Tuesday, November 22, 2011 9:35:48 PM
Are Voters So Different From the Joe Paterno Apologists?
Reuters
Some Penn State students have rallied around their fired coach, while the U.S. public routinely supports leaders who fail to prevent atrocities
Conor Friedersdorf
Nov 14 2011, 1:05 PM ET
Reflecting on the Penn State child molestation scandal, the cowardice of the man who didn't intervene when he witnessed one of the the rapes, the inadequate response of Joe Paterno, and the students who rowdily protested Paterno's firing, Joe Carter wrote [ http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/10/thoughts-on-the-penn-state-scandal/ ] this at First Things: "I tell myself that it must be an anomalous event, for I can't bear the idea that it may be symptomatic of our larger culture."
Depressed as I am by the conclusion that America as a whole isn't so different from Penn State, I can't shake it. I don't mean that we condone child molestation, or feel anything but outrage at child abusers. But are America's elected leaders, like Joe Paterno, largely decent men who do too little when atrocities are committed beneath them and at worst become complicit? Are Americans, like the students who protested at Penn State, more viscerally upset at the idea of holding their favorite leaders accountable than by terrible abuses themselves?
I think so.
No two atrocities are exactly alike, but the Penn State abuse case is particularly horrifying because the 8 victims were children, the most helpless members of our society. That single-digit number of victims is and ought to be shocking. To put it into perspective, however, 750 children in the Texas juvenile detention system alleged sexual abuse by staff in the six-year period ending in 2007, a figure that includes the inevitable false accusations, but that most likely understates the total number of actual abuse victims, according to most experts, because a lot of kids in confinement understandably fear for their safety too much to admit being abused.
Let's suppose, however, that the actual number of abuse cases is radically lower, subtract the cases allegedly perpetrated by other inmates, and focus only on those committed by government employees. Using an excessively conservative estimate, 100 actual instances of sexual abuse by staff, let's compare it to the total number of staff members jailed for abuse in that period.
Zero.
"Staff covered for each other, grievance processes were sabotaged and evidence was frequently destroyed," David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow wrote [ http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/jan/07/the-crisis-of-juvenile-prison-rape-a-new-report/ ] in the New York Review of Books. "Officials in Austin ignored what they heard, and in the very rare instances when staff were fired and their cases referred to local prosecutors, those prosecutors usually refused to act."
Although Gov. Rick Perry's administration "knew as early as June 2005 that two administrators at a Texas Youth Commission [ http://www.chron.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fhouston-texas&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Texas+Youth+Commission%22 ] facility were not being prosecuted on allegations of sexually abusing youths in their custody," according to the Houston Chronicle [ http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Perry-aides-knew-TYC-charges-not-pursued-1542662.php ], the sexual abuse problem wore on for years.
Mother Jones offers this summary [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rick-perry-juvie-record-texas-youth-commission ]:
Allegations of systematic mistreatment at TYC facilities first came to the Governor's desk in 2001, when then-Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) forwarded along a complaint that his office had received. That was six years before media coverage of the conditions in juvenile detention centers launched a public scandal. And critics of Perry, who is now a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, point out that he received tens of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and executives for a firm tied to some of the worst abuses. Far from the picture initially painted by Perry, of a shocking scandal that was dealt with swiftly and emphatically, his administration had sat on the concerns for years.
The TYC's own numbers tell the tale. The commission officially reported 535 cases of abuse at its facilities in 2002, more than double the total from just four years earlier. Likewise, the number of residents diagnosed with mental illnesses skyrocketed during that same period, from 27 percent in 1995 to nearly half in 2002. And despite his office's initial denials, top Perry staffers had been formally briefed on abuses at juvenile justice facilities as early as 2005. In 2006, President Bush's Department of Justice even initiated a probe of the TYC conditions, but declined to intervene because it was not able to prove that any victims sustained "bodily injury."
In the Penn State case, most consider it self-evident that the trustees did the right thing by getting rid of the university's president, its athletic director, and its football coach, not because they molested kids themselves, but because they failed to respond adequately or covered up the problem. The administration of Rick Perry behaved better in some ways, worse in others. Certainly its inability to deal with the abuse problem in Texas resulted in more total kids being sexually abused. But the point isn't to make Perry out to be a monster, or even an anomaly, for nationally [ ], "Fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished." Officials at juvenile prisons bear most direct responsibility for this shocking fact. State officials are next in line.
But voters are to blame too.
What Perry's case shows is that a man can preside over a state whose juvenile justice system routinely results in child rape and other sexual abuse, and that even a public scandal about inadequate oversight won't stop him from being reelected. Furthermore, when he decides to run for president, this sort of failure won't even be a minor campaign issue, never mind it costing him votes.
Child rape in juvenile prisons just isn't a problem that stirs American voters, not like tax increases or cuts to Medicare or ballot initiatives about gay marriage or card-check unionizing. Even less do Americans want to confront the rape epidemic going on in adult prisons [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/11/the-rape-of-american-prisoners/?pagination=false ]. When it's the Catholic Church or Jerry Sandusky abusing people, everyone is rightly outraged not only at the perpetrators, but at the people in charge, and even the low-level folks who knew about the problem but did nothing to stop it. Prison rape of juveniles and adults has been a known problem for decades. Bureaucrats accept it as inevitable, elected leaders ignore the kids and sometimes even joke about the adults getting what they deserve, and voters exact no price.
That is why the problem continues.
There are American atrocities besides child sexual abuse. During the Bush years, there was the sadistic treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and a few instances where detainees were blindfolded, strapped to a board, gagged, and subjected to water being forced into their noses and sinuses until their lungs filled, terrifying them with the thought that they were drowning. Even those abuses that resulted in jail time for the perpetrators never ended in punishment or even censure for folks atop the chain of command.
The most prominent legal minds to advocate forcibly filling detainees' lungs with water are members in good standing of the conservative movement, including John Yoo, who once argued that if the president were trying to interrogate a detainee, he might be legally able to crush the testicles of the man's child to get him talking. President Obama, who affirms that torture was perpetrated during the Bush years, has failed to fulfill his obligation under international law to investigate and prosecute those responsible, preferring to focus on his domestic agenda.
His administration's drone strikes are killing some unknown number of innocent people -- the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London reports [ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/ ] 160 children dead, a figure the U.S. government disputes. Without even knowing how bad the "collateral damage" actually is, most Americans support the drone campaign, persuaded that it will decrease the chances of a terrorist attack by some unknown percentage. The possibility of reducing future terrorist attacks is enough for many to justify the certainty that faraway innocents, including children, will be killed [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/u_s_takes_the_lead_on_behalf_of_cluster_bombs/singleton/ ].
I am as horrified as anyone that Penn State's leaders shamefully allowed bureaucratic inertia, concern for their careers, misguided senses of responsibility toward their football program, cowardice, or negligence stop them from protecting children who suffered terrible abuse due to their inadequate action. But though the specifics of any situation are unique, I do not think it is anomalous, in our country, to close our eyes and ears to the reality of atrocities and our complicity in them, as the long-running abuse of juveniles in state custody and dead foreign children show; it is exceedingly rare to hold folks at the top responsible for atrocities committed on their watch, even when some of their actions are illegal and play a direct role in bringing the atrocities about; and partisans of political candidates on the right and left act as determined apologists for the bad behavior of their champions in a way not unlike the Penn State students who rallied behind Paterno.
It is easy, after all, to see the humanity in our leaders; the good things they've done; the ways in which we identify with them; and the trust we've invested in them, whether actively at the ballot box, or passively as we think of them as representing us to the nation or world. And a polity is always averse to fully confronting the worst excesses perpetrated by those who represent it. I share the distaste most people have for Penn State students who are blind to Paterno's failings and disposed to ignore the tragedy's victims; as Americans, however, many of us vote for leaders whose negligence has caused far more damage and ignore victims far more numerous.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/are-voters-so-different-from-the-joe-paterno-apologists/248406/ [with comments]
===
Vehicle board rejects proposal for Confederate flag license plate
'Texas is better than this,' says U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, while showing racist uses of the Confederate flag.
Ralph Barrera/ AMERICAN-STATESMAN
By Mike Ward AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:57 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
Published: 10:35 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
A state panel soundly rejected a controversial proposal to display the Confederate battle flag on a specialty license plate Thursday amid emotional pleas to remember and honor Texas' history.
In an 8-0 vote, the state Department of Motor Vehicles' governing board turned down an application by the Sons of Confederate Veterans for a plate emblazoned with the flag. It was the first time the board turned down a proposal for a specialty plate since the agency began operating in November 2009. The board has approved 89 plates.
