The Dying Roars of a Wounded Beast

Lots of apparently contradictory news this week from the extreme right, but all actually pointing to a similar conclusion. The culture wars are over, the ideological purists are outraged that people accept gay lifestyles and religions other than Christianity, and the wounded beasts are roaring in their death throes, certain the world is going to hell.

The news that James Dobson would step down as head of Focus on the Family crossed the wires around noon on Feb. 26. It had been half-expected for quite a while, as the public's growing annoyance with the Mad Doctor was one factor that led to reduced Focus contributions. The obvious question is, can a Dobsonless Focus, like a New Life Church without Ted Haggard, retain any sense of identity? In the case of New Life, the answer was a qualified "yes," and the church was less hostile to others, even as it retained its sense of evangelism. With Focus, the board will likely aim for a kinder, gentler family-values institution, but I'm not so sure the PR shtick will work.

Meanwhile, the Colorado legislature saw two types of craziness at the end of February. Sen. Scott Renfroe of Greeley, during debate on a domestic partners act, equated the sin of homosexuality with murder. Just as the Colorado Republican Party was trying to recover from the horror, the always-irrepressible Sen. Dave Schultheis from Colorado Springs became the sole member of the state legislature to vote against a bill to mandate AIDS testing for pregnant women. Schultheis, normally a virulent anti-abortion activist, actually said he wanted babies to get AIDS to teach their moms responsibility. Thankfully, ProgressNow Colorado has started an online petition drive to get him censured. I'd prefer to see him run out of the state or run over by a truck.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says we should expect this kind of revitalization of the extreme right, as wacko groups have to cope with an African-American president and a society that has largely accepted new cultural norms. There's always a danger that one or two such groups would attempt an Oklahoma City re-run. But most will just scream louder and louder in their irrelevance. Be sure to turn off the lights and shut the doors on your way out, gang.

Roll Over Albuquerque Tribune, Here Comes Rocky Mountain News

Another one bites the dust, as the dailies fall one by one.

No Child Left Red-Lined: From District 11 to Your Neighborhood School

School District 11 in mid-city, Colorado Springs, is facing the same kind of pressures as most school districts across the U.S. in 2009: Declining enrollment and aging buildings means more consolidation. Desire for science-centric magnet schools leads to deals with the devil for corporate aerospace companies to run the schools, using district money. Parents are the last to know the ultimate plans of the board.

In late February, parents learned that many of the schools slated for closure in District 11 were in lower-income neighborhoods. Isn't it funny how even kids get red-lined? Even though parents were kept in the dark until the last moment, they have been quick to organize. This is a video of them gathering outside a closed, executive-session meeting of the board on Feb. 25, 2009.

Scott Moss Riffs on Barack Obama and the Supremes

Scott Moss, who teaches constitutional law at CU, was the guest speaker at the Colorado state ACLU annual meeting Feb. 21. I captured most of his speech in three segments: the one above, followed by Part 2 and Part 3. I ran out of memory for the last couple minutes of his speech, where he adds the final two elements of his Top Five Rights Issues:

4. Civil Rights Enforcement: will be aggressive, but could be severely limited by budget constraints.

5. Legislation on issues such as gay rights, union rights (Employee Free Choice Act) and the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act may be supported, but a lower priority due to the crisis in the economy.

Moss ended with a discussion of whether the glass is half-empty or half-full on state secrets. Obama's poor position on the fight with the British High Court over Binyam Mohamed has been followed up by disturbing signs on extraordinary rendition, secret bombing in Pakistan, and restrictions on National Security Agency information.

"When the information relates directly to a war being waged, secrets will be kept, though Obama will not adopt the kind of broad definitions we saw on the War On Terror," Moss said. "Remember, Obama was never part of the pacifist wing of the party. There will be interceptions, there will be detentions, but there will be limits on what is considered state secrets during time of war."

The ACLU meeting also heard from State Board Chairman Lino Lipinsky, who reminded attendees that without ACLU cases, the Denver police would have continued their common trend in 2005-2008 of locking up the wrong people in outstanding warrants (occasionally even mixing up race and legal status in the mistaken identity), and leaving innocent people in jail for days or weeks.

