In today's Times Reagan archivist Kiron K. Skinner takes the occasion of Martin Luther King Day to claim MLK as Reagan's soulmate: Dr. King invoked God-given and constitutional rights in defense of extending civil rights to every man. He believed in his country's distinct ability to maintain a steadfast commitment to its values even when institutional realities pointed in other directions. Dr. King personified the American creed. That it was Ronald Reagan who bestowed on Dr. King the honor of a national holiday should no longer come as a surprise. Skinner acknowledges that Reagan first came under the national radar pushing the explicitly anti-Civil Rights Goldwater candidacy, but argues that Reagan's personal sympathetic behavior towards Blacks and his shared vocabulary of God, democracy, and constitution constitutes more common ground than division. It's an absurd argument which depends on the falacious reasoning that In the president's mind, the values Dr. King championed trumped political differences. The distinction between "politics" and "values" is always suspect, but few times has it been manipulated more cynically than here in arguing that whether or not Black men and women are to be systematically discriminated against in all spheres of life on account of race and poverty is a more superficial issue than whether the American constitution is suitable for appeals to political change. Skinner obscures the historical Reagan, who kicked off his Presidential Campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights activists had been brutally murdered, with a call for "states' rights" and an excoriation of "welfare queens." And Skinner obscures the historical King, the radical who deserves celebration today, who wrote: I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked."

There are moments when Yale's leadership takes significant, even potentially unpopular progressive stances in line with the best values of the University. While they tend to be on symbolic issues - like reimbursing lost financial aid for students with drug possession charges - and exclusively on national and international debates rather than local struggles, they should be acknowledged, both because credit should go where it's deserved and because it's nice sometimes to be able to be proud of the leadership of this institution. While there's certainly much more Yale could do to defend its non-discrimination policy, the letters released to the YDN, showing a nearly two-decade struggle with the Pentagon over the incompatability of the army's hiring practices, Yale's non-discrimination policy, and military recruitment on campus, are a nice break for those of us used to only seeing Levin directing pithy and blistering rhetoric at the working people of this University.

Today the ACLU announced a major lawsuit against secret service limitations on protests at Bush appearances. I saw this in person with the PA ACLU when Bush came to town this summer. The most aggregious and obvious violation is the pattern of allowing pro-Bush activists closer to Bush than anti-Bush activists. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with imagery. At risk of sounding subversive, I have to wonder, kind reader, if you were trying to shoot the President, which crowd would you be trying to infiltrate?

A few personal experiences and impressions of the past 72 hours: The eight Yale retirees (three of whom had to leave for medical reasons, five of whom held out for the full 24 hours) are real heroes whose perseverance is a model to all of us and whose victory presses the movement forward and raises the bar for everyone within it - and within this community. Their victory demonstrates the combination of strategically savvy and symbolically appropriate tactics, solidarity of workers, clergy, students and community, media scrutiny, organizing strength, sheer numbers, and iron will necessary for a victory like hasn't been seen here since the '84 strike. The whole episode, from the moment the eight declared that they weren't leaving David Swenson's office without a meeting to the moment that - poised to arrest them - Yale announced that it would instead grant their request, also dramatized both the shameful lengths to which Yale will go to perpetuate injustice and the potential and urgency to save Yale University from the Yale Corporation. The three times I was turned away and/or threatened with arrest by Yale police for trying to enter the Investment Building with hoagies for the retirees - who'd been hold up in the office for hours without food or use of the bathroom for several hours at this point - spoke volumes, as did the necessity for New Haven police to take jurisdiction because my University refused to allow food or bathroom facilities to a few elderly employees who showed up after decades of service to the University to confront the man who's been quietly investing their pension fund in insider trading rather than in decent pension offers for the next generation of Yale workers. It was the sight of fifteen riot police entering the building to drag out five senior citizens, however, that was most deeply infuriating, and Yale's last-minute realization that to have them do so would shame Yale's leadership such that