Archive for November, 2006

Dear President Ahmadinejad,

Thanks for your recent correspondence. It’s been way too long since we last spoke. We should keep in touch more often.

Thanks so much for your kind words about us, and we appreciate you extending your hand in friendship to our nation.

We see you’ve outlined some of your concerns about American foreign policy and have appealed to our desire to defend “the innocent and the weak against oppressors and bullies.” We’d very much like to work with you on this, but first we have just a few concerns of our own. We know that you “readily embrace the promotion of human ideals such as compassion, empathy, [and] respect for the rights of human beings,” so we hope you consider the following:

• According to Reporters Without Borders, your country holds the record for press freedom violations.
• According to the International Federation of Human Rights, members of the Bahai faith, the largest religious minority in Iran, have been subjected to “unwarranted arrests, false imprisonment, beatings, torture, unjustified executions, confiscation and destruction of property owned by individuals and the Bahá’í community, denial of employment, denial of government benefits, denial of civil rights and liberties, and denial of access to higher education.”
• Your country ranks second only to China in the number of citizens executed, one of whom, in 2004, was a 16-year-old girl hanged in a public square for committing adultery despite being unmarried and despite claims of being sexually abused. In order to prove rape, she would have had to produce four male witnesses. She was one of 159 people executed in 2004 for violating Islamic law.
• Last year, these two Iranian teens were hanged for being gay, a crime punishable by life imprisonment or execution in your country:
• Torture is not illegal in your country, and is often carried out in Iranian prisons, including of this Canadian-Iranian photojournalist who was beaten, tortured, raped, and died in prison from a fractured skull.

Oh, plus you deny the Holocaust an awful lot.

None of this is to deny the nobility of the Iranian people or your nation, though. We’re just trying to keep up an open dialogue, you know?

Happy holidays,
The American People

Alright folks, here’s out second guest post, this time it’s from our good friend and regular commenter Tom (a.k.a. Tet), many thanks to him. Tom and I agree about 99% of the time :)

I’ve got some time this morning, so I’ll use it to explain my reasons for a McCain candidacy being disasterous for the future of the Republican Party. It’s not that you’re making things up in your observations of them, Billy Joe, it’s just that your baseline is limited by your lifetime.

You speak a lot about “owning the center” and while I don’t recall you saying that the Republicans traditionally own the moderates in America specifically, it is often implied by your writing.

Here’s the deal, however: The Republican center in American politics has only existed a very, very short time–specifically since 1980. Prior to that, the Democrats were in firm control of the middle-class of Middle America since the 1932 election.

The Republicans were the party of the elite. They were powered by big money from the Rockefellers and other “old money” capitalists. The labor unions members in the northern cities and the segregationists in the South felt strongly opposed to the Republican Party, and, since they vastly outnumbered the actual *owners* of the factories, they kept winning.

This is why the Democrats held control of the Congress for so many decades during the 20th Century, even during the time that Republican presidents like Eisenhower and Nixon were in office.

Once government had grown to unprecedented size (say in the late 70s) *and* was shown to be ineffectual under Jimmy Carter, the Conservatism that had been invented by Karl Hess, expounded by Barry Goldwater, and embodied by Ronald Reagan could at last come on strongly and attract people away from the naturally Democratic center.

This was a *reaction* to a bloated government, not a desire for the government to enact change. As RR said, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government IS our problem.”

Once Bush senior was elected (a traditional member of the Northeastern Elite that had represented the Republican party for most of the Century) he abandoned the conservative philosophies and raised taxes, which caused the center to move back home to the Democrats and elect Clinton.

Newt recovered that base with the Contract With America and maintained a Republican majority until the members of Congress and the President forgot about the promises that they had made to that base and the ‘06 election followed.

