Month: September 2014

From

The Huffington Post:

Former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce resigned as Arizona
Republican Party’s first vice chair late Sunday after receiving
criticism over recent comments he made about women on Medicaid.

Pearce made the controversial
comments on his weekly radio show.

“You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get
[female recipients] Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal
ligations,” Pearce said, according to
the Phoenix New Times. “Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs and
alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol,
then get a job.”

In resigning, Pearce said that his sin was actually failing to

attribute the controversial sentiments to someone else. Given
the general craziness of Arizona politics, and Pearce’s centrality
to America’s anti-immigration hysteria over the past several years
(see Kerry Howley’s great feature of him from 2008: “The
One-Man Wall“), I am disinclined to give his explanation the
benefit of the doubt.

Far too many self-professed limited-government conservatives
exhibit the same tic as either Pearce or his unnamed plagiarism
victim. Yes, please get the government out of people’s health
decisions…as long as those people aren’t receiving any welfare.
And if they are? Random
drug tests, dietary
restrictions on food stamps, and now sterilizations. (Keen
observers will note that such intrusive morals-testing is never
applied to recipients of corporate welfare.)

Though this particular subcategory of nanny statism is a
specialty of the right, there’s a lesson here, too, for those on
the left (as well as for everybody else). Whatever the
transaction between government and citizen, imagine your most hated
political enemy in charge of implenting it. Chances are you will
find his executive ideas
fundamentally offensive to your values. One way of limiting
such offense is to drive all your political enemies out of
government. A more realistic and attainable alternative, however,
is to limit the opportunities for government to get all up into
your tubals.

If you just can’t get enough of the debate over
the Keystone XL pipeline, take note of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline
proposal—which has the potential to become the Keystone of the
East. Unlike Keystone, which would ship oil from the Canadian tar
sands, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline would ship natural gas extracted
from the Marcellus shale formation.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, has enthusiastically
endorsed the project. Still, environmentalists and local residents
are not pleased. In fact, writes A. Barton Hinkle,
environmentalists are downright dismayed—even though the power
companies plan to do precisely what the Environmental Protection
Agency wants them to.

View this article.

Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was recently
visited by the Austin police and Child Protective Services for
allowing her son Isaac, age 6, to do the unthinkable: Play outside,
up her street, unsupervised.

He’d been out there for about 10 minutes when Roy’s doorbell
rang. She opened it to find her son —and a woman she didn’t
know. As
Roy wrote on her blog HaikuMama last week, the mystery woman
asked: “Is this your son?”

I nodded, still trying to figure out what was happening.

“He said this was his house. I brought him home.” She was
wearing dark glasses. I couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t gauge her
expression.

“You brought…”

“Yes. He was all the way down there, with no adult.” She
motioned to a park bench about 150 yards from my house. A bench
that is visible from my front porch. A bench where he had been
playing with my 8-year-old daughter, and where he decided to stay
and play when she brought our dog home from the walk they’d gone
on.

“You brought him home… from playing outside?” I continued to
be baffled.

And then the woman smiled condescendingly, explained that he was
OUTSIDE. And he was ALONE. And she was RETURNING HIM SAFELY. To
stay INSIDE. With an ADULT. I thanked her for her concern, quickly
shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.

What happened? The usual. A busybody saw that rarest of sights—a
child playing outside without a security detail—and wanted to teach
his parents a lesson. Roy might not have given the incident a whole
lot more thought except that shortly afterward, her doorbell rang
again.

This time it was a policewoman. “She wanted to know if my son
had been lost and how long he’d been gone,” Roy told me by phone.
She also took Roy’s I.D. and the names of her kids.

That night Isaac cried when he went to bed and couldn’t
immediately fall asleep. “He thought someone was going to call the
police because it was past bedtime and he was still awake.”

As it turns out, he
was almost right. About a week later, an investigator from Child
Protective Services came to the house and interrogated each of
Roy’s three children separately, without their parents, about their
upbringing.

“She asked my 12 year old if he had ever done drugs or alcohol.
She asked my 8-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with
people’s private parts, so my daughter, who didn’t know that things
like that exist, does now,” says Roy. “Thank you, CPS.”