it would become more difficult to carry forward its regressive agenda was small comfort. It's shameful that when light and truth rear their heads at Yale, Yale tries to lock out the light and starve out the truth. The TV media did a better-than-usual job of covering the sit-in, in part because it was visual and in part because of Rev. Jackson's presence. The most salient facts - why the retirees went in, that they won, and that Yale was poised to have riot police drag them out - came across on pretty much all the channels. The print media, including the YDN, was unfortunately dismissive of the drama, giving on average a sentence at the end of an article contextualizing the strike about a successful sit-in calling for a meeting but giving no sense of how or why it happened - or that it lasted 24 hours. As in the last strike, few experiences are more powerful than walking the lines and talking to workers about why they're out and what they're fighting for. There are few ways someone in this city of any political perspective (including, perhaps, readers of this site) could be doing with an hour on a weekday morning than talking to the men and women who, yet again, Yale has forced to the point of challenge and personal sacrifice for lux and veritas. I met a fourth grader who's walking the picket lines for the fourth time because, he explained, of a very greedy man who isn't very good at sharing his toys. Jesse Jackson, Emelio Hernandez, David Lee, and others have brought home over the past few days a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the civil rights movement cannot be separated from the movement for economic justice without destroying the integriy of the movement and insulting the dignity of those who compose it. On day after the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this point has a particular urgency. It's strange how much more easily middle class Americans tend to believe that the liberty of bosses is contingent on their right to private property than that the freedom of workers is contingent on their right to wages. A classmate once accused me of disgracing the memory of MLK by wearing a pin with a photo of him at an SEIU 1199 rally (the union he often described as his "favorite union"). When I asked how it was inappropriate to celebrate a photo of an event that actually happened he suggested that MLK must have been caught by coincidence standing in front of an SEIU podium. To say that where a woman can sit on a bus is a moral issue but whether she can raise enough money to feed her family is merely a political question is a convenient but fundamentally unjust contention. Today was one of the most intense freshman move-in days Yale has seen. The civil disobedience was of a much more serious and more dramatic character than last September, and the picket lines were some of the thickest and loudest I've seen here. The UOC gave out several hundred copies of our new pamphlet to freshmen and families, most of whom came off understandably as mostly overwhelmed, confused, anxious, and eager to get more information. Yale forced our table off of Old Campus on the grounds that, in the words of Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, we were there "to bias freshmen, not to orient them." Meanwhile, the Office of New Haven and State Affairs had three tables set up trying to get students on board with their agenda of condescension and division by giving our lollipops and tape measures. And the crew team had a thirty foot boat in the middle of campus. Yale police also stopped us from entering dorms to poster; one man told me I wasn't allowed to enter with the poster I had and when I asked whether I could go in to put up, say, a capella posters, he referred me to his boss, who told me no one was allowed to enter with any kind of poster and then asked to see my posters. When I confronted Dean Brodhead about this he told me that I wasn't being forced off of Old Campus myself, and so democracy was intact. As we already knew, Scott Marks is a much better speaker than Jesse Jackson; John Wilhelm is a much better speaker than John Sweeney; Howard Dean is a much better speaker than Joe Lieberman. Yale's last minute decision to postpone tomorrow's freshman invocation, an event which to my knowledge has never been cancelled in the University's history (including during, say, World War), on the grounds of "the threat posed by our unions," represents a resounding acknowledgement by Yale that contrary to their publicity, business is not going on as usual here, and the crisis is not under control. John Wilhelm was right to say, of of Yale's prior claims that hardly anyone was out on strike and there was no disruption, "That's exactly the problem - you do all the work here, and Yale can't see you." He also added that - as Yale's contract offer makes clear - Yale can't count. This was abundantly clear when Yale produced statistics purporting to show that strike turnout was low which left out 800 Yale workers - guess where they were? Perhaps one of them was Associate VP for New Haven and State Affairs Mike Morand's secretary, who despite getting ample exposure to Yale's side - which Conroy et al claim the union leadership is blinding the workers to - is out on strike.

