Another nail in the coffin - New York's civil liberties destroying new gun regulations

One of the bedrock principles of modern liberalism is that civil liberties - things like privacy, free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly - have been and continue to be under assault from a variety of forces.  Liberals fought the most heinous examples of this in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, though their successes in that cause continue to be stymied by the economic and social segregation and racism that seems to permeate the United States even today.  Liberals also lost many natural allies in the moderate Right by not equally defending other rights and liberties, most notably the one to keep and bear arms.

In the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. many liberals at first rushed to discuss mental health issues, breakdowns in community, and myriad of other issues that have allowed our violent, individualistic culture to keep using guns in what the media likes to portray as an ever downward civic spiral.  Some liberals jumped immediately to the bandwagon of another permanent assault weapons ban, in spite of scant to no evidence the last one did anything to dry up the weapons pipeline.

You can, I hope, imagine my disgust then when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed what would become the most restrictive state level gun laws in the nation.  From a civil liberties perspective, the most heinous part is the involuntary seizure of weapons from persons found to be on mental health watchlists or databases.  The seizure would apparently occur as the result of the person's diagnosis and condition, not any sense or history of activity constituting a threat.  The State Assembly is expected to pass the bill today, and the Governor is ready to sign it.

When did Democrats, as the political party supposedly representing liberal politics and ideas - decide it was appropriate to respond to acts of violence by further destroying our Constitutional Rights?  Just as it's important to protect Second Amendment rights - which will be severely (and IMHO inappropriately) restricted under this new legislation; it's also a requirement to protect Fourth Amendment Rights:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

 Like it or not, Liberals and their Democratic politicians who support Gov. Cuomo's position and legislation are now in clear and extraordinary violation of this Right. 

What's more, it is the party whose members died in the 1960's so that African Americans could vote which has done this.  Again.

When do Liberals get their Party back?

The Wisconsin stand-off and the Recession - can we please stop comparing apples and ice cubes?

This, dear friends, is why I hate all the "crush the public sector and it will solve our financial problems" rhetoric that is running amok these days:

Rather, the Left sees the public sector worker as a critical component of the service delivery that government is entrusted with by the people, much the same way GM sees their assembly lines as a critical component of its delivery of finished cars.

The Annual Liberal Blog Post - Richard Cohen checks the box

I'm no fan of the Washington Post's Richard Cohen - he of supporting torture and state sanctioned terror (as long as America practices it). I believe Mr. Cohen serves no agenda but his own -which is undersatndable in a town that hastruly lost any ablity to conceive of real public service.

Yet today he makes some sense (in what is sure to be his annual "See, I'm really a liberal columnist who has to fight off all the big, bad conservatives" column).

This fatuous infatuation with the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment, is clearly the work of witches, wiccans and wackos. It has nothing to do with America's real problems and, if taken too seriously, would cause an economic and political calamity. The Constitution is a wonderful document, quite miraculous actually, but only because it has been wisely adapted to changing times. To adhere to the very word of its every clause hardly is respectful to the Founding Fathers. They were revolutionaries who embraced change. That's how we got here.

He even manages (sort of) to point out that President Obama's Liberal credentials are, at best, strained:

Similarly, only a spell can explain why much of the Republican Party insists on calling Obama a socialist. To apply this label to the very man who saved Big Finance, who rescued Goldman Sachs and the rest of the boys, who gave a Heimlich to the barely breathing banks, can only be explained by witchcraft or voodoo or something like that. It has caused the GOP to lose its mind. Obama did something similar to the American auto industry, saving it from itself. He did not let it fail or nationalize it, as a socialist would have done, but pumped cash into it so that -- this is me speaking -- it can fail later on.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Almost a defense of liberal policies in a town where the policies, and their defenders get few and far between as the weeks drag on.

My problem with believeing this, of course, extends to Mr. Cohen's fetish for defending the indefensible:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives -- and maybe were -- and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs -- not time-stampers who take no chances.

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went
right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done -- back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

Its a great place Mr. Cohen live in, where we as a nation can break our own laws, destroy probably innocent lives (on both sides of the torture chamber) and then run around calling the people who did it great patriots. And as long as Cohen stand by these words, I can't stand by him as a liberal.

So thanks for your annual broadside at consrvatives. It happens to all be true. Sadly, it does nothing to buff your images with real liberals.

