Plundered Latins fighting back

After 150 years of being subjected to American imperialism, gunboat diplomacy and exploitation, Latin American countries are rearing up to tell Yanqui to stay home.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spearheads that drive for independence, emboldening Latins to surge to the Left. He set the example by pronouncing Venezuela socialist.

Chavismo and populism forever! He called Bush 43 the devil (he was) and urged Americans to read social critic Noam Chomsky (they should).

Examples of the new Latin America defiance of Uncle Sam:

• President Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, nationalized the tin, gas and oil industries. He is trying to stem capitalist greed. He vows to close the “open veins of Latin America,” a reference to the title of a book by Eduardo Galeano.

• In Chile, President Bacheter waves the banner of socialism. She often reminds Chileans of the right-wing coup in 1973 that toppled Allende, a golpe engineered by the United States.

• In Paraguay, Lugo won the presidency, exorcising the ghost of Stroessner and his 35-year dictatorship. A former Catholic bishop, Lugo is now the bishop of the poor and the downtrodden.

• In Brazil, President da Silva is a former metalworker who battles for the working class.

• In Ecuador, President Correa has kicked the Yanks off their air base at Manta.

• In Salvador, Funes is the country’s first leftist president.

• In Nicaragua, the president is Ortega of Sandinista fame.

• In Honduras, the army overthrew leftist President Zelaya, particularly angering Argentinians, Brazilians and Chileans with their bitter memories of human rights abuses by the military in 1960 and 1970.

• In Cuba, de facto president Fidel Castro got an abrazo from the Organization of American States. The OAS voted to lift the ban on Cuban membership. (Cuba was expelled in 1962 because its Marx-Leninism was deemed incompatible.)

The U.N. General Assembly passed resolution after resolution for 17 years condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, rightly called the embargo “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth.”

Despite the lingering dumb policy, most Latin American nations are now declaring for people over profits, for equality over gross injustice.

But the United States strenuously objects. It hates socialism and deplores the unhinging of its hegemony. As Daphne Eviatar writes in The Nation: it is “as if representing the interests of the majority were inherently deserving of scorn.”

America historically has supported right-wing Latin dictators. It gave the despicable Pinochet regime in Chile $290 million in 1976. It endorsed Cuban dictator Batista who got enormously rich from the Mafioso in Havana.

Washington has railed at Cuba for 60 years, always “winning” the argument by uttering the dread word communism. No democrat defends dictatorship. But democratic socialism is a worthy goal.

President Teddy Roosevelt boasted that he had seized the canal from Panama. President Taft proclaimed: “The whole hemisphere will be ours soon…by virtue of our superiority of race and morality.”

Does history record a more arrogant statement to support colonialism and imperialism?

In 1935 after a 33-year career in the Marines, Gen. Smedley Butler admitted the plunder of Latin America:

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business and Wall Street…I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba profitable for National City Bank…I helped save the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras safe for American fruit companies.”

Or, as Galeano puts it: “the Imperium sends forth its Marines to save its monopolists’ dollars.” No wonder the United States has been the biggest enemy of Latin America.

It stole half of Mexico under the banner of manifest destiny. It seized Cuba, Puerto Rico Rico and the Philippines, making them colonies while building an empire. President McKinley hailed the seizure as ushering in “civilization and humanity.”

The United States role in Cuba is shameless. The Platt Amendment permitted U.S. intervention. It sealed the theft of Guantánmo.

Galeano writes passionately in “Veins” of how the great wealth of Latin nations has been appropriated by capitalist imperialists: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, cotton and bananas.

United Fruit, an American corporation now called Chiquita, ravaged Central and South America. Emily Biuso in The Nation recently tells how: strong arming, destroying natural habitat to build banana plantations, enslaving the local people in low-wage and suppressing labor movements.

“Any attempt by the workers to assert their rights was met with harsh consequences,” Galeano writes.

But Latin America, now blessedly under new management, will no longer tolerate gringo dominance.

Gays still face blatant bias

It is both stunning and enraging that the last two Democratic presidents have promised great changes but delivered the same centrist pablum on many important issues. The villains: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Obama, like Clinton, promised while campaigning to abolish the ignominious anti-gay military policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. In office Clinton and Obama reneged. Now Obama defends indefensible bigotry and discrimination.

He calls the policy “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.” He buys the military argument that gays undermine morale and esprit de corps.

Under the anti-gay policy the Pentagon has discharged 12,000 soldiers. About 800 of those let go were especially valuable as specialists in Arabic.

The policy wastes talent. It also wastes money training people to be fired.

The Supreme Court is also obtuse, refusing to review a case of discrimination against Army Capt. Jim Pietrangelo. Pietrangelo, fired under the policy, served six years in the Army and fought in Iraq.

