If the right of public employees to unionize is recognized as a human right, whatever is or is not in the constitution, then it cannot legitimately be one of the things Gov. Walker was elected to obliterate. Hence, to the extent he tries to do so, he will in fact be seen as illegitimate, no matter how legitimately elected. This is the point the Capitol Square crowds are trying to make with their quotation from the Middle East uprisings.
One has to ask what kind of country the Tea Partiers desire, though. Clearly it is a big step away from a commonwealth. In Tea Party Utopia, it seems, the Partiers would get maximize their personal wealth, at whatever cost to the well-being of their fellow-citizens, even, or perhaps especially the poorest. It’s a country where there would be no planning or direction of economic activity from Washington, apparently in the faith that an atomized economy could avoid obliteration by the better-organized economies of other nations. And a faith as well, in the teeth of historical evidence, that privately-funded economic forces undirected by government, would give us an adequate infrastructure. And in Tea Party Utopia, cultural elites would be denied the support and recognition that even the tiny sliver of the national budget dedicated to edifying them conveys.
To me, proof exists that the future can be different. The Emancipation Proclamation, Brown, the Civil Rights Acts, and the creation of a society that could elect a mixed-race president are not just American achievements; they are major human achievements. They themselves embody but also point further down the path we as a species are following: gradually reconfiguring our psyches to recognize but one race and one tribe: human.
It is easy to imagine now, if TSA had leveled with us about what it proposed to do, what members of the public would have said what they felt about government official using radiation to take revealing pictures of them, and, as an alternative, literally groping their “privates.” TSA would be expected to respond with arguments about the recent attempted “underwear bomber,” and how these searches would make us all safer. And then a policy calculation in which the public was involved and invested could have been made, by an agency better advised about how the public felt.
Political Correctness is an antibody that attaches itself to your diseased discourse and protects the American immune system.
The role of the leakers and the press and bloggers who disseminate what the leakers share is not institutionalized, and there is little or no quality control. But as a result of their actions, things that need to be made public, like torture and illegal wiretaps, often are publicized. The Leakocracy serves as a valuable if not vital safety valve in our society.
We should attend to what other countries do and think – just as they should be looking at us. Nobody’s too dumb to teach or too smart to learn, whatever Justices Thomas and Scalia may say. As antidotes to “exceptionalism,” consider the burqa — and consider Roman Polanski.
Cruising US-1 through the South (aka the Jefferson Davis Highway in places), way too much Confederate commemoration, way too fuzzy on actual history, and virtually no offsetting commemoration of slavery and its aftermath.
How is the Pope like a Peruvian steamship? The State Department stopped both of them from getting sued. You’re right; it’s not funny at all.
Government employees who make policy are expected to know this going in, whether it’s written down or not. They are accountable for their views, and the currency in which they render account may well be their careers.