April 2015 Archives

Dear America,

Lest you labor under a false impression, I believe that police violence is not a racial problem per se, but rather is a problem with law enforcement in general.  I do not believe that because we hear nothing about cases with Caucasian, Asian or Latino victims, all victims of police brutality are African-American.  But over the past year we have been exposed to abuse of black arrestees on at least four occasions because those stories have become nation-wide news in each case, thus evoking in many the impression that racial prejudice is always the raison d'être in such cases; I know from experience that cops take liberties with white people too.  But that isn't the issue with which I am concerned today.  Rather, in two of these recent cases of apparent excessive force by police, the issues that should be addressed--police training, personnel processes that allow brutal people to carry badges and guns, the pervasive culture that favors abuse in some police departments and the psychology of the average cop relative to not just his professional duty, but his moral duty as well--have been obscured by this trend toward attribution to race as the primary cause of the police misconduct involved.  And the consequence in each of these two cases--Ferguson and now Baltimore--was not demonstrations, but race riots.

Unfortunately, such devolution of events from legitimate protest to not just lawless, but criminal behavior has two effects.  First is that it reinforces the syllogistic idea that all policemen and all police brutality are functions of racism, that only racism can cause such brutality and that all police are therefore racist. But the fact is that in at least two of the cases that have become fodder for the popular furor we are seeing, the victims were at least low-level criminals in the process of committing low level criminal acts.  Whether it was walking down the middle of the street and then resisting reasonable commands to stop doing so or selling "loosies" on the street, each victim passed through a threshold of cause for police to confront him in those two cases.  As to the most recent case in Baltimore, that of Freddy Gray, the victim was characterized even by some of his friends as a low level drug dealer, and he happened to be carrying a switchblade at the time of his arrest.  None of that is to say that there was cause for the police involved to execute the victims on the street...or in the transport vehicle as in Freddy Gray's case.  It is to say that the victims were not heroes or saints; they were not innocent victims, though victims they might have been.  It is not the case that every police officer is a criminal at heart, nor is it the fact that every time someone gets beaten by a cop, it is the cop's fault and not his own.  When you act outside the law, you should expect to be confronted by law enforcement, and when that occurs, resistance to the lawful application of legal authority in the form of arrest should be  expected to result in violence.  While brutality is unacceptable in our society, physical restraint, and yes, necessary and appropriate violence, is sometimes a part of law enforcement, but it may be that obscuring that fact with racial motifs serves a disproportionately deleterious purpose in American social discourse.

When the movement represented by protest beatifies people of dubious character, and the result is demonstrations that lead to violence and criminality like looting and arson, the movement itself is discredited because it looks to the world as though that movement is the criminal mob within it, and that the condemnation of racism is just a gambit for lawlessness.  All that being said, it is impossible for the legitimate movement against police misconduct and racism to prevent mobs of malfeasant miscreants from infiltrating them, but it is not impossible for them to audibly condemn the misconduct of some among them, and to support the police in their efforts to apprehend them and separate them from a legitimate social movement.  The only way for the righteous movement against racism and police misconduct to validate itself is for its leadership to point out the flawed characters who have become emblematic of what they are trying to do--and by that I mean not just the criminal mob within the protest that appears on the nightly news, but the criminal element that becomes the victims inspiring the cause as well--so that neither can  taint its legitimate and noble purpose.  In the case of Michael Brown of Ferguson for example, the victim may not have deserved to be shot to death, though the resolution of that issue in favor of the police officer who did the shooting seems more than credible to almost everyone who examines the evidence with an open mind, but he was a bully and a thug as demonstrated by contemporaneous video of him robbing an old man in a convenience store.  Now, his parents are suing on his behalf, but that suit, even if it yields a recovery for the family, does no service to the movement for racial justice in this country, and that case, along with the rioting in both Ferguson and Baltimore connected with it and the death of Freddie Gray, serve no purpose but to discredit the quest for vindication of principles that are American to the core and have no race or creed.

