Impeach!

Not Bush. The Vice President!

Vice presidents didn’t used to be controversial figures. In fact, the job was something of a booby prize, awarded to an also ran, a promising newcomer whose career the party deemed not quite ready for prime time, or as a reward to an elder statesman.

The main role of the vice president was largely to balance the presidential ticket in a campaign, either geographically or ideologically and, once in office, for the president to have somebody to send to those all-important state funerals and political fundraisers.

Al Gore became known as the first modern vice president to break that mold and to actually be influential on public policy matters. He had Clinton’s ear more than most modern vice presidents and was considered an anomaly.

Then came Dick Cheney and his co-presidency with Bush. You could say, with some understatement, that he certainly has pushed the envelope on the vice president’s role.

Here’s how Dan Quayle described his encounter with Cheney, in an article in today’s Washington Post, the first in a four-part series examining the Vice President's role in the Bush administation. Quayle's recollection highlights how very different the traditional vice presidential role used to be:

In his Park Avenue corner suite at Cerberus Global Investments, Dan Quayle recalled the moment he learned how much his old job had changed. Cheney had just taken the oath of office, and Quayle paid a visit to offer advice from one vice president to another.

"I said, 'Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising . . . you'll be going to the funerals,' " Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. "I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, 'We've all done it.' "

Cheney "got that little smile," Quayle said, and replied, "I have a different understanding with the president."

"He had the understanding with President Bush that he would be -- I'm just going to use the word 'surrogate chief of staff,' " said Quayle, whose membership on the Defense Policy Board gave him regular occasion to see Cheney privately over the following four years

Indeed, since that fateful meeting, Cheney has pushed the boundaries so far that he’s becoming a threat to the Constitution and a danger to democracy.

As today’s WaPo reports, Bush has signed all kinds of clandestine powers to his vice president, literally in the darkest secrecy.

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

And Cheney has resisted even in the most innocuous of subpoenas to testify about his role in anything. He has claimed executive privilege, and most recently even clashed with executive level agencies alternately claiming that even they have no jurisdiction because he is not part of the executive branch of government but is the president pro temp of the Senate. When it suits him, he cites separation of the various branches of government to keep from being accountable to any governmental branch. Basically, he’s putting himself and the office of vice president above the reach of the law.

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security

And here:

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.
In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals and information flow into the vice president's office from around the government, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviews that almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similar one-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to the vice president but little or no reaction flowing down.

And this:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, was astonished to learn that the draft gave the Justice Department no role in choosing which alleged terrorists would be tried in military commissions. Over Veterans Day weekend, on Nov. 10, he took his objections to the White House.

The attorney general found Cheney, not Bush, at the broad conference table in the Roosevelt Room. According to participants, Ashcroft said that he was the president's senior law enforcement officer, supervised the FBI and oversaw terrorism prosecutions nationwide. The Justice Department, he said, had to have a voice in the tribunal process. He was enraged to discover that Yoo, his subordinate, had recommended otherwise -- as part of a strategy to deny jurisdiction to U.S. courts.

Raising his voice, participants said, Ashcroft talked over Addington and brushed aside interjections from Cheney. "The thing I remember about it is how rude, there's no other word for it, the attorney general was to the vice president," said one of those in the room. Asked recently about the confrontation, Ashcroft replied curtly: "I'm just not prepared to comment on that."

This cannot stand!

In a republic with a democratically elected representative government, governed under a constitution, this is unacceptable behavior. No man is above the law. And certainly nobody – not the president or his vice president – should be allowed to wipe away, with the stroke of a pen, the most basic of human rights, the right to a trial. We are a nation of laws. That is our greatest legacy to the world. It's what every soldier, not just in Iraq, but in every war we've ever fought to defend democracy has fought for.

This vice president must not be allowed to subvert that legacy. Dick Cheney must be reined in. He must be held accountable to the American people and made to comply with the rule of the law or he must go.

Michael Bloomberg: Whom Does He Hurt?

I’ve been surfing the blogosphere and the MSM newspapers, especially the New York ones. There are basically two prevailing opinions about who gets hurt most if New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who just jumped from the Republican Party to the Independent label, decides to run.

According to David Frum, in National Review on-line, it hurts the Republicans most. Here he writes:

“So far, none of these winners and losers will affect the general outline of the election much. But here's one more prediction: Bloomberg will launch his campaign on the high road, giving worthy speeches about rebuilding US alliance, reforming health care, combating climate change, and other topics designed to win him the approbation of the Manhattan financial and media elite. Favorable publicity may bump him up to 5% or 8% in the polls, just enough to keep him spending money. But after the conventions of the summer of 2008, voters will begin returning to their homes in the two big parties. Bloomberg's numbers will dwindle (as Nader's did). He will then face a stark choice: accept that he's been made a monkey of - or up the ante. Nobody gets to be as rich as Bloomberg if he is not a fierce competitor. So - assuming he has followed the path thus far - he will double down. He will go negative, filling the airwaves with harsh attack ads.

Against whom will those ads be aimed? A lot will ride on that question. Attack ads are dangerous things, because they damage both the attacker and the attackee. Their main effect is not to change votes from D to R or R to D, but to depress turnout among potential supporters of the targeted candidate. Candidates refrain from excess negativity for fear of damaging their own image. But a Bloomberg in the polling basement will feel no such constraint.

The ads will be a free gift to the candidate Bloomberg dislikes less at the expense of the candidate he dislikes more.

And the candidate he dislikes more will almost certainly be the Republican.”

Frum makes some interesting points, but I don’t think Mayor Bloomberg hurts the Republicans more than the Democrats for a several of reasons. First, no really plugged in Republican ever truly believed Michael Bloomberg was one of them. He was a lifelong Democrat who switched parties just to avoid a crowded primary field. And he gives the term RINO all new meaning. From day one, Bloomberg declared that his mission was to remake the Republican Party as a liberal party. It was never going to happen outside of Manhattan’s silk stocking district where the politics are more pro-business, free trade, libertarian, and corporatist than Republican.

So, the other prevailing conventional wisdom, as captured by John Hawkins at Rightwing News is:

The natural issue for a third party candidate would seem to be illegal immigration, but Bloomberg is pro-comprehensive immigration, just like all the top tier Republican and Democratic candidates, other than Fred Thompson. If Fred Thompson or another tough on illegal immigration nominee like Duncan Hunter were to win the nomination, Bloomberg would hurt the Democratic candidate. If both candidates are pro-comprehensive immigration, Bloomberg's entry would probably be a wash.

Bloomberg is pro-abortion. Again, that would probably undercut the Democratic nominee.

Bloomberg is Jewish and since Jews typically vote Democratic 70/30, he would probably draw more of them from the Democratic candidate.

Since Bloomberg is from New York, you'd have to think he would have the potential to draw votes away from the home town girl, Hillary in New York State and perhaps in states like Florida, which have a lot of transplanted New Yorkers living there. If Rudy turns out to be the GOP nominee, this would probably turn out to be a moot issue.

Bloomberg does have a reputation as a fiscal conservative, but he has raised taxes and is not in any way, shape, or form a small government guy. We're talking about a guy who banned trans-fats in restaurants. So, for that reason, he would probably have a lot of difficulty appealing to small government conservatives. Again, this issue would probably be a wash.

Bloomberg hasn't talked a whole lot about foreign policy which isn't surprising, given that he's just a Mayor, but the limited number of things he has said about the issues make him sound more like a Democrat than a Republican. So again, he would probably drain more support from the Democratic candidate.

In fact, if you look at Hawkins' talking points, Bloomberg is your typical slightly left of center candidate, much like the Democratic frontrunners. It’s a general rule of thumb that when two individuals who hold roughly the same moderate to liberal principles run against each other in a three way race against a conservative, the two left center candidates will split the liberal, moderate and independent votes leaving the conservative to slide into an easier victory with a smaller number of dedicated true believers.

I think Bloomberg undercuts any Democratic candidate. He probably won’t be a threat to the very liberal parts of the Democratic base, as Ralph Nader was in 2000, but he will appeal to independents. They are not aligned with any party and Bloomberg’s pragmatic socially liberal, fiscally moderate, pro-business, sympathetic to the poor, not antagonistic to labor platform will appeal to them. And despite his recent foray into Republican politics, their base never thought he was one of them anyway.

Another problem for Democrats is that Bloomberg never cut his ties to some of his most powerful Democratic friends and allies. Indeed, in his last run for mayor, in 2005, he sucked up lots of the money that would have gone to his Democratic opponent because of his longtime friendship with powerful Democratic fundraisers like Toni Goodale. Here’s a quote from Christ Smith at New York Magazine:

Toni Goodale, the socialite, professional fund-raiser, and loyal Democrat, knows Rattner well but wasn’t invited. Yet her long friendship with Bloomberg, a neighbor, was enough to hamper one of his Democratic challengers. “I’ve been supporting Gifford [Miller] since he was a baby,” Goodale says. “I was one of Kerry and Gore’s major, major fund-raisers; I raised hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for each one. I think Gifford is great, and he could be a terrific mayor—someday. But he knows we’ve been friendly with Bloomberg. My daughter works for the corporation counsel—for Michael Cardozo, who was my kindergarten boyfriend—and in effect for Bloomberg. So when Gifford asked for help with fund-raising, I said no.”

