The Editorial Page

California’s shame

EDITORIAL — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:17:22 GMT

Equal marriage rights suffers a setback, but there is hope. Plus, young voters.
The politics of division as practiced by lame-duck president George W. Bush at the connivance of his onetime Svengali Karl Rove are not dead.

The politics of division as practiced by lame-duck president George W. Bush at the connivance of his onetime Svengali Karl Rove are not dead.

Democrat Barack Obama’s decisive national victory over Republican John McCain certainly dealt a body blow to those who would pit whites against nonwhites, the native born against immigrants, the haves against the have-nots, and those who practice their fundamental right to worship as they choose against those who exercise their equally constitutional right not to worship at all.

But anyone who doubts that the politics of intolerance and inhumanity are alive and well need only to look to California, Florida, and Arizona, which voted to deny same-sex couples the basic human right to marry that couples of differing genders enjoy. The Taliban would be proud.

The situation in Arkansas is even more dispiriting. Voters in that state went so far as to mandate that only married couples can adopt children or serve as foster parents. Since heterosexual unions are the only couplings recognized in Arkansas, voters removed the possibility that straight singles could adopt in order to bar gays and lesbians from becoming parents or guardians. Pity the children.

While the same-sex-marriage bans in Arizona and Florida (the latter, for good measure, also outlawed civil unions) undeniably hinder the just cause of civil rights, the vote in California was most significant.

In May, the Republican-dominated California Supreme Court issued a ringing declaration establishing that couples of the same gender had the equal right to marry as those of differing genders. “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights,” the court ruled.

California voters thought otherwise. Although the state went overwhelmingly for Obama, voters allowed the state constitution to be amended in order to outlaw marriage for gay and lesbian couples. In a predominately multicultural state like California, it is difficult to pinpoint the constituent groups responsible for the defeat. But the effect of African-Americans who approved the ban by a margin of more than 70 percent is difficult to deny.

The irony, of course, is bitter. The same day that a black American was elected president for the first time, his fellow citizens denied the dignity of marriage to same-sex couples. What a country.

Equally undeniable was the opposition of religious groups to same-sex marriage. The Mormon-led movement was joined by Catholics and Evangelicals Protestants who decided that the teaching of Jesus Christ to love your neighbor as yourself need not apply in California — or, by extension, to the rest of the nation.

Hope restored

EDITORIAL — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:09:55 GMT

Barack Obama's election has sparked international wonder. His task, however, is great.
Barack Obama's election has sparked international wonder. His task, however, is great.

Seventy-five days from this Thursday, America's long nightmare will have ended.

The reign of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney junta will be over. Dubya will be winging his way to Crawford, Texas. There, he can comfortably adapt himself to history's probable judgment that he was the worst president in the United States' history. His henchman, Cheney, will have the leisure to prepare for what we hope will be a lifetime of defending himself against lawsuits for the torture he sponsored and the assault on civil liberties he engineered.

Democrat Barack Obama's decisive win over Republican John McCain in Tuesday's election is truly a triumph of hope. For some voters, McCain was no doubt more horrifying than Obama was appealing. But for legions of Obama supporters, his victory offers the transcendent promise of a new national beginning.

When Obama takes the oath of office in January, he will face the greatest battery of challenges any president has had to contend with since 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt crossed the threshold of the White House during the Great Depression.

The Cold War presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan all had to face the menace of an aggressive Russia, then known as the USSR. The Soviet threat, however, was singular. And the foundation of our security was a robust economy that exhibited resilience seemingly beyond strain.

The facts today are very different. America is in an economic retreat that promises to be far graver than a periodic downtick. Compounding this domestic anxiety, the nation is mired in two unsuccessful wars, the prosecution of which has led to more — not less — international instability.

This is the reality Obama inherits. But while the political and policy challenges he faces are daunting by any measure, they are at least tangible, concrete — even if solutions today appear elusive.

As Obama himself has defined it, his true test, his greatest challenge, will be nothing less than spiritual: to restore a modicum of comity to national debate, to dial down the rhetoric of division, and to promote a sense of common purpose. If Obama can renew America's faith in itself, he will be on the road to re-energizing and re-defining a sense of national purpose appropriate to the 21st century.

The "Yes, we can" message of hope preached by Obama on the campaign trail was the seed of his electoral success. It is a message that will be fortified and nourished by the pride so many feel for the achievement of an African-American being elected president, and is the ultimate realization of the refrain "Rosa sat so Martin could walk, and Martin walked so that Barack could run."

Dictator McCain?

EDITORIAL — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:43:37 GMT

Don’t laugh: if the Arizona ‘maverick’ is elected, he’ll complete the job Bush started
The only thing standing in the way of Republican John McCain assuming the powers and prerogatives of a dictator should he be elected president is the vote of a single Supreme Court justice.

The only thing standing in the way of Republican John McCain assuming the powers and prerogatives of a dictator should he be elected president is the vote of a single Supreme Court justice.

Four of the nine current justices — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Joseph Alito, and John Roberts (all Republican appointees) — subscribe to the view that the president is a “unitary executive,” not subject to congressional oversight and able to nullify the Constitution if he thinks such actions are necessary.

In plain language, Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts believe that it is constitutional for the president to act unconstitutionally, to violate the Constitution. The idea, at first blush, seems bizarre, almost comical. But it is not a joke; or, if it is, it’s a very scary one.

It is almost a given that the next president will appoint at least one new Supreme Court justice.

Of the four justices who tend to favor more liberal or moderate interpretations of the Constitution, John Paul Stevens is 80, Ruth Bader Ginsburg 75, Stephen Breyer 70, and David Souter 69. The swing vote between the conservative and the liberal blocks, Justice William Kennedy, is 72.

McCain has promised to appoint the same sort of conservative judges as did President George W. Bush, who named Alito and Roberts to the high court. The nation can only assume that his sidekick, Sarah Palin, would do the same — or worse — if 72-year-old McCain were to die on in office.

It is telling that when Vice-President Dick Cheney, the dark brain of the Bush White House, was auditioning Alito and Roberts for their top-court gigs, he wasn’t particularly interested in their views on abortion or the execution of teenagers, two domestic issues dear to the hearts of some conservatives and most right-wingers.

Rather, Cheney was interested in Alito and Roberts’s views on executive power. He wanted to know whether they worshipped in the pew of the unitary executive.

Two things were at stake: not only, of course, the future of the Cheney/Bush-style imperial presidency (the legacy thing is big with traditionalists), but also the future criminal prosecution or administrative sanction of the hundreds — or perhaps thousands — of government employees and officials who executed the Bushies’ more questionable orders. (You have to credit that Dick; he thinks ahead.)

Debatable

EDITORIAL — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:19:42 GMT

Can Obama show grit? Will he connect? Can McCain stop lying? Will he remember?
With the presidential debates about to begin, political pundits are full of advice for Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.

With the presidential debates about to begin, political pundits are full of advice for Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama, according to conventional wisdom, should try to provoke McCain’s legendary temper. McCain, the thinking goes, must ruthlessly attack Obama’s inexperience and elitism — to make sure, as his own campaign manager recently said, that this election is not about issues.

Our advice: forget the conventional wisdom. Voters desperately want that “straight talk” McCain once prided himself on, but which, in his run for the White House, he has abandoned in favor of crooked and warped pandering. They want to hear what the candidates really think is happening in the world, in the country, to the economy, and in Washington — and how the two men hope to tackle those problems.

As it happens, we have reached this stage of the campaign with two presidential candidates who, for whatever reasons, polls show most Americans like, trust, and respect. That’s certainly a testament of some kind to the voting public, who in extraordinary numbers took part in the careful selection of the nominees.

But the two choices for the office have enormous differences in policy, ideology, and priorities that voters need to hear — unscripted, unfiltered, and preferably without the petty squabbling over trivialities that has so far been a hallmark of this campaign.

Presenting such a serious debate will require some adjustment for both candidates. Obama, always a better orator than debater, needs to present specific ideas without lofty grandeur — and yet be compelling and forceful, rather than, as he often is in these situations, cautious and humorless.

McCain, a skilled panderer — and a quick wit — used those skills to outperform his Republican primary rivals in front of audiences who knew what they wanted to hear. Now, McCain must forgo easy point-scoring temptations if he is to convince swing voters that he is the right man to tackle challenges for which they themselves — and even he and Obama — don’t know all the answers.

On foreign policy — the pre-arranged topic for this Friday’s debate — McCain, mainly because of his age, tough talk, and former POW status, is presumed to hold an advantage. But Obama needs to stick confidently to his guns: he is right in his more nuanced, diplomatic approach, and the electorate agrees.

In particular, Obama should repeatedly demonstrate that McCain approaches world affairs with the same “us-against-them” cowboy mentality that people negatively associate with President George W. Bush.

The quick and the dead: Underground in Providence

PHILIP EIL — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:25:10 GMT

Grave-gawkers
It’s been a rough year for cemetery buffs.

It’s been a rough year for cemetery buffs. From ransacked Confederate graves in Virginia (they’re looking for brass buttons to pawn, experts say) to Poe scholars squabbling over the Raven-Man’s remains, the news hasn’t been good.

And what about that trip to Pere Lachaise? Well, as long as airfare to Paris is $1000, Jim Morrison, Proust, and Piaf are going to have to wait. Yes, times are tough for grave-gawkers, but it’s not all bad news. There’s plenty of funerary fun to be had — free of charge — in Providence.

Unlike Paris, where big shots like Chopin and Oscar Wilde are interred in one place, Providence’s tombstone tour has three top stops. The first site, Prospect Terrace Park on Congdon Street, is where the man who started this whole Rhode Island “experiment,” Roger Williams, rests.

Famous for quipping, “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” Williams was initially buried on Prospect Hill in 1683. In 1860, however, his remains were moved to the North Burial Ground, only to be relocated once more (in 1939) to Prospect Park. “HERE REPOSES DUST FROM THE GRAVE OF ROGER WILLIAMS,” the monument reads, as Williams’s statue watches another condo mar his skyline.

The next stop on the headstone hike is Swan Point Cemetery, located on the city’s East Side, off the east side of Blackstone Boulevard, and it boasts an overwhelming number of important figures in local history.

Beneath its manicured lawns rest four recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, 23 former governors (including Theodore Francis Green, for whom the airport is named), and Helen Adelia Rose Metcalf, the founder of the RISD. Yes, you could spend all day roaming Swan Point (written walking guides are available at the office), but there are two headstones, in particular — George H. Corliss and H.P. Lovecraft — that shouldn’t be missed.

Corliss was an engineer who found success manufacturing steam engines in Providence during the 19th century. His towering, 70-foot Corliss Steam Engine was the talk of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where the machine powered the entire Machinery Hall. Lovecraft was an anxiety-addled horror writer, who, since his death in 1937, has risen to high literary esteem. He is also the owner — albeit posthumously — of the coolest epitaph in town. His headstone reads, “I Am Providence.”

Bad craziness

EDITORIAL — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:13:19 GMT

Wall Street’s meltdown is more dangerous than realized. McCain is clueless, but does Obama recognize the root of the problem?
The news from Wall Street this week is dire.

