November 22

It means only one thing to those of us of a certain age. It was the day of days, the event of our national lives. That it no longer is the focus of every succeeding November 22 tells us that one day even September 11 will pass without substantial notice. Yet whether cable television devotes every moment to reliving a national nightmare, its importance remains the same and, as Mad Men showed so well a few weeks back, any recollection of that day can trigger many floods, even among those who, unlike some of us, were very, very young that day.

Yes, I was called up short when Mad men's creator, Matt Weiner, mentioned that not everyone knows that Oswald was murdered only a few days after the President was killed, since there is no American who was over five years old at the time who doesn't remember that and the sense, at that very minute, that we had spun completely out of control exactly as Mad Men reminded us.

And, yes, Mad Men was also right in the sense that the world just ended that day and began again, with different values, different history, and different rules. The guilt and sadness over the death of our young President resulted, it is true, in the seminal legislation of our time, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, and medicaid and medicare also in 1965. But the spirit of the era was gone and gone, it seemed, forever.

Ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country.

That sense of obligation to our fellow citizens, the articulation of the underpinning of Roosevelt's New Deal but now in the hands of

a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world

President Kennedy's death marked the end of an era, not the beginning he had promised us and his hopeful ideals for the country were replaced, first, by the war in Vietnam, followed by the war on the Great Society and then of the New Deal itself. The election of President Obama is the first thing that has happened since then which provides even a hint that we can get back on the path President Kennedy set for us.

But as much as Matt Weiner offered a reminder of how many people have no recollection of November 22, 1963, a diary on Daily Kos the other day shows that the path to darkness remains before us as well. We live in a time when a person with a Jewish sounding last name who blogs about the limits of Sarah Palin's appeal receives an email about "Why People Like to Stuff People Like You into Ovens." This is the combustible atmosphere that existed in 1963. Deny that at your own peril.

The diarist advised that we not fear the people who are out there---the "crazies" as Regina Spektor calls them---and that advice is worth trying to heed, but it will not be easy.

Over and over the reminders take over this space.

We are living in a time when a doctor providing abortions is murdered and people cheer or try to justify it.

We are living in a time when elected officials can appear on Meet the Press and justify threats of violence and even the overthrow of our government and are not hooted into an apology or oblivion.

We live in a time when a man proudly brags about the gun he brought to a rally where the President of the United States was speaking and yet this incident gets less coverage than whether some guy tried to hoodwink cable tv (big woop) by claiming his boy was in a balloon.

We live in a time when people are "praying" for the President of the United States hoping for his death.

We live among hate.

Hate cost us a president and almost two generations of progress. It is countenanced today by people who should know better and there appear to be nobody or very few in the Republican Party willing to speak out against it, the way the otherwise racist William F. Buckley did against the John Birch Society
or even Sen Prescott Bush spoke out against, tepidly, the "methods" used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist crusades.

Part of this day, as every November 22 since 1963, will be spent mourning our late President, but the day should also be dedicated to never allowing this hatred to change our world again.

Congratulations, Senator Kennedy

(and, thanks to Senators Dodd, Harkin and, ok, Reid, for picking up when Senator Kennedy was unable to proceed).

It's not what I had in mind, nor, I suspect, what Senator Kennedy had in mind, but it will have to do.

A great night for the country.

Guest Blogger: President Harry S Truman

This is a busy week for many people, and even busier for this once a week blogger. The annual memorial to the President who first inspired the guy who writes under this name to become a public servant will, work permitting, appear here tomorrow, but there is so much else to write about.

After watching Senator Lincoln (how does she get to call herself that) channel Richard Nixon ("let me make myself perfectly clear" she tells us) in deciding to let the Senate debate health care so long as it passes nothing of any use to anybody, it seemed wrong to let her have the last word on this subject, or anything close to it.

So here is the best that can be done under the name Barth. Thanks to a reminder from Rachel Maddow the other day, we can present, as a special guest blogger, President Harry S Truman, in words he presented almost exactly 64 years ago. His entire "post" is here .

A few shockingly relevant portions ought to be read before the lesser beings who populate the Senate today enrage us any further:

In my message to the Congress of September 6, 1945, there were enumerated in a proposed Economic Bill of Rights certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.

One of them was: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." Another was the "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of . .. sickness ...."

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection....

Medicine has made great strides in this generation--especially during the last four years. We owe much to the skill and devotion of the medical profession. In spite of great scientific progress, however, each year we lose many more persons from preventable and premature deaths than we lost in battle or from war injuries during the entire war.

We are proud of past reductions in our death rates. But these reductions have come principally from public health and other community services. We have been less effective in making available to all of our people the benefits of medical progress in the care and treatment of individuals.

