September 2015 Archives

Dear America,

One of the major political problems in this country is the media, television news in particular.  I have complained about this before, but it has come up again, and once again I feel compelled to talk about it.  The Keystone pipeline is a network of oil pipelines that run generally from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada down to the Houston storage terminal in Texas.  It doesn't run in a straight line, but as of this summer when the last segment running from Port Arthur, Texas to Houston was finished, it is a complete and uninterrupted system.  The only part of the Keystone system that is still un-built is the XL segment, which would run from Hardisty to Steele City, Nebraska,  a route already covered by phase 1 of the system...completed several years ago and operational ever since.  As you probably saw on the news, the issue of the Keystone XL has reemerged in our political discourse by virtue primarily of Bernie Sanders calling Hillary Clinton out on her refusal to take a position on it, which she now has done; both she and Bernie are against it.  Of course, the Republicans, McBoehnell--John Boehner, now former Speaker of The House and Mitch McConnell, unfortunately still Majority leader of The Senate--in particular, have seized on it, albeit only briefly, in an issue to resurrect it as an electoral propaganda piece.  That is why I am bringing it up again.  It is important to get it right when discussing it because some people will vote, at least in part, based on candidates' positions on the XL

Last week on the day when the flap was raised, Lester Holt's evening broadcast on NBC included a piece not just on the controversy but on the details of the pipeline as well.  And during that piece they showed an animation of the pipeline's current configuration and what they purported to be the placement of the XL portion of it.  To some extent, they got it right.  They showed a broken line directly between Hardisty and Steele City, which is really where the XL is intended to run.  But then they flashed a red solid line on and off where phase 3 of the pipeline has already been built to link the facilities in Steele City and Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas, where the last link to Houston was finished this year.  That is not the XL pipeline, but many viewers, given the flashing red line, will have assumed that it is, and that segment could be deemed crucial for supplying Canadian crude to our Gulf Coast refineries...at least to the extent that it isn't duplicated by extant pipelines in the area, which it may well be though that doesn't seem terribly important for this discussion.  This discussion is about misrepresenting facts that are critical for candidates for the presidency of the United States in such a way as to make their positions on the related issues appear unreasonable.  That was the effect of NBC's mistake.  Let me point out again that the XL section of the Keystone pipeline runs between terminals in Canada and Steele City, Nebraska...a route already linked by other segments of the Keystone pipeline.  All the XL does is increase the volume that can be transported from Canada to Nebraska.  It doesn't increase the volume of the rest of the system, which I assume will be the next quest of the petroleum industry.  If the XL had linked Hardisty with the terminals and refineries in Illinois, which is where most of what is used in the mid-west and the east is distilled and distributed from, that might have some utility for the United States, but that isn't what it's for.  It really can serve only one purpose, which is to bring more crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries, which already export over 40 million gallons of gasoline and 60 million gallons of other petroleum distillates to foreign consumers every day.   That is the only legal way to export petroleum from the United States...as distillates.  Raw crude cannot be exported.  So in the end, this is a symbiosis between TransCanada and American refiners, including Exxon-Mobil, for the sole purpose of increasing profits by transporting Canadian crude across this country--with all the hazards and environmental consequences entailed in doing so--to the facilities of American petroleum industry companies so that they can export more gasoline and other distillates to other countries.

If the people whose votes are going to be influenced by candidates' positions on the XL pipeline knew all this, it might change their party and candidate affiliations and it might not, but at least they would be basing their decisions as to for whom they should vote on reality.  But very few voters will go to TransCanada's own website to confirm what I just said, and virtually none went to that website to fact-check NBC and Lester Holt the night they got it wrong.  So now, I've tried to do my part to set the record straight, and I talk about this whenever I get the chance.  What are you going to do?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I forced myself to watch the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night even though I find those guys...and that woman...infuriatingly dishonest intellectually.  They managed to blame Barrack Obama for what they construe as the miserable condition of our country without giving even passing notice to the conditions he faced when he took office thanks to his Republican predecessor and a congress that had one Republican house and one Democratic one with neither able to function because the Republicans use procedure to control what they can't control by democratic right.  Unemployment was near 10%, we were bleeding jobs at the rate of 750,000 per month and we were in a recession, not that the GDP actually is an indicator of anything other than corporate profits.  More than ten million Americans who never had it have health insurance now, and though they complain about the Iran nuclear deal, we at least have some kind of understanding with that rogue nation that we never had before relative to acquisition of a bomb. So for them to call the Obama administration a catastrophe is nothing but self-serving hypocrisy...the crassest kind of politics, and the false claim that W kept us safe is nothing but whistling in the dark.  We may not have had a second 9/11 type attack, but the incubator for all the attempts that have been thwarted since was built under George W. Bush's aegis through exactly the same kind of policies that the Republicans are promoting now.

