A deadly game of chicken?

If Todd Gitlin (with whom I expect to disagree) is this freaked, perhaps we all should be:

I've been wondering all day whether what's going on between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other, is a game of chicken--the drag-strip game where two drivers race toward each other and the first one to turn away loses--or something worse. This wondering comes from Jerusalem, where I'm attending Shimon Peres' President's Conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel.

...The sense of threat here is vivid, it is deeply felt ...

...the session moderator, Israel's former ambassador to the US, Itamar Rabinovitch, somehow intimated--I'm sorry I didn't take down his exact words--that Israel's government would put it to Bush that if he didn't take action, Israel would. ...

Who's well informed enough to know what's up? Are we crying wolf again? No one knows. Possibly not even Bush knows what he will do during the seven months that remain in his White House stay. ... possibly this is not just a game of chicken, and Bush's finger is getting itchy--Iraq having gone so well. Then what's the lame duck got to lose in his unending, unreasoning fight against tyranny?

TPM Cafe

Go read it all.

The limits of a victim narrative

Bush is in Israel today, celebrating that country's 60 years. Soft spoken Tony Judt asks, how long will U.S. support for Israel last? Loads slowly, but worth viewing.

Costly listening

Living in San Francisco, it is hard to remember that there are still places where sticking up for the humanity of gays and lesbians can get you in big trouble. But there are.

The experience of the Rt. Rev. Christopher Senyonjo, former Anglican bishop of Western Buganda in Uganda, proves it. After retirement he counseled troubled Ugandans and found that some who came to him were homosexuals. He listened -- and he urged his church to listen.

The Church should listen to the silenced, perplexed, intimidated, abused and marginalised homosexuals in our midst. They are not only in institutions of learning but are everywhere (though in minority) rubbing shoulders with the heterosexuals.

Thinking Anglicans, U.K.

Doesn't sound very radical, does it? The 76-year-old father of seven also agreed to be chaplain to Ugandan gays organized as Integrity Uganda. The Ugandan church responded by not allowing him to conduct services, cutting off his pension, and urging the Ugandan government to arrest him.

That was in 2001. After services at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist on Sunday, Bishop Christopher talked with a small group about gays in Uganda. He's still repeating the same message he offered in an interview seven years ago:

What is really needed is education. I find that there is a lot of misunderstanding about human sexuality. And I've started writing about it -- because many people regard human sexuality as for procreation and if you think of why we have so much opposition against homosexuality, it is because it is not regarded as productive. The idea of love didn't come out very easily -- whereas when you read the very beginning in Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 18 the reason why Adam -- to me, I don't say it was a male, but it was Adam, a being -- the reason why God made a helpmate fit for that being was to heal a loneliness. It does not say, "to have children." Children are okay, but really healing loneliness or aloneness was so important. I think this is the major point. There is a need for education. ...

I would say that the church generally has not dealt with human sexuality. People have been afraid of human sexuality as such, so there's a lot of taboo connected with it. There's a verse which really helps me a lot, in the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 16, Verse 12 -- "And our Lord said, 'There are still many, many things I would like to tell you but you cannot bear them now." The only problem is if you're not willing to listen to what the spirit is saying now.

Grace Cathedral interview

Bishop Christopher will be at the international meeting of bishops at Lambeth in England this summer, still trying to get his Church to listen.

Quite a guy.

People in the U.S. can help support Integrity Uganda through Integrity USA. Not surprisingly, the need is great.

Clinton supporters get the bad news

Over last weekend, I spent a good stretch of time among people who had been Hillary Clinton supporters in the Presidential primary. These are good, progressive people. They'll be on board with the Democratic nominee in the fall. But this week, they were in pain about how the campaign has gone. You see, they had just learned that Clinton was not going to win. This was new news to them -- they didn't know until the media told them after North Carolina and Indiana. And they have grief and confusion still to process.

These folks voted for Clinton in their primaries and it made them feel wonderful. They are feminists of a particular, honorable sort; many have broken ground and held places in male-dominated institutions themselves. It's been a tough road. Many seem to me to hold on to a belief that I can't share, that women in positions of power will do things differently (and better, more fairly, more lovingly even) than men. And they didn't learn that Clinton had lost for a very long time.

