Garrison Keillor: Put them to work.

Garrison Keillor, not known for his conservatism, wonders why the government is not putting people to work:

It's the conservative in me that wishes we had an old-fashioned government jobs program, such as FDR's Works Progress Administration, which hired unemployed people to work to build roads, libraries, public toilets, hiking trails, tens of thousands of small useful projects. (When my dad saw the initials WPA on the cornerstone of a building, he said it stood for "We Poke Along," but he could afford to be disdainful since he'd been hired after high school by his uncle Lew to pump gas at Lew's Pure Oil station.) My inner conservative thinks unemployment is wasteful and damaging to the spirit -- 15 million unemployed, many more underemployed -- a disaster, a blight upon the land. Intolerable. Work is redemptive.

I often wonder why we are paying out unemployment benefits without asking recipients to do something in return. There a lot of work that the government needs done; can't some of this work be done in return for unemployment benefits? How about cleaning up vacant lots and parks? How about tutoring children how to read? How about helping the military with some of the non-combat related tasks that it needs to get done domestically? I realize that many jobs are specialized, and that you can't just throw anyone into many types of jobs, especially for short periods of a few weeks or months. And I despise the idea of make-work, forcing people do things that aren't productive in return for a check. But can't the taxpayers get something in return for some of those unemployment benefits, at least in some cities, some of the time? I do agree with Keillor that at least some kinds of work can be redemptive--and most adults I know are out there dragging themselves out of their cozy houses to do some sort of work. I don't think of meaningful work as punishment, but perhaps that's where I differ with those who think that Keillor's idea is cruel.

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The Long Road To Papal Self Destruction

The legal back-and-forth over the Vatican’s position on the sexual abuse revelations seems to Americans bizarre. While certainly the Catholic Church has a large contingent, we are a traditionally Protestant nation and after ditching the Anglican’s after the Revolution, the whole question of a Church being able to deny the right of civil authority to prosecute one of its representatives for criminal acts was swallowed up in the strident secularism that, despite the current revisionist rhetoric of a very loud activist minority, characterized the first century of the Republic. Even American Catholics may be a be fuzzy on how the Vatican can try to assert diplomatic immunity for the Pope in order to block prosecutorial efforts. But the fact is, the Vatican is a State, just like Italy, Switzerland, Germany, or the United States. The Pope is the head of a political entity (technically, the Holy See, but for convenience I use the more inclusive term Vatican), with all the rights and privileges implied. The Vatican has embassies. They have not quite come out to assert that priests, being officials (and perhaps officers) of that state, have diplomatic immunity, but they have certainly acted that way for the past few decades as this scandal has percolated through the halls of St. Peter. It would be an interesting test if they did, to in fact allow that attorneys generals, D.A.s, and other law enforcement agencies have absolutely no legal grounds on which to prosecute priests. To date, the Vatican has not gone there. So what is the political relationship between, say, the Vatican and the United States? From 1797 to 1870, the United States maintained consular relations with the Papal States. We maintained diplomatic relations with the Pope as head of the Papal States from 1848 to 1868, though not at the ambassadorial level. With the loss of the Papal States in 1870, these relationships ended until 1984, although beginning in 1939 a number of presidents sent personal envoys to the Holy See for specific talks on various humanitarian issues. Diplomatic relations resumed January 10, 1984. On March 7, 1984, the Senate confirmed William A. Wilson, who had served as President Reagan’s personal envoy from 1981, as the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. The Holy See in turn named Archbishop Pio Laghi as the first Apostolic Nuncio (equivalent to ambassador) of the Holy See to the U.S. The Pope, as head of the governmental body—the Holy See—has the status of head of state. Arresting the Pope—even issuing a subpoena—is a problematic question under these circumstances, as he would technically enjoy immunity stemming from his position. The question, however, more to the point is the overall relationship of the global Church to the Vatican and the prerogatives the Pope and the Holy See seem to believe they possess in the matter of criminal actions and prosecutions of individual priests, bishops, even archbishops. That requires going back a long time. At one time, the Holy Roman Church held secular power and controlled its own territories, known as the Papal States. When this “country” was established is the subject of academic study, but a clear marker is the so-called Donation of Pepin. The Duchy of Rome was threatened materially by invading Lombards, which the Frankish ruler Pepin the Short ended around 751 C.E.

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We need a monarch.

I hate to sound like a Tea-Party nutbag, but I really love the United States' Constitution. As I've mentioned before, I'm a free-speech fanatic. I love the Constitution's sharp focus on individual liberties, its emphasis on the rights of the accused, and that grade-school-civics favorite, the checks and balances of power. I despair when these ideals meet real-life sacrifices, especially glaring ones like, oh, the utter lack of Congressional declarations of war since WWII. I also don't like to sully the document's purity with excessive amendments, interpretations and adaptations. No Defense of Marriage Amendment, please, but while you're at it, no marriage at all (it violates the establishment clause, you see). But don't call me a Scalia-esque strict constructionist. If I could, I would copy-edit the otherwise brilliant Constitution and correct a centuries-old omission with no qualms: I would give the United States a monarch. It probably seems unamerican, undemocratic and all-around anti-freedom-y to propose that we foist an unquestioned figure to the crown of government. It probably sounds old-fashioned, all uppity and needlessly symbolic and European. I know it does. It's exactly my point.

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Problems with heavily monied judge elections

At Raw Story, Adam Skaggs warns that bigger money than ever will be pouring into judicial elections in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United. He also offers some good suggestions:

[S]tates should adopt public financing systems for judicial elections (something West Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Wisconsin have already done). Public financing gets judges out of the unseemly business of dialing for dollars to make sure they win. States also need to adopt stricter disclosure rules, so the public knows which individuals and groups are spending in judicial campaigns. And states should institute new disqualification regulations to ensure that, if a judge is assigned to hear the case of a major campaign supporter, he or she must step aside and let a wholly impartial judge preside.

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