“Tidings Of Comfort”: On Multiple Fronts, Government Wasn’t The Problem; It Was The Solution
Maybe I’m just projecting, but Christmas seemed unusually subdued this year. The malls seemed less crowded than usual, the people glummer. There was even less Muzak in the air. And, in a way, that’s not surprising: All year Americans have been bombarded with dire news reports portraying a world out of control and a clueless government with no idea what to do.
Yet if you look back at what actually happened over the past year, you see something completely different. Amid all the derision, a number of major government policies worked just fine — and the biggest successes involved the most derided policies. You’ll never hear this on Fox News, but 2014 was a year in which the federal government, in particular, showed that it can do some important things very well if it wants to.
Start with Ebola, a subject that has vanished from the headlines so fast it’s hard to remember how pervasive the panic was just a few weeks ago. Judging from news media coverage, especially but not only on cable TV, America was on the verge of turning into a real-life version of “The Walking Dead.” And many politicians dismissed the efforts of public health officials to deal with the disease using conventional methods. Instead, they insisted, we needed to ban all travel to and from West Africa, imprison anyone who arrived from the wrong place, and close the border with Mexico. No, I have no idea why anyone thought that last item made sense.
As it turned out, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some early missteps, knew what they were doing, which shouldn’t be surprising: The Centers have a lot of experience in, well, controlling disease, epidemics in particular. And while the Ebola virus continues to kill many people in parts of Africa, there was no outbreak here.
Consider next the state of the economy. There’s no question that recovery from the 2008 crisis has been painfully slow and should have been much faster. In particular, the economy has been held back by unprecedented cuts in public spending and employment.
But the story you hear all the time portrays economic policy as an unmitigated disaster, with President Obama’s alleged hostility to business holding back investment and job creation. So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual record and discover that growth and job creation have been substantially faster during the Obama recovery than they were during the Bush recovery last decade (even ignoring the crisis at the end), and that while housing is still depressed, business investment has been quite strong.
What’s more, recent data suggest that the economy is gathering strength — 5 percent growth in the last quarter! Oh, and not that it matters very much, but there are some people who like to claim that economic success should be judged by the performance of the stock market. And stock prices, which hit a low point in March 2009, accompanied by declarations from prominent Republican economists that Mr. Obama was killing the market economy, have tripled since then. Maybe economic management hasn’t been that bad, after all.
Finally, there’s the hidden-in-plain-sight triumph of Obamacare, which is just finishing up its first year of full implementation. It’s a tribute to the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign against health reform — which has played up every glitch, without ever mentioning that the problem has been solved, and invented failures that never happened — that I fairly often encounter people, some of them liberals, who ask me whether the administration will ever be able to get the program to work. Apparently nobody told them that it is working, and very well.
In fact, Year 1 surpassed expectations on every front. Remember claims that more people would lose insurance than gained it? Well, the number of Americans without insurance fell by around 10 million; members of the elite who have never been uninsured have no idea just how much positive difference that makes to people’s lives. Remember claims that reform would break the budget? In reality, premiums were far less than predicted, overall health spending is moderating, and specific cost-control measures are doing very well. And all indications suggest that year two will be marked by further success.
And there’s more. For example, at the end of 2014, the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which tries to contain threats like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the Islamic State rather than rushing into military confrontation, is looking pretty good.
The common theme here is that, over the past year, a U.S. government subjected to constant bad-mouthing, constantly accused of being ineffectual or worse, has, in fact, managed to accomplish a lot. On multiple fronts, government wasn’t the problem; it was the solution. Nobody knows it, but 2014 was the year of “Yes, we can.”
