Columnist.
Republicans picked picked Cleveland to host their 2016 national convention, and the city, writes the Plain Dealer's Stephen Koff, "is swooning over its victory." No kidding. "Huge day for our city. Has anything ever happened here that's bigger?" tweeted Aaron Goldhammer, co-host of ESPN Cleveland's morning sports show. Ed FitzGerald, Cuyahoga County's elected executive and the 2014 Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, rejoiced in the GOP's confirmation "that Cleveland is now in the middle of a historic renaissance." Local folk hero Charles Ramsey, who last year saved three Cleveland women held hostage for 10 years, told a TV interviewer that news of the coming Republican convention made him "giddy … happy as a clam."
Amid the sound and fury that greeted the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, many liberals had sharp words for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the federal law in which the court's decision was grounded. The left-wing Center for American Progress urged Congress to weaken the law's protections, and the New York Times editorial blog pointedly reminded voters that "acts of Congress can be overturned or changed if the right lawmakers are in place." The Freedom From Religion Foundation placed full-page ads insisting that "Congress must repeal RFRA." Hillary Clinton fed the bonfire, telling an audience in Aspen, Colo., that the court's application of the statute called to mind the type of "very unstable, antidemocratic" theocracies where men exploit "women and women's bodies … because of their religion, their sect, their tribe."
By votes so lopsided they were practically unanimous, 144-7 in the House and 38-1 in the Senate, the Massachusetts Legislature last week approved a $36.5 billion budget for fiscal 2015, the largest in state history. The puny band of Republicans who voted against the budget -- Senator Robert Hedlund and Representatives James Lyons, Leah Cole, Geoff Diehl, Shawn Dooley, Ryan Fattman, Marc Lombardo, and Leonard Mirra -- had no hope of changing the outcome. They didn't even represent a majority of the negligible GOP caucus.
Had the Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts abortion clinic buffer-zone law over a strenuous dissent from the four liberal justices, the truculent reaction from many state politicians -- who promptly vowed to find some new restriction that would get around the ruling -- might have been easier to justify. But all nine justices agreed that the Massachusetts law indefensibly violated the First Amendment. Even the court's staunchest defenders of abortion rights -- three of them women -- had to remind Beacon Hill that citizens have a right to speak on public sidewalks. That's a pretty basic component of American liberty. It would have been reassuring to hear Bay State officials acknowledge as much.
If anyone ought to appreciate the power of immigration to stimulate employment, it is America's energetic anti-immigration advocates, whose jobs wouldn't exist if it weren't for the influx of immigrants they spend their days seeking to curtail. Then again, appreciating anything about immigration -- least of all the ironies of our endless debate on the subject -- goes against the restrictionists' grain. Fulminating about immigrants is one of America's enduring pastimes, and it doesn't leave a lot of room for wry humor. Or for logical consistency. Which helps explain why immigrants can be depicted on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as indolent leeches who flock to the United States to go on welfare -- and condemned on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for taking away jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.
Tea Party insurgent Chris McDaniel came tantalizingly close to knocking off Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi's Republican primary runoff last week, but a surge in black voter turnout saved the six-term incumbent's bacon. Cochran's election to a seventh term in November now seems a foregone conclusion, and boy, are a lot of conservatives mad. "There is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that's decided by liberal Democrats," McDaniel fumed on election night, slamming Cochran and the GOP establishment for "once again reaching across the aisle [and] abandoning the conservative movement."
At a June 12 appearance in New York before the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton made the familiar argument for ending the US trade embargo against Cuba, the same one critics of the policy have been making for years. "The embargo is Castro's best friend," the former secretary of state said; it provides the Havana regime with "an excuse for everything." Scrapping sanctions would "change the psychology of this issue" and improve US relations with the rest of the hemisphere. So "we should advocate for normalizing relations and see what [Cuba's rulers] do."
