The South Could Sing A Different Note

MSNBC reports on the issue of whether or not the 1956 Disney film "Song of the South should be re-released.

Excerpt:

But the movie remains hidden in the Disney archives — never released on video in the United States and criticized as racist for its depiction of Southern plantation blacks. The film’s 60th anniversary passed last year without a whisper of official rerelease, which is unusual for Disney, but President and CEO Bob Iger recently said the company was reconsidering. The film’s reissue would surely spark debate, but it could also sell big. Nearly 115,000 people have signed an online petition urging Disney to make the movie available, and out-of-print international copies routinely sell online for $50 to $90, some even more than $100.

I grew up in the South and saw this film as a young child, seeing nothing wrong with it at that early age and not reconizing the signifigance of the issue involved at that time. Now, however I see how it could be taken in a negative sense, with its depictation of african-americans as happy servants and such. That being said, I see no reason to hide from history and try to pretend that it never happened, these things need to be brought out into the open to be seen and to be discussed. If "political correctness" is used to stifle discussion then the open mindedness that the PC movements wish to cultivate is swept under the rug with everything else.

What is needed is the re-release of this historic film, but it not need be released as is, this is a perfect opportunity to put it in its historic context. Imagine an opening commentary by a well respected black history specialist or a leader from the NAACP who could point out the good and questionable qualities of the film. Such an opportunity would be very informative and when placed along with the film itself provide a context that could easily be viewed. Instead of criticism of such a release, black leaders should work with Disney to capitalize on the opportunity and make the movie sing an all new tune in harmony with modern times.

But such commentary should not merely denounce any racist undertones of the film, but should also point out the films merits. The stories told for example were not the invention of slave owners, but of the slaves and former slaves themselves, and are as much a part of black history and heritage as the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and should be embraced as such, rather than being attacked as racist expressions. Yes "tar baby" can be incredibly racist and insensitive, but it is not such of its own accord, just by its usage. So when Uncle Remus tells his tales in the movie, he is not promoting racism, but instead demonstrating how intelligence can overcome a difficult problem as in the case of the briar patch as opposed to how unthinking reaction will get you deeper into trouble as in the part about of the tar baby, lessons that trancend the rascist backdrop of the era.

We must take the good and seperate it from the bad in our own minds, and use the thoughful commentary of experts to aid in this. Should we sweep everything under the rug, we lose much history and heritage and lose the chance to learn from the past, as a lesson is to be learned from both its good and bad points.

The 5th Labor

Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan report on Political profiling and partisanship.

Excerpt:

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

The Bush administration has put a cloud of doubt over the Justice Department that will take years to dispel. Given the importance of the Rule of Law to our way of government, this greatly tarnishes our society as a whole. The only way to revive the confidence of the American people will be non-partisan investigations with full cooperation and tranparency from government officials. Anything less will do little to restore the lost faith of Americans in government anytime soon.

I am reminded of the 5th labor of Hercules,to clean the Augean stables in a single day. The amount of dirt and filth amassed in the uncleaned stables made the task surely impossible. However, Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

We need a Herculean effort, and shovels wont do to clean out the filth in government, we need to start diverting rivers and clean out the mess in one big rush, if we try to do it piecemeal it will only, like the stables, recreate itself.

Hypocracy

The White House is at the partisan game yet again, Think Progress repost on Republican trips to Syria that have recieved no White House criticisms.

Excerpt:

Here’s what the White House isn’t talking about:

Republican Reps. Aderholt and Wolf are currently visiting Syria. According to a congressional official on Rep. Robert Aderholt’s (R-AL) staff, Aderholt and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) are currently visiting Israel and Syria.

Republican Rep. Hobson accompanying Pelosi on Syria visit. Speaker Pelosi will be traveling with a contingent of members of Congress to Syria. The delegation includes Reps. David Hobson (R-OH), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Tom Lantos (D-CA), Henry Waxman (D-CA), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Nick Rahall (D-WV)

Moreover, as the AP reports, “Earlier this month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey held talks with a senior Syrian diplomat on how Damascus was coping with a flood of Iraqi refugees, the first such talks in the Syrian capital for more than two years.”

Do they really think that they can get away with such blatant hypocracy and not be called about it? If his approval rating was 60% he might....maybe.