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 25, 2014
“NRA Mad House Of Mirrors”: The Scandalous Dirty Laundry That Will Not Get Hung Out To Air
We live in a post 9/11 society that has harnessed an ability to employ every technological means along with unleashing legal restraints to fortify unparalleled security measures in our war for safety. Several wars and presidents later, and now with a new incursion into Syria, the cost and sacrifice for our security continues to spiral. Paranoia runs high. Police are militarized. Citizens are militarized strolling streets and store aisles “jewelried” by firearms strapped to their bodies as if in some futuristic apocalyptic movie. And then, despite all of this heightened security, some guy in daylight freely hops over the spiked White House iron gates, jogs across the lawn and enters the White House through an unlocked front door where he is finally tackled and apprehended. This is an unprecedented and historical event that has been made by the lowest form of the biggest security breach at the highest asset of our society. It is incredible and incredulous.
The media machine is chomping down on this as a secret service institutional dysfunction. There will be Congressional investigations, soul-searching, protocol reforms, sound bites, and political grandstanding, but the other equally scandalous dirty laundry part of this story will not get hung out to air. The NRA will see to it. Why was the obviously mentally unhinged perpetrator, a known-known to law enforcement, Omar J. Gonzales, 42, a two tour Iraq war veteran able to own a personal firearms arsenal, some of which he had loaded in his car parked near the White House. Luckily, he was not intent on using it on that day in that moment in that setting.
Our society is very sick but not yet sick enough of guns. Sick with a warped second amendment epidemic guided by the likes of the National Rifle Association under the leadership of Wayne Lepierre and Ted Nugent who want to hand out guns to everyone, even and especially to kids as if it was candy. This is like the old mantra of McDonald’s, “get a kid early and you have them for life.” Whereas it would be unfair to blame our gun sickness entirely on the NRA, it is this organization that stands front and center with the money, tactics, power, politicians in their pocket, and symbolism that could immediately change the destructive trajectory that our gun culture costs to human life, to our way of life, and to our desire to walk free and brave in our own play areas free from senseless slaughter. Recent F.B.I. reports confirm what many believe, there is a clear and significant rise in mass shootings in America. This despite every slickly packaged argument for more gun amusement the NRA makes behind their house of reality distorting mirrors in defense of and advocacy of more guns for everyone. America has a greater daily security threat from folks with guns than deranged terrorists abroad. In the convoluted world of NRA mirrors the lies and deception cloud over the ugly truth that our gun culture fosters the economic health of the “mourning-grieving industry.”
But rather than be a reasonable broker to balance rights with real safety, the NRA has been grossly negligent and hostile to even the slightest retreat from out of control gun promiscuity. After each high profile gun slaughter episode that causes a societal wink, nod, acknowledgement and obligatory notion that maybe now change can occur, the NRA goes into damage control mode by disappearing into silence, until the news cycle moves to the next big headline, then it emerges from their dark corridors of power and influence with some nutty pro gun candy coated taunt aimed to defuse reasonable dissent.
The latest episode that sparked this artist out of numbness and reached down into my second amendment mental abyss to pull me back into the light happened on August 25, 2014. A nine year old girl in Arizona lost control of her Uzi firearm and shot and killed her gun instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, at the Last Stop Shooting Range, also known as “Bullets and Burgers.” The little girl was learning to shoot an Uzi? When did this become part of the American gunscape? It truly was a “last stop” for the parties involved. How much more perverted can it get than changing behavior with a conditioned pairing of burgers, “kid candy,” with the danger of firing exotic, rare and powerful guns. Is this the McDonaldization of guns and is it really supposed to be amusement?
I am pleased that Mr. Vacca’s family is praying for her without contempt. But this little girl’s summer vacation became a needless life changing tragedy. Sadly and incredibly, she was of legal age in Arizona, set at eight to shoot this weapon. Mr. Vacca leaves behind a wife and four children. That makes five lives multiplied by two entire social circles devastated by this tragedy. For what? Ultimately this was ruled an”industrial accident.” Incredible! And the NRA after-the-dust-settled response, “kids just wanna have fun.” Incredulous!
