Don't Take It Personally, Senator. He Just Doesn't Like People.

The surprise should be that it took so long to happen- and is so limited.

Last month, criticizing Massachusetts Senator Warren on MSNBC's Hardball, President Obama stated "I love Elizabeth. We're allies on a whole host of issues. But she's wrong on this. Last weekend, Obama charged "The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else.”

After the Senate (at least temporarily) yesterday blocked the Trade Promotion Authority (fast track authorization) the President had been aggressively seeking, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), an ally of Senator Warren on the matters of trade, financial regulation, and giving a helping hand to the middle class, remarked “I think the president was disrespectful to her by the way he did that... I think that the president has made this more personal than he needed to.”

Had Senator Brown been less respectful himself, he might have noted that, following Obama's initial criticism of Warren, the President misleadingly claimed

Every single one of the critics saying this is a secret deal, or send out e-mails to their fundraising base that they're working to stop a secret deal, could walk over and see the text of the agreement. When I just keep on hearing people repeating this notion that it's secret -- I gotta say, it's dishonest. And it's a little concerning when I see friends of mine resorting to those sort of tactics.

Were Brown less reserved, he might have mentioned that the person making that statement has decided that this non-secret deal is a national security matter. On the floor of the Senate, an exasperated Senator Barbara Boxer explained (video below)








The guard says, "you can’t take notes." I said, "I can’t take notes?’” "Well, you can take notes, but have to give them back to me, and I’ll put them in a file." So I said: "Wait a minute. I’m going to take notes and then you’re going to take my notes away from me and then you’re going to have them in a file, and you can read my notes? Not on your life."

I gotta say, it's dishonest, swears the guy who maintains it is not a secret deal, although a Senator is subject to prosecution if she reveals anything about it. As Joseph Stiglitz told Chris Hayes

Well, to put it quite bluntly, I think from what we`ve been able to see of the TPP, you have to remember, USDR keeps these trade agreements secret and the only reason we know about it is from WikiLeaks (ph) and in my case, talking to negotiators from other countries where there`s a little bit more transparency than the United States.

From what we`ve been able to see, this is a very bad agreement. It`s not just about trade. The trade part is bad enough. But it`s about intellectual property, regulation.

While Brown called Obama "disrespectful," he could have knocked him for being dishonest. Patronizing might have come into play, also.  It wouldn't be the first time for Obama, who infamously on the campaign trail in 2008 lifted his nose in the air and maintained "It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

During his re-election campaign, the President, defending his wife, patronizingly argued "there's no tougher job than being a mom," a perspective torn to shreds (in another context) a year ago by writer and mother Mary Elizabeth Williams.

The President not only looks down on mere mortals, the habit is spreading.  Presidential press secretary Josh Earnest, appearing on Morning Joe, actually stated

Well Joe, as somebody who gets paid to talk in public for a living, I try to be mindful of at least trying to be slow to criticize people who say things in public that are so inconsistent with their reputation and with their character. And Senator Brown is somebody that has a good relationship with the president. They've worked effectively on a range of issues including nominating and confirming the first woman to be the chair of the Federal Reserve. So, Senator Brown is a stand-up guy. And I'm confident after he's had a chance to take a look at the comments he made yesterday, that he'll find a way to apologize.

Gosh, Barack Obama's feelings were hurt and Sherrod Brown will apologize, Earnest speculated, "after he's had a chance to look at the comments he made yesterday" As a child, Brown just blurts things out, infers the President's spokesperson.

So keep at it, Senator.   It may be a dream, but perhaps a couple of other members of Congress will follow your lead and Barack Obama will realize your criticism is quite mild, that others have not escaped the realization of how demeaning he is.






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Although Will Cain Still Makes No Sense

In January, twelve people were killed in an attack on Charlie Hebdo's Paris office by gunmen shouting "Allahu Akbar"( ("God is great"). The magazine continued to publish, which should have ended any reasonable debate whether Charlie Hebdo courageously demonstrated the Western principle of freedom of expression.

Alas, it did not and six members of  the PEN American Center boycotted the recent ceremony at which the organization awarded its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French publication.

That prompted conservative cable news pundit Will Cain, on a "Real Time" panel (video below) with former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee and MSNBC host Alex Wagner, to call Trudeau a "coward," a characterization with which host Bill Maher agreed.

