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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nicholas Thompson who wrote (48080)	9/21/2008 10:59:55 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 224699

The Point: Disturbing line Palin tossed off in address At the GOP convention, it had classic lynch-mob slant. By Mark Bowden Inquirer Currents Columnist In the weeks since John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, she has become one of the most famous people in America. She has been cunningly impersonated on Saturday Night Live by her look-alike Tina Fey, grilled by ABC's sober anchor Charlie Gibson, and investigated by teams of reporters who by now have hunted down every person in Alaska with a grudge or criticism. We discovered that her teenage daughter is pregnant and watched as the hockey-playing lad who knocked her up was rapidly betrothed, cleaned up and hauled wide-eyed into the national spotlight with his soon-to-be in-laws - a bracingly modern variation of the old shotgun wedding. We have learned that Palin, like just about every other politician in human history, tends to hire her friends and fire her enemies. We will learn more, but none of the above has done much to alter her image as a refreshingly independent, aggressive, smart, down-to-earth, and surprisingly effective public official. And we all know she can give a good speech. But it was in that much-heralded speech at the Republican convention that Palin tossed off a line I found more disturbing than anything unearthed about her since. It got a predictably enthusiastic response from the keyed-up partisan crowd. "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America," said Palin, and then, referring to Barack Obama, quipped: "He's worried that someone won't read them their rights." Quite apart from the cheap distortion of Obama's position, typical of most campaign rhetoric, this is a classic lynch-mob line. It is the taunt of the drunken lout in the cowboy movie who confronts a sheriff barring the prison door - He wants to give 'im a trial? It is the precise sentiment that Atticus Finch so memorably sets himself against in Harper Lee's masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird, when he agrees to defend a supposedly indefensible black man charged with rape (falsely, as it turns out). I wonder if Palin really believes her own position on this. I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just a speechwriter's idea of a great applause line, perhaps she hasn't fully thought it through. The sentiment is on the wrong side of a deep principle, one that we have long honored in this country, that has to do with basic fairness, the rule of law, and ultimately with standing up intelligently to terrorism. Palin's comments referred to McCain's condemnation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer that upheld detainees' rights to the most basic of legal protections against arrest and imprisonment, a habeas corpus petition. The court ruled that our government cannot just call someone a terrorist, arrest him, and hold him indefinitely without showing some reasonable cause. McCain has called this "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Obama has praised it. The court's decision is just the latest word in an evolving national discussion of what to do with captured "terrorists." Congress and the White House have been wrestling with this since Sept. 11, 2001, and will continue to do so. Even those who applauded the court's defense of habeas corpus are not so sure that federal courts are the right place for "enemy combatants" to appeal their detention. And among those who side with the court, few would argue that enemy combatants are owed the full legal protections enjoyed by citizens. But certainly anyone arrested and locked away deserves the chance to challenge their arrest. Mind you, we are not talking about a trial here, just a hearing to establish that there is enough evidence to lock the suspect away. Palin's applause line applied the lynch-mob standard: Because a man has been arrested, he is guilty. End of story. In 2003, when the first group of prisoners was released from Guantanamo, I traveled to Pakistan to find two of them, Shah Muhammad and Sahibzada Osman Ali. Both hailed from tiny villages in the mountainous region of Pakistan where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been hiding. As an American, I was nervous traveling in that region, and honestly didn't know what to expect when I found them. I was greeted with warmth and elaborate courtesy. Both were men in their early 20s, uneducated, unworldly, and dirt poor. They had been rounded up by entrepreneurial Afghani warlords who were being paid $4,000 a head to capture jihadis for the Americans. Four thousand dollars is a huge payday in Afghanistan, and the warlords were not discriminating. Both apparently hapless young Pakistanis were among the original herds of elaborately restrained detainees in orange jumpsuits delivered to Camp X-Ray, the ones who were all treated like mass murderers. Some of them were. Many, it turns out, were not. Shah Muhammad and Sahibzada Osman Ali were held for almost two years before the authorities figured out that they did not pose a threat to Western civilization. Maybe the authorities and I both have it wrong. Perhaps these two are huddling right now with Osama bin Laden himself, but they have stood in my mind ever since as examples of why detainees deserve a hearing of some kind, whether in federal court or before some panel that is seen to be fair and reasonably concerned about basic justice. We are at war against forces who seek a permanent state of fear, for whom violence is an end in itself. Our side of the fight defends government by consent, and the rule of law. It is why we fight, and what makes our use of violence against our enemies morally defensible. This is why it is critical that we respect individual rights and act lawfully. That does not mean reading Miranda warnings to enemy combatants, as Palin glibly suggested, or affording them the full battery of rights given criminal defendants in this country. It does mean that even those accused of the most vile crimes have some. Our Founding Fathers called them "unalienable."

