Noam Chomsky: Obama's Attack on Civil Liberties Has Gone Way Beyond Imagination

Mike Stivers: Anyone following issues of civil liberties under Obama knows that his administration's policies have been disastrous. The signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively legalizes indefinite detention of US citizens, the prosecution of more whistleblowers than any previous president, the refusal to close Guantanamo, and the adoption of ruthless positions in trials such as Hedges vs. Obama and Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project don't even encapsulate the full extent of the flagrant violations of civil, political and constitutional rights. One basic question that a lot of people seem to be asking is, why? What's the rationale?

Noam Chomsky: That's a very interesting question. I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech.

The case in question was a law group that was giving legal advice to groups on the terrorist list, which in itself has no moral or legal justification; it's an abomination. But if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on it until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don't understand why he's doing it.

The NDAA suit, of which I'm a plaintiff - it mostly codifies existing practice. While there has been some protest over the indefinite detention clause, there's one aspect of it that I'm not entirely happy with. The only protest that's being raised is in response to detention of American citizens, but I don't see why we should have the right to detain anyone without trial. The provision of the NDAA that allows for this should not be tolerated. It was banned almost eight centuries ago in the Magna Carta.

It's the same with the drone killings. There was some protest over the Anwar Al-Awlaki killing because he was an American citizen. But what about someone who isn't an American citizen? Do we have a right to murder them if the president feels like it?

On Obama's 2012 election campaign web site, it clearly states that Obama has prosecuted six whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. Does he think he's appealing to some constituency with that affirmation?

I don't know what base he's appealing to. If he thinks he's appealing to the nationalist base, well, they're not going to vote for him anyway. That's why I don't understand it. I don't think he's doing anything besides alienating his own natural base. So it's something else.

What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there's a little difference in his tone. It's not as crude and brutal as they were, but it's pretty hard to see much of a difference.

It also extends to other developments, most of which we don't really know about, likethe surveillance state that's being built and the capacity to pick up electronic communication. It's an enormous attack on personal space and privacy. There's essentially nothing left. And that will get worse with the new drone technologies that are being developed and given to local police forces.

That expansion of the surveillance state, do you see that as another facet of expanding executive power?

It's an enormous expansion of executive power. I doubt that they can do much with this information that's being stored. I've had plenty of experience with the FBI in simpler years when they didn't have all this stuff. But they had tons of information. They were just drowning in it and didn't know how to use it. It's sort of like walking into the New York Public Library and saying "I want to be a chemist." You've got all the information there, but it's not doing any good.

Might that change with enhanced technology and search capabilities?

There will be new ways of combing through the data electronically to pick up things that look like suspicious connections, almost all of which will mean nothing, but they may find some things. It's kind of like the drone killings. You have what's called "intelligence." Sometimes it means something; other times it means nothing. It also means that if you have suspicions of somebody for some reason, whatever it is, you can go in there and find all sorts of incriminating stuff. It may not be legally incriminating, but it will be used to intimidate people - threatening to publicize things people meant to be private.

 Do you think nonviolent, verbal dissent could eventually be criminalized?

It could be criminalized. Anybody who has looked at law enforcement at all knows that one of the techniques is to try to force confession or plea-bargaining by just using material that the person doesn't want publicized. That's very common. You can threaten to expose something even if it didn't happen, or it's just a rumor. That's a powerful weapon to get people to cooperate or submit, and I suspect we're going to see a lot of that. We already do see a lot of it in the criminal courts. Most cases don't come to trial. They're settled. And a lot of them are settled in this way.

There's an alarming quote from Chris Hedges in reference to the NDAA suit. He said, "If we lose [the suit], the power of the military to detain citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military prisons will become a terrifying reality." How much weight does this case hold?

We've already lost that right. If you look at the criminal systems and the truly oppressed populations, like the black male population, for them, due process is sometimes existent, but overwhelmingly they just don't have it. You can't hire a lawyer; you don't get a decent defense and you don't have resources. That's how the prisons are filled.

Do you think the left in general could become another oppressed population in the future?

I don't think there's much of a threat there. I doubt that there'll be anything like what there was in the 60s. We're nowhere near the days of COINTELPRO. That was the FBI, and it was pretty harsh. It went as far as political assassinations. Again, the worst of which was directed towards blacks. It's harder to attack privileged whites.

It's the same with the drug wars. The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.

You can see the same with incarceration rates, which are increasing outrageously. That all started with Reagan. He started a race war. There's a great book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. She points out, and she's quite right, that it's very analogous to what happened after reconstruction when slavery was technically eliminated, but it just turned into criminalization of black life. You ended up with a large part of the black, mostly male population in jail, and they become slave labor. This runs deep in American history. It's not going to be easy to extricate. Privileged whites on the left will never be subject to this, though. They have too much political power.

How do the military-industrial complex and market forces in general perpetuate these systems of injustice?

Very much so. Just look at the incarceration rates now. They're driven by privatized prison systems. The development of the surveillance technology like drones is also highly commercialized by now. The state commercializes a lot of this activity, like the military does. I'm sure there were more contractors in Iraq than soldiers.

Is there any way that political economic reform - like, say, overturning Citizens United - might rein in these industrial complexes?

Well, I don't think Citizens United is likely to be overturned, and it is, of course, a rotten decision, but it does have some justifications. And there are some civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald who more or less supported it on free speech grounds. I don't agree with it, but I can see the argument.

On the other hand, things like detention without trial, well, that strikes right at the heart of Anglo American law dating back to the 13th century. That's the main part of the Charter of Liberties, the core of the Magna. Now that had a narrow scope; it was mostly limited to free men.

It's interesting to see the way in which due process is being reinterpreted by Obama's Justice Department in regards to the drone killings. Attorney General Eric Holder was asked why the administration was killing people without due process. Well, there was due process, he said, because they discuss it within the executive branch. King John in the 13th century would have loved that.

In two years, we're going to get to the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, and it'll be a funeral. Not just this, but every other aspect. Take rendition, for example. One of the provisions of Magna Carta is that you can't send someone across the seas for punishment. Much of the world participates in rendition now.

Is there potential for legal redress in cases like Hedges vs. Obama? How viable is that strategy?

Well, I was asked by Chris Hedges to participate and I'm one of the plaintiffs. I think it's a viable strategy. But NDAA is not the worst of it by far. Holder vs. Humanitarian Law is certainly worse. Legal strategies are certainly worth pursuing, and they can achieve results. Our system of law is flawed. But it's still a system of law. It's not Saudi Arabia.

There has been considerable outrage towards the Bradley Manning case - what do you make of the campaign to support him?

