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(09/18/12 1:58am)
The weird part about writing my column this fall is that I will never see it in print. I am spending the semester in Australia, but I decided at the end of last year to continue writing this column, assuming – incorrectly – that the upcoming election would be both interesting and centered around important issues. So, welcome to election season 2012: the race to the bottom. If 2008 were a baseball game in which the teams tried for home runs, this time around it is all about clearing the benches and charging the mound.
Which is worse for America? A campaign based almost entirely upon falsehoods and platitudes, or one that focuses on the small, petty, petulant problems it has with the opponent? The latter is more depressing, but as we struggle to our knees and begin to look for answers to the questions of the 21st century, both are dangerous. Together, they add up to a depressing election between two men so walled off from the world that they make Don Draper look like the Kardashian family by comparison.
Presidential elections in the modern era have developed a distinct pattern: candidate runs on lofty ideals and promises to change the way Washington works. Then, four years later, the less shiny incumbent desperately tries to retain his grip on power with a barrage of mud slinging that brings out the base and depresses the independent-minded voters who just might cross party lines. We cannot afford another such election cycle.
Today, we view the history of America as the history of great leaders. The 2008 election of Barack Obama was more about the man, his story and his speaking abilities than about any real issues. America is crying out for a knight to appear and lead us out of the wilderness. But this is merely a mistake of our modern cult of the individual. America has always been at its greatest when our leaders were secondary to their ideas; not Thomas Jefferson but independence; not Abraham Lincoln but a house united; not Franklin D. Roosevelt but a new deal for a nation tired of the old one. FDR actually went to great lengths to hide his personal story and the crippling illness that came with it. There is a reason why the United States bloomed under quiet leaders like Eisenhower – a man who understood that duty leaves little room for ego. In our system, no great businessman or cunning politician is enough to bridge the divide. Instead, history shows that it is determined by groups of people who are willing to form coalitions that solve the problems at hand; the Constitution was not written by one man, nor were the Federalist Papers. Lincoln would never have restored the Union without the help of Ulysses Grant. FDR could not have brought change without the help of the shift in public opinion.
Now is not the time for petty issues and character attacks. It is the time for consensus and compromise. You don't redo the kitchen cabinets when the house is on fire. If we cannot set aside minor quibbles like who put a dog on the roof of his car, the marathon time of a vice presidential candidate and the tax rates that certain candidates paid, or move beyond fait accompli like the Affordable Care Act, we will slide into the league of fallen empires. The United States will become one of those giants of history that children will learn about, confounded by the fact that the speed of its rise was matched only by the depth of its decay.
Here is the state of our union going into the fall election: not only is our house divided against itself, but it is also crumbling and close to default. Our middle class has become endangered. Our infrastructure is the shame of the developed world. Our schools are stuck in the industrial era. Our seas are rising and our soldiers are falling. Yet nobody wants to pay to fix any of these problems or to actually discuss tangible solutions. We expect first-world infrastructure, a level of entitlement support developed when lives were nearly two decades shorter and the most powerful military in the history of the world while paying little of our unprecedented wealth.
Rarely before has the magnitude of our challenge been so poorly matched by the level of our political discourse. President Obama earned my vote when he signed the healthcare act that will forever bear his name – a historic achievement that must be defended from the scourge of the Tea Party, even at the cost of another four years of gridlock. The recent Democratic National Convention did a fantastic job of reminding us of the stakes. But despite all the speeches and attacks, neither candidate has convinced me that he will help deliver the solutions the United States so badly needs.
(05/05/11 1:28pm)
On the final Saturday of my orientation last February, we gathered at the Snow Bowl. Fresh with the energy that comes with making new friends and eager to solidify our places in the group, we tore off our shirts to the strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and ran out into the snow and sunshine — the perfect metaphor for the start of our college experience often marked simultaneously by exuberance and vulnerability, by friendship and freezing cold. But this year’s Feb leaders were warned against a repeat. According to the College Handbook, we have a strict zero-tolerance policy against any activity — no matter how ridiculous or inconsequential — that can be considered “hazing.”
I’ve always found zero-tolerance policies ineffective and distasteful. They may seem like the easy option when faced with a large and unruly group, but their unyielding responses inevitably seem to produce the worst kind of injustice.
Take the Middlebury swimming and diving team, whose spirit, cohesion and season were irreparably damaged by a rather silly accusation of hazing.
What the team did was stupid and ill-considered, but so were both the punishment and the false moral high ground assumed by those who rushed to judge them, canceling a meet for the men and women even before all the details could come to light.
Under Middlebury’s impossibly broad definition of hazing, the so-called “guilty” parties include many groups on campus — and not only the sports teams. Just living in Battell seems like it could qualify. Quoting the College’s own anti-hazing policy, the Middlebury application process can easily be defined as “an act . . . against a student in connection with” joining “an educational institution” which “should reasonably be expected to have the effect of humiliating, intimidating, or demeaning the student or endangering the mental or physical health of a student.” I am reasonably certain that I was not the only one intimidated by the application process. And being waitlisted was pretty damn humiliating.
My point here is that the swim teams fell victim to an overly broad policy coupled with an overly zealous prosecution. The most remarkable fact about the alleged hazing was the lack of alcohol. No one’s health was in any danger. At most, a couple of people were embarrassed. An appropriate punishment for the perpetrators would have been a day of community service or something similar. Instead, the administration treated the entire team like a group of criminals. Besides the first-years, the women’s team had to miss the rest of their season, the entire team was put on probation and last week, the coach and assistant coach stepped down. While they claim this was not connected to the “incident,” team members have since been asked not to speak to the press, as though we live in the kind of society where no one will notice this purge.
Zero tolerance policies have no place in a liberal arts education. They are unreasoned, unquestioning and often unjust. They teach the opposite of the lessons that our Middlebury College education aims to bestow, pushing things into the dark instead of allowing open dialogue. Next time a student is a victim of hazing, it seems likely he or she will take a good look at the possible consequences of speaking out and decide to remain silent.