In the past, the benefits of modern medical science have not been enjoyed by our citizens with any degree of equality. Nor are they today. Nor will they be in the future--unless government is bold enough to do something about it.

People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.

Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race--everywhere in the United States.

We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation....

The principal reason why people do not receive the care they need is that they cannot afford to pay for it on an individual basis at the time they need it. This is true not only for needy persons. It is also true for a large proportion of normally self-supporting persons.....

For some persons with very low income or no income at all we now use taxpayers' money in the form of free services, free clinics, and public hospitals. Tax-supported, free medical care for needy persons, however, is insufficient in most of our cities and in nearly all of our rural areas. This deficiency cannot be met by private charity or the kindness of individual physicians....

Everyone should have ready access to all necessary medical, hospital and related services.

I recommend solving the basic problem by distributing the costs through expansion of our existing compulsory social insurance system. This is not socialized medicine.

Everyone who carries fire insurance knows how the law of averages is made to work so as to spread the risk, and to benefit the insured who actually suffers the loss. If instead of the costs of sickness being paid only by those who get sick, all the people--sick and well--were required to pay premiums into an insurance fund, the pool of funds thus created would enable all who do fall sick to be adequately served without overburdening anyone. That is the principle upon which all forms of insurance are based....

A system of required prepayment would not only spread the costs of medical care, it would also prevent much serious disease. Since medical bills would be paid by the insurance fund, doctors would more often be consulted when the first signs of disease occur instead of when the disease has become serious. Modern hospital, specialist and laboratory services, as needed, would also become available to all, and would improve the quality and adequacy of care. Prepayment of medical care would go a long way toward furnishing insurance against disease itself, as well as against medical bills.

Such a system of prepayment should cover medical, hospital, nursing and laboratory services. It should also cover dental care--as fully and for as many of the population as the available professional personnel and the financial resources of the system permit.

The ability of our people to pay for adequate medical care will be increased if, while they are well, they pay regularly into a common health fund, instead of paying sporadically and unevenly when they are sick. This health fund should be built up nationally, in order to establish the broadest and most stable basis for spreading the costs of illness, and to assure adequate financial support for doctors and hospitals everywhere. If we were to rely on state-by-state action only, many years would elapse before we had any general coverage. Meanwhile health service would continue to be grossly uneven, and disease would continue to cross state boundary lines.

...

People should remain free to choose their own physicians and hospitals. The removal of financial barriers between patient and doctor would enlarge the present freedom of choice. The legal requirement on the population to contribute involves no compulsion over the doctor's freedom to decide what services his patient needs. People will remain free to obtain and pay for medical service outside of the health insurance system if they desire, even though they are members of the system; just as they are free to send their children to private instead of to public schools, although they must pay taxes for public schools....
None of this is really new. The American people are the most insurance-minded people in the world. They will not be frightened off from health insurance because some people have misnamed it "socialized medicine".

I repeat--what I am recommending is not socialized medicine.

Socialized medicine means that all doctors work as employees of government. The American people want no such system. No such system is here proposed.
Under the plan I suggest, our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now--on the basis of their own voluntary decisions and choices. Our doctors and hospitals would continue to deal with disease with the same professional freedom as now. There would, however, be this all-important difference: whether or not patients get the services they need would not depend on how much they can afford to pay at the time.

I am in favor of the broadest possible coverage for this insurance system. I believe that all persons who work for a living and their dependents should be covered under such an insurance plan. This would include wage and salary earners, those in business for themselves, professional persons, farmers, agricultural labor, domestic employees, government employees and employees of non-profit institutions and their families.

In addition, needy persons and other groups should be covered through appropriate premiums paid for them by public agencies.

Sixty-four bleeping years. At least we got medicaid, and all that took was the shock from having the President of the United States taken from us.

Sixty-four years and we will have to sit through yet another iteration of the idea that, President Truman's explanation to the contrary notwithstanding, that we are talking about socialized medicine. We have not progressed a whit beyond that in all this time.

Sixty four years. Thanks, Senator Lincoln for allowing the Senate to talk about it over the next few days.

Scary Times

This space will again commemorate the anniversary of what was, until 9/11, the worst day of our national lives with me in its midst. Many of us got to relive the day through Mad Men a few weeks ago.

That is tomorrow, though. For a warm up act, may I direct your attention to this disturbing post on Daily Kos yesterday and references to some of the prior complaints about this which have appeared here.

and, as for the antisemitism discussion which followed that post, I left out a reference to this, not wanting to start down that road again on Daily Kos.

Two Regina items

This is the podcast of last week's Mountain Stage, where Regina is the clean up hitter at about 1:35 into the broadcast. Really clean, lovely recording of Reg in one of her really excellent performances. If this is too much of a pain in the neck to download, NPR has roughly the same thing (just the Regina part) here.

Then there is this, from some presumably young person, introducing a new song, which, from what I can make of it, recognizes the tough times we are in:

Whining about bowing and Other Attempts to Demean the President

These goons never miss a moment to demean our President. Never. Politics stops at the water's edge? Not when the President is a Democrat. It is enough to make one think there is a vast right wing conspiracy against our President.

Yesterday it was the Known Traitor Hoekstra (having disclosed highly secure information he received as a member of the Intelligence (cough, cough) Committee), on Face the Nation:

I think that the government has been too slow in giving us information. There hasn’t been enough transparency for members of Congress, for the press, or for the American people. You know, I think that we need to move very, very aggressively and do a full-scale investigation as to who knew what and where.

You know, this Awlaki guy in Yemen. He’s been on our radar screen since 2001, 2002. What -- my sources tell me we had evidence back in 2002 that would have enabled us to prosecute him. Why didn’t we prosecute him then?

The other thing I want to know is people want to know who Hasan has been talking to in the Middle East. I want to know who Awlaki is talking to in the United States. And have we been able to capture those communications? I want to know what’s going on between the intel community, the Department of Defense, and the FBI.

I think we had a lot of information on Hasan, but I’m not sure that we put all of these things in place so that we would have been in a position to perhaps stop what happened at Fort Hood last week.

And, about President Bush's failure to do ANYTHING about a CIA warning in August, 2001 that Osama bin Laden was about to strike the United States? Well, at least he asked for copy of the report. Thankfully, the 9/11 Commission actually got it and disclosed it.



Now comes the idiotic rant about bowing to the Emperor of Japan. Here now is the distinguished historian Page Smith's account of our first Ambassador to the Court of St. James upon his presentation to King George III who, after all, would have had him executed for treason (which Adams surely committed) had the Revolutionary War gone the other way:

The Foreign Secretary then carried Adams with him in his coach to the court and ushered him to the antechamber, "very full of ministers of state, lords, and bishops, and all sorts of courtiers." The Dutch and Swedish ministers, perhaps noticing Adams' agitation came up to chat and in a few minutes Carmarthen returned to escort him to the King's closet. The door was closed after him and Adams found himself alone with the Killoro and the Foreign Secretary. He bowed the three times that etiquette required - at the door, again halfway into the room, and a third time standing directly before His Majesty. It was a strange and dramatic confrontation - two short, stout men, both rather choleric, stubborn and strong-willed, sharing a certain emotional instability and a native shrewdness and wit. They were both great talkers and both, in their hearts, farmers. They both lived in worlds where they felt frequently that every man's hand was turned against them. One was the King of the most powerful nation in the world, the other's permanent rank that of a provincial lawyer and farmer. It was the New England fanner who represented victory and the King who had been forced to accept defeat. The name of Adams, John or Samuel, had been a stench in the nostrils of George III for almost twenty years and now an Adams stood before him, ambassador from those colonies which not so long ago had been the King's special treasure.

Both men were agitated and ill at ease. Adams, obviously nervous, ("I felt more," he wrote later, "than I did or could express") delivered his speech as best he could and the King listened "with a most apparent emotion .. . very much affected" and replied with a tremor in his voice: "Sir...the circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. . . . I will be very frank with you," the King continued slowly, rather haltingly, searching out his words. "I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power." Then in a more informal spirit the King asked Adams if he had come most recently from France. "Yes, Your Majesty." The King gave his short, barking laugh. "There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France." Adams was disconcerted at the remark, but he adopted the King's light air and answered: "That opinion, sir, is not mistaken; I must avow to Your Majesty I have no attachment but to my own country."

"A honest man will never have any other," the King replied.

The King spoke a few words to Lord Carmarthen and then turned and bowed to Adams, signifying that the audience was at an end. The American retreated, walking backward with as much grace as he could affect, bowed a last time at the door, and withdrew.

Other comments about my KSM post

I don't usually publish the back and forth on other sites about my gibberish, but this week's long post has led to some interesting discussions, such as this one at TPM:



Commenter:

These terrorists could get a fair trial without having a criminal trial. The military tribunal process has been around for a very long time and seems to work just fine. And even Mr. Holder thinks that military tribunals are the appropriate place for the people behind the USS Cole. But somehow he treats the 9/11 terrorists differently. Why the difference?

My guess is that one or more of these detainees will be released on procedural grounds, perhaps because they were not read their Miranda rights. And that will be a travesty.

Is that what you want?

And I bet you don't live or work in New York. Because this trial that Mr. Holder has convened will invite grave and unnecessary security risks with terrorists all over the world salivating at the opportunity to strike in NYC in front of a huge stage.

