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Global Warming. How much is science -- how much is politics?
A variety of viewpoints from both believers and skeptics
of catastrophic man-made global warming.
Cross posted from Rethink
Written by Ashok Karra
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
For My Republican Readers: Why Do We Need a Party? And How Are We Going To Win Elections In the Future?
All of us are familiar with the story that the Founders were opposed to political parties, and those of you who have gone through the previous posts on faction and equality can see deep arguments for why parties are a problem. The two I'm thinking of right now are:- Parties increase the chance that a majority faction imposes its will.
- Parties make it hard for us to relate to each other as citizens; we think of each other as means to an end (pro-choicers ally with leftist evangelicals to get what they want), or we attack each other for similarly artificial reasons.
1. Problem: the Republican party is in shambles. Congress is most certainly lost for several cycles now. Most observers are placing blame at President Bush, but truth be told, everyone blames President Bush for everything. I actually think he was the last great hope for saving this party, and it was the structure of the political landscape that was too big an obstacle.
Consider - in 2000, when Vice President Gore was whining, Republicans were furious. Those "Sore Loserman" buttons were hilarious; there wasn't DailyKos with the sort of leverage it had but there were plenty of right-wing media outlets online with almost similar power. It didn't look like this party had anywhere near a dour mood. In 2002 and 2004 again elections were delivered and it looked like the Republican party was a force to be reckoned with for some time.
People underestimate just how good a campaigner President Bush is - we might never have seen anyone as good at campaign strategy as he is. Consistently the base was energized and new voters were being pitched to, for a time. Furthermore, he and Rove had a strategy to bring in Latino voters: he had (has) real concern for the future of the party, knowing that a party that's growing old and with an active but small Evangelical component can't win elections forever.
The deepest problem with this story - the reason why the Republican party has fallen apart now - is that President Bush was too good, and up against too much. Could any one person really build the Republican party for the future?
We, who were Republicans, took too much for granted.
I'll prove it to you - go onto right-wing websites and ask how many people on those sites are younger than 40. It's hilarious talking to other conservatives: numbers of them I've talked to dismiss younger people, the ones sometimes paying their Social Security now, as "dumb" and "ignorant" (I'm not going to humiliate the person who said this. I don't talk to her anymore anyway). It's really clear most people on the Right are older, much much older. And they're doing their best to keep younger people away from the party, by setting a tone that makes it sound like young people have no concerns besides drugs and getting laid.
Case in point: I should vote Democrat. I know very few on the Republican side right now who could care less for what I teach. Why don't I just vote for the party that will give federal dollars via a blank check to universities and give me more opportunites for a cush tenured job? Where does the Republican party cater to my self-interest, given the fact I do have qualifications and make something of them every single day?
Not once in these last 8 years of Republican rule was a serious attempt made by the party to build the party.
People want to blame Republican candidates for this. But that's utter nonsense: the issue is larger than any given candidate. The young/old divide has occurred because the party has no common ground other than a vague appeal to values.
The same thing holds for the Democrats, btw: Senator Obama has so little experience that he might turn out to be one of our most conservative presidents. Who knows how the reality of holding power and being in charge of the military will shape him? And it's not like he keeps his promises. What motivates Democrats right now is a vague sense that he's Progressive. But there's a big difference between catering to the Samantha Power crowd and actually endorsing their views because you believe them.
When we lost sight of the particular interests that should make us partisan, we became susceptible to how a campaign makes us feel. That inability to be specific, I submit, occurred with candidate-centered elections. Stripping the parties of their power actually alienated us from the electoral process more. Now we can choose what candidate we like, sure, but we have no clue what he stands for.
Whereas if the parties meant something, you would have to be able to articulate reasons for why you liked the party, as opposed to saying "I'm afraid of the other guy." And if you have areas where you and the party disagree, you have to be vocal and make it clear that your voice matters. (Notice that I'm dodging any idea that there was a golden age of American democracy: I submit the process before this was probably too corrupt and insider. This process, though, might border on meaningless.)
