Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The Past Has a Presence Here
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: June 15, 2012
 
 
 
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Adam Wiseman for The New York Times
Organ pipe cactuses at the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca.
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Adam Wiseman for The New York Times
Spiced grasshoppers at a market.
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Adam Wiseman for The New York Times
The archaeological site Monte Albán, about seven miles outside of Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico. Evidence points to the area as home to perhaps the earliest state in the Americas.
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Adam Wiseman for The New York Times
Textiles dyed by using the cochineal, in Oaxaca.
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Adam Wiseman for The New York Times
Cochineals on a nopal cactus. These insects are crushed to make the prized red pigment.
 
 
 
OAXACA, Mexico — The past casts a sharp shadow here, wherever you look. You see it on mountaintop plateaus, where the ruins of ancient pyramidal staircases and capital-I-shaped ball fields hint at mysterious rituals that disappeared over a millennium ago.
 
You see it during market days in nearby towns, whose traditions may be even older than those Zapotec ruins. Stalls with cheap contemporary kitsch — SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirts and bootleg Snow White baskets — are juxtaposed with culinary offerings from other centuries: crunchy grasshoppers laced with chili peppers, and mounds of black mole paste used for making spiced sauces.
You see it too in this town’s astonishing botanical garden of native plants, whose exotic cactuses and succulents are bounded by the walls of a 1500s Dominican monastery, the Spanish colonial structure shaping plangent counterpoint with indigenous flora.
For a visitor from the United States used to different kinds of exhibitions, it is startling how different the effect of the displays is here, how crisp certain contrasts seem and how brightly illuminated some familiar controversies become. It has something to do with the indigenous past, which has a different weight here, a different character.
In Oaxaca, which lies on the southern end of the Mexican landmass as it curves eastward to the isthmus, the first impression may be that of a quaint Spanish colonial town set in a protected valley. There are more museums here than can readily be explained: museums devoted to stamps, to pre-Columbian statuary, to the region’s cultural histories, to contemporary artists, to archaeological sites.
But for all that immersion in heritage (Oaxaca has even received the Unesco seal of approval as a World Heritage Site), there seems to be no temptation to glaze over the past’s harshness and imagine a pastoral harmony disrupted by colonization and only now struggling back. Leave that well-worn narrative for back home, where it has, unfortunately, become one of the embarrassments of the museum world.
In the United States, in institutions ranging from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington to regional natural history museums, the real arbiters of indigenous history these days are representatives of contemporary tribes. They oversee the display of a museum’s tribal artifacts and reshape accounts of the past, in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions. And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.
But here, something else happens. When you stand on a flattened hilltop above the village of Atzompa, some seven miles outside of Oaxaca, and look over at a nearby peak, you can glimpse the immense ruins of Monte Albán, a pre-Columbian plaza of breathtaking expanse used for ceremonies and games. Below those ruins, where perhaps 25,000 people lived in the early part of the first millennium, you can make out faint remnants of terraced farming on the hillside. The past is visible in the landscape.
On Atzompa’s adjacent plateau, similar ruins have been discovered. An impoverished village once reliant on its lead-based glazed pottery (now shunned), Atzompa will soon reap the benefits of recent discoveries when the government opens this site during the next year, showing off these fields and structures to visiting tourists.
We are not dealing here with imagined reconstructions, but with the past’s palpable presence. And most of these ancient cities and monuments were abandoned some six centuries before the Spaniards plundered the region. After 80 years of archaeological research, their meanings are still unclear, though much has been written about Zapotec social hierarchies, gladiatorial-style games and stone carvings.
What is more clear is that remnants of those worlds also exist in the valley, where the slow-changing cultures of this buffeted but protected region still reflect Zapotec and Mixtec heritages. So here everything is plentiful that in the United States is rare: indigenous ruins, ancient languages, signs of direct lineage. And there is an edge to it all. Centers like Monte Albán are monuments to power and accumulated material wealth; they are also clearly evidence of a large-scale political organization, relics of perhaps the earliest state in the Americas.
There have still been attempts to romanticize this past: Some of the carvings in the museum at Monte Albán were once thought to show dancers in acrobatic motion; now they are more convincingly interpreted as images of brutally castrated prisoners of war.
But how different all of this is from images of the indigenous past north of the border! There are few areas where evidence of ancient state-size power exists (mainly in the 2,000-year-old relics of societies that once thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers). There are few places where cultural continuity is even remotely clear, and where ancient languages are still widely spoken. Even before colonization, cultures disappeared, leaving behind neither oral traditions nor written records. And forced migrations and centuries of warfare so disrupted native traditions that the past now seems little more than an identity-affirming fantasy.
There are Oaxacan counterparts, but they have a different character. Nelly Robles García, the head of Mexico’s national archaeological administration, explained in her dissertation that it was not easy to balance the needs of archaeologists with a sensitivity toward the local community, which also has its set of demands. “An experienced archaeologist,” she writes, “on hearing ‘the community will decide,’ immediately abandons hope of success.”
But generally there seems to be so much less gauze layered over what is being seen, because there is so much left to be seen.
Much of this becomes evident at the remarkable Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca, in the former monastery of Santo Domingo. The anthropologist Alejandro de Ávila Blomberg selected the plants and gave the garden its conceptual structure. In a manuscript about the garden, he cites Pablo Neruda’s description of Mexico, “with its cactus and its serpent,” as being a land both “flower-bedecked and thorny, dry and hurricane-drenched, violent of sketch and color, violent of eruption and creation.” That is the mixture evoked in this ensemble of native plants.
This is not a garden in the European sense, presenting an idealized landscape. At first, it can even seem untamed. The Oaxaca region, Mr. de Ávila Blomberg explains as he guides visitors, has been home to more ethnic groups, more indigenous languages and more species of plants than any other region in Mexico, and indeed, more than most regions of the world.
While sections of the garden, with its five acres of planting, are organized by climatic zones, it is also organized to shape a kind of history, beginning with plants grown from “the oldest cultivated seeds known”: 10,000-year-old squash seeds found in a cave about 25 miles from the city.
Most dramatically, extending down the garden’s center are columns of organ pipe cactuses, planted as if to guard the prickly pear cactus gathered nearby. The prickly pear, or nopal, cactus turned out to form a crucial axis on which Spanish colonization turned. A white parasitic insect, the cochineal, can be seen on its broad leaves. Squeeze them, and a bright red stain is left behind, the source of a cherished crimson dye once coveted for oil paints and cardinal robes. The cochineal, Mr. de Ávila Blomberg explains, made “the splendor of Santo Domingo” possible. It is also used in the garden, he explains, to color the water that pours through a sculpture by the Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo, called “La Sangre de Mitla” — the blood of Mitla — invoking one of the great local Zapotec ruins.
There is a polemical point to this bloodletting, of course, because this is a nationalist garden. And only partly in jest, Mr. de Ávila Blomberg makes sure that visitors notice that the garden’s design places a cactus along the path leading to the monastery’s arched window, as if “giving the finger” to its alien colonists.
But such polemical displays do not undermine the garden’s ultimate embrace of even that past as one more strand in a complex cultural fabric. And such tensions, along with so many others here, make the American identity museum, with its romantic imaginings, seem like bland fare in comparison.