It was only last week, about a month after it all began, that
the case was officially closed. That’s when Roy felt safe enough to
write about it. But safe is a relative term. In her last
conversation with the CPS investigator, who actually seemed to be
on her side, Roy asked, “What do I do now?”

Replied the investigator, “You just don’t let them play
outside.”

There you have it. You are free to raise your children as you
like, except if you want to actually give them a childhood. Fail to
incarcerate your child and you could face incarceration
yourself.

Children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was recently
visited by the Austin police and Child Protective Services for
allowing her son Isaac, age 6, to do the unthinkable: Play outside,
up her street, unsupervised.

He’d been out there for about 10 minutes when Roy’s doorbell
rang. She opened it to find her son —and a woman she didn’t
know. As
Roy wrote on her blog HaikuMama last week, the mystery woman
asked: “Is this your son?”

I nodded, still trying to figure out what was happening.

“He said this was his house. I brought him home.” She was
wearing dark glasses. I couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t gauge her
expression.

“You brought…”

“Yes. He was all the way down there, with no adult.” She
motioned to a park bench about 150 yards from my house. A bench
that is visible from my front porch. A bench where he had been
playing with my 8-year-old daughter, and where he decided to stay
and play when she brought our dog home from the walk they’d gone
on.

“You brought him home… from playing outside?” I continued to
be baffled.

And then the woman smiled condescendingly, explained that he was
OUTSIDE. And he was ALONE. And she was RETURNING HIM SAFELY. To
stay INSIDE. With an ADULT. I thanked her for her concern, quickly
shut the door and tried to figure out what just happened.

What happened? The usual. A busybody saw that rarest of sights—a
child playing outside without a security detail—and wanted to teach
his parents a lesson. Roy might not have given the incident a whole
lot more thought except that shortly afterward, her doorbell rang
again.

This time it was a policewoman. “She wanted to know if my son
had been lost and how long he’d been gone,” Roy told me by phone.
She also took Roy’s I.D. and the names of her kids.

That night Isaac cried when he went to bed and couldn’t
immediately fall asleep. “He thought someone was going to call the
police because it was past bedtime and he was still awake.”

As it turns out, he
was almost right. About a week later, an investigator from Child
Protective Services came to the house and interrogated each of
Roy’s three children separately, without their parents, about their
upbringing.

“She asked my 12 year old if he had ever done drugs or alcohol.
She asked my 8-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with
people’s private parts, so my daughter, who didn’t know that things
like that exist, does now,” says Roy. “Thank you, CPS.”

It was only last week, about a month after it all began, that
the case was officially closed. That’s when Roy felt safe enough to
write about it. But safe is a relative term. In her last
conversation with the CPS investigator, who actually seemed to be
on her side, Roy asked, “What do I do now?”

Replied the investigator, “You just don’t let them play
outside.”

There you have it. You are free to raise your children as you
like, except if you want to actually give them a childhood. Fail to
incarcerate your child and you could face incarceration
yourself.

When Congress passed an Authorization for Use of
Military Force after the 9/11 attacks, virtually every legislator
in Washington voted for it—even Ron Paul, though he
expressed some misgivings. The only “no” vote came from the
California Democrat Barbara Lee, whose district includes such
radical strongholds as Berkeley and Oakland. Thirteen years later,
The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf has
looked back at Lee’s arguments and the reactions they received.
And by “reactions they received,” I mean mail: thousands of letters
that now fill 12 boxes.

Friedersdorf’s article largely consists of quotes from those
letters, whose sentiments range from “To combat terrorism, let’s
act in accordance with a high standard that does not disregard the
lives of people in other countries” to “You should have been in the
Trade Towers you anti-American Bitch. Drop dead!!!”
Friedersdorf also points out that Lee’s position has often
been misunderstood, noting that she “wasn’t saying no to
any use of force against terrorists—rather, she was averse
to giving the president authority so broad that it could be used to
launch any number of wars.” But the part of the article that I want
to highlight comes when he sums up at the end:

Even though a majority now considers the war most
understood the AUMF to authorize to be a mistake; even though it
has been used to justify military interventions that no one
conceived of on September 14, 2001; even though there’s no proof
that any war-making of the last 13 years has made us safer; even
though many more Americans have died in wars of choice than have
been killed in terrorist attacks; even though Lee and many of her
constituents were amenable to capturing or killing the 9/11
perpetrators, not pacifists intent on ruling out any use of force;
despite all of that, Representative Lee is still thought of as a
fringe peacenik representing naive East Bay hippies who could never
be trusted to guide U.S. foreign policy. And the people who utterly
failed to anticipate the trajectory of the War on Terrorism? Even
those who later voted for a war in Iraq that turned out to be among
the most catastrophic in U.S. history are considered sober,
trustworthy experts….

