I want to be absolutely clear from the very beginning that I favor complete and total marriage equality for all people.  Every human being on the planet ought to be able to have the law recognize his/her commitment to another person as being real, valid, valuable, and worthy of unique legal status.  I am telling this story just to remind us all that marriage, commitment, love and loyalty exist whether recognized by governments or churches or not.  The real reason that same sex marriage is inevitable is that it already exists all around us.  As more and more people open their eyes and look, they will see these marriages for what they are.  Total commitments to love, to honor, to be together in sickness and in health whether recognized and celebrated by anyone other than the two partners involved or not.

This is the story of my friend Carol.  Carol knew she was a lesbian as a teen.  She made the decision to put her real feelings and desires in the closet in order to fit in to the vision society prefers.  So she went to college, married a truly remarkable man named Tim, went to work, and started trying to get pregnant.  Infertility issues halted the pregnancy plans and as time went on, it become clear to both Carol and Tim that she was not happy.  Their mutual respect and affection led to a period of trying everything possible to make their relationship work.  They even went so far as to experiment with Carol having girlfriends to fill the sexual and emotional needs that were missing from her marriage.  There were nights when Tim slept in the guest room so that Carol and her girlfriend could sleep together.  It soon became clear that the marriage was unworkable for both of them.  They divorced.  Tim remarried, had a family and remained close friends with Carol for the remainder of her life. 

Carol went on to enjoy a series of monogamous lesbian relationships.  She and her partners bought houses together. Carol began looking at using a sperm donor to get pregnant.  She was supported through this period of infertility and continued disappointment by her girlfriends and by the gay and lesbian community in which they moved.

Finally, Carol met Diane.  They fell head over heals in love with each other.  They moved in together.  They had a formal commitment ceremony.  They tried to get pregnant.  They decided to adopt.  They brought home two beautiful little girls from China.  They were a family.  They had a marriage, whether the law recognized it or not.  They were totally committed, mutually supportive, co-parents to their girls.  They loved.  They honored.  They cherished.

Not long after bringing their second daughter home, Carol was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer.  Nothing test the bonds between people as much as a serious medical crisis.  Carol and Diane fought the cancer together for 2 years.  Diane did the research, found the experimental clinics in Mexico, the drug trials in Washington State, and spent money she had inherited to fund the entire ordeal.  When Carol decided enough was enough, that it was time to stop, face reality, and prepare herself and her children for her inevitable death, Diane supported that decision without hesitation.  When the pain became too much to bear, Diane found hospice care.  When Carol hated hospice and wanted to die at home, Diane moved her back home.  A week later Carol died in her sleep at home, in her own bed, in the arms of the woman who loved her more than anyone else in the whole world. 

I have been married to my husband for 22 years.  I will pray to whatever God you want that I never have to be as married as Carol and Diane.

Diane continues to raise their daughters alone.

It is past time for the law to acknowledge these marriages as being as legal, binding and valid as any other.  The people in them already do.

Today is one of the happiest days of the year.  It is the last day of school.  Joy and excitment fill the air around me, and that is just in the faculty lounge.  Here are few thoughts on education reform in honor of this final day of classes.

Teacher accountability has become a front burner issue in education reform cirlces as more and more reformers in postitions of power (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee) begin to take on the major unions on the issue of teacher tenure.  Since I work in Texas tenure is not an issue.  We do not enjoy collective bargaining, nor are were contracted by the state.  Teacher accountability is a key issue for improvement in education whether the work force is unionized or not.  The key to teacher accountability is to collect information about teacher performance from a variety of sources.  Schools should absolutely track the improvement of individual students from grade level to grade level based on test scores.  This is the easiest way to gather statistical, objective information about teacher performance - looking at the achievement of students.  However, because the act of teaching is also a performance of many tasks and skills that tests simply cannot measure, futher information should be gathered and evaluated.  In Texas most teachers are formally observed in the act of teaching a class by a trained administrater.  This has two benefits.  First it puts administraters in classrooms, and second it allows for a criterion based assesment of a teacher's classroom performance.  Colleges and universities regularly ask students to evaluate the performance of faculty members.  Public schools can and should collect this type of data as well.  Even very young children can fill out an evaluation form and report their feeling about the performance of their teacher.  Parents can also be asked to evaluate teacher performance.  Teachers could also be required to look at these various pieces of data and then defend their performance in front of a panel of peers and administraters - something like defending a doctoral dissertation maybe.  I understand that implementation of this type of program is both costly and time consuming, but if teacher accountability is necessary to improve public education, and it is, then the evaluation of teachers must measure their performance in a variety of ways, and teachers themselves should be required to look at, discuss, and defend their performances.

