Isebrand.com

Giuliani's record

"It's insulting," says former NYC mayor Ed Koch about Rudy Giuliani's characteristic depiction on the campaign trail of New York City when he became mayor, according to Chris Smith's article, "Rudy Has Seen the Enemy and He Is...Us," in New York Magazine.

Chris Smith asks, "[W]ere we really living in the hellhole of depravity and despair that Giuliani describes without ever realizing it? And was he the man who single-handedly tamed 8 million misbehaving New Yorkers, delivering us from an economic and physical nightmare?"

From Smith's article:

The crack plague burned out just as Giuliani and [his police commissioner Bill] Bratton deployed an additional 8,000 men and women in blue—thanks to President Bill Clinton and David Dinkins, Giuliani’s much-derided predecessor at City Hall. The murder rate had actually begun declining in 1991, under [David Dinkin's] Police Commissioner Lee Brown, and continued to fall under his successor, Ray Kelly; Dinkins, however, wasn’t quick enough or deft enough to claim credit.

And did crime continue to drop under Rudy Giuliani as mayor? Yes, just as it did in most US cities: "murders also dropped 73 percent in San Diego; killings were down 70 percent in Austin, 59 percent in Honolulu, and 56 percent in Boston."

Rudy says on the campaign trail, "I lowered taxes in New York 23 times! Nobody had ever done it more than once."

Well, as Smith points out,

The city payroll ballooned by 25,000 during his tenure. Eight of those 23 tax reductions came from [the state government in] Albany. A ninth, by far the largest, originated in the City Council—and Giuliani fought it, tooth and nail, for nearly two years. The truly rich irony in that episode, the expiration of a 12.5 percent surcharge on personal income, is that it’s the same tax Dinkins, with the help of Council Speaker Peter Vallone, added to hire more cops.

What is more:

When a recession started, Giuliani wasn’t able to adjust. His borrowing and spending helped transform the city’s $3 billion budget surplus into a $4.5 billion deficit—most of which piled up prior to September 11.

Giuliani can seem thin-skinned, too. "On the presidential-campaign trail, Giuliani defines every issue and problem facing the country—not to mention his political competitors—as 'enemies.'" Smith recalls that during Giuliani's mayoralty, "When a newspaper story gave passing mention to David Dinkins’s role in bringing Disney to Times Square, Giuliani raged in a press conference that he deserved the credit."

Regarding Giuliani's character, Smith writes:

New York knows Giuliani is capable of quiet grace—and of cheap cruelty. He shook the city’s political culture out of its lazy, reflexively liberal posture. But Giuliani’s personal character is defined by a parochial, boys-from-the-neighborhood attitude that’s far more old-school bossism than 21st-century globalism.

Chris Smith is correct:

Giuliani arrived at City Hall at a pivotal moment in New York’s history, and his contribution to the city’s revival was enormous..... The downside to Giuliani’s temperament was that when battles didn’t present themselves, he invented them or lost interest.

Smith summarizes:

Giuliani says he wants to do for the country what he did for the city. Yet the tactics he used in New York are either inapplicable or irrelevant. Crime is down nationally, and Bill Clinton reformed federal welfare policy; lowering taxes seems extremely unlikely, especially if a recession sets in. What would certainly be transferred to the White House, though, is Giuliani’s character. He’s selling his strength of will as an indispensable trait in a tough world. But we know from eight years of firsthand experience that Giuliani’s strength would also mean degrading his enemies, a contempt for the press and Congress, a mania for secrecy, and the rewarding of personal loyalty at the expense of competence.

The waning ethos of respect for separation of Church & State

From Frederick Clarkson's post on Talk To Action:

The framers of the Constitution were actutely aware of the history of religious warfare and persecution in Europe, and certainly in the 150 years of the colonies. They sought to innoculate the new nation as best they could against such conflicts. They did it in part by proscribing religious tests for public office, as stated in article 6 of the Constitution. This meant that one's religious views, or lack thereof, or changing one's mind about, would be irrelvant to our status as citizens.  As a culture, we have sought to create an ethos of respect for this underlying principle.

The religious right in all of their neo-theocratic fervor, have sought to undo all this. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney in their pursuit of the support of the religious right are doing great damage to alll that we have done as a nation to make the vision of the framers of the Constitution real in the lives of as many Americans as possible.

JN1034

The blog JN1034 is gutsy indeed. And impressive.

Within the categories and theology of Orthodoxy, JN1034 offers a compelling defense of human rights, and is particularly concerned with stopping the "global persecution against gays in the Orthodox Church," as well as supporting ecological responsibility.

What is particularly striking about this blog, however, is its theological sophistication. It takes as its inspiration the theology of théosis based in some part on St. John's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 34.

The people contributing to JN1034 are theologically informed and--for now at least--determined.

