Gail Collins

Dear Friends,

I do not believe that I have posted before about Gail Collins or one of her columns in The New York Times.  She is one of my favorite columnists for two very good reasons. First, I most always agree with her and when I don't it is simply a matter of degree.  Second, she has a great sense of humor, at least in her column.  I have never met her so I really don't know what she is like in person. 

Today's column was as usual a great one (here).  It is entitled "The Curse of the Wow Factor". You need to read the entire column.  As you may guess, it focuses on the recent appearances of half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN).  They are over the top in terms of talking without saying anything substantive or simply making stuff up.  I believe it was Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" that showed a clip of Governor Palin talking about how terrible President Obama's nuclear arms decisions were.  She had the facts and the United States history wrong and she made no sense.  He followed that clip with a clip of President Obama being asked to comment on what Governor Palin had said.  President Obama declined to comment on her foreign policy experience and ideas. 

The juxtaposition of the two clips was great.  In the first clip you have an uninformed, incomprehensible person who lacks any substance.  In the second clip you have perhaps the most intelligent President that we have ever had who is thoughtful, articulate and full of substance. 

I would have posted the clips but I am traveling and my internet connection is tenuous at best so I can't right now but I will try later.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

No Fly List and Limits on our Freedom

Dear Friends,

A few days ago The New York Times ran an article illustrating the terrible problems that are caused by the No Fly List, entitled "Ensnared by Error on Growing U.S. Watch List" by Mike McIntire. (here)  It is well worth reading in its entirety. The basic facts of the story are:

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.
Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day. 
But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government’s response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.

The article goes on to report:

“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”
Now, he added, “It’s getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”

The list is secret, who is on the list is secret, how you get on the list is secret, how you get off the list is secret.  The Obama Administration continues to claim that everything is secret for national security reasons and continues to oppose law suits to obtain justice for innocent people who are being hurt by this abridgment of their freedoms.  So much for openness in government. Fortunately, some of the lawsuits like the one brought by Rahinah Ibrahim are actually progressing through the courts and shedding light on some of the mystery.  The article reports about the reinstatement of her case against the F.B.I.'s Terrorist Screening Center by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

“If your name or my name or anybody’s name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn’t be on that list.’ ”
Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim’s case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.
The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.

The details of this story are so amazing that they are hard to believe.  If being on the no-fly list is insufficient legal grounds for arrest why did this happen and why are we using contractors:

When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.
The contractors’ duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.
The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.

There is no happy ending to this story.  Here is the end of the article:

Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.
Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants’ lawyers would comment for this article.
At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.
“You’re holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That’s just baloney.”

In case you want another story with no happy ending related to the no-fly lists watch this video:




If you want to see the ALCU's answers to frequently asked questions about no-fly lists, go here.

The Obama Administration talks about open government and bringing needed change to many of the Bush Administration policy, but it seems to act just like the Bush Administration when it comes to secrecy and a willingness to deprive people of their freedoms without due process or a chance for redress.



Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Moving Toward Fulfilling a Promise

Dear Friends,

I have been accused of never saying anything nice about President Obama or recognizing all the good things that he does.  Well today was a great day for President Obama, the United States, Russia and the entire world.  President Obama and President Medvedev signed a nuclear arms control treaty.  Here is the link to The New York Times article on it. 

Candidate Obama made it clear that he would seek a world free of nuclear weapons.  While acknowledging that it may not occur in his life time, he pledged to work toward that worthy goal.  Just a short time into his Presidency, he has taken a first very positive and visible step in that direction.  There was a time pre-President George W. Bush where this signing would not have been so significant.  But among the many disasters that President Obama inherited from President George W. Bush was a dysfunctional relationship with Russia.

Our relationship with Russia has been made functional by President Obama with a great deal of help from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  I wanted Senator Clinton to stay in the Senate and take over Senator Reid's position as Senate Majority Leader, but she didn't and she has turned out to be a great Secretary of State. 

According to The New York Times article cited above:

The Russian president signaled general support for the American-led drive to impose new sanctions on Iran, saying that Tehran’s nuclear program has flouted the international community. “We cannot turn a blind eye to this,” Mr. Medvedev said, while adding that sanctions “should be smart” and avoid hardship for the Iranian people.
Mr. Obama said he expected “to be able to secure strong, tough sanctions” on Iran during the spring.

We need the support of Russia and other historical foes if we are to bring peace to the world.  That means we need functional relationships so that we can find common ground where it exists to work together toward mutually advantageous goals.  President Obama and Secretary Clinton understand this fact of life and are doing a great job of restoring the United States' place in the world and restoring civil and functional relationships with other nations where that is possible.

