Category: Politics

— Eric S. Raymond demonstrates a finely nuanced political sensibility in this post ostensibly listing liberal and conservative values. About 15 of his twenty issues are strawmen, such as the claims that conservatives are creationists and liberals communists.

So here are my Top Ten Reasons for not being a Libertarian:

1. America isn’t France: we don’t do runoffs.
2. You can’t privatize everything: nuclear power, in particular, needs to be run by government or not at all.
3. The Free Market doesn’t give a damn about the environment.
4. The social safety net is a moral imperative, so we have to make it work as well as we can.
5. Most often, the truths of politics lie in the middle and not at the extremes.
6. The only force big enough to control big business is big government.
7. Freedom has to be balanced against justice, or the strong will exploit the weak.
8. Some truths are self-evident: two-parent families are the best means for raising children that will ever be devised.
9. Harry Browne is a libertarian.
10. Libertarians are juvenile.

No strawmen, only the facts. Now a much more interesting list would be the Top Ten Reasons Why I’m not a Moderate, since that’s the dominant political point of view in this country as in all developed nations. Reason number one: Moderates are wishy-washy and have no moral compass.

— “Lying in Ponds is an attempt to quantify and analyze partisanship in the American punditocracy.” I heard this ole boy on NPR talking about his method for rating the partisanship of America’s punditocracy. Given that it rates Krugman as the number one most partisan pundit, it must be accurate. Definitely worth a visit, despite the Monty Python reference in the name.

— The welfare system exploded during the Nixon/Ford Administration, and I’d never understood why, since Nixon’s not exactly the kind of guy anyone would accuse of having an excess of compassion for the needy and downtrodden. There’s an explanation to be had from the book PatrickRuffini.com // Rants reviews today, “Intellectuals and the American Presidency.” Nixon hired Democrat Pat Moynihan to reform the welfare system, according to Nixon’s vision where getting rid of social workers was the main priority. With them out of the picture, the welfare system turned into nothing more than a money transfer system, which lead to massive expansion down the road. It turns out the most important thing the welfare system does is help the poor and downtrodden get their lives together and do the things adults have to do, but this work takes adult supervision.

— NYPOST.COM National News: CONDIT PLOTS REVENGE ON EX-PAL By NILES LATHEM

June 2, 2002 — WASHINGTON – Dumped Democrat Gary Condit is quietly seeking revenge against the former prot?g? who cost him any chance of retaining his congressional seat.
In an astonishing break with political tradition, Condit is now helping the Republican candidate in his California district, The Post has learned.

Somehow I’m not surprised – politicos never forget a slight.

— TAP: Web Feature: Tapped:. by . May 28, 2002. is unkind toward libertarianism:

A NICE QUICK TAKE ON LIBERTARIANISM. From Chris Bertram over at Junius. (Charles Dodgson has some thoughts, too.) Tapped once spent three days at a Cato Institute retreat at the Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. We came away with the view that libertarianism — especially the Ayn Randian kind — is the Scientology of politics: If you accept the premises, it all makes perfect sense. Kind of like Dianetics. Certainly the Cato conferees seemed liked cultists. When Tapped told one of them we sorta believed in gun control, he turned to us, glared menacingly, and said “You’re either ignorant, or evil. And either way, I’m going to take steps to protect myself against you.”

Welcome aboard the Cluetrain, Tapped – you’ve graduated from adolescent to adult politics. Now if we can wean you off liberalism, you’ll be there.

The Bertram v. Lindsay debate is first rate, however.

— In the California Legislature, bill passage from committees and the floor requires a certain fixed number of votes: 41 on the Assembly floor, 21 in the Senate, and a majority of all members of a committee. So the best way to hurt a bill a member doesn’t like without going on record in opposition is to abstain from voting. Like a ‘no’ vote, an abstention doesn’t count toward the total needed for passage. Feminist Democrats opposed to AB 2240, the bill by Rod Wright that relieved men falsely charged with paternity from the obligation to support another man’s child, drew an extremely large number of abstentions in the Assembly, one by the bill’s most vocal critic, lesbian Jackie Goldberg. This article from
The Stockton Record explains:

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, argued against the bill but withheld her vote rather than voting “no.”

She said a man whose only relationship with a child has been as sender of monthly court-ordered checks should be let off the hook if a DNA test shows he is not the biological father. But she doesn’t like the idea that someone learning the truth during a divorce might decide he no longer wants to support a child whom for years he has taken as his own.

