"Instead of being a merit society, we’re an entitlement society, where government’s role is to take from some to give to others. What I know is that if [President Obama and the Democrats] do that, they’ll substitute envy for ambition. And they’ll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God," – Mitt Romney.
Why has it not been more noticed that Romney has been the crudest, nastiest McCarthyite in this race so far? Only Santorum comes close, with his statement of the president involved in “absolutely un-American activities," to this deranged analysis of Obama's handling of the Green Revolution:
We sided with evil because our president believes our enemies are legitimately aggrieved and thus we have no standing to intervene.
We sided with the opposition but because they asked us not to give a propaganda coup to the regime, we did so without grandstanding. But notice that Santorum has all but accused the president of "siding with evil", with the enemies of the United States. This is an accusation of treason. It appears that it will be a central plank in the GOP platform this fall – and Romney has spearheaded the charge.
The in-tray continues to be flooded with criticisms of the Dish defending Ron Paul. First, a general dissent:
Unendorsed? Riiight. You're clearly still pimping Ron Paul on your blog, especially with that ad featuring the African-American guy. And you still have yet to really post anything on Jon Huntsman, the one you supposedly decided to endorse. For someone who was on Sarah Palin's case 24/7 about being Trig's real mom, you've been very dismissive of Paul's newsletter debacle to the point where you're now showing his "alternative" ads for not being a bigot even though he really has avoided and deflected this whole thing when questioned on it in a way that would make Palin proud. As a fan of your blog I'm actually shocked you've let something like this slide this easily.
The Dish has done its best to air the strongest criticisms of the newsletters – see here, here, here and here for just a handful of posts. Find another Paul-friendly blog that has aired them more thoroughly – not just this time but last time as well. As for Huntsman, he is, alas, a one-state candidate who is currently losing to Paul in his targeted state. He has even been unable to capture some of Gingrich's voters, most of whom have gone to Romney. But Huntsman is now targeting Paul, as Zeke Miller notes of the above ad:
Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is emerging as the strongest critic of Rep. Ron Paul in the Republican field, with a hard-hitting new video that collects some of the libertarian candidate's incendiary remarks through the years. Paul is what stands between Huntsman and second place in the New Hampshire primary, and Huntsman is willing to do what it takes to position himself as the only alternative to Mitt Romney in the Granite State.
Another:
Like you and Greenwald, I am saddened that this "associations" game is being played. Yes, Ron Paul needs to have a sitdown about the newsletters in the same way Obama sat down with the Tribune on Rezko. But, while I think Paul is an important voice in the process, I could never actually give him my vote. To me, it is the extremity of his arguments that disqualify him – his ridiculous call for a return to the gold standard, the absolutism of his isolationism, combined with his pride that he has had only one bill with his name on it passed in all his years in Congress. It is important to have a core set of values; it is also important to work with other members and compromise – to have positions on which you will bend and principles on which you will not. But he presents himself as someone for whom his positions and his principles are one and the same (the newsletters notwithstanding). His absolutist stances, and his unwillingness to support any bill that doesn't meet his very narrow purity test, suggest to me that he is not the person who should be holding the veto pen.
Another:
You wrote: "And it has shown that the left is ultimately more concerned with the hunt for damning ideological associations, than with the ideas that Paul has promoted – even when those ideas are closer to some of candidate Obama's than president Obama's."
Where to begin? First of all, Obama did not espouse anything close to Paul's isolationism when he ran for president. He threatened to bomb Pakistan if our allies there proved unwilling or unable to strike al Qaeda. He wrote a long piece outlining his foreign policy, in which he stressed the need to refocus the war on terror on the Af-Pak border region. On domestic policy, again: huh? Obama would have nothing to do with Paul's strange idea of freedom, in which any kind of persecution, discrimination and repression is fine as long as a state government does it, rather than the federal government. Can you imagine Obama arguing that states should be able to outlaw abortion, or that the Civil Rights Act is an unconstitutional violation of freedom of association? This is a dangerous and asinine position. For all of Paul's fetishisation of what he imagines the Constitution to mean, he seems to have missed the 14th amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights to the states. The Supreme Court had ruled, in 1833, that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The 14th amendment applied them – or incorporated them- to the states in what is known as the "incorporation doctrine."