The Daily Dish Out

Andrew Sullivan lays into David Brook's NYT column at his bolg at the Daily Dish. This is pure gold so no short excerpts this time but a full posting of Sullivan:

Fisking Brooks

It's been a while since I did a good fisking, but David Brooks' column today angered up the blood. He's a friend. I mean no personal animus. He's a good guy. But I think he is deeply, deeply wrong about what ails conservatism. David's column is in italics. (Sullivan's are in bold, my addition for easier reading) My responses aren't:

There is an argument floating around Republican circles that in order to win again, the G.O.P. has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days. It has to once again be the minimal-government party, the maximal-freedom party, the party of rugged individualism and states' rights. This is folly. It's the wrong diagnosis of current realities and so the wrong prescription for the future.

So far, nothing but rhetoric and cliches from David. "Rugged individualism"? Why the "rugged"? Why not just freedom to live one's life as one chooses, as opposed to the way in which David's allies in the religious and authoritarian right want to boss us around?

Back in the 1970s, when Reaganism became popular, top tax rates were in the 70s, growth was stagnant and inflation was high. Federal regulation stifled competition. Government welfare policies enabled a culture of dependency. Socialism was still a coherent creed, and many believed the capitalist world was headed toward a Swedish welfare model.

In short, in the 1970s, normal, nonideological people were right to think that their future prospects might be dimmed by a stultifying state. People were right to believe that government was undermining personal responsibility. People were right to have what Tyler Cowen, in a brilliant essay in Cato Unbound, calls the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm burned into their minds — the idea that big government means less personal liberty.

But bigger government always means less personal liberty. This is simply a fact, not an opinion. The trade-off is always there. It may be worth it in some instances - which is why I'm not a libertarian. But it is simply true that every dollar taken by the government is one dollar less for you and me to spend on what we decide is best; every freedom removed or infringed by the government is one less for you and me to enjoy. You can defend the trade-off, and should at times, but please don't pretend it isn't there.

I'm a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom. I think universal healthcare insurance is an infringement of liberty, but since we have committed to providing emergency healthcare for all, it's a trade-off worth making for fiscal and moral reasons. Small government conservatives don't want to abandon government. We want it small - but strong and focused on what government really ought to do. And we have learned from experience that the bigger government is, the less effective it often is; and the more confusing and massive it is, the less accountable it is.

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes to make us all feel more secure in amorphous ways? The lesson of our time is the utter incompetence and dysfunction of government at all levels. The solution to this is not to enlarge government, but to remove from it what it shouldn't be doing, and focus like a laser beam on getting it to work right on the essential tasks no private entity can do.

But today, many of those old problems have receded or been addressed. Today the big threats to people's future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation.

And more government is the answer to all this? "Complex, decentralized phenomena" require clumsy, bureaucratic big government to solve them? When did David Brooks become a closet liberal? (Answer: in the 1990s.) What we desperately need is smaller, better government: a more effective use of military and intelligence to contain and deter Islamist terror, freer trade, effective education (which is best innovated at a local not federal level), a simple, serious carbon tax to foment private sector innovation in new energy technology, and shrewder diplomacy. This isn't big government. A Reaganite government could do all these things, after tackling the middle class welfare state that is slowly strangling the capacity of government to operate solvently at all.

Normal, nonideological people ...

Please. This is a straw man. Everyone who differs from David is ideological and abnormal?

... are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The 'liberty vs. power' paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a 'security leads to freedom' paradigm. People with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world.

I'm sorry, but the security-before-freedom is and has always been central to small government conservatism, not the Christianist-dominated welfare state Bush has created and Brooks helped defend. None of us who believe in maximal freedom and minimum government believe the government should not be dedicated to security. In fact, it's the over-extension of government that has helped take its focus off security. I'd love to end farm subsidies, pork, the mortgage deduction, and to means-test social security - and spend the money saved on securing our ports and borders, rebuilding hollowed out necessities like FEMA, increasing the size of the military, and providing universal health coverage through the private sector. And all of that is compatible with small government conservatism.

People with secure health care can switch jobs more easily. People who feel free from terror can live their lives more loosely. People who come from stable homes and pass through engaged schools are free to choose from a wider range of opportunities.