There are thirty gun deaths a day in America. I ache when I consider how many lives have been lost and ruined over senseless perverted NRA interpretations to the right to keep and bear arms. I ache when I hear of little kids, mentally disturbed folks and veterans, and for each relative of perpetrators and victims that become part of the slaughter. I began to think about a mountain of shoes of the dead from gun violence and how that would compare to the scenes of shoes from victims of the Holocaust at the hands of Nazis. This reality motivated me to paint “NRA Mad House of Mirrors.” The only way out of this is to see through the NRA’s mirrors.
By: Allen Schmertzler, Political Artist Specializing in Figurative, Narrative and Caricatured Interpretations of Current Events; The Huffington Post Blog, September 26, 2014
“A New Round Of Conservative Complaints”: Even A Response To Ebola Can Apparently Be Politicized
President Obama traveled to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta this week to unveil an ambitious U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa, including money, materials, and military and health personnel.
It’s one of the most aggressive responses in U.S. history to a disease outbreak. Michele Richinick reported that “as many as 3,000 military personnel will assist in training new health care workers and building treatment clinics in the countries affected by the disease,” and some of our financial resources will be used to “construct 17 new treatment centers, each with 100 beds, and 10,000 sets of protective equipment and supplies to help 400,000 families protect themselves from the epidemic that is spreading exponentially.”
A day later, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, announced plans to establish “a new on-the-ground mission in West Africa to coordinate the struggle against Ebola,” while the World Bank Group issued a report warning of a “potentially catastrophic blow” to the economies of countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
Given all of this, it seems like an odd time for conservative media to start a new round of complaints.
Right-wing media are using President Obama’s plan to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as another opportunity to attack him. Conservatives are calling the president a “hypocrite” because he’s sending “more soldiers to fight Ebola than we are sending to fight ISIS”; labeling the plan “arrogant” because of problems with HealthCare.gov; and accusing him of trying to “change the subject” by “fighting a really bad flu bug.”
It was former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) who equated the Ebola virus with a “really bad flu bug.”
Rush Limbaugh added, “We are sending more soldiers to fight Ebola than we are sending to fight ISIS or other Muslim terrorists…. I didn’t know you could shoot a virus. Did you?”
For what it’s worth, there’s a credible argument to explain why a military component should be part of the response to an outbreak like this. Julia Belluz had an interesting piece on this yesterday, noting the larger debate.
Obama has repeatedly referred to the threat of Ebola in security terms, arguing the virus could cripple the already fragile economies in the African region. He’s made the case that this will have consequences for not only the security of countries there, but also for nations around the world – even if the virus doesn’t spread beyond Africa.
For examples of this war-like mentality, look no further than the president’s address, delivered Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta: “If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us. So this is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security – it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic. That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease.”
It’s a fairly easy argument to make. There are critics of the “securitization” of these public-health crises, but in countries facing “potentially catastrophic” economic and destabilizing conditions, it’s not hard to imagine unrest and possible violence.
The point is not to “shoot a virus”; it’s to create conditions in which people who contract the virus can receive care.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 18, 2014
“It Will Be Ugly, And It Will Escalate”: Buffer Zones, Clinic Escorting, And The Myth Of The Quiet Sidewalk Counselors
The Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts “buffer zone” law — which barred antiabortion protests immediately outside clinics. Justice Scalia portrayed the law as hindering ‘sidewalk counselors’ who lovingly entreated women to consider alternatives. This portrayal, embodied by the grandmotherly petitioner, allowed some to view the decision as protecting gentle civility. Referencing one particular Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston, this “quiet counseling” was seen as well-intentioned, and, more importantly, constitutional.
It is also a myth — or at least a dramatic euphemism that applies to very few at the Boston site. I should know. I was there.
For four years, I volunteered as an escort on Saturday mornings. The scene described in the court — like a delusional game of telephone — was drastically different from reality.
Our mornings were mostly spent scanning the streets, attempting to spot patients before they approached the zealous spectacle. We’d tactfully ask if they were looking for the clinic, and walk them through the crowd.
