% of all “resisting arrest” charges, while an even smaller group of just 5% accounted for over 40% of those incidents.

Those incidents, by the way, can result in injuries and costly lawsuits. Once more, back to the Twin Cities:

But more people in the community are calling for greater accountability for police officers, saying they’d like to see the money the city spends on settlements used for other needs.

“There’s got to be a way of holding an officer accountable for what they do and not put their misdeeds on the backs of taxpayers of St. Paul,” said Jeff Martin, president of the St. Paul NAACP. “There’s got to be some equity in the system — if you’re an officer who cost the city some money, you should be held to a higher standard, whether that’s losing your job or maybe some of your pension.”

How do we keep track of whether a certain subset of officers has a proclivity for stopping people at random, for seeing disorderly conduct where others see merely a noisy argument, whether suspects seem to get injured resisting arrest more by certain officers than by others, or whether certain officers spend a ridiculous amount of time (Rafferty’s word) filing paperwork — “another layer of bureaucracy” (Carlson’s words) — for arrests they’ve made on “manner of walking” or open container charges while dangerous criminals make their getaways?

Accountability is all the rage for other subsets of government employees. If we tracked and evaluated the performance of police departments the way we do the performance of schools, do you think we might find “innovative solutions,” cost savings, and improved performance there, too?

Increased oversight might explain why your typical authoritarian would oppose accountability measures for the police. Teachers? We expect to hold them accountable. Government bureaucrats? We expect to hold them accountable. But police? Heaven forfend!

Because, you see, the authority-authorities are special. If we hold them to the standards of accountability we are so free with when it comes to common public employees, where will it end? Next thing, people will want to hold the High Priests of Wall Street accountable for committing trillions of dollars worth of fraud on a global scale. And we can’t have that.

Looking before leaping
by Tom Sullivan

Many refugees. Fewer solutions. Even fewer explanations.

Grim news from Austria:

A truck full of refugees discovered abandoned on an Austrian motorway on Thursday contained more than 70 bodies, the interior ministry said on Friday, announcing an updated death toll.

Austrian police had originally put the toll at up to 50 and are due to announce the exact number within hours. The vehicle had come to Austria from Hungary.

Dozens more perished in a sinking off the coast of Libya:

A boat reportedly packed with people from Africa and South Asia bound for Italy has sunk off the Libyan coast, raising fears that dozens have died.

A security official in Zuwarah, a town in the North African nation’s west from where the overcrowded boat had set off, said on Thursday there were about 400 people on board.

While an official death toll has not been announced, sources told Al Jazeera that dozens of people died in the incident, with many reported to have been trapped in the cargo hold when the boat capsized.

In Vienna, just east of the truck filled with bodies, European leaders at a scheduled summit struggled with a response:

“Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence and persecution,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. “And given the large number of unresolved conflicts in our neighborhood, the stream of refugees seeking protection in Europe will not abate in the foreseeable future.”

The gruesome discovery of the truck brings the total of refugee deaths to more than 2,390 this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, compared to 2,081 on the same date in 2014. Many die aboard boats or rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean Sea, or while jumping onto trains as they try to reach the United Kingdom from France’s port city of Calais, where about 3,000 people live in squalid camps near the Eurotunnel entrance.

The BBC has this explainer on the source of the migrants and refugees. The Guardian attempts to dispel some of the misinformation: “Far from being propelled by economic migrants, this crisis is mostly about refugees.” Nearly two-thirds are fleeing “countries torn apart by war, dictatorial oppression, and religious extremism.”

What you won’t find is much analysis about what precipitated the conflicts in Libya and Syria, and one of the largest refugee crises since the end of the Vietnam War, from which we apparently learned little about looking before leaping. Hullabaloo readers can probably fill in those blanks without much prompting. Then again, one London tabloid has an explanation to warm chickenhawks’ hearts: We didn’t intervene enough.

So it goes.

“Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country”
by Tom Sullivan

The usually jocular Charlie Pierce appeared shaken last night on Chris Hayes’ show when he spoke about the on-air shootings yesterday in Virginia. He came packing the truth. “Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country right now,” Pierce said, glancing at the floor. “A lot of stuff that was in the kind of foul tributaries of American life has made it into the mainstream.”

