Are manners dead? Cellphones, Twitter and Facebook may be killing off the old civilities and good graces, but a new generation of etiquette gurus, good-manner bloggers and self-appointed YouTube arbiters is rising to make old-fashioned protocols relevant to a new generation.

Seriously, how am I not cited in this?!

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This zany New York Times op-ed comes to us courtesy of Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, who argues that it’s about time a) we forget about our long-standing (and, in his mind, ridiculous) obedience to the constitution and b) he look for a new line of work.

To make his point, he gives some terrific examples drawn from the long and rich tradition of constitutional disobedience, like John Adams’ support for the Alien and Sedition Acts and the fact that at least two prominent abolitionists “denounced [the constitution] as a pact with the devil.”

Of course, Seidman doesn’t think we should give up on everything contained in the constitution, just things he doesn’t like. We should stick with all the parts he cares about:

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.

Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.

The New York Times is pretty clear in its opposition to the death penalty.

Here’s the conclusion from the editorial the paper printed after Connecticut’s legislature voted to repeal the death penalty:

Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a review of decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class and politics. The growing number of states reconsidering this barbaric system is a welcome sign. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.

I’m always curious what people who support the death penalty think when they read paragraphs like this one. When faced with the evidence of obvious bias (which the editorical cites), how does one ignore it? Is it possible to tell oneself — and believe it too — that the mountain of evidence must be false?

It reminds me of children — fingers in their ears, trying to drown out parents or siblings — repeating “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I’m not listing …” in a voice that gets increasingly shrill.

MJ Rosenberg, a former foreign policy aide for Senator Carl Levin, has written an interesting recollection of the one time anyone in Congress ever had anything unkind to say about Israel and got completely — and unfairly and weirdly — hammered for it. I’m being a bit flippant about this, to be sure, but this is serious business. I think there are quite a lot of important problems to discuss about Rosenberg’s piece, especially insofar as it lends to support — with the voice of an insider expert — to the argument that one powerful interest group has succeeded in changing the tone of American political discourse by shutting down debate about one element of our foreign policy.

The piece is entitled, “How the Lobby Chills Middle East Debate” but my sense is that it ought to be titled, “Does the Lobby Chill Middle East Debate?” The “How” presumes that the “Israel Lobby” has a chilling effect on what elected officials choose to say about Israel, where my amended title asks whether or not this presumption is correct, something that we, as good social scientists, could actually measure.

But that would be problematic for Rosenberg, since there’s nothing to measure in the piece. It’s simply one person’s anecdotal recollection of an event from 1988. Careful Running Chicken readers will not be particularly surprised that I don’t find this single anecdote from 20+ years ago to be very persuasive. There’s no evidence to suggest that elected officials were persuaded by this event to change from one position on Israel to another, nor is there any evidence to suggest a chilling effect on the speech of elected officials.

What’s more, there’s nothing in Rosenberg’s piece to suggest the work of the nefarious “Israel Lobby.” What we see instead is that a bunch of people didn’t like the position taken by Levin with regard to some comments by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir on the desirability of land-for-peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Those people said unkind words and made some threats — empty ones, it turns out — in an attempt to pressure Levin into retracting his letter; he did not do so. Was the “Israel Lobby” behind these unkind words and empty threats?

Rosenberg tell us the following:

I wrote the draft. Levin edited and re-edited it. Then he called in the head of AIPAC, Thomas A. Dine, to run the language past him. Tom said it was “great.” Levin told Dine that he would not embarass him by revealing that he had approved the letter.

…

But then one of the senators who had the letter gave it to the New York Times. And within minutes the phones started ringing off the hook.

Are we to understand, by this, that the “Israel Lobby” is actually connected to the Times? That the “Israel Lobby” is so powerful that they have a standing arrangement with some senators such that any document seen by these senators that might be interpreted as critical of Israel will be sent to the Times so that the “Israel Lobby” can then mobilize its army of lobbyists, donors, and voters?

And what are we to make of the fact that the head of the “Israel Lobby” at the time, AIPAC’s Thomas Dine had seen the letter and pronounced it “great”? Is this to say that the AIPAC organizers don’t consult with the head of their organization? That the “Israel Lobby” is so powerful as to have a chilling effect even on the position of its own leadership? That AIPAC is somehow at the center of the powerful “Israel Lobby” that manages to chill speech at the level of the U.S. Congress and also that it manages to speak with more than voice when it comes to developing a position on the same document?

Actually, what might be the case with regard to this anecdote is that some senator — we don’t know which one, sadly — perceived this letter as an opportunity to challenge Levin (or, really, any one of the thirty senators who signed the letter). If this opportunistic senator read the political tea leaves carefully — or, really, not so carefully (as I’ve argued) — (s)he would know that the majority of people in the U.S. were just generally more supportive of Israel than of the Palestinians and might be unhappy to read that Levin (or their own senator, perhaps) was critical of the Israeli PM’s position with regard to negotiations with the Palestinians.

I think that there’s really no debate about whether or not this was the position of the American electorate in 1988. Keep in mind that this was a time when the PLO was still considered a terrorist organization, and that it would still be a few more years before the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat that signalled the possibility of a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, the whole world thinks a negotiated settlement that involves the creation of an independent Palestinian state on land taken by Israel from Egypt and Jordan in 1967 is (or at the very least ought to be) a fait accompli. This simply was not the case in 1988. To say that the “Israel Lobby” somehow recognized a need to mobilize in order to counter Levin’s letter and to keep the lid firmly down with regard to any criticism of Israel is, I think, to look at this historical moment through the lens of 2011.

HT: Jonathan Cunningham.

Strong words from the New York Times today:

The death penalty is capricious, discriminatory and barbaric. The shortage of sodium thiopental has stripped what Justice Harry Blackmun called “the machinery of death” of even a cloak of scientifically based reliability.

But will that — along with all of the problems with the lethal injection drugs (detailed in the opinion piece) — be sufficient to convince anyone of their conclusion?

When Illinois joined New Jersey and New Mexico this month as the third state to abolish the death penalty in the last four years, it made the choice compelled by a long record of judicial abuses, false convictions and other fundamental problems. That should be enough for all states to abandon the penalty once and for all.

I’m entirely convinced … but, then, I was convinced well before I read the Times this morning.