Doug:

I like your strategy of using it as a counterpunch.  I like even better the idea of not letting BO getting away with blaming the housing bubble and the ensuing vicious feedback loops on Bush starting right now.


Obj:  

IMHO Morris is completely correct.  I would add that Romney has been weak and off-balance here in just the kind of way that most have us have feared from the beginning he would be as a candidate.

================

"Obama's depiction of the Bush years is wrong in just about every possible way. First, Bush was hardly a deregulator. In fact, the nation's regulatory budget nearly doubled in his eight years, and regulatory staffing climbed 42%, according to an annual report on the federal regulatory state by George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Nor did Bush's tax cuts devastate the budget. In fact, revenues as a share of gross domestic product hit 18.5% in 2007, which is above the post-World War II average. And deficits fell three years in a row to a low of $160 billion. Unemployment, meanwhile, dropped to 4.4% just before the recession hit. And as we've pointed out on countless occasions, the financial crisis that caused the recession was not the result of too little government, but of far too much government intervention in the banking industry. Then again, Obama can't even keep his own complaints straight. Moments after lambasting Bush's tax-cutting, deregulating ways, he was bragging about how he's imposed fewer regulations than Bush, cut taxes more than a dozen times and how he's not a big spender. (None of that is true.) The real question before voters isn't whether they want to return to some dark, mythical past of Obama's imagination, but whether they want four more years of a dismal present characterized by stagnant growth, chronic unemployment, massive deficits and a president who is utterly clueless about how to fix any of it." --Investor's Business Daily

By JONATHAN MARTIN
The shorthand to describe Marco Rubio since his arrival two years ago on the national political scene is usually "tea-party senator" or "tea-party favorite" or some variation on those phrases.
The implication that he is a political outsider has puzzled many Floridians, who have known the freshman Republican senator as a member in good standing of the state's GOP establishment since the mid-1990s, when he was a young campaign operative and lawyer in Miami's Cuban-American community.

Now, thanks to two new books, the wider political community will see why such labels are so ill-suited for the Florida phenom.

One of the volumes is the senator's own memoir, "An American Son," the other a biography, "The Rise of Marco Rubio," by Manuel Roig-Franzia, a writer for the Washington Post's Style section. The books chronicle Mr. Rubio's rise within the political system, from serving as a congressional intern and local director of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign to becoming, at age 36 in 2007, Florida's first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House. By the time Mr. Rubio turned 40, he was a U.S. senator.

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Marco Rubio, running for the Senate in 2010.
.An American Son
By Marco Rubio

Sentinel, 307 pages, $26.95
.Mr. Rubio's own account and especially Mr. Roig-Franzia's effort show us an ambitious young man with an LBJ-like appreciation for the importance of cultivating political patrons. The pattern was on display when Mr. Rubio took his first law job working at the firm of a Miami-area Republican politico who would go on to become state GOP chairman (Al Cardenas); when Mr. Rubio ran for and won a seat on the West Miami city commission, thanks to the support of the popular mayor (Rebeca Sosa), who dubbed him "Marcito"; and when he got to Tallahassee as a state representative and ingratiated himself with two of the state capital's most powerful Republicans (House Speaker Johnnie Byrd and Gov. Jeb Bush).

"His rise has actually been as conventional as they come," writes Mr. Roig-Franzia. "He'd climbed the staircase methodically, touching each step along the way rather than leaping from the landing to the top floor."

If the two books offer an important corrective to the perception of Rubio-as-political-outsider, what they don't do is drop any political bombshells or even offer much in the way of news about a man regularly included on lists of Mitt Romney's potential running mates.

The preferred euphemism among GOP insiders when it comes to Mr. Rubio's vice-presidential prospects is that his stock lately has been diminished by unspecified "baggage." But neither volume reveals any such freight.

Part of the challenge for Mr. Rubio and his image-obsessed cadre of advisers as they attempt to frame his story—and for an author writing about him—is that he is an object of such fascination that any new material is unlikely to hold until a book comes out.
So much information in these two accounts that might raise eyebrows has already been aired.

For instance, each book addresses allegations that Mr. Rubio improperly used a state party-issued credit card during his two-year tenure as Florida House speaker—a topic that Florida newspaper investigations combed through at great length during the 2010 campaign.