Foreign terrorists who wage war against the United States have no place sitting in a court that upholds the values that they so greatly detest. I think Mr. Holder has honored the mass murder of 9/11 just like it was any other crime.

My reply:

1. I live and work in New York. I used to work, as a matter of fact, in 2 World Trade Center and I commuted to work and occasionally still do, through the Trade Center. I knew a fair number of people who were killed there and a number of people who lost spouses or siblings there.

2. The Cole was a military target on foreign soil.

3. When a statement is taken in violation of, say, Miranda, it is "suppressed" meaning, it generally cannot be used at the trial. It does not mean that the defendant goes free "on a technicality." That happens on tv only. Believe me. I know.

4. There will be no travesty. If there is, we are in more trouble than a trial will establish.

Further comment:

#1 applies to me as well and I still work downtown. Which is why I am so surprised that a fellow New Yorker like you would want KSM and his colleagues put through the media circus of a criminal trial just a few blocks from Ground Zero.

I'm really not sure why US versus foreign soil matters. But do you think that if FDR had captured the Japanese military that bombed Pearl Harbor, we would have brought them back to Hawaii and tried them in federal court? No, instead FDR ordered his execution. That should tell you something.

As far as procedural technicalities only happening on TV, I hope you're right. (and I hope that you're a lawyer who knows better than me, because I'm not a lawyer but have spoken to others who are). While a procedural dismissal or acquittal is unlikely, just the fact that it's a remote possibility disturbs me.

And KSM's lawyers will have at their disposal all the rules available to any American defendant, including exclusion of evidence because torture was used or defendants were questioned too harshly. And how does KSM get a fair trial unless he and his lawyers have access to all of the classified and top secret documents which the government has put together over the last 8 years?

It already is a travesty because it will be such a media circus that could have been avoided if we kept it in a military court.

My further reply:

About the Japanese at Pearl Harbor: they were, as my original post explained, military officers of the Empire of Japan, serving an military objective. Had the planners or those who carried out those orders been captured they would have been treated as prisoners of war. The execution of a prisoner of war, except under unusual circumstances and following a court martial, is, in fact, a war crime.
The Geneva Convention in force at the time of World War II is here.

President Roosevelt did not "order" anyone's execution. The president, even as commander in chief, does not have that authority, and, contrary to what the immediate prior president believed, he is not the equivalent of the English monarch in the twelfth century.

Admiral Yamamoto, who many see as the architect of Pearl Harbor, was shot down in a well panned ambush in the air in World War II. I am certain the President was aware of the plan, but that does not qualify as an execution, but rather a military mission against a uniformed officer of an enemy at war, but the debate over its legality, such as it was, was discussed in its usually well written way by the great television show The West Wing a few years back.

Yes, I am a lawyer and I practice in this area. I cannot help you with fears over what "might" happen, only about what things are likely to happen.

I do not think the law is arbitrary and rootless as you (and your lawyer friends) apparently believe. Your lawyer friends ought to consider another line of work if they think the law is as bad as some of what passes for legal thought seems to suggest.

Yes, there are times when a judge suppresses evidence or otherwise renders a successful prosecution to be impossible when they should not have done so. Sometimes it is because the law has developed in an unnecessarily restricted way and some of us work very hard to have that changed. Those laws should be addressed differently not based on who the defendant is, but because they are wrong.

More often when evidence is wrongly suppressed it is because the judge interpreted the law incorrectly. Sometimes appeals from those orders are successful; other times not. When that happens, it is generally because the judge made an honest mistake, not because he or she wants to free criminals.

The discovery of state secrets issue came up in the Ramzi Yusef trial (in 2001, by the way) for the first Trade Center bombing. The defendant got nothing which could be used against the United States.

Judges are human beings, too. I cannot think of a judge who is going to go out of her or his way to find a way to let KSM or his co-defendants wriggle out of a conviction. I would be surprised if, notwithstanding the thumb suckers on Sunday morning tv, that KSM will be allowed to plead guilty and demand his own execution, but given the Attorney General's background and experience, and the rest of the Justice Department, they would not proceed to trial on this case without quite enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Stalin's Soviet Union people were executed after secret trials. We are a different people, thank God and thanks to our Founders. You call that a circus. I call it freedom. If you think broadcasters and print journalists should not make this into a circus, you ought to tell them that.

(The cases that caused cameras to be banned from courtrooms for many years, one of the first "trials of the century" was the Hauptmann trial around 1938 for the kidnapping and murder of the "Lindbergh baby" and ultimately the 1965 reversal of the conviction of Billy Sol Estes, raise many of those issues, but the technology is quite different today.)

Hang in there, Bill. It will be all okay. Have faith in our system of laws. They are not as absurd as tv likes to make them sound.

And now, here's someone who has given even more thought to this issue, who is quite eloquent in her comments about what is at issue: