“The Security To Take Risks”: Secure Enough To Explore The Possibilities Of Our Ideals
In his interview with Tom Friedman, President Obama discussed how his foreign policy is guided by a principle I haven’t heard him articulate before.
What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-Ã -vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.
“We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk. And that’s the thing … people don’t seem to understand,” the president said. “You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies. The same is true with respect to Iran, a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. … You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”
The notion that Iran is undeterrable — “it’s simply not the case,” he added. “And so for us to say, ‘Let’s try’ — understanding that we’re preserving all our options, that we’re not naive — but if in fact we can resolve these issues diplomatically, we are more likely to be safe, more likely to be secure, in a better position to protect our allies, and who knows? Iran may change. If it doesn’t, our deterrence capabilities, our military superiority stays in place. … We’re not relinquishing our capacity to defend ourselves or our allies. In that situation, why wouldn’t we test it?”
I say that I haven’t heard him articulate this principle before – but that’s simply because I haven’t heard him apply it to foreign policy. But the minute I read this portion of the interview, I thought of something a young Barack Obama told Tammerlin Drummond back in 1990 not long after he’d been elected the first African American President of the Harvard Law Review.
The post, considered the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School, almost always leads to a coveted clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court after graduation and a lucrative offer from the law firm of one’s choice.
Yet Obama, who has gone deep into debt to meet the $25,000-a-year cost of a Harvard Law School education, has left many in disbelief by asserting that he wants neither.
“One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life,” Obama said recently. “You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That’s what a Harvard education should buy – enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back.”
I believe that what the President is talking about is something we all know deep inside ourselves but rarely allow to take hold. Too often our fears feed our sense of insecurity and keep us from taking the kinds of risks that could improve things. We embark on a never-ending quest to find more (money, power, etc) and never recognize that the ground we are standing on is already secure enough to allow us to let go and explore the possibility of our ideals.
The damage that kind of cycle does to an individual is very similar to how the fear-mongering from Republicans is affecting our country right now. It is in this way that President Obama embodies what is truly exceptional about the United States. He knows that just as a young man with a degree from Harvard Law School could afford to take some risks with his career (and look where that got him!), the richest and most powerful nation on this earth is secure enough to be able to take some risks to promote engagement and the potential for peace.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 7, 2015
“Libertarian-ish, Not A Libertarian”: Rand Paul Becomes Less Of A Libertarian Every Day
On Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky, Senator Rand Paul will officially kick off his campaign for president. As the New York Times reported Monday, his father, former Congressman Ron Paul, will be right by his son’s side for the campaign announcement. But don’t expect to see much of the elder Paul throughout the campaign—or hear much from him. While Rand and Ron both consider themselves libertarians, their positions on multiple issues have diverged in recent months as Rand has attempted to make himself a legitimate contender for the Republican nomination. In the process, that has alienated many libertarian supporters of Ron.
While Ron Paul was always an outsider candidate with no real shot of becoming president, Rand has much larger national ambitions. That has required him to make compromises on some of his positions, compromises that many libertarians find unacceptable. Retaining their support will almost certainly be a necessity for Rand to win the GOP nomination. But will they look past his heresies?
Rand Paul has been a savvy political operator during his time in the Senate and has always sought to leverage his libertarian support on issues that had broad acceptance within the GOP. For instance, Paul expertly seized on the issues of criminal justice reform and the overreach of the National Security Agency (NSA). These were long-held libertarian positions that, partially thanks to Paul’s advocacy, suddenly found renewed interest among mainstream Republicans. The issues garnered support among conservatives because they would shrink the size of government. They were the perfect issues for him to retain his libertarian credibility while earning greater support among traditional Republican voters.
But recent issues have demonstrated where traditional Republicans differ from libertarians, and that has put Paul in an uncomfortable position. Libertarians like Ron Paul set a very high bar for military conflict. Often, they are called isolationists, a term that has sometimes been used to describe the younger Paul, much to his chagrin. In the early parts of his time in the Senate, Paul displayed many of those leanings. In 2011, for instance, he called for ending all military aid to Israel. As late as June 2014, Paul wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq. “Why should we choose a side, and if we do, who are we really helping?” he asked in the piece. Just a few months later, after the Islamic State murdered two American journalists, Paul condemned President Barack Obama for not doing more to stop the terrorist group.