Supporters insisted the plate was designed to honor fallen soldiers, not slavery. Opponents loudly objected, saying the so-called battle flag is a racist relic that represents bigotry and segregation.
"There are always those who take the wrong side of history for the right side of politics," said U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, one of nearly a dozen state and federal lawmakers who showed up to oppose the plate. "This is an opportunity to take the right side of history and the right side of politics."
Granvel Block, commander of the Confederate Veterans group in Texas, said he was disappointed by the vote. He said the ancestral history group will probably take the case to court, as it has done in three other states — which resulted in similar tags being issued.
"They listened to emotion rather than facts," Block said, blaming "inaccurate information that got off onto everything but our plates."
Block said the flag emblem proposed for the tag is the group's official logo, in use since 1896.
The nearly two-hour public hearing that preceded the vote was rife with historical conflict and interpretation, opened by Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson reading from an 1858 speech extolling white supremacy and slavery.
"That's a pretty offensive narrative," Patterson said. "Would we have a commemorative plate honoring the person who said this? I'd say not.
"It was Abraham Lincoln."
He echoed statements from Block and other Confederate Veterans members at the hearing. "This plate is not to honor the reason for the war," he said, urging approval. "I'm able to separate the good from the bad. \u2026 I believe there was nobility in the cause."
College Station resident Ray James, a past commander of the Texas division of the group, said similar specialty tags have been approved in nine other Southern states.
Opponents were unmoved.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, said the vote was a victory against Texas' racist past. "Texas is better than this," she said.
Gary Bledsoe, state chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the battle flag has been adopted by more than 500 hate groups over the years and clearly stands for bigotry.
"Why should we, as Texans, want to be reminded of a state-sanctioned system of segregation and repression?" asked state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas. State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, added that this plate "would be like sticking poop in the face of black people every day."
One by one, more than a dozen black pastors from Austin, Houston and other cities stood to oppose the plate, often with sermon-like recitations that drew amens from audience members.
"I see something that represents hate and has made people feel less than human," said the Rev. George Clark, 82, of Austin's Mount Zion Baptist Church. "The fear is still here."
Just before the vote, Chairman Victor Vandergriff, a business consultant and former Arlington car dealer, told the board that state law allowed them to reject a plate they found offensive.
The board then quickly did so, unanimously, with Vice Chair Cheryl Johnson of Friendswood absent. The hearing room erupted in loud cheers and applause, and opponents went outside to sing "God Bless America" together.
Last April, the board deadlocked 4-4 on the issue. That action came after an internal Texas Department of Transportation committee, working behind closed doors, turned down an initial request for the tag two years ago.
Also on Thursday, the board approved a specialty plate honoring Buffalo Soldiers, black regiments commanded by whites that fought in the Indian Wars after the Civil War. That tag, also sponsored by Patterson, will benefit the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.
The vote was 5-3, with members Victor Rodriguez of Brownsville, Raymond Palacios Jr. of El Paso and Johnny Walker III of Houston voting against it.
Next up for the board in December will be a vote on a proposed plate showing the three Christian crosses at Calvary, with the words "One State Under God," proposed by a Nacogdoches church to raise money for its ministry projects.
mward@statesman.com
Copyright © 2011 Statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/vehicle-board-rejects-proposal-for-confederate-flag-license-1962017.html ["User comments are not being accepted on this article."]
===
Hey, Congress, Rick Perry Is Gunning for Your Livelihoods
Reuters/Mary Chastain
Seeking to reclaim his image as an anti-Washington crusader, the Texas governor proposes to radically transform every branch of government
Molly Ball
Nov 15 2011, 2:12 PM ET
How much does Rick Perry hate Washington? So much that he wants to kick out members of Congress and make them get real jobs.
Perry's plan [ http://www.rickperry.org/uproot-and-overhaul-washington-html/ ] to overhaul the federal government, announced Tuesday at a town hall in Iowa, demonstrates his beef with every one of its branches. He would end lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices and slash numerous departments from the federal bureaucracy -- and yes, he remembered their names this time.
But it's Perry's proposals to demote and reduce Congress that represent his most resonant attempt to claim the mantle of the mad-as-hell, anti-government candidate. He would cut members' salaries in half, cut their staff budgets, and decrease the amount of time they spend in session, encouraging them to get jobs back home instead.