Another defends Paul:
I think you are not seeing these dununciations against Paul for what they are: attacks not from the left-right partisans but from the established business wing of both parties. The truly progressive and intellectually honest leftists I know, including myself, both agree and disagree with Paul about his issues, just like all fair-minded and politically engaged people. I wanted to vote Paul in 2008 but couldn't, and I had hoped that Obama would not continue awful Bush-era policies, but he has of course disappointed true liberals all over the map, and I will hope to vote Paul this fall. I will vote Paul over Obama, Obama over Gingrich or Santorum, and I will not vote if it is Romney/Obama. Those two are cut from the same cloth.
True liberals – those of us that believe in the middle class, not fighting stupid wars – would love to see Paul in the Oval Office, or Kucinich, or that guy in Brittain who is railing against the EU. We see them as being the only sincere politicians – at least I do. I know that they believe everything they are saying.
I abhor voting corporatist Democrats, but the Republican party has been trying to drive this country off of a cliff since the second Clinton term. The GOP and Dems are the right and left wing of the American Business Party, and Paul stands outside of it. If he pulled a miracle and won next November, I would predict that he would be hedged in by Congress even worse than Obama, but I take comfort that these libertarian ideas are growing and spreading.
It is a shame that Paul is so old. This movement – the new one not yet coopted by religionists and business interests, as the Tea Party has – will need a new voice or it will fade away and the oligarchs will have won. I am not an Occupier, but I hear their message. As a nation we cannot endure what the two parties have wrought for much longer.
I thought all the financial experts told us it would be done for by now. But Dave Betz makes one more bold prediction:
The Euro will not survive. It is manifestly untenable. The can cannot be kicked further down the road. The next time it is tried the foot will break before the can goes anywhere. The political shenanigans of European leaders to stave off the implosion are just that: shenanigans. European economies will tank hard this year and there will be considerable social unrest as a result. The best that can be said is that the residuum of wealth, low-cost security, and cheap opiates will probably see us through the worst of it until the Baby Boomers have largely died off. The life prospects of today’s under 10s are probably pretty good, the over 40s will be OK too, but everybody in between is going to get hammered. Domestic security will be preoccupied with preventing these righteously pissed-off people from breaking too much stuff.
The euro zone will not collapse, and the European Union will not fall apart. It’s been a rough stretch, alright, but the EU will always do the minimum to hold itself together. If anything, the current euro crisis will lead to a deepening of integration in Europe, at least among the euro members, as the common currency forces fiscal congruency among the member states. I would bet on the EU to succeed. Europe’s collective unconscious remembers what came for centuries before the EU, and nobody wants to return there.
Kenan Malik sees the Euro making it through the year, but not much longer. I have to say I was a little gobsmacked by the interest now paid by Italy. It's half what it was a couple of months ago. I guess the new round of borrowing in the new year will be the real test.
Look at the numbers from Iowa television. No candidate has relied more on these shady organizations which can hurl negative accusations without any candidate accountability. This will surely be the general election strategy: a stream of McCarthyite attacks on an allegedly treasonous president from sources who can remain completely anonymous.
Bottom line: Ron Paul is not merely a "flawed messenger" for these views. He's an absolutely toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger for these views. This is, granted, not Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time levels of toxic, but still: if you truly support civil liberties at home and non-interventionism abroad, you should run, not walk, as fast as you can to keep your distance from Ron Paul. He's not the first or only person opposed to pre-emptive wars, after all, and his occasional denouncements of interventionism are hardly making this a hot topic of conversation among the masses. In fact, to the extent that his foreign policy views aren't simply being ignored, I'd guess that the only thing he's accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is. Crackpots don't make good messengers.
