Frozen Scandals and the Myth of Self-Correction

By David K. Shipler

            Perhaps it’s premature to say, but it seems likely that Edward Snowden’s enormous sacrifice will be in vain. In the pattern of recent leakers and whistle-blowers before him, his damaged life will have no compensation in the form of revised policy. Nothing will change. So it has been with the likes of Thomas Tamm, Thomas Drake, and others who didn’t go to jail as Army private Bradley Manning will, but suffered the destruction of their careers for the sake of informing an American public that basically didn’t care about the wrongdoing they exposed.

This is the phenomenon of the “frozen scandal,” as Mark Danner described it brilliantly in 2008, in The New York Review of Books:

“We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

The "Expectation of Privacy" and Surveillance in the 21st Century

As published at thenation.com June 17, 2013

By David K. Shipler

In 1928, the Supreme Court ruled that no warrants were needed for police to listen in on phone conversations, because voices were transmitted outdoors, beyond the private property that was protected by the Fourth Amendment. “The language of the amendment cannot be extended and expanded to include telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant’s house or office,” the majority wrote in Olmstead v. United States. “The intervening wires are not part of his house or office, any more than are the highways along which they are stretched.”

If this sounds absurd, we can hope that today’s arguments on the forfeiture of privacy in a digital age will someday sound equally ridiculous. The telephone was still a relatively new technology in 1928, as cellphones and the Internet are today, and the law had not yet adjusted to its use. It took thirty-nine years for the Supreme Court to catch up with the times and reverse Olmstead. In Katz v. United States, the Court devised a new test to determine the Fourth Amendment’s jurisdiction—“first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable,’” as Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote in a concurring opinion. Thereafter, wiretaps required warrants.

DNA: The Tilted Supreme Court

By David K. Shipler

             Four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that people who proclaim their innocence have no constitutional right after their convictions to demand that DNA tests be done on the evidence in their cases, although plenty of guilty verdicts for rape and murder have been thrown out because mismatches have later been discovered. Yesterday, the Court ruled 5-4 that people arrested for “serious” crimes have no constitutional right to withhold their DNA from the police, even though the DNA is used for fishing expeditions into unsolved crimes unrelated to the reasons for the arrests.

Together, the two rulings create a tilted playing field in the criminal justice system: The individual is compelled, but the state is not. Anyone taken into custody (and presumed innocent) is compelled to give up his DNA at the outset but after conviction cannot compel prosecutors to give up the DNA found in the semen, blood, or other tissue from the crime scene.

The prosecutors’ obligations to test evidence for DNA rest in a variety of state laws, the Court decided in 2009, not in the Constitution’s guarantee of due process or the defendant’s right to summon “witnesses in his favor,” as the Sixth Amendment provides. The state laws are a mixed bag, and not always much protection; some deny convicts’ right to DNA if they confessed, although about one-quarter of the convictions reversed on the basis of DNA evidence involve false confessions, the Innocence Project reports.

The odd result is that the Court finds DNA the quintessential identifier in one ruling and a dispensable piece of evidence in the other. It is critical when it serves the state and merely optional when it serves the individual. This hypocrisy is mirrored by many prosecutors across the country who hail the precision of genetic coding to discover the criminal, yet resist its use to exonerate the wrongly convicted.

The inconsistency, the failure to bolster the system’s truth-seeking purpose, is reflected by the most colorful Justice, Antonin Scalia, who has been on both sides of the question. He joined the majority in the 2009 decision denying convicts the right to test crime-scene evidence, but in the latest case, Maryland v. King, he blustered sardonically in an entertaining dissent against the majority’s decision to uphold the Maryland law—which had been struck down by the state’s Supreme Court—requiring DNA to be taken without a warrant after an arrest. He warned of sweeping consequences, and he may be right.

Courts usually proceed incrementally, each decision building on precedent, and with DNA collection now approved for those arrested and presumed innocent, it will be a smaller step to wider use, as Scalia noted. DNA is a tool of infallible identification, after all. Why not require it for a driver’s license, for passing through airport security, for enrolling in public school? If lab techniques improve to speed up processing and reduce cost, a national database containing everyone’s DNA will someday be conceivable, and probably less constitutionally dubious than before this ruling. 