Got that? A major fundraiser who did heavy lifting for Kerry and Gore but threw her considerable financial weight behind Republican (in name only) Bloomberg and not the Democrat Gifford Miller. And despite his more recent dustup with the Transportation Workers Union Local 100 during the transit strike, Bloomberg won the endorsement and cultivated the support of some of the city’s municipal unions:

Frank Ombres is standing on West 34th Street, grinning broadly as thousands of his happy union brothers pour out of the Hammerstein Ballroom after a raucous event that’s part press conference, part TV-commercial shoot, and part union-hall blowout. Moments ago, Mike Bloomberg was onstage, bopping tentatively as “Welcome to the Jungle” screamed from the loudspeakers and carpenters and glaziers chanted “May-uh Mike! May-uh Mike!,” their enthusiasm stoked by the city’s humming economy and an open bar paid for by Bloomberg 2005. Turning his company into an international powerhouse earned Bloomberg the respect of his corporate peers. But nothing satisfies the ego of a pencil-necked plutocrat like soaking in the cheers of a theater full of burly construction workers.

Ombres is secretary-treasurer of Laborers Local 731, and after the rally, he’s telling a story about meeting Bloomberg in a slightly different setting. “He had us over to his house a couple months ago,” Ombres says. “All the union leaders. That was pretty cool. It’s a fancy place, but he’s a regular guy. He put on a good spread. And he’s come through for us. All we want is work and new members, and he’s got construction going for the next 50 years.”

Bloomberg inoculates himself from some of the blame for his role in putting down the transit strike in 2006 because Governor Pataki, not the mayor, appointed the Metropolitan Transit Board that played hardball with the TWU. Although Bloomberg went to court to force the strikers back to work – the judge invoked New York state’s Taylor law to fine the striking union $1 million a day – the mayor actually played no role in the negotiations. So, he was able to lay it at the governor’s feet for appointing an intransigent board.

The Democrat’s only hope of not losing in a three way race where the two liberals split the independent and moderate votes is that Bloomberg keeps saying he’s not going to run. If he keeps his word, that’s the Democrats’ best shot at holding their base and reaching out to moderates and independents disenchanted with the Republican Party.

Hopefully, Michael Bloomberg is simply positioning himself to come back to the Democrats some day and be a player there. Otherwise, we have a long, difficult campaign season that might end in bitter disappointment for both Bloomberg and the Democrats.

Bloomberg probably wouldn’t win. The track record for third party candidates without a party machinery to help get out the vote isn’t very promising. But he sure could keep the Democrats from reaching the White House and he could give victory by default to the very Republicans he supposedly disdains. We can only pray that his much vaunted pragmatism wins out over his ego.

AIAW Unmasked - Sort Of

I am doing something a little bit different for me. I usually don't post pictures or illustrate my posts. The reason for this is simple. I'm not much good at the technology, simple as it is to use. And I would rather write than show photos of myself. But I just got back from visiting my father in Fort Lauderdale for Father's Day, and I'm not really in the mood to do a serious post. And I'm certainly not in the mood for the usual blogger-political warfare that appears to be breaking out across the blogosphere. I don't want to lose the mellow feeling for a few more days at least.

So hopefully, you'll enjoy some pictures of me with some of my union buddies. They were taken at Chuck Caputo's campaign kickoff a few weeks ago. I never really meant to post them. But at a loss for anything else, I thought it would be fun for people to see I'm not really anonymous - it's just the title of a blog.

Karen

L-R: John Niemec, from Fairfax County Firefighter's Union; not-so-Anonymousisawoman, Dan Duncan, President of the Northern Virginia Central Labor Council; and Bob Moses, Vice Chair of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee and fellow AFL-CIO member

L-R Captain Brad Waltrip, Airline Pilots Association; AIAW; Dan Duncan; and Diane Waltrip, Legislative Aide to Del. Chuck Caputo

Congrats to All Our Candidates!

If you go back to my endorsements, you will see that not everybody I wanted won yesterday. I am disappointed. And my heart goes out to those candidates who didn’t win. Running for office takes a leap of courage and a lot of work. Each and every person who does it deserves kudos for putting themselves on the line. They risk disappointment, rejection, embarrassment, and the downright meanness of the general public. When you become a public figure, the public feels it owns you and forgets that there is a human being in there who still has feelings just like they do. So my sympathy and heartfelt appreciation goes out to all those who didn’t make it but chose to take the risk and to subject themselves to that.

And my hearty congratulations to all those who won even if you weren’t my first choice. And that’s important. In a Democratic primary, those who might not have been my first choice are still my candidates now. And I will support them, work for them, and vote for them in November. And I hope to see the rest of you, regardless of who your first choice was, there beside me in the trenches.

Now, I’m heading out to see my dad for Father’s Day.

Primary Endorsements

You know, there’s no primary in my district. That means I get to wake up at my normal time and go to work without detouring to a polling place at 6 a.m. That’s only one of the benefits of having no contested races in my district. The other is that I actually don’t have to make endorsements. There’s wisdom in not going out my way to make enemies.

So, against all commonsense, I’m going to give you my endorsements anyway.

Let’s start with the Greg Galligan-George Barker race.

I have all the respect in the world for George Barker and could absolutely support him against Jay O’Brien if he comes out the victor tomorrow. He has a long resume of public service and has been involved in the community and Democratic politics for years. He’s capable and bright.

But Greg Galligan did the difficult thing last time. When the Republicans were in the ascendancy in public esteem and Democrats couldn’t win certain districts, Greg went out and challenged a popular incumbent. That took courage.

In addition, Greg, in his much shorter career, has proven himself equally capable and bright. He simply hasn’t lived long enough to rack up the credentials that George has. This time, I’m going to choose courage and conviction over experience.

Another reason I’m for Greg is because I think it’s time the Democratic Party started being future oriented and thinking like people who could actually win and leave a legacy. For too long we’ve elected placeholder politicians. Those are officials whose ambition is limited. They run for a local or state office and that’s where they stay.

And we need some of those people who are at exactly where they want to be and who will build up seniority within the system. But we also need a farm team that will move on. We’ve been caught short in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate because we don’t have candidates who have served at the local level and build up their names and their public recognition to run for higher office. We got lucky with Jim Webb but we almost had a vacuum that would have catapulted George Allen into the frontrunner status in the 2008 Presidential race.

Judy Feder, Andy Hurst, Ken Longmeyer were all great candidates. But they went up against Goliaths and they just weren’t Davids. They shouldn’t be expected to be. Sending beginners, with virtually no name recognition and no experience with elective office, into battle against popular incumbents in leadership positions in Congress is not a winning formula.

We need to elect young, ambitious people to local and state offices who will move up a ladder, whether aspiring to higher statewide office or going on to the federal level. We need to nurture and develop the Chap Petersens, David Bulovas, Steve Shannons, and the Greg Galligans. There is nothing wrong with George Barker. But I don’t want more placeholders who played it safe, waited for an opportune time, and whose ambition begins and ends at one office.

So, if you live in 39th District and you are a Democrat, vote your party’s future and vote for Greg Galligan to go against Jay O’Brien for state Senate.

The other race I’m going to make an endorsement in is the Supervisor for Providence District. As with George Barker, I don’t have the same animus as some other bloggers do with Linda Smyth. But I do think Charlie Hall has more of a vision of where to take Providence and Fairfax. We need somebody independent of the developers, more responsive to their constituents, and with a better vision for Fairfax County.

I do think Gerry, Linda and the other Board members are on the right track with the Cool Counties initiative and mixed use, smart growth development around existing Metro stops. But I also think Charlie Hall has more determination to walk the walk and really stand up for things like the tunnel rather than an aerial rail to Dulles.

As for the Margi Vanderhye vs. Rip Sullivan Delegate’s race in the 34th, I think Margi is the better qualified candidate. Here my logic is the reverse of Galligan-Barker race. Margi is a long time activist who has proven herself capable and knowledgeable on the issues. Sullivan is very promising. The difference between him and Galligan is that unlike Greg, who was the Democratic standard bearer and took on a difficult race that nobody else wanted to take on, Sullivan is a newcomer who needs to pay some dues. Although I support Margi, I hope he sticks around.

As for Morris Meyer vs. Rex Simmons races, I have to admit I have no opinion. I thought that it was ridiculous of the Simmons campaign to compare Meyer to George Bush in a flyer that said that like another Texan, he didn’t know much about Virginia.
It was a dumb tactic. But it’s true the Meyer just moved here and his main issue seems to be the environment and Global Warming in general. Can’t fault him for picking the future of the entire world to run on. But I think he does need to spend a little more time in Virginia getting to know the local issues, including the environmental impact of specific projects and developments here at home. I’m going to go with Tip O’Neill’s famous statement “all politics is local.” This is another one where I want to see Meyer active for a few more years and then run again.

