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Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally, a Week Later
Last Saturday, Glenn Beck held his "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, DC. Reason.tv's segment on the event, which went up a few hours after its conclusion, is above. (Shot by Jim Epstein with help from Josh Swain; edited by Meredith Bragg and Epstein; hosted by me; approximately 6.30 minutes).
Go here for the writeup we gave the rally and to get downloadable versions of the video.
Reflecting on the event after a week has passed, some things stick with me, including the following:
1. While I think Beck is often massively confused in terms of basic facts, he is channeling a very strong tradition in American with regards to religion and the public square. One of the main themes of the rally is that is was our "turning away" from God that led to our present problems (which are never fully articulated but are palpable due to recession). The solution, offered by Beck and other speakers and certainly most of the people we talked with in the crowd, was "embracing" God and putting him back in the center of our lives, both private and public. Regardless of whether the Founders were Christian in the way that many contemporary Christians would recognize (they weren't), the notion of the U.S. as a god-fearing country that publicly demonstrated its religiosity is an old and powerful one. What is particularly odd about the anxiety that we've turned God (vaguely Christian in invocation, but really a non-denominational higher power) out of the public square is the not-small fact that we haven't: In a way they certainly didn't in the '60s and '70s, for instance, politicians are far more publicly pious than they used to be. But that may be less important than the feeling.
2. The recession is undergirding a huge amount of free-floating anxiety about everything. This is obvious but rarely goes baldly stated. For much of the new century, and certainly for all of the past three years, there has been nothing but uncertainty in the economy and a good degree of uncertainty in the political arena. The people we talked to felt something like cogs in a machine whose shape and size they didn't even understand. They were not rabid xenophobes or racists or even haters in general, but they were pissed off that their individual actions did not seem to mean much. They were not conspiracists (few if any brought up Obama as a Muslim or a foreign national, for instance), but they felt cheated and frustrated that their individual lives seemed to be controlled by larger forces and institutions over which they had little or no control. And to the extent that they talked about government, the focus was generally upon government spending that they assumed threatened to destroy the future, for them and their kids or grandkids.
3. That sort of mind-set has a history of giving rise to two sorts of broader movements. It can create a populist movement, which seeks to tame power elites, demonize foreigners, turn government over to a new crew, etc. Or it inspires self-improvement modes that have political import but are not fundamentally political (the various Great Awakenings in America, or the self-help gospels of Norman Vincent Peale). The rally was an interesting mix of both strands. In his day job, Beck rarely misses an opportunity to rail against politicians, especially those he deems socialistic or progressive, and there's no mistaking Sarah Palin on any podium as a politician. Yet more strong at this event was the self-help dimension, the idea that self-transformation was the key to a larger group transformation. A lot of that seems to stem almost directly from Beck's facility with and embrace of 12 Step rhetoric. In some sense, the rally was a giant AA meeting (I don't mean this snarkily), flush with the notion that whatever else is going on in the world, you can control some portion of your own life.
4. The attendees saw a continuity between George Bush and Barack Obama, spendthrift and ineffectual Republicans and Democrats. To me, this was the most interesting aspect of the crowd. There were definitely more Republicans than Democrats (who may have been missing almost totally), but virtually everyone we talked with identified as an independent. Who was fed up with the past decade, really, not just the past 18 or so months of Obama.
5. The crowd reminded me of Wal-Mart (not being snarky!). I live part-time in small-town Ohio where the local Wal-Mart Super Center is a major third space. Over the past few years and contrary to its image as wholesome, the chain has gone serously goth. Check out the T-shirts you can buy there and virtually every other one has skulls and crosses on it. And if something doesn't have stylized chains and blood on it, then it's in Day-Glo colors. The crowd reflected that, with more piercings than I've seen at some rock shows, ZZ Top beards galore, a biker look on many men and women. A noticeable number of the crowd were even wearing inexpensive Faded Glory (Wal-Mart's housebrand) American flag T-shirts. Any number of commentators may have been appalled by the crowd, but check it and see: This is America.