E.J Dionne - a Newly strident voice for Liberals!

E.J.Dionne is my new favorite liberal commentator. Not because he's new as a commentator, but because he has - finally - started to call our present government what it is:

STUPID

Sadly, as a Washington Post columnist, he's likely to soon be working for Huffington Post (as his former colleague Dan Froomkin is). But atleast until then, I really hope we see more of this:

I'm a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power.

We need a new conservatism in our country that is worthy of the name. We need liberals willing to speak out on the threat our daft politics poses to our influence in the world. We need moderates who do more than stick their fingers in the wind to calculate the halfway point between two political poles.

And, yes, we need to reform a Senate that has become an embarrassment to our democratic claims.

Mr. Obama fails to restore civil lilberties

Glenn Greenwald is right - and it makes me sick. For A Democrat to do this . . . .

The Real Stimulus Package

Over at Think Progress, Matt Yglesias has a good piece on what the final stimulus actually looks like. While some commenters got the colors wrong - I think there could have been a yellow in there instead of two greys - the basic idea is this. For all the howling by Republicans about the stimulus, the single biggest piece at approximately 32% is made up of . . . wait for it . . . tax cuts! Yes Sir, step right up, because Democrats are actually adopting Republican economic ideas, even after those ideas have been debunked by history. So, when they whine as they will about eing shut out, send them this graph and ask them to have Michale Steele apologize for their hystrionics.

And while we're at it, ponder this from teh Center fro American Progress study Matt cites:

"While Keynesian hasn’t been disproven, supply-side economics has. President Bush’s economic advisors assured the American public in the early 2000s that the president’s massive tax cuts would generate economic growth and create jobs. This classic supply-side policy intervention did no such thing. The 2000s economic recovery was the weakest of all post-World War II recoveries in terms of growth in investment, GDP, and job creation."

As I've said before, supply side responses to demand side issues just don't work.

What we learn from Mr. George Will.

There has been much press since 15 February about the writings of George Will on climate change. Back then, Mr. will wrote an opinion piece continuing his fight against climate change (and particularly climate change caused by human action) by misrepresenting global sea ice data to try and prove that global warming isn’t occurring, or is at least not the next big catastrophe. If you’ve missed this tempest, I’ve included many links below you can follow for a variety of view points.

I’m not going to spend time rebutting the science – others have done a far better job then I could. I’m also not going to spend too much time dealing with the journalistic ethics, though I did leave a fairly lengthy comment on the Columbia Journalism Review blog about the controversy. There, I wrote in part:

“So, if Mr. Will believe (sic) the science says something that I do not, he needs to do two things. First, he needs to accurately tell us what scientists say, instead of telling us the opposite, and he needs to cite his sources. And for the record, published scientists do not cite blog posts in peer-reviewed literature.”

Having framed my two arguments, now I am forced to ask myself – what do I as a scientist and blogger do about this? What role can I adopt? And what can I carry forward as a lesson for future events like this one?

First, I think it needs to be said that Mr. Will can always be expected to start his columns from a conservative ideological point, not a set of facts. Pundits always start with their worldview. Second, I think I need to remind a few people that we shouldn’t expect Mr. Will to frame the facts he chooses in ways that we recognize or agree with, at least if we come from a liberal perspective. That’s not his job. Third, we do need to be on our guard in our responses. As I have noted before (and so Glenn Greenwald), too many forthright and reasoned responses to conservative opinion makers get shoved aside because they can too easily be accused of being shrill (as if conservatives never are). Finally, we need to make sure our responses not only set the facts straight, but make clear when ethical standards have been violated. This is especially important, since many Republicans rail that liberals do not believe in personal responsibility, the rule of law, or any kind of moral or ethical code.

Having digested all that, I view Mr. Will’s two columns as a cautionary tale for liberals (and climate change scientists especially). We need to get out ahead of these controversies. We need, as bloggers, science journalists, scientists, bureaucrats in science agencies, to start figuring out where we might be confronted by conservative ideologues and run their stories with our rebuttals before they do. This shouldn’t be too hard anymore.

