“So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”

– President Barack Obama, 2009
Address to Notre Dame University

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

Read it all.  If you’ve ever been in a pound and known that a few dozen furry eyes are staring at you begging to be sprung from the joint, that’s close to the feeling expressed here…

It does make one wonder whether our prisons (or more inaptly named “penitentiaries”) really are serving a purpose?  What good does it do to warehouse 6 million Americans to no ostensible purpose?

Here’s the additional catch: Iran could very well instruct Hezbollah to play its aces all at once.  Between a Syrian government looking to re-assert itself, a Hezbollah looking for a moment to strike, Iraq in turmoil and an Iranian regime looking for an out… the mix could very well be in for a wider regional conflict.

…or it could be nothing.

Still, the American people certainly did not see Libya coming up on the radar.  Now we have 16,000 troops on the ground.  With the massive NATO presence in the Persian Gulf right now, there’s enough powder in the keg.

The Susquehanna River city of 50,000 is saddled with about $300 million in debt tied to its nearly 40-year-old trash incinerator. Beset by environmental problems and fines for years, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shut it down in 2003 with about $100 million in debt already piled on it, some of which had gone to finance other city projects.

Guess we’ll be a bit more careful about where to place the public trust next time, won’t we?

Lessons learned?  Governance is hard work… but you pay your bills.  All the more reason for taxpayers to keep a keen eye when the public trust is used for back risky initiatives — public or corporate.

Today, however, political purists from both sides openly sneer at the idea of going to a dinner party. Who wants to risk hearing a viewpoint different from his own or be forced to defend her beliefs without the benefit of talking points? Politicians say they’re too busy to socialize, citing the demands of travel to their districts, the increasing unpredictability of the congressional calendar and the absence of their spouses. The last is a particular blow: That fewer government spouses live in Washington means another source of political friend-making is lost, and it’s a loss as well for the city charities that traditionally relied on congressional spouses for fundraising leadership (in return for providing venues for gracious bipartisan mingling).

Thus cries for such civil conversation tend to fall of deaf ears, especially when this sort of eavesdropping tends to be the result from an overeager reporter or blogger bottomfeeding for news.

Using some sophisticated statistical techniques, Burkhauser, Larrimore, and Simon then correct for these factors, and find that, using this more accurate measure of economic resources, the American middle class has done quite well over time, including during the last business cycle of 2000-2007. They write, “When using our broadest measure of available resources—post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits—median income growth of individual Americans improves to 36.7 percent over the period from 1979 to 2007, and by 4.8 percent between 2000 and 2007.” In other words, contra Stiglitz, middle class Americans have made substantial gains over the relevant periods. They have gotten richer—in fact, quite a bit richer—and not poorer.

Read it all.

I love reading Lew Rockwell’s daily e-mail.  I don’t always agree with the articles he passes along, but they are always good for thought.

This one just happens to be one with which I vehemently disagree, where Walter Williams criticizes Rep. Charlie Rangel’s admonishment regarding the 3/5 compromise:

My questions for those who condemn the three-fifths compromise are: Would blacks have been better off if slaves had been counted as a whole person? Should the North not have compromised at all and a union not have come into being? Would Rangel and Sharpton have agreed with Southerners at the Constitutional Convention, who argued slaves should “stand on an equality with whites” in determining congressional representation and Electoral College votes? Abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” that deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”

Now I can understand if someone chooses to make a “presentist” argument that the southern Founding Fathers were implacably wedded to the institution of slavery.  To argue, on the other side of the coin, that this failure of the Founding Fathers to eliminate slavery and live up to their ideals is somehow an attack on the Constitution?

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

…is absurd.

Call a spade a spade — slavery was an abomination.  Those who practiced and defended the institution did so at the cost of 600,000 American lives as North and South fought bitterly over “states rights” to keep their chattel property enslaved.  The aftermath of economic enslavement that followed physical liberation through Jim Crow laws and segregation only compounded the problem.

Today, we still struggle against inequalities of opportunity, even as we implicitly grant inequalities of outcome (and in a society that prizes free markets and meritocracy, hope that those who can excel will do so).

Nothing could be more antithetical to the American experiment than stripping away the rights of fellow human beings.  Slavery was one of those dichotomies… and Rangel is right to remind Americans of this historical injustice.

“Most would understand the phrase that the mind of More was like a diamond that a tyrant threw away into a ditch, because he could not break it.” — G.K. Chesterton

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, a man martyred not to political ambition — but to the honor of God.

