Mike Lee’s speech: Bring back Judge Napolitano’s 'Freedom Watch'

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Texas’s Ted Cruz have added much to the discussion this past semester, but I would like to suggest they misunderstand their forum. As a business model, the Senate today should be looked at as a pirate ship where full and honest discussion is considered seditious and principled management models are eyed suspiciously as cloaking dissent.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on Monday, Lee said: “The single most important policy would be federalism,” which means making “as many decisions at the most local level as possible.”

This does indeed get to the crux of the matter, but you cannot get there from here. A hundred years of centralization cannot disappear overnight; it goes back further, to Jay’s Treaty in 1794 when Washington cast his lot with Alexander Hamilton and the New Yorkers in opposition to Jefferson, Madison, the South and western regions. The die was cast. But the end game of centralization came in 1913 with passage of the difficult-to-explain 17th Amendment, which fatally shifted focus from states to Wall Street in the election of senators. 

But this needs more discussion, more explanation, and I have heard Lee explain it perfectly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s groundbreaking TV show “Freedom Watch,” which rose in a creative arc with the Pauls, Lee and Sarah Palin, and was suddenly pulled by its network a year before last President’s Day.

We need it back.

But the pull of empire is deeply embedded in American minds and hearts and has been here since the first moments. Possibly this jewel from The Life and Death of Sam Crow tells why: “Einstein said that any intelligent fool can make something bigger and more complex. But it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to make something in the opposite direction.”

Perhaps there needs to be a different place for discussion outside of Washington and New York; something more central to America today as Washington was central to the colonies. Possibly Richard Nixon’s idea of a regional matrix for states should be reconsidered, an idea that did not fit the times or the contours of culture back then. The great ambassador George Kennan has advanced a similar suggestion with a model more suited to the fully developed regional cultures of America today.

But “getting big” is not necessarily in our DNA. It is in the model of the post-WWII power arc. Possibly senators cannot solve this, and it must be the work of governors. There needs to be a counterweight to the 17th amendment if states are to countervail the pull of Washington and New York. 

Virginia Del. Jim Lemunyon suggested a few years back a Constitutional Convention. And it may take that, but it is really the red states, the heartland states, that are left behind by the centralization of power. It is they that need to find their own center. Possibly a “super committee of governors” for the time being could meet to discuss — hopefully in some centralized location such as Louisville or Indianapolis — but first of all we need to bring back Judge Nap and “Freedom Watch.”

Because right now we are and have been heading hell-bent in the direction of China, a totalitarian matrix for 5,000 years, many of those centuries a slave state; or ancient Egypt, not a state at all, but a vast and timeless universe in the shifting sands of wandering hordes.

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Top 10 for the 10th Anniversary of Times Watch: Presenting the Absolute Worst From the New York Times

This week marks 10 years of Times Watch, the Media Research Center's project monitoring the liberal bias of the New York Times, America's most influential newspaper. Over the course of roughly 3,500 posts since March 2003, we have followed the Times through events historic (wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), pathetic (Jayson Blair, Howell Raines) and dangerous (the paper scuttling two separate anti-terror programs.) 

Here in rough chronological order are the Top Ten highlights of the New York Times' 10-year investigation into the bias of the New York Times.

1) Maureen Dowd's Dishonest Deletion 

2) Times Brought Low By Reporter Jayson Blair's Plagiarism 

3) Raines of Error: Howell Raines’ 21-Month Times Editorialship 

4) Anti-War Reporter Chris Hedges, Unplugged 

5) Smearing the Duke University Lacrosse Team as Rapists 

6) Publisher Sulzberger's Left-Wing Graduation Rant 

7) Scuttling Two of Bush's Anti-Terrorist Programs 

8) John McCain Affair Allegations Backfire 

9) Blaming Jared Loughner's Rampage on Conservatism 

10) Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

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1) Maureen Dowd's Dishonest Deletion

The first major story broken by Times Watch involved deception by columnist and former White House reporter Maureen Dowd, who left out vital words from her May 14, 2003 column, "Osama's Offspring," on President Bush's pursuit of the Taliban during the Afghanistan war. Dowd used an ellipsis to totally misrepresent a Bush statement from a May 5 speech in Arkansas to imply he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is "not a problem anymore," changing Bush's meaning to make him look naive about the war on terror.

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore."

But those quotes were taken wildly out of context. Here's what Bush actually said (the part Dowd left out is in italics): "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore."

A Times spokesman insisted that Dowd's "intention was not to distort the meaning of the quote," and several newspapers who used the distorted quote issued corrections. Dowd returned to the subject in a later column that included the full quote, but without issuing an actual correction. 

2) Times Brought Low By Reporter Jayson Blair's Plagiarism

Times Watch continued a busy first year in 2003 with coverage of a plagiarism scandal involving reporter Jayson Blair, whose mass plagiarism and deception led to one of the low points in the history of the paper and the downfall of both executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd.