The Rise of Marco Rubio
By Manuel Roig-Franzia

Simon & Schuster, 291 pages, $25
.Would-be newsworthy items about Mr. Rubio's personal biography have been reported more recently. In the past, Mr. Rubio has misstated when his parents emigrated from Cuba—he had portrayed them as fleeing Fidel Castro rather than leaving the island, as they did, for economic reasons before the revolution. The confirmed and practicing Catholic was a Mormon for a time during his youth. Last year, Univision, the Spanish-language television network, aired a story on the drug-trafficking conviction of the senator's brother-in-law in the 1980s (when Mr. Rubio was a teenager). A twist to the story was that, according to Mr. Rubio's advisers, Univision dangled an offer to soften the report in exchange for an appearance by Mr. Rubio on the network's Sunday-morning political talk show. But reports about his parents' immigration history and the Univision spat have been plentiful, with various players fully airing their sides of the story.

The books are themselves testimony to how fierce the competition is in the Rubio marketplace. The two authors raced one another to get into print, with their publishers changing schedules to be first out of the box. Their arrival in a virtual dead heat is a boon for the political junkie, because the books make valuable companions. Mr. Roig-Franzia lays out, in the detached-if-skeptical manner of a journalist, the questions surrounding Mr. Rubio's past (see above) and Mr. Rubio offers his version of events. But beyond the material's lack of freshness, each book is hampered by another challenge: There is only so much to say about the life so far of a 41-year-old.

"An American Son" is of a piece with other quickie books written by still-climbing politicians: cautious, on-message and heavily tilted toward the most recent big campaign. But the book is more valuable than many other such insta-memoirs, partly for the same reason that the senator is a more compelling figure than many of his contemporaries: His story as the son of poor Cuban immigrants makes for good copy. Assisted by the talented former John McCain co-author Mark Salter, who is credited in the acknowledgments for helping to "organize and revise the manuscript," Mr. Rubio is at his best when he depicts his forebears' struggles in pre-Castro Cuba and his close relationship with his father and maternal grandfather, who lived with the Rubios when the senator was a boy.

A chapter on the death of his father, Mario, in 2010 is the book's most affecting section. Mr. Rubio describes in detail his father's last moments, with three generations of family gathered in a hospital room, as lung cancer and mphysema claim him. "At one point, my mother sat next to his bed and stroked his hand and cried. She kept asking him to wake up. They had been married for sixty-one years. It was more than her heart could bear."

Mr. Rubio confesses to doubts familiar to many who have cared for an ailing parent. He made "the terrible mistake," he says, of urging his father to undergo chemotherapy even though the treatment had no effect other than adding to the misery of the man's final months.

It would be unthinkable for a family-values politician writing a book not to honor those who molded him and still shape him, but one can't read the Rubio book without being struck by how consumed he is by the urge to do right by his family. Whenever he has moments of self-pity, he dons the hair shirt of his parents' sacrifices and his politics-averse wife's willingness to be in public life.

But if Mr. Rubio is open about how much he is driven by his family's example, he is less so when it comes to stickier topics. For instance, in recounting how his parents, in search of better jobs, moved the family to Las Vegas for almost six years (beginning in 1979, when he was 8 years old), Mr. Rubio describes a strike by workers at a hotel where his father was a bartender. Marco, then 12 years old, joined his father on the picket line. "I became a union activist," he writes, calling the labor movement his youthful "new obsession." But then he drops the subject, never explaining how his political views were informed—or not—by the experience.

The senator is somewhat more forthcoming about his Mormon boyhood—he had been baptized Catholic, but his mother, impressed by the wholesome influence of Mormons in the Rubios' Las Vegas neighborhood, steered the family to Mormonism. Mr. Rubio, however, handles the matter with the delicacy of one hoping to avoid offending any constituency. He doesn't really explain why, just shy of his 12th birthday, it was he who urged the family to return to its Catholic roots. He simply became curious about his former faith, he says, and began researching it in the World Book encyclopedias that his parents had given him the previous Christmas.

Instead of treating such topics at some length, Mr. Rubio pads his life story with a glut of information about his adolescence and young-adult years. What is an editor for if not to strike discussions like the one about how much football playing time he got as a high-school junior?

A little over the third of "An American Son" is devoted to Mr. Rubio's 2010 Senate campaign. The most dedicated students of politics will appreciate the details of how close he came to dropping out of the Republican primary in the face of an initially tough challenge, but here again there is room for an editor: The references to polls, quarterly fundraising reports and debates begin to blur.

If "An American Son" overfloweth with insidery details, however carefully selected, Mr. Roig-Franzia's "The Rise of Marco Rubio" suffers from the author's lack of access to his subject and those close to the man in question.

The Rubio operation wanted the senator's book to speak for him, and his advisers plainly declined to provide Mr. Roig-Franzia with the cooperation he needed to paint an intimate picture. "The Rise of Marco Rubio" instead relies heavily on press accounts and whatever the author could glean from seeing Mr. Rubio at his public appearances.

During the 2011 mini-controversy over the immigrant story of Mr. Rubio's parents, Mr. Roig-Franzia uncovered fresh information (as did the Tampa Bay Times) and published it in the Washington Post. His book fleshes out that reporting with new material. For instance, he has unearthed a 1962 Edison Voicewriter audio recording of a hearing regarding Mr. Rubio's maternal grandfather. Pedro Víctor García wanted to stay in the U.S. but amid the country's deteriorating relations with Cuba was "caught in an immigration no-man's land," as the author puts it. Yet the discovery of the recording, though interesting, doesn't change the story—eventually the application was approved.