And yet many, many voters who watch and listen to the man do not see a crackpot. They see the only person in public life prepared to tell the truth: that America cannot afford its current military-industrial complex and entitlement state; and that America's lurch after 9/11 toward authoritarianism and empire has been disastrous for our interests and liberties. Who else, one wonders, would Kevin want people to vote for if they want a real shift away from aggression abroad, an imperial presidency at home and a drug war whose victims count in the millions. Obama? The man whose response to marijuana legalization was to laugh out loud? Who just signed into law the right of a president to seize any citizen at will and detain him or her indefinitely without trial? The president who launched a war in Libya and refused even to ask for Congress's approval after two months? Who else on the right? Dan Drezner has a somewhat different critique:
Ron Paul is great at affecting the marketplace of ideas. He would be worse than Newt Gingrich if he actually became president, however. The great presidents — Washington, Lincoln, FDR — knew when to compromise and when to stand firm, when to lead public opinion and when to follow it. They were, in other words, great politicians. The presidents who simply knew they were right on everything and resisted compromise — Jackson, Wilson, Bush 43 — tended towards the disastrous. Paul would be part of the latter group.
So if Ron Paul wants to influence the debate, that's good. He raises important questions about important issues. He's also wrong about some really important issues and therefore should be kept away from the presidency.
Look what an impact Paul has made on the GOP in the last five years. But, yes, as I wrote in my withdrawn endorsement, he does have all the problems of a total ideologue. He would be a president primarily of vetoes – forcing all sorts of strange alliances in the Congress to overturn them. But I don't see why he, more than, say, Gingrich, should be "kept away" from the presidency. He's one of the least volatile temperaments among these candidates, and has strong competition for nuttiness. He's not the one advocating Congress's right to haul judges before them and abolish whole circuits. He's not for mining on the moon. Or for "doubling Gitmo". Or for criminalizing all abortion in every state. Or for "curing" gays as a business.
Brick university buildings, park, bike lanes, huge crane and parking garage in the distance – I'm pretty sure that's Ann Arbor. I'd pinpoint it better, but the whole city pretty much looks like that, and if I had time to go on such a quest I wouldn't be spending New Year's Eve working on a dissertation.
Another writes:
Ok, my first attempt for 2011! After looking at the pole banners, the colors, and the flat landscape, I immediately thought of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And then on the campus map I discovered Palmer Field. After reading about all the construction that has been going on, I feel fairly confident that I am in the right spot. I also feel fairly confident that is either the Life Sciences building or one nearby located on Washtenaw Avenue. The view is an upper floor looking north toward Couzens Hall and the Cardiovascular Center.
Yes! I entered before the strike of midnight!
Another:
When I first saw this picture I figured that it had to be New Jersey, based on the housing and skyline, and based on the density of the buildings. It reminds me of either Hamilton Park in JC or Weequahic Park in Elizabeth and Newark. I'm probably way off and it's some obscure city in the former Soviet bloc.
Another:
European cars driving on the right, a soccer goal in the park, the trees and architecture all point to continental Europe. I'm sure those yellow and blue bus stop signs will be a better clue to someone else … I'm going to guess that this is Prague and the exact location or something in the view is connected with the late Vaclav Havel.
Another:
Given that Tuesday is the Iowa Caucus, and that this picture is of the flattest land I've ever seen, I'd have to say that this is somewhere in Iowa … not Des Moines (not "big enough"), but Cedar Falls? I'm still a bit too full from my New Year's Eve dinner to spend time searching this one out, but I'd eat my hat if wasn't Iowa.
By the way, I want to thank the staff for a great year of window views. I have seen places that I would never have visited and some that I definitely will NOT be going to.
