Nate Thornton – dead at a young 95

He was one of the youngest of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers.  He passed away Sunday night while watching 60 Minutes.  He just peacefully went to sleep after a long productive life.

Here’s one interview.  He was also a member of one of SF’s “two gangs.”

I interviewed him a few years ago on KMUD.  He got to Spain in one of the latter waves, and by then the Spanish military was keeping the very young and untrained American volunteers off of the front lines (the first wave had been decimated at the Battle of Jarama).  He did not see much combat, but instead drove supply trucks to fortify lines.  He described one of his few moments of actual fighting when some Franco force aircraft had been attacking the supply line and one of them was hit by Republican ground fire.  The pilot bailed and he and a couple of other soldiers opened fire on him as he came down.  The problem with young idealists fighting wars is that they think too much about what they’re doing.  Franco was short on pilots so killing one was strategically sound even though it didn’t seem right to be shooting at someone who was a sitting duck, albeit a downwardly mobile one.  The pilot landed on the opposite side of a hill.  “I never knew whether he made it” Nate said with very apparent sadness in his voice, and he stopped talking for a moment.  CS Lewis once painted a very nice thought about two soldiers on opposite sides of a war killing each other in battle and embracing shortly thereafter in Heaven.  Maybe somewhere Nate can finally ask the man whether he made it.  Unless the man’s still living in Barcelona somewhere.

Mostly I’ve known him for decades as a kindly and humorous friend of my grandmother’s.  Like her, he was politically engaged right up to his last breath.

I think the remaining survivors are now in the single digits.

Scalia endorsement of ERA?

Remember the Equal Rights Amendment killed by voters in the south and midwest several decades back?  One of the conservative mantras against the ERA has been its “redundancy” in that the 14th Amendment already guarantees equal protection of the law.  Only now, Scalia says it doesn’t.

Here’s one case in which “original intent” conflicts with “strict construction.”  His argument is that because those voting to pass the 14th Amendment did not contemplate the abolition of sexual (and sexual preference) discrimination it therefor follows that the Equal Protections clause cannot be applied against it.  Only those forms of discrimination contemplated at the time count, and presumably that means only discrimination according to race.

Did they contemplate discrimination between voters of different counties such that the recount rules should be uniform despite different realities?  Scalia didn’t have any problem with finding prohibitable discrimination in Bush v. Gore ten years ago.  Maybe he’s changed his mind?

And for the strict constructionists here, this is the text of the applicable portion of the 14th Amendment.

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Governor Brown’s shock and awe budget proposal

State deficits are different from federal in that they can’t simply generate money to temporarily offset them.  Unlike the nation, the state’s credit rating really is key to economic recovery.  On the other hand, deficit problems have never been resolved by cut backs, or for that matter tax increases.  Revenues increase when taxable transactions increase, and pulling money from the economy only compounds things and sometimes budget cuts can lead to even bigger deficits.

But apparently, Brown having promised that there won’t be tax increases without voter approval, intends to educate the public with cross-the-board cuts, this time including roads and prisons which conservatives never like to touch.  From the Times Standard:

According to the report, Brown’s proposal seeks to eliminate local redevelopment agencies and enterprise zones, cuts social service benefits, closes parks, reduces library hours, restricts Medi-Cal access, houses low-level offenders in county jails and imposes deep cuts to the California State University and University of California systems. Brown’s proposals are grim, in part, because he hopes they will encourage voters to approve tax and fee increases in a special election early this summer, the Bee reported.

It’s a big political gamble on his part, and I think he’s essentially hitching up to the same wagon Obama’s on – hoping that the recovery is real.  But eliminating enterprise zones is hardly going to help with recovery.