We live in a period of great social injustice both economically and socially.  There is no way to separate that injustice from these events in that economics and the social Darwinism that plague us are at the root of much of what passes for nothing but human decadence, but when we try to move in the right direction, we do not need distractions and misdirection in the form of opportunism and venality.  In both Ferguson and Baltimore, some people...black people...have vocally protested the hijacking of their protests and their neighborhoods by outsiders who are seizing an opportunity to rob and burn, and they are the real heroes here.  Not Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

As far as politics is concerned, there is nothing new.  The Republicans are still trying to catch the elusive Hillary Clinton in some sort of mortal sin while coming up with nothing more than venial ones.  They continue to flog the Benghazi murders, but even after at least three full investigations they can't come up with anything inculpatory, so they have resorted to pretexts on which to bring Clinton before them toward the end of creating some kind of spectacle that will embarrass her.  Though eight of Trey Goudy's prefabricated questions for the former Secretary of State apparently do relate to Benghazi, that event now serves as nothing but a gambit for his committee's subpoenas, their primary interest being her private email account, with which the other 124 questions are concerned.   But even with the currency of that issue behind them, it is obvious that the Republicans are struggling to find something to do that will capture public sentiment.  They have gone so far as to schedule not just one, but two sessions with Ms. Clinton so that they can drag the passion play out a little farther toward the 2016 election season.  But while the now-habitual strategy of vilifying the opposition rather than coming up with cogent policy ideas is still their modus operandi, the Republicans' control of the policy message they seek to send to the voters as the identity of the Republican Party continues to be elusive.

The first three announcements of candidacy for the presidency by Republicans have been by the arch-conservatives Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, and while the first two are probably nothing but background noise in the final analysis, Rubio seems to be gaining recognition in a broader sense, and he may have the effect of making the anointment of a unifying candidate as difficult, and Pyrrhic, as were the last two quests for the presidency.  The debates will probably be fewer in number this time, but Republicans seem destined to demonstrate the disarray of their party again...and in an equally significant way.  The fractiousness that the 2008 and 2012 Republican debates put on display was so broad from pole to pole that in the end, the moderate candidates were forced to box themselves into some positions that were too conservative to be enticing to a popular national majority.  This time, Paul is playing the same role that Newt Gingrich did as the self-proclaimed advanced, non-mainstream thinker, Cruz is playing the role of Paul's father as the fringe candidate and Jeb Bush is vying with Scott Walker, the anti-labor Governor of Michigan, for the title of most viable, just as Rick Perry and Mitt Romney did in 2012.  The actors have changed, but the roles are still the same, and as the field rounds out to include those who today are only watchers and waiters, the sanctimony and personal ambition that is at the core of Republican candidacy will emerge giving the same caution to voters as has kept the Republicans out of the White House for six years this century and for the last eight years of the last one.

With that in mind, one might think that the Republican majorities in the two houses of congress would be more intent on showing themselves to be competent and reliable, but their performance since taking control of the Senate, and thus both houses, demonstrates that the Republicans just can't help themselves.  They keep reloading that foot-shooting pistol they carry and firing it whenever they get the chance.  Recently they have made a lot of noise about a reiteration of the authorization for The President to use military force, or the standing AUMF that both George W. and President Obama have relied upon for the power to deploy our military in the air and on the ground in Iraq and Syria respectively, but as would-be party leaders took to the grandstand, what should have been a univocal call for such became just one more cacophony that made it clear that the Republican Party is no more internally consistent than it has ever been since the turn of the century.  And as if to amplify that message, they sat on the nomination of the next Attorney General of the United States, Loretta Lynch, for nearly half a year despite their persistent plaints about her predecessor, Eric Holder--notably the only Attorney General to ever be found in contempt of congress--for the past six years.   And what's more, they did it in service of an already bipartisan bill to protect against human slavery over language in it that does no more than reiterate "the Hyde Amendment," which proscribes the use of federal funds for abortions.  The clause in question is totally redundant in light of Hyde, which has been law for decades, but the Republicans failed to pass a bill that even their opposition approve of, a reauthorization of a program that already existed to aid the victims and potential victims of a universally abhorrent crime, in order to advocate for something that also already exists.  What a waste of taxpayer money...and this from the party that claims to advocate austerity.