The news from Wall Street this week is dire: Merrill Lynch, the nation’s largest brokerage house, sold itself in a fire sale for about $50 billion, which is only a fraction of its previous worth; Lehman Brothers, a once venerable investment bank, filed for bankruptcy — at $399 billion, the largest in American history; and American International Group, a global insurance and financial powerhouse with a value in excess of $1 trillion, is going into a government-supervised purgatory in an effort to spare markets and customers from the pain of its collapse.

This triple-barreled blast of economic calamity is only the latest bulletin in an ongoing and frightening saga of economic dislocation and decline. In the wake of the subprime mortgage scandal, housing prices have plummeted and mortgage foreclosures have skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The distressed sale of Bear Stearns in March and the government bailout of seemingly whimsically named Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers of last resort, were clearly only dress rehearsals for this week’s meltdown.

What is truly scary is that the worst may not be over. Some investment experts fear another round of grassroots bank failures similar to the savings-and-loan crisis of almost 20 years ago. Although individual deposits are insured up to $100,000, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which safeguards savers, has only $50 billion to guarantee more than $1 trillion in deposits. Add to this bitter cocktail the growing suspicion that the wounded auto giant General Motors will fail without a government-guaranteed rescue plan, and you begin to understand that the crisis is far worse than anyone with authority in either government or business is admitting.

The criminally irresponsible policies — foreign and domestic — of President George W. Bush triggered this emergency. For the first time in American history, a president is waging war (in Iraq and Afghanistan — and maybe, before long, in Iran) without raising taxes. In other words, Bush is fighting with American blood and foreign credit. To keep voters fat, happy, and compliant, the Bush administration kept credit easy and regulation of the ensuing financial shell game ridiculously lax. Housing prices ballooned as people who had trouble keeping up with their big-box-store bills bought into the scam using home-equity lines of credit and their credit cards. Their housing prices — together with the economy and the financial superstructure — then crashed when these delusional souls failed to make their mortgage payments. The nation is now learning what junkies have long known: withdrawal is a bitch.

Palin: The plain truth

EDITORIAL — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:37:36 GMT

Don’t be fooled by the Tina Fey styling, McCain’s vice-presidential pick is a menace
In selecting Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, Republican nominee John McCain pulled a Clarence Thomas.

More coverage from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions

In selecting Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, Republican nominee John McCain pulled a Clarence Thomas.

Today, Thomas is a headline name, a 17-year veteran of the US Supreme Court. But when he was nominated, Thomas was a relatively unknown, relatively inexperienced Republican legal bureaucrat.

Thomas had two things going for him: he was a hard-core right-winger, and he was African-American.

For the president — then George H.W. Bush — to name an African-American to the nation’s highest court required a certain sort of brass.

During the four years Bush held that office, and the eight preceding years when Ronald Reagan reigned, the well-being of black America was a low political priority, to the extent that it was at all a concern.

Thomas’s racial heritage provided a perverse sugarcoating for the bitter pill of his radical right-wing views. And it worked.

Now comes Sarah Palin, an articulate, untested radical right-winger. (The Phoenix went to press before Palin’s Wednesday-night convention address. For coverage of that and the rest of Republican National Convention, go to thePhoenix.com/election2008.)

Until 72-year-old McCain plucked 44-year-old Palin from the comfort of her frontier obscurity, she had served six years as the mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 6715.

Palin followed that star turn by winning the governorship of Alaska, the nation’s largest, least-densely-populated state, which is more of a wilderness preserve controlled by the energy industry than it is a functioning polity.

When she wasn’t busy wrestling bears or catching salmon with her bare teeth, Palin coached high-school basketball and ran the family taxi service to hockey practice. Along the way, she battled political cronyism and government corruption.

Clearly, Palin is the stuff of legend. It is a wonder that the Republicans are waiting for the election. Why not bundle her off to Russia today to set straight that nasty, trigger-happy strongman Vladimir Putin?

Palin has clearly stirred the passions of Republican conventioneers. Their enthusiasm is unrestrained. Anyone watching the St. Paul convention on television might think it was an over-caffeinated meeting of the American Association of Retired People. By the time McCain takes the podium, the frenzy will be stronger than Hurricane Gustav. B-12 shots all around!

What Obama must do

EDITORIAL — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:14:51 GMT

A new talent must wrestle with an old hand at political survival
For all the fawning press Barack Obama has received, the grace and favor with which he has been treated is nothing compared with the free ride McCain has enjoyed.

More coverage from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

During the past several national elections, whenever a Democratic presidential candidate has changed his or her mind on an issue, or trimmed his or her sails in the face of hostile public opinion, the mainstream media have been quick to tag that candidate a flip-flopper. When John McCain changes his mind, he is being a maverick, a tell-it-like-it-is hombre. For all the fawning press Barack Obama has received, the grace and favor with which he has been treated is nothing compared with the free ride McCain has enjoyed, at least from the predominantly old white guys who dominate convention coverage.

The benefits of the doubt Obama has been granted — and he is granted fewer every day — are probably attributable to his freshness as a tasty new morsel for a television-dominated process. TV demands lean meat it can fatten so it has someone to devour. The fact that Republican McCain as well as Democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton have survived repeated cycles of this cannibalism gives them a special status: survivors.

Survival, in fact, is perhaps the most exalted state to which a politician can ascend in the ultimate reality show known as presidential politics.

Survivors have proven their very seriousness by having escaped scandal or defeat, or having weathered a particularly turbulent political storm. And because they have survived, they reap the benefit of extra consideration. Past skill warrants a suspension of judgment rarely extended to most politicians.

