Farewell

So I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, but not about blogging, which is why I'm convinced that this will be my last post here for the foreseeable future. A couple of reasons for this.

First, I intended this as a small vanity project for my year in Chicago. Now that my year in Chicago is coming to a close, it's only fitting that the blog do so as well.

Second, I'm not convinced this is the medium I'm most comfortable writing in. I like writing, it's true, and I like sharing thoughts with others but I'm also turned off the hierarchy and obstrepsousness of the blogging world. I'm not willing to do what it takes to write a blog of which I can be proud, by the standards of the blogosphere.

Third, I'll echo David Greenberg: perhaps I'm just not cut out for blogging. I'll maintain the perspective of reader and not of participant.

Fourth, and this is the most significant reason and will sound weirdest of all, I just can't tell what's real anymore. I'm struggling with establishing what is real. I know this is strange and I can't articulate it as well as I would like but I can't figure out the connection of the political events I might blog about to my life and, conversely, why no one blogs about things that really have some importance, like relationships, jobs, serious ideas, and so forth.

Fifth, there's all kinds of practical reasons. I'm leaving behind regular access to the Internet for the foreseeable future, I've got a job that will leave with me little spare time I want to spend on this, etc., etc.

Farewell.

Martin's speech

I didn't get a chance to see Paul Martin's speech live last night but reading the text is revealing. One passage grabbed my eye:

Let me speak plainly: what happened with the sponsorship file occurred on the watch of a Liberal government. Those who were in power are to be held responsible. And that includes me.

I was the Minister of Finance. Knowing what I've learned this past year, I am sorry that we weren't more vigilant - that I wasn't more vigilant. Public money was misdirected and misused. That's unacceptable. And that is why I apologized to the Canadian people a year ago.

This is amazing! In a day and age when politicians and the rest of society evade responsibility for any and every thing that has gone wrong, here we have an elected head of government, taking responsibility for a tremendously damaging political disaster.

Of course, it can be said that he's doing this as political cover and hoping that by taking responsibility he'll be able to stay in power but the fact that someone said that something so terrible was, in part, his fault, is amazing.

Now if only the American intelligence community and the Republican party were listening and could take this message.

Oil Markets

I'm not any kind of economist or anything but reading about the president's logic behind his renewed push for passage of the energy bill raises some very obvious questions. (I realize that the word logic may be charitable.)

President Bush said yesterday that his national energy policy would not lower gasoline prices anytime soon, but called on Congress to pass it by August to begin weaning the nation from imported oil and transitioning to alternative sources of power and fuel.

First, the only alternative sources of fuel I see in this bill are more non-renewable supplies that at some point are going to be depleted, decreasing supply and raising the price.

But let's talk about the logic of reducing dependence on imported oil. First of all, I see this as shorthand for "Middle East oil" and, in fact, the U.S. gets very little oil from the Middle East. Most comes from Canada, Venezuela, or domestic sources.

But it doesn't matter where the U.S. gets its oil because its a world market. Supply is calculated on a global basis so even if the U.S. increases production, which the president is urging, it won't necessarily do anything to the supply of oil if there's still such huge demand that is overwhelming the supply capacity on a worldwide scale.

The only way that increasing domestic production would help the U.S. is if the government set a price for domestic oil lower than the world market price and given the ideological leanings of the current administration I imagine that this is an unlikely prospect. (Nor, maybe, is it a good prospect: ask the Canadians about their National Energy Program of the 1970s and early 1980s.)

What's causing high oil prices right now is excessive demand on a global level, particularly because of increased Chinese demand. It is my understanding that even if the supply of oil increases, the demand still really will not be met. So increasing domestic supply is not going to do anything to lower prices because oil prices are determined on a worldwide scale.

Karl Rove Indicts the Media

So Karl Rove thinks the media isn't doing its job right. I'd tend to agree in the broadest possible terms. But there's one comment that is worthy of further scrutiny.

Rove argued that the press pays too much attention to polls and "horse-race" politics, and covers governing as if it were a campaign.

Could this not also be because Rove and his client treat governing as if it were a campaign. The "60 Stops in 60 Days" tour is a campaigning approach to governing. The president saw that he was getting nowhere in Congress - where the governing happens - so turned this debate into a campaign directly to the people. The fact that this campaigning is failing shouldn't obscure the fact that it is still a campaign-style approach to the business of governance.

When the president starts having more cabinet meetings and fewer exclusive rallies, I'll be a little more sympathetic to this part of Rove's argument.

Christopher Shays

Christopher Shay's recent comments on Tom Delay and the cold shoulder he is receiving from his fellow partisans is indicative of something very important that we're seeing less and less of in Washington: centrist moderates.

Guys (and gals) like Shays are people who are actually looking to get things done and can wheel and deal in the center where reasonable and rational legislation that actually advances the public good in this country gets made.