“This decision is an absolute travesty of justice,” Pietrangelo pointed out. “The justices should be ashamed of themselves. It is nothing short of rubber-stamping legalized discrimination.”

If the military is so worried about sexuality it should focus on the shocking number of rapes women soldiers suffer from men soldiers.

Boobus Americanus

We hear much blather from politicians about the “wisdom” of the people. The truth is otherwise. The people are so often wooden-headed.

Case in point: the voters of California enacted an absurd law that someone goes to jail for life after committing a third felony, even if that “third strike” is as harmless as stealing a few videos. Murderers, on the other hand, are often paroled after 10 to 15 years in jail.

Or take gay marriage. The people of California voted it down. The votes was un-Christian, opposing love and happiness.

The California Supreme Court, after first ruling that gay marriage was constitutional, reversed itself. It ruled 6-1 to sustain the “wisdom” of the people.

Judge Carlos Moreno had it right in dissent. He wrote that the majority “places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority.”

There you have it: that dread tyranny of the majority. In a democracy the people rule. The people, however, are often asses.

As Moreno noted in his dissent: Proposition 8 requiring “discrimination against a minority group…strikes at the core of the promise of equality” in the state Constitution.

Or look at referendums in Colorado and Maine where the voters approved anti-gay and lesbian laws.

Nevertheless, the worldwide trend is to approve gay marriage. Norway is the most recent nation to become enlightened on the issue. But tradition-bound America, arguing against a fundamental right, might take 50 years to come to its senses.

A recent poll by the New York Times and CBS shows just 42 percent of Americans approving same-sex marriage. But it is never a question of what polls show. The point is what is right. Gay marriage is right.

Katha Pollitt in a Nation article wrote: “All this fussing about stabilty and children are smokescreens for deep emotional, irrational aversion to homosexuality.” She is so right.

Julian Bond, distinguished battler for black rights for decades, was angered by the California vote. He wrote:
“The state that proudly declares ‘the future starts here’ took a backward step while reinforcing the truism that minority rights should never be subject to a popular right…What is at issue is the arbitrary denial of a civil right to some people.”

Obama turncoatism

On this issue too Obama is crushingly disappointing. He strongly favored gay marriage while campaigning. Yet now his administration files a brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. The brief falls back on the hoary argument that hetrosexual marriage is the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.”

Gays are understandably outraged at Obama turncoatism. As Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, puts it: “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings…when we read an argument…implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Obama threw a tiny bone to gays, extending benefits to same-sex partners in federal jobs. But: he left out the more important health and retirement benefits. Obama, the Man of Hope, is as retrograde on gayism as G.W. Bush.

Lotteries, torture and partisan press

States once thought it sinful to gamble even in such innocuous ways as playing the numbers. But they overcame such scruples when they realized that gambling was a painless way to fill state coffers.

Here in the Silver State many Nevadans who crave the numbers game have to cross the California border to satisfy their urges. Lotteries are forbidden in Nevada. The casino lobby won’t allow them.

Oh, we hear in the Legislature that lotteries are regressive, preying on the poor. Or, opponents argue that owners of small gambling halls would face ruinous competition. Or, we hear wails that lotteries would have an unfair advantage over casinos because they can operate with fewer employees.

But those are all smokescreens. The truth is that not one Nevada lawmaker has the guts to take on Big Gambling. It, like mining, corporations and businesses, get away with tax murder. They are the third rail of Nevada politics: untouchable.

Torture-loving judge
Don Gladstone was the last “hanging judge” in Nevada, disgracing the Sparks Municipal Court until ousted by voters in 1995.

Today another judge with roots in Nevada disgraces the judiciary: Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (The 9th, with headquarters in San Francisco, hears appeals of federal cases originating in Nevada.)

Unfortunately, voters cannot remove Bybee. He has a lifetime appointment. He can be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate but that is quite unlikely.

Bybee, chief White House legal counsel in 2002, signed memoranda approving waterboarding, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and box-confinement amid bugs.

Steve Sebelius, editor of CityLife in Las Vegas, rightly castigates Bybee for abandoning the rule of law, disregarding international treaties and disavowing his own humanity.

Bybee’s memo said: “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious personal injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death.”

Hardly a glowing recommendation for the Boyd law school in Las Vegas where Bybee taught before consorting with the Bush criminals.

Partisan media
We have a partisan media in America today. The shouters and ranters of the hard-right flood the airways with their bilge, drowning out the softer and saner voices of liberalism.

But a partisan press is hardly a new thing in America. Almost from the beginning of the republic political discourse was full of lies, hyperbole and absurdities. The Partisan Press era was woefully irresponsible.

The Jeffersonian republican press (pro-French and antimonarchial) declared that the honorable George Washington had debauched the nation, that he was evil, a great deceiver, the source of all the nation’s woes.

