PlanetAlbany

Two more U.S. soldiers killed by purported allies

These deaths bring to six the number of American soldiers apparently killed by Afghan security forces since the protests over burned Korans began a week or two ago. A switch in strategy along the lines advocated by Fareed Zakaria seems overdue. But the main point has little to do with politics or strategy, yet is as sharp to me -- with two U.S. Army veterans of Afghanistan in the family, both having served two tours, one due to go back soon -- as Occam's Razor: How can we keep deploying our soldiers there as trainers for the Afghan army and police, when the main threat to them now comes precisely from the people they are training? So bring them home, now.

Bring 'em home

After two-plus weeks driving around the eastern United States with my newly retired wife, we found none of our relatives and friends, of widely varied political viewpoints, favoring continuation of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Recent events appear to prove the main threat to our troops now comes from their purported Afghan allies. It is no comfort to say, as our political and military leaders do, that we will not be deterred from current plans "to shift increasingly away from a lead role in combat in the next year and toward intensified training and advising." Since the main threat comes from the people we are training and advising, against which there is very little realistic defense, that blather is anything but reassuring.

I'm not inclined particularly to blame the Obama administration, whose distractions in places like Libya and Syria have so far proved much less costly than the Bush administration's foray into Iraq. But if our leaders can't make a better case than this for continuing to risk the lives of our sons and daughters, after 10-and-a-half years, then I'll go with Seeger and Springsteen.

Why doesn't TU run Douthat's column? (updated)

The Albany Times Union's opinion department subscribes to The New York Times news service, regularly running its syndicated columnists such as Maureen Dowd and David Brooks. But the TU does not run the Times' Ross Douthat, so you won't read in its pages his Sunday column about "the media's abortion blinders".

Discussing a recent controversy, Douthat writes: "From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had 'politicized' the cause of women’s health. ... Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable."

This seems to me obviously true locally, and a particular problem in the TU editorial department, which strives mightily to obfuscate and deny the possibility of regarding abortion as a legitimately controversial issue. The Times itself has long had similar policies and coverage. For many years, like the TU now, it carried no regular columnist with pro-life opinions. But to the Times' credit, it did hire the pro-life Douthat -- whose views are apparently too dangerous to be read in Albany.

Update: This is not, to be clear, a strictly partisan problem. While pro-life Republicans are obviously beyond the pale, even the Obama administration came in for ferocious criticism in December 2011 when it decided to restrict over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill, and most news reports did not mention legitimate concerns about the pill sometimes acting as an abortifacient. No surprise that today's Catholic-bashing TU column on related issues manages to avoid all mention of abortion.

Media watch

The Times Union has a front-page story today, an expansion and rewrite of the AP, headlined Locals greet Komen reversal, concerning reaction to the announcement by "The Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer charity, ... that it will continue to fund breast cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood, reversing a decision made earlier this week." Three local sources are quoted, all of them Planned Parenthood supporters. Nobody is allowed to put the contrary view, that Komen would be wise to remove itself from the Planned Parenthood connection because that organization is the biggest abortion provider in America, and a lot of people have reasonable moral objections to abortion.

TU blogger Libby Post links the Komen story to the ongoing controversy over the proposed appointment of Thomas Marcelle as Albany County attorney, which Post has led a campaign to derail because of Marcelle's connection to the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund. While most of the opposition to Marcelle has come from a gay rights perspective, Post also focuses on abortion: "That’s how the erosion of rights always starts. A little chip here and a little chip there and before you know it, we’re back in 1950, women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and reproductive choice is relegated to the back alley and a hanger."

The TU's news coverage of the Marcelle brouhaha has been more even-handed  than today's Komen story, and the anti-Marcelle editorial was predictable. "We would have preferred that [Albany County Executive Dan] McCoy had picked a county attorney with more progressive views," says the editorial, which is considerably more restrained than Metroland columnist Miriam Axel-Lute. She alleges Marcelle "is in the employ of an organization that is specifically devoted to undermining one of the most important tenets of our Constitution. That is completely and utterly unacceptable." The italics are in the original.

Axel-Lute's point is that the Alliance Defense Fund seeks to undermine the First Amendment, and seeks to impose its views on people by "removing their autonomy over their own bodies and their legal right to equal protection for their families under law." I think the First Amendment claim is hogwash, but it's the latter sentence that is more radical. She is asserting that anyone opposed to the most expansive definitions of abortion and gay rights, e.g. "Marcelle, and any other employee or supporter of the Alliance Defense Fund, is not fit to hold public office in the United States of America." That's also the logic of the less extreme language in the TU editorial, and seems to me much more of a threat to liberty than anything proposed by the Alliance Defense Fund or its allies.

Fix is in at TU

Today's lead opinion column on the editorial page of The Times Union is by James Featherstonhaugh, identified only as "an Albany lawyer." I guess everyone is supposed to know the guy is a wired lobbyist-fixer currently representing harness race tracks as president of the New York Gaming Association.

