Strategic Voting and other short notes

A week from tomorrow I’ll be voting in the New Hampshire primary. But I’m a Democrat and the interesting primary is in the other party, so should I vote as a Republican?

I’ve done it before. In 2000, I crossed over to vote for McCain against Bush, even though I wouldn’t have voted for McCain against Gore. But I didn’t do it to benefit Gore. I just thought McCain would be a much better president than Bush.

That’s my ethic for strategic voting, and I recommend it to Democrats in the later-voting states: Don’t try to screw up the Republicans, vote to improve the field for November. Yes, it would probably improve Obama’s chances for re-election if, say, Bachmann won the Republican nomination. But that can backfire: How would you feel if some October scandal made Obama un-electable and you had to live with President Bachmann for the next four years?

Right now, Intrade says Romney is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. Would somebody else on the Republican side be a much better president than Romney? Probably not. So I’ve let the deadline for changing my registration pass. With reservations that I’ve outlined here and here, I’ll vote for Obama.

In a season dominated by the likes of MasterCard, WikiLeaks reminded us of what’s really priceless.

Creating the illusion of three dimensions on a flat TV screen is more than just providing different images to each eye, as current 3DTVs do. If you are your screen’s only viewer, if your 3D glasses also tell the system where you are in the room, and if the system has vast computing power, then it can do something called head tracking, which makes a huge difference, as seen here.

TPM explains why Romney doesn’t want to release his tax returns: He didn’t just make a lot more money than you, he did it without holding a job. That means he paid a much lower tax rate. (I say: “Eliminate the work penalty!“)

These two recent Paul Krugman columns are worth your time: Nobody Understands Debt and The Post-Truth Campaign.

It’s a little bitchy, but Salon’s annual Hack List is a guilty pleasure.

January 2, 2012 – 12:38 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

The Yearly Sift of 2011

What’s past is prologue.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

all the Sift quotes of 2011 are here

In this week’s sift:

December 26, 2011 – 12:46 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Sifting the Sifts of 2011: Escape From Bizarro World

Looking back over the Sifts of 2011, I notice my increasing frustration with playing whack-a-mole against the spinmasters of the Right. More and more, pointing out specific lies, omissions, and mischaracterizations got relegated to the short notes. In the main articles, I tended to focus my attention on a more fundamental question: How do they do this? How has the Right managed to construct what David Frum has called its “alternate reality” and what can we do about it?

First, what do I mean by “alternate reality” (or, as I prefer to call it, Bizarro World)? I’m not talking about legitimate differences of political philosophy, but the black-is-white world where global warming is a hoax (perpetrated by any scientist not bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil), budget-cutting creates jobs, American Christians are a persecuted minority, the main victims of racism are white, the EPA is a threat to the economy, voter fraud is a bigger problem than voter suppression, Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim Marxist, workers would be better off if unions and government regulations stopped stifling the job-creating brilliance of the very rich, corporations like BP don’t need any environmental oversight, and so on.

I attacked a bunch of those things head-on in Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say, the year’s most popular post. Other specific issues got hit in Voter Suppression 101 and Blowing Smoke About Clouds.

But that’s just whack-a-mole on a higher level. The real question is why anybody takes Bizarro World seriously in the first place. Why should liberals have waste our energy arguing about, say, Obama’s birth certificate, when there was never any reason to doubt it?

In Confessions of a Centrist in Exile I pointed out one consequence of Bizarro World: The center is occupied territory now. Compromise is for honestly held points of view. But reality can’t compromise with unreality. People who want to solve a problem (like inequality or global warming) can’t compromise with people who say there is no problem. And honest real people can’t compromise with the corporate salesmen who would kill them to make a profit.

I addressed some the mechanisms that create Bizarro World in Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation: Oversimplifying just a little, corporate money has created a conservative echo chamber that can create “controversy” out of nothing. The mainstream media then feels it has to treat those claims as “controversial” even if they lack any semblance of reasonability. Since the Left will never be able to compete with the corporatists in money, we need to insist on reform inside the culture of the media. (Yesterday Hunter on Daily Kos expressed his dismay that “fact checking” is now a specialty: “nothing is more humiliating than the notion that our media is so incompetent at verifying facts that an entirely new sub-profession needs to be assigned to the task.”)