When Jefferson ran for president in 1800 the anti-republican Federalists said he would close all the churches, burn all the Bibles, abolish marriage, toss women into brothels and encourage murder, rape, adultery and incest.

Obviously gross falsities. Yet we find similar absurdities being mouthed today by right-wing madmen. They denounce President Obama as a socialist, a communist who will fly the hammer and sickle over the White House.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Yahoo from Kentucky, calls Obama “a threat to this country.” And the Rabid Right declares that Obama should rename the Democratic Party the “Democrat Socialist Party.”(Note the sneer. The proper adjective is Democratic.)

Great ignorant hope
The Republican Party has been reduced to irrelevancy. Sarah Palin, the Great Ignorant Hope from Alaska, flamed out. Now the GOP mantle has fallen on Rush Limbaugh. God save the mark!

Limbaugh enthralls right-wingers with his medieval mind, shouting hoary shibboleths. Even Michael Steele, reactionary chairman of the GOP national committee, calls Limbaugh’s broadcasts incendiary and ugly.

Still, torturemeister Dick Cheney embraces Limbaugh and repudiates Colin Powell, the one class guy in the Bush administration.

Cheney, like the rest of the GOP, opposes everything good for Americans like universal national health and card-signing unionism. He favors everything bad for Americans like deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

Editor Sebelius rightly deplores the GOP hatred of unions: “Republicans hate anything that puts power in the hands of individuals over the corporation, the poor over the wealthy.”

Lapsed Unitarian

After Phil Altick, University of Nevada, Reno, physics professor, died several months ago, Professor Frank Tobin of the foreign language department, remarked at the memorial service that Altick was a lapsed Unitarian.

Funny line. But the best thing Altick said was expressed after he came back from a semester teaching abroad. He was asked what he thought about teaching in London.

“They know more than we do,” Altick replied.

“About physics?”

“No, about everything.”

Sotomayor’s ‘crime’: mild liberalism

Benighted Republican senators, angry because President Obama did not pick a Genghis Khan or an Attila the Hun for the Supreme Court, have trained their ire on poor Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Her crime? A smattering of liberalism in her decisions on the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Never mind that the Supreme Court is already packed with reactionaries, constantly voting 5-4, 5-4, 5-4, to strike down anything decent and humane and to uphold anything indecent and inhumane.

Jeffrey Toobin, in a recent New Yorker article, limned the Five Horsemen of Reaction led by Chief Justice Roberts. It sides “with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislature and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” It defers “to the existing power relationships in society.”

Justice Souter nailed Roberts when dissenting from an opinion the chief justice wrote. Souter said Roberts’ opinion reminded him of Anatole France’s observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”

Obama as an Illinois senator voted against confirmation of Roberts, correctly declaring that Roberts uses “his formidible skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook,” Obama said. “It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”

Which is where Judge Sotomayor is perfect. She understands the struggles of so many Americans. Roberts in his ivory tower and smug comfort will never understand that reality.

Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York, to Puerto Rican parents. She was brought up in a housing project, providing the empathy that Obama seeks.

However, her understanding of the Little People gets her into trouble with GOP troglodytes. In a 2001 speech, Sotomayor said: “a wise Latina with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She is being reviled as racist for speaking the truth. Roberts, in contrast, epitomizes nearly all lawyers and judges: howling conservatives.

Supreme Court history is full of reactionary decisions favoring business and property against the needs of people and the humanism of civilized nations. It has so often blinked at reality and found its retrograde politics in the Constitution.

Just a few examples among so many: 1) Dred Scott [1857] held that slaves were property, inferior beings and “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” 2) In Adkins [1923] the court struck down a Washington, D.C., minimum wage.

3) In Coppage v. Kansas [1915] the court called yellow-dog contracts--forced vows not to join a union--constitutional. The court gleefully noted that “some people have more property than others,” “the right of private property” was paramount and that “inequalities of fortune” are just.

4) In Hammer v. Dagenhart [1918] the court declared child labor constitutional. 5) In two years it struck down 10 major New Deal laws--judicial nullification without parallel in U.S. history. 6) In Bush v. Gore [2000] the court, in a partisan political decision that had nothing to do with the law. stopped the Florida recount to hand the presidency to G.W. Bush.

Sotomayor would bring much more to the court then mere knowledge of the underside of life. She is smart, compassionate and thoughtful.

Roberts, at 54 a young man as Supreme Court justices go, could plague the country for decades. But at least Sotomayor would inject the same compassion shown by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter in their heated dissents.

On the appeals bench, Sotomayor ruled for baseball players, not the owners. She ruled that homeless people must be paid the minimum wage. She held that an inmate could sue a corporation operating a halfway house for federal prisoners.

