Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Ponnuru: "Lemieux…correct[]."

My contrarian cred is established! Seriously, it’s a strange world in which any of my empirical analysis would even be considered controversial; as Ponnuru himself recently noted, pro-lifers who want to overturn Roe are not, in fact, irrational, and unless you’re trying to pitch an article to an editor who likes contrarianism for its own sake this is pretty obvious.

In related news, Publius has a good post patiently explaining another reason why majorities in public opinion polls do not inevitably manifest themselves in legislative outcomes. It’s important to remember that–although it will be spun this way–even if the referendum to repeal the bill is successful, it’s not a vindication of the anti-Roe pro-choice position in the least. First, the very fact that this legislation could pass despite not being very popular is a repudiation of the simplistic assumption of legislative majoritarianism on which the p-c-a-R argument depends. Second, not every state has an initiative process available. And third, the South Dakota legislature erred by being too principled. Although they fatally undermine the only legitimate justification for abortion bans, including rape and incest exemptions probably would have made the law safe. Should the law be overturned, future legislators won’t make the same mistake.

And, finally, a terrific article in Salon about the campaign against Mississippi’s last clinic. It needs to be read in full, but a teaser:

To Benham, waiting for a new Supreme Court justice to overturn Roe v. Wade is like being a German who heard and saw nothing. Impatient for change, he and his followers are determined to make Roe functionally irrelevant — the right to an abortion doesn’t mean much if women can’t exercise it. In their struggle, they’ve made the Jackson Women’s Health Organization their ground zero. They’re convinced that if they can close down the last abortion clinic in the state, where abortion rights already hang by a political thread, their crusade will gain momentum across the country. On July 30, another antiabortion group, Oh Saratoga, based in upstate New York, commenced its own seven days of protests in Jackson. Its Web site promises to bring a “summer tsunami against that state’s final ‘abortuary.’”

There’s also a lot of good stuff about the lies peddled by Mississippi’s state-funded “Crisis Pregnancy Centers.” I particularly enjoyed this:

At Jackson’s Center for Pregnancy Choices, which gets roughly $20,000 a year in payments from the state’s sale of Choose Life plates, I picked up a pamphlet about condoms. It warns that “using condoms is like playing Russian roulette … In chamber one you have a condom that breaks and you get syphilis, in chamber two, you have an STD that condoms don’t protect against at all, in chamber three you have a routinely fatal disease, in chamber four you have a new STD that hasn’t even been studied.”

According to Barbara Beavers, the pretty, honey-voiced mother of four who runs the Center for Pregnancy Choices, as many as 40 percent of the pregnancy tests the center administer come back negative. Some of the women who take them live with their boyfriends, making a commitment to abstinence unlikely. But Beavers is unapologetic about her opposition to birth control, in part because she thinks a woman whose contraception fails might feel more entitled to an abortion. “They think, it wasn’t their fault anyhow, so let’s just go ahead and kill it,” she said. The best birth control, she added, “is self-control.”

But abortion laws have nothing to do with regulating sexuality! Anyway, the whole article is must-reading, and check out the Frontline documentary on the same subject if you haven’t already.

Stadium Funding–Always A Great Investment!

In the light of Pat Gillick being sold several acres of North Dakota oceanfront property by Brian Cashman, Joe Sheehan asks a good question:

How’s that taxpayer-funded ballpark working out for you, Philadelphia?

Yeah, I’m guessing when the taxpayers of Philadelphia were being bilked for the new stadium, “next year we’ll look to trade our star RF and decent innings-eater for the first decent offer, and when we don’t get a decent offer we’ll just go ahead and give them to the &*%&@ Yankees for a 2-for-1 Sausage McMuffin coupon” wasn’t a major selling point. (And if Phillies fans are expecting that money to be put back into the team, I would suggest examining Gillick’s recent history in greater detail.) Those small-market Phillies in their dilapidated park just can’t compete!

I also have no idea what the Tigers were doing, although I suppose it’s harmless, and they’re in good shape anyway.