6. The organizers and the attendees are not part of the Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they are proto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money and they seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange (nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bank bailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can't deliver.
Where does this crowd and its energy and mentality go from here? We'll find out over the next few months.
Hugh Hefner, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the NRCC, the Playboy Mansion, and Twitter
The closer Washington gets to the
labor day break, the more
stories like this become news:
Playboy's Hugh Hefner has a pet congresswoman, and now a tweet about a private fundraising lunch at the Playboy Mansion with California Rep. Loretta Sanchez is catching some heat from Republicans and putting the lawmaker in an unwanted spotlight.
It all started when Hefner on Tuesday announced his donor luncheon.
And because we are living in year 2010, a Twitter kerfuffle ensues. U.S. News relates the entire play-by-play here.
Tim Cavanaugh Talks Higher Education Bubble With Cavuto on Fox Biz
Is that diploma you went into debt for worth the
sheepskin it's printed on? Reason Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh will
talk about the higher
education bubble on Neil Cavuto's Fox Business News show this
afternoon.
Time: Approx. 6:30 p.m. Eastern (3:30 Pacific), Friday September 3.
Place: Fox Business Channel.
New at Reason: Michael C. Moynihan on Cambodian Refugee and Self-Described Reagan Republican Sam Meas
Reporting from Massachusetts, Senior Editor
Michael C. Moynihan profiles Republican congressional candidate Sam
Meas, a refugee from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge and the
self-professed “new face of the Republican party.”
Gingrich: Use Government Power to Trample Property Rights of Muslims
The loathesome ex-House Speaker, who has been
singularly awful on the Ground Zero mosque issue, reaches down
into the septic tank for
more:
"I think the Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war," he said[...]
And if that fails, he said, the state government should step in and use its considerable power to stymie the development.
"The Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene because frankly he has the ability to slow it down for decades if he wants to."
And, if the federal government doesn't intervene, and the state government declines to use its regulatory and enforcement powers to delay a private development project, Gringrich says the mayor should step in. [...]
"There are a number of different steps that could be taken. There's no reason this has to occur and whether it's city, state, or federal there are plenty of ways for America to stop it," Gingrich said.
Link via Doug Mataconis.
Well, at least Gingrich has some great, wonky ideas for cutting the size of government! Uh....
[MATT] LAUER: Let's talk about cutting, cutting the deficit here. You've said, you're thinking more seriously now than ever about running for president. Let's say I make you president right now. Congratulations. And I give you what a lot of people are predicting - a Republican-controlled House and Senate. That means you've got to make some really tough choices in terms of cutting this deficit. What are you willing to say? And name it by name, that you would be willing to cut right now to cut deficits.
GINGRICH: First of all, you just may, create a nightmare for virtually every Democrat watching the show, so I apologize to them. But to, but to work out your scenario, in the four years I was Speaker of the House, the average rate of increase was 2.9 percent a year including all the entitlements. That is the lowest rate of increase since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. We did it by carefully setting priorities.
LAUER: But-
GINGRICH: Now, now just let me finish.
LAUER: Okay, go ahead.
GINGRICH: So, so we doubled, for example, investment in national health research at the National Institutes of Health while we were being very tough on other spending. I would start and I'd go through this budget pretty dramatically and I would eliminate a great deal of federal bureaucracy. I would reform unemployment compensation. I would reform workman's comp at the state level. I would have a very pro-jobs, very pro-savings, very pro-take-home pay policy. When we reformed welfare, 65 percent of people on welfare either went to work or went to school and we saved billions and billions of dollars. That's part of how we managed to balance the budget. Remember Matt...
LAUER: Would, would you make cuts in Social Security and Medicare?
GINGRICH: No, no.
Jacob Sullum on Gingrich's awfulness here.
Noise Complaint Leads to Police Shooting, Killing 17-Year-Old
Last Sunday night, police
in Morganton, North Carolina shot and killed 17-year-old Michael
Sipes. The officers were responding to a noise complaint called in
by a neighbor in the mobile home park where Sipes lived. His mother
says there were three children in the home on the night Sipes was
killed, and were likely he source of the complaint.
