Rich Mintz  

I was dismayed, but not surprised, to read that the death of Osama bin Laden this past weekend has resulted in a ramp-up of security theater in New York and around the country. If Mike Bloomberg, who presumably has no particular political aims (he surely doesn’t want to be President; what a terrible life compared to that of a billionaire; and he would never put up with extended periods in Albany or Washington), can’t call publicly for a rollback of the most pointless and theatrical protections, then who can?

Obviously there’s a short-term threat of reprisal attacks, but it seems that (absent a dedicated and politically unpopular effort on the grounds of American ideals by someone with the credibility to do it, such as President Obama) the security-industrial complex appears to be here to stay independent of that. When the successful achievement of your stated goal (the capture of bin Laden) leads only to ratcheting up of the alert status, just as its non-achievement would, you’re stuck in an unbreakable feedback loop of regulatory capture.  Sigh.

Our first-tier targets (the symbolic ones that mean something to lunatics halfway around the world, like the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge) will always need special attention. And the competent and professional NYPD needs to continue to do the fine job that it always does.  But as Matt Yglesias has pointed out repeatedly (along with James Fallows and dozens of others), our airports have mountains of conspicuous security at the “security checkpoint,” but almost none at the curb.  Or in the Starbucks.  Anyone can walk onto the platform at Penn Station carrying virtually anything.  Anyone can walk into Disneyland with a Thermos full of anthrax.  At 5pm on a Thursday anyone can walk into the mob of PATH pedestrians at Church and Vesey, right in front of the main WTC construction gate, and sneeze leprosy or tuberculosis bacilli into a thousand communities across three states.

In a free society, that’s as it should be. The most important security safeguard isn’t the TSA, it’s people paying attention and being willing to speak up.  (Or as Yglesias put it, “Whatever it is that explains why we don’t have constant truck bomb attacks on the streets of Washington it has nothing to do with building security at second-tier federal agencies.”)  The two times in New York I’ve seen something and said something, once in Penn Station and once on the streets of Brooklyn, police (Amtrak and NYPD) mobilized immediately, and in both cases went out of their way to say to me, “don’t ever hesitate to tell us if you see something that doesn’t look right.”

At the end of the day, we decide what kind of society we want to have.  I’m willing to say that I want a society where freedom of association and freedom of movement are valued so highly that we are willing to accept a moderate amount of risk of small disruptions to the public peace as part of their price.  I felt that way while Osama bin Laden was alive, and I feel the same way now that he isn’t.

Now this is interesting: my old friend Jonathan Miller, former Kentucky State Treasurer and author of The Compassionate Community, is leaving state government and entering the blogosphere, with The Recovering Politician set to launch on April 1.

If the content is as expected (and if it can compete with the visuals on the website, which are already striking), this will become a daily read. Jonathan’s a smart guy, thoughtful and articulate about policy, and committed to the public welfare deep in his bones. So sign up, subscribe, and read…

The judge in the Log Cabin Republicans’ “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” suit in California ruled for the plaintiffs tonight, concluding that the policy of dismissing gay and lesbian members of the military is unconstitutional on both First and Fifth Amendment grounds. She says she will issue a permanent injunction against its enforcement within a week. Not clear yet whether DOJ will appeal.

Associated Press story here; opinion itself is here. The opinion is worth leafing through; among other things, the judge finds that the Government’s claims about unit cohesion are directly contradicted by the evidence, including evidence that the Government has delayed the discharge of gay and lesbian servicemembers until after their combat tours are over.

Stuff like this is obvious to gay people, in the same way that mixed-race couples in 1940 found it obvious that prohibitions against their marriage are inherently unconstitutional. But it’s a relief to see the culture as a whole acknowledging it. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends toward justice — I believe that that is true fundamentally, and not just contingently or locally, among a human race that is wired for communitarian living — and we’ve seen a lot of positive social change for gay people in just a few short years.

I’m watching a “Rockford Files” episode in which Nazis are about to figure (so it seems) in the plot, and something occurs to me: in 1977 when this episode was made, the Nazi era was precisely as recent as the Jimmy Carter/Ronald Reagan era is now.

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.

No, it’s not what you think … or is it? (Hat tip: Colin Stewart.)

Bonus “Today on Craigslist” from this weekend’s Glenn Beck rally, via Wonkette (note: subject matter not safe for work): well, I won’t post this one, but if you Google “wonkette tea party craigslist honor” you’ll probably find it…

I sure love me some Orly Taitz… and she’s back!

