Point Man for Maryland Racists

Del. Pat McDonough of Baltimore and Harford Counties always reminds me why I'm glad I live on the west side of Baltimore County.  Our pols are far from perfect, but at least they're not demagogues pandering to the worst fears of constituents.

McDonough is best known for his incessant attacks on Hispanics.  He calls them attacks on illegal immigrants, but his discernment of who's legal and who's not is something he's spent no time honing.  All Hispanics are illegals, so far as he's concerned.  Of course he's spearheaded the crusae to repeal Maryland's effort to make the children of illegals full citizens with strong educations and a likelihood of being productive members of society.  Wouldn't want that.  Better to send them all home.  Of course, you can never catch them all to send home, so that means you just create a sub strata of society that has no chance of advancing on the economic ladder.  Unless they're Cuban, of course.

But McDonough's usual racist attacks on Hispanics isn't today's subject.  No, our hero took the opportunity of the last day of the legislature's specials session to call for martial law in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/breaking/bs-md-mcdonough-race-20120516,0,101275.story

Here's a quote from The Sun about the "news release" McDonough put out.  The title of the release is just so subtle. "'Black Youth Mobs Terrorize Baltimore on Holidays.' In it, McDonough said he had sent a letter to Gov. Martin O'Malley urging him to use the state police to help prevent attacks and to declare the Inner Harbor area a "no-travel zone" until safety can be guaranteed."

Let's just think about the stupidity here.  The solution to a few incidents of youths causing fights is to shut down the businesses at the Inner Harbor, and barring that, to scare as many people away from patronizing those businesses as possible.  How's that helping the city? 

Keep in mind that no one has been killed in any of these incidents.  In fact, no one has been seriously injured, viral video of one guy being knocked down, robbed, and stripped naked notwithstanding.  That guy was so drunk he didn't even remember the incident or report it to the police until the next day.

Now, there's no question the police need to be on the scene in large force whenever these incidents occur.  Plentiful arrests of these bands of bozos, who appear to think they're just engaging in some fun, will put an end to it quickly enough.

The real issue isn't misbehaving youths.  The issue is that McDonough feels it's necessary to point out the ethnicity of the youths.  Quoting The Sun again, "McDonough refused to back down, saying he had heard from police that the crowds involved in several recent incidents were all black. Failing to mention the race of the participants, he said, would be 'political correctness on steroids.'"

McDonough, of course, has no first hand knowledge of the ethnicity of the youths and cites no specific person with such knowledge.  He's citing the grapevine.  There's a persuasive source. 

Then there's what he calls "political correctness".  This remains one of my favorite bullshit terms the loons on the right use.  It's so broadly used as to be almost meaningless, but it boils down to a label for anyone who doesn't agree with them and points out the utter baselessness of their assertions.

For instance, what relevance does ethnicity have?  Is McDonough saying that everyone should be forewarned to run away from black people?  It certainly seems that's the only possible relevance.  So, if you run across an NAACP meeting, make sure to run and hide, lest the distinguished members suddenly turn into a violent mob and attack you.  Even if his warning is limited to black youth, I'd have to say he and his adherents avoid Ravens games.  Most of the team is black.  They're young.  They might go charging into the stands to assault people at random.

I would hope the voters of eastern Baltimore County and Harford County would have enough of this idiot and his blatant racism, but he's been there a long time, so I doubt it.  Still, there are more and more black and Hispanic voters living in that area, so his day will come in time.  More power to them.  I'll stay in western Baltimore County, home of the sane.

Fleeing Maryland

I'm a little late getting this post up. Returning from vacation is always a bite in the ass. Throw in a conversion of computer operating systems and a move of my desk all of 3' that requires packing up my entire desk and you can see why I'm a little occupied with other things.

But on to the show.

A frequent canard of the Maryland GOP and its sympathizers is that Democrats, who've been running the state for decades, with the exception of a brief 4 year term for Bob Ehrlich as governor, are chasing away anyone with any large sums of money. People with money are fleeing to live in Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Virginia. Anywhere but Maryland because of its exhorbitant taxation. The Democrats are also chasing away businesses because of their regulatory and tax policies.

Now, I don't care where the wealthy want to live. As a middle class Maryland resident, I think I'm getting quite a lot back for my tax dollar. Then again, I'm either part of a large silent majority or a small silent minority who doesn't object to taxation in the first place. These nit wits of the Know Nothing ilk think all taxation is bad and have entirely missed the fact that the Boston Tea Party was a protest not of the tax itself but that the colonists had no say in the passage of the tax. The taxes the Know Nothings abhor were passed by a body elected by them and the rest of us. Oh, sure, their choice for the office didn't win, but they had a vote in it. They just couldn't convince enough of their fellow citizens that their choice was the right choice. What the Know Nothings want is a dictatorship of their minority view. Very patriotic. Very original intent.

