Sheldon Richman
[T]he difference between republic and empire might be restated as the difference between taking the girl next door to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and paying a Saigon whore in chocolate bars and the Yankee dollar.It's from Bill Kauffman's "My America vs. the Empire."
Cross-posted at Free Association.
David T. Beito
Glenn Singleton, the professional “diversity expert” and leading beneficiary from the blowback generated by the conservative campaign of Michelle Malkin, Wayne Perryman, and many others against Bellevue Community College, is on a roll (For background, see Jesse Walker, Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber, and King Banaian at SCSU Scholars).
It turns out that Bellevue College is probably one of the more modest profit centers in Singleton’s expanding “diversity training” empire. In a revealing article for the Rocky Mountain News, Vincent Carroll reports that the Cherry Creek school district in Colorado has just shelled out six figures (yes, that’s right, six figures) for his “advice” on how to improve black and Hispanic student achievement.
What is Singleton's explanation for low black and Hispanic test scores? The rise of single-parent families? Poor teaching? Grade inflation? Administrative bloat? Of course, not. “"It is our belief,” Singleton and his co-author Curtis Linton proclaim, “that the most devastating factor contributing to the lowered achievement of students of color is institutionalized racism." Carroll provides more chilling details:
"We will shine the light on racial dominance to uncover how Whiteness challenges the performance of students of color while shaping and reinforcing the racial perspective of White children," Singleton and Linton promise…
The program also promotes a worldview in which American society is relentlessly oppressive; in which individuals, even today, remain at the mercy of their racial origins; in which"white talk" is"verbal, impersonal, intellectual" and"task-oriented," while" color commentary" is"nonverbal, personal, emotional" and"process-oriented." …..
Enlightened whites, in the authors' description, speak in the chastened, cringing language of someone who has emerged from a re-education camp. Singleton and Linton praise the example of a white male teacher in North Carolina who has this to say about his new perspective:"Although I often try to seek counsel of colleagues of color, it is inevitable that times arise where it's only after the fact that one of them points out some flaw in my reasoning. The flaws are often the result of my ingrained Whiteness and my own blindness to its perpetual presence."
White teachers (and minority teachers co-opted into the white power structure) stymie black and Hispanic students because they fail to understand their cultures and how daily racial oppression affects their outlook. They also push a curriculum tooled for whites, and are ignorant of the special ways that blacks and Hispanics communicate.
Speaking of low student achievement, another problem with Singleton's theory is that it does nothing to account for the poor performance of so many white students.
Sheldon Richman
I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government.In other words, his conception of" clean" government takes precedence over free political speech. As Will asks, if McCain ever takes the oath to defend the Constitution,"what would he mean?" It is amazing that McCain is seen as a refreshing political personality. He's as reactionary and as power-lusting as they get. (And a sanctimonious warmonger to boot.) Will correctly notes that people like McCain, obsessed with campaign finance, hold two propositions at the same time:
Proof that incumbent politicians are highly susceptible to corruption is the fact that the government they control is shot through with it. Yet that government should be regarded as a disinterested arbiter, untainted by politics and therefore qualified to regulate the content, quantity and timing of speech in campaigns that determine who controls the government. In the language of McCain's Imus appearance, the government is very much not" clean," but it is so clean it can be trusted to regulate speech about itself.If in 2008 it's Hillary versus McCain, I'm for Hillary, for two reasons: It'll keep McCain out of office, and the congressional Republicans will act more like an opposition party. Yeah, anybody but McCain.
Cross-posted at Free Association.
David T. Beito
Mel Gibson, a long-time skeptic of the Iraq war, has compared George Bush to ancient Mayan tyrants:
Gibson reveals he used present day American politics as an inspiration, claiming the government callously plays on the nation's insecurities to maintain power.
He tells British film magazine Hotdog,"The fear-mongering we depict in the film reminds me of President Bush and his guys"
The epic, due for release later this year, captures the decline of the Maya kingdom and the slaughter of thousands of inhabitants as human sacrifices in a bid to save the nation from collapsing.
Meanwhile, Gibson's conservative former fans at Free Republic are going ballistic with righteous anger.
David T. Beito
Conservatives used to say they wanted to tear down that sprawl. These days, a lot of them just want to take it over. The neocon activist David Horowitz even toyed with the idea of"adding the categories of political and religious affiliation to Title IX and other existing legislation," thus making conservatives an officially protected class. He eventually gave up on that notion, but he's still pushing an"Academic Bill of Rights" that would let students lodge official complaints against professors for the topics they choose to explore in the classroom.