So what you're seeing in the Republican young/old problem is an appeal to values so vague that it is the mere tone which causes friction. The older elements just can't stand hearing the younger ones, and that's the divorce in a nutshell. Notice that the older elements drive the mindlessness of conservative media: How many times do Malkin and LGF and Rush and the rest have to repeat the same story? Isn't there something a bit different to talk about? No? We're gonna talk about the same thing for 8 years? Alright...
2. Solution: The Left has it halfway correct online. They've got people talking and creating, they're active. They moved to increase participation here, and that alone won them midterms and will probably win them the Presidency. Even though the Obama campaign uses the Internet more than it uses him, there's no doubt in my mind we would even be talking about Obama if it weren't for the Internet.
Where they have it wrong is that none of this is building a party. Kos can preach "winnerism" and talk in terms of taking the party back, but I don't think the wins are the same thing as having a party.
What a party does is plan for the future: forget Obama. Forget these Congressional elections. What do you want America to look like 10, 20 years from now? And what sorts of citizens will it have and how will it involve you?
The party takes the present concerns and makes them a platform. It gives a vision for America. Statesmen then determine what's feasible and proper and work from there. But that looking ahead is critical: without it, all people do is attack each other over the pettiest of issues. Politics loses any sense of nobility.
I realize some of you probably remember C.S. Lewis saying the problem with Communism is that it believes in the future. That sort of applies to what I'm talking about: in a sense, this is an instantiation of the general will I'm working with here. But on a very real level, making pronouncements like "no one is allowed to think of the future" is simply idiotic. Of course you're thinking of the future. You have hopes. And you should have a place to invest those hopes and deliberate with others, and you should be allowed to look ahead and ask for the country you want. It's a free country.
You don't have that option nowadays. All you're allowed to do is ask for very specific things, like gasoline. To ask for those specific things, you need to embrace "change" and "hope," or conversely the "maverick" who stood up to "special interests." You must make a moral choice based on the tone of the candidate in order to get gas to drop a few pennies. The specific policy doesn't originate from a genuine partisanship, or a real concern on the part of citizens. It only exists because the abstract appeals are so vacuous there's nothing else to say in our media-obsessed world.
You already know the solution. I want to turn as much of the Internet as possible into a real teaching tool. And I want parties to take the lead.
I want the Democrats to help their members learn about John Dewey and the history of American labor and Margaret Sanger and Marx and Rousseau. I want them to be able to talk about Keynes and not have to go to Paul Krugman for quick and dirty talking points. I want to see Democrats that have an awareness of their party and country historically, and where progressivism fits into a larger scheme of ideas. I also want them to know what the other party's ideas are and where they come from. Maybe Ayn Rand and Hayek should be on Democrat reading lists, at the least.
Maybe there should be a Democratic reading list.
I want Republicans to sponsor classes for anyone willing to learn, and yes, I volunteer to teach them. I will gladly teach Lincoln, Jefferson, the Federalist and go back to Locke and Blackstone and all that stuff if need be. I'll even throw in a Bible reading seminar of an interfaith sort - we'll read the Bible as literature.
This sounds ridiculous - the parties as educative - but think about what I'm asking. All I'm saying is that people should know why they believe what they believe. In the absence of formal education caring to do this, and instead only teaching specialized skills for making money, the party that embraced this would do a civic duty of the highest magnitude. It wouldn't just inform its members politically: it would banish the utter chaos and vapidness of what we call politics today and bring back politics simply. We'd be better as people for being citizens, and I see nothing wrong with that.
Made and posted on Youtube by LibertyPen
There are two ways to protect liberty --
at the voting booth and in the jury room.
Posted on June 13, 2008
By Henry Mark Holzer
As the world has just learned, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 yesterday that “for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war.” So summed up Justice Scalia in a stinging dissent in which he was joined by justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Justices Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, made up the majority Breyer.
There is much that can be said about the Boumediene v. Bush decision:
How the Court was able to review the case, in light of its long-standing practice of waiting until lower federal courts have an opportunity to rule.
