Matt Y. and Atrios both commented today on one of the most ludicrous examples of how car-centric culture and laws are out of control—-mandatory bar-parking.  For instance, Long Beach, CA requires 20 parking spaces for every 1,000 sq. ft. of tavern floor.  Unless you’re a complete Pollyanna, there is no doubt that the more that people use cars to get to and from bars, the more drunk driving there will be.

Atrios:

[A]nyone who drives and drinks, no matter how well-intentioned, is at least occasionally going to drive after drinking more than they should.

Matt:

Obviously it’s possible to go to a tavern, not consume alcohol, and drive home safely. I’ve even served as a designated driver in my day. But in general, public safety demands a very low ratio of “people driving home from the bar” to “customers drinking at the bar” so there’s clearly something absurd about the idea of regulating bar-related land use so as to encourage and facilitate extra driving.

And of course beyond the specific case of mandatory bar-parking, it’s always worth emphasizing that part of the cost of an auto-dependent built environment is to massively increase the number of people on the road who’ve got at least a drink or two under their belt.

The fetish for “personal responsibility” that supersedes any attempt to write policies that actually encourage better choice-making is particularly irritating when it comes to straight up public safety considerations like reducing drunk driving.  It’s just not enough to tell people not to drink and drive, and then make it difficult for them to drink without driving.  Wagging your finger and telling people not to drink will, like Atrios noted, get you to a certain point, but after that, good luck.  There will always be a whole bunch of people on any given night and especially on the weekends who have their reasons to be at the bar drinking.  And while a lot of them are too overconfident, belligerent, or wingnutty (or all three) to take seriously the dangers of drinking and driving, a lot of people drink and drive when they’d take the drink and use public transportation option if it was available to them.  I’ve always thought that reducing drinking and driving should be a centerpiece in trying to find ways to make cities less car-centric.

The project of reducing how much I drove in Austin, coupled with my now living completely car free in New York, has really caused me to think about the various things that encourage driving over walking and using public transportation.  Obviously, most of it is that there’s no infrastructure to make going car-free or at least not driving possible—-stuff really is too far away.  But I also noticed a lot how the culture of driving everywhere causes people to hop in their car mindlessly and drive to places that are totally walkable.  Things like mandatory bar parking just reinforce this notion.  Even just a few places in a neighborhood that don’t have parking and subsist on foot traffic can help create a culture where people think of doing things like walking to the bar.  I’ve noticed that once people start walking here and there a few times, the habit kicks in and they start doing it more and more.  Certainly, the commitment we made in Austin to walk to places if at all possible made the transition to New York a whole lot easier. 

Now, this only works in terms of stuff that really is walkable, and in most places in the U.S., that’s not much.  But a lot of bars exist strictly to be neighborhood bars, and I’ll bet in many of these cases, 80% of their customers live within a mile.  In fact, I think a lot of people drink close to home to minimize the amount of time they spend behind the wheel.  They could easily be nudged into reducing that time to zero minutes, if they start to think of bars as places you walk to instead of drive to.

The Alliance Defense Fund is seeking to expand Iowa’s ill-conceived conscience clause (now limited to abortion) to county clerks compelled to hand out marriage licenses to gays, because the only way to ensure the proper function of society is to make sure that a certain religious segment of it can repeatedly fuck the rest of us over. 

However, a letter sent to county recorders by the Alliance Defense Fund says Miller is forgetting completely about “one of the most foundational rights and liberties we enjoy as Iowans” … “the right of conscience.”

That right, the letter says, is codified in Iowa Code 146.1.

“This right is based upon the simple truth that it is wrong to force anyone to violate his or her conscience,” said the letter, also from the Iowa Family Policy Council.

It cites the motto on the seal of the state, which reads, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”

“This noble motto … is emblematic of the moral sentiments of Iowans from the banks of the Missouri to the waters of the Mighty Mississippi. … As citizens of the State of Iowa and thus, the United States, we enjoy the protections of this right guaranteed in the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions. This right of conscience protects individuals against coercion by the state authority, and serves as the first line of defense against the cancer of tyranny.”