According to Sipes' mother and others in the house, the police repeatedly knocked on the door to the home, but never identified themselves. They say both Sipes and his mother asked more than once who was outside. A neighbor who heard the gunshots also says he never heard the police identify themselves. Police officials say the officers did identify themselves.
According to those in the trailer at the time, as the knocks continued, Sipes retrieved a rifle, opened the door, and stepped outside. That's when Morganton Public Safety Officer Johnny David Cooper II shot Sipes in the stomach "four or five times."
More here and here. Profile of Sipes here. The story is still fresh, but at first blush he certainly doesn't seem like the kind of kid who would knowingly confront police officers with his rifle.
California Roundup: Teachers Union Warns of Technopocalypse Under New Obama Admin. Testing Plan
* Meg Whitman proves
that a smart person can always get out of jury duty, is dismissed
after five-hour ordeal.
* When kids don't have to fill in circles with a number 2 pencil, the terrorists have won: With a big bribe from D.C., California joins the group of states participating in two new programs to upgrade standardized testing. But wait! It may not be all bad. The new tests will use advanced positronics to generate ranges of questions that change according to student answers. The L.A. Times' Howard Blume and Jason Song quote a United Teachers Los Angeles representative denouncing these "educational weapons" that will also feature (in higher-level tests) a quiz in which students use state of the art "search engines" to gather data from interconnected electronic brains and "extract the information necessary to write a brief research paper in response to a prompt."
* Don't push Barbara Boxer cause she's close to the edge: At the Wall Street Journal, John Fund says the Democratic junior senator is in a kill-or-be-killed contest with Republican challenger Carly Fiorina. (Up to this point, Boxer has lucked into elections that pitted her against a series of Glass Joes.) At Politico, Republican Michael Rosen says, "Boxer will lose, not because Fiorina is an impressive candidate (although she certainly is), but because voters — even in liberal California — have grown disaffected with ideological, partisan insiders with minimal accomplishments to their name." Wishful thinking? New SurveyUSA poll has Fiorina ahead by two.
* Same poll has the No-On-19 vote growing. While the legalize-and-tax ballot initiative still leads in polls, the pressure from the state's discredited but enduring institutions is building. "Queen of California" Sen. Dianne Feinstein is leading the opposition. Barely coherent editorial screeds like this one keep coming out. Everybody else still treats Prop. 19 as a big joke.
* It only matters who counts the votes: Democratic incumbents are ponying up for Proposition 27, which would dismantle the recently created redistricting commission and give the job of drawing legislative districts back to the Democrats in the legislature. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers developer Haim Saban also among big Prop. 27 donors.
Reason.tv: Life, Liberty & Happiness - Q&A with American Visionary Art Museum's Rebecca Hoffberger
The word liberty is used a lot but it's not often that individuals think deeply about what the word means, says Rebecca Hoffberger, the founder of Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM.)
Hoffberger's goal with AVAM was to create "a grassroots salon that would tackle all the great themes that have ever bedeviled and inspired human kind." The most recent exhibition, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness featured a wide range of self-taught artists including Saddam Hussein's personal doctor, Ala Bashir, and a schizophrenic hoarder named Dick Lubinsky. The exhibition provides an unforgettable commentary on an American truism. Hoffberger explains that art is strongest when it portray's life experiences that are "too big for words" and that art is powerful tool for those trying to express "the need for liberty."
Produced by Dan Hayes. Camera by Jim Epstein and Joshua Swain. Edited by Hayes. Music by Dan Thieman.
Approximately 7.30 minutes.
Go to www.reason.tv for downloadable versions of the video and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Why Is 'Un-British' Bad?
I was struck by British Defense
Minister Liam Fox's description
of the new Medal of Honor video game set in Afghanistan.
He called it "thoroughly un-British," a phrase that presumably
refers to something more than the game's country of origin.
