In responding to my post below Kidding On The Square writes a very nice treatise on the life of the Puritans, a subject so relevant today….for so many reasons. He quotes from Richard Bushman’s book From Puritan to Yankee
No attempt to trace the history of liberty can deal with the detached individual in isolation. Freedom is a condition not of the single man alone but of man in relationship to a community. The group protects him against the misuse of the power of others and provides the setting within which he can advantageously exercise his own powers. Therefore, changes in the nature of the community, which necessarily either increase or restrain the capacity of the individual to act, affect his liberty.
…
Particulary significant in the analysis of the process by which the Puritans became Yankeees is the light it throws on the relationship between society and individual personality. The description of the forces in the community that gave birth to the wish to be free, among men brought up in a closed order, illuminates an important, and neglected, facet of the history of liberty in the United States.
Via Peter Daou I see that the right wing bloggers are all atwitter about this article in which a teacher is reported to be suing his principal for allegedly refusing to let him teach the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God.(Well, technically it mentions a Creator.) According to these furious Republicans, the founders are rolling in their graves:
Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.
“It’s a fact of American history that our founders were religious men, and to hide this fact from young fifth-graders in the name of political correctness is outrageous and shameful,” said Williams’ attorney, Terry Thompson.
“Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country,” he said. “There is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence.”
Vidmar could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose and claims violations of Williams rights to free speech under the First Amendment.
Phyllis Vogel, assistant superintendent for Cupertino Unified School District, said the lawsuit had been forwarded to a staff attorney. She declined to comment further.
Perhaps the facts are just as the lawsuit alleges in which case the principal has some explaining to do. But before we make that judgment it might be worth our while to find out if what this teacher is saying IS ACTUALLY TRUE. Nobody from the other side has commented and nobody knows the whole story. Anybody can file a lawsuit and call the press. It doesn’t make it a fact. Indeed, somebody really ought to ask themselves if an attorney making the statement “there is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence,” isn’t just a little bit too cute.
Certainly, it’s a stretch to evoke the founding fathers on this religiosity issue, particularly Jefferson. He wasn’t a Christian, he was a Deist. I know that’s inconvenient, but it’s true. Back in those days you didn’t have to pass a religious test to be in government like you do today. Why, they even put it in the constitution.
“. . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that they wrought an effect on my quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.”
Franklin
“… I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.”
Jefferson
What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.”
Madison
. . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”
Adams
The 1796 treaty with Tripoli, negotiations begun under Washington and signed by Adams states:
[As] the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion
Please spare us the rewiting of history. There were Christians, Deists and atheists among the founders. But they were all products of the Enlightenment which the current Christians seem determined to reject. The founders are rolling in their graves, all right.
Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts
Rev. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family
Rev. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries
Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media
Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Association
(And 25+ other ministries)
That’s the best case for lawsuit reform I’ve ever heard, right there.
STF points out that this is coordinated to come out the day before Thanksgiving so that they can pound it over the holiday week-end without anybody being able to properly respond. These precious little stories are becoming commonplace these days. I remember the one about the teacher who was allegedly discriminated against because she put a picture of Bush on the bulletin board. It turned out that she had a fucking shrine up there and was insulting 12 year old kids whose parents were voting for Kerry. All the wingnuts keened and wailed about the unfairness of it all, always being the first to claim victimhood. As each tale is debunked they just move to the next.
These little personal stories are a very effective way to spread propaganda. We need to figure out a way to deal with this stuff.
Mr. Daschle is the first Senate party leader in more than half a century to lose a re-election campaign. His emotional talk, in which he also urged his colleagues to find “common ground,” was attended by nearly all of the Senate’s Democrats, who gathered him in their arms and hugged him afterward.
But only a few Republicans showed up, and Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, who broke with Senate tradition to campaign against Mr. Daschle in his home state, South Dakota, did not appear until after Mr. Daschle finished speaking.
Has there ever been a group of more graceless winners in history?
The scant Republican showing provoked Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, to speak out. “I don’t know why, why in the closing days, some element of comity, some element of grace, some element of respect for a human being, could not have gotten some of our friends out of their offices,” Mr. Lautenberg said.
Because they are assholes, all of them.
The Real American people have spoken. These fuckers represent them. They are going to lecture me about values and I’m supposed to respect them and believe them when they tell me they are concerned about their children. God help this misbegotten country.