A second piece of Bizarro World is the corruption of academic research by corporate money, which I covered in Turning Marketshare into Mindshare.

In The Dog Whistle Defined I looked at another tactic: using code words in your public campaign to point to reprehensible commitments made privately. In Turn the Shame Around and Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us I talked about the psychological hooks the 1% uses to co-opt many of the 99% — or at least to shut them up.

Finally, I tried to provide a counterframe in Eliminate the Work Penalty. Our current tax system taxes wages at a higher rate than money made by investing money, and the only current debate is on how much to increase that gap. We need to start calling these special rates for dividends and capital gains a “work penalty” and try to eliminate them completely.

Economics. A second theme of the year has been rethinking economics. (More about that in the Sifted Books of 2011.) Jobless Recoveries are Normal Now, Economics Works Backwards Now, and Jobs of the Future are the main posts on this theme. In a nutshell, our current ideas about economics require the rich to consume all kinds of crazy things so that the poor can have jobs making them. What if they don’t? What if the crazy things they decide to consume can be made without much labor? Or what if that level of consumption will kill the biosphere? Maybe we need to come up with some new way of connecting people with the resources they need to survive.

Obama. Finally, I’ve been trying to criticize the Obama administration without providing fodder for Republican alternatives that would even worse on the specific issue I’m criticizing. So I put my criticism of Obama’s political strategy (compromising with people who don’t want to compromise) into the fantasy conversation Barack, Can We Talk?. This was also part of the Bizarro World theme: “What we need from our Democratic president isn’t just a few more dollars for infrastructure or the unemployed, we need a defense of reality.”

Other posts on that theme are Detention Without Trial, Is Obama On Our Side?, and Presidents and Precedents.

December 26, 2011 – 12:43 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Politics in 2011: The Tragedy of the Tea Party

Years of American politics don’t usually boil down to one story, but to a large extent 2011 does. The main character is the Tea Party and the story is a tragedy.

Like any populist movement that catches on, the Tea Party started out embodying some simple and compelling ideas:

  • When the government plans to go another $1 trillion in debt every year, as far as the eye can see, something is seriously wrong.
  • The will of the people doesn’t seem to make much difference any more.
  • On many issues, the two parties don’t offer much of a choice.

What really brought these points home was TARP. It was proposed by a Republican administration in the middle of an election campaign. Polls said it was unpopular, but it passed anyway. Then after the Democrats had a landslide victory, the new administration carried out TARP as if the people had said nothing at all.

If those initial ideas had been all the Tea Party was about, they might have sparked a long-needed public conversation about what the government does and the way governance happens. We could have talked about

  • the cost of an aggressive foreign policy and the wars it gets us into,
  • what kind of safety net we want or can reasonably expect,
  • what a fair tax structure looks like,
  • how big a role should government take in trying to manage the business cycle,
  • what dangers we need the government to protect us from and what we can handle ourselves,
  • how to reduce the influence of special-interest money,

and many other subjects. My answers would probably have comflicted with many Tea Partiers’ answers, but at least they are the right questions.

For a variety of reasons, that conversation never happened. Nonetheless, the Tea Party dominated the elections of 2010 and entered 2011 triumphant. It had provided the energy for a stunning Republican comeback that retook the House, significantly cut down the Democrats’ advantage in the Senate, and took complete control of many state governments. Tea Partiers looked to be in a position to dictate the 2012 Republican nominee.

And then things started to go wrong.

In any tragedy the hero has a flaw, some collection of character traits that were visible even in his triumph, but which eventually bring him down. From the beginning, the Tea Party had a number of tragic flaws.

  • Anti-intellectualism. The Tea Party drew the wrong conclusion from TARP, blaming economists and bureaucrats more than bankers. In general, the Tea Party became suspicious of expertise, not of power. What developed was not a set of policies, but a few slogans like “stop the spending” and a belief that we just need to elect good people willing to “stand up for common sense solutions“. In 2011, Herman Cain could appeal to Tea Partiers by claiming not to know things like “the president of Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.”
  • Hidden motives. Simplistic slogans can mask unsavory agendas. And so a legitimate desire to see institutional power return to the people got conflated with the belief that white, English-speaking, fundamentalist Christians built this country and need to take it back. So although the Tea Party pitched itself as nonpartisan and not concerned with social issues, in practice “good people with common sense” came to mean right-wing Republican Christians.
  • A Faustian bargain. The “nonpartisan” Tea Party got much of its leadership training from FreedomWorks (run by Republican lobbyist Dick Armey), much of its funding from billionaires like the Koch brothers and their associated organizations, and much of its publicity from Fox News. (A Breitbart attempt to “debunk” these claims actually ends up supporting it if you read all the way through.) The danger of being co-opted by corporatists and billionaires was there from the beginning.

