“License Plates Are Not Bumper Stickers”: When License Plates Take On An Obvious Political Tinge, Sparks Fly
A group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans has asked Texas to issue a license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag, which many consider an emblem of slavery. Texas said no, and the Sons are suing because the state accepts other messages for specialty plates.
The Sons have a point.
North Carolina issues a license reading, “Choose Life.” When lawmakers there refused to allow a competing abortion-rights message, the American Civil Liberties Union sued.
The ACLU has a point, as well.
States have jumped on the slippery slope of letting various business and social interests promote themselves on the specialty license plates. Now they have slid into the U.S. Supreme Court, which has taken the Sons of Confederate Veterans case.
The justices have examined license plates before. In the 1977 Wooley v. Maynard case, Jehovah’s Witnesses held that the New Hampshire state motto stamped on all license plates, “Live Free or Die,” offended their religious convictions. The court ruled that New Hampshire residents had a right to cover up those words on their plates.
How about no messages on state-issued license plates? Or perhaps limiting them to such neutral bragging as Wild, Wonderful (West Virginia), Evergreen State (Washington), Sweet Home (Alabama) or Garden State (New Jersey)?
I’ll admit to a soft spot for environmental messages — such as calls on Florida plates to protect whales, dolphins, sea turtles, manatees and largemouth bass — but not for blatant advertising. Sports teams are big businesses, and they have specialty plates.
Rhode Island offers a plate featuring Mr. Potato Head, marketed by the local toymaker, Hasbro. The fees car owners pay for such plates may go to a good cause (in Mr. Potato Head’s case, a food bank), and states take their cut. Still, it’s an ad.
But when license plates take on an obvious political tinge, sparks fly. And that’s why a blanket “no” to specialty plates is the right way to go.
Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University, doesn’t agree. He sees license plate messages as “mixed speech.” Because the United States allows a freedom of expression unmatched by any other country, the state has an obligation to defend its values, he writes in his book When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality.
Brettschneider believes that Texas was correct in turning down the plates displaying the Confederate Stars and Bars but that North Carolina was wrong in rejecting the abortion rights plates.
I asked him, What about the argument that many see the Confederate flag more as a historical artifact than as an endorsement of slavery? Brettschneider responded that the flag’s history, including its use in opposing civil rights legislation, suggests otherwise. And even if the intent of some of its backers is pure, the considerations are bigger than the views of a private person.
Texas would be tied to the symbol, he said. “Texas has a deep duty to avoid an association between the state’s message and a racist message.”
But who speaks for the state? What happens when one set of officials is replaced by another with entirely different interpretations?
“The Constitution requires deference to the democratic process,” Brettschneider answered, “but it also sometimes requires limits on that process.”
We do agree that bumper stickers are a great invention. They are a frugal way to advertise one’s religion, preferred candidate, dog’s breed, football team or sense of humor. State approval not required.
As for specialized messages on license plates, I persist in opposing them all. Professor Brettschneider’s approach is well constructed and certainly more nuanced, but managing its tensions would be a hard job.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“There Are Things In It That Scare Me”: For Republicans, Dishonesty Works And Deceit Instills Fear And Uncertainty
There isn’t a democracy on the planet in which even conservative candidates take aim at citizens’ access to health care. At a certain level, the very idea seems a little silly – a national candidate would presumably fail if he or she told their electorate, “Vote for me and I promise to leave some of you behind without access to basic medical care.”
But the United States is the exception. The Republican Party is the only major party in any major democracy that believes citizens are not entitled to medical care as a benefit of citizenship. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), as we discussed yesterday, want the GOP to abandon universal coverage as a worthwhile goal.
The Affordable Care Act may have extended new health security to tens of millions of families, but Jindal and Republicans believe voters should elect them to deliberately take that security away.
In theory, this should be a very tough sell. Why in the world would any Americans consider voting, on purpose, for a platform that could deliberately punish their own family?
The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with the power of fear.
The New York Times recently published a fascinating piece on Kentucky’s triumphs in implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the article highlighted a woman named Amanda Mayhew. On paper, the piece presents Mayhew as a classic example of an “Obamacare” success story: thanks to the ACA, she been able to receive free, overdue dental care; she was able to see a dermatologist for free; and she received medication to treat depression for free. This one law has made a big, positive difference in her life.
And then came the twist.
“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”
For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer.
Mayhew went on to tell the NYT that she’s “thankful” for her coverage, she would “gladly give up my insurance today if it meant that some of the things that are in the law were not in place.”
The problem, of course, is that Mayhew has been misled. Despite what she “heard from news programs,” the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer. It actually does the opposite – which is why the law has received the enthusiastic support of the American Cancer Society and AARP.
