Five myths about why the South seceded

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?

As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.
South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.


2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations — the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white “sundown towns” and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting — “anything but slavery” explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure,” The Washington Post reported.
These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Controversy in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.


3. Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.
Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.
However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.
Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” Given this belief, most white Southerners — and many Northerners, too — could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.” Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.


4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.
Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union’s goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.
On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
However, Lincoln’s own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
White Northerners’ fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.
Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers — and those they wrote home to — became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers’ and sailors’ votes made the difference.


5. The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society.
Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them — or forced them to abandon slavery?
To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.
As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time — as we did not during the centennial — that secession on slavery’s behalf failed.




Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and co-editor,
with Edward Sebesta, of “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.”

Let There Be Light Bulbs By GAIL COLLINS NYTimes

Of all the controversies now raging in Washington, the one I find most endearing is the fight over federal regulation of light bulb efficiency.

“Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy,” complained Representative Michele Bachmann in her Tea Party response to the president’s State of the Union address.

Bachmann has strong opinions on this matter. She is the author of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal a federal requirement that the typical 100-watt bulb become 25 percent more energy efficient by 2012.

Bachmann hateshateshates that sort of thing, as you would expect from a woman whose Earth Day speech in 2009 was an ode to carbon dioxide. (“It’s a part of the regular life cycle of the earth.”)

Hysteria over the government taking away our right to buy inefficient light bulbs has been sweeping through certain segments of the Republican Party. Representative Joe Barton of Texas, sponsor of the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, says we’re about to lose the bulb that “has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.” Barton’s vision of the standard 100-watt incandescent is so heroic, you’d think it would be getting its own television series.

“When Congress dictates which light bulbs folks in South Carolina must buy, it’s clear the ‘nanny state’ mentality has gotten out of control in Washington,” said Senator Jim DeMint, one of 27 co-sponsors of a Senate bill calling for repeal of the new efficiency standards.

The great thing about this battle, which has spawned predictions of widespread light-bulb-hoarding, is that it will take your mind off Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and the pending government shut-down. It’s a little like the Donald Trump presidential candidacy, only less irritating.

Opponents of the law claim that the newer, more energy-efficient and cost-saving breeds of bulb give a less pleasing light, although that doesn’t seem to have dissuaded the American consumers from moving away from the incandescents in droves. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association says demand for the allegedly beloved old bulbs has dropped 50 percent over the last five years.

A terribly cynical mind might suspect the whole hubbub was just for political show. Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the energy committee, said he had not actually been accosted by any of his fellow senators begging him to help get angry light bulb aficionados off their backs.

“I heard the statements at the committee hearing, but nobody’s walking the halls lobbying me about this,” he said.
That was the famous hearing during which Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky began with a rant about light bulbs and wound up complaining that his toilets back home didn’t work. “You busybodies always want to tell us how we can live our lives better,” he said passionately. “I’ve been waiting for 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are.”

If Paul has been stewing about his bathroom fixtures since 1991, it may go a long way toward explaining his rather gloomy worldview. But the crux of his argument came at a different point, when he demanded to know whether Kathleen Hogan, a Department of Energy official, was “pro-choice.”
“I’m pro-choice on light bulbs,” Hogan said cannily.

Paul, not to be dissuaded, claimed that Obamaites favored “a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman’s or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb.”
The proper comparison here would really be between the energy-efficiency regulations and the government rules that set minimum standards for sanitation and medical care when an abortion is performed. If you were willing to overlook the fact that any attempt whatsoever to equate abortions and light bulbs is completely nuts.

It’s a classic Tea Party herd of straw horses. Paul managed to lump the light bulb regulations with things his supporters hate (abortions/federal government telling me what to do) while ignoring the fact that the rules are much closer to things they like, such as standards that guarantee that if they go to a hospital or clinic, the place will be clean and staffed by qualified personnel.

Although the Rand Paul crowd is blaming the light bulb regulations on Obama, the rules were actually signed into law in 2007 by George W. Bush. And as Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article recently, Washington has been in the standard-setting business since 1894, “when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics.”

You have to wonder if, back in 1894, there was a general outcry against the federal government trying to tell an American citizen how big his ohm should be. 