Bradley Manning is another case of radical violation of the Magna Carta. Here's a guy, an American citizen. He's been held in prison without trial for about a year and a half, a large part of it in solitary confinement, which is torture, and he's never going to get a civil trial. It'll be a military trial if he even gets one.

It's pretty remarkable to see that things like this are acceptable and not even worthy of comment. And Bradley Manning isn't even the worst case. Take, say, the first Guantanamo prisoner who went to what's called "trial" under Obama. Omar Khadr, his name is. Take a look at his history. He's a 15-year-old boy in his village in Afghanistan. Soldiers invade the village, so he shoots at them, trying to defend it. That makes him a terrorist. So he was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, which is worse than Guantanamo. There's no Red Cross, no supervision, no nothing. He was there for a couple of years, and then sent to Guantanamo for another couple of years. Finally there came a chance to have a hearing before a military tribunal. This is mostly under Obama, for the record. His lawyers were told, You have two choices: You can plead guilty and you get another eight years in Guantanamo. Or you can plead innocent, in which case, you're here forever. So those are the choices his lawyers were given, practically in those words. So they told him to plead guilty. He's actually a Canadian citizen, and though they could have gotten him out anytime they wanted, Canada finally had the courage to step on the master's toes and asked for him to be released, though he remains imprisoned.

The point of this is that we accept it. There's virtually no protest over the fact that a 15-year-old child is treated this way.

Is it possible that we might see a revival of the global justice movement of the 1980s to launch large-scale movements against these practices and policies?

There is a global justice movement, and it does important work. But it doesn't conform to the prevailing doctrinal system of the powerful, so it doesn't make it into the public view. There was an interesting report published recently by the Open Society Institute, "Globalizing Torture." There were some very interesting aspects to that. It wasn't commented on much, but Latin American analyst Greg Grandin at New York University wrote a comment on it that was very important. He said that if you look at the map of countries that participated in the US torture practices - which remember, is a violation of Magna Carta - most of the world participated. Most of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. But there was one striking omission: Latin America. There wasn't a single Latin American country that participated. Which is striking because Latin America used to be under the thumb of the United States. They did what we wanted or else we would overthrow their governments. Furthermore, during that whole period, Latin America was one of the world centers of torture. But now they've liberated themselves enough, so they're the one area of the world that didn't participate. That helps explain the passionate hatred of Chavez and Morales and others who have taken Latin America out of the US's reach. Those are very important changes. It shows that things can be done.

In your time as an activist and writer, do you see states on a trajectory toward more openness, transparency and accountability, obviously with movements pushing that, or do you see them as more opaque, unaccountable and exclusive?

These things are always going on in parallel. In many respects it's more open and transparent. But there's a backlash to try to restore obedience, passivity and power structures. That struggle has gone on throughout history. Over hundreds of years, they do move toward openness, freedom and justice. Like Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. It's very slow, and it often bends backwards and that's true of basically any movement you can think of. Civil rights, women's rights, freedom of expression, etcetera. And we should remember that, in a lot of these movements, the United States has been a global leader. Freedom of speech is protected in the US beyond any country I know - certainly more than the European countries in all sorts of ways. And it's not in the Bill of Rights, incidentally. It comes mostly from Supreme Court Cases of the 1960s, some of them in the context of the civil rights movement. That's what large-scale popular movements do. They push things forward.

Do you see potential for a movement like that in response to recent policy and practice in regards to surveillance?

There should be. Nobody could have predicted what happened in the 60s. In the 50s, things were totally dead. I lived through it, so I know. There was very little activism going on. Then, all of a sudden, things started to happen. Unpredictably. A couple of black kids sat in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. It could have ended there. Cops could have come and thrown the kids in jail and it would have been over. But it grew into a huge popular movement. That could happen again.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-obamas-attack-civil-liberties-has-gone-way-beyond-imagination?paging=off

Beyond Obamacare: How a Single-Payer System Can Save US Health Care

As Minnesota’s physicians, health care leaders and legislators grapple with the complex changes brought by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), many are concerned that even after the law is fully implemented, hundreds of thousands of people will remain uninsured while health care costs continue to spiral.

What if there were a simple, streamlined solution that would guarantee health coverage for every Minnesotan while saving the state billions of dollars? A growing number of Minnesota physicians are endorsing what they consider to be such a solution: single-payer health care. Weary of having to comply with hundreds of different insurance plans’ administrative requirements while their patients are denied needed tests and treatments, these physicians are drawn to the simplicity, cost-effectiveness and truly universal coverage offered by a single-payer system.

Their views were supported by an independent analysis last year demonstrating that with a state-based single-payer system, every Minnesotan could have comprehensive coverage while the state would save billions annually.

A deeply flawed system

The desire for meaningful reform comes in the face of the U.S. health care system’s long-recognized dysfunction. Despite health care accounting for 18 percent of the nation’s economy—twice that of other wealthy democracies—48 million Americans lack health coverage. Another 29 million are underinsured, having poor coverage that exposes them to unaffordable out-of-pocket expenses. Health insurance premiums have doubled over the past decade, with the average annual cost for family coverage now exceeding $15,700; and health care costs now account for two-thirds of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States.

At the root of these problems is the fact that we have a fragmented, highly inefficient system. Employed Americans younger than 65 years of age have job- based insurance, if their employer chose to provide it; the elderly and disabled are covered through Medicare; the poor by Medicaid; military veterans through the Veterans Administration; and American Indians through the Indian Health Service. Persons who do not fall into any of those categories must try to purchase individual coverage in the private market, where it is often prohibitively expensive or unobtainable if they have a pre-existing health condition.

Owing largely to this fragmentation and inefficiency, a staggering 31 percent of U.S. health care spending goes toward administrative costs, rather than care itself. Inefficiency exists at both the provider and payer level. To care for their patients and get paid for their work, physicians and hospitals must contend with the intricacies of numerous insurance plans—which tests and procedures they cover, which drugs are on their formularies, which providers are in their network. Meanwhile, private health insurance companies divert a considerable share of the premiums they collect toward advertising and marketing, sales teams, underwriters, lobbyists, executive salaries and shareholder profits. The top five private insurers in the United States paid out $12.2 billion in profits to investors in 2009, a year when nearly 3 million Americans lost their health coverage.

The ACA of 2010, known widely as Obamacare, is expected to extend coverage to 32 million more Americans But it accomplishes this goal primarily by expanding the current fragmented, inefficient system and maintaining the central role of the private insurance industry in providing coverage. As a result, the ACA is expected to do little to rein in health care spending. Furthermore, it will fall far short of achieving universal coverage, as tens of millions of Americans (including 262,000 Minnesotans) will remain uninsured after its full implementation.

