Kafka Comes to America

That’s the title of a new book about the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, and, by all accounts, an accurate description.

Truth be told, I probably won’t read it when it comes out - not for lack of interest, but rather, lack of intestinal fortitude.

I just read Nicholas Kristof’s astute opinion column in the New York Times detailing some of the absurdities of Gitmo, and I’m working my way through Charlie Savage’s Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (just released in paperback), where Gitmo is but one illustration in Savage’s larger picture of executive abuse of power.

Even these brief accounts of the injustices of Guantanamo are enough to turn my stomach. As Kristof notes today, “it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America’s image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.”

A few examples of the excesses of Gitmo, as chronicled in Takeover:

• Despite Bush administration claims to the contrary, few of the inmates at Guantanamo are “hardened terrrorists.” A 2006 Seton Hall University School of Law study revealed that 60% of the inmates had “no definitive connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.”
• 86% of the detainees were not caught in combat, but rather, were turned over to U.S. forces by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance when the U.S. was offering cash bounties.
• Most of the detainees were simple peasants who had been conscripted into Taliban militias against their will.

And this, of course, isn’t even the worst of it. Maher Arar’s is as Kafaesque, and as shameful to America as anything you can possibly imagine. And of course there are also the stories of Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.

It’s easy to forget the many ridiculous abuses of power of the Bush administration. There are just so damn many. But Guantanamo and the Bush administration’s assertion that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply are among the most egregious, and the most damaging to America’s image abroad.

 

Does Your Pastor Love America as Much as You Do?

I didn’t get to see Wednesday night’s debate on ABC, but I’ve read enough on the Internets to know that I’m glad I didn’t see it.

Hillary and some members of the press think that Barack deserved some “tough” questioning about things that were on people’s minds - like lapel pins, if Jeremiah Wright loves America as much as Barack (seriously: wtf kind of question is that?), etc.

Fair enough.

As Cogitamus asks, why isn’t John McCain being asked equally tough questions? What about his relationship with fraudster Charles Keating? What about his adulterous past? What about his wife’s drug abuse?

If it’s fair to expect the Democratic front-runner to answer barely-relevant, personal questions, then surely it’s fair to ask similar questions of St. McCain.

 

Sorry for the lack of posts…

…but not really, because since my last post I became a daddy!

My wife is doing great and our beautiful baby girl is healthy and wonderful.

 

Reason #4,563 I Love the Internet

Can you imagine going through life as Chastity Beltz? How about Tiny Bimbo?

John Tierney at the New York Times finds even more atrocious names.

Hat tip: Sullivan.

 

You Don’t Say

This has to be one of the most obvious stories the Tribune, or any newspaper for that matter, has ever printed. People without health insurance are more likely to suffer from chronic sickness and die than their insured counterparts.

And yet I don’t fault the Trib for running this monument to obviousness. Anything that calls attention to the dire situation millions of Americans are in is fine by me. Maybe these kinds of stories will fuel enough public outrage that people push their legislators to do something. Maybe reporting that people, and even Utahns with jobs (!!!) are dying because of inadequate care will motivate our Legislature to take some substantive action on the problem. Maybe.

I’m not holding breath.

 

Echoes of Waco (Updated)

I haven’t been following the FLDS-San Angelo story terribly closely, but everything I have read concerns me deeply.

There’s the obvious concern about the children, but also about some massive state action resulting in needless harm to both children and adults. Echoes of Waco, in other words.

Or perhaps more accurately, echoes of the Short Creek raid in the mid-1950s.

Voice of Utah pointed out the absurdity of evacuating an entire town’s worth of children because of one anonymous tip.

Besides being, at least on the face, unconstitutional and a vast abuse of state power, it seems that this is the sort of action that will only further entrench the FLDS. Members will see themselves as being persecuted by the government for practicing their religion, and will bond together even more closely. A siege mentality can’t be all that far off.

Update: The FLDS are already sounding the anti-government call. “The hauling off of women and children matches anything in Russia or Germany.” Good work, Texas.

 

The Church and Higher Education

More and more young Utahns, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, are putting off or skipping higher education.

Only 62% of those enrolled in Utah’s four-year institutions returned for their second year, 10% fewer than the national average. The Tribune article doesn’t explain their methodology, so it’s not clear if 38% are not enrolling for school immediately after their first year or fail to return after some specified time.

I always imagined that, if anything, our fair state would have a higher percentage of college graduates considering the LDS Church’s emphasis on education and the relatively inexpensive higher ed options available in our state.