Senator Ted Kennedy is a case in point. His survival of a cheating incident at Harvard and the drowning of a female companion at Chappaquiddick (tempered as they were by the murder of Kennedy’s two brothers, as well as by other family tragedies) gives his career as a national icon an unspoken but palpable poignancy that is further enhanced by his ongoing cancer battle. Kennedy’s unexpected and moving speech at the Democratic National Convention was another triumph over adversity. As such, it was an apt metaphor for a nation that has had to endure eight years of President George W. Bush.

The Clintons may be on a path to achieving similar gravitas. Hillary’s speech certainly laid the foundation for such a reputation. She was breathtaking in the sweep of her Tuesday night convention speech, fortifying in her message that the Democrats must unite behind Obama to spare the nation four more years of Bush policies, this time with McCain’s name on them. It only remains for Bill to equal, or exceed, her performance for the Democrats to put behind them the memories of the Clintons’ attempt to blackmail Hillary’s way onto the ticket by holding her voters hostage. After Tuesday night, it is hard to imagine that stain having any relevance.

Georgia on your mind?

EDITORIAL — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:28:58 GMT

Why the Russians are acting like Soviets! And why it will be difficult to stop them!
So much for the Republican Party’s long-standing boast that Ronald Reagan neutered the Soviet Union.

So much for the Republican Party’s long-standing boast that Ronald Reagan neutered the Soviet Union.

Russia’s brutal Soviet-style invasion of the relatively small and decidedly democratic nation of Georgia this past week may not have been enough to provoke a “better-dead-than-red” backlash here in the United States. But the Russian tanks that rumbled toward the Black Sea must have made former Soviet citizens (such as the independent people of the Ukraine) and former Soviet clients (say, in Poland and the Czech Republic) more than a bit nervous.

The Kremlin has been off its game for much of the past 20 years. Losing control of Eastern Europe and watching the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolve into 15 different nations must have been a bummer.

Now, thanks to the corrupt and anti-democratic leadership of Vladimir Putin, together with a multi-billion surge in treasure from oil and natural gas, Russia is again flexing its muscles.

Putin, having squelched Chechnyan rebels in two multi-year rounds of bloody fighting, was emboldened to deal with the Georgians, who Russians traditionally consider to be obstreperous upstarts. The Kremlin likes its neighbors tame.

Georgia, with 4.6 million people (a bit more than half the population of New York City), is — or was — perhaps the most pro-American of the former Soviet Republics: witness the 2000 troops that nation committed to President Bush’s Iraq War.

The ostensible trigger for this latest invasion was the desire of provinces in western Georgia to break away and affiliate with Russia. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, an admirable democrat who nevertheless is considered a loose cannon by diplomatic standards, appears not to have handled the situation well. Two weeks ago, the long-simmering conflict erupted into mortar fire along the border, prompting air strikes from the Kremlin soon thereafter, as Russian troops and armored forces entered the fray in support of the splinter region. Early Wednesday, a cease-fire was agreed upon by both sides, but the peace remains tenuous at best.

However, when a big power like Russia (or China or the United States) desires to intervene militarily in a neighboring state, almost any reason can be manufactured.

Turmoil in the Georgian provinces is only a pretext for the Russian war. The underlying reason has more to do with the misguided American policy of seeking to integrate such former Soviet Republics as Georgia and the Ukraine, and such former subject Eastern European nations as Poland, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — against Russia’s protestations.

Mao's ghost

EDITORIAL — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:58:50 GMT

The spirit of the chairman haunts the Beijing Olympics
When the 21st century is old enough to support a sense of historical perspective, the date 8/8/08 may well be more significant than 9/11.

Photo illustration by K. Banks.

When the 21st century is old enough to support a sense of historical perspective, the date 8/8/08 may well be more significant than 9/11. The Olympic Games, which begin today, mark China’s modern coming of age.

Beijing 2008: Special issue: China, Tibet, and the Olympics

“Modern” is an important qualification. As the planet’s oldest civilization with a recognizable sense of continuity, China has seen glory before. Gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass were all products of its ancient genius. But for much of modern history, China was a nation on the margins: misunderstood and discounted, shamelessly exploited by Western powers and brutally pillaged by the Japanese.

Chairman Mao Zedong changed that — though it takes a strong constitution to stomach the murderous nature of his achievement.

Mao brought China neither peace nor prosperity. His Soviet-inspired agricultural policies led to famine; his Cultural Revolution transformed the country into a massive concentration camp. Median estimates of the total number dead as a result of Mao’s will and whim float around 50 million — give or take 10 million. Whatever the body count, most historians agree that Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time.

It was Mao’s perverse achievement to forge in the smithy of the ancient Chinese soul the makings of a reconstituted superpower. Whether the nation’s ascendancy is because of Mao or in spite of him is almost irrelevant. The DNA is too tight to unravel, the duality too synthesized to deconstruct. Mao, or a version of him, is China. China, in some manifestation, is Mao. Mao’s embalmed corpse on display under glass in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square taps into the Confucian ideal of ancestor reverence, and yet also transcends it. Mao, the great helmsman, washes all other ancestors with his wake.

The cult of Mao is a form of zombie politics; it is part of the voodoo employed by the shrewd, sophisticated bureaucrats who command the Middle Kingdom. They are, by Mao’s standards, faceless. The art of ruling the world’s most populous nation is to be one of a crowd. (During the terror of the Cultural Revolution, only Mao’s favor could save one from the chaos; to survive, the individual had to melt into the mob. Its memory disciplines the masses.)

