Yes, John McCain. We know quite well who you are, and we don’t want anyone with your ego and your temper to have the power to fire American nuclear weapons.

While we’re on the issue of violence, are you consciously trying to get one of your enraged followers to inflict physical violence on Barack Obama? Listen to your rhetoric at your recent rallies. And see here.  I’m not the only person to wonder whether you are trying to incite violence.  See this post by Jeffrey Feldman. Consider this: You have successfully convinced your followers that Barack Obama is a terrorist.   What would you think one of your followers might be inclined to do once they became convinced that a “terrorist” was about to become President?

Then take a long look in the mirror.  Doesn’t your behavior and your rhetoric at recent rallies remind you of the sort of hate-filled political rallies you’d find in the sorts of despotic countries you’d like to overthrow? Doesn’t it further trouble you when a uniformed officer helps stir up the crowd on behalf of your ticket?

Senator McCain:  You didn’t have much further you could fall in my book, but you’ve just slipped from disgraceful to despicable.

For the past few years, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has successfully injected a huge does of psychology into the study of morality. Along the way, he has gone a long way toward bridging the “is” with the “ought,” a chasm that many philosophers have insisted to be unbridgeable.  Haidt explores these moral-psychological issues in highly readable form in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis:  Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Here’s a photo of my personal well-worn copy of Haidt’s book:

Based on his experiments, Haidt has been extraordinarily successful in describing the moral differences distinguishing conservatives and liberals.  Which group is more moral?  That isn’t the right question, according to Haidt.  Both of these groups sincerely strive to be “moral.”  Conservatives and liberals differ in the way they characterize morality because they base their differing moral senses on different measures. Based on Haidt’s research, there are the five separate measures (I think of them as tectonic plates) that underlie all moral systems.  Conservative morality substantially draws on all five of these five measures:

- harm/care
- fairness/reciprocity
- ingroup/loyalty
- authority/respect, and
- purity/sanctity

For liberals, however, the moral domain consists primarily (or only) of the first two of these five measures (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity).  For liberals, the other three measures (I’ll call them “conservative measures”) tend to fly under the liberal radar.  In fact, many liberals scoff at claims that the conservative measures (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity) have anything at all to do with morality.  To avoid a potential misunderstanding, remember that many conservatives also find the first two measures on the list to be important. Conservatives don’t limit their senses of morality to these first two measures, however.  Many conservatives thus feel strongly about issues regarding fairness and they feel compelled to help the poor and unfortunate members of society.  These impulses aren’t the full story for conservatives, though, and these first two measures are often overruled by the three “conservative measures.” For more detail on the five measures, see this previous DI post on Haidt.

Liberals thus downplay the three “conservative measures” and argue that when a government treats its citizens well and fairly, the government has fully done its job.  For liberals, the three conservative moral-measures are, at most, matters of personal prerogative.  For liberals, it’s certainly not the government’s job to tell us “My country, right or wrong.”  For liberals, it’s absurd for the government to expect us to respect authority figures we find severely lacking.  For liberals, government should focus on equal rights, not the personal disgust felt by many heterosexuals, when considering the issue of gay marriage.

Here’s the problem:  the three conservative moral measures often work for conservatives.   Why do they work for conservatives?  It’s not clear.  It’s a trillion dollar question.  If you can figure it out, let us know.

Conservative measures don’t compel all of us, of course, but they seem like life and death considerations to many conservatives.  The bottom line is that the three “conservative moral measures can be incredibly powerful influences on many people.  The conservative measures underlie the emotions that are triggered when conservatives see waving flags and threats of “terror.”  Use of certain types of triggers (such as “orange alerts” invocations of “God”) allow Machiavellian political operatives to play conservatives like puppets.  The documentary “War Made Easy” demonstrates the unrelenting (and potentially destructive) power of these “conservative” moral measures.

In his September 9, 2008 article at Edge.org, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, Haidt hits the bulls-eye when he explains why Democrats are so often seem so confounded in the face of Republican moralizing.  In his article at Edge, Haidt has persuasively explained how it is that so many conservatives embrace God-fearing flag-waving, even when those preachy flag-wavers are unabashed liars. Consider what Haidt proposes as the “first rule of politics”:

This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

In short, morality bubbles up from below for most people.  Morality is a gut-level phenomenon.  Morality does not originate in the form of top-down intellectual activity, contrary to what philosophers have often suggested. Haidt’s writings thus line up well with those of Antonio Damasio, who demonstrated through experiments involving people with damage to the pre-frontal cortex that there is no such thing as rationality in the absence of the guiding influence of emotions.

If Democrats are going to prevail, then, they can’t simply explain things to the People, they can’t simply stand up to reason with the People.  Instead, Democrats need to tap into the right emotions with their political positions.  They need to set aside serious time to better understand those conservative moral tectonic plates.  Only if they take this bottom-up approach will good things follow.

As Haidt makes clear, preaching about a “fair” society and a society that “cares” are not enough.  These two moral measures, in the absence of the other three, make for a thin, non-compelling moral soup for most conservatives.  Conservatives don’t want soup, they want a thick stew!

Conservatives don’t believe that the job is done when government makes sure that citizens have fair doses of resources and then sends them out to have a good life with no strings attached.  For conservatives, this seems like a big amoral (or immoral) party-time or, as Haidt, puts it, a shopping spree.

How does Haidt, a “moral psychologist” define morality?:

Morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Notice how Haidt’s definition focuses on the function of a moral system rather than any particular repertoire of activities (e.g., “Don’t have gay sex!) or any particular way of intellectualizing conduct (“For the sake of justice, let’s enact a new program to fairly distribute resources to the poor.”).  Notice, too, how both conservative morality and progressive forms of morality easily fit into Haidt’s definition.

