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Belfast Council's wrong decision about the Union Jack

Violent protests in Northern Ireland continue for the 40th day following Belfast City Council's unbelievably ill-considered decision to not regularly fly the Union Jack (also known as the Union Flag--contrary to popular belief, both terms are acceptable and interchangeable).

Belfast City Council lacks the authority to make such a decision in the first place, and had they kept that in mind, the violence could have been averted. They rushed to the short-term, impulsive view--however arguably well-intentioned it was--instead of beginning their thinking with fundamental concepts: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a nation-state and, as its name denotes, includes North Ireland and, as the name denotes, is a monarchy--in this case, a British-style one, which means bound by constitutional laws and precedents.

The violent consequences of the decision belie the value that presumably the council placed on their own supposed wisdom. They ought to have appealed to the Crown to not fly the flag daily, and permission would almost certainly have been granted because neither the Crown nor Her Majesty's Government want trouble in Northern Ireland, and both respect the fact that uncompromising decisions inflame public opinion there. At that point, Loyalist violent protest almost certainly would have been completely headed off. Yes, there would have been Loyalist grumbling (and I think rightly so), but Loyalists could hardly vociferously protest a decision approved by the Crown itself.

It's called the rule of law, and it's where diplomacy ought to start, and decisions about state and national symbols in conflict-torn areas are matters of diplomacy. If you don't like the law, seek to change it--at least at first--but don't just pretend rule of law doesn't exist. The Belfast council no more had the right to make this decision than the council of New York City has the right to decide how the flag of the United States of America is or is not flown somewhere in New York City.

The council should publicly acknowledge its mistake, appeal to the Crown, and the Crown should grant the request as made.

John McPhee on Working with William Shawn and Roger Straus

If you can get your hands on a copy of the July 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker or subscribe to the magazine so you can access the articles behind the magazine's website's paywall, read John McPhee's "Editors & Publisher." It's delightful and fascinating. On the magazine's website, Jon Michaud gives a sense of the article: 

John McPhee pays tribute to the New Yorker editors William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb and to the book publisher Roger W. Straus, Jr. In the course of his article, McPhee also discusses the introduction of profanity into the pages of the magazine. This is the latest in a series of articles by McPhee about his career at The New Yorker. Its predecessors have included pieces about fact-checking, the structure of his Profiles, and the perils of trying to predict the future. In 2007’s “My Life List,” an article about the unusual foods he has eaten while on assignment for the magazine, McPhee recalled Mr. Shawn’s “squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food.” He described how this weighed on him when he was writing “Travels in Georgia,” a Profile of the ecologist Carol Ruckdeschel, who collected, and in many cases ate, roadkill:

I was acutely conscious from Day One of the journey and Day One of the writing that my first and perhaps only reader was going to be William Shawn. It shaped the structure, let me tell you. Where to begin? With the weasel we ate the first night out? Are you kidding, I asked myself….

I turned in the manuscript and went for a five-day walk in my own living room. The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Mr. McPhee. How are you?” He spoke in a very light, very low, and rather lilting voice, not a weak voice, but diffident to a spectacular extent for a man we called the iron mouse.

“Fine, thank you, Mr. Shawn. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. Is this a good time to be calling?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, I liked your story … No. I didn’t like your story. I could hardly read it. But that woman is closer to the earth than I am. Her work is significant. I’m pleased to publish it.”

Elsewhere in McPhee's article:

The dissimilarity between Roger [Straus] and Mr. Shawn could not be exaggerated. They were a pea and a prawn in a pod. Shawn grew up in the middle of the merchant class..... [Roger's] mother was a Guggenheim. Shawn was as shy as he was soft-spoken. Roger was a fountain of garrulity. Words came out of him so fast that he tried to economize by saying, at the end of every other sentence, "et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, and so on." If something was marvelous, it was "mawveless." His words wore spats.

via www.newyorker.com

A television commercial for The New Yorker calls it possibly the greatest magazine in the world. I think that might be right.

(Image, L to R: Gottleib, Shawn, Straus.)

The Supreme Court’s Independence

In February, 1803, when the Marshall Court finally met, it did something really interesting. In Marbury v. Madison, a suit against Jefferson’s Secretary of State, James Madison, Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power it had not been explicitly granted in the Constitution: the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional. This was such an astonishing thing to do that the Court didn’t declare another federal law unconstitutional for fifty-four years.

via www.newyorker.com

Jill Lepore's interesting piece in The New Yorker, "Benched," on the SCOTUS, judicial review, and the principle of judicial independence. It touches on the thorny issue of judicial elections, too.