As a result, the Republicans who took power in January, 2011 had little in the way of a public agenda. In Congress, that mostly meant opposing whatever Obama wanted to do. But in the states, new governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio had enough support in the legislature to do more-or-less whatever they wanted.

On Day 1, the governors started implementing a detailed and aggressive agenda that hadn’t been part of their campaigns — the same agenda in one state after another: break the public employee unions, make it harder to vote and harder to sue corporations, cut funds for education and medical care, privatize public schools, cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, and slash any regulations that protect workers or the environment.

This agenda did not bubble up from the people; it came from the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) — a group funded and controlled by corporations, in which corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators work together to write model bills that serve corporate needs.

That agenda proved to be wildly unpopular, and energized a liberal populist backlash. In Wisconsin, two Republican senators were recalled and Governor Walker will face a recall election later this year. In Ohio, Kasich’s S.B. 5 was repealed by a wide margin in a November referendum. In states that did not allow such direct voter action, the governors’ approval ratings have plumented. (Friday Rachel Maddow reviewed how this played out during 2011.)

In addition, both in the states and in Washington, the right-wing Christians that the Tea Party had elected on economic issues turned out a series of new laws restricting abortion. (Maddow has kept track of this in her series on Really, Really Big Government.)

In Congress, the new Tea Party Republicans have identified little in the way of wasteful spending (such spending cuts as they have gotten are of the across-the-board variety), but instead have gone after the EPA and Planned Parenthood. They have carried water for Wall Street by watering down the Dodd-Frank bill (which they now want to repeal entirely, returning to the pre-crisis status quo) and for the oil companies by pushing the Keystone XL pipeline. They have opposed cutting the deficit by raising taxes on incomes over $1 million a year, even risking a tax increase on working people in order to protect the rich.

In short, a movement that billed itself as returning power to ordinary people instead has implemented a pro-corporate, pro-billionaire agenda. Vague slogans co-opted well meaning Americans at the grass roots into working to benefit the 1%. (I urged them to reconsider this summer by comparing them to football players who run the wrong way.)

By the end of 2011, the Occupy movement had seized the anti-Wall-Street pro-ordinary-people energy that used to power the Tea Party, exposing the Tea Party as a stalwart defender of the 1%. The Republican establishment is pulling its hair out over the extreme positions presidential candidates are taking to woo Tea Partiers. And in the House they’ve been embarrassed into retreating on the payroll tax bill.

In any general election, the Tea Party has become poison. By fall, no one — literally no one — will claim to be a Tea Party candidate.

How the mighty have fallen.

December 26, 2011 – 12:41 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Sifted Books of 2011: Rethinking Economics

I don’t have a book-review strategy on the Sift. In deciding what to read and what to write about, I usually just follow my nose and figure out later what it all means. So I don’t know why I reviewed exactly half as many books in 2011 as in 2010: 8 instead of 16.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to note that more than half of the 2011 books were about economics: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy by Warren Mosler (reviewed in two parts: first, second), Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton, The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford, and Consumed by Benjamin Barber.

There’s a strong contrast here with last year’s economics books. Then I was often telling you about books by economists from the liberal mainstream, like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. But these five are more radical start-over-from-scratch books.

In retrospect, here’s what I think that means: For a long time now, I have doubted the conservative conventional wisdom that the market can solve any and all problems. But lately I’ve also begun to doubt the liberal conventional wisdom that we can achieve a fair and vibrant economy by tinkering with interest rates, regulations, and government spending. This year’s books reflect my search for a new way of thinking about the economy.

Both Graeber and Mosler are telling us that money isn’t what we think it is. Mosler’s book examines the nuts-and-bolts of how the banking system creates money, while Graeber takes a long anthropological look at where this whole idea of money comes from and how it changed society.