Which brings us back to Bellevue. The incident that finally fused the left and right wings of P.C. came at Bellevue Community College last month, after the black Republican Wayne Perryman protested a stupid and racist joke embedded in a math question. (It began:"Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second.") The affront to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was noted, and several right-wing pundits publicized Perryman's crusade. Hundreds of angry e-mails poured into the college.As the cliché goes, the solution to bad speech is more speech. It's fine for the professor's offended students to protest. It's also fine for sympathetic outsiders to join in, though it's hard to imagine how one idiot's joke at one obscure school could rile up anyone not plugged into the perpetual outrage machine. But the end result of the protests was not so fine. With the college chastened, its Pluralism Steering Committee offered a series of recommendations, including:
•"a Community Pluralism Committee reporting to the President, an integral part of our original Pluralism Initiative Structure that never solidified."
•"The college creates and fills the position of Vice President of Equity and Pluralism."
•"The college provides increased funding for pluralism training and development including hiring Glenn Singleton for the Beyond Diversity workshop at least once, and maybe several more times."
In other words, Perryman's protest became an opportunity for bureaucratic expansion…. So this isn't simply a case of people on the right taking advantage of the structures put in place by the left, nor of building a parallel apparatus of their own. It's a case of a conservative campaign that actively helped those original structures grow, even landing a professional diversity hustler a job. Left and right were already co-dependent; now they're in a full-fledged clinch. I wonder how they'll feel in the morning.
Gene Healy
“I envy Kennedy having an enemy,” Clinton said, thinking it must have been a good deal easier to sell programs and ideas negatively, just by shouting that the Russians were coming. “The question now is how to persuade people they could do things when they are not immediately threatened.”--Richard Reeves, “Why Clinton Wishes He Were JFK,” Washington Monthly September 1995
Gene Healy
Mark Brady
"There is, of course, one thing that Britain and America could do that would wholly disorientate Ahmadinejad and have him rushing troops to his borders. It would be a sudden end to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a decision would remove at a stroke the running theme of Iranian militancy. It would saddle Tehran with two unstable neighbours whose insurgents and revanchists would cause it, its allies and its surrogates no end of trouble. After a bit of initial crowing the next Iraq will be Ahmadinejad's nightmare. Unfortunately such a step seems too clever by half for the west's present leadership."
Mark Brady
And just as the left was split, so were (and are) classical liberals. Consider, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who supported French colonization of Algeria. For more see Jennifer Pitts' edition of Tocqueville's writings on empire and slavery.
For Enlightenment thinkers against empire, see Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment Against Empire that describes the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Muthu discusses at length the anti-imperialism of Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder.
Footnote: Muthu and Pitts are husband and wife. Both teach in the Politics Department at Princeton University.
Wendy McElroy
Good luck to everyone involved -- past, present and future.
For more commentary, visit my blog or libertarian discussion BB.
Keith Halderman
While she does quote a policeman, she does not name or quote any businessmen. If Caldwell had found some worried entrepreneurs their apprehension would be a bit tardy since Americans have been going to Mexico in droves to seek all sorts of drugs both recreational and medicinal for decades. MTV Spring Break Cancun` will not show you all those fresh faced college students smoking marijuana but I feel confident in saying that is precisely what very many of them do there. And, in fact, Caldwell does undercut her own theme by quoting shoe shine person Elipio Rodriguez to the effect that drugs are already everywhere. He says, “There by the bridge (to the U.S.) anyone can do drugs. Police always patrol there, by those who are selling, and nothing ever happens. Do you think something will change now?”
Cross Posted on The Trebach Report
The only other non-government official heard from is 58-year-old waiter Raul Martinez who provides the obligatory what about the children? A former Pentagon anti-drug official and a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman have their say but no one from the drug reform movement or those involved in actually passing the legislation are allowed a voice in the AP’s world.
I would like to say positively that the transparent straw man of drug tourism will not have an effect on policy. I can not, however, because a communication from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has informed me that Mexico’s President Vicente Fox has so far declined to sign the law. The NORML website reports that U.S. officials, including one from the Drug Enforcement Agency, met with Mexican officials and among other things "urged them to clarify the law so it would not make it attractive to those who would go to Mexico to use drugs."
So it appears that this manufactured fear of drug tourism is having an effect, but why? If someone visits a place because of the availability of drugs they will still spend money on all the other things, transportation, entertainment, food, gifts, that other tourists do, there will simply be more people spending money. No one solely uses drugs.
As for increased violence that is not a problem because legality would eliminate the need for black market mayhem. Drug use per se causes an infinitesimal amount of the violence the prohibitionist like so much to talk about. The drug alcohol is by far the most associated with pharmacological aggression, yet it also legal in most places and highly celebrated in others. In successful attempts to reduce the violence connected with important soccer matches both the Portuguese and Dutch police instituted a policy of tolerating marijuana smoking. Also, ask Dutch police where they would rather go on a call, a bar serving alcohol or a cafe` serving marijuana and they will say the cafe` because it is much less dangerous.