The solution

The central feature of a single-payer health care system would be one health plan that covers all citizens, regardless of their employment status, age, income or health status. Having a public fund that pays for care would slash administrative inefficiencies and eliminate profit-taking by the private insurance industry.

Under a single-payer system, the way society pays for health care would change, but the market-based health care delivery system would remain. Physicians and hospitals would continue to compete with one another based on service, quality of care and reputation. The chief difference is that they would bill a single entity for their services, rather than numerous insurers.

Individuals would benefit immensely by having continuous coverage that is decoupled from their employment. This would alleviate “job lock,” in which people remain in undesirable employment situations in order to maintain coverage. In a single-payer system, individuals could choose to see any provider, in contrast to the current system in which choice is restricted to those who are in-network. Deductibles and copays would be minimal or eliminated, removing cost as a barrier to obtaining needed care.

A single-payer system would be funded through savings on administrative costs, along with modest taxes that would replace the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses currently paid by individuals and businesses. The cost savings to individuals, businesses and government would be considerable. The nonpartisan U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that single- payer health care would save the United States nearly $400 billion per year, enough to cover all of the uninsured.

Physician support for a simplified, universal health care system is robust and growing. A 2008 survey published in Annals of Internal Medicine found that 59 percent of physicians supported a national health insurance system—up from 49 percent in 2002. Physicians for a National Health Program, a national organization advocating for single-payer reform, reports a membership of 18,000. In Minnesota, single payer has been formally endorsed by nearly 800 physicians, other providers and medical students.

The Minnesota model

Recognizing the implausibility of achieving single-payer reform at the national level in the current political climate, many single-payer advocates have turned their attention to state-level reform. The ACA provides for “state innovation waivers” to be granted beginning in 2017, allowing states to implement creative plans they believe would work best for them. With this in mind, organized single-payer movements have taken root in states as varied as Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, California, Oregon and Vermont. Vermont’s governor and Legislature passed a law in 2011 setting the path for the state to move toward single payer.

In Minnesota, two advocacy organizations—Health Care for All Minnesota and the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program—are garnering public support for a single-payer system. Gov. Mark Dayton has expressed support for single payer, and Sen. John Marty (DFL-Roseville) has authored legislation to establish such a system in Minnesota. Known as the Minnesota Health Plan, it would replace the current inefficient patchwork of private and public health plans with a single statewide fund that would cover the health needs of all Minnesotans—inpatient and outpatient services, preventive care, prescription drugs, medical equipment and mental health and dental care. A 2012 study by the Lewin Group confirmed the feasibility of single payer in Minnesota. It concluded that adoption of a single-payer system would provide coverage to every Minnesotan, including the 262,000 left uncovered by the ACA, while saving the state $4 billion in the first year alone. The average Minnesota family would save $1,362 annually in health costs, while the average Minnesota employer that currently provides insurance would realize savings of $1,214 per employee per year. The analysis showed these savings came primarily from administrative simplification; provider compensation remained unchanged.

Conclusion

With nearly 50 million uninsured people in the United States and skyrocketing health costs, the need for profound reform of our health system could not be more clear. The ACA is a start, but it will fall far short of achieving universal coverage, and it allows unsustainable spending growth to continue. Single-payer health care would eliminate administrative waste and inefficiency, thereby creating an opportunity to achieve truly universal, cost-effective health care.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/24-0

Gay Parents as Good as Straight Ones

MED's Benjamin Siegel says that according to three decades of research, kids of gay parents are doing just fine. Photo by Melinda Green

When the Supreme Court took up the issue of gay marriage last month, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that experts debate whether same-sex parents are bad for children.

“There’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences are of raising a child in a…single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not,” Scalia declared.

Benjamin Siegel says Scalia’s contention is—not to get too technical—baloney.

Siegel, a School of Medicine professor of pediatrics, coauthored a report, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics the week before the court case, arguing that three decades of research concur that kids of gay parents are doing just fine.

“Many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents,” Siegel writes with coauthor Ellen Perrin, a Tufts University professor of pediatrics and director of developmental and behavioral pediatrics.

In an interview with BU Today, Siegel acknowledges the limits of all this research: none of the studies has been a randomized, controlled trial—the Holy Grail of scientific investigation—and all studies of gay parenting are necessarily small, since there aren’t many gay parents. The report cites estimates that gay couples and single parents are raising almost two million American children.

Those caveats notwithstanding, “the preponderance of evidence” says Scalia’s fears are groundless, Siegel says. Does he expect the report to influence either the high court or state legislatures debating gay marriage and adoption? “That’s my hope,” he says, “and I must say, it’s not a political hope. It’s a scientific hope.…That it will put an end to questioning that people who are homosexual cannot raise children or be foster or adoptive parents.”

Siegel says in the Washington Post, one of several major media that picked up his report, that “we’re never going to get the perfect science, but what you have right now is good-enough science. The data we have right now are good enough to know what’s good for kids.”

The best study so far, Siegel tells BU Today, is the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, begun in 1986. The study has followed 154 lesbian mothers and recently checked in on 78 adolescent children, comparing the mothers’ and kids’ self-reported status against national standardized samples.

The lesbian mothers’ reports of their children “indicated that they had high levels of social, school/academic, and total competence and fewer social problems, rule-breaking, and aggressive and externalizing behavior compared with their age-matched counterparts,” Siegel and Perrin write. If you might expect parents to say that, consider their kids’ testimony: “The self-reported quality of life of the adolescents in this sample was similar to that reported by a comparable sample of adolescents with heterosexual parents.”

Siegel and Perrin’s report also cites three studies done in the United States and Europe—two involving lesbian mothers and the third one involving men and women whose adult children reported they’d had a parent involved in a same-sex relationship. Those studies similarly found no difference in outcomes for the children as compared with children of heterosexual parents.

A dissenting Australian study, Siegel and Perrin write, interviewed teachers of 58 children who’d been raised variously by married heterosexuals, unmarried heterosexuals living together, and gay parents living together. Even that study found mixed results (the children of gay parents did more poorly in language and math, but better in social studies and attitudes toward learning, for example). Moreover, most children in the study wound up with gay parents because their straight birth parents had divorced, “potentially adding to the children’s stress,” Siegel and Perrin write. And the Australian researchers suggested the gay couples’ children “were severely stigmatized in their schools and communities,” adding stress.

Siegel cites another antigay parenting study by a University of Texas researcher that has also been criticized for its methodology. The researcher compared children in happy heterosexual marriages with children whose parents divorced after a gay affair. The researcher has admitted that his scientific work and Catholic faith are inseparable; Catholic teaching denounces homosexual acts as sinful.