Saturdays were favored by protesters, so escorts arrived in the early morning. Wearing identifying vests, we flanked the entrance and greeted patients outside the zone. Two would rotate to the back to watch the garage entrance, where only the more tenacious protestors wandered. We’d accompany patients up the long walk to the front, usually trailed by someone asking if Satan sent us. (He didn’t.)
During the freezing New England winters, we would briefly warm up inside, but were mostly left to stomp our feet and count how many toes we could feel. Once a month, a Christian band would show up, surreally, and hold a concert.
We knew the “quiet counseling” well. “Just like Auschwitz,” one would say, “you’re delivering them right into the furnace.” This particular protester would speak right into her ear — until he approached the painted line on the ground.
Sometimes, a male accompanying a patient would lose his cool. He could have been her boyfriend or brother. We didn’t know and never asked. Once they entered, the doors could burst back open and he would charge whichever protestor called his companion a whore. We would intervene.
Justice Alito felt the law represented “viewpoint discrimination” — constitutionally, one message can’t be favored over another. But as an escort, I never talked about abortion, even outside the zone. When guiding patients, I would detail what they could expect. I didn’t offer my perspective, or even criticize the protestors. My goal was to provide a calming presence seconds before what would be one of the more trying moments of their lives. I explained how to access the clinic, and maintained a low patter to distract them from strangers calling them beasts and murderers. If they were confused by the protestors’ Boston Police hats, we cleared that up too.
If the patient was African-American, the protestors said they were “lynching” their child. If the protestor was crying, they said the tears would never stop, even in hell. If a patient was with her mother, they thanked the mother — for not killing her own baby.
Surprisingly, those Saturdays were not without their lighter moments. For a group dedicated to attacking Planned Parenthood — a multi-purpose clinic — they seemed stunned when someone wasn’t seeking an abortion. “You’ll never be the same. You’ll always be a dirty killer,” one would say. A startled patient would respond, “Why would a Pap smear make me a dirty killer?” Many others sought birth control — though they didn’t approve of that either.
This is not to paint all protesters as unhinged. I still remember one young priest who didn’t condemn me and chose instead to make small talk — which we continued periodically. Another time, upon news of the Columbia shuttle deteriorating upon reentry, we all shared a collective moment of humanity.
Being in a college area, there were counter-protestors (also kept out of the buffer zone) — who promoted pro-choice politics through direct and shocking slogans. Many of us didn’t care for them either. We just wanted calm in an atmosphere of invective and hysteria.
The desire for calm stemmed, in part, from the 1994 Brookline shootings. The victims were known by some of my fellow volunteers. This very real risk led the police to call for a buffer zone. One of the victims, a 25-year-old receptionist, was not just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder was premeditated; her killer focused on her.
Even when I was there, clinic staff driving up would be greeted with protestors filming them and, not so subtly, stating the staffer’s home address. Those were the more chilling moments.
It is difficult (though not impossible) to argue that a unanimous Supreme Court case was wrongly decided. After all, it is a broad law. But that is not my goal. Instead, I’m writing to dispel the myth painted of Good Samaritans softly offering a helping hand. In the public relations war over whether the affected individuals were compassionate counselors or marauding bullies, many justices seemed to accept the former characterization.
The law was overturned as an overreaching infringement on free speech. Is this a free speech issue? Yes, of course it is. But as others have pointed out, buffer zones exist elsewhere, including outside the Supreme Court. Favoring free speech, the Court famously allowed Nazis to march in Illinois and, more recently, the Phelps church to picket funerals (at a distance). But parades and funerals eventually end. Here, the Court risks turning clinic entrances into permanently hostile environments — inciting those who have spent weeks agonizing over their decision. They overturned the express wishes of an elected legislature — including pro-life lawmakers who supported the measure in the interest of public safety.