Imagine if the College applied a zero tolerance policy to alcohol. Students would go even further to hide their consumption. The Middlebury social scene — for what it’s worth — would retreat behind locked doors. Most importantly, students would lose access to medical care, creating a serious health risk. And how many would actually stop drinking?
Zero tolerance policies have no place at Middlebury. They leave no room for common sense. Nothing else here has made me more disenchanted with the administration.
Rushed judgments, accusations against the athletes’ characters and unfair assumptions seemed to rule the process. We need to stop pretending that making an example of a team every now and then will make hazing go away. For better or for worse, initiations are an integral part of the college experience; instead of pushing them undercover or off campus, the best we can do is bring them into the open and make them safe.
(04/14/11 4:09am)
Rahm Emmanuel once famously said that he would never let a good crisis go to waste. Only in an emergency can the American people be convinced to allow some kind of drastic change; otherwise, the majority prefers change to plod along at a more manageable pace. So, how does a politician convince his constituents that their unemployment problem is less important than the debt problem? He manufactures a crisis, or blows a temporary problem out of proportion. That’s what Republican governors are doing across the country as they force workers to abandon half a century of labor protections. That’s also what Paul Ryan, the new and eager chairman of the House Budget Committee, is doing right now with his morally repugnant long-term plan to allegedly solve our looming debt crisis.
As I wrote in my last column, we do not have a debt crisis. We do have a massive budget deficit and our debt has skyrocketed, but the slow recovery from the recession should take precedence. A strong and growing economy will get us out of that mess far more quickly than the kinds of massive cuts that Ryan and other extremists salivate over on their way to work every morning.
Even if you accept that we need to act quickly to reduce long-term government spending, one look at Ryan’s plan reveals that it will address no such issue. By turning Medicaid into a series of block grants, by completely dismantling Medicare so that seniors have to buy far more expensive private insurance, by gutting the Pell grants that help poor students afford a first-class education, by cutting back on the food stamps used by an ever-growing segment of the population and through a draconian series of other cuts, he would indeed cut $5.8 trillion in long-term spending.
In Ryan’s eyes, the money from those cuts can have only one destination: the wealthy. His plan would use the vast majority of the $5.8 trillion that he allegedly intended to subtract from the debt and instead use it to fund the GOP’s out-of-control fetish for tax cuts. These tax cuts would make the Bush tax cuts look tiny in comparison. The top income tax rate — once 91 percent under our secretly Socialist President Eisenhower — will fall from 35 to 25 percent. Corporations will receive greater tax cuts. The total amount of Ryan’s savings that will go to tax cuts is $5 trillion, meaning that a proposal that’s pitched as solving our deficit could actually only diminish long-term deficits by $800 billion at the cost of restructuring the American economy in one of the worst possible ways.
There’s ample reason to doubt even this figure. It turns out that to reach these savings, government discretionary spending must magically shrink from 12 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP after all of the other cuts. Ryan does not say how this will be achieved, but significant decreases in defense spending are of course not part of the proposal. Even more bizarrely, he also relies on a projected unemployment rate in 2021 of less than three percent. As the rate is currently hovering under nine percent, this would require a literally unprecedented boom in the American economy. Although his proposal is short on details, I can only imagine he reaches this number either by assuming that the people who can no longer afford health care will simply die off or he plans to toss the unemployed into prison.
That such a proposal would make its way into the highest levels of the American government is a sad testament to the success of the far right. Soon, thinking Republicans like Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins will have vanished from the ranks of the GOP. The party of Michele Bachmann, John Boehner and Paul Ryan would dismiss Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and even Reagan as “liberal.”
It is uniquely depressing, disgusting and shameful that men like Paul Ryan can look at this country and decide that, in a time when the wealthiest one percent of Americans receive nearly a quarter of the nation’s income, the rich are not rich enough and the poor are too well off. I can only hope that the next election cycle will sweep this new generation of political robber barons from power.
(03/17/11 4:14am)
A heavy knock on the door startled me as I sat at my desk the other night, wallowing through a lengthy problem set.
“Come in,” I yelled, and then returned to my work. When I noticed my visitors I nearly fell out of my seat. President Barack Obama stood in my doorway, flanked by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In the hallway, standing on his tiptoes and looking like a turtle with big glasses was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“Mr. President!” I gasped. Behind me, I heard a tap on my window. There stood House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), jumping up and down, struggling to see inside. Boehner strode past me and pulled my curtains shut.
“Ignore Nancy,” he said. He reached into my fridge for a bottle of wine — by which, of course, I mean grape juice — and poured a generous amount into a glass that was definitely not stolen from Ross Dining Hall. He let out a deep sigh, full of longing for times past. “We’ve got a problem,” he said to me. A solitary tear ran down his orange cheek.
Obama scornfully handed Boehner a tissue. “What he means to say is that we need your help. We just can’t agree on this budget, and Harry here says you’re the one to fix it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, sir...”
“So tomorrow, we are endowing you with the power to take whichever steps you deem necessary to fix this budget crisis. We all pledge to support whatever plan you come up with. Even Mitch agrees to support it.” Obama reached out to shake my hand. “Good luck, Zach.” He snapped his fingers and they all disappeared in a flash of red, white and blue light.
Once in charge of fixing the budget crisis, my first step was to repeal the Bush tax cuts, restoring $3.7 trillion of revenue to the government over the next 10 years. I decided that we would bring the war in Afghanistan to the quickest possible end and stop throwing money at contractors when American troops could do the job just as well. I increased the age at which the elderly could receive Social Security benefits from 65 to 70 — except for those who could qualify for hardship benefits — and decided to phase out payouts for wealthy retirees entirely. When that law was first passed, average life expectancy was 62. Now that it’s more like 78, this seems not only necessary but also fair.
With the more obvious adjustments taken care of, I moved on to look at the harder choices. I found a few billion dollars in the government’s discretionary spending fund, but that was only a tiny chunk of the federal budget so I moved on to defense spending — always the first target of a liberal looking for some budget savings — and started by canceling a lot of expensive weapons that were under development.