Eagleton challenges the capitalism-has-won narrative of the post Cold War world, and shows how our “victorious” capitalism is displaying the flaws that Marx predicted a century and a half ago. And Ford goes back to the Luddite claim that machines destroy jobs, arguing that even if it wasn’t true then, it is now.

Barber’s book is on the boundary between economics and politics, arguing that if capitalism is allowed to run wild it will destroy democracy. Consumer and citizen are two very different roles, and the more we identify with our consumer role, the less we will be able to perform our duties as citizens.

Barber presents a different side of the scene portrayed by Ford. I summarized Barber’s point like this:

The root of the problem Barber presents is capitalism’s success in satisfying all the genuine needs of people who have money, creating a situation in which “the needy are without income and the well-heeled are without needs.”

Here’s the Ford/Barber connection: In our mechanized world, the one thing the well-heeled don’t need is more labor, which is all the needy have to sell.

Given this theme, there are two books that I should have written about but didn’t. Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and the 1944 classic The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. Both are woefully short of effective prescriptions, but they add important ideas to the diagnosis.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring in this arresting image from a book I haven’t read, A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark: In 1901, the British economy found jobs for more than 3 million horses. All those jobs are done by machines now, and horses are purely recreational.

There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.

How many human workers will go the way of the horse?

Polanyi’s book is a hard read, but fascinating. He tells the story of how the market economy was created in the 1800s. That statement is already radical, because so many people believe that the market economy is natural and goes back into deep antiquity.

In fact, Polanyi says (and Graeber agrees), markets used to be only a small part of the economy. In order to have what we now think of as a market economy, markets had to be created for what Polanyi calls the three “fictitious commodities”: labor, land, and money.

Labor is only another name for a human activity that goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanisms of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious.

My hunch is that the re-thinking of economics has to start there.

A related question is why our political system can’t adjust to our new economic realities. That led me to look at So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser, which is a history of lobbying.

The possibility of another way of functioning entirely led me to Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. McGonigal starts with the observation that the multi-player computer games like World of Warcraft and Halo soak up vast amounts of human time, effort, and ingenuity. What makes these invented worlds so much more engaging than reality?

Part of the answer is that successful games appeal to aspects of the human character that have been left out of the homo economicus model of human nature. In other words, we aren’t all trying to get as much stuff as we can for as little effort as possible — at least not all the time. Sometimes we want to achieve self-respect and honor even if it costs us effort and money.

McGonigal describes the widespread perception among gamers that their game persona is a better human being than their work persona. Something can be done with that. (One fictional view of how that could work is the Daemon/Freedom™ series by Daniel Suarez.)

Another book I should have reviewed made a similar point looking backward rather than forward: The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Major social changes, he claims, come not from self-interest but from a sense of honor. Society changes because our ideas about what is honorable change.

Appiah looks at societies that ended dueling, slavery, foot-binding, and honor killings of sexually activity female relatives. In each case, he finds that the cause is not economic and not fundamentally rational; in fact, the rational arguments against the practice were well known long before they became convincing. Instead, change happens via an invisible shift in the community’s honor code: Practices that once defended honor suddenly become dishonorable.

Two books I should have reviewed that deserve more than a paragraph here are 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang and The Myth of Individualism by Peter Callero. Maybe next year.

The one book I reviewed that doesn’t fit this pattern is The Hour of Sunlight by Sami al Jundi, which is one Palestinian’s attempt to envision peace between his people and the Israelis. Interestingly, that review was an afterthought: The article I wanted to write fell through at the last minute, and I needed something to fill the space.

December 26, 2011 – 12:33 pm Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

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The State of the Sift

2011 was an expansion year for the Weekly Sift. I redesigned the blog, moved it to weeklysift.com, and added the Link of the Day feature to its Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Traffic is up: The Sift got 137,000 views since it moved in July. Pre-July statistics aren’t really comparable, since an entire week’s Sift used to be one post and now is four or five — but trust me, readership is up.

The increase, though, is mostly due to a few posts going viral. One post: Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say accounts for half of those post-July views (68K), with 58K coming on one day. Add in Why I’m Not a Libertarian (21K), and One Word Turns the Tea Party Around (18K) and you’re over 100,000. Other posts that got kiloviews are Turn the Shame Around (7.6K) and Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation (2.7K)

Regular readership is also up, but not as dramatically. The email list is steady at a little over 100. In addition, 104 people follow the blog via WordPress, while another 140 or so subscribe via Google Reader. I’m not sure how many people get the RSS feed some other way. There may be some overlap in those numbers, but probably something like 300-500 people consider themselves subscribers in one form or another.