China today is a dragon with a capitalist head and a communist heart. It is a living, breathing, thriving contradiction. Because the dragon is rising (the metaphor is no less apt because it is melodramatic), its momentum tends to mask its weak spots.

A sobering question

EDITORIAL — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:28:59 GMT

Can Obama make Democrats face up to economic reality?
With every passing week the nation’s already-screwed-up economy becomes even more distressed.

With every passing week the nation’s already-screwed-up economy becomes even more distressed.

Consider just two trends: food and fuel prices are rising faster than at any time in recent memory. Housing prices, meanwhile, have suffered their biggest decline in 21 years.

This means that average citizens will be paying more to put food on their tables, to drive to and from work, and to heat their homes this winter. While the nation’s average Joes and Josephines are dedicating a higher portion of their take-home pay just to get by, they also are helplessly watching the value of their homes — their principal and most basic investment — decline in value.

As for sending their kids to college, that, too, has gotten more difficult. Nationwide, more than 50 education-loan providers have discontinued offering both private and federal money. In Massachusetts, some 40,000 students will similarly go without loans because the state agency charged with helping low- and middle-income students could not secure funds due to distressed capital markets.

Will things get better? Sure, but not any time soon.

One factor that will keep the economy bollixed is runaway federal spending and borrowing. President Bush is going to saddle either Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama with a record deficit of nearly $500 billion, once the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are factored in.

It is a fact of life — though most Republicans do not want to recognize it — that Bush squandered the surplus his presidential predecessor, Bill Clinton, left the nation. The Bush tax cuts, which favored the wealthy and the well-off, helped to wipe away the Clinton surpluses. These days, the United States borrows about one-third of its operating expenses (excluding Social Security) just to keep the government going.

Simply put, the national government is in even worse shape than the average American family. If that is not a sobering thought, then what is?

While Bush is certainly the poster boy for reckless handling of the economy, he is not the only culprit. Every president since (and including) Democrat Jimmy Carter has contributed to the sorry economic state in which we find ourselves. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush helped dig the hole. And Clinton shoveled more than is commonly realized.

With the assent of Congress and the connivance of the Federal Reserve Board, the White House, for more than 30 years, allowed the financial industry — the banks, insurance companies, and brokerage businesses — to relax or abandon meaningful standards of regulation.

Voting right

EDITORIAL — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:04:37 GMT

Why Beacon Hill should adopt same-day voting and join the national popular-vote movement. Plus, that Obama cover.
The Massachusetts Legislature is expected to vote in the next several days on two proposals that would make democracy, well, more democratic.

The Massachusetts Legislature is expected to vote in the next several days on two proposals that would make democracy, well, more democratic. One of these would provide for the direct election of presidents by national popular vote; the other for same-day voter registration, allowing previously unregistered citizens to qualify at their polling places on Election Day. The Phoenix urges the legislature to adopt both.

The national popular-vote proposal would not replace the Electoral College; rather, it would modify its procedures.

The popular-vote plan is an interstate compact, a type of state law allowed by the US Constitution that enables states to enter into a legally enforceable contract to undertake agreed joint actions, such as electing a president.

The compact would take effect only when similar legislation has been enacted by states collectively possessing a majority of electoral votes — that is, 270 of the 538.

Those states will then vote as a bloc for the winner of the national popular vote, guaranteeing a supermajority of electoral votes and thereby preventing the candidate who receives the fewest popular votes from ending up in the White House, as was the shameful case in 2000. It would also eliminate the possibility that now exists of the election being thrown into the House of Representatives — where each state has one vote (regardless of population) — if no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College. And it would force presidential candidates to campaign nationwide, instead of concentrating their efforts in a handful of so-called battlefield states.

So far, the bill has been approved by the Massachusetts House of Representatives and awaits action by the State Senate. Around the nation, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland have already approved national popular-vote legislation. And in 20 other states, one body of the respective legislatures has also done so. The State Senate here should approve the bill.

Same-day voter registration is an easier concept to understand, but it faces a more uncertain fate on Beacon Hill. As this newspaper noted when it endorsed the idea back in April, voter turnout is depressingly low. Massachusetts ranks only 21st in the nation in this respect. The idea of making it easier and more convenient to register voters, by allowing those with proper identification to do so at the polls, should be a no-brainer.

Reality bites

EDITORIAL — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:24:56 GMT

Will Obama make good on his plan to exit Iraq by 2010? Don’t bet on it.
The war in Iraq has been on the back burner of the American political scene for some time.

The war in Iraq has been on the back burner of the American political scene for some time. During the final months of the interminable primary season, the headlines were dominated by relatively hollow talk about NAFTA, a vitally important discussion of Senator Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and the now moot question of whether onetime Democratic front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton could beat the math and wrestle her party’s nomination away from Obama.

Obama has yet to confirm when he will make his promised trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, which will also include visits to France, Germany, Great Britain, and Israel — though it seems to be scheduled within the next couple of weeks. Regardless of whether it comes before or after the August 25 Democratic National Convention in Denver, that trip once again will catapult the Iraq War to the center of political debate.

The presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, discounts the continuing psychic, political, and economic cost of maintaining a large American military presence in Iraq for as many as 100 years. Obama does not. But so far, at least, Obama has failed to communicate the grave and complex difficulties the nation will face in withdrawing from the Iraq quagmire. That none of his fellow Democratic presidential aspirants failed to fully appreciate those difficulties is beside the point. After Obama’s official August instatement as his party’s standard-bearer, that will be even more irrelevant.