Furthermore, schools must re-exam the way technology is used and implemented in classrooms.  This generation, for better or for worse, has a completely different relationship with technology than previous generations.  Where most teachers see technology as a tool, students see technology as lifestyle.  Kids use information technology effortlessly.  If they need to know something, they google it.  If they want to share the information with others, they text it.  Then they go to school, where they are forbidden to use cell phones, where access to computers is serverly limited, and where they are protected from the bad stuff on the internet by firewalls that also end up blocking valuable content related resources.  No wonder they are bored.  They know that information can be located and delivered almost instantly, yet they sit in classrooms that still operate the way they did a fifty years ago.  Until we catch up with where they are technologically, until we figure out how to use all technology to get information to kids and help them use and understand it, we will continue to loose their attention and respect.

Finally, the time has surely come to open everything going on in education to scrutiny.  Abundant evidence suggests that the traditional school calendar - based on the needs of an 19th century agrarian culture, is obsolete.  Let's allow brave schools, parents and students to experiment with other calendar options, and make it easier bureaucratically for them to do so.  We know that attention spans shorten in the face of new technologies.  Let's examine length of classes and the overall arrangement of the school day.  Research indicates that while homework rarely does any harm to learning it also seems to do little good, yet it is continually assigned for reasons and in ways that research shows are ineffective.  This list could go on and on.

It is time for the education mainstream to begin to challenge its own preconceived notions about how schools should be administered and how teachers should be evaluated.  To do less is to change the bandaid on a gaping wound when we have a chance to stitch it closed.

The New York Times's token conservative op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat, ruminated today on the relative unhappiness of the liberated American woman.  His point of inquiry is as follows:  "Since American women today are wealthier, healthier, better educated, more likely to be employed outside the home, and earn more money than ever before, why do they report higher levels of unhappiness than they did 30 years ago?"  Assuming that the statistics Douthat is reporting are true, it is an interesting question, and one for which Douthat provides several potential answers.  He speculated about the decline of 2 parent families, the impact of the "second shift", the challenges of motherhood in modern society.  He doesn't find any of the these to be satisfactory answers and neither do I.  I think, in fact, that Douthat is looking for a complex answer rather than confronting the obvious, simple explanation.  Perhaps the answer lies in the promise of America itself - that respect is to be earned through accomplishment. 

America is the world's great meritocracy.  Respect and power are earned through hard work and determination - the American iconic ideal of the self made man..  We have no such iconic ideal of the self made woman.  Even Ophrah is judged by her weight and appearance as much as by her drive and extraordinary business success.  When we witness accomplished women disrespected in the public sphere, it is made clear that meritocracy is exclusively male.  It should not be surprising that we who are excluded would find that sad.

Politics and governemnt provide a plethora of recent examples to illustrate this point.  Hillary Clinton is a bitch - a female icon that does indeed exist in our culture.  She has ridden her husband's coat tails to a position of power that she did not earn.  Therefore, she can be derided for her appearance, her lack of fashion sense, her laughter and her tears. Sarah Palin is a babe - another iconic female type.  Unfortunately she is stupid.  Clearly she rode her physical beauty to a postion of power that she did not earn.  Therefore, she can be derided for her gaffs, her family problems and her love of masculine outdoor pursuits.  Sonia Sotomayor is an affirmative action baby - yes another iconic type.  Her success was not earned; it was given to her based solely on her minority heritage.  Therefore, she can be derided as hard to work with, and lacking intellectual firepower.  Nancy Pelosi, arguably the most powerful woman in the world, is a ball buster - yet another iconic type.  She did not earn her postion of power. She  usurped it from a more deserving man.  Therefore, she can be compared by her political opponents to a fictional man eater called "Pussy Galore" with no fear of recrimination. 