Having said all this, I’d like to add that despite all the heat and light generated by the more controversial races, the whole field of Democrats is good. We have bright, capable people who can govern. When this is over, please come together and don’t let sour grapes get in the way of Democratic victories. At some point, we all need to take a deep breath and ask ourselves what matters most. It should be voting for those who most clearly share our principles and values not voting sour grapes and personal resentments.

So, good luck to all our candidates. And after the smoke clears tomorrow, let’s get together and make this a Democratic year again!

Economic Bitter Fruit of an Unfettered Free Market

Note: This is cross posted at Raising Kaine

Republicans like to tout the strong economy as a sign that their conservative, free market philosophy still works and that they are still “the party of ideas.” Indeed, with foreign policy and the war in Iraq in shambles, their economic success is all they’ve really got.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that ain’t a whole lot. In fact, there are a couple of pieces of just plain rotten news about the economy today.

First, according to former Georgetown economics professor, Alfred Tella, writing in today’s Washington Times, there is a discrepancy between the rosy unemployment numbers that we’ve gotten and what may be a real and troubling trend toward higher unemployment. He writes here:

“Nonfarm payroll employment perked up in May, rising a respectable 157,000, about twice as much as in April. Since the end of 2006, payroll jobs, as measured by the government's employer survey, are up 664,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged in May, and at 4.5 percent, was the same as last December.
In contrast, total employment as measured by household survey (a more comprehensive count that includes the self-employed, agricultural, private household and unpaid family workers, and workers on unpaid leave) has been stagnant so far this year -- a puzzling inconsistency. In the three prior years, both employment series were on a generally rising trend.

According to Tella, the real rate of unemployed Americans may be closer to 4.9% or higher.

You see, the unemployment rate just measures those out of work who are currently looking for a job. But in a bad job market many people get discouraged and stop looking and then they are no longer counted. So a lower rate may not necessarily mean that the country is at full employment or that every able bodied American who wants to work has a job. It could just mean they couldn’t find a job and gave up. It also could mean that while they have dropped out of the labor market they are doing menial chores or “consulting,” i.e., picking up small, piece meal jobs that bring in some income but could hardly be considered real employment. And, of course, people who are consulting don’t have health benefits or pension plans. Consulting is sometimes genuinely lucrative and attractive to entrepreneurial types. But lots of times it’s merely a face saving term for folks just scrapping by after being laid off. But those folks don’t count as part of the unemployment rate.

So on paper the economy looks like it’s stronger than it is. Indeed, what we have is a paper pushers’ good economy. Investors push around paper profits but our country doesn’t manufacture much. CEOs, corporations and large investors are doing fine; but since not much is produced here, workers are losing ground every day.

And there’s more economic bad news on the doorstep today too.

According to this piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, you gotta pay - they're capitalists), productivity is down significantly and that raises fears amongst both economist and the Federal Reserve about inflation. Here’s the Wall Street Journal quote from Mark Whitehouse:

“New evidence that American companies are having a hard time keeping labor costs under control raised worries about a pickup in inflation, sending stocks tumbling. The Labor Department reported that the sum nonfarm businesses pay their workers for each unit of production rose at an annualized rate of 1.8% in the first quarter, sharply exceeding its initial estimate of 0.6%. The jump in so-called unit labor costs stemmed from a combination of factors: sharper compensation growth, which was revised upward to 2.8% from 2.3%, and lower growth in productivity -- or output per hour -- which was revised down to 1% from 1.7%.”

Of course, what’s bad for one segment of the economy isn’t necessarily grim news for another. While productivity is down, wage growth is up

I’ve been arguing for years that the old formula that higher productivity eventually produces higher wages is wrong. It used to be true that higher productivity led to higher profits, which employers passed on to their workers. The reason for this was that demand for the company's goods grew so they needed more workers to produce more widgets (or whatever it was they manufactured). But that’s not been true for a long time. Instead, higher productivity has been fueled by technology and automation and to a lesser, but significant extent, by outsourcing and off shoring. Because of those factors, even as productivity and profits climbed there was little demand for new workers to produce more goods and services.

Even higher productivity doesn’t eliminate the law of supply and demand. In the “new economy” the demand for labor is lower because of efficiencies that make the production of goods cheaper and less labor intensive, so corporations don’t have to share their profits with workers. Bosses never pass on their profits in the form of wage hikes simply out of the goodness of their heart or out of a sense of noblesse oblige. If businesses don’t have to hire more staff to meet rising demand for their goods, the demand for labor doesn’t rise. And with automation and off shoring, the demand for workers won’t rise even as consumer demand for their goods does. So companies get to keep their profits and they don’t have to share or play nice with workers. That includes not having to provide decent health benefits or pensions to compete for employees.

The only time bosses give raises or offer decent benefits is when they have to do so to retain their workforce. If they don’t need that workforce, then wages will stagnate no matter how high corporate profits climb.

The Washington Post, bless their little free trader hearts, never got that part right. Their business writers spent most of the last seven years assuring readers that higher productivity would trickle down to workers and raise their salaries. Now, though, the Wall Street Journal, a far better business publication that actually understands economics, tells the truth with this explanation:

“While strong growth in jobs and wages is good for workers, it raises the possibility that companies, unable to offset higher labor costs by increasing productivity, will try to pass those costs along to consumers, a trend that could fuel inflation and prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in response. "Even if economic growth is not gangbusters, the Fed could end up with an inflation problem," said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Conn.

And therein lies the problem. What’s good for workers – higher wages – is bad, not only for business but for investors, because it cuts into profit. Of course, one could question why exorbitant pay and extravagant perks for CEOs doesn’t affect the bottom line or push inflation pressure upward. That, for some reason, seems a reasonable investment in talent. CEOs, basketball stars, and coked out starlets all appear to have "talent" that make them valuable commodities on the free market.

On the other hand, the educators who teach your kids, the cops who protect your life and limb, and the guy who sacks your groceries don’t have value in the marketplace, even though they contribute immeasurably more to your life.

So much for the wisdom of unfettered markets and other ideologies that don't match the reality on the ground.

Meanwhile, look for investors and business types to push the panic button and try to slow growth, especially wage growth in order to put a break on inflation. That’s just one more proof that the interests of the average wage earner are not the same as their boss’s interests. And one more sorry example that the good times passed the American worker by. All those years when the corporate profits were rolling in and CEOs were living extravagantly never trickled down. Only the economic downturns trickle down to workers. It is the bitter fruit of a free market economy indeed.

Ben Tribbett's Long Argument With Political Reality and Hypocrisy

Bwana over at Renaissance Ruminations has a great defense of Ben Tribbett up. Here's the money quote:

The Mason Conservative takes issue with the language Ben used in a recent post where he labeled a Fairfax supervisor a “miserable rhymes with witch“. I wouldn’t use this language, and hope that in the future Ben doesn’t give in to such linguistic emotion. Nonetheless, while anyone can get fired up about whatever they want to, this seems to be relatively small potatoes. It is clear this was less a direct attack on Ben’s editorial stylings than a collateral attack on Ben’s claims regarding the Mark Tate allegations…and that is what makes the MC post interesting. You see, toward the end of the post MC asks who would take Ben Tribbet’s word over that of Shaun Kenney…and frankly, in the fact set we have out I don’t know that is a question MC really wants to be asking.

You can say what you will about Ben, but What You See Is What You Get.

I have met the man, and to some degree taken his measure. He is a bleeding heart in the best sense of the word. He knows what he knows and what he thinks, and wears his heart on his sleeve. He fervently wants change, and isn’t real careful sometimes how he phrases things in pursuit of that change. He will call a spade a spade-no facades up over at NLS!

Like Bwana, I’ve met Ben. I’ve known him for years and I can vouch for the fact that there are no facades with him.

My taste is less confrontational, inflammatory and in your face than Ben’s. But he’s honest and what gets under so many people’s skin is that Ben has a long running argument with the status quo and hypocrisy. He also uses a wicked sense of humor to eviscerate those he believes are betraying the public trust. Or even those he simply thinks are two-faced. That means most of the human race needs to watch out around him.

Years ago, the slogan “Cynicism is the last refuge of the idealist,” was very popular and on college campuses, people even hung printed copies of it on their desks and dorm room doors. I hope Ben always remains an idealist, but escapes the fate of cynicism. It’s a lot to hope for. Especially from somebody still arguing with political reality and those of us who are lesser mortals.

Media Matters and Ours is Failing Us

Vivian Paige has an excellent post up about last night’s Democratic Presidential debates, in New Hampshire, complete with a chart displaying graphically the amount of talk time that each candidate was allotted by moderator Wolf Blitzer. The chart was compliments of Chris Dodd’s campaign. As Vivian points out:

Look - we all know that the MSM has decided that Obama, Clinton and Edwards are the only candidates worth hearing from but does it have to be so obvious? Can’t they at least pretend that the voters haven’t made that decision yet? After all, even the primaries are seven months away!

