Taking Sides

They say in Harlan County
there are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
— Florence Reece, Which Side Are You On?, 1931

In this week's Sift:

  • Connecting the Dots: Economy, Anger, Racism, Policy. A labor leader's speech at Harvard does a rare job of pulling it all together.
  • The Sift Bookshelf: Two Books on Social Justice. Unjust Deserts explains what's wrong with the it's-my-money argument against taxation. The Moral Underground reveals how middle-class people subvert the system when they see the reality of life among the working poor.
  • Thanks, Everybody. My April 15 message about how I benefit personally from tax-supported programs. Probably you do too.
  • The Doublethink Network. Learn from Bill O'Reilly: If people catch you making up facts, make up some more facts to prove them wrong.
  • Short Notes. Why airliners avoid ash clouds. The short supply of first-rate sociopaths. Who covers rural stories? Confederate History Month. Could Protestants be locked out of the Supreme Court? And more. 
Connecting the Dots: Economy, Anger, Racism, Policy
Two Wednesdays ago, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gave a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He put his finger on our economic problem in one sentence:

[F]or a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.

Naturally, he says, people are angry about the results of this misguided policy — lack of jobs, stagnant wages, unpayable debts, lack of opportunity for hard-working people. For similar reasons people were angry during the Depression, both here and in Germany. The question then was how that anger would be expressed: in violence against each other, or in united action to fix problems through the democratic process. 

Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.

This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.

In a good speech, you identify a problem and describe what people-in-general have to do to solve it. In a great speech, you bring it home. You look your audience in the eye and tell them what they have to do. You don't want people walking up the aisles in clumps saying, “What a good speech!” You want individuals staring at the carpet silently, thinking “What am I doing?”

So Trumka could just wring his hands about those know-nothing demagogues on cable TV and talk radio, and the policy wonks at the Kennedy School would eat it up. He could settle for denouncing racism, homophobia, nativism, and all the other distractions and conspiracy theories that the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs throw in our way — and probably get himself a standing ovation. 

That's not what he does. He brings it home:

At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice — whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred — of anti-intellectualism — will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.

And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.

… Let me be clear: There is no excuse for racism and hatred. All Americans need to unite against it. The labor movement must be a powerful voice against it. But you cannot fight hatred with greed. Working people are angry — and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

Which side are you on, Harvard? Are you going to keep churning out those talking heads who explain why working people have to tighten their belts and produce more for less money, and why it's right and just for all the economic growth to go to the top 1%? Or are you going to help envision an economy that works for everybody, and find the practical steps that will get us there?

And if you side with Wall Street, Harvard, don't get all huffy when ordinary people line up behind yahoos and hooligans. Don't wag your finger about how they just don't understand history or Econ 101. What other choice did you give them?
The Sift Bookshelf: Two Books on Social Justice

Put together, two well-written recent books tell a powerful story: 

  • Our economic system is unjust. What individuals receive has very little to do with what they earn as individuals. 
  • The injustice becomes undeniable when you look at the lives of the working poor. 
  • When middle class people have to deal with the working poor, many of them start subverting the system to mitigate that injustice.

The books are Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly and The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson. Each is about 200 pages and easy to read, but both have deep roots in academic research.

Unjust Deserts splits neatly into two halves. The first half is economic and explains the primary illusion of our market economy: Even though we get paid as individuals, most of the value in our paychecks comes from our participation in a system that we did not build ourselves, based on know-how largely inherited from past generations. 

We don't work harder or have more talent than Americans did in 1800, so that can't possibly be the basis for our much higher standard of living. And we didn't inherit this know-how as individuals, from the ancestors in our particular family trees. The knowledge base that has increased our productivity is primarily social. Our generation as a whole inherited it from previous generations.

And that raises the moral and political question discussed in the second half of Unjust Deserts: If this productive economic system is our common inheritance, what justifies extreme inequalities of wealth? Yes, people deserve to receive the value they personally create through their work and talent, but why should a few people also get the lion's share of the common inheritance?