In what way do conservative politicians excel?   They know that “morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.” For conservatives, morality is far more than a voluntary social contract. (more…)

[DemocracyNow press release]

ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here.

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfully detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar.  These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.

I found this on Reddit.com, which contained the link to wired.com.   How many times have you heard someone say, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then why do you care whether the government is spying.  Bruce Schneier at Wired assembled these well-considered responses:

“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.  Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (”Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Michael Moore didn’t mention this country in Sicko, but it offers health benefits that exceed those of most other countries, even France. It is a “model of sustainable ecology.” And check out the prison. This country has the world’s lowest murder rate, yet the longest prison sentence available is 21 years. Name this country . . .

And check out the final quote on the video.

If you read this Mother Jones article, you can get a disturbing update on the U.S. prison system.

Just when we thought it was a good time to buy one of those magnificent, Soviet-era dachas in Georgia, this happens.

We’re getting the updates on the most spectacular round of this event, but the fact is this has been brewing since the break up of the Soviet Union.  Georgia couldn’t wait to get out from under Russia’s thumb, where it had been for two centuries at least.  That they could not understand the desire on the part of the Ossetians and Abkhazzians to get out from under their thumb is proof that willful blindness, when politically inspired, is alive in all parts of the world.  Georgia has been conducting low-level warfare in these two regions since 1993 at least.  What has prompted this present crisis is Georgia’s president decision—due to a promise he made in his election campaign—to settle the issue once and for all and bloody well take the two provinces in question.  In anyone’s lexicon of who to blame, Georgia is here the equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decision to annex Kuwait (or China in its decision to annex Tibet—but for diplomatic reasons we don’t wish to draw such comparisons).

By that calculus, Russia has acted the part of the United States by invading Georgia and beating it about the head and shoulders until leaves Ossetia and Abkhazzia alone.

So why are we condemning Russia?

Because Georgia is the poster-child for America’s post-Soviet ambitions to see democracies spring up and flourish all over the former superpower.  Saakhashvilli won a more or less open election with a staggering landslide (something the Republicans claim often but never achieve for themselves) and Georgia has every appearance of becoming a successful democracy.

We’ve made commitments, at least verbally.  We told Georgia we’d back them.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Just what does that mean, though?  Back them how?  Cheer?  Send money?  Troops?

We are organizing humanitarian aid.  We want to use our military to deliver it.  This would put U.S. troops on the ground in Georgia, sort of a glove on the ground in front of Russia, a school yard dare.  If Bush plays this right, we may be in a shooting conflict with Russia before he leaves office.  McCain’s rhetoric seems to support the idea that we should push Russia out.  Diplomatically, of course (if possible).

But the fact remains that Georgia was the bad guy first.  We should have told Saakhashvilli to leave those two little breakaway states alone.  Democracy being our religion, our missionary zeal should have inspired us to take the side of the underdog.  Or in this case the under-underdog.

I am not so naive as to believe that the reasons for saying this and not saying that in a political situation are not complex.  But the consequences of policy can often surprise and embarrass us.  Damnit, why can’t the allies we back just behave?

Saakhashvilli and Vladimir Putin have also had a running cut fight going on since they got in each others’ faces.  There is no love lost between these two.  At times it has been juvenile, with references to height or brains.  Doubtless Putin welcomed an opportunity to humiliate Saakhashvilli and that, too, is bad public policy.  As I say, juvenile.

Doesn’t this all remind us of someone else, though?

The real tragedy is that here we have a president who has squandered whatever moral authority he had by essentially behaving in more or less the same way—naked aggression, overt regime change, nation building, using any excuse to send in troops, etc etc—trying to shake his finger, school-principle-wise, in Russia’s face, scolding them in a classic “Do what I say, not what I do” moment.

Now, for their part, Russia has a problem it will need to get over.  What Putin really doesn’t want is for Georgia to become a member of NATO.  Bad enough to have all the former Eastern Bloc countries signing up in what Russia can only perceive as a competitor organization—not necessarily the enemy, but surely we can understand their sentiment in feeling that Europe, not to mention the United States, may still feel a bit of concern over Russia’s ambitions and the bases of her fears?  So it is reasonable to see Russia’s attack on Georgia as—also—a warning.  Russia is saying, “Look, we can overrun this pissant democracy whenever we want, so have a care what kind of deals you make with them.”  This is a form of gunboat diplomacy.  Russia is probably saying more to us than to Georgia, which they consider a nuissance more than a threat.  But they would like to keep it a nuissance.  By joining NATO and allying itself with the West in such an overt way, Georgia does become a threat.

So what?  If Georgia wants to join NATO and we want them, so be it.  But we really ought to be more careful what kind of commitments we make to what kind of leaders and we ought to be willing publicly to chastise such leaders when they become antithetical to the stated goals of American policy.

In point of fact, the state department told Saakhashvilli not to go into Osettia.  We knew he was about to do it.  We suggested in very strong terms that this would not be a very good idea.  He ignored it.  We’re downplaying that now.  Maybe we shouldn’t.  Maybe we should let some of these sorts hang out to dry when they go against what we not only believe but in fact told them about.

It all goes back to what kind of promises got made.  And man we need to be more careful with those.