Mr. Roig-Franiza, a former Miami- and Latin America-based correspondent, is most engaging when evoking the Cuba of Mr. Rubio's forebears and the South Florida of his youth and early career. The author notes, for instance, that when Mr. Rubio's parents lived in Havana, their apartment (No. C9) was "on a street called Maloja. A short walk away, through a quilt of angled streets, is one of Havana's most curious sights"—a neoclassical structure called El Capitolio that was the home of the Cuban legislature in the 1950s and today is a museum. "It bears a double-take-inducing resemblance to the U.S. Capitol in Washington," Mr. Roig-Franiza writes, "the unlikely future destination of the Rubios' son Marco."

If Mr. Roig-Franzia deploys shoe leather tracking Mr. Rubio's beginnings, the biographer doesn't answer questions about the politician's public record and finances beyond what has been previously reported. What exactly did Mr. Rubio do for the $300,000 he was paid by the law firm that employed him during his speakership? Mr. Roig-Franzia makes a pregnant reference to a Florida newspaper's analysis that the firm did $4.5 million of work for the state in the three years before Mr. Rubio ran the Florida House but goes no further.

Constrained by lack of access to sources and perhaps by deadline pressure, "The Rise of Marco Rubio" loses steam as it moves from Cuba and Miami to the campaign trail and Washington. The author resorts to quoting his subject's Twitter feed ("There is great wisdom in resting on the Sabbath") and citing cable-news analyses of the politician.

One sympathizes with Mr. Roig-Franzia. It's tough to get an entire book out of a senator entering his second year in Washington, especially one who freezes you out. But that's the peril of writing about an image-conscious and thoroughly establishment-oriented politician.

—Mr. Martin is a senior political reporter at Politico.

C'mon JDN, as already noted in this thread Marco Rubio was at work on this with both sides of the aisle-- which is probably why Baraq decided to blow off his previous concerns that he was not allowed to do what has he done here-- blow off his responsibility to enforce our laws.  Apparently this seems to be of little interest to you.

By PAUL HANNON LONDON—The euro-zone's bailout funds are now insufficient to aid a large member of the currency area, the world's biggest private financial institutions said Sunday.

In its monthly report, the Institute of International Finance Inc. said that following the euro-zone's decision to provide Spain with up to €100 billion ($126.3 billion) with which to support its stricken banks, the currency area's bailout funds have resources of just €251 billion.

"This means that...the Eurogroup's rescue funds, as currently authorized and structured, will have sufficient funds to help a small economy like Cyprus, but hardly enough to deal with any large country," the IIF said.

The banking group said rescue funds will increase in November as euro-zone members make additional contributions to the European Stability Mechanism, the currency area's permanent bailout fund.

The IIF represents more than 450 of the world's largest private financial firms.

The banking group repeated its view that the euro zone needs to move towards a "banking union," or a shared way to support troubled banks.

It said the euro-zone's decision to direct the €100 billion earmarked for Spanish banks through the government rather than directly to the institutions in need "validates investor concern about the vicious linkage between weak sovereign and bank balance sheets."

 Mean Street host Francesco Guerrera calls on WSJ's Charles Forelle to discuss why the European crisis is so important to the U.S. economy.
.The IIF said that the amounts involved in the bailout should be "more than adequate" to recapitalize troubled Spanish banks and provide them with a "decent" buffer against future losses.

But it said the Spanish and euro-zone authorities had been partly responsible for the "lukewarm" response of investors to the bailout, which was agreed on June 9.

"Investors have been disheartened by inconsistent public statements from Spanish and European officials as to the nature and degree of conditionality and monitoring attached to the loan." the IIF said.

The banking group said investors were also worried by the possibility that existing and future bonds issued by the Spanish government would be "subordinated" to the ESM if it were to provide the bailout. That would mean that in the event Spain's government had problems paying its creditors, the ESM would be taken care of first, and bondholders would get what was left.

The IIF said the ESM's status as senior creditor could therefore push up already high borrowing costs for Spain and any other government that looked to it for help.

"The ESM...claim of seniority would increase the credit risk premium on outstanding and future sovereign debt of countries receiving...assistance," the banking group said. "The whole issue of credit seniority and subordination needs to he clarified quickly."

I gather however that the knowledge of a ready-to-use-right-now capability is a matter known beyond a reasonable doubt to all, though similar to Libyan weaponry in the final days of Kaddaffy most are avoiding talking about it-- though here the consequences are FAR more serious.  As bad as the manpads of Libya were-- and are!-- Islamofascists in Syria with chem bio on missiles and a hard on for Israel are true nightmare scenario material.

Doug:

Good find.

All:

Lets keep our eye open for more such.  This alliance could be a good thing for both I am thinking.

Now this is a rant!

Subject: The coming collapse of the Euro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez-88_hIrLY&feature=youtu.be

Contrary to his own previous statements on the subject, with his Executive Order BO today blew off his responsibilities under our Constitution to enforce the immigration laws.  One suspects Sen. Marco Rubio's growing bi-partisan chances of success with his variation of the Dream Act, thus removing the issue as of of advantage for BO with Latinos had more than a little to do with it.

MR's response?  Instead of making the points I just did, he said well he supported the concept, but that legislation would be more permanent than an Exec. Order.

Pathetic.

OBJ:

You're new here (and welcome aboard btw!) so I think if you go back you will see I grasp the point just fine.  

Right now I'm trying to move forward the Washington Patrician Milktoast Reps towards a winning mindset.  (We have a running riff around here about how many famous people must be reading this forum because we front run them on so many things-- I'm hoping this will happen again) as well as simultaneously express my frustration at just how much less Romney is than he can be.

Doug:

Good discussion. 

Question presented:  Can we focus attention on the housing bubble and its true causes or are we estopped from doing so by things in MR's record?