Unjust Deserts argues that they shouldn't. Progressive taxation and social spending aren't some kind of theft, they're a (fairly feeble) attempt to restore the usurped inheritance. (I made this case independently last year — after Unjust Deserts was published but before I had heard of it.)

The Moral Underground picks the story up from there. The poor are often portrayed as lazy welfare collectors, but a lot of them are in fact working much harder than the rest of us. They are stuck in low-wage jobs with little flexibility and no future, and they have to juggle that small amount of money and limited free time to take care of their children.

The dirty secret of our moral vision is that it has a class bias. Solid upstanding reliable citizens are supposed to maintain certain standards: They fulfill their commitments. They show up where they're supposed to be, ready to do what they've committed to do. People who can't or won't do that are judged to be deficient morally, not economically.

But all that showing-up-well-prepared requires a support system. You need reliable transportation. You need people to watch your kids when you have to be on the job. And most of all you need someone to cover for you during those small emergencies that happen to everybody: You get sick; your kid gets sick; the baby-sitter doesn't show up; there's a problem at school — and so on.

Many of the working poor don't have that support system, so they're forced into choices that wealthier people in more flexible work environments don't have to make: Do you send a sick kid to school, leave her at home by herself, or stay home with her and get fired? Do you cut out on work early to make the bus, or rely on your 9-year-old to take care of the toddler until you can get home some other way? Do you bring the kids with you to your night job and hope that you can keep them safely out of sight while you fulfill your duties? No matter what you choose, you are immoral from somebody's point of view. You're a bad worker, a bad parent, or both.

When middle-class people are forced to confront the realities rather than the stereotypes of minimum-wage life, they are often shocked into subverting the system — breaking company rules and sometimes breaking the law so that hard-working people are not punished for the impossible choices they are forced to make.

Lisa Dodson is a social scientist who researches that rule-breaking and tries to identify the unstated moral code that pushes otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud, theft, and other crimes rather than participate in what they perceive as a greater injustice. Her book focuses focuses on three types of middle-class people who see the reality of life among the working poor: managers of low-paid workers, teachers, and health-care providers.

The Moral Underground's nitty-gritty stories humanize the theory in Unjust Desserts. What, for example, should teachers and principals do when a high-school student's performance suddenly collapses because her mother has gone back to Haiti to care for a dying grandmother, leaving the 16-year-old to manage three younger children? Should a doctor prescribe an unneeded drug to a Medicare-covered mother if that's the only way to get it to the uninsured daugher who does need it? Should a store manager fake his employee's time card rather than fire him for going to a meeting demanded by his son's teacher?

The working poor should be heirs to the vast social inheritance of America, but they are not. They deserve not handouts and charity — which they usually don't get either — but a fair social contract: In exchange for your hard work, you can not only survive, but thrive. You can raise children and give them a chance to thrive as well.

If your intuition tells you there's something fundamentally unfair about our economic system, Unjust Deserts explains why you're right. And if you feel driven to subvert that unjust system in your everyday life, The Moral Underground tells you that you're not alone.

J. K. Rowling is a billionaire now, but she can't vote Tory because she remembers belonging to the working poor:

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money.