There seems to be something of a scold mentality emerging about those of us who question the sincerity of those who are up in arms about the libertine ways of the liberal elite. I had perceived this as saying that the Red States are just as “immoral” as the Blue States. But some, like Bob Sommerby, see it as a case of liberals claiming moral superiority. To the extent that honesty is more moral than hypocrisy, then I suppose he may be right.
We could argue this all day, but the crux of this is Sommerby’s assertion that Democrats would win if we used Bill Clinton’s formula and respected the views of these citizens with whom we disagree. Well, yes. As a general rule we should always be respectful of others. But, that does not necessarily mean that those who disagree with us are sincere or that we will win by being respectful of them.
The problem is that the evidence suggests that those who are sincerely shocked by what they saw on MNF are not representative of the vast majority of the so-called Real American voter. How can we explain, for instance, how those NFL fans who complained about the “Desperate Housewives” skit on MNF were shocked by the brazen sexuality of it but have never before raised hell about the tittilating beer commercials that have been shown on that same broadcast for years? And, we can pretend that the sexy show the skit was was advertising isn’t hugely popular in the states that voted en masse for George Bush, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is:
The results of the presidential election are still being parsed for what they say about the electorate’s supposed closer embrace of traditional cultural values, but for the network television executives charged with finding programs that speak to tastes across the nation, one lesson is clear.
The supposed cultural divide is more like a cultural mind meld.
In interviews, representatives of the four big broadcast networks as well as Hollywood production studios said the nightly television ratings bore little relation to the message apparently sent by a significant percentage of voters.
The choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar. And that means the election will have little impact on which shows they decide to put on television, these executives say.
[…]
“Desperate Housewives” on ABC is the big new hit of the television season, ranked second over all in the country, behind only “C.S.I.” on CBS. This satire of suburbia and modern relationships features, among other morally challenged characters, a married woman in her 30’s having an affair with a high-school-age gardener, and has prompted several advertisers, including Lowe’s, to pull their advertisements.
In the greater Atlanta market, reaching more than two million households, “Desperate Housewives” is the top-rated show. Nearly 58 percent of the voters in those counties voted for President Bush.
And in the Salt Lake City market, which takes in the whole state of Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, “Desperate Housewives” is fourth, after two editions of “C.S.I.” and NBC’s “E.R.”; Mr. Bush rolled up 72.6 percent of the vote there.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that those fans who complained about the MNF sketch watch “Desperate Housewives.” (It’s that the blatantly sexy beer commercials and close-up crotch shots and cleavage of the cheerleaders on MNF for years have not provoked a similar outcry from fans that speaks to their hypocrisy.) But these ratings do suggest that contrary to the emerging myth about Bush voter outrage at libertine Blue State immorality, somebody isn’t being entirely truthful about their attitudes toward popular culture. After all, according to E&P the
“top three states for readership of Playboy magazine are Iowa, Wyoming, North Dakota … and they all top heathen New York by 2-1 margins.” Of course, they read it for the same reasons. The articles on stereo equipment.
Sommerby complains about Jeff Greenfield saying that the NFL fans who complained were the same ones who lied to their wives and went to strip clubs. A correspondent wrote in:
And to make sure the shocked fathers and mothers associate the descent of sexual morality with liberal Democrats, you tell me that Jeff Greenfield thinks that we fathers who complain about TV trash are hypocrites who “lie to their wives and drive to a topless bar”. He’s been watching The Sopranos too much; most of us family men don’t do that. Chances are, those who do that would agree with Jeff that everyone complaining about Hollywood and TV immorality is a lying hypocrite.
By the way, I’m a long-time Democrat living in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I was shocked by that sexual introduction to a football game. And we wonder why more middle class Catholic and Evangelical voters keep shifting from Democratic to Republican.
I’m not going to defend Greenfield’s comment because I have no way of knowing who is going to strip clubs and neither does this guy. It’s possible that married football fans are not primary among those who frequent these places. There are an awful lot of them, however, all through the country, many in the heartland. Somebody’s going to them.
But, what is relevant in his comment isn’t family men going to strip clubs, anyway. It’s family men who obviously watch the Sopranos complaining about the so-called immorality coming from Hollywood and implying that the Democratic party is responsible for it.