Over at The Intersection, one of Chris Mooney’s commenters, Wes Rolley, notes he has suggested to ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous that they have Chris on as a guest to debate Mr. Will. While I’d love to see Chris on that show (he’d thus be in D.C. and we could meet for brunch after), responding to Mr. Will now is too little, too late. Had we been data mining before hand, someone could have put this out on the intertubes, and then when the first column came out, we could have all politely directed the WaPo to the blog post in question, thus making the error not just one of science (where faked controversy helps the Post sell papers) but rather one of process. And journalists, as we’ve seen, love to defend their process.

I’ll grant you I don’t have the time to do that regularly. I don’t have the audience to make that impact. And I don’t have a good command of every aspect of the science. I also can’t easily think like a conservative most days. But I’m betting there is someone out here who can. And they need to start doing so, or we’ll end up fighting rear-guard actions for decades, all the while witnessing the increasing economic, environmental and security demands of a planet driven warmer by our inaction.

One note – my typing isn’t the best, and I have now spotted three typos in my CJR comment, even though I reread through it twice before hitting the POST button. I’d really love to see more spell checking available in blog comment sections for typing challenged folks like me.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked-ice-a-saga-in-five-chapters/#comment-15159

http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2009/02/george_will_lies_music_to_my_e.php

http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/02/the-george-will-scandal/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/15/george-will-global-cooling-warming-debunked/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/27/in-a-journalistic-blunder-reminiscent-of-the-janet-cooke-scandal-the-senior-editors-of-the-washington-post-let-george-will-reassert-several-climate-falsehoods-plus-some-new-ones/

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902240010?f=h_top

http://mediamatters.org/static/pdf/wapo-letter-20090224.pdf

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902260029?f=h_latest

http://mediamatters.org/discuss/200902260029

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/expers-big-flaw-in-wills-ice-assertions/

UPDATE:
Here's a good summary page that gives you the state of Play as of 5 March or so.

Vodoo economics v2.0 - the continued foilbes of Republican math

What he said.

Societal Shame - do we need more or less?

Over at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat has an interesting take on the effectiveness of shame in society. I commend it to you, even though he and I are definitely on different ends of the political spectrum.

Once you read it, come back here, and ponder this with me: If there were a strong sense of societal shame that would have stigmatized the actions of those responsible for the current economic crisis, would we be where we are today? You see, I tihnk that when Republicans talk about "voluntary" regulation of markets, they are theoretically calling for the establishment of shame mechanisms in society to keep individual actors in markets from doing things that are, in the long term, detrimental to those actors. If I'm right, Republican policy makers believe this moral imposition will be stronger then any governemental regulatory scheme, since you can't price being stigmatized the way you can price . . . . say air pollution fines vs. installing the latest clean air technology.

Now, the next question to ponder - have we, as a society, made enough use of stigmatization and shame in responding to this crisis? I'm not asking about what we should have to prevent it - I'm asking about what we are doing to respond to it. Clearly, We've seen Congress rake business leaders over the coals, and we've seen a few pudits begin to take these guys to task f or their actions. But if we aim to do more then just endure this crisis, maybe we need a more folks calling our business and elected leaders out on thier behavior. After all, many in congress who watched this mess unfold, and did nothing, are still on Capitol Hill.

H/T to Mike for turning me on to Ross' writing.

Can we all DEMAND some change now?

Listening to Michael Steele, newly minted Republican National Committee Chair on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous, I started having really bad 1980’s flashbacks. As the interview unfolded, it became clear why all the House Republicans and many of the Senate Republicans were so opposed to the Democratic stimulus bill then in the Senate for debate. Here’s the exchange that really got me going, from the ABC website transcript (emphasis mine):


“ STEPHANOPOULOS: He suggests that you and Republican Party leaders here in Washington are on the wrong side of the biggest issue, jobs.

STEELE: Well, no -- you know, with all due respect to the governor, I understand where he's coming from. Having been a state official, I know what it means to get those dollars when you're in tight times. But you've got to look at the entire package. You've got to look at what's going to create sustainable jobs. What this administration is talking about is making work. It is creating work.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that's a job.

STEELE: No, it's not a job. A job is something that -- that a business owner creates. It's going to be long term. What he's creating...

STEPHANOPOULOS: So a job doesn't count if it's a government job?
(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: Hold on. No, let me -- let me -- let me finish. That is a contract. It ends at a certain point, George. You know that. These road projects that we're talking about have an end point. As a small-business owner, I'm looking to grow my business, expand my business. I want to reach further. I want to be international. I want to be national. It's a whole different perspective on how you create a job versus how you create work. And I'm -- either way, the bottom line is...