The Times article featured a well-intentioned woman, whose heart clearly seems to be in the right place, who would sacrifice her own access to medical care in order to scrap provisions in the law that do not actually exist.
And that’s where Republican rhetoric comes into play. For years, the naive among us – a group that I include myself in – have marveled at the extraordinary lies that have been told about the Affordable Care Act. Why, we ask, would the right lie so brazenly to families who urgently need access to doctors and medicine?
Because dishonesty works. Deceit instills fear and uncertainty.
When Republican candidates vow to gut the American health care system and take Americans’ coverage away, there are plenty of voters who are willing to go along because they’re eager to undo those horrible provisions in the law they “heard about” on “news programs.”
The power of deceptive propaganda, backed by billionaires and their powerful elected allies, shouldn’t be underestimated.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that 41% of the country still, even now, believes “a government panel” exists to “make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” That’s two out of every five Americans who believe a ridiculous falsehood.
It’s not that these people are bad or dumb. It’s not that they want their neighbors or community to suffer. The issue here is that some wealthy and sophisticated folks launched a con job on the public, and the scam roped in a lot of victims.
Why else would politicians run on a platform of pushing millions of Americans into a position where they’re one ailment away from bankruptcy? It’s because they think they can get away with it – nice, generous folks will sacrifice their own security to prevent imaginary threats from hurting someone else.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 13, 2015
“The NYPD Slowdown’s Dirty Little Secret”: Not All Of Them Want The Slowdown To End
The police slowdown in New York, where cops have virtually stopped making certain types of low-level arrests, might be coming to an end soon. For a lot of police officers, it’ll be an unhappy moment, because they never liked making the penny ante collars in the first place.
“We’re coming out of what was a pretty widespread stoppage of certain types of activity, the discretionary type of activity by and large,” police commissioner Bill Bratton told NPR’s Robert Siegel in an interview Friday.
In the rank and file of the police department, there are mixed feelings about the slowdown and a possible return to the status quo.
“I’d break it down like this,” an officer in East Harlem told The Daily Beast. “20 percent of the department is very active, they’d arrest their mothers if they could, and they want to get back to work. Another 20 percent doesn’t want any activity period; they’d be happy to hide and nap all day.”
The officer added, “And then there’s the great middle that thinks things are fine now as far as their concerned and all they want is good arrests.”
The not good arrests, by implication, were all the low level infractions policed as part of the so-called “Broken Windows” approach to law enforcement, defended by both Bratton and Mayor de Blasio. It holds that one of the ways to bust high-level crooks is to crack down on seemingly minor crimes.
Between December 29 2014—January 4 2015, arrests across New York city dropped by 56 percent and summonses were down 92 percent compared to the same time last year.
It’s not novel to point out that the police slowdown, which pitted the police and their unions against city hall, granted one of the central demands of the #blacklivesmatter protestors—an end to Broken Windows policing.
Less noted though, is how many police officers are themselves ambivalent about actively enforcing low level offenses, and how that bodes for the post-slowdown future of policing in New York.
Retired NYPD lieutenant Steve Osborne made the point in an op-ed for the New York Times that was sharply critical of both de Blasio and the protestors.
“More police productivity has meant far less crime, but at a certain point New York began to feel like, yes, a police state, and the police don’t like it any more than you,” Osborne wrote.
“The time has probably come for the Police Department to ease up on the low-level ‘broken-windows’ stuff while re-evaluating the impact it may or may not have on real, serious crime,” he added. “No one will welcome this more than the average cop on the beat, who has been pressed to find crime where so much less of it exists.”
Day to day, no one has been telling police officers in New York how not to do their jobs.
“It sounds very unusual,” the officer in East Harlem said, “but I haven’t seen any coordinated activity besides the union putting the message out and then saying jump.”
It hasn’t taken much effort to coordinate the slowdown because, as Osborne notes, average beat cops were never that excited in the first place with going after public urination and loitering arrests. To them, it was a distraction from stopping more serious crimes.
Broken Windows advocates argue that some cops always resisted more active policing. When Broken Windows was first introduced, they say, police officers had to be pushed, by Bratton among others, to adopt the active policing approach that brought crime down to its current historic lows in new York.
But as New York got safer, the methods rather than the results became the measures of success. More arrests meant better policing as the tail started to wag the dog.
Bratton himself has said nearly as much in criticizing his predecessor Ray Kelly’s overuse of the controversial stop and frisk tactic that overwhelmingly targeted minorities.
“The commissioner and the former mayor did a great job in the sense of keeping the community safe, keeping crime down, but one of the tools used to do that, I believe, was used too extensively,” Bratton said in March 2014.
Stop and Frisks have fallen considerably since their high in 2011 when 685,724 New Yorkers were stopped by police, but some numbers driven approaches remain embedded in the department.