In case you’re not an obsessive follower of this story, Orly is the über-Birther who’s bombarding the federal courts with frivolous lawsuits about Obama’s origins. Here’s a detailed history of the saga (juiciest part here — court’s judgment worth reading in its entirety).

Well, Orly’s back! She’s pissed off a Federal judge, the Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, but she’s not letting it go. In our latest installment, Orly claims that Obama’s passport is doctored and she can prove it. If I’ve learned anything from TV about judges, it’s that they don’t like having their time wasted, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that fine go up, and up, and up…

With all the coverage of Sarah Palin’s Facebook and Twitter strategy, it’s easy to forget that a presidential election is not conducted by putting the members of each candidate’s social network on one side of a scale and seeing which side is heavier. (Obligatory joke about obese red-staters goes here.)

But would that it were! If it were, someone like Stephen Fry — actor, auteur, thoughtful social commentator — would boot that Sarah Palin right back to the hostess counter at the Wasilla Applebee’s where she belongs.

Consider:

(True, Fry wasn’t born in the United States. But then I think I read somewhere that Obama wasn’t either, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his success any.)

I’m ashamed of my fellow Americans this month, as allegedly intelligent and thoughtful people toss the Constitution (not to mention American values and common sense) in the garbage, and come out against the Islamic cultural center (abbreviated by everyone as “mosque”) on Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

This location is six blocks from my apartment, and I walk past it almost daily, so I think I have standing to have an opinion on the matter. The elected and appointed officials who have jurisdiction are, in large part, people whom I and my neighbors selected, who serve at our whim and whose salaries we pay. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, live 4,300 miles away and 236 miles away, respectively. Would they kindly shut the hell up and go away?

There have been Muslim-Americans living in Lower Manhattan effectively forever, in planning terms; there were mosques in our neighborhood before the World Trade Center was here, and long before I lived here, and certainly before Sarah Palin ever came shopping here. Every day, hundreds of Muslim-American taxi drivers stop for lunch or dinner at one of the halal restaurants on Church Street around the corner from the proposed site. And last time I checked, neither the First Amendment nor RLUIPA had an asterisk leading to the disclaimer “except Muslims.” End of story.

Matt Yglesias’s Mosque Exclusion Zone posts are funny, and right on point, but this is a serious matter, which is why I was so disappointed to learn today that the Anti-Defamation League, one of America’s most important historical forces against intolerance and bigotry, has come down on the wrong side of this issue.

There are, to be sure, political issues in American social discourse that have two sides. But if you have any respect at all for equality, for freedom of religion, or for the founding principles of America, this isn’t one of them. And we do have plots of secular hallowed ground in America — but they’re not at “Ground Zero” (an embarrassing term that highlights all the wrong aspects of the events of the past decade). They’re in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks rode home from work on the bus. They’re in Little Rock, at Central High School. They’re at Tule Lake, in California, where my great-grandparents (I’ve been told) taught school during one of the most shameful failures of our constitutional system in our nation’s history. They’re at Gettysburg. They’re in Jackson Heights, Queens, home of some of the most diverse census tracts in the country.

I’m angry at Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, but at the end of the day, what can you expect from anti-intellectuals and opportunists? But the ADL? I’m ashamed of them, for losing sight of their mission, and for the implication that they are speaking in my name as a Jewish American. They emphatically are not, and I’m afraid they have done permanent damage to their credibility today.

Here comes FarmVille for iPhone.

Could you beat a Muppet in a staring contest? I doubt it.

Daniel Kroop launches Los Angeles and First, a blog about Los Angeles politics — specifically the City Council — that promises to be a good read, if the first week is any indication.

Am I really the only person in America who finds the “gay panic” subtext in this Pretzel M&Ms ad a little bothersome?

Aerolineas, the Argentinian airline, updates its brand identity.

In “Do You Take This Immigrant”, the NYT’s Nina Bernstein interviews people on both sides of the desk at one particular immigration office: the one where green-card applicants and their US-citizen spouses are questioned separately and together to root out cases of fraud.

The incidence of fraud is very, very low, but that doesn’t keep this process from being emotionally draining and controversial. The examiners interviewed come off as, on the whole, respectful and thoughtful people. One of them is even herself a US permanent resident. It’s worth noting that a Federal district court settlement almost four decades ago put extra safeguards in place with regard to this process in New York that don’t apply elsewhere.