To: Nicholas Thompson who wrote (48080)	9/21/2008 11:01:39 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 224699

The American Debate: Populism gone wild: Palin latest example of push to mediocrity By Dick Polman Inquirer National Political Columnist The rise of Sarah Palin inevitably prompts me to ponder the demise of meritocracy in America. Never mind the fact that her presidential readiness is measured by the proximity of Alaska to Russia, or the fact that the McCain camp listed Ireland as one of her foreign visits until it turned out that her plane had merely refueled on Irish soil. I'm more interested in the simple test that she has twice flunked about her own state - and the fact that John McCain, using grade inflation, gives her an A anyway. She stated on ABC News that Alaska produces "nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." The accurate energy statistic, according to the federal government, is 3.5 percent. She subsequently amended her boast, claiming during a stump speech that Alaska produces "nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas." Wrong again. The accurate oil and gas statistic, according to the feds, is 7.4 percent. Yet none of that matters to McCain, and why should it? In America these days, we award everyone for merit, from the brilliant to the mediocre. Just as in Little League, everyone gets a trophy. It's the ultimate in populist democratization. Which is why McCain insists, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, that Sarah Palin "knows more about energy than probably anybody in the United States of America." Palin, however, is merely the latest beneficiary in the national celebration of mediocrity, much like one of those early-round American Idol entrants who wins insta-fame for being Just Like Us. Lest we forget, the lame-duck administration in Washington has long been dumbing down the standards for public service, by seeking to elevate the ill-qualified to positions of authority. I think first of Harriet Miers, tapped for the U.S Supreme Court by President Bush, who lauded her as "the best person I could find." It turned out that Miers had penned exactly three legal articles (including a promotional story about some new bar association seminars), and that her most notable legal work had arguably occurred years earlier, when she handled the paperwork on Bush's fishing cabin. I think of Monica Goodling, who was tapped for a key post at the Justice Department - evaluating the performance of U.S. attorneys, and helping to fire those deemed insufficiently conservative - despite her scant prosecutorial experience, and her stint at a law school listed in the "fourth tier" (the lowest score) by the academic rankers at U.S News & World Report. I think of George Deutsch, a 24-year-old NASA appointee who barred NASA scientists from talking publicly about global warming, and who ordered NASA's Web designer to append the word theory to every mention of the Big Bang. Not only did Deutsch have no science background, it also turned out that (contrary to his initial claim) he didn't even graduate from college. But his political work for Bush's reelection campaign was deemed sufficiently meritorious. I think of Claude Allen, the Bush domestic adviser who in 2006 pleaded guilty to shoplifting $850 worth of goods from Target. Allen had originally been tapped by Bush, three years earlier, for a federal appeals court judgeship, until it turned out that he had acted as lead counsel in a case exactly once, and had practiced law for only seven years - five years short of what the American Bar Association defines as the minimal qualification for a judicial nominee. And I think of Michael Brown, whose creds to head FEMA were a mystery, unless one argues that his earlier tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association made him a good choice to aid distressed Americans. "Brownie," however, was not alone. Patrick Rhode, the acting deputy director, got his FEMA job after working as a Bush advance man. His previous experience had consisted of covering natural disasters as a local TV anchorman. Rhode is the FEMA guy who lauded the agency's response to Katrina as "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history." So when I read up on Gov. Palin, and learned that she had tapped, as her state agriculture director, a former high school classmate and real estate agent with no management or government experience who nevertheless deemed herself qualified because of her long-standing affection for cows . . . well, my reaction was: Here we go again. One wonders how the Founding Fathers would view the demise of meritocracy. Alexander Hamilton insisted in the 76th Federalist Paper that our leaders "would be both ashamed and afraid" to elevate people whose chief qualification appeared to be "insignificance and pliancy." But today Hamilton would probably be dismissed as an "elitist" who cannot relate to the average Joe's apparent yearning for leaders who know just as little about the issues as they do. So goodbye, Hamilton, and hello Roman Hruska. The late senator from Nebraska is the guy who once defended an ill-qualified, ill-fated high court nominee by saying, "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?" Hruska was ridiculed for this remarks. But that was so 38 years ago. Given the populist impulses that are running rampant today, he looks like a seer.