The cross and the lynching tree

If you've not see the Bill Moyers Journal program with theologian James Cone, please view it here. It's a must-see and offers an important and challenging way to view the American experience.

Dr. Cone was a challenging, forceful advocate for what to many Americans will be a new way forward in thinking about race--our republic's self-inflicted wound. After hearing Dr. Cone's sometimes wonderfully almost-inverted or paradoxical perspectives, I came to see even the original Constitutional 3/5's "compromise" differently. It wasn't a compromise between North and South; it was really a compromise between humanism and inhumanity, separate from issues of region or states rights. It was only the humanity of Americans who happened to have dark skin pigmentation that was "compromised." How sick, sad, barbaric, and limiting. (And yes, they were Americans: they--we Americans of a different color--were here and they (we) had to be addressed, even in our founding document! Is that not itself an acknowledgment of something too many white Americans forget: black Americans were here from the start?) So, I think that one way, a probably challenging way, to look at the 3/5's compromise is as a horrific, false beginning, but a beginning nonetheless, and least the one history has stuck us with. The full embrace of the whole personhood of the black American--up from a mere fraction of a person--is what we all must strive for as Americans if we care to see the situation completed and redeemed. That completion will involve many aspects: legal, political, cultural...perhaps even along the way the election in 2008 of a black man for President. But it is a work that needs to be finished soon, for it is so terribly past time for it to be completed.

America must face up that we are one community. We-- you know, if anybody in this society-- if anybody is brother and sister to the other, it's black people and white people because there is a-- there is a tussle there that you cannot get out of. It is a-- it is deeply engrained in our relationship to each other in a way that's not with anybody else--
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246 years of slavery.... We have built this country. White people know that. Then, after slavery, segregation and lynching, we still helped build this country. So, it's a history of violence, a history of black people fighting in every American war-- even the Civil War.

- James Cone

It's with the words of Dr. Cone that I will leave you with for now, as Isebrand.com takes a short break for the Christmas holiday. The next post is expected to be on December 26.

Juan Cole on "the surge" in Iraq

Juan Cole writes in Salon.com that the surge will not save Iraq, only diplomatic work will do that.

What the recent publicity about the "success" of the troop surge has ignored is this: The Bush administration has downplayed the collapsing political situation in Iraq by directing the public's attention to fluctuating numbers of civilians killed. While there have been some relative gains in security recently, even there the picture remains dubious.
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The current "good news" campaign from the Bush administration regarding the troop surge is only the latest in a long history of whitewashing the war since the 2003 invasion.
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The Bush administration has heralded any number of such "milestones" reached, but not whether they led to worthwhile results.
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[T]he relative reduction in violence is artificial and probably cannot endure. Blast walls enclose once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend on.... Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?
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The lack of virtually any good political news from around the country is what drives the war boosters to cite death statistics.
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[A]lthough there has been a relative lull in violence in the U.S.-reinforced Baghdad, the U.S. military acknowledges that the Iraqi capital is still a very dangerous place. One question is whether the violence will explode again when U.S. forces inevitably withdraw. But the far more important question is this: How much longer can Iraq limp along as a failing state before it really begins to collapse?

While it's true that the ultimate solution in Iraq must be diplomatic, not political, surely the relative success of the surge mustn't be ignored. Political solutions among the various factors in Iraq will be less likely, I assume, if the country is in chaos. And it is in chaos, but not as badly as in 2006 and some of 2007. I was extremely disappointed after reading in New York Magazine this observation by Kurt Andersen about anti-war Democrats' failure to note the decrease of violence in Iraq:

among the many dozens of posts on Daily Kos during the past two weeks there was only one citing this major and, for antiwar activists, inconvenient turn of events. No mention of or link to the Times piece, but simply an opportunity to rant once again about Joe Lieberman. Shouldn’t the online headquarters of the Democratic left be chewing over the issue like crazy, if not admitting they may have been mistaken about the surge then at least trying to figure out how to deal with the possible domestic political impact of the new facts on the ground? It seems like willful obliviousness, childish and slightly cowardly—not unlike hard-core Republicans’ four-year-long circle-the-wagons refusal to face the facts about the rest of the misbegotten war.

I've stressed elsewhere that the decrease in violence in Iraq has multiple causes; the surge is but one of several reasons for a lower civilian and military "body count."

It seems to me that the mess in Iraq is one America can't simply walk away from, but the Bush Administration is the ultimate cause of the mess. The invasion of Iraq was peddled to the American people with fear-mongering and falsehoods, it was done almost unilaterally and squandered rising global pro-US sentiment in the wake of 9/11, leaving us without enough allies and allied troops for the job of rebuilding Iraq, and ruining our reputation when we need international cooperation against terrorists. The debacle is bankrupting us, too. What to do? What to do?

Good news out of Iraq/Afgahnistan

"Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion," according to a source in an AP story.