The description was a little harsh- and inaccurate- but perhaps turnabout is fair play, or at least nearly so. In an article published mid-April in The Atlantic, the Doonesbury creator had contended

Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. 

We thus have the spectacle of one cartoonist boldly condemning a publication for itself boldly condemning the extremism variously manifested in a religion claiming between 1.6 billion and 2 billion adherents, and whose more radical elements have not always taken kindly to criticism.
  
The charge that Charlie Hebdo has been afflicting the afflicted while comforting the comfortable does not hold up under scrutiny,  Following the Paris attack four months ago, Jason Karaian and Gideon Lichfield wrote

But Charlie Hebdo is not anti-Islam as much as it is anti-religion and broadly anti-establishment. It defends its “right to blasphemy,” in the words (and drawings) of Bernard Velhac, known as Tignous, one of the cartoonists killed in the shootings today. “We publish caricatures every week, but people only describe them as declarations of war when it’s about the person of the Prophet or radical Islam,” cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb,told Der Spiegel in 2012. He was also killed in the shootings today.

Around the time of the 2011 controversy over its Muhammed issue, the magazine’s editor noted that the publication had been sued 13 times by Catholic organizations but only once by a Muslim one.

Going after organized religion generally is what we in America call being politically incorrect, which Maher practiced until 13 years ago he offended the crowd all caught up in the anti-Muslim hysteria of its time. He is not interested in riding the waves of public opinion.

Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the stand-up comic, still resisting the emotion of the moment, is seeing things far more clearly than his detractors.  He is among many who have tried to distinguish the radicals from the moderates, as when on Friday he asked rhetorically "Why don't we get on the side of those Muslims- who want to live in the 21st century- rather than getting on the side of those who want to live in the 7th?"

Trudeau argues "Charlie Hebdo,which always maintained it was attacking Islamic fanatics, not the general population, has succeeded in provoking many Muslims throughout France to make common cause with its most violent outliers. " The perspective, Maher notes, "assumes we just have to accept that Muslims are unable to control themselves the way we would ask everyone else in the world."

Still, Maher's major contribution to the debate lies elsewhere, though nearby. Unlike most individuals critical of radical Islam, he does not deny terrorism which has come from the right.  Moreover, he acknowledges homegrown fanatics, including Pamela Geller, "a loon" with whom he's "not a fellow traveler."

That includes, also,  Westboro Baptist Church. But Maher adds an appropriate distinction: "They always protest my (standup comedy) shows but it never ends in a gun battle." There are extremists, and then there are extremists.










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Where's Hillary?

Ask not "Where's Waldo?" Ask "Where's Hillary?"

On April 27, Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future wrote

Will Hillary Clinton oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the fast track authority designed to ramrod it through the Congress? She’s been noncommittal to date, with many assuming she will eventually support the president who she served as secretary of state. But by calling out his opponents, President Obama has turned the escalating battle over fast track and TPP into an intra-party back-alley knife fight. As someone seeking to lead that party, Hillary can’t remain on the sidelines for long. And, if she adheres to the standards that she put forth for the agreement, she might well end up joining the opposition.

Eleven days later, Dave Johnson, also of the Campaign for America's Future, linked to Borosage's post and explained

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled the voting process for trade promotion authority, commonly known as “fast track,” to begin as early as Tuesday. If passed, fast track prohibits the Congress from amending trade agreements no matter what problems might show up, requires these agreements to be voted on within 90 days, limits the debate Congress is allowed and prohibits filibusters.

"Hillary can't remain on the sidelines for long," Borosage complained, but she has exceeded our expectations. Two days before the pivotal vote- on fast track- Mrs. Clinton (photo from Lucas Jackson/Reuters) is nowhere to be found.

She has done her best to avoid the issue. Asked in April about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clinton cryptically remarked "Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. We have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive." (This stands in contrast with candidates publicly opposed to jobs, prosperity, national security, and competitiveness.)

Cynically, the thought arises that Mrs. Clinton is playing a very cynical game. With Bernie Sanders raising enough money that he may get the media attention necessary to challenge the front runner on issues of economic justice, it's unlikely HRC eventually will come out in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Yet, her silence is facilitating passage of fast track authority, which would make heading off approval of the TPP a truly formidable task.