A university investigation cleared the researcher of scientific misconduct while sidestepping the question of flawed methods, leaving it “to debates that are currently under way in the academy.”

http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/gay-parents-as-good-as-straight-ones/

Boy Scouts Proposal: Let in Gay Youth, Keep Out Gay Adults

The Boy Scouts of America on Friday proposed lifting a ban on gay scouts but maintaining a prohibition on gay adults from leading troops, a compromise that attempts to end a fight that has split the century-old American institution into bitter factions.

Reaction from scouting supporters ranged from outrage to limited approval. The biggest organization in scouts, the Mormon Church, said it was studying the proposal, leaving uncertain the outcome of a May vote by scout leaders that will set policy. Gay rights groups said continuing to bar gay adults was unacceptable, but they welcomed the change for youths.

"The general feeling is that this is a bad move," which could precipitate a major crisis, A.J. Smith, president of the Association of Baptists for Scouting, wrote in a website post, attempting to summarize Baptists' views. "This is about a concerted effort to bring down a cultural icon. We must brace ourselves for the long haul on this one."

The scouts' decision is a focal point of a heated gay rights debate in the United States, where polls show public opinion is fast moving toward greater acceptance and a core of social conservatives stridently oppose such change.

In the coming months, the Supreme Court will rule on whether to strike down parts of a federal law that defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman. In 2011, the military repealed a ban on openly gay soldiers.

The Boy Scouts proposal would create a situation where a gay youth could become a scout and then be forced to resign when he becomes an adult.

Scout leaders in 2000 won a Supreme Court battle over the right to exclude gays. There are more than 2.6 million youth scouts and 1 million adults, with faith-based groups sponsoring 70 percent of scout units.

If the resolution is approved, "no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone," Deron Smith, the organization's spokesman, told Reuters.

But the policy is not changed for adults, the group said, and an internal document obtained by Reuters says that when youth members become adults, they "must meet the requirements of our adult standards" to remain in the group.

LONG STUDY BEFORE COMPROMISE

Smith said a parents in three of four U.S. regions opposed the current membership policy.

A report on the matter found religious groups linked to the Scouts were concerned with homosexual adult leaders, not with youth, and concluded "a change in the membership policy specific to youth only would be consistent with the religious beliefs of the BSA's major chartered organizations."

AT&T Chief Executive and Chairman Randall Stephenson, a Boy Scouts board member who had called for allowing gays scouts and a key corporate advocate on the issue, endorsed the new policy on youths but did not comment on banning gay adults.

"I fully support the BSA Executive Council's resolution to ensure all youth have the opportunity to participate in scouting and benefit from the life-long leadership skills scouting helps develop," he said in a statement.

Gay rights groups were quick to say the decision was not far-reaching enough.

"By refusing to consider an end to its ban on gay and lesbian parents, the Boy Scouts have missed an opportunity to exercise leadership and usher the organization back to relevancy," said Rich Ferraro, a spokesperson for GLAAD, which promotes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon church, which has more than 430,000 youths in scouts, "will take the time needed to fully review the language and study the implications of this new proposal," spokesman Michael Purdy said.

The Mormon church has consistently opposed gay marriage, and was a primary promoter of California's 2008 ban, known as Proposition 8. But recently it has emphasized respecting gay church members and declared that homosexuality is not a choice, reflecting changing attitudes among members.

"This was an exceptionally difficult decision as a business," said Patrick Boyle, whose 1994 book "Scout's Honor" examined sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America.

"They were stuck in a very bad spot with their constituents divided - constituents being the parents, and also the churches and the businesses that support the scouts."

The road to a decision has been long. In July 2012, the group's board voted to uphold the gay ban. Six months later, group leaders said they were mulling over whether to remove the national restriction, leaving local branches to decide whether to admit gays and lesbians. A final vote, expected in February, was delayed following a request from a coalition of 33 faith-based councils that represent about one-fifth of all youth members in the Boy Scouts.

Boyle notes that this reversal "shows how the gay rights movement has caught fire in the past dozen years."

Chuck Small, a BSA adult leader and the parent of 10- and 12-year-old scouts in South Carolina, welcomed the proposal.

"It's a hard and divisive issue, but what it comes down to is that we learn more from people who are different from us than people who are like us," Small said.

"I think it's a healthy thing, and I hope my boys are up to the challenge to accept people for what they do, rather than what they believe or how they're made up.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/19/us-usa-boyscouts-ban-idUSBRE93I0OY20130419?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

For-Profit Prisons Admit Lying to Get Taxpayer Money

Guantanamo Hunger Strike Grows as Military Locks Out Press

In the midst of an ongoing hunger strike, the military is denying reporters access to the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

The military is telling reporters it will be over a month before there’s even a possibility of a tour of the detention facilities that house most of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners. A military spokeswoman based in Guantanamo told HuffPost on Friday that there would be no opportunity for press to access any of the prison facilities until May 6 at the earliest. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage had been trying to fly down for a visit next week, but told HuffPost that he was informed Friday afternoon the trip wasn’t happening.

Reporters will be flying to Guantanamo later this month to witness pre-trial hearings in the military commission proceedings against the accused bomber of the U.S.S. Cole and the five men charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.

Because of a rule created by the military last year, reporters aren't able to see the prisons during their visits. Officially, the military says tours aren’t possible while military commissions are underway because there aren’t enough guards to both run commissions and give reporters a tour of the facilities. Reporters say, and military officials will concede, that the rule was created after a February 2012 Fox News report focused on a $750,000 soccer field built for the more cooperative detainees. That report came out of a tour conducted while reporters were at the base for a commission hearing, and tours during commissions came to an end from that point forward.

The last reporter to visit one of the facilities was Carol Rosenberg, the Miami Herald reporter who has been covering Guantanamo for over a decade. A reporter for Business Insider also visited the prison facility earlier in March but didn’t report on the hunger strike until weeks later, when he published a story saying detainees were treated “absurdly well.” A Reuters reporter who took photos of one of the facilities last month was told that taking photos of written messages detainees had hung over a fence facing a door to their cell block was "off limits."

As of Friday, the military acknowledged that 41 prisoners are on hunger strikes, meaning they have missed at least nine consecutive meals.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/guantanamo-hunger-strike_n_3022836.html

Bill to Legalize Marijuana Introduced in Alabama

Many traditionally write off the Southern United States as an area dead to cannabis law reform, but one Representative is behind a new effort that can change all of that.

This week, Rep. Patricia Todd (D-Birmingham) has introduced House Bill 550, the Alabama Cannabis and Hemp Reform Act of 2013. This measure would legalize the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana and the cultivation of up to 12 mature marijuana plants by those over the age of 21. It would also authorize the Department of Revenue to establish marijuana retail outlets. You can read the full text of the measure here.