(Electronic Arts, which produces the Medal of Honor
series, is based in Redwood City, California.) I surmise that
un-British, like un-American, implies a
contradiction of values that are part of the national identity. But
what exactly are those values? I would have guessed that they
include decency, fair play, tolerance (except of indecency and
unfairness), and maybe a stiff upper lip. But after doing a little
research, I'm not so sure. Here is a list of things that recently
have been deemed un-British:
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's manner
British director Ridley Scott's boasting
"Living life at a high level of intensity"
The Jeremy Kyle Show (which I gather is a British version of The Jerry Springer Show)
If the standard is what British people actually do, several of these are more wishful (or wistful) than realistic. Unfortunately, the more appealing the implied value, the less likely it is to be upheld in practice.
It's The Love Boat...For Ideas! Join Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Ron Bailey, Jacob Sullum, Patri Friedman, & Matt Ridley for Reason's First-Ever Cruise, Feb. 2011!
Regular readers of Reason.com and Reason.tv and subscribers to the print edition of Reason already know that we're shoving off on our first-ever cruise in February 2011. Get more shiver-yer-timbers details here.
Among the Reason staffers who have already been shanghaiied into participating are Matt Welch, Jacob Sullum, Ron Bailey, and Nick Gillespie.
Our special guest stars include best-selling author Matt Ridley, whose latest tome is The Rational Optimist, and Patri Friedman, the visionary behind The Seasteading Institute. More speakers will be announced soon...
Here's what you'll get on the Reason cruise:
Moderated panel sessions featuring Reason editors and guest speakers, along with plenty of discussion.
Special additional sessions hosted by our cruise partner, The Seasteading Institute.
Many chances to meet and spend time with our editors and special guest speakers.
Exclusive parties and dining with our editors and guest speakers. You will dine with your fellow Reason cruise attendees, so that you have the chance to meet many of your fellow freedom lovers.
Admission to Reason seminars and ad-hoc sessions
Admission to numerous Reason cruise private cocktail receptions.
Admission to Reason group excursions.
Port charges, taxes, fuel surcharges, and government fees.
Accommodations and all meals.
We set sail from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on January 30 next year and return, god willing, February 6, after visiting exotic ports of call in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Antilles. We'll be shipping out on Celebrity Cruise's Solstice, a big mother of a ship every bit as unsinkable as the Titanic and James Cameron's career put together. Double occupancy cabins start at around $1,500 per person and spaces are limited.
So come aboard, we're expecting you! Go to ReasonCruise.com for details.
Video produced by Meredith Bragg.
New at Reason: Cathy Young on the Legacy of the Iraq War
Only time will tell if Operation Iraqi Freedom
was a blunder, writes Cathy Young. But it is not too early to say
that Americans are not the villains in this story. As Young
explains, that role belongs to the dictator who drove so many of
his subjects to welcome a foreign invasion, and to the extremists
who unleashed carnage on their own.
Brendan O’Neill on Tony Blair’s “bitchy memoirs”
Frequent Reason contributor
Brendan O’Neill is not a fan of Tony Blair’s new memoir:
Never mind his claim about seeing the queen washing dishes after a barbecue at Balmoral. Forget his description of John Prescott’s affair as a ‘silly sex scandal’. Put to the back of your mind his ‘drink problem’. (Half a bottle of wine a night? Quick, someone call AA!) No, the really shocking thing about Tony Blair’s memoirs is that they exist at all, that all this personal crap, all his griping, grimacing and schoolgirl-style hatred of certain Labour colleagues, has been vomited into the public arena at precisely a time when Labour is trying to select a new leader. Such a teenage elevation of the needs of the self above the needs of one’s party speaks volumes about the end of politics and its replacement by the tyranny of therapy.
Read the whole thing here.
New York's Absent Teacher Reserve Hears Call to Action, Goes Back to Reading the Newspaper
New York City recently pledged to rid itself of the infamous rubber rooms where unemployed and unemployable teachers sat—sometimes for years—while accruing seniority and pay. But today The Wall Street Journal reports on a scam even sweeter than sitting around in a room doing nothing all day for pay—sitting around wherever you want doing nothing all day for pay.