I’ve heard mention of Teddy Roosevelt with regards to Bush’s ideas on foreign policy.  Bush seems to like the Big Stick approach.  But take note—Teddy said  “Speak softly” first.  He rarely used the Stick.  It was a warning as much as a prescription.  For all his bombast, Teddy Roosevelt was a cautious diplomatist.  He had a grasp, as they say.

This guy doesn’t.

Apparently neither do many of his allies.

An interesting post at Huffpo. Citizens can perform a “citizen’s arrest” in some states. Beware that if you try to arrest Karl Rove, you could be arrested yourself.

It is awkward for me to argue that adults have the right to smoke marijuana. Whenever I make this argument, I suspect that people think that my arguments constitute a thin and self-serving façade for my own personal desire to smoke marijuana.

I have never smoked marijuana, though, and have never desired to do so, even though I worked as a rock musician in the 70’s. I don’t know why I have never desired to use marijuana or any other street drug. Maybe it’s because I fear the loss of “control”—life is already a bit out of control, it seems. Perhaps I have been cowed by the existence of criminal laws prohibiting possession of even possession of small amounts. Nor do I smoke or drink. I try to find my personal high through things like talking with friends, exercising and by exploring ideas.

When discussing the potential legalization of drugs, personal prejudice and flimsy anecdotes have a way of driving the conversation. That’s why I wanted to say a few things about my own attitudes toward marijuana before preceding.

This topic of the illegality of marijuana arose at a gathering of acquaintances yesterday. For those opposed to legalizing marijuana I suspect that their main argument was that marijuana use is morally wrong. In “mixed company” (involving people for and against criminalization of marijuana), this moralistic argument is left unarticulated, however, because it is a rare day when a simple claim that something is “immoral” convinces anyone of anything. In such gatherings, then, “health” arguments often serve as proxies for this unspoken bigger battle. For instance, in my experience, conservatives embellish the health risks of marijuana to justify their moral concerns in the same way that they embellish the health risks of abortion (the claim is that “abortion increases the risk of cancer”) to justify their moral concerns in that area.

What’s ironic is that so many people who oppose the legalization of marijuana based on “health” arguments would NEVER refer to the much more serious health concerns pertaining to tobacco and alcohol to argue for criminalization of tobacco or alcohol. So it’s not really about heath issues, right? In fact, many of the people who want to keep marijuana criminalized personally use, if not abuse, tobacco and alcohol (including using alcohol to an excess) as do many of their friends and family members. We wouldn’t want to make criminals out of my good friend Bob or my Aunt Mary, would we?

Conservatives hammer the “health” issues in an attempt to drive a clear wedge between marijuana and those legal mind-altering drugs. They argue that marijuana is dramatically different than legal drugs and that this difference justifies turning marijuana users into criminals. I find it interesting that conservatives use this same tactic to concoct a wedge between human animals and all of the other animals in an effort to find a special place for humans, in an effort to lambaste scientific findings based on biological evolution.

I do want to engage in one more digression . . . . It is astounding to me that conservative churches raise huge alarms regarding the use of illegal drugs but often say nothing about legal mind-altering drugs. Consider this quote by Tim Wu:

Over the last two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a full set of substitutes for just about every illegal narcotic we have.

It would seem, then that obedience to authority is a big factor in why many conservatives oppose drugs. Obedience is one of the well-documented pillars of conservative morality. Haidt’s approach dovetails with George Lakoff’s conclusions that the government metaphorically serves as a “strict father” to conservatives. This invites a chicken and egg issue. Is marijuana “bad” because the government says that it’s bad, or is it just “bad” and the government just recognizes this “truth?” The bottom line is that the government is certainly on board that marijuana is “bad,” and Wu/Haidt/Lakoff have given us reason to suspect that conservatives latch onto that government position to justify their own moral views. I suspect that this is exactly what is happening with regard to marijuana. The anti-marijuana folks are holding themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Now, back to my gathering of acquaintances. During our conversation, I heard from a proud conservative that marijuana should remain illegal because it is a gateway drug. However, tobacco has been well documented as a far superior gateway drug. I didn’t hear any of the anti-marijuana folks say anything about criminalizing that famous gateway drug, tobacco, so I was not convinced that this gateway “reason” to keep marijuana criminalized was genuine.

At the gathering, I also heard an argument that was new to me. I heard that people shouldn’t smoke because smoking marijuana “causes cancer.” (more…)

It’s difficult to watch hecklers, even when you agree with them. On a superficial level they are rude. By interrupting formal speeches they are preventing the officially designated speaker from delivering his or her message.

But what alternatives do we have when modern-day powerful politicians carefully exclude people who disagree with the speaker? Here’s the modern formula for political mind-control:

1.    Inept/corrupt politician talks to a large audience; and
2.     Audience warmly applauds the long stream of BS.; and
3.    There is no hint of any dissent.

This combination has worked wonders for George W. Bush.  Time and time again, he speaks only to a pre-filtered and therefore friendly audience that, in reality, represents only 20% of America.   And consider that Bush almost always speaks before private audiences, where dissenters can be excluded even more easily.   When Bush dares to stray out in front of an audience that he has not hand-picked, he gets roundly booed.   John McCain is now picking up where Bush left off by giving most of his speeches before highly screened audiences.

I’d like to take this moment to appreciate the efforts of at least some hecklers.   First of all, take a look at this video of John McCain being heckled at the recent conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.  The hecklers were accusing McCain of being a war criminal.  Admittedly, these are harsh words, truly.  And, again, this is a rude display.  But there are good reasons to think that anyone supporting military action in Iraq did so illegally and that these illegal acts have caused hundreds of thousands of people to die and millions of people to be permanently displaced from their homes.  Hence, the accusation “war criminal.”

