The Camel Has No Back Left

Well, it has finally come down to this. All the pretty words have been used up. All the excuses, in all their varieties, have been told again and again. And, for the people who used to claim to be principled Republicans or principled Conservatives, what little that was left of their reputation is completely in tatters.

Not the ones who have left the party, of course. Just the ones who are still with Donald Trump, still cheering at his rallies, still believing that all the facts they might read in the mainstream newspapers or see on television are just fake news and lies told by Democrats who wield vast political power even though they can’t even get a single bill to the floor in either house of Congress.

So, two questions. What has set me off this time, and how should the media be covering this latest outrage? They are, obviously, linked. And, maybe, a third one. If the camel’s back is already broken beyond mending, can you really say any longer “this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

For the few people who may not know about the President’s tweet on Sunday, it was about illegal immigrants crossing the border. Some of them might be people legally seeking sanctuary - likely the ones who turned themselves in at the federal check points to plead for asylum - but he made no distinction.

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order...” he tweeted, showing that when you are President, you need not follow the rule of law or the rules of good grammar.

                                             There Are Consequences

See why I’m upset? Law and order means following the rule of law in an orderly way. That means that, if the law says you have to have a court hearing before being deported, you have that court hearing. If the law says you are entitled to a lawyer (and it does), it means you get one. And if the law says you have to treat all people equally, you have to do that, too.

Probably why you are seeing so many deportation sweeps by ICE in Minnesota and Tennessee and Oklahoma. Oh, wait, you aren’t. In Chinatowns in New York and California, maybe? In the Italian and Polish communities across our nation? Nope. We somehow missed them, but we did get one Canadian jogger who was on an unmarked  path that somehow crossed a small part of our 3,000 mile unmarked border. 

Well, our system does mock good immigration policy, because good immigration policy is something that must be spelled out and followed. And there must be a reason for it. If the President doesn’t like the policy we have, he might ask the Republicans who control both houses of Congress to come together with the Democrats and change it. 

Oh, wait. He already asked them to do it, and they did come together and gave him a bill both agreed on. He promptly said he would not sign it.

Now, he could ask again, but that might start a national debate on what we want an immigration policy to do, and how it should be done. I don’t think that’s what the President really wants.

Even worse, it might shine some light on a dirty little secret that has been troubling some people in the know for decades. Yep, for decades. Want me to share it with you? After all, some people in the Deep State have been studying it for quite a while, and you should know it as well.

The secret is that the native-born population of the United States has been shrinking since the 1970‘s, and it is only immigration - and that includes illegal immigration - that keep a lot of our houses and apartments from turning into empty shells.

What? You didn’t know the birth rate was declining? You think I am exaggerating the problem?

Well, that’s because its been happening for a long time, a slow and steady decline that just sort of fades into the background. You have probably just gotten used to it, like almost everybody else.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - which looks at things like birthrate, fertility rates and newborn health issues - the birthrate for nearly every group of women in the country fell in 2017, and the 3,853,472 recorded births was down two percent from 2016, which made it the lowest number in 30 years.

In fact, our nation’s birth rate has been below the replacement rate - which means our population would be dropping without immigrants coming in - since 1971. The really scary statistic is the one used to calculate generational replacement, or the number of babies women of childbearing age would have to have over their lifetime to keep the population stable. Our rate last year was 1,764.5 per 1,000 women. To hold the population steady would have required 2,100 births. Quick. Bring in 350 new immigrants  for every thousand women of childbearing age, just to keep our population from changing.

That fact sort of puts a damper on just allowing people from Sweden to come to our country, or only aerospace engineers or doctors, or the mother and father of a model you picked for your third wife. Snarky, I admit. But true.