Then, in a copy of Time Magazine to which I subscribed purely for Joel Stein’s column, I saw an article about the deficit. One of the things about a recession is that government revenue dries up pretty quickly, exploding the size of the deficit. Because of the economic climate, current debt projections are based on an anemic 2.8 percent growth rate in our GDP. In February, however, the Federal Reserve predicted that the economy will grow at a rate of 3.9 percent in 2011. At that rate, the annual deficit should shrink from $1.4 trillion today to a measly $113 billion by 2021.
I grasped the solution that seems to have been missed by most of the media. Massive cuts such as the House Republican budget plan that would lead to the loss of 700,000 more jobs are totally unnecessary.
So, I restored most of the weapons programs, because making weapons is what we do best. Someone has to fill that role; and have you ever seen an F-35 or a Reaper drone? The awesomeness makes them well worth the money, and the military drives a lot of technological innovation that makes its way into the civilian world in ways most of us would not imagine. The same company makes bomb-defusing robots in Iraq and dust bunny-diffusing robots back home.
I did, however, tell the manufacturers that they needed to stop writing “made in the USA” on all the weapons we’d be selling to repressive regimes. (Quick: Are the former protestors in Egypt more or less likely to buy American because of an advertisement stamped on the tear gas canisters that bombarded them?)
I changed U.S. trade laws to prohibit the importation of products made with child labor or in sweatshops. Suddenly, our manufacturers had a fighting chance. Sure, prices at Wal-Mart went up a little. But for the first time in a generation, wages for the middle and working classes began to rise. On the strength of a revolution in green manufacturing jobs, our trade deficit shrank and GDP growth increased. We were pushing a 4.5 percent growth rate.
The deficit was vanishing into history and I wanted more, so we used our awesome military technology and annexed Canada for its resources. This caused a bit of an uproar in the Canadian press, but when we decided to adopt their healthcare system, they settled down and were actually pretty nice “aboot” the whole thing.
(03/03/11 5:08am)
“It’s difficult for anyone to have warm and tender feelings for the crazy man.” – Glenn Beck, Feb. 22
It’s a surreal scene: Glenn Beck, all alone on a TV set flooded with a low, blue light. He’s surrounded by an array of chalkboards; like mirrors in a haunted house, they reflect the many, many fears of the chubby, baby-faced excuse for a man who was once the rising star at Fox News. Words like Marxism, socialism, Islamism, political correctness and George Soros cover the boards. Beck circles a word here and there as he rants about the Communist/Islamist/UN caliphate that will soon engulf the Western World. The mind of Glenn Beck is a terrifying place.
One of the items in his set is a large television screen showing five different scenes. On the bottom, video streams from Libya, Yemen and Bahrain show protesters rioting, burning cars, and clashing violently with the police. The two feeds on the top of the screen show protesters peacefully waving signs demanding that they retain their right to bargain collectively. In the mind of Glenn Beck, these are the same. He actually seems to believe that a combination of socialists and radical Islamists have banded together in places across the world in order to form a New World Order.
Beck fears these protesters so much that he seems to support any measure against them. When a prominent Libyan intellectual who happened to belong to the Muslim brotherhood called on Libyan soldiers to rise up and assassinate the leader who seems intent on butchering his people with the help of mercenaries and fighter planes, Beck expressed support for Qaddafi, who he called “the crazy man” without any sense of irony. He qualified this support by saying that the dictator reminded him of “Scar, from the Lion King.” Apparently his viewers need to use Disney cartoons in order to gauge their views of the real world.
Unsurprisingly, Beck’s ratings are down nearly 40 percent since January of 2010. This might be because he doesn’t offer solutions to his nightmares other than to buy gold and wait in a basement for the world to end, toy rifle in hand and tin foil hat in place. He claims not to support the dictators throughout the Middle East, but if they fall for any reason other than military intervention by Republican presidents, he points to a vast, international conspiracy run by either George Soros or the Muslim Brotherhood. He sees liberal workers protesting in Wisconsin and Ohio and young people in the Middle East alike as the agents of this international conspiracy. To him, they probably all look like Jafar, from “Aladdin.”
It’s a shame that the situation in Wisconsin has not received more attention from the mainstream media. Freshly elected Governor Scott Walker has created a budget crisis as an excuse to try and undo a century of labor agreements. No longer will teachers be able to use their collective bargaining power to negotiate for better benefits. Salary increases will be tied to the Consumer Price Index, which means that, essentially, teachers will never again have a salary increase. Their “raises” will always match or lag behind inflation. Wisconsin responded with a fury that seems shocking to their new Republican leaders. As of last Saturday, at least 70,000 protesters had flooded the capital, making camp in the halls of the state capital and trying the only way they know to preserve that most American of rights — the right to unionize, to demand fair compensation for an important and thankless job, and to defend against the encroachment of a government that doesn’t respect the rights of its citizens. By villainizing the protesters, commentators like Beck are ignoring the legacy of their beloved Ronald Reagan, who said that the Solidarity movement in Poland should “remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost” (full disclosure — I stole this quote from the Facebook page of one of my high school teachers. Thanks, Mr. Feldman!).
Glenn Beck should be praising these protesters. But in the fearful mind of Glenn Beck, since they aren’t members of his beloved Tea Party, they must be Marxist Islamist Nazi Zombies. At times like these, Beck seems increasingly likely to abandon everything and flee to an underground bunker in an undisclosed location. I hear the caves in Afghanistan are great this time of year.
(02/17/11 5:04am)
Recently retired Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas is not a man to sit idle. First elected to the Vermont legislature the same year he graduated from Middlebury with a degree in Russian studies, he rose rapidly through the state’s elected offices despite his unenviable status as a Republican in the nation’s bluest state. In 2002 he succeeded Howard Dean as Governor and served four terms in office as one of the most popular state executives in America. Halfway through his final term, he still enjoyed an approval rating of 65 percent. While he may have stepped down as governor this year, his political career is far from over.