The letter suggests counties adopt policies that ensure no one will be required to “issue or process a marriage license, or to perform, assist, or participate in such procedures, against that individual’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

The suggested policy continues: “A person shall not discriminate against any individual in any way, including but not limited to employment, promotion, advancement, transfer, licensing, education, training, or the granting of employment privileges or conditions, because of the individual’s participation in or refusal to participate in the issuance of a marriage license.”

Except that it’s neither foundational nor expansive as a right.  Iowa Code § 146.1 gives a conscience clause as it relates to performing medical procedures which result in abortions; it makes no sense that you’d draft a general right in a specific statute for a specific activity.  What the ADF is asking for is an expansion of a principle to the point where it will have no limit; there is no “right of conscience” (and every April 15th, the government reminds you of that).  To create one, and to create one as broadly as the ADF would have it, would essentially imperil every constitutional right on an issue of first invocation of conscience.  You have the right to petition the government (for, say, some vague conglomeration of anti-tax, anti-spending and anti-Muslim principles), except if the city clerk decides they can’t issue a protest permit because their brother died at a pointless conservative rally sponsored by Fox News.  My conscience says that I can’t rent this apartment to a single mother, which is obviously more important than the Fair Housing Act.

It’s the same problem as the tolerance/intolerance argument: you create an insane recursive loop of oversensitivity, where your conscience violates my conscience, but since you started it, you get to call me a hatemonger and yourself the innocent victim.  If I don’t have to issue a marriage license because of my moral convictions, why should I have to process unemployment benefits or respond to your crime report or deliver your mail?  The entire point of America is supposed to be that, at the very least, we extend rights to all who abide by the law, regardless of who they are or where they come from. 

If you find yourself unable to extend a constitutional right to those to whom it applies because your sky-man told you it was wrong, then go pray for a new job and let someone else serve the public.  It’s certainly an issue for taxpayers to get angrier about than, you know, teabagging. 

I really, really like the idea of making Rush Limbaugh the head of the Republican Party, largely because it’s true. 

So, when Peter Daou writes an insanely high-minded pooh-poohing of the tactic, it really rubs me the wrong way.  The idea that governing is nothing more than principled leadership with an eschewing of political considerations until such point as our greater angels must sully their robes with the filth of the political earth upon which they are forced to trod every few years is ridiculous.  It was the great lie of the Bush years - every time he’d make a political move, it would be with the tacit admonition of Democrats for daring to be political in the face of his great conservative principles.  I prefer not to be governed by sanctimonious bullshit.

What it ultimately comes down to for Daou is the fact that he was a Clinton staffer, and the Clintons never figured out Limbaugh:

The myth of a technological, grassroots revolution, of prodigious strategic and tactical brilliance, of a do-no-wrong campaign, perhaps the greatest ever run, that myth sounds good, but it’s not what happened. The reality was that the 2008 election was the age-old battle of character-building and character-destruction. Obama’s team won that battle against Hillary Clinton not just because of Obama’s abundant positive traits but because people like Rush Limbaugh gave him a 15-year head start against her. He won it against John McCain because McCain squandered years of character-building by enabling the excesses of George W. Bush and by running an erratic, unfocused campaign that served to highlight the best of Obama’s character and the worst of his. Character versus character.

This is a fundamental misread of the entirety of The Longest Election In Human History.  Obama’s team won against Hillary Clinton because her team forgot to run a campaign in February.  Yes, Clinton had firmly established negatives, but Obama’s victory had more to do with smart, coordinated tactics being employed with consistent messaging mixing strong positive and negative messages coherently.  By the time Clinton went on the attack, it was too late - and lest we forget, the main reason she was considered viable well past her point of defeat was because she ran an increasingly negative campaign against Obama. 