How the majority torturously construed the English and American constitutional history of habeas corpus.
How the majority dishonestly eviscerated its controlling precedent on habeas corpus.
How habeas corpus was never intended to apply, and never did apply, to unlawful enemy combatants captured outside the United States.
How the processes established by the political branches—Congress and the President—for handling unlawful enemy combatants more than satisfied the Constitution.
How the majority was able to invalidate the Detainee Treatment Act.
How the decision will severely compromise the military’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism.
How the judicial usurpation of presidential war-powers has now become nearly complete.
How this contra-constitutional coup has been engineered by a razor thin 5-justice majority of the Court, three of them having been appointed by Republican presidents (Stevens: Ford, Kennedy: Reagan, Souter: Bush I) and the other two by Republican bandwagoneers in the Senate (Ginsburg and Breyer).
All this and more—important as it is to our Constitution, our Nation, and our national security—will be discussed at length in the days to come, as Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Boumediene receives the scrutiny and obloquy that it deserves. But those discussions will have to wait, because in this election year there is a more fundamental aspect of the decision that needs to be considered.
In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said this about the now-unconstitutional Detainee Treatment Act (“DTA”):
“The majority rests its decision on abstract and hypothetical concerns. Step back and consider what, in the real world, Congress and the Executive have actually granted aliens captured by our Armed Forces overseas and found to be enemy combatants:
· The right to hear the bases of the charges against them, including a summary of any classified evidence.
· The ability to challenge the bases of their detention before military tribunals modeled after Geneva Convention procedures. Some 38 detainees have been released as a result of this process.
· The right, before the [Combatant Status Review Tribunals], to testify, introduce evidence, call witnesses, question those the Government calls, and secure release, if and when appropriate.
· The right to the aid of a personal representative in arranging and presenting their cases before a [Combat Status Review Tribunal].
· Before the [United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit], the right to employ counsel, challenge the factual record, contest the lower tribunal’s legal determinations, ensure compliance with the Constitution and laws, and secure release, if any errors below establish their entitlement to such relief.”
Roberts continued, as he worked toward exposing what the Supreme Court’s majority was really up to:
“In sum, the DTA satisfies the majority’s own criteria for assessing adequacy. This statutory scheme provides the combatants held at Guantanamo greater procedural protections than have ever been afforded alleged enemy detainees—whether citizens or aliens—in our national history.”
Then Roberts asked: “So who has won?”
His answer: “Not the detainees. The Court’s analysis leaves them with only the prospect of further litigation to determine the content of their new habeas right, followed by further litigation to resolve their particular cases, followed by further litigation before the [United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit]—where they could have started had they invoked the DTA procedure. Not Congress, whose attempt to “determine— through democratic means—how best” to balance the security of the American people with the detainees’ liberty interests … has been unceremoniously brushed aside. Not the Great Writ [of habeas corpus], whose majesty is hardly enhanced by its extension to a jurisdictionally quirky outpost, with no tangible benefit to anyone. Not the rule of law, unless by that is meant the rule of lawyers, who will now arguably have a greater role than military and intelligence officials in shaping policy for alien enemy combatants. And certainly not the American people, who today lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.” (Emphasis added.)
If the detainees have not won, if Congress has not won, if the principle of habeas corpus has not won, if the rule of law has not won, if the American people have not won—and, one can add, if the Commander-in-Chief has not won—who has?
Earlier in his dissent Chief Justice Roberts suggested the answer, writing that the Boumediene decision is “not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants,” and that “[a]ll that today’s opinion has done is shift responsibility for those sensitive foreign policy and national security decisions from the elected branches to the Federal Judiciary.”
More specifically, in the last four words of Justice Roberts’s dissent about who has won he names names: “unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”
Justice Scalia, too, sees the decision for what it is and surely understands who has won, writing in his dissent that:
“Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension [of habeas corpus] Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus(and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.”
For this constitutional and national security debacle, ultimately we have to thank not only the 5-justice majority but also justice-nominating and justice-confirming Republicans in the White House and Senate.