As a detective in the Bronx tells The Daily Beast, “there technically are no quotas” in the police department “but you can call them what you want, “productivity goals,” they are back door quotas.”
And those back door quotas can put pressure on officers.
“I have to suspend my disbelief,” the officer in East Harlem said, “to see how sentencing a guy with an open container is going to really bring crime down.”
“Violent crimes haven’t gotten worse in my little slice of heaven despite the slowdown on summonses and misdemeanors,” the officer added. “We’re still responding to robbery patterns. We haven’t gone down in presence for the more serious offenses.”
He acknowledged that it was too soon to say how such a policing strategy would play out over an extended period. “Whether it works will reveal itself over time. That remains to be seen.”
Once New York is out of the slowdown, it’s not clear what kind of policing the city will see on the other side. Will Bratton push the police to bring arrests back up to levels before they dropped off or will the department test its ability to back off?
Maybe there will be some new middle ground possible despite the bluster and rhetoric. According to The Daily News, the combative president of the police union is pushing for just a slowdown that’s a little bit faster. As one police source told the paper, “He said they should go back to at least 50% of what they used to do.”
By: Jacob Siegel, The Daily Beast, January 10, 2015
“It’s More Than Romney Promised”: What Would Republicans Say If Mitt Romney Were President And The Economy Was This Strong?
Imagine if Mitt Romney were president right now.
Imagine if, 722 days after winning the election, President Romney were presiding over an economy growing at five percent a year, an unemployment rate dipping beneath six percent, and gasoline that was less than $2-a-gallon.
This is, after all, what Romney promised. Hell, it’s more than Romney promised.
“I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to six percent, and perhaps a little lower,” he told Time during the campaign. December’s tumble to 5.6 percent unemployment is, thus, two years ahead of schedule.
As for the five percent growth rate and the sub-$2 gas — that’s more than Romney dared ask the electorate to expect. Tim Pawlenty — remember him? — promised to nudge growth to five percent and was roundly mocked for his troubles. And to find anyone promising $2-a-gallon gas, you need to dig up Michelle Bachmann’s campaign lit (even Newt Gingrich didn’t dare predict gas under $2.50, and he wanted to use space mirrors to light highways).
If Mitt Romney were president right now, he would be seen as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. There would be parades in the streets. The kids would have “severely conservative” tattoos. Men would be saying “gosh.”
This is the problem with how Washington — Democrats and Republicans alike — interpret economic news. If Mitt Romney was president right now the economic numbers would be seen as proof that he was a remarkable success. They would appear to show that his agenda — repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, greenlighting the Keystone XL pipeline — was precisely what had been needed to unleash the awesome growth engine that is the American economy. Conservatism would be ascendant. Liberalism would be discredited.
But Barack Obama won the election. The Affordable Care Act hasn’t been repealed. Taxes were raised in 2013. Regulation has proceeded apace. The Keystone XL pipeline is no closer to being built. And yet the economy is roaring. The ambitious economic promises the GOP field made for their conservative policies have been achieved despite the continuation of liberal policies.
There is an easy liberal interpretation here: President Barack Obama is great. Liberalism is great. And it’s simply entrenched media narratives and the GOP’s relentless resistance to giving Obama credit for anything that has left his approval rating stuck at 44 percent.
But I come not to praise President Obama. I come to bury the lazy economic thinking that infects American politics and, particularly, political campaigns.
Washington tends to think of itself as the cause and everything that subsequently happens in the world as the result. A booming economy is proof that Bill Clinton is a genius, or that Ronald Reagan is a genius. A crappy economy is proof that Barack Obama is a naif, or that George H. W. Bush can’t govern. It’s a view of causality usually found in five-year-olds, but it is pervasive in American politics. It is also false.
Policy matters, of course. And, particularly in 2008, 2009, and 2010, it was, arguably, the driver of our economic fortunes. But, for the most part, the economy is driven by much beyond what happens in the White House and the Congress (caveat: the Federal Reserve is an immensely powerful actor, but come campaign time, politicians tend to pretend it doesn’t exist).
It’ll be some time yet before we know whether the economy is truly beginning to roar or the engine is about to sputter out. But the $2 gas that’s left economists so optimistic isn’t the fault of anyone in Washington; it’s a mixture of technological innovation leading to more supply, falling global demand leading to yet lower prices for that supply, and Saudi Arabia refusing to slow production because it wants to choke America’s nascent shale-gas industry (Brad Plumer has an excellent look at the causes behind the cheap gas here).
The reasons unemployment has fallen below six percent are varied, and some of them are problematic (like the reduction in labor-force participation). Government policy has played a role, and my read of the evidence is that premature austerity, particularly at the state and local government level, did a lot to slow the recovery. Nevertheless, anyone suggesting that the job gains over the last two years are the clear result of anything Congress did, or didn’t do, is fooling themselves.