Over the following nine months, Paul’s remarks about the military and his policy positions have seemed to become more and more hawkish. Last October, he gave a speech on military intervention that you could never imagine his dad giving. “The war on terror is not over, and America cannot disengage from the world,” he said. “To defend our country we must understand that a hatred of our values exists, and acknowledge that interventions in foreign countries may well exacerbate this hatred, but that ultimately, we must be willing and able to defend our country and our interests.” It was quite a rhetorical change from a man who just 20 months earlier performed a 13-hour talking filibuster over U.S. drone use.
In January, Paul made news at a forum hosted by the Koch Brothers when he challenged the traditional Republican line on military action. “Are you ready to send ground troops into Iran? Are you ready to bomb them? Are you ready to send in 100,000 troops?” he asked senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who had criticized the Iran negotiations. “I’m a big fan of trying to exert and trying the diplomatic option as long as we can. If it fails, I will vote to resume sanctions and I would vote to have new sanctions. But if you do it in the middle of negotiations, you’re ruining it.” That was music to the ears of libertarians everywhere. Maybe, they thought, Paul would actually stick to his libertarian roots on foreign policy.
Nope. In early March, Paul signed on to Senator Tom Cotton’s letters to the leaders of Iran, explaining why the American political system effectively prohibited Obama from making any lasting commitments in the negotiations. The letter received widespread condemnation, including from many within the Republican Party. But in libertarian circles, Paul’s signature was treated as almost an act of treason. At the Daily Beast, Olivia Nuzzi reported on a number of libertarian leaders who declared Paul’s signature the final straw; they would no longer support him for president.
At the end of March, Paul proposed a massive increase in defense spending, raising it more than $190 billion over the next two years and offsetting those increases with cuts elsewhere. As Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel reported at the time, this doesn’t quite represent a flip-flop. But it’s still quite a change from Paul’s 2011 budget which would have reduced defense spending to $542 billion in 2016, including additional war funding. Under his new plan, defense spending would be nearly $700 billion in 2016.
As his 2016 officially kicks off, Paul will have to strike a balance between appeasing the defense hawks and libertarians within the Republican Party, both of whom view him suspiciously. To some extent, his movement back and forth between the factions has made it unclear what his foreign policy views actually are. Last week, for instance, as Republican candidates criticized the president’s deal with Iran, Paul stayed noticeably quiet. When his staff finally responded to questions to Bloomberg on Monday, they offered little insight into Rand’s actual position on the deal. That tactic—sidestepping the question—will work for now. But eventually it’s going to fail as Republican voters and donors will demand his position on different foreign policy issues.
The good news for Paul is that his positions on the NSA and criminal justice reform, among other issues, still play well within the party. More than any other candidate, he has made a concerted effort to reach African Americans. These are all libertarian positions that will play well for him during the primary. But it will still be hard for many Ron Paul followers to overlook—or brush off—Rand’s turn to hawkishness on foreign policy, assuming he goes in that direction. For instance, Nick Gillepsie, the editor in chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, calls Paul “libertarian-ish,” not a libertarian.
Do Republican primary voters want a “liberatarian-ish” candidate? We’ll find out soon enough.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, April 7, 2015
“Higher Courts Let Prosecutors Get Away With Murder”: Supreme Courts Bear Responsibility For Conduct They Accept From Attorneys
For anyone studying the bubbling issue of prosecutor misconduct, the LAT states—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—form a good lab. March alone brewed up:
—belated charges against a prosecutor in Texas, where the defendant was executed a decade ago;
—soul-searching in Louisiana, where a prosecutor bemoaned his win that sent an innocent man to prison;
—and absolution in Arkansas, where the state’s Supreme Court informed me that a prosecutor who withheld critical evidence from a man on trial for his life did not violate any rules of professional conduct.
The Texas case centered on Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson murder of his three young daughters. Now the State Bar of Texas has filed a formal petition accusing the prosecutor of obstructing justice by making false statements and concealing evidence favorable to Willingham’s defense.
“Before, during and after the 1992 trial, [Jackson] knew of the existence of evidence that tended to negate the guilt of Willingham and failed to disclose that evidence to defense counsel,” the bar said.
It won’t help Willingham, who protested his innocence to the end. But the move suggests that at least some Texans are paying attention.
Next door in Louisiana, a former prosecuting attorney reflected on a conviction he’d won that kept a man on death row for 30 years—and held himself accountable.