I love the anecdote that the first time the SCOTUS met, upstairs in the Merchants' Exchange building at the corner of Broad and Water Street, in New York City, "only three Justices showed up and so, lacking a quorum, court was adjourned."

Next Week's Supreme Court Arguments on Health Care Law

The Supreme Court is set to hear three days of arguments next week over challenges to the health reform law President Obama signed two years ago. Here's a viewer's guide from The PBS Hews Hour as well at a summary by Jeffery Toobin of The New Yorker.

Watch A Viewer's Guide to Supreme Court Arguments on Health Care on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Toobin:

The legal challenges to ACA, which the Supreme Court will hear next week, center on its key provision, the individual mandate. The mandate essentially requires all adults to obtain health insurance, either through their employers or by buying it themselves. (There will be subsidies for those who cannot afford it.) The idea of a health-insurance mandate first came to wide public notice in 1989, in the form of a proposal from the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s venerable right-wing think tanks.... For decades, no one suggested that an individual mandate was unconstitutional.
.....
The main argument that opponents of the health-care law have come up with is that the mandate regulates economic inactivity—i.e., not buying insurance—and the Commerce Clause allows only the regulation of economic activity. In the first appellate review of the law, last summer, the Sixth Circuit demolished that argument. The court pointed out that there are two unique characteristics of the market for health care: “(1) virtually everyone requires health care services at some unpredictable point; and (2) individuals receive health care services regardless of ability to pay.” Thus, there was no such thing as “inactivity” in the health-care market; everyone participates, even if he or she chooses not to buy insurance. Indeed, the choice to forgo insurance imposes a direct cost on the taxpayers, who wind up footing the bill. Those choices by consumers, especially in the aggregate, represent an economic matter that Congress may decide to regulate.

Alan Flacks' "The Flacks Report"

I've known Alan for nearly a decade now. I don't know him extremely well, but we've occasionally discussed everything from parks issues to Democratic club workings over the years. He is, according to his blog, The Flacks Report,

a consummate Upper West Side gadfly for years and a fixture at meetings of the community board and political clubs, including the Three Parks Independent Democrats, where he is the house nudge. He puts out a regular e-mail newsletter called The Flacks Report: dispatches from the West Side to in-boxes in Albany and Washington bearing information about the latest judicial selection or Democratic club meeting.

"Federal court rules against military gays policy"

From Gene Johnson's AP story:

The military cannot automatically discharge people because they're gay, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in the case of a decorated flight nurse who sued the Air Force over her dismissal.

The three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not strike down the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But they reinstated Maj. Margaret Witt's lawsuit, saying the Air Force must prove that her dismissal furthered the military's goals of troop readiness and unit cohesion.

The real marriage fight in CA is in November in the voting booth. Give to CaliPAC, Equality for All, or both.

You’re heard the  news by now. May 15: California’s Supreme Court upheld the right of marriage for same-sex couples.

Please seriously consider giving a small contribution: http://actblue.com/page/may15

We’ve won the right to marry, now we have to defend it. The Calitics CaliPAC will be there to fight against the marriage initiative and to fight for progressive values. Equality for All is the unofficial “official” campaign against the November anti-marriage constitutional amendment.

Nativists, Iraq dead-enders, commongood destructionists...and the religious right

In a recent dKos diary concerning Maryland Republican politics, the diarist described the Republican base as "shrinking to little more than Iraq War dead-enders, nativists and anti-government zealots frothing at the mouth over taxes."

The diary is excellent in the analysis of a recent Maryland GOP Primary contest, but there's cause to quibble with the definition of the base. There's a key demographic missing. Guess who?

Mike Huckabee has the answer if you don't: America's religious rightwing.

Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority (1978-'89) never had support enough to mount a presidential campaign.

But then Pat Robertson did--and did well in Iowa's caucuses, and his Christian Coalition (1988-'97's zenith) surpassed the Moral Majority in size.

Next came GW Bush's national candidacy and presidency (1999-present). Bush hugely won the stronger-than-ever conservative evangelical Christian voting block by playing directly to its concerns and using "evangelicalese" colloquialisms and allusions.

Now Mike Huckabee. He's a dyed-in-the-wool conservative evangelical (effectively a fundamentalist). He's won numerous GOP state primaries and is a viable running mate option for John McCain.