She ruled that a broker who held stocks because of misleading information could sue. She wrote that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot use cost-benefit calculations to preserve aquatic species.

She dissented when her appeals court upheld the legality of strip searches for girls at a juvenile detention center in Connecticut. She called it what it was: embarrassing and humilating.

Nevertheless, Sotomayor is hardly a flaming liberal. She was wrong to side with New Haven, Conn., when it rejected results of a firefighter promotion test because blacks and Latinos performed poorly. Her abortion position is unclear, having decided few pro-choice cases and all those on the fringes of Roe.

But no justice ever scores 100 percent. Sotomayor is a good choice to replace the retiring Souter.

Obama: fresh air but, but…

The change is wonderful: from the reactionaryism of G.W. Bush on everything to the progressivism of President Obama on many things.

He reversed Bush policies favoring corporations over people. He eliminated funding for the absurd Bush abstinence-only sex education. His Food and Drug Administration has overturned the right-wing stance under Bush, letting 17-year-olds use a contraceptive pill without a doctor’s prescription.

Obama’s White House released graphic torture memos written by Bush’s so-called Justice Department. His Labor Department will enforce regulations on worker safety, grossly neglected in the Bush administration. His Justice Department will enforce antimonopoly laws. Bushites never did.

Obama seeks to end the racial disparity in sentencing for crack (blacks) and cocaine (whites). His drug czar will ease the bogus war by stressing treatment rather than prison. Obama scrapped Bush plans to open the coasts to oil and gas drilling. He is halting the Bush rules easing power plant pollution.

He urges better car mileage and higher emissions standards, blocked by Bush pooh-poohing of global warming. He has overturned the Bush policy of more timber-cutting and ever more roads in national forests.

The Obama adminstration will no longer prosecute dispensers of medical marijuana, ending Bushite raids. Obama wants science to rule in medical matters, not ideology.

All of these Obama actions and plans are commendable. But Obama is a half-a-loaf specialist, a tergiversator. Instead of giant strides, he take baby steps.

Obama is not the “radical communist,” as the frenzied Right bleats. Nor is he the “blatant socialist” as the less frenzied call him. Obama is a liberal-leaning centrist.

Obama wanted to shut the Guantânamo prison but discovered an old truism: presidents propose but Congress disposes. Nevertheless, Obama wants to keep the secret military jail at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And, to the outrage of civil libertarians, his administration will try alleged terrorists by a kangaroo court (military commission).

Obama proposed funding for stem cell research from embryos at fertility clinics only, gutlessly ruling out lab research. Obama lifts travel restrictions to Cuba. Good. But he does nothing about the shameful policies of embargo and nonrecognition.

He promised Planned Parenthood to sign an abortion rights bill but now puts such legislation on the back burner. He seeks to block a lawsuit on behalf of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outed by Bushies because her ambassador husband exposed a spurious reason for war in Iraq.

But the biggest disappointment is Obama’s foolish pursuit of losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush wars have become the Obama wars. A hundred surges in Afghanistan won’t subdue the Taliban, the warlords, al-Qaida and the poppy growers.

Pete Seeger sang: “We were neck deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on.” Obama is no fool. But he forgets the folly of Vietnam and the wisdom of Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Obama’s Pentagon lifted the ban on coverage of the war dead--but half-bakedly. He is letting families decide. As DeWayne Wickham, USA Today columnist, writes: “Our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars...News organizations shouldn’t let family wishes dictate how they cover war news.”

Obama listens to the military too much. He is back-pedaling on gays in the military. He resists court orders to release photos documenting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama circles himself with permanent war party advisers.

CIA drones pound Pakistan, Obama’s third war. To pursue that war he wants to build a superembassy in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, garanteeing a long-term commitment.

Obama insists in “moving forward” rather than having a Truth Commission investigate the abuses of the Bush-Cheney criminals. But revealing crimes of the past are essential cleansing.

Obama surrounds himself with Jewish lobbyists who will defend Israel à outrance. He runs scared of the gun lobby, refusing even to fight for a ban on assault weapons. He vowed to usher in a “new era of openness in our country.” But in office Obama continues the discredited state secrets policy of Bush.

Obama will keep polar bears off the endangered species list as Bush did despite the rapid melting of the Arctic Sea. He promised to reverse of the heinous Bush policy allowing mountain-top mining that dumps rock and dirt into streams. But now his Environmental Protection Agency says it’s OK.

On the hustings Obama offered withering criticism of signing statements by President Bush. In office Obama issues signing statements. He opposes gay marriage so he refuses to exert moral leadership against prejudice.

Obama, the Great Compromiser, tarnishes a promising presidency.