Thanks, Everybody
Thursday was April 15, so I assume that Sift readers have either filed their tax returns or asked for an extension. Every year around this time the newspapers are full of columns about the evils of our tax system and how the government wastes our hard-earned money. So I thought I'd say something different.
Thank you, taxpayers.
I grew up hearing the story of how my grandfather stalled his Depression-era creditors long enough for Roosevelt's federal farm loan program to take effect. So our 160-acre farm didn't get foreclosed, my father farmed it all through my childhood, and my parents still own it today. Thank you.
I went to a public high school and a state university. My graduate education was paid for by a National Science Foundation fellowship. Thanks.
I've lived with the benefit of government regulation all my life. My food has been inspected. My drugs have been tested. The SEC has kept an eye on the people who sell me investments. The FDIC has kept my bank accounts secure. God knows how many unsafe or fraudulent products were taken off the shelves before I could make the mistake of buying them. Thanks.
My wife has had cancer twice and survived both times. I've never traced the history of the drugs and procedures that saved her life, but I'll bet there's a lot of federally-funded basic research involved. Thanks.
The air I breathe and the water I drink are cleaner than when I was in grade school — I was 12 the last time the Cuyahoga River caught fire — because laws to clean them up were passed and enforced. Thanks.
I drive on interstate highways in cars that are safe because government regulators forced the car companies (kicking and screaming, usually) to make them safe. I ride in airplanes guided by federal air traffic controllers, often flown by pilots who learned their trade in the Air Force. And those planes probably wouldn't exist at all without research paid for by the Pentagon. Thanks.
My parents are in their upper 80s and failing. I live a thousand miles away, my sister only a little closer. I don't know how we'd manage without Social Security and Medicare. This past year several of my friends have been out of work. I'd have been seriously worried about them if not for unemployment insurance. Thanks.
Thanks for the Internet, which started out as a federal program. Thanks for taking care of the poor, so that I don't have to live in a place where people drop dead in the streets. Thanks for FEMA, which I haven't needed yet, but you never know. Thanks to the CDC for all those infections that I haven't been exposed to. Thanks for the National Weather Service. Thanks for the national parks. 
I'm sure I left some stuff out, but you get the idea. Thank you for paying your taxes. Thank you for participating in this society where we take care of each other, and where we buy stuff collectively that none of us could buy as individuals. (The free market can give us Disneyworld, but it takes a government to give us Yellowstone or Yosemite.)
Every day, I read about a government that gives us nothing and steals our money, money that we earned by our own individual hard work, without any help at all. Maybe someday NASA will discover the planet those writers live on. When it does, let's not go there.
The Doublethink Network
When somebody nails you for making facts up, don't apologize. That's wimpy. This is your fantasy world and you can't let people push you around in it. Go make up some new facts to bash the person who nailed you.

Learn from the master, Bill O'Reilly. When Republican Senator Tom Coburn reassured a constituent that she wouldn't go to jail if she didn't buy health insurance, he strongly implied she must have gotten that false information from Fox News. That ticked O'Reilly off. Nobody at Fox, O'Reilly told Coburn, had ever said people would go to jail if they didn't have health insurance.

It doesn't happen [on this show], and we researched to find out if anybody on Fox News had ever said you're going to jail if you don't buy health insurance. Nobody's ever said it.

Nobody. Well, TPM's researchers must be more thorough than O'Reilly's, because they put together more than three minutes worth of clips in which one Fox talking head after another — including Glenn Beck being interviewed by O'Reilly himself — says that people will go to jail if they don't buy health insurance.

I'm wondering how the doublethink works. How long does it take Fox viewers to go from “You can go to jail — I heard it on Fox” to “Where does that Tom Coburn get off? Nobody at Fox ever said you could go to jail!”? Is it instantaneous or is some kind of process required? And is the jail meme dead now or just inactive? Could O'Reilly go back to claiming the health care bill puts people in jail and have his fans make the switch with him? How quickly?
Short Notes

Cocktail Party Physics explains why airliners can't fly through volcanic ash clouds: A jet engine's combustion chamber melts the ash particles, which then stick to its turbine blades. Eventually the engine stops. (In addition to an ash cloud, the Iceland eruption is producing some great pictures.)

KFC's new Double Down — two chicken patties surrounding cheese and bacon — sounds like the unhealthiest sandwich ever, but it can't hold a fat-dripping candle to Wendy's Triple Baconator.

A former CEO passes on this interesting theory of why CEOs make so much money. It really is supply and demand, but not the way some economists would have you believe:

the CEOs of the world largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1 to 3 percent of [people] are sociopaths– people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. 