Pierce wrote earlier about the shooting at Esquire:

A news crew, doing a completely ordinary happy-face morning feature at a mall get blown away on camera. If this had happened in Somalia, we’d have a lot of earnest talk about the dangers of a failed society. If it had happened in Syria, Lindsey Graham might liquefy entirely and disappear in a rush down a storm drain. But it happened here, in the exceptional home of American exceptionalism, so, once again, we will be told that Alison Parker and Adam Ward are merely more of the price we pay for the exceptional exceptionalism of a free society.

The killings of a reporter and cameraman as they covered a “happy-face” news story brought gun violence perilously close for both Hayes and Pierce. Pierce was blunt about it:

“It is worrisome to be out on the campaign trail now. It is not terrifying. It’s nothing like following a rifle platoon into the Hindu Kush or something, but there’s something unsettling and something that’s come loose in the body politic. And, frankly, I’m worried about it.”

We are a country now where more money equals more speech for the elite, and more guns equals more freedom for the rest, and murderers post their snuff films on social media. (Next time it will be streamed live.*) What’s to worry about?

Somewhere in the flood of post-September 11 articles about how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us, one writer asked, Would America keep its head? Uh, no. Except the country’s post-September 11 temporary insanity seems, like untreated depression, to have settled in and taken a “set.” The governor on the engine has broken. No, that’s not right. It has been sabotaged. Now it is racing out of control. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

Futurist Sara Robinson periodically reassesses the country’s drift towards the abyss. With daily mass shootings, with Donald Trump threatening to round up and deport millions, and with his “passionate” followers beating the homeless, calling for “white power,” and demanding that Latino citizens “Get out of my country,” it might be time to re-check the cultural doomsday clock and see how many minutes it is to midnight.

* when Howard Cosell went live to cover the assassination of “El Presidente,” it was in Woody Allen’s fictional banana republic.

Biden time, or what?
by Tom Sullivan

Speculation in the press about a Biden run for president caught fire after Vice President Joe Biden met with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Saturday. But Politico reports that Biden will not attend this week’s Democratic National Committee meeting in Minneapolis. That should dampen the speculation unless Biden turns up by surprise. All the major Democratic contenders are expected.

If Biden decides to run, writes Michael Tomasky, the Warren meeting was brilliant press. But things could get ugly fast. The Obama-Clinton primary fight of 2008 was ugly enough. In the end, Tomasky believes, “Obama had the larger and more morally urgent historical claim to make in the minds of most Democrats and liberals. The woman would have to wait, as women so often do.” Making women wait again while yet another white guy takes the White House could be a gut punch to women who believe it’s now Clinton’s turn. Whatever their policy differences with Clinton, too many of the male persuasion on the left don’t seem to appreciate that. Remember the PUMAs?

The Washington Post offers several more reasons why a Biden run would be risky for his legacy. Also, as pretty much everyone observes, it is pretty late in the game for Biden to get in, unless he is positioning himself, as Tomasky suggests, to be the contingency candidate should Clinton succumb to some new “scandal,” as she never has before.

There is a wide-open city council race where I live, in a town where Democrats dominate. The question I ask myself about every candidate is: What does this lefty bring to city council that we don’t already have? As the panel last night on All In with Chris Hayes noted, that’s really the question to answer about a Joe Biden race for president. There’s really nowhere for Biden to go in this field. Where’s his opening?

But the speculation about a Biden-Warren ticket seems outlandish. Warren has already declined a draft movement herself and seems convinced that she will have more clout over a longer term right where she stays in the Senate. Being President of the Senate would take Warren out of the main action. And as NPR reminds us, Biden’s past support for the credit card and banking industries might not make Biden her first choice to champion her issues. Bernie Sanders is already doing a good job of moving the needle on those, even if mostly with the progressive base so far.

