I've decided to pack up my things and leave Blogger for Wordpress. You can still type in www.notesfrombabel.com, but it will now forward to notesfrombabel.wordpress.com.
Read more...
No Such Thing as "Warrantless Distrust" When It Comes to Government
Ezra Klein laments his fellow citizens' lack of faith in the beneficence represented by the federal government's efforts to provide universal health care, going so far as to diagnose our democracy as "sick" for its faith-deficiency:
What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government -- and by extension, their fellow citizens -- capable of.
Other liberals are also concerned that our messy political process is woefully ill-suited to provide people the programs and services they need--for heaven's sake, we can't let a little thing like people not wanting something prevent them from getting it.
Will Wilkinson does a fine job reminding Ezra why our distrust is justified. But it's important to add that, even were our distrust not so well-earned, red-faced tirades against "the man" are a healthy thing in any event. It should be a badge of honor in a limited republic for legislators to have such a terrible time passing programs and regulations. So-called sick and mindless mobs, in conjunction with the cryptic machinations of our governmental and political processes, help to limit the access by factions to the enormous power vested in the federal government.
Modern progressives have hoped to join forces with the populists, who were also enraged at the system in which they struggle while others enjoy stratospheric success. But, just as the first progressives a century ago, modern progressives are dismayed to find that the populists aren't interested in uprooting capitalism--they just want a shot at being its beneficiaries themselves. The economic bubble-bursting talk went a long way to temporarily drive populists into the progressives' tent, but the highfalutin talk about Keynesian economic theory and egalitarian redistribution of wealth will not resonate with the common "ignorant" American for long. As the town halls are showing, the honeymoon is already over.
Read more...
Is There Such a Thing as "Generational Poverty" in the United States?
Jamelle at League of Ordinary Gentlemen writes:
There are a constellation of problems – hyper-segregation, extreme inner-city poverty, the black urban underclass, hell, affirmative action – which don’t make any sense unless you have a firm grasp on the policy history of African-Americans and the federal government’s refusal to invest economically in African-American communities. Inner cities desperately need targeted programs to alleviate black unemployment and create educational and employment opportunities. But those won’t happen, in large part, because Americans simply don’t understand the role government has had in creating those problems, and the responsibility we all bear for solving them.I don’t have the faintest idea what is meant by “generational black poverty.” The Homestead Act was in place before my ancestors got here. And at the end of all those other federal government programs, my mom found herself growing up in housing projects in Oakland. But as soon as she graduated high school at 17 she left and got a job and a couple years later married my dad, also with nothing more than a high school education, and with their respective jobs as telephone operator and mail carrier, made a nice life for themselves. I cannot jam into my brain’s belief center the notion that their being white saved them from what otherwise would have been “generational white poverty.”
For what it’s worth, I don’t expect that to change; if we acknowledge the federal government’s role in creating generational black poverty, then necessarily have to acknowledge the federal government’s equally direct role in building the wealth of middle-class white America.
There is perhaps a culture, a mindset of failure that is causing something like “generational black poverty.” And maybe that is what is meant by the author. But that is a problem that simply cannot be ameliorated by government. Particularly federal government. Granted, the federal government made quite a mess of things in its romp through two centuries of American history. But there’s no good to come from insisting the bull march back into the china shop and tidy up after itself.
Read more...
Before You Lynch McCarthy As a Birther Nut...
NRO's Andy McCarthy has taken a lot of flak for his recent article, in which he suggests that Obama not be let off the hook completely for his secret-keeping. The attacks on McCarthy seem to be largely based on misinterpreting McCarthy's piece as being something other than what it really is: a lament over the abandonment of investigative reporting.
At the outset, McCarthy does not once take up cause with Birthers--those who believe that Obama was not born on U.S. soil, and is otherwise not qualified to be President based on citizenship grounds. In fact, he states just the opposite:
The mission of National Review has always included keeping the Right honest, which includes debunking crackpot conspiracy theories. The theory that Obama was born in Kenya, that he was smuggled into the U.S., and that his parents somehow hoodwinked Hawaiian authorities into falsely certifying his birth in Oahu, is crazy stuff. Even Obama’s dual Kenyan citizenship is of dubious materiality: It is a function of foreign law, involving no action on his part (to think otherwise, you’d have to conclude that if Yemen passed a law tomorrow saying, “All Americans — except, of course, Jews — are hereby awarded Yemeni citizenship,” only Jewish Americans could henceforth run for president).Instead, McCarthy bemoans the poverty of research done by investigative reporters whose job it is to, ahem, investigate. Burden of proof is the operative concept underlying McCarthy's point, as I take it. That is, to waive McCarthy off because he cites to questionable sources misses the issue entirely. The burden of proof does not lie in favor of the subject of a news investigation, viz., the President of the United States. Every hint, every lead, every suspicion is to be ferreted out with the zealous assumption that the fellow is a rat and a sneak and a crook ready to yield his tale of lies to that would-be case-cracker with the tenacity and contempt for public figures' privacy to go the distance and get the story, dad-gummit.
Instead, somehow the burden of proof is now shifted to those who would challenge the “official” record provided by the Administration. A formal investigation is not warranted, under this view, unless and until substantial and corroborated evidence has already been amassed. Proffering less than this with a request for further investigation is derided as crackpot paranoia fit for scorn, contempt, and general hecklery.
That’s not how this is supposed to work. No, McCarthy’s is not piece of investigative reporting. But it doesn’t purport to be. McCarthy is not an investigator or a prosecutor—he was a fine one of those already, and I doubt he would volunteer to continue doing it on an opinionator’s wage. His piece simply suggests that there are some clues here, the sort that investigative journalists used to take up and sniff down and let us know at the end whether there is anything to jump up and down about. The observation here is that there is a curious lack of interest in any such sniffing.
Read more...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