Another gets the right city:
No Google maps, no image searching – just the way my heart almost skipped a beat when I first saw the photo of my favorite city, Chicago. I'll be disappointed if that's not Chicago because it will mean that I've lost my feel for my former home, but that architecture, those alleys, that park – no, there's no way I'm wrong.
Another nails the right location:
I've been hoping for a Chicago one for a while so I could get it! I've lived here long enough to know the place inside out. This is shot from an upper floor window – I'll guess 9th floor, near the southeast corner of the building that stands nearest the intersection – of the Mount Sinai Hospital at 15th Place and California Avenue. The view is south-southwest along California Avenue, encompassing some homes and the large park, which were the two clues I needed to pinpoint this.
The overall feeling of the photo – a gridded, denser, older, colder city, with development stretching farther than the eye can see and a horizon dotted with tall structures – gave me a strong sense that it would be Chicago. Once I looked in more detail, I noticed the red brick three-flat building to the far left, a housing type and architectural style that is fairly unique to Chicago. At this point, I knew I had to find it.
The mix of housing styles, presence of surface parking and at least one obvious vacant lot, narrowed the scope down to the city's less wealthy south and west sides. Chicago has a number of large parks, linked with boulevards, that ring the central area, an "emerald necklace" that has recently been submitted as a whole for listing in the National Register. The distinctive curved roadway in the park, once a horse carriageway, was a good sign that it would be one of these stately old parks.
I immediately ruled out Jackson and Washington Parks, near the University of Chicago, where I work, as the view wasn't familiar. I then began working my way clockwise along the boulevard system, looking for large surface parking lots near tall buildings adjacent to parks. I thus ruled out Sherman Park, Gage Park, and McKinley Park, before arriving at Douglas Park in the North Lawndale neighborhood, where I found the features I was looking for. I was then able to confirm the precise locale by looking at the bike lane on California Avenue (which I've ridden), the soccer field in the park, and the configuration of windows on a couple of the houses.
North Lawndale is a rough neighborhood with an interesting history. Mount Sinai is a holdover from its days as the principal Jewish neighborhood of Chicago. It essentially became all-black in the 1950s, and then was devastated by riots in the 1960s, from which it has not yet recovered.
Another sent the above photo. Another writes:
The park at the right of the photo is Douglas Park, where I have played far too many soccer matches for my now mid-30s joints to recall.
A shot of the park:
Another writes:
Checked in New Year's Eve day when I remembered that it was also a VFYW Saturday (you are more reliable than the mailman) and was delighted to take one look out the window and know it was the Chicago's West Side. Until a couple months ago I lived about two miles north of this window and spent a number of years walking the wide boulevards along Humboldt Park (Douglas Park's sister due north). I've enjoyed getting, if not winning, windows in Auckland, Jakarta, and Casablanca, but this one put a smile on my face. Thanks, I miss that town.
Another points out, "In Google Maps, the white cars are even in the street view":
Another notes:
One interesting thing I noticed while doing my research is that the person in the light-colored building to the bottom left of the photo must be very paranoid. The building is blurred out in all the Google Street View pictures, so they must have contacted Google and complained.
Another reader:
This one is easy for me: Mount Sinai Hospital. I'll guess 12th floor. To the right is Douglas Park. Also to the right, on the south end of the park, is St. Anthony's Hospital. The fact that Mt. Sinai Hospital (Jewish) and St. Anthony's (Italian) exist within blocks of each other is a vestige of the days when people of different ethnicities wouldn't go to the same hospital. While Mt. Sinai was originally Jewish, it is now a significant provider to the poor and working-class Blacks and Hispanics in the area.
I've worked as a social worker, researcher and lawyer in this part of town for years, and I often drive down California past 15th Street to go to the main Cook County Criminal Courts Building (the largest unified criminal courts system in the world, or at least it used to be). The tall, ugly brutalist court administration building is obscured by smoke, directly to the south.