Beyond the fringe
by Tom Sullivan

Lazier pundits like to view Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as fringe candidates. But that’s Village-speak for “not establishment.” What fans find attractive about both is their iconoclastic styles, which couldn’t be more different. Writing for Bloomberg News, Will Leitch attended Donald Trump’s event in Mobile, Alabama last weekend and found that the common thread among those standing in line in the heat was this:

They were sick of all the bulls–t. They were sick of being talked to like they’re idiots. They might not be up on the policy papers or every specific detail of the Iran deal. But they can smell bulls–t.

Trump, the flashy billionaire, the reality show host, the consummate bullshitter, uses bullshit to cut through bullshit. They like that. Leitch explains:

They hate Hillary Clinton, they hate Obama, they hate Jeb Bush, and they hate them all for the same reason: They think they’re lying to them. Many, I found, especially hated Bush for his Spanish-language campaign ads. This came up several times. Bush is “as bad as any of them,” said Tony Hamilton, a truck driver from nearby Pensacola, Florida. “I voted for his brother and his dad, but not him, never. He’s just like the rest of them.”

They hate them so much that even if incoherent — his speech was all tangent and no theme — Trump’s unabashed bullshit comes across as authenticity, and that’s good enough. Even when Trump asks an audience of lower-income, southern T-party voters, “anybody here have a Mercedes-Benz? They’re wonderful, right? Great, great cars,” the crowd goes with it.

Meanwhile, for all his unhipness, Bernie Sanders has attracted a large percentage of the youth vote, Nathan Heller writes at the New Yorker. Sanders feels “open and friendly,” but in a more coherent way:

… From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fundraising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.

With 37 percent favorable among under-30 voters in
one poll, Sanders hardly sounds fringe. Hillary Clinton polls 40 percent among the same age group, writes Heller.

Both Sanders and Trump supporters seem tired of business as usual. But while Sanders seems like a seasoned veteran with ideas whose time has come, Trump comes off as a pitchman selling himself as “new and improved.”

But Mr. President, you must be-leeve
by Tom Sullivan

While we’re believing that Donald Trump is going to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without a plan to pay for it, and while we’re believing he’ll build a 2,000 mile-long southern border fence and get Mexico to pay for it (because Donald knows how to negotiate), why not engage in a military buildup without a plan to pay for it? (And without raising taxes. That’s a given.)

According to Politico, “a growing roster of Republican hopefuls” believe the U.S. needs dozens of new warships if it expects to keep throwing around its global weight. Not that the news outlet could find any to quote for the article. Honestly, this almost reads as if it should be labeled “sponsored content” from the Navy League of the United States for the group’s lobbying campaign, “America’s Strength: Investing in the Navy-Marine Corps Team”:

It’s a love affair steeped in the ideology that more warships bristling with aircraft and missiles translates into more security — and that control of the high seas will not only guarantee international trade but also check the worst ambitions of other powers like Russia and China. And it’s also fueled by a powerful shipbuilding lobby in Washington that is also calling anew for billions more in federal spending to beef up the sea service.

Christie was the first to raise the issue earlier this election season, saying the Navy “should be an armada without equal,” and pledging, if elected president, to reach the goal of 350 ships. Walker also noted earlier this year that “we’re at, what, 275, 280 vessels right now? We’re headed down toward 250. That’s less than half of where we were under Reagan.”

And on Monday, Kasich weighed in, saying that “reinvigorating the Navy’s ability to project power globally is critical to defending and advancing American interests, including ensuring the free flow of global commerce.” Rubio has been more nuanced, calling for increasing the number of aircraft carrier strike groups from 10 to 12 (the newest carrier, about to enter the fleet, is estimated to cost $13 billion).

Richard Danzig, former Navy secretary in the Clinton administration, believes this is “more sloganeering than strategic thought.” Candidates are substituting a nice, round number for sound planning. But then, it’s what they do, and it’s what the Navy League of the United States very much wants.

This rebuild-the-fleet tough talk is familiar to anyone paying attention when The Great Communicator ran for president in 1980. Reagan promised a military buildup, that trickle down economics would, and that his tax cuts would help America grow its way out of the budget hole they created. Really. Instead, the national debt nearly tripled. Can you hear Donald Trump promising the same?

Sometime during the Reagan presidency when economic reality was sinking in, at least for the country, Doonesbury ran a strip (I wish I could find) simply showing the White House exterior and Reagan talking to the fairy Tinkerbell. Reagan had worries. Tinkerbell had promised he could cut taxes, build a 600-ship navy, and balance the budget all at the same time.