The other skills a CEO needs are rare enough, but when you add in sociopathy it becomes a hard slot to fill.

I just ran across The Rural Blog, based at the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Issues and Community Journalism. It's mostly an aggregator rather than a source of original stories, but it aggregates stuff that you can miss if you just read big-city papers. Want to know the connection between union-busting and mine safety? The investigative journalism that won a Pulitzer for the tiny Bristol Herald Courier? What Obama's education people don't get about rural schools? What actual Kentuckians think of FX's new Harlan-County-based series Justified? Rural Blog's got it covered.

I had to smile at the implied smugness of Rural Blog's recent coverage of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. It's as if they're saying “You city folks just noticed this guy, did you?” Yes, RB, I did just notice him.

Yet another panel says Climategate amounted to nothing: “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit.”  

Stephen Colbert and Ta-Nehisi Coates comment on Confederate History Month.

Rick Perlstein's piece on the Tea Party is worth a read. This “spontaneous grass-roots anger” shows up like clockwork every time a Democratic administration takes office.

John Paul Stevens is the only Protestant on the Supreme Court, serving with six Catholics and two Jews.

The death toll at Big Branch Mine is only twice the daily national average of workplace deaths.

April 19, 2010 – 1:37 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Without Angels

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
— James Madison, The Federalist #51

In this week’s Sift:

  • Executive Power I: Assassinations. There’s a target list at the CIA. If your name were on it, people would come to kill you. That should bother you, even if you’re pretty sure your name isn’t on the list. Can we get this changed before the Palin administration takes office?
  • Executive Power II: Domestic Spying. On Inauguration Day, President Obama was well positioned to make a clean break with his predecessor’s legal justifications of warrantless wiretapping. He didn’t.
  • The Mine Disaster. It’s another example, if you needed one, that corporations value profit more than their workers’ lives.
  • Taxes, Terrorism, and the Washington Times. WT columnist Richard Rahn explains why the IRS is like the SS, why violence against civil servants is a justifiable response, and why IRS employees shouldn’t try to get away with a Nuremberg defense. I have a different diagnosis of tax-day anger, and make a modest proposal for re-directing it.
  • Short Notes. I review The Family. Paul Krugman explains climate-change economics. John McCain was never a maverick. When the newspapers are gone, what will crazy people hoard? Jon Stewart covers Fox News’ coverage of the nuclear treaty. Christie Wilcox breaks up with the Discovery Networks because of their relationship with that other woman. Newswipe presents the generic news report. And more.
Executive Power I: Assassinations
When I voted for Barack Obama, one of the major issues on my mind was executive power. In my pre-election Sift, two aspects of the Bush administration I wanted to bury were that it “asserts that it can imprison its own citizens indefinitely without trials” and it “spies on its own citizens without warrants”.

Regular Sift readers know that I continue to support President Obama, and that in general I’m happy with how this hopey-changey stuff is working out. But on executive power issues I’m not happy. Obama has tended to use his power with more restraint than Bush did, but for the most part he has defended the expansive view of presidential power that the Bush administration put forward.

And that’s not good enough. When I discussed these issues with Republicans during the Bush years, I always argued that the presidency needs to be kept under control even if you trust the person who happens to be president. I asked them to imagine Hillary Clinton becoming president and wielding the same powers Bush had established — because you can’t grant powers to a president you like, but imagine that those powers will magically go away when a president you don’t like takes office. It’s that government-of-laws-not-men thing.

Well, turn that around: If you don’t want President Palin (or whoever the next conservative president might be) exercising expansive, extra-constitutional powers, the time to get rid of those powers is now, when we can hope for cooperation from the Right.