Douglas is a classic New England conservative; a member of an endangered species. He seems most comfortable in a suit and tie, drives an aging Dodge Neon and line-dries his clothes in order to save on his electric bill. He’s master of the ‘retail politics’ that dominate in Vermont and New Hampshire; I have not yet met a Vermonter who hasn’t shaken his hand at some point and he remembers all of them by name. With his embrace of the stimulus and support for environmental conservation, he is also the type of politician that, in any other state, the Tea Party would have run out of the GOP. In Vermont, however, this allowed him to survive the wave that swept Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008.
As a member of the minority party in a tiny state, Douglas has had to work with his opposition throughout his political career. It is clear when he disagrees with something, but he knows when to respond with a rueful smile or one of his many deadpan jokes. He seems to regard his opponents with a friendly respect, speaking admiringly of Dean’s job in office and Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) work in Washington. He refers to the new Democratic governor Peter Shumlin (D-VT) as “Shummy,” and had Congressman Peter Welch as a guest speaker in the class he taught this January. The one notable exception to this esteem for his adversaries is his clear distaste for Senator Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Democrat who has become a hero on the left for his opposition to any compromise on the Bush tax cuts. Douglas clearly sees Bernie as too extreme, too much of a firebrand and more of a show pony than a work horse.
All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that Jim Douglas will attempt to unseat Sanders in 2012. He will deny this when asked, but it is clear that his mind could change if he sees a path to victory. Douglas ran for the Senate against Leahy in 1992, giving the veteran legislator a run for his money. Since then, his profile in the state has increased substantially. As a first-term Senator, Sanders is considerably more vulnerable than Leahy. His “take-no-prisoners” approach endears him to the liberal wing of his party, but he alienates both moderates and the press. Douglas, the popular governor of the bluest state in the nation, has already demonstrated his ability to win these voters, along with a large share of Democrats. This makes him the only Republican with a shot at winning the seat in 2012. No other candidate could seriously challenge Sanders. With his future career plans not yet laid, the chance to jump back into the arena next year may be too tempting to refuse.
This is bad news for Democrats nationally. They currently hold the Senate with a razor-thin majority and two-thirds of the seats up for reelection in 2012 belong to Democrats. If they lose a seat in Vermont, they will fare far worse in the rest of the nation. Much of their success depends on how President Barack Obama tackles unemployment and the debt; if neither has improved by 2012, Douglas could find himself the member of a large Senate majority. But one thing is certain: Douglas will not be content with an early retirement. Politics is his only hobby.
(01/20/11 5:07am)
I am not going to write about what happened in Tucson two weeks ago. Obviously the events are tragic — although we can take a small measure of hope from the survival of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) — and enough has been said about the shooter.
Nor am I going to try and lay this at the feet of the Tea Party; Jared Loughner was not inspired by the violent rhetoric they toss around casually without fear of reprisal. While we can probably all agree that it is unwise to pray for the death of your opponent or to shoot a human-shaped target with your opponent’s initials written on it, Sarah Palin’s crosshairs on a map were not the reason for this incident.
What the tragedy at Tucson does show is that we need to seriously question our societal obsession with firearms.
The saying that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is — to put it bluntly — a load of crap. A disturbed individual could never show up at a rally with a concealed bow and arrow or a butcher knife and kill six others.
What kind of private citizen needs to be able to fire 30 rounds without reloading? If someone breaks into your house, and it takes 30 shots to either shoot the intruder or scare them away then there is a fair chance you have also accidently hit your dog, your neighbors and — if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was any guide — every piece of antique china in the dining room. Despite what you might think from playing Call of Duty, bullets are not easily stopped by sheetrock and two-by-fours. The only reason for carrying such a dangerous weapon is if you’re Jack Bauer, repelling an entire team of enemy commandos. In that case, an M-4 or MP-5 would be more effective anyway and have the added benefit of being unable to be concealed in public.
The second amendment says that “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Even though Justice Antonin Scalia and the NRA insist otherwise, this text does not allow an unlimited right to carry more guns than Neo in The Matrix. The key phrase of the amendment is “a well-regulated militia.” This phrase does not refer to the crazies training to combat their impending relocation to FEMA concentration camps. It can only refer to the National Guard or a similarly organized and regulated group. Should you be able to carry a weapon if you’re not serving? Sure — a shotgun or a hunting rifle seems both reasonable and consistent with the founders’ intent. But you don’t have a constitutional guarantee allowing you to carry an Uzi to work.
I almost cried when I read Gail Collins’ column about Tucson in the New York Times. I’m no John Boehner, bawling into my designer sleeves at the first sight of pathos, but I do have a ten-year-old sister, so when I read that a little girl, only nine, was shot in the chest that day because she had just been elected President of her class and wanted to learn more about democracy, I understood why we still have the death penalty.
If, as a society, we cannot agree to keep handguns and automatic weapons out of the hands of the deranged, to ban extended magazines and to forbid the practice of carrying a pistol under one’s jacket, then we must prepare to accept more tragedies like Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine. The nine-year-old victim, Christina Taylor Green, was born on September 11th, 2001. More children and teens are killed by gun violence every year than perished on that awful day. How many more must die before we learn? Guns by themselves do not kill people. But people with guns sure as hell can.
(12/02/10 5:04am)
Discussing politics is one of the easiest ways to ruin any family gathering. In my past I have managed to spoil visits from several of my relatives. One time involved my lobbyist uncle and his “artist” wife — who, depending on the incident, either would not stop complaining about how they could barely afford to keep both their maid and their grown children employed due their unconstitutionally high taxes, or about the dangers of vaccination. Another time occurred with my grandparents after my grandmother explained to me that she was a Republican because, when she was growing up near Boston, all of the Democrats were either Irish, Catholic or Irish Catholic.
Needless to say, I have mostly learned my lesson by now and I was determined to make it through Thanksgiving dinner without so much as a crack about the Fox News story claiming that Socialism almost killed the Pilgrims. This reduced my possible appropriate topics for conversation to school, skiing, my fish and all the shiny new gadgets that I wish I could buy. When, halfway through the first course, my mom made a disparaging comment about Sarah Palin — something along the lines of: “Sarah Palin is such a moron” — I cringed and tried to remain focused on my gravy-covered mountain of mashed potatoes.
