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Photo Credit: Aaron Powell[/caption]
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Contrary to the claims of some conservatives, gays can and do serve in the military. This video highlights the story of a combat medic at Fort Hood, Texas, one of the major troop installations in the United States. Warning: long video (13 minutes).
Sergeant Darren Manzella served as a combat medic, and his chain of command investigated the claim that he was gay. Manzella provided pictures and video of him with his boyfriend, but found “no evidence of homosexuality.”
The story makes clear that Manzella gave them plenty evidence of homosexuality, but it didn’t make any sense to get rid of a good soldier in a critical field when he wanted to continue serving and there was a war going on.
The British and Israeli armed forces allow gays to serve openly and still have first-rate combat units. When Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says it is time to repeal DADT and believes that we can do so without compromising readiness, objections based on domestic politics, and not on military grounds, lose a lot of credibility.
Yesterday Defense Secretary Bob Gates complained that European defense spending is too low:
The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.
If Gates is really upset about this, he should blame his predecessors. The United States has played an active role in stifling European defense, and is now reaping what it has sown. As Alex Massie points out, American opposition to anything that would “duplicate, decouple from, or discriminate against” NATO meant that anything the Europeans decided to do would have to be kept within the context of NATO and the “transatlantic alliance.” For more on this phenomenon, see this paper by Cato research fellow Chris Layne, and pages 105–117 of Layne’s excellent and very provocative book The Peace of Illusions.
As we know in the context of public goods and alliance behavior, the bigger countries are forced to carry disproportionately big loads. By extension, when there is one super-giant country in the alliance, the only reason smaller countries would contribute would be if it were outside of the alliance context, which we have just seen the U.S. opposes. Accordingly, the European abrogation of its own defense has only gotten more pronounced since the end of the cold war, because Uncle Sucker has insisted on picking up the tab. Call your Congressman.
And we have recent evidence of U.S. opposition to increased European efforts: on a trip to Europe last month, Secretary of State Clinton was asked about the prospect of an independent European defense force. Her answer, in full:
Well, again, this is a European matter. It certainly is a French and German matter. And I respect the decision making of allies like France and Germany, so it is really within those two countries’ sphere of authority.
I think the U.S. view is that we would not want to see anything supplant NATO. If it were able to supplement NATO, that would be different. But given the strains that already exist on NATO’s budget and military expenditures in our countries, we think it’s smarter to figure out how to use the resources we have more effectively, use the alliance that we’re members of in a more strategic way. But again, that is ultimately a decision of the French and the German people.
What America is asking is for European countries to refuse transfer payments from U.S. taxpayers who are currently paying for their defense. Not likely to happen.
Bonus question of interest to theory hounds: What does American opposition to the formation of an autonomous European security and defense policy tell us about IR theory? Given that the countries in question definitely qualify as democracies, wouldn’t liberalism tell us that the United States should be encouraging, rather than stifling, an autonomous European defense?
The Washington Post offers an instructive campaign finance story this morning. The essence of the story: employees of banks and brokerage houses contributed more to candidate Barack Obama in 2008 than to his rival John McCain. A lot more in fact: such employees gave almost twice as much to the current president at they did to the Arizona senator.
Now, however, President Obama is attacking the banks and Wall Street for greed and selfishness, not to mention for ruining the economy. Moreover, Obama is proposing curbs on Wall Street pay and heavy regulation of banks. It would appear, in other words, that contributions don’t buy many favors with this administration.
But the story goes deeper. Wall Street is now shifting its contributions to the GOP. That’s not surprising. In fact, being an intelligent man, President Obama must have known his attacks on Wall Street might deprive his party of contributions. Yet, he went forward with the attacks and proposed laws.
Why? In the coming election, contributions will matter a lot less than votes. Obama thinks his attacks on Wall Street will cast the Democrats as the party of “us” against the detested “them.” The votes gained will greatly outweigh the donations lost. The currency of politics is votes in the market for election.
The next time someone tells you that donations are “legalized bribery,” ask them why Obama took $18 million from Wall Street and gave them in return endless abuse and hostile legislation.
Quid pro quo, indeed.
A report (PDF) released today by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemns in well documented form the growing violation of human rights under the regime of Hugo Chavez. The 302-page study is yet another confirmation of the multitude of ways in which individuals, NGOs, union leaders, politicians, activists, businessmen, students, judges, the media and others who disagree with Venezuelan government policies are targeted by the government and its supporters through intimidation, arbitrary use of administrative and criminal law, and sometimes violence and homicide.
Among the many cases it documents, the report describes how the government last year shut down a publicity campaign in defense of private property run by our colleagues at the free-market think tank CEDICE. The government claimed that it did so to safeguard public order and the mental health of the population.
Particularly interesting is that the commission issuing this report (produced in December but for some reason only made public today) is part of the Organization of American States, which has proven itself useless at best and counterproductive at worst, in the face of blatant rights violations by the Venezuelan and other populist Latin American governments in the last decade. Will the same OAS that invited Cuba to rejoin the organization last year now debate the new report or will it and its head, Mr. Insulza, remain silent as they have for so many years?
Meanwhile in Cuba, the country Chavez holds as a model, political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died yesterday after going on a hunger strike, suffering beatings and having been denied water by prison authorities for 18 days. The mistreatment led to kidney failure. According to Cuba Archive, an NGO that documents deaths attributable to the Cuban regime, Zapata “was then held naked over a powerful air conditioner and developed pneumonia.” What will the Permanent Council of the OAS have to say about that?
Google executives who had nothing to do with the creation, uploading, review, or display of a video have been criminally convicted in Italy for its brief appearance on a Google site.
The video, which showed Italian children taunting an autistic schoolmate, was promptly taken down after Italian authorities notified Google. The company assisted the authorities in locating the girl who uploaded it, according to Google’s account. (Her subsequent conviction makes it safe to assume that Google was cooperating with a criminal investigation as required by Italian law.) But four Google employees were charged with criminal defamation and failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.
That can’t happen here—unless we let it happen here.
This is a good time to review and extoll the Communications Decency Act—not because it attempted to censor Internet speech (that part was overturned), but because it protected providers of interactive services (like Web sites) from having to become gatekeepers over Internet content. The law shielded them from liability for what users of their services do.
I believe common law would have eventually reached that result had the statute not been passed, but without protections like that in the CDA’s section 230, the wide-open, rollicking, soapbox-for-all Internet we know would not exist—it would be just a plussed-up television because everything uploaded would have to get a professional’s review for potential liability.
That’s what Italy stands to end up with if it allows liability against providers of interactive services. It’s what we stand to end up with if the many threats to CDA section 230 get traction.
Today, in what seems like an endless string of 3–2 votes, the SEC moved to restrict the ability of investors to short stocks, claiming that such restrictions would restore stability and protect our financial system. The truth couldn’t be more different. Short sellers have long been the first, and often only, voice raising questions about corporate fraud and mismanagement. For instance, shorts exposed the fraud at Enron, WorldCom and other companies while the SEC largely slept.
Bush’s SEC, lead by former Congressman Chris Cox banned the shorting of various financial industry stocks during the crisis. The SEC then, as now, would have us believe that Bear, Lehman, AIG, Fannie, Freddie and others were not the victims of their own mismanagement, but rather victims of bear raids by short sellers. In another instance of Obama and his appointees reading from the Bush playbook, SEC Chair Mary Shapiro finds ever creative ways to expand Cox’s misguided policies.
Short sellers only profit if they end up being correct. Sadly Washington instead believes in punishing market mechanisms that work and throwing increasingly more money at failed agencies, like the SEC. Rather than attacking short sellers we should applaud them for doing the SEC’s job. But then if we had more short selling, providing greater incentives for investors to root out fraud, we might start to question why we even have the SEC.