"We send members of Congress to look out for America, not enrich themselves," Perry said in his Bettendorf, Iowa, speech Tuesday morning. "But too often, they are taken captive by the Washington culture. That's why we need a part-time Congress. I say send them home to live under the laws they pass among the people they represent."
With its single-digit approval ratings and manifest failure to accomplish simple tasks like raising the debt limit, Congress is an easy target. Perry has been running against Washington for a long time: In 2010, running for a third term as the incumbent chief executive of one of America's largest states, he managed to convince voters he was the anti-establishment choice, largely by painting his main primary opponent, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, as an out-of-touch denizen of the Capitol.
"The Washington insiders won't address Beltway decay, they won't try a totally new way, because they like things as they are," Perry added. "The lobbyists make their living on protecting corporate loopholes and securing earmarks for the special interests they represent."
As with Sarah Palin's screed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/us/10iht-currents10.html ] against "crony capitalism," Perry is tapping a vibrant -- and bipartisan -- sense that D.C. is riding high on the hog while the rest of America suffers. (Palin, however, pointed [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/12/palin_perry_has_been_a_participant_in_government_waste.html ] to Perry as part of the problem, and the culture of cronyism he's fostered in Texas is notorious.) It's a sentiment shared [ http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-14/wall_street/30278445_1_tea-party-wall-streeters-theory ] by the angry Americans of both the tea party and Occupy Wall Street. The Barack Obama of 2008, too, wanted to kick out all the lobbyists and fix a broken Washington.
But the idea of the humble "citizen legislature" composed of working men and women whose lives are just like their constituents' is a fantasy. Most states have legislatures that are by some definition "part-time," but it's a system that creates its own problems.
For one thing, part-time legislatures are hotbeds of conflicts of interest. A lawmaker who's also a farmer seems like the ideal chair for the Agriculture Committee until it transpires that he's pushing legislation that deregulates his own industry or provides it with government subsidies. Teachers, firefighters and other public workers seem like great candidates until you realize they're the ones overseeing the budgets that determine their own salaries, benefits and perks. Already, nearly a third of Congress is made up of lawyers -- what happens when they can join firms that double as lobbying shops?
Perry's plan includes a plank aimed at curbing congressional conflicts -- he would make it a crime for lawmakers to engage in insider trading. But in a part-time Congress, that would only be the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, it's not actually that easy to find a real job that lets you work only half the time and spend the other half citizen-legislatin'. Campaigning and working on policy tend to eat up the time the legislature's not in session, making it even harder to hold down steady employment. According [ http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=16701 ] to the National Council of State Legislatures, even though Texas lawmakers spend only 140 days every two years in session, they report spending more than two-thirds of their time on their legislative jobs.
As a result, many state legislators end up being retirees or independently wealthy -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but it hardly makes lawmakers more representative of the population as a whole. Those who do have jobs frequently end up with sinecures that put them in the pocket of interest groups.
Even if all these difficulties could be resolved, how on earth would a President Perry get Congress to approve his plan? Pretty obviously, he couldn't -- but that's not the point.
Like Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan, Perry's "Uproot and Overhaul Washington" proposal isn't intended to be "realistic." Cain's response to those who say his plan couldn't pass is that politicians propose things they think can pass, while businesspeople look to solve the problem. It's the very "realism" of mainstream politics that must be attacked -- the timid incrementalism that maintains the corrupt status quo.
"There are some who want to tinker with the status quo," Perry said on Tuesday. "They want to work within the current system to achieve marginal change. Then there are those who believe, as I do, that Washington is too broken to be fixed by tinkering on the margins. I do not believe Washington needs a new coat of paint, it needs a complete overhaul. We need to uproot, tear down and rebuild Washington, D.C."
Let the Beltway pundits recoil in horror! Let Ben Bernanke and Karl Rove wring their hands in anguish! This is the Rick Perry who wrote a book called Fed Up! in which he argued that just about everything, including Social Security, was unconstitutional. This is the Rick Perry who got in trouble for hinting that if the feds got much more uppity, he might support Texas seceding from the union.
But that Rick Perry has largely been absent from the presidential campaign trail. Instead, he's been somnolent, forgetful and phony -- the very embodiment of coasting complacency, from the looks of it.
