Alabama Crops Rot: Why?

Via Doug Mataconis:

A sponsor of Alabama’s tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won’t change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms.

Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time.

“The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do,” said Chad Smith, who farms tomatoes with his uncle, father and brother.

“My position is to stay with the law as it is,” Beason told the farmers.

Beason helped write and sponsor a law the Legislature enacted in June to crack down on illegal immigration. It copied portions of laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia and other states, including allowing police to detain people indefinitely if they don’t have legal status. Beason and other proponents said the law would help free up jobs for Alabamians in a state suffering through 9.9 percent unemployment.

The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.

“This law will be in effect this entire growing season,” Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.

“There won’t be no next growing season,” farmer Wayne Smith said.

“Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They’ll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double,” he said.

So, let me get this right: crops rotting. Hard working American farmers at risk of losing everything they own. No one coming to work the fields.

It can't be about jobs, as this is threatening to put more people out of work. But if the anti-immigrant folks are to be believed, it's NOT about racism either.

Kick out all the brown people, make a lot of people lose their farms and homes--in many cases, old farms that have been owned by the same family for generations--make food more expensive for the average citizen who is struggling to get by, and generally inflict more damage on an already depressed economy. Historically speaking, racist otherism is about the only thing that makes Americans dumb enough to continue with such programs in the face of all available evidence.

If you don't want to call it racism, fine: call it criminally ignorant economic insanity. But the Alabama electorate should decide whether it will continue to support the politicians that did this to them, and if they do, I'd like to know why.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Turley on Obama and Civil Liberties

In today's LA Times, GW law prof Jon Turley says what everyone who follows civil liberties already knows: President Obama has been dreadful on civil liberties:

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

What I find compelling about the op-ed, however, is something most of the establishment Left can't bring themselves to say publicly:

It's almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama's position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse. However, realism alone cannot explain the utter absence of a push for an alternative Democratic candidate or organized opposition to Obama's policies on civil liberties in Congress during his term. It looks more like a cult of personality. Obama's policies have become secondary to his persona.

This paragraph explains perfectly why Obama should face a primary challenge--and why the Democrats would never allow one.

No one wants to recognize that their guy/party is a sham. Political people are invested in the party system and while they are first to accuse their opponents of callow opportunism and careerism, when it happens within their own ranks, that behavior is met with the same "pragmatic" political argument and the silence is, and must be taken as, tacit consent.

This country needs a Democrat to stand on principle and challenge Obama on his civil liberties record. The professional Left, who so often pride themselves on their principles, should be leading the call for a primary challenger to keep Obama honest. Unfortunately, most of them are too busy worrying about Republican primary red meat to give a damn about what their man continues to do with the power they labored and lobbied to give him.

Quote of the Day

"They also noted that he has won awards for his police work and his effort to get guns off the street."

Attorneys discussing their client, Jerome Finnegan--the disgraced cop at center of robbery and kidnapping ring-- who was sentenced to 12 years for murder-for-hire plot to kill cop he thought was aiding the investigation into his aforementioned robbery and kidnapping ring.  Chicago Tribune 

Jeff Toobin's History: Scarcely Related to Reality

Jeffery Toobin’s new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni leaves one wanting. I was waiting for a “gotcha” moment or perhaps a revelation about the couple that I hadn’t previously known or, at least, anything of interest that would warrant a few thousand words in the New Yorker.

[sad trombone]

Instead, what I read was a bunch of intimation about the Thomases traveling in conservative social circles, the revelation that Justice Thomas is an originalist (!!!), and a smattering of information about his life on the High Court.

One could have gotten as much useful information off of the justice’s Wiki page.

But what got me about the article wasn’t its complete lack of substance—an appalling lack, though it was, given the outlet and the author’s credentials as an astute Court watcher—but its blatant whitewashing of 14^th Amendment history. Toobin writes:

In his jurisprudence, Thomas may be best known for his belief in a “color-blind Constitution”; that is, one that forbids any form of racial preference or affirmative action. But color blind, for Thomas, is not blind to race. Thomas finds a racial angle on a broad array of issues, including those which appear to be scarcely related to traditional civil rights, like campaign finance or gun control.* In Thomas’s view, the Constitution imposes an ideal of racial self-sufficiency, an extreme version of the philosophy associated with Booker T. Washington, whose portrait hangs in his chambers. (This personal gallery also includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.) *emphasis mine

I don't want to get into the campaign finance argument, but the gun rights comment was just too patently ignorant to let go.

Apparently looking to emulate his CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer and become the witless wonder of legal journalism, Toobin exhibits no respect for the substance of either the Heller or McDonald amicus briefs or decisions. Beyond that, Toobin should have a reasonable enough grasp of history—and by reasonable, I mean a basic, non-sanitized history understood by grown-ups—to be familiar with the stripping of blacks' legal protections that came in the post-Reconstruction era and continued up through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. When marauding bands of hooded murderers ride the nights on horseback, the ability to protect one's family from them is very much a civil right—and the systematic removal of those rights doesn't require a special “angle” of jurisprudence to understand. 

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler penned a piece for the September issue of the Atlantic called “The Secret History of Guns.” Professor Winkler spent nearly 2400 words (of roughly 4700) detailing the explicitly race-based nature of various gun control actions—from Andrew Johnson unsuccessfully vetoing the gun rights of Freedmen (the legislative precursors to the 14^th Amendment) to then-Governor Ronald Reagan capitalizing on the spectre of armed Black Panthers at the California capitol. A snippet:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

Fittingly, as DC readies itself to officially open the memorial to America's most beloved and famously peaceful civil rights leader, Winkler goes on to note that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for—and was denied—a concealed carry permit for a handgun after his home was bombed.