Progress Isn’t Ineluctable

Erik in comments and Roy via email object to my snideness about JFK, and I’m willing to do at least a partial walkback. I certainly hold to my core assumptions: JFK is an enormously overrated President and he was weak on civil rights beyond the call of political necessity before 1963. But I do duly note his finally getting behind civil rights in 1963. And although nothing like the 1964 CRA would have passed with Kennedy in the White House, this is as much praise of LBJ as it is criticism of JFK; I doubt that, say, Humphrey could have gotten strong civil rights legislation through Congress either. And, certainly, my comparison of JFK to Glenn Reynolds is unfair; as Roy says, “I’m not sure that, as you imply, Reynolds is some kind of “JFK liberal.” I don’t think Kennedy’s was a sit-on-your-ass-and-wait for-inevitable-change approach — he was slow about the Civil Rights Act, but he got the party sufficiently invested in it that Johnson had to follow through once he had the votes in Congress. Can you imagine Reynolds, thrown back in time, supporting even Kennedy’s televised speech on the subject? He’d prefer that the Chamber of Commerce led the way. Not bloody likely.” Fair enough.

Anyway, there’s a better example of JFK liberalism at hand. I’ll be discussing various aspects of Jack Balkin’s new book What Roe Should Have Said over the next week or two. As you would expect, in his hypothetical dissenting opinion Jeffrey Rosen (in addition to some microwaved Ely) serves up his beloved countermobilization myth, with Tocqueville being invoked twice:

And because I have no doubt that Tocqueville was correct when he predicted that American society would move inexorably in the direction of greater and greater equality, I expect that most state legislatures, in time, would come to recognize these laws as a barrier to the full equality of women and would eventually have joined the handful of states that have already decided to repeal them.

[...]

Tradition, of course, is not a static thing: it evolves dramatically every decade, reflecting the social changes that are constantly transforming American society in the direction predicted by Tocqueville. (170, 174)

In addition to the obvious problems of Whig history, and the logical problems (because New York and California have liberalized their abortion laws–in the latter case, after being prodded to by the courts–we can assume that Alabama and Mississippi will follow? Why?) it’s precisely this assumption that change just sort of happens naturally that underlines Rosen’s quite obviously erroneous assumption that reproductive freedom would be better off if Roe was overturned. What’s missing from the picture is not only the reaction and false starts, but the struggle. And as with civil rights, litigation has always been a part of struggles for reproductive freedom, for the obvious reason that in a country with judicial review you don’t unilaterally leave any weapons on the table. Complacency can be as important an enemy as outright opposition.

Democracy on the March

Remember when a whole bunch of reactionaries suddenly discovered women’s rights as a club to bash people who opposed the high-cost replacement of a secular dictatorship with a low-capacity quasi-theocracy that would be at the mercy of sectarian militias? Oddly, I don’t think we’re going to be hearing much about the country we forgot about so George Bush could play with his shiny new Iraq toy from these quarters:

ONE MORNING late last year, Setareh’s students found a landmine in their classroom. It was hidden under a bag in the mud-brick building of the first girls school in her rural Afghan village.

The landmine was not, of course, unexpected. The Taliban had posted a note in the village mosque a few weeks earlier, ordering all girls schools to close. And another “night letter” left at a nearby school had warned: “Respected Afghans: Leave the culture and traditions of the Christians and Jews. Do not send your girls to school.” Otherwise, it said, the mujahedin of the Islamic Emirates, the name of the former Taliban government, “will conduct their robust military operations in the daylight.”

[...]

Over just four days in December, armed men shot and killed a teacher, a school gatekeeper and a male student in Helmand province. An instructor had been warned to stop teaching girls and boys in the same classroom. In January, armed men in Zabul province beheaded a high school headmaster in front of his children. By March, half of the schools in the province had closed. Afghan education officials say that attacks now average one school a day.

The Taliban is responsible for many of these attacks, but local warlords seeking to further their power and criminal groups (often involved in Afghanistan’s booming narcotics trade) also are targeting schools. Setareh’s village is far from Taliban areas in Wardak province, which is controlled by warlords ostensibly loyal to the government. But a district official told me that it was the local warlord’s thugs who planted the landmine. The official was afraid even to say the warlord’s name out loud. The landmine was safely removed, but Setareh has moved her lessons to a private courtyard, and she asked me not to print her real name.

The Afghan government, which depends on international support, needs a strategy to monitor, prevent and respond to attacks on education. It must sack local commanders hostile to the education of girls, strengthen Afghanistan’s feeble police force and order it to investigate, arrest and prosecute those responsible for threats or attacks.