So for the signing of this nuclear arms control treaty and the clean up work that had to be done to get here, we should praise President Obama, Secretary Clinton and the Obama Administration.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Worse than President Bush

Dear Friends,
I have in the past chastised President Obama for continuing some of President George W. Bush's policies and/or defending them in legal actions that are ongoing.  President Obama has now gone beyond what President Bush did with respect to ignoring the Constitution, and we must make him reverse this policy.  Please write him here.  

The New York Times this morning reported that President Obama has authorized the killing of an American citizen.  (here)

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

Anwar al-Awlaki has not been convicted of any crime or provided with anything that approaches due process.  I do not claim to be a Constitutional scholar, but I have studied Constitutional law, and there is no reasonable argument that can be made that the President of the United States has the power to order the targeted killing of an American citizen because the President of the United States thinks that the targeted individual has committed a crime or is a terrorist.  Even if Anwar al-Awlaki is in fact a terrorist and even if he has committed a crime, the President of the United States does not have the right to kill him.  The accused is entitled to a fair trial with due process and the courts decide the penalty if the person is found guilty.  If Anwar al-Awlaki is on a battlefield, he may be killed as a participant in a battle in accordance with International law.  If Anwar al-Awlaki is in hiding in Yemen, it would be a violation of US law, International law, the US Constitution and probably the laws of Yemen.

But beyond the illegality and unconstitutionality of ordering the killing of an American not on an active battlefield who has not had any of his Constitutional rights observed, it is just plain wrong.  We will never be safer, and we will never win a war against terrorists by acting like terrorists ourselves.  This type of targeted killing is antithetical to everything that America should stand for.  In taking his oath of office the President pledges to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. President Obama is failing to uphold his oath of office.

Thank you for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

El Sistema

Dear Friends,

I am on the Board of MacPhail Center for Music whose mission is to transform lives through music education.  At a committee meeting at MacPhail today, I was reminded of El Sistema, an amazing program in Venezuela that has a long history of transforming the lives of the neediest children of Venezuela through classical music.  Here is a link to the US website for El Sistema. As those of us who understand the power of music know, music gives children self-esteem and confidence which can help to break the cycles of poverty and crime.  It is not that the children become professional musicians.  It is that their lives have meaning, and they can see away out of poverty.

There are many United States music organizations that are trying to figure out how to adapt El Sistema  to the United States.  Actually adapting the program to the United States is not all that hard.  Children in poverty are children in poverty all over the world.  The really hard part is that in the United States, we say that we don't have the money for such a program.  We always have money for jails and wars but not to save and educate our children.

El Sistema is almost entirely funded by the Venezuelan government.  Venezuela has about 26 million people.  The CBS program "60 Minutes" reports (here) that El Sistema has about 300,000 kids in it at any given time and close to 800 orchestras, ensembles and choirs.  It also reports that the program costs about $80 million.  If those numbers are correct, El Sistema spends about $300 per child per year.  What an incredible financial deal.  Children are given self-esteem and confidence, they are given hope to get out of poverty, they avoid lives of crime and become successful citizens at way less than the cost of having them in the criminal justice system.  The United States has a population a little over 10 times the population of Venezuela so an equivalent per capita expenditure would be just under $1 billion per year.  Even if it costs more to conduct this program in the United States, the cost would still be a very small number, especially compared to the benefits and the costs that would not be incurred if the program works well.

There are certain obligations that governments have.  Among those are to give all of the country's children a chance to succeed which means to provide them with education that gives them literacy, knowledge, values, historical understanding, creativity, hope, self-esteem and confidence.  Our education system is failing when judged by this standard.  We need to use our resources, expertise and creativity to improve our education system.  We need to be willing to look outside our borders to find methods that work and adapt them to our own use.  We are a great country, but we have lots to learn from other countries.  We also need the will to pay for education.  It is the right thing to do to meet our obligations as a society.  It is also  financially the most efficient thing to do.  We will have less crime and a much better and more creative work force which will lead to a much stronger economy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Massey Energy

Dear Friends,
I was saddened to read today of the deaths of miners in a Massey Energy coal mine.  (here)  Normally I would have just glanced at the headline, been sad for a while, lamented the priority of profits over safety and moved on.  However, my son just spent most of his Spring break from college in West Virginia working on a series of articles on the West Virginia coal mining debates for the Wilder Voice, a long form journalism magazine at Oberlin College.  Here is a recent blog post from him about his trip.
I am very proud of John for spending his Spring break working to better the world.  I am also reminded that while I feel that our education system is failing us, many college students are getting great educations and are learning and practicing values that have historically made our country great.  There is hope, but we must force our elected representatives to understand what is important.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Who is President Obama?

