Month: August 2010

An Afghan boy visits a market during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on August 11, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Muslims all over the world are supposed to go without food, drink, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan in order to purify themselves and concentrate their mind on Islamic teachings. By Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

I haven't paid close attention to the debate, but it doesn't appear anyone has mentioned the math of term-limiting Supreme Court justices. Suppose the term limit for a justice were nine years (somewhere near the middle of Sides' suggestion of six, eight, or twelve years). Under such a limit, there would be one forced retirement per year (assuming equal spacing of appointment). Under such a system, Bush's fifth appointment to the Court would have come in 2005; not until 2012 would there be fewer than five Bush-appointed justices.

Really, any term limit under 14 years will guarantee any two-term president the ability to "pack" the court with justices of his or her ideological bent. Now you're facing a problem similar to FDR's: how do you limit the judiciary branch while keeping the branches of government separate? Well, you can't.

Another writes:

I worked as a law clerk for a federal judge for several years, and I saw the wisdom of lifetime tenure play out many times, both with my judge and others. It is indispensable.

The most fervent "liberal" or "conservative" judge sometimes loses his or her nerve when asked to disfigure the Constitution. Not always, to be sure, but plenty often enough to keep us very, very free after two-plus centuries. And although the collective (if it can be called that) mindset of the judiciary changes very slowly, it changes both to the left and the right. No school of thought has a permanent advantage just because the judges have quasi-permanent tenure. Finally, the tenor of federal judicial opinion tends to lag the tenor of political opinion by a decade or so – hence the wave of "liberal" rulings in the fifties and sixties, and the "conservative" outlook that will persist for at least the next ten or so. Ending lifetime tenure would tend to temporally correlate the effects of short-lived ideological trends between the branches – what could be worse for a system designed not to be reduced by occasional quakes, but to withstand them in favor of the persistent small tremor?

For crying out loud; Alexander Hamilton nailed it in Federalist 78 – and he nailed it BEFORE it happened, which I find truly extraordinary.

Greenwald summarizes Gibbs' rant:

(1) The Professional Left are totally irrelevant losers who speak for absolutely nobody, and certainly nobody in Real America who matters; but (2) they're ruining everything for the White House!!!  And:  if you criticize the President, it's only because you're such a rabid extremist that you harbor a secret desire to eliminate the Pentagon — that's how anti-American you are!  You're such a Far Left extremist that Dennis Kucinich isn't far enough Left for you, you subversive, drug-using hippies!  You're so far to the Left that you want to turn the U.S. into Canada.  As David Frum put it today:  "More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base." 

Yglesias somewhat sympathizes with the press secretary:

But you don’t improve your relationship with same-team ideological activists by attacking them in red-baiting terms. What’s more, we’re seeing a serious confusion here on the role of political activists in the system. As I said during the health care debate, it’s not the job of the President of the United States to stand up for a pure ideological vision—his job is to cut compromises to implement policies that improve on the status quo. But by the same token, it’s not the job of activists to be “satisfied” with compromises premised on the current boundaries of political feasibility.

Gibbs backpedals furiously. I suspect Obama's actual view is that pressure from his base – or just from those who voted for him on the basis if some unfulfilled promises – is a good thing. I see no contradiction, for example, in supporting this presidency as the best chance we've got on many fronts while severely criticizing its incoherence and cowardice on civil rights.

Will Wilkinson revisits his pro-immigration case against birthright citizenship. Tim Lee takes him on:

Each year, thousands of Americans are born to undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship guarantees that when they grow up, they’ll enjoy the same freedoms that the children of American citizens do. Ending birthright citizenship means that, instead, they’ll be forced to live underground in the country they call home. This isn’t an “act of symbolic violence against hard-won American ideals of equality.” It’s a sacrifice of the actual freedom and equality of actual human beings who will be born on American soil over the coming decade.

Wilkinson looks to other countries for alternatives to birthright citizenship. Both the conservative John J. Miller and the liberal Yglesias find the birthright debate a distraction to immigration reform. I agree. I'm in my third decade of trying to become a permanent resident. If I'd walked off the plane and got a woman pregnant, I'd be a lot richer (the legal fees over so many years are enormous) and a citizen by now. But I strongly support birthright citizenship and believe the reform we really need is a focus on skills rather than family ties beyond immediate ones. But I have long since understood that there is no way this country's political system can handle this question rationally – or at all. Not so long as one political party is completely batshit with cultural panic and paranoia.

Farhad Manjoo:

Black people —- specifically, young black people —- do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It's this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.

Caveats here.

Leonhardt’s fascinating column is reverberating. My thoughts here. Felix Salmon summarizes:

• In 2008, only 13.2% of the labor force was unemployed at some point. That compares to 18.1% in 1980, and 22% in 1982.
• Real wages, which normally fall during recessions, have risen in this one. Even nominal wages are up.
• The mancession is over: “male employment has risen by almost one million this year, while female employment has fallen by 300,000″.

Salmon still finds cause for concern:

The problem is that persistent unemployment at or around 10% is unacceptable in the U.S., especially with the social safety net being much weaker here than it is in Europe. Leonhardt is right that Euro-style safety nets aren’t particularly innovative, but they do at least keep people housed and clothed and fed and living outside poverty — reasonable expectations for anybody to have, I think, in the richest country in the world.

Tyler Cowen puts his two cents in. Heather Horn throws more voices in the mix.

A case-study in cowardice: Jim Hoft accused the teacher who famously confronted Sarah Palin of being a liar. He headlined that she was no teacher, as claimed. But, as we all know, she is. She teaches theater tech. She was not in a drag queen band, moreover, but did direct a production of Hedwig. How does Hoft respond to the debunking of his non-scoop:

UPDATE: The Palin-haters now claim that “theater tech” is the name of some class they teach in Alaska. Sure it is… Keep spinning libs.

This is the Breitbartian mindset in a nutshell. Truth matters not a jot in a political war. If you err, you keep slurring the other. All that matters is a tribal war.

Nine more here.