That cuts a chunk out of the Fourth Amendment’s provision for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Taking a swab from inside a person’s cheek is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, both sides agreed, and the majority found it reasonable. The trouble is, under judicial precedent a search normally requires individualized suspicion to a degree that depends on the circumstances—to search your home, for example, requires probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge; to frisk you without a warrant as you walk down the street requires a police officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that you are armed.

The Fourth Amendment has been chipped away as more and more suspicionless searches have been allowed by the Court, often with Scalia’s acquiescence: He voted for random drug tests of children in school choirs and other extra-curricular activities, for instance. The erosion has been helped along by the supposedly liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who puzzled some commentators by joining with the majority on taking DNA after arrests. But nobody should be confused. Breyer has never been a big defender of the Fourth Amendment. He also endorsed suspicionless drug testing of schoolchildren, which prompted the plaintiff who lost, Lindsay Earls, to challenge him politely several years later. When Breyer visited Dartmouth, where she was then a junior, she asked whether justices ever recognized that they’d made a mistake. Yes, Breyer answered, “but not in your case.”

The Fourth Amendment was written as a bulwark, but it has proved a fragile restraint in an age of easy digital surveillance, biometric advances, and sweeping concerns about crime and terrorism. “I don’t think that there’s much left of the Fourth Amendment in criminal law,” Federal District Judge Paul L. Friedman told me several years ago—a startling statement from a respected judge who presides over drug and gun trials.

So behind this fading shield, DNA is a double-edged sword, useful to prosecutors and defendants alike—provided they can both wield it equally. In the small fraction of crimes where DNA is available, it is a marvelous tool for getting to the truth and reducing errors, for identifying the rapist and murderer, and for freeing the innocent.

But that won’t work if the DNA database contains evidence from only unsolved crimes. If we’re going to check all arrestees’ DNA, we also need a database of evidence from crimes we think we’ve solved, so that erroneous convictions can be uncovered. The law enforcement officials celebrating yesterday’s ruling would earn some integrity by pledging to establish such a resource. 

Obama's Search For the Next Era

By David K. Shipler

            Perhaps the most salient element in President Obama’s speech on national security last week was his attempt to begin weaning the United States from its post-9/11 mindset. If he pursues the effort and revises policy accordingly, he might help the country move away from fear and back toward the constitutional principles that have been sacrificed unnecessarily. This would end an era that is begging to be left behind.

            But his record has not been encouraging, and the environment he faces is not helpful. The problem is a mixture of reality and beliefs. Fear has to abate, but it won’t when real terrorism maims and kills at a Boston Marathon, or when the word “terrorism” is applied too broadly, as Republicans and some conservative pundits demand. Hardly anyone is comforted to learn, as Obama explained, that the threats now come from atomized al-Qaeda offshoots and radicalized individuals, rather than by centralized direction.

Yes, as he noted, that looks more like the baseline of terrorism the world has endured since long before 9/11. But it is not enough for Obama to say so. As he may have learned from earlier attempts to change emotional dynamics through speechmaking, actions speak louder than words. His well-crafted 2009 Cairo speech extending an open hand to the Muslim world was not followed by intensive, inventive policy. Four years later, on the other hand, his recent address in Jerusalem on Israeli-Palestinian peace is being followed by Secretary of State John Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy—a good effort whose outcome is not yet clear.

So let’s see if Obama follows his words on national security. He might consider how his administration’s behavior contributes to the problem of belief—namely, the public’s belief that we are still in the war whose end he now wishes to declare.

Taxes and Politics: The IRS Befuddled

By David K. Shipler

            The Internal Revenue Service looks more befuddled than partisan when it comes to enforcing the federal prohibition against mixing political activity with the benefits of tax-exemption—a concept introduced into law in 1954 by Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson to help himself in a tough reelection campaign.

In practice, the statute has been widely ignored, even as conservative churches have made repeated efforts for years to provoke the IRS into withdrawing their tax-exempt status so they could challenge the law’s constitutionality in court. In the run-up to the election last fall, right-wing preachers denounced President Obama from the pulpit, endorsed conservative candidates, and urged parishioners to campaign and vote against politicians who favor abortion rights and same-sex marriage—and publicized their sermons widely to spark a reaction.

It hasn’t worked. The IRS has not taken the bait, at least so far, and the recent tempest makes it even less likely that the agency will gather its courage in the face of a well-organized conservative movement.