Dear Friends,
In The New York Times today, Frank Rich wrote a great column (here) that was I believe written just for me.

I must admit that my view of President Obama can swing wildly between being in awe of his intellect, his thoughtfulness, his oratory and his positions and being dumbfounded by his unwillingness to take liberal stands, hold people accountable for their actions and stand up to the right wing fear mongers.  I do my best to differentiate between times when President Obama breaks a campaign promise or fails to do something that he said he would and when he just does something that I don't like or fails to do something that I think he should.  I was particularly struck by the following paragraph in Mr. Rich's column:

Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”

After some reflection, I do not believe that I am one of the liberals that Mr. Rich's friend describes.  I expect President Obama to keep his campaign promises.  I also expect President Obama to listen to the views of the people that elected him and support him and to take those views into account.  I do not expect to agree with everything he does or for him to agree with me all the time.  I also expect that when you campaign on slogans of hope and change that you better have a real sense of urgency in addressing the multitude of problems that our country and world are facing.  I do not think I am racist.  I think that I am entitled to hold President Obama accountable for his promises and the expectations that he created, and I will continue to do just that.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

How to Create Jobs

Dear Friends,
In The New York Times today, Thomas Friedman wrote a great column (here) which discusses some research and conclusions reached by Robert Litan, head of research at the Kauffman Foundation which promotes entrepreneurship.
The substance supports my post yesterday that our education system is failing to educate in the way that we need it to.  Mr. Litan is focused not on morals, but on what our economy needs from the education system.  As background, Mr. Friedman provides the following fun fact:

“Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Mr. Friedman goes on to provide a road map for how we can create jobs.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Mr. Friedman focuses his column on the immigrant part of the equation.  I also see that there is a link between what Chris Hedges addresses in his book discussed in my prior post.  The same failure of our education system that teaches skills and not values also fails to produce "smart, creative, inspired risk-takers".  Our education system lets us down in so many ways.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Education

Dear Friends,
Since my post about student loan reform generated so many comments, I have decided to continue to discuss education.  I am currently reading "Empire of Illusion - The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" by Chris Hedges.  It is a fascinating and very disturbing book.  I have not finished it yet, but I will, but it is taking a while because it is requires me to think and reread often.

The first chapter is entitled "The Illusion of Literacy".  Here is a portion of a paragraph on page 44:

Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic.  There are 7 million illiterate Americans.  Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence.  There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.  Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate--a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year.  A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates.  In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.

Given these statistics, is it any wonder that our democracy is in trouble?  As you will recall, I agree completely with Thomas Jefferson that an educated electorate is essential to a successful democracy. 

The literacy rate is only a part of the problem.  Our education system even the elite colleges and universities are teaching skills not values and are focused on sustaining the current system instead of asking the big questions.  Quoting from pages 90 and 91of the book:

In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Education After Auschwitz".  He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged" and that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be uncovered, examined, and critiqued through education.  Schools had to teach more than skills.  They had to teach values.  If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible...The moral nihilism embraced by the elite universities would have terrified Adorno.  He knew that radical evil was possible only with a collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nourish the capacity for individual conscience.  He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hypermasculinity.

It seems to me that all of Adorno's fears are being realized today.  Mr. Hedges argues quite persuasively that education system, even our elite universities, are only teaching skills and not values.  He notes that the number of students that are studying the humanities is dropping rather dramatically while the number of undergraduates that are getting business degrees is soaring.  He bemoans the fact at page 97 that

Writers from Euripides to Russell Banks have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice. Literature is a tool to enlighten societies about its ills.

But of course we are not educating our students to ask the big questions then literature is nothing more than something to be read.  Our education system fails to challenge the students to do the reflection and to ask the big questions.  At page 103 Mr. Hedges continues:

For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge.  To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill.  To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanistic ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals.  A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not is speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.  Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions.  They are products of a moral void.  They lack clarity about themselves and their culture.  They can fathom only their own personal troubles.  They do not see their own biases or the causes of their own frustrations.  They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structures and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster.

Mr. Hedges argues that since the elites are educated in the skills required by the system they serve, they are not equipped to solve the problems we are facing. 

They have no concept, thanks to the educations they received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one.  They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management.  They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure.  Their entire focus is numbers, profits and personal advancement.  They lack the moral and intellectual core.  They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships.  The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets.  The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market--which they slavishly serve.

Mr. Hedges conclusion is that President Obama is a product of this elitist system and that he has surrounded himself with similar people.  I certainly hope that President Obama is able to break out of this mold.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal