Shrinking Commons

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, writes, “Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. . . .While independent India had been founded by high-born well-educated men, by the 21^st century few such types stood for elections or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, the poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had" (pp 216-7). But in Boo’s portrait of the lives of the poor, living in a fetid slum by Mumbai’s gleaming airport, the vote brings no secure power. It brings promises and celebrations at election time; it offers the possibility of individual access to the system through the corrupt political machines that exchange petty patronage for loyalty and eschew any change that might undermine their inconsequential power. The real power lies with the police, courts and government bureaucracy that set the poor against each other and supply “justice” for bribes.

The privatization of public space extends across the economic spectrum in India, just as it does in the rest of a world increasingly characterized by gated communities, private security guards, the dismantling of public education, the shredding of the social safety net, and proxy armies fighting off-budget wars.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is not to privatize it, as Garrett Hardin suggested in his 1968 essay. It is to reclaim it for the common good.

Stumble of the Week

3^rd Runner-up Amanda Clayton, whose food stamps were cut off by Michigan’s Department of Human Services after it was revealed that she had won $1 million on the “Make Me Rich" lottery game show. Clayton, who is unemployed, had continued to collect the public payments because, among other things, “I have two houses.” 2^nd Runner-up The graceful concession speech took a hit this week when idiosyncratic Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich said, after losing the primary for a redistricted Ohio seat to fellow Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur: “I would like to be able to congratulate Congresswoman Kaptur, but I do have to say that she ran a campaign in the Cleveland media market that was utterly lacking in integrity.”

1^st Runner-up Iraq seems to have stumbled off the list of countries that John McCain wants to bomb. It is not clear how long it can remain out of his sights, since it is firmly nestled between prime targets Syria and Iran. Other reported countries on his long list include Venezuela, Sweden and northern California.

This Week’s Winner Japan’s nuclear program has virtually shut down, with the last of its 54 reactors scheduled to go off-line next month. The country has responded to the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster with a combination of stringent conservation policies and increased dependence on imported fossil fuels – and the Japanese people have also, in the words of poet Madoka Mayazumi, begun to ask “some basic questions [about] the constant pursuit of more. . . . An aesthetic of reduction can be one way to reframe our lifestyle.”

Growth?

Third in a (sort of) series     In a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, it seems unconscionable to talk about policies that slow economic growth. In a world in which we use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide our resources and absorb our waste, it seems unconscionable not to.

This, I think, is the great – and often unspoken – divide in progressive politics today. The United States has long equated the nation’s well-being with its median standard of living, and we use economic growth to measure human progress. For the last 70 or 80 years, the Gross Domestic Product has been the measuring stick of America’s prosperity . . . and even of its people’s personal happiness.

That whole notion is under attack – from Joseph Stiglitz’s Mismeasuring Our Lives to Woody Tasch’s Slow Money to Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. And yet, when a hard choice must be made, we continue to treat environmental issues as a luxury to be addressed after we have solved the more immediate economic problems.

Everyone’s mantra in this election is “jobs.” And while Republicans attack environmentalists as job killers, Democrats bring them to the table to discuss “green jobs” and to figure out how to build future growth on alternative energy and better management of ecosystem services.

That’s all fine. But the deeper question is whether the model of economic growth, in whatever form, is viable any more. That question – as we are already beginning to see in issues such as the Keystone pipeline and “fracking” – threatens to divide the current Democratic coalition.

A Goldwater Liberal

At a talk she gave last week, Gloria Steinem referred to Barry Goldwater as a moderate Republican. I almost fell out of my chair.

But consider this. Goldwater:

• Accused Pat Robertson of trying to turn the Republican Party into a religious organization (“If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye”).
• Supported gays in the military ("You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight").
• Endorsed medical marijuana, defended Roe v. Wade, and believed in the separation of church and state.
• Delivered the word to Richard Nixon that he must resign.
• And lamented that a “bunch of kooks” had taken over the GOP, telling Bob Dole in 1996, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"

Before we get too carried away, Goldwater also opposed the Civil Right Act (as, by the way, did Al Gore Sr.), was one of eight senators to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment,declined to censure Joe McCarthy, discussed nuclear defoliation of Vietcong supply routes, and suggested the United Nations move to Moscow or Beijing.

Still, while we think of America as a more conservative society in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today, in some ways its politics were not. When he ran for president in 1964, Goldwater’s views on religion, gay rights and abortion were simply not issues, and the Republican party paid little attention to the cultural conservatives in its ranks. Now they have taken over the party, and they are gunning not just for Barack Obama but for Mitt Romney . . . who is standing there in his new blue jeans desperately hoping to get picked by their team.

Stay tuned. I’m trying to figure this out myself.

The Wars Within

It has become an axiom in today’s politics that Washington is increasingly, intolerably and perhaps permanently polarized, that the two major parties are moving toward their ideological extremes, and that the result is legislative paralysis and really ugly politics. There is a lot of truth in that sentence.

But it misses a critical internal debate in which dissenting groups in each party are challenging that party’s economic orthodoxy. I’ll outline those changes in this post, and look more closely at each in the days ahead. I welcome your thoughts.

On the Republican side, the tendency to lump together Tea Partiers and cultural conservatives – while dismissing Ron Paul as a libertarian outlier – has shed insufficient light on what is driving bitter rivals to pummel Mitt Romney as much for his persona as his politics. One clue lies in the success of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which attracted to the GOP millions of disaffected Democrats, They were not simply nostalgic for the Jim Crow south or fed up with the 1960s. They were also heirs to an agrarian, and often angry, economic populism, which meshed with similar beliefs held by generations of western and midwestern Republicans. One result was to vastly expand the wing of the party that detested “Wall Street” and its bankers, financiers and internationalist worldview.

Meanwhile, the reigning Democratic ideology equates social justice with economic growth, a position that resonates with the party’s dominant interests – labor unions, entitlement recipients and minorities seeking opportunity. Environmentalists, however, are increasingly raising fundamental questions about both the possibility and the desirability of unlimited growth.

Stumble of the Week

Civility took another step backward with Olympia Snowe’s announcement that she will not seek re-election to her Maine senate seat. Snowe, one of the few remaining moderates in the GOP, cited the atmosphere in Washington as a reason for her retirement: “I do find it frustrating that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.” Shortly after her announcement, she became the only Republican to vote against the Blunt Amendment. Ordinary People. While the Blunt Amendment failed by three votes, the arguments of its supporters that the issue was First Amendment rights for employers and institutions it ignores the needs and desires of the people who actually have the insurance policy or need the services. But don’t forget, corporations are people, too. Mitt Romney’s flip flop on the issue is only news because he took little more than an hour to do so.

Gut Instincts. In 2001 George W. Bush looked Vladimir in the eye and said, "I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Masha Gessen’s new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, “is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and . . . made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.”

Inhumanity. Asked about the boy who had killed her son Demetrius Hewlin at Chardon High School, Phyllis Ferguson showed the nature of true humanity: “You have to forgive because if you don’t forgive you hold that in your heart. It’s still in your memory of your child. You got that hatred in your heart.”

“On March the 8th, which will be Demetrius’ birthday next Thursday, I appreciate if everybody will light a candle for him. He would be 17 years old.”

Blunt Instrument

Several organizations are reported to be moving quickly to take advantage of the Blunt Amendment, which is not to be confused with Virginia’s blunt instrument (Feb 27^th post). Its aim is to amend current health care law to enable those with “religious or moral objections to specific items or services to decline providing them.” In a way that makes sense only in Washington, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has attached his legislation to Senate Bill 1813, whose purpose is to reauthorize Federal aid to highway construction programs.

The amendment, which has attracted 23 co-signers, could redefine health-care delivery:

• The First Church of Christ, Scientist could open a chain of hospitals across the country that, to comply with its religious beliefs, will offer no medical services whatsoever. They will, however, accept Medicare and Medicaid.
• To expedite its program of posthumous baptisms (Feb. 24^th post), the Mormon Church could install baptismal pools adjacent to wards for the terminally ill.
• While the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will provide no contraceptives in its pedophilia treatment centers, it could install large shredders to ensure confidentiality (http://articles.philly.com/2012-02-25/news/31098596_1_church-lawyers-abuse-complaints-priests).
• The Shriners, however, would seem to have an issue. Although the organization has operated outstanding children’s hospitals for decades, some believe that any group whose members wear a red fez and worship in a temple must be Muslims – the one religion to which the Blunt Amendment probably does not extend. I mean, look at the logo.

And the organization’s name change from the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine to Shriners International will probably not fool the senators – who know that international is just another word for un-American.