They aren't political junkies. They didn't see that winning the nomination was about amassing delegates. They had no idea that the Clinton campaign had dug itself into a hopeless hole by failing to contest the caucus states. They had heard rumors that the campaign was running through its money -- but the scale of money raised and spent in the entire campaign mostly just horrified them. The fact that Obama has raised so much actually weighed against him with them. "What a waste..."

Their champion, candidate Clinton, had no incentive to teach them the truth about what was happening. So until recently, they've been living inside a different reality, a false picture of the campaign in which Clinton could somehow earn the nomination.

But these are good, progressive people. They'll be on board with Obama in the fall, if not among his core cheerleaders. ***

Another of these people's leaders did them a disservice in the Washington Post over the weekend. Feminist political fundraiser Ellen Malcolm offered a Clinton-boosting column entitled "Quitters Never Win." It included this barb:

"The first woman ever to win a presidential primary is supposed to stop competing, to curtsy and exit stage right."

Hey, wait a minute. The first African-American and the first woman to win a presidential primary was Representative Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Chisholm took 66 percent of the vote in New Jersey. Talk about erasing a champion of women ...

H/t to hilzoy at Obsidian Wings for pointing to the Malcolm column.

Taking advantage of the surveillance society

Click on the image above. Go ahead, do it.

According to the Telegraph (U.K.):

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by....

Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

... Only a quarter of the organisations contacted fulfilled their obligation to hand over the footage -- perhaps predictably, bigger firms were reluctant, while smaller companies were more helpful -- but that still provided enough for a video with 20 locations.

You gotta love the ingenuity.

H/t Cogitamus.

Of storms and science

People line up to receive water in a village affected by Cyclone Nargis located near Yangon.
May 11, 2008. REUTERS/Strinnger (MYANMAR)

I sent my contribution to help the people in the path of the cyclone via Avaaz.org. These excellent international activists have been supporting the democracy movement in Burma for some time and are currently helping to coordinate a fund-raising drive in support of the International Burmese Monks Organization's on-the-ground relief efforts. I'm sure that Doctors without Borders is also making a serious effort to get aid to those who need it most.
***

The horror of Cyclone Nargis formed the background to my reading on a five-hour airplane flight last night. To distract myself from my captivity inside a CO2 spewing cattle car, I wolfed down Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming. If you want to think about how science works, it's a great read. And you will also learn a lot about the great storms that can wash away cities and thousands of living beings, as well as about our species' developing understanding of how we've changed the planet. As for the relationship between the storms and the climate change ... as Mooney shows, hard conclusions about that are not currently available.

Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions formed most of what I understand about inertia and change in human knowledge. Because I am not a scientist, I'll restate what I internalized from Kuhn in my own language: most of the time, what we know is "normal science" -- serviceable, replicable conventional wisdom about how the world works. But sometimes, the serviceable wisdom begins to develop problems, perhaps first on the periphery of notice, apparent wrinkles in how the fabric of reality exists. When enough these develop, someone, usually an outsider, not an established expert, will propose a new way of seeing reality that shifts perspective, simplifies what had become complex, and, eventually, makes sense. This new way then becomes the conventional way of knowing -- and the process begins again.

Kuhn calls this process a "paradigm shift." Chris Mooney's Storm World is a kind of case study shaped by Kuhn's paradigm. He investigates whether our understanding of extreme weather is undergoing a paradigm shift

as a bunch of climate scientists stampeded into a field like hurricane research.

Scientists have largely developed a consensus that human activity is causing global warming -- they are not even close to agreeing how or whether that is effecting the behavior of hurricanes.

Roughly speaking, the debates can be described as between empiricists (scientists whose knowledge of hurricanes comes from collection of thousands of data points often from flights through the storms) and theorists (whose understanding derives from computer modeling based on accepted physical theories). Mooney points out the similarities between current debates and 19th century controversies between storm observers and theoretical physicists.

Current controversies are much exacerbated by the politics of global warming. Climate science is deeply dependent on government funding; as Mooney has shown elsewhere, the Republican administration has been extremely hostile to science whose policy implications might lead to regulation of their buddies in the coal and oil industries. Climate and weather scientists nonetheless have to earn their living in these hostile government settings. Moreover, the shape of "knowledge" that satisfies the criteria of science doesn't translate well into citizen discussion of policy needs.

It often seems as if the only way journalists and advocates can draw attention to climate change is in the context of individual disasters and weather events, such as very intense hurricanes. Yet specific weather events can never be "caused" by a statistically averaged change in global climate over time, even if they're precisely the kind of events that should grow more common as global warming sets in.