The positioning of the top three - with Clinton in the middle - at the podiums was a dead giveaway that this “debate” was not going to give much time to the other candidates. To me, that does a disservice to the viewers, the ones who will ultimately be making the decision.

Indeed, 20 minutes into the debate, my husband and I both checked our watches, distressed to realize that within that time period, only the top three contenders – Clinton, Obama, and Edwards had even been addressed with questions. The others present were rudely overlooked.

This is probably the most poorly conducted, biased debate I’ve ever seen. It even surpasses last month’s shameful League of Women Voters event, where Charlie Hall, running for Providence District supervisor, was first up to answer each question, giving incumbent Linda Smyth the advantage of always having the last word.

That unbalanced debate could, at least, be written off as local yokel hacks who got caught clumsily trying to stack the deck. It was simply an amateur night that ended up giving their favored candidate more embarrassment than help.

But this is the professional media, the folks who pride themselves on being the gatekeepers and the shapers of public perception.

Unlike the LWV, though, their purpose isn’t even political. In a media world driven increasingly by a search for the next great star rather than a substantive focus on issues, this was all about the horse race and the charisma kids in the top tier, not about really examining the issues that affect people’s lives.

In fact this post on Huffington Post, from long time Los Angeles Times reporter, Nancy Cleeland, shows the frustration of journalists who want to do good work in an era when publishers and corporate owners want to focus on the next scandal with Lindsay or Brittany. Here’s what she had to say about her departure from the Times.

After 10 years, hundreds of bylines and some of the best experiences of my professional life, I’m leaving the Los Angeles Times at the end of this month, along with 56 newsroom colleagues. We each have our reasons for taking the latest buyout offer from Chicago-based Tribune Company. In my case, the decision grew out of frustration with the paper’s coverage of working people and organized labor, and a sad realization that the situation won’t change anytime soon.

Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs. It’s also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online. Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity — and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.Of course, I realize that revenues are plummeting and newsroom staffs are being cut across the country. But even in these tough financial times, it’s possible to shift priorities to make Southern California’s largest newspaper more relevant to the bulk of people who live here. Here’s one idea: Instead of hiring a “celebrity justice reporter,” now being sought for the Times website, why not develop a beat on economic justice? It might interest some of the millions of workers who draw hourly wages and are being squeezed by soaring rents, health care costs and debt loads.

And even in the political sphere, once respected reporters and pundits are more interested in chasing the next star than in discussing repeal of the alternate minimum tax, health care, outsourcing, immigration policy, or even an exit strategy for Iraq.

In fairness, all of the candidates, when given a chance to speak, did address these issues and they all had thoughtful solutions. They all came prepared to engage the audience even if the media often seemed to want to give only selected candidates the chance to do so. And Vivian is right on target that that approach does a disservice to the public.

It’s possible that the most creative solutions could come precisely from the second tier of candidates because they are the ones more likely to be thinking outside the normal political "inside the Beltway" box. But they were never given the time to develop their ideas fully in front of the audience.

We live in serious times but we no longer have a serious media. Unfortunately, today’s top journalists are like crows. They are very intelligent creatures, with short attention spans, and they are easily distracted by bright, shiny objects.

Don’t look for substance or service to the American people from them.

What's Old Is New

Lowell has a great post up at RK on the Tyson's Metro tunnel. Now that it appears that any hope of an underground station is being ditched in favor of aerial tracks (or an El, as we used to call it in New York), Lowell dug out an article that he wrote on this topic over a year ago. Here's what he said then:

I thought about calling this article, "penny wise and pound foolish," because that's exactly what this cheapskate, half-assed approach to Metro in Tysons is all about. So, let's see now, Metro in Tysons is not going to: a) be underground; b) have pedestrian bridges so that people can actually reach the stations across busy, dangerous roads; c) have sufficient rail cars on the line; d) even have freakin' ESCALATORS at some stations (apparently, they're going to just have stairs and elevators, and not even enough of the latter to serve people with disablities). Nice.

At that time, Connolly seemed to be a huge booster for the tunnel. Indeed, even as recently as March and April I saw him sporting a button that proclaimed: "Under, not Over."


But it looks like Gerry is talking out of two sides of his mouth. According to these posts: here and here, he and the rest of the Board of Supervisors has pretty well resigned itself to an aerial Metro stop.


As somebody who rides Metro fairly regularly, I can tell you that this plan is a recipe for Metro disaster for passengers. It will create more urban sprawl and gridlock, deprive Fairfax of the type of smart growth and mixed use that we desperately need to solve our transportation and quality of life problems, and come with unintended consequences, including iced over tracks when we have inclement weather. Underground works so much better for our region for a host of reasons And it really bothers me that they have no plans for escalators - not that Metro maintains its escalator service as it is. There are real problems and a flagrant disregard for the Americans with Disabilities Act here.


I'm actually not unsympathetic to Gerry and the Board. I get it that the feds are threatening not to fund it at all and even our governor, Tim Kaine, seems to be on the side of the federal government and Bechtel rather than concerned with what's good for Fairfax.

Let's face it, this is something the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has worked on for years and they are scared of losing it completely. Nobody has been in their corner but the angry citizens who are now poised to turn on them if they cave in to this pressure.

But the simple fact is that if it's not done right, it will add to Fairfax's problems rather than fix them.

The Assault on the Assault on Reason and Why Al Gore Is Not Running

I attended the Politics and Prose sponsored lecture/book signing for Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason,” at George Washington University last night. The auditorium was packed. In fact, when we got there at 6:15, there was a line snaking around the block to pick up tickets at the Will Call. People even were trying to buy extra tickets. Several of us in line joked that it reminded us of the scalp-free zones at baseball games and rock concerts – but for Al Gore? We giggled at the thought of it.

Nevertheless, it was a sold out event and Gore was playing to a packed house of about 2,000 people. But if they expected a searing indictment of the Bush Administration all wrapped up in fiery rhetoric – red meat for the true believers – they probably would’ve been disappointed.

Gore delivered his argument - which is that the media and dissenters have been intimidated into silence on a variety of issues, including global warming, economic conditions and the war in Iraq, by a deliberate assault on open and reasonable debate - in measured and rational tones, in an often long winded lecture. He spoke conversationally with the same professorial cadence that the press and public found so annoying the last time he ran for office.

And this audience was rapt. They hung on his every word and gave him several standing ovations. Then they lined up eagerly to have their copies of his new book autographed.

The 1,000 or so people who stayed for the book signing were whisked past the table where Gore sat signing books with the speed of an efficiency expert setting up an assembly line in a Ford factory. It had been previously announced that books would not be personalized and Gore would not answer individual questions (there had been a question and answer session after his lecture). And he mostly stuck to it. Each book was signed and then shoved to the side while the adoring owner picked it up and quickly made way for the next person in line. It was a smooth operation and, considering the huge crowd, went briskly. The lecture started at 7:30, the book signing by 8:30; and we were home in Northern Virginia by 10 o’clock.

The huge auditorium reminded me of the large lecture halls in a university, with students jammed in to hear a very popular professor. Gore looked relaxed, happy, and engaged. He was doing what he loved best, lecturing to a smart audience of his peers. He looked like a professor delighted with his honors class, not a candidate running for office.

A Memorial Day Special: A Measure of Peace

Note: This is a work of fiction. It’s something I originally wrote for a writer’s workshop and later put up on a writing Website. I’ve referred to it a couple of times in other posts. I had thought about sending it to a magazine to be published but kept putting off actually doing so. Since most publications have a 4 to 6 month lead time, my choice was to either hold it till next year or post it here. I decided there’s nothing I’d rather do than share it with my friends and readers. I doubt that I’ll post other short stories here since this really isn’t intended to be a fiction site. But I hope you enjoy a special Memorial Day offering – something a little out of the ordinary – for a special day.

The Wall is a blunt slab of black marble that rises out of the ground like a musical crescendo. Located at the Washington War Memorial, it’s the dirge for my generation’s folly.

I stood in front of it, my eyes scanning the list of names engraved on its shiny surface. I found the one I was looking for and, with my hand covering my mouth, I sank to my knees in front of Billy’s name. My eyelids were blinking rapidly to block the tears that were forming. I felt a little silly. I told myself it wasn’t as if I didn’t know what I’d find. I’d come looking for it. I called it closure and told my doubting family that it’s what I had to do.

Billy Reynolds and I were not childhood sweethearts. Far from it! I was a tomboy and I used to slug him. He slugged me back. Until one day when he noticed that I had grown up. I’d hurled some awful insult at him to goad him on. He had his fist clenched and was pulling it back to build up momentum before he delivered the punch. I was squaring off to pounce back. Suddenly his hand just dropped to his side instead, and he had a crestfallen expression on his face as he turned and walked away. He hung his head and his shoulders were hunched. He looked as deflated as a balloon.

“Chicken,” I taunted.

But he just ignored me and kept walking away.

We were only twelve then but he hated me for growing up. I could still be mean to him, but he had learned too well from his proper family that he couldn’t hit a woman. Especially because he recognized that he was becoming more of a man than a boy himself.

