As much as I think some exec paychecks are obscene and point to real imbalances in our economy, I'm really leery of limits on pay levels in private companies...But, yeah, when a company would be out of business without taxpayer help? Then we're in your business. Do you really need $15 million as opposed to $2? Is your mortgage that high? Do you have that many kids in school.It isn't just when derivatives traders come to the taxpayer asking for huge sums of money that taxpayers get riled up. I hear frequent complaints from my fairly conservative neighbors here in central PA about government workers in general. They don't have a problem if the operator of a paving machine who works for a private contractor gets paid $25/hour -- if the private contractor is willing to pay that much, so be it -- but if the same person does the same work for the township then $25/hour is too much. Even though the private contractor has submitted the lowest bid to the township for the work, so we taxpayers are actually paying that $25/hour, or even more when you consider overhead. When you think about it, if the private contractor was paying the paver less, then their bid could be even lower.
It seems McCain has more to worry about from members of his own party than Obama does from Hillary and Bill. Will the MSM ask him how he's going to reach out to the right wing of the GOP? We're waiting to hear ...Unlike the last GOP platform, which mentioned George W. Bush on nearly every page, this platform mentions McCain only in its preamble — and some of the positions it takes fly in the face of McCain's own record as something of a Republican maverick.
Pennsylvania state Sen. Jane Orie read the party's stance opposing same-sex marriage: "We call for a constitutional amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman."
McCain has consistently opposed such a constitutional amendment because he thinks it's an issue for states to resolve.
He has also urged action to curb global warming and favors a cap-and-trade system that many in his party oppose. The GOP platform makes no mention of cap and trade, while it rails against what it calls "doomsday climate change scenarios."
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, considers the platform "very conservative" and says it clearly falls short of what the McCain campaign would have wanted.
"Obviously, they're very interested in not being slapped in the face, and the party's not interested in slapping the candidate in the face," Keene said. "But the party has not taken the position that you would've wanted them to take if you were a campaign operative for John McCain."
When are we going to see pictures of McCain in his native Panamanian garb? Does this mean he is a practitioner of Santería or some other Caribbean/Latin American voodoo religion? Is his middle name Aureliano or Arcadio? or perhaps Chávez? Or even (shudder) Fidel?
]]>Frank said
The question is: Can we govern responsibly? And governing responsibly means working with everybody, listening to and exchanging views with the people who care passionately ... but then as you go forward with the goals, taking reality into account. People who then denounce those who take reality into account ... make it impossible for us to govern.
This raises the question: how was the political reality that gays and lesbians deserve protection from employment discrimination but transgendered people don't created? Is this Frank's own reading of the body politic? Did some co-sponsor say to him "I'll sign on, but only if you remove that clause about transgendered people"?
I have no way of knowing what went on in Frank's head, or what corridor conversations occurred. But the effect of inclusion of transgendered folks in such a bill on its chances of passage strikes me as marginal. What is more likely to happen, as we've seen over and over with Congresses over the last eight years, and even longer, is that a liberal-sponsored bill gets watered down more and more with amendments, and then goes down to defeat anyway, or gets filibustered, or in the best case, gets vetoed and the attempt to override fails narrowly. If that is what's going to happen here, why not do not only part of the right thing, but all of the right thing?
In fact, it may be the case that transgendered people are more accepted by society than gays and lesbian, not less. By certain (misguided) standards, some of them are attempting to conform to "nature's dictate" that sex only occur between men and women, by changing their gender to conform to their attraction.
As for the "reality" that the electorate wants the Congress to back down from challenging the Bush administration on the Iraq war, this so-called reality was created out of whole cloth by Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, et. al.
Sorry, Barney, I like and applaud the work you do, but the "reality" of politics is that you have to fight for what is right.
This initiative would change the way California apportions presidential electoral votes, from a statewide winner-take-all rule, as almost every other state does it, to a system where electoral votes are awarded to the winner in each congressional district. As Hertzberg writes, this would "spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes — votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union."
At a first, superficial glance, this seems more "fair" than awarding all 55 electoral votes to the winner, but as Hertzberg points out, the system is still winner-take-all, just on a district by district basis. And since big Republican states like Texas and Georgia aren't going to change the way they do it, the possible outcome would be to snatch a Republican victory in '08 from the jaws of ignominy and defeat.
This is not a shortcut to the elimination of the "injustice" of the electoral college, but it may just appear to be that to California voters if they aren't paying attention.
]]>1) It is an important principle of just war theory that justice, though it rules out many ways of fighting, cannot rule out fighting itself--since fighting is sometimes morally and politically necessary. A military response to the capture of the three Israeli soldiers wasn't, literally, necessary; in the past, Israel has negotiated instead of fighting and then exchanged prisoners. But, since Hamas and Hezbollah describe the captures as legitimate military operations--acts of war--they can hardly claim that further acts of war, in response, are illegitimate. The further acts have to be proportional, but Israel's goal is to prevent future raids, as well as to rescue the soldiers, so proportionality must be measured not only against what Hamas and Hezbollah have already done, but also against what they are (and what they say they are) trying to do.
Not exactly. Just war theory does not rule out fighting since fighting is sometimes morally necessary. Political considerations do not enter into the question, however. And any putative claims by Hamas and Hezbollah that further acts of war by Israel are illegitimate are irrelevant. Just because they can't claim that further acts of war are illegitimate does not make them legitimate.
2) It doesn't matter that, so far, the Gazan rockets have done minimal damage; the intention every time one is fired is to hit a home or a school, and, sooner or later, that intention will be realized.
If this could be shown to be true, Israel would have a much stronger case, in my opinion. But this is just an unsubstantiated claim on Walzer's part.
3) When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible--and no one else is--for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire. But (the dialectical argument continues) Israeli soldiers are required to aim as precisely as they can at the militants, to take risks in order to do that, and to call off counterattacks that would kill large numbers of civilians.
Clearly the thesis can only be true if the antithesis (Israel being careful) is also true. Practically speaking, in war this never happens, so the thesis is refuted; the responsibility for civilian deaths is shared.
4) The trickiest part of Walzer's argument is the final section. Here he argues that
a) Attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah were not inevitable since they commenced after Israel's withdrawal.
b) Said attacks have probably made future unilateral withdrawals impossible.
c) Israel's actions make it less, rather than more, likely that it will have a security partner on the other side.
d) Until Israel has such a partner (with help from the US and the international community required), it is entitled to act militarily on its own behalf.
Even taking his assumptions at face value, it is a strange perspective on inevitability that holds that things that happened in the past were not inevitable, but things Walzer thinks will happen in the future are. Especially c) and d), taken together, call his conclusion into question.
Most of Walzer's argument is about jus in bello (the conduct of just war once war has begun). I don't have a problem with much of what he says in this regard. I do have a problem with his eliding this to a general defense of Israel's decision to enter into the war in the first place, at the scale that it did. Especially the principle of last resort seems not to have been followed. To my mind the thorniest question to answer when assessing jus ad bellum (whether going to war in the first place is just) is this: if both sides have legitimate grievances, can either side claim that their warmaking is just?
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