Ohio Man Found Fused to Chair

This can happen? A morbidly obese man in Ohio has died after he was found with his skin fused to the fabric of his recliner. Apparently, he had not left the chair for two years, and was covered in urine, feces, and maggots. He lived there with his girlfriend, who fed him so that he did not have to get up. Another local news station, Gawker points out, says that his skin had not “fused” but was rather stuck to the fabric from the urine and feces.

 

Microsoft Co-Founder Slams Bill Gates

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen paints an unflattering portrait of Bill Gates in a new book, accusing his former partner of scheming to grab his Microsoft shares while he was recovering from cancer. Allen says in the book that he has not received enough credit for Microsoft’s work, but people at the company are confused by his portrayal of events: They say he puts himself in meetings he did not actually attend. In a statement, Gates said, "While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul's, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft.”

Las Vegas sportsbook took $10 bet on VCU at 5,000 to 1

The sportsbook at the Las Vegas Hilton is sweating out the Final Four a little more than its Sin City counterparts.

That's because a person put in a $10 bet at the sportsbook earlier this season on Virginia Commonwealth to win the national championship -- at 5,000 to 1.

If Shaka Smart and the VCU Rams cut down the nets in Houston, several Las Vegas sportsbooks would take a hit.

CAPTION

By Jamie Squire, Getty Images

Should the Rams win two more games and cut down the nets in Houston, this particular fan will cash in a ticket worth $50,000.

"We definitely have some liability associated with VCU winning the title," Hilton book manager Jay Kornegay told Covers.com. "I can't say I'm comfortable."

At one point this season, the Las Vegas Hilton listed VCU at 9,999 to 1. When the NCAA tournament started and with VCU one of eight teams playing in the first round in Dayton, the Rams were listed in the "field" grouping, which opened at 200 to 1.

"They probably would have been much higher like 400- or 500-1, if they weren't associated with the field" Kornegay said. "But because they were playing in the play-in game, we put them in the field. I mean we had them at 200-1 to win the region."

And the Hilton isn't the only sportsbook with its eye on the Rams:

Jay Rood, book manager at the Mirage, told Covers.com Sunday that he took "significant" futures action on VCU at 175-1 and Butler at 150-1. Mike Colbert, book manager at the M, told the Las Vegas Review Journal that he took some big-money bets on VCU at 16-1 before the Sweet 16. And, over at Caesars, sportsbook analyst Todd Furhman wrote a ticket on the Rams at 500-1 in January.

But the sportsbooks aren't reaching into their wallets yet. The Rams still have to win two more games before these tickets can be cashed.

Apocalypse Now? A Christian Understanding of the End Times

Sorry, Maya. Just when peculiar apocalyptic interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar were about to thrust you into the media frenzy sure to come in 2012, some knuckleheads cut in front of you by predicting the return of Jesus on May 21, 2011.

They insist the world will end a few months after that, unfortunately ruling out the possibility of my San Francisco Giants repeating as World Series champions.

Of course, Christians have been proclaiming the nearness of Jesus' return ever since there have been Christians. The New Testament reflects this, even as it gives evidence of a growing acknowledgment, as the first century transitioned into the second, that the "imminence" of this hope need not imply its "immediacy." The church learned it would be in it for the long haul.

Yet some of the more fringe members of the Christian family have never stopped casting out predictions of a specific day on which human history will dramatically change forever, usually accompanied by fire and brimstone. So far, one might conclude, Jesus has been uninterested in taking the bait.
Despite the history of failed speculation about a precise advent of this new future, some Christians keep going with exuberant talk about the end of days. Whatever their motives, the results are sometimes good for the bottom line: numbers of butts in pews, as well as authors' bank accounts.

Witness the Left Behind franchise, which has made millions promulgating a theology based on the notion of a "Rapture," in which living Christians are snatched away to an otherworldly existence while the rest of earth slides fearfully into political and moral chaos. This theology comes from a very idiosyncratic view of the Bible that is popular in fundamentalist circles but has also infiltrated wider Christian discourse. Yet it represents a way of thinking about God and history that possesses, at best, dubious biblical support. Its retribution fantasies hardly align with notions of divine love and justice found in many other parts of the Bible.