So, we slog on politically as a nation, trying to overcome the foolishness permitted, facilitated and even required by the Republicans' effete leaders, and precipitated by the conservative polar elements of their fragmented party.  And by showing us this they expect us to be persuaded to vote for them?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Recently I have been questioning myself regarding my generalized opinion of conservatives and Republicans in particular.  Sometimes, I hear things that sound rational from them, and I am trying to develop an open mind in that regard rather than rejecting what they say in consequence of my distrust of the source.  Marco Rubio, for example, is talking in very vague, general terms about some issues that are quite timely at this moment in our political history--the treaty with Iran, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and climate change to name a few--and because of his practice of merely limning the issues rather than articulating specific ideas and proposed policies, he seems almost credible.  And if he is right, it is in my best interest...as it would be in yours...to consider voting for him, but there's the rub.  How can you know if what he would do if he found himself in a position of power would be felicitous if he doesn't say specifically what he thinks and proposes.  I suppose that's the problem with all politicians: you don't know what you'll get until you've got it.  But when it comes to the issues involved in the current political contentiousness, too much is at stake to wait until it is too late to make a difference.  For that reason, while I am trying to keep an open mind, I am also trying to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to Republicans, and even Democrats if I sense a conservative bent in them.

Thus, when Rubio says things like, science doesn't know how much of global warming relates to human activity, and therefore, when we consider measures to take, we should also consider economic impact and the burden on business that such measures represent, and reject measures that are unduly burdensome in those arenas of human activity.  That sounds fairly rational as a premise, but the question is, is it really a euphemism for his presumption that any regulation related to the environment is too burdensome on business and should therefore be rejected out of hand.  If you parse what he says, that possibility becomes ever more ominous in light of the tendency in the past for conservatives to be unequivocally opposed to government regulation whenever it circumscribes corporate activity no matter what the purpose or the consequence of failure to regulate.  If you start your thinking from the axiom that if it's good for business it's good for everyone, almost nothing that is civic minded is viable.

And of course the Affordable Care Act is a prominent issue now with the related case before the Supreme Court about to be argued.  If the conservative forces marshaled for the litigation prevail, citizens of most of the states will no longer be able to get federal subsidies if they cannot afford health insurance on their own, which translates to the inability to acquire health insurance, and hence health care, at all.  With the environment there is a vague remoteness about the attendant issues like cap and trade, EPA standards and the like.  We don't feel those things personally though we can understand their implications intellectually.  But with healthcare, it affects us daily and immediately, so keeping an open mind about the conservative position is considerably more difficult.  My immediate family and I have health insurance, but I have a half-brother who has been disabled most of his adult life, and his immediate family...at least his wife...didn't have insurance until he recently got her covered under New York's expanded Medicaid program, which many of the states whose citizens will be unable to afford insurance if the conservatives win in the Supreme Court opted not to participate in when the Supreme Court last got involved in all this.  The rationale behind the current law suit seems to be that the financial burden of federal subsidies is profound, and thus, the states who didn't opt for Medicaid expansion and setting up their own health insurance exchanges are being burdened through the federal taxation system.  On the surface that seems rational, but in the final analysis, the consensus seems to be that the ACA saves money for everyone by making it cheaper for our society in general for all who used to partake of our healthcare system by going to the emergency room or through various welfare programs for example, to have insurance that puts them in the healthcare mainstream.  How does that become the "job killer" that people like John Boehner say it is, and given the casuistry involved in claiming that it does, why should my mind be open to people who say such things, like Marco Rubio.