And yet it is exactly these moderates who get targeted by the other party looking to pick up seats because their consituents are presumably more likely to support the other party as they are already comfortable with someone so centrist. Shays was targeted in the last election, Lincoln Chafee is being targeted this cycle, and the list goes on.

But it is exactly these people who bring the most good to the Congress. Charles Stenholm was one such moderate and now he got redistricted out of office. And don't you think the Republicans are wishing they hadn't done that? He was a compelling - Democratic - voice for Social Security overhaul and his support could have started a trend toward bipartisan legislation. But the Republicans instead said that they'd rather have a one-seat larger majority than having Stenholm in the House when he could vote against them at times.

Because there are so many safe seats, the radicals and the non-mainstream folk (Nancy Pelosi, Tom Delay) are the ones with the safest seats and the leadership roles while the people who are actually representative of the American people are most likely to lose their seats.

Isn't that backwards?

Memo

A great little piece in the Washington Post, showing how Mel Martinez takes after his president. Not surprising, given that he served in the "take no responsibility" cabinet of the president. In its entirety:

It's hard to find good help these days.

"It is with profound disappointment and regret that I learned today that a senior member of my staff was unilaterally responsible for this document. It was not approved by me or any other member of my staff, nor were we aware of its existence until very recently."

-- Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), April 6, 2005, blaming his staff for a controversial memo about politicizing the Terri Schiavo case.

"It was something that was put out by someone in the office and immediately withdrawn, as we saw what had happened. [It was] absolutely not my words and never would be my words."

-- Martinez, Sept. 28, 2004, blaming his staff for a news release calling federal agents "armed thugs" for seizing Elian Gonzalez.

"Words were used that were not mine, and were not of my choosing. Those words were spoken by others."

-- Martinez, Aug. 27, 2004, blaming his staff for a flier saying his opponent was catering to the "radical homosexual lobby."

Two questions.

First, is anyone responsible for anything anymore? Or, when something goes wrong do we just blame whoever happens to be closet?

Second, was the lawyer who wrote the Schiavo memo fired because he wrote the memo or because the memo was wrong in its analysis?

Third, can someone be "unilaterally" responsible for something? Try "solely."

(OK, that was three sets of questions. I'm not a math major you know.)

Un-Buh-Leave-A-Bull

This defies the imagination. Radical conservatives are having joint bash-the-judiciary sessions.

Now it's one thing to express displeasure with a court's decision. I've disagreed with what courts have written and done in the past. Disagreement is in the nature of politics and a basic part of being human.

But it's an entirely other thing to decide that judges need to be offed, so to speak, to ensure that the political system functions always in your favor. Some of the more outrageous remarks.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."

...

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

...

The Schlafly session's moderator, Richard Lessner of the American Conservative Union, opened the discussion by decrying a "radical secularist relativist judiciary." It turned more harsh from there.

...

"If about 40 of them get impeached, suddenly a lot of these guys would be retiring," he said.

Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary," escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of "five people on the Supreme Court" has a "revolutionary agenda" rooted in foreign law and situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his head with black elastic, decried the "primordial illogic" of the courts.

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."

(Sorry that's so long. But there was so much that was outrageous.)

Leaving aside the "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" clause on which this country declared its independence and the fact that while it's apparently not alright to be a "Marxist" judge, it's alright to quote the most murderous communist in favor of execution and the fact that if the American public is overwhelmingly opposed to you perhaps it means you're wrong and not the American public, let's ponder for a moment what this says about our political system.

I want to take you back to the waning days of the Roman Republic. The last 100 years were marked by on-going civil strife and war, as competing generals and politicians disregarded the rules of the system that had sustained Rome for 400 years and rewrote the rules to benefit their own end, which was, to seize power. The point at which the Republic began its decline was when politicians stopped respecting the framework of government that had for so long structured political competition.

This is exactly what is happening now. Radical conservatives are so intent on getting their way, that they are willing to disregard the entire basis of the political system that has sustained this country for so long. It is said about the Constitution that "it was written by geniuses so that idiots could operate it" (or something like that) but what these radicals want to do is, essentially, re-write the basic nature of our political system to achieve their own ends.

I can handle losing. I understand that it may be the case that a majority of people in the United States don't agree with my leftish views on matters. That's fine. But what I can't handle is having the winners re-structure the system in their favor so as to ensure their dominance. The rules of the game need to stay the same (or, we all need to agree to change certain rules) so we all have a chance of coming out ahead at some point.

But the Republican rule - especially since 2000 - has been marked by a disrespect for the basic tenets of our political structure. Obviously, this list is a long one, but consider the three hour Medicare drug vote, the recount in Florida, the recall of Grey Davis, attempts for the "nuclear" option, the Terri Schiavo bill, and so on. In every case, members of the radical seldom-right tried to twist and distort the system in their favor.

And that is when things begin to fall apart.

UPDATE: Good stuff from old friends at The Debate Link and Kevin Drum on the same topic.