Much to my surprise, the segment of my extended family at my house this holiday has a deep antipathy towards the former half-term Alaskan Governor. My dad’s sister and her family are what Palin would call “real Americans.” They come from one of the most rural parts of upstate New York, possess a love of fast cars and big trucks that clearly eluded my parents and are more comfortable with guns than Palin can ever pretend to be. One of my cousins built a secret compartment into his truck where he could keep his pistol and he seems to get immense satisfaction from nailing woodchucks with a sniper rifle.
I expected them to be a bit more enthusiastic about Palin, or at least to complain about Obama. Instead, they agreed wholeheartedly with my mom, and my cousin’s wife Diane joked about smashing her TV if Palin’s daughter Bristol — apparently qualified as a celebrity by her status as the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only education — won “Dancing with the Stars.” This would have been less of an overreaction than when a Wisconsin man took a shotgun to his TV because Bristol advanced another round.
Sarah Palin is running for President. Of course she will try to keep people guessing for as long as possible; once she announces her candidacy, TV shows will not be able to pay her money for her unsophisticated political analysis or cheesy documentaries about her charmed life in the sticks. Her candidacy, entertaining as it might become, is no laughing matter. If George W. Bush seemed uncurious, at least he knew which Korea is a United States ally. He also never resigned his office as Governor because it was not enough fun.
My point here is not just that Sarah Palin is a moron. She was, after all, accepted to five colleges in four years — three more than I was — nominated as a Vice Presidential candidate and invented the Oxford Dictionary “word of the year” with her confused combination of “refute” and “repudiate.” Neither am I calling her the anti-Christ, although here I have no proof to the contrary.
Her problem is that, despite sky-high ratings among Republican loyalists, she attracts less independent support than any other possible candidate. She could potentially win the Republican nomination in 2012, but party heavyweights correctly believe that this would be a disaster for both their party and, potentially, America. Palin’s nomination is the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi winning the Democratic nomination, except without the policy experience or the Botox.
If she did not look so much like Tina Fey, no one would give her a second thought. Now that’s a woman all Americans can support.
(11/11/10 5:45am)
Last Tuesday was not a good day for any American outside of the top one percent of wage earners. Democrats lost 65 seats in the House, bestowing the GOP with their biggest majority in, well, over half a century and now cling to power in the Senate by a narrow margin. The next two years will likely be characterized by ridiculous Republican investigations of the Obama White House — is he from Kenya? From Indonesia? From Mars? — tax cuts without matching cuts in spending, attempts to undo all the progress of the past two years and a general lack of drive to solve the problems of today. When the Republican minority leader in the Senate says that his top priority is preventing Obama from winning reelection, you know he could care less about trying to fix the economy.
With all of that, I’m far too depressed to analyze the seeds of the Democratic defeat, or even to point out the good things that happened — Shumlin prevailing in the Vermont Governor’s race, or Bennett winning by a narrow margin in Colorado, or Reid holding his seat and his position as Majority Leader. Plus, I’m not even sure that last one is a good thing. And so, like any self-respecting writer, I’ll turn to alcohol to numb the pain — writing about alcohol, that is.
Republican politicians aren’t the only thing sweeping the nation and causing widespread vomiting this fall. The colorful alcoholic beverage known as “Four Loko” has exploded in popularity and is rapidly becoming the drink of choice for college students around the country. Both the New York Times and Washington Post recently ran stories about the dangers of the drink, which contains a large dose of alcohol, caffeine and other ingredients more commonly found in a can of Red Bull.
While the can itself states that the drink is 12 percent alcohol –— the same as, say, a dry Reisling — estimates, both in the media and on campus, seem to differ as to just how many “drinks” are contained within one $2.50 can. One story I read suggested that the answer to this was three, while another said four — which would make sense, given the name of the drink. Yet if you do the math, it turns out that a single can contains a quantity of alcohol more comparable to an entire bottle of wine, or about six standard drinks, along with as much caffeine as a large coffee.
The drink’s popularity has unsurpsingly caused widespread concern among school administrators and healthcare professionals. Many schools are taking the step of “banning” Four Loko from their campuses because of its perceived risk to the student body, while Michigan just banned it from stores all across the state. These measures will probably be ineffective at best. Stupidity remains a far greater risk than some stylish new drink. A closer look at the hospitalizations among students who drank Four Loko reveals a common trend — all drank copious amounts of other alcohol as well. One student was admitted to the ER after chugging three cans of the stuff and then taking some Tequilla shots. Others mixed the Loko with beer and shots of rum and vodka. But I’ve yet to see a headline this fall about how shots pose a health risk to the nation’s youth.
Obviously, students should be made aware of the risks of a drink that they may not be as familiar with as beer or hard alcohol. They should know, for example, that a single can contains more calories than a Wendy’s “Baconator” burger. With time, awareness will grow, and Four Loko’s popularity will fade, as does every new weekend fad. In the meantime colleges — including Middlebury — need not consider a ban on the beverage. Most of the students who consume it are under 21 anyway, and those above deserve the right to choose what they drink for themselves. It’s already against the law for underage students to consume any alcoholic beverage, including Four Loko, yet they overwhelmingly flout those rules to drink on the weekends. Public Safety officers already make students dump out their drinks and/or give them citations when they bust up an underage party. A ban of any single drink will not change this. By banning Four Loko, colleges only will add to its popularity and appeal, decrease the information available about it and delay medical attention for students who need it but who fear repercussions.
(10/14/10 3:59am)
The current environmental movement is driven mostly by concerns about sustainability coupled with energy independence and the threat of global climate change. While we have made progress through more efficient cars, eating locally and switching to compact florescent light bulbs, the vast majority of our electricity comes from technology that dumps carbon dioxide and other dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. The number of wind farms has grown precipitously in the past few years, but these farms lack the potential to make up for our reliance on coal, oil and natural gas plants.