                                    Now, Let’s Look At The Real Problems

So, insults aside, what is our immigration policy? You can’t just say we won’t let anyone in who might be a terrorist, because terrorists are pretty good at hiding it. You can’t say that you can ban all people from a country that exports terrorists, not when we are arresting some home-grown terrorist want-to-be’s who are flying out to the Middle East to get training with ISIL. And, now that we are friends with North Korea, shouldn’t they, at least, be taken off the list of banned countries? See how quickly troublesome questions come up. Heck, I won’t even go into what we should do when some other nation accuses our own citizen of visiting and turning out to be terrorists, or spreading anti-government propaganda which they consider a terrorist act. And, what if that propaganda is handing out a bible? (Yep, our friends the North Koreans, again. Although, tell me, how do you really tell the difference between a terrorist North Korean and an ally South Korean if one of them has a passport obtained through bribery?

See how easy it is to fall into the snarky trap. I apologize.

But, the issue is real. It has been decades since our nation had a big discussion on our immigration policy and how to implement it. Do we still want to be a shining example to the world? Do we want to ask the best and brightest kids to come over, but warn them their parents or their wives may not get in as well? And, how do you set a low bar for unskilled people - agricultural workers, people who work the night shifts cleaning up the diner - while keeping the same immigration bar high to insure that you are bringing in those best and brightest?

Then, after doing all that, how do you adjust the immigration numbers to keep the population steady. Heck, maybe that’s part of the reason so many small towns in the middle of the country are slowly drying up. Not enough workers. Not enough customers. Not enough people. 

Read about that lately?

Must You Protest So Loudly?

Let me start with a confession. I’ve fallen into a bad habit, although I have a lot of good reasons for it.

I seem to be chasing events lately, instead of looking deep into the future and predicting - with a remarkable degree of accuracy - what will be happening months or years from now. If I did that, I could tell you not only what will be happening, but what to do about it, as all good prognosticators are wont to do.

You can probably see why I’ve been slacking off. Events change so fast in this post-fact era that all I can do is reach out and try to grab them. New events are like painted horses on a fast-moving merry-go-round - pretty to look at but hard to catch, and all of them come back over and over again. 

He’s fired. She’s fired. They are indicted, and indicted again. Our trade balance is getting worse. There are threats of war, and promises of peace. And, we’re back to trade and tariffs, and those potential witnesses are said to be co-operating, But the President says he never really knew them, and despite their impressive titles, they never worked for him long enough to actually do anything. And, it’s all fake news anyway.

See how easy it is to fall into my rut?

                                So, Let’s Try Something New

Well, here’s where I get out of it. Fearless Prediction Number One - to be put away and re-read six months or so from now. (If you think this is easy, write your own prediction, print out this blog, and read them both sometime between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Then you can see who is closer to the truth.)

Here it comes: There will be protests. And, the protesters will be attacked for their bad behavior, their secret motives and for breaking the law, some law, any law. And, counter-protesters will spring up from the very earth itself.

“Heck,” you say. “There are always protests. That’s no prediction.” And, you would be kind of right. But, mostly, you would be wrong. That’s because protest movements grow and change, get bigger or fade out. They evolve naturally as they get bigger, and the more people they attract the more they are likely to drift away from their original purpose.

Unless they don’t. The anti-war movement didn’t change. The anti-nuke protests didn’t change, although a lot of offshoots sprang up. The current anti-government protests - too big, too liberal, too conservative, not doing its job - seem to have gotten lost in a swamp of different opinions.

Now, protests are as old as society, and society’s reactions to them hasn’t changed much over the centuries. There are just three basic ones - Ignore them. Stamp them out violently. Admit the protesters are right and - after a long and painful process - come together with the protesters and find common ground. Sometimes, that common ground is how badly other protesters, protesting some other thing, are behaving.

                                   The Very First Protest, And The Reaction

Doubt it? Well, remember in the Bible when Eve said something like “who is this God who tells me not to eat that delicious-looking apple?” Well, society - read that as God - gave mankind death and original sin.

Want something more modern? Well, how about those women who got tired of writing nice letters asking to be allowed to vote,  then took to the streets and disrupted things. Or those radical college students who were burning their draft cards, then occupied campus buildings to protest the Vietnam War. 