I've always taken a dim view of wedding gift registries, on the principle that greed is bad and greed masquerading as courtesy is worse. But I relented, just for a moment, when I read about the public's reaction after learning that Jon Meis, the Seattle Pacific University student who disarmed a killer during a school shooting, would be getting married this month. Grateful strangers not only bought up every item for which Meis and his fiancée had registered, but also donated $50,000 to pay for their honeymoon and other expenses. The upwelling of generosity was heartwarming. Yet gift registries in general are anything but. What began in the 1920s as a way to let wedding guests discreetly find out a couple's preferred china or silver patterns has metastasized into institutionalized avarice, crass and mechanical. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but you'd never know it from seeing affianced couples prowling through Crate & Barrel or Macy's, avidly zapping bar codes with handheld scanners while visions of high-end espresso machines and flat-screen TVs dance in their heads.
Thousands of Americans will rally in Washington, D.C., at a March for Marriage on Thursday in support of "the simple and beautiful message," to quote Brian Brown, that "marriage between one man and one woman is unique and critical for our society." Brown is president of the National Organization for Marriage, the event's lead sponsor. Don't he and his supporters know that they're on the Wrong Side of History?
The great state of Minnesota, you'll be glad to learn, is no longer interested in the size and color of your bug deflector. The legislature in St. Paul recently scrapped the 1953 law regulating that automotive accessory, one of almost 1,200 antiquated or bizarre laws that Governor Mark Dayton recommended repealing as part of a major legislative "unsession." Among other changes: Minnesotans have been liberated from the ban on possessing more than two hen pheasants, the penalty for distributing berries in the wrong-sized container is history, and it is now legal to coast with your car's gears in neutral. "We got rid of all the silly laws," one state official told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. That was probably overstating things, given the more than 46,000 laws that Minnesota lawmakers have enacted over the years. Still, the pruning of 1,200 pieces of deadwood is no small achievement.
Israel's response to the renewed partnership between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas was admirably, and literally, constructive: It advanced plans to build 1,500 housing units in so-called Jewish "settlements" -- i.e., burgeoning Jerusalem neighborhoods and several nearby West Bank communities. The Israeli housing minister, Uri Ariel, described the decision as "an appropriate Zionist response to the establishment of the Palestinian terror government." Hamas and its allies aim at uprooting the Jewish state; Israel's answer is to send those roots down a little deeper.
Gregory Sullivan is appalled. The former Inspector General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been studying House Bill 4111, the legislation authorizing a $1.1 billion expansion of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The bill, which sailed through the House of Representatives last week on a 130-19 vote, would empower the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority not only to enlarge its already enormous convention facility in South Boston by 60 percent, but to select a hotel company to build and operate a 1,000- to 1,200-room hotel on land owned by Massport across the street.
For decades, gasoline taxes have been the largest source of funds for building and fixing America's highways. What happens if those funds dry up? Gasoline sales have been trending downward in recent years, thanks in part to more fuel-efficient cars, which travel farther and farther between fill-ups. That trend is sure to continue. Federal fuel-economy standards require automakers to achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon for new vehicles by 2025. And the first all-electric cars -- such as the BMW i3, which can run for 80 miles on battery power alone -- are now showing up in dealers' showrooms. Transportation politics are endlessly thorny, and debates over paying for America's highways frequently become debates about other issues, such as mass transit, federalism, and the environment. But the looming gas-tax shortfall offers a chance to repair the funding mechanism itself -- one that disguises the costs of operating roads and gives the impression that using them is literally a free ride.
As a candidate for president in 1988, Michael Dukakis famously proclaimed: "This election is not about ideology; it's about competence." It wasn't a winning argument. Dukakis had run as the architect of the so-called "Massachusetts Miracle," the state's mid-1980s economic boom. But the miracle was turning into a fiscal meltdown, and as it did Dukakis's once-commanding lead went down the drain. On Election Day, he lost to George H. W. Bush in a 40-state landslide. Dukakis played down ideology because he didn't want to be tagged as a liberal, and he played up competence because that's what all candidates do. Twenty years later, Barack Obama did the same thing, but with far greater success. Running to succeed the deeply polarizing George W. Bush, Obama held himself out not just as a leader who would never "pit red America against blue America," but as a natural-born manager whose hallmark was smarts and competence.
