Maybe you've heard about Lilly Ledbetter, as in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. You see, Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama. When she was hired her pay was in line with her male colleagues, but over the years the smaller raises that she ALWAYS received created a significant pay gap, and in case you're saying "so what?" pay gaps are illegal, not to mention sexist and immoral. After years of the discriminatory pay, Ms. Ledbetter discovered her employer's duplicitousness and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A jury sided with Ms. Ledbetter and found that Goodyear had violated her civil rights. This decision was upheld by the court of appeals and was recently decided upon by the Supreme Court you know the one, the gender and racially conscious body made up of 7 white men and one woman and one black guy (it's Clarence Thomas, so I'm not sure he even counts).
Goodyear and it's supporters in such justice-oriented organization as the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce believed that the complaint with the EEOC and the subsequent jury award had violated the statute of limitations since her last discriminatory raise was before the 180 day limit. In previous cases the EEOC, the Courts of Appeal, and the Supreme Court ruled that each pay check based on discrimination violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well, not any more, thanks to your favorite five male Justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts) a long standing precedent of civil rights law has been destroyed and an important protection for all of us has disappeared.
As the nation debated when life began, very few people actually saw that the Supreme Court rules on more than abortion cases (although they also upheld an amazingly offensive Partial-Birth Abortion Ban). Perhaps it's fitting that the last defender (ok, the last quasi-sometimes-defender) of our rights has been turned into a political arm of the ultra-conservative Republican Party. We are living in a time of unprecedented corporate power, a new Gilded Age, and now we have our Gilded Age Supreme Court.
However, the decision was 5-4, and that means there were 4 sane voices. These four voices were represented in the oral dissent of Justice Ginsburg, the court's only female. This was Justice Ginsburg's second oral dissent this year, which marks the first time in her career that she gave to oral dissents in one year. She is often regarded as a collegial member who is often focused more on etiquette and backroom chats than the spectacle of oral dissents (oral dissents are regarded as theatrical indulgences and are rarely used). Justice Ginsburg's new found boldness is profiled in the New York Times, Oral Dissents Give Ginsburg a New Voice on Court.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
Newt Gingrich Thinks He Can Be President
So, Newt Gingrich thinks he can be President. Newt Gingrich is out of his mind.
First, let's get one thing straight, 1994 was not a revolution. The midterm elections saw a paltry 38.8% nationwide turnout, and the Republicans only received 19% of the eligible vote. The number of Dems voting declined across much of the nation, while Republican turnout increased. The nation saw a 21% drop in the reported participation rates of those with incomes of $15,000 and lower, while there was a 33% increase in the share of the vote cast by those whose incomes were $50,000 and over. African Americans turnout saw a decline of 2 percentage points and turnout among young people declined to 14.5% of eligible voters. And men only slightly increased their share of the electorate (disproving the "angry white guy" myth). The 54 seat pickup for Republicans in the House and 8 seat pickup in the Senate has been seen as the culmination of a decades long realignment in the states of the old Confederacy. Even as Democrats had a significant registration advantage (37.8% to 22.4%) the region had been voting for Republican Presidential candidates since Nixon. This "realignment" has often been cast as a revolt at the base of the Democratic Party because of the "race issue," i.e. the Democratic support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act which essentially destroyed much of the legal infrastructure of Jim Crow. This "southern strategy" mythology has been widely discredited, in fact there was little or no significant shift at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder from support for the Dems to the GOP. Once again, the myth of the disaffected, poor, angry white man was true in anecdote only. The real "realignment" happened much further up the economic ladder. Which makes it not much of a realignment since Americans with upper incomes typically vote Republican. The depressed turnout among Democratic loyalists (the poor, the young, and black folks) accounts for the 1994 turnout. The questions that remain are: 1. What drove down Democratic turnout? 2. What drove up Republican voter turnout? and 3. How many registered Democrats voted for Republicans? Gingrich likes to sell his "revolution" narrative over the "realignment" narrative and the "turnout" narrative, because it portrays him as savior of the Republican Party. The fact that the Republican majority lasted from 1994 to 2006 has as much to do with the privileges of incumbency and gerrymandering as a lasting electoral realignment, let alone a revolution. The presidential and congressional elections of 1996 demonstrate that the post-World War II southern economic development revitalized a southern Republican party, but still didn't signal a "revolution" by any means. The Presidential vote in Kentucky, Virginia, and Georgia were all within 2 percentage points. The 1998 House elections saw a nation wide pick-up of 5 seats for the Democrats (reaction against the "overreaching" by Congressional Republicans during impeachment, likely because they began believing their own "revolution" mythology). The 1998 Senate remained unchanged, divided 55 to 45 in the hands of Republicans. The 2000 election once again saw a South that was closely divided, and in that way more similar to the nation as a whole than different. The South is not an ideologically distinct and homogeneous region, at least not any more.
