Gloomy win

We (and by that I mean liberals, moderates and those who believe in good government; run by good politicians) scored a win yesterday.

It might not feel like it, because our guy lost.

That's right, Hackett lost to Schmidt.

The margin was 52-48. Four points. Close, a squeaker even (3,500 votes). He didn't get the seat but we won nonetheless.

They tried to tar him as a lackluster patriot (a sham, someone who led a Marine Civil Affairs unit, but not a, "combat" unit, and so unfit to claim he's a combat vet [and civil affairs is no slacker, if he can't claim to be a combat vet, I certainly can't). They took his statements of disgust with the President, as a president, and tried to make it seem he was a traitor; to the Nation and the men fighting the wars. They said his opponent would pay more attention to the District, because she wouldn't be gallivanting around in Iraq.

They spent damn near a million dollars to beat him.

And it was nip-and-tuck all the way. This is a district which has been seeing the Republican win by thirty points. To get within five is a win.

Imagine, as Steve Gilliard points out, that this had been flipped, that Berkeley had a run this tight, and the Republican lost by a mere 4 points. It would be the headline on Rush: "Dems on the run!"

This is what Dean is tallking about, what Western Democrat is talking about, and; to a lesser degree, I have been talking about.

We lost the big one, and there are a lot of rear-guard actions to take to keep that loss from becoming a rout. This is the way it's done. Put someone up, from dog-catcher to President. Make the case for the things we believe. When they fling muck (as they did, and they will) scrape it off, and fling it back. Don't reward bad behavior. If they do it once, and get away with it, they'll do it again. This is no time to let the other sides cavils and complaints that we aren't taking the high road quash us when they take the low.

Make them spend the money. Make them go begging for more. When someone like Hackett needs some, pitch him 20 bucks. We can't afford to think the only local races that matter are the ones in our back yard. It isn't how the Republicans see it, it isn't how the allies of the Republicans see it.

Shaping politics from the pulpit

Evangelical Christian leaders nationwide have been emboldened by their role in re-electing President Bush and galvanized by their success in campaigning for constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage, passed in 18 states so far.

Now some are organizing to build on last year's successes. They want to solidify their role in setting the political agenda and electing sympathetic public officials.

The Ohio effort isn't unique. Johnson's project - which he says has signed up more than 900 pastors in Ohio during its first 10 weeks in operation - has helped spawn the Texas Restoration Project in Bush's home state. The fledging Pennsylvania Pastors' Network has signed up 81 conservative clergy so far. Similar efforts are beginning to percolate elsewhere.

"It's maturing as a movement within the evangelical Christian community," says Colin Hanna of Let Freedom Ring, a Pennsylvania-based group that teaches pastors how to be involved in politics.

This is no time to cry in our beer. We may have been beaten, but we didn't lose.

Bahhhhgh!

The Army is doing it again. For a time, a couple of years back, while I was at Ft. Lewis, the Army Knowledge Online splash page was propagandizing soldiers.

I say this becaus unless one is "Active Army, Army Reserve, National Guard, DA Civilian, Retired Army, and Army Guests" one is never going to get past that page, and so isn't likely to be calling it up very often.

Which is why cutlines like this one annoy me.

Army engineers from Alaska-based Company C, 864th Engineer Combat Battalion, level a portion of the nearly completed 117-kilometer TK Road, stretching from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan. The road will link vast, difficult-to-access portions of the country, fostering commerce and facilitating travel to election polling sites next month.

I like the pictures on that page. They show me some of what is going on in the army (I confess, the birthday wishes posted a few days ago bothered me, I can't say why, but they did. What happens if that poor guy doesn't get home? His wife saying every day is one day closer to them being together is going to be awfully painful, but I digress). But no one needs to pitch the doings of the Army to me in such a way as to convince me the policies which put us where we are are good, or important.

I don't, at a gut level, at the level on which I predicate my service (day to day, not year to year) give a damn about the policies. You don't need to sell me on them (unless you are asking me to give a thumbs up, or down, on one).

