Call It A Comeback
Full damage control at Jack! HQ:
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I’m going to prioritize the next few days in writing to responses to e-mails and the sort. Jeff Berkowitz responds to the my defense of 24/72 hour waiting periods by bringing up a woman who is being threatened under an order of protection:
Well, imagine it. Imagine a battered woman who called the police in Chicago to enforce a protective order and to protect herself form her battering husband, but police arrived a gunshot too late. So much for the efficacy of Protective Orders. A Women’s issue, perhaps?
Or perhaps a basic issue of gun safety. If someone is buying a firearm and planning on effectively using it in 72 hours they are setting themselves up for either hurting themselves or a bystander. While the common myth of how effective handguns are for personal safety suggest you point and shoot, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Add on top of that the great fear in such a situation and someone who is planning to use the firearm without practice or training is buying into a false sense of security. A false sense of security promoted by ‘gun rights’ advocates. Far more effective means of personal security are available for someone not trained to use a firearm in the short run.
Of course, if someone is first interested in buying a firearm, the waiting period in Illinois is much longer because Illinois prudently requires a Firearm Owner Identication Card that takes a couple weeks to receive.
Ultimately, the 2nd Amendment has never been ruled an individual right. One can argue with that all they want, but it doesn’t change it. That doesn’t address whether something is reasonable policy, but in this case, one has to ask why cooling down periods are a bad thing. If someone is a responsible owner, what is the rush to use the firearm in under 24 or 72 hours?
Beyond background checks there is a good reason for the waiting period and that is it reduces easy access to guns from people in excited states. No one legally entitled to own a gun is limited, but people who make decisions out of fear or anger are given a cooling off period. From personal experience, the scared woman on the other end of the line doesn’t know about FOID cards let alone how to clear a chamber.
Most importantly, the argument that quick access to firearms is a safety issue backfires on those trying to make it.
Long Story short, my e-mail is funky, I didn’t get on the ball for guest posters and my internet connection is funky too. So ArchPundit will be slow for a couple more days–if I owe you an e-mail, it’ll have to wait until I get back.
But go check out the Capitol Fax–Rich Miller interviewed Danny Davis on his participation in Rev Moon declaring himself the Messiah.
Davis wouldn’t budge, comparing the elaborate ceremony to a “fraternity or sorority meeting,” or rituals performed by the local Elks lodge. “That’s kind of the way I regard these ceremonies.”
I seem to remember the rope and a brick, not declaring oneself the Messiah in my day.
What the $#@$? Now she writes a fictional column on the danger of…walkable communities.
Really, walking is a part of the international socialist conspiracy. And the Clinton/Gore administration that ended. OR DID IT?
Next…a fictional column on the dangers of flouridation.
First, RIP. I wish no one’s family to go through such a disease and certainly hope he was at peace as the disease progressed.
While I often describe myself as a fairly partisan Democrat who nonetheless argues for non-traditional solutions to problems (i.e. market incentives in environmental regulation and school choice with accountability in education) there is one area where I absolutely am at the left end of the U.S. political spectrum: Latin American policy. Having visited Nicaragua in 1991 and originally planning a career studying it, that then, probably inevitably, turned toward my long obsession with American politics, few places have the same draw on me.
My view on Latin America, and Central America in particular, is that we have never lived up to the Declaration of Independence there. We claimed to be supporting those who were freedom fighters, but were really thugs and rapists. In Nicaragua we met with Alfredo Cesar. He had originarlly been the spokesperson for the interim government after Somoza was thrown out and would become a leading opposition figure to the Sandanistas.
Cesar was interesting to me because he was highly critical of the Contras–far more than when he spoke to the American press. This comes up because a wonderful blog, Beautiful Horizons, that often concentrates on Latin America mentions Violetta Chamorro’s son who says this:
In Nicaragua, Reagan’s financial and military support for anti-government rebels “caused a lot of damage in our country, a lot of suffering, a lot of death and destruction,” said Carlos Chamorro, a journalist and political analyst, whose mother, Violeta Chamorro, became president in elections in 1990 that ended the rule of the Marxist-led Sandinistas.