There are, of course, many passages in the New Testament that steer attention toward the dawn of a new era -- begun in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but also finally to be fulfilled in his future "appearing" and the expectation of a coming judgment. These themes remain a key feature of Jesus' teachings. We can't evade those texts if we hope to understand the New Testament, as a whole. Serious, thoughtful Bible-readers ignore them at their own peril, for doing so allows the distortions of the Left Behind juggernaut to fill the void.

Christians, and those who observe Christianity from a distance, need to be aware of what these texts describe and the functions they should fulfill.
(There is not space in this post to delve into the Bible's thoughts about the end of the world or the possibility of an afterlife. Although they are tempting, those related topics will have to wait for another day, assuming I make it.)

So, how should we read?

First, we have to note how context matters. Future hopes are given greatest attention in the New Testament usually when two other things are in view: the corrosive effects of religious hypocrisy and early Christians' experience of persecution. Biblical passages about Jesus' return therefore reiterate that God's commitment to the world is not warmly embraced by the world's business-as-usual religious, social, and political routines.

Second, biblical images associated with Jesus' return are highly symbolic. Clouds, trumpets, stars falling from the skies, angelic shouts -- these are familiar tropes in the Bible and its related literature. They became staple symbols, ways of signaling the divine presence. They are more theologically evocative than physically descriptive.

Third, "symbolic language" does not mean "not to be taken seriously." These texts are important in their ability to communicate that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds. They point toward the promise of a better future. New Testament scholar Dale Allison likens the Bible's visions of the end to its visions of the beginning:

"Genesis is no historical record of the primordial past, and the New Testament offers no precognitive history of the eschatological future ... We must interpret them not literally but as religious poetry, which means with our theologically-informed imaginations." (page 97)

Therefore, these passages prompt us to let the dimensions of our "longed-for future" be creatively informed by our "present religious experience and faith and theological reflection" (page 98). What Christians say, then, is the state of affairs Jesus promised the world has yet to come to full fruition. New Testament talk about the future issues vivid reminders that God still has work to do among us. The specifics about the future remain wholly mysterious. Still, the dominant emphasis is on promoting hope, not inciting fear.

All this could leave Christianity vulnerable to charges of escapism, but only if it leads people to ethical and social passivity.

A fourth observation pushes against passivity, however. Biblical images about Jesus' return evoke the sights and sounds of Roman propaganda. For example, caution expressed in 1 Thessalonians 5:3 concerning seductive reassurances spoken about "peace and security" in the world refers to an imperial slogan. Also, as one might expect given Christians' occasional status as a marginalized group in the first century, these images sometimes also imitate Roman propaganda. The description of Jesus' return in 1 Thessalonians 4 depicts him with language recalling Roman dignitaries' official visits to cities.

These passages' subtle connections to imperial rhetoric allow them to subvert it, too. They thus can commit Christians to an unwillingness to rest content with the status quo of human political existence. They portray the future that God will inaugurate as showing up our inferior ideals -- exposing all that humankind settles for (and gets oppressed by) as false substitutes for true peace and true security. They speak about a world that is sick, about people who abuse power.
 At the same time, they call people of faith not to shun or denigrate human society but to work for the world's redemption.

And so I'm already making plans for May 22. In fact, I'm predicting the Giants will beat the Oakland Athletics that afternoon.

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game. But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.
Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.
Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”
In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”
“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.
Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.
For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.
Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.
And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”
While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.
“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

By NOAM COHEN NYTimes

PUNDIT PREP - THE WHITE HOUSE RESPONDS: "1) The lead seems to breeze past this statement 'having largely succeeded in stopping a rout of Libya's rebels,' with no acknowledgement that this is the core goal of the mission and the [Security Council resolution]. 2) The story asserts that 'Only on Thursday, the sixth day of air and missile strikes' did we give command of the [no-fly zone] to NATO. What is the standard you're comparing this effort to that leads you to believe 6 days is slow? Moreover, what should have happened that hasn't during those six days that impacted our core objective? 3) You assert that the coalition is fraying, but the trajectory is nothing but positive. First they agreed on AWACS. Then they agreed on implementing the arms embargo. Now they've agreed on giving C2 of the no fly zone to NATO. And they've tasked the planning to put civilian protection under NATO C2 as well. On top of that, you saw the UAE commit 6 F-16s and 6 Mirages today. How is that fraying?