This one isn't the most blatant of it. I happen to think better roads are probably in the best interests of the Afghanis, but fostering commerce, facilitating elections? So what. They need roads, we build roads.

This is as bad as hearing about schools in Iraq.

Judgeships (edited, to add some things)

Debate is going to go on about this.

But this article from the Atlantic Online raises an interesting, and perhaps fundamental point:

The Justices of the Supreme Court not only aren't like you and me, they aren't like other judges.

Now that Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement, how many remaining justices have ever held elected office? How many have previously served at the highest levels of the executive branch of government? How many have argued big-time commercial lawsuits within the past thirty-five years? How many have ever been either criminal defense lawyers or trial prosecutors? How many have presided over even a single criminal or civil trial? The answers are zero, zero, zero, one, and one, respectively. (David Souter was a New Hampshire prosecutor once upon a time, and later served as a trial judge.)

The answers would have been starkly different fifty years ago. Five of the nine justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, had once worked as trial prosecutors, and several had substantial hands-on experience in commercial litigation. More famously, that Court included a former governor, three former senators, two former attorneys general, two former solicitors general, and a former SEC chairman.

That Court, in other words, was intimately familiar with the everyday workings of the political and judicial systems, and with the beliefs and concerns of everyday Americans. Not so the Court that recessed in June, eight of whose members (in addition to their long tenure in the splendid isolation of the Supreme Court's marble palace) have been drawn from judgeships on appellate courts, and sometimes from academic law before that—places already far removed from the hurly-burly of our judicial and political systems. The current justices are smart and dedicated. But they're not like you and me.

Debates over the Court's "balance"-ideological, ethnic, gender-will doubtless heat up as Congress considers the current vacancy. Yet there is likely to be little discussion about the greatest imbalance-the one in the collective real-world experience of its justices. The Court's steady homogenization by professional background has gone largely unremarked....

Over time the justices have failed ever more conspicuously to understand what messes their decisions might make. In 1997, while forcing Bill Clinton to give a sworn deposition in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit, the Court stunned litigators and trial judges by predicting that this was "highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [President Clinton's] time." Only Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to appreciate that the realities of modern discovery practice "could pose a significant threat to the President's official functions." Sure enough, the district court ordered Clinton to answer detailed, tangential questions about his relations with various women. The rest is history....

Moreover, that road is receding further in the rear-view mirror. Longer life spans and justices' increasing reluctance to retire have raised their average tenure from fifteen years before 1970 to twenty-five years since then. Until this summer no justice had retired in eleven years. Real-world experiences gained before their years on the appellate and Supreme courts have become distant memories for today's justices.

This lack of connection with the everyday may be why some of the more recent decisions like Castle Rock v. Gonzales where the court (in a Scalia opinion) held the police didn't have to enforce a restraining order (the use of the word shall in the law is the wiggle room the majority found to say the property right didn't exist to file a suit) are legally justifiable, but at odds with what seems to be common sense, and the, apparent, legislative intent of the law.

In a narrow sense this is, perhaps a legitimate holding (though Stevens, in dissent points out a similar wording in a contract for private security would be seen as a property right, and so the private company would be liable. As this was a case about personal safety, not merely material possessions that seems an interesting distinction for the Court to be hanging its hat on. Then again this is Scalia, who's never met a "strict interpretation of the text" which didn't agree with his personal beliefs).

But it may be that not living, nor really inhabiting the same world the rest of us do (where matters of life and limb are real, not abstract, issues) is part of what leads to this. The Court is an ivory tower. Tenure insulates, as it should (the sketch where a newly elected Thomas is catering to the other justices, until someone points out he isn't subject to anyone's approval for his continued presence, at which point he gets what would be called, "uppity," in some circles, touches on a very real point about the Court), but to take those we grant such tenure to, from a class already tenured, is to double the insulation.

That much insulation may be ill. Not that these aren't thoughtful people, but that may be the very crux of the problem. Everyone has heard the jokes about theory and practice, well the lawyers we are asking to set the boundaries between them haven't had much practice.