STEPHANOPOULOS: I guess I don't really understand that distinction.

STEELE: Well, the difference -- the distinction is this. If a government -- if you've got a government contract that is a fixed period of time, it goes away. The work may go away. That's -- there's no guarantee that that -- that there's going to be more work when you're done in that job.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, but we've seen millions and millions of jobs going away in the private sector just in the last year.

STEELE: But they come -- yes, they -- and they come back, though, George. That's the point. When they go -- they've gone away before, and they come back. And the point is that the small-business owners take the risks. They're the ones that are out there in the morning putting that second mortgage on the house, taking the risks that are necessary so that they can employ your -- your kids and my kids and future generations. That's sustainable, long-term growth. Otherwise, then why do we need the small-business community? Why don't we all just get a government job and call it a day? “


What’s so remarkable here is that Mr. Steele has all but admitted that, in spite of the current economic state, including the recent loss of over 500,000 jobs in a single month, the Republican Party still believes that the government can not create jobs. It can only make work. So, opposition to the stimulus, even sweetened as it is with a variety of tax cuts, incentives and reductions, is all about sticking to a deeply held political and economic principle, no matter what the facts on the ground or the truth in evidence.

I'd love to see MR. Steele, who is no moderate, try to make that distinction to a family now living in a homeless shelter because they have lost their house to foreclosure after loosing their jobs inthe last year. He'd fail miserably, since to many unemployeed, the distinction is meaningless. Sure, as my colleague Mike at the Big Stick points out, it would be better to have high demand for high skilled labor created by the stimulus package. It would be ideal. We're way past ideal.

So why are Republicans clinging so tightly to this line of reasoning? Several thoughts come to mind. First, the Republican Party is still a Social Darwinist, supply side economics, monetarist policy party. They firmly believe that markets can indeed solve economic crises, and that market failures of any type should not ever be addressed through government action – which is welfare in their world view. Second, any economic action taken by government must be directed at businesses, not workers, because it is businesses that create jobs, and supply. And finally, Republicans still believe in supply side economics, no matter what the evidence of the last 30 years shows.

The biggest problem with this world view, however, is that if we follow their reasoning we’ll spend an aweful lot of time, and money (yours and mine incidentally) trying to fix what is now a demand side problem with supply side glue. As unemployment continues to rise, and the economy continues to contract, demand drops like a stone. President Obama said as much last night in his first Prime Time press conference:


“Question: Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier today in Indiana, you said something striking. You said that this nation could end up in a crisis without action that we would be unable to reverse.
Can you talk about what you know or what you're hearing that would lead you to say that our recession might be permanent when others in our history have not? And do you think that you risk losing some credibility or even talking down the economy by using dire language like that?