To: Nicholas Thompson who wrote (48080)	9/21/2008 11:02:56 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 224699

Commentary Single-payer best for health care By Judith Gordon We almost had a catastrophe in our health care system. A mandated 10 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursements was averted Tuesday when Congress overrode President Bush's veto of a bill that would protect doctors from the cut. But the reduction was instigated by a flawed calculation designed to reduce Medicare spending that Congress has refused to fix and still must address by the next scheduled cut in January 2010. Any drastic reduction in Medicare reimbursements will limit people's access to physicians, which would cause a disaster in our health care system. The proposed reduced reimbursements would have barely covered rising expenses in staff, utilities and malpractice insurance. Since Medicare fees are the basis for all other insurance carriers, many physicians would have opted out of the Medicare system by either going to a fee-for-service structure (pay when you are seen and get reimbursed by your insurance company) or by getting out of medicine altogether. If there are fewer doctors available to see patients, the doctors who remain will end up with bigger patient workloads, causing longer wait times and greater travel distances to see a doctor. More than 50 percent of our nation's doctors work in small practices of one to five physicians, which has created a sense of having community health-care providers. This community access to physicians to address our health care needs is what was threatened by the proposed Medicare cuts. The immediate crisis has been resolved, but the overall problem of future access to physicians has not. In today's environment, doctors have no input into fee reimbursements, insurance authorizations for care, or quality-care measures. These are all dictated by non-medically trained, bottom-line entities that have frustrated physicians and kept them from providing the type of health care to patients that they swore to provide under the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. We must address the financing of our entire health care system, which is the root of political debate nationally on this issue. A possible solution here in Pennsylvania could be the proposed Family and Business Health Security Act (HB 1660 and SB 300), which endorses a publicly funded, privately provided health care system. This comprehensive (everything) universal (everyone) single-payer proposal calls for higher quality, comprehensive health care for patients with a 25 percent savings on administrative insurance costs. Currently, non-Medicare carriers have a 30-percent overhead in administering their health care plans. Medicare's overhead is 3 percent. The bill would also end the need for nightmare negotiations between insurance carriers and health care providers and businesses because there would only be one payer for all health care costs. This reform would be funded through an annual fair tax that replaces an unfair premium/co-pay/deductible system that far outstrips inflation. Businesses and patients would be able to budget their predictable and stable health care costs. Adopting a single-payer health care system can be done. Our elected representatives must be forced to act by all of us - patients , physicians, and employers. We need a system that will strengthen the doctor-patient relationship and encourages well-being and trust. In 1776, there was a revolution spearheaded by events right here in Pennsylvania. Now, we in this state have the opportunity to lead a revolution in health care for the entire country. We must all implore our legislators to be the leaders they were elected to be and take morally responsible action to provide health care for all Pennsylvanians. Judith Gordon is state co-chair of HealthCare4ALLPA.org. E-mail her at jsghealth4allPA@verizon.net