McCain’s problem was that he never had a message past Labor Day, and had everything thrown off by Saint Sarah’s insistence on speaking without thinking.  The closest he and Obama ever were was when he was pushing the “celebrity” meme in the summer, and it fell apart when he decided that he would (but actually wouldn’t) call Obama a socialist, and then attack him for hating the country, and then attack him for taking the pudding from the lunch line…all in the same day. 

The secret to the Limbaugh line is that it’s a consistent message that’s reinforced when the head of the Republican Party apologizes to Limbaugh for insulting him, and then tacitly agrees with Limbaugh’s statement that the head of the RNC isn’t the head of the party at all.  It disrupts and destroys the entire Republican message, and forces everyone from the chair to contenders for 2012 to spend days, even weeks, debating over who’s actually in charge. 

It’s incredibly smart politics.  And it allows for smarter, more effective policy.  Of course, we can always stop and whine about how it’s not fair when the next six weeks of news coverage is about whether or not Obama hates productive Americans, too.  That was fun for the past two decades. 

The infighting between the social right and the rest of the right is reaching…well, a fever pitch is far too strong of a term for what’s essentially a national ideological passing of the buck.  Anyway, Ramesh Ponnoru wants us to get our facts straight: it is beyond offensive to declare that social conservatives are in any way responsible for any of the bad things that have happened to the GOP.  To prove this, he uses the only tool Republicans ever need to prove that Republicanism works: at some point, they won.

In 2002 and 2004, Republicans ran hard on social issues and the courts — and scored victories at every level of politics. In 2006 and 2008, they left those issues off the table, and got walloped.

You remember 2002!  How Republicans at every level completely avoided foreign policy and terrorism, and instead ran on abortion and same-sex marriage.  And you also remember 2004, where Republicans didn’t run on character and foreign policy (again), and instead pinned their entire electoral hopes on same-sex marriage bans, with no other arguments or policies coming down the pipeline.  Of course you do, because you’re a smart person, and also because Ramesh Ponnoru is paying you. 

There’s a reason that Republicans are going to take forever to change what’s wrong with their party - the party’s constituted of magnificent liars with an unbelievable capacity for denial.  Republicans never, ever lose.  Ever.  Republicans don’t fail, it’s that losers calling themselves Republican just aren’t Republican enough.  And when you take that core idea and then translate it to the many factions of the Republican Party fighting with each other, it becomes difficult to see how they’re going to rectify a schism that requires someone, at some point, to admit failure.

Whatever the solutions are to the nation’s problems, this is what gives me faith more than anything else that they’re going to come from the left rather than the right - for all of our coalition’s problems, there’s a general realization that we can, in fact, fail, and that the failure should be met with something on the order of a change.  The nature, purpose and correctness of that change are always up for debate, but the basic maturity required to realize that you can be wrong is something wholly missing from the current iteration of the GOP. 

After all, real Republicans won every race they ran this year. 

Ezra notices the start of one of my favorite election year tropes: sure politicians have all these goals, but how are they going to accomplish them? 

But will Obama, amid the pulsating theatrics, also attempt the less glamorous and more difficult task of explaining specifically where he wants to move the country, and how he proposes to move it, above and beyond reciting his policy positions? History, as well as recent public-opinion polls, suggests that he badly needs to do so. As a lifelong Democrat who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries, I would like to see him succeed in fulfilling his promise.

It’s never quite clear what this is supposed to mean, and Sean Wilentz comes to the same conclusion that people making this criticism always come to - Democrats can find their message by being more like Republicans.  John McCain was tough and Obama was too liberal!  And…and…yeah!

Nobody making this criticism, as of yet, has been able to articulate what they actually want from the Democrat in question to accomplish the stated goal.  Stop talking about policy and start talking about how you’re going to accomplish your policy - well, the educated guess probably resides in persuading the legislature to write and pass bills which the president then signs into law.  During this process, he and dozens of surrogates will likely head out on the stump and into the media in order to drum up support for the measures which he’s seeking.  If that’s the question they’re actually asking (which it isn’t), then there’s the answer. 