Consider what happens at events where there are no hecklers while McCain touts his war-monger ideas.  Consider, first, that humans are a species of animals that run in herds. We are emotionally attracted to people who appear to be liked by lots of other people.  Consider, also, that polite silence appears to constitute approval.  When ideas are stated repeatedly yet unopposed, we see them as even more credible than they are.

And here is a point that is critically important:  when even a single member of a group speaks up in dissent, it makes it much less likely that an audience member will feel pressured to fall in line with the other members of the group. This effect was thoroughly demonstrated in the 1950’s through a series of experiments by social scientist Solomon Asch.

Excluding potential audience members, a trick at which conservatives excel, works a fraud on everyone attending the speech and everyone viewing it later on a video.  What else would you assume when a huge audience graciously listened while McCain promoted war-mongering?  We presume that audiences constitute a cross-section of the public at large.  This fraud is further perpetuated when we are not also shown videos of the numerous techniques used by political operatives to pre-filter an audience to make sure that the audience was thoroughly friendly?

Finally, notice how the television commentator framed the people protesting McCain in the above video. Perhaps “protester” would be the most neutral word for someone who shouted words of protest at a war-monger who tried to exclude people of dissenting viewpoints from his audience.   Instead, the commentator used the word “heckler,” a word that suggests incorrectness, and it suggests that most of the people who sat quietly agreed with McCain’s speech.

For the grand finale, of course, the “heckler” is usually escorted off the stage by law enforcement officials, suggesting that the heckler is a law-breaker, even when the heckler is often bravely and patriotically making sure that we don’t fall prey to the illusion of the “thoroughly happy audience.”

Too bad we can’t heckle the corporate broadcast media.  How different things might be if someone could pop up next to a television news desk and yell a few words of dissent . . .

The “bipartisan” telecom immunity bill is about to be made law.  It contains a specific provision granting amnesty to the telecoms which has been titled “”Protection of Persons Assisting the Government.”  How bad is this new law?  That depends on how badly you prefer that Courts be open and accessible to citizens.  You see, the proposed law provides for secret dismissals of lawsuits.

Glenn Greenwald has written a scathing review of the bill at Salon:

Perhaps the most repellent part of this bill (though that’s obviously a close competition) is 802(c) of the telecom amnesty section. That says that the Attorney General can declare that the documents he submits to the court in order to get these lawsuits dismissed are secret, and once he declares that, then: (a) the plaintiffs and their lawyers won’t ever see the documents and (b) the court is barred from referencing them in any way when it dismisses the lawsuit. All the court can do is issue an order saying that the lawsuits are dismissed, but it is barred from saying why they’re being dismissed or what the basis is for the dismissal.

So basically, one day in the near future, we’re all going to learn that one of our federal courts dismissed all of the lawsuits against the telecoms. But we’re never going to be able to know why the lawsuits were dismissed or what documents were given by the Government to force the court to dismiss the lawsuits. Not only won’t we, the public, know that, neither will the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Nobody will know except the Judge and the Government because it will all be shrouded in compelled secrecy, and the Judge will be barred by this law from describing or even referencing the grounds for dismissal in any way. Freedom is on the march.

Unbelievable . . .  Not Greenwald who is an astute and highly credible media critic.  I’m reacting to the proposed law.

I highly recommend visiting Salon for a review of Greenwald’s entire article.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the government in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. This decision strikes down a key section of the Military Commissions Act, the horrible piece of legislation passed by Congress in October 2006 that sought to condemn detainees to indefinite imprisonment with no real right to challenge their detention.

The MCA provided only for “Combatant Status Review Tribunals”, a farce trial that makes a mockery of the protections given by the Constitution to an accused person. Detainees are tried before military officers, rather than neutral judges. In these tribunals, they have no right to a lawyer, they can be barred from seeing the evidence against them, and they cannot call witnesses in their defense. In a number of cases, when the first CSRT concluded an inmate was not an enemy combatant, the government simply ignored the ruling and convened a second one to reach the decision it preferred.

These inquisitorial, rigged “trials” give further evidence of why the writ of habeas corpus is so vitally important. For over 700 years, it’s protected people against arbitrary and capricious imprisonment by their government. By forcing the government to publicly show the reasons why it has detained someone before a neutral magistrate, habeas corpus turns imprisonment into a tool of justice, rather than a tool of tyranny.

The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress may suspend habeas corpus, but only in cases of “rebellion or invasion”, when it is vital to protect public safety. Clearly, neither of these conditions is in effect at the moment. Thus, the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus for detainees was unconstitutional, and the Court was absolutely in the right to strike it down.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been in detention, in some cases, for over six years without ever being given the chance to prove their innocence. The Bush administration’s attempt to put them into a legal black hole, beyond the reach of all law, is anathema to everything the American justice system stands for. It’s long overdue that this injustice was corrected. If any of these detainees are terrorists or have committed war crimes against the United States, then let the government prove that in a court of law. Our justice system has served us well against those who would harm us for over two hundred years, and it will continue to do so. On the other hand, if any of these detainees are innocent - a very likely circumstance, given the dragnet-like way in which they were swept up - then their detention is an outrageous evil, and they should immediately be released.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that neither the President nor Congress may “switch the Constitution on or off at will“. The Court rejected the legal fiction that, because Guantanamo Bay is technically part of Cuba, the detainees have no recourse under the U.S. Constitution.