Similar zones were upheld by the court in 2000, a ruling which was not overturned. Clinic entrances still cannot be blocked, and injunctions are allowed against particularly worrisome parties. Chief Justice Roberts even suggested other mechanisms the state can use in lieu of the zone. But it’s an ever-changing landscape, and those remaining precautions have become the next targets of these quiet counselors. Because, to those that brought the case, speech alone is not the goal.
The grueling decision of whether to have an abortion should never be taken lightly, and there is no shortage of advocates for either side that fill our collective eardrums. But that debate stops a few feet outside the clinic. Just like politicking outside voting booths, these last ditch efforts lose the veneer of debate and become akin to intimidation — which can easily morph into confrontation or devastating anguish. Anyone who wants to stop and chat can do so. But once patients decide to cross the line, they should be left alone. The Court noted that the environment is currently more peaceful than it once was. There’s a reason for that.
None of this is to say that this isn’t a legitimate debate. It is. But those who favor stripping the buffer zone away — what small help it is — shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a flood of polite conversation will follow. It will be ugly, and it will escalate.
By: Brian Giacometti, Field-based NGO Program Manager for Governance and Rule of Law; The Huffington Post Blog, July 7, 2014
“Dissent And Violence”: Where Terrorists And Assassins Don’t Hide
At the end of last week, I wrote about a report showing how law enforcement authorities reacted to Occupy protests as if they were the advance guard for an al Qaeda invasion of America, on the apparent assumption that unlike non-violent right-wing dissent, non-violent left-wing dissent is likely a prelude to violence and thus must be met with surveillance, infiltration, and ultimately force. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a decision on a case involving the Secret Service that seems to grow from a similar assumption about the connection between dissent and violence.
The case was about an incident in 2004 when President George W. Bush stopped at an outdoor restaurant in Oregon. A crowd quickly formed, with some people cheering Bush and some jeering him. The Secret Service forced both groups away from the location, but let the pro-Bush citizens stay closer than the anti-Bush citizens; the plaintiffs charged that this was impermissible viewpoint discrimination. The Court ruled 9-0 that the Secret Service acted reasonably to protect the president. Having read the decision, I don’t necessarily disagree with their reasoning—a lot of it turned on things like lines of sight to where the president was sitting from different corners in the area. But I’d be shocked if the agents involved weren’t particularly on their guard when the anti-Bush protesters showed up.
What we ought to question is the assumption that there’s any connection at all between the content of a non-violent protest and the potential for premeditated violence, particularly of the really dangerous kind, like terrorist attacks and attempts to assassinate the president. If you have two groups of people yelling at the president, and one group is saying “You’re great!” while the other group says “You suck!”, is there any higher probability that a threat to the president’s life will come from the second group than the first? The answer is, of course not. If someone wanted to assassinate the president, they would have no reason to seek out a bunch of protesters opposing that president to use as a cover. They’d want to get close enough to fire a shot, and it wouldn’t matter what the people among whom they hid would be saying.
That’s true despite whatever intuitive sense one might have that people who are opposed to the president might want to assassinate him. There’s a belief not just that anti-government violence exists on the same spectrum as peaceful protest, but that at any given moment, such violence is a potential outgrowth of such protest. And more: that people planning violence will incorporate peaceful protest into their plans.
That assumption leads to things like the Department of Defense spying on Quaker anti-war protesters during the Iraq war. Think about how nuts that is. The anti-terrorism officials whom we charge with our safety actually seemed to believe that al Qaeda would send a cell to America with plans to launch a major attack, and instruct them: “The week before zero hour, make sure you go to an anti-war rally. Make a sign that says ‘Bush Is the Real Terrorist.’ That will lay the groundwork for the explosion.”
Again, this case about the Secret Service was probably rightly decided, but the belief that terrorism, bombings, assassinations, and/or general violent mayhem are the potential result of every left-wing protest is absolutely common among law enforcement authorities at every level of government. It isn’t just factually wrong, it’s actually dangerous—to the people who end up having their rights violated, and to the country’s safety.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 29, 2014
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