Although much attention has been paid to John McCain’s manufacturing a new surge timeline in Iraq, let us not forget that he’s also manufacturing the psychology of the oil market.

Bush recently lifted the executive order banning offshore drilling that his father put in place in 1990. He also asked Congress to lift its own moratorium on oil exploration on the outer continental shelf which includes coastal waters as close as three miles from shore.

“The price of oil dropped $10 a barrel,” said McCain, who argued that the psychology of lifting the ban has affected world markets.

The White House didn’t go that far. Presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino said the price drop also could reflect diminished demand.

“I don’t know if we fully deserve the credit,” Perino said.

There is a reason that Perino is loath to take full credit for the price drop - it’s not deserved.  The falling prices have more to do with the fact that American gas use is falling about as sharply as American gas use can fall, dropping 2.4% year-over-year. 

It really does leave you to wonder if McCain’s policy briefings consist of tossing darts at a wall, one area with problems and one area with explanations.  “Okay, so the…housing crisis, yes!  We haven’t talked about that one in a while.  Is actually caused by…Moqtada al-Sadr?  Ah, fuck it, run with it.  Call up Romney and let him know.”

Barack Obama still has to answer serious questions about his plan to institute a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The idea of federal funds being given to FBOs for secular programs to service at-risk populations is one that pre-dates Bush’s politicized iteration.

However, any plan, given the state of civil rights protections, has serious reality-based problems—there is

nothing

to prevent a religious organization from firing LGBT employees if there are no state or local protections on the books. Look at this case in Kentucky. No amount of oversight, monitoring, or, at this point, spin control, can make this kind of discrimination go away. (ACLU):

The American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a brief today in a federal appeals court urging the court to allow a discrimination lawsuit to go forward on behalf of a lesbian who was fired from her job at a publicly-funded Baptist group home in Kentucky.  The home for vulnerable children required the woman to observe its religious belief that being a lesbian is sinful. The brief also charges that taxpayers should be able to challenge the state of Kentucky’s decision to give public funds to a home that imposes its religious beliefs upon the children in its care.

“I put my heart and soul into helping the children who were under the care of Baptist Homes and was making a difference in their lives,” said Alicia Pedreira.  “It was unfair to be fired for being a lesbian.  It’s not right that an organization that is funded by state and federal dollars to do work for the state can get away with this.”

The ACLU and Americans United filed the lawsuit on April 17, 2000, on behalf of Pedreira charging that it was unlawful for the publicly-funded Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children (since renamed Sunrise Children’s Services) to fire Pedreira because she did not observe her employer’s religious beliefs about sexual orientation.  The complaint also charges that it was unconstitutional for the state to spend taxpayer dollars to fund a religious organization that attempts to indoctrinate children placed under state care with its religious beliefs.  After years of litigation, the district court dismissed the case on March 31, 2008.  The legal groups appealed that decision to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and are urging the court to allow the case to proceed.

Pedreira told her story to WBUR’s Anthony Brooks:

She flips through a large, red notebook, full of documents that chronicle her experience, including her first evaluation - where she received excellent feedback from her supervisor.

The red notebook also contains a copy of a picture that changed her life. A photographer snapped the photo of Pedreira and her partner after an AIDS walk in 1998. In the picture, the two women lean against each other affectionately. Pedreira wears a tee shirt with a map of the “Isle of Lesbos.”

The trouble began when the photographer entered the photo in a contest at the Kentucky State Fair, and thousands of people saw it, including her co-workers.

She said she didn’t think anything of it until someone at work mentioned the shirt she was wearing. Pedreira says, “At that point I went, oh no, and at that moment I pretty much thought that I was going to be fired.”

She was right. A week later the President of Kentucky Baptist Homes asked her to resign. A letter explained that her “homosexual lifestyle is contrary to the Home’s core values.”

