Hank Kalet

The Westboro Baptist Church likes to make a spectacle of itself, picketing military funerals to draw attention to its retrograde views on homosexuality.

But new restrictions on protest signed into law by President Barack Obama yesterday are not the answer to marginalizing these people.

The new law, “Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012,” provides “a wide-ranging package of benefits to military personnel and enacting new restrictions on protests of service member funerals.” According to The Huffington Post

Under the new legislation, protests must be held at least 300 feet from military funerals and are prohibited two hours before or after a service. The law counters a 2011 Supreme Court ruling, which found that displays such as Westboro’s were protected under the First Amendment.

So, while the intent seems benign, the means used have dangerous implications for other protesters in other situations. The right way to push back against the Westboro church and other hate groups is to engage in counter demonstrations like two that

drew national attention last month, when large groups of people turned out in both Missouri and in Texas in an attempt to create “human walls” to shield attendees of military funerals from Westboro’s demonstrations.

The best way to combat noxious speech, as we know, is with more speech.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean. 
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.  
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

A businessman in Maine wants to build a privately financed and managed toll road cutting east-west across Maine, saying it will make the state an important cog in the global economy.

According to The New York Times, the plan is meeting opposition from residents and environmental groups, and has support from many in the business cool unity — making the debate seem a typical one, similar to what we might see anywhere.

The difference is the private-financing. As the paper notes:

A 2009 report by the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found that some other privately financed toll roads had failed, leaving taxpayers responsible.

The state is paying for a feasibility study — at a cost of $300,000 — which would be reimbursed if the road is built, the paper says.

The state is paying for the study because it has an interest in the economics of the project, said Ted Talbot, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Transportation; it is not being done for Mr. Vigue.

“We want to know, if it’s a toll road, how does it become profitable for a private company to operate?” Mr. Talbot said. “Someone has to plow it, police it, maintain it.”

To me, that is the key. When then-Gov. Jon Dorzine proposed his N.J. Turnpike privatization scheme, the big questions on the table were about governance. There was a fear — which was legitimate — that drivers would be at the mercy of a private company and that the tolls would jump at the same time that service (upkeep, snow removal, even traffic management and policing) would deteriorate.

Other states have privatized existing roads with mixed results, but the privately constructed and managed road is rare, meaning there are even fewer examples to turn to for context. The fears expressed by the critics of the Corzine plan five years ago seem mild compared to questions raised by this road and the potential precedent it could set. Will the road be affordable to drivers or purely a truck route? Will the vetting process for builfing it be as rigorous as it would be for a public road? What involvement will the public have in the planning and approval of it?

The potential precedent — i.e., the possibility that private roads could proliferate — makes it more than a local or purely Maine issue and one to which all of us must pay attention.

Somerset County could have led the way toward a new vision of government in the state, but its 19 towns nixed efforts to create a single county police force that would have saved taxpayers in Somerset about $44 million over 10 years.

Under the plan, the county would have been split into five precincts under the supervision of one police chief and an executive board.

The merged department would have had 606 police officers — an increase over the 592 officers now employed in the county. Officials studying the issue projected a combined savings of $44 million over the next decade, caused largely by reduced overhead and a different salary structure for new recruits.

Some of the concerns were valid — in Franklin, for instance, the most populous and diverse town, one that borders New Brunswick and shares some of its urban characteristics, there was concern about a loss of service, though the precinct arrangement could have been structured to protect it and the other populous southern towns.

In the end, Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R-Somerset) was right:

“We cannot continue to gripe about property taxes and then do nothing to transform our cost structure,” he said.

Consolidation of services among contiguous towns makes sense — full consolidation makes even better sense for many towns and regions, but that is an argument that appears a non-starter in this home-rule state. A much-discussed police merger in Hightstown and East Windsor was nixed a few years ago and it took 50 years of debate and several failed efforts to get the Princetons to unify.

For now, Somerset County will continue to be served by 19 police departments and its residents will be stuck with the ever-growing bill.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

David Firestone, on The New York Times’ Taking Note blog, takes both parties to task for the failure of our federal legislature to do the nation’s business. As so many mainstream pundits have taken to do, he falsely equates the Democrats’ ideological proposals with the GOP’s obstructionism.

Passing bills is passé in the 112th Congress, one of the least productive in history. Rather than work, the two parties prefer to spend their time in ideological combat, making points rather than policy.

Staffers from opposing parties fence on Twitter, as if the whole world were watching and there were any risk of changing minds. Lawmakers send furious letters back and forth from one chamber to another, demanding action but expecting none. They post these missives to their Web sites, providing the illusion of passionate activity to the voters back home.

It is a blistering indictment, but is it accurate? And, is it fair?

First, the accuracy issue. Democrats, often to their detriment, have shown a willingness to compromise. They have consistently retooled their proposals– the stimulus, the jobs bill, the Bush tax cuts, even on so-called entitlements. The Republicans respond by moving the goal posts, by asking the Democrats to continually give and give until their positions are indistinguishable from GOP proposals and they still say no. The goal is not legislation or even ideological purity; it is the destruction of a presidency.

As for fairness, I have to question the notion that “ideological combat” is a bad thing. The two parties are supposed to,stand for different things and voters have a right to expect that the people they support will stand up for the values they have. Compromise is necessary to get work down, of course, but there should be limits to the trade offs. Part of the Democrats’ problem over the years has been an unwillingness to define what they believe and then structure their policy proposals and arguments around those core beliefs. Under Clinton — and to a lesser degree Obama — they have preferred a strategy of triangulation and an attack on partisanship.

Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, goes so far as to denigrate ideology, as if holding political principles and sticking to them is a bad thing. In a nutshell, it is an argument that idolizes compromise, making it the goal and not a tool in the toolbox of political activity.

The issue in Congress is not ideological purity. It is the unhinged hatred that the Republicans feel toward the president and the Democrats. It is clear from the language they use that they have no other goal than winning political points and hamstringing the Democrats. And with the obscene amounts of cash flooding the political system, primarily from the right, they know there will be no consequences. That means the dysfunction is only going to get worse and the right more unhinged, even as the Democrats continue their attempts to make nice.

Maybe it is a bipartisan failure, after all, though not in the way that Club Washington thinks.

My latest column is available on The Progressive Populist. It’s on the broken campaign finance system.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.