Perry's plan is the right kind of symbolic gesture for the electorate he's trying to reach. But at this point, most of them don't seem to be listening to him anymore.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/hey-congress-rick-perry-is-gunning-for-your-livelihoods/248516/ [with comments]
===
(linked in):
from earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68371480 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61854884 and preceding and following
Reuters
Some Penn State students have rallied around their fired coach, while the U.S. public routinely supports leaders who fail to prevent atrocities
Conor Friedersdorf
Nov 14 2011, 1:05 PM ET
Reflecting on the Penn State child molestation scandal, the cowardice of the man who didn't intervene when he witnessed one of the the rapes, the inadequate response of Joe Paterno, and the students who rowdily protested Paterno's firing, Joe Carter wrote [ http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/10/thoughts-on-the-penn-state-scandal/ ] this at First Things: "I tell myself that it must be an anomalous event, for I can't bear the idea that it may be symptomatic of our larger culture."
Depressed as I am by the conclusion that America as a whole isn't so different from Penn State, I can't shake it. I don't mean that we condone child molestation, or feel anything but outrage at child abusers. But are America's elected leaders, like Joe Paterno, largely decent men who do too little when atrocities are committed beneath them and at worst become complicit? Are Americans, like the students who protested at Penn State, more viscerally upset at the idea of holding their favorite leaders accountable than by terrible abuses themselves?
I think so.
No two atrocities are exactly alike, but the Penn State abuse case is particularly horrifying because the 8 victims were children, the most helpless members of our society. That single-digit number of victims is and ought to be shocking. To put it into perspective, however, 750 children in the Texas juvenile detention system alleged sexual abuse by staff in the six-year period ending in 2007, a figure that includes the inevitable false accusations, but that most likely understates the total number of actual abuse victims, according to most experts, because a lot of kids in confinement understandably fear for their safety too much to admit being abused.
Let's suppose, however, that the actual number of abuse cases is radically lower, subtract the cases allegedly perpetrated by other inmates, and focus only on those committed by government employees. Using an excessively conservative estimate, 100 actual instances of sexual abuse by staff, let's compare it to the total number of staff members jailed for abuse in that period.
Zero.
"Staff covered for each other, grievance processes were sabotaged and evidence was frequently destroyed," David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow wrote [ http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/jan/07/the-crisis-of-juvenile-prison-rape-a-new-report/ ] in the New York Review of Books. "Officials in Austin ignored what they heard, and in the very rare instances when staff were fired and their cases referred to local prosecutors, those prosecutors usually refused to act."
Although Gov. Rick Perry's administration "knew as early as June 2005 that two administrators at a Texas Youth Commission [ http://www.chron.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fhouston-texas&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Texas+Youth+Commission%22 ] facility were not being prosecuted on allegations of sexually abusing youths in their custody," according to the Houston Chronicle [ http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Perry-aides-knew-TYC-charges-not-pursued-1542662.php ], the sexual abuse problem wore on for years.
Mother Jones offers this summary [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rick-perry-juvie-record-texas-youth-commission ]:
Allegations of systematic mistreatment at TYC facilities first came to the Governor's desk in 2001, when then-Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) forwarded along a complaint that his office had received. That was six years before media coverage of the conditions in juvenile detention centers launched a public scandal. And critics of Perry, who is now a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, point out that he received tens of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and executives for a firm tied to some of the worst abuses. Far from the picture initially painted by Perry, of a shocking scandal that was dealt with swiftly and emphatically, his administration had sat on the concerns for years.
The TYC's own numbers tell the tale. The commission officially reported 535 cases of abuse at its facilities in 2002, more than double the total from just four years earlier. Likewise, the number of residents diagnosed with mental illnesses skyrocketed during that same period, from 27 percent in 1995 to nearly half in 2002. And despite his office's initial denials, top Perry staffers had been formally briefed on abuses at juvenile justice facilities as early as 2005. In 2006, President Bush's Department of Justice even initiated a probe of the TYC conditions, but declined to intervene because it was not able to prove that any victims sustained "bodily injury."
In the Penn State case, most consider it self-evident that the trustees did the right thing by getting rid of the university's president, its athletic director, and its football coach, not because they molested kids themselves, but because they failed to respond adequately or covered up the problem. The administration of Rick Perry behaved better in some ways, worse in others. Certainly its inability to deal with the abuse problem in Texas resulted in more total kids being sexually abused. But the point isn't to make Perry out to be a monster, or even an anomaly, for nationally [ ], "Fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished." Officials at juvenile prisons bear most direct responsibility for this shocking fact. State officials are next in line.
But voters are to blame too.