If these extraordinarily accomplished women get no respect, how can any woman earn respect in her own world?  How can any woman be seen as the iconic self made man?  If the simple desire for wide spread respect cannot be met, if success and power cannot be seen as earned, then perhaps that is what is making American women sad.  And that should sadden us all.

The ease with which Congressional Republicans, with an assist from the MSM, have been able to derail President Obama's plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay has gotten me thinking about risk assesment.  The reaction of  the US Senate and the MSM to the prospect of incarcerating terrorism suspects in the US has been irrational at best and hysterical at worst.  The counter arguments based in objective fact seem to gain no traction against the completely unarticulated risk to our safety that would follow the movement of "the worst of the worst" from Guantanamo to US prisons.  We react viserally to the risk and dismiss the evidence that would allow us to properly asses that risk and put it into context.  When did we become so risk averse?  Why does this aversion to risk persist even in the face of evidence showing that a particular risk is minimal?

Take for example the way parents are expected to eliminate the risk of a stranger harming one of their children.  New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy published an article in April of 2008 explaining why she allowed her then nine year old son to ride a subway and a bus alone after being left alone in New York's Bloomingdale's Department Store.  The result, vast numbers of readers threatening to turn her in for child abuse.  Are there risk involved in letting a nine year old find his own way home in New York using public transportation.  Yes, there are. Are those risk relatively small?  Yes, they are.  The research center STATS.Org reports that, "The statistics show that this (stranger abduction) is an incredibily rare event, and you can't protect people from very rare events.  It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightening."  Further the US Department of Justice reports that the number of children abducted by stangers - already an incredibly small number - has been going down over the years.  So why would so many parents not even consider letting their nine year old do such a thing.  I have come to the conclusion that in this instence it is because we are overwhelmed by too much information on one side of the issue and practically none on the other.  The MSM makes big money off of stories of child abductions.  To include the information necessary to correctly asses the risk to one's own child would kill the buzz surrounding these stories and decrease the ratings earned from non-stop reporting of them.  So, this statistical information is rarely, if ever, reported.  The result is a nation of hyper vigilant parents and of children whose natural inclination to explore, experiment, and learn to be self sufficient is stifled.

No wonder Americans are so pliant when it comes to terrorists held at GITMO.  It has been duly reported by the MSM that these guys are the "worst of the worst" according to the Bush administration, and that these men are such a danger to the lives of Americans that they must be held in legal limbo forever.  No facts are included to allow us to asses the true level of risk these men might pose collectively much less individually.  Our fear is a knee jerk response to the notion of what seems to be an avoidable risk.  Of course very little research is required to discover that 500 or so of the "worst of the worst" have already been released from GITMO.  Although the Pentagon reports that one in seven former GITMO detainees return to terrorism, these are individuals who were released back into the caldron of Islamic fanaticism.  Is it not rational to conclude that we would be safer if these guys were released and monitored in places where access to continued fanaticism would be more limited, such as well the US?  Here is another fact that should help us asses risk.  The only detainees likely to just be released into the US are the Chinese Uighars, I believe there are 11 of them.  These folks had no beef with the US prior to being held at GITMO for years without charges.  NPR reports that the community of Uighars already living in the US has pledged itself to take these former detainees into their homes and communities and to assist them in making the transtition into society.  Not so scary really.  The truly scary and dangerous guys will face either military trials or trials in federal courts.  Once convicted - and seriously, the prosecution especially at the federal level is incredibly effective generally and would surely be so in these instances - the real "worst of the worst" would be held in federal supermax prisons.  In his speech today, President Obama reminds us that "Nobody has ever excaped from our supermax prisons which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists."  Doesn't is seem obvious that our fear is disproportionate to the actual risk?  Once again, because we so happily ingest the scary stuff as infotainment, we fail to receive the mitigating information, and we seldom seem to seek it out.