Whatever she believes about the trade deal itself, Clinton likely wants the President of the United States to have the authority to present such agreements for up-or-down approval to the United States Congress.  She wants, and probably expects, to be the next President herself and is, in a way, in a similar situation to that of Barack Obama on torture in the Bush Administration.

Obama seems to have been always opposed to torture. But as President he not only has refused to prosecute members of the prior Administration for the regime illegal under both international and U.S. law. Further, as Jonathan Turley  pointed out in 2010,  the current Administration "worked hard behind the scenes not only to prevent any investigation of torture in the United States but shutdown efforts abroad to enforce the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. This includes threatening the Spanish that, if they did not derail a judicial investigation, it would have serious consequences in bilateral relations."

Of course it did. Protect the prior President, and future Presidents will protect you, or at least be stymied because there is little precedence in going after past occupants of the Oval Office.  If Barack Obama gets his way on bargaining away U.S. sovereignty to multinational corporations, it will set a precedent and make it easier for his successor to do the same without a whimper from the United States Congress.

So where is Hillary?  She is in hiding, where her interests lie.

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Mothers Are Women, Too

Mary Elizabeth Williams, a happy and proud mother of two girls, wrote this past week that Mother's Day

is not going to be a great day for everybody. It’s hard for people who’ve lost their moms. It’s hard for those who had crummy moms — and believe me, it hasn’t escaped my notice that in our cultural glorification of motherhood, the fact that a lot of women who’ve had children have done a piss poor of raising them seems to get conveniently left out a lot....

I certainly know several childfree women, and I’d say the number of them I’d describe as selfish, shallow and self-absorbed is dead even with the number of mothers I’d describe that way. That’s why I’ve never understood women who circle the wagons and shut out their childfree friends once they cross over to Motherland.

Though gracious and generous enough to avoid the term, Williams recognizes that people can be awfully patronizing about motherhood:

I recently had a conversation with a fellow mom in which we wound up passionately disagreeing about the concept of motherhood itself. She argued that you can be a “mother” even if you haven’t had children; you can be a mother of ideas, of enterprise. I countered that “woman = mother of something” is a label not every woman wants or aspires to. And while my status as a mother is in my heart easily the biggest, best aspect of my life, it is not the only one. It is not the sole thing that defines me, the only identity I have, the single thing I’d want to be remembered for. It’s sure as hell not my “job,” and I deeply resent the relentless categorization of women’s personal lives in professional terms, like we have to call it a job for it to matter. You’ll notice you rarely hear fatherhood described as the best job in the world. If you want to call something my job, then pay me for it. Motherhood is the thing I volunteered for and I’m completely fine with that.

Recognition that being a mother is (usually hard) work but not a job is nothing new for Williams, who thirteen months ago explained

Aside from the fact that I harbor no illusions that what I do in raising my children is more difficult than, say, defusing IEDs or putting out oil fires or finding cures for cancer or being a sweatshop factory worker, I also don’t consider motherhood my job. I have a career, one that’s satisfying and challenging and for which I get paid. But being a mother isn’t a job any more than being a spouse or a daughter or a friend or, let’s not fail to mention here, a father is. Oh, it’s work, make no mistake, physically and emotionally demanding work. Work that many of us chose and love. But it isn’t a job and it sure as hell isn’t on a higher moral plane than many other forms of work.

The "job" thing has been effective political strategy for many companies. The video (below) from Boston ad agency Mullen for American Greetings CardStore includes a woman referring to a "sick, twisted idea," which would be an apt description for the promotion itself.  Williams concluded

The fact that I have had and am raising children is not a résumé item. It’s not something I “gave up” my life for. It’s sure as hell not a competitive act, one in which I somehow get to beat out every person who isn’t female or doesn’t have kids for best and most. And I don’t appreciate messages that seem to build women up while essentially telling them that nothing they can achieve in life matters more than having babies. You want to thank women, want to show women they have value? Close the wage gap. Challenge the insidious rape culture that exists in the military and in our colleges. Join the fight for our reproductive rights, so we can decide when and if we choose motherhood, safely. Don’t pat us on the head and minimize our contributions outside of the domestic sphere. You think motherhood is thankless, hard work? So is feminism. How about you celebrate that?