A majority of New York City teachers who lost their positions at schools earlier this year have neither applied for another job in the system nor attended any recruitment fairs in recent months, according to data released by the Department of Education Thursday.
The city spends about $100 million a year on 1,800 teachers currently in the pool who don't have full-time teaching gigs. In theory, these teachers, some of which have been enjoying this ride since 2006, are part of a reserve corps of teachers who can be called up at a moment's notice to fill vacancies and do substitute teaching: The Absent Teacher Reserve. (Notice that Reason magazine gets along fine without retaining a reserve corps of bloggers ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.)
But there are 1,200 vacancies in the system. While 59 percent of the teachers haven't applied to any jobs through the official system, the rest are presumably being rejected by principals, even with union-negotiated arrangements that put outsiders at a distinct disadvantage.
Who cares what unemployed teachers are up to, you say? Well, there's this:
New York is the only city in the country where teachers are guaranteed pay for life even when their school closes and they are put out of a permanent job.
Challenging Obama's License to Kill
In today's Washington
Post, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union, and Vincent Warren, executive director of the
Center for Constitutional Rights,
explain why their groups have filed a lawsuit challenging the
Obama administration's policy of "targeted killing" for suspected
terrorists. Romero and Warren say targeted killing can be justified
1) on the battlefield as part of an armed conflict (in Afghanistan,
for example) or 2) outside of an armed conflict "as a last resort
and in the face of a truly imminent threat to life." But Obama's
policy, based on the
view (also espoused by his predecessor) that the entire world
is a battlefield in the War on Terror/War on Al Qaeda, gives the
executive branch carte blanche to kill people it unilaterally
identifies as members or supporters of Al Qaeda, including U.S.
citizens, wherever they may be found and regardless of whether they
pose an imminent threat:
We simply cannot accept the proposition that the government should have unchecked authority to carry out extrajudicial killings...far from any actual battlefield. Nor can we accept the contention that the entire world is a battlefield....
The danger of dispensing with due process is obvious. Without it, we cannot be assured that the people the government kills are individuals who presented a threat to the country. Indeed, over the past decade, our government has repeatedly labeled men terrorists only to find out later—or to be told by a federal judge—that the evidence was overstated, wrong or nonexistent. If we invest the government with unchecked authority to impose death sentences on people who have never been convicted of or even charged with a crime, it is inevitable that innocent people will be executed.
Romero and Vincent also note that the U.S. government is setting an example it assuredly does not want others to imitate:
The conduct of our government heavily influences the practices of other countries. The United States would in all likelihood not endorse the authority it claims for targeted killings if it were asserted by other countries. Americans would surely be appalled if another country claimed the right to send a drone after a declared enemy in Wyoming.
In a column a few months ago, I noted how Obama's license to kill blurs the line between warfare and summary execution. More on the ACLU/CCR lawsuit here.
ObamaCare: It’s Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Worse
When President Obama made his pitch for the health care overhaul, he framed it this way: “Insurance reform; making sure that you can have choices in the marketplace for health insurance, and making it affordable for people; and reducing costs.” It was a pitch aimed at consumers: More access, more choices, lower prices. But over at InsureBlog, certified underwriter Bob Vineyard scans the health insurance market in Georgia and finds that, in the post-PPACA insurance market, there have definitely been changes—but not the ones Obama promised. From the highlight (lowlight?) reel:
All but two health insurance companies have withdrawn from offering maternity benefits.
...As of [August 26th], it is almost impossible to find a rate for children's health insurance if they are under age 19 and you are looking for coverage to be effective on 9/23/10 or later. [Note: See here for more on why.]
...Many have already indicated higher premiums for the 4th quarter of 2010 and later, especially on children under age 19.
...Doctor and hospital networks are shrinking in an effort to further control costs but also has the effect of limiting access to a wide range of medical providers.
More here.
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