Billings Blog

Aaron Flint had on an odd guest, William G. Boykin, who said some odd things, such as that the ACLU is more powerful than Christianity and that he wasn’t sure Islam was a real religion. The mind boggles. Flint said some odd things, too, under the safe shelter of Republican talking points. Geez, if I wanted to hear Republican talking points, I would listen to Sean Hannity.

First was that Obama flip-flopped on the “Mosque at Ground Zero” issue. That’s news to me. Obama stood up for the general principle that people have a constitutional right to religious freedom. Then he said he wouldn’t comment specifically on the wisdom of the proposal at hand. That’s perfectly clear and appropriate, is it not? The president ought to stand up for constitutional principles, and he ought to keep his mouth shut when people exercise their freedoms in ways that have nothing to do with his office. That was the mistake he made in the “beer summit” incident: He took a public stand on an issue outside his proper area of governance.  Maybe he’s just smarter now.

Second was that Flint criticized Obama for his so-called “Apology Tour” early in his presidency. I don’t want to waste time on that pointless old debate, but I did question what seemed to be an implicit notion that America should never apologize. Why not? We all agree that when we screw up as individuals, we should apologize for our actions, even when the harm they cause is unintentional. Why should countries — especially big, powerful countries — be any different?

Take Iran, for just one example. We helped overthrow a democratically elected government there. We propped up a ruthless dictator there for decades. We even sided with the butcher Saddam Hussein during his bloody and unprovoked war against Iran. Those were huge, massive screw-ups. Why not apologize? How does apologizing for genuine wrongs make us weaker? How does it hurt our interests? Most importantly, if we refuse to admit errors, how do we find the moral grounding to keep from making such stupid mistakes again?

UPDATE: I think Winston Churchill agrees with me.

UPDATE 2: In another of his endless rants about the “Ground Zero Mosque,” Hannity repeated today his outrage that the imam in question supposedly said that the United States has killed more innocent Muslims than Al Qaida has killed innocent Americans. Hannity finds this outrageous, but it is almost certainly true, isn’t it?

Roger Clawson finally reads “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” I was pleased to see that Ed Kemmick chimed in in comments. He and I both read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” after the Jane Smiley essay he mentions appeared. I think Ed liked the book quite a bit better than I did (it’s fairly turgid and a bit sentimental for my tastes), but I think we agree that it is worthy of any serious reader’s attention.

When I was soliciting suggestions for books to teach in my English classes last spring at Rocky, Ed suggested “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It was an excellent suggestion, I think, but I was too daunted to take it on. But it is remarkable how many of the characters and incidents of that book remain prominent in my mind, even just from reading the Classics Illustrated version and from poring over it for a few hours when I was a kid, still too young to get my head around all that thick prose but pretty sure I held something important in my hands.

I’m pretty sure I heard Aaron Flint say this morning that progressive tax rates are immoral and unconstitutional. Am I going crazy? Or is he? (Jesus makes a pretty good case for progressive taxation in Luke 21.)

I know I heard him say that Montana AP “got punked” on its coverage of two stories this week. One was the AP’s coverage of Janet Napolitano’s visit to Montana. I couldn’t quite get Flint’s point on the radio, and I’m still not sure I get it even after reading this. I guess the AP story failed to indicate sufficiently how far Havre is from the border crossing — a grievous error.

Flint’s other complaint was that AP didn’t write a story about Max Baucus’ admission that he hadn’t read every word of the final draft of the healthcare bill. I agree that Baucus so rarely gives straightforward answers to simple questions that it’s probably newsworthy when he does. But not reading every jot and tittle of a major piece of legislation is a very sensible thing for a congressman to do.

Congress decides what ought to be in bills, then it has people draft the bills to say what Congress intended. Getting the language exactly right is a very complicated business (that’s why we have so many lawyers in this country) and it involves a lot of definitions of terms, references to existing statutes and careful parsing of language. One advantage of having so many lobbyists in Washington is that you have people both for and against any major bill poring over the language looking for loopholes and inconsistencies, of which there are likely to be many. Even well intentioned readers of major bills are likely to misread and misinterpret numerous provisions, which accounted for some of the screwy news coverage we had on the healthcare issue last summer.

But to argue that it’s a good use of the time of 535 members of Congress to have them act, in effect, as final proofreaders of long and complex legislation is really pretty silly.  Which I suppose is why AP didn’t write about it. And I don’t quite get why Flint thinks this was an error.

OK, the ACLU sounds a little over the top on this one. Fears that teachers might be rendered “uncomfortable” by having to enter a building where other people sometimes worship scarcely sounds like a high offense against the First Amendment. Doesn’t everybody know that there’s nothing sacred about a building? Churches reside within people, not buildings.

On the other hand, I sort of appreciate the ACLU’s “camel’s nose in the tent” attitude about these matters. From a legal standpoint, there probably is always danger in yielding contested ground. And the ACLU is certainly no more over the top than Aaron Flint, who writes, “This just proves the Montana ACLU is nothing more than an anti-Christian, anti free-market lobby and litigation shop. ”

Weird. The ACLU is a “litigation shop,” I suppose; that’s why it hires so many lawyers. But this incident proves nothing about the free market, which isn’t involved. And anti-Christian? Does Flint imagine that the ACLU would have reacted differently if the school district held meetings in a synagogue? Or, heaven forbid, a mosque?