Does that guy in the Philly suburbs use the V-Chip? I don’t know. But I do know that Democrat Bill Clinton championed them and pushed through legislation that mandated them but only 7% or so of family men who have them use them. Evidently, he watches the NFL with all those sexy beer commercials and big pom pom waving babes. Does he shoo his kids away from the TV when they come on? Maybe. Does he keep his kids from watching “The Sopranos?” I certainly hope so. But hewatches it, that’s clear. (He sure seems to know about the Bada-Bing.) So, it’s a complicated situation, isn’t it? Lots and lots of things for parents to be concerned with. I understand that. But, considering what we can surmise about his viewing habits, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not entirely moved by his Claude Raines act.
Yes, we may be in different tribes. But vast numbers of people from both tribes are watching the same “trash” on television and getting divorced and having children out of wedlock and all the other horrible outgrowths of a society that is evidently in horrible decline. The difference is that one of the tribes seems to like to consume this crap and then pretend not only that they don’t, but that the other tribe is forcing it on them.
Perhaps pandering to this is the way to win votes. Our politicians have certainly made an effort to do it now for years. But as I have discussed elsewhere, it doesn’t seem to be working. But sure, we can keep pretending that that swathe of red America is really offended by the popular culture that we blues evidently represent, even though most Americans are the same consumerist purple from sea to shining sea.
It just seems to me that if you incorrectly diagnose the problem, you probably won’t prescribe the right cure. But, hey, words are cheap. Phony moralists have proved that from time immemorial. Except for the non-stop character assasination, Monica’s big mouth and impeachment, being respectful of conservative values (and Ross Perot)worked like a charm for Bill Clinton.
So, by all means let’s pander till we can’t stand up. We’ll all pretend to be duly chastised by our libertine ways and pay obeisance to those good heartland values that neither they nor we actually live by. Whatever. But, don’t expect me to actually believe that George W. Bush’s majority represents those things any more than we depraved liberals do. Politicians and preachers lie. Neilson ratings and product sales don’t.
David Niewert has written a very important post about Democrats and rural America that is worth reading and thinking about as we work out how we need to go forward. Ezra homes in on the point that young Democrats tend to leave rural America because there aren’t many opportunities for those who are interested in progressive politics because the national party is concentrated in the urban areas. This is an important point and one that I hope party activists and organizers are thinking long and hard about. It isn’t just the lack of direct political opportunity it’s the lack of local opinion leaders in the media as well. Everybody listens better to their neighbors than to strangers. They have the better hand.
But, I think that Niewert has hit upon the essence of the problem when he says:
People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.
If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.
And the chances are that what you’ll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you’re really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.
That’s what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.
[…]
It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it’s palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.
People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.
Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.
It’s important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican “solutions” like the 1995 “Freedom to Farm Act” have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation’s family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.
No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn’t bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America — it’s liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance — those are the reasons things are so bad.
These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.
People are hurting and they are told relentlessly day in and day out that liberals from big cities are the ones inflicting the pain. This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. This is the new American nativism. Minorities and immigrants have been joined by a blurry, indistinct non-American urbanite. (I suppose this is progress of a sort.)
I hear a lot about how Democrats need to stop with the so-called identity and rights based politics in favor of a populist message. It would certainly seem that that would be the way to reach these folks. They are getting the shaft from the very people for whom they are voting with a classic misdirection. It may be true that the liberal elites in the big cities don’t care much about rural America, but it’s the conservative elites who are actively and vigorously screwing them. But the Republicans have a way of dealing with that.
One of the most extensive national reports has been a New York Times Magazine piece headlined, “Mr. Washington goes to Mississippi.” The story opens with Barbour getting kicked out of a cow auction, and quotes people who portray him as race-baiter, an expert schmoozer and a shrewd fund-raiser with “despicable clients.”
Barbour, a Washington, D.C. lobbyist, quickly denounced the story.
“I am certainly never surprised when The New York Times attacks a Southern, conservative, pro-life, Christian Republican. Ask Charles Pickering,” he said, referring to the Mississippi judge whose nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was held up by Democrats who questioned the judge’s record on civil rights.
“It’s what I expected from The New York Times because they don’t like guys like me.”
And, therefore, they don’t like guys like you.
Democrats will say that we need to let the red state voters know who the enemy really is. We need to stop talking about guns, god and gays (and race) and get to the meat of the matter. As Max Sawicky wrote in his article “Why a Right Winger can’t be a populist,”
Culture and values, among other things, are highly contested. For the sake of this essay I put them aside to focus on Money.