Every method for generating electricity has tradeoffs (some more obvious than others). We often read of coal miners trapped in cave-ins far below ground while at the same time the emissions generated by these plants heat the planet and pollute our air. Natural gas and oil both have different problems with extraction and with transportation but the same issue with pollution. Despite these significant shortcomings, these three options currently rule the energy market. Hydroelectric plants once seemed like a great way to provide sustainable power but it turns out that blocking rivers causes serious damage to the surrounding ecosystems and the communities downstream.
Even among those who believe that wind power has a role to play in our energy grid, few people want one 300 feet from their house or decorating the top of the nearest mountain. The places people want them generally tend to have less wind. Solar energy cultivation shows promise but, as with most renewable, it requires a lot of space and an expensive investment in technology.
The time has come to renew the construction of nuclear power plants. Despite high-profile failures — Three Mile Island and the recent issues with Vermont Yankee come to mind — nuclear power is safer, cleaner and more efficient than our current options. Nuclear fuel does not come from the Middle East and the reactions in one of these plants do not launch carbon or other chemicals into the atmosphere. A single nuclear plant produces more electricity than 1,500 large wind turbines — far more than even the largest wind “farms.” Nuclear presents the solution for moving forward.
40 years ago, the United States was constructing fission plants at a dramatic rate. In part due to protests and safety concerns, new development ceased abruptly. Yet much of Europe still relies on it as a source of power — France currently produces nearly 80 percent of its electricity through nuclear power while the EU as a whole uses it for 30 percent. We can achieve this with the market incentives as well.
Incredibly high start-up costs prevent new nuclear development. Only government action can prevent fossil fuel-based power sources from continuing their stranglehold on the American electricity market. We have seen this in the government’s approach to renewable energy, where producers are given a rate of 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour to allow them to compete in the marketplace.
President Barack Obama recently pledged to extend this tax credit to the next four nuclear power plants constructed in this country. In addition, the government will guarantee the loans for these plants in order to offset the risk of the investment in an unsure market. Congress and the President should extend this guarantee once plans get underway for more plants and should consider directly loaning money to companies interested in constructing new facilities in order to build momentum and attract investors. If Congress ever allows the creation of a “cap and trade” system to reduce carbon emissions, nuclear energy would become a much more competitive option. But even without legislation that raises the cost of competing energy sources, these loans will be repaid as plants pay off their start-up capital.
No source of energy is perfect. Nuclear power is cleaner, more efficient and is our only technology that can provide the electricity to replace fossil fuels. For the 21st century and beyond, as we improve our ability to capitalize on the massive supplies of power contained in a single atom, nuclear power is the ultimate source of “green” energy.
(09/30/10 4:01am)
Bill Clinton made an appearance on the Daily Show two weeks ago, and he made the first strong case I’ve heard in a while — from a Democrat — for keeping his party in power after November: 18 months have passed since President Obama took the White House with the tough task of repairing the damage to the economy caused by the recession. Tough times and tough choices remain, but his administration has made progress. They deserve two more years before voters pass the keys back to the party mostly responsible for this mess.
It was probably a mistake to focus first on health care at a time when people were more concerned with their jobs. Yet it was still a good long-term move: as of last week, insurance companies can no longer drop people’s coverage when they get sick, children can no longer be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and limits on claims have been banned. All of these are positive and necessary steps forward for our country. None of these would have happened without Democratic control.
Despite unrealistically sunny projections by the administration that have hurt the public perception of their policies, the vast majority of economists believe that the stimulus bill prevented things from getting far worse. The bill protected a lot of jobs — providing states with money to prevent massive layoffs of teachers, policemen and firefighters, as well as creating jobs in the construction sector. Government spending has a far higher and faster rate of return than tax cuts, which people often save rather than spend in a weak economy. We desperately need more money for schools and direct spending on our infrastructure. Many of our roads, bridges and tunnels were built after World War II. Our rail system is the shame of the developed world. With interest rates at record lows and millions of Americans out of work, we might as well invest the money now.
If Democrats retain control of Congress, some of this might happen. If Republicans seize the reins of power, none of it will; these are, after all, the same people who attack both the first stimulus package and the Troubled Assets Relief Program, a program that has mostly paid for itself. There is no chance they will support the spending needed to help repair the economy. Instead, they’ll push through tax cuts that we cannot afford while doing nothing about entitlements and the ballooning defense budget. Don’t believe me? Read their recently unveiled “Pledge to America.”
The best arguments for a Democratic Congress come from the Republican Party. I have never enjoyed situations where the best reason to support one party is because the other would be so disastrous to America, but we have reached that point. The “Pledge to America,” promises to rein in spending and balance the budget, which sounds reasonable until you read their proposals for doing so. They pledge to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent — at a 10-year cost of $3.7 trillion — and promise not to cut money from Medicaid, Social Security or the military, which together make up nearly 60 percent of the total federal budget. To make up for this, they propose repealing Obama’s health care bill and cancelling the rest of TARP. The Republicans claim that ending the bank bailout will save $16 billion — hardly enough to fill the crater in the budget the tax cuts create.
I believe in a balanced budget. Now might not be the best time to focus on it, but we will soon need to make the tough choices necessary to close the deficit. Yet, based on history and the Republican “vision” for the future, they are not the party to accomplish this task; they don’t even appear to understand the math.
Democrats have been almost comically bad at building support for their agenda, but it’s tough to be the ruling party in the world of the 24-hour news cycle. And they deserve more time to fix the damage from the recession and the Bush administration; they deserve two more years. If they haven’t made any progress by then, I will gladly vote for a Republican in 2012. I just hope it’s someone reasonable, like Mike Bloomberg or Mitt Romney.
Unfortunately, the Republican party of today is anything but reasonable.
