Month: May 2010

A reader writes:

Beinart says, "I'm not even asking [Israel] to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state….What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become–and I'm quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here–an 'apartheid state.'"

Does he really not see that refusing to grant full, equal citizenship to an ethnic minority will itself make Israel an apartheid (or at least a Jim Crow) state?  Is his view of a reasonable, compromise position seriously that Israel should get out of the territories but then relegate a large and growing segment of its own citizenry to second-class status, based on ethnic origins? 

Wow.

Ezra Klein broadens the debate:

Paul's defense of himself is that his view on the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with race and so he is not a racist. But by the same token, the fact that Paul's view on the Civil Rights Act is so dominated by his libertarian ideology that he cannot even admit race and segregation into the calculus is exactly why this is relevant to Paul's candidacy, why it's an issue and why it's among the best evidence we have in understanding how he'll vote on legislation that comes before him. If this isn't about race, then it is about all questions relating to federal regulation of private enterprise, and Paul will be asked to vote on such questions constantly.

A reader writes:

Your reader may be right in arguing that very few state and federal prisoners are sent to prison because of possession. But the statistics he quotes fail to take into account jail inmates, who make up the vast, vast majority of individuals cycling into and out of the correctional system each year. Of the over 10 million individuals in a correctional facility at any given point in a year, roughly 9 million are individuals in jail for just weeks or months at a time. The Bureau of Justice Statistics your reader quotes are for state and federal prisoners with sentences of one year or longer.

The appropriate figure is the percentage of jail inmates arrested on drug possession, which the BJS estimates (2002 is the last year for which I can find good data) at 10%. That's 10% of about 650,000 inmates – 65,000 individuals on possession. E.D. Kain was a lot closer to the truth than your reader let on. Fact-checking, indeed.

Another writes:

Between 1997 and 2007, police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos, and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana in NYC. Blacks accounted for about 52% of the arrests, though they represented only 26% of the city’s population over that time span. Latinos accounted for 31% of the arrests but 27% of the population. Whites represented only 15% of those arrested, despite comprising 35% of the population. Reason discusses the study here.

Another:

I'd love to invite your reader down to New Orleans.

While someone might not be sentenced to any real jail time for getting caught with a joint, they are often arrested and put in parish or county jail until they can be bailed out (or not, in NOLA's case). So if you miss your shift, or if your employer finds out you've been arrested, you're screwed. Only recently has our DA begun issuing citations to settle marijuana cases in municipal instead of criminal court. But all around America you are going to get arrested for a joint. And even if you're sentenced to community service instead of hard time, drug policy still has incredibly deleterious effects on society, especially those who are already vulnerable.

Another:

The fact is that an arrest and conviction of possession, even if it is a small amount, does make you unemployable and costs society a great deal of money. My son and his best friend are examples of that.

After Hurricane Ike, Houston had a curfew. They were out after the curfew and were stopped. The officer searched the vehicle and charged both with possession. Both were convicted and did their probation with no problem. However when my son went to apply for a job at WalMart they would not hire him because of the conviction.

If you are looking at how much the possession charges cost, you have to add the cost to book and incarcerate two men overnight. Then the cost to go to court. Then the cost of monitoring them while on probation. You also have to add that my son was unemployed for six months until he could find an employer that didn't do background checks. That's six months of taxes all government entities could use right now.

Another:

In Oklahoma, possession of any amount is punishable by a jail term of up to one year. Subsequent offenses of any amount are punishable by jail terms of 2-10 years. No "intent to distribute" required. First time offenders may see their sentence discharged to probation and a fine, but the subsequent charge guarantees time. First time offense is a misdemeanor, all other offenses, including the subsequent possession charges are felonies.

The dissenter may live in a state where simple possession *never* results in a jail term, but in Oklahoma it is quite common to find people locked up for it. This state has some of the toughest marijuana penalties in the US and takes pleasure enforcing them, and ranks 4th in the nation in persons per 100,000 currently imprisoned. Not all of us live in states like California or Montana.

Another:

Let's not forget about parolees.  In nearly every case, passing drug tests is a condition for maintaining parole.  And, obviously, any arrest of a parolee constitutes violation of the parole terms.  So it's disingenuous to claim that "nobody" goes to prison for possessing a joint.  Hell, possession isn't even a requirement; people go to jail quite often because of low levels of non-psychoactive cannabis metabolites present in their urine.  Sometimes for a very long period of time.

Jeffrey Goldberg asks Josh Green the critical questions:

Jeffrey: Why does everyone think you're gay?

Joshua: Gays just wish I were gay. And your readers wish I were gay. It's my chiseled physique. I can't help it.

Jeffrey: Are you now, or have you ever been, Jewish?

Joshua: No, but my love of hummus ought to make me an honorary member of the tribe, don't you think? I've always assumed you're on the membership committee.

Jeffrey: Why do you deny your Jewishness?

Joshua: To withhold satisfaction from the folks who send me all that anti-Semitic hate mail.

Jeffrey: What are you going to do with your life after journalism dies?

Stealth gay and stealth Jew and all abs, Josh Green is the man.

For the countless Christians wrestling with new scholarship and inquiry into the origins of our faith, Adam Gopnik's new summary is both rich and, in parts, revelatory. His favorite Gospel, and mine, seems to be the spare bleakness and concise mystery of Mark. Money quote:

In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: he doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But, as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic.