Another provides more details on the jail system:
Known as "26th and Cal" or "Cook County" to Chicagoans. You definitely don’t want to find yourself there. Fuck that. A DOJ report found that Cook County had systematically violated the constitutional rights of inmates (see here). Specific alleged violations that have resulted in Federal sanctions and/or class action lawsuits include:
– Systematic beatings and rapings by corrections officers – Inmates forced to sleep on cell floors due to overcrowding and mismanagement – Rodent infestation and injury caused to sleeping inmates by rat and mouse bites – Failure to provide adequate medical care, including failure to dispense medications
Cook County has held several infamous criminals including Al Capone, Tony Accardo, Frank Nitti, Larry Hoover, Jeff Fort, Richard Speck, Matthias St. John, and John Wayne Gacy. It was also the setting for the musical Chicago.
On that note:
Another reader:
Needless to say, as a Chicagoan I knew it was Chicago instantly – the grayness of the city streets, matching the dirty sunset. Nelson Algren, the City's poet laureate (in all but name), said it best in his incomparable Chicago: City on the Make: "Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." And if you can look at this photo and still love this place, then I reckon he was right.
On to guessing the correct floor of the hospital:
I have been playing VFYW for a month, have been close every week, but this time I think I have the answer! It looks like this is taken from the top (11th?) floor of the Mt Sinai Hospital in Chicago, looking north from the middle window of the bay protruding from the north facade. I can't find a floor plan of the building but guessed the middle window because the other two, as corner rooms, would seem to have more light. The view looks onto the parking lot with hospital shuttle buses and shows Douglas Park to the right. Key clues for me were the flat terrain, the rowhouses and the architecture of the building in the background on the park.
So very close. Another gets the right floor:
There were lots of hints in this week's photo, but the final giveaway was the sign at the bus stop across the street. That blue-white-blue design is fairly unique to the Chicago CTA, and eliminates cities like Detroit, whose signs are red and black. Chicago has a ton of parks, but a tablet PC and Google Earth make this kind of search fast and easy.
To identify the window, I noted that the it looks directly down the west side of the alley on the far side of the parking lot. Next, I looked over the top of two of utility poles, and noted where they intersect the street. Google maps doesn't have bird's eye views of Chicago, but Microsoft's Bing does. I grabbed an east-facing bird's eye view [seen above], and added the two vectors leading back to the building. Then, using the north facing bird's eye view [seen right], added perspective lines from the west side of the alley to the base of the building, and up the side. That pinpointed the window in the middle of the three possible windows on the south-facing side of the hospital. Returning to the east view, I dropped a vertical line down the side, and since I couldn't see which window that intersected on the south side of the building, I dropped an identical line down the west side (those two lines of length L). That showed it's the second window from the top – the 10th floor, if the floors correspond to windows – circled in yellow on the north-facing view.
The 10th floor is home to the Mother Baby unit, making me wonder if the photographer was perhaps a new father?
Three readers correctly answered the 10th floor of Mt. Sinai, but the above reader has already won the contest, and the following reader is the only one to have gotten a difficult window in the past without winning, so he is the winner this week:
The shot reminded me strongly of New Haven, but the Green didn't match up (no soccer fields for a start). So I spent a long time Google-mapping up and down the Northeastern seaboard. I quite liked Baltimore's Patterson Park for it, but the buildings were all wrong. Sigh.
I was ready to give up. But then I thought hey, why not check out all the rectangular city parks in the Midwest? That would be a good use of a Saturday afternoon.
Ohio's cities turned out to be a bust. Nothing looked right until I found some very promising bike lanes beside Washington Park in Chicago. The Park was wrong, but I felt sure I had the city. Finally, I reached my destination: the south east corner of Douglas Park.
Four freaking hours! That's how much of my Saturday this one cost me. Was it worth it? Of course not. For the love of God, stop this game. (Perhaps you think it's not your fault I wasted my Saturday and that I should take responsibility for my own actions. Well that's not how we apply blame here in America. See the Drug War, etc.)