Human Rights: Wiping Away the Smirk

By David K. Shipler

            It used to be sadly comical when Russia took a holier-than-thou posture on human rights. But the United States has fallen so far that Americans don’t get to smirk much anymore. In the recent tit-for-tat over rights abusers who are being declared unwelcome in each other’s countries, at least three of the former top U.S. officials fingered by the Russians are, in fact, true violators of basic liberties. They have been branded legitimately. In the aftermath of today’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, it is worth remembering how easy it is, in the face of such tragedy, to deviate from the rule of law.

            The three are David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, who evaded the law and the Constitution to engineer torture and illegal surveillance; John Yoo, who wrote infamous memos for Bush’s Justice Department defining torture so narrowly as to give the CIA practically a free hand; and Geoffrey D. Miller, who as an army major general commanded both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, where suspects were abused and humiliated, generating iconic photographs.

            They are among the eighteen Americans listed by Russia.

The NRA's Dark America

By David K. Shipler

            Years ago, driving through the Wild West Bank, I was stopped by an Israeli army checkpoint on the road up the Jordan Valley. The young soldier asked if I had any weapons in the car. No, I said. Well, in that case, he advised, it would not be a great idea to continue.

            That’s the kind of America envisioned by the NRA: Don’t send your kids to schools where teachers can’t sport .45 Magnums on their hips or keep Tec 9s in their desks. Don’t lull your kids into thinking there are safe places, free from marauding crazies, where they can concentrate on learning. Remind them every moment of every school day how scary the world is, how vulnerable they are, how consistently high their stress and sense of danger should be. Beginning in their early years, keep those cortisol levels elevated to make sure they greet every affront as if it’s a dire threat. With teachers as role models, every kid will want to carry a weapon. What a wonderful country we’ll have.

Fifty Years Later: Will You Get a Good Lawyer?

By David K. Shipler

Adapted from Rights atRisk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America

            Will you get good lawyering if you can’t afford it? Maybe, depending on where you’ve been charged. The quality of your legal defense will be determined, like the value of real estate, by three factors: location, location, and location.

            Fifty years today, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Gideon v. Wainwright that indigent defendants are denied their Sixth-Amendment guarantee of “the Assistance of Counsel” unless government provides them with lawyers. In practice, however, the effect of the ruling has been very spotty, creating a patchwork across the country. You’re better off in Washington, D.C., for example, than in parts of Texas and Georgia; anywhere in Alabama; and certain counties of New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. You’re usually more fortunate in federal than in state courts, and in local jurisdictions where indigent defense is funded by states rather than counties.

            Ask Anthony Ray Hinton. He has been sitting on Alabama’s death row since 1986, when his court-appointed lawyer was given only $500 to hire a reputable firearms expert to dispute the questionable findings of a police lab. The “expert” he found on the cheap, a one-eyed retired engineer who couldn’t operate a comparison microscope, had jurors laughing in ridicule.

Voting By Tax Return

By David K. Shipler 

            Years ago, my wife’s parents wrote on their tax return, “For use in the national parks only.” It made them feel better.

            Wouldn’t this be fun? What if, when we sat down to do our taxes, we discovered a new section on our 1040s that listed government programs, with a blank space beside each one? We’d write in the percentage of our tax payments that we wanted to be spent on defense, foreign aid, food stamps, housing subsidies, education, border security, and the like. Very empowering. It’s worth wondering how it would alter the federal budget. Polls give us a clue.

Medicaid: An American Parable

By David K. Shipler

            Watching the Republican governors who still insist that they will not accept a penny of the federal government’s money to provide health insurance to their near-poor citizens brings to mind Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian who traveled in the United States in 1831. He saw a country honeycombed with generosity taking the form of myriad associations organized to promote one worthy cause or another.

What he chronicled in his work, Democracy in America, has come down to us as evidence of our powerful impulses to charity, to philanthropy, to the common good—so much so that today, United Way chapters present annual Tocqueville awards to honor individuals who have been exceptionally generous with time or funds.

To be sure, Tocqueville was not a big-government advocate. He admired citizen-led private efforts over those that came from above. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France or a man of rank in England,” he wrote, “in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

But for a modern society, intricate with technological and economic complexity, this observation raises two questions: one practical, one moral. What mechanism is most practical in, say, the area of health care? What can be done privately, and what must be done publicly? And where does moral responsibility lie? Only at the local level of community, or on the broader plane of national concern?

These are the elements of our most acerbic debates as we struggle and disagree over where to locate the shifting line that should divide the private from the public.