Progressives delude themselves

MADISON, Wis.--Panelists here at the recent conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Progressive magazine were overwheliming optimistic. They are doomed to overwhelming disillusionment.
These wonderful optimists talk about organizing, solidifying and exhorting. They extol the power of labor. They urge pressure on politicians. They demand speaking truth to power. They talk about the wave of the future.
Their hearts are in the right place but they refuse to face reality.

That reality was exemplified by the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s only daily newspaper. It did not print a line about the two-day convention attended by 500 delegates nationwide and celebrities like Robert Redford, Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan.
Reality. Progressives and leftists make up a miniscule part of the population, maybe 100,000 out of 310 million. Their agenda has so few adherents. Progressive magazine has a paltry 55,000 circulation.
Reality. The system will not allow profound changes. Corporations and lobbyists, with their money, rule America. They get what they want. The bulk of the people suck hind tit.
Reality. America does not have a democracy. Four Republican senators from Wyoming and Alaska have power far beyond the number of their constituency of 1 million.
Wyoming, with 500,000 people, has two senators. The District of Columbia, with a population 100,000 greater, has none. California has 36 million people but just two senators.

The Senate with its archiac rules is woefully undemocratic, requiring 60 votes to halt a filibuster. This means it can override the will of the majority on such progressive measures as universal health and card-signing unionism.
One mossback senator, the rebarbative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, can singlehandedly hold up funding for national parks for one year. And: that same one man amends a credit card reform bill to allow loaded weapons in national parks, a totally unrelated measure.
The antiquated Electoral College has given the presidency four times to the loser in the popular vote.
Reality. Americans are innoculated with capitalistic abundance. They love it. The schools, the media and society inculate the American Way.
Nevertheless, the conference was enlived by panelists like Joan Claybrook and Ron Hayes with stiff doses of radicalism.
Claybrook, Public Citizen head for 25 years, offered 12 sensible reforms for corporations, among them: chartering of corporations, ability to revoke those charters, overturning the egregious Supreme Court ruling in 1886 giving citizen rights to corporations, closing corporate tax loopholes, eliminating tax-free outsourcing, setting up a corporate investigating commission and establishing a corporate criminal court.
Hayes, advocate for worker construction safety, declared: “We must make corporate misdemeanors the felonies they should be when workers are killed on the job.”

Sheehan impressed. She denounced President Obama for his warmongering in office after sounding anti-war notes on the hustings.
One panel noted that the civilized countries of Europe have measures uncivilized America does not: universal health, family allowances, maternity leaves, sick pay, longer vacations and strong unions.
Naomi Klein, author of the leftist bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine,” called the two-party system the fraud it is.
She demanded a much-needed Truth Commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush thugs. She correctly denounced Obama for wanting to bury the past, to look forward instead of cementing the past in America’s “historic memory.” She rightly denounced capitalism but never said socialism is the solution.
A sports panel endorsed the “Beer and Circus” of college sports. The panelists embroidered that view by telling amusing stories. But never once did they point out that sports don’t belong in universities. Never once did they observe that sports has become the opiate of the masses.

The conference had its frustrations: microphone-hogging questioners who delivered five-minute speeches, panel moderators who yaked and yaked when the delegates wanted to hear the panelists, standing ovations, self-adulation, preaching to the choir and cheers for commonplace statements.
And, oy vey, the many panelists who simply could not utter simple sentences without that terrible speech mannerism “you know.”
Nevertheless, Progressive deserves accolades. For 100 years it has fought the power of greedy corporations and predatory banks, exposed the plight of workers, battled for the environment, opposed war and decried empire-building. The magazine has denounced racism, sexism and homophobia.
As the weekly Madison Cap Times put it: “It has cherished our civil liberties and defended them against the Joe McCarthys, the Richard Nixons and the Dick Cheneys who would eliminate them.”
But overall the conference lacked the radicalism of Marx. He wrote in the “Theses on Feuerbach” in 1888: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point…is to change it.”
Marx’s vision of change for justice will never be fulfilled in conservative America.

Souter: star amid dim constellation

Justice David Souter could probably walk into a popular Washington, D.C., restaurant and not be recognized by 49 out of 50 diners.

In this celebrity-conscious land, the Supreme Court justices rank well below Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and The Simpsons in public recognition. The Supreme Court itself is a virtually unknown body unless it hands down decisions stirring outrage on issues like abortion and flag-burning.

Souter will happily retire this summer, going counter to the dictum of Jefferson that few in power die and none resign.

Souter had no flash, no dash, no flamboyance. He was quiet and unassuming, But he was a sterling man and a fine justice. He was decent and humane, so unlike the Five Horsemen of Reaction who control the court today.

Souter refused to join the court politicians who turn their prejudices into legal principles. He refused to join them in ruling for corporations, property and business. He chose the side of the angels: people, consumers and justice.