“There might be a group that was supported by Reagan that may have a different memory of him. But I have the impression that a majority of the people will associate him with the war and with the destruction,” Chamorro said. The U.S.-backed war killed at least 20,000 people.
The Washington Post and Beautiful Horizons miss an important part of the story. Chamorro’s father, Violetta’s husband, was murdered, most likely by Somoza’s son–a kid who can be fairly compared to Saddam’s offspring. And he and his father were tools of the U.S. Government.
The Sandinistas were problematic. They were authoritarian and they did not accept free speech as they should. But the effort to destroy them that resulted in the raping of literacy workers and other wide ranging human rights abuses were not worth the effort. It was wrong.
Randy quotes Oscar Arias who is far more eloquent than I ever could be on the issue:
I know well you share what we say to all members of the international community, and particularly to those in the East and the West, with far greater power and resources than my small nation could never hope to possess, I say to them, with the utmost urgency: let Central Americans decide the future of Central America. Leave the interpretation and implementation of our peace plan to us. Support the efforts for peace instead of the forces of war in our region. Send our people ploughshares instead of swords, pruning hooks instead of spears. If they, for their own purposes, cannot refrain from amassing the weapons of war, then, in the name of God, at least they should leave us in peace.
Just to make Greg have a coniption 😉
The Good Mr. Durbin yesterday made the AG very uncomfortable.
Durbin: And here’s the problem we have. You have said that you’re not claiming executive privilege; that’s for the president to claim. But the law’s very clear: you have two options when you say no to this committee: Either the executive claims privilege and refuses to disclose, or you cite a statutory provision whereby Congress has limited its constitutional right to information.
So which is it, Mr. Attorney General? Is it executive privilege, or which statue are you claiming is going to shield you from making this disclosure of these memos at this point?
ASHCROFT: Thank you for your remarks.
First of all, let me agree with you as it relates to the value of the Constitution both at war and at peace. I couldn’t agree more heartedly with you that the Constitution is controlling. And I would never suggest that we absent ourselves from a consideration of and adherence to and complete compliance to the Constitution of the United States.
ASHCROFT: And if there is any way in which I have suggested in my remarks today that we wouldn’t do that, I want to take this opportunity to make it very clear that the Constitution of the United States is controlling in every circumstance and is never to be disregarded.
(CROSSTALK)
DURBIN: I respect that.
But under which standard are you denying this committee the memos, either executive privilege or a specific statutory authority created by Congress exempting your constitutional responsibility to disclose? Under which are you refusing to disclose these memos?
ASHCROFT: I am refusing to disclose these memos because I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from his attorney general that is confidential and that the responsibility to do that is a function of the executive branch and a necessity that is protected by the doctrine of the separation of powers in the Constitution.
And for that reason — and that is the reason for which I have not delivered to the Congress or the members of the Senate these memos, any memos.
DURBIN: Sir, Attorney General, with all due respect, your personal belief is not a law, and you are not citing a law and you are not claiming executive privilege. And, frankly, that is what contempt of Congress is all about.
You have to give us a specific legal authority which gives you the right to say no or the president has to claim privilege. And you’ve done neither.
I think this committee has a responsibility to move forward on this.
In response to a small point about accountability for vouchers, Jeff Berkowitz responds:
I mean, Archpundit should ask himself who sets the accountability standards for computers. Well, I think Dell knows you can go to any one of a number of competitors. That fear of losing customers tends to make Dell pretty accountable. Same with cars, watches and indeed, blogs. The reason people like Jack Ryan favor school vouchers/school choice, especially for the inner cities, is that they want low income minorities to have similar, if not identical, market power and accountability to the market power and accountability that Cong. Jackson’s parents got by sending Jesse Jr. to St. Albans, that Speaker Mike Madigan and his wife got by sending Lisa Madigan to the Latin School, that Governor Blagojevich and Patti get by sending their daughter to a Montesouri school and that affluent suburbanites get, albeit to a lesser extent, by sending their kids to high priced public schools, with the cost of admission being the ability to live in the affluent neighborhood and pay the high property taxes, mortgages and rents.