I guess my point is that I have tried to see it their way.  I have considered the vague protests they make and I am trying to get past the fact that they don't seem to have any suggestions for what we should do when it is obvious that we should do something, like with healthcare and the environment, but I can't seem to get over the hump.  What frustrates me most is things like all this talk about the Pacific trade deal that our president seems intent on pursuing.  If NAFTA is any indication, all it will do is precipitate the export not just of goods, but of jobs as well, it seems to me.  President Obama, and Hillary Clinton as well, aren't conservatives, but it seems that at least in this regard, they are trying to do it to us too, so it would be nice to have someone to whom can we turn.  But the only alternative to what we liberals have seems to be conservatives, not moderates...and Jeb Bush isn't a moderate no matter what he says.  Come 2016, what's a lifelong progressive to do?  I can't open my mind far enough to even consider voting for people who say the things...and don't say the things...that conservatives do and don't say because when you look at them from all perspectives, there's nothing new about these Tea Party types that makes them viable alternatives.  And as for liberals, where the hell are they?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Two interesting, diametrically opposed articles about individual wealth were juxtaposed in the Amazon Prime subscribers' internet addition of the Washington Post yesterday.  The first was titled, "Americans are spending $153 billion a year to subsidize low-wage workers," and it was about the fact that millions of full-time, low wage workers in industries like food service, retail and home health care earn so little that they still qualify for food stamps.  Many of them work more than one job, and they still cannot lead decent, independent lives because they can't earn enough money to do so.  On the next page was an article titled, "Lockheed's Marilyn Hewson is the highest-paid female CEO so far this year," and it quantified her compensation for 2014 at $33.7 million.  The two articles together made my head swim with a nest of vitriolic ideas about wealth and politics.

What came to my mind first was relatively trivial: women are no more noble when it comes to money than men are.  If J.P. Morgan-Chase's male CEO, Jamie Dimon, is vile because he earns $20 million or more per year, Lockheed's female CEO, Marilyn Hewson, is just as vile.  Neither of them is capable of spending in any reasonable way what they make yearly even if given a lifetime to do it in, so they are both poster-children...for excess.  Men don't have a corner on that market.

Next was the social injustice of such staggering rates of compensation.  The Hewson article observed that stock holders wouldn't be angry about her outlandish compensation package because the company's stock had risen by 30% in 2014.  That observation suggested to me that the stock market isn't rational, but then investors aren't either.  The money made by the select few trading in the market, which no one realizes comes out of all our pockets because you can't make money out of thin air, should be taxed intensely because it isn't earned in any sense.  The increased price per share of a company's stock is a function more of money not paid out to share holders in dividends and thus held in the company's treasury rather than reinvested in capital developments like plants and equipment, much less in employees both old and new.  The result is that increased prices for their goods exacerbate the trend toward inflated prices for all the things we use without increases in the compensation we earn for making them, but the rich still get richer for producing and contributing nothing to our society.

Then my mind swung toward the broader issue of economic injustice and the fact that the working man and woman haven't seen their levels of prosperity increase in three decades...ever since Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of supply-side economics: an absurd set of ideas in my estimation, but one that even liberals hesitate to argue with these days out of political correctness.  The idea that money people get for doing nothing (capital gains) should be taxed at a lower rate than money earned by actual work is derived from supply-side theory, but it ignores its own ineluctable consequence: that the sloth generated by unearned wealth is encouraged while honest labor is discouraged because it can never result in prosperity in and of itself for the vast majority of working people, including those who work for Hewson and Dimon.  At that point, tangents began creeping into my thinking, like the despicable nature of the resistance of those with great wealth, and the people against whom they abuse their wealth by propagandizing, to universal health care unless everyone, including people who can't do so, pays for his own.  All in all, the simple fact that those two articles appeared on one screen together set me off and my college radicalism bubbled to the surface again in the form of what I think we should do about it, and what the prospects are for doing it.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate who represents the greatest hope for rectifying the social stratification by wealth that we are seeing and have seen over the past thirty years or so.  But while she says things like, she wants the phrase "middle class" to mean something again, she also wants to make that happen by stimulating small business, which does create most of the jobs in our economy, but also most of the inadequately paid jobs.  The great female, liberal hope is just as confused as our current president when it comes to the causes and remedies for our modern economic caste system, and her opposition will be willfully opposed to such remedies.  Marco Rubio wants to decrease Social Security benefits, invoking the conservative canard that doing so can balance the budget, rather than increasing the amount that the rich pay in taxes, which would actually reduce the deficit rather than just seeming to on false pretenses.  It's enough to make one run for office...except for the fact that unless you are rich and run with the rich crowd, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell...or a working man's chance in America either.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I happened across a love-fest between Sean Hannity and Marco Rubio yesterday, and to those of you who read these letters, even if only once or twice before, it will be no surprise to you that I found their mutual admiration society repugnant.  So the fact that my criticism of the event is centered on the repetitive nature of Republican politics won't surprise you either, nor, perhaps, will it be of any interest to you since I have covered all of the topics I heard them discuss before.  But I cannot resist pointing out that, while some in the Republican Party want to label Marco Rubio a "fresh, new fact" with prospect for success in national politics that were lacking during the preeminence of Mitt Romney, Rubio is just one more practitioner of stale old Republican tactics and strategy.  Their strategy is to ascend to power by whatever means necessary, and their tactics are surprisingly uniform from electoral event to electoral event: they vilify the opposition for its ideas, and but proffer no ideas of their own.   To put it concisely, with regard to everything that the Democrats and President Obama have suggested and done over the past six years, their candid appraisal is, "nope, that's not it."  Their presumption, I presume, is that no one will notice that what they mean, but are not saying, is, "I got nothing here."  Rubio made use of that tactic overtly on at least one occasion during his conversation with Hannity, which I have to admit I could only tolerate for about fifteen minutes.