Sounds like it’s time for some 24-year-old Heritage Foundation hacks to hand out copies of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Meanwhile, as the Talking Dog notes, we’re also seeing the folly of the Friedman/Leeden “overturn the chess board” theory of randomly invading countries that pose no threat to the United States. Dynamics can, in fact, change for the worse:

The fog of war makes it impossible for me or anyone else to determine whether or not Israel’s war against Hezbollah is succeeding of failing militarily. But it’s painfully obvious that Israel’s attempt to influence Lebanese politics in its favor is an absolute catastrophe right now.

The (second in a decade) attack on Qana that killed scores of civilians has all but cemented the Lebanese public and Hezbollah together.

Cable news reports that 82 percent of Lebanese now support Hezbollah. Prime Minister Fouad Seniora – whatever his real opinion in private – is now closer to openly supporting Hezbollah in public than he has ever been.

The March 14 Movement (the Cedar Revolution) is, at best, in a coma if not outright dead.

Hezbollah was popular while Israel occupied South Lebanon. When Israel left Lebanon it finally became possible for Hezbollah’s power to be strictly relegated to it own little corner because support for the organization evaporated.

Now that Israel is back, Hezbollah’s support is back.

But the next Strat-O-Matic board we flip over will be the charm!

What’s True Isn’t Relevant, and What’s Relevant Isn’t True

Like Neil, I think Matt is being far too charitable to Dan Gerstein’s silly attempt to defend Lieberman’s pro-Alito vote. Or, to be more precise, I think Matt’s half-defense is an “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play” argument–given that all of Gerstein’s non-trivial arguments boil down to a defense of the Sacred Gang of 14, I don’t know what there could be left to agree with:

• It is indeed literally wrong to say that “Joe Lieberman put Sam Alito on the Supreme Court,” but since nobody actually argues this it’s also irrelevant. By the same standard, none of Lieberman pro-reproductive freedom votes should be counted in his favor unless they passed by one vote. Votes do not have to be decisive to be part of the record one uses to evaluate a legislator, and the fact remains that on the most important vote on reproductive freedom since 1987, Lieberman voted the wrong way.
• So, the defense comes down to the value of the Gang of 14 agreement to Democrats, and this value is “zero.” Preserving the filibuster means nothing if the judges who are acceptable under the standard include people like Alito and Priscilla Owen. Who exactly is Lieberman waiting for? Roy Moore? A tanned and rested Robert Bork (defeated by the Senate although his voting record would be essentially indistinguishable from Alito’s)? The mummified corpse of James McReynolds? Preserving an entirely meaningless procedural agreement ahead of substantive outcomes is precisely the kind of inside-Beltway wankery that has Lieberman in trouble, and was also in evidence in his appallingly two-faced vote on the bankruptcy bill.
• On a historical note, with respect to the idea that ideology had nothing to do with conservative Senators filibustering quintessential Warren Court liberal Abe Fortas–if you believe that, I have a valuable collection of Harold Carswell’s Supreme Court opinions to sell you. And even if it were true, why on earth should the most important factor in evaluating a Supreme Court justice be off the table? Particularly when the politicians selling Alito were notably lacking in candor about his constitutional philosophy?
• And, of course, had an Alito filibuster caused the Republicans to detonate the nuclear option, this would be a feature, not a bug. As one of Neil’s commenters notes, “How would the nuclear option have been worse than what actually happened? What’s the point of having the theoretical option of a filibuster if you can’t use it? Furthermore, if the Republicans actually did use the nuclear option, not only would the immediate situation have been no worse than what actually happened, but a long-term precedent might have worked in our favor. When we get a majority back and the Republicans try to filibuster, say, universal health care, we then have the ability to steamroll them on that.” Exactly right.

So, in other words, his pro-Alito vote should absolutely count against his record on reproductive rights and civil liberties, just like his disgraceful behavior during the Schiavo affair. The critique is 100% fair. [Schiavo link via Jane.]

And Now To Salt The Earth So It Can Never Grow Again

Well, I think the Braves dynasty can now be declared dead.

It’s been quiet since he played so poorly last year, but Carlos Beltran has been having a hell of a year. 282/385/628? For a good center fielder? At Shea? (Check out those road splits.) I believe the other word for that is “MVP.”

On the other hand, if there was still a pennant race in the NL East I would be marginally less angry that the Phillies did this…

The Key Point

Marshall:

But it’s hard to find the signs promising at this moment. And for Israel, one number tells the irreducible story. 140 rockets fell on northern Israel today. That’s the highest count since July 12th when the whole thing started. And in terms of how Israel understands its own security, that’s the most damning thing: even using main force, they can’t stop the rocket attacks on their civilian areas

.