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Videos Concealed

Buried in this Politico story is one potentially radical development: "During a recent speech, Grassley also floated a pitch to require states to give those charged with a misdemeanor counsel in court." A few months ago, NPR had reported

To understand some of the distrust of police that has fueled protests in Ferguson, Mo., consider this: In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson — a city of 21,135 people — issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.

A new report released the week after 18-year old Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson helps explain why. ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-area public defender group, says in itsreport that more than half the courts in St. Louis County engage in the "illegal and harmful practices" of charging high court fines and fees on nonviolent offenses like traffic violations — and then arresting people when they don't pay. The report singles out courts in three communities, including Ferguson.

No detail was given, and so goes the saying, "God is in the details." So, too, "the devil is in the details," which must provide quite an intriguing confrontation. Still, give these (alleged) offenders an attorney, the practice of filling municipal coffers with fines would end pretty quickly. Police officers don't want to spend their workweek in court; so, too, are towns uninterested in paying for counsel, nor in having to defend arrests on petty charges.  It would help deal a blow to "broken windows" policing, which can exist only because the right to counsel is limited.

So it will not happen. Momentum for reform seems focused on other elements of the system, such that

The Congressional Black Caucus has been pushing for decades to reform the criminal justice system, including doing away with laws that force mandatory minimums for certain drug offenses or requiring police department to retrain and adopt body cameras.

Last week, Paul introduced legislation with Rep. Keith Ellison, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, that seeks to reclassify some nonviolent drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.

Again, God/the devil is in the details and a full assessment should await those details being flushed out (in what is called the "RESET" Act). However, an AP article the past week points the way toward reform that would be revolutionary if enacted.  In Delaware

A police dashcam video released Thursday shows a black suspect being kicked in the face by a white police officer who was charged this week with assault.

The video, recorded in August 2013, was released by Dover police after a federal judge ruled last week that it was no longer considered confidential. The judge's ruling came in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the suspect by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Recorded by another officer's dashboard camera, the video shows Dover Cpl. Thomas Webster IV kicking Lateef Dickerson after Dickerson gets down on his hands and knees in response to commands to get on the ground.

Dickerson, 30, was knocked unconscious and suffered a broken jaw, police said in a news release Monday after Webster was charged.

Webster, 41, was arrested Monday and placed on unpaid leave after a grand jury indicted him for second-degree assault. A previous grand jury declined to indict Webster in March 2014, and the U.S. Attorney's Office, after reviewing the case, found no violation of Dickerson's civil rights.

Yet, Officer Webster was arrested only Monday, soon after the video (below) of the incident was released. Blogging on Daily Kos, Shaun King remarks

.... it's clear that the video is the only reason new charges were filed and Webster was arrested.

What national standards need to be in place concerning law enforcement videos such that departments are not able to conceal them for years at a time? Had this video been released immediately, the officer would've likely been arrested immediately.

This is an insight from a leftist blogger. Notably- and not surprisingly- it didn't come from the likes of Rand Paul, Cory Booker, Mike Lee,or any of the other Senators (or Representatives) leading the crime reform bandwagon.  Until an idea like King's becomes mainstream, or one such as Grassley's catches the attention of his colleagues, change to the criminal justice system ought (as another saying goes) be taken with a grain of salt.

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Digging In Deeper

CNN reminds us President Bill

Clinton signed into law an omnibus crime bill in 1994 that included the federal "three strikes" provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. On Wednesday, Clinton acknowledged that policy's role in over-incarceration in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison," Clinton said Wednesday. "And we wound up...putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives."

Clinton's comments come on the heels of protests in Baltimore over policing and the death of a young black man there and a week after Hillary Clinton delivered one of the first policy addressees of her presidential campaign on criminal justice reform, saying that the system focuses too much on incarceration.

The problem wasn't that putting people in prison left insufficient money to educate and train them for new jobs.  There money always was there; what was lacking was will, with Clinton having a fetish for balancing the budget and the GOP (as usual) uninterested in spending on human capital. Combine that with the job-killing NAFTA, Clinton would have had us train and educate individuals for jobs which no longer existed or, with the tech boom were relatively-low paying and offered few benefits.