The viewship numbers on weeklysift.com are in addition to that. On a typical non-viral week, about 300 people view the lead post and around 100-150 read the short notes.

Also, I typically repost the week’s lead post on Daily Kos. Some of them drop like stones, while others do better there than here. (Barack, Can We Talk? got a better-than-average 611 page views on the Sift, but went crazy on Kos, drawing 806 comments and 825 recommendations. DKos doesn’t provide page-view numbers.)

Posts have gone viral over two main avenues: Reddit and Facebook, with an occasional mention from some other small blog. The next level of viral would be to get quoted by some of the big-name people I often link to: Digby, Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, or (dreaming big) Rachel Maddow.

Maybe next year.

December 26, 2011 – 12:27 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

Pressures From Below

Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below. 

— Roger Baldwin

In this week’s sift:

  • Detention Without Trial. President Obama isn’t going to veto the NDAA after all. How big a problem is that?
  • Christopher Hitchens and the Politics of Atheism. I come to bury Hitchens, not to praise him. But all the same, there are some things you have to give him credit for.
  • Victoryish, and other short notes. What’s the right way to mark the end of the Iraq War? NPR can’t find the jobs that a millionaires’ tax would kill. Are co-ops the future? More Rick Perry parodies. Links to my holiday stories. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. In an extraordinarily slow week on the Sift, Perry and Parody was the most popular post with 107 views. (Whenever I have a low number to report, somebody always reminds me that around 300 people access the Sift in ways that don’t show up in these statistics.)
  • This week’s challenge. As you plan your holiday donations to charity, check out the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. Don’t just give your money away, give it away as effectively as possible.
December 19, 2011 – 1:28 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Detention Without Trial

Wednesday, the Obama administration announced that the President would not to veto the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the $600+ billion bill to fund the Pentagon for another year, into which Congress had inserted a number of other provisions.

That decision touched off a firestorm of debate among liberals: Was this a massive betrayal of human rights and civil liberties, or had Dianne Feinstein’s last-minute amendment eliminated the NDAA’s most serious problems?

Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer stated in bold:

The bill no longer authorizes the indefinite military detention of Americans captured in the US.

while Marcy Wheeler (whose EmptyWheel blog is my first stop on these kinds of issues) had the opposite view:

DiFi’s fix, which had the support of many Senators trying to protect civil liberties, probably made the matter worse.

and Steve Vladek of Lawfare wrote:

I’m not at all convinced that the conference version of the NDAA is substantially better than the House or Senate version (or that either is better than nothing)

None of these people is in the habit of making things up or is easily fooled by spin. So to sort this out, we’ll need to go back and tell the story from the beginning.

The AUMF. In the beginning was 9-11. Congress responded a week later by passing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) almost unanimously: 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. Everybody wanted to go on record backing a swift and sure response.

The AUMF was short and sweeping. It authorized the President to

use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

But as the War on Terror developed, the Bush administration’s interpretation of “necessary and appropriate force” shocked many people, including me. It claimed the AUMF authorized not just the expected strike into Afghanistan, but also acts within the United States against American citizens. In May, 2002, Jose Padilla was arrested in O’Hare Airport and spent the next 3 1/2 years in military custody (in debilitating conditions) without any charges being filed against him.

The Bush administration framed the War on Terror as a new kind of war, where traditional notions of the battlefield and the enemy did not apply. So in practice, the battlefield was wherever the President said it was, and the enemy was anybody the President pointed his finger at.

Hundreds of non-Americans were held in a legal limbo, having neither the rights of criminals nor of POWs. That limbo was located in Guantanamo, a law-free zone which the administration said was neither part of the United States nor under the legal jurisdiction of any other country.

Traditionally, POWs are held until the war is over. But America’s nebulous “enemy” had no leader capable of announcing a general surrender. So in practice, the war would be over when the President said it was over.

The Supreme Court. These legal interpretations were tested piecemeal in a series of cases that went to the Supreme Court. The Bush administration won some and lost some. Standing against the administration was the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

In its favor were two points: The Court has historically been reluctant to involve itself in war decisions, and past Courts have judged presidential actions according to the Jackson Test:

When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty.