Correct assesment of risk requires information.  The MSM has compelling financial reasons to ignore mitigating information and push fear because ratings seem to indicate that fear sells.  The MSM is a profit driven business.  They will continue to provide us with the information that increases ratings and therefore increases advertising dollars.  Mitigating information is actually fairly easy to locate.  Each of us must become more responsible about our consumption of information and become more willing to check out the facts on our own.  Otherwise, like the parent who stifles a child to the child's future detriment, we will stifle our nations growth and progress to the future detriment of us all.

 

The Rule of Law both as an abstraction and as practiced in the United States is suffering the worst possible fate.  It is being ignored.  It is being evaluated in the darkest recesses of the American soul and found wanting, but not openly debated in deliberative public forums where the process of discussing conflicting values and ideals can lead us to not only a collective standard, but to a deeper understanding of its importance.  If we are ever to find our way back to the America promised in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, we must immediately bring the discussion into the public arena.

Obviously a nation whose government systematically violated its own laws and international law in its implementation of torture as an intellingence gathering method has lost touch with the importance of the rule of law in our lives and the life of our nation.The fact that we are dithering over whether or not to even formally investigate these criminal actions speaks volumes about our connection to the rule of law and its role in a civilized society of equals.  In such a society, the equality of citizens is buillt on the equal application of the rule of law.  All are bound by the same set of rules, are judged by the same system of adjudicaiton, and if found to have violated the law, suffer the proscribed consequences. To even consider that our leaders, our government and the people who staff it are somehow to be held to a different standard or to no standard at all should be sufficiently troubling to at least warrent an investigation into the circumstances under which the law was violated.  To ignore a potential violation of the law at the highest level of our government errodes the glue that holds our society together and leaves us trying the live and work together without the vital guidelines that make that possible.Ordinary citizens must stand up for and protect our own stake in society and our own equality by insisting that an investigation into the law breaking of the Bush administration take place.  That the appropriate charges be filed if the evidence collected supports such charges and that those charged are tried under the guidelines established in the Constitution. We must not continue to argue the case for or against torture in the media.  We must have it argued in a court of law. A court of law, including the Congress in cases of impeachment as designated in the Constitution, is the only way to re-establish the principle of law and to therefore re-inforce the bonds and tacit agreements which hold us together.

In my talks with my collegues, friends and students, I often find the same, rather cavalier, attitude regarding the Constitutional protections outlined in the Bill of Rights.  There is a strong presumption of guilt for those who find themselves under investigation, or indicted, or on trial.  These "criminals" ought not be protected by the law.  They ought to be punished by it.  When I try to engage these well meaning, educated people in a discussion of why these provisions exist, that the presumption of innocence protects us all from being falsly accused and punished, it tends to be a very brief conversation ending with the assertion that good people don't need these protections because they don't commit crimes, don't associate with those who do, and therefore would not find themselves in the position of needing to take advantage of these protections.  It is hard to shake the faith folks have in the vagaries of fate.  It is much easy to shake their faith in the basic fairness and justice inherent in the rule of law.

This problem is not unique to the right side of the political and social spectrum.  The left also makes the same errors.  Today we find the Obama administration arguing that legal rules agaisnt hearsay are not part of the American legal tradition and can be discounted  when the government sees an overwhelming reason to do so.  It doesn't take a degree in law to see the flaw in this line of thinking.  One of the most basic protections granted all in the Bill of Rights is the right to confront our accusors.  That is why hearsay is prohibited in most cases and why  exceptions to this rule made for convenience would undermine the rule of law and the very fabric of society.  We would no longer be applying the law fairly to all.

I continue to be stunned by the ease with which we as a nation have dispatched habeous corpus.  Is there a more basic human right than to be able to challeng our dentention in front of a legally proscribed neutral arbiter?  Yet, we seemingly readily ignore this most basic right when it is more convenient to do so. 

In all of these examples, not only are we being undermined as a society, we are actively participating in our own dismantling.  Our equality under the law is what holds us together.  When the law is ignored to serve a short term goal, and some are no longer required to follow the law, we are no longer a society of equals.  It is time for us to have an honest conversation about the importance of the rule of law and the equality that it creates.  If not we risk the very things we most want to protect.