"The international community has responded to Qaddafi's actions with unprecedented speed. It took two years of fighting in the former Yugoslavia before the UNSC passed a resolution establishing an [International Criminal Court] referral. It took 3 months for an arms embargo, and more than a year for an asset freeze and two years for a travel ban. Those things happened in 9 days in Libya. NATO began Operation Deliberate Force-the air campaign against Serb military forces, who had attacked civilians in UN Safe Areas in Bosnia-in August 1995, more than four years after the first bombing by Yugoslav Air Force against civilian targets in Croatia, and more than three years after the start of attacks against civilians in Bosnia.

"In March 1999, NATO began Operation Allied Force, an air campaign against Yugoslav ground forces in Kosovo and strategic targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was more than a year after Serbian police began a series of violent raids in the Drenica region of Kosovo. Operation Odyssey Dawn commenced on March 19, two days after UNSCR 1973 was adopted by the Security Council, and 31 days after beginning of the Libyan peoples' uprising against Gaddafi. Somehow we have lost a needed sense of historical perspective in this discussion. Things that took years are taking days and weeks. Unprecedented support from Arab states is treated as cursory. And the prevention of a mass slaughter of Libyan people is written about as if it were not the core goal of the effort, but rather an aside."

In Defense of ‘Dithering’ By TIMOTHY EGAN NYTimes

Five years ago a young politician who seemed wise beyond his years was asked by Tim Russert what makes a great president. It was the kind of question that Russert, who could prompt more news in a single interview than entire cable operations do in a year, was so good at.

The politician took a thought breath before proceeding: “Obviously, most of the time it seems that the president has maybe 10 percent of his agenda set by himself, and 90 percent of it set by circumstance.”

Barack Obama: meet your 90 percent. The senator who so accurately predicted how events make the leader now finds himself a president trying to lead through those events.
In the process, despite a largely incoherent chorus of second-guessers, Obama has settled into a groove of reflective dithering before making his decisions. For the most part, it has served him well.

Think back to … oh, all of one week ago. The mercenaries of Muammar el-Qaddafi were closing in for the slaughter of people trying to take a breath of the same Arab Spring air going around Tunisia and Egypt.
Had Obama done nothing, as the Dennis Kucinich fringe Democrats and the Ron Paul isolationist Republicans would have it, the blood of many civilians would be filling the streets of Benghazi. Don’t forget: the regime had promised to chase its own citizens into closets and butcher them.

Or, had Obama put U.S. troops on the ground, as the imperious former Bush “diplomat” John Bolton insisted, a humanitarian mission would now be seen as another superpower invasion of an oil-rich Arab nation.

In his deliberative fashion, Obama ultimately saved countless lives in the short term, and will allow the rebels in Libya to own their revolution in the long term, if they can push ahead — a big if, of course. In the meantime, the economic and diplomatic noose will tighten around Qaddafi and the people he pays to kill on his behalf.

What Obama wanted to avoid, as he discussed during that same Russert interview, was the “messianic certainty” that led President George W. Bush to start a disastrous, trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq. In putting together an international coalition, backed by a United Nations resolution and the Arab League — all in record time — Obama also pulled off a nice bit of statecraft. And, had he used another day to reach out to Congress, there would be much less criticism at home.

Still, Republicans can’t cope with a president who tries to think before he leaps. Mitt Romney, who wakes most mornings in a groggy scramble to find his principles, faults Obama for the nuance of his Libya policy. How dare the president see shades of gray instead of black and white!

Newt Gingrich first criticized Obama for not imposing a no-fly zone, but now hits him for imposing a no-fly zone. You read that right. “I would not have intervened,” Gingrich said a few days ago. This followed a statement, barely two weeks ago, where he said he would intervene “this evening.” And he now calls the air strikes over Libya the worst foreign policy blunder in his lifetime.

Overstatement and misjudgment are Gingrich’s stock in trade — two reasons why he’ll never be president. He can always be counted on to fulminate on demand, with consistency the only casualty; the subject doesn’t matter.

The real problem for Republicans is that they are perplexed over what position to take on an issue that defies partisanship. So, Obama’s least-thoughtful critics attack him for thinking.