The problem is the public school choice programs demonstrate that parents often don’t have the ability to tell between a good school and a poor school. One of the larger examples is the St. Louis voluntary transfer program that operated for over 10 years below capacity despite thousands of children going to substandard schools. The Saint Louis Public Schools is riddled with bad schools (I’ve been in many of them and evaluate test scores from some on a regular basis) and yet parents despite choices to go to excellent county schools, magnet schools and now some charter schools, continue to send their kids to neighborhood schools that are often failing.
The reality that no one wants to talk about in inner-city schools is that many of the parents don’t have the capacity to make informed decisions. This is actually true of more than inner-city districts, but in other districts proxies work marginally well and parents do okay. Parents suffer from abject poverty, drugs, families that are falling apart, irregular work schedules, neighborhood violence, family violence and low generally low level of education. Given many of these parents didn’t do well in school and most had bad experiences in school, what makes them capable of evaluating the quality of a school?
One argument is that this view is paternalistic, and it is to some degree, but it also is a reality of what goes on in inner-city education. Parents are often unable or incapable of making choices that are in the best educaitonal interest of their children.
This doesn’t mean you take away the choice, but that you regulate it with standards just as we do with public schools–though the current standards are silly and pointless. Public money=public accountability. If you are going to start up a school that is receiving public money there is no reason it shouldn’t meet standards set by the public sphere. We can allow some of those standards that are based on specifically being a public school such as faith be put to the side as long as children have a choice, but in terms of instruction and standards I’m at a loss as to why we shouldn’t enforce those standards.
The assumptions of the market assume that the information is equally and freely distributed. That isn’t the case in schools and even amongst middle class parents they often make choices that we wouldn’t describe as rational. One of the better examples is Gary Orfield’s research that points out that parents often choose whiter school districts than one’s with higher performance. That isn’t rational, but it is certainly a choice. It is doubtful that they are studying the test scores as much as using race as a proxy of quality.
Putting in a voucher system that relies solely on parental choice in what schools survive and what schools don’t is asking for Harold Hills to get in the business to take advantage of poor students already being taken advantage of in our society.
But one of the better moves to improve health for teenagers would be to ban junk food from schools. In fact, that ban was pretty much in effect when I was in high school–let’s not talk about my currently oversized condition (you try and workout regularly with twins). Join Cross guys bring it up in relation to Tom Cross’ efforts to ban junk food in schools.
Illinois is actually one of the smarter states that requires physical education from grade school through high school every day with exceptions for health class and drivers ed (or those were the exceptions when I was in school). It is an important way to promote exercise and taking care of oneself–improving phys ed education for teachers would go along way to making it a field that isn’t just for coaches, but Illinois is on the right path.
Was in the Trib this weekend.
I’m an interventionist. A liberal one who believes that judicious use of US power can make the world a better place. I’ve seen the horrors of the misuse of that power in Nicaragua, but I still believe the US can be a productive force in keeping the world stable and avoiding genocide. And both those goals make us more secure.
Despite my change of heart on Iraq, I’ve supported most of our international efforts over the last 10-12 years. Used within the context of world institutions American power can do amazing things. Used outside of that context it is far less powerful. And I believe that there are decent Republicans who have similar beliefs. While partisan rancor is high right now, there are several Republicans I have a great deal of respect for–one of them being Dick Lugar. From the Trib article are some excellent insights:
“Unless the United States commits itself to a sustained program of repairing and rebuilding alliances, expanding trade, pursuing resolutions to regional conflicts, supporting democracy and development and controlling weapons of mass destruction, we are likely to experience acts of catastrophic terrorism that would undermine our economy, damage our society and kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people,” Lugar said.
Simple sentences are not his friend. But the point is obvious: The present strategy isn’t working.
“The United States, as a nation, simply has not made this commitment,” he continued. “We are worried about terrorism, but the evolution of national security policy has not kept up with the threat. We have relied heavily on military options and unilateral approaches that weakened our alliances. We have engaged in self-flagellation over the Sept. 11 tragedy rather than executive affirmative global strategies aimed at addressing the root causes of terrorism.”
The administration, which often regards Congress as little more than a nuisance, has even been reluctant to have key witnesses testify before Lugar’s committee.
Lugar isn’t perfect. He thought our efforts in the former Yugoslavia would fail. He was wrong there, but on Afghanistan and Iraq he has a depressingly nearly perfect record.
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