As many of you have seen, yesterday, Pew Research released new polling data that revealed, for the first time in data from a US based polling firm, that Americans support legalizing marijuana by over 50%. The survey found that 52% support legalization and only 45% were opposed. This is no longer just an issue relegated to states such as those on the West Coast and Colorado, traditionally considered bastions of marijuana law reform, this support is now nationwide.

As it very well should be, marijuana prohibition is a failed policy that squanders hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year, inversely affects society’s underprivileged, violates civil liberties, and fuels a violent, criminal black market responsible for countless deaths on our border as well as our local communities.

If states such as the traditionally conservative Alabama are beginning the discussion around alternatives to our failed prohibition of marijuana, the collapse of the drug war machine and its war on a green plant cannot be too far behind.

ALABAMA: If you live in Alabama click here to easily write your Representative and urge him or her to support this legislation!

http://blog.norml.org/2013/04/05/bill-to-legalize-and-regulate-marijuana-introduced-in-alabama/

Video of Exxon Pipeline Break in Arkansas

Why Conservatives Hate College

The right's decades-long war on academia and "liberal professors" is about defining an elite "populists" can oppose

If you want to understand the origins of the 21st century campaign against the liberal professoriate, you have to understand why conservatives like William Buckley were engaged in a similar campaign in their day. Some of the anger that National Review authors directed at left-leaning academics reflected the same impulses and strategic calculations that sustained McCarthyism: the sense that the nation was under threat during the Cold War; the view that the ranks of the American left were filled with communists or former communists who were either outright traitors or simply not to be trusted, especially with the impressionable minds of youth; and the awareness that even if there was a meaningful difference between communists and liberals, the distinction could be blurred to good political effect. Buckley, after all, was one of McCarthy’s most vigorous defenders, coauthoring in 1954 (with Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law) “McCarthy and His Enemies,” which a reviewer for the New York Times appropriately described as “the most extraordinary book yet to come forth in the harsh bibliography … of ‘McCarthyism,’” given its point-by-point defense of some of McCarthy’s most outlandish claims. However, most of the criticisms of academia that appeared in National Review did not allege subversion by professors per se, and this was particularly the case from the 1960s onward. What lay behind the alternative lines of critique that Buckley and his collaborators pursued?

First, as someone intensely committed to invigorating the conservative movement, Buckley took seriously the notion that he had to engage the American left in a war of ideas. Intellectuals, he believed, play vital roles in politics by articulating conceptions of “the good” and theories of the world that may filter down to average people and shape their political predilections, through their direct educative functions, and as advisors who sometimes have the ears of policy makers and politicians. As Kirk put it in 1962 in a regular column he wrote called “From the Academy”: “Today’s lectures in the classroom become tomorrow’s slogans in the street.” The American professoriate, Buckley and his colleagues felt, had in recent decades strongly backed the cause of liberalism not simply in terms of professors’ personal political commitments but also in their behavior in the public sphere. Given these beliefs, going after liberal academics was an entirely natural thing for them to do.

Indeed Buckley’s assumptions about the importance of the intelligentsia to the American left were not without some basis in fact. On the one hand, the 1950s and 1960s were decades of major expansion in the American college and university sector. Expansion of the nonacademic intellectual class was almost as large, fueled by the growth of government bureaucracies and the cultural consumption needs of an increasing number of educated, white-collar workers, which created new markets for journalists, writers and others. As creators and disseminators of ideas, intellectuals were playing a more significant role in American life than ever before.

On the other hand, many intellectuals at the time really were on the left and lent their services to liberal causes. To give one example, academics and intellectuals had been key supporters of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for the presidency in 1948. Academic Wallacites included Rexford Tugwell, the “brains trust” economist who had taken a position at the University of Chicago after a term serving as the appointed governor of Puerto Rico; Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley; and Harvard literature professor F.O. Matthiessen. Support for Wallace, it is true, was a minority position within academe, despite an article he wrote in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science making a case for his campaign. Lazarsfeld and Thielens’s survey data make this clear. More anecdotally, many influential professors came out against Wallace, including Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., charging that his calls for peace with the Soviets meant that he was doing their bidding. But these critiques, issued in conjunction with the work that scholars like Galbraith and Schlesinger were doing for the recently formed liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action, were as much about the need for unity among liberals as anything else: Academic critics of Wallace were every bit as enthusiastic as he was about continuing the program of New Deal liberalism and ensuring civil rights for blacks.

When civil rights issues gained even more prominence a few years later, academics and intellectuals once again stepped forward to act on behalf of liberal ideals. Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma,” written with the support of the Carnegie Foundation, had come out in 1944, helping to convince academics (as well as many others) who might have been on the fence that civil rights was an essential national goal. Later, academics like Horace Mann Bond, Kenneth Clark, John A. Davis, John Hope Franklin, Mabel Smythe and C. Vann Woodward were tapped by the NAACP to support its efforts in Brown v. Board of Education by writing briefs and providing expert testimony, including testimony about the psychological effects of segregation on black children. In the early 1960s, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a more radical organization, saw the value in recruiting both college students and scholars for their efforts. Historian Staughton Lynd, the son of sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd, became coordinator of SNCC’s “freedom schools,” working closely with Howard Zinn. And in 1965 professors such as Richard Hofstadter, Walter Johnson and C. Vann Woodward were among those who marched with Martin Luther King (whose activism was greatly influenced by his academic experiences as a graduate student at Boston University) to Montgomery. While these efforts placed academic activists on the right side of history, to conservatives who opposed the civil rights movement they represented an abomination. The fact is, as David A. Horowitz (the historian) concludes, there were a great many intellectuals in the postwar period throwing their weight behind progressive efforts at social change, a group whose collective ideological work was helping to sustain and deepen American liberalism and keep conservatism from gaining ground. There is nothing all that surprising about Buckley’s going after them: Nefarious elite conspiracies or not, when academics seek to make their mark in the political arena, either directly or indirectly, they can expect to be attacked by some of their opponents. Such is politics, although it is also inevitable that Buckley’s depictions of them would be overblown — partisan writers are not given to balance, nuance and restraint.

But what explains the tenor of the attacks, specifically the fact that they were couched in a language of anti-elitism? A second factor is the rhetorical function that opposition to liberal professors, cast as representatives of the knowledge elite, played for the emerging conservative movement.