During the Bush years, the case that crystalized everything for me was Jose Padilla. Padilla is an American citizen who was arrested in 2002 at O’Hare Airport. He was held in solitary confinement and sensory deprivation (the Christian Science Monitor characterized his treatment as a “mental twilight zone“), but wasn’t charged with a crime until 2006. During that time, the only thing justifying his detainment was a memo signed by President Bush declaring Padilla an enemy combatant.

I never argued that Padilla was an innocent victim or a nice guy. Maybe he was even the terrorist plotter the administration said he was. What bothered me was that legally, there was no difference between Padilla and me or you. If it was your name on that memo, then you’d have been in the brig in South Carolina with a hood over your head.

A presidential signature, and your whole life goes away. That’s not right. That’s not how America is supposed to be.

As in the Padilla case, it’s entirely possible that al-Awlaki is a bad guy. He’s a “radical” Muslim imam who is thought to be hiding in Yemen. Anonymous government sources tell the NYT that he’s an Al Qaeda operative and a recruiter for Al Qaeda. He had a connection with the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. And recently he is supposed to have crossed the line from justifying terrorism theoretically to actual participation in terrorist plots. So now he’s on a CIA “target list” — which means he can be assassinated.

Everything they say about al-Awlaki might be true. But as far as any legal process is concerned, he’s no different from you and me. If your name were on the same presidentially approved list at the CIA, then you could be assassinated too.

During the Bush years, this kind of thing was justified by daisy-chaining several arguments that individually make a certain amount of sense.

  • As commander-in-chief, the President has the powers that any subordinate commander would have.
  • On the battlefield, a military commander has the power to identify and kill the enemy. As long as he’s not willfully targeting non-combatants, the laws of war grant him considerable benefit of the doubt.
  • The struggle with Al Qaeda is a war.
  • The battlefield in the war against Al Qaeda could be anywhere. For example, no one thought that the World Trade Center was a battlefield until the planes hit it, or that Fort Hood was a battlefield until Major Nidal started shooting.
  • Defining the limits of the battlefield is a military judgment to be made by military commanders.

Each point sounds sort of reasonable in isolation. But if you put it all together, the President has the power of life-and-death anywhere he thinks he does. It’s up to him to decide where the battlefield is, and on that battlefield he can identify and kill the enemy.

You can imagine — I usually do imagine — that President Obama is trying to use this power responsibly. So if he thinks that the part of Yemen where al-Awlaki is hiding is a battlefield in the War on Terror, well, maybe it is. And maybe al-Awlaki is operating on that battlefield as an enemy of the United States. Maybe shooting him there really would be an act of war that would save innocent lives here.

But the Bush administration never drew any boundaries around this logic, and as far as I know the Obama administration hasn’t either. So I don’t see what stops President Obama (or some future president with less reason to like me) from deciding that my apartment building is the battlefield and that I am the enemy.

If Obama’s good character is the only thing keeping him from killing me, then we have a government of men and not of laws. And if we have a government of men today, someday we will have a government of bad men. We need to get back to a government of laws before that happens.

Other people have been all over this: Glenn Greenwald. Marcy Wheeler. Newsweek.

Executive Power II: Domestic Spying

In December, 2007, candidate Obama said:

No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.

We should have gotten him to define illegal. Foolishly, most liberals thought Obama was referring to a plain reading of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In other words, we assumed illegal meant (or at least included) “without a warrant”. It’s debatable whether the Founders would have recognized a warrant from a secret court like FISA, but at least a FISA warrant is some kind of check on the executive branch.

The Obama Justice Department inherited all the suits against the government that were still unresolved on Inauguration Day. That would have been the moment to start over, or at the very least to ask judges for time to write a new policy. Instead, the Obama lawyers have mostly stuck with the same arguments the Bush lawyers made.

The hardest thing about controlling warrantless wiretapping is finding a case that a court can rule on. A court can’t just decide on its own that the government is doing something illegal; it needs a suit filed by an actual victim of the illegal activity. But if the wiretaps are secret, how do you establish your victimhood?