“If you say that DNA is the only determinant of fatherhood, you narrow the whole scope of what fatherhood is,” Goldberg said. “You reduce the father to a sperm donor, and if we do that, then why do we need you at all?

“Fatherhood,” she said, “is a relationship.”
And, she said, letting judges sort out those finer points may not solve the problem, since “the bench is still predominately male.”

“I know how these things end,” said Goldberg, who represents urban Los Angeles. “They end with a woman and a child in poverty.”

She said she wasn’t surprised so many Democratic women “stayed off” the bill. And many other women around the Capitol also understood.

The sole determinant of “motherhood” in such cases is biology, of course, which creates problems for lesbians who’ve raised a sperm-donor child together. The mother has custody rights, but the partner doesn’t unless she formally adopts the child. This is a background issue for Goldberg, but not the only reason for her vote.

A list of the 21 abstainers can be found here. Some of the notables include:

Goldberg
Dion Aroner, Goldberg’s college roommate.
Manny Diaz, smeared by an opponent as a deadbeat dad.
Carole Migden, San Francisco lesbian
Tim Leslie, ultra-conservative
Joe Simitian, Santa Clara Assemblyman

San Diego lesbian Christine Kehoe voted for the bill, so it wasn’t so much a question of a lesbian position on paternity driving the opposition as a callous disregard for justice.

— Dan Walters, the dean of Capitol reporters in Sacramento, reports that Assemblyman Wright’s DNA bill has cleared the Assembly (Men gain a rare victory in political gender war as DNA bill passes)

The election of more women to the Legislature — itself largely a product of term limits — and the major influence that women’s rights advocates have achieved within the dominant Democratic Party have tilted the political balance in the war between the sexes toward women in recent years.

A landmark domestic relations policy change occurred when the Legislature imposed tougher standards on child support — so tough, in fact, that it sparked creation of men’s rights groups. They complained that divorced dads, even conscientious ones, are being treated like criminals, subject to having their wages seized arbitrarily and having visitation rights ignored.

In 1996, the men won one, after a fashion, when the Legislature passed and then-Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation declaring alimony to be temporary support aimed at making recipients become self-supporting “within a reasonable period of time.” And it would allow their alimony to be terminated if they failed to move toward self-support. Women’s rights groups didn’t like it, saying it could allow ex-spouses — women overwhelmingly — to be hauled into court and threatened with cutoff of their support payments if they didn’t return to school or get jobs.

The groups that opposed the new alimony law tried to have it repealed, but could not win as long as Wilson remained governor.

“The only collection of women who oppose this bill are second wives,” then-Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl said as she urged a repeal.

In 1999, after Gray Davis succeeded Wilson as governor and Democrats had achieved larger legislative majorities, Kuehl and other women’s rights champions in the Legislature pushed through a repeal, which Davis signed.

Last year, Davis and other Democrats delivered another victory to the distaff side of the gender war when they enacted a Kuehl-carried bill that would void any prenuptial agreements unless the spouses were represented by attorneys or waived that right.

The measure was sparked by a state Supreme Court decision upholding the prenuptial agreement signed by the former wife of baseball star Barry Bonds, even though she was not represented by an attorney.

The men won a rare skirmish in the state Assembly on Tuesday when it voted 51-3 to make it easier for men to challenge child-support orders when DNA tests prove that they are not the biological fathers of the children involved.

The measure is backed by men’s rights groups, and advocates, including its author, Assemblyman Rod Wright, D-Los Angeles, said it was a matter of fundamental fairness, likening it to DNA tests that free wrongly convicted prisoners. But critics said it would plunge more children into poverty, and Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, said it would resurrect the “age-old double standard.”

The Wright bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, and even if it clears that hurdle, an uncertain fate in Davis’ hands. He’s quite aware that he needs female voters to win re-election.

This bill says that men who’ve been falsely claimed to have fathered children that they did not in fact father can be released from their child support obligation after undergoing DNA testing. While this should be completely non-controversial — you can’t be a deadbeat dad if you aren’t a dad — the lawmakers quoted have held it up for three years, and it’s still a long way from becoming a law.

For bonus points, guess what the sexual orientation of lawmakers Sheila Kuehl and Jackie Goldberg is, and why they care about child support; for extra-bonus points, guess which side the National Center for Lesbian Rights took. Go to the bill analysis and scroll to the bottom.