What Perry's case shows is that a man can preside over a state whose juvenile justice system routinely results in child rape and other sexual abuse, and that even a public scandal about inadequate oversight won't stop him from being reelected. Furthermore, when he decides to run for president, this sort of failure won't even be a minor campaign issue, never mind it costing him votes.
Child rape in juvenile prisons just isn't a problem that stirs American voters, not like tax increases or cuts to Medicare or ballot initiatives about gay marriage or card-check unionizing. Even less do Americans want to confront the rape epidemic going on in adult prisons [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/11/the-rape-of-american-prisoners/?pagination=false ]. When it's the Catholic Church or Jerry Sandusky abusing people, everyone is rightly outraged not only at the perpetrators, but at the people in charge, and even the low-level folks who knew about the problem but did nothing to stop it. Prison rape of juveniles and adults has been a known problem for decades. Bureaucrats accept it as inevitable, elected leaders ignore the kids and sometimes even joke about the adults getting what they deserve, and voters exact no price.
That is why the problem continues.
There are American atrocities besides child sexual abuse. During the Bush years, there was the sadistic treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and a few instances where detainees were blindfolded, strapped to a board, gagged, and subjected to water being forced into their noses and sinuses until their lungs filled, terrifying them with the thought that they were drowning. Even those abuses that resulted in jail time for the perpetrators never ended in punishment or even censure for folks atop the chain of command.
The most prominent legal minds to advocate forcibly filling detainees' lungs with water are members in good standing of the conservative movement, including John Yoo, who once argued that if the president were trying to interrogate a detainee, he might be legally able to crush the testicles of the man's child to get him talking. President Obama, who affirms that torture was perpetrated during the Bush years, has failed to fulfill his obligation under international law to investigate and prosecute those responsible, preferring to focus on his domestic agenda.
His administration's drone strikes are killing some unknown number of innocent people -- the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London reports [ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/ ] 160 children dead, a figure the U.S. government disputes. Without even knowing how bad the "collateral damage" actually is, most Americans support the drone campaign, persuaded that it will decrease the chances of a terrorist attack by some unknown percentage. The possibility of reducing future terrorist attacks is enough for many to justify the certainty that faraway innocents, including children, will be killed [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/u_s_takes_the_lead_on_behalf_of_cluster_bombs/singleton/ ].
I am as horrified as anyone that Penn State's leaders shamefully allowed bureaucratic inertia, concern for their careers, misguided senses of responsibility toward their football program, cowardice, or negligence stop them from protecting children who suffered terrible abuse due to their inadequate action. But though the specifics of any situation are unique, I do not think it is anomalous, in our country, to close our eyes and ears to the reality of atrocities and our complicity in them, as the long-running abuse of juveniles in state custody and dead foreign children show; it is exceedingly rare to hold folks at the top responsible for atrocities committed on their watch, even when some of their actions are illegal and play a direct role in bringing the atrocities about; and partisans of political candidates on the right and left act as determined apologists for the bad behavior of their champions in a way not unlike the Penn State students who rallied behind Paterno.
It is easy, after all, to see the humanity in our leaders; the good things they've done; the ways in which we identify with them; and the trust we've invested in them, whether actively at the ballot box, or passively as we think of them as representing us to the nation or world. And a polity is always averse to fully confronting the worst excesses perpetrated by those who represent it. I share the distaste most people have for Penn State students who are blind to Paterno's failings and disposed to ignore the tragedy's victims; as Americans, however, many of us vote for leaders whose negligence has caused far more damage and ignore victims far more numerous.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/are-voters-so-different-from-the-joe-paterno-apologists/248406/ [with comments]
===
Vehicle board rejects proposal for Confederate flag license plate
'Texas is better than this,' says U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, while showing racist uses of the Confederate flag.
Ralph Barrera/ AMERICAN-STATESMAN
By Mike Ward AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:57 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
Published: 10:35 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
A state panel soundly rejected a controversial proposal to display the Confederate battle flag on a specialty license plate Thursday amid emotional pleas to remember and honor Texas' history.
In an 8-0 vote, the state Department of Motor Vehicles' governing board turned down an application by the Sons of Confederate Veterans for a plate emblazoned with the flag. It was the first time the board turned down a proposal for a specialty plate since the agency began operating in November 2009. The board has approved 89 plates.