This is a great victory for due process and for the American legal system, and a bright day for friends of liberty everywhere. The only dark spot on this decision is that it was by a narrow, 5-to-4 majority. (Scalia’s dissent begins “America is at war with radical Islamists” and goes on to cry about how the terrorists will kill us if we don’t lock people up indefinitely with no trial. I am not joking.) If John McCain is elected president and has the chance to make the next few appointments to the Supreme Court, the fragile constitutional bulwarks which still stand against arbitrary government power will be in extremely serious jeopardy.

What can you do if the police dig through your garbage without your permission?   You  get even by digging through their garbage.   Willamette Weekly published this article back in 2002. Their idea was both simple and effective.  Whose garbage did they investigate?:

We chose District Attorney Mike Schrunk because his office is the most vocal defender of the proposition that your garbage is up for grabs. We chose Police Chief Mark Kroeker because he runs the bureau. And we chose Mayor Vera Katz because, as police commissioner, she gives the chief his marching orders.

The first two of these three had publicly proclaimed that it was OK for the police to invade a woman’s privacy by digging through her garbage.  This is a well-written piece demonstrating that revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.

That’s the message of Audrey Schulman, writing in Orion Magazine. Her article is entitled, “How to be a Climate Hero.”

Schulman describes psychology experiments where the subject is surrounded by stooges, everyone in the room doing a mundane task.  Eventually, something untoward happens. For instance, smoke starts pouring out of the vents, indicating a dangerous fire. If there are stooges present and they do nothing, the subject will usually do nothing.

It’s been repeated with many variations on the type of emergency: staged robberies, lost wallets, people in hallways crying for help, etc. Every time, if there was more than one person witnessing the event, all of them were almost certain to do nothing.

What does this lesson about the Bystander Effect have to do with climate change? Most of us are sitting around doing nothing at all, because most of us are sitting around doing nothing at all.

Right now everyone understands that something truly horrible is happening to the planet’s climate. The heat waves and forest fires, the floods and droughts. But there are 6 billion of us now—quite the Bystander Effect. So we stay in our seats filling out forms, trying to ignore the smoke swirling thicker around us. We bustle about our normal lives, assuming it can’t be as bad as it seems because surely, then, everyone would be marching in the street about it.

Here’s an important lesson you can learn from Schulman’s post. Learning about the Bystander Effect “innoculates” you against its destructive effect. When you are made aware of the Bystander Effect, you don’t have to do nothing just because most everyone else is doing nothing. You can jump into gear, reducing your carbon footprint and making lots of noise for change. Write those letters to the editor and write to your representatives. Discuss these issues with even a few friends; they will then be comfortable talking with their friends. We don’t have to be a country that still sells SUV’s and incandescent bulbs, a country that is still carving out exurbs and failing to enact a responsible national energy policy.

The lesson Schulman is teaching is a lesson we can all use every day in a massively dysfunctional society. It’s time to speak up, even if no one else is speaking up. Everyone else needs you to act first.

I have no sympathy. I can’t help it, but powerful people who behave this way strike me as the essence of…

Spitzer wired the call girl service the money. Granted, he set up a relatively elaborate blind to hide the transaction (it was his own money, not the state’s), primarily from his wife, but the fact is he established the monitoring protocols in the banking system in New York to catch exactly this kind of covert transfer. In other words, he made sure the system could catch him.

The first question that came to my mind was: why didn’t he use cash?

The second question—

Well, the second question is such a cliche it almost doesn’t bear asking, but: what he hell was he thinking?

Not thinking. Acting. Reacting. Making an assumption. I’ve already heard the term “self destructive” applied, and it would indeed seem the case. He was instrumental in breaking up a prominent prostitution ring as a prosecutor, he’d gone on record about the destructiveness of prostitution to families and to society, he had made a Big Deal about ethics in all his campaigns.

For the record, while I certainly agree that prostitution can be destructive, I do not agree that it is necessarily so. Like other things, it depends on context, and in the context of a society that criminalizes it, thereby making sex workers vulnerable to all sorts of criminal control elements, yes it is very destructive. But not in and of itself as an idea. There have been times and places where it was not so, and even in this country (Nevada) we can see instances where it is the avenue to financial independence for women and men (yes, men—we forget in the salaciousness of scandal that there are male prostitutes, both straight and gay, that women from time to time have been known to pay for sex they can’t get “at home”). Like any other industry, there are levels, and like any otehr industry in history where social controls did not exist, there are abuses. Keeping it illegal means normative protections and access to all the safeguards that, say, construction workers take for granted do not and cannot apply.

However. In Spitzer’s case he created his own disaster by loudly proclaiming his support for keeping prostitution illegal and then acting on that stance. Add to that the banking practices for which he was also responsible, and I find I have no sympathy for him. He acted foolishly.

Clinton did not run on an extreme family values platform. It was there, he gave it lip service, but it was never a centerpiece of any of his campaigns. One may question his judgment in the case of Monica, but the lying to Congress was far worse than his little breech of conduct in an anteroom of the Oval Office.

People at that level should know better. To be crude, they have staff who can handle that sort of thing. (Let’s be honest—even CEOs, presidents of corporations, and so forth hire “handlers” who do everything from scheduling high powered meetings to getting the cleaning done. Arranging trysts—and making sure they stay off the radar– would simply be one of their functions, and a governor, much less a president, should have two or three people like this.)

As to why he did it…do we really need to ask that? Come on. Sex and its convolutions is one of those areas wherein we turn a blind eye as if a part of our brain had been excised and we can’t bear to think about it.

What follows is a teensy-bit R rated. Nothing graphic, but the ideas might shock.