Idea:  I'm thinking that it might be effective to "abandon" the Bush rate cuts (which I am not persuaded were all that well desinged to begin with-- but at the moment I don't have the time to see what we have concerning them in the Tax thread) in the name of "lower rates, broader base with less loopholes"

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By WALTER R. BORNEMAN
Two hundred years ago, on June 17, 1812, after considerable debate and a close vote, the United States Congress made its first use of powers granted it by Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution and declared war on Great Britain. It would come to be called the War of 1812.

There was plenty of provocation: Locked in the Napoleonic Wars, both Britain and France routinely seized neutral American ships that dared to trade with either belligerent. Worse, the British navy made it a normal practice to stop American ships and comb stateside docks for able-bodied seamen to impress into His Majesty's service. And farther west, the British were stifling efforts at settlement beyond the Ohio River by encouraging a host of Native American nations to attack.

These provocations aside, the odds did not look good. Seven million Americans were scattered across 18 states. The population of the British Isles was almost double that. Britain's army was among the best trained and most disciplined in the world. In January 1812, the effective strength of the American regular army numbered 4,000 officers and men.

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James Madison as painted by Gilbert Stuart
.The American navy wasn't any better. The fleet consisted of five frigates, three sloops, seven brigs, and an assorted collection of 62 coastal gunboats. Britain floated some 175 capital, or heavy firepower, ships. Little wonder that upon hearing what Congress had done, President James Madison was said by Augustus John Foster, Britain's ambassador, to be "white as a sheet."

If remembered at all, the War of 1812 is often thought of as a sideshow of military ineptitude squeezed between the earlier glories of the American Revolution and the later traumas of the Civil War. But the war boasts what was by far the most contested declaration of war in U.S. history, and it recalls a time when the war power was firmly entrenched in the legislative branch of American government.

On June 1, 1812, Madison's war message was submitted to both houses of Congress. Given the custom of the day, it was read by clerks who droned on without inflection for about half an hour. In the House, many congressmen had recently returned from spring visits home, where they found no groundswell of support for war. After vigorous debate, the House passed the declaration of war on June 4 by a less-than-resounding vote of 79 to 49. "I think," bemoaned New Hampshire's Josiah Bartlett, "the business was too hasty."

Over in the Senate, things moved more slowly but also more contentiously. During the next two weeks, the Senate narrowly voted down a variety of amendments—one of which would have stopped short of full-scale war but authorized letters of marque and reprisal, which licensed private shipowners to take action against British shipping. Showing the young nation's audacity, another amendment would have issued such letters against both British and French ships.

Finally, on June 17, 1812, the Senate voted 19 to 13 for Madison's original declaration of war. Madison signed the declaration the following day. Two centuries later, this remains the closest war vote. Why since 1812 has Congress either overwhelmingly supported a president's request for a declaration of war or given him a bye when faced with his unilateral military action? The political fallout from the War of 1812 provides at least part of the answer.

While the war issue in 1812 was not rigidly defined along party lines, Federalists generally opposed the war while Jeffersonian Republicans (forerunners of Andrew Jackson's Democrats) favored it. Two years later, the most antiwar of the Federalists went so far as to convene at Hartford, Conn., and debate constitutional amendments designed to weaken the central government. Some insist that they debated outright secession.

As they debated, things looked pretty bleak for James Madison—his capital was in ruins, the British fleet had a stranglehold on American commerce, and a good third of the country was still ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to what they called Mr. Madison's War. Within a few months, however, Madison's peace commissioners had managed to win a draw at the negotiating table and, even more amazingly, Jackson had dealt British regulars a smashing defeat at New Orleans.

It hadn't been pretty, but the American union had survived. Madison donned the cloak of victor and two years later handpicked his successor, James Monroe. Those who had opposed the war, particularly the Federalists who had gathered in Hartford, were relegated to history's footnotes. In fact, the Federalist Party sputtered its last gasps and soon ceased to exist.

Militarily, the War of 1812 was filled with American defeats, but politically, it coalesced 18 loosely confederated states into a truly national union and marked the beginnings of a national psyche that would carry the country across the continent. The War of 1812 was also the apex of one of the most rudimentary of the constitutional checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches—the power to declare war. After the War of 1812, never again would Congress debate so vigorously and vote so narrowly to declare war. The political risks of doing so and ending up on the losing side had proven too high.

Mr. Borneman's books include "1812: The War That Forged a Nation" (HarperCollins, 2004) and "The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King," just published by Little, Brown.

http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/the_queens_english_no_more
 
The Queen’s English no more
Carolyn Moynihan | 15 June 2012




On the last day of June a sad event in the long and noble history of the English language is scheduled to take place: the Queen’s English Society will formally be wound up. Forty years of trying to raise the awareness of fellow Englishmen about the misuse of apostrophes and semicolons, the overuse of the exclamation mark and the insidious effect of American spell checks -- to say nothing of texting and twittering -- have seen the ranks of active supporters thin to vanishing point. Only 22 members came to the recent annual meeting, and ten of those were committee members.

As the society’s chairman, Rhea Williams, said in a not very elegant statement: “Things change, people change. People care about different things. If you look at lots of societies, lots of them are having problems… People don’t want to join societies like they used to.” (Shouldn’t that be “as they used to”?) And she is perfectly correct about that, although a few years spent plugged into the internet have taught me that there is a multitude of people who espouse the QES cause unofficially and like nothing better than to point out the spelling and grammatical errors in other people’s online comments -- and even, sad to say, journalists’ articles.

(In defence of the profession I must add that many of the mistakes one finds in the otherwise polished prose of a publication such as MercatorNet come from speed rather than ignorance; under pressure of time, proofreading becomes a luxury. Wasn’t The Guardian, a leading English newspaper, once fondly known as the “Garudian” because of all its typos? And do not forget, dear reader, that one person’s bad grammar is another’s stylistic innovation, designed to keep you awake.)