Food for Sport

This just in. MSG apologizes for name, considers change. In the wake of publicity surrounding recent gaffes over Jeremy Lin, the scrawny looking, Chinese-American, Harvard graduate who has become one of the greatest sensations in the history of the National Basketball Association, the board of MSG Sports, owners of the New York Knicks and Rangers, has called an emergency board meeting to address the company’s name.

Lin, who plays point guard for the Knicks, has unleashed an outburst of “Linsanity” across the land and a corresponding outbreak of apologies for insensitive names and boorish behaviors. Most recently, Ben & Jerry’s Boston Scoop Shops apologized for its "Taste the Lin-Sanity" flavored ice cream, whose recipe included pieces of fortune cookies (http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-jeremy-lin-yogurt-20120227,0,1130363.story). Earlier Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports had apologized for a stunningly offensive tweet, which for some reason did not get him fired, and ESPN has suspended one employee and fired another for verbal incidents.

The latest fireworks, according to an unidentified source, arose when the parent company appeared to be caught off guard when a reporter asked about its name. An anonymous spokes “person” later issued a statement: “We should have been more aware,” it said. “We were a big corporation before we realized we were an ingredient in Chinese food. We apologize for our insensitivity.”

In related news:

Several delicatessens in Brooklyn have stopped offering the “Reuben;” McDonald’s will no longer refer to the things on which it serves its “meat” as “buns;” and the Episcopal church has disassociated itself from white bread.

The Pappy State

This is not about abortion. It’s about arrogance, paternalism and the abuse of power. But let’s begin with abortion – which I am hesitant to do because it is, in almost every instance I can imagine, none of my business. And it is certainly not the business of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress or presidential candidates. But Friday’s post on Virginia Senate Bill 484, requiring “transvaginal ultrasounds” for pregnant women, elicited some strong responses, one of which included a news story about Pennsylvania’s House Bill 1077. Incongruously known as “the Women’s Right to Know Act,” HB 1077 mandates ultrasounds for pregnant women contemplating abortion. The bill’s name plays off the real right-to-know law, whose purpose is to assure transparency in state government. Until a concerted effort, led by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, pushed through an improved law in 2008, Pennsylvania had the worst right-to-know law in the United States. (Full disclosure: the PNA hired me to write a blog in support of that campaign.)

A disturbing pattern emerges in the Virginia and Pennsylvania bills:

• Both were introduced by women who seemed sort of clueless – Pa. Rep. Kathy Rapp said she had “never heard of” a transvaginal ultrasound, while Va. Sen. Jill Vogel said she would withdraw her bill . . . after it had already passed.
• Then the paternalists took over – “It's really just to help women make a good and informed decision.” Anything I can do that would help better educate a woman.” Blah, blah, blah.
• The bills humiliate women – the Pennsylvania bill, for example, stipulates where the screen must be placed in front of the woman and even the typeface of the statement she must sign (bold).

Both bills are off the table at the moment . . . but remember that the Virginia bill did pass the Senate, while the Pennsylvania bill had 112 co-sponsors in a legislature that currently has 197 members.

For more:

http://www.publicopiniononline.com/ci_20033700?source=most_viewed

http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billinfo/billinfo.cfm?syear=2011&sind=0&body=H&type=B&BN=1077

http://www2.wsls.com/news/2012/feb/01/va-senate-approves-abortion-ultrasound-requirement-ar-1656051

Stumble of the Week

Runner-up The Virginia Senate. A lot of people these days talk about getting the government off our backs, which raises the question of where they would like us to put it. The majority of the Virginia Senate gave their answer earlier this month in Senate Bill 484 (http://www2.wsls.com/news/2012/feb/01/va-senate-approves-abortion-ultrasound-requirement-ar-1656051), which requires pregnant women even considering an abortion to have a “vaginal ultrasound,” a procedure that is as invasive as it sounds, particularly when mandated by the state. (Has it been that long since groups like those who backed this bill denounced ultrasounds for healthy women as a form of social engineering?) Gov. Bob McDonnell, who had sponsored a similar bill when he was a legislator and was initially a strong supporter of the Senate bill – but who also has national ambitions – made a U-turn, saying that “mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state.” The House of Delegates, which had been poised to approve the Senate bill, instead passed a bill removing the mandatory provision. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/us/governor-of-virginia-calls-for-changes-in-abortion-bill.html?ref=us) This Week’s Winner: The Mormon Church, which apologized profusely for having baptized – posthumously and without the family’s knowledge – the parents of . . . I kid you not . . . Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor, who died in 2005. Simon’s father, Asher Wiesenthal, was killed in action on the Eastern Front in 1917; his mother, Rosa, died at the Belzec concentration camp in Poland in 1942. A spokesman for the Mormon church called the baptisms “a serious breach of protocol.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17036046)