Cathy Hazouri, executive director of the state office, said that some members may have not liked the actions the ACLU took to defend demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, but that the ACLU needs to be inherently contrarian with everyone, even its loyal members.

"We are the permanent loyal opposition," she said. "Sometimes, even we don't agree with what we do."

Risk-Addicted

Normally, I might have cheered Andrew Cuomo's subpoena of Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, for the billions in bonuses issued to at the end of 2008 to executives of Merrill Lynch before the merger. But I was in the middle of the lead article of Foreign Affairs, where Roger Altman tried to explain why bankers behaved the way they did, competing to create the dumbest and most unstable instruments possible.

Sure, Altman is going to make a partial defense of bankers, but his explanation makes sense. He sees housing as merely the market of random exploitation, and subprime mortgages as the easiest instrument to exploit. To him, the crisis began with excess global liquidity, and a clamoring among institutional investors and foreign investors for the highest risk possible among instruments (since yield is proportional to risk). If this liquidity had been there during the Internet-infrastructure/dot-com boom of 1999, the meltdown might have happened then. Suddenly, bankers were scrambling to approve as many subprimes as possible, and bundle them into futures contracts. (Yes, I know you're thinking of a prosecutor rolling his eyes as all the drug dealers in town claim, "We had to cut the heroin with Comet cleanser, everyone was doing it.")

I've already made the argument for mandating a cap on rates of return on investment (12, 15 percent?), which may be more important than capping executive salaries. Free-market wankers may whine that the Nanny State is once again trying to dictate the level of risk which can be assumed. But if you run a sky-diving or hang-gliding school and have a couple students who always insist on launching from the most dangerous spot to increase their thrill over the risk involved, in a drive for monoamine oxidase overdose, don't you have a responsibility to say something, at least because of your liabilities? If you run a gun shop and a customer boasts of going home to play Russian roulette, isn't there a cautionary tale? Remember, cops can treat a suicide attempt as a crime, if they wish, because the damage is not limited to the individual, it affects the society at large. And if you become addicted to increasing levels of risk, you will eventually die, run the numbers.

None of this is meant to take the heat off bankers, mortgage brokers, hedge-fund managers, or any of the other links in the chain that led to the meltdown. But the next time some conservative blathers on about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Democrats being the sole cause of our problems, or Rick Santelli launches into another mindless rant about how poorer people caught in subprimes were the cause of our miseries, remember the Altman article. A few friends last week mentioned the long-rumored and long-forgotten anonymous conspiracy-theory newsletter, One Great Big Conspiracy. As I watched Cuomo defend his subpoenas, I thought about the apocryphal final issue of OGBC, never finished and never distributed, with a mirror on the cover and the bold declaration, "The problem is YOU." (And me.) Let this be our mantra as we climb out of this mess.

Rev. Lucius Walker of Pastors for Peace

Rev. Lucius Walker, executive director of Pastors for Peace, was in Colorado Springs Feb. 17-18 for a gumbo fund-raising party and a series of talks to promote the work of his organization, which arranges peace caravans to Cuba. He was kind enough to sit down with me for a brief chat at First Congregational Church about the work of Pastors for Peace. To contact the organization for donations of money or goods, write ifco@igc.org, or call 212-926-5757.

Diddly-Swat

Wake up, media! While we obsess over Obama's visit to Denver and Khmer Rouge trials and GM/Chrysler revamps, only the venerable New York Times noticed - and placed on its front page -- the fact that Pakistan had reached a wide-ranging peace agreement with the Taliban, allowing the organization self-rule in Swat province.

I worry that this may be the spark that leads Obama to fulfill his campaign warning that he might directly invade Pakistan. I certainly do not favor military intervention, but I also do not adhere to the international diplomacy view that "all deserve a voice at the table." Ideological catastrophists whose philosophies require the murder of dozens, thousands or millions, be they Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso, or Wahhabists, deserve no place at anyone's table. Thanks to the wisdom of the Pakistan government, Swat residents who own DVD players or satellite dishes will be beheaded, just like the wife of that TV station owner in upstate New York who urged understanding of Islamic traditions. Isn't Medieval life fun?