Hannity lobbed Rubio a soft-ball something like, how are you going to defeat Hillary Clinton--whom the Democrats are going to coronate rather than nominate--and the Democratic Party.  Rubio's response was a long-winded observation that the problem isn't that the candidate and the party are not good, it's that the Democrats' and President Obama's ideas are bad...  Let me point out, gleefully, that there was nothing after that...no sign of an idea of his own.  He mentioned "Obamacare" obliquely, that is, he said that it could never be repealed while President Obama is in office, but if a Republican president is elected to work with a "hopefully" Republican congress, Obamacare would be repealed and replaced.  At that point, if Hannity were intellectually honest he would have asked, "with what?"  Need I say that no such question was asked...at least during the period for which I could stomach their mutual preaching to their one note choir.  What neither Rubio nor Hannity conceded, or even hinted at, was the fact that more than ten million people who never had health insurance before--millions of them voters--have health insurance now, nor did they offer anything more probable to replace it even though Rubio said that replacement was part of the repeal package.  It was one more retread of the now ancient Republican litany on the subject of the universal healthcare system that they never will support, not because it constitutes government overreach, but because they really don't care about the 48 million Americans who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act and the ones among them who died in droves not because they couldn't be cured of virulent disease, but because they couldn't afford to be.  At least one other potential Republican candidate has proposed the health savings accounts that they are trying to sell as an alternative to a single payer system, but when the trappings of such a program are stripped away, it becomes apparent that such a plan helps only those who can afford them, and even they don't get the coverage for catastrophic illness that almost everyone needs.

And of course, they touched on international affairs...Iran in particular...and Rubio spewed the list of complaints that old-line conservative jingoists have used to justify war after war, four of the last five of which--Vietnam, the first Gulf war, the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan--we have prosecuted without a scintilla of progress toward the putative goal of democratic liberty for all.  In each of those cases, our opposition ultimately prevailed or the government we installed turned out to be a kleptocracy that oppresses the parties we deposed instead of the deposed oppressing those whom we placed in power.  As to Granada, the only possible exception to my assessment, I don't know what the outcome was.  I don't even know what the war was about, nor does anyone else I suspect.

As to Rubio and Hannity, I assume that they also went into the Obama administration's efforts to mitigate the damage done by the post- Glass-Steagall economy that the Republicans touted as an alternative to Keynesian economics that would create a self-priming economic pump that would last in perpetuity.  And in that context, they probably panned the Obama recovery legislation that passed in his first year in office by observing that, while the unemployment rate had been cut in half, the deficit grew astronomically and so did the national debt while the jobs created were inadequate, both in terms of the wealth they produced and their relationship to American dependence on foreign talent.  Rubio puled that we have ceased to train the tradesmen we need in our public education system though we spend billions on Pell grants and college loans, which he didn't seem to understand to mean that he supported creating a population of tradesmen with tax dollars, but he had no use for the use of government funds to create a population of professionals with aspirations to join Rubio in the middle class.  It was as if he said that he was all in favor of training maids and nannies, but he didn't see the need to train teachers for a public school system.