Courage

In little more than a week, three journalists have died in Syria, and a fourth lies in a makeshift hospital in the city of Homs, teetering between life and death. I want to pay homage to them simply by noting the courage it takes to do the work that they have done – and the importance of that work to all of us. They carry, not guns, but only pens, pads and cameras to record the stories of war’s victims. Not long ago, my friend Bob Caputo, who spent years as a photojournalist covering wars across the African continent, described trying to get into Mogadishu in the early 1990s to cover the Civil War in Somalia. His only way in was to hitch a ride on a plane from Nairobi that was carrying relief supplies to the war’s thousands of victims. Bob is a big man. With his equipment he probably weighed 250 pounds, which meant, he said, that if he were to get on the plane, 250 pounds of supplies would have to come off. And that raised the question: is what I am doing valuable enough to displace what that food and medicine could do? It was a moral gut check, and he concluded that the story of what was happening in Somalia had to be told to the world. When Bob finished talking, his cheeks were wet with his tears.

Anthony Shadid died last week, apparently of an asthma attack suffered while he was reporting from somewhere inside Syria. Two days ago, Marie Colvin, the one-eyed American war correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a young French photographer, were killed by rocket fire. French journalist Edith Bouvier may not make it out.

For more on Shadid, Colvin, Ochlik and Bouvier:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-the-middle-east-dies-at-43.html?ref=obituaries

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/middleeast/marie-colvin-and-remi-ochlik-journalists-killed-in-syria.html?hp

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/american-reporter-marie-colvins-final-dispatches-from-homs/?ref=world

What is happening to us?

Sometimes, if I take the news seriously, I wonder if we will bomb ourselves back to the 12^th century or just elect a president from the 12^th century. I take the news seriously

I have no particular light to shed on the escalating saber rattling by all sides over Iran, except to think that a proxy attack by Israel does not seem like the lesson we should have taken from Iraq and Afghanistan – and that a political campaign already filled with vitriol is not a good venue for conducting foreign policy.

The Crusades mentality has penetrated to the core of the presidential debate, as religion has become its latest – and perhaps most dangerous – flashpoint.  In the last few days, Newt Gingrich has blasted the Obama administration’s “war against religion;” Rick Santorum has railed against Obama’s “phony theology” (although he said he was talking about the president’s environmental policies, not his personal faith); and Mitt Romney has accused the president’s team of having “fought against religion.”

Some of you wrote to compare Martin Luther King’s praise of extremism in the last post with the extremism we are witnessing today. It is worth noting that King went on to write: “Will we be extremists for hate or for love . . . for the preservation of injustice or the extension of justice?” And then he invoked the same god that has been turned into a political battering ram: “Jesus Christ,” he wrote, “was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness.”

“My feets is tired . . .

. . . but my soul is rested.' So said Mother Pollard, a 72-year-old elder in Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, after several weeks of participating in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. King quotes her in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I reread in honor of Black History month. Written in 1963, the letter is addressed to white clergymen who were supporters of civil rights but put off by King’s tactics of non-violent direct action, civil disobedience and willingness to break what he believed “unjust laws” – for which he was fully prepared to go to jail.

It is interesting to read the letter now, in light of current upheavals around the world, particularly the uprisings in the Middle East almost all of which began as peaceful protests and ended with horrendous violence precipitated by the state. Many of us have forgotten the repressive violence from threatened governments that confronted our own civil rights movement two generations ago. The demands for freedom and justice seem little different in Libya than they were in Little Rock; and the worries about whether long-repressed Arab peoples are ready for self-government seem a lot like those voiced by the well-meaning white moderates who prefer, wrote King, “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

And in a time when the word extremist is hurled about willy-nilly, it is worth remembering King’s response: “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

Stumble of the Week

3^rd Runner-up: Rick Santorum’s tax returns, whose release has again been delayed so Santorum can consult with his accountant, even though he says he files his own returns. I have never understood the issue with tax returns. Didn’t he file them? If so, what does he need to go over with his accountant? Is he allowed to change them? Why not just release the ones he filed? (Meanwhile, his primary financial backer, Foster Friess, defended Santorum's somewhat peculiar position on contraception, telling Andrea Mitchell, “Back in my day they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly.") 2^nd Runner-up: “Fast Eddie,” aka Michael Maher, who was arrested in Ozark, Missouri, after being outed by his daughter-in-law as the legendary armed-car robber who disappeared from England with a million pounds in 1993.