By the time we got to high school we had declared enough of a truce to actually date. And what young girl wouldn’t give up a life long rivalry to date the town’s football hero with the brown hair, blue eyes and sprinkle of freckles across his nose?

I wouldn’t.

He might have been the football hero of Hudson Springs, in upstate New York, but I was the town hippie. I had long blond hair that I wore parted down the center. I dressed in long granny dresses that he said were unflattering. “Why don’t you show your legs,” he would ask.

“Male chauvinist pig.” I would answer.

I spouted bad poetry, anti-war rhetoric and Bob Dylan lyrics. Billy loved the Beach Boys. But we were drawn to each other. We dated and argued constantly. I wouldn’t go to his senior prom unless I could wear a black armband. I told him that proms were a petit bourgeois institution anyway. He told me I was nuts. So much for brilliantly articulated intellectual arguments.

He went away to college and we wrote for a couple of years. Then just as I was getting ready to join him at the state university he announced that he had been drafted. I was horrified, especially when he told me that he intended to go.

“Go to Canada,” I pleaded. “It’s just across the border.”

But he refused. He wanted to go into the army because he thought it was his duty to serve. I told him only fascists would go. He said I was nuts. This was becoming a routine. “Don’t you have any other argument except that I’m nuts?” I asked.

“Yes I do, but you are nuts.” He insisted.

“The war’s immoral,” I said.

“I want to be a lawyer someday not a fugitive,” he pointed out.

“Good, at least you’ll defend innocent people and be useful then,” I said.

“No, I want to be a corporate lawyer, and gouge the public and stick it to innocent people.” He said.

“Billy!” I punched his arm in exasperation.

“Okay, I’ll study criminal law and help felons stay on the street.”

“I give up.” I stalked away as he laughed.

“I just can’t have a serious conversation with you.” I complained.

“No, you just can’t spout leftist clichés at me because I don’t take them seriously.
Anytime you want to engage in an actual argument, I’m ready.”

Then the tears were running down my cheeks and not from laughter. Yes he infuriated me by refusing to take me seriously. But he also made me laugh and at that moment I was so afraid that if anything happened to him the laughter would stop forever.

“Please don’t go to Vietnam,” I begged.

“Donna, I’ve got to. I’m sorry if you think that makes me a fascist pig.”

“It doesn’t make you a fascist pig. It makes you somebody who could die there. Billy I’m so scared I won’t see you again.”

“God, I hope that’s not true,” he said, putting his arms around me. “I want to come back and marry you.”

“Will we have to get married in a church?” I asked.

“No, we can get married in a Buddhist temple and read our vows from Mao’s Little Red Book.” He replied.

“Buddhists don’t read Mao Tse Tsung,” I pointed out. “They’re not Communists.”

“I know you Donna, you’ll find a way to combine them just to piss me off.”

“You’ll marry me anyway?”

“No, you’ll accuse me of supporting a petit bourgeois institution and being a male chauvinist pig,” he said.

“Marry me anyway,” I said.

“I’ll marry you anyway. I love you Donna.”

Of course we both wrote. I protested the war. Billy fought in it. We were an unlikely couple but we did love each other. And one Christmas when Billy was home on leave we did get married. It was a small wedding with just my parents and siblings and Billy’s family. And no, it wasn’t a Buddhist wedding with vows taken from Mao’s “Little Red Book.” It was actually a very traditional ceremony in our local Catholic Church. I even wore a white gown and Billy looked handsome in his dress uniform.

Near the end of his tour of duty the tone of his letters had begun to change. His attitude was shifting. He never became stridently anti-war just as he had never been really gung ho for it. Truth was, unlike me, Billy was usually calm and measured in his opinions. In an age of irresponsibility, he felt a sense of obligation. In a time when people mistrusted institutions, Billy had career ambitions within those institutions. He hoped to improve them, to be sure. But he wanted to do it from the inside. Where I tried to goad him with anti-establishment rhetoric, he used his wicked sense of humor to deflate my arguments because he wasn’t an ideologue.

And in the end neither was I. I loved him much more than my ideology. I kept my ideals and allowed him the space to keep his. But his letters began to disturb me. There was more cynicism in them. He was seeing things in Vietnam that bothered him. Things that have already been written about and argued to death so many times by others far more articulate than either of us. I counted the months until his discharge. I even dreamed about our starting a family.

Then I got the call that every soldier’s wife dreads. Billy’s whole platoon had been caught in a Vietcong ambush. There were no survivors.

At the funeral I sat next to Billy’s younger brother, Don, who was sixteen and looked just like Billy. On either side of use, like sentinels, were Billy’s parents, Kay and William Reynolds, Sr.

We gave Billy a military funeral. I jumped at each volley of gunfire from the rifles used to salute the fallen soldier, who had been, all too briefly, my husband. I watched as the two young men in full dress uniform solemnly folded the flag that had draped Billy’s coffin. They brought it over to Billy’s mother, but she made a slight gesture with her head. The one holding the flag knelt before me and placed the flag in my hands.

He rose, saluted, pivoted smartly on his heel, and marched off. Tears were streaming down my face as my hand clutched the flag. Billy’s brother leaned over and whispered, “Donna, try not to burn it.”

I had to bite my lip hard to keep from laughing even through my tears. “Don you’re as horrible as Billy was,” I whispered back.

He squeezed my hand. “Thanks.”

We clung to each other’s hands for a few minutes more. Then, all too soon, the funeral was over.

But how do you forget your first love?

So this Memorial Day I made the long trip from upstate New York to Washington, DC. I looked up Billy’s name. I placed a little swatch of cloth on the ground next to it. As I rose, I heard the distant roar of motorcycle engines. I looked up and saw a group of men on Harleys. Bikers. Then I remembered the Rolling Thunder group that came to the Vietnam War Monument every year at Memorial Day. They were Vietnam vets who came to pay homage to their fallen comrades. I watched them as they slowly drove down the street. When they had passed, I looked back at the Wall sadly. Then a tall figure loomed in front of me, blocking the fading sunlight. I looked up and smiled at the handsome young man in his crisp new uniform.

“You ready Grandma?” He asked.

“In a moment,” I answered.

“Grandpa must’ve been something,” my grandson said. He had grown up with all the stories about his grandfather who had died a hero. My son, Will’s father, had idolized the patriarch he had never known. Perhaps I saw to that too well. Despite my protests, he had gone into the army although it was during a time of peace. Now his son was following a tradition that Billy had unwittingly started. I sighed and turned from the Wall.

“Come on Will. We’ll go to the Old Ebbitt Grill near the White House for dinner.”

“Isn’t that where you used to protest the war grandpa fought in,” he asked with mock innocence.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do it again while you eat dinner.” I answered.

We fell into an easy banter and for a moment it took me back to all those years ago to somebody else who had had wicked sense of humor and liked to tease me. I linked arms with Will and tried to feel a measure of peace as I said a prayer for his safety. In a few days he would deploy for Basra.

A Lady In Distress

Two new and unwelcome unauthorized biographies about Hillary Clinton are being released just in time for the summer beach reading season. At least, neither book will be greeted enthusiastically by the Clinton campaign. Both books, Carl Bernstein’s “A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” and “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, don’t break any new ground. And since both tomes are by respected journalists, neither will be hatchet jobs. Bernstein, of course, is best known for his work with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post on the Watergate break in and his subsequent reporting as an ABC correspondent, and Gerth and Van Natta are both award winning New York Times reporters.

Despite all their accumulated credentials, I’m not sure why another book about Hillary Clinton is needed, let alone two. In fact, while I was complaining to a Republican friend (both of us were actually criticizing our party's respective choices) about the fact that I feared that Hillary is still too polarizing a figure for my comfort, he asked the following perceptive questions, “Is there anything the public doesn’t already know about her and Bill? Is there really any opportunity for an October surprise for her campaign?”

Good point. Her life with Bill, in and out of the White House, has been subject to so much scrutiny that it’s hard to see the public giving these two biographies more than a collective yawn before moving on to the next new best selling light fiction as they slather on more sunscreen.

That’s especially true if this report by Dan Balz and Perry Bacon, Jr., in today’s Washington Post is accurate:

“The books recount the roller-coaster ride through the Clinton presidency and his tenure as governor of Arkansas, raising anew issues of marital strife and infidelity, Clinton's strong and sometimes controlling personality, the scandals that ultimately led to impeachment, the failed effort to reform health care and much more.”

Although Balz and Bacon point out that both books could hurt Clinton’s presidential bid by rehashing past scandals and reminding voters of their Clinton fatigue from the late nineties, others predict that the public will largely ignore the ancient history. Indeed even the media has moved on to the newer scandals involving Brangelina and Brittany and Lindsay.

On the other hand, books like these do renew the energy of that part of the Republican base that has always made it a cottage industry to hate the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. Indeed the coffers of publishers like Regnery are perennially enhanced by printing books with unflattering pictures of her on their covers.