And oh yeah, the shot seems to have been taken from an upper floor of Mount Sinai Hospital. I'm gonna guess the 10th floor. Hope whoever took it is doing OK.
From the photo's submitter:
I work as a radiologist at the hospital and was visiting the IT department on the 10th floor when I saw this shot. I thought it would make a good contest entry. It is looking south. Clues are the "el" station, the bus stop sign and Cook County jail behind the smoke. Mt. Sinai is a public aid hospital in a decidedly downscale section of the city, so I imagine, given the demographics of your audience, that relatively few readers have firsthand experience with the area.
Mt. Sinai was founded in 1919 as a 60-bed hospital to serve needy Eastern European immigrants and to train Jewish physicians who were denied educational opportunities elsewhere. It is now a 320-bed hospital and is the second largest public aid hospital in Illinois. It serves the Lawndale community on the West Side. In the '60s and '70s Lawndale, with many other neighborhoods in Chicago, was the victim of "white flight" when the predominantly white working-class and Jewish population moved to the suburbs. Many hospitals closed or moved. Sinai changed focus and stayed. The neighborhood is changing again, with a large influx of mostly Mexican immigrants beginning in the '80s and '90s.
One more reader:
This picture was taken from Sinai Children's Hospital, 1500 S. California Ave, Chicago IL. Now you want to know the exact window, right? It's on the south face of the wing that juts out to the south. Based on how the view seems to line up with the cars in the parking lot, I'll say it's one of the westernmost windows of the three on each floor. Which floor? Clearly higher than the three- or four-story houses just south of the parking lot. I'll say the 9th floor, because the horizon is just above the 8th floor of the red building to the southwest (the one with the white sign that says "Loft Space for Lease" – yeah, my eyes are that good, with a little boost from Google maps; it's on W. 21st Street just west of S. Marshall). Plus, the lower floors have air conditioners, and this one appears not to.
This is the first time I (or really, we; my husband and I did this together) have entered the contest, so we won't win based on previous solutions. We're shamelessly angling for the sympathy vote. Last summer you published another view from a Chicago hospital window, the one with the reflection of the medivac helicopter taking off:
My husband submitted that. I regret to report that last month, just six weeks after completing a very aggressive chemo regimen, new tumor was discovered.
There may not be much meaning to the latest twist in the Iowa race than Dana Milbank's judgment:
The "Santorum surge" in recent days has little to do with the candidate himself and everything to do with the fact that he is the last man standing after voters discarded all the rest.
But if you cannot see the irony of a movement allegedly based on individual liberty coming to rest on Santorum's head, you need to read another blog. Of course, we have long known that the Tea Party is essentially a branch of the Republican Christianist right – and they have come back to Santorum because, as Dana notes, they have nowhere left to turn. They could either fracture and let in Paul or Romney. Or they could back Bachmann (d'oh!), Perry (oops!), Gingrich (thrice married) or Cain (now gone). And whatever else you can say about Santorum, he is by far the most hostile to individual freedom of all kinds in the Republican race. Exhibit One, courtesy of David Boaz:
This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
I actually read It Takes A Family, which might more accurately be titled It Takes A Franco – and not James. Jon Rauch noted:
A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.
Santorum would use the constitution to over-rule state decisions on marriage and abortion; he would launch a new war with Iran; and he would initiate a full-fledged industrial policy. He is the candidate of holy war at home and abroad. And you thought social issues had lost their grip on the Republican base.
I have the answer! It looks like this is taken from the top (11th?) floor of the Mt Sinai Hospital in Chicago, looking north from the middle window of the bay protruding from the north facade. I can't find a floor plan of the building but guessed the middle window because the other two, as corner rooms, would seem to have more light. The view looks onto the parking lot with hospital shuttle buses and shows Douglas Park to the right. Key clues for me were the flat terrain, the rowhouses and the architecture of the building in the background on the park.
The Dish 