1^st Runner-up: Lee King, “Fast Eddie’s” son, whose wife of two months blew the whistle on the old man, but who then got outed on his own. Even though he is only 22, three former girl friends have appeared. They claim three children by him, plus one more on the way. Oh, and his wife is pregnant. Maybe Foster Friess is onto something.

This Week’s Winner: Saeid Moradi, the Iranian bomber, who mistakenly blew off the roof of his safe house in Bangkok. Badly wounded and bleeding profusely, he tried to hail a taxi, but the driver refused to pick him up. When police arrived, he threw a grenade at them, but it bounced back off a tree and blew his legs off. Which would all be amusing if this were a Keystone Kops movie instead of a deadly assassination tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran.

Both/And

My daughter has both a small child and a demanding career. That is to say, she has two full-time jobs. It isn’t easy juggling her schedule, but she wants to do it, she needs to do it, and she does it well. She lives in a world made possible by the feminist movement, but I don’t think of her as a feminist so much as a mother and a nurse practitioner who struggles every day to balance two roles that define her life. And I am awfully proud of her. So I have followed with interest the flap over the part in Rick Santorum’s 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that says: “Many women . . . find it easier, more ‘professionally’ gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children.” The passage goes on to blame “radical feminists” for refusing to acknowledge the equality of work done in the home, and ends up calling for “both fair workplace rules and proper respect for work in the home.”

I think Santorum and his critics have both missed the essential point – for many women the issue is not “either-or”, it is “both-and.” They want – and more often they need – a family and a job, just as men do. And we need what they have to offer on both fronts. So yes, it takes a family. But it also takes a village.

Millennial Righteousness

RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives declare 2012 as the "Year of the Bible" in Pennsylvania in recognition of both the formative influence of the Bible on our Commonwealth and nation and our national need to study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures. Adopted by the Pennsylvania House, January 24th by a vote of 193-0. 2012

• Rep. and former Speaker DeWeese (D) is convicted of conspiracy, conflict of interest and theft.
• Former Rep. Freese (R) gets 4 to 12 years for corruption.

2011

• Former Speaker Perzel (R) pleads guilty to conflict of interest, theft and conspiracy.

2010

• Rep. Veon (D) is convicted of illegal fundraising.

2009   

• Sen. Fumo (D) is convicted on 137 counts of corruption.

2007

• Rep. Habay (R) is convicted of harassment, perjury solicitation and intimidation.

2005

• Legislators vote themselves a pay raise at 2 a.m. without public knowledge – and with an authorization to receive the money as "unvouchered expenses,” thereby evading the Constitutional prohibition against taking salary increases in the term they are passed. Gov. Rendell (D) signs the bill. Public outrage forces repeal of the raise – and 17 legislators and a Supreme Court justice are tossed out in the next election.

2000

• Sen. Loeper (R) pleads guilty to hiding $330,000 in income from consulting firm.
• Rep. Gigliotti (D) is convicted of extortion, mail fraud and tax evasion.
• Sen. Slocum (R) pleads guilty to discharging 3.5 million gallons of raw sewage into Brokenstraw Creek as plant manager in Youngsville.
• Rep. Druce (R) is convicted of hit-and-run death.
• Rep. Bebko-Jones (D) pleads guilty to forging nominating petition signatures.
• Rep. LaGrotta (D) pleads guilty to ghost employment of family members.

Stumble of (last) Week

For some reason, this did not go out on Friday. This Week’s Winner: The Press. In response to Wednesday’s post on “the luxury of candidates” to define the world so they can stay always on message, an old friend wrote: “I couldn't agree more. It's also the responsibility of journalists to ask the right questions.” The writer is a former journalist, who watched with resigned sadness the evisceration of the daily newspaper his grandfather had founded and his family had run for more than a century. A public conglomerate with no particular interest in the public trust role of journalism had bought the paper, slashed the editorial budget and ultimately killed the paper. That happened – and continues to happen – all across America, as corporate owners in search of a quick buck cut the heart out of newspapers.

The result is fewer reporters who even know how to ask the right questions, and few publishers who care. And because theirs is a profession that requires skill, courage and the time to dig deep, investigative reporters are an endangered species.