Ballot-access hurdles are a classic incumbent-protection device, one of the techniques political insiders use to protect their monopoly from pesky challengers and citizen initiatives. So it's tempting to chortle when one of those hurdles trips up an incumbent as seasoned as Representative John Conyers Jr., a Detroit Democrat serving his 25th term in Congress, who was disqualified last week from the Democratic primary ballot for failing to submit the 1,000 valid voter signatures Michigan law requires. There are plenty of reasons why voters in Michigan's 13th congressional district might want to usher Conyers into retirement. The man is 85, he has been in Congress for half a century, and in recent years he has compiled an embarrassing record of ethical lapses and controversies. He is often visibly befuddled; veteran Detroit News editor Nolan Finley notes that "stories abound about Conyers' gaps in lucidity."
For all the attention it's gotten, the anticipated merger between Pfizer Inc., the New York-based pharmaceutical giant, and its British rival AstraZeneca is far from a done deal. Pfizer has yet to make a formal offer, as its CEO told a parliamentary hearing last week; it has only broached informal proposals that AstraZeneca has so far rebuffed. But if the merger does go through, Pfizer makes no bones about its intention to shift the company's legal domicile to the United Kingdom, thereby saving a fortune in taxes. As a US business, Pfizer's foreign earnings are subject to a combined 42.1 percent corporate tax rate -- the 35 percent federal rate plus New York's 7.1 percent. As a British company, its top tax rate would fall to 21 percent. The difference could amount to $1.4 billion a year.
If Oklahoma prison authorities had been able to carry out Clayton Lockett's execution using sodium thiopental, his death on April 29 would likely have been swift and relatively painless. The powerful sedative used to be part of the standard lethal-injection drug combination, but when its only American manufacturer stopped production in 2010, European governments barred pharmaceutical companies on the other side of the Atlantic from exporting sodium thiopental to the United States. As the British business secretary, Vince Cable, made clear at the time, the point of the ban was to strike a moral pose. "This move underlines this government's and my own personal moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances," he said. The practical effect, however, has been to drive death-penalty states to devise new lethal injection protocols, sometimes with gruesome results.
Is America's lawyer bubble getting ready to pop? Critics have long bewailed our national glut of lawyers, to little effect. Chief Justice Warren Burger predicted 35 years ago that America was turning into "a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts." At the time, the population of attorneys in the United States had surpassed 450,000, and law schools were graduating 34,000 new ones each year. By 2011, the annual production of law degrees was up to 44,000, and at 1.22 million, the number of lawyers in the country -- which included me -- had nearly tripled. Over the same period, the population of the United States had risen just 40 percent.
The United States jails more prisoners than any nation on earth -- about 2.3 million, or more than 1 percent of all American adults. Our gigantic penal system is regularly characterized as a national disgrace. I've applied the label myself. Plainly there is something deeply disquieting about a democratic superpower locking up so many people that 25 percent of the world's reported prisoners are housed in US cells. How can a country with an incarceration rate of 716 inmates per 100,000 residents, roughly five times the global average, think of itself as "The Land of the Free?" Yet whether America's vast prison population really represents such a scandalous failure depends on what prison is supposed to do. In that light, consider a trove of data released last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the US Department of Justice.
A few thoughts on the Donald Sterling scandal, but first a personal disclosure: I have sometimes uttered words in the heat of a domestic squabble that I later regretted. I have expressed thoughts in personal conversation that I would never want to share with the world. On occasion I have yielded to impulses in private that I would be loath to be judged by in public. Maybe you have too.
