The Inquiring Manatee

Never Mind Michael Vick, Get Rid of the Pit Bulls

   

Should former Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Michael Vick be reinstated to the National Football League after spending 23 months in prison for masterminding a pit bull dogfighting ring?
    There are good arguments on both sides of the NFL commissioner's decision to conditionally allow Vick's return, as long as he misses the season's first six games, and assuming that any team would risk the PR blows of taking him.
     It can be said that he paid his debt to society and that society should accept felons back in their former careers if they have been rehabilitated.
     I happen to agree with the opposing viewpoint: Vick broke the law. NFL players, especially quarterbacks, rightly or wrongly are set up as role models for kids. Doctors who do jail time lose their licenses and don't get them back upon release. Finally, and decisively in my view, the very real threat of losing one's career will act as an added deterrent to reprehensible conduct like Vick's needless financing of the low-life "sport" of dogfighting.
      Whatever happens to Vick is nearly beside the point, however. Society should go on to concentrate on the breeding of pit bulls -- whether for fighting or for any other purpose. At best, these horribly ugly, slavering beasts are fit only for watchdogging junkyards. A few of them could be allowed to live for such a use. The rest should be euthanized.
       Examples abound of pit bulls tearing babies and adult owners limb from limb, acting individually or in packs. They are killer dogs, which is why gangbangers love to parade with them, displaying them as the canine equivalent of an Uzi. If you don't run a junkyard and you are not a terrorist, you don't need a pit bull.
       In the future, without pit bulls, dogfighting devotees will have to content themselves, perhaps, with watching a couple of chihuahuas go at it. Your average chihuahua will take a little nip out of the other guy, then suggest that both battlers go out for a beer, leaving everyone contented.

Birthers, Flat-Earthers: The Same Kind of Morons

    

The "birthers," including Rush Limbaugh and CNN's Lou Dobbs, who insist that President Obama is foreign-born and not a U.S. citizen, should move on with their pitiful lives.
     In denial that any Democrat could possibly be elected president, these willfully ignorant fanatics go farther in their state of denial: they ignore every bit of convincing evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii, an American state, and therefore is a "natural-born" American qualified under the Constitution to hold the nation's highest office.
     Repeated confirmations by Hawaii state officials that a birth certificate and other documentation prove citizenship sail right off these odd ducks' backs. They want to believe. They desperately need to believe. It is vital to them to believe that it can't possibly be true that this young man, a black man with a father from Kenya, could be president. It shakes their entire world view. Surely Obama was born in Kenya. Or New Guinea. Or Indonesia.
     But keep talking, you jerks. It makes you look stupider and stupider to intelligent people every day. In fact, I plan to start a whisper campaign that Rush Limbaugh was born on Mars.

My Take on the Gates Arrest Controversy

  

Everyone including President Obama has been spouting off about the July 16 confrontation in Cambridge, Mass., between the distinguished Professor Gates of Harvard and a police sergeant at the professor's home. Now it's my turn.
    Both men were hotheads. Both overreacted. There is blame to be placed on both sides. The situation was unusual, bizarre. Both Gates and Sergeant Crowley originally were in the right. Gates was merely trying to enter his own home. The cop was responding to a crime report -- one that could have risked his life -- and was simply doing his job in showing up at Gates' house.
     Gates quite understandably was outraged at being questioned. But he acted with a hot temper, immediately perceiving racism, refusing to show his identification (which would have ended the incident instantly) and threatening the officer by demanding his name and badge number and saying he hadn't heard the last of this. Gates was pompously pulling rank. A racial thing had given way to a class thing, and Gates was saying he was of a higher and more powerful class than the cop and would prove it by using his influence damagingly.
      No matter how provoked Crowley was, however, as a professional matter he should have let Gates blow off steam for a few minutes rather than interpreting his conduct as somehow criminal and running him in for a humiliating booking. I wouldn't go as far as Obama by saying that Crowley acted "stupidly" -- at least no more stupidly than Gates did -- but with more calm and thought he would have chalked the report up to a false alarm.
     

Sotomayor Hearings: The Court is Now in Sessions

    

     WILMINGTON, Vermont -- It is unfortunate that, in Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama., Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee do not have a ranking member matching the stature and intellect of committee chairman Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.
     TV viewers of this week's Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings are getting a lurid peek at Sessions and seeing him for what he is: a crabbed, right-wing Snopes who embodies what is wrong with today's rump, Southern-based Republican Party.
      I first saw Sessions during the 1992 presidential campaign when I was traveling with President George H. W. Bush's re-election campaign. He was making a speech -- in Birmingham, I think it was -- and I was impressed only with his ambition.
      Sessions lacks grace. He has that mean little Faulkner Yoknapatawpha County mouth, with an accompanying world outlook.
      In lecturing Sotomayor constantly this week about the need for judges (he used to be one) to hew strictly to existing law, not letting their life experiences influence their decisions, Sessions typifies the desperate fear of conservatives that judges will carve out new rights for the poor and powerless, upsetting the status quo.
      One of the many factors Sessions forgets or ignores is that the Supreme Court of the United States frequently is called upon to act in unsettled, gray areas of the law. It is at those times that the mettle and reasoning of a justice are tested. In situations without clear precedent, it is of course prudent to rule as narrowly as possible, shying from finding and grappling with cosmic constitutional questions that may not be fairly and maturely presented.
      Even in narrow rulings, however, abstract reasoning alone may not yield a satisfactory answer in the case at hand. It is then that a lifetime of broad experience that has produced, yes, the empathy of a wise Latina -- or a wise white male, or a wise black woman -- should be called into play to help produce a result that directs the law toward equity.
       Sadly, such a concept of well-rounded jurisprudence is anathema to the rigid Sessions. He is trying to nail Sotomayor into his own Procrustean bed of dead-brained, passive judicial decisionmaking. Let the world watch, and see an illustration of the kind of thinking that in apartheid South Africa was called verkrampte -- cramped, as opposed to verligte, enlightened.