Targeted Killings: Justice is Relative

By David K. Shipler

            A dozen years ago, the notion that a named American overseas could be legally targeted for death on the say-so of any “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” as the Obama administration now argues, would have been patently absurd. The constitutional requisite for due process in which government allegations are challenged and tested and never taken for granted remained largely intact. Only in the heat of combat was the commander in chief entitled to exercise lethal power. Otherwise, death sentences were handed down from the courtroom, not from the Oval Office.

            But the country has fallen so far to the right on national security since 9/11 that anything less than autocracy seems reasonable and moderate. So it is with a new proposal, put forth by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, to involve the judiciary in the secret process of assassination. It is a mark of the age that what was once unthinkable becomes sensible. If the rule of law interferes, change the law. But if history is just, it will not judge us kindly.

The Other Vietnam Veterans

By David K. Shipler

            With John Kerry confirmed for Secretary of State and Chuck Hagel in hearings to become Secretary of Defense, much is being made of the breakthrough that they represent: the first time that veterans of the Vietnam War will have occupied those two senior cabinet positions. These men, each sobered in his own way by combat, know the miseries of warfare, and seem to have absorbed their lessons.

            But outside the glare of this spotlight on uniformed veterans, there are other Americans, those who went to Vietnam out of uniform, who also saw the miseries close at hand as they tried to do some good for ordinary people. I have watched recently as a farflung community of those invisible Vietnam vets have connected by Internet because one of them is dying. They are sharing reminiscences, are writing about the traumas they still carry, and are reaffirming the moral opposition to the war that moved them to activism decades ago.

Some avoided the war by persuading their draft boards that they were conscientious objectors, and then went to Vietnam anyway, in civilian clothes and unarmed.

Will Obama the Constitutional Lawyer Please Stand Up?

By David K. Shipler
     Published in The Nation, issue of Feb. 11, 2013
There’s something about Barack Obama that induces

Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The right

envisions a vile socialist, while many on the left picture

an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term

but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

No hard evidence exists to sustain either view. Obama

behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain

social programs but boldly right on military force and civil

liberties. His supporters, who have watched him duplicate and

codify some of the Bush administration’s most damaging civil

liberties violations, are now reduced to wishful thinking that an

authentic Obama will soon step forward and return the country

to the constitutional footing that was abandoned after 9/11.

Russia and the West: The Continuity of Culture

By David K. Shipler

            In 1977, after a deadly fire killed at least twenty and blackened the walls of Moscow’s massive Rossiya Hotel, a West German television crew was stopped by a police lieutenant from filming on the street outside. Why? asked the correspondent, Fritz Pleitgen. The officer explained: “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our misfortune.”

            It was a quick glimpse into the xenophobia of Soviet times, and into Russians’ agony over the way they pictured themselves being seen by the outside world. Think how much pain and isolation it takes to imagine foreigners eagerly laughing at your tragedy.

            Given recent events, it’s worth asking how much Russia’s complex about the West has changed in 35 years.

Guns: Working Around the Second Amendment

By David K. Shipler

            Please forgive the cynicism, but here’s a prediction: For all the heartfelt hand-wringing and passionate calls to action since the Newtown massacre, Americans will not be made safer from gun violence. After a year or five years (let’s give Congress plenty of time), the country will still be awash in firearms, they will still be available to many untreated mentally ill people, and mass shootings will still occur on occasion, probably even in schools. Guns exist in a perfect storm of politics, law, and culture not easily revised.

In the most optimistic scenario, the Second Amendment might serve as an asset to those favoring modest controls, for under recent Supreme Court rulings, gun ownership is no longer jeopardized. Recognizing an individual right to bear arms rather than one based only in state militias, the thin conservative majority has effectively eliminated what the National Rifle Association and its supporters saw as the dire threat that all guns would eventually be outlawed and taken from the hands of law-abiding citizens.

That cannot happen as the Second Amendment is now interpreted. In both District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), a 5-4 majority ruled that the right to keep a loaded gun at home was protected by the Second Amendment. Whether the right extends to handguns outside the home remains uncertain until the justices consider cases that have been decided differently in lower courts.

The Right to Exploit

By David K. Shipler

            No political movement in America can match the dazzling facility with words mastered by conservative Republicans. From “death tax” to “pro-life,” they brand complex issues with simplistic slogans that slide easily into conversation. So it has been with “right-to-work” laws, just passed in Michigan, and now on the books in 24 states.