At issue is Obama’s campaign position to immediately begin withdrawing combat brigades from Iraq, and to have achieved total withdrawal — save for some non-combat troops necessary to protect our diplomats — within 16 months of assuming office, which would be May 2010.

Putting aside the definition of what constitutes “combat” troops — and that is sure to become an issue in the months ahead — there are approximately 152,000 American servicemen and -women in Iraq. A close reading of the policy tea leaves that gather around Washington think tanks suggests that it would not be a surprise if the US still had somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 boots on the ground by the middle of 2010. (For readers interested in more detail than space here allows, check out former Phoenix political writer Michael Crowley’s piece in the May 7 issue of the New Republic, and George Packer’s report in the current issue of the New Yorker.)

Crackpot court

EDITORIAL — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:34:39 GMT

Taking a shot at the Supreme Court’s recent gunplay
This past week’s Supreme Court ruling, invalidating Washington, DC’s handgun ban, demonstrates just how far afield “movement conservatism” has taken our country.

This past week’s Supreme Court ruling, invalidating Washington, DC’s handgun ban, demonstrates just how far afield “movement conservatism” has taken our country. For that, we have an irresponsible Republican Party to blame; tragically, real people will have to pay dearly.

For years now, the GOP has embraced crackpot conservative theories for political advantage. “Trickle-down economics” helped convince middle-class voters to support reckless tax cuts for the wealthy. Global-warming denial was dreamed up and propagated by corporations who wished to avoid regulation. Myths of a “war on Christmas” and doomsday consequences of same-sex marriage have pulled evangelical Christians to the voting booth to elect Republicans.

Firmly held, irrational, absolutist beliefs may be good short-term politics, but they make for terrible policy — somewhere along the way, the political right lost control of the distinction. Ever since Congress subpoenaed Terri Schiavo’s vegetative body, it’s been clear that the Republican Party is being ruled — and destroyed — by right-wing nut cases.

“Gun rights” has been for the Republicans one of the most important, and most crass, of these foolish ideas. Most reasonable people agree that private ownership of weaponry should be carefully controlled and regulated — as a public issue, guns are not all that different from automobiles. Debate over the details properly belongs in the venue of local, state, and national legislatures, to be shaped through discussion, lobbying, public pressure, and ultimately elections.

But that approach doesn’t get people riled up to pay membership dues to the National Rifle Association (NRA), or to vote Republican out of the belief that Democrats intend to take away one’s hunting rifle.

So, since the early 1970s, the NRA and its ideological brethren have pushed the novel, and unjustified, theory that private gun ownership (for other than state-militia purposes) is an enshrined constitutional right. Republicans latched on, and won over millions of working-class voters.

Now, five justices have turned this ludicrous idea into constitutional law, proving that years of nominations made to appease the far right have at last given us a crackpot Supreme Court.

For a full dissection of the case, see the well-argued (and appropriately outraged) two-part dissent written by Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer. Suffice to say that Justice Antonin Scalia, in his almost willfully irrational majority opinion, finds that the Second Amendment “elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” If you can find anything in the Second Amendment’s 27 words that remotely supports that conclusion, well, you apparently are fit for today’s Supreme Court. Talk about “activist judges”!

As goes Gloucester?

EDITORIAL — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:40:01 GMT

Debating the ‘pregnancy pact’ will not make a surge in teenage motherhood disappear
Waves of chatter wash over the city of Gloucester, where 17 high-school students are pregnant.

Waves of chatter wash over the city of Gloucester, where 17 high-school students are pregnant. But for all the yapping in print, online, and over the airwaves, there’s little clarity — and even less wisdom — to be found.

The rip tide of publicity that hit the blue-collar fishing port comes from the disturbing story in Time magazine that approximately half of the now-pregnant girls made a pact to have children and raise them together, giving unintended meaning to the concept “it takes a village.”

The idea that there was a “pact” was clearly attributed to high-school principal Joseph Sullivan. He, it appears, has been muzzled by local authorities and is now on vacation, unavailable for follow-up.

Into the breach steps Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk, a political newcomer with a lot of energy and a can-do style that helped her win office. Kirk may have succeeded in raising questions about the existence of a pact. She has not, however, been able to alter the underlying reality that at least some of the girls — pact or no pact, widespread or smaller than suggested — wanted to get pregnant. “Pinkies up” is not an appropriate strategy in this situation.

Conservatives should take note of the fact that Gloucester has, well, a piss-poor sex-education program. Its opposition to making birth control available — some fear it might promote sexual license — seems asinine given the number of pregnant girls at Gloucester High, not to mention the number who already walk the halls with baby strollers. Unwanted pregnancy is not the only issue. There are also sexually transmitted diseases to consider, and the possibility of HIV infection. By several measures, the Gloucester community is being dangerously irresponsible.

Liberals likewise should be chastened. The overall sex-education program may leave some wanting in Gloucester, but short of birth control, sex-oriented health-care services are available. The question of whether single, teenage girls who want to become pregnant can be dissuaded is a bit of a new frontier. The situation is more complicated than teaching the facts of life. Sociology trumps biology.

One of the factors making it difficult to understand what is going on in Gloucester is the age of the girls involved. Old enough to become pregnant, they are sufficiently young that news organizations are reluctant to report on them in detail. Privacy, of course, is a humane consideration. But it’s hard to imagine that the issue of parental consent isn’t also at play: old enough to get pregnant, but too young to be quoted in the papers without the okay of a parent.

Russert explained

EDITORIAL — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:29:36 GMT

NBC’s top talking head had an outsized influence simply because he did his job so well
In terms of being an old-fashioned, old-style media icon, nobody in broadcasting today could top Tim Russert.