The trend line of national-level electoral success by the religious right is toward greater, not lesser, success and control. Other trend lines, such as opinion poll results of young Americans on issues ranging from civil unions to environmental concerns, may give some credence an eventual waning of the religious right--but that would take probably at least 20 years, and the outcome is speculative. The real electoral (and judicial appointment) facts, however, (nothing speculative about them) could reasonably been seen to indicate the the Religious Right is alive and well in America and within the Republican Party.

Horrid Specter

From Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: "With one piece of legislation, Sen. Arlen Specter,....the Pennsylvania Republican who masqueraded for months as a tenacious opponent of the White House," offers a bill, the National Security Surveillance Act (S. 2543), that would immeasurably advance the "Bush vision of an imperial presidency."

Richard Nixon infamously told David Frost in a 1977 interview that, by definition, "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal." Specter, in effect, wishes to make the Nixonian theory of presidential infallibility the law of the land....

Specter's proposal is based on the plainly erroneous--and truly radical--premise that Congress has no power to regulate presidential war powers, as spelled out in Article II of the Constitution. That is the John Yoo/David Addington "president as monarch" theory that the Bush administration has been peddling to justify everything from the lawless detention of U.S. citizens to the use of torture as an interrogation tool to the president's deliberate violations of U.S. law governing eavesdropping.

Specter's bill...is framed as a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.
.....
[Specter's] bill makes it optional, rather than mandatory, for the president to subject himself to judicial oversight when eavesdropping on Americans, in effect returning the nation to the pre-FISA era. Essentially, the president would be allowed to eavesdrop at will, precisely the situation that led to the surveillance abuses of the Nixon White House and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Contact your US Senators today! It's easy. Simply go here, and select your state from the drop-down menu. Your two Senatrs' names will appear with their contact links. Write them a note telling them that you oppose the National Security Surveillance Act (S. 2543), that it was put there for a good reason: Watergate proved that Presidents can't be above the law.

Crossing Godwin's divide?

The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the 1st Amendment does not fully apply to America's 21,000,000 federal employees, including public school teachers and professors. Of course, all the ultra-conservatives on the Court were in the majority.

Let's put this in context though, and you tell me if it's irrational to suggest that the U.S. under George W. Bush and Republican leadership hasn't all but set the stage for the republic's collapse:

*The President has broken 750 laws and Congress does nothing about it
*Real wages are plummeting
*Republicans have actually considered suspending elections
*We're losing an insurgent-driven war in Iraq with an army devoid of counter-insurgency training and, therefore, is committing atrocious acts
*The personal-plus-government average US household debt is now more than $557,910
*The media almost monolithically is reactionarily opposed to all centerists and liberals (but did you know it was this bad? One small thing you can do: donate to Media Matters)
*We're involved in a war that is making us more vulnerable to terrorism
*The President, in step with a larger demonization movement, rallies for a Constitutional denial of rights to an entire class of citizens--a first in American history since the time Presidents opposed emancipation and lauded the 3/5's compromise
*Our army is stretched to the breaking point
*Economic "recovery" standards are lower than they were in the 1930's
*Republicans in Congress and The White House routinely attack scientific research, (read The Republican War On Science) thereby affecting everything from the efficacy of sex education to right-to-die cases to global warming

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't even touch on the issues of corruption and cronyism from D.C. to Iraq or the Republican strategies of stealing elections.

Things are bad.

But are then, if you will, "Nazi-bad?"

Online political discussions have for years been more hampered than aided an initially quite tongue-in-cheek thing called "Godwin's Law," which might be summarized as: "The first person to mention the Nazis in a political debate automatically loses the debate."

I like the spirit of the recent online piece, "A Stretch No More: Crossing the Godwin Divide" by "occams hachet," in which occams calls Godwin's bluff. Yes, comparisons particularly of Bush to Hitler or Republicans to the Nazis run the risk of being cheap, easy, and patently unhelpful. But they run that risk--which is not the same as them being by their very nature always invalid.

In "A Stretch No More," occams makes note of what are if not bold parallels, between the state of our frightened republic and Hitler's Germany, than what are at least evocative realities. One I find particularly troubling is the demonizing and crypto-eliminationist rhetoric in America.

Bruce Wilson recent wrote about this in his post, "Enough Hate Speech to Stun an Ox," on Talk To Action.  And David Neiwert is an expert on eliminationist rhetoric, as well as on "pseudo-fascism" in general.

(Photo collage: from martial "BattleCry" youth rallies to baptisms of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the Christian Right is on the march and transforming American society and law.)