Columnist.
Except for diplomats posted abroad, early voting isn't an option in Israeli elections. So when Israel's election day dawned on Tuesday, with impressions of the campaign's home stretch fresh in voters' minds, no one in the country had yet cast a ballot. The giant pre-election rallies in Tel Aviv, the final flurry of ads, the polls showing the main opposition party in the lead, the prime minister's unexpected repudiation of a Palestinian state: Together Israelis had taken it all in, and together Israelis would put it all to a vote. That experience of a collective Election Day is one that voters in the United States used to take for granted. No longer.
For a nation that almost never puts murderers to death -- there were 14,196 homicides in 2013, but only 39 executions -- Americans spend an awful lot of time debating whether and how to do it. The Utah legislature last week passed a bill reinstating the firing squad to execute death row inmates, as a back-up in case lethal-injection drugs aren't available. It was in Utah five years ago that the last death by firing squad in the United States took place, when Ronnie Lee Gardner paid with his life for the courthouse murder of attorney Michael Burdell in 1985. Utah's governor hasn't said yet if he will sign the bill into law -- but his isn't the only state grappling with the question of how capital punishment should be carried out.
What does Massachusetts have against the First Amendment? A lawsuit filed in Superior Court by two family-owned companies -- 1A Auto Inc., an auto-parts vendor in Pepperell, and 126 Self Storage Inc., a storage-unit rental firm in Ashland -- challenges state campaign-finance rules so crazily lopsided they should be equipped with grab bars. Massachusetts law has long banned businesses from contributing to political candidates or parties, but under rules dating back to the 1980s, labor unions are free to spend up to $15,000 per year in direct political contributions with no disclosure required. Labor unions can also set up PACs -- political action committees -- to funnel money to candidates and parties they support. Businesses in Massachusetts aren't allowed to do that either.
As a card-carrying American exceptionalist, I don't share the presumption that a US policy should be changed just because it puts America at odds with the prevailing world view. From ultra-free speech to capital punishment to birthright citizenship, America frequently marches to the beat of its own drummer -- and that's OK with me. But that doesn't mean we never err, or that there aren't times when good sense requires pulling the plug on an obsolete practice, and admitting that other nations may have a better approach. Take Daylight Saving Time. Please.
When the French transit company Keolis landed an eight-year contract in January 2014 to operate commuter rail for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the deal was hailed by T general manager Beverly Scott for its stringent "no-excuses expectation that the operator will run the trains on time." "No excuses" promptly became a catchphrase, invoked repeatedly over the past year whenever Keolis and its performance have been in the spotlight. A Nexis search yields dozens of news stories referring to the "no-excuses contract" the company signed. As commuter service all but collapsed under the crippling snowstorms that hit Greater Boston this winter, the state's new transportation secretary, Stephanie Pollack, bluntly insisted Keolis would be held to its tough performance benchmarks, despite the snowfall's historic proportions.
"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out. The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. The killing, it seems clear, was a professional hit. Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by gunmen who escaped in a precisely timed getaway car, the murder unrecorded by nearby security cameras, which were mysteriously turned off -- all in a section of the Russian capital that normally teems with security personnel and surveillance. It was a calculatedly shocking crime, the highest-profile assassination since the Stalin era, and Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine immediately moved to exploit it. The Russian ruler said he would personally oversee the inquiry into Nemtsov's killing, which his press aide described as a "provocation" intended to make the government look bad. With almost unfathomable cynicism, government investigators speculated that one of Russia's best-known liberal democrats might have been martyred by his own allies in a bid for sympathy.
Charlie Rose wasn't sure he'd heard right. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, his guest on PBS, was lamenting that the controversy over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's forthcoming speech to Congress had "injected a degree of partisanship" into the traditionally bipartisan US-Israel relationship. That's not only "unfortunate," said Rice. "It's destructive of the fabric of the relationship." Rose seemed nonplussed. "It's *destructive* of the fabric of the relationship?" The national security advisor dug in. "It's always been bipartisan. We need to keep it that way.… And when it becomes injected or infused with politics, that's a problem."