(09/16/10 3:59am)
It’s been a frustrating year and a half for liberals. Despite hefty margins in the House and Senate, the Right has seized both the political narrative and substantial leads in most polls. While the Democrats have had some political victories – the stimulus package, health care reform, financial reform, and the appointment of two Supreme Court justices – each of these seems only to benefit the Republicans. On the face of things, it would seem as if these issues were unpopular. Yet that’s not the case – as least before the passage of the finished product, the Democratic bills had broad support. The bills themselves are not the problem; the problem is that they lack an overarching theme.
Americans love a narrative. FDR pushed his “New Deal” with dramatic and lasting effects on American society; Truman followed in his footsteps with a series of programs known as the “Fair Deal.” LBJ advocated for his “Great Society” and Reagan seized the metaphor of a “shining city on a hill” to share his vision with America. President Obama has articulated no such vision. His administration, instead, has been reactive, fighting skirmishes to win the daily news cycle when instead they should focus on setting the tone and defining a new, progressive agenda.
By definition, Conservatism is not an idea, but a response to ideas: Conservatives seek, above all else, to preserve the past. Libertarianism – which has become fashionable with young people who only four years ago would have been staunch Democrats – is similar in that it rejects large government without a clear alternative. Yet the agendas of both movements are dominating at the moment because the President has not made a firm case for liberalism. Instead, the Democratic Party has cowered in fear of being labeled with the “L word,” allowing its meaning to be twisting into some kind of unrealistic, idealistic and vaguely sinister plot synonymous with communists (or fascists if you slept through your history classes).
The time has long past for Obama to explain why government is not the enemy. Instead of a lukewarm defense of apparently unconnected initiatives, America badly needs a positive vision for the future. We cannot allow the agenda to be set by extremists who would honestly like to abolish Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, the Department of Education, the civil rights act, and the 14th and 17th amendments to the Constitution.
“Liberal” and “Progressive” should no longer be shunned as smears. They are not dirty words, but badges of honor – reminders that in these troubled times, Government by the people must remain for the people. With one in ten workers unemployed, this is not the time to tell Americans to lift themselves up by their bootstraps; these people are trying their hardest, and they deserve our help.
Liberals believe in the safety net. We believe that all deserve access to healthcare and to education, regardless of their ability to pay. We believe that poverty benefits no one – not even the wealthy – and that the eradication of extreme poverty is a reasonable and honorable goal. We believe in tolerance and acceptance in society; in equal rights and opportunities for all who are willing to work for them. We believe in second chances. We believe in the basic good of the human race: that almost no one wants to be unemployed, that few people willingly choose a life of crime, and that wars are generally harmful to all parties. We believe in having the option to drink juice in the dining hall with dinner, even if it is marginally more expensive than soda. Liberalism is not communism; we do not believe that everyone deserves the same wage – they deserve the same chances. We believe in the freedom to choose and in freedom from fear. And we firmly believe that this safety net benefits every member of society, from the poor and downtrodden to the rich and highly educated.
President Obama ran on a platform of hope and change. The change has already begun, and will continue as long as Democrats retain their control in Washington. What we really need now is some hope.
(04/29/10 4:00am)
We all watched in horror last year as the real estate market popped like an over ripe tomato, shaking the entire economy with the violence of its implosion.
As people lost homes and jobs, tax revenue at all levels of the government shrunk precipitously. Deficits — already out of control after eight years of an administration bent on passing a crippling financial burden on to our generation — exploded.
In many states, shrinking property tax and income tax revenues led to the threat of massive layoffs where our society could least afford them: in the public school system.
The stimulus package passed by the Obama administration staved off this threat — for a little while. As the stimulus money, always intended as a band-aid rather than real reform, dries up, the specter of teacher layoffs has again reared its ugly head.
The public school system was in trouble long before the current crisis. As salaries remained stagnant over the last few decades, many of the best and brightest teachers fled the schools in favor of higher-paying, higher-status jobs. Today, many teachers come from the bottom of their class into a field with long hours, meager salaries and demanding students.
Despite their best intentions, American public schools have fallen far behind both their private and foreign competition.
Public school students are about to fall even further behind. Without stimulus funds or a substantial property tax base, most schools are facing significant budget deficits. Many of them will take the same, horrifying measure of cutting budgets for after school activities, laying off support staff and firing the teachers who have not been rendered immune to reform by tenure.
The activities and electives that keep students most engaged in their education will disappear.
Class sizes will expand; test scores will contract. Children will be left behind, unable to gain entry into selective colleges or compete in the global marketplace.
Education is the cornerstone of a liberal democracy, the silver bullet for the problems of society.
It reduces crime rate, unwanted pregnancies, unemployment and the rapidly expanding inequality between the haves and the have-nots. Good public schools help to level the playing field and promote socioeconomic diversity in college and the workplace.
Without a great system for educating those who can’t afford the cost of tuition or the time to travel to private schools, we risk severe damage to the middle class and to the American dream.
If students in public schools can’t keep pace with their competition from kindergarten all the way through high school, no amount of work in college will allow them to overcome the deficit.
Comprehensive education reform has fallen out of the public consciousness: President Bush tried and failed, and the fallout makes another attempt unlikely.
Plus, with the state of the economy and a pressing need for financial, immigration, and energy reform, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have more than enough on their plate. Education should take first priority. Pumping money into the public school system — increasing teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest back into the system, retaining the activities that hold student’s interests and shrinking class sizes so that students receive more personal attention — is the most important step in putting the economy back on track.
America’s economy has always been driven by innovation and entrepreneurship. And those qualities can’t always come from the upper class.
That didn’t work for Rome, or the British Empire, and it won’t work for the United States.
The American dream requires that all hard-working citizens have the opportunity to join the world economy, regardless of their financial background.
Education is the ultimate economic stimulus. Without major public education reform — on the federal, state or local level — any other measure we take to shore up our economy is merely a band-aid.
(04/15/10 3:54am)
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet former Vermont Governor Howard Dean and to ask him about the campaign to replace retiring Governor Jim Douglas in 2010. Dean had the surprising thought that Susan Bartlett — the longtime chair of the state senate appropriations committee — might make the best governor, even though she appears to lack the campaign skills of her rivals. Dean conceded that all five Democratic candidates would do a great job as governor and lamented that none would likely win a clear majority in the hotly contested primary race.