One is not astonished to find Featherstonhaugh's position: "Allowing table games to be deployed at the nine racetrack casinos" would be just hunky-dory. As he public-spiritedly opines, "Enhanced gaming should be executed by trusted partners in known locations without disruption. Let's join the governor and the state legislative leaders and make the New York way even better."
Every day in every way things just get better and better.

Secret ethics

Doesn't sound like I missed much at the second meeting of the new state ethics commission. Why would anyone show up to see a bunch of political insiders, mostly lawyers, who are apparently determined to do their business in secret and thus cannot be held accountable?

A different kind of Republican

Freshman GOP Rep. Chris Gibson says "I'm underwhelmed, I'm disappointed" by the Republican presidential candidates, though he knows he will "hold my nose" and vote for the party's nominee in November. Speaking this week at a meeting of the Tea Party-flavored "New York 20th District Advocates" at DiDonna's restaurant on the south shore of Saratoga Lake, Gibson said most of the candidates "just sign up for the empire," meaning they support an aggressive foreign policy empowering the president to make war and continuing to fund U.S. bases all over the world. The only candidate who does not support that model is Ron Paul, whom Gibson mentioned sympathetically in another context; but he didn't endorse him, either, and part of the discussion focused on Gibson's defense of his recent vote for a defense bill which authorized detention of non-U.S. citizens -- a bill which Paul opposed. Like Paul, Gibson opposes the Patriot Act, regarding it as unconstitutional. He said he supports President Obama's policies on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gibson noted he has not been a party-line vote in Washington, bucking his leadership to pass an amendment continuing to fund a rural broadband loan program, and, most recently, being one of only seven Republicans to favor continuation of a payroll tax cut. His colleagues swiftly came around on the latter issue and passed a two-month tax-cut extension, which Gibson said he wants continued until comprehensive "pro-growth tax reform" is passed. On the recent flap about Obama's recess appointments Gibson was critical both of the president and congressional Republicans, and said in an era of divided government the parties need to work together more. He even defended the existence of the National Labor Relations Board (although not its appointments and actions under Obama) as a check on corporate power, and said the tax code needs to be reformed so that it no longer favors big business over small.

The missing a word (updated)

Today's Albany Times Union op-ed, "Let teenagers learn about sex," like Sunday's editorial, "Shenendehowa fails sex ed," is about a controversy involving a Saratoga County school district and Planned Parenthood. Today's article remarks inaccurately that "some presidential candidates would like to expel Planned Parenthood from the entire country," and both it and the editorial carefully avoid mentioning the real reason people don't want Planned Parenthood involved in sex ed: its status as the country's largest provider of abortion services, and as a vigorous advocate of policies and laws supporting the continued provision of abortion on demand.

Updated Jan. 13: TheTU today returns to the fray, with another editorial bashing Shen on behalf of Planned Parenthood, and continuing to avoid the a word.

Conventional spending

In the State of the State this afternoon, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he wants to build "the largest convention center in the nation" (Why not the world? What are we, pikers?) at Aqueduct race track in Queens, plus modernize and expand the existing Javits convention center in Manhattan, and spend a billion dollars on economic development in Buffalo.

What about Jerry Jennings' long-proposed convention center in downtown Albany? What about the nanotech incubation center proposed for the former Union Station in Albany's downtown, which failed to make the recent cut in regional economic development funding? Albany Councilman Anton Konev, who is no fan of a downtown convention center, also points out (accurately) that the state-funded UAlbany nanotech center is doing more to create jobs in the suburbs than benefit the city of Albany, where the poverty rate is almost as high as Buffalo's. The Common Council is not renowned for promoting job growth in the heart of the city, and the mayor's long-touted relationship with Cuomo has yet to bear fruit. How can Albany miss out when there's pork to be sliced?

Rules of engagement

Whether Albany police were justified in killing Nahcream Moore on South Pearl Street Thursday night will depend on whether their story holds up under investigation. But the statements critical of police by Willisa Marshall, driver of the SUV in which Moore was a passenger, do not persuade me.

She said, "He didn't shoot at your officer, so you should have been trying to get the gun away from him, not to shoot him in front of us," as recorded by Channel 13 news (that's my transcription; I think their printed story on that link slightly misquotes her). In the TU story (first link above), that quote does not appear, and instead she is quoted as saying: "I didn't see no gun. If he did have one, I'm sure he did not approach them with his." Moore got out of the car before he was killed.

Marshall obviously would not have been surprised if Moore were carrying a gun, and apparently thinks that if he did brandish one, police should not have responded with deadly force. Nor is her opinion unusual. It was apparently applauded at the public meeting where she spoke Friday, and echoes similar comments made earlier this year in England by people connected to Mark Duggan, whose fatal shooting by London police served as the spark for several days of rioting across that country.

While "racial profiling" and other alleged injustices are being cited in this case, it seems to me part of the problem is popular entertainment. I don't so much mean the modern rap music or other media demonizing police, but the long-conventional scenario in which the cop or cowboy hero waits for the bad guy to fire at him before shooting back. In the real world at close range, doing that would likely get you killed or badly wounded, and is not what police are trained to do.