            Like the “right to life,” the “right to work” is not a right but a diminution of a right, one that has contributed to the lowest labor union membership in decades, currently just over half the rate of thirty years ago. Only 6.9 percent of those employed in the private sector belong to unions, which are nearly extinct in the free enterprise economy. The unions’ last bastion is in government, where 28.1 percent of federal, 31.5 percent of state, and 43.2 percent of local government employees (mostly teachers, firefighters, and police officers) are unionized. This leaves the country’s overall union membership, public and private, at 11.8 percent, down from 20.1 percent when comparable data collection began in 1983.

            The result is not a free market in labor but a rigged market, one in which the seller is relatively powerless next to the buyer. No seller of her labor to Walmart can bargain alone against the gargantuan buyer, the employer who unilaterally sets the price. Low-skilled workers, especially, are not in a position to negotiate individually; with no coin of professional talent to put on the table, they must bargain collectively or not at all.

Congress in Wonderland

By David K. Shipler

            “EAT ME,” said the note on the plate of cookies. So Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham took bites and rapidly shrank until they were small enough to fit through the tiny door into the halls of Congress.

            There, mingling with their same-sized colleagues, these once-larger men badgered the White House and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about her account of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, parsing the language of the CIA’s talking points she had been given, which had carefully excised a reference to a terrorist group because the information remained classified to protect intelligence gathering.

            The trouble with being very small is that you can’t get an overview of the very big problems that tower around you.

Should We Talk to Hamas?

By David K. Shipler

            It’s nice for Egypt’s new government, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, that the United States has handcuffed itself by refusing to deal directly with Hamas. And perhaps it’s just as well, since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has more influence with Hamas than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would. Plus, he gets to play a pivotal role in the eternally exasperating Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lucky him.

            But it’s not so great for American interests that the “terrorist” label, which the U.S. government has imposed on Hamas, carries such a broad set of taboos as to restrict Washington’s flexibility in a crisis.

Hamas employs terrorism, obviously—witness today’s bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the random rocketing of Israeli civilians—but it was also elected to govern Gaza, which Israel voluntarily left to the Palestinian residents in 2005. Denying Hamas the symbol of legitimacy it would gain through contact with American officials may be morally satisfying, but it has about as much impact on reality as the U.S. embargo of Cuba.

The Longer Campaign: Radicalizing America

By David K. Shipler

            The most significant lesson of the election may be one that has gone practically unnoticed: Conservatives have failed to radicalize the American electorate, even after years of well-organized, heavily-financed efforts. Most voters have not been pushed to the extremes, not by Fox-News and Rush-Limbaugh propaganda, not by thinly encrypted appeals to racial bigotry, not by evangelical preachers threatening the wrath of God for abortion and same-sex marriage. Fire and brimstone ain’t what they used to be.

As the pundit class has observed, Republicans have been left behind by the demographic shift. But that’s not the whole story. The group identities that have always described the landscape of American politics run deeper than skin color or national and religious heritage. Groups have real political interests and resilient attitudes, not easily manipulated in an open society where multiple voices can be heard.

To Vote or Not To Vote

By David K. Shipler

            “Have you registered to vote?” the white cashier asked the black cashier at a hardware store. Both young women looked barely 18.

            “No,” the black woman answered, because then she’d get called for jury duty.

            I groaned out loud. So did a man at the next counter. You have to vote, we told her. In the quarter century since I’d moved to this county in Maryland, I explained, I’d been called for jury duty a total of two times. The other guy said his total was zero. Then he corrected himself: once, he said.

            People give lots of reasons for not voting, and the lower the income, the lower the turnout, a fact that hurts Democrats and those who want to boost government anti-poverty programs. I’ve heard non-voters say that voting won’t change anything and takes time they don’t have. They can’t get off from work, they’re stressed and busy, and they’ve been made dizzy by the barrage of lying campaign ads. But to avoid jury duty? That was a first. (It was also mistaken, because jury pools in Montgomery County, where we were standing, are drawn from lists of licensed drivers as well as registered voters.)

“This is terrible!” my fellow shopper declared. “It’s part of being a citizen.” You have to vote, we both told her. She gave us a pleasant smile.

Civil Liberties: Liberals Give Obama a Pass

By David K. Shipler

Published at Salon.com Nov. 3, 2012

Let us stipulate, as lawyers like to say, that President Obama has a deplorable record on civil liberties, one that threatens long-term damage to the country’s constitutional culture.