But seriously, folks, how is this a victory for men over women? Since when does the right of children, both male and female, to know who their father is have to take a back seat to the right of their mothers to collect money from some random guy who had nothing to do with their being brought into this world? It’s sad that fundamental justice and equity has to be cast in terms of gender war. That’s Sacramento for you.

Historical footnote: the last time Wright tried to pass this bill, 1999, one of his chief witnesses in support was former Berkeley radical Art Goldberg, Jackie’s brother.

— Clinton pollster Mark Penn says the Dems need to reach out to dads to remain relevant (For Democrats, Key Voters May Be Married to Soccer Moms)

According to Mark Penn, whose polls formed the political road map of the Clinton White House, the Office Park Dads, or “OPDs,” are the husbands of those legendary swing voters of 1996, the Soccer Moms. And there is deep political disagreement in these mythic households of American suburbia. While the Democrats were carefully marketing themselves to the Moms in recent years, they lost the Dads, he said.

It’s a fact that men, especially, white men, were the voting bloc that went most strongly for Bush in 2000, with white women only slightly in favor of the President and ethnics of both sexes lining up for Gore (although ethnic men were less enthusiastic about him than ethnic women.) This was a reversal of the pattern in the Clinton elections were men were more evenly divided and women made the difference. But the question is: “what do the Dems have to do to appeal to dads?”

Ask a fathers’ rights activist and he’ll tell you that half of dads are divorced or separated from their wives, or will be someday. Democrats have pushed divorced dads into the poorhouse or the underground economy with child support obligations that are completely through the roof, and an enforcement system that mocks the civil liberties of all Americans much worse than anything John Ashcroft proposes for the war on terrorism. Democrats are largely responsible for a Congressional Resolution on Fathers’ Day urging dads to pay their child support and shut up about it, so they’ve got a lot to atone for. And wishing for something doesn’t make it so.

Source: Ben Domenich and RoboPundit.

— The Times of India speculates that Abdul Lone was killed by militant Pakistani separatists because he was a force for peaceful resolution of the Kashmir question:

Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s killing has been timed with the Prime Minister’s visit to the state. Lone was seen as one of the Hurriyat leaders closest to the Indian authorities, and was believed to be agreeable to elections in the state. He had been an MLA in the 1970s. The leader was also seen to be close to the US. His dastardly killing today could be a terrorists’ message to the Indian government, and a warning to other moderate leaders in the Hurriyat Conference.

Control of Kashmir has been the major bone of contention between India and Pakistan since partition. Historically, there has been a slight majority of Sufi Muslims in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, so following the logic of partition, the region should have gone to Pakistan, but the King preferred to go with India. Pakistan has never been satisfied with the status quo, and has attempted to sway the balance of loyalties by running the Kashmiri Pundits out of the state. They essentially succeeded in the Kashmir Valley in 1990 through a campaign of terror, and have since focussed on the southern areas of the state.

Jammu and Kashmir is important to India because its a mountainous buffer between their country, China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Bloggers should be interested in any conflict in which Pandits are murdered and victimized en masse, of course. See Kashmir News Network for more information.

— The Kolkata Libertarian believes that all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan is a distinct possibility, for a number of reasons that he mentions. Among these:

India does not possess the surgical-strike capabilities of the U.S., which means that it’s going to be an all-or-nothing set of scenarios when the two sides go to war. If the Indian military had the technological, logistical and operational means with which to wage a low-level offensive battle, they would have had it over with last December. Instead, they have resorted to the only available response – the threat of large-scale war on multiple fronts, followed by the inevitable tit-for-tat nuclear response.

We all like to think, here in the West, that nuclear war is too horrible for anyone but a madman to seriously contemplate. The pressures on Musharraf and the tensions within his country and between Pakistan and its neighbors are such that going completely crazy would be a short trip for the dude. The situation over there is much more serious that most Americans think, and much more serious than the situation in the Middle East. Colin Powell should forget about the Israelis and concentrate on averting tragedy on the Indian Subcontinent right now.

Incidentally, the reason that religious fanaticism is so strong in Pakistan has to do with national identity. This country was thrown together at the time of Indian independence as a payoff to Jinna for his role in the swaraj struggle (correction: to keep him from making trouble in India post-independence.) The name “Pakistan” combines an acronym made up of the three ethnic groups (Pashtun, Afghani, Kashmiri) with the Indo-European word for “land”, “stan.” The only common bond in Pakistan is Islam, which becomes fanatical when called upon to act as a national value system and not just something you do at the Mosque on Friday. It’s an old-timey creed, in other words.