The idea that a narcissistic, self-deluded recipient of the largess of his great nation could succeed in deluding the electorate into the same set of beliefs about him without including the fact that if it weren't for that largess, he wouldn't be where he is gives me a dramatically sinking feeling about our national future.  I do not support converting our secular humanism into sanctimonious social Darwinism, and that is what a Rubio presidency concomitant with entrenchment of a Republican congress would constitute.  Fortunately, it doesn't look any more possible now than it did before Sean Hannity tried to suggest otherwise last night.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

To no one's surprise, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted of thirty or so counts of terrorist activity accusations, including three murders, all of which raises two questions.  The first is the question of what to do about this barely post-adolescent perpetrator of heinous acts, and the second is what to do about his ilk.  As to the first question--should Tsarnaev be executed--my opinion is that he should not, and the reason is not that I am against the death penalty, which I am, but that is not relevant in this matter.  Tsarnaev is an irredeemable villain in my opinion, but even that isn't relevant per se, except for the fact that in my opinion again, he deserves the worst punishment that can be meted out to him: life in prison without the possibility that he will ever see the outside world in person again.  Such a sentence would satisfy three of what our society's purposes should be in this regard, and the first is related to the four universally accepted reasons in juris prudence for punishment: restraint, rehabilitation, retribution and deterrence.  As far as restraint is concerned, it is obvious that as a society we cannot permit someone as dangerous as Tsarnaev to roam the streets given not just the violence he has wrought but the threat of violence that he constitutes.  We have a right, both legal and moral I would argue, to protect ourselves from him, and for that reason if no other, he should be in prison from this day until he dies.  Of course, the other three philosophical, juris prudential  reasons for punishment have their appeal as well, but while retribution in any form, including the death penalty might give the victims and those who cared about them some satisfaction--and my guess is that that is where the jury is headed--it will accomplish nothing.  The old adage is that "revenge is a dish best served cold," but it never can be.  Passion will always be involved, and in my experience--which I don't claim for an instant compares to what the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and their families have gone through--there is no final satisfaction in taking revenge.  My pain and frustration in  circumstances that evoke a desire for revenge in me are never assuaged in consequence of the immutability of what has been done.  The past is the past and it can never be changed, which is one reason that retribution is the least respectable of the four reasons for punishment in the literature on the subject.  Add to that the fact that Tsarnaev's purported reason for doing what he did was retribution and it is clear that we will not be ennobled by executing him.  As to rehabilitation and deterrence, neither Tsarnaev nor his ilk are candidates for it.  Once such dogs bite, they are a threat to everyone around them forever, so restraint...the protection of society...is the most plausible reason to punish Tsarnaev, and that means a life in prison.  But beyond this philosophical and moral conundrum that the prospect of the death penalty represents, there is a practical consideration.

The Tsarnaev brothers were self-styled martyrs.  Whether their motivations were the seventy virgins that they thought Mohammed had promised them or some inner rage over what they perceived as an injustice perpetrated against them and their people, death was literally the "final reward" they were seeking as has been the case with all of the terrorist attackers we have seen here and abroad.  When they act they are courting death, so why should we oblige them.  Why should we gratify their perverse desires.  Further, consider the legacy they leave if they are executed.  The Tsarnaev brothers are the spawn of a woman who is as rabid as at least the older brother was, and if they are martyred in her eyes, she will be validated in some way among the disturbed minority of Muslims who subscribe to the notion that Islam should be the universal faith in this world and that they have the divinely mandated mission of seeing to it.  She will become a symbol of Jihadi zeal rather than remaining the demented sociopath that the facts make her out to be, and it seems counterproductive to give that small segment of the multi-billion Muslim population of the world a heroine--and hence a rallying point--from which to recruit for their perverse cause.  Put concisely, inflicting execution on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is tantamount to facilitating those who agree with him in their insidious quest to inflict mayhem and murder on us.  It would be not just retribution against him...futile in nature as it is...but also a self-inflicted wound for the rest of us.  Add to that the fact that some will certainly say that it is the same kind of behavior that the brothers themselves committed and the result will be a blow struck against our society in the moral debate over Jihad's justification between the vast Islamic majority and the Islamist lunatic fringe, at least in the minds of those lunatics who pursue it and their prospective recruits.  We further their cause if we resort to capital punishment because they will use it as a rationale for what they will call capital punishment in the future...what is today nothing better than savagery and atrocity.