To those of you sent here when you googled... aclu supports internment camps Sorry, but no. Zinn argues that in the 50s the ACLU "withered" and muffled its criticism of McCarthyism to remain politically viable - heavy charges that I don't have the background to support or refute. But the ACLU was one of the few groups to visibly and stridently condemn the Japanese interment - raising the contemporary ire of Ann Coulter, who argues that it's hypocritical for a left organization to support J. Edgar Hoover's left stances (opposition to internment) and not his right ones (opposition to privacy and democratic oversight). I should apologize for already having given her argument too much ink back in July when she wrote it - as well as her equally silly one that since Democratic FDR shamefully caved to conservative animus towards Japanese-Americans in supporting internment, Conservative Republicans must be the real defenders of civil liberties. For anyone who still believes Coulter that FDR and the ACLU (and, for that matter, everyone from Bill Clinton to Cynthia McKinney) get their marching orders from the same playbook (care of Karl Marx), I should perhaps also clarify that the ACLU also opposes HOLC red-lining and the racial segregation of blood donations. Kissinger the war crimminal That about says it right there. That, and lemme know if you want to take a trip with me to look through his archives after his death for some tidbits about the full depravity of the man. IBEW chatroom Is there one? Hot. Sign me up. Ed Rendell hoagie photo Populism is not about eating a hoagie better than John Kerry (although I don't know who eats a hoagie worse than John Kerry). Populism is about wanting to see the Democratic Leadership Council go the way of the AFL-CIO's CIA-tool the AIFLD. Populism is most certainly not having the DLC choose Philadelphia for its annual celebration of prostitution to big business and scorn towards the American people to celebrate you as the kind of Democratic candidate that will reassure the bosses that they have nothing to worry about from the Democrats. Oh yeah - and the Philly soft pretzel is the real icon, not the hoagie or the cheesesteak. Matt Naclerio Should run for Mayor of New Haven. Katie Krauss Should've gone for Ari Fleischer's job while it was still open. Schwarzengger and antisemitism The most thorough and judicious article-length discussion of Schwarzenegger's relationship with Kurt Waldheim I'd say is Timothy Noah's here. Schwarzenegger's refusal to condemn a member of the Wehrmacht "honor list" for the Kozara massacre - or even his actions - raises troubling questions about his political courage and his sense of justice. Although on the question of how he'd govern the state of California, this is more disturbing. auth cartoon philadelphia inquirer israel, auth antisemitism, etc. I think I spilled enough (virtual) ink on this here. Josh Cherniss' thoughts to which I was responding (a response to my original piece here), are here. If he posts a response to mine, it'll be posted here - I suspect we've both exhausted the topic for now however. If you're one of the several who entered one of the searches above and you want to talk more about it, lemme know. Al Franken and Arianna Huffington's political show in bed It's been too long. Bring it back. Maybe we could get Arianna Huffington, Cruz Bustamante, Peter Camoje, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Simon, and Gary Coleman in bed together on TV - who says the American people don't have the patience for substantive political coverage? verizon cwa strike Read about smart tactics, support from Senators, and what you can do to help. arianna huffington verizon Know something I don't? Lynda-Obst Bitch Now I don't know the woman personally, but that's just not nice. Interfaith religious symbol I have been known on occasion to refer to James Baldwin as God...But I have to say Jim Lawson really wowed me this weekend. So he may be my nominee. Unless you found this site thinking it was an interfaith religious symbol, in which case sorry to disappoint... And for all of you who came here searching for wild bouquet If you're looking for a gift, get something here. Trust me - it'll make him/her swoon. Or buy me something and make me swoon...

Coming before President Bush's desk soon will be the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which passed both houses unanimously last Friday. From a press release from Human Rights Watch, which was instrumental in the crafting and passage of the legislation: "For far too long the United States has ignored the brutality of prison rape," said Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch's U.S.Program. "Sexual violence - indeed, any violence - should not be part of anyone's prison sentence. This legislation puts prison staff on notice that they can no longer turn a blind eye to rape." The Prison Rape Elimination Act would initiate a series of efforts to track and curtail the incidence of rape in prisons and jails. The legislation requires the collection of national statistics on the prevalence and effects of rape; directs the Department of Justice to provide training and technical assistance to federal, state and local officials responsible for addressing prison rape; authorizes federal grants to support state and local programs to prevent and punish prison rape; and provides for the reduction of federal prison funding for states that do not control prison rape. The National Prison Rape Reduction Commission, a federal body created by the legislation, will spearhead the creation of a comprehensive report on the subject and issue recommendations to be used by the Attorney General in generating national standards to detect, prevent, and punish prison rape. "The unanimous passage of this bill is an extraordinary accomplishment," said Fellner. "If implemented fully and effectively, it will be a first step towards ensuring that prison sentences are not sentences to sexual violence and abuse." HRW wrote a damning report