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, attending a meeting of the National Governors Association, was asked by two Washington Post reporters whether President Obama is a Christian. "I don't know," Walker candidly replied. He has plenty of company. During the president's reelection campaign in the summer of 2012, the Pew Research Center polled a national sample of registered voters: "Do you happen to know what Barack Obama's religion is?" More than one-third of the respondents -- 36 percent -- said they didn't know. Only 45 percent identified the president as a Christian; 16 percent said he's a Muslim.
When Grover Cleveland ran for president in 1884, he was endorsed by Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World*, which listed four reasons for encouraging its readers to send Cleveland to the White House: "1. He is an honest man. 2. He is an honest man. 3. He is an honest man. 4. He is an honest man." As a prominent Democratic newspaper, the *World*'s support for Cleveland, the Democratic nominee, was to be expected. But such insistent praise for a candidate's truthfulness and honor was as remarkable then as it would be now -- voters in the Gilded Age, like voters in the Digital Age, had ample grounds to regard "honest politician" as a contradiction in terms.
Book burning is as old as books, and as current as this week's news. The Associated Press reported on Monday that Islamic State fanatics have ravaged the Central Library of Mosul, the largest repository of learning in that ancient city. Militants smashed the library's locks and overran its collections, removing thousands of volumes on philosophy, science, and law, along with books of poetry and children's stories. Only Islamic texts were left behind. "These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah," one of the ISIS jihadists announced as the library's holdings were emptied into sacks and loaded onto pickup trucks. "So they will be burned."
Four months after Ukraine's president traveled to Washington to plead for lethal military aid in its fight against Russian-sponsored violence and treachery, the US government is finally taking his entreaty seriously. The New York Times reports that "an array of administration and military officials" are leaning toward providing defensive weapons to Kiev's struggling armed forces, a step the White House has so far rejected. According to the Times, those in favor of arming Ukraine now include Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and NATO's military commander, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove. Secretary of State John Kerry and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reportedly "open" to the idea. Even National Security Adviser Susan Rice, long opposed to supplying lethal assistance, is now prepared to reconsider. But not, it seems, President Obama.
Unless you've spent the last few weeks in solitary meditation on a remote island, you couldn't miss the wave of media stories breathlessly proclaiming that 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history. As usual, the coverage was laced with alarm about the menace posed by climate change, and with disapproval of skeptics who decline to join in the general panic. Among those seizing on the news to make a political point was President Obama, who used his State of the Union address to voice disdain for those who don't share his view. "I've heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they're not scientists," he scoffed. "Well, I'm not a scientist, either. But. . . I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities."
On Jan. 9, the government of Saudi Arabia publicly whipped a liberal Muslim writer, Raif Badawi, flogging him 50 times outside a mosque in Jeddah. It was the first installment of the 1,000 lashes to which Badawi had been sentenced -- in addition to 10 years in prison and a fine of more than $250,000 -- for the crime of "insulting Islam" on his former website, the Saudi Free Liberals Forum. Two days later, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Saudi ambassador to France joined in the great Paris solidarity march in defense of freedom of expression. Such hypocrisy was more than seven members of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom could abide. The commission -- an independent, bipartisan federal agency -- had several times expressed concern about the persecution of Badawi; it denounced his lashing as "a cruel and barbaric act" inflicted "for nothing more than creating an online forum for diverse views to be expressed freely." Last week, writing in their individual capacities to the Saudi embassy in Washington, the seven commissioners drew attention to the glaring inconsistency between Saudi Arabia's public show of support for civil liberties in France and its brutal denial of those very liberties in Badawi's case.
The morning after President Obama's State of the Union address, Politico had a story on how Republicans had responded to one contentious issue. The headline: "Priebus struggles to explain GOP immigration messages." That would be Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman. His "struggle" was to clarify why Iowa's new senator, Joni Ernst, said nothing at all about immigration in her 10-minute reply to the president, whereas Florida Representative Carlos Curbelo, in a Spanish-language version of the GOP response, urged Obama to work with Republicans "to create permanent solutions for our immigration system, to secure our borders, [and] modernize legal immigration." Good thing Priebus wasn't asked about the formal Tea Party response to the president's speech, delivered by another Florida Republican, Rep. Curt Clawson, or he'd have had still more reason to squirm. Speaking in English *and* Spanish, Clawson called pointedly for "embracing … legal immigrants, and the millions waiting in line legally to begin their own American Dream."