Why, then, has his base of support not been eroded decisively? Why have so many on the left fallen silent, after railing against George W. Bush’s rights violations, as Obama has prolonged and codified most of the same practices? And why have so few on the right, riding a groundswell of resentment toward big government, failed to resent the biggest governmental intrusions into personal privacy since the FBI’s domestic spying during the Cold War?

The Blessings of Romnesia

By David K. Shipler

Getting a fix on Mitt Romney’s positions and beliefs is like trying to nail a custard pie to the wall. But let’s give a small cheer for his Etch-A-Sketch routine on foreign policy. Holding his finger to the wind (while we’re mixing metaphors, we might as well go whole hog), he and his handlers apparently detected a fresh breeze of moderation among the electorate, so he abandoned his super-hawk routines on China, Russia, Iran, Syria, and Israel. As Vice President Joe Biden observed, Romney agreed with Obama so often during their debate that he seemed about to give the President his endorsement.

Fussy foreign-policy wonks have listed ad nauseam the important subjects ignored, bemoaning the lack of creative ideas, the surfeit of pedestrian formulas, and of course the factual misstatements, mostly by Romney--as in Obama’s fictional “apology tour.” But it’s encouraging that Romney now (at least for the moment) sees the center as the place to be when addressing the international maelstrom he will inherit if he wins.

This apparent shift is a little premature. It usually happens in the Oval Office, where the rigors of foreign affairs drive presidents toward the comfortable middle, no matter if they begin on the right or the left.

Syria: No Good Options

By David K. Shipler

A sad coincidence occurred this week. As the 14-year-old Pakistani campaigner for girls’ education, Malala Yousafzai, was being flown to Britain for treatment after being shot in the head by the Taliban, David Sanger of The New York Times was reporting from Washington that most small arms flowing to Syrian rebels were ending up in the hands of “hard-line Islamic jihadists.” On the surface, Pakistan has nothing to do with Syria, but when you throw Afghanistan into the picture, you get a cautionary tale.

In the late 1970s, the Soviet-imposed regime in Kabul sparked religious resistance in the Afghan countryside, in part by requiring schooling for girls, a socialist (and Western) doctrine that violated absolutist Islam. For a decade after Moscow’s 1979 invasion an insurgency of mujahideen, organized by regional warlords, bled the Soviet army with weapons from the CIA, finally driving the Russians into a humiliating withdrawal, much like America’s retreat from Vietnam.

Affirmative Action 2.0

By David K. Shipler

When admissions officers from thirty elite universities were asked how many of them were the first in their families to attend college, about two-thirds raised their hands. It was a stunning response, which surprised even them. Here were the gatekeepers for all the Ivy League schools—from Dartmouth to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest--plus an array of the other hardest schools to get into, from Amherst to Rice, Carleton, Stanford, Wellesley, Smith, Swarthmore, and the like. They were gathered in Aspen in 2004 to consider how to increase enrollment by students from low-income families.

I had been invited to speak to them about the dynamics of poverty, which some of them already understood very well. Their own upward mobility helped give them a sense of mission, which they were poised to take home to their respective presidents. Some have since succeeded, to a point, and others may do so soon, for race-based affirmative action is now in jeopardy before the Supreme Court. Class-based affirmative action is the likely substitute.

Mixing Religion Into Politics

By David K. Shipler

(published in Moment, Sept.-Oct. 2012)

If opinion polls on religion and politics are accurate, the American public reached a turning point last March, in the heat of the Republican primaries. For the first time in the 12 years that the Pew Research Center has been surveying attitudes, a plurality—38 percent—said that politicians talked too much about faith and prayer, exceeding the 30 percent who thought they talked too little. Until now, the figures had been reversed. The “too-little” camp reached a high of 41 percent in 2003. And this year, only 25 percent—down from 60 percent in 2001—felt that political leaders were expressing religious faith in just the right amount.

Does this indicate a growing distaste for candidates who mix religion into government? Let’s not get ecstatic quite yet. The First Amendment still sits uncomfortably on a good number of citizens, especially white evangelical Protestants.

Compassionless Conservatism

By David K. Shipler

I met Debra Hall in Cleveland years before Mitt Romney slandered 47 percent of all Americans as lazy parasites who want government to feed, house, and coddle them. She was 39, the single mother of two, and lived near poverty by working intensively at hard jobs that paid extremely low wages.