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, has written supercilious stories declaring that Souter was a careful, “a low-impact justice.” Liptak compounded the insults by writing that Justice Scalia has a judicial philosophy while Souter has none, that Scalia is highly quotable while Souter is not.

Memo to Establishment journalist Liptak: 50 Scalias are not worth one Souter.

The Supreme Court has had 110 justices. None wrote as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes whose opinions are studded with aphorisms and wonderful philosophical asides. But most of the justices have been poor writers, including the outstanding Justice Brennan.

What counts is decisions, not how well justices write or how much they are quoted.

Perhaps Souter’s most memorable decision was Casey, reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion. He led the court in reversal of a black man’s conviction of killing a white woman because the jury was nearly all white. He cast the pivotal fifth vote to uphold affirmative action.

But it was in dissent that Souter stood out. When the court upheld the notorious three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, Souter dissented. He noted the absurdity of sending a man to jail for life for a third felony like stealing a golf bag.

He dissented when the court struck down the Violence Against Women Act, calling the ruling a woeful misreading of the Constitution. When the economic royalists killed the overtime pay provision of the Labor Standards Act, Souter dissented. He denounced the violation of civil liberties and equal protection.

When the court killed a provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Souter complained in dissent about the court’s “crabbed version” of the law. When the court upheld a law requiring the National Endowment of the Arts to take into account so-called decency, he rightly dissented.

He was dismayed when the court overturned an effort by schools in Louisville, Ky., to prevent resegregation. His dissent called the ruling profoundly unhistorical.

When the court ruled that public schools must be open to Bible study groups, Souter dissented because of the clear violation of the wall between church and state. When the Unholy Five smashed that wall by saying that the University of Virginia must subsidize an evangelical magazine, Souter dissented. He decried the violation of the First Amendment in approval of state funding for religion.

However, Souter was clearly wrong about one thing: cameras in the Supreme Court. He insisted that “the day you see a camera coming into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.”

The courtroom is a sacred place. But the “nine old men” adamantly refuse to enter the Digital Age. The Supreme Court is an appellate court. It studies the facts and decisions of lower courts.

Unlike jurors, the justices are not persuaded by emotions, by the tricks and pyrotechnics of trial lawyers. The Supreme Court deals with substantive constitutional issues. It would enlighten citizens to see and hear the oral arguments presenting the pros and cons of an issue, the fierce questioning by the justices.

Skelly Wright, the late, great appeals court judge, rightly argued that televising oral arguments would “be a matchless lesson in the meaning of our constitutional rights and principles.”

Justice is supposed to be blind--but not invisible.

Finally, a confession. I wrote after Souter’s appointment that nothing in his background indicated he would rise above mediocrity. So much for the omniscience of columnists!

Souter had a marvelous capacity for growth, a quality alien to the “brilliant” Scalia. Souter became a bright star among a dim constellation of reactionaries.

Cheers and jeers for Glick

Milton Glick has had an easy path to approval as president of the University of Nevada, Reno. His odious predecessor, John Lilley, may have been the worst president UNR ever had.

But Glick looks fine in his own right. Assessments of his nearly three-year stewardship are good. Typical comments:

“A decent, personable guy. A straight shooter. He has greatly improved faculty morale which sagged badly in the Lilley era”…“Self-deprecating. Hides little. Quick study who does not miss much.”

Joe Crowley, former UNR president, said Glick is doing an excellent job.

He has “deftly established himself as the most influential president in the system,” Crowley said. “Regents like him personally and admire him professionally…He is methodical, willing to listen, intent on staying open and in touch.”

Crowley said Glick is good in the Carson City corridors of power. “He understands the demands of politics and participates effectively in the political game,” Crowley concluded. “He represents the university so well in the political arena, meeting with key legislators regularly, knowing how to twist elbows and mold minds.”

But some are not so impressed.

One knowledgeable source says Glick is a politician who will not rock the boat. “He’s a straight talker when it comes to insignificant matters. But when it comes to important things, Glick is just another CEO.”

Or, to put it in the vernacular: he protects UNR’s ass.

Glick is too defensive about legitimate complaints. Whistleblowers should be praised, not fired. His dismissal of Professor Hussein Hussein, a celebrated animal nutritionist, was autocratic. It still rankles.

Glick insists that Hussein was a plagiarist and should have been fired. But Judge Peter Breen, retired from the Washoe District Court, ruled that he saw no evidence of plagiarism. Just one of four members of the investigating faculty panel recommended dismissal.

Another complaint is that Glick keeps people in key posts who should be gotten rid of. In other words, politics as usual in the supposedly hallowed halls of a university.

More politics: a dean of the College of Science was hired even though that person wasn’t a finalist. Bypassed were highly qualified candidates from the Desert Research Institute and a scientist from the University of California.