Mooney's not particularly thrilled about the efforts of environmental activists to insert themselves in these debates either; he takes a particular whack at my friends at Resource Media who work with enviros to get their message out. I'm enough of an outsider myself to wonder whether he properly appreciates the value of outside irritants in creating room for creative (possibly paradigm shifting) insiders.

All in all, this is a fascinating, not at all polemical, study of how science "knows." Few topics could be more important to our future as we all live through the grand human experiment with global warming human ingenuity has set in motion.

Beach exclusions

The authority controlling the beach is clear about who is allowed to use it. One has to assume the users who are allowed can read the rules for their mutts. (I wasn't one of those allowed users, but in early spring there was no one around to object to my passing through.)


The dogs' people must be the kind that always ask "why?" So here are the "whys." But I do have to wonder whether, in addition to these concerns, there might not also be the usual objections to stepping in shit.

Views from my window:Classic skyline

It looked a lot nicer before it started really raining, as it has now. I'll be at meetings later today in that white building in the foreground which was built to face the other way. It has a rather nice pseudo-Gothic stonework front -- now facing a parking lot.

A candidate with an impeachment agenda

Brad Newsham is running for Congress against Barbara Lee. No, he's not exactly serious about it -- he's too good a guy for that.

But he's properly pissed off that Democrats haven't lifted a finger to impeach our law breaking rulers, so he's doing his bit.

His slogan:

"Tired of the old sham? Write in Newsham!"
(In the June 3 Democratic primary, District 9. Please.)

If I lived in the district, I'd do it.

How long will this fly?

Since the last weekend in March I have been booked on 12 flights on United Air Lines. Of these, half --6 flights -- have been either delayed, had equipment changes that required reseating, been rerouted or otherwise not flown as planned.

These were all work flights. None of them made me so late that I missed my obligations. Several of them left me extremely tired and stressed.

I would think U.S. business would be screaming bloody murder if this is really the norm in air travel. I think it is.

I write this while sitting in a gate area waiting to board a flight whose departure has now been delayed 3 hours.

For Democrats, it's Black-Brown unity time

After last night, -- after Barack Obama effectively clinched the nomination -- it has become clear that the emerging Democratic party coalition, rooted in a working class made up of people of color combined with just enough white voters (though not a majority) can win a national Democratic nomination for President.

This would be more surprising if it were not the pattern that we've seen in California since the mid-1990s. I've discussed this at length here.

Can this coalition win a national campaign? I would have thought that ongoing demographic trends placed such an outcome years in the future, but apparently we are going to find out whether it can happen now, this year. This pattern has carried Obama to the nomination; will it hold up in the general?

Fortunately, Senator McCain is a very weak candidate, adrift in a terrible environment for a Republican. As the wars drag on (and McCain applauds), the economy tanks (and McCain reveals his cluelessness) and George W. blusters about his relevance, the Republican brand gets hammered.

But, to cement the emerging Democratic coalition, Obama needs to bring Latino voters into his fold in supermajority numbers. Other Democrats have been getting those numbers from Latinos. Obama hasn't come close to winning a majority of these voters yet. Can he do it in November?

Although McCain has a (largely unearned) image of relative decency on immigration issues, Obama should win Latinos on economic concerns. Latinos (and people of color in general since they are routinely on the receiving end of bullshit) often are less distracted from self-interest by media circuses than some more entitled voters.

The real question here is whether ongoing Black-Brown tensions fueled by different histories, different cultures and sometimes economic competition will overcome Latino self-interest.

In particular, Latinos and African Americans have very different patterns as voters.

African-Americans are intense, reliable voters. Their percentage of the actual voting electorate is often higher than their percentage of the population. Some vestigial memory of their historic fight to win voting rights, coupled with repeated attention from registration and GOTV campaigns, tends to bring out African-Americans in high numbers. In 2000, nearly 85 percent of registered African-Americans voted, as compared with 76 percent of all registered people. The same comparison in 2004 showed 88 percent voting as against 79 percent overall. African-Americans vote!

Meanwhile, Latinos as a percentage of the U.S. population are increasing rapidly, having surpassed the raw number of African-Americans in the last few years. But their participation in the electorate is nowhere near as large.