If anything was revolutionary about 1994 it was the revolutionary nature of the new Congressional Republicans, especially the leadership. 1994 saw the elevation of Newt Gingrich to the Speaker's chair and Tom DeLay to Majority Whip. Under their leadership the power of committee/subcommittee chairs was dramatically weakened and centralized power under their leadership. A six-year chairmanship limit was imposed on the committees, and the 1970 "subcommittee bill of rights" was repealed. Gingrich also bypassed the system of seniority appointments to chairmanships by appointing Gingrich loyalists to chair the influential Appropriations, Judiciary, and Commerce Committees (Appropriations is all about money and Judiciary and Commerce are all about regulations, these are the money committees).
Gingrich likes to sell himself as a savior but is not a savior. He is a strange little man. He likes to write obnoxious historical "what-if" fiction. The whole genre is annoying speculations about different historical possibilities. For example, in his 1995 novel, 1945, Gingrich imagines that Hitler was in a plane crash and spent several months in a coma. So, he never attacked the US and is now set out to attack post-Churchill England and cripple the US by attacking Oak Ridge, the location of the development of the atomic bomb. More recently he wrote Gettysburg, which imagines a Civil War where the Confederacy wins the battle of Gettysburg, and strangely portrays the Confederacy as a group of disciplined citizen-soldiers led by wise and honorable gentlemen and the Union as a bunch of ruffians led by "hot-tempered and vindictive" leaders.
Perhaps his most bizarre public speech, his videotaped "Renewing American Civilization." Names the five pillars of American civilization as 1. The Historic Lessons of American Civilization, 2. Personal Strength, 3. Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise, 4. The Spirit of Invention and Discovery, and 5. Quality as Defined by Deming. How 1-4 are not lessons of American Civilization is beyond me, and how he came up with these 5 still baffles me. Gingrich likes enumerated lists, like when he lists the 5 reasons to study American history: 1. History is a Collective History, 2. American History is the History of our Civilization (REALLY???), 3. There is an American Exceptionalism that can be Best Understood Through History, 4. History is a Resource to be Learned from and Used, and 5. There are Techniques that can help you Learn Problem-Solving from Historical Experience. As Joan Didion states, "the attempt to track from one to five... leaves the tracker fretful, uneasy, uncertain just whose synapses are misfiring." Gingrich's writing abounds with enumerated lists, just as he did on a recent episode of Meet the Press where he enumerated the six (yes, only six) steps to save Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: But specifically, how would you win the war in Iraq militarily?
MR. GINGRICH: First of all, you, you would empower General Petraeus. You’d pass the supplemental immediately. You’d give him the money. Second, you would encourage the Iraqis to triple the size of their regular army. Third, you would, you would encourage the development of a, of a military tribunal system to lock people up the way Abraham Lincoln would’ve done it. Fourth, you would establish a nationwide ID card with biometrics so you can actually track everybody in the country. Fifth, you would make sure that the State Department actually staffed the embassy with people in favor of winning the war and you actually had your fully, fully equipped intelligence and economic development teams. Six, you would say to the Iranians, “If you don’t cut off everything you’re doing, we’ll begin to bring enormous pressure to bear with you,” if necessary, blockading the flow of gasoline into Iran, which has to import 40 percent of its gasoline because it only has one refinery in the entire country.
To describe Gingrich's thinking as schematic is an understatement as he declares there to be "Seven key aspects" and "nine vision-level principles" of his second pillar of American Civilization, "Personal Strength." There are also "five core principles" of "Quality as defined by Deming" (Pillar 5). There are "three big concepts" of Pillar Three (Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise) as well as "five enemies of entrepreneurial free enterprise." And finally, the "seven welfare state cripplers of progress" under Pillar Four (Spirit of Invention and Discovery), one of which is simply described as "Ignorance." Then in his Window of Opportunity, he gives us the truly astounding list of the "great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts." Only six, not seven, not five, six. When discussing health care he described the "eight areas of necessary change," on arms control, he gives us the "seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons." Then there are two initiatives, "three broad strategic options for the next generation," and finally, "six realistic goals which would increase our children's chances of living in a world without nuclear war." There is also Gingrich's most famous list, the Contract with America. On the first day of the session Gingrich promised to pass eight reforms and to in the following 100 days to bring another ten bills to a vote.