Or those generally well-behaved Indian tribes who collectively owned much of what is now the United States. Their protests that treaties were being broken right and left didn’t get much traction in New York State - where I live - until some unruly activists decided to block the New York State Thruway. Then they got permission to open a casino.

Let me add that all the polite complaints and high moral condemnation of slavery in our country didn’t get very much done for a really long time. But we did get a lot of lengthy discussions about states rights under the Constitution. Human rights didn’t come about until long after the Civil War.

So, how do we deal with protests, and how good a job is the media doing in covering them?

 Well, it depends. Our media generally love cute protests. I have seen scores of stories with cute children holding protest signs demanding a stop sign, and novel ones where parents uphold the right of their children to put up a lemonade stand. Animal rights protests get some attention, but not very much. Someone who pickets a dealer because they purchased a used car that failed inspection might draw a cable TV crew, but only on a quiet Summer day.

                       But Some Protests Go On For Months, Or Longer

Repeat protests are mostly ignored. Use non-union labor, and the daily picket line you put up may get covered once. Let teachers go out on strike, and it’s a story for one or two days. Denounce a politician for voting to take money away from Planned Parenthood or blocking a bill that would have required background checks for all gun  buyers and you will likely get 30 seconds, max. Such is fame in this 24-7 media world.

Now, let’s say you have a big protest. How do your react? How does the media cover it? 

Well, the people who protest want it on the front page of the local paper and want it to be the lead story on the nightly news. The people who are the target want it to be a two paragraph item buried on page 16 and a 30-second video clip, preferably interviewing someone who isn’t too good at expressing what the protest is about.

An honest and unbiased media will use a really flexible yardstick to decide how to cover a big protest. Values change depending on where things happen. A crowd of 1,000 people in a town of 30,000 is really a big deal. In Boston or Manhattan it’s hardly worth a mention. After all, the Boston Marathon draws about 30,000 entrants, and a lot more spectators. In Washington, D.C. a big crowd starts at half a million people.

So, what makes it a really big story. Usually, the opposition. People who don’t want to see the protest bring out police to clear the streets, or force demonstrators to hold their protest so far from the spotlight that no one will see them. Which often doesn’t work.

The best example, for me, was how Chicago Mayor Richard Daily tried to keep protesters away from the Democratic National Convention so the delegates would not have to be yelled at or otherwise shamed. In the long run, it didn’t work out well for the Democrats.

                                How Should We Grade The Media?

So, here’s the point. The media, as a whole, are pretty good at covering the day-to-day business of protests. But, they have a hard time putting events in context. Black LIves Matter protests get a lot of attention, but how that movement is changing isn’t given the attention it deserves. Maybe it’s because there aren’t enough organizations with the staff to put one or two people on the story for six months or a year. 

Or, maybe, it’s because the whole issue of police conduct, the growing violence in some parts of our society, the entire issue of gun control are so intertwined that you can’t easily deal with something that is - simultaneously - a problem and a symptom of an entirely different problem.

Good heavens, does this all come down to lack of staffing on our media conglomerates, or the fact that viewers and readers don’t demand much more than pictures    of a crime scene, with a single news anchor saying they don’t really know what happened, but it looks like a police car has left the scene?

Well, back to my prediction. More groups will be forming. More protests will be made on the streets. More and more competing claims - life is getting worse, life is really wonderful, trust me and buy the products our advertisers are selling - will be made all through the summer. Then we will turn over our airwaves and our mailboxes to candidates who promise much.

And then, the people will get to vote. And, at least some things will become clear. If the Russians allow that to happen.

What's Missing From White House Press Conferences

Like most of the rest of the reporters in the nation, I have never covered a presidential press conference. It’s not surprising, since almost all of them take place in Washington, where most reporters will never get a chance to work, let alone be assigned to cover the White House. *

Still, I keep making a list in my head of the questions that reporters should ask at the daily briefings, and whenever Donald Trump holds still in a public place long enough to be interviewed.

It is, I think, a list worth sharing. If you read all the way to the bottom, I promise to share something else - my sure-fire plan to fix the problems still plaguing Puerto Rico, which our nation seems incapable of addressing, certainly not in time for this year’s wave of hurricanes.