“Be not afraid of your office.”

If more politicians honored that than ideology, ambition, ease, or position then this world would be a far better place. May the life and example of St. Thomas More continue to inspire those in public service, elected and otherwise.

Every once in awhile, you hear the talk from Northern Virginia about how they pay more into state government than they get back, that Richmond bleeds them dry, and that they should secede from the Commonwealth writ large and become the Glorious People’s Republic of Northern Virginia.

…or that we should trade northern Virginia for southern Maryland.
…or that West Occupied Virginia should return to the fold.
…or that the Hampton Roads as “Virginia’s cul-de-sac” should break away.
…or that Delmarva should just magically appear.

The list continues ad infinitum.  It’s not an old tradition.  State secession movements are as old as Virginia itself, and even more dominant if you include events such as Bacon’s Rebellion, Turner’s Rebellion, the little independent “kingdoms” in the hollows of Appalachia, not to mention native American tribes who are still seeking federal recognition.  So strong is the tradition in Virginia that our forefathers, when they settled and established the Republic of Texas, made absolutely sure they could split the state by treaty.

Of course, there’s always the politically driven secession movement that crops up from time to time… and in today’s installment, it’s in southern Arizona:

Before secession could occur, it would have to be approved separately by the Legislature, and by a second, binding referendum by residents of the proposed state.

If the Legislature refused, organizers could try to sidestep lawmakers with a statewide referendum. If both the Legislature and Pima County voters agreed, then it would be up to the U.S. Congress to grant Baja Arizona formal statehood.

The modern concept of Baja Arizona dates back to 1965, according to Hugh Holub, a local attorney widely credited with coining the term that year during anti-war protests at the University of Arizona. He supports the current effort.

“It sure sends a message to the rest of the world that we aren’t like the folks in Maricopa (County),” he said, referring to the state’s population center and capital.

But a more historical precedent can be found in Arizona’s origins as a U.S. territory, more than half a century before statehood was granted in 1912. The northern bulk of Arizona was ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848, six years before the lower portion of the territory, south of the Gila River, was separately acquired in 1854 under the Gadsden Purchase.

“It should have been its own state from the get-go,” Holub said.

In the case of Baja Arizona, this has more to do with a bunch of liberals upset that McCain won and their candidate lost.  Bummer, folks…

I’ll leave alone the utter chaos  and absurdity that would ensue if every locality or sub-section of a state that had a disagreement with the rest of the polity advocated for secession — imagine a Senate that outnumbered the U.S. House.  Still, when you begin to look at arbitrarily drawn lines for states despite regions, it’s not entirely inconceivable that this sort of thing could happen.  Jefferson had some pretty wild ideas.  Heck — there’s even a proposed State of Jefferson on the border between Oregon and California.

Let’s not forget our brethren in West Virginia… or western Virginia… or “the occupied territories” or what have you.  I’ll admit — I’m a bit jealous that they took some of the most beautiful parts of the Commonwealth away.  West Virginia was, for all intents and purposes, the last state secession movement, and a terrible model.  For the more esoterically minded, it is a nice quibble that ranks alongside the great “what ifs” of history.  ”What if” the two states reunited?

One can dream just as readily as one could dream about a Constantinople that resisted the Turks, or Rome that withstood the barbarians, or a British Empire still in existence.  Interesting thoughts… but a particularly useless exercise rooted more in romanticism than reality.

Such is the fate of most of these state secession movements.  Curious ideas, even romantic ones.  I doubt we will ever see a Baja Arizona or State of Jefferson on our maps anytime soon, much less a North Virginia to compliment the West.  Still… one can dream.

In 2011, we can see how media, political -isms, and interest groups are splitting apart our polity today.  In 1947, this wasn’t any different… because they had seen it happen in Germany.  Worth about 17 minutes of your time when you have a moment… and can tolerate the 1950′s era tone:

When people split the American public, it’s typically to someone else’s advantage.  Most folks don’t have the time to ask “why should I believe this?” when people present arguments — we just swallow whole what MSNBC, Fox News, the Washington Post or Richmond Times-Dispatch (pick your poison) tells us to believe.

Political power a lot easier to plunder for yourself when you target a scapegoat… which is why it’s so important to identify and critically assess this sort of rhetoric.  It’s an old trick and an old tool, but always, always beware the revolutionary.