"British forces formally handed over responsibility Sunday for the last region in Iraq under their control," according to the Canadian Press. I believe, perhaps naively, that the British would not be doing this if they didn't honestly think that the region was basically secure.

"[A]ttacks along the Afghan-Pakistan border have dropped more than 40 percent since July and the U.S. and its allies are making progress in the fight against the Taliban," according to Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel in an AP story. That doesn't mean it won't be a long slog and horrifically expensive.

"Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance"

Joe Conason on Salon.com gives a good assessment of the Mitt Romney vs. Mike Huckabee situation. In short: both are religionists effectively supporting religious tests of a sort, but Romney's implying that his Mormonism lets him pass the test; Huckabee's implying that Romney's Mormonism means he fails the test, or at most passes with marks much lower than Huckabee's.

The Rev. Huckabee has proved willing to risk his oversold reputation as the "nice" evangelical with a primary strategy that draws attention to his qualifications as a "Christian leader," in contrast to the suspect Mormonism of Romney.
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In response, Romney delivered an address that simultaneously pleaded for religious tolerance and urged intolerance of what he termed the "religion of secularism."
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Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

(Image: Reuters photos from the Salon.com Conason commentary.)

Rightwing Christians take over college's Student Association

Hat-tip to Pharyngula. Here's the story, on the blog Halfway There, of a group of rightwing Christian students who have swept the Student Association elections at American River College in California.

As reported in the American River College student newspaper, the Current:

It's not completely official yet, but early results indicate nine out of the 10 candidates elected in the recent Student Association election are members of the former Christian Civilization Club.

The near-sweep is historical in that representatives generally are elected as individuals, rather than as a bloc.

Members of the former club, known for hosting a booth in the Library Quad denouncing Islam, organized an electoral campaign promoting club members, candidates who were on the CCC mailing list, or candidates who ascribed [sic] to the principles of the Christian Civilization Club.

Pharyngula and the Halfway There see a connection between this election and the rise of a virulently homophobic Christianist movement in California that appears to be fueled largely by rightwing conservatism within the Slavic community there.

The tale of the election of these students shows the importance of political organizing. As Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates once remarked to me at a conference concerning the religious right, the key to promoting and defending human rights is simple and not secret, and it's the lesson of the civil rights movement: "Organize, organize, organize." The CCC students organized, and benefited. Students who value human rights must now do the same on ARC's campus.

Huckabee's surge: the religious test at work

Mike Huckabee's Christianist ideas are well highlighted by Frederick Clarkson over at Talk To Action. Fred cites The Des Moines Register, The Wall Street Journal, the AP, and other blogs to successfully show that the religious test that the Christian Right has made operative in the Republican Party (though they aim to establish it nationally) is working well against Mitt Romney and working well for Mike Huckabee.

This rejecting of candidates based on their religious beliefs or non-beliefs could become, if more widely implemented beyond Republican constituencies,* effectively a ban of non-evangelicals from public office.

*tense correction made and "beyond Republican constituencies" added on 12/12 for clarity

Strategy of vultures

Devilstower on Daily Kos contrasts Mitt Romney's awkward kowtowing to religion-based Republican leaders with John F. Kennedy's braver stand against those of an earlier time (only just) who would subject politicians and government policies to religious tests. In so doing, Devilstower also calls on Democrats to abandon a "strategy of vultures" relative to progressive goals, such as fighting poverty.

[T]here is a war over the place of religion in American life.... And if you believe in the separation of church and state, you won't be surprised to find that you're losing.
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If you listen to the media, it was forty-seven years ago that John Kennedy gave a speech to reassure majority Protestants about his Catholic faith. That's completely untrue  Kennedy never made such a speech. 

Instead, John Kennedy stepped in front of a suspicious, openly hostile audience of protestant religious leaders and delivered a speech in which he adamantly maintained that faith of any sort should not be in an issue. His speech was not an apology for being Catholic. It was a bold demand to hold fast to an "absolute separation of church and state."
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We've reached the sorry state where the Republican Party officially and vocally support everything that John Kennedy stood up against in his 1960 speech. The Democratic Party has adopted a strategy on this and many other issues, in which they either stand aside or lend half-hearted support to Republicans. They do this in the hopes that when Republicans push too far, Democrats can pick up the pieces without having offended anyone. That's the strategy of hyenas. The strategy of vultures.
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Forgotten in all this are the issues that Kennedy wanted to address in that long ago speech.  The issues that Kennedy called the "real issues" of the campaign. Issues like poverty.

"the hungry children I saw in West Virginia"

Health care.

"the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills"

Inequality and education.

"an America with too many slums, with too few schools"

And the loss of respect the nation was suffering in international affairs.

"the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power"

What the Democrats needs is a strategy of lions, not vultures: the work of the hunting pride on behalf of those who need to be fed. Instead, it has those who bury their heads into long-dead meat. That's not leadership on anyone's behalf. It's simple weakness and opportunism. Alas, for the "Party of the People."