Historians of conservatism have noted that a key condition for the movement’s getting off the ground was the formation of a collective identity capable of binding its various strands. In the post–World War II era, when the ideological foundations were being laid for later advances, different groups of conservatives could often be found at one another’s throats, with the biggest debates breaking out between traditionalists and libertarians. Histories commonly observe that National Review, through the efforts of Buckley and editor Frank Meyer, was instrumental in articulating a conception of conservatism capable of bridging some of these divides and enabling coalition building. The “fusionist” philosophy developed by the magazine focused on what all American conservatives ostensibly had in common, including patriotism, opposition to collectivism, and a strong belief in the principles of federalism and local self-determination, as well as recognition of the value of Western, Christian civilization and an objective moral order. All this is right: Had National Review with its fusionism not come along, the conservative movement would have been slower to coalesce.

But missing in these historical discussions is recognition of another point. The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has argued that while much of politics revolves around material concerns, American politicians and other political actors are constrained at every turn by culture, by a deep code at the heart of American political discourse that identifies certain themes, values and narratives as sacred and to be cherished, and others as profane and immoral. Drawing on contemporary and historical materials, Alexander argues that this code centers around democracy. Whether they are on the left or the right, American political figures must find a way to wrap their beliefs, claims and proposals around democratic ideals of freedom, self-governance and equality if they are to gain traction with voters. In fact, argues Alexander, in a book about the 2008 presidential race, a significant part of any political campaign involves the effort by politicians to paint themselves in democratic hues and depict their opponents as somehow undemocratic.

Cultural constraints of this sort posed a major challenge for the emerging conservative movement, particularly in a historical context where many Americans habitually associated democratic values with liberalism or at least with the center-left. How could a movement that explicitly sought to defend the rich and to preserve long-standing social hierarchies against the ideals of egalitarianism avoid the charge that it was undemocratic? Buckley and other conservative intellectuals did so by painting restrictions on capitalist activity and attempts at mandating progressive social change in other areas as violations of liberty: the liberty of property holders — a category with which many Americans could identify in the prosperous 1950s — to do as they wanted with their property, including profit from it, and the liberty of local communities to continue with their cherished traditions, not least their religious traditions. This way of framing things gained considerable rhetorical force when it was paired with populist themes. In a recent article, sociologist Robert Jansen attempted to define populism in a manner that is useful to scholars of both the left and the right and who study populism in the United States and abroad. According to Jansen’s definition, a style of political engagement can be considered populist if seeks to “mobilize … ordinarily marginalized social sectors into publicly visible and contentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people.” It is unclear whether post-war American conservatism meets Jansen’s first criterion, although the mobilization of evangelicals in the 1960s and beyond would seem to be an example of bringing a previously marginalized group into the political fold. But Buckley and his colleagues did speak frequently in a language that sung the praises of ordinary Americans. It was precisely ordinary Americans who, in their depiction, found their liberty most threatened by collectivism and who would rally under the banner of conservatism to restore their rights and re-create a just social order. Hand in hand with this idea was the identification of an enemy of the people said to be lording power over them, an enemy the people would work to vanquish. Left populism found its enemy in economic elites. As cold war hysteria cooled, conservatives increasingly found theirs in liberal intellectuals and their allies in government, the press and the judiciary said now not to be communists but to be leading the charge toward collectivism in other ways. Intellectual and cultural elites and their bankrupt ideas, claimed National Review authors, posed major threats to freedom.

Part of what is so remarkable about this is that elsewhere in National Review could be found articles that championed elitism, that sung the praises not just of the rich but of the conservative cultural elite. Buckley, like his wealthy oilman father, had been influenced by the writings of Albert Jay Nock, who described all those educated conservatives who defended individualism through the lonely night of New Deal statism as constituting a “remnant”; eventually they would be the ones to lead the country out of darkness. National Review was written for just this group, in a sophisticated and urbane style. In the end, though, that the magazine spoke out of both sides of its mouth on the populism question is perhaps not mysterious. The idea of a remnant might be useful for rallying a small and privileged cadre, but in its unadulterated form it could hardly provide the basis for a mass political movement. Populist elitist bashing could, and National Review gave voice to both rhetorics.

Savvy and strategic though Buckley and others in his circle were, it is doubtful that they consciously decided to target intellectuals in order to score populist points. After all, Buckley had started doing so during his days writing for the Yale Daily News, before he sensed the wind of national political change. More likely is that the tactic, which built on established anti-intellectual tropes and on conservative populist themes that were bubbling up elsewhere, emerged from what amounted to experimental efforts by those in the National Review network at finding a collective identity for conservatism that would gain traction. In other writing, Jansen has argued that populist mobilization should be viewed in terms of practices that political actors develop as they work through the practical problems and challenges that political life throws at them under particular social and historical conditions; these are practices that may not be carefully planned in advance by the social actors who enact them but that tend to be hammered out over time through experimentation and that may then become routinized if they prove successful. This is an apt way of thinking about the language used by Buckley and those around him. Going on about the depravity of the liberal elite worked in the sense that it seemed to resonate for many readers of the magazine and segments of the broader public and helped to position conservatism — despite its origins in the remnant — as a democratic alternative to the liberal status quo.

One aspect of this resonance demands particular attention. Amy Binder and Kate Wood’s research found that opposition to the liberal professoriate is a common thread that helps unite many conservative collegians. It is not clear that this is any more the case now than it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. National Review’s attacks on the professoriate may have rung especially true for college-educated conservatives at that time because they provided a language and a coherent narrative for understanding experiences they themselves could have had as students. During this buttoned-down period, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities were hardly preaching radicalism. But they may have been doing something that conservatives found every bit as insidious. Historian Andrew Jewett has argued that midcentury liberal social scientists and humanists, writing when overt partisanship in scholarship was very much frowned upon by the academic community, sometimes endeavored to “naturalize” their politics, smuggling their political commitments into their academic writing by arguing in one way or another that a left-leaning, pluralistic society and a left-leaning, pluralistic worldview were objectively good and healthy — as in the claims of Hofstadter, Adorno and others — and that deviations from these ideals represented forms of degeneracy or abnormality. This was not lost on smart conservative students who took social sciences and humanities courses only to find that on some occasions the material they were asked to read simply took for granted that their views were wrong, while implicitly characterizing them — and their families and friends — as immoral or psychologically flawed. “God and Man at Yale” was Buckley’s first sustained attempt at expressing the grievances of young conservatives who felt mistreated during their college days. National Review critiques extended this effort, and the same themes and concerns were important in the early days of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).

Buckley’s critiques of higher education, and those of his National Review colleagues, soon became staples of American conservative discourse. One way to think about this is with a concept developed by the historical sociologist Charles Tilly: “repertoires of contention.” In his book “Popular Contention in Great Britain” (1995), Tilly argued that between 1758 and 1834, the manner in which British citizens went about making claims on those who held power — claims for more rights, for higher wages — underwent a fundamental shift. In the 18th century, Tilly discovered, “vengeance against moral and political offenders occupied a prominent place in the contention of ordinary people,” while “local people and local issues, rather than nationally organized programs and parties, entered repeatedly into … collective confrontations.” By the early 19th century things were different. There was no less political agitation, but it now took a different form. More of it centered around pubs and coffeehouses, public meetings, rallies and marches. Political associations that could register citizen complaints and petition Parliament grew in size and influence. More claims were national in scope. More or less spontaneous and isolated attacks on employers thought guilty of worker mistreatment gave way to coordinated turnouts and strikes. Violence was not uncommon, but it did not accompany contentious politics as often as before.