Here’s why McCain cannot win, no matter what the polls are currently saying:

He believes that the government can solve America’s problems. Whether it can or not is irrelevant, because the majority of Americans do NOT believe that this is the case. A Hitler won’t arise in America simply because the middle in America absolutely HATES authority of any kind–it was fleeing authority that brought our ancestors here. (In Dawkinian terms, we’ve been selectively breeding for anarchists in America for 350 years and we’re GOOD at self-government by now.)

A Republican that could get elected President would look like this:

Governor of a successful state

Anti-Abortion, while allowing for exceptions in some cases

Nationalist in terms of trade and borders (near-Pat Buchanan would be the ideal place on the spectrum to win)

In favor of lowering taxes and reducing spending domestic and foreign

Isolationist in foreign policy

Scrupulously honest and humorously outspoken (in the Harry Truman vein)

You guys know anyone out there like this?

~By Tom (a.k.a Tet)

Matt Lauer this morning on the Today Show:

For months now the White House has rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into a civil war. And, for the most part, news organizations like NBC have hesitated to characterize it as such. But after careful consideration, NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted — that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas — can now be characterized as a civil war.

And the lede in an LA Times article a couple days ago:

Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. [emphasis added]

I expect to hear much of the crowd reading this blog to cry out against liberal bias, but come on. I’m a liberal who supported the war, but it’s time we all faced reality, and it’s surprising and refreshing to see the media stepping up to do so.

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

~James Madison (A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785)

Madison still your favorite Tom?

Hey Urbanagora readers, my call for guest posts has been answered first by Brandon Ruiz (a.k.a. S&D), my new friend at the law school. He’s a bright young liberal lad from the West Coast, so if you want to know anything about Pelosi’s new policies, just read his post! Your contribution is appreciated, Thanks Brandon:

Well Billy asked that we submit to alleviate him and Brian of some of the work of being creative and thought-provoking on the blog, so I offer my humble services. Now before I get too deep, I’d like to write my initial disclaimer: these are my opinions, not truths, and therefore are neither right nor wrong, but my view of the issue. Feel free to disagree, but if you say I’m “wrong” I’ll have to summarily execute you. That said, let the fun begin. By the way, this is a long one.

There is an issue that has attracted my attention over the past several years that I’ve really been itching to properly lay out in writing so that I can articulate what exactly I mean when I say the following words: “I hate suburbia.” I’d like to lay out a few definitions so that I’m properly understood. When I say “urban areas” I’m talking about downtowns, commercial districts, and the condos, townhouses, apartments, row houses, and houses that are within say 5 miles of the city center. The term “suburb” refers to anything further out. Within the category of “suburb,” there are three broad categories which are not mutually exclusive, but more of a spectrum. There are “inner suburbs” which are older, more integrated suburbs with their own small commercial districts and downtown areas. There are “bedroom suburbs” which tend to be further out than the inner suburbs and where the majority of the people live in the area and commute in to the city to work (generally for quite a long time ~ 1 hour + roundtrip). Finally, there are “exurbs” which are more or less like bedroom suburbs, but with even less of a commercial district and further from the city center.

Suburbs are bad news. They’re environmentally unsustainable, socially isolating and disruptive, extremely expensive, and piss poor land use. As I said above, there are differences in types of suburbs, and I think that the general categories are all of what I just mentioned in increasing degree as one gets farther from the urban center.

The issue of environmental unsustainability is to me self-evident, but because not all of you are me, I’ll explain. Approximately half of all air pollution is produced by personal automobiles. The growth in the use of cars was an outgrowth of the massive expansion in suburban living spaces supported by the U.S. government following WWII as part of the Montgomery G.I. bill. It’s generally agreed that greenhouse gas emissions are a bad thing and we could dramatically reduce emissions by reducing our dependence on cars. Reducing our dependence on cars, unfortunately also requires either a retraction or an expansion – we need to either stop living in exurbs and bedroom suburbs (and to a lesser extent inner suburbs) or we need to move to relatively small, self-contained towns like Champaign – to reduce our use of cars.