You’re married. You have 90% of a good relationship with your spouse. But you like this one thing in bed, really like it, the way wine connosieurs like a rare Bordeaux—and for whatever reason your spouse just won’t do it. The question is, do you just shut that desire off and go to your grave never having it? Or do you step outside to have your Bordeaux?

We all have choices, sure, but the nature of that one seems draconian. You might say to the connosieur “You’ve become an alcoholic, you may not drink at all,” and that would be valid. But to say “I don’t like Bordeaux, at least not that vintage, so you can’t have it either as long as you’re with me…” That’s not the same.

How one chooses to handle this problem is also another matter. I’m all for open discussion. Sneaking around behind your spouse’s back is a major Do Not Do for me. But one ought to be able to talk about this. (Personally, I have always been of the opinion that the Clinton’s have an arrangement like this, going all the way back to Bill’s days as governor of Arkansas. I think what incensed Hilary was that Bill picked that partner under those conditions, and then lied about it. After all, he had handlers…)

But my lack of sympathy for Spitzer has nothing to do with the sex. It is the two-faced way he has conducted his public policy life. Obviously, he thought the rules he advocated for everyone else ought not to apply to him.

Or, more perversely and I think not at all uncommon, he wanted to rid the landscape of any and all opportunity in order to keep temptation away from himself—that he knew on some level that he couldn’t say no, so the only way to protect his integrity would be to banish the object of his desire.

But that meant banishing it for everyone else as well. So to serve the interests of his own inability to manage an appetite, everyone had to pay the price.

Just as they kind of are now.

He rendered himself ineffective as a governor in this. Because of the illegal nature of prostitution, because of that he opened himself up to blackmail. The only way out of that trap would be to declare that he didn’t care and that he believed prostitution ought not be a crime in any event.

But he’d already closed that avenue of argument.

No sympathy at all.

Idiot.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

One out of every 99 American adults lives in a prison cell, according to a new Pew study.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world . . . .

The report said the United States is the world’s incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

Is anyone else struck by the irony that Homeland Security so often erodes First Amendment rights? Homeland Security has become obsessed about listening to personal phone calls and seizing people’s cell phones and laptops when they travel.  Ironically, there is no security for the victims of gunmen who shoot up college campuses and city council meetings.

At 48 years old, I can remember attending high school and college without any fear that someone would walk in and begin blasting away. The recent stories on the news, starting with last year’s Virginia Tech shooting, followed by a local killing rampage at a Kirkwood City Council meeting (5 dead, 2 critically injured, one of whom was the city’s mayor), and yesterday’s deaths on the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, has me wondering what has changed? Is it my level of awareness or is it a change in the basic behavior and beliefs of Americans?

Initially outraged by the extremely cavalier treatment of US citizens with Muslim backgrounds who attempt to travel out of the United States, I now find myself feeling deeply saddened and frustrated that innocent folks are uselessly harassed while others, intent on venting their rage, are so easily able to take many lives in a few short minutes. Is there a connection here? I think there is.
 
For eight years now we’ve lived in an atmosphere of fear, created by and fed by an embedded media that supports a President and a government that speaks of terrorism and “The Enemy” as something out there, waiting to get us all.

Whatever we might think about the media’s ability to affect how we think and behave, I personally believe it is impossible to escape its effect altogether. Even if we refuse to turn on the TV or the radio, there is the Internet.  And even if we do not indulge in surfing the Internet, our neighbors, friends and family members are certainly not on a low- or no-media diet. The atmosphere of fear pervades the very air we breathe.
 
Unfortunately, there is no respite and there are no sure-fire solutions offered by the government or the media. Homeland Security?  It’s not effective.  It’s a “war” we cannot win. Just as computer viruses and system break-ins continue to be engineered by those with the fever to destroy, terrorists bent on passing through security lines will think of new and creative ways to detonate their bombs and kill people.

The result is that we feel completely out of control. Guess what? It’s true. We are. Despite increased security (That woman’s a Muslim! Take her cell phone!), shooting rampages continue, children continue to be raped and kidnapped, and the fear builds.

We can run but we can’t hide from fear. We can keep our children indoors and we can give them cell phones with instructions to call us from wherever they go, but we still can’t quell the fear. Fear has the capacity to build on itself and, without a means to face it, we become driven by it.  The Fearful people themselves become dangerous. People who are basically motivated by fear can become so angry and frustrated that they act out. They sometimes kill. (more…)

It’s easy to call Cookie Thorton a madman. No one in his or her right mind would walk into a civilized city council meeting and open fire - we can all agree on that. But by writing this week’s shooting in Kirkwood off as the aberrant act of a crazed mind, we are left coming up empty when we ask why. Platitudes will abound, only God can know why these innocent people were taken from us, they will say. My sympathies lie with the families and friends of all the victims, including Mr. Thorton. He snapped, that much is obvious. My challenge to investigative journalists is to examine this story deeply - from all sides - until the underlying truths can be pried free and examined openly. Hopefully, we can all learn from the complex tensions that plague the Kirkwoods of our world.

Kirkwood is a robust community, straddling the older inner suburban ring and the vast newer suburban sprawl fanning out from St. Louis. It is one of the last bastions of great older housing stock, vast Victorians and cozy brick cottages all on substantial lots and connected by sidewalks and parks and schools. New construction has been squeezed in, too, with condos popping up as well as the random new home over a razed lot. Its town center thrives with shops and salons, restaurants and coffee houses. A popular community college, a hospital and a busy recreation center, complete with a theater, ice rink and a swimming park full of fountains and activities, add to Kirkwood’s stability and appeal. The southern edge has become a retail mecca, with not only a Sam’s Club and a Wal-Mart, but also a Target right next door. Strip malls connect them and face another row across the road.