According to Tilly, these were not disconnected historical facts but signaled important changes in citizens’ underlying “repertoires” for making claims: the routines, practices and habits they typically employed as they articulated their grievances and went about pursuing redress. What brought about the shift? Tilly’s basic answer is the rise of capitalism and the growing administrative capacity of the British state. As industry and Parliament loomed larger as centers of social power, citizens found that only through coordinated action could they make their demands heard. But repertoire change did not occur automatically in response to these pressures. As Tilly portrays it, in line with Jansen’s account of the emergence of populist practices, it was an instance of collective learning born of struggle and trial and error.

Buckley and those around him were important in shaping modern American conservatism’s repertoire of contention, including its collective identity, the way it saw itself as a movement. Through the influence of National Review, YAF and allied organizations, opposition to liberal academic elites became part of what it meant for a substantial number of conservatives to be conservative. Built into the conservative repertoire at a foundational moment, this theme would echo in conservative thought and politics for generations to come, though with continual adaptations.

In the late 1960s its salience only increased amid campus unrest. We should not underestimate how troubling conservatives found such unrest to be. Reagan liked to claim he would never have made the disturbances at Berkeley a campaign issue had he not frequently been asked his thoughts about them while on the campaign trail. This may or may not be true, but there is no question that most conservatives regarded the student protests with abhorrence, particularly as their intensity increased near the end of the decade. For example, in his history of YAF, Gregory Schneider notes that

growing radicalism on campus, such as the siege of Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin’s “Dow Days” riots during the spring of 1968, pointed to a need to resist student activism. A breakdown in authority and the fear of revolution gripped the air as classes resumed in the fall of 1968; the campus was more politicized than ever before, and a hardcore active Left was making inroads among formerly apathetic students disenchanted about the war, the draft and the growing oppressiveness of American society and government. For the next several years, YAF would turn to combat the Left on campus.

YAF antiradicalism was particularly strong in California, Schneider reports, given that it had Reagan’s backing and the fact that the New Left had been so active on campuses there. Standing up for law and order, conservative students in California wore buttons in support of S. I. Hayakawa, the “embattled” president of San Francisco State, and at least temporarily overcame their factional differences to denounce leftist students, their faculty supporters and liberal campus administrators who, in their view, had not been as courageous as Hayakawa in trying to stem the tide of dissent.

But it was not only conservative students who felt scandalized. So did a great many conservative professors, according to Ladd and Lipset’s data, who objected to both the goals of student protest and the protestors’ tactics of educational disruption. Some political and economic elites on the right were equally incensed, clearly. The Powell memo discussed earlier provides one indication of this; other evidence is not hard to come by. An article about the Olin Foundation by historian Jennifer de Forest, for instance, notes that the organization’s commitment to higher education reform grew out of the experiences of the 1960s. Founder John Olin, who had inherited his father’s munitions fortune,

matured into an activist philanthropist in 1969 in response to events at Cornell University, his alma mater, to which both he and his father gave generous donations. That year a group of black student protesters occupied the student union building. Pictures of the student leader holding a shotgun and wearing a bandolier filled with ammunition appeared on the front pages of newspapers nationwide. American conservatives were infuriated when Cornell’s president not only negotiated with the students but also absolved them of individual responsibility for damaged property. In reaction to these events, the 78-year-old Olin decided to focus his giving on promoting conservatism in American higher education. In this way he hoped to leverage his funds, as he put it, to check “the creeping stranglehold that socialism” had gained over America.

The 1960s were also a spur to the philanthropy of the Bradley Foundation. Michael Joyce, its entrepreneurial president during its most active years of giving — the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, after Rockwell International purchased the Allen-Bradley Company in Milwaukee, infusing the organization with cash — had been converted to the right after thinking about what he saw as the failure of 1960s-era social policies. That conservative students, academics, some elites and rank-and-file voters often blamed the left-leaning faculty for encouraging student radicalism — not a logically necessary move, given that, as Ladd and Lipset’s data also showed, a reasonably high percentage of liberal academics also disagreed with student protest tactics — testifies to the influence of National Review’s framing of the situation.

How does all this relate to the most recent period of conservative critique? In one sense, there is nothing more surprising about Horowitz or Pipes or any other conservative commentator going after liberal academics than there is about Buckley going after them. Academia is a strongly left-leaning occupational group, and its members are active politically. What is more, some number of social scientists and humanists today, freed from the constraints of their midcentury predecessors by scientific/intellectual movements that sprang up in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, explicitly bring their politics into their academic work and claim strong intellectual justification for doing so. At the same time, some faculty research, while not political in nature, draws factual conclusions with which conservatives disagree. In this context, it would be surprising sociologically if conservative commentators did not go after academics (which is not to condone conservatives’ behavior). Still, the intensity of recent attacks is noteworthy, as is their social organizational basis. How should we explain the drumbeat of criticism coming from the NAS, ACTA, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Center for the American University and so on?

Schrecker is not wrong to highlight the relevance of a greatly expanded infrastructure for conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. But there is a better way of explaining its role: the sociological approach to the study of organizations known as organizational ecology. Just as that approach can be used to make sense of higher education, so too has it been used to leverage an understanding of politics. For example, sociologists who study movements for social change have noted the common tendency for successful movements to transform themselves over time into nonprofit advocacy organizations, or what are sometimes called “social movement organizations” (SMOs). Scholars have used the organizational ecology framework to identify the social conditions that make it possible for SMOs to arise and acquire the resources needed to survive, and have considered such issues as how the appearance of multiple SMOs — sometimes competing with one another for supporters, financial resources and influence — can constrain the activity of any one of them, with implications for success and organizational longevity. The framework also provides a fruitful way of thinking about American conservatism.

The best way to understand the conservative movement as it took shape in the last third of the 20th century — and as it continues to exist today — is to see it as comprising a complex ecological field of political organizational activity consisting of the Republican Party at the state and national levels, politicians and political operatives, conservative donors and philanthropies, political action committees, lobbyists, conservative media organizations, religious organizations and educational institutions, and a wide variety of think tanks, advocacy groups, and voluntary associations. Different elements of the movement sometimes act in a coordinated fashion, but this is a contingent outcome that must be achieved, as there are a great many centers of activity, with different interests, commitments, ideologies and beliefs lying behind each.