It’s an unhappy fact of political life that the direction of the economy tends to decide elections even though it isn’t actually driven by political decisions. Politicians tend to get around that by pretending otherwise: they take more credit than they deserve when the labor market is doing well, and they receive more blame than they deserve when it’s flagging.
By the normal rules of politics — the rules we would be playing under if Mitt Romney had won the election — the recent economic news proves Barack Obama is a magnificent leader and liberal policies an economic boon. But the normal rules of politics, at least when it comes to interpreting the economy, are dumb.
By: Ezra Klein, Vox, January 12, 2015
“Sometimes, It’s Not Entirely About Us”: A Note On Criticism Of Obama For Not Attending Paris March
The march in Paris yesterday expressing solidarity in the wake of the terrorist attack on the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was an inspiring sight, with somewhere between one and two million people, joined by world leaders, proclaiming their defiance of terrorism and their support for freedom of expression. But don’t think for a second that politics was absent, there or here at home. For instance, there was apparently a great deal of behind-the-scenes wrangling between the French, Israeli and Palestinian governments over whether Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would attend. Back here in the United States, the Obama administration has been roundly condemned for not sending sufficiently high-ranking officials to participate in the march.
Many argued that President Obama should have attended, since other heads of state like Angela Merkel and David Cameron were there. “Our president should have been there,” wrote Sen. Ted Cruz. Others said that if not the President, then at least the Vice President or Secretary of State should have gone (the U.S. was represented at the march by the American ambassador to France). The criticisms have been somewhere between vehement and vicious, and not just from conservatives, but from mainstream reporters and news organizations. CNN ran a headline reading, “Where was Obama?” The New York Daily News cover read: “You let the world down.” Jake Tapper, writing about the absence of American officials, opined: “I say this as an American — not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN — but as an American: I was ashamed.”
Let’s dispense with this specific question with no more than the attention it deserves: It would have been all but insane for President Obama to participate in a march, in public, in a foreign country, with a couple million people around him. The security requirements necessary to protect him make it impossible. The Secret Service has to do an extraordinary amount of work and planning for him to drop by Ben’s Chili Bowl a mile from the White House; the idea that with a couple of days notice he could walk through the streets of Paris in an enormous throng of people is absurd.
But let’s be honest: practical considerations aside, the world wasn’t waiting to see whether Barack Obama would participate in this particular march. As shocking as this idea may seem from our perspective, sometimes it’s not entirely about us.
And it isn’t as though the whole American political leadership, from the President on down, haven’t spoken out on this subject. Should the administration have sent Vice President Biden to the march? Yes, they should have. That would have been a fine gesture (and I’m guessing he could have fit it into his schedule). But what’s interesting to me is the way that people and organizations that hesitate to express personal opinions on other topics feel free to issue thunderous condemnations of the White House for its less than active participation in what is, after all, a symbolic act.
Maybe my memory’s faulty, but I don’t recall any other journalist committed to the ideal of “objectivity” saying he was “ashamed” about the fact that millions of Americans have no health coverage, or about the 30,000 Americans killed by guns every year, or about our ample contributions to global warming. It’s precisely because those things are about real people’s lives that it would be considered deeply inappropriate for a mainstream journalist to express such an opinion. But you can say you’re ashamed about something entirely symbolic — and in the long run essentially meaningless — like the fact that the American ambassador attended a march when it would have a bigger deal had the Secretary of State or the Vice President been there.
That isn’t to say that symbolism is unimportant. Much of politics is about the creation and dissemination of symbols. But what exactly is the damage that has been done by the fact that a (supposedly) insufficiently high-ranking American official represented our government at this event? Will the peoples of the world no longer believe that America is an advocate for freedom of speech, or that Americans abhor terrorism? I doubt it.
And before anyone gets too self-congratulatory about his or her own courage and ideals in expressing solidarity with those murdered in France, consider another event that occurred last week, when Boko Haram killed as many as 2,000 men, women, and children in the city of Baga, Nigeria. There are mundane reasons why that news got so much less attention than the events in France — perhaps most important, those killings occurred in an isolated place, while Paris was already full of reporters, and more could get there quickly and easily to report on the story. But it’s undeniable that a terrorist attack in Europe — and one targeting journalists — is going to be of infinitely more concern to the media in Europe and America than an attack in Africa.
When someone in France or Germany or the United States says “Je suis Charlie,” in many ways they’re right. The victims of the Paris attacks were people like them, which makes the horror of their murders feel more real and immediate. And of course, there’s a critical democratic value at issue, that of free expression, which allows us to expend plenty of words considering what these events “mean.” Boko Haram’s victims, on the other hand, weren’t advocates for a cause, and their deaths weren’t imbued with symbolism. They were just human beings.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 12, 2015
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