I don’t live in Kirkwood, but I go there to shop and eat. I have a good friend who moved there from the city; oh, and my shrink’s office is housed in one of the many medical buildings scattered around the hospital, so I do visit now and again, let’s say. My friend loves living in Kirkwood, and I know many others who feel the same. A co-worker grew up there, and happened to be back there the night of the shooting, enjoying Ben and Jerry’s with her family right across the street from City Hall. She was visibly shaken as she recounted the story to us the next day - not so much by the hour or so they’d been locked down inside with their treats, but more by the identity of the shooter. She knew Cookie, she said. When my friend was in school, he’d married her P.E. teacher, and would stop by now and then to visit. He’d play games with them, getting them active and laughing. He was just wonderful, she said. We all loved him. I’ve heard that more than once these last few days. He was delightful, so kind. A great guy. Wow. What happened? Did he succumb to some lurking mental illness, some defect that can’t possibly affect any of us “normal” citizens? Or was it something else?

Cookie Thorton lived in Meacham Park, the one part of Kirkwood that most citizens don’t want to mention. Meacham Park is run down. It doesn’t fit the Kirkwood image. The houses are tiny, the yards not typically landscaped and sometimes hardly mowed. Many are rentals, and by and large, the residents of Meacham Park are poor. And as is too often the case, they are also mostly black.

I visited one of these residents regularly a few years back. She was the foster mom of a baby I represented as a CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocate), or Voices for Children as they are now called in St. Louis. This woman was lovely, big and loud and full of life. She loved that baby with all her heart, and I clearly remember wishing that all foster kids could have the privilege of being cuddled by someone like her as they waited for their lives to be sorted out by the grown-ups supposedly in charge.

Her house was small, but it was clean and tidy. She managed to get by on a minimal income; she’d moved there so that her own kids could go to the Kirkwood schools for a good education. They got by with a lot fewer things but as much love and laughter as you’d find in any of the sprawling Victorians rising only a few blocks away. Sadly, they also got by on a lot less respect than is given to those for whom success is measured by the weight of their possessions.

Meacham Park made headlines in 2005 when Kevin Johnson shot and killed a police officer in his patrol car. Johnson was just recently sentenced to the death penalty. He did kill a cop but I’m not sure how the fact that his younger brother had just died that same day didn’t somehow ameliorate the sentence. Especially since his brother had collapsed at home, and according to some witnesses, the police were slow to respond. Johnson believed they didn’t do enough to help. Maybe they thought he’d collapsed because of an overdose, or because he’d been fighting. Maybe they responded just fine and were only perceived to have not cared. Regardless, Johnson felt like they didn’t give what was a legitimate medical emergency (the brother died of a heart ailment) its due. He was distraught and in his grief needed to blame someone. He made a horrible, cold decision to “take out the first cop he saw.” He didn’t think, he acted irrationally. One of the officers provided a target for that grief, and now Johnson is scheduled to join his brother in death. All of it, senseless. Johnson had been in trouble with the law before, and I am not, in any way, defending his actions any more than those of Cookie Thorton. He caused great grief to an entire community, and he should pay dearly for his actions, absolutely. But until we look hard at the underlying problems here - the tension between minority residents in a low-income neighborhood and the powers-that-be in their town - I fear more of these episodes on the horizon.

Meacham Park residents are certainly not all steeped in a mentality of violence, nor is the violence in our fair municipality concentrated there. But I’d be a fool if I said that it doesn’t exist, and we’d all be fools to deny that the ready access to firearms in this country makes acting upon emotional outbursts potentially more violent and permanent. I believe, as a culture, we’ve taken our right to bear arms (which I support in its basic form) to an absurd extreme, but that remains another debate for another time.

Cookie Thorton apparently had owned an asphalt business. According to his brother, he’d been promised a slice of the redevelopment work in the area a few years back, presumably when the strip malls and box stores went in. A goodly amount of work for an asphalt guy, what with the flat roofing and the expansive parking lots to cover. He didn’t get it, though, and without the work he believed the city fathers had promised him, how could he afford to find himself a space for his business? So he parked his trucks at his home, providing an open target for an annoyed city government. My guess is that he’d complained about not getting the work, maybe even loudly. We do know that he was a vocal complainer, doing so loudly and bitterly and eventually bizarrely once the spat began in earnest. He felt slighted, he complained, and my guess is that the city decided to quiet him by citing him for parking commercial vehicles in a residential area. Uh-oh, you can’t do that! City ordinances prohibit it, and he was breaking the law. Cut and dried, that’s what that is.

Those city ordinances are designed to protect the appearances of neighborhoods, we all know that. Who wants a big ol’ asphalt truck hunkered down in their block? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. But what was Cookie to do? Sell his trucks and lose his business? And if he’s paying fine after fine to the city that promised him work and didn’t deliver, how is he supposed to save up for a business lot onto which he could move the trucks? No one, it seems, could find a compromise.

Again, easy to say who’s right and who’s wrong here. Cookie broke the law, the city tried to enforce it, he fought them and lost, he should just shut up and deal with it. Right? He certainly shouldn’t have taken the action he did on Wednesday night. But what?