“Oh, Mr. President, but you must believe,” said Tinkerbell. Our current crop of Republican carnival barkers want Americans with swelling hearts and short memories to believe again, with Donald Trump in the role of P.T. Barnum.

Update: A clever reader supplied a link to the Doonesbury strip mentioned above. Thanks!

A suspiciously “European” solution
by Tom Sullivan

American presidential candidates debate deporting millions of immigrant families to Mexico as Europe faces the worst refugee crisis since WWII. On the Macedonian border with Greece, CNN reported last night:

Refugees who are soaking wet and hungry in makeshift camps, with only a few nongovernmental organizations present to help, told the CNN team of sheer misery.

A Syrian man said he never imagined Europe would be like this.

“Look at her,” he said, motioning to his 3-year-old daughter in his arms. “In Syria she was a princess, now she is like a rag. They are treating us like animals.”

He said that if someone could get him back to Syria, he would go. “Better to die from bombs in my homeland than die out here,” he said.

The Independent reports this morning:

For a second day, they came. And, for a second day, they faced a wall of riot shields, razor wire and batons. But on Saturday something was different. As the Macedonian police waved a handful of exhausted refugees through from Greece, something snapped and hundreds rushed the lines, causing chaos and police retaliation in the form of volleys of stun grenades and beatings. Many were injured.

And yet they still came and, eventually, with the tide of humanity too much to hold, the Macedonians opened the border with Greece. The police, who only hours before had swiped and batted at the crowds, simply stepped aside as thousands – men, women and children, many from Syria – streamed through, crying tears of joy as they began their next step to sanctuary and escape from the horrors of war in their own countries.

The Guardian, also this morning:

Hundreds of migrants have crossed unhindered from Greece into Macedonia after overwhelmed security forces appeared to abandon a bid to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe following days of chaos and confrontation.

Riot police remained, but did little to slow the passage of a steady flow of migrants on Sunday, many of them refugees from the Syrian war and other conflicts in the Middle East, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.

Macedonia had declared a state of emergency on Thursday and sealed its southern frontier to migrants arriving at a rate of 2,000 per day en route to Serbia then Hungary and the EU’s borderless Schengen zone. This led to desperate scenes at the border, as adults and children slept under open skies with little access to food or water.

Elsewhere on the Mediterranean, Italian and other naval vessels rescued another 2,000 refugees yesterday, responding to distress calls from more than 20 vessels in danger of sinking.

Donald Trump and others on the right are too busy insisting we have walls to build across our southern border to take notice. But maybe someone should point out that this is a suspiciously “European” solution coming out of the mouths of American politicians:

Throughout Europe, leaders are succumbing to the keep-them-out syndrome. Hungary is building a fence (along its border with Serbia). Spain has done the same (in Ceuta and Melilla). Bulgaria followed suit (on the border with Turkey). More fencing is springing up in Calais.

In Macedonia, which is not in the EU, they are deploying armoured vehicles against migrants. Will this work? Unlikely. When you flee atrocities and war, the desperation to reach a haven will always be stronger than security fences and dogs.

The causes of migration in Europe and the Middle East are more instability than economics, argues Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian. Human smugglers often portrayed as the source of the problem are simply reacting to the opportunities presented by demand for their services, as any conservative economist could tell you. But as I recall, one of the last mass migrations in my lifetime occurred after the U.S. military debacle in Vietnam. Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the current crisis presents itself in close proximity to American adventures in Iraq and Syria. Strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett has suggested that one of America’s greatest exports is security. Isn’t instability more like it?

Cons not ready for the Big Con
by Tom Sullivan

Real activists work in community organizing, political campaigns, voter registration, call-your-congresscritter, and Get-Out-the Vote efforts, etc. Then there is conservative James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Anti-government militiamen play with weapons in the woods, pretending they’re Rambo. O’Keefe’s hidden-camera crews play at being undercover agents, hoping to coax real activists into doing or saying something that, with the right editing and promotion, will appear nefarious on Fox News.