When I talk about social isolation, I mean something like Durkheim’s anomie (personal unrest, alienation, and anxiety that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals – Dictionary.com). The daily routine of millions of Americans goes something like this: Get up at 6 a.m. to get ready for work. Leave the house by 7. Sit in traffic for an hour and arrive at work around 8. Work from 8-5 (if you’re lucky). Leave work. Sit in traffic for another hour. Get home around 6. Eat (it’s now 7). Watch T.V. Sleep. Basically people go from their little box (house) to a littler box on wheels (car) to a big box where they do stuff they don’t like (work) then reverse order. They spend a portion of their weekends sleeping in and recuperating and have two days max to relax. This seems pretty normal in modern society, but it’s really not. Up until about a century ago the majority of the world’s population worked, ate, and lived in the same place. This created strong social bonds and a strong sense of community. With the industrial revolution came rapid changes and people stopped working and living in the same place. With the rise of suburbia, the distances grew. I am here to argue that this separation of work, commercial, and home spheres is at least in part responsible for a marked lack of civic participation by Americans (low voter turnouts, decline in community organizations, etc). When people live, work, eat, play, and shop in one relatively bounded area, they have more investment in it and are more likely to know others and care about their wellbeing. With our modern car culture, people are increasingly isolated in their little boxes because to get anywhere of worth we have to hop in our cars and drive, completely destroying any chance of encountering our neighbors and of really knowing our neighborhoods (how many of you can even name half the people on your block?).

Suburbs are expensive. You might say that they’re cheaper to live in than cities, but much like the cars I also detest, that’s just the sticker price. No one pays the true cost of their home in the suburbs (again the further out from the city the more this is true). They don’t pay because they aren’t taking into account the extra gas it will cost to commute, the societal costs of the extra pollution their cars create, the extra costs of servicing their homes with electricity, gas, water, sewage, and post (urban areas give suburbs a backdoor subsidy on utilities by paying the same rates despite the fact that such services cost a fraction of the price to deliver to urban areas). If all of these externalities were internalized into housing prices, I think suburbs would become quite unattractive. Additionally, the rise of suburbs has led to the depression of the inner-cities which has disproportionately affected minorities. Furthermore, the number of roads necessary to support these commuters and their costs are astronomical (the economic benefit of light rail or mass transit by comparison is approximately double that of highways).

Suburbs are piss poor land use. Yep, I’m a land-use nut. Suburbs are, in my mind, a paradox. People move out of the city to get away from people, get away from congestion, and get a slice of nature. In moving to the suburbs, they crowd up people in the ring of suburbs closer to the city than they are, create more traffic congestion, and cover over the wonderful nature that the last suburban ring enjoyed up until the new ring was built. Point in case for this is my own mother who moved up to the mountains in California a couple of years ago. One day she complained that a developer wanted to buy the land across the way from her house (which, by the way, is grossly oversized) and build big, gaudy spec houses, ruining her view of the mountain. I simply smiled and said “but mother I’m sure that’s what your neighbors said when they were building your house. You took their mountain.” In short, suburbs eat up green spaces and by sprawling out to infinity make it ever more difficult to escape developed lands.

So criticism aside, I propose solutions. These are by no means complete. I don’t have all the answers…yet. They are, however, a start. There are two ways to go, as I mentioned earlier, out or in. Personally I like in. Not everyone has to live in Manhattan, we just have to develop viable public transit systems (generally rail systems) that link communities together. To do this effectively, however, requires a certain population density that suburbs simply don’t offer (inner suburbs may, though I’m not absolutely certain). Cities should become walkable and more compact. Neighborhoods should shift to more mixed-use purposes and stop this silly zoning segregation we currently have. Large cities should be linked by bullet trains. Before Billy kills me for making this post too long, I’ll just refer you all to a few weblinks that do the job: http://transitorienteddevelopment.org/ and http://newurbanism.org/ .

~By Brandon Ruiz (a.k.a. S&D)