At the same time there are legions who will cry “Good job!” at the demise of the QES and scoff at the very idea of unchanging rules. A good number of the 335 comments on the Guardian’sreport about this event are evidently along those lines. Says one: Doing anything by the rules just isn't the done thing any longer. Anyway, who needs rules when they have predictive texting? Who even needs words, let alone sentences, when they have text-speak. Grammar? OMG! Punctuation? LOL! Spelling? UMBK!

(I know, the use of “they” in the above sentences is ungrammatical, but the alternative is horrible: an encounter with the gender police over the use of “he”, or “she”, with the prospect of being forced into that abominable compromise “he or she” or, even worse, “s/he”.)

But let me come to the point: in the absence of the QES are we to have a standard for written English, or not? Who will arbitrate between “different to” and “different from” (let us not even consider here the strange Americanism “different than”!) Who will point out the egregious error in the sentence, “Your wrong!”? Who will reprimand the profligate users of exclamation points? Are such delicate tasks to be left entirely to Microsoft? Or Apple? Or Samsung? Perish the thought!

And yet, and yet… the task of prescribing standards is a high calling and one that should not be undertaken lightly. Few of us could sustain the rigour required for modelling the English language in all its linguistic perfection, not to mention deep obscurity. Who would never use the preterite instead of the past perfect tense, or change case after the verb “to be”, or use “owing to” when “due to” is required?

The QES itself has been found sadly deficient in its self-appointed role. Provoked by a remark on the society’s website belittling his profession (“We believe that descriptive linguistics, which declares anything anybody said or wrote to be ‘correct’ caters to mass ignorance under the supposed aegis of democracy and political correctness.” - You can see why he was mad at them) descriptive linguistics scholar Geoffrey K Pullum turned a ruthless eye on the site’s content and came up with rich pickings.

A malformed use of “neither … nor”; passive constructions; punctuation errors; a missing co-ordinate; wordy officialese; use of “anyone” instead of “someone”; even, even, a split infinitive -- Pullum found them all in one short paragraph describing the society’s mission. The press release about the society’s winding up yielded another batch of purists’ no-no’s, including a missing verb, a sentence beginning with a conjunction, and a missing full stop. The last straw for Pullum, a British-American, was QES’ insistence that Britons should shun the word “sidewalk” and stick to “pavement”. “We’ll adopt such American nouns as we damn well please, OK?” he frothed.

Such are the passions that can still be aroused over English usage. And such are the perils of prescriptivism, even in the largely benign form advocated by the Queen’s English Society. But surely they are right in insisting that a line should be drawn, across which no-one should be allowed to step with impunity.

Models of enforcement are not lacking. On YouTube there’s Smosh grammar police (somewhat coarse and violent but they get the message across about “they’re” and “there”, and have been viewed more than 5.7 million times -- which tells you something). And the rather too realistic Grammar Nazis (over 4.8 million views) whose representative gives a lesson on the dangling participle that you will never forget. (Actually, I am informed that the latter is a parody of a scene in a movie called, ahem, Inglorious Basterds (sic)). If nothing else these videos may make grammar appealing to boys.

It only remains to decide where the line is to be drawn. Some candidates:

Ending a sentence with a preposition? Too bad; Winston Churchill, allegedly, put paid to that little hang-up umpteen years ago with the expostulation: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” Or something a bit stronger.

The split infinitive? Sorry, but that’s been a lost cause ever since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gave it a heroic gloss: "In those days men were real men, women were real women, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged."

Use of “it’s” instead of “its”, or vice versa? Well, good luck with that one -- its going take more than an army of grammar nazis to make a dent in the wall of ignorance about the apostrophe and it’s vital importance to civilisation as we know it.

Hmmm. It’s all looking a bit difficult. And, after all, it is meaning that counts -- the battle of ideas and not the clash of participles. That is what we stake our reputation on in this publication and, who knows, one day MercatorNet might be an oracle of grammar and style as well. We’re working on it.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

PS: There are some cunningly placed grammatical errors in this piece. A free copy of the QES Punctuation Guide for anyone who can correctly identify five.

 
 

http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/the_kids_are_all_right_think_again

The kids are all right”? Think again
Michael Cook | 15 June 2012




Kids thrive in families with same-sex parents. This is beyond serious debate. The science says so. Get over it.

Denying this self-evident truth has become tantamount to homophobia. In 2010 a Florida court, the Third District Court of Appeal, was certain enough to state complacently that: “based on the robust nature of the evidence available in the field, this Court is satisfied that the issue is so far beyond dispute that it would be irrational to hold otherwise”.

The Big Bertha of the artillery defending gay parenting is the 2005 official brief on same-sex parenting by the American Psychological Association (APA). It declares that “there is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation”. This is a bold claim. There is no more question about gay parenting, the APA implies, than there is about the earth revolving around the sun. Without a quaver of uncertainty it summarises its findings with pontifical aplomb:

“Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents. Indeed, the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children's psychosocial growth.”

In fact, a rigorous analysis of the evidence to date suggests nothing of the kind. The APA views on the beneficent effects of same-sex parenting are poorly researched, according to a blistering report released this week. Loren Marks, of Louisiana State University, finds that much of the science that forms the basis for the highly regarded report does not stand up to scrutiny.

"The jury is still out on whether being raised by same-sex parents disadvantages children," explains Marks. "However, the available data on which the APA draws its conclusions, derived primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalized claim either way."

In his study, published in a leading peer-reviewed journal, Social Science Research, he found numerous shortcoming in the 59 studies which the APA brief used as  the basis for its assertions.