It is a profession that we desperately need – and it is one dangerous job. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 898 journalists have been killed since 1992 – 634 of those have been murdered. In many parts of the world, if you ask the right questions you end up dead or behind bars. The trivialization of the profession from both within and without insults those who still try to ask those questions, encourages those who would silence them, and deprives all of us of a vital window to the truth.

Tea Party

• Last week, at a program I moderated on environmental justice, I had my first direct encounter with a follower of the Tea Party movement. While it’s unfair to generalize from a sample of one, this guy lived up to the stereotype – intransigent, belligerent, misinformed (no, Henry Waxman is not a senator from Wisconsin), and completely uninterested in dialogue. He was also oddly likable.

• I also read an article about Tea Party activists showing up at local planning meetings across the country to protest environmental – and even cost-saving – proposals, ranging from bike lanes to high-speed rail lines, from smart meters on home appliances to smart growth to limit sprawl. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/activists-fight-green-projects-seeing-un-plot.html?scp=1&sq=Activists%20Fight%20Green%20Projects,%20Seeing%20U.N.%20Plot&st=cse

• On Saturday a note from an old friend raised concerns about a movement that seemed increasingly able to impose its views on local governments. “I think this is as battle worth fighting,” he wrote, and suggested a counter-offensive as a focus of this blog.

The public object of the protesters’ anger is something called Agenda 21, a non-binding resolution from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio that called on all nations to practice sustainable development and conserve natural resources. The apparently Orwellian name, the UN imprimatur and the link to the “global warming hoax” have made Agenda 21 a bull’s eye for Tea Partiers and talk show hosts. The Republican National Committee recently condemned its “destructive and insidious nature”– although it didn’t explain how it had overlooked this “dangerous” threat for 20 years.

The dangerous threat is from zealots seeking to impose their know-nothing views on the country – and working harder than the rest of us to do so. This is a battle worth fighting.

Komen Out

An idiosyncratic guide to Mitt Romney’s recent primary woes: July 20, 2010. Karen Handel finishes first in the Republican primary for governor of Georgia, defeating Congressman Nathan Deal by more than 10 percentage points. In her campaign she calls for abolishing government funding to Planned Parenthood.

Aug. 10, 2010. Despite endorsements from Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, Handel is narrowly beaten by Deal in a run-off, during which Deal had accused Handel of being a card-carrying member of the Log Cabin Republicans, the ever-shrinking GOP organization that supports gay rights. Handel responded to this McCarthy-like tactic by . . . denying membership in the organization. Unfortunately, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found evidence not only of her membership, but of her support for domestic partnership benefits.

April 2011. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation hires Ms. Handel as senior vice president for policy.

Nov. 29, 2011. The Komen board adopts a policy that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood.

Jan. 24, 2012. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives unanimously passes H.R. 535, a non-binding resolution declaring 2012 the "Year of the Bible."

Jan. 31, 2012. Komen ends its annual $700,000 contribution to Planned Parenthood.

Feb. 3, 2012. Komen reverses itself.

Feb. 7, 2012. Handel resigns.

Feb. 7, 2012. The US Court of Appeals strikes down California’s Proposition 8 and affirms gay marriage . . . at least for now.

Feb. 7, 2012. Rick Santorum wins the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses and the non-binding primary in Missouri.

The Luxury of Candidates

China is reportedly teaching the Iranians how to build intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S., while Iran is simultaneously expanding the uranium enrichment activity that Israel is threatening to bomb. Meanwhile, the United States has recalled its ambassador and all diplomatic personnel from Syria, whose government has escalated the killing of its people, and Egypt has announced it will put on trial 19 Americans who work for non-governmental organizations in the country. Russians are protesting Vladimir Putin in the freezing temperatures that have killed hundreds in Europe, and Greece, on the edge of economic collapse, is building a wall topped with razor wire to keep out illegal immigrants from Turkey. The list goes on. No, it is not just the economy, stupid.

And yet presidential candidates of all persuasions stick to the poll-driven narrative that the upcoming elections are about jobs, jobs and only jobs. A lot of people are still hurting badly in America, domestic economic issues continue to be a source of enormous concern, and this country’s social and economic divisions must be addressed. But America does not exist in a bubble cushioned from the rest of the world. Candidates, whether incumbents or not, get to define the issues in short-term insular ways that allow them to stay on message and play to their audiences.  Those responsible for making actual decisions must contend with a much more complex and uncertain world.