No doubt the prosecution will argue that the depravity of Tsarnaev's acts demands the death penalty, but the virtue of the argument, both in moral and in practical terms is questionable.  If we can rather maintain our passion for justice at the same time as we see the best path toward destruction of the international force that Jihad has become, we will reject capital punishment in this case, even if in this case only.  It is the rare instance in which that thing that seems most symmetrical with the crime committed is really nothing but a Pyrrhic victory for our society.  I hope the jury sees that.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Over the past week or two, the Indiana statute putatively intended to solidify religious freedom in Indiana as if the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply there has garnered almost universal attention among the media, and of course, Indiana's governor, Mike Pence, has been the poster boy for his state's misguided legislation.  I say misguided for several reasons, but I'll get to them after I say my piece about Mike Pence.  He is the silver haired former Republican congressman from Indiana who said when asked whether he was going to run for president in 2012 that he and his family were going to "pray about it" over the following weekend.  Apparently God dropped everything and presided over their deliberations, which led to their paterfamilias running for governor instead.  In Pence's mind, what he does in his political career is a function of afflatus rather than political ambition, which runs parallel to his belief that his pontifications of righteousness, presumptuousness and  sanctimony are tantamount to piety.  Pence is the embodiment of the either self-deluded or hypocritical motivations of a despicable contingent of the members of a  segment of our population that describes itself as "evangelical."  According to Webster's New World Dictionary, evangelical means "in, of, or according to the Gospels or the teaching of the New Testament."  There are two phrases in that definition that are the quintessence of evangelism: the Gospels and the New Testament.  They are quintessential because they define the creed's etiology very simply and very specifically.  It derives solely from the descriptions of the life, death, resurrection and the words of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Gospels, that is in the first four books of the New Testament...you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the vast majority of people who seem to understand that the Gospels don't imprecate against sinners but rather adjure tolerance and forgiveness even of sinners--as in let he who is without sin cast the first stone and do unto others as you would have them do unto you--and who thus characterize themselves as evangelicals are not people like Mike Pence.

Pence proved that on national television.  When confronted with the discrimination argument against the ostensible freedom of religion statute that had just passed in his state's legislature and been signed into law by him, Pence couldn't bring himself to say outright that the law would not, and was not intended to, bar homosexuals from receiving public accommodations and services like bakeries and photography studios if the purveyors of such so choose.  And thus, he made it clear that the intention of the law was indeed precisely what he subsequently claimed to eschew...things like exclusion from public accommodations and the Hobby Lobby case's nullification of the Affordable Care Act's mandate that birth control be provided under health insurance policies, at least as it applied to closely held corporations.  Pence is a bigot, at least on the sexual preference issue and the broader issue of whether fundamentalist doctrine should prevail over secular humanism.  I knew someone in college who used to call people like Pence "Christers."  It is pejorative in its way, but not in the same way in which "nigger," "yid," "kike," "wop,""queer" and "faggot" are.  Rather, it connotes the kind of self-righteousness and peremptory values that pass for legitimate religiosity among people like Pence...the kind of people who would never use such epithets, but whose thoughts and feelings reflect them.  If anyone ever deserved the epithet Christer, it would be Pence.  In my opinion, if God really advises people about politics, I am confident that he will advise voters not to vote for Pence...for any office.

But setting Pence aside, the rationale for the Indiana law, and for all of the other 19 or 20 state laws that it emulates, is a reflection of the kind of values that Mike Pence and the Republican majority in Indiana's state legislature embrace.  The reason I can say that with such certainty is that our federal constitution was amended in 1865 to include the 14th amendment, which incorporates all of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights and applies those mandates against abuse of power not just by the federal government but by all of the governments of all of the states as well.  That means that the first amendment's proscription of laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" and a federal statutory codification of those first amendment principles passed during the Clinton administration do exactly what Pence and his cohorts say they were intending to do, thus obviating any such action in Indiana, Arkansas, Arizona or any other state.  Those 19 or 20 state statutes were nothing better than thinly veiled attempts to circumvent the strictures imposed by our founding principles as embodied in their seminal documents and the 14th amendment to thus defeat individual liberty rather than protect it.  If such were not the case, the amendment of Indiana's statute to prevent anyone from invoking it as a defense to a discrimination case brought in court would not be necessary.  Texas included such a provision in its parallel legislation, so the Indiana legislature surely knew that it was necessary to avoid any confusion if confusion isn't what they were inviting. 