What were these shortcomings? Marks writes in the detached, sober voice of an academic, but his analysis of a study which has been one of the main props of the “the kids are all right” argument is devastating.

Most of the studies looked at short-term outcomes. There have been numerous in-depth studies about cohabiting, divorced, step, and single-parent families. Researchers have looked at adult outcomes of childhood experiences in tens of thousands of families. They assessed these different family structures with respect to health, mortality, and suicide risks, drug and alcohol abuse, criminality and incarceration, intergenerational poverty, education and/or labor force contribution, early sexual activity and early childbearing, and divorce rates as adults.
Research on gay parenting is in a completely different class. None of the 59 studies in the APA report examined these outcomes – even though these are desperately important as background knowledge in a national policy debate.  Instead they looked at “gender-related outcomes” like sexual preference and gender identity.

Social science research into other kinds of family structures shows that the differences in outcomes for children increase with age. A major study published in 2001, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, by Judith Wallerstein, found that the impact upon children really kicked in when they became adults and tried to form their own families. But none of the 59 studies in the APA Brief tracked “societally significant long-term outcomes into adulthood”.

Most of the studies involved fewer than 100 participants and were biased toward well-educated white lesbians with high incomes. This is a problem that researchers have known for years. But, incredibly, the APA report insisted that its conclusions were “extraordinarily clear” despite the lack of diversity.

Furthermore, the 59 studies failed to examine parenting by male homosexuals. Of the 59, only 8 focused on male couples. Of these 8, only 4 had a heterosexual comparison group. Of these 4, only 1 (one) focused on outcomes for children. This is an example, says Marks, of “a recurring tendency in the same-sex parenting literature to focus on the parent rather than the child”.

Many of the studies compared homosexual couples with single mothers, not intact families. Instead of comparing gay and lesbian parents to marriage-based, intact families as heterosexual representatives, many of the researchers studied single mothers. This is called stacking the deck. Social science research shows that “children in single-parent families are more likely to have problems than are children who live in intact families headed by two biological parents”. It's entirely possible that two well-organised, well-heeled women in a leafy inner-city suburb will do a better job than a single mother in a housing commission flat. But that's not the question.

Of the 59 studies, only 33 involved comparisons with heterosexuals. Of these 33, 13 explicitly involved single mothers. Of the remaining 20, it was impossible to determine whether the “heterosexual parents” were single mothers, cohabiting mothers and couples, remarried mothers, or continuously married mothers and couples.

In the light of this, the APA’s pompous claim that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents” takes on a whole new meaning. What it really means is that “Not a single study has compared children of lesbian or gay parents to children of heterosexual parents”.

Not a single study? Not even one? There was one study -- and the APA trashed it. In 1996 an Australian researcher, Sotirios Sarantakos, did a comparative study of 58 children of heterosexual married parents, 58 children of heterosexual cohabiting couples, and 58 children living with homosexual couples. The combined sample size of 174, says Marks, made Sarantakos’s study the largest one to examine children’s developmental outcomes rather than adults’ feelings. In fact, it was probably the strongest of all the studies mentioned in the APA report. However, its finding undermined the tidy consensus. Sarantakos found that “children of married couples are more likely to do well at school in academic and social terms, than children of cohabiting and homosexual couples”.

So what did the APA do with this report? Nothing. In the annotated bibliography, its entry says “No abstract available”.

This single dissenting voice was relegated to the ignominy of a footnote: “Children Australia, the journal where the article was published, cannot be considered a source upon which one should rely for understanding the state of scientific knowledge in this field, particularly when the results contradict those that have been repeatedly replicated in studies published in better known scientific journals.” In other words, “your results undermine our consensus, you live in a grass hut, and none of Us thinks you fit in. Thanks for coming and next time use some deodorant”.

A consensus based upon poorly-designed studies which have been “repeatedly replicated” is probably not reliable. Replication is a pillar of scientific method. If a scientist’s findings cannot be replicated by colleagues, they are deemed suspect. But if a number of researchers use the same small sample sizes drawn from the same biased population samples, the same results are likely to emerge. This does “not seem to constitute valid scientific replication”, Marks observes drily.

Furthermore, most of the studies cited in the APA’s brief were very small, which, in combination with other statistical shortcomings, weakens their conclusions. As a kind of benchmark, Marks lists 15 large studies which contrast children’s outcomes in various kinds of heterosexual family formations. The average sample size in these studies is 9,911, while all 59 same-sex parenting studies combined only reached 7,800.

Asserting the emergence of a new kind of family which is every bit as good as the traditional one is a big claim. Proving it requires big data. But not one of the 59 studies referenced in the APA brief is based on a large survey.

From a social science point of view, Marks concludes, the jury is still out on gay parenting. There are simply no solid studies which prove or disprove whether gays and lesbians make good parents. Fans of the traditional family can rest easy: a stable family with a married mother and father is still the best place to raise kids.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

second post

Patriot Post

Around the Nation: Corporations Aren't Hoarding Cash After All

The Federal Reserve issued a report this week on the amount of cash held by U.S. corporations, and it amounts to about half a trillion dollars less then previously thought. Non-financial corporations still hold $1.74 trillion in liquid assets, an unprecedented amount. But as The Wall Street Journal's Ben Casselman writes, "Perhaps more significant than the number itself, however, is how the revision affects the trend. Before the revision, the Fed showed corporations continuing to accumulate cash, with liquid assets rising nearly every quarter since the recession ended and reaching a record $2.2 trillion at the end of last year. Now, however, it appears corporate cash piles grew rapidly through 2009, then leveled off. Companies aren't spending their cash, but they aren't holding more of it, either."
The Fed's finding puts a significant dent in Barack Obama's claim that corporations are just "sitting on the sidelines" and refusing to invest in the economy.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/06/08/7-reasons-why-the-right-should-not-seek-to-convert-the-left/?singlepage=true