So while no President can legitimately do something flat-out unconstitutional, in nebulous regions it matters whether or not he has the backing of Congress. So it matters what Congress intended the AUMF to authorize.

Jose Padilla‘s case would have clearly established the limits of the president’s detention power, but the Supreme Court was not eager to rule on it. The first time Padilla’s habeas corpus petition reached the Supremes in 2004, they dodged by ruling that Padilla had filed in the wrong venue.  A refiled petition came back to them late in 2005. Fearing a Court ruling that might clip their wings, the Bush administration made the Padilla case moot by charging him in criminal court.

So the general question of whether a president can indefinitely imprison an American citizen without charges remains unsettled.

Obama. In the 2008 Democratic primaries, liberals liked that Barack Obama was a constitutional lawyer and a champion of civil liberties. As president, he got off to a good start. In his inaugural address he said:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Two days later he ordered Guantanamo closed within a year, detainees treated according to the Geneva Conventions, and interrogators restricted to the techniques in the Army Field Manual rather than “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture).

Things have gone downhill considerably since then, as Jonathan Turley outlined last September in the LA Times.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses

Worse, by doing this as a Democrat he has left liberal civil libertarians nowhere to roost. Can we expect Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich to be better? Can we surrender every other liberal value and back Ron Paul?

NDAA and the Feinstein Amendment. The NDAA is a huge bill. Tucked into the middle of it is section 1021 — just two pages, which the Lawfare blog reproduces here.

1021 spells out the detention policies that the Bush administration interpreted into the AUMF. It “affirms” that the AUMF authorizes the detention of “covered persons” — not just members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but “associated forces” and people who “substantially supported” them. Detention is authorized “until the end of hostilities”.

1021 is cleverly worded not to appear to authorize anything new. Subsection 1021d says that 1021 doesn’t  “limit or expand” the President’s authority, and 1021e (the Feinstein amendment) says:

(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.

This is what Democratic congressmen mean when they say that the bill just “codifies current law”. This is technically true, but false in practical terms, because no one is sure what current law means. And when the courts try to figure out what current law means, they’ll consult the NDAA.

Example. Suppose a new Jose Padilla is arrested and held in military custody without charges or trial. (To bring home how sweeping this power is, Marcy Wheeler explained how a president could imprison banker Jamie Dimon, leading Daily Kos’ David Waldman to say tongue-in-cheek: “Too difficult to prosecute Wall Street crime? Don’t!” Just lock ’em up in a military brig without any trials.)

In court, the administration could not argue “This detention is authorized by the NDAA of 2012” because the Feinstein amendment specifically says the NDAA doesn’t do that.

However, the NDAA would come up in the following way: The administration would claim that the detention was authorized by the AUMF. The defense would counter that this is a bizarre interpretation of “necessary and appropriate force” that the Congress of 2001 never envisioned. And the administration would respond: “Yes, Congress did. We know so because Congress ‘affirmed’ that interpretation in the NDAA of 2012.”

I hope the Court would then ignore the AUMF, quote the Fifth Amendment, and tell the administration that Americans get trials. But that position would have the full force of the Jackson Test against it.

President Baggins. President Obama and the various Democrats in Congress who (along with many Republicans) supported this bill have put liberals between a rock and a hard place. So far, President Obama has used these extraordinary powers less flagrantly than President Bush. For the most part, he has been carrying the Ring like a hobbit, not wielding it like a Dark Lord.

But Obama is the wrong Baggins. Rather than take the Ring to Mount Doom like Frodo, he’s been holding it like Bilbo. His very lack of flagrancy keeps the Ring from being destroyed, because no Padilla-like case arises that will force the Supreme Court to rule.

And if he preserves the Ring long enough, maybe President Sauron will possess it after him. The Republican candidates other than Ron Paul seem eager to play the Sauron role, and President Paul would be a disaster for a lot of other reasons. So what’s a liberal to do?

I have no good answer. The Republican candidates scare me to the point that I am unwilling to undermine Obama’s re-election bid. I can’t support a primary challenge (which isn’t happening anyway), and when we get to the fall election, preserving the Ring (bad as it is) is still better than wielding it. (Marcy Wheeler sums this up as: “Vote for me or Newt will have authority to indefinitely detain you.”)