I suppose that Pence and his like minded compatriots have the right to do what they did, but they should have the courage to call it what it was before they fixed it. You can call segregation whatever you like, but what's in a name.  Tyranny by any other name smells just as vile.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

For decades...seventy years or so really...all you had to do to vilify someone was to call him a communist.  After the formation of the Soviet Union, "reds" were the monsters seen under every bed, but in the late 1980's, international communism as led by the USSR became a historical relic as a parade of Russian leaders marched through the Kremlin, each leaving behind a somewhat more sophisticated, and as it turns out, a somewhat more corrupt political scion until the current iteration of post-communist leadership, Vladimir Putin, ascended to what has become more of a throne than an office.  In the 1970's, an ayatollah in Paris threatened the Shah of Iran with death if he didn't abdicate his throne, and ultimately the ayatollah unseated him.  With that political cataclysm, a new international threat was born: the Islamic theocracy, which Iran continues to be today.  Now, as the Iranian government ostensibly pursues nuclear arms of their own, the world impugns them and their motives--despite the presumed presence of nuclear weapons in Israel a few hundred miles from Iran's nearest border with it, about which no one seems concerned--and firmly ensconces them under every bed in the world as the next great threat to us one and all.  Frankly, I doubt that Iran could ever ascend to that level of menace, and to say that I doubt it is a generous measure of my skepticism about the hand-wringing public consternation in which political leaders in many nations, especially the conservative politicians in this country, are indulging.  None-the-less, if we assume that a "nuclear Iran" is a goblin legitimately worthy of fear, the real question becomes obvious: what if anything do we do about it.  To answer that question, we must start with a determination of what we can do about it, which is where the conservative ballyhoo falls short.  There are really only three options.

The first, and most obvious, is to just let it happen.  Nuclear defense programs in other nations that have managed to develop "the bomb" have cost them enormous sums of money over the course of generations now, and if we want to impair Iran's hegemonic strivings, there is probably no better way than to encourage them to spend half their governmental revenues on defense, largely nuclear bombs and missiles, neither of which will ever be used as is demonstrated by the fact that neither of them ever has been used...by anyone including the members of Reagan's "Evil Empire" and George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil."  That's what the rest of the world's paranoid nuclear powers do.  We live in a world in which the well established motif of MAD, that is Mutual Assured Destruction, is the paradigm on which politics are conducted by nuclear nations, all of which comes to a great "sound and fury, signifying nothing"...but folly.  If we really want to hurt Iran, that's the way to go.

The second is a treaty like the one that Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to negotiate with Iran as we speak...or write, I guess.  The United States and its allies involved in the negotiations are trying to hem Iran in with sanctions so that by treaty it won't be able to develop a nuclear bomb for at least ten years, the thinking being apparently that by then we will be able to come up with a better idea for either inducing them to forgo such an effort or preventing it in some practical terms.  That makes sense in that it seems possible, even if what eventuates from the negotiations is a pact as holey as Swiss Cheese and just as much a matter of taste for those who have to eat it.  Still, it would act as a constraint against overt nuclear militarism, and even if Iran cheats to the extent that they develop nuclear capacity anyway, so what.  If Iran ever used a nuclear bomb on anyone--and it must be considered that for a bomb to be usable the Iranians would need to concomitantly develop a missile capable of delivering it, not just to Israel but to the United States as well--its own devastation would be essentially guaranteed, and immediately so.  Thus, the first and second options work together to inflict on Iran nothing less, and nothing more, than the fruits of its own folly, and why should we try to tell them that what they are doing is a foolish thing, and they are doing it to themselves.  If they want to cheat and lie, which the rest of the world thinks Iran's leadership perceives to be a best practice, let them.  It amounts to nothing in the final analysis, but with a treaty we at least have effected an official stance for them to be bound by, even if in name only.  And then there is the third option...the conservative's option.

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Your friend,

Mike