Here goes.

• “Mr. President (or Sarah, who speaks for him),  you say a lot of people feel that this Russia probe is a witch hunt. Or a lot of people feel you should get tougher on foreign imports. Or build the border wall right away. Or agree that children who are taken across our border - no matter how young - are automatically criminals and should be taken from their parents and locked up. My question, sir, is could you please name some of these people, so that we can see where you are getting your information from and how reliable it is. Do they all support you wholeheartedly, or do some of them have qualms?   It would be good to know.

* “Mr. President, you say we could solve the immigration problem immediately, if only the Democrats would sit down and work with your party. But, they aren’t allowed into the  meetings where your party is making policy. So, sir, who gets the blame? Is it Paul Ryan or is in Mitch McConnell? Or someone else?”  Hillary, I think,  is no longer in government.

* Mr. President, you say that no one is tougher on Russia than you are. And, there are places - like Afghanistan - where local leaders spent years fighting Russian troops before they chased Russia out and they started fighting us. Are we actually at war with Russia now? WIll you impose sanctions at least as strict as the ones you have imposed on Canada and Mexico, or the ones that were imposed by the European Union after Russia annexed the Crimea?”

“And, sir, could you please tell us what sanctions are currently in place against Russia?” 

• Mr. President, I know the economy is doing great (you said so) and black unemployment hasn’t been this low ever (you said so) and the Democrat Party just refuses to go along with any bills you propose (you said so) and it doesn’t matter because Republicans control both houses of Congress (a verifiable fact) and you have the solid support of nearly half the nation’s Republicans.”

      “ But, sir, lots of people are saying that as the summer drags on and gasoline prices continue to rise, as stores keep closing and people keep having to work two jobs to pay their mortgage, and as our school taxes go up and up because the states are no longer getting as much federal aid, there will be anger in our nation. So, sir, who gets the blame, and will you tell us before the elections in November?”

See? Wouldn’t you like to see the White House Press Corps ask just one of those questions? I bet the President would say “Thank you. Next.”

        Now, My Sure-Fire plan to fix the problems in Puerto Rico.

First, let’s all agree that we still don’t really know just what has happened in Puerto Rico since it was hit by the worst hurricane in 80 years on Sept 20, 2017. Maris struck with winds of up to 155 miles an hour, most of the island’s population of 4.5 million was left without electric power and hospitals were overwhelmed, pharmacies immediately ran low on drugs, and thousands of households went without clean water or power for months or longer. All well reported.

Official damage numbers are either still vague or badly reported. In October, President Trump said the death toll - then officially just 16, and later raised to 64 - was much less than the 1,837 people who died after a hurricane struck New Orleans.

Now it is being widely reported that a new Harvard study shows Hurricane Maria killed 4,645 people, 70 times the official death toll. Some stories said that was a likely number, or that it could be more, or possibly less. Still, 4,645 seems an awfully precise figure.

So, let’s look more closely. Or, to give credit where it is due, let’s look at FiveThirtyEight, which did the real work of looking at it. (If you don’t occasionally look at FiveThirtyEight, you should. You learn a lot. Especially about sports.)

In this case, the number 4,645 is just the midpoint in a range of deaths that has a low of 793 and a high of 8,498. It comes from looking at 3,300 families and finding 38 deaths in the months following the storm, then trying to see what the impact on the island’s whole population might be. If you want to know more, go to the source.

You could also look at how difficult it has been to figure out just how much damage was done to Puerto Rico. Pick any number you like - millions, hundreds of millions, all the way up to 77 billion. We do know that 200,000 Puerto Ricans just left and came to the United States to get away from the mess, but that number is, as we say in the journalism trade, a little soft.

Now, we do know some people are still without water or power of both, or had it and then lost it again. No one is saying that federal officials there are doing a great job, except maybe our President. Look that up too, if you want.