Supporters insisted the plate was designed to honor fallen soldiers, not slavery. Opponents loudly objected, saying the so-called battle flag is a racist relic that represents bigotry and segregation.
"There are always those who take the wrong side of history for the right side of politics," said U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, one of nearly a dozen state and federal lawmakers who showed up to oppose the plate. "This is an opportunity to take the right side of history and the right side of politics."
Granvel Block, commander of the Confederate Veterans group in Texas, said he was disappointed by the vote. He said the ancestral history group will probably take the case to court, as it has done in three other states — which resulted in similar tags being issued.
"They listened to emotion rather than facts," Block said, blaming "inaccurate information that got off onto everything but our plates."
Block said the flag emblem proposed for the tag is the group's official logo, in use since 1896.
The nearly two-hour public hearing that preceded the vote was rife with historical conflict and interpretation, opened by Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson reading from an 1858 speech extolling white supremacy and slavery.
"That's a pretty offensive narrative," Patterson said. "Would we have a commemorative plate honoring the person who said this? I'd say not.
"It was Abraham Lincoln."
He echoed statements from Block and other Confederate Veterans members at the hearing. "This plate is not to honor the reason for the war," he said, urging approval. "I'm able to separate the good from the bad. \u2026 I believe there was nobility in the cause."
College Station resident Ray James, a past commander of the Texas division of the group, said similar specialty tags have been approved in nine other Southern states.
Opponents were unmoved.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, said the vote was a victory against Texas' racist past. "Texas is better than this," she said.
Gary Bledsoe, state chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the battle flag has been adopted by more than 500 hate groups over the years and clearly stands for bigotry.
"Why should we, as Texans, want to be reminded of a state-sanctioned system of segregation and repression?" asked state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas. State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, added that this plate "would be like sticking poop in the face of black people every day."
One by one, more than a dozen black pastors from Austin, Houston and other cities stood to oppose the plate, often with sermon-like recitations that drew amens from audience members.
"I see something that represents hate and has made people feel less than human," said the Rev. George Clark, 82, of Austin's Mount Zion Baptist Church. "The fear is still here."
Just before the vote, Chairman Victor Vandergriff, a business consultant and former Arlington car dealer, told the board that state law allowed them to reject a plate they found offensive.
The board then quickly did so, unanimously, with Vice Chair Cheryl Johnson of Friendswood absent. The hearing room erupted in loud cheers and applause, and opponents went outside to sing "God Bless America" together.
Last April, the board deadlocked 4-4 on the issue. That action came after an internal Texas Department of Transportation committee, working behind closed doors, turned down an initial request for the tag two years ago.
Also on Thursday, the board approved a specialty plate honoring Buffalo Soldiers, black regiments commanded by whites that fought in the Indian Wars after the Civil War. That tag, also sponsored by Patterson, will benefit the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.
The vote was 5-3, with members Victor Rodriguez of Brownsville, Raymond Palacios Jr. of El Paso and Johnny Walker III of Houston voting against it.
Next up for the board in December will be a vote on a proposed plate showing the three Christian crosses at Calvary, with the words "One State Under God," proposed by a Nacogdoches church to raise money for its ministry projects.
mward@statesman.com
Copyright © 2011 Statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/vehicle-board-rejects-proposal-for-confederate-flag-license-1962017.html ["User comments are not being accepted on this article."]
===
Hey, Congress, Rick Perry Is Gunning for Your Livelihoods
Reuters/Mary Chastain
Seeking to reclaim his image as an anti-Washington crusader, the Texas governor proposes to radically transform every branch of government
Molly Ball
Nov 15 2011, 2:12 PM ET
How much does Rick Perry hate Washington? So much that he wants to kick out members of Congress and make them get real jobs.
Perry's plan [ http://www.rickperry.org/uproot-and-overhaul-washington-html/ ] to overhaul the federal government, announced Tuesday at a town hall in Iowa, demonstrates his beef with every one of its branches. He would end lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices and slash numerous departments from the federal bureaucracy -- and yes, he remembered their names this time.
But it's Perry's proposals to demote and reduce Congress that represent his most resonant attempt to claim the mantle of the mad-as-hell, anti-government candidate. He would cut members' salaries in half, cut their staff budgets, and decrease the amount of time they spend in session, encouraging them to get jobs back home instead.
"We send members of Congress to look out for America, not enrich themselves," Perry said in his Bettendorf, Iowa, speech Tuesday morning. "But too often, they are taken captive by the Washington culture. That's why we need a part-time Congress. I say send them home to live under the laws they pass among the people they represent."