At the same time, I am not willing to pretend that this is not an issue, or let President Obama pose as a civil libertarian. We have to keep this inflated presidency out of Republican hands while simultaneously preserving the civil-liberty issue for 2016, when perhaps we can find a real champion.

December 19, 2011 – 1:14 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

Christopher Hitchens and the Politics of Atheism

I could write a long article about the strange way we mythologize the recently dead (especially if they die mid-career), and how particularly inappropriate it is to treat Christopher Hitchens that way, given how much of his writing was devoted to breaking down mythology. But since Glenn Greenwald already wrote that article, I’ll just take those ideas as a place to start.

Hitchens himself was never one to make a socially-required saccharine comment if it got in the way of driving his point home. Interviewed after the death of Jerry Falwell, he lamented that “there isn’t a hell for him to go to.” And his farewell to Jesse Helms article includes the phrase “senile racist buffoon”.

So, in honor of the spirit he didn’t believe in, I’m here to bury Christopher Hitchens, not to praise him.

The New Atheists. I have never been a fan of Hitchens or any of other New Atheists. (My review of two new-atheist classics preceded Hitchens’ God is Not Great, which I would have included.) By treating all religion as either full-throated fundamentalism or watered-down fundamentalism, they overlook the most interesting contemporary religious thinking and also misrepresent a lot of the history of ideas.

Plus, something about Islam makes them crazy. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris found torture in the context of the War on Terror to be “not only permissible, but necessary”. (It’s hard to imagine a position more out-of-step with the tradition of the Humanist Manifestos.) And Hitchens was one of the most outrageous apologists for any abuses the Bush administration could come up with, as long as they were targeted at Muslims.

But at the same time, I get where the New Atheists are coming from, and I think they’re a necessary phase in the development of a more reasonable humanism. To put it bluntly: You are not really equal until you are allowed to as a big a jackass as anybody else.

Put that idea in racial terms: As long as they had to be Booker T. Washington or Martin Luther King to get respect, black Americans were nowhere near equality. Real equality would mean that blacks can be just as obnoxious as whites and get away with it — and nearly half a century after Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, we’re still not all the way there.

Christopher Hitchens was an atheist Muhammad Ali. He didn’t just politely ask to be included, like Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis; he loudly pointed out that he was better than you. If he was an obnoxious jerk at times, well, that in itself was a step towards equality. During Hitchens’ career, how many high-profile Christians got away with being loud obnoxious jerks? Lots.

Anti-atheist discrimination in politics. Many American atheists are (like Hitchens) economically and educationally above average. But politically they’re still an oppressed class, ranking well behind blacks and even gays. (Let’s not even talk about the Christians who fantasize that they are oppressed because they losing their right to oppress others or to use public resources to promote their faith.)

Last time I checked, there was exactly one admitted atheist in Congress. The constitutions of several states either explicitly ban atheists from holding public office (Tennessee, Article IX), or exclude atheists from the protection of a no-religious-test-for-office clause (Maryland Declaration of Rights, Article 37).

(I haven’t verified the exact number of states that have such clauses. Some articles claim eight, but a few of their links point to obsolete constitutions.)

Bans on atheist office-holders are unenforceable because of the federal constitution, as North Carolinians found out in 2009 when they tried to keep Cecil Bothwell from taking his seat on the Asheville city council by quoting Article VI, section 8 of their constitution. But keeping them on the books is like leaving up the “whites only” signs.

And what exactly is the point of printing “in God we trust” on the money or saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Is any public good achieved other than to remind atheists that they aren’t really Americans?

Stereotypes of atheists. In addition to discriminatory laws, personal prejudice against atheists is still socially acceptable. In polls taken over the last 30 years, the number of people who admit they would refuse to vote for an atheist candidate has stayed stuck at around 50%. (A 2007 poll by Newsweek got a 62% refusal.) Compare that to the 17% who said in 1999 that they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon or the 38% who wouldn’t vote for a Muslim.

In that same Newsweek poll, 26% thought it was not possible for an atheist to be moral. And this opinion is based on what, exactly? Have atheist leaders been raping children, like Catholic priests have? Have well known atheists been caught doing crystal meth with gay prostitutes, like a certain high-profile televangelist? Have they assassinated doctors in the name of their beliefs? Crashed airplanes into skyscrapers? What?