The five Democratic contenders, who spoke at a forum this Sunday at Middlebury, had few differences between their stances on the major issues; all agreed on the need for more jobs, affordable healthcare and clean energy. As every candidate alluded to in the debate, the most important quality in the Democratic nominee is the ability to defeat Republican candidate Brian Dubie.
In a field teeming with technically qualified candidates, one stands out for his ability to connect with voters and for the clarity of his proposals: former state Senator Matt Dunne — who currently manages Google’s community affairs program — possesses the energy and the knowledge necessary to be both a great candidate and a great governor for this state.
Several weeks ago, Dunne spoke in depth with a group of the Middlebury College Democrats. We sat down with him for over an hour and received long, practical answers to questions about everything from education to agriculture policy. He spoke with intelligence and excitement about his plan to replace the crumbling Vermont Yankee nuclear plant with two carbon-neutral biomass plants and laid out a path to provide health care access to all Vermonters.
In a race dominated by candidates who have eagerly awaited Douglas’s retirement, Dunne stands out as a rising star — someone with vision, not just the next politician in line.
Vermont cannot afford to elect another Republican. In a state with an overwhelming Democratic majority, with the Senate’s only socialist member and where two-thirds of votes cast went to Barack Obama, it’s silly to even imagine a Republican contending in the gubernatorial race. And yet Governor Douglas’ retirement marks the end of four terms in office where he presented a firm roadblock to Vermont’s ability to move forward on many issues.
In 2006, Douglas vetoed an act preventing gender identity discrimination, only to be overruled the next year. In 2009, the governor vetoed a law allowing same-sex marriage and was courageously overridden by the legislature. He has vetoed campaign finance reform several times, a resolution to replace the un-democratic electoral college with a popular vote and a renewable energy bill because of a tax increase aiming to balance the budget.
Douglas leaves his office with a $150 million budget deficit and no coherent plan to replace the Vermont Yankee plant. A Republican governor in Vermont after Douglas’ retirement would continue to serve only as a foil to the public interest and a burden on the public checkbook.
As students in such a small, politically progressive state, we have the opportunity to make a difference, and we need to take advantage of that chance to produce a government that represents our values. Brian Dubie’s administration would not represent those values, or the values of the state of Vermont.
There are still many months until the Democratic primary, and even longer until the general election in November. Now is your chance to make a difference. Join me, Bill McKibben and the thousands of Vermonters who support Matt Dunne for Governor. In such a small state, your vote — and, more importantly, your voice — truly matters.
(03/18/10 4:59am)
I guess New York can’t let Illinois have all the fun.
On Feb. 26, New York State Governor David Paterson announced an end to his reelection campaign. For many voters, this was hardly news; Paterson — who was widely mocked by the national political establishment, lobbied by the Obama administration not to run and who stumbled into office as a poor replacement for disgraced Governor Elliot “Client Number Nine” Spitzer — had seen his approval rating dwindle to a mere 26 percent.
Even when Spitzer resigned in connection with a prostitution scandal in 2008, his approval rating remained slightly higher; at least he was competent in his office.
Paterson, who began his term with random confessions of previous cocaine use and extramarital affairs, constantly appeared out of his depth in the messy world of Albany politics. The only reason that his decision not to run again even made the front page was the governor’s clear connection to an aide’s domestic violence case.
The aide, David A. Johnson, allegedly stripped a female companion of her clothes, choked her, and stopped her from getting help. This should have prompted Johnson to seek an early retirement or to turn himself in to the authorities.
Instead, he had friends in the State Police contact the woman several times. When the police were apparently unable to quiet her, Johnson called in the big guns: he had longtime friend Paterson call the woman the day before she was due to appear in court.
She failed to show up the next day, and the case was dropped. Problem solved, right?
The governor appears to not recognize any wrongdoing on his part, seems bewildered by calls for his resignation and swears that he did not abuse his office; I guess he lets his staffers handle the abuse.
Barely had the cries for Paterson’s head subsided when another New York politician snatched the headlines: 20-term congressman Charles Rangel was finally forced from his powerful position as chairman of the House Ways and Means committee by a report that he took free, corporate-sponsored trips — plural — to the Caribbean.
While that alone would never dislodge the great Mr. Rangel, he is also currently under investigation for failing to disclose several checking accounts valued between $250,000 and $500,000, illegally renting four apartments in New York City and not reporting $75,000 in income from his villa in the Dominican Republic.
It’s hard to imagine his excuse for these transgressions, given the fact that his congressional committee writes the tax laws that the rest of us have to obey.
Under normal circumstances, those two stories would be enough to hold the attention of the ever-busy news media, but freshman Congressman Eric Massa from the 29th district seems fully intent and fully capable of topping the bizarre achievements of his two political elders. He announced on March 3 that he would not seek reelection due to health reasons.
It quickly became clear that those “health” concerns were an attempt to conceal a whole different type of problem: that the Congressman had sexually harassed a whole host of navy shipmates, colleagues and male staffers throughout the course of his career.
Allegations rapidly emerged that Massa told an aide they should “frakk,” that he once gave a navy shipmate an unwanted “snorkeling” late at night (look it up on UrbanDictionary), that the Congressman celebrated his 50th birthday with a rowdy “tickle fight” with his younger staffers and that he would brag about his special “Massa Massages.”
The Congressman tried to defend himself as “a salty old sailor” — as if that phrase wasn’t evidence enough of his guilt — and fired back that the White House had forced him out because he wouldn’t support the health care bill.
By the time he appeared on Glenn Beck the next day, Massa admitted to the obviously disappointed “crier-in-chief” at Fox News that his mistakes were his own.
Maybe Massa realized that he might want to save the slightest shred of dignity for his retirement; between a governor covering up an aide’s domestic abuse, a Congressman firmly in the pocket of corporate interests and another felled upon his own sword, so to speak, dignity seems to have completely abandoned the state of New York.