With its single-digit approval ratings and manifest failure to accomplish simple tasks like raising the debt limit, Congress is an easy target. Perry has been running against Washington for a long time: In 2010, running for a third term as the incumbent chief executive of one of America's largest states, he managed to convince voters he was the anti-establishment choice, largely by painting his main primary opponent, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, as an out-of-touch denizen of the Capitol.
"The Washington insiders won't address Beltway decay, they won't try a totally new way, because they like things as they are," Perry added. "The lobbyists make their living on protecting corporate loopholes and securing earmarks for the special interests they represent."
As with Sarah Palin's screed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/us/10iht-currents10.html ] against "crony capitalism," Perry is tapping a vibrant -- and bipartisan -- sense that D.C. is riding high on the hog while the rest of America suffers. (Palin, however, pointed [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/12/palin_perry_has_been_a_participant_in_government_waste.html ] to Perry as part of the problem, and the culture of cronyism he's fostered in Texas is notorious.) It's a sentiment shared [ http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-14/wall_street/30278445_1_tea-party-wall-streeters-theory ] by the angry Americans of both the tea party and Occupy Wall Street. The Barack Obama of 2008, too, wanted to kick out all the lobbyists and fix a broken Washington.
But the idea of the humble "citizen legislature" composed of working men and women whose lives are just like their constituents' is a fantasy. Most states have legislatures that are by some definition "part-time," but it's a system that creates its own problems.
For one thing, part-time legislatures are hotbeds of conflicts of interest. A lawmaker who's also a farmer seems like the ideal chair for the Agriculture Committee until it transpires that he's pushing legislation that deregulates his own industry or provides it with government subsidies. Teachers, firefighters and other public workers seem like great candidates until you realize they're the ones overseeing the budgets that determine their own salaries, benefits and perks. Already, nearly a third of Congress is made up of lawyers -- what happens when they can join firms that double as lobbying shops?
Perry's plan includes a plank aimed at curbing congressional conflicts -- he would make it a crime for lawmakers to engage in insider trading. But in a part-time Congress, that would only be the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, it's not actually that easy to find a real job that lets you work only half the time and spend the other half citizen-legislatin'. Campaigning and working on policy tend to eat up the time the legislature's not in session, making it even harder to hold down steady employment. According [ http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=16701 ] to the National Council of State Legislatures, even though Texas lawmakers spend only 140 days every two years in session, they report spending more than two-thirds of their time on their legislative jobs.
As a result, many state legislators end up being retirees or independently wealthy -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but it hardly makes lawmakers more representative of the population as a whole. Those who do have jobs frequently end up with sinecures that put them in the pocket of interest groups.
Even if all these difficulties could be resolved, how on earth would a President Perry get Congress to approve his plan? Pretty obviously, he couldn't -- but that's not the point.
Like Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan, Perry's "Uproot and Overhaul Washington" proposal isn't intended to be "realistic." Cain's response to those who say his plan couldn't pass is that politicians propose things they think can pass, while businesspeople look to solve the problem. It's the very "realism" of mainstream politics that must be attacked -- the timid incrementalism that maintains the corrupt status quo.
"There are some who want to tinker with the status quo," Perry said on Tuesday. "They want to work within the current system to achieve marginal change. Then there are those who believe, as I do, that Washington is too broken to be fixed by tinkering on the margins. I do not believe Washington needs a new coat of paint, it needs a complete overhaul. We need to uproot, tear down and rebuild Washington, D.C."
Let the Beltway pundits recoil in horror! Let Ben Bernanke and Karl Rove wring their hands in anguish! This is the Rick Perry who wrote a book called Fed Up! in which he argued that just about everything, including Social Security, was unconstitutional. This is the Rick Perry who got in trouble for hinting that if the feds got much more uppity, he might support Texas seceding from the union.
But that Rick Perry has largely been absent from the presidential campaign trail. Instead, he's been somnolent, forgetful and phony -- the very embodiment of coasting complacency, from the looks of it.
Perry's plan is the right kind of symbolic gesture for the electorate he's trying to reach. But at this point, most of them don't seem to be listening to him anymore.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/hey-congress-rick-perry-is-gunning-for-your-livelihoods/248516/ [with comments]
===
(linked in):
from earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68371480 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61854884 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