on prison rape, No Escape, in 2001. A Florida prisoner whom we will identify only as P.R. was beaten, suffered a serious eye injury, and assaulted by an inmate armed with a knife, all due to his refusal to submit to anal sex. After six months of repeated threats and attacks by other inmates, at the end of his emotional endurance, he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor. In a letter to Human Rights Watch, he chronicled his unsuccessful efforts to induce prison authorities to protect him from abuse. Summing up these experiences, he wrote: "The opposite of compassion is not hatred, it's indifference." ...Prison authorities, unsurprisingly, generally claim that prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse is an exceptional occurrence rather than a systemic problem. Prison officials in New Mexico, for example, responding to our 1997 request for information regarding "the 'problem' of male inmate-on-inmate rape and sexual abuse" (the internal quotation marks are theirs), said that they had "no recorded incidents over the past few years." ...Yet prison authorities' claims are belied by independent research on the topic. Indeed, the most recent academic studies of the issue have found shockingly high rates of sexual abuse, including forced oral and anal intercourse. In December 2000, the Prison Journal published a study based on a survey of inmates in seven men's prison facilities in four states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facility. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these, over 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped. An internal departmental survey of corrections officers in a southern state (provided to Human Rights Watch on the condition that the state not be identified) found that line officers -- those charged with the direct supervision of inmates -- estimated that roughly one-fifth of all prisoners were being coerced into participation in inmate-on-inmate sex. Interestingly, higher-ranking officials -- those at the supervisory level -- tended to give lower estimates of the frequency of abuse, while inmates themselves gave much higher estimates: the two groups cited victimization rates of roughly one-eighth and one-third, respectively. .... It's a relief to know that stopping prison rape, at least, is a human rights cause that none of our legislators are willing (publicly) to stand against. The passage (once signed) of this legislation is an important step. There are more difficult ones to follow. Counterpunch has several strong pieces on the topic. Joanne Mariner: The hostility with which some prison authorities reacted to the draft legislation suggests the extent of the official unwillingness to acknowledge the problem of prison rape. According to Reginald Wilkinson, head of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction -- which is, ironically, one of only two state prison systems to retain the now old-fashioned concept of rehabilitation in its name, if not in its practices -- the idea that prison rape is common is "a flat-out lie." Steve J.B.: The Prison Industrial Complex is supported by tax dollars. It operates the way that it does because people don't object. I was in prison for shoplifting. Should I have been locked in a cell with a guy twice my size and weight who was doing life for a violent crime? I don't object to having been incarcerated for committing a crime. But I don't think it was right that I was made a gift to another inmate. I don't think that "Prison Bitch" is a very funny song. Alex Coolman: Martha Stewart's name hasn't been dragged into this newest rape "joke" because she's a woman and our society now understands that the rape of women isn't funny. But in Borowitz' hands, the rape of men in prison is once again being treated as fodder for cruel, inane humor instead of what it really is: one of the most appalling, institutionally ignored abuses of human rights in this nation.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania (one of the places I've been interning this summer) scored an important victory today when District Judge Robert Kelly ruled, in our favor, that forcing students - public and private school both - to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day or have their refusal reported to their parents is a stark violation of students' rights. The overruled sponsor's measure, State Rep. Allan Egolf, had a less than inspiring defense of his idea: "I thought there wouldn't be any problems with it," Egolf said. "We just wanted to make it so the kids had the opportunity to learn the pledge and what the flag means to our country and what it stands for. If you don't learn it in school, where are you going to learn it?" This argument, like many made in defense of school prayer, seems to demonstrate a willful disregard for the distinction between studying an idea and practicing it. It's about as convincing as the state's lawyer's argument in court: "The Pledge of Allegiance is only 70 or so words long anyway." Kelly, relatively conservative himself, was much more perceptive: This letter home, Kelly wrote, "would chill the speech of certain students who would involuntarily recite the speech or [national] anthem rather than have a notice sent to their parents." Kelly also wrote that Egolf's comments from the House debate had made it "obvious that he views refusal to recite the pledge or anthem as something negative for which disciplinary sanctions would be warranted." Justice Jackson, seventy years ago, said it best however: To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions. That it took a District Court ruling to stop the state of Pennsylvania from forcing all children to declare their allegiance to the flag or be told on to their parents (presumably because such subversion would demonstrate to the parents a failure in their conditioning of their progeny) doesn't make our institutions look too hot either - although that much better than if, as many expected, Judge Kelly had ruled the other way.