In terms of being an old-fashioned, old-style media icon, nobody in broadcasting today could top Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press and the Washington bureau chief for NBC News, who died this past week without a hint of warning at the age of 58. Stephen Colbert is surreal, Jon Stewart is satirical, Keith Olbermann is outraged, and Russert was, well, tough and amiable and grounded, rooted in American politics as it has been played since the days of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

The airwaves and news pages have been full of well-deserved tributes to Russert. Among his memorable qualities was the sense, as so many observed, that he “never forgot where he came from.” (Russert hailed from the blue-collar precincts of Buffalo, New York, a city of undeniable grittiness.) If there is a problem with this line of remembrance, it is that the eulogists did not push it far enough. If Russert did not forget his roots, is that to say that others in journalism have trouble remembering where they came from? Or whom, or what, they are supposed to be serving? Hint: think the public interest.

The reporters and commentators today are not the civic heroes they once were. A 2004 public opinion poll suggested that, among the wretched, journalists score only slightly better than used-car salesmen, and on par with politicians, in terms of credibility. There is, of course, a gross dollop of unfairness in much of this, scorning the messenger for the bad news he brings. And there is much bad news to digest these days: war in Iraq and the prospect of conflict with Iran, rising gas and food prices. There is even talk of charging Internet users not flat fees but fares determined by how much they download. As the line between what was once considered news blurs with what was once clearly entertainment, those who seriously cover the facts are tarred with the sins of those who transmit gossip. It does not help that a handful of international conglomerates own most of the media. It just makes it easier to tar so many with the same brush.

Many, it is sad to say, deserve such treatment. Exhibit A in the most recent case against mainstream corporate media is that, in the run-up to the Iraq War, the press allowed President Bush to lie and hoodwink the nation into following his criminally mistaken lead. It is hard to imagine an issue closer to home than an international conflict in which American men and women are dying in the name of a bogus cause. But the sorry record of the press gets even sorrier when one considers what else Bush and the Republicans got away with for so many years: the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class got screwed.

Intelligence deficit

EDITORIAL — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:37:18 GMT

Bush fooled voters and the press once on Iraq. Can McCain get away with the same thing?
The American press and public rarely get riled up these days over new revelations concerning President George W. Bush and his administration’s sorry history.

The American press and public rarely get riled up these days over new revelations concerning President George W. Bush and his administration’s sorry history. Perhaps America’s outrage has been tapped out. Maybe that’s why so little attention was given to this past week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on the misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War. Bush lied, people died — tell us something we don’t know.

Well, apparently not everybody knows yet. Five of the seven Republicans on the committee refused to endorse the report, and instead blasted its findings. (Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine joined the Democrats.)

And John McCain, who touts his military and foreign-policy experience as his main credential for the presidency, has yet to concede that the Bush administration misled anyone in order to wage an unnecessary war — indeed, he continues to claim that the invasion was justified, even knowing what we do now.

Despite this glaring lack of judgment, McCain remains nearly even with Barack Obama in national polls. So, apparently people still need to be reminded of how we got where we are with this war.

This latest Senate report, as well as former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s new book, makes the answer increasingly clear. It is not that the administration was acting upon, and relaying to the public, faulty intelligence. It was that Bush administration officials didn’t care what the intelligence — either from our own agencies or other countries’ — said. And they had even less interest in conveying that information to the American people, so that they might have all the facts at their disposal.

“As Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed just this week,” veteran journalist Bill Moyers said Monday in a speech at the National Conference for Media Reform, “the administration, with the complicity of the dominant media, conducted a political propaganda campaign using erroneous and misleading intelligence to deceive Americans into supporting an unprovoked war.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee looked at false public statements made by Bush, Dick Cheney, and others, and compared them with the intelligence information that the administration actually had. Some of those statements were, in fact, based on the best intelligence available, which happened to be wrong. Other claims were deliberately puffed up, and contrary intelligence opinions tamped down. In other cases, they were based on no intelligence at all, such as the suggestion that Iraq was developing drones to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States. (The committee’s report has prompted Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich — over objections from the timid Democratic leadership — to introduce 35 articles of impeachment against Bush, beginning with “Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign To Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.” Another prominent Democrat, Rob Wexler of Florida, is a co-sponsor.)

Gold muddle

EDITORIAL — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:01:42 GMT

George W. Bush is going to the Beijing Olympics
President Bush’s decision to score a historical footnote and be the first sitting US president to attend an overseas Olympic Games seemed like a good idea at the time.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. President Bush’s decision, that is, to score a historical footnote and be the first sitting US president to attend an overseas Olympic Games, in this case the August Games in Beijing. Like many of Bush’s “good ideas,” however, this one is another big mistake.

It is hard to imagine a more politicized pageant than the Olympics.

The vile Nazi theatrics of the 1936 Berlin Games are now the stuff of history books.

Closer to the world’s collective memory are the 1968 Mexico City Games, which began with that nation’s government forcefully dispersing thousands of protesters, shooting down and killing perhaps 300 (the estimates vary) in the process.

Four years later, Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich.

In 1980 the US boycotted the Moscow Games in protest of the Soviets’ 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984 the Soviets and 13 Eastern Bloc nations and allies returned the favor, shunning the Los Angeles Games, at which even saber-rattling President Ronald Reagan kept a low profile to keep international tensions within acceptable bounds.

And in 1996 — one year after America-born terrorists bombed the Oklahoma City federal court house — a bomb killed one person and wounded others in Atlanta, sparking what, by post-9/11 standards, now seems like a “manageable” panic.

In every instance, the Games went on. Dead bodies were and are beside the point. Political repression, international terror, and geopolitics do not register with the curiously obtuse, corporately fueled ethic of industrialized sport that is the Olympics.