More importantly, as both of my fans know, I grew up in a fundamentalist church whose survival depended in large part on this nation’s strict commitment to separation of church and state. DeTocqueville had it right 175 years: Keeping the government out of church is the best thing that ever happened to religion. If Flint thinks the ACLU is bad for Christianity, just wait until the theocrats take over.

By the way, Aaron, with reference to your comment on an earlier post: What would you like to talk about? The Fairness Doctrine?

Dennis McDonald, the Democratic opponent of U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, was on Aaron Flint’s show Friday. It was a good interview, not too different from the long interview I had with McDonald the other day, who seems to be slowly finding his feet in this race. On Flint’s show, McDonald accused Rehberg of essentially doing nothing to help matters in Washington. A few callers defended Rehberg, but I didn’t hear any mention of Rehberg’s most substantive budget-cutting proposal: an across-the-board 5 percent spending cut the next two years in all federal spending except for defense, homeland security and veterans affairs.

I haven’t been too impressed by Rehberg’s other spending proposals, such as a ban on earmarks (possibly good policy but paltry in terms of balancing the budget), a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget (dangerous and unnecessary, since there are situations in which deficits make great sense and since Congress already has all the constitutional authority it needs to balance the budget) and a spending freeze (which might keep things from getting worse fast but won’t do much to make them better).

I don’t much like his across-the-board cuts either, in part because they exempt defense. Come on, I was in the Army. Don’t tell me you can’t 5 percent worth of cuts there, even with a couple of wars on. I agree that I don’t want to cut benefits for veterans, but I don’t much want to cut benefits for poor people, either, so why isn’t everything on the table? Also, Rehberg couldn’t even be troubled to pick up a pencil and figure out how much his proposal would save, a serious defect.

But the best critique has come from a fellow Republican, Jeff Essmann, who wrote in today’s Gazette:

Some states have made across the board budget cuts, which harm all state functions but forgo the hard work of examining what is working and what isn’t, and what is critical from that which is merely good. Across the board cuts act, in reality, to preserve the present structure of government to live another day.

Essmann was talking about state government, not the federal government. But the shoe sure fits.

As soon as I saw this headline, I knew which Paul would be on which side of the mosque issue. Ron, whatever you may think of his politics, is an honorable and intellectually consistent man. When he says he doesn’t want government poking its nose in places where the Constitution clearly says it should not be poking its nose, he means it, and he stands by it. Rand, maybe not so much.

Rocky Mountain College and Billings Public Schools both begin classes this week, so the wife and I have brought summer to a furious close. First there was the Bob Dylan concert, then over the weekend we drove to Glacier National Park to use a free rafting trip on the Flathead that my wife won in a raffle. It was 15 hours of driving and two nights in motels for a three-hour raft trip, but it was well worth it. I’m so tied to the paper that just getting out of town is pretty exciting, and the weather was absolutely gorgeous.

This weekend we went to see “Hair” (see review in this week’s Outpost). Now she is off to school, and I am trying to buckle down to textbooks and syllabi.

Limbaugh noted that 18 percent of Americans now think that President Obama is a Muslim. Then Limbaugh, who has of late been referring to the president as “Imam Barack Hoover Obama,” spent two hours laying out in detail every Muslim-related reference, gaffe, slur or inference against Obama he could think of, all without ever quite going so far as to himself call Obama a Muslim. Classy act.

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, David Gregory asked Mitch McConnell why nearly a third of Republicans think Obama is Muslim. McConnell said he had no idea. Hint to McConnell: Turn on the radio.

Gregory, by the way, continued his lonely crusade to get Republicans to say how they would pay for extending the tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year. He has asked this question in recent weeks of McConnell, Boehner, Sessions and Pence, all of whom have simply refused to answer.

McConnell seemed to think that he really didn’t have to answer because the existing tax rates are current tax policy. That’s nonsense, of course. Nobody thinks that continuing to operate the way we have been will balance the budget, so some policy is going to have to change. Besides, current policy actually is that tax rates go up at the end of the year. That’s the law that was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush. McConnell wants to change existing policy, not preserve it.

Republicans have determined, apparently, that plans for responsible governance are not the way to win elections. Sadly, they are probably right.

Republican Mike Linder, who is challenging incumbent Jay Bell for Yellowstone County sheriff, has released his first radio ad. The topic: the million dollar lawsuit the county just lost to employees alleging bias. Linder doesn’t directly blame Bell, who got the job after Sheriff Chuck Maxwell died, for the suit, but he does say, “Jay Bell’s not doing anything to fix it.”

Meanwhile, the Montana Republican Party is criticizing Sen. Jon Tester because his name showed up as a “special guest” at a fund-raiser in support of Bell. Will Deschamps, chairman of the Montana Republican Party, said, “I hope Senator Tester declines this invitation promptly. Anything less leaves Montana’s law enforcement officers with the impression that Tester will defend people who illegally discriminate against them.”

Deschamps added, “I believe Senator Tester should apologize to the Montana law enforcement community and the taxpayers of Yellowstone County for allowing his name to be used to promote this candidate.”

It’s going to be a long campaign.

Bill O’Reilly crushes dissent.

Hat tip to Digby, who also links to this rich story.  Seems that corporations can not only donate to political campaigns, they can do so without fear of criticism (at least on MSNBC).