Again, before we even start thinking about abstract questions of justice and morality it needs to be acknowledged that the policy isn’t working.

…more from Edelstein.

"An Ill-Advised Temper Tantrum"

Somebody needs to coin a catchy name for an addendum to Goodwin’s Godwin’s Law, which holds that whenever anybody argues against a particular military action, some idiot will mention Neville Chamberlain, irrespective of how howlingly inapt the analology is. (In the meantime, I propose the “Fox News Democrat” law: All columns that begin with the phrase “As a liberal Democrat” are ipso facto bad.)

To state the obvious, invoking Chamberlain isn’t an argument; it remains true that in most circumstances offensive military action is a bad idea. Countries have the right to defend themselves, but what matters is whether the action is prudent. And in this case, it’s pretty clear that the answer is “no”:

Yep. This ‘accidental’ war (as The Economist recently put it) will end up having proved something of a disaster for all parties involved save, perhaps, Hezbollah. Israel will not have eradicated Hezbollah (a totally unrealistic war aim, regardless, Krauthammer and Co’s reckless imbecility aside), the United States has complicated its regional position immensely, and, as Cohen points out, the Cedar Revolution lies in ashes. Was the IDF action worth hundreds dead, thousands wounded, massive flows of internally displaced and refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, an environmental disaster unprecedented in Lebanon’s modern history, and the scuttling of Lebanon’s tenuous movements towards emergence from an oppressive Syrian yoke? All for, at the end of the day, a deal on Shaba Farms, the return of the two soldiers (probably in the context of a prisoner exchange anyway), French and other troops on the Lebanese-Israeli and Lebanese-Syrian borders (gee, wonder how porous that latter one will be?), and some (likely mostly chimerical) ‘disarming’ of Hezbollah?

Well no, of course not, this was more by way of an ill-advised temper tantrum than a serious military operation, as Arik Sharon would himself admit, if only he were aware of the disaster underway. Sharon would have recalled previous Lebanese quagmires and would have well understood (aided by the wisdom of years and the lack of any need to prove himself) that resort to airpower, in the main, cannot succeed in this context, with the specter of hundreds and hundreds of civilian deaths earning Israel international opprobrium in every world capital (save Washington), and that there is no real, sustained post-’82 appetite in Israel for a massive land incursion regardless, not least given the ultimate futility of same. No, Sharon would likely have chastised Ehud Olmert for his impestuous over-reaction, one so helpfully fanned on by myopic strategic blunderers and amateurs in Washington, both in policy and journalistic circles.

The idea that a few weeks of air strikes were going to crush Hezbollah when more than a decade of occupation didn’t do the job is self-evidently stupid, and given this Olmert’s actions are not just bad morally but bad strategically. It won’t make Israel more secure, and the great strengthening of illberal forces in Lebanon is bad for both countries. Nothing good comes from this.

The Bingo Ball Essay

Via Roy, Kerry Howley has a response that can now be applied to every essay submitted by a Ladies Against Women member:

This piece, while being utterly devoid of substantive content, really does have it all: a reference to “gangsta rappers,” awkward use of the word ho, a sorrowful nod to the slutty poor (they “suffer most,” let’s please not forget), mention of a “media-saturated culture,” a reference to that peerless chronicler of the cutting edge, The New York Times Style Section, and my personal favorite, a lengthy quote from the expert on the nuances of sexuality among adolescent girls, septuagenerian Tom Wolfe.

As I took some time off from a long string of rainbow parties to read this column, I could think only of the South Park episode where we learn the show King of the Hill Family Guy is written by manatees rearranging “idea balls,” each of which are stamped with words to be used in the script. Is there a tank somewhere with balls labeled “Vagina Monologues,” “college hook-ups,” and “Girls Gone Wild”? Are these columns composed with magnetic poetry?