But the one fortunate thing about having watched the debate was observation of the spectacle that the Republicans have made of themselves over the past twelve years.  Huckabee contrived to defend the ultra vires acts of a red-neck town clerk by invoking her first amendment religious freedom while ignoring her attempted violation of the other constitutional freedoms--freedoms confirmed by the Supreme Court very recently--of other people they don't like.  Trump was his usual bombastic self, but the hard-core audience, ultimately a small electoral minority, applauded for him anyway.  Jeb Bush stumbled through without saying much of anything at all and Carly Fiorina was the surprising bully on the stage, ramming her jingoistic drivel down everyone's throat as if she had the personal magnitude to bring Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah down to their knees just because she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, which she sees as a success despite the vast consensus to the contrary.  Ben Carson was the low key adult in the group, but even he committed a couple of faux pas, at least in my opinion, albeit subtle ones.  John Kasich was unsurprisingly, repetitively and  self-aggrandizingly self-promotional and Chris Christy was his usual self-serving, positivistic self.  Surprisingly, Rand Paul sounded reasonable, at least on foreign policy and the absurd argument over marijuana laws versus states' rights.  But overall, the party didn't present anything that looked like a viable presidential candidate.  As a Democrat, it all looked pretty good to me.

But then there is the fact that people like Donald Trump can gain the kind of popularity he has with ideas like one that was presented to him yesterday at a campaign event: that as a nation we need to get rid of the Muslims among us, including Barrack Obama, whom the questioner claimed was a Muslim himself.  Trump responded by saying, essentially, that he will be putting out some sort of policy statement on the issue soon.  I can hardly wait.  But meanwhile, no one seems to have risen from the crowd to protest either premise...that we need to cull Muslims from American society or that our president is a Muslim.  I happen to believe that Muslims need to do more to eradicate its violently radical contingent, small as it may be, but I can't believe that anyone sane clings to the myth about Obama's Muslim affiliation, good, bad or indifferent as such would be.  That's what scares me: the resurgence of American xenophobia and jingoism, both of which got us to where we are today in the world.  And amidst that groundswell of fatuous nationalistic conceit, fifteen Republicans have stood up to volunteer to lead the movement, and thus this country into oblivion.  We are fortunate as a nation that, at least for now, there isn't enough of a moron constituency to represent an electoral majority, but what if their numbers grow.  What are we going to do as a nation if they take power and propel us in the direction they seek for us.  They cling to the idea that Reagan was a great president, but they ignore the fact that we have Putin today because Reagan pushed Gorgachev out of office in favor of Boris Yeltzin, which prepared the Russian political ground for the rise of the hard-line, former head of the KGB.  They don't acknowledge that the demise of the Sunni empire of Saddam Hussein was the fertile ground in Iraq from which ISIL sprang to life as the scion of Al Qaeda and took to invading Syria.  They don't acknowledge that the Republicans gave us unemployment, concentration of wealth in a ruling class and wages for the working man that have not allowed for progress toward the American Dream for over 35 years.  So much of all of it is self-destructive for those who would put one of them in high office, yet they are so zealous...so anxious to preside over their own debacle.

In the end, it looks like the rational among us will still be safe after 2016.  My question is, what then?