Mostly, American atheists have just been doing their jobs and raising their families. According to research by the evangelical Barnes Group, 21% of atheists have been divorced, compared to 24% of Mormons and 29% of Baptists. Funny how you never hear about the Baptist threat to American family values.

The immoral atheist is like the shiftless Negro or the greedy Jew — a stereotype. But it’s a stereotype you can still voice in respectable company.

The Overton window. Whether you loved Christopher Hitchens, hated him, or found him embarrassing, you’ve got give him this: He stretched the Overton Window. In the same way that the crazy ravings of Glenn Beck and virulent nastiness of Rush Limbaugh have made previously beyond-the-pale conservatives look like statesmen, Hitchens’ in-your-face style has created some space in the mainstream for softer-spoken atheists and agnostics.

Anybody whose beliefs are more complicated that just “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” owes a little bit to Hitchens. As long as he was the guy sitting furtherest out on the limb, you didn’t have to be.

So I guess, in my own grudging way, I’ve gotten around to praising him after all.

December 19, 2011 – 1:12 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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Victoryish, and other short notes

President Obama’s announcement of the end of the Iraq War raises a number of issues. First, it’s only sort-of true as long as the AUMF for Iraq remains in effect. And even if it is over, how should we commemorate the end of a huge mistake? AlterNet summarizes the enormous costs and the minimal benefits. And Mark Fiore imagines President Obama declaring “Victoryish!”

Whenever liberals propose taxing the rich, conservatives say higher rates will prevent small businesses from hiring more people. NPR went looking for actual small businesspeople who would say the same thing, and couldn’t find them.

Gar Alperovitz, whose book Unjust Desserts I reviewed a while ago, had an NYT op-ed proclaiming co-ops as the way of the future. I want to believe, Gar. I really do.

The Rick Perry parodies continue to role in. A Democratic candidate for Congress made one. And Scott Bateman cartooned over the Perry audio.

Take the quiz: What kind of liberal are you? (I come out as a “working class warrior”.)

It’s not just anecdotal any more: The EPA links fracking to water contamination.

Unlike most conservative columnists, Ross Douthat occasionally provides some insight I find interesting. Like this one: Ron Paul represents what Tea Partiers imagine themselves to be, while Newt Gingrich is what liberals imagine Tea Partiers are.

The columns of Grist’s Greenie Pig (a.k.a. Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan) examine that very important question: How do you achieve a more sustainable lifestyle without being a superior jerk about it? In this one, she explores the etiquette of bringing re-usable leftover containers to restaurants.

Retired air force Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore coins a different usage of the 99%/1% split: The 1% who fight our wars and the 99% whose lives are virtually unaffected by them.

We’ve chosen -— or let others do the choosing —- to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name. And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury, and eroded our rights and freedoms.

What happens, Astore wonders, if the military 1% becomes sufficiently estranged from the rest of us that they become the troops of the economic 1%, who are “already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land”?

His solution: End all “wars of choice” whose goals are too nebulous and ephemeral to hold the attention of the general public.

Rest in peace, Joe Simon, who gave us Captain America.

A unique take on the nominating process comes from ex-senator and presidential wannabee Gary Hart:

The reason for the current confusion in the Republican nomination race has to do with the confused coalition the current party has become. It is now made up of a variety of factions that have no economic or social cement that holds them together.

Hart goes on to list them: “conservative Protestant evangelicals, neoconservative foreign policy and national security hawks, the Tea Party, much but not all of Wall Street, many of Main Street’s small business owners, libertarians and cultural conservatives”

Less important historically than who the eventual nominee will be is whether the nominating coalition proves strong enough to take over the national Republican party and control it for a number of elections and decades to come.

Why am I not surprised that President Obama and I like the same TV shows?

I got last week’s vocabulary term news desert, from Tom Stites. This week he elaborated in an article at the Nieman Journalism Lab. That was part of a 3-article series you can find here.

It’s time to remind you of my various holiday pieces: Midwinter recreates a pre-Christian winter solstice, and Carol at Christmas is one of my Mike DeSalvo stories. Ghosts of the Unitarian Christmas is my Dickens parody for UUs.

December 19, 2011 – 12:59 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)