Ann Coulter's latest column demonstrates all the talents that have so endeared her to her fans - farcically forced fury, painfully flat humor, recklessness with facts and incoherent logic. A choice selection: Absurdly, liberals claim to hate J. Edgar Hoover because of their passion for civil liberties. The left's exquisite concern for civil liberties apparently did not extend to the Japanese. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese for the internment camps, liberals were awed by his genius. The Japanese internment was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. Joseph Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action – and celebrated foe of "McCarthyism" – supported the internment. There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment – that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast. Here Coulter employs a favorite tactic - citing illiberal choices made or perpetuated under Democratic administrations and using them, despite contemporary criticism from the left or pushes from the right for even more draconian moves, as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the left as a whole (she does this masterfully with segregation, for example). The fact that FDR, bowing to the pressures of fear and jingoism within and outside of the government, betrayed the values of the left and trampled on the Constitution and principles of human decency in signing Executive Order 9066 simply demonstrates that FDR was neither as courageous nor as Left as history makes him out to be. The fact that a man like Daniel Pipes, who refuses to condemn internment, is considered a distinguished scholar and an ally of this administration in foreign policy, and that a man like Howard Coble (R-NC), who came out in support of the camps last February, chairs a house subcommittee on domestic security raises troubling questions about the agenda this administration (Republican, for those of you keeping score at home) wants to lead this country. Coulter, for her part, spent her last column gloating about a Department of Justice report acknowledging abuse of immigrants detained after September 11 as evidence that the government isn't letting details like the constitution get in the way of the Bush Doctrine (but this is the same woman who maintains both that we should "bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" and that conservatives are the most compassionate suffering people in the world). Coulter, in fact, seems not to have ever met a regressive policy towards immigrants that she couldn't countenance, spin, and celebrate - but at least she's against internment camps... Congressman John Rankin famously declared, "I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai'i now and putting them in concentration camps...Damn them! Let's get rid of them!" He was also instrumental in securing the place of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in American Government. The final lines excerpted above raise the self-parody to an even higher plane. Faced with the information she provides - the leftist ACLU praised Hoover for opposing FDR assault on civil liberties and condemned him for later launching his own - a logical person might conclude that the left supports protecting civil liberties - maybe even that some on the left are willing to condemn political allies who pursue regressive policy and work with political opponents for shared progressive goals (the ACLU's coalition against the PATRIOT Act - one of Coulter's favorite pieces of legislation - is a contemporary example as well). Instead, Coulter judges the left as hypocritical for supporting Hoover's left-wing moves and opposing his right-wing ones. One can understand why this might bother Coulter - for her, personality trumps politics every time.

Today marks a long-overdue but nevertheless greatly welcome reversal of the High Court's 1986 defense of Sodomy Laws. It's a notable loss for the "Religious Right" that was so central to the Republican Party of the Impeachment Era, and increasingly seems to be on its way out in favor of the foreign policy hawks and domestic libertarians (and the single-issue grassroots campaigns of the NRA). The response on the right ranges from Sullivan's celebration to Will's argument that sodomy laws are wrong but a purely local issue (like segregation?) and a constitutional right to privacy is a step on a slippery slope to damnation (like interracial marriage?), to some inspired Lamentations from the Christian News Service: In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul says men whose "foolish hearts were darkened" exchanged the truth of God for a lie. His warning about man's wisdom has apparently gone unheeded in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down an anti-sodomy law in Texas -- effectively telling states they can no longer punish homosexual couples for engaging in activities the Bible says are "unnatural" and sinful. Fortunately for AgapePress, the Supreme Court is yet to rule on whether the right to privacy includes other Biblical prohibitions like eating fish without fins and scales (same Hebrew word - to'evah - as is used to describe homosexuality). "Under our constitutional republic, it is the place of the state legislature, acting through its duly elected representatives, to decide what is moral," [American Family Association Chief Counsel Steve Crampton] says. "For a handful of un-elected judges to impose their views of morality is not law, it is tyranny." Actually, today would be a shining example of what a Supreme Court should do - hold a nation's legal system to its own best values. Crampton may be thinking of this. A Florida attorney believes the decision handed down will awaken Americans who want to preserve traditional marriage. Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, says the decision will galvanize the majority of Americans who want to preserve family values but who have ignored the radical agenda of homosexual activists. "This particular decision essentially is a shot over the bow and a wake-up call that I believe will galvanize the sleeping giant of the majority of Americans who believe in traditional family values and traditional marriage so that every American will get involved in this cultural war," Staver says. "If we don’t, in the next decade or two, we could lose traditional family values and marriage in this country." See my parents' marriage, as I testified in March, is holy because of the love with which it's infused, not because they get legal recognition our gay friends don't. It's sad to me that some people see anything that expands and democratizes the legal institution as chipping away at the worth of the personal bond. It's a shame to see people convinced that their marriage needs to compete for significance and exclusivity. Staver also says the decision underscores the importance of the next Supreme Court appointment. Indeed. Bring it. P.S.: In case there was any confusion, Justice Scalia wants us to know that he has nothing against gay people personally. Well that's a relief. It's easy to lost track of his personal preferences when you get so caught up in his exercise of power as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States... But I'm sure some of his best friends are gay, right? Well, let me clear up any confusion now by sharing that some of my best friends are people like Justice Scalia...