Obama: No, no, no, no. I think that what I've said is what other economists have said across the political spectrum, which is that, if you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of.
We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough and, as a consequence, they suffered what was called the lost decade, where essentially, for the entire '90s, they did not see any significant economic growth.
So what I'm trying to underscore is what the people in Elkhart already understand, that this is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession. We are going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
We've lost now 3.6 million jobs, but what's perhaps even more disturbing is that almost half of that job loss has taken place over the last three months, which means that the problems are accelerating instead of getting better.
Now, what I said in Elkhart today is what I repeat this evening, which is, I'm absolutely confident that we can solve this problem, but it's going to require us to take some significant, important steps.
Step number one: We have to pass an economic recovery and reinvestment plan. And we've made progress. There was a vote this evening that moved the process forward in the Senate. We already have a House bill that's passed. I'm hoping, over the next several days, that the House and the Senate can reconcile their differences and get that bill on my desk.
There have been criticisms from a bunch of different directions about this bill, so let me just address a few of them.
Some of the criticisms really are with the basic idea that government should intervene at all in this moment of crisis. Now, you have some people, very sincere, who philosophically just think the government has no business interfering in the marketplace. And, in fact, there are several who've suggested that FDR [President Roosevelt] was wrong to interfere back in the New Deal. They're fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.
Most economists almost unanimously recognize that, even if philosophically you're -- you're wary of government intervening in the economy, when you have the kind of problem we have right now -- what started on Wall Street, goes to Main Street, suddenly businesses can't get credit, they start paring back their investment, they start laying off workers, workers start pulling back in terms of spending -- that, when you have that situation, that government is an important element of introducing some additional demand into the economy.
We stand to lose about $1 trillion worth of demand this year and another trillion next year. And what that means is you've got this gaping hole in the economy.
That's why the figure that we initially came up with of approximately $800 billion was put forward. That wasn't just some random number that I plucked out of -- out of a hat. That was Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal economists that I spoke to who indicated that, given the magnitude of the crisis and the fact that it's happening worldwide, it's important for us to have a bill of sufficient size and scope that we can save or create 4 million jobs.
That still means that you're going to have some net job loss, but at least we can start slowing the trend and moving it in the right direction.
Now, the recovery and reinvestment package is not the only thing we have to do. It's one leg of the stool. We are still going to have to make sure that we are attracting private capital, get the credit markets flowing again, because that's the lifeblood of the economy.
And so tomorrow my treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, will be announcing some very clear and specific plans for how we are going to start loosening up credit once again.
And that means having some transparency and oversight in the system. It means that we correct some of the mistakes with TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] that were made earlier, the lack of consistency, the lack of clarity, in terms of how the program was going to move forward.
It means that we condition taxpayer dollars that are being provided to banks on them showing some restraint when it comes to executive compensation, not using the money to charter corporate jets when they're not necessary.
It means that we focus on housing and how are we going to help homeowners that are suffering foreclosure or homeowners who are still making their mortgage payments, but are seeing their property values decline.
So there are going to be a whole range of approaches that we have to take for dealing with the economy. My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs, we are making sure that the financial system is working again, that homeowners are getting some relief.
And I'm happy to get good ideas from across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans. What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested, and they have failed. And that's what part of the election in November was all about.”


Stop and think about that for a second. $ 1 Trillion in DEMAND lost each year for two years. DEMAND. How do you stem that with supply side approaches like tax cuts? How does a machinery reinvestment tax credit address this? And what good would a two year payroll tax holiday (that’s Social Security, Medi-care and Medi-cade, BTW) do to increase DEMAND? The only way I know of to increase demand is this – put people to work, and make sure they can work for long periods of time. Get the credit markets flowing again (Hello TARP, the people are still waiting) so people can borrow again, and then let them DEMAND so that supply can again be ramped up.

Of course, to make Republicans happy, we’ll probably have to use another term besides DEMAND to describe our position. It sounds too personal, too much like something an individual might control, rather then a business. And we’ll especially have to make sure we don’t “make work” while we do it.

It's the End of Year as we know it - and liberals feel fine?

As you know if you read the teaser below, you know that I'm closing out the year in a bit of a stew. Seems that, while I am supposed to be all atwitter about Mr. Obama's election (especially with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate), I am still uneasy. You see, Mr. Obama, for all his change, is still a centerist politician. he's not a traditional liberal Democrat. Which begs the question - does America really need a liberal antidote to ultra right (or even moderate) Conservatives? And if we do, how to we make it a reality?

The "common wisdom" in DC is that we don't. After all, these supposedly learned persons will say, the Nation began to move Right with Nixon. We swung farther that way with Reagan and Bush I. Clinton was no real liberal, and Bush II just took the pendulum too far. Mr. Obama, they will close, is just setting things back. He'll regulate business (but only just so much); he'll keep the bank bailout in place (and with few requirements of those banks); he'll get the economy going again with big infrastructure spending which will also be good for business.

But will it be good for workers? Will you and I - getting up each day, going to work, paying taxes, playing with our kids - will we really benefit from Mr. Obama's Change We Can Believe In?

Cynical? Perhaps. But as a liberal who has wandered about in the political wasteland, I think I am entitled to a little cynacism. And, as a true liberal, I am skeptical that Mr. Obama, even with a Democratic majority, will infact get us back to a more liberal country. You see, he has a lot to do - restoring the rights eliminated by the Patriot Act; closing Guantanimo Bay; repealing all the last minute Bush II evnironmental and health roll-backs; and then there is the minor issue of keeping the economy from collapsing further. its a tall order.

I look forward to seeing what he accomplishes.

TEASER Alert!

Over at Mike's place, I ask a burning question for liberals these days. It's a teaser, so stay tuned.