The Boumediene decision is thus a grave cautionary lesson about what is at stake in this presidential election: nothing less than the future of the Supreme Court for another generation, and with it the security of the United States of America.
In the last sentence of his dissent Justice Scalia writes: “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.” Surely we will regret it—if the Nation lives.
Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a constitutional lawyer and author most recently of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006, A Conservative’s Perspective.
For more, visit the CrossAction News home page, delivering the latest breaking Christian conservative news, updated regularly with continuous coverage of Christian topics and world events.
Made and posted on youtube by wyattmcintyre
He said: "My first attempt at video editing, a tribute video to those who fought, some surviving, others falling, on the Beaches of Normandy in World War II.
Part of the reason I suppose I did this now was that there is what I consider an alarming trend with some who refer to this person or that person as a Nazi or some Hitler as if this is just an insult you hurl around. It seems perhaps, even if unmeant, to be insulting to the memories of those who fought so valiantly, gave so bravely and fell with such nobility on those far distant beaches fighting the onslaught of Hitler and the Nazi's. This is a thank you to them and a plea for others not to take what they fought against so lightly as if to consider it so light as just to throw around so easily.
With heartfelt gratitude that can never completely to expressed to those who served thank you to all who fought there, we remember."
This is a wonderful video in honor of our fallin. It has it's own website. It also tells us the history for the boots, rifle and hat set up at Memorial Services for our troops. This is one video you don't want to miss.
http://00f2630.netsolhost.com/farewellmarine.html
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Safe From Truth
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, May 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Anti-Militarism: House Democrats have passed a bill to stifle the good news that we're winning in Iraq. They are so invested in losing that they apparently fear a popular backlash against them from victory.
Congress seems to be acting out the role of Col. Nathan R. Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson in the film "A Few Good Men." When pinned in covering up a murder, Nicholson famously yells back at Tom Cruise, playing the interrogating attorney: "You can't handle the truth!"
Democrats have decided this election year that American voters can't handle the fact that victory in Iraq is at hand.
In its passage last week of the defense policy bill, the House issued a prohibition against the Pentagon's "concerted effort to propagandize" the American public regarding the Iraq War.
It came in the form of an amendment authored by Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., which also would authorize an investigation of the Defense Department's "propaganda" efforts by the Government Accountability Office.
Hodes' addition to the bill passed by voice vote and the overall bill passed the House by a large margin. The Senate will wait until after the holiday recess to consider it.
It's not as if the Pentagon brass, as they wage a global war on terrorism, don't have better things to do than sit down and answer foolish questions about public relations operations from a bunch of GAO bean-counters.
Besides, haven't congressional Democrats insisted all these years that it wasn't the military they had a problem with regarding the Iraq War? Haven't they been saying how much they support those in uniform, that our military leaders really agreed with Democrats that Iraq was unwinnable, and that it was only the civilians who run war policy in the Bush administration they were attacking?
According to Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., the Hodes provision could end up classifying even the U.S. Marines' slogan, "The Few, the Proud, the Marines," as a "concerted effort to propagandize" in violation of the law.
The Democrats' efforts to save America from good news in Iraq stem from a New York Times article last month charging that retired military officers appearing on TV were "puppets of the Defense Department" because they get frequent private briefings and talking points.
The paper called it "a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated."
How divided were the lines between government and journalism when the New York Times in 2005 refused the pleas of the White House not to endanger investigations that were in progress and alert terrorist plotters by exposing the National Security Agency's secret program to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of suspected terrorists?
Or when the Washington Post that same year imperiled national security by revealing the secret CIA interrogation program in which terrorist detainees were taken to foreign prisons where information that could prevent future attacks was extracted?
Democrats seem to be motivated largely by the notion that those who wear, or have worn, the uniform of the U.S. armed forces cannot be trusted. Witness Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, last week outrageously suggesting that presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain looks at everything "from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous."
As will be obvious again on this Memorial Day, most Americans trust and appreciate our servicemen and women. Their wrath is sure to fall on those who pass laws that presume them to be liars.
This is one of Normulator's Videos.
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