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

Kim Davis, the recalcitrant Kentucky town clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and spent some time in jail for contemning the court that ordered her to do so, has managed to bootstrap her fifteen minutes of fame into weeks, and who knows, maybe months.  That is, in and of itself, of little moment in the world, but the peripheral consequences of her position may become significant.  It is Davis's right to display the kind of moral positivism and religious zeal that she has exhibited when she does it in her own name only.  She has that right under our constitution just as people who disagree with her do.  The problem with it isn't legal.  The problem is the tyranny that she is willing to inflict on others, though that willingness in her personal life, like her right to harbor the beliefs she does, is her prerogative.  But when she uses her elected office to inflict it, that is a different matter. Under the law, her refusal to perform her legal duty on her personal moral grounds was what is called an ultra vires act.  That means that her denial of the right to apply for a marriage license to people--in this case same-sex couples--was outside the scope of her powers to act as town clerk.  Of course, that issue has already been resolved by the federal judge who ordered her to issue such licenses in the first place, despite her continuing fulminations.  There is no danger that a rogue county clerk will reverse the mandate created by the U.S. Supreme Court's recognition that when it comes to rights, homosexuals are in the same protected class as everyone else.  But while the applicability of that principle to Kim Davis is trivial in the larger sense, subscription to her position is not because two presidential candidates have now risen...or fallen if you prefer...to her defense.  Mike Huckabee has defended Davis's claim that she has the right to deny those licenses under the first amendment's freedom of religion clause.  When Huckabee appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, he was enfiladed by Joe Scarborough and his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, for conflating his religious beliefs with the law in his defense of Davis, but he was unremitting in his advocacy on her behalf, with or without rational basis.  And now, Ted Cruz--a U.S. Senator and Republican aspirant to the presidential nomination of his party as well as a constitutional lawyer--has said he will join Huckabee and Davis in their quest to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.

Of course, the Davis affair is like a neon sign flashing "hypocrite" over and over again as Davis has been married four times and divorced three times, which Scarborough and Huckabee agreed is a violation of biblical tenets (not being too familiar with The Bible, I am skeptical about that, but I admit that I am unqualified to render an opinion on what The Bible says).  But whether Davis is a hypocrite for appealing to law for relief of her marital woes despite the religious prohibition of such, the willingness of Huckabee and Cruz to come to her defense is far worse than simple political opportunism.  These two men, both of whom want to be our president, would put their Christian faith above the law.  For Huckabee that is no surprise as he is a Baptist minister, though it should cause any American who values his own religious freedom a significant amount of dubiousness about Huckabee as a politician.  Cruz is another matter.  He is a lawyer, and from all accounts a formidable one.  He has been to the U.S. Supreme Court on several occasions to argue constitutional issues with great success, and he counts himself among those who call themselves "strict constructionists."  Strict constructionists believe that our constitution is not open to interpretation, but rather is to applied literally as it is written without insertions or deletions.  Nothing in the constitution, they think, allows for extrapolations like zones of privacy and gun control...or limitations on campaign financing like that proscribed under the Citizens United case.  Yet, even with all his expertise and fanaticism on the subject of states' rights, he seems to think that a municipal clerk, less than a state official, has the right to flout the law of the Supreme Court just because her religion disapproves of a duty that is incumbent upon her under state law.

It will be interesting to see if Cruz reconsiders.  Unlike Huckabee, who is just a sanctimonious self-seeker, Cruz should know better.  And if he bothers to think about it, the voters who would be swayed toward him by his efforts to pander to them in this way won't even be enough to win him a primary, much less a national election.  So for political reasons if for no others, standing by Kim Davis's side holding her hand as Huckabee did yesterday is a bad move.  But beyond political opportunism, Cruz's adherence to the kind of fundamentalism over law and rights that Davis stands for is worrisome...or it would be if Cruz actually had a chance to win the Republican nomination.  And the tandem of Cruz and Huckabee, in that they are the probable favorites of the evangelical right, may be even more worrisome, because advocates of the political extremes tend to shift the debate in the direction of those extremes.  Thus, we could hear Jeb Bush, who could become president theoretically, waxing Christian dogmatic over the course of the next year, and to the extent that he has prospects for success, that is a threat to all of us who don't want to have our moral beliefs dictated to us.