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/14/holder-defends-foreigners-voting-in-florida-elections/

=======================

Patriot Post

Florida v DOJ Over Voter Purge
On Tuesday the state of Florida filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security in order to continue with Republican Gov. Rick Scott's plan to purge ineligible voters from the rolls. "I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters," said Scott. "We've been asking for the Department of Homeland Security's database, SAVE, for months, and they haven't given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of state of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state, and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information."
Almost immediately after the Florida suit was filed, the Justice Department filed their own suit against Florida, claiming that the Sunshine State is violating Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act. Notably, DOJ dropped its allegations that Florida is violating the Voting Rights Act. Scott claims that the state has identified 100 non-U.S. citizens who were registered to vote, 50 of whom already cast illegal ballots in Florida elections. Apparently, the DOJ thinks that's just fine. After all, Florida will once again be a crucial swing state in the upcoming presidential election, and Barack Obama will need every vote he can muster, illegal or otherwise.

Data Watch
________________________________________
Industrial production declined 0.1% in May To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Robert Stein, CFA - Senior Economist
Date: 6/15/2012
Industrial production declined 0.1% in May, coming in short of the consensus expected gain of 0.1%. Production is up 4.7% in the past year.
Manufacturing, which excludes mining/utilities, declined 0.4% in May but was down 0.2% including upward revisions to prior months. Auto production fell 1.4% in May while non-auto manufacturing fell 0.3%. Auto production is up 25.0% versus a year ago while non-auto manufacturing is up 3.8%.
 
The production of high-tech equipment rose 0.5% in May, and is up 0.8% versus a year ago.
 
Overall capacity utilization moved down to 79.0% in May from 79.2% in April. Manufacturing capacity use fell to 77.6% in May from 78.0% in April.
 
Implications:   Overall industrial production dipped 0.1% in May. Manufacturing, which excludes mining and utilities, fell 0.4 percent. Both figures came in slightly below consensus expectations. However, industrial production is still up 4.7% from a year ago, growing more than twice as fast as the overall economy. The data we watch most closely is manufacturing production ex-autos.  This figure fell 0.3% in May, but has risen in 9 of the last 11 months.  That’s a very good track record, given that manufacturing ex-autos usually falls three or four times a year even during normal economic expansions. In other words, it is much too early to read anything significant into the slippage in production in May. Given low inventories, particularly in the auto sector, we don't expect any persistent stagnation. Although capacity utilization declined in May, it is still up substantially from a year ago. As a result, companies have an increasing incentive to build out plant and equipment. Meanwhile, corporate profits and cash on the balance sheet show they have the ability to make these investments. In other news today, the Empire State index, a measure of manufacturing activity in New York, fell to +2.3 from +17.1 in May. This suggests growth continued in June, but at a slower pace than in May. However, these kinds of surveys are also influenced by corporate sentiment rather than actual activity, and, given news out of Europe, we would not be surprised if this were having a negative effect.

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/opinion/kristof-hugs-from-iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120614

http://pjmedia.com/blog/are-telecom-companies-helping-china-spy-on-america/

Apparently all three of them will be 1/2 block from my house tomorrow. Bill is giving a commencement speech at Redondo Union HS because his nephew (via his brother) is graduating.  Due to security issues, a substantial clusterfcuk is expected.

 

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/12/meet-the-radical-doj-lawyer-keeping-foreigners-on-florida-voter-rolls/

http://www.dickmorris.com/obamas-coming-taxes-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

The devil is going to be in the details.  This will be interesting.

Data Watch
________________________________________
The Producer Price Index (PPI) declined 1.0% in May To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Bob Stein, CFA - Senior Economist
Date: 6/13/2012
The Producer Price Index (PPI) declined 1.0% in May, coming in below the consensus expected drop of 0.6%. Producer prices are up 0.7% versus a year ago.
Energy prices fell 4.3% and food prices declined 0.6%. The “core” PPI, which excludes food and energy, increased 0.2%.
Consumer goods prices were down 1.5% in May, but are up 0.3% versus last year. Capital equipment prices rose 0.1% in May and are up 2.1% in the past year.
Core intermediate goods prices fell 0.2% in May but are up 0.5% versus a year ago. Core crude prices were down 1.3% in May, and are down 3.9% versus a year ago.
Implications: Energy prices plummeted in May, dropping by the most in any month in more than three years. Almost completely as a result of this drop, overall producer prices were down 1% in May, coming in below the consensus expected decline of 0.6%. That’s good news for companies making purchases, but no justification for another round of quantitative easing. “Core” prices, which exclude food and energy, and which the Federal Reserve claims are more important than the overall number, were up 0.2% again in May. Core prices are now up 2.7% from last year, which is much faster than the overall PPI. In the past three months, the core PPI is up at a 2.5% annual rate while overall prices are down at a 4.9% rate. In other recent inflation news, trade prices declined in May, with overall import prices down 1% and overall export prices down 0.4%. “Core” prices were also down in the trade sector in May, with imports ex-petroleum ticking down 0.1% and exports ex-agriculture declining 0.5%. Import prices are down 0.3% from a year ago, although up 0.3% excluding oil. Export prices are down 0.1% from a year ago, and up only 0.1% excluding agriculture. We do not expect the lull in inflation to last. With short-term rates being held near zero while nominal GDP is growing at about a 4% annual rate, monetary policy is loose. As a result, all these measures of inflation are very likely to move higher later this year. Be careful of all the stories you’ll read in the near future about how the Federal Reserve was right all along and that inflation is not a problem. By later this year, the conventional wisdom will realize this was temporary.