 

 

It both shames and saddens me to admit that the American citizenry has again been duped by the Cheney fear machine, clearly we have.  The torture debate is being lost in a sea of misdirection, specious arguments and outright lies.  This must stop.  Whether or not any Bush administration official or bureaucrat is ever charged with war crimes, we as a nation must clearly stand on the moral and legal side of the torture line. 

Former Vice President Cheney, with an assist from the MSM, has replaced the real and necessary argument as to the legality and morality of Bush's torture policies with a faux debate about whether or not torture works.  This is a faux debate for two pretty obvious reasons.

First, of course torture works if your goal is to get your prisoner to say what you want him to say.  Tortured prisoners do talk.  What they say is useless unless you are attempting to force a confession - see KSM admissions regarding Daniel Pearl's murder, or you are eager to collect information only valued in quantity rather than quality - all intelligence is actionable if you choose to act on it.

Second, all crimes work to solve the problems and issues of the persons who committ them.  A hungry person has a problem.  He needs food.  Stealing the food solves the problem.  So what?  Stealing is still both illegal and immoral.  The fact that it "worked" is irrelevant to the illegality.  A prominent and powerful man gets questioned about his relationship with a young woman at work while being deposed in a lawsuit.  He has several problems - the truth is that he did have an innappropriate sexual relationship with this young woman, his wife and daughter will be publicly humiliated yet again, and he already has a special prosecutor breathing down his neck.  So, he lies.  Problem temporarily solved.  Lying worked.  But lying under oath is still illegal.  The temporary relief provided does nothing to change the illegality of the action.

Smart, moral people of all political stripes must push back and push back hard against these faux arguments and return the focus where it must be.  Who is responsible for these crimes?  How were the mechanisms of our government used to facilitate and cover them up?  Are criminal investigations and trials necessary and appropriate?  What changes to our government bureaucracies need to be made to insure that this never happens again?  These are the issues that must be debated.  Whether or not torture worked is a red herring and these arguments should be avoided.  Every cry of "Torture Worked" must be met with a louder cry of "Still Illegal"! 

 

I have taught in the public schools for 20 years.  Please hold you applause.  Seriously,  I have been a part of public education long enough to have learned that some things just don't change.  High school students will always be more interested in each other than in the historically significant.  Current events are whatever the most current gossip sources decree not what is reported in the media.  New is always better than old.  Young is always more important than old. The kids are always at least one step ahead of the grown ups.  Everyone agrees that teachers are the primary reason that American education is broken.  Everyone knows more about how to fix schools than the adults who go to them on a daily basis.

I am a pro-reform educator.  Change is absolutely necessary to make our public schools relevant, forward thinking and successful.  I just don't understand why everyone's ideas as to how to accomplish this change are more valid than mine.  It happened again recently while reading Huffington Post.  Joel Klein, Chancellor of NY Schools, weighed in on how to fix teachers.  His proposals were not at all radical.  Tying tenure to performance rather than to time served.  Using test score to measure and track teacher performance. None of these are necessarily bad ideas.  I don't necessarily disagree with them in principle. However, they are all ideas about things to be done to teachers, not for teachers, not with teachers, but to teachers.  Like the children we teach, we are to be molded and shaped to fit the vision of the powers that be.  Like children we cannot be trusted to develop on our own.  Like children we must be humored and then ignored.  Not only is this attitude insulting; it is also a major roadblock to true education reform.  If we acknowledge that teachers are part of the problem, then we must also see teachers as part of the solution.

The elephant in the room that teachers can see but regulators, politicians and educational experts cannot is that each child is a unique individual.  Even kindergarteners come to school on that very first day with personality and world view largely formed.  They will all learn in different ways and at different rates.  Some will love learning.  Some will not.  Some will embrace knowledge for its own sake.  Some will only learn what is obviously necessary and relevent. Some will wear their ignorance as a badge of honor.  Teachers understand this in a viseral way.  We see it every day.  We work with or fight with these facts every day.  No amount of merit pay or teacher training or test score tracking will change those facts.  Teachers, like doctors and lawyers, cannot guarentee results.  There are simply too many factors to be considered for each individual child.  Multiply that infinite number by the number of kids in a classroom and you can see the problem. We deal with people, not with mathematical formulas.  Good lawyers loose trials.  Good doctors loose patients.  Good teachers loose students.

I don't see much hope for education reform that is top down in its orientation because administraters, politicians, and education academics do not work with kids daily.  The kids are not people to them.  They are statistics, products and test scores.  Until classroom teachers who deal directly with the kids as people each and every day become part of the process of creating real plans for education reform,  we will not succeed.

Teachers can be taught by other teachers cooperatively and respectfully.  Teachers can learn to produce the test scores that the public wants to see if allowed to be part of the process that creates them.  Teachers can be held accountable for student performance if their unique insights and input are part of the process of evaluation.  After all doctors regulate other doctors through the AMA.  Lawyers create and inforce their own rules through the Bar Association.  Teachers can contribute to the process of evaluation of their peers as well. Let us participate in the solutions since we are so clearly set up to be the problem.
    

Yesterday saw the GOP return to scare tactics in order to find some way of returning to relevancy.  Today we see many examples that clearly show why that cannot be allowed to happen.  Irrational fear or rational but overstated fear corrupt our politics and our lives. 

Today, for the very first time since his inauguration, President Obama has angered me.  He has let fear - of political recriminations - prevent him from doing what is right.  Perhaps he is correct that a Legislative repeal of the absolutely repulsive "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" policy should not be priority during these difficult times, but that does not excuse him when he allows the termination of honorable gay service members to continue.  I understand that he cannot make the law go away, but he is choosing not to do the things he could and should to lessen its negative impact on individuals, the military and the nation.  He can and should sign a stop loss order as Commander and Chief putting a halt to any termination of service men and women under this policy until such time as the law can be reviewed and eliminated.  To allow this legally sanctioned descrimination to continue is simply not justifiable.  He,like so many Democratic politicians, is conditioned to expect not only that the GOP will use any excuse to play the gay card, but expects these tactics to be successful.  The employment rights of homosexuals should not be a political issue. This is a civil rights issue.  To allow descrimination to continue due to fear of political repercussions in the future is not acceptable.

Also in the headlines today is news indentifying specific Congressional leaders who were briefed on the Bush Administrations illegal torture program and who then did nothing to stop it.  Again we see the clear and corrupting influence of fear.  Fear not literally of another terrorist attack, but rather fear of being blamed for a future terrorist attack caused these law makers to be complicit in war crimes.  Their silence facilitated the continuence of these crimes and now gives the instigators of them political cover when it comes to investigations.  Maybe the reason the political establishment is so vehemently opposed to investigating obvious war crimes is because the corruption, lawlessness, and immorality cut across all brances of government and both political parties.  Again, moral and legal rightness is being thwarted by fear - the fear punishment for these crimes.

I am sure that in some ways paralysis on these and other issues of morality, law and social justice seems to be a viable course.  It is calm and peaceful to simply ignore and bury tough issues and self-recriminations.  But that peace is a false peace.  These issues will continue to rear their ugly heads and to grow and morph into new tangents that we cannot possibly anticipate.  We must set aside our own fears and force our leaders to set aside theirs.We must find the courage to stand up, take an unblinking look at ourselves and our politics and do what is right on issues as important and defining as human and civil rights.  We must cease to fear fear.

So Congressional Republicans have gone retro again.  Instead of doing the difficult intellectual work required to apply their time honored principles of small government, they have returned once again to the successes of the past.  The latest video hit from the GOP sells not new ideas, serious policy proposals, or even serious policy differences.  It sells the same product that put them in the White House fo eight years - fear.  If the GOP can once again make Americans feel that the physical safety of themselves and their children is at immediate risk, we will be forced to return them to power.  Fortunately, there are signs that a backlash against fear is taking root. Americans are once again ready to be seen and to see themselves as brave, competent, tough and ready to fight for their principles.