Down the street or across the country, a valid driver's license is all you need to lawfully get behind the wheel of a car. If you've met your state's conditions to be issued a license -- passed the test, submitted your fingerprints, paid the fee -- there's not a state in the country that won't honor it. A valid license to carry a firearm should be treated the same way. In many respects, Americans who esteem the Second Amendment have reason to be upbeat these days. In opinion polls, a majority of respondents says protecting gun ownership is more important than enacting stronger gun control. Three out of four Americans would oppose a ban on private possession of handguns. Putting their money where those convictions are, consumers turned out in droves to buy firearms during the holiday season: Though Black Friday sales generally were down last year, purchases of guns on the day after Thanksgiving went through the roof. The FBI conducted a record 175,000 background checks on Nov. 28 -- an average of almost three per second -- then set another record the week before Christmas.
The final words of his final speech, delivered from the pulpit of the Mason Temple Church of God in Memphis on April 3, 1968, eerily foreshadowed the next day's catastrophe. "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life," the Rev. Martin Luther King told his listeners, who had braved a thunderstorm to be there. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain…. I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!"
Last week Deval Patrick shed the title he had worn for eight years. This week he donned the first of what will doubtless be a batch of new titles: The commonwealth's former governor announced plans to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a "visiting innovation fellow" at the school's Innovation Initiative. As Patrick re-acclimates to life in the private sector, there will be plenty to keep him busy. He told Fortune magazine that he has been approached by venture firms, equity firms, and corporations. He will have his pick of speaking engagements and media appearances. And the political hive will keep buzzing with speculation about any future electoral plans.
Even before last week's terrorist attacks in Paris, the French prime minister was concerned about the continued viability of Jewish life in France. In an interview with The Atlantic prior to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres, Manuel Valls made a grim prediction: "If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure." His misgivings were far from groundless. An exodus of French Jews is already underway and accelerating rapidly. In 2012, there were just over 1,900 immigrants to Israel from France. The following year nearly 3,400 French Jews emigrated; in 2014 approximately 7,000 left. For the first time ever, France heads the list of countries of origin for immigrants to Israel, and the ministry of immigration absorption expects another 10,000 French Jews to arrive in 2015.
Next week, President Obama will be on Capitol Hill, appearing before a joint session of Congress for the annual ritual known as the State of the Union address. Amid the hoopla and pageantry -- the partisan cheers and ovations, the shout-outs to honorees in the gallery, the approving nods or deprecating scowls from the vice president and House speaker -- one dour anomaly will be hard to miss. Members of the Supreme Court will be sitting poker-faced in the front row, draped in their black robes and refraining from any applause or show of loyalty. The Constitution directs the president to periodically "give to the Congress information of the State of the Union," and most presidents since Woodrow Wilson have delivered that "information" in a formal speech. But nothing in the Constitution requires the Supreme Court to be on hand for the performance, and there is no time-honored tradition that explains their presence. It wasn't until the late 1950s that justices began regularly showing up for State of the Union addresses. Nothing has been gained by the change, least of all admiration for the Supreme Court or confidence in its impartiality.
North Korea isn't very funny, and the ghastly Kim Jong Un is no joke. All the more reason not to discount humor -- the caustic humor of mockery, satire, and farce -- as a weapon against the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang. For all the outrage generated by North Korea's cyber attack on Sony Pictures' email network, more cold-blooded by far is the Kim government's response within its own borders to Seth Rogen's sophomoric new spoof. "North Korea has begun the expected crackdown to prevent the movie 'The Interview' from polluting the 'people's paradise,'" reports Nightwatch, a national-security intelligence newsletter. "A three-star general heads up a border task force to keep the movie out. Task force members are going house to house searching for copies of the movie." Any North Korean caught owning or watching the film is likely to be charged with a capital crime.