Lee and many letter writers who supported her were far more
prescient in their analysis than Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Try telling the average American that many Berkeley liberals were
more correct about the War on Terror than those two. They’ll laugh
in your face, even if they personally supported and now oppose
those two wars.

The first sentence in that quote is slightly wrong: I know of no
poll that shows a majority of Americans regretting the
Afghan war. But we’re coming close. As of February, Gallup shows 49
percent of the country thinking “the United States made a mistake
in sending military forces to Afghanistan” and 48 percent thinking
it didn’t. In other words, there is basically an even split, with a
slight plurality tipping toward Lee’s perspective.

Regular Reason readers know I’ve been
mentioning that poll a lot
lately. That is because I remember September 2001 and the
public mood at the time, and I find the shift in public opinion
staggering. When Gallup first polled Americans about the Afghan
war, about two months after Lee’s vote, only 9 percent held the
position that 49 percent do today. We are not all Barbara Lee now,
but Barbara Lee’s perspective has become mainstream—if not in D.C.,
than in the country at large.

When Congress passed an Authorization for Use of
Military Force after the 9/11 attacks, virtually every legislator
in Washington voted for it—even Ron Paul, though he
expressed some misgivings. The only “no” vote came from the
California Democrat Barbara Lee, whose district includes such
radical strongholds as Berkeley and Oakland. Thirteen years later,
The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf has
looked back at Lee’s arguments and the reactions they received.
And by “reactions they received,” I mean mail: thousands of letters
that now fill 12 boxes.

Friedersdorf’s article largely consists of quotes from those
letters, whose sentiments range from “To combat terrorism, let’s
act in accordance with a high standard that does not disregard the
lives of people in other countries” to “You should have been in the
Trade Towers you anti-American Bitch. Drop dead!!!”
Friedersdorf also points out that Lee’s position has often
been misunderstood, noting that she “wasn’t saying no to
any use of force against terrorists—rather, she was averse
to giving the president authority so broad that it could be used to
launch any number of wars.” But the part of the article that I want
to highlight comes when he sums up at the end:

Even though a majority now considers the war most
understood the AUMF to authorize to be a mistake; even though it
has been used to justify military interventions that no one
conceived of on September 14, 2001; even though there’s no proof
that any war-making of the last 13 years has made us safer; even
though many more Americans have died in wars of choice than have
been killed in terrorist attacks; even though Lee and many of her
constituents were amenable to capturing or killing the 9/11
perpetrators, not pacifists intent on ruling out any use of force;
despite all of that, Representative Lee is still thought of as a
fringe peacenik representing naive East Bay hippies who could never
be trusted to guide U.S. foreign policy. And the people who utterly
failed to anticipate the trajectory of the War on Terrorism? Even
those who later voted for a war in Iraq that turned out to be among
the most catastrophic in U.S. history are considered sober,
trustworthy experts….

Lee and many letter writers who supported her were far more
prescient in their analysis than Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Try telling the average American that many Berkeley liberals were
more correct about the War on Terror than those two. They’ll laugh
in your face, even if they personally supported and now oppose
those two wars.

The first sentence in that quote is slightly wrong: I know of no
poll that shows a majority of Americans regretting the
Afghan war. But we’re coming close. As of February, Gallup shows 49
percent of the country thinking “the United States made a mistake
in sending military forces to Afghanistan” and 48 percent thinking
it didn’t. In other words, there is basically an even split, with a
slight plurality tipping toward Lee’s perspective.

Regular Reason readers know I’ve been
mentioning that poll a lot
lately. That is because I remember September 2001 and the
public mood at the time, and I find the shift in public opinion
staggering. When Gallup first polled Americans about the Afghan
war, about two months after Lee’s vote, only 9 percent held the
position that 49 percent do today. We are not all Barbara Lee now,
but Barbara Lee’s perspective has become mainstream—if not in D.C.,
than in the country at large.