But government has no business and no competence in creating "stable homes". That's the role of families, churches, local leaders, relatives, synagogues, mosques and all the institutions of civil society that David seems to want to be replaced or guided by government. Brooks "national greatness" isn't conservatism; and it never was. It's statism, overlayed with religious sanctimony and imperial ambitions.

The 'security leads to freedom' paradigm is a fundamental principle of child psychology, but conservative think tankers and activists have been slow to recognize the change in their historical circumstance. All their intellectual training has been oriented by the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm. (Postwar planning in Iraq was so poor because many in the G.O.P. were not really alive to the truth that security is a precondition for freedom.)

Well yes on the latter. But providing basic law and order is not what we are discussing in America. I might add I find it amazing that in an era when habeas corpus has been suspended for many, when the government is wire-tapping phones without a warrant, when U.S. citizens are "disappeared" without charges for several years, and when torture has been introduced as a legal government tool, David is actually charging that the problem with the liberty vs power paradigm is that it is outdated?? It has never been more relevant. It is Brooks who is stuck in the past - some time in the late 1990s when the intellectual experiment that created the Bush administration was in its infancy. The authors of that experiment should, to my mind, be leery of venturing out in public, not defending "no U-turns" in Bush conservatism.

The general public, which is less invested in abstract principles, has been quicker to grope its way toward the new mental framework. As a Pew poll released last week indicated, the public has not lost its suspicion of big government. Most Americans believe government regulation does more harm than good. But they do think government should be more active in redressing segmentation and inequality. Almost all corporations, including Wal-Mart, have extraordinarily high approval ratings. But voters are clearly anxious about globalization.

The Republican Party, which still talks as if government were the biggest threat to choice, has lost touch with independent voters. Offered a choice between stale Democrats and stale Republicans, voters now choose Democrats, who at least talk about economic and domestic security.

Hmmm. I wonder why many Independents have become turned off by the GOP? Could it be that David's project of bringing in a cohort of religious zealots has tarred the GOP as a bunch of intolerant, bossy bigots? Could it be that the massive spending, debt and entitlement splurge has alienated fiscal conservatives in the Perot mode? Nah. It's the libertarians fault, isn't it? In my view, the obvious reason voters now pick Democrats is the astonishingly awful legacy - foreign and domestic - of Republican power under the aegis of Brooks's philosophy. If you have to choose between two big government parties, dedicated to taking care of everyone, why not pick the brand that knows how to do it and actually believes in it? And the one that isn't patently mean-spirited toward gays, immigrants, and non-evangelicals?

The Bush Republicans, following David's advice, have exploded spending, loaded massive debt onto the next generation, taken pork to record levels, and passed a biggest new entitlement since the Great Society. They've increased spending faster than anyone since FDR. Meanwhile their actual effective governance has been a shambles. Of course voters prefer Democrats when they have to pick between fundamentalist, insolvent, incompetent big government and secular, solvent big government. I sure would.

The Democrats have a 15 point advantage in voter identification. Voters prefer Democratic economic policies by 14 points, Democratic tax policies by 15 points, Democratic health care policies by 24 points and Democratic energy policies by 20 points. If this is a country that wants to return to Barry Goldwater, it is showing it by supporting the policies of Dick Durbin.

No, they're simply registering that the Brooks experiment in turning the GOP into a religious, statist party for cronies and incompetents has been a disaster for Republicanism and a catastrophe for conservatism. Given no true conservative alternative, voters have gone back to the Dems. Brooks was an intellectual architect of both visions - massive intervention abroad, and warmed-over socialism at home. No wonder the conservative coalition has fallen apart, and people are now backing Democrats.

The sad thing is that President Bush sensed this shift in public consciousness back in 1999. Compassionate conservatism was an attempt to move beyond the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm. But because it was never fleshed out and because the Congressional G.O.P. rejected the implant, a new Republican governing philosophy did not emerge.

The classic dodge: national greatness conservatism - big spending at home, big wars abroad - wasn't tried and therefore didn't fail. Please. It was tried, David, with bells on, and it has failed so spectacularly you need glasses with neocon thickness not to see it. In fact, its manifest failure may consign conservatism to the political wilderness for a generation - and has deeply increased the security dangers America now faces.

The party is going to have to make another run at it. As it does, it will have to shift mentalities. The 'security leads to freedom' paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).

Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future.

And Bush and Cheney are? I know who I'd pick. Until the GOP thoroughly purges itself of the impulses of the Bush era - impulses enabled and supported by Brooks - they're finished. And they deserve to be.

---------------------------
Andrew, you can be one of my 300 Spartans anyday, you've definately got the warrior spirit and a distain for partisanship. A well done frisking of a well deserving piece. I share your view of Conservatism and mourn for the direction that my party has taken since the days of Goldwater and Reagan.

Should Churches Be Taxed?

While looking into this issue a bit I can across an interesting idea at Blogcritics Magazine on the subject from back in 2004:

Excerpt:

I believe that the tax-exempt status of a religious institution should be proportional to its nondenominational charitable activities.

For example, a church that spends money on fancy cars for its preacher should be taxed on those expenses. A church that runs a soup kitchen but requires its beneficiaries to pray for their supper should have to pay tax on the portion of its income used to run that soup kitchen. A church that owns its building and uses the facility for both worship services and charitable deeds should be taxed according to a formula, the same way a person can deduct home office expenses from his income taxes. Better financial minds than mine could come up with the formula.

I like this idea as it does not punish purely non-profit activities, but requires that the profitable ones take up their fair share of the tax burden that the rest of us share. Like the writer I don't profess to be a great financial mind, but I don't think I'd be taxing any soup kitichens just because they charged money. After all they could charge money in these cases and still not be making any profits, and in many cases actually losing money. I would have no problem, however, in taxing them on profits made on such activities after a certain profit margin was reached.

The New International Face Of America

Michael Young at Reason Magazine profiles of next United Nations Ambassador.

Excerpt:

Describing Khalilzad as a "neoconservative" may be simplistic. In an interview published on Monday to mark Khalilzad's departure from Iraq, the New York Times used the term unhesitatingly. But then one remembers what Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, had to say about the man with whom he worked closely in supporting the Afghan mujahideen between 1979 and 1980: "He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an insightful strategist."

Personally I think he will do a good job. He has a demonstrated record of accomplishment in Afganistan and Iraq under the toughest of conditions. I'm no fan of Neoconservatism, and I don't think Khalilzad really fits into the mold as precisely as some would like to suggest, since he seemed to put reality above idealology in his middle east assignments. Perhaps he is a Neocon mugged by reality. His quiet backroom arm-twisting is what as needed rather than Bolton's abbrassive in your face style. We definately need a bit more arm twisting in that organization given recent developements

The Greatest Show On Earth? No, But I'll Take It.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Dahlia Lithwick of Slate magazine have upgraded the chances of Attorney general Alberto Gonzales losing his job.

You can read about it here:

Gonzo-MeterAlberto Gonzales, like cheese, stands alone.

Excerpt:

So, it looks like Bob Novak was right when he said that Gonzales stands alone. Oh wait, maybe Bush is still standing behind him—but that doesn't help him all that much, because it seems the president stands alone, too. So there you have it. Two lonely guys and a flushing sound.

You know its bad when the National Review Online tells a Republican appointee that it is Time To Go
Excerpt:

What little credibility Gonzales had is gone. All that now keeps him in office, save the friendship of the president, is the conviction of many Republicans that removing him would embolden the Democrats. It is an overblown fear. The Democrats will pursue scandals, real or invented, whether or not Gonzales stays. But they have an especially inviting target in Gonzales. He cannot defend the administration and its policies even when they deserve defense. Alberto Gonzales should resign. The Justice Department needs a fresh start.

It will be interesting to see what course this scandal runs, and there seems to be question about if it will run or not. Partick Leahy pretty much assured us of that with his announcement yesterday.

"In case anybody's thinking of shortchanging it that way, I have a message for them: We'll finish this investigation before we'll have any confirmation hearings for a new attorney general,"

With the FBI scandal, the GSA slideshow affair, and this scandal going, looks like Congress is running a three ring circus, We will just have to wait and see how talented the animal trainers are, and how many end up getting out of the clown car. I'd really enjoy seeing the administration have to jump through some oversite hoops for a change. Personally I think we may be in for a good performance.

When the Circus comes to town usually there is an elephant walk to start off and draw more viewers, this time is not an exception. I've got my Craker Jack ready and am ready to applaud.