Only about half of Latinos are eligible to vote either because they are new immigrants or because they are under 18. So, although they are 15 percent of the population, their participation in the 2008 national electorate is projected to amount to only 6.5 percent in November. But that doesn't mean the Latino vote doesn't matter. Latinos

constitute a sizable share of the electorate in four of the six states that President Bush carried by margins of five percentage points or fewer in 2004 –- New Mexico (where Hispanics make up 37% of state's eligible electorate); Florida (14%); Nevada (12%) and Colorado (12%).

Currently polls show Obama defeating McCain in three of these states, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, while he polls very poorly in Florida. Of course, in Florida, "Hispanic" usually means Cuban, so that is a major difference.

It is conceivable, with luck and good campaign management, both of which he's had thus far, Obama could win the Presidency with only a relatively low share of the Latino vote -- say the approximately 59 percent that John Kerry won nationally in 2004. But for that to happen, Latinos would have to turn away from recent trends that have carried them toward identification with the Democrats. Only 23 percent currently align with the Republican Party. Far better would be an Obama victory in which the Latino population feels they made a major contribution.

Senator Obama seems like a unity sort of guy, so we can probably trust that he'll reach out for the Latino vote. Let's hope so -- a long term progressive majority rooted in the unity of the communities of color alongside a minority of whites who vote progressive values may depend on experiences in this expectation-shattering campaign year.

Little noticed

War without end? British soldiers patrol a street in Helmand, Afghanistan (Reuters: Ahmad Masood)

Apparently the U.S. intends to take the Afghanistan war back from NATO. Next year the Pentagon plans to send 7000 additional troops, according to the New York Times last Saturday.

... the step would push the number of American forces there to roughly 40,000, the highest level since the war began more than six years ago, and would require at least a modest reduction in troops from Iraq. ...

The increasing proportion of United States troops, from about half to about two-thirds of the foreign troops in Afghanistan, would be likely to result in what one senior administration official described as “the re-Americanization” of the war.

Great. While one war lurches from irrational to absurd with a stop at criminal -- just what are our troops and Iraqis dying for anyway? -- another heats up. And rumors of yet another war swirl by.

Ruben Salazar remembered

Mysteriously, the United States Postal Service has issued a stamp honoring Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar. I say mysteriously because the powers-that-be don't usually honor people whose heads were blown off by rampaging police officers breaking up a peace demonstration.

Ruben Salazar was a Chicano journalist who broke into the Anglo mainstream with the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s. He wasn't just relegated to covering the barrio; the newspaper sent him to cover Vietnam. His reporting told stories the country didn't always want to hear. UC Santa Barbara professor Mario T. Garcia reports:

...his most poignant article was about the death of a 19-year-old African American soldier, Jimmy L. Williams, whose family was not allowed to bury him in the local all white cemetery in Wetumpka, Alabama.

"All of Williams' buddies killed with him were resting this Memorial Day where their survivors wanted them to be. All but Williams," Salazar wrote in the article, which focused on the politics of race in the Vietnam War.

Salazar also pulled no punches in explaining Chicanos to Anglo Angelenos.

A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.

He resents being told Columbus "discovered" America when the Chicano's ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer's trip to the "New World."

Chicanos resent also Anglo pronouncements that Chicanos are "culturally deprived" or that the fact that they speak Spanish is a "problem."

Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English and so the "problem" is not theirs but the Anglos' who don't speak Spanish.

Los Angeles Times Salazar retrospective

On August 29, 1970, 20-30,000 Chicanos turned out in East L.A. to protest the Vietnam War where young, drafted Latinos were dying disproportionately. My friend, Betita Martinez, tells of preparing to speak from the podium, looking up, and seeing hundreds of L.A.P.D. charging into the crowd. Tear gas and bullets followed the baton charges. The people scattered.

Ruben Salazar holed up in the back of a bar. Native Angeleno (Craig Hill) writing on a Los Angeles Times blog tells what happened next as folks in the community came to understand it.

The inquest was covered wall-to-wall pre-Watergate on more than one LA TV channel, if memory serves, without missing one word uttered. It came out after many days of testimony that the highly respected Ruben Salazar was hit in the head or face while standing in the back of a bar he was taking refuge in, without any warning, by a tear gas canister, fired by either LAPD or country sheriffs for absolutely no good reason. ...

When the coroner's testimony got to the well-kept secret that the tear gas canister was the murder weapon (my words), every one in the audience at the hearing and across the city was stunned, myself included, for this fact had not only been totally concealed by the cops and any knowledgeable media people theretofore but every allusion that had been made by them up to that point kept alive the fiction that the victim had been shot by the mysterious killer Chicano cited on the front page who "escaped" out the back, making the desired suggestion the "rioters" were at fault for the death of one of their own, as opposed to the only people who obviously would have been firing tear gas.

During the hearings it was determined there was no threat emerging from the quiet bar. Tear gas was being used willy-nilly to drive people from out of hiding into the street where it was unmercifully unsafe. I do not believe any action of any significance was ever taken against the cop who fired the tear gas without any knowledge or care it would hit anyone in the head, or the cop above him who ordered or allowed it. ... 38 years after a relatively young widely accomplished community leader's life was ended, Ruben Salazar gets a stamp. What a trade-off.

I'm with Craig Hill -- a stamp and newspaper eulogies somehow don't seem quite adequate to remember either Salazar's accomplishments or his death. But I guess I should be glad he is remembered at all.

Racewire pointed me to this story. Betita told the story of the Chicano Moratorium at a reading from her new book, 500 Years of Chicana History.

It doesn't have to be that way ...

The _________ generally treated the _________ as inferiors who ought to be grateful for _________ 's willingness to lead the struggle against _________ and to establish a new order across _________ under its leadership. ... The _________ cruelly mistreated _________ prisoners. ... Operating on the pretense that _________ was involved in an "incident" rather than a war, the government generally left handling of POWs to subordinate unit commanders. ... Few records of the fate of _________ POWs were maintained, and inspections of POW camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross were not permitted.

Did this read to you like a description of the U.S. "war on terror" in Afghanistan, or perhaps Iraq? It did to me, but that's not the subject described here. This paragraph recounts the behavior of Japanese forces invading and subjugating China in the 1930's. See the bottom of the post to read the original paragraph.

Apparently armies that consider themselves superior to those they conquer tend to indulge in similar excesses toward the defeated -- unless some wiser authority enforces better behavior.

But it doesn't have to be that way ...

Ulrich Strauss, a retired U.S. diplomat long resident in Japan, has published a rich account of the interior struggles of the few Japanese who became prisoners of U.S. forces during the Pacific conflict in World War II. Its title, The Anguish of Surrender, refers to the Japanese soldiers' strongly held conviction that they must never allow themselves to be captured -- to do so would be the ultimate betrayal of their country. Yet despite this belief, a few were taken prisoner. And because their captors rapidly figured out that good treatment by Japanese speaking interrogators would melt their resistance, these POWs frequently provided useful intelligence to U.S. forces.

Many POWs, ill and starving after days wandering in the jungles or hiding out in caves, were astonished at the superior quality of food and medical treatment they received. Contrary to expectations, most Japanese POWs, psychologically unprepared to deal with interrogations, provided information to their captors. Trained Allied linguists, especially Japanese Americans, learned how to extract intelligence by treating the POWs humanely. Allied intelligence personnel took advantage of lax Japanese security precautions to gain extensive information from captured documents. A few POWs, recognizing Japan's certain defeat, even assisted the Allied war effort to shorten the war.

The U.S.-Japanese war was a brutal and racist conflict. For more on this, see historian John Dower's War Without Mercy. Each side thought the other racially inferior.

Yet U.S. military leaders understood that humane treatment of prisoners benefited their forces. They restrained troops who might have executed enemies and chose to obey the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war even though Japan famously was violating these norms. And restraint paid off, in a shorter war and a peace in which the defeated could recover their self-respect and dignity.
***

Here's the paragraph quoted above with the blanks filled in.

The Japanese generally treated the Chinese as inferiors who ought to be grateful for Japan's willingness to lead the struggle against Western colonialism and to establish a new order across East Asia under its leadership. ... The Japanese cruelly mistreated Chinese prisoners. ....Operating on the pretense that Japan was involved in an "incident" rather than a war, the government generally left handling of POWs to subordinate unit commanders. ... Few records of the fate of Chinese POWs were maintained, and inspections of POW camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross were not permitted.

Are they different?

Test yourself here. A nice little effort to reveal just how wacko McCain really is, brought to you by Move-On.

Imperial paradigms

Two hundred years ago today, the executions pictured above marked the beginning, in Europe, of the modern era of nationalist, citizen-based resistance to empire. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya shows French soldiers firing at citizen "patriots" placed up against a wall in Madrid on May 3, 1808. The painting hangs in the Prado museum.