Ponderous deliberation, which doesn’t sit well in an age when we all move information with our thumbs, has been a hallmark of the Obama presidency from the beginning. His 90 percent of circumstances started on Inauguration Day, when Bush handed him the worse recession since the Great Depression, and continued through an oil spill that nearly poisoned an entire ecosystem.

During the spill, it was liberal cable pundits who wanted a president who could shout, emote and point fingers. Instead, he quickly negotiated a $20 billion escrow fund from BP that attempts to make whole those hurt by the spill. Similar success followed with the auto bailout, which saved General Motors, but cost Obama much of his early political capital.

There are certainly inconsistencies in the Obama approach to Libya. Why not help the protesters who are clubbed and jailed by our ally in Bahrain? “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma?” Obama asked in one of his books. “We can’t arbitrate a civil war,” he argued. As president, those questions are no longer Hyde Park parlor debates.

A poll just published by Reuters/Ipsos found 48 percent of respondents describing Obama’s military leadership as “cautious and consultative.”
Another 36 percent chose “indecisive and dithering.”

I would argue that the combined 84 percent are basically saying the same thing — that this president is anything but impulsive.
 And next year, with an improving economy in a world where the United States is held in much higher regard, most people will probably choose a president who takes time to get it right, rather than one who is afraid to dither for a good outcome.

'Superbug' spreading to Southern California hospitals  March 24,2011  09:55

 

A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium has spread to patients in Southern California, according to a study by Los Angeles County public health officials.
More than 350 cases of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, have been reported at healthcare facilities in Los Angeles County, mostly among elderly patients at skilled-nursing and long-term care facilities, according to a study by Dr. Dawn Terashita, an epidemiologist with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
It was not clear from the study how many of the infections proved fatal, but other studies in the U.S. and Israel have shown that about 40% of patients with the infection die. Tereshita was not available for comment Thursday morning but was scheduled to speak about the study in the afternoon.
"These are very serious infections, hugely complicated by the fact that the treatment options are severely limited," said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for healthcare-associated infection-prevention programs at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health describes CRKP as an antibiotic-resistant organism that "can cause infections in healthcare settings, including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound or surgical site infections, and meningitis."

The pathogen is even resistant to specialized drugs developed to treat difficult infections. "This is considered a threat to patient safety," according to the county, because such antibiotics "often are the last line of defense." Unlike other superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the CRKP pathogen is an enterobacterium, in the same "lethal family" of bacteria as E. coli, Srinivasan said.
"We've been monitoring the rise of this organism for a few years at CDC," he said. "Initially, it was first described in North Carolina, and then we started getting reports in the New York and New Jersey area. We are seeing reports of this organism all over the country now."
He stressed that unlike MRSA and other superbugs, CRKP has not spread in communities but remains confined to healthcare facilities.
"The key is that it remains pretty rare in most places," he said, although, "there are pockets of the country where they are encountering this a lot, like New York City."
The superbug is usually treated with the antibiotic colistin, which is so strong it is often toxic to patients but in other cases has not proved strong enough to overcome the bacterium, Srinivasan said.
The CDC recommends an aggressive approach in preventing the spread of the bacterium, including isolating infected patients and testing those around them.
Prevention is key, Srinivasan said, including ensuring regular hand washing by healthcare workers and other basic infection-control measures.
Tereshita analyzed the results of patient tests the health department required hospitals and labs to submit June 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2010. Reports were filed by 102 hospitals and five labs.
Of the infections reported, 146 (42%) occurred at eight long-term acute-care hospitals, one of which had an outbreak.
An additional 20 cases were reported at skilled-nursing facilities.
The rest were reported at acute-care hospitals. Particular facilities were not identified in the report.
The mean age of patients who tested positive for the pathogen was 73, and more than half were female, the study showed.
Terashita concluded that CRKP was more common in Los Angeles County than public health officials had thought (possibly because cases had not been reported accurately), that hospitals need to do a better job of reporting infections and that healthcare facilities need to raise awareness about the bug to prevent the spread of infection.
"These patients tend to travel frequently between these and other healthcare facilities," she wrote.
Terashita's study had been embargoed for release at a conference of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America in Dallas, beginning on April 1, but several news organizations decided to publish the results Thursday, citing the "public health concerns involved."