The problem is that we can’t put them aside and concentrate on money because culture and values dictate what people think about money. And the culture and values of a large part of this country says that when it comes to money the government always gives it to the wrong people. We have a much more complicated problem on our hands than just moral values vs economics. And it goes all the way back to the beginning.
I wrote some things before (in response to the Dean campaign’s insistence that you could appeal to guys with confederate flags on their pick-ups because they need health care too) about studies that show that Americans rejected the European style welfare state largely because a fair portion of our people have always believed that the government only helps the undeserving. This stems from the fact that most social programs were traditionally handled through churches and immigrant organizations which meant that the government mostly funded African American welfare programs because they didn’t have the institutions or the money to do it for themselves. This led to a widely held belief in rural America that the government doesn’t help the white working man and woman, it instead takes their tax dollars and gives it to blacks.
It is from this basis that modern Republicans have built their case against the liberal elites who allegedly hold Real Americans in contempt. It is the essence of the Southern Strategy and it’s been highly successful for decades.
It’s worth repeating that despite what Dean said in the primaries about putting the FDR coalition back together, there has never been a time when a majority of southern whites and blacks in the south voted for the same party. Blacks were not allowed to vote in the south in the 1930’s. Indeed, it was only during the recent party realignment process that they overlapped at all. Let’s not kid ourselves about why this is.
We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don’t like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts. In the past, populists often shrewdly coupled their argument with nativist causes and were able to scapegoat either immigrants or blacks as part of their argument, thus partially nullifying this cultural resistence. Even FDR agreed to set aside the issue of civil rights for the duration. Needless to say, we aren’t going to go down that path.
So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.
Now, we could, of course, make a fetish of pointing out the awful truth — that most federal transfers come from the blue states to the red states. But, that doesn’t really address the problem, which comes down to attitudes about the big city poor (blacks) vs the rural poor (whites.) And all that is tied up with the monumental social changes of the last fifty years, which mostly benefit them but which Rush and Sean tell them is the cause of all their problems. Every day, all day, with relentless precision. The message is that liberals are taking their money, giving it to people they don’t like and then forcing their decadent culture on them to the point where they … cannot … resist.
Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams showing that the rural red states benefit far more from federal redistributon of wealth than the metropolitan blue states. You could explain that many of the social changes that have happened have benefitted them in their own lives while acknowledging that there has been a cost and that changes of this magnitude can be frightening and destabilizing. You could show that the massive New Deal programs and the post war expansion benefitted primarily the middle class, not the poor. You could rally the people to the side of their own class instead of the corporations who benefit from the policies currently in place.
But, as we’ve seen, people are not rational. In fact, when it comes to modern American politics there seems to be a conscious embrace of the irrational, an epistomological relativism that renders such reasoned arguments completely inneffectual. People who listen to Rush or absorb his message through osmosis in their social group are operating on the basis of some very long standing tribal hueristics that have been very sophisticatedly manipulated by the real elites in this country. It will take more than fiery speeeches about sticking it to the man to penetrate this mindset.
Certainly, a populist message should work for the Democratic party. But, our populist message cannot obscure the fact that we represent blacks, urban dwellers and those who appear to be agents of rapid social change. And even if it could, the Republicans are hardly going to sit back and be quiet about it.
This problem needs some fresh thinking and I think that the article I posted about earlier about undecided voters provides us with some clues. The first is that we have to stop thinking in terms of issues or a combination of issues. People think in terms of worldview and tribal identity.
The next thing we need to recognise is that we are living in a post modern environment in which straight appeals to reason are not very effective. We have to begin to use symbols and semiotics more effectively. This means that we have to be more stylistic and sophisticated in our presentation. TV with the sound turned off.
But that won’t be enough. We need to consider the American character and use it to shape our message. There is tremendous complexity in our national character and racial or social resentment is only a part of it. And there is a lot of tension, for instance between Equality/freedom — Community/individualism. This tension has always been present and the line isn’t drawn by region — it’s drawn within each person. We have to use some of these commonly understood and believed American values to illustrate our wordview in ways that people can understand hueristically instead of intellectually. We do this with a certain kind of candidate, a certain message and a certain kind of presentation. But we have to embrace this way of communicating before we can possible hope to use it to relate to Americans who are conditioned to buy and consume on the basis of their feelings not on the basis of their reason.