Nevertheless, most sentiment about Glick on “university hill” is upbeat. During a recent conversation in his office, Glick repeatedly called me Jake, often smiled and was the soul of amiability.

Doubtless the Glick charm offensive. But it is typical of how he wins over people. He considers himself, as he should, the first among equals, quite the opposite of the autocratic, imperious and grandiose Lilley.

Glick got off to a terrible start at UNR in 2006, engineering a raise for the basketball coach. But now, facing a budget calamity, he realistically envisions a need to slash the athletic department by up to $700,000. He called the $53,000 sports budget cut proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons ridiculously low.

Glick is also rejects the winning-is-everything attitude about sports in higher ed. “We will not tolerate criminal behavior,” he says emphatically.

He is convinced that the governor’s draconian higher ed budget will not be enacted, a prophecy likely to prove true. He calls the proposal to cut faculty pay illegal, a violation of the contract that professors sign with the university.

He is agreeable to restructuring the UNR Faculty Senate, which is badly malapportioned to favor of administrators over professors. “The very heart of a university is the teaching faculty,” Glick insists.

He doesn’t miss teaching (he taught chemistry for 17 years at Wayne State University in Detroit). Besides: “As president I can teach the whole university.”

He admits he was not a great researcher. (His research area was X-ray crystallography, an abstruse field having something to do with crystal structure.)

Incredibly for a Ph.D., he extols the value of writing while admitting that Ph.D.s can’t write. “Writing is essential whatever the discipline,” he notes. “Writing is so important.”

He opposes beer drinking at Wolf Pack football games. “I don’t like it but a survey showed that people want it.” (The people are right for a change. Prohibition was the worse social experiment the nation ever undertook.)

Glick is also wrong when he urges students to graduate in four years. UNR has a working student body. Students sometimes put in 40-hour weeks, ruling out graduation in four years.

Glick, a dapper man, lightly bearded, is charming guy, a good guy. He is the best college president in Nevada.

Despite the horrendous budget woes facing higher education in Nevada, Glick feels “very fortunate to be president. I love being here.”

Most UNR faculty, administrators and alums love having him here.

Pandering to Reno Aces

A newspaper should have no friends.

--Joseph Pulitzer

The Reno Gazette-Journal coverage of the recent home debut of the Reno Aces was shameless boosterism.

When the Aces, the new Triple-A professional baseball team in the Truckee Meadows, opened their season recently in downtown Reno, the Gazette-Journal treated it as if it were the second-coming of Christ.

Its page one headlines: “A new downtown ballpark captures our hopes and imagination…Triple-A experience is so much more than baseball at today’s opening game.”

That day’s page one index had seven items, including “GAME DAY BLOG” and “ARE YOU ON TWITTER?” On page one the day after the opener the G-J carried an index of seven breathless items, including “MEET THE FIRST FANS THROUGH THE GATE” and “THE HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN.”

The only thing missing after each blurb was an exclamation point.

Alongside those embarrassing second-day gushes appeared a column headlined: “How are we going to top this?”

Dennis Myers, news editor of the Reno News & Review and media watchdog, was appalled by this complete disregard of any pretense of objectivism.

The G-J and TV stations gave the impression that they owned the Aces with their “reverential and admiring coverage,” Myers wrote.

He decried failure to do a probing report on how the ballpark was financed and “the implications of that financing for the city’s taxpayers.” Myers asked: “Where was the scrutiny of the Reno Aces corporation along with the bubbly, adoring ‘news coverage’? ”

Local news departments have become PR firms, totally ignoring the Pulitzer dictum that a newspaper should have no friends.

The G-J, rapidly decending from a subpar newspaper to a bad one, is now carrying a special section called “Good News.” The very nature of so much news is bad.

The media do regularly run good news. It was good news that the Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer Prize last month for public service. The Sun was honored for articles describing lack of construction safety regulations leading to high death tolls. The jurors saluted the courageous reporting of Alexandra Berzon.
It was precisely what newspapers should be doing, not boosting the home town.

In hailing the award, the Las Vegas CityLife expressed the hope that Las Vegas would soon produce another Pulitzer winner. I nominate CityLife columnists Steve Sebelius and Hugh Jackson. They write the hardest-hitting, toughest public affairs journalism in Nevada.

Unfortunately, their kind of commentary is not likely to win a Pulitzer. Newpaper jurors, very much part of the Establishment, prefer safe and sound columnists, not guys like Sebelius and Jackson who tell the naked truth.

Cheering a disgrace

The oldest cry from the Right is that the media are liberal. Would it were so. After President Bush held a farewell press conference, White House reporters gave him a standing ovation.

A standing ovation is highly unprofessional for supposedly neutral journalists. Moreover, how could any reporter applaud the sordid eight-year record of 43?