In April 2003, a reporter for a San Antonio newspaper noticed a story in the New York Times was almost identical to one she had written the week before.

An exhaustive internal investigation uncovered dozens of instances of plagiarism or deception on the work by that same reporter, Jayson Blair, guilty of stealing copy from other newspapers as his own, putting quotes in the mouths of people, and filing fraudulent datelines from his apartment in Brooklyn – even using the Times photo bank to create the illusion of verisimilitude.

The paper printed a 7,239-word front-page investigation on May 11, 2003: "Times Reporter Who Resigned  Leaves Long Trail of Deception." The report "uncovered problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments" in October 22. The investigation showed how warning signs went unheeded, like this one from editor Jonathan Landman: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger argued that only one person was responsible, and it sure as heck wasn't him: "The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let's not begin to demonize our executives -- either the desk editors, or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher."

In his atrociously-selling 2004 memoir, "Burning Down My Master's House," Blair made excuses so hypocritical and self-serving you almost felt sympathetic toward the Times and its arrogant executive editor Howell Raines: "I wasn't going to fight for a job at a newspaper that had disappointed my idealism, for a newspaper that I had allowed to take something very precious from me."  The mea culpas scattered throughout the book were invariably equipped with trapdoors -- addictions, work pressure, depression, and discrimination are to blame as well as Jayson himself.

Which brings us to....

3) Raines of Error: Howell Raines’ 21-Month Times Editorialship

Another consequence of Jayson Blair's plagiarism was the downfall of Howell Raines, who hired Blair and served as executive editor of the New York Times from September 2001 to June 5, 2003. In that brief span the crusading liberal activist managed to alienate virtually everyone he worked with through his unpleasantly driven personality.

Noting Raines had served for years as editor of the Times editorial page, Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson asked a prophetic question: "Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views?" Raines’ management of the Times over the next 21 months gave Samuelson and other skeptics an affirmative No.

One sign something was awry came on Nov. 18, 2002, in an editorial suggesting three-time Masters’ golf tournament winner Tiger Woods boycott Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, for its refusal to admit women as members. The paper's anti-Augusta crusade eventually got the attention of Newsweek, which noted that the Times had run a whopping 32 stories on whether the Augusta National Golf Club would admit women.

Raines’ Augusta jihad soon caused the paper even more grief. New York Daily News columnist Paul Colford revealed on Dec 4, 2002 that the Times had spiked columns by two sports columnists who had written columns disagreeing with the editorial board's stand on Woods. (After outcry, the columns eventually appeared in revised form.)

Bloodied but unbowed, Raines continued to deny liberal bias in 2003, accusing his critics of a “disinformation” effort “of alarming proportions” to “convince our readers that we are ideologues” while accepting a National Press Foundation award. Raines worried “those of us who work for fair-minded publications and broadcasters have been too passive in pointing out the agendas of those who want to use journalism as a political tool,” meaning conservatives.

The beginning of the end for Raines came in April 2003, when a reporter for a San Antonio newspaper noticed that a Times story by reporter Jayson Blair was almost identical to one she had written the week before. Accused of plagiarism, Blair eventually resigned, causing a firestorm and involving the paper in more negative press.

The scandal encapsulated what many considered Raines’ autocratic refusal to listen to his staff, and his propensity for playing favorites. At a Times staff meeting, he admitted that as a “white man from Alabama,” he may have given Jayson Blair “one chance too many” because Blair was black, an admission that did little to invite confidence. In fact, Raines had specifically boasted of Blair’s hiring in front of the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001, saying: “This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

Raines reviewed his tenure as Executive Editor in a self-serving 21,000-word piece in the May 2004 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, which contained this shocking sentence demonstrating Raines' beef with the paper – it wasn't liberal enough! "Another disturbing development, for which I was unprepared, was that a small enclave of neo-conservative editors was making accusations of political correctness in order to block stories or slant them against minorities and traditional social welfare programs."

Raines' 2006 autobiography The One That Got Away demonstrated how those who accused him of liberal slant were right all along, attacking his perceived ideological enemies at Fox News:

Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for 'fair' news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest of America's periodic religious manias. The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its 'news' is made up....Fox Television showed us the future - outright lies and paranoid opinions packaged as news under the oversight of Rupert [Murdoch], a flagrant pirate, and Roger Ailes, an unprincipled Nixon thug who had assumed a journalistic disguise in much the same way that the intergalactic insect in Men in Black shrugged into the borrowed skin of a hapless hillbilly. 

You can read the other seven entries at Times Watch.

Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.

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WATCH: The Most Compelling Case For Marriage Equality In Under A Minute

California Attorney General Kemala Harris gave an impassioned, pithy defense of marriage equality during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s hearing on whether California’s Proposition 8, which overturned the state’s marriage equality law, is itself constitutional.

Asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley to explain why she was refusing to defend the state’s proposition, Harris insisted that the measure undermined the fundamental rights of gay Americans, taking away their equal protections under the law:

I am absolutely against a ban on same-sex marriages because [bans] are simply unconstitutional. And it is one thing to read the polls, which we have discussed which show again that a majority of Americans are in favor of same sex marriage, but it is more important to read the Constitution. And the Constitution of the United States dictates, I believe, under every court precedent that we have discussed in terms of describing marriage as a fundamental right that the same-sex couples that are before the United states supreme court — Mrs. Windsor, Miss Perry — be allowed to have equal protection under the laws as any Americans when it comes to their ability to join themselves with their loving partners in marriage and raise their children. And 61% of Californians are in favor of same-sex marriage.

Watch it (Harris’ central case is from :18 to 1:10):

When asked afterwards by Crowley why Californians voted in 2008 to ban same-sex marriage, Harris points out that, in 2013, 61 percent of Californians support equality. But, more importantly, she argued that there were 50,000 children in California “who are asking: why can’t my parents be married too?”

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WATCH: 12-Year-Old Urges Rhode Island To Grant His Parents Equality

Thursday evening, the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on marriage equality legislation that lasted a staggering 12 hours — until 4:57 AM Friday morning — allowing every single individual who wanted to testify for or against the bill to do so. One of the most compelling testimonies came from 12-year-old Matthew Lannon, who explained about why his two moms and two dads deserve marriage:

LANNON: Both my moms and my dads have been together for 14 years. When I think about what marriage means to me, I think it’s about two people that love each other. My parents certainly fit that description. Although they can’t legally marry, their commitments are very very real. My parents have stayed together through sickness and health, through thick and thin, through good times and bad…

So even though I’m only 12, I have some ideas of what’s important to me. I want to be someone who knows no discrimination. I want to become a man who doesn’t judge someone by the color of their skin, their gender, or who they love. I want to use the gift I was given to help make the world a better place.

In closing, here’s what I believe. If there’s one thing you don’t mess with in life, it’s love. My parents and all the other gay and lesbian people here just want to be happy, just like you. All they want is to be treated fairly. But unlike most of you, they have to come again here year after year and explain over and over why their love is equal to yours. This year, you have the opportunity to change that. I say: choose love.

Watch it (via Providence Journal):

The New Civil Rights Movement has more analysis of the long night of testimony. This is the first time marriage equality has been considered in the Senate, having previously been blocked by Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed (D). The committee did not vote before convening this morning.

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Congressman Receives Threats From Gun Advocates Warning Him To ‘Watch His Back’

Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN), gun safety advocate who represents “real gun country,” told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Saturday that his office is receiving anonymous threats, warning the Congressman to watch his back.

“I have never, ever in all my life feared for my security, and I’m not fearful of it now,” Nolan began. “But I’m a little more [fearful] than I ever had been before. We’ve been getting a lot of not very thinly veiled threats and calls into my office. You know, things like, ‘you tell Nolan he better watch his back’”:

NOLAN: Nobody has actually come out and said they’re gunning for me, but the messages are quite angry, vitriolic, and a little bit frightening to people at my front desk who have been taking the calls. I’m a little nervous about it. I’ve never been nervous before. [The NRA] are very toxic in the effect they’re having on the American public.

Watch it:

Nolan added that during his Congressional campaign, NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, crisscrossed his district telling voters with hunting licenses that he “is going to take your guns away.”

Since the shooting in Newton, Connecticut, the NRA’s efforts have only intensified. The organization cast its opposition to President Obama’s gun safety regulations as “the fight of the century,” circulating a letter characterizing Obama’s proposals as “about banning your guns … PERIOD!” “Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their gun ban allies in Congress only want to BLAME you, VILIFY you, BULLY you, and STRIP you of your Second Amendment freedoms,” the letter says. NRA President David Keene even blamed Obama for the death threats the organization received.

But while the NRA’s over-the-top rhetoric and tactics have polluted the gun debate, Nolan sees “a big change in national sentiment” in favor of sensible gun safety reforms. “Not only are people in urban areas concerned but people in rural areas are, too,” he said. “They understand that you don’t need an assault rifle to shoot a duck or to protect your home.”

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Watch Live: Ambassador Rice and Nick Kristof Discuss Foreign Policy in a Google+ Hangout

Today, join Ambassador Susan E. Rice and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof as they break ground on the frontier of social media and U.S. foreign policy. In a live Google+ Hangout, Ambassador Rice and Mr. Kristof will discuss the world’s most pressing challenges and America’s role in an increasingly interconnected world. They will be joined live by a selection of citizens who will ask questions from the U.S. and overseas. 

Watch the conversation live at 2:30 p.m. EST on The Times’s homepage or on the New York Times Google+ page, and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #NYTHangout. For more work on U.S. work at the United Nations, follow @AmbassadorRiceand @USUN on Twitter and ‘Like’ Ambassador Rice on Facebook.

Ed. Note: Follow the White House on Google+ for news, behind-the-scenes photos and chances to join White House Hangouts with administration officials.

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