This is the world in which we live whether we like it or not. The Republicans are selling a vision and a sense of belonging to a certain tribe. We are selling an argument and a program. They are using 21st century tools to manipulate primal human needs and simplify the world. We are using 20th century methods to appeal to reason in a complicated way. They have the better hand.
Note: Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a few posts on this subject and others sort of tangentially related. A couple of readers asked me to put them all together in one place. Here they are.
It’s a Small Story…but it illustrates why so many of us not only support President Bush as a politician with whom we agree most of the time, but love and respect him as a man:
President Bush stepped into the middle of a confrontation and pulled his lead Secret Service agent away from Chilean security officials who barred his bodyguards from entering an elegant dinner for 21 world leaders Saturday night.”
That’s why everybody loves and respects him. He’s a natural born hero. If the Democrats could find one of those, maybe they’d get some respect too.
On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.
Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.
Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.
The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.
“This man gave me my life,” the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.
Yeah. A man who grabs his secret service guy’s arm in a melee is worthy of your love and respect. A man who won the silver and bronze stars in combat and later saved a man’s life with quick thinking while all around him were quaking with indecision is worthy of nothing but the most vile, personal contempt.
Oh, but I understand that Junior once said he felt bad for calling Al Hunt a fucking son of a bitch in front of his four year old. He is worthy of love and respect as a man in so many ways.
“I’m very proud of the fact that we held the line and made Congress make choices and set priorities, because it follows our philosophy,” Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said in House debate.
[…]
Also enacted during the postelection session was an $800 billion increase in the government’s borrowing limit. The measure was yet another testament to record annual deficits, which reached $413 billion last year and are expected to climb indefinitely.
While the spending bill was one of the most austere in years, it had something for everybody…[including] a potential boon for Bush himself, $2 million for the government to try buying back the presidential yacht Sequoia. The boat was sold three decades ago, though its current owners say the yacht is not for sale.
Well, Junior is the true heir to Nixon and proud of it. Why shouldn’t he asssociate himself with Nixon’s iconic imperial toys. It’s only fitting.
Via The Daou Report, I see that those wacky Republicans are boldly trying to stick their noses into people’s private business again. According to kd4dean over on Kos the Republicans tried to slip in another provision into the spending bill that would have allowed acouple of committee chairmen or their henchmen access to any American’s tax returns for any reason. Somebody noticed.
“This is a serious situation,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. “Neither of us were aware that this had been inserted in this bill,” he said, referring to himself and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Florida.
Questioned sharply by fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, Stevens pleaded with the Senate to approve the overall spending bill despite the tax returns language.
But Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, said that wasn’t good enough. “It becomes the law of the land on the signature of the president of the United States. That’s wrong.”
Conrad said the measure’s presence in the spending bill was symptomatic of a broader problem — Congress writing legislation hundreds of pages long and then giving lawmakers only a few hours to review it before having to vote on it.
Stevens, who repeatedly apologized for what he characterized as an error, took offense at Conrad’s statement. “It’s contrary to anything that I have seen happen in more than 30 years on this committee,” he said.
Pounding on his desk, Stevens said he had given his word and so had Young that neither would use the authority to require the IRS to turn over individual or corporate tax returns to them. “I would hope that the Senate would take my word. I don’t think I have ever broken my word to any member of the Senate.”
“… Do I have to get down on my knees and beg,” he said.
Both Young and Stevens will cede their chairmanships when the new Congress elected earlier this month takes office in January.
Some Democrats didn’t accept the assertion that the provision was a mistake and demanded an investigation.
“We weren’t born yesterday, we didn’t come down with the first snow,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California. “This isn’t poorly thought out, this was very deliberately thought out and it was done in the dead of night.”
Members of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee now have limited access to tax returns, but there are severe criminal and civil penalties if the information is disclosed or misused.
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the measure will “bring us back to the doorstep to the days of President Nixon, President Truman and other dark days in our history when taxpayer information was used against political enemies.”
We crossed that threshold some time ago, I’m afraid.
I do enjoy the fact that the guy who made the “error” was offended that nobody would take his word. That’s what happens when your leadership tells people to go fuck themselves over and over again, Ted. It tends to erode trust.
Here’s a nice personal piece about what it means to be a moderate liberal on ThatColoredFellasweblog. At the end of his post, he links to a number of online political quizzes, one of which defined my philosophy quite succinctly, and correctly I thought, the following way:
LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations,defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.