And that’s precisely where the danger comes for Republicans. Every time Hillary haters have tried to throw mud on her for her husband’s behavior, which is the great temptation for the self-righteous so-called values crowd, it has backfired because it reminds the larger public of two things. One is that Hillary was, in fact, the wronged wife and the victim. And, two, she behaved with great dignity during that difficult period in her life. She gained tremendous stature by stoically standing by her husband’s side, not contributing to a Constitutional crisis by leaving him, and generally acting with grace under extreme pressure. The public came to view her as a lady in distress who behaved with great decorum. And something about that view brought out all the protective instincts that people have toward victims who do not deserve what fate has dealt them.

If you don’t believe me, think back to Hillary’s debate, in her first Senate race, with Republican opponent Rick Lazio. He was a moderate, pro-choice New York Republican who was running strong at the beginning. During one of their debates, though, he aggressively stepped into her space, practically wagged his finger in her face and brought up Bill’s bad behavior in a way that suggested she was complicit in his adultery. The picture carried by the press nationwide was of her looking down with a sad expression as Lazio literally got in her face. Even with his choirboy good looks, Lazio looked like a bully who had just asked a rape victim how short her miniskirt was before her attack. People hated him for blaming the victim, the lady in distress. While I’m sure that incident was not the only reason for it, Hillary went on to win the election by 55 percent.

Books that attempt to revive Bill’s scandals or paint Hillary as controlling, cautious, and manipulative are a dime a dozen and they most bring a collective yawn. For more interesting summer reading, I’d recommend Brad Meltzer’s page-turner, “The Book of Fate,” which is now out in paperback.

Fred Thompson's Phony Red Pickup Truck

Ok, I know I’m the Virginia Democratic blogger whose been pushing the Fred Thompson for President idea here in the Old Commonwealth. I really was intrigued by Arthur Branch running for an office higher than the television DA of New York City. I mean how realistic is the premise that New Yorkers actually voted for Bubba for any office in New York City?

It’s not that I support Thompson. Just the opposite. I actually think he’d be a terrible president. But I also believe he’s going to be an attractive candidate to a lot of the Republican right because the already announced candidates just haven’t caught their enthusiasm yet. Certainly the three frontrunners have not excited the Republican base.

Because of that it would be a mistake for Democrats to write Thompson off. On paper, he can be a credible candidate, as this shows:

"He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former member of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a Visiting Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, researching national security and intelligence. Thompson is also a public speaker with the Washington Speakers Bureauand is a special program host and senior analyst for ABC News Radio. He publishes a daily blog and podcast on ABC Radio web site."

I’ve seen him at National Airport doing the NYC to DC shuttle. On paper he can appear to be a credible candidate.

But the rumor has gotten out that he is famously lazy – not a good trait for a candidate let alone for a president. I think that in the placid years of the Clinton administration, back in the halcyon days of 1999-2000, when America was at peace and had a truly good economy, one where the benefits actually filtered down to ordinary working people, Thompson’s lack of serious engagement wouldn’t have been a liability. In fact, back then, the most serious political issue seemed to be with whom it would be more fun to throw back a beer. The likeability factor got more serious media attention than an actual foreign policy debate did.

But these are serious times. The sizzling economy is not trickling down past the corporate boardrooms of Halliburton or the floor of the Wall Street trading floor. Ordinary Americans are losing good job, pensions, health benefits and their pay is mostly flat. And at the same time, we are in a seemingly endless war in Iraq with no exit. People may be losing their patience for the "aw shucks" folksy persona of rich phonies.

In Sunday’s Tennessean, Larry Daughtrey, one of Tennessee’s best political writers, has this devastating piece on Fred Thompson. Here’s the money quote:

"In the Washington world of workaholics, Fred is remembered as a virtual teetotaler. During his eight years in the U.S. Senate, an insertion into the Congressional Record amounted to heavy lifting.

His high school yearbook sized him up early: "The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do."

Sliding back and forth between the fantasy worlds of the silver screen and politics is nothing new for him.

Back in 1992, the Gucci loafers, Lincoln Continental and high-dollar lobbying fees of Fred D. Thompson, Esquire, weren't playing too well at the political box office in Tennessee. So, he bought an old red pickup and a pair of $100 boots, tuned up the drawl and beat a Harvard man for the Senate in Big Orange country."

In addition, I’ve known the rumors for a while that even while campaigning in that red pickup truck, Thompson would ride a few miles out of town and the limo would be waiting, which Daughtrey sort of confirms in his article.

Frankly, in National Airport, when Fred Thompson wasn’t thinking about future voters, he didn’t seem very friendly either. The exact word to describe him - when the klieg lights weren’t on for a Law and Order scene and the political press wasn’t around to sing his praise - is “dyspeptic.”

Of course, because running for president is hard work, Thompson might not do it. As an actor, it may be the ratings for next season and not the votes.

But, as Daughtrey put it, “if he buys a used Boeing 707 and paints it red, watch out.”

Big Pharma and the Mental Health Crisis

Guest Post from Alison:

Note: This post grew out of some comments to a post that I wrote on mental health issues earlier this month and an exchange of emails between Alison and me. I appreciate the points she made about non-drug treatments for even severe mental illness. Like Alison, I am a layperson. But I have seen some devastating side effects from psychotropic drugs and it seems to me that they should be a treatment of last resort and used temporarily if at all possible. I believe that drugs do have a role to play in the treatment of some mental illnesses, but I also agree with Alison that too often drugs are simply thrown at mental health problems indiscriminately and often by family physicians who are not qualified to prescribe and monitor their long term use.


With the disclaimer that I am a layperson in regards to neuropsychology, the issue isn't whether psychiatric illnesses are biological or not but what works in helping people to recover from them.

Lots of diseases and disorders are biologically based but do respond to non-drug approaches better than drug approaches to either curing or maintaining optimal functioning. As for the chemical imbalance theory, the best way I can summarize that in a neutral manner is to say it has never been proven and has been discredited/discarded as overly simplistic at best. Our brains and bodies are always in and out of chemical balances of various sorts, and at this point researchers are looking more at proteins, but again it is never a simple balanced or not balanced explanation, there are multiple processes going on all the time. Also, all kinds of activities and situations affect the brain, not just drugs. Cognitive therapy has been shown to change the brain, trauma has been shown to change the brain, all kinds of good psychotherapy can change the brain. Depression and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been studied more than schizophrenia and CBT, but in England,CBT and "Hearing Voices" groups and new individual psychotherapy approaches that teach clients how to understand what triggers their voices, what they may mean and ways to keep the experience of voices from overwhelming them have all been shown to improve the quality of life and functioning of people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In the old days in the U.S., psychotherapy was used and worked well on many people diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; more people with schizophrenia fully recovered before the advent of drugs than after, in fact, if they had access to good psychotherapy as most did not. When community mental health centers were formed (although never enough and never fully funded), the standard of care was psychotherapy and medication together, not medication alone as it is so often today. Drug "holidays" were more common as psychiatrists would test to see if their patients still needed to be on psychotropic medication over time. One rarely sees this today as the pharmacological approach (and big Pharma) have taken over psychiatry on the whole.The few places where intensive psychotherapy is being used successfully with people with psychotic illnesses in the U.S. are private hospitals such as Austen Riggs, which also has recently released research on the success of their approach and private practitoners who work with individuals with psychotic illnesses. Other helpful non-drug approaches to psychotic illnesses are peer support, either adjunctive or stand alone, social and employment supports and individualized wrap around services. There is also, of course, the long known but often overlooked fact that a certain percentage of people with psychotic illnesses will recover with or without any treatment at all---E. Fuller Torrey, hardly a progressive in these matters, says 25%, others say up to 60% if people are not kept on drugs indefinitely because the neuroleptics themselves cause structural changes to the brain. This is getting long and others have written much more eloquently about it, I would summarize that people with schizophrenia and other psychotic and affective disorders have a range of etiologies of their illness and a very large range of response to treatment and that many different kinds of treatments can be helpful, not just drugs.

Support Big Box Legislation in Fairfax!

Jambon has a great post up at Raising Kaine today on proposed Big Box legislation that will be before the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors tomorrow, Monday, May 21, at 4 PM. The hearing will be held in the Fairfax Government Center at 12000 Government Center Parkway, in the Board Auditorium.

This legislation could be another example of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors commitment to greening the county and to smart growth. Big box stores like Target, Home Depot, and Wal Mart contribute to suburban sprawl and traffic congestion.

Lately, city and county planners have been encouraging mixed use developments built near existing Metro stations and bus stops. Besides making environmental and economic sense, there are health care experts who have said that our suburban way of life, where we get into our cars for every shopping errand, is contributing to the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in this country.

Mixed use development has the added health advantage of getting people to live, shop and possibly even work in a single community where they can walk rather than ride to jobs and stores. What a concept. It used to be called a small town!

Anyay, if you're able to get to the Government Center (and in all honestly, I'll be at work in DC), please get out to support Big Box legislation.

Gun Raffle in Fairfax on Thursday

Today's Washington Post is reporting on a proposed gun raffle to be held in a government building in Annandale, Virginia on Thursday. Local Fairfax officials have been meeting with the Commonwealth Attorney to try to figure out if there is any way to prevent this raffle from going forward in response to an outpouring of sentiment from Fairfax residents who are clearly uncomfortable with these preceedings.