“As a prosecutor and officer of the court, I had the duty to prosecute fairly,” attorney A.M. “Marty” Stroud III wrote to a Shreveport newspaper. “Part of my duty was to disclose promptly any exculpatory evidence relating to trial and penalty issues of which I was made aware. My fault was that I was too passive. I did not consider the rumors about the involvement of other parties…”
Stroud agreed that Louisiana owed significant monetary compensation to the man whom he’d helped convict. Yet, he wrote, “The state does not accept any responsibility for the damage suffered by one of its citizens. The bureaucratic response appears to be that nobody did anything intentionally wrong, thus the state has no responsibility. This is nonsensical.”
Noting that evidence that would have cleared the defendant was available at the time of the trial, Stroud wrote: “The easy and convenient argument is that the prosecutors did not know of such evidence, thus they were absolved of any responsibility for the wrongful conviction.”
Stroud dismissed that argument. And he refused to absolve himself.
Last year, 125 men and women were released from prison because they were wrongfully convicted, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations. Two-thirds of those cases were overturned because prosecutors either reopened investigations themselves or cooperated with other investigators to ensure that justice was done.
But supreme courts, who bear the ultimate responsibility for the conduct they will accept from attorneys, have stood by like indulgent parents, tolerating outrageous behavior and even ruling that others must too.
(In the infamous Louisiana case of Connick v. Thompson, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2011 that a prosecutor could not be held liable for withholding evidence in a murder case because the defendant, who was a month from execution before the withheld evidence was discovered, had not shown that the prosecutor’s office displayed “deliberate indifference” to its duties.)
Echoes of that protectionism can be heard in the Arkansas case of Tim Howard, who will be retried later this month for a double murder that occurred 18 years ago near where these three states join. As I wrote here before, Howard is being retried because after he was sentenced to death, investigations turned up potentially exculpatory evidence that had been withheld from his attorneys.
I know firsthand how loath state officials have been to hold his prosecutor accountable. Four years ago, when I learned of the withheld evidence, I wrote an article for my newspaper first. Then, as a citizen, I wrote a letter to the state supreme court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, complaining about what the prosecutor, Tom Cooper, had done.
Supreme courts routinely sanction lawyers for offenses as minor as misspelled words in briefs or as serious as defrauding clients or showing up drunk in court. I thought that withholding evidence in a death case constituted a gross violation of the court’s Rules of Professional Conduct.
While I didn’t say as much in my letter, I viewed Cooper’s failure to turn over key evidence as horrific neglect, at best. To my mind, it rose to the same level as that of a surgeon who killed by failing to sterilize an instrument, or a driver who ran over a kid while texting. Given the high stakes of a capital trial, there seemed no kinder way to spin it.
The director of the court’s Office of Professional Conduct promptly notified me that he would wait for a court to rule on whether the misconduct I alleged—and which the state’s attorney general by then had tacitly acknowledged—had actually occurred.
The letter also informed me, in all caps and bold type, that I must not disclose the nature of my complaint to anyone, including, ironically, members of the news media. If I did, the letter warned, I could be held in contempt of court and “punished by fine or jail.”
While Howard’s case wound its way back to court for a ruling, I reflected on the Arkansas Supreme Court’s threat. I concluded that it was unlawful, a violation of First Amendment.
I wrote to the committee explaining my concern, but after receiving no response I filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct. That was in 2011.
Arkansas’s attorney general represented the committee. My attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, argued that the boiler-plate letter I’d received, which went to all persons filing complaints about attorneys, constituted prior restraint and struck at the heart of free-speech protections—protections that were voted into the Bill of Rights particularly so that citizens could discuss their elected officials.
The state never did admit error. But in January 2013, we settled. I withdrew my lawsuit and the court ordered that henceforth the content of complaints could be discussed.
The following November, the judge hearing Howard’s claim about the withheld evidence concluded that misconduct had indeed occurred, though he softened his ruling by opining that the misconduct had been “inadvertent.” Nevertheless, he vacated Howard’s conviction, opening the way for the new trial that will take place this month.
As soon as the judge announced his finding of misconduct, I wrote again to the Office of Professional Conduct. Pointing out that a court had now made a finding of misconduct, I would renew my complaint against Cooper.
Sixteen months passed without a response. During that time I learned that, of the hundreds of attorneys the committee has sanctioned during the past 25 years, not one has been a prosecutor.
I began to think that my letter about Cooper, like my earlier ones about the First Amendment, would be totally ignored. But in the middle of March, just three days after my article about Howard’s upcoming trial appeared here, a letter from the director of the Office of Professional Conduct arrived at my office.