If the grand masters of the Olympics were truly interested in depoliticizing the Games, why not settle on a permanent home in more neutral settings, say, Switzerland or Sweden for the winter sports and Greece, the Games’ historic home, for summer sports?

The answer is simple: cash. Ever-changing locations allow the Olympics a steady stream of funding from would-be hosts who trip over themselves to pay to hold the Games. The cost to China this year has been estimated at $20 billion and counting.

There is also, of course, television. Static sites might be less politically charged, but rotating host cities provide the sort of backdrops that the television industry needs to justify its huge investment in broadcast rights. NBC paid a combined $1.5 billion for the 2006 Winter Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Games, and will be charging as much as $750,000 for a 30-second spot to recoup.

Courting disaster

EDITORIAL — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:15:51 GMT

Why McCain’s right-wing judicial pledge would further compromise America’s future
With the price of food and gasoline running at punishing levels, it is no surprise that the economy has replaced the disastrous war in Iraq as the issue with which voters are most concerned.

With the price of food and gasoline running at punishing levels, it is no surprise that the economy has replaced the disastrous war in Iraq as the issue with which voters are most concerned. Taken together, the two are quite literally issues of life and death. But as understandably preoccupied as the nation is with the current sorry state of affairs at home and abroad, voters should not lose sight of the fact that while the next president confronts the crises of the moment with one hand, he or she will craft the future with the other.

Judicial appointments are among a president’s most effective tools for shaping the social, political, and economic future of this nation. The dozens of trial and appellate judges a president names will determine the quality of justice, referee appointed and elected officials, and regulate the intricacies of our vast corporate culture.

The most important appointments, of course, are those to the Supreme Court. It is a risky business predicting how many vacancies might occur on the Court over the next four years. But putting larger issues of fate aside, it is likely that the next president will make one or maybe two appointments, to fill the seats of Republican justice John Paul Stevens, who is 88 years old, and Democratic justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is 75.

Putative Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s recent speech at Wake Forest University — in which he pledged to extend the legacy of President George W. Bush by continuing to appoint radical, right-wing judges — should come as no surprise to even casual political observers, particularly as he continues to pander to the hard-core conservatives of his party whose contributions and votes he must garner to have any chance of winning in November.

Despite McCain’s highly publicized maverick moments, he is at his core a ruby-red Republican. Like Bush, McCain values the economic supremacy of the few over the many, and is dedicated to the proposition that the power and prerogatives of the presidency are more important than the civil liberties of the citizenry. Any Democrat disenchanted with the hard-fought primary season would do well to remember this.

While we admire Senator Hillary Clinton, the Phoenix has a clearly stated preference for Senator Barack Obama. But it is painfully clear to this newspaper that either of the Democrats would name superior candidates to the judiciary. If McCain is elected, Bush’s royalist economic policies and reactionary political and social vision will become even more entrenched than they are today.

Rhode Island: Vote for Obama

EDITORIAL — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:00:48 GMT

Barack offers the best chance for a fresh start
The 2008 election is guaranteed to enjoy a special place in history.

The 2008 election is guaranteed to enjoy a special place in history. For the first time since 1825, when James Monroe left office after succeeding James Madison, the nation will have seen two presidents, William Clinton and George W. Bush, each complete eight consecutive years in office. Granted, Clinton had to endure impeachment, and Bush botched the challenge of Hurricane Katrina, bollixed the economy, subverted the constitution, and embroiled America in Iraq. Nevertheless, their contiguous tenures mark an unusual period of executive stability.

Throughout most of our history, assassination, scandal, and political upheavals have conspired to keep the occupancy of the Oval Office churning. Given this precedent, it is remarkable that this nation — the world’s oldest constitutional republic — has been so comparatively secure. Clearly, as the venerable saying goes, Providence looks after orphans, drunks, and the United States.

Also worth noting: for the first time since 1928, neither a sitting president nor his vice-president are seeking election. In other words, it has been 80 years since voters have made their choices on a relatively clean slate. Given the sinister influence of Vice-President Cheney, that is indeed providential.

The most historic developments of 2008, of course, are the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. One way or another, the Democrats are poised to nominate either the first woman or the first African-American as a candidate for president.

There is no doubt that either Clinton or Obama would be superior to the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. Elections, however, are about making a choice. When Democrats and Independents go to the polls next Tuesday, the Phoenix urges a vote for Barack Obama.

Obama’s candidacy is not only about hope, not only about change. Most important of all, it is about the future.

Almost four years ago in Boston, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, electrified and inspired the Democratic convention as no national newcomer had done since 1948, when Hubert Humphrey championed the cause of civil rights.

Obama’s clarion call has been to reject the politics of confrontation and division as practiced by Bush, right-wingers, and talk-radio motor mouths.

His vision is of comity and common purpose. Eloquence is his calling card. It is penetrating, transcending verbal facility — the hallmark of someone at peace with himself, someone who is comfortable inside his own skin, someone who is confident rather than cocksure. Obama is also a maverick. There is no doubt that his promise outstrips his experience. That was also true of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Vision was their strength; rhetoric was their means to an end.

Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Wilson so successfully captured the spirit of their times — synthesizing the best, marginalizing the worst — that history remembers them as representative leaders: presidents who made a difference. The Phoenix believes that Obama has the capacity to do so, too, in a way that Clinton — for all that is admirable about her — does not.

Obama comes to the political marketplace unencumbered by the bonds of dynasty. By voting for him on Tuesday, citizens are maximizing the opportunity to put the recent past behind them and to start anew.