There are millions of middle aged relatively wealthy adults, who quit smoking marijuana years ago, who would love to go somewhere to safely get high, recapturing some of their youth, and then return home to resume their normal lives. A city that realized the potential and put a Dutch cafe` policy in place would reap enormous economic benefits for its citizens. At the present time no location in the U.S. is experiencing such a needed windfall, one more cost of the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs.
David T. Beito
A German submarine sank the British passenger ship Lusitania nine-on years ago on this date. Over thousand people died including 128 Americans.
Outraged politicians and newspapers demanded revenge and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the lone antiwar voice in the administration, resigned in protest. It looked like war was inevitable.
In a few weeks, however, the war fever died down. Americans started to wonder if this was incident really justified the plunge to war. Also, plausible accusations (later proven true) began to be voiced that the Lusitania had carried contraband in violation of international law.
In contrast to 9-11, the cycle of Crisis and Leviathan was avoided, at least temporarily. The U.S. did not go to war for another two years.
Mark Brady
Sociological footnote. We should avoid demonizinggangs in civilian life. For example, consider the gulf between the reputation and the reality of the Hells Angels. Bottom line: Lurid accounts of gang activities very often provide an excuse to extend police surveillance and powers.
Hat tip to Lew Rockwell over at his eminently readable blog.
Mark Brady
Elsewhere Norman Finkelstein suggests that The Lobby: It's Not Either/Or. Worth a look.
UPDATE: Alexander Cockburn says yes, of course, there is an Israel lobby and although he finds the Mearsheimer and Walt paper to be"extremely dull … [it] has the merit of stating rather blandly some home truths which are somehow still regarded as too dangerous to state publicly in respectable circles in the United States."
Cockburn continues:"Meanwhile, mostly on the left, there has been an altogether different debate, over the actual weight of the Lobby. Here the best known of the debaters is Noam Chomsky, who has reiterated a position he has held for many years, to the general effect that US foreign policy has always hewed to the national self interest, and that the Lobby's power is greatly overestimated."
Cockburn concludes thus:"I have to say I'm not 100 per cent on board with [Noam Chomsky] on this one. The Lobby really does have very hefty clout. Ask Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. In her excellent book The One-State Solution Virginia Tilley makes a persuasive case that the US strategy and tactics in Iraq have more to do with what Israel wants than any self-interested 'realist' US plan."
Aeon J. Skoble
Amy H. Sturgis
Why people interested in liberty and power should care.
Why people interested in film should care.
Mark Brady
Hat tip to Lew Rockwell.
William Marina
The question is, what job to Apprentice him into, and should we wait 3 more years?
George again showed his incredible ineptitude as a Sorcerer-in- Training by his neglect of the situation in America while he was off chasing Dragons of Mass Destruction (DMDs) in Iraq.
Meanwhile, back at the Ranch, George has left for Washington, leaving Cindy forlorn and alone. Take that, Bitch!
Rumor has it that George is reconditioning John Kerry's old Vietnam Swift Boat, for patrol duty along the Mississippi. The President-in-Apprenticeship, feels certain that Bennie Ladin is lurking somewhere along the broken levees. The WMDs, it seems, were right here in America all along.
It appears George has commissioned a new song, " I Took the Swift Boat to the Levee, and the Levee Wasn't Dry," to be bellowed from the speakers on his boat 24/7 as part of a "shock and awe" strategy that will cause Bennie to beg for "The Sounds of Silence." This is all part of the modern technological tools of war dreamed up by Rummy, to save us from having to recruit more soldiers.
One hopes that The Donald, and the irrepressible Martha, can teach Georgie a thing or two, since his Daddy and the Silver Fox, apparently never were able to do so.
What job do you think George ought to be apprenticed into, remembering he failed in the oil business, was bailed out into baseball, and appears to have had some problems running the country, even with Dick's help? I would suggest, let's vote on it, but the American
people have already done that twice, and even in George's version of baseball, "three strikes and your out."
How about as a singer? Think of him in a duet of "Old Man River," with the old Commie, Paul Robeson, "tote that barge, lift that bale, I no longer drink whisky so I can't land in jail." Or, maybe, as a professional cyclist, or as a preacher with Pat Robertson as Billy G fades into the sunset?
Meanwhile the folks who faced Katrina, without the recommended work on the levees having been done, need to brace for what the Apprentice has told us will be a very long recovery.
Thanks, George!
David T. Beito
Zora Neale Hurston in Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2003),654.
David T. Beito
In recent decades, many of us came to regard the interior of our automobile as a new" castle" of freedom and sovereignty. Apparently, however, if a growing number of state legislators have their way, the days of this last private refuge are numbered.
By a vote of 66 to 31, the Louisiana House just approved a bill to"prohibit anyone from lighting up a cigarette, cigar or pipe in a vehicle while a child required to be in a booster seat or car seat is riding along _ a child up to 60 pounds, or up to about eight years old."