Oh sure, there are variations–if it’s Christina Hoff Summers, for example, it is legally required that there be a reference to the fact that Judith Butler once one an award for the Worst Paragraph Evah In The History Of Prose!!!!ONE!!!!–but, really, these are distinctions without a difference. Meanwhile, speaking of columns composed with magnetic poetry, if you examine the far-worse-prose-than-Butler Cathy Siepp column Roy links to, you’ll see that Mickey Kaus has time to weigh in on the pressing issue of area codes and how this somehow makes liberals bad. You can see that he has plenty of time on his hands, because in an example of his very favorite technique he several times raises the question of whether Bill Cinton is sleeping with Belinda Stronach. Of course, he has absolutely no evidence of this, and neither do the linked stories. But they might raise the suggestion to ignorant readers, and this is not bad journalism–Bill Clinton asked for it! And, of course, Kaus is not part of this irresponsibility–he’s just asking random questions about journalism, not trying to passively-aggressively spread a rumor! And even if he is, well, as with the Kerry intern–whether or not it’s true, it’s out there, as Cokie Roberts would say.

[Bonus Kaus: today he gallantly defends his recent date Ann Coulter from charges that she is a "deranged bigot." After all, all she did was call Bill Clinton a latent homosexual based on nothing but his supposed bad traits! And call Al Gore a "big fag"! But, of course, Sullivan's comments had to have been directed against an isolated phrase rather than her entire body of work. And...oh, why go on.]

And in other news from the wild world of wingnuttery, according to the FRC’s aptly named Tony Perkins Major League Baseball are now pornographers…because they have accepted money to show their games on the teevee, and apparently the naked breasticle is also featured on some of newtworks on the very same cable system. I, for one, am horrified! Well, as long as the first show isn’t “Don Zimmer After Hours…”

"Why Is It Written In Crayon?"

Teh funny is finally found.

The Johnson Rule: An Application

Apparently Glenn Reynolds (alongside a typically dishonest characterization of a past post from Josh Marshall) thinks it’s reasonable to ask if “if Israel is too nice to win.” Fortunately for such situations, Jim Henley has developed the Jimmy Johnson rule: “People who say their problem is that they are too nice are never, never right. (It’s not that people are never too nice, but the ones who are will never make the claim and the ones who will make the claim are never nice, let alone too nice.)” Indeed.

Coming Next: The Stamping Out Driving Other Kids To Soccer Practice Act

James Joyner on the latest round of federal abortion regulation:

Indeed, it’s hard to fathom a reason to oppose this legislation. Whatever one’s views on abortion, surely kidnapping to accomplish it is a bad thing.

The thing is, kidnapping generally refers to taking someone without their consent. In this ever-changing world, it’s good to know there are things we can count on, and pro-lifers assuming that women who obtain abortions are entirely devoid of agency is certainly one of them. As for the larger question, it’s actually very easy to oppose this legislation, given that parental consent laws don’t actually accomplish anything (at least if one charitably assumes that the point it to encourage communication within stable families as oppose to putting as many arbitrary obstacles in the path of poor women trying to get abortions as possible.)

Ah, but don’t these laws contain bypass options for young women in the worst family situations? As Helena Silverstein (with Wayne Fishman) again remind us in a must-read article, being generally designed and implemented by people who are hostile to reproductive freedom, they frequently don’t work:

The palatability of involvement mandates rests on the supposed effectiveness of the judicial bypass process. But the actual functioning of this process does not come close to resembling what is imagined. For example, research we conducted in Alabama and Tennessee shows that nearly half of the courts charged with implementing the bypass mechanism were unprepared to do so. In an even worse showing, more than two thirds of Pennsylvania courts were unprepared.

The reasons for these implementation failures vary. Courts often are ignorant of their responsibility. Sometimes judges refuse to hear bypass petitions on ideological grounds. Other times, court personnel are unavailable. Courts occasionally seek to convince minors that abortion is morally wrong. Whatever the reason, there is in fact an enormous disconnect between what parental involvement laws promise and what implementers of such laws deliver.

Thus, the CCPA bolsters laws that don’t work and, in doing so, potentially endangers minors who have legitimate reasons to avoid parental involvement and who are poorly served by states’ false promises. If the CCPA becomes law, some teens will continue to go out of state for abortions, either subjecting a trusted relative or friend to the risk of a jail term or making the trip alone. Others will face the prospect of being forced by a parent to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

If the federal government really cared about protecting vulnerable teens, it would pursue prosecutions under the CCPA only after states have proven the reliability of their bypass processes. But, of course, this isn’t going to happen — the primary impetus behind the CCPA and state involvement mandates has little actually to do with protecting minors’ interests, pious rhetoric notwithstanding.

Opposing these laws isn’t just possible; it’s necessary.