So what? I can hear you ask, he likes lists, who doesn't? It's an easy way to organize information and it shows that he is an action oriented person. This list-making reflects the memo-world of management with it's enumerated "action items" and other jargon-laden garbage. Not only does it show a lack of big-picture holistic thinking, they do nothing to advance discussions on the most important issues facing our nation and sometimes they slide into nonsense. For example, in To Renew America, he proposes several interesting questions like, "Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park?" Then he waxes poetic on the possibilities of space honeymoons, actually saying "imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attractions." What does that even mean? Earlier in Window of Opportunity, he writes, "one reason I am convinced space travel will be a growth industry is because I represent the Atlanta airport, which provides 35,000 aviation-related jobs in the Atlanta area."
His two early political screeds, Window of Opportunity and To Renew America are filled with these lackluster enumerated lists and flights of fantasy and seem to make sense when we consider that Mr. Gingrich manages his days by breaking them into 15 minute increments (I seriously wonder if Gingrich himself isn't some sort of Nick Hornby character, think "top fives" from High Fidelity and Will from About a Boy who states, "I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than thirty minutes. Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour.") The truth is Mr. Gingrich got the idea of 15-minute activity blocks from Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. His favorite thing to do in an activity block? Read biographies, the bottom rung of the history ladder, no wonder he imagines himself to be a savior and revolutionary, he still thinks history is made by "great men" who have biographies written about them which tend to ignore the social and economic forces that shape history.
Let's just get this straight, Newt Gingrich has lost his damn mind. According to Mr. Gingrich, Forrest Gump proved that "the counterculture destroys human beings and basic values." I always thought that it simply proved that life was a lot like a box of chocolates. Then last month in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women he argued that English should be the official language of the United States, beating out such aspirants as Esperanto and Tagalog. In this speech he called Spanish the "language of the ghetto." Then in his non-apology he blaimed his "word choice was poor" and that he had been taking Spanish classes for some time. The man is insane. At a recent event hosted by the Federalist Leadership Center and the Lincoln Club of Orange County Mr. Gingrich estimated that he had around 25 ideas a minute. A journalist covering the event for the Red County Magazine believed him and wrote an article calling him a one man think-tank. In the ensuing interview Newt once again turns to his favorite past-time, enumerated lists. Citing three lessons from history that are important for us all to think about; 1. Intelligence can fail, 2. You may not understand the culture of your opponent, and 3. Technology matters (for what isn't clear). Then he outlines his four critical components of healthcare reform, which he says should be visualized as a box with four quadrants (WTF?!). The first quadrant is financing. Another quadrant focuses on "the need for individual responsibility" (like for not getting sick? like not working in a coal mine?). The third quadrant addresses "issues related to society and culture" (I don't know what that means, oh wait, I bet he's talking about the sexual habits of non-whites, how silly of me). The fourth quadrant addresses "the healthcare system itself" (now my brain hurts). On immigration he suggests a two fold enumerated list (sorry, no awesome boxes with quadrants this time) that is comprised of the visionary suggestions: Control the Border and Enforce the Law. Holy shit, he's done it, he's solved the immigration "problem". From there he follows with an another list that includes among other things national id cards with biometrics that will be organized and managed by credit card companies. Up until now I kind of thought Mr. Gingrich was like that adorably idiotic uncle that everyone humors, but now I realize he's simply the stupidest man alive.
