Month: April 2009

A New Agenda

Steve Waldman argues that whether life begins at conception is the wrong question:

According to a 2007 survey commissioned by a progressive think tank called Third Way, 69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the "taking of a human life," but 72 percent believe it should be legal.

Let that soak in. Most people think abortion is taking a human life and yet favor the procedure being legal. How grotesque! Are we Americans utterly immoral?

Actually, what the data proclaim is something that politicians and activists can't: Most Americans believe there are gradations of life.

Some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. But in reality they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more "killable" than a nine-month-old fetus. For them, determining whether "life" begins at conception really doesn't determine anything.

He imagines a less toxic abortion debate:

Politically, the battle would shift away from the third trimester (pro-lifers having largely won) and the first trimester (pro-choicers having largely won) and toward the second trimester – what most Americans view as the true moral gray zone. Both sides could use a mix of science, libertarian philosophy and theology to argue for more, or fewer, restrictions during this period.

(hat tip: Dreher)

Does Decriminalization Work?

Weeed1

Greenwald praises Maria Szalavitz's new article:

Few political orthodoxies have more of a destructive impact than our approach to drug policy.  Our harsh criminalization framework results in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of American citizens, breaks up families, burns tens of billions of dollars every year, erodes civil liberties, turns our police forces into para-military units, and spawns massive levels of violence and criminality — all while exacerbating the very harms it seeks to address.  If a measured, rational debate over America's extremist drug policies can take place in Time Magazine, then it can take place anywhere.

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

I'm a so-called stay-at-home mom who decided, pretty much on a lark, to apply for temporary Census 2010 work this spring. (The Census is going door to door verifying every address in the country in advance of the decennial census next year.) It's been an eye-opening, and depressing, experience.

I ended up supervising a crew of about 15 people. Some were terrific workers — there are always a few, I guess! — and I don't imagine they'll stay unemployed long, even in this difficult economy. But many, from my observation, were barely capable of holding on to even this temporary work. Of course, that didn't stop them from thinking the government owed it to them. When work started to wrap up earlier than anticipated, some were hostile, and others shifted into an undeclared slowdown in an attempt to eke out a few extra days.

In the meantime, at our city's central temporary Census office, competition was fierce to impress higher-ups from the regional office, in the hopes that permanent jobs might materialize. Supervisors above the crew level pushed relentlessly to increase production, upping quotas, urging us to fire people who couldn't keep up. We were told we could not work overtime, but without more hours we couldn't meet the goals that were set.

Most crew leaders I knew ended up working unpaid overtime, because they were bullied into it. We heard stories of people in the office being fired for doing the same. Given a goal they could not meet, but fearing they would be fired if they did not meet it, they accomplished their work, only billed for the maximum 40 their supervisors allowed, and subsequently were fired for lying on their timesheets.

Because people are so desperate for work, no one complained on the record. There was no one to complain to. I couldn't decide which annoyed me more: those who wanted to earn money for doing inferior work or those who were so desperate for permanent assignment that they abused their workers. And, of course, there was the ridiculously incompetent bureaucracy to navigate. Because so many temps were hired on the fly, efficiency was terrible. All the endless forms we had to fill out regularly got lost. No one ever knew what was going on. We got conflicting procedural instructions on a daily basis.

 My take-away: We may need immediate government stimulus, but we need to stop pretending the government can get good work done rapidly. Watching government money slosh around this bureaucratic microcosm has convinced me that "fast," "government" and "quality work" are completely incompatible. But hey, the extra cash is coming in handy!

Specter’s Math

If you subtract 200,000 moderate Republicans from the Pennsylvania base, Specter essentially ran out of support from his own party. It's a classic pattern of the losing party actually becoming more extreme after it loses – because the rump is more marinated in ideology than the less committed and more pragmatic members. You can spin this as cowardice on Specter's part, and many will. But it does not strike me as a good sign for the GOP that the base in a state like Pennsylvania – already trending blue – is trending ever more red.

The Conservative Case For Mass Transit

David Schaengold explains:

Sadly, American conservatives have come to be associated with support for transportation decisions that promote dependence on automobiles, while American liberals are more likely to be associated with public transportation, city life, and pro-pedestrian policies. This association can be traced to the ’70s, when cities became associated with social dysfunction and suburbs remained bastions of ‘normalcy.’ This dynamic was fueled by headlines mocking ill-conceived transit projects that conservatives loved to point out as examples of wasteful government spending. Of course, just because there is a historic explanation for why Democrats are “pro-transit” and Republicans are “pro-car” does not mean that these associations make any sense. Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.

Read it all.

(hat tip: E.D. Kain)