Apparently Dr. King also subscribed to this “extreme” and peculiar “angle” of civil rights.

It's not that I think Toobin wrote this as a hit piece. (It was, if anything, a miss piece.) But by writing this as he did, he mischaracterized an important and well-documented aspect of traditional civil rights in America that—at the very least—any responsible Court watcher would instantly recognize from recent cases, whether or not he agreed with the policy outcomes. Toobin goes further to imply Thomas relies on a revisionist history that is perceived through his putatively unorthodox originalism and colored by his race. That is simply bullshit. 

Gun rights and self-defense have gone hand-in-hand with civil rights for blacks since the very first Civil Rights Act in our nation's history. It seems Mr. Toobin is the one with a questionable understanding of traditional American civil rights. 

bellum medicamenti delenda est

On the London Riots

Just before this writing, the riots in London and other parts of Great Britain were well into their third night. And the video that is coming out of them is jarring, if not altogether shocking. Several outlets and writers are contributing their two cents. My former colleague Jesse Walker highlighted an editorial from UK's Guardian, which puts the current riots in context:

There is, though, an important difference between 1981 and 2011. Thirty years ago, Lord Scarman's landmark report concluded that the Brixton riots were "essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police". The evidence for that conclusion was overwhelming. Thirty years ago, London's police had provided repeated provocation for concern and anger. Much policing of that era was too aggressive, too high-handed, based on crude and often racist stereotypes, and lacked any convincing accountability, either strategically or for individual abuses.

It would be reckless to pretend that the latest riots owe nothing to bad policing as well as bad people. The circumstances of the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, the official response (or lack of it) to a protest against his killing, and the local backdrop to these events, must be fully examined before a final judgment is made. Moreover, police use of guns will always run the risk of lethal abuse. But it is also clear that there have been major changes, almost all of them for the better, in the policing of London and of black communities, in the years since Scarman. Police training, behaviour, leadership, methods and accountability have all been qualitatively improved. Tottenham is also an improved place in countless ways. (links in original, emphasis mine)

And my friend Ned Resnikoff highlighted this blog post by Penny Red, (which you should read in its entirety, btw):

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.  (Emphasis mine)

Now, the problem I have with both pieces -- again, which are both worth reading, especially the blog post -- is the wrongheaded, yet understandable desire to make sense of it all. That somehow, some way, we must be able to put blame on someone, something, some wrong deed that caused the catastrophe to happen; that there is something preventable that we can guard against in the future. Perhaps there is, but even if that were so, it doesn't really explain the violence.

There can be catalysts to violence, and maybe the beginning of the violence had been fueled by righteous rage. But reading anything but dumb, horrible, senseless angst and anger into that violence is fruitless.

I am old enough to remember the Rodney King verdict, and I remember the aftermath. I remember how angry I was--I even threw something across the room, breaking it and denting the entertainment center, and screaming at the television, "How COULD they?!?!?"

I understand violent anger, believe me.

But that doesn't mean that the kids who beat Reginald Denny within an inch of his life were anything but brute thugs when they did it. That doesn't mean that there was any sense to rioters burning the shops in their own neighborhood, owned by immigrants and their own black and brown neighbors. And it sure as hell doesn't mean that the powers that be understand a message being sent by looters, marauders, and 'those black bastards' that were destroying their own community and hauling TVs as booty from their pillaging.

It takes more than an outburst of raw emotion to sustain the devastation of days-long riots, and any political force that may have sparked them will have long-been subsumed into the incoherent havoc that is mob violence. Whatever real problems that exist in the affected communities don't explain the violence any more than the relative peace in the affected areas was indicative of a hunky-dory system til Friday.

In short, there is no more reason to a riot than there is to a lynching. There are causes, there is wanton violence, and there is no shortage of blame after-the-fact. There is a trigger that almost everyone can agree on, and then there is carnage. There really isn't much more to them than that.

Pace Ms. Red, violence is the epitome of mindlessness. Treating riots as anything else elevates them to a level of political significance that they do not deserve.



bellum medicamenti delenda est

Just for Fun Friday: The Stand-Up Economist

I feel bad about only posting stuff like this without real content, but it isn't that I haven't been writing. I just haven't been happy enough with the final product to post it comfortably.

Anyway, a video for your enjoyment:

Just for Fun Friday: When She Broke English

Yesterday, a wonderful and awful thing happened: this piece of overwrought high middle school scribbling was published over at Thought Catalog. It's not just that it's bad -- it's that it is so terrible that one has to wonder if it's actually satirical commentary on the state of American education. A sample:

When she closed her eyes sometimes she could smell him, his pungent body odor, the way she possessed it when their blushing bodies rubbed together in awkward embrace, her soft fleshy thigh against his, his flushed chest against her beating breast. She remembered most the heavy weight of his naked body when he shuddered against her, relaxed his muscles, and eased into her torso, those rare moments where the whole world fell away and they became nothing more than each other, an ugly fleshy mass of hair and limbs that was her primal perfection. Then they would sit for hours, nude, absorbed in nothingness, and those were the moments she loved best. She would feed him cheese on crackers and he would turn to her with an expression of complete surprise; it was in those moments that it seemed like he had only just laid his eyes on her for the first time, and while he was momentarily absorbed in a rapt wonderment she would gorge herself on his love.

The unintended consequences of abstinence only sex ed: torso sex. With cheese and crackers.

I could go on for hours, but you really should just read it in its entirety. Additionally, I highly recommend the dramatic reading of this literary monstrosity, as performed by Ms. Emily Crockett:



Remember kids: don't play Mad Libs with a thesaurus. It's not a toy.

Have a good weekend!

bellum medicamenti delenda est