Summer in Southern Vermont

     

WILMINGTON, Vermont -- Rain, endless clouds, lightning and thunder dominate the summer of 2009 in this friendly town of 2,000, midway between Bennington to the west and Brattleboro to the east.
      My wife Irma Hawkins and I arrived with our cat and two dogs on July 2. Since then, there has been but one day of unalloyed sunshine. We usually bring sunny weather with us from California for our eight-week stays here -- indeed, we are all but contractually obligated to do so, and our friends are duly grateful -- but this year, Jupiter Pluvius is the resident god in the Green Mountain State.
       Here is our lake under typical conditions this month:
        Still pretty, though, isn't it?
     This summer promises to be something short of idyllic. Aside from the problematic weather, my back hurts and I haven't been able to run my usual 5 miles on Highway 100, going north toward Canada. Carrying one of Irma's heavy steel sculptures up the stairs of our house in Venice, Calif., did me in. With luck and a few Tylenols, I hope to resume running tomorrow. Got to get ready for next April's Boston Marathon.
      Speaking of Boston, we arrived at Logan International Airport there after a red-eye flight from L.A. As we drove our rented SUV (an excellent Ford Edge) out of town on I-90, the rain was coming down in such torrents that we could barely see Fenway Park's Green Monster wall off to our left. As we moved northwest to our destination, 144 miles away, the rain let up. But new storms moved in later, and still more after that.
       Luckily, most of the Fourth of July was clear, allowing us to view the all-American small-town parade up in Wardsboro, Vt., a 25-mile drive from Wilmington, and also Wilmington's public fireworks display that night amid a bundled-up crowd. Here is a photo from the parade:
       That's the Grafton (Vermont) Cornet Band. There were antique cars, homemade floats, booths selling homemade apple pies. The real Vermont. There's no place like it.
     The price you pay for small-town life is the need to drive at least 20 miles to find goods and services that you need. As near as I can figure, for example, Wilmington has no dry cleaner. For big-box stores, there's the Walmart in Hinsdale, N.H., which I try to avoid on ideological grounds, and the giant malls of Keene, N.H., a 35-mile drive. We hit Keene yesterday and came home with a new printer, a photo tripod, clothes from Target and T. J. Maxx
      In recompense for our remoteness, we get quiet, time to read, time to think, time to catch up with old friends and help them with their troubles as they have helped us in the past.
      That's life at a summer place. Life in Vermont. It lives and thrives, rain be damned. And even in the height of a lightning storm, there is unparalleled natural beauty in how it lights up the lake.

Que Sarah Sarah (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)

     

When it comes to overweening ambition, no one in history can match Sarah Palin.
      Ambition for the presidency, despite her manifest lack of qualifications, accounts for Palin's bombshell announcement (dropped on the dead Friday of the July 4 holiday weekend) that she is resigning as Alaska's governor July 26. Her excuse, as near as I can understand her rambling explanation, involves the trouble and expense of defending against 15 investigations of ethical violations.
      The real reason for the strange political move is that Palin feels she's now too big to be confined to out-of-the-way Alaska when there's a 4-year national campaign to be run. Palin regards the adulation of the abortion crazies as evidence that the whole world loves her and demands her as the next president of the United States.
      There is precedent for politicians shaking off a full-time job for the freedom of unrestricted campaigning for the White House. Bob Dole resigned early from the U.S. Senate in 1996 to spend more time organizing for the run against Bill Clinton that fall. Jimmy Carter didn't start running for president in 1976 until he had left the Georgia governorship; he was literally jobless while a candidate, while many of his rivals had to hold down public positions. Ronald Reagan found as a former California governor in 1976 and 1980 that he had more leeway to run for president than when he made an abortive run for the GOP nomination while still in the governorship in 1968.
      Palin will have more time for fundraising, and she won't have to worry about hostile legislators and journalists in Alaska biting her ankles. She has launched herself into the greater political environment, for better or worse. In her case, I think it's for the worse. It's a gamble; she could have used the governorship as a springboard for a Senate try in 2010, but in resigning she is telling Alaskans that she is far above and beyond them now. Lots of luck getting them to elect her to anything again. As for the rest of us, we are stuck with her until 2012. This is good news only for supporters of the pending Tina Fey Lifetime Employment Act.
     Unluckily for Sarah, developmentally disabled little Trig will be too big and heavy by 2012 to carry around as a prop. Palin will have little going for her except her backwoods outlook, her silly winks, her spotty and scandal-plagued record in politics and a newly confirmed reputation as an unpredictable dingbat.

The Manatee's Seasonal Migration

   

As of Thursday, July 2, The Inquiring Manatee's home waters will shift for the summer from the human-made canals of Venice, Calif., to the human-made Lake Whitingham, Vermont. Let's see if this blog's perspective changes as it moves East.
    Wish the Manatee luck with the weather, please. Manatees, native to the Sunshine State of Florida, don't particularly like a lot of rain, and that is what the East, and New England in particular, has been having this year.