But back to the point. Oh, sorry. I haven't gotten there yet.

Some weeks ago I read in the Baltimore Sun that Baltimore was noted by a business survey to have had the 6th lowest business operating costs in the entire US. In the entire United States of America. Sixth lowest. Have we all got that now? There are only 5 other cities in the country with lower operating costs for businesses.

Now, if you ask any Maryland GOP flack, Baltimore City is the nexus of the ills of the state of Maryland. It's full of additional taxes and social ills and whatever else you want to demonize. And demonnize they frequently do in letters to the Sun or comments on line.

So, I've been waiting weeks now to see what the Maryland GOP has to say about Baltimore being an evidently business friendly environment. So far, I've heard or seen nothing. Where's the hurrahs? Where's the congratulations? Where's the call for business to descend on Baltimore and take advantage of its welcoming environment? The silence is deafening.

I guess there's too much to do in trying to perpetuate the myth that Democrats are socialists.

Local Hypocrisy

A minor uproar made the pages of the Baltimore Sun last week when the all Republican, five member Carroll County Commission (the bunch who run the county in lieu of a county council and county executive that more populous counties have, and Carroll arguably should have) spent $800 in county taxpayer money to have the pastor of an Anne Arundel County church present a seminar, whose attendance was originally strongly urged for county employees. Seems the pastor is a prime mover in a group called The Institute for the Constitution, which believes the US Constitution is biblically based.

Not surprisingly, both the ACLU and Americans United for the Separtion of Church and State opposed the whole thing. The Commissioners ended up clarifying that attendance was voluntary, and all of about 50 people attended the seminar. The pastor also managed to hardly mention God or religion, which is a neat trick, considering.

Quoting the Baltimore Sun's report on the seminar, we have mention of one of the Commissioners who attended, and David Whitney, the pastor.

'"We made clear that this would be an objective look with no proselytizing." (Commisioner Richard Rothschild)

Whitney walked the class through Maryland's early history and asked the audience to travel back nearly 250 years to understand the rationale of the time. In the 18th century, only men 21 and older who owned at least 50 acres could vote.

"Property owners paid taxes," he said. "Those who paid nothing in taxes had no vote."

He described how the state's constitution evolved but never deviated from one basic concept.

"Our rights come from God, not the government," Whitney said, in one of only a few religious references Friday.'

I'm trying to figure out how this is an objective look. Whitney espouses a view in favor of natural law. Granted, that was a common view when the original Maryland, as well as US, Contstitution was created, but less so when the current Maryland Constitution was drafted in 1867. Furthermore, the Maryland Constitution has nearly 200 amendments, the most recent of which came into force in 2008. Obviously, a lot of philosophy from a lot of different eras has been glommed onto the Maryland Constitution. An originalist argument is invalid on its face because it essentially says that we should not pay attention to all those amendments.

This is the same problem with the Know Nothings (aka the Tea Party), just on a local scale. A talismanic view of a constitution is not only unrealistic, it makes the document itself useless as an instrument of governance. Both the US and Maryland Constitutions were drafted as changeable documents. Hell, the Founding Fathers were still running the country when they were fighting over what the US Constitution meant, so it's hardly possible for people now to claim to have the knowledge of what the US Constitution meant then and that such view should the final say on the matter. Marbury v Madison, anyone?

I suppose Whitney can contend that he's quoted out of context, but the above quote from the Sun implies that he views with favor that only white males who owned 50 acres or more could vote, or at the very least, it wouldn't be a bad thing to allow only people who pay taxes now to vote. Ironically, this might disenfranchise the very wealthy who pay an effective rate of 0 with their deductions and living off of investments rather than earned income.

Regardless, he certainly seems to think that it was fair that voting was restricted in that way at that time because it limited voting to those who paid taxes. Except it also disenfranchised people who paid taxes. Though not common, women and non-whites did own property. Furthermore, plenty of white men who owned less than 50 acres, which they still paid taxes on, wouldn't have qualified to vote, either.

So, I'm thinking, how many people does the Carroll County GOP want to disenfranchise? Since they're a little shy of a religious litmus test, maybe they'll propose only county taxpayers can vote? Not that such a thing would survive court challenges, even with the Federalist Know Nothings on the Supreme Court now.