But I wonder if the LDS Church actually contributes to some of these educational delays in some way.

The most obvious way that LDS culture might interfere with education, of course, is the missionary program. Mormon youth are eligible to serve as missionaries at ages 19 (for men) and 21 (for women), smack in the middle of a four-year college program.

I’ve often wondered, especially since I returned home from my mission at age 21 to face 3 and 1/2 more years of college, if both the Church and I wouldn’t have been better served if I’d completed my education first.

Further, “Utahns,” according to the Tribune, “tend to be ‘debt averse,’ leading some to prolong their educations.” Though Latter Day Saints have been counseled that student loans are an acceptable, LDS leaders have counseled members repeatedly to get out and stay out of debt. Perhaps that message has crowded out the message that student loans are acceptable in the minds of other Latter Day Saints.

So what do you think? Do missions and avoidance-of-debt counseling make us as Mormons more likely to delay or skip entirely higher education?

 

Congratulations! You’ve Just Won Adequate Healthcare Coverage!

If you didn’t already think that our health care delivery system was in total shambles, maybe this will convince you.

Oregon is giving away health insurance to lottery winners. That’s right: playing Powerball or scratching a couple of lotto tickets might just be your way to finally getting adequate health care coverage.

Will this be enough to convince Congress that it’s time for reform?

 

Obama’s Speech, Revisited

Last night, while jolking (jog-walking, a form of exercise particular to those of us trying to get in shape) at the gym, I had the deep displeasure of catching about 50 minutes of cable news. I had the option of either watching Fox News, CNN, or the gym parking lot.

I should have gone with watching the parking lot.

The topic of conversation on Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly and Campbell Brown’s shows was, of course, Senator Obama’s speech. O’Reilly and his guests (the not-as-noxious-as-Limbaugh-or-Hannity-but-noxious-nevertheless Laura Ingraham) presented intellectually dishonest presentations of Obama’s speech, saying that he failed to reject Reverend Wright’s unhinged and unsavory remarks, while Dobbs and Brown asked their esteemed guests questions, and subsequently failed to correct or challenge them when they offered false or questionable claims. Is this what passes for intellectual debate these days?

Today while sitting in my car during my lunch break (don’t worry - I wasn’t idling), I heard a discussion on NPR regarding Obama’s speech that I wish were the standard for the norm for intellectual debate in the mass media.

One of the panelists, a Michael Meyers (no, not that one. Nor the even more frightening one), wrote an Op-Ed piece for the LA Times yesterday claiming that Obama “blew it.” And Obama blew it, he says, not for any of the reasons you might think.

No, Obama blew it not because he failed to acknowledge the concerns of one group or another, nor because he insufficiently distanced himself from remarks of one kind. Rather, Obama blew it because he failed to offer a way out of the way we currently think about race.

Meyers contends that Obama had an opportunity to remind us that we are all a part of the human race, and that race as it has hitherto been discussed and thought of is not merely wrong, but harmful:

We can’t be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories. All of these prejudices surrounding tribe-against-tribe are old-hat and dysfunctional — especially the rants of ministers, of whatever skin color or religion, who appeal to our base prejudices and to superstitions about our supposed racial differences. The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.

This, rather than O’Reilly’s bilious conversation and Dobbs’ irrelevant discussion on The Speech, is thought-provoking.

 

 

“The Common Stake”

Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama could have offered a defensive speech today on his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He quite easily could have downplayed his relationship with Wright, stating that he only attended the Trinity United Church of Christ for fellowship with other African-Americans. He could have offered platitudes about race.

Instead, Obama offered what could be the speech that defines the 2008 campaign. Obama didn’t skirt the legitimate questions of his relationship to Wright, nor did he downplay his relationship with Wright. Instead of platitudes and clichés, Obama’s speech was honest and forthright about race in America, and yet hopeful for the future.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

Obama goes on to say that we can continue focusing on gaffes by opposing campaigns, demanding apologies, or we can continue focusing on Rev. Wrights, or seeing race only “as a spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial…We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election we’ll be talking about some other distraction…and nothing will change.” Rather, Obama asks that we focus on the common issues and problems we all share:

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There are only a few times I can think of when my heart swelled with pride to be an American. I remember when President Bush, just a day or two after 9/11, standing atop the rubble of the World Trade Center, grabbed the bullhorn and told the firefighters that he heard them, and that all of America heard them, and soon, the people who had committed this atrocity would hear them, too. I was proud of our resiliency, our strength, our determination.

Obama’s speech today was another such occasion.