S, what to do? What to do about the lives of two or three million people - all United States Citizens - who have been living with little food or water or electricity since September. What about the ones why are sick, and have no hospitals they can go to?

Well, here is my plan. So simple, it is brilliant. Send a lot of planes and boats there, and bring them all to the United States. Now they couldn’t go to small villages or towns - at least not at first - so we will send them to big population centers, places which have political clout so that our government will really get on the job of rebuilding the island.

So, where would they go? Well, I would first put a half million or so in Lexington, Ky, near Fort Knox and the home state of MItch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate. He certainly knows when it is time to act on things. He has told us so more than once.

Another half million or so could go to Wisconsin. Milwaukee already has almost  600,000 people and Madison has more than 230,000, and the state could use the extra population. And Paul Ryan, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, could get a good first-hand look of the size of the problem he has been dealing with since the storm.

Now, there will still be a lot of other people to relocate, and for that let me suggest a fine rural area - the wide, wide spaces of California’s Central Valley region. Warm weather, lots of agriculture, an area just like Puerto Rico. There is even a public works project there that could whisk all those out of work people to jobs in San Francisco in about an hour - the federally-funded bullet train project. And the local congressman, Republican Devin Nunez, is already familiar with the cost overruns that have driven that project up by more than 20 billion.

With all those billions in federal money slushing around, it should be easy to divert some of it to housing and food and care of all those people, at least until Puerto Rico can be rebuilt. Of course, it will be a one-time job. Federal policies no longer let us consider the impact of global warming on construction projects.

Hope the Navy doesn’t have a base there.

• Truth be told, I actually did cover some events in Washington - the anti-war marches and protests, and some of the anti-discrimination protests over the lack of housing, jobs and police brutality against minorities. After half a century, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

* Second truth be told, I was part of a mob of a dozen reporters penned into a secure location at an airport in Westhampton Beach when President Clinton and his wife walked past on the way to a fund-raiser or two, and he did stop briefly to chat and answer a few questions, but I didn’t get to ask one.

Free Speech, At Least For Some

So, what is all this stuff about free speech all about anyway?

That sentence is a grammatical absurdity - with one awkwardly placed dependent clause which rings hollow to the ear - but it is a valid question. 

While it seems simple, the question is anything but*. It turns out to be horribly complex, and part of the reason seems a lot like that mocking question of a few years ago: it depends on what you mean, exactly, by just two things - “free” and “speech.”

You want examples? Have some:

* “I can say anything I want. I have free speech,” you say. But, you don’t.

* “You can’t stop me from talking,” you say. Sometimes, I can.

* “You can’t punish me for what I say,” you say. Well, it depends

*“Free speech is protected in the Constitution,” you say. Well, the answer depends on lots of things - protected for who, protected in what way, and - ultimately - on just what you think speech really is.

See, it’s already getting complicated.

                        Here’s How It All Started

Let’s start by looking at the heart of the matter. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It will probably be the only simple thing you will find in this blog. Here it is:

“ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Seems simple, but when our Founding Fathers wrote it, they never thought that the simple idea would get split up the way we do it today. Is commercial speech protected in the same way as political speech? Is political speech protected for everybody, or on every subject, no matter how disgusting or radical or explosive?

Is free speech the same in your house and in a public square, in a school or in a house of worship? At a political convention or in the military? You can see how things start to get a little complicated.

You can always go to the Supreme Court for guidance on the matter, but they have made literally scores of decisions on free speech issues over the years, and a lot of them are a little out of date. Some go back to a time when there was no spam, no computers, no internet. Or, go back even further, to a time when there were no telephones or telegraph lines, or even much literacy. All things that make a difference to what you may mean by free speech.

                      And, Sometimes, It Depends on What “Is” Is

It kinda makes Bill Clinton’s famous defense make some sense. Remember he said “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is”, and we all made fun of him. But then he explained that if “is” meant never has been, it had one meaning, while if “is” meant not currently, it meant something entirely different. And, he was right.