Politically the selling of fear is losing its punch.  A recent ad produced by an anti-gay marriage organization called "The Gathering Storm" is one example of the backlash against fear.  The add attempts to make Americans afraid of married homosexuals by using both the language of visuals of fear of the other.  It was immediately and roundly riduculed.  Pundits, bloggers and MSM alike rightly highlighted the disconnect between the scary images of the gathering storm and the specter of gay marriage.  In short it was obvious that there was nothing that scary about gay marriage.  One could argue that recent polling gains in favor of gay marriage or at least civil unions are backlash reactions to the emperor being naked.  There is nothing to fear.  When fear is the motivation for action and fear evaporates in the face of the obvious, there is no motivation.

Likewise recent GOP attempts to create political ground by selling the fear of GITMO detainees being transfered to the US are failing to gain traction.  Again bloggers, pundits and ordinary people are able to see past the fear and into the truth.  The US incarcerates more people than any country on earth.  We have successfully imprisoned hundreds of years worth of scary, dangerous people.  If there is one thing we are manifestly good at, it is locking dangerous people up so that they can not harm us.  Again there is  nothing to fear from these perhaps 250 detainees.  We can securely incarcerate them just as we have Charles Manson (a terrorist is ever there was one), Timothy McVey (until he was convicted and executed under our laws and constitution) and a plethora of drug lords, gang leaders and mass murderers.

We are even beginning to see this backlash in areas not involving politics per say.  As a parent of small children I feel constantly bombarded by fear for their safety and well being.  The MSM's hysterical reporting of crimes against children has led to a generation of kids who are developmentally stunted by this fear.  They stay children longer and become independent adults much later largely because they have been kept with in partental eye sight at all times.  Finally messages are getting through to deflate that bubble of fear.  Crime statistics bear out the fact that violent crime in the US is dropping across the board, that these crimes against children are incredibly rare, and that your kids are rationally speaking as safe running around the neighborhood without parental supervision as we were as children.

I am pleased and relieved to see this re-emergence of America as the the "home of the brave".  Until Sept. 11, 2001, we saw ourselves as brave, competent, tough and eager to fight for our principles.  By definition terrorism's goal is to instill enough fear in a population to get them to overreact, to undermine their own principles, to be controlled by the fear.  For eight years we as a nation allowed ourselves to succumb to those fears.  No more.  The backlash has begun.

 

Greetings from the Lone Star State.  Enjoy us while you can; we could decide to leave any day now.  Two Texas related items struck me on TPM today.  The first was Josh's post about Mexican drug cartel violence and whether or not concerns about spillover into the US were realistic or anti-immigration propaganda.  Like most choices of this nature my best guess is that both are true to some extent.  Anti-immigrant propagandists will use any information - factual or not - to further their cause.  However local media (I live in the Houston area) regularly reports stories about cross border kidnappings and murders especially in El Paso, which sits directly across the border from Ciudad Juarez, one of the most violence ridden of Mexico's border cities.  Below is a link to a NYTimes article on the subject.  This ariticle is based on incidents occurring in Arizona, but makes clear that local law enforcement - not just the feds and/or our crazy state government - see cross border violence as a real issue.  If the local cops who actually deal with street level crime have these concerns, I think that makes them a little more credible.

The second post of course deals with the borderline insane rantings of our beloved "Governor Good Hair" - credit Molly Ivins for the nickname.  What non-Texans probably don't know is the degree to which we natives are taught to fervently believe in the myth of Texas exceptionalism.  Part of the justification for that exceptionalism that we are all taught as children is that the treaty making Texas a state contains provisions allowing Texas to succeed and return to being an independent nation or to divide itself into 4 separate states.  Governor Perry was not really threatening succession but rather speaking the native's code language to remind us all of our exceptional greatness.  All Texans indulge in speculation about and periodic "threats" to support succession.  As a practical matter, even the fiercest Texan knows that succession would be foolish, but we like to indulge the fantasy for our own amusement.  In other words, "Don't Mess With Texas", we might just take our crazy Governor, ignorant legislature and exceptional American patriots and go home. 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/us/23border.html