She learned how to type, how to keep an inventory, and how to drive a forklift, but she couldn’t find a job commensurate with her skills. Hired by a bakery, she was placed at a grueling conveyor belt; all the forklift drivers there were men. When I last saw her, she was getting up at 2 a.m., driving her beat-up car to the bakery, and putting in long, numbing shifts for $7.90 an hour. Yet when I asked her to list the reasons that she thought she had been confined to a life of poverty, she answered with one word: “Lazy.”

Lazy? I said. You work harder than I do. And harder than Mitt Romney, I’d now add. So, where does this self-indictment come from?

It’s not unusual to hear the poor blame themselves by using the same terminology inflicted on them by the upper classes.

Where Are All the Bumper Stickers?

By David K. Shipler

I just spent two days driving from Maine to Maryland and saw a total of five bumper stickers for presidential candidates. [Postscript: In 10 days of driving 1300 miles in rural Alaska, I saw no bumper stickers at all--only one for Romney when I got to Anchorage.] This is disastrous for undecided voters who are waiting for a revelation on the highway.

The first was a snappy slogan on a pickup in Maine: “Protect Freedom. Defeat Obama.” This was confusing. The young man behind the wheel didn’t look as if he meant a billionaire’s freedom from reasonable taxes, which Obama’s defeat would surely guarantee.

In Massachusetts, a hatchback came along with a red, white, and blue sticker in the middle of its cargo door: “NOT a Republican,” and an Obama-Biden sticker down on the bumper, where it belonged. The driver was behaving more safely than the young woman who cut me off at high speed on the interstate; as I hit the brakes, her “Romney” sticker loomed large. This is the kind of driving that can lose a candidate the election, as surely as Al Gore lost it when he sighed during a debate.

Here’s a reminder for drivers promoting candidates on vehicles: Undecided voters have X-ray vision.

Unfit Running Mates

By David K. Shipler

Only once since Ronald Reagan chose George H. W. Bush as his running mate in 1980 have Republicans picked a vice presidential candidate who was qualified to step into the Oval Office if necessary. He was Jack Kemp, former Housing Secretary, who ran with Bob Dole in 1996, a smart and solid man who could have been a decent president.

With all the rest, the Republicans have exposed the country to a high-stakes gamble with very bad odds. In 1988, Bush selected Dan Quayle, an inexperienced senator whose perpetual deer-caught-in-the-headlights look made him seem less than intellectually capable. He was a lightweight vice president who only recently, in cogent criticism of his party’s swing to the hard right, has shown the good sense he would have needed as president.

Dick Cheney, Vice President under George W. Bush, displayed such contempt for the Constitution’s protections of individual rights after 9/11 that, as a president unrestrained, he would have damaged the country’s structure of liberty even more extensively than Bush allowed him to do. (One Cheney gambit, which Bush rejected, was to knock down a pillar of American freedom by sending the Army in pursuit of a hapless so-called “sleeper cell” of wannabe terrorists in upstate New York. They were duly prosecuted by the civilian system.) Much of Cheney’s legacy has persisted under Obama.

The Amorality of the Market

By David K. Shipler

The lobstermen on the Maine island where I spend summers stayed home yesterday. They did not leave port to haul traps in the season that is usually the busiest and most lucrative of the year. It wasn’t the weather. The windless sea was as calm as gray glass, and the patchy fog burned off soon after sunrise—not that fog ever stops these guys anyway.

The reason they left their boats on their moorings, as many of their colleagues on the Maine coast have done from time to time this summer, was the ruthless market. Their co-op told them it wouldn’t be buying yesterday, because the price has fallen to the lowest since the 2008 economic collapse—at this moment, just $2.05 a pound “at the boat,” as they say. It’s slipped below $2.00 on other parts of the coast.

Money is Speech, Poverty is Silence

By David K. Shipler

As billionaires exercise their First Amendment right to freedom of speech by assaulting the country with propaganda, the poor remain quiet. Even as half a dozen Republican governors insist that they will not accept a penny of the federal government’s money to provide expanded Medicaid health insurance to the nearly poor, those citizens do not raise a voice.

The reason is obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. The poor cannot afford to buy TV ads, produce slick Internet messages, or hire fancy public relations pros to manipulate vocabulary and insinuate their versions of reality into daily news coverage, talk-show babble, and political agendas.

This is the other side of the coin of freedom that the Supreme Court struck in its Citizens United decision overturning federal limits on campaign spending by corporations, unions, and other groups.