The Davis affair is a distillation of the two competing ethics in the 2016 election.  There are those who would constrain others, even in their personal, private choices, by imposing their beliefs on everyone else and those who believe that our nation is a common weal to which we are all entitled in equal measure.  While Kim Davis is almost a caricature and thus more a target for comic derision than a political figure, people like Cruz and Huckabee are a threat to our liberties.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The newest volley in the war against same-sex marriage is being fired by County Clerk 

Kim Davis of Roland County, Kentucky.  It's been in the news, so everyone is aware of what she is doing: denying marriage licenses to same-sex applicants because...she doesn't want to issue them.  When asked why she wouldn't issue a license to a homosexual couple, that's what she actually said; "I don't want to."  She elaborated by attributing her aversion to God and His law, but her first answer was, "I don't want to."  The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that we are all the same under the law, and when Davis went to court to try to get an exemption from the law that would allow her to refuse to comply because of her right to religious freedom, she lost and is now under court order to issue licenses in accord with the law.  Of course, this whole matter has become the fodder for a continuing discussion of the purported tension between the rights of homosexuals and transgender persons on the one hand and the religious piety of the sanctimonious minority, but in this case, not even that "tension" exists.  It is the law in Kentucky that same-sex marriage is legal and that those same-sex couples who wish to marry are entitled to licenses so that they can do so.  Thus, in Davis's case, the issue isn't whether she should be able to exercise her religious freedom.  No one is asking her to marry a member of the same sex or even endorse the practice.  She is just being asked to do her ministerial duty, that is, a duty that is not discretionary but is rather required under the law.  Let me put it another way.  Davis isn't asserting her right to practice her religion.  She is claiming the right to prevent others from exercising their rights under the law.  The two are very different things.

The sticking point lately has been the point at which the old concept of "public accommodation" begins to apply to cases of gender discrimination the way it does in cases of race discrimination, and the comparison seems apt to me.  The basic premise that we are all created equal under the law doesn't necessarily require each of us to regard all others as equal in our own eyes.  But there is a difference between the celebrated cases of denial of pizza, wedding cakes and floral arrangements to people because they are homosexuals and denying the privileges conferred on all of us by the law to them.  I believe that is why the judge in Davis's case issued a court order compelling her to comply with Kentucky law and issue marriage licenses to same-sex applicants.  It wasn't an aversion to her religion inspired intransigency; it was an aversion to a county clerk deciding what the law of the land is when the law of the land is perfectly clear, and it isn't what she wants it to be.  As it turns out, she is elected and thus cannot be fired, though she certainly could be impeached...and should be if she doesn't do her professional, statutory and legal duty, though the consensus is that in Kentucky, that will never happen.  And thus, the people of Kentucky who want the law to be obeyed--and they seem to be in the majority, though perhaps not overwhelmingly--will be thwarted by not just a minority of the population but a single zealot who claims the impunity of religious conviction and afflatus.  

This may be hyperbolic, but bear with me.  Let's say that a county clerk thinks that interracial marriage is a violation of God's law.  If Kim Davis is permitted to prevail on the same-sex marriage, why shouldn't the proponent of same-race marriage prevail against those who think marriage across racial lines is acceptable?  Of course, that could never happen today, so the analogy is probably moot and therefore unpersuasive.  But suppose a clerk somewhere believes that marriage of any kind is against God's law.  Suppose that he wants to deny all marriage licenses because he thinks that God wants us to be fruitful and multiply...and he doesn't care how we do it.  The Bible doesn't mention marriage as far as I know, so that idea isn't as far-fetched as it seems at first blush, which begs the question of what makes Kim Davis different from anyone who thinks that the law is wrong...any law for any reason.  What makes Kim Davis different from the posse comitatus types who think they shouldn't have to pay income taxes or obey federal law because it infringes their state rights and thus their freedom.  Do they have a point, and are we all therefore doomed to submit to their form of tyranny?  What about a case in which a county clerk thinks that Jews are heretics and thus not to be tolerated.  Could that clerk deny marriage licenses to Jews, or could a police chief who harbors such prejudices deny the protection of the law to Jews?  Or to Catholics for that matter.  Or what if he just thought you were a religious anathema?

You can see that Kim Davis's position that she is exempt from performing her legal duty is the beginning of a slippery slope, and the world has been at that beginning before.  Her kind of religious zeal isn't just innocent true-belief.  It is the beginning of a hard fall that we would all take--Jews, Evangelicals, blacks and whites--if she were to prevail.  I hope the people of Kentucky keep that in mind when they decide what to do with Kim Davis.

Your friend,

Mike