These Spaniards had revolted against Napoleon's attempt to install a Bonaparte (his relative) on the Spanish throne. The French Revolution that began in 1789 had created citizen armies filled with nationalist patriots rather than peasant conscripts; Napoleon used the mighty French force this novel development had made possible to try to impose a French empire on much of Europe. But the passion for citizen nationalism spread to France's occupied territories -- hence the Madrid revolt of 1808 and its bloody suppression.

The Spanish call the ensuing six scorched-earth campaign their "War of Independence." The British who aided the Spaniards in tying down the French army call it the Iberian Peninsular War.

The war was a brutal affair in which the occupying French repeatedly tried to eradicate Spanish resistance by the "unlawful combatants" of their day with bloody reprisals. This failed. Irregular Spanish fighters, the first guerillas (this conflict was the origin of the English adoption of the word) bled the Napoleonic empire of human and material resources, contributing to its fall in 1814.

Spain and Portugal too were devastated by the brutal campaigns fought across their territory and did not recover for more than a century.

H/t to terrorism.open democracy for highlighting this all too contemporary-seeming history.

Minneapolis in the morning

Not exactly the view out my window, but the view on the way to the training I was at this week.




I don't know a more attractively vertical downtown.

Clinton campaign death watch

Best description I've seen yet of what Hillary Clinton is waiting for:

"Obama ordered a Whopper Junior from a guy with a Louis Farrakhan tattoo but failed to denounce the pickles" ...

publius,
Obsidian Wings

It's time for this to be over.

Mission Accomplished Day

Hadi Mizban / AP

Five years ago today, a U.S. President celebrated his triumph over Iraq's tin pot dictator. Since then, Iraq has suffered over a million deaths that would not have occurred without the invasion, 4 million Iraqis have been made refugees, and the country has devolved into a failed state. There can be no question that the United States is responsible for this situaton; do we care?

Pass cards ahead?

So the Supreme Court has upheld Indiana's voter ID law. The requirements are tough:

The Indiana law, adopted by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2005 without a single Democratic vote, is regarded as the strictest in the country. It requires a voter to present a photograph as part of an unexpired document issued either by Indiana or the federal government, a requirement that in most cases can be satisfied only by a current driver’s license or a passport. The state’s motor vehicle agency provides a free photo ID card for people who do not drive, but obtaining it requires a “primary document” like an original birth certificate or a passport.

Would-be voters without proper identification may cast a provisional ballot that will be counted only if they appear within 10 days at a county clerk’s office and present acceptable photo identification or, alternatively, swear either that they are indigent or that they have a religious objection to being photographed.

New York Times,
April 29, 2008

That ought to be enough to discourage old and poor people who don't have a current drivers license from voting, don't you think? A 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School concluded that there are a lot of U.S. citizens who would be tripped by such a law if this rule goes national.

• Thirteen million citizen adults do not have legal documents proving citizenship.

• Poor people are those most likely to lack legal documents. Some 12 percent of voting-age citizens earning less than $25,000 per year do not have a readily available U.S. passport, naturalization document, or birth certificate.

• As many as 32 million voting-age women may have available only proof of citizenship documents that do not carry their current name.

I guess those Indiana Republicans had some people in mind that they didn't want voting -- and it seems likely those people are poor, old, and otherwise marginalized, probably by race. And the Supremes have just said, "Go for it! It's fine to create obstacles to some people voting."

The disenfranchisement that may come of this law is profoundly anti-democratic, small "d" as well as large "D." And there's an additional aspect of this ruling that is in some ways just as troubling.

We're all getting more and more used to proving our identity in order to go about our daily lives. We need those driver's licenses not only to drive, but also to get aboard a passenger plane. Parts of Canada and Mexico that once shared an economy and daily life with communities on the U.S. side of the border are now cut off by the requirement that U.S. residents have a passport to get back into their own country. More and more workers are accustomed to swiping company ID badges to enter their workplaces; a few even have been implanted with RFID chips by employers to verify their identity. Stores often demand to see a driver's license from a customer using a credit card.

We're becoming a society in which various identity cards, usually driver's licenses, have become a kind of "pass card." Don't leave home and try to go anywhere without one. (Actually, the Feds are now issuing a kind of cut-rate wallet size passport for use at the Mexican and Canadian borders that they label a "pass card.") Does that worry anyone? It certainly makes me feel no safer and less free.