More below the fold.

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Although the New York Times tells us today that dissatisfaction with Obama’s FISA stance is the provenance of hairshirted liberals and bloggers on the internet doing their Youtubing and hoping (Comments from Left Field has more, including some ruminating on the question why the dissatisfied elements of the GOP base are never “far-right”), there’s something that we fair hippies are allowed to be dissatisfied about: Obama’s completely consistent position on Iraq.

I reference Margaret Carlson, who I’d actually forgotten existed until until MoDo quoted her today pulling the same schtick she has for the past decade plus: being the renowned hostess of elite, A-list parties who, because she has funny glasses and a librarian haircut, gets to weigh in on how utterly weird and alienating to regular people Democrats are. 

That someone is Obama. His familiar line is to say he will be as careful getting out of Iraq as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were careless about getting in. He put 16 months as a deadline for removing troops.

That was in the Democratic primaries. In the general election, he’s ``refined’’ his timetable depending on what the generals on the ground have to say.

To the potent and vehement antiwar members of his party, this was like saying he’d stay 100 years, so he’s carefully walked his refinement back. He told an audience in Powder Springs, Georgia, this week: ``Don’t be confused. I will bring the Iraq War to a close when I am president.’’ Assuming he meant ``in my first term,’’ that’s 48 months, not 16.

Oh, the Obama rule, I almost forgot: in lieu of explicit, mind-numbing detail that would put even the tenacious, insightful press corps to sleep, assume Obama’s fucking up.

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Jonah Goldberg calls Barack Obama a 21st century slavemaster.  Actually, to be fair, he uses a clever allegory that requires much hyperventilating on my part to reach my totally unreasonable point:

There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

For those who don’t remember, the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States.”

See?  I can’t believe I’m…taking…this…

He just called a man, let alone a black man, a slavedriver.  Does this mean that Barack Obama’s newest middle name is “Massa”?

There is one benefit to Goldberg’s idiotic penchant for selling every point he makes with the most offensively wrong analogy possible - he’s about 75% of the way towards Ann Coulter’s flameout into utter irrelevance, and he’s only published one book.

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One of the joys of being an underinsured/sometimes uninsured, but healthy, 25-year-old: every time new insurance asks me for a family doctor or a shot record, I don’t have A and I have no idea how to get B.  I’m the asshole who shows up and continually has to ask if it’s okay if I don’t know answers to any number of questions about my medical history, but I’m sure I got all my shots at some point since the early 80s.

Salon has a story on the death of the family doctor (not the literal death of the actual family doctor, which is a rather touching Hallmark TV movie), which made me think about the medical histories of those in my age bracket.  I’ve lived six different places in the past six years (so I’m also the asshole who’s apparently a bigger credit risk), with whatever doctor I could find whenever I needed said doctor’s care.  Most of it was Urgent Care for various bugs and a sleep center for a bout of insomnia I’ve had for about a year now.  I’ve had no primary care/family physician, largely because routine checkups take absolutely forever to schedule, and most of the doctors in said categories are out in the suburbs near the nice schools and the families with the kids and the insurance and whatnot.  And it’s a common story across many of my friends, particularly those who grew up without regular insurance - a family doctor, even simply a routine doctor is a luxury we really don’t have.

What we need, and most of us want, is the Norman Rockwell version of a concerned, empathetic family doctor we can trust to sniff out the rare or serious illness, manage the ordinary, while also being a medical cleric who knows his patients. What we need is a family friend to whom we can turn for reassurance, comfort and, yes, even bad news.

But primary care physicians—those trained in family medicine and general internal medicine—are an endangered species. It’s only a bit of hyperbole to say that, if the trend continues, the family doctor will become a fond memory, a nostalgic reminder that the medical system once had a more human face and sense of community.