Philip Van Cleave, president of Virginia Citizens Defense League, the group that is holding the raffle to raise funds to support several gun shops who are being sued by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said that his group will give tickets free to anybody who walks through the door. That's because research has turned up a loophole to Virginia law, which says that a gaming event cannot be held on public property without a special waiver, which Fairfax lawmakers are not inclined to provide the group.

You know, you can’t get as pro Second Amendment a Democrat as I am. I truly believe that people do have a right to have weapons, whether for hunting or to protect themselves. And yes they really have a right to carry a concealed weapon too.

But this scuffle in Fairfax County between the Virginia Citizens Defense League and county officials who are uncomfortable with a gun raffle being held in a government building in Annandale has turned me completely off the pro-gun faction. And this is exactly the type of extremism from the gun lobby that will blow up in their face. Scorched the earth policies usually end up scalding those who adopt them

Look, if you were to go into a public office building in most cities or municipalities in this country, you would have to go past a metal detector. If you had a weapon, whether a gun or a knife, it would be confiscated. In fact, if you carried pepper spray, that too would be taken from you. Certainly, you couldn’t go into any federal building, under the very pro-gun Bush administration, with a concealed weapon of any kind – and that includes non-gun weapons – without a guard taking it away from you. Indeed, most federal buildings still have all those cute color-coded warnings that the Bush administration has made into a paean to paranoia regarding national security. Bring a gun into, say, the Treasury Building or the State Department and you’re liable to be held as a terrorist.

But bring a gun into a government center in Annandale, Virginia and suddenly you become a Second Amendment patriot?

The only reason the Virginia Citizens Defense League is doing this is not to snub Michael Bloomberg in New York City but to thumb their noses at liberal Northern Virginians, who the Virginia Citizens Defense League think don’t agree with their pro-gun stand either.

Truth be told, most Fairfax residents are uncomfortable with a display of guns in a public building. If the Million Mom March had a base, it probably is in Northern Virginia. But you know what? There is something to be said for home rule and respecting the mores of a region that’s different from the rest of Virginia.

Back where I came from, in upstate New York, it used to be the Republicans who supported home rule. And in Byrd Machine Virginia, it was the Democrats who supported the Dillon Rule that essentially stripped the grassroots of control and gave all power to the state. And that was done to keep power in the hands of a few very corrupt, racist Dixiecrats in the bad old days.

It’s time we admitted this.

I don’t want to take guns away from anybody. But I think holding a gun raffle in a public building in an urban area where citizens are clearly uncomfortable with public displays of guns is disgusting.

It’s not about Michael Bloomberg. For these bozos, it’s about Northern Virginians. And I’m one of those Northern Virginians.

Let people have their guns. But don’t thumb your noses at those whose culture is different by a public display. You want to take on Michael Bloomberg. Fine. Do it in Southwest.

The War of Words About Iraq

The Democrats seem determined to lose the confidence of the public by not sticking to their guns about getting out of Iraq. And they seem even more determined to lose the war of words about Iraq by claiming that the war is already lost. And, of course, the Republicans have no reason to do the hard work of ending the war as long as they think they can score political points by calling the Democrats defeatists. Neither side is correct.

The war in Iraq, in fact, was won long ago. Of course, since our premise for invading Iraq turned out to be false, it’s easy to lose sight of exactly what our original goals were – at least the publicly announced goals – and therefore to not recognize that we actually met them. Our military succeeded in doing everything this administration asked of them and doing it as successfully as humanly possible.

Our original justification for going into Iraq was to depose Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein and find his weapons of mass destruction before he could turn them against his Middle Eastern neighbors or us.

We got rid of Hussein and his sons. We installed a new government. Unfortunately, we never got those WMDs. But you can hardly blame the military for that. Those unconventional weapons were never there to start with, so that’s a benchmark that was impossible to meet. All the rest the military succeeded in doing.

It’s the continuing occupation that’s so damned hard.

And that’s where we are failing. It was doomed from the start and not by the military but by an incompetent civilian administration that put inexperienced people into powerful positions in Iraq, even though their appointees lacked knowledge and were not competent to rebuild the Iraqi nation. This article from the September 17, 2006 Washington Post, taken from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Life in the Imperial City, highlights the tragic missteps that certainly helped derail our efforts in Iraq.

As Chandraskekaran documents, those civilians who flooded into the country in the early days of our victory – and it was a victory – were young and their primary qualification for service was that they were ideologues, who were loyal to the Bush administration. Surprise, surprise! Like that hasn’t been the major qualification for every position of responsibility that has led to abysmal failure on the part of the Bush administration both at home and abroad.

It’s important, though, to define the real problem or we will never be able to fix it in Iraq. And the American public is as uneasy with the Democratic timetables for withdrawal as they are disapproving of Bush’s intransigent insistence on staying the course. For good reason, thoughtful people fear the consequences of pulling out and wiping our hands of the whole mess, which we largely created in the first place. It’s not unreasonable to fear a destabilized and failed state in an already volatile region that always is in danger of exploding.

But we also can’t continue an occupation that is spiraling into chaos. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing into infinity. That’s not defeatism. That’s common sense. In fact, here’s an excerpt from an article by Christopher Preble, “How to Exit Iraq,” taken from the Cato Institute’s Website in 2005.

“Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski declared last week that the United States could never achieve its goals of a democratic, stable and peaceful Iraq unless the American people were prepared to "commit 500,000 troops, spend [US]$200 billion a year, probably have a draft," and have some form of wartime taxation. Brzezinski conceded that Americans "are not prepared to do that."

Cato is not a leftwing think tank. Nor is Bryzesinski a Northeastern liberal dove. And he’s right. We’re not prepared to do those things. Nobody on the right currently criticizing the Democrats is willing to reinstate a draft let alone consider raising taxes. All they really want to do is chant slogans about defeatism and try to score political points off Democrats. That’s not a way to find a solution in Iraq.

Eventually, we have to step out of the way of the civil war going on in Iraq and let the Iraqis come up with a political solution to their political problems. We can’t do that for them. But we also can’t withdraw from the entire region. In short, Johnny isn’t going to come marching home all that soon. But he does need to get out of the Iraqis’ way.

The strategy we need is to re-deploy troops out of Iraq to nearby hot spots where they can continue to combat terrorism and defend our national interests. We also may have to leave some troops in Iraq to continue to train security forces. We cannot leave them in a lurch and abandon them. Colin Powell’s pottery rule is still true. We broke it. We have an obligation – moral and practical – to help fix it.

To do that, we also are going to have to open talks with Syria, Saudi Arabia and, yes, Iran. They are not our friends. At best, they are treacherous allies in a dangerous region. But they realize that an unstable Iraq is not in their own self-interests. In other words, while they are not our buddies, they are stakeholders in an effort to stabilize their own region. And that’s exactly how to approach them, as adversaries who happen to have a common interest with us. In the case of Iran, we will need special care. We are going to have to warn them in no uncertain terms to stop meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs. But right now, the chaos our presence is bringing to that region is actually strengthening their influence among their fellow Shia. Iran is the wild card. But we won’t get them out of Iraq as long as we are there. Our presence provides rationalization for their interference in the region.

In the end, there is a real possibility that such talks may fail. Because of that we do need to leave a door open to be able to return should the situation warrant it. Again, Preble from the Cato piece:

“The jihadis will claim that the American withdrawal represents a victory for their side. But while the United States has already suffered a blow to its credibility, it is still eminently capable of defending its vital interests. An American military withdrawal would not, and must not, signal that the United States has chosen to ignore events in Iraq.

“If Iraqis wish to retain their sovereignty and independence, they must ensure that al-Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups do not establish a safe haven in their country. Accordingly, the withdrawal of U.S. forces must be coupled with a clear and unequivocal message to the new government of Iraq: do not threaten us or allow foreign terrorists in your country to threaten us. If you do, we will be back.”

The truth is we had a military victory long ago. And if need be, to contain a real threat to our domestic security, we are thoroughly capable of going back in to remove a genuine threat. Americans will always support our military in actions to strengthen our legitimate national security interests.

But we have also had a diplomatic failure of monumental proportions caused by a political lack of will on the part of an incompetent and arrogant administration that still places ideology above evidence and facts.

Now we’ve got to step out of Iraq but not out of the region. Iraq must solve its own political problems with the help of the international community as led by America. We do have that responsibility. But we have got to stop losing the peace. And the only way to do that is to get out of the business of occupying another country. Let me repeat what I said near the beginning of this piece: That is not defeatism. It’s common sense.

The Awful Sound of a Ball Dropping - Update!

UPDATE: Since I first wrote this piece yesterday, I saw an excellent post from Catzmaw on Raising Kaine. Catzmaw is a lawyer and she explains in great detail the differences in the legal code under which a mentally ill person can be involuntarily committed and the flaws in the system.

I'm not going to try to summarize her very fine explanation. Instead, I'm just going to urge you to click on the link and read her superb diary on this subject. Thanks Catzmaw for shedding light on a topic that we cannot let fade from the public view.