If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.

None of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: the Son of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of Hercules, for instance.

But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the Jewish idea of divinity—omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and seeing all. If God he was—not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God, but actually one with God—then God once was born and had dirty diapers and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told again.

The Incarnation is the core truth of the Christian faith – and also what makes it seem so insane to those outside revelation's grasp. But because of the Incarnation, the core of the Christian faith is not, it seems to me, a theology – that merely became necessary when human beings fought to run churches – but the story of a man … who told stories. The Synoptic Gospels endure in a way that no "doctrine" ever can, and that John almost misses in his sublime attempt to make sense of the ineffable. They tell about a contingent moment of eternity. And that moment had a body. And a temper.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's the top story on Memeorandum this morning. TNC watches the above Maddow interview:

Does Paul know anything about blockbusting? Does he think banks should be able to have a policy of not lending to black businesses? Does he think real-estate agents should be able to discriminate? Does he think private homeowner groups should be able to band together and keep out blacks? Jews? Gays? Latinos?

I think there's this sense that it's OK to be ignorant about the Civil Rights Act because it's a "black issue." I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is that for a senator to be ignorant of the Civil Rights Act, is not simply to be ignorant of a "black issue," but to be ignorant of one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed. This isn't like not knowing the days of Kwanzaa, this is like not knowing what caused the Civil War. It's just embarrassing–except Paul is too ignorant to be embarrassed.

To bar private business owners from discriminating in employment would have been an unthinkable power for the federal government for much of American history. Now it's accepted as inevitable for almost everyone who can claim to be treated unjustly for an aspect of their identity irrelevant to a job. What I believe was a necessary act to redress a uniquely American historic evil became a baseline for every minority group with a claim to grievance.

To my mind, this is settled law and should remain that way. But it is not without cost to liberty (as I argued in Virtually Normal). And a real libertarian will feel some qualms about it. Not because they are racists or homophobes (although some may be). But because a truly principled defense of individual freedom will inevitably confront the huge role government now plays in policing fairness in what were once entirely unfair private transactions. You could argue, and I would agree, that the Act expanded freedom immensely overall. But you have to concede, I think, that it also restricted freedom for a few.

Bork made this case in The New Republic as the Civil Rights Act was being debated. It's a principled argument, and should be treated that way, without the usual stigmatization. There was a very solid constitutional case against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was why Goldwater opposed it. But as an empirical matter, I think the history of race in America proves the inadequacy of pure freedom to redress the darkest of human impulses – to own, torture and terrorize an entire race. Bruce Bartlett explains why:

As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.

In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.

Worse, Paul's entirely abstract intellectual argument wrests pure principles out of an actual society, with actual historical atrocities, violence, oppression and contempt. That's why I cannot be a libertarian the way some others like Paul are. I do not believe you can reify an abstraction like liberty and separate it from the context – historical, cultural, moral – in which it lives and breathes and from which it emerged. I can believe in freedom and believe in equality of opportunity but I should be mature enough to see when there has to be a compromise between the two – and decide. On the issue of race in America, the libertarian right was proven wrong – morally, empirically wrong. Giving up the ancient and real freedom to discriminate was worth it – indeed morally and politically necessary for America to regain its soul.

This is what makes the tea-party movement un-conservative. It is dealing with the world as it would like it to be, not as it is. It has an almost adolescent ideal it cannot compromise. I think that makes the movement, in its more serious incarnation (like Paul), a useful addition to the public debate, especially in reminding the GOP of some core principles it threw away under Bush and Cheney. I'm with Conor on this. Its bright, fixed glare also helps us illuminate what we believe in – merely by revealing what we no longer believe in.

But all this makes the movement simultaneously unready and unworthy for government. And, in its tinges of racial and cultural panic, will further marginalize the GOP in its fast faltering attempt to win over the next generation, especially among minorities.

Glenn Greenwald makes the point a lot of out gay people have recently been screaming at the television:

The very notion that it is "outrageous" or "despicable" to inquire into a public figure's sexual orientation — adjectives I heard repeatedly applied to those raising questions about Kagan — is completely inconsistent with the belief that sexual orientation is value-neutral.   If being straight and gay are precise moral equivalents, then what possible harm can come from asking someone, especially one who seeks high political office:  "are you gay?"  If one really believes that they are equivalent, then that question would be no different than asking someone where they grew up, whether they are married, or how many children they have.  That's what made the White House's response to the initial claims that Kagan was gay so revealing and infuriating:   by angrily rejecting those claims as "false charges," they were — as Alex Pareene put it — "treating lesbian rumors like allegations of vampiric necrophilia."

The double standards are pretty staggering:

It's ironic indeed that so many progressives — who spent months during Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation process insisting that one's life experiences (growing up as a poor Puerto Rican in the South Bronx) play a crucial role in how one understands the claims of litigants — are now demanding that sexual orientation be permitted to be kept hidden as though it's completely irrelevant to one's perspective.  If there's nothing whatsoever wrong with being gay, why the double standard?  Just as Sotomayor's background would undoubtedly affect her ability to understand (or "empathize" with) claims of discrimination or other forms of oppression, wouldn't the same be true of a judge's growing up gay — or choosing to remain closeted?

Douglas Adams wrote the following words of wisdom in the pre-blog days of 1999:

So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural skepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can't, it's just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.

(Hat tip: Kottke)