Of all the various elements of the 1950s that conservatives are trying to bring back - women in the kitchen and out of the work force, sexual prudishness, the overuse of the word “keen” - this is the one that it would be great for them to actually fight for, tooth and nail.  We’re never getting milkmen back again, but having a personal doctor who knew you and the mole on your back and your lack of gastrointestinal tolerance for enriched breads was a really, really good thing that “the market” has largely done away with.  You make more money being a specialist, and you still get paid for the initial consult when someone comes to you for back pain that’s actually a tumor.

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Matt talks about term limits:

It really does seem a bit odd that a mayor with a 67 percent approval rating should be forced from office because of a term limits law. I suppose I understand the theory that presidential-level term limits serve as a check on tyranny, but there doesn’t seem to me to be a good reason to worry about that at the local level of government.

Term limits in Ohio actually helped created a great racket for the continuation of legislative political machines - State Representatives and Senators are term-limited to eight consecutive years of service (one can serve eight years, go away, and run again and serve another eight years).  What happens far too often is that a soon-to-be-term-limited official “retires” a few months early, allowing a successor in the same party to take over the seat in a low-information, low-turnout election and run as an effective incumbent in November.  It doesn’t get new, fresh faces in office - it simply gets handpicked, identical politicians in gerrymandered seats.  It’s worse than lifelong incumbency, in a way, because it allows political parties to game elections in order to ensure the results they want.  It also tends to ensure that you get a lot of politicians who are simply biding time for their next job rather than doing the current one.

Legislatures and executives are different, however; I can see the case for executive term limits a lot more easily than I can legislative limits, particularly given the scope of power executives have over appointments and administration.

It always struck me that the problem with Bush’s approach to faith-based initiatives was that he viewed their purpose as paying churches to proselytize, rather than viewing them as partners in government-led action.  Obama’s plan actually follows the more moderate path that Ohio’s FBCI took after years of Taft’s office funnelling money who knows where - looking at faith-based organizations (note: organizations, not just churches) as potential partners the same way you would other nonprofit organizations, rather than looking to simply pay churches for being churches.

The critical part is also the fact that agencies which accept federal funds must abide by federal hiring guidelines in the use of said funds - a necessary compromise unless the government wants to step into the process of hiring denominational clergy .  The other benefit is that the lack of ability to discriminate using federal funds will likely push out many of the fundamentalist organizations that made the initial faith-based initiatives so problematic.

Ah, well, I know this probably isn’t the most popular position.  Fire away.

Passenger rail won’t ever replace the airline industry.  That’s because the point is to supplant long distance car travel.  Where passenger rail really looks great is in the Rust Belt, where you have several large urban areas between two and five hours apart from each other from Illinois to Pennsylvania.  Personally, I would have killed the last few years if I could have traveled from Columbus to Cleveland or Cincinnati without putting 300 miles on my car each time. 

Also, this is so wrong, yet so, so right.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of McCain’s $300 million electric engine prize is that if we’re willing to sock that much money away for it already, why not just spend the $300 million as startup costs for actually doing it rather than hold it in reserve as a token prize for our next gazillionaire?

My second thought is that if we were going to pursue a program like this, we need to go full force.  $300 million for an enterprise needing billions to succeed and promising tens of billions when it does is eerily reminiscent of the insulting-yet-satisfying redemption rewards you got as a kid (or last week) from Chuck E. Cheese.  Sure, you spent ten dollars to get enough tickets to get a $1.50 notebook and 30-cent pen, but dammit, it was still somehow worthwhile, because it was stuff.  The money you get from the government has the right proportion of input-to-reward, but it lacks the sort of bubbly uselessness that propagates the entire idea. 

I think we should have more useless prizes for otherwise good ideas.  An Iron Man-branded defunct Bradley Tank for inventing cold fusion?  Yes!  HDTVs for planes that are 25% more fuel efficient?  Damn right!  Successful replanning of an entire metro area to reduce gas usage, pollution, and sprawl?  You, my friend, get a Family Guy DVD box set.  Season 2.  Just Season 2.

Sigh.