Let’s put that free speech in a different context. A business generally has the right to free speech in its ads. You can’t say this drink cures cancer, but you can say that Jones landscaping is the best in the state.  Ah, but when Jones workers go out on strike and wave signs outside his office saying he is unfair and doesn’t care about his workers, he calls the police and asks to have them removed. They say “free speech.” What does the cop do?

Or, let’s say your child, who is really smart, writes a biting editorial in the school paper, and the high school principal has it removed. She says that it is her paper, and she can do whatever she wants. The ACLU says that it is a public forum, and she can not. How does the Court of Appeals rule, and will the Supreme Court reverse the decision? And, what if it is a college paper? What if it is your web site, and you block opposing views? What if you demand to have equal time to rebut a commentator on Fox News, or what if you are a presidential candidate who demands to appear on a televised forum, only to be told you only got 29 percent of the vote in a primary - a run-off has been scheduled - and their cut-off for candidates is 32 per-cent.

                                Welcome to the swamp.

To clarify a point, the guarantee of Freedom of Speech in our Constitution provides freedom from the government banning your right to speak, or to ban stories before they are published. It says nothing about suffering the consequences of what you have said. In the private sector, you can be fired if you damage the reputation of your employer or cost them customers.

 There are also several contradictory rulings about the power of public schools and colleges to limit speech, and government has been given broad powers to limit where you can speak freely.

Want to protest a political party’s actions at their national convention once every four years? Then the local government has the right - to insure public safety - to move large demonstrations far away from the convention site. If no delegates see the protesters, did it really happen? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise?

                          So, What If No One Is Listening?

Now, some of you have probably noticed that it costs a lot of money to spread a message - whatever it is - through the traditional media. It’s why hich Quang Duc - a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist Monk set himself on fire in June 11, 1963 on a busy Saigon road. To get people to notice his protest. His demand for free speech.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of his suicide spread around the world, and John Kennedy said “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world...”

But, sometimes things go wrong. And not. He was not protesting the war in Vietnam, but the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. President Diem promised reforms, but never implemented them. In fact, in response, ARVN special forces troops launched raids on Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam, leading several other monks to immolate themselves in further protest.

And how did it end? A U.S.-backed coup toppled the Diem government, and Diem was assassinated in November, 1963. And you know how the war ended.

So, back to free speech. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, but you can say nasty, racist things at a Klan rally. But you can’t say those nasty, racist things about one particular person and add that “something should be done” about him (or words to that effect). That is not protected speech. The Supreme Court again.

This year, the Supreme Court had several more free speech cases on its calendar, from the right of a baker not to make a cake for a gay couple - he said it was his way of expressing his beliefs - to the right of a worker not to pay partial union dues because it was his way of protesting the union and its political choices. My favorite, however, was Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky.

                           A Lawsuit Badly Named

I think it should have been titled Cilek v. Minnesota Board of Elections, but titles aren’t always clear in court cases. This one came about because, in 2010, Andrew Cilek went into his polling place in Hennepin County, Minnesota to cast his vote. He was wearing his Tea Party t-shirt with the Gadsden Flag (the one with the snake) and the “Don’t Tread On Me” motto, and an anti-voter fraud button reading “Please I.D. Me.” Because you can’t campaign in a voting place, he was not allowed to vote. (historical accuracy - after being told no several times, he eventually was allowed to. It was enough to get his case to court.)

I won’t even begin to calculate just how much it has cost in political sacrifice and lawyer’s fees to protect our right to free speech, or just how much the phrase has been expanded since the founding of our great Republic.

But, I will go back to my initial point. There is a whole lot about this Free Speech stuff. And there is a whole lot more that has to be explored. Dare I suggest that our President is currently writing a whole new chapter all by himself?

What happens a few years from now when little Johnny in eighth grade turns in a paper on Mexico and calls the people who live there “^(*&%&^&^” ? Will that be free speech, or will his Gadsden Flag t-shirt wearing teacher just give him an A+?

  * See. You can end a sentence with a conjunction. The OED says it has become more common over time, and that writers now feel free to use it for effect. You have the word of an English major.