PlanetAlbany

What about Pakistan?

Admiral Michael Mullen's testimony about the direct involvement of the Pakistani intelligence agency in attacks on U.S. troops and facilities in Afghanistan seems highly credible, which I take kind of personally because my daughter and son-in-law have each served two recent tours in the latter country. White House efforts to cast doubt on what Mullen is saying seem not credible and discreditable. What to do about this I do not know, but continuing to pretend there is nothing fundamentally wrong so as not to have to do anything about it is a bad idea.

The opposite of stigma

I understand (though do not wholly agree with) the stigmatization of stigma, because condemning suicide or addiction could inhibit prevention and recovery by deterring people from seeking help. So, however, can the opposite approach lead to the glamorization of self-destruction -- as in this piece by the novelist James Salter in the Oct. 13 edition of The New York Review of Books, about a biography of Ernest Hemingway by Paul Hendrickson.

Writes Salter: "[Hemingway's] suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it." Which calls to mind George Orwell's remark in a 1945 essay: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Crazy ...

As a newly minted Republican and longstanding complainer about political correctness, should I take it personally when Atlantic blogger James Fallows asks: "When will they take a stand against their own crazies?" His post is on booing from the crowd at the Republican presidential debates, highlighting that reaction to a gay soldier's question about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

While some of the booing at debates (e.g. in support of executions) made me queasy, let's not get too prissy about this. A political platform is not a church service, and a certain amount of raucous heckling is par for the course unless there are specific rules against it. If the gay soldier didn't want to get booed, maybe he shouldn't have waded in to this controversy (which I guess was a reason for Don't Ask Don't Tell in the first place). And I didn't see anything wrong with Sen. Rick Santorum's response.

'Twas amusing to see the booers in the same debate come after Gov. Rick Perry because of his support for granting in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants. His resistance was one of his few good moments on stage. Today I got an email from an aged relative, a lifelong conservative and the Catholic child of parents who emigrated to New York, who has become a bit of an obsessive about illegal immigration. It was a diatribe from one Frosty Wooldridge, who appears to blame the problems of Detroit largely on illegal immigration and says (although it's all-cap boldface in the version I got): "If you think Mexicans and Muslims and other foreigners will eventually fit right in then you are as big a part of the problem as they are." I looked up said Wooldridge, and discovered he's an anti-Catholic supporter of Planned Parenthood. I don't think my relative knew that, but Wooldridge is a crazy I am happy to disown.

Bash Hanna for right reasons

The New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms PAC put out this Facebook post last week:

"Hanna for tax increases? Hanna supporting President Obama's grab and go from job creators plan? Huh?! With Republicans like these ... (insert your own sentiment here)." It included a link to a story about the upstate Republican congressman Richard Hanna being open to tax increases on the rich.

So .. here is my "own sentiment": NYCF is the most outspoken and effective socially conservative lobbying organization in the state -- which doesn't make it particularly effective. Its leader, the Rev. Jason McGuire, was hinting about abandoning the GOP after gay marriage passed in June, but now is apparently back to playing Republican politics. The problem with the post is that Hanna's willingness to consider tax increases on the wealthy is irrelevant to social issues. NYCF itself has often recognized Democratic Sen. Ruben Diaz as the (only?) outstanding social conservative in the state Legislature, but Diaz is a standard liberal on most fiscal issues.

You could try to link fiscal and social issues, e.g. noting that Hanna was one only seven House Republicans to vote in favor of funding Planned Parenthood. But tax increases on the rich are eminently defensible and (according to polls) highly popular. It's hard enough to build support for socially conservative positions in New York without advocating for an unrelated unpopular position.

 

Changing registration

A friend who lives in the same Republican-dominated suburb told me the other day he's changed his registration from Democrat to GOP so as to undermine and subvert his new party. I haven't been a Democrat for many years, and spent most of my adult life as a blank -- i.e. not registered in any party -- until this month, when I, too, became a Republican.

Subversion is not my motive. Yet I am no friend to Republican tax policy or waterboarding/rendition/the death penalty. I do not hate railroads or love corporate America. Nor, however, do I follow the liberal line of permanent, speech-policing outrage about mostly imagined racism, sexism, Christianism, theocracy, heterosexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. I won't spin a party line.

The Republican presidential candidates do not inspire me with confidence, and the New York state party has never inspired anyone. I don't have any special animus against President Obama. But I'm almost certainly going to end up voting Republican, as I have in every presidential election since 1992.

The reason, of course, is abortion (and related issues like embryonic stem cell research). Most of the current GOP presidential candidates are professedly pro-life, but I'm skeptical. Take the two front-runners: Mitt Romney, who was vigorously pro-choice when running for office in Massachusetts, and Rick Perry, who endorsed pro-choice Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But they and the other plausible candidates are a lot more pro-life than Obama, which means I'm going to have to vote for one of them, so I may as well vote in the primary, too.

Movement on the track

There has been (welcome) movement on the long-stalled plan to build a second track between Albany and Schenectady and do other rail improvements funded under the 2009 stimulus bill, according to the TU's Eric Anderson (apparently the only reporter who can be bothered to cover these issues).

"But agreements on other projects, including a third track for high-speed trains in western New York and other improvements, haven't been reached," according to the Times Union story. Wouldn't want to rush into anything, I guess. As for the ones they do have agreement on, work will start next year, i.e. three years after these supposedly "shovel-ready" projects were funded. If those Republican presidential candidates were to turn their attention toward New York, they'd find material for campaign commercials.

Ghost task force, stimulus; real floods, bottleneck

You can call Assemblyman Jim Tedisco a grandstander, but there's a time and a place for it, and when he's right, he's right. With rain pouring down as I write and more rivers overflowing, it would indeed be a good idea to investigate why a flood control task force created five years ago never held a single meeting. Legislative hearings are not always useless, and it would be instructive to dig up some bureaucrats and politicians to testify about this under oath.

With President Obama scheduled to release another jobs plan tomorrow, legislators also could try to find out why the state's 2009 rail stimulus money from the federal government remains largely unspent, including funds for a second track between Albany and Schenectady to relieve a longstanding bottleneck. There isn't even a plan to spend the money on building the track, just endlessly unresolved disputes among the state DOT and the railroads. Apparently the New York State High Speed Rail Planning Board is another ghost commission, having been created last year (update: or the year before) but never convened.