Have you ever tried to deal with a local bureaucracy? Merely by mentioning this to people, I’ll wager you’d hear story after frustrated story. I know I did. One woman told me about her husband’s business being tortured by a city council upset with his business partner. Her husband had poured piles of money into rehabbing old property and revitalizing another inner suburb here by opening a popular and thriving restaurant, but his partner managed to aggravate the council. My friend and her husband felt completely battered, cited and fined and slowed down by one minute detail after another. Code violations were being selectively enforced, as other developers got away with sidestepping them one after the other. And once the offending business partner was bought out and sent packing, the council suddenly had no more time to mess with them and, poof, it all went away.

Another friend told me about the hoops he was required to jump through when trying to sell a small house in a faltering suburb, an area in which property values were falling and people were consistently moving away. His house failed inspection for the most inane reasons, while the homes of elderly neighbors who were being moved to nursing homes were consistently passed in the exact same condition as his. The last straw for him was grass - the house would have passed save for a bit of grass in the driveway. He went to city hall and engaged in a shouting match with an inspector, his frustration blazing. He said he totally understood the feeling of frustration Cookie Thorton must have felt. He felt it that day. The security guard came in ready to haul him away, but realized he was only venting, and let him have his say. My friend is a fairly small man, Caucasian and clean-cut. I wonder, had he been shaped or colored otherwise, would it have played out the same way? I’m not sayin’. Just wondering . . .

Another friend impeccably rehabbed a house in the city, across the street from mine. He had French doors installed on the front of the second story, leading out to a small deck over the front porch. Our volunteer “block captain” turned him in to the city for code violations, for not maintaining the historical integrity of the structure. The house had been boarded up for years, mind you, a real eyesore on an otherwise pleasant block. And nearly every other rehabbed house up and down the street had been changed in some way that violated the historic building code - wrong windows, glass blocks, you name it. But she turned him in because the old door hadn’t been French. And when she was questioned about it, she stated that it wouldn’t be fair to turn the other people in, because they couldn’t afford to pay the fines or make the changes. But this guy, well, he’s in the media so he can afford it. She said this with a straight face, as if anyone in her right mind could see her logic and would agree that equal enforcement of the rules made very little sense.

So much for cut and dried. So much for winning if you play by the rules, losing if you don’t. You win if you don’t piss them off, that’s all. If you do, well, God help you.

Personally, I think Cookie Thorton was driven to his insane end not by mental illness but by cultural illness. Not by overt racism but by the insidious intolerance of those who struggle by those who do not, resting precariously on a base of generational racism on both sides. Mayor Swoboda of Kirkwood, who as of this writing is fighting for his life in a local hospital, certainly did not deserve to get shot - nor did anyone else that night. Disputes should be able to be solved in other ways, civilly, not by “going to war,” as Cookie’s brother said he did. The mayor has a reputation in some circles, though, spoken quietly several times over the past couple of days, for being intolerant of those who didn’t agree or go along with him.

Cookie most assuredly didn’t go along. He wanted to be treated fairly and he believed that he was not. He pushed against the system and the system pushed back, hard. He lost first his dignity, then his free-speech lawsuit, and finally, apparently, his mind. And now none of it can be returned to him, nor can the lives of his victims be returned to their loved ones. He will be vilified, without a doubt. But I hope that somehow, beyond that blame, we might also finally hear his side, and learn some hard lessons from this tragic, senseless episode.

Was he really promised work that was not delivered? If so, why? If not, what happened that made him believe he had been?

Who did get the work he thought he was getting? Were those contractors connected to anyone in City Hall in any way? How many contractors on those jobs were minority-owned and/or Kirkwood-based businesses?

What was the basis of other disputes he had with the city - did any of them have any merit?

Were the parking violations for which he was cited the only ones being enforced? Are code violations typically enforced equally between Meacham Park and the rest of Kirkwood?

These are some of the questions I hope the media will strive to answer - not to lay blame for these deaths anywhere but at the feet of Cookie Thorton - he and he alone took those lives. Rather to determine if any of his frustration was justified, and if so, to begin a real and public discussion on changes that might mitigate such feelings in the future.

I believe this kind of discussion would be much more productive, if also more painful, than whether or not metal detectors should be installed in the city office buildings. If our laws are not enforced consistently and fairly, the laws shouldn’t exist in the first place. If enforcement is used not judicially, but instead to silence, drive out or otherwise harass citizens on the fringes of our communities, we step away from democracy into a chaos that will ultimately swallow us all.

The United States. Here are some shocking details from Nomi Prins of Alternet:

The United States has more inmates and a higher incarceration rate than any other nation: more than Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, India, Australia, Brazil and Canada combined. Nearly 1 in every 136 US residents is in jail or prison. That’s 2.2 million people, an amount that quadrupled from 1980 to 2005. (There were only 340,000 people incarcerated in 1972.) Adding in figures for those on probation or parole, the number reaches 7.1 million.

Over the next five years, the American prison population is projected to increase three times more quickly than our resident population. The Federal Prison system is growing at 4% per year with 55% of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses, and only 11% for violent crimes. Women are more likely than men (29% to 19%) to serve drug sentences, dismantling thousands of families. One-third of prisoners are first time, non-violent offenders. Three-quarters are non-violent offenders with no history of violence.

For one of the main causes, consider these additional stories and statistics regarding the alleged ”War on Drugs.”

Bhutto is dead.

One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue.  Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.

We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides.  Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable.  We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.

But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions.  The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational.  Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.

Which in the end will be everyone.  Under such a program, no one may be in charge.

And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror.  All progress must cease by this program.  Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.

These people are insane.  Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying.  They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made.  Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.

There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear.  One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.

The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home.  We do not riot.  We do not overturn the Constitution.  We do not have coups.  (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.)  How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion?  We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.

Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself.  But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.

And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.