Could it be? A judge had found misconduct serious enough to warrant a new trial for a man who’d spent 16 years on death row, and would the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct finally break with its long tradition and actually punish a prosecutor instead of threatening those who dared to complain about one?
Nope.
This latest letter advised me that, though my complaint against Cooper was “carefully reviewed,” “sufficient evidence” had not been found that Cooper—the former prosecutor who is now a judge—had violated even one tiny rule of professional conduct.
No doubt most defendants facing a judge would love to murmur the word “inadvertent” and be graciously forgiven. But that doesn’t work in America’s courts—unless you’re a prosecuting attorney.
By: Mara Leveritt, The Daily Beast, April 6, 2015
“Hispanic Jeb vs Identity Politics”: The Most Damaging Gaffes Are The Ones That Reinforce A Preexisting Narrative
In case you haven’t heard, the New York Times is reporting that, ”In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled ‘race/ethnicity.’”
Native American Elizabeth Warren, meet Hispanic ¡Jeb!
What with all the serous news in Iran and Indiana, this might seem like a silly thing to talk about. Team Bush has responded to the story, and – based on this Tweet from Jeb Bush, Jr. (which his dad Re-Tweeted) – the strategy appears to be to try to downplay the story by poking fun at it.
That might be there best hope, because there is potential this could turn into a big deal, electorally speaking. That’s because this kind of symbolic thing is easy to mock (see Elizabeth Warren) — and easier to understand — than some policy proposal.
The most damaging gaffes are the ones that reinforce a preexisting narrative about someone. A very vocal and activist segment of the Republican primary base is vehemently opposed to anything that looks like “amnesty,” and Jeb’s support for immigration reform already has him in hot water with this contingent of the GOP. This latest revelation is amnesty on steroids. It personalizes what was, heretofore, a policy story. Bush can now be portrayed as someone who has “gone native” with the amnesty gang, and is no longer “one of us.”
When Sen. Marco Rubio was pushing immigration reform, buttons started popping up branding him a “RINO” who wants “AMNISTIA.” The fact that these buttons looked similar to a Mexican flag, and featured Rubio wearing a sombrero, only added to the subtlety. Already, the New York Times and The Week (where I also write) have associated photos with stories about this topic showing Bush surrounded by mariachi bands and/or men wearing sombreros. Those are the mainstream outlets. Wait till the blogs get hold of this. (And don’t get me started on talk radio…)
Unless this gets fixed, the conservative base (which is decidedly and passionately opposed to immigration reform, and already hostile to Bush) will use this as a cudgel to relentlessly mock and attack Bush.
To a certain extent, they have a point: Bush’s cultural experience is far different from that of most Americans. I have no idea why he checked that box, but it is reasonable to say he’s married to a Latina, his kids are Hispanic, and he lives in an area where he can probably go till lunch before speaking anything other than Spanish. This is not to say he’s un-American, but it is to say he’s international and cosmopolitan, and really, to a lot of folks, that’s pretty much a distinction without a difference.
In reality, though, the difference is huge. As noted earlier, there will be comparisons to Sen. Warren. But Elizabeth Warren presumably benefited from her bogus Native American status. Bush had nothing to gain (and as it turns out, a lot to lose) by identifying as Hispanic.
Jeb’s political ideology is such that he doesn’t think anyone should benefit from identity politics — that merit, not ethnicity, is what should matter. Liberals like Warren believe that certain minority groups should get preferential treatment; Jeb, as a conservative, does not, and as such it doesn’t really matter what ethnicity he chooses to identify as. Heck, as Florida governor, Bush even went so far as to end affirmative action in the state.
As the New York Times reported in 2000:
“There is widespread support among whites for Mr. Bush’s program, which would end preferences for businesses owned by women and minorities in bidding for state contracts. And it would end college admissions preferences based on race, substituting a program guaranteeing admission to at least 1 of the 10 state universities for high school students who graduate in the top 20 percent of their class.”
Bush is wise to try and diffuse this with humor, but only time will tell if that works. This could still be politically damaging. But that doesn’t mean it should be. Jeb’s WASPy family background only makes this story more delicious, but practically speaking, he probably is culturally Hispanic, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. What we should be interested in is the fact that, as governor, he supported conservative policies, and has a long history of rejecting identity politics. For that, at least, we should be saying ¡Viva Jeb!
By: Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast, April 6, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 