Of course, the President did balance the budget, largely with a bold, huge tax increase in 1993, for which he apologized to a wealthy group of contributors in 1995. Soon afterward, he reversed himself- sort of- stating "If I said anything which implies that I think we didn't do what we should have done, given the choices we faced at that time, I shouldn't have said that," which (roughly translated) means "Ohmigosh, that didn't sound right!"

Then there was the time, in July of 1993, that President Clinton signed the bill- which he cited as "a major step forward"-  establishing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military.  In 2010, he told Katie Couric that he regretted generating DADT, though he added "keep in mind, I didn't choose this policy."   Similarly, in 2013, he wrote that he had come to believe the Defense of Marriage Act, which he signed in in 1996, is unconstitutional, though he argued it was a response to the likelihood of more draconian initiatives, perhaps including even a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

The former President has not stated that he regrets a 1998 bombing raid in Sudan, ordered partly in retaliation for bombing of three U.S. embassies. The target is now commonly believed to have been merely a pharmaceutical factory, which at the time US intelligence believed was involved with both the processing of a nerve agent and Al-Qaeda. Three years after the event, The Guardian reported the facility was

one of only three medium-sized pharmaceutical factories in Sudan, and the only one producing TB drugs - for more than 100,000 patients, at about £1 a month. Costlier imported versions are not an option for most of them - or for their husbands, wives and children, who will have been infected since. Al-Shifa was also the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast, mostly pastoralist, country. Its speciality was drugs to kill the parasites which pass from herds to herders, one of Sudan's principal causes of infant mortality.

Although  it would be helpful- and far more meaningful- were the former president to acknowledge his role in the financial calamity the nation has mostly (though not fully; graph from Pew Research Center) climbed its way out of.   that's probably asking too much. However, Clinton's flexibility and willingness to call into question some past actions bespeak an awareness of self or of reality that is lacking elsewhere.

At least President Clinton's  decision on Al-Shifa did not unleash the forces turned against Middle Eastern nations and the West as did the invasion in 2003 ordered by President George W. Bush.  That has not, however, deterred one of  the three major GOP presidential candidates who, one can hope, is gradually being unmasked as a right-wing extremist.  We now learn 

After spending months distancing himself from his family’s political legacy, Jeb Bush surprised a group of Manhattan financiers this week by naming his brother, former president George W. Bush, as his most influential counselor on U.S.-Israel policy.

“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” Bush said Tuesday, speaking to a crowd of high-powered investors at the Metropolitan Club, according to four people present. The Republicans in the room spoke on the condition of anonymity to divulge information about the private meeting.

Strategically, it's probably a smart move. Steve M. believes "Republican voters want a candidate who'll say things that please conservatives and make non-conservatives furious. Jeb just did that -- furtively." However, that probably is mere "gravy" to the main dish, that of pleasing mega-billionaire Repub donor Sheldon Adelson, who loves Israel almost as much as he hates unions, and couldn't have been pleased to find that the candidate had considered former Secretary of State James Baker (of "f_ _ _ the Jews" notoriety) a foreign policy adviser.

John Ellis Bush might have been content with "I love my brother and served well the country he loves so much."  Obviously, the second part of those three claims would have been untrue, but everyone would have understood and given him a pass.  It's one thing to have made the mistakes President 43 made but adding him as part of your foreign policy team is fairly contemptuous, suggesting the third Bush believes the American electorate will swallow just about anything.

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Hillary Clinton was right about two things she stated on her crime speech on Wednesday, May 6. She stated "Let's take on the broader inequities in our society. You can't separate out the unrest we see in the streets from the cycles of  poverty and despair that hollow out those neighborhoods."

She admitted also "I don't know all the answers."

Mrs. Clinton doesn't only not know all the answers. She also plays a little fast and loose with the facts. The former Senator maintained "Women—white women without high school education—are losing life expectancy. Black men and black women are seeing their life expectancy goes down in so many parts of our country" (graphs of life expectancy, white and black men and women; and of causes of death, off-point, both from National Vital Statistics System)

While life expectancy of white women without a high school education has declined precipitously, the life span of white men without a high school diploma also has dropped significantly. Further, the overall increase in the lifespan of black Americans, both female and male, has increased more than that of white Americans. Clinton's reference to education is helpful; that to race, much less so. In 2003 Alex Henderson found it "troubling"

a report that the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington released in July 2013. That study broke down life expectancy for men and women in different parts of the U.S., showing a strong correlation between income levels and longevity. The report found that life expectancy is 81.6 for males and 84.5 for females in Fairfax County, Virginia (a very affluent area) and 81.4 for males and 85.0 for females in Marin County, California (another upscale area) compared to only 63.9 for males and 72.9 for females in McDowell County, West Virginia or 66.7 for males and 73.3 for females in Tunica County, Mississippi.