Prudish New York Times

The New York Times, publishing in the 21st century but with 19th century prudishness, recently ran a story about Supreme Court arguments on the use of the word “fuck” in broadcasts.

“You know the word I mean,” Adam Liptak of the Times coyly wrote.

This is 2009. Sophisticated Times readers can handle that word without blinking.
Another Establishment speaker

I have endured Scripps dinner speakers for nearly three decades at the University of Nevada, Reno, journalism school. All are Establishent to the core.

The speaker this spring was no exception. Edie Lederer, an Associated Press veteran, entertainingly described how she covered wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But she never gave the faintest suggestion that these wars were unjust, uttered not a word about U.S. empire-building and gave nary a hint that U.S. provocations led to the 9/11 attacks.

Just say it plain
The Associated Press reported that a basketball player had “a torn anterior cruciate ligament and torn meniscus.”

Surely there is a more felicitious way of writing that so it can be understood by readers who are neither doctors nor medical students.

Paul Mitchell, journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a sports authority, learnedly explains the injury:

“The ligament acts as a stablizer for the knee (keeps it in place). The meniscus is a fleshy tissue that acts as a shock absorber.” If the parts wear out, “the athlete risks rubbing bone on bone in the knee joint.“

But, Paul, why couldn’t the AP simply say the player had a knee injury? Newspapers are written for general readers, not specialists.

Failure of moral leadership

Politicians cannot get too far ahead of their constituents. If they do, they will not get elected or re-elected. But for Men and Women of God not to be ahead of their parishioners is reprehensible.

Martin Luther King is a sterling example of a church leader who led the nation into paths of righteousness on race. In contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a lame follower. He will not lead his Anglican flock to higher moral ground on gays and lesbians.

Williams refused to invite U.S. Bishop Gene Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of bishops in the Anglican communion. Robinson was uninvited because he is the first openly gay Anglican bishop.

Paul Elie pointed out in a profile of Williams in the March issue of Atlantic that “the prohibitions against homosexuality are theologically unsound.” Strictures against homosexuals in Genesis and in the letters of Paul are un-Christian. So are church teachings insisting that the only place for sex is within orthodox marriage and that the purpose of sex is to bear children.

Williams is an accommodationist. He does not want to alienate those conservatives who oppose gay and lesbian clergy and who find gay marriage abhorrent. On the other hand, he does not want to lose progressives who espouse the Christian viewpoint.

Williams’ via media is to abdicate leadership on the supreme church moral crisis of the day.

The middle way is a cowardly way. Williams has traded truth for unity. He has failed to fulfill the hope he stirred in many of the 80 million Anglican-Episcopal adherents when he was elevated to archbishop in 2002.

Fluoride bill doomed to die

A fluroide bill has been tossed into the legislative hopper in Carson City for decades. For decades it has been defeated. So often state lawmakers don’t know what is good for their constituents.

Backers of a new bill to fluoridate Washoe County water rightly declare that fluoridation will improve dental health.

But foes say it is unnecessary and too expensive. They say fluoride is a toxic chemical. They probably think fluoridation is a death-dealing plot by al-Qaida.

Sparks Councilman Mike Carrigan, chairman of the Truckee Meadows Water Authority board, takes the fatuous position that the people have voted it down so the TMWA should also oppose the plan.

Such thinking is endorsement of tyranny of the majority. Yes, the majority rules in a democracy. But the voters often are not smart. They often oppose their best interests and the best interests of society. If form holds, the people will “win” again.

Lucky teachers

Teaching is a privilege. With that privilege goes a huge responsibility. Teachers can have a great influence on young people.

Teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, J school, I try to do more than instruct students in the skills of journalism. I try to instill a lifelong reverence for learning, the Baconian idea of taking all knowledge to be their province.

I stress love of ideas and the play of the mind. I hope to open minds that might never have opened.

I encourage student cultural enrichment, to love literature, classical music, art, great films and theater. And I stress the importance of constant reading, books both literary classics and books on the major issues of the day.

I read students the challenging lines from Whitman: “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, / He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Glad to be alive

Sometimes we pause to realize how fortunate we are to be alive. Such a moment occurred recently when I looked out my office window at UNR.

Above, in a crystal blue sky, I saw a red-tailed hawk, soaring and turning, with striking black wing tips and white underwings gleaming in the sun. What a wonderful sight!

Later, while listening to the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcast on WCPE in Chicago over the Internet, I heard the meditation theme from Massenet’s “Thaïs.”

Beautiful. Then I heard several reprises of that lovely theme. How bereft would we be without music.

It us a sad commentary on the campus radio station, KUNR, that I must listen to the glories of opera on an out-of-town station. I have listened, enjoyed and cried over Met performances on KUNR for decades. But the Philistines there now bury the Met at 9 p.m. Sundays.