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Virginia definitely dropped the ball on Seung Hui Cho. And what makes this all the more disturbing is that it is not as rare as we would like to believe. According to an article in today’s Washington Post, journalists Brigid Schulte and Chris L. Jenkins report that Cho never received treatment that a judge in Blacksburg ordered for him after he was declared a danger to himself and others.

As the article points out, it is impossible to predict whether treatment would have prevented the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech, but it might have averted it or at least made it far more difficult for Cho to purchase a gun.

Because of loopholes in Virginia law, Cho neither received court ordered treatment nor was he placed on a list that would have alerted gun shop owners not to sell to him. Given Cho’s serious lack of interpersonal skills, I suspect it would have been difficult for him to go out and buy illegal weapons on the street. The fact that he was so uncommunicative would have posed a serious barrier to his purchasing weapons from an illegal dealer.

But perhaps, even more important than limiting Cho’s access to weapons, timely therapy might have helped Cho back to a normal productive life. The greatest part of this tragedy was that this was a smart person who had a lot to offer society. He could have built a productive life rather than been the cause of so much destruction and tragedy.

And he’s not the first young person in Virginia for whom lack of effective mental health treatment and too easy access to guns led to a lethal result for others. Last year, Fairfax teenager, Michael Kennedy, shot and killed two police officers in a Sully District police substation after he walked out of a mental health facility. There were significant differences between the cases to be sure, but one thing was the same in both situations. These were two troubled young men whose behavior set off alarm bells among those who knew them yet didn’t receive treatment that might have saved their lives and the lives of their victims.

According to the Post, about Cho:

"Cho, they said, slipped through a porous mental health system that suffers from muddled, seldom-enforced laws and inconsistent practices. Special justices who oversee hearings such as the one for Cho said they know that some people they have ordered into treatment have not gotten it. They find out when the person "does something crazy again," in the words of one justice -- when they are brought back into court because they are considered in imminent danger of harming themselves or others.

" 'The system doesn't work well,' said Tom Diggs, executive director of the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which has been studying the state mental health system and will report to the General Assembly next year.

"Involuntary outpatient commitments are relatively uncommon in Virginia, officials said, because those in the system know they are not enforced. They are almost an act of faith."

I think society does have to proceed carefully when declaring any person a danger to himself or herself. To be sure, forty years ago, there were terrible abuses of the mental health system.

At that time, it was far too easy for a parent to have an adult child – usually a young woman – committed to a mental hospital as a method of interfering with his offspring’s choice of lifestyle. And adult children often had an elderly parent declared mentally incompetent and sent to facilities so that they could get their hands on their parent’s money. And in general, people were simply warehoused for years in substandard back building wards rather than treated and released. And all of that lack of care often cost the state lots of money. So, the move during the 60s to de-institutionalize mental patients was viewed as humane and pragmatic. That was especially true when new generations of drugs appeared that seemed to be capable of treating serious mental disorders while allowing patients to return to normal lives.

All of that was a positive development that ended years of abuse of people’s civil liberties and returned truly mentally ill people to society as fully functioning and productive citizens. But because of past abuses, the pendulum has swung too far. In many cases, such as those in Virginia, it’s extremely difficult to impose treatment on the mentally ill against their will no matter how desperately they need it.

But mental illness, by definition, is different from diabetes or heart disease. If I want to ignore my doctor and not take insulin or a statin for cholesterol, I have the right to make an informed decision. If I want to try chanting OM instead of taking a beta-blocker to lower my blood pressure, I’m guaranteed the right to make that choice. Nobody should protect me from my choices regardless of how foolish they might be as long as I hurt nobody else in the process.

But with mental illness, the sicker you are, the less you are able to make a decision based on informed consent. Unlike a physical illness, the more serious a mental illness is, the more likely it also is that the patient is out of touch with reality. The hallmark of a serious mental illness is the fact that the patient is delusional and is incapable of choosing care for himself. Such a person does not even realize that he is sick and out of touch with reality. To be blunt, he thinks the space men really are out to kill him in a devious plot and that he is totally justified in killing all of them to save himself. It’s self-defense. And such a person may also think that you or I are those deadly space aliens posing as human beings.

That’s an extreme and very over simplified example. But the impact of some mental disorders is that they can be dangerous to others besides the individual patient. So society has an interest in and a right to restrain that patient or to compel him to get treatment.

The problem is that we have no will and little resources to do this. Some extreme libertarians will argue that it is not the government’s place to provide care to sick people. That may be a valid argument for a diabetic who isn’t a threat to others. It may even be true for somebody with a depression who poses no risk to the public. But just as nobody in their right mind would argue that we ought to let dangerous criminals out of high security prisons because it’s expensive to keep them there for their full sentences, it’s ridiculous to argue that we shouldn’t ensure treatment, whether institutionalization or outpatient, for those whose mental illness makes them dangerous to others. That’s not being punitive.

In fact, in addition to the lives of innocent victims, the dangerously mentally deranged person is also a victim whose life might be saved. But only if Virginia stops dropping the ball and instead makes treatment a priority.
But with each passing tragedy, the sound of that ball dropping is getting too deafening to ignore.

Against The Crowd

Several of my favorite bloggers have undertaken a campaign to get a shock jock, Neal Boortz, removed from some Virginia radio stations for his inflammatory remarks about the Virginia Tech shootings. By now everybody in the Virginia blogosphere has heard Mr. Boortz’s unseemly and inaccurate statements so I am not going to link to them. I don’t need to spread his venom any further.

But for anybody who did miss his remarks, he and several other pundits have said that the students at Virginia Tech were somehow to blame for the massacre that occurred there a few weeks ago because they passively lined up to die and nobody fought back or tried to stop the shooter. I’ll deal with that in another, related post. For now let me just say that that was a completely inaccurate assessment of the situation, based on early, erroneous reports. But even if the students had in fact passively complied with the demands of a crazed killer who was firing rounds of bullets from a high capacity magazine, calling them “wussies” is ridiculous. Blaming the victim in a situation like this is despicable.

Unfortunately, campaigning to get the radio stations to cancel Boortz’s show or to get his syndication to fire him is both misguided and a colossal waste of energy.

It’s misguided because it has allowed the right to hijack the debate so that it’s no longer about what Boortz said but about censorship. Somehow, instead of focusing the discussion on Boortz’s statements, refuting them and exposing him for the pompous fraud that he is, liberals have allowed him to become the victim while they are now the villains. It would be nice to blame the right for this but the truth is people who call for silencing others really do bring those charges on themselves.

And yes this time it is censorship. It’s true that by one definition censorship is when the government knocks on somebody’s door and arrests him for making controversial statements. But censorship is also engaging in a dedicated effort to get radio stations to drop somebody because you don’t like what he said. This is not really allowing the market forces to remove Boortz. It is a concerted campaign to silence him.

Whatever happened to Voltaire’s “I may not agree with what you said but, I will defend to my death your right to say it.”

On the other hand, all of the energy going into this effort to get radio stations to remove Boortz is wasted because instead we should be fighting to revive the fairness doctrine.

Despite what conservatives tell you, they are no more in favor of free speech than the left is. What they really mean is that they favor preventing anybody from interfering with their right to dominate the airwaves. But contrary to their assertions, those airwaves are not private property and never were. Private companies lease the right to broadcast over the airwaves from the government, which owns the frequencies. That’s why the FCC can control content and fine companies for indecent broadcasts, just as the Bush appointed FCC did to CBS for Janet Jackson’s half-time fashion mishap a few years ago.

Some on the right may try to make the argument that the fairness doctrine is an attempt by the left to limit free speech. However, it is anything but that. In fact, it would expand freedom of speech. All the fairness doctrine says is that some time must be set aside on public airwaves for opposing points of view.

There’s an old saying that you are free to say whatever you want, but you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That may not be entirely true. I once attended a free speech symposium where the speaker, an ACLU member, said you should be free to yell fire as long as somebody else is right beside you to yell equally loudly, “that’s a lie; you’re safe so sit back down.”

In other words, your freedom of speech is only as secure as mine is. Each side will only stop lobbying to silence others whose opinions they dislike when there is a place for everybody to be heard.

It’s no good pontificating about free debate and the marketplace of ideas when it doesn’t actually exist. And if only one side gets to dominate the airwaves it’s not much of a marketplace. It’s more like a monopoly. And when that happens those shut out of the market will continue to shout down the other side by attempts at censorship.

Even more important, it is in the common good and absolutely vital to democracy to have a real marketplace of ideas with genuine, lively, spirited debate. And it’s especially crucial to be able to point out when somebody is spreading lies. And that’s what Boortz and others like him are doing every time they repeat the story that the students at VT did nothing to prevent Cho from shooting them.

It’s like crying fire in the crowded theater. You can either silence the shouter, or you can allow the dissenter to stand there and point out that there is no fire. One way will lead to real censorship; the other will expand freedom of speech for all and give the public a genuine marketplace of ideas. It will protect democracy by allowing the minority opinion to be heard, even against the crowd.