There was indeed a growth of conservative war-of-ideas-type institutions during this period. But this was not simply because, in response to the Powell memo and to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, conservative elites worked to create new institutions of ideology production to better serve their cause. After all, while conservative think tanks and advocacy groups multiplied then, so too did liberal and nonideological ones (although not at the same rate as their conservative counterparts). Another important factor in their expansion, as political scientists Theda Skocpol and Paul Pierson have argued, was the dramatic growth of the American state, whose increasing size and power after World War II — a function of exigencies of governance as much as ideology — made it a more important stake than ever in political struggles, leading to a proliferation of all manner of organizations concerned to steer it in one way or another. This was a key structural change providing a historical backdrop to Powell’s call and to the rise of conservatism generally.

Specialized conservative advocacy organizations that took on the liberal professoriate arose as the conservative field became reconfigured in this context not because, at least in the cases I have examined, their founding was directed from above, but because the midlevel moral entrepreneurs behind them — each of whom connected in a deep personal way to the line of critique Buckley pioneered — sensed that they could carve out niches for themselves on the conservative landscape by becoming specialists in the rhetoric of professorial attack that had already become a well-established part of the conservative repertoire. They were able to get the funding and support and airtime that they needed to operate because a distinct subset of conservative philanthropic leaders, donors and media figures were as wedded to the identity Buckley had helped forge for the movement, and as keen to take on liberal professors, as they were. Strategy and interests no doubt mattered here, but so too, we may theorize, did beliefs, personal experiences (such as being a loyal Cornell alumnus), social relationships and moral commitments. An additional reason support may have been forthcoming from some, though not all, quarters is that the organizations these entrepreneurs started performed important latent functions for the conservative movement (i.e., functions that are sociologically identifiable but not generally obvious to the social actors involved). In conjunction with other conservative groups attacking the “liberal” judiciary and the press, they continued to shore up the movement’s populist credentials by identifying an elite to which conservatives could stand opposed — a task that grew in importance as populist elements within the Republican Party gained even more prominence. They continued to provide a vocabulary for conservative college students (and their parents) to express frustration with their higher education experiences. And they helped to call into question the credibility of academic knowledge, which made the growing number of conservative intellectuals in think tanks working on topics like taxes or energy policy or financial deregulation seem more reliable and trustworthy by comparison. Inasmuch as the conservative movement has been able to accommodate and support rhetorical efforts that have these latent effects, it can be considered not merely a field of action but also an emergent complex system — capable, on occasion, of functioning in a more or less spontaneous fashion to ensure its own survival and prosperity.

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/31/why_conservatives_hate_college/

Harvard-Educated Physician Kept off Mississippi Health Board, but Forced-Birther Nominated to Serve

The powerful Mississippi Board of Public Health has four vacancies to fill come the end of June. Two current members have been  renominated by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant for six-year terms and two new nominees will fill the slots of two departing members.

One of those nominees is Terri Herring, director of the Pro-Life America Network, an organization that has worked to shut down the state's only abortion clinic and get a "personhood" amendment passed by the voters that would declare human life begins when an egg is fertilized and thereby ban all abortion. Fifty-five percent of voters in conservative Mississippi shot down a personhood amendment on the ballot in 2011.

If confirmed, Herring, a college drop-out who has no medical education or training and has been an activist in the anti-abortion movement for 27 years, will replace Ellen Williams, a registered nurse with a doctorate in administration who is dean of the Division of Nursing at Northwest Mississippi Community College.

In a state with a black population of 37 percent, the 11-member health board has one African American member. It would have had two if Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves hadn't kept the nomination of OB/GYN Dr. Carl Reddix from reaching the Senate Health Committee for confirmation last April. Then-Gov. Haley Barbour, also a Republican, had appointed Reddix to fill an unexpected vacancy on the board in the summer of 2011. Reddix served in that post until Reeves's action got him removed 10 months later.

Reddix was ousted because he had agreed over a decade to provide emergency services to the state's only remaining abortion clinic, the Jackson Women's Health Organization. Reeves's spokewoman said at the time "he felt that [Reddix's] association with the abortion clinic was not appropriate in a role that would shape health policy for the state." Reeves said he wanted a qualified physician instead.

Reddix, born in the Mississippi coastal city of Biloxi 54 years ago, graduated from Tougaloo College, then earned degrees from Tufts University School of Medicine and Harvard University. He completed his residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Clearly short in the qualifications department. His role for the clinic was straightforward. He didn't ever provide an abortion, but he was ready to provide emergency help if something went medically wrong. He says he was called upon only a couple of times to do so in all the years he agreed to help if the need arose.

The real problem with Reddix was that he had "admitting privileges" at a local hospital. The legislature last year passed a law that requires abortion clinics to hire only those physicians with hospital admitting privileges, a medically unnecessary practice, as a means by which to close the state's last remaining abortion clinic. North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple just signed a similar law designed to close that state's last abortion clinic in Fargo. Read about Reddix's views below the fold.

 

In an interview with the Jackson Free Press last year after he was kicked off the board, Reddix answered several questions, including this one:

You said you understand the political realities; I wonder if you could flesh that out a little bit. What do you think that political reality looks like?

Well, I think the elected officials have to play to their base, whoever they think that is. And the question is whether our state leaders choose to be servants of the fringe or statesmen for us all. Clearly, we don't have very many statesmen. We've got some politicians, but our statesmen are limited, which has been true throughout governance and democracy. ...

All politicians have to listen to their base and make sure they get re-elected; ultimately, that's their central focus. But when you have major issues, as we do in our state, especially regarding health care and the needs of its citizens, I just believe that it's an easy place for people to hold off their political base and much easier to be statesmen, because you can't profess to be Christian and then not really care about the masses. I think it's a lot easier to hold those type views if you're talking about basic health care services. Unfortunately for me, this whole ruckus was over providing potentially necessary health care services to needy women. ...

We as physicians make recommendations for people to end pregnancies in general because of major anomalies with the developing fetus, especially those anomalies that are incompatible with life. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me to recommend or to force someone to carry a baby to term when that baby has anomalies and injuries--birth defects--that are incompatible with life.

It's never easy for women to undergo elective terminations; it's not easy when women have miscarriages. Both those things should be looked at from the same perspective, for outsiders, and especially for us men. It's a big deal for women. It's never callous, and it's never without lots of introspection. [...]

There are definitely some people unqualified to serve in public office in Mississippi. Dr. Carl Reddix isn't one of them.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/27/1197438/-Harvard-educated-physician-kept-off-Mississippi-health-board-but-forced-birther-nominated-to-serve