First, let's get one thing straight, 1994 was not a revolution. The midterm elections saw a paltry 38.8% nationwide turnout, and the Republicans only received 19% of the eligible vote. The number of Dems voting declined across much of the nation, while Republican turnout increased. The nation saw a 21% drop in the reported participation rates of those with incomes of $15,000 and lower, while there was a 33% increase in the share of the vote cast by those whose incomes were $50,000 and over. African Americans turnout saw a decline of 2 percentage points and turnout among young people declined to 14.5% of eligible voters. And men only slightly increased their share of the electorate (disproving the "angry white guy" myth). The 54 seat pickup for Republicans in the House and 8 seat pickup in the Senate has been seen as the culmination of a decades long realignment in the states of the old Confederacy. Even as Democrats had a significant registration advantage (37.8% to 22.4%) the region had been voting for Republican Presidential candidates since Nixon. This "realignment" has often been cast as a revolt at the base of the Democratic Party because of the "race issue," i.e. the Democratic support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act which essentially destroyed much of the legal infrastructure of Jim Crow. This "southern strategy" mythology has been widely discredited, in fact there was little or no significant shift at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder from support for the Dems to the GOP. Once again, the myth of the disaffected, poor, angry white man was true in anecdote only. The real "realignment" happened much further up the economic ladder. Which makes it not much of a realignment since Americans with upper incomes typically vote Republican. The depressed turnout among Democratic loyalists (the poor, the young, and black folks) accounts for the 1994 turnout. The questions that remain are: 1. What drove down Democratic turnout? 2. What drove up Republican voter turnout? and 3. How many registered Democrats voted for Republicans? Gingrich likes to sell his "revolution" narrative over the "realignment" narrative and the "turnout" narrative, because it portrays him as savior of the Republican Party. The fact that the Republican majority lasted from 1994 to 2006 has as much to do with the privileges of incumbency and gerrymandering as a lasting electoral realignment, let alone a revolution. The presidential and congressional elections of 1996 demonstrate that the post-World War II southern economic development revitalized a southern Republican party, but still didn't signal a "revolution" by any means. The Presidential vote in Kentucky, Virginia, and Georgia were all within 2 percentage points. The 1998 House elections saw a nation wide pick-up of 5 seats for the Democrats (reaction against the "overreaching" by Congressional Republicans during impeachment, likely because they began believing their own "revolution" mythology). The 1998 Senate remained unchanged, divided 55 to 45 in the hands of Republicans. The 2000 election once again saw a South that was closely divided, and in that way more similar to the nation as a whole than different. The South is not an ideologically distinct and homogeneous region, at least not any more.
If anything was revolutionary about 1994 it was the revolutionary nature of the new Congressional Republicans, especially the leadership. 1994 saw the elevation of Newt Gingrich to the Speaker's chair and Tom DeLay to Majority Whip. Under their leadership the power of committee/subcommittee chairs was dramatically weakened and centralized power under their leadership. A six-year chairmanship limit was imposed on the committees, and the 1970 "subcommittee bill of rights" was repealed. Gingrich also bypassed the system of seniority appointments to chairmanships by appointing Gingrich loyalists to chair the influential Appropriations, Judiciary, and Commerce Committees (Appropriations is all about money and Judiciary and Commerce are all about regulations, these are the money committees).
Gingrich likes to sell himself as a savior but is not a savior. He is a strange little man. He likes to write obnoxious historical "what-if" fiction. The whole genre is annoying speculations about different historical possibilities. For example, in his 1995 novel, 1945, Gingrich imagines that Hitler was in a plane crash and spent several months in a coma. So, he never attacked the US and is now set out to attack post-Churchill England and cripple the US by attacking Oak Ridge, the location of the development of the atomic bomb. More recently he wrote Gettysburg, which imagines a Civil War where the Confederacy wins the battle of Gettysburg, and strangely portrays the Confederacy as a group of disciplined citizen-soldiers led by wise and honorable gentlemen and the Union as a bunch of ruffians led by "hot-tempered and vindictive" leaders.
Perhaps his most bizarre public speech, his videotaped "Renewing American Civilization." Names the five pillars of American civilization as 1. The Historic Lessons of American Civilization, 2. Personal Strength, 3. Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise, 4. The Spirit of Invention and Discovery, and 5. Quality as Defined by Deming. How 1-4 are not lessons of American Civilization is beyond me, and how he came up with these 5 still baffles me. Gingrich likes enumerated lists, like when he lists the 5 reasons to study American history: 1. History is a Collective History, 2. American History is the History of our Civilization (REALLY???), 3. There is an American Exceptionalism that can be Best Understood Through History, 4. History is a Resource to be Learned from and Used, and 5. There are Techniques that can help you Learn Problem-Solving from Historical Experience. As Joan Didion states, "the attempt to track from one to five... leaves the tracker fretful, uneasy, uncertain just whose synapses are misfiring." Gingrich's writing abounds with enumerated lists, just as he did on a recent episode of Meet the Press where he enumerated the six (yes, only six) steps to save Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: But specifically, how would you win the war in Iraq militarily?
MR. GINGRICH: First of all, you, you would empower General Petraeus. You’d pass the supplemental immediately. You’d give him the money. Second, you would encourage the Iraqis to triple the size of their regular army. Third, you would, you would encourage the development of a, of a military tribunal system to lock people up the way Abraham Lincoln would’ve done it. Fourth, you would establish a nationwide ID card with biometrics so you can actually track everybody in the country. Fifth, you would make sure that the State Department actually staffed the embassy with people in favor of winning the war and you actually had your fully, fully equipped intelligence and economic development teams. Six, you would say to the Iranians, “If you don’t cut off everything you’re doing, we’ll begin to bring enormous pressure to bear with you,” if necessary, blockading the flow of gasoline into Iran, which has to import 40 percent of its gasoline because it only has one refinery in the entire country.