Project Veritas now seems to have set its sights on the Hillary Clinton campaign, Time reports:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices around the country have been put on alert after at least two women approached Iowa staff under the guise of being supporters in an apparent effort to catch the campaign engaging in improper or illegal activity, a Clinton campaign official said.

The motivations of the women is not known, but their alleged techniques match those of Project Veritas, the conservative group run by James O’Keefe, which specializes in undercover stings meant to embarrass liberal groups and politicians. The group declined to comment on the Clinton campaign’s allegations. “Project Veritas does not comment on investigations, real or imagined,” said Daniel Pollack, the director of communications for the group.

But it’s pretty easy to imagine them being behind an effort to secretly film campaign staffers seeming to accept illegal donations or advocating voter registration infractions after repeated prodding. It worked against ACORN, and copycats recently used the same technique to cause Planned Parenthood grief.

A few of us were at a private party last year when an associate of O’Keefe’s sneaked in “and made a bee line to [Lisa] Graves” from the Center for Media and Democracy. Graves said the team had been stalking her at the Netroots Nation conference all day. They were promptly ejected.

Give me that old time Constitution
by Tom Sullivan

It was good for Samuel Adams. It’s good enough for me.

Donald Trump’s championing the elimination of birthright citizenshhip is a xenophobe’s dream. Trump is getting enough mileage out of hyping the “anchor baby” threat that many among the Republican presidential field are drafting off him, hoping to hang on long enough to pass him in the final laps. Talking Points Memo’s David Leopold debunks some of the nonsense, summing up Trump’s immigration reform plan in four words: They have to go.

When it comes down to it, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has very little to do with immigration; it is fundamentally focused on the preservation of civil rights. Trump’s extremist proposal to end birthright citizenship — whether by elimination or reinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause — comes at the grave cost of abridging civil rights, even hearkening back to the days of Dred Scott, when people were viewed as commodities to be bought and sold.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you listen to conservative talk radio in Iowa. Media Matters reports:

Iowa radio host and influential conservative kingmaker Jan Mickelson unveiled an immigration plan that would make undocumented immigrants who don’t leave the country after an allotted time “property of the state,” asking, “What’s wrong with slavery?” when a caller criticized his plan.

Calling the Iowa state fair “the carnival of the damned,” Charlie Pierce wonders why any American politician would ever engage, not with Mickelson, but with the audience that tunes in for this sort of vulgarity.

Michael Keegan from People for the American Way condemns Republicans for entertaining the notion that we abandon the 14th Amendment:

The Republican presidential contenders’ rush to badmouth a basic constitutional right — in an apparent attempt to appeal to their supposedly Constitution-loving far-right base — speaks volumes about what they really mean when they talk about constitutionalism. They use their pocket Constitutions for the parts that come in handy. The rest of it? Not so much.

Besides, the Founders didn’t pass the 14th Amendment, so technically it’s not really the Constitution, is it? Give us that old time Constitution, back when we didn’t need the specter of voter fraud to justify keeping lesser-thans from the polls.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, Rick Perlstein wrote. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, that flexibility is baked into the right’s anti-gay wedding cake.

They not only tolerate the relativism of which they accuse the left, they embrace it. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast explains that far from being shunned by the GOP’s evangelical base, the religious right is embracing Trump in spite of his whatever faith, his string of marriages, and advocating “getting even” in his speech at Liberty University. After all, an eye for an eye is in the Bible, right?

Watch how often believers in nominally Christian America reference the Bible. Except when the Savior’s New Testament teachings about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, rendering unto Caesar and turning the other cheek make them feel that Christ is too soft on personal responsibility or too left on social issues. Then they turn to the 39 pre-Christian books of the Bible filled with good, Old Testament-fashioned smiting and stoning and vengeance and wrath of God stuff – hoping to get a second opinion.

Old Testament Patriots approach America’s founding the same way. The Constitution is holy writ, yes, but when keeping to its laws and principles makes them feel soft on terror and people less American than they are, right-wingers turn to pre-ratification letters and speeches by the founders – particularly the ones whose ideas lost early arguments as the Constitution took shape – hoping to get a second opinion.