For those keeping score at home, McDowell County is 89.1% white and 9.5% black/African-American. Tunica County is predominately black- but its annual per capita income in 2010 was $11,978 when yearly per capita income nationally was $39,791.  Both counties are poor.

There is a longevity issue that Clinton did not mention and probably won't. Henderson noted

There is a considerable amount of data on life expectancy among Americans, much of it disturbing. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. lags behind a long list of countries when it comes to overall life expectancy. WHO has reported that the U.S., factoring in both genders, has an overall life expectancy of 79 (76 for males, 81 for females) compared to 83 in Japan and Switzerland, 82 in France, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada, Israel, Luxembourg, Singapore and Sweden, 81 in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand, Finland, South Korea, the Republic of Ireland and Norway, and 80 in Belgium, Slovenia, the U.K., Malta, Kuwait and Portugal.

... and when one compares life expectancy in McDowell County to life expectancy in Guatemala, one of Latin America’s poorest countries, Guatemalans come out slightly ahead. WHO has reported an overall life expectancy of 69 for Guatemala (66 for men, 73 for women).

Lagging life expectancy in the USA is critical when considering the solvency of Social Security, for critics often cite increasing lifespan as rationale for increasing the age of eligibility for Social Security or for cutting benefits in some other manner.  Affluent people are living longer; the poor and the working class, not so much, if at all.

Consider, additionally, that Clinton is in a long line of would-be criminal justice reformers in pointing out "a stark fact" that "the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world's total prison population."It's a stark fact, also, that Americans don't live as long a, and enjoy less social mobility than, residents of similar nations, inconvenient refutation of the America the Exceptional meme.

Clinton does, however, seem to emphasize

When we talk about one and a half million missing African American men, we're talking about missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers.

They're not there to look after their children or bring home a paycheck. And the consequences are profound.

It's comforting to believe that "one and a half million missing African American men" (or lots of white men) would otherwise be there "to look after their children or bring home a paycheck."  But it just isn't so.

Criminality is not the preferred lifestyle of employed men, or even of men who stay close to home to look after their children.  There once was a time when liberals/progressives acknowledged the connection between being gainfully employed and avoiding descent into crime or deviance.  Mrs. Clinton prefers to paint a picture of families falling into poverty because of incarceration of the man of the house (to which she obviously was referring) rather than to remind us that poverty as often contributes to anti-social behavior.

She could have done that, of course, but that would have implied we have to spend money, a reality neo-liberals prefer to ignore.

"The era of big government is over, but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves," President Clinton famously announced in January 2006, and his wife seems to have taken at least the first part of that to heart. Mrs. Clinton advocates one thing which would be a financial expense- or rather presumably would be an expense. It is an uncontroversial innovation and one to which no price tag has been widely applied, as if the cameras one day will fall down upon the heavens onto police uniforms, without cost to the public. (And maybe there will be no costto the public- wait until a creative municipality or state decides that they should be paid for with additional fees imposed upon those criminal defendants, whose concerns were the focus of HRC's entire speech.)

All the other reforms will be, it appears, will be revenue neutral- or perhaps even be revenue-positive. She did promise "I'll be talking about all of this in the months to come, offering new solutions to protect and strengthen our families and communities."

But for now at least, her priorities include ending "arbitrary mandatory minimum sentences" and expanding "specialized drug courts and juvenile programs (to) work to the betterment of individuals and community."  Presumably, the latter would replace prison terms for many offenders, and the former would bring (public/government) costs down by enabling inmates to be released early.

There are two facets of reform- law enforcement and criminal justice- to reform address crime in society. In her speech last week, Hillary Clinton ignored the first (except for a token reference to cameras) and was sorely lacking in the latter.





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