To describe Gingrich's thinking as schematic is an understatement as he declares there to be "Seven key aspects" and "nine vision-level principles" of his second pillar of American Civilization, "Personal Strength." There are also "five core principles" of "Quality as defined by Deming" (Pillar 5). There are "three big concepts" of Pillar Three (Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise) as well as "five enemies of entrepreneurial free enterprise." And finally, the "seven welfare state cripplers of progress" under Pillar Four (Spirit of Invention and Discovery), one of which is simply described as "Ignorance." Then in his Window of Opportunity, he gives us the truly astounding list of the "great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts." Only six, not seven, not five, six. When discussing health care he described the "eight areas of necessary change," on arms control, he gives us the "seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons." Then there are two initiatives, "three broad strategic options for the next generation," and finally, "six realistic goals which would increase our children's chances of living in a world without nuclear war." There is also Gingrich's most famous list, the Contract with America. On the first day of the session Gingrich promised to pass eight reforms and to in the following 100 days to bring another ten bills to a vote.
So what? I can hear you ask, he likes lists, who doesn't? It's an easy way to organize information and it shows that he is an action oriented person. This list-making reflects the memo-world of management with it's enumerated "action items" and other jargon-laden garbage. Not only does it show a lack of big-picture holistic thinking, they do nothing to advance discussions on the most important issues facing our nation and sometimes they slide into nonsense. For example, in To Renew America, he proposes several interesting questions like, "Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park?" Then he waxes poetic on the possibilities of space honeymoons, actually saying "imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attractions." What does that even mean? Earlier in Window of Opportunity, he writes, "one reason I am convinced space travel will be a growth industry is because I represent the Atlanta airport, which provides 35,000 aviation-related jobs in the Atlanta area."
His two early political screeds, Window of Opportunity and To Renew America are filled with these lackluster enumerated lists and flights of fantasy and seem to make sense when we consider that Mr. Gingrich manages his days by breaking them into 15 minute increments (I seriously wonder if Gingrich himself isn't some sort of Nick Hornby character, think "top fives" from High Fidelity and Will from About a Boy who states, "I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than thirty minutes. Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour.") The truth is Mr. Gingrich got the idea of 15-minute activity blocks from Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. His favorite thing to do in an activity block? Read biographies, the bottom rung of the history ladder, no wonder he imagines himself to be a savior and revolutionary, he still thinks history is made by "great men" who have biographies written about them which tend to ignore the social and economic forces that shape history.
Let's just get this straight, Newt Gingrich has lost his damn mind. According to Mr. Gingrich, Forrest Gump proved that "the counterculture destroys human beings and basic values." I always thought that it simply proved that life was a lot like a box of chocolates. Then last month in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women he argued that English should be the official language of the United States, beating out such aspirants as Esperanto and Tagalog. In this speech he called Spanish the "language of the ghetto." Then in his non-apology he blaimed his "word choice was poor" and that he had been taking Spanish classes for some time. The man is insane. At a recent event hosted by the Federalist Leadership Center and the Lincoln Club of Orange County Mr. Gingrich estimated that he had around 25 ideas a minute. A journalist covering the event for the Red County Magazine believed him and wrote an article calling him a one man think-tank. In the ensuing interview Newt once again turns to his favorite past-time, enumerated lists. Citing three lessons from history that are important for us all to think about; 1. Intelligence can fail, 2. You may not understand the culture of your opponent, and 3. Technology matters (for what isn't clear). Then he outlines his four critical components of healthcare reform, which he says should be visualized as a box with four quadrants (WTF?!). The first quadrant is financing. Another quadrant focuses on "the need for individual responsibility" (like for not getting sick? like not working in a coal mine?). The third quadrant addresses "issues related to society and culture" (I don't know what that means, oh wait, I bet he's talking about the sexual habits of non-whites, how silly of me). The fourth quadrant addresses "the healthcare system itself" (now my brain hurts). On immigration he suggests a two fold enumerated list (sorry, no awesome boxes with quadrants this time) that is comprised of the visionary suggestions: Control the Border and Enforce the Law. Holy shit, he's done it, he's solved the immigration "problem". From there he follows with an another list that includes among other things national id cards with biometrics that will be organized and managed by credit card companies. Up until now I kind of thought Mr. Gingrich was like that adorably idiotic uncle that everyone humors, but now I realize he's simply the stupidest man alive.
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