In general you can’t, but a variety of screw-ups have made it obvious that the Al-Haramain Foundation (a Saudi charity suspected of being an Al Qaeda front) was wiretapped, and the government has refused to produce a warrant. The Bush administration introduced the Catch-22 defense that the wiretapping program itself is secret, so Al-Haramain’s lawsuit should be quashed by the state secrets privilege. (In other words: The state secret is the fact that the state is breaking its own laws. And this continues to be a state secret even after the New York Times wins a Pulitzer for exposing it.) The Obama administration has taken up that defense as if it were their own.

At the end of March, a federal judge rejected that argument, saying:

Under defendants’ theory, executive branch officials may treat FISA as optional and freely employ the SSP to evade FISA, a statute enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.

The judge issued a summary judgment against the government. (Text here.) The case may be headed for the Supreme Court, though Marcy Wheeler thinks there are some hidden nuggets here that the government might be inclined to accept.

If it does go to the Supremes, by then a new Obama appointee may have replaced Justice Stevens, one of the most stalwart voices against excessive executive power. Glenn Greenwald outlines the ways in which one of the front-runners, Elena Kagan, would have more sympathy for the executive than Stevens did.

The Mine Disaster
I assume you’re getting your primary coverage of the West Virginia mine disaster somewhere else. So I’ll just add a few supplementary thoughts:

1. This is the current level of corporate ethics: If they can make money by killing their workers or customers, they will. It’s not just a few bad apples; it’s standard operating procedure. (See my review of Doubt is Their Product.) That’s why we need unions and governments: As individuals, we’re not powerful enough to stop corporations from killing us.

2. Current law is more concerned with protecting the mine owners from frivolous claims than protecting the lives of miners. Supposedly regulations were strengthened in 2006, but the conservative theory of regulation still prevails: The government needs to have an airtight case before it acts, and the company gets access to a multi-level appeal process before it has to respond — no matter how urgent the issue is. The WaPo reports:

When weighing whether to put a mine in the pattern-of-violation category, federal regulators cannot count any contested violation, and they may consider only violations that have occurred within the past 24 months. Yet cases at the commission are taking an average of 27 months to resolve

So even though the mine that exploded had 11 times the national rate of safety violations during the past year, those violations didn’t count yet because Massey Energy was still contesting them.

3. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is a piece of work. In general I don’t like to demonize individuals, but I’ll make an exception here: This is a bad man. See Digby and Chuckie Corra for a more detailed case, or just watch him pose as a friend of labor while wearing a flag shirt at a teabagger rally and saying this:

Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety. The very idea that they care more about miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.

Because he cared so much about safety, 29 miners are dead. He cares about water pollution too. And West Virginia’s mountains.

Taxes, Terrorism, and the Washington Times
Washington Times columnist Richard Rahn unloads a big heap of crazy about the IRS, comparing it to the SS and the KGB, and doing his best to justify violence against the ordinary folks who work there.

According to news accounts, attacks and threats against IRS personnel are rising, and unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue until there is a fundamental change in our tax laws and collection methods. People who do not have access to the media and cannot afford expensive tax lawyers sometimes reach such a level of frustration with the IRS that they resort to violent or irrational behavior.

Here’s an idea: Maybe there’d be less violent or irrational behavior if we had a fundamental change in the irresponsible rabble-rousing of terrorist sympathizers like Richard Rahn.

Violence against IRS employees is no joke. Joe Stack crashed his plane into an IRS office just two months ago, killing Vernon Hunter and causing Ken Hunter to observe, “My Dad wasn’t responsible for [Stack’s] tax problems.” But Rahn has an answer for that:

IRS officials and workers will say the tax code is not their fault – it is the fault of Congress – and they are only doing their jobs. It is unambiguously true that the tax code and IRS are creatures of Congress, with all of its self-dealing, corruption, ignorance and incompetence. But it also is true, and was made explicit at the Nuremberg trials, that those who carry out orders that they know to be wrong or should know to be wrong are not absolved of personal responsibility.

Nuremberg? Yeah, ruling that somebody’s spare bedroom isn’t really a home office is exactly like gassing Jews. Totally the same thing.

For the record: Taxes are low here compared to other wealthy countries. And personally, I’ve managed to do my own taxes for decades now without an expensive lawyer and without killing anybody. Here’s my secret: I assume that to the extent I made money, I owe tax. The tax laws for ordinary people make a lot of sense from that point of view.

On the other hand, if you start with the view that government is trying to steal your money, that it is your moral responsibility to do everything you can to stop them from doing it, and that a person as clever as yourself ought to be able to win this game and not owe any tax — then the tax form will drive you nuts.

Here’s my suggestion: If April 15 drives you to “resort to violent or irrational behavior” don’t go after IRS employees, go after the people who put those crazy ideas in your head. (That, by the way, is a joke. I don’t want to hear about some Sift reader crashing a plane into the Washington Times. As satisfying as it is to imagine Rahn spending one day dealing with the same kind of fear he’s inspiring in civil servants, two wrongs don’t make a right.)

Rahn misses what’s actually immoral about our tax code: The kind of income that rich people make (dividends and capital gains) is taxed at a 15% rate, while wages can be taxed at rates as high as 35%. (See page 89 of the 1040 Instructions.) Wage-and-tip-earners start paying a marginal rate higher than 15% when their taxable income crosses $34,000 for single people and $64,000 for married couples. So a waitress serving martinis to a table of hedge-fund managers may well be paying a higher marginal tax rate than her customers.

Here’s a principle that should make as much sense to honest conservatives as it does to liberals: Income is income. Taxing different kinds of income differently distorts the economy because then people do tricks to turn one kind of income into another. The reason corporations get so tricky about stock options, for example, is that CEOs pay less tax on stock-option capital gains than if they made the same amount of money in salary.

Dwight Eisenhower used to be considered a mainstream Republican. During his administration the top tax rate was over 90%.

Conservatives are all about catching and punishing law-breakers … unless they’re rich. Fox News’ Megan Kelly interviewed Rep. Steve King about the IRS’ new unit focused on wealthy tax cheats, and together they raised a lot of sympathy for those poor, poor tax-cheating billionaires. If we make the rich obey the law, Kelly and King claim, they’ll take their magical job-creating abilities elsewhere. “No one ever got a job from a poor person,” King says.

Violence against census workers is no joke either.

Short Notes

My review of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power ended up focusing more on religion than politics. So I moved it to my religion blog, Free and Responsible Search.

Paul Krugman’s article about the economics of climate change (Building a Green Economy in the NYT magazine) is long but worth it.

[O]nce you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost.

In February, the conservative media was claiming that a snowstorm in D.C. disproved global warming. Back when I was declaring this to be a stupid story, I predicted:

Undoubtedly next summer there will be a heat wave somewhere, and I doubt that Fox News or the Washington Times will present it as evidence that Gore was right after all.

My time estimate was off. Wednesday it hit 90 degrees in Boston, breaking the old April 7 record by four degrees. This comes right after New England’s wettest March ever caused floods. No second thoughts from Fox or the Times.

Still, it’s important not to answer stupid with stupid: Weather — hot or cold, wet or dry — isn’t climate. Only long-term weather patterns are relevant to the global-warming discussion. This study, for example, looks at 60 years worth of Northeastern weather and concludes that storms with heavy rainfall are happening more and more often.
Thinking ahead: A Texas man filed for a restraining order against the police who might try to prevent him from using deadly force at an abortion clinic. The court forwarded the request to the FBI, who arrested him.

Remember that stuff from 2008 about John McCain being a maverick? You must have misheard. “I never considered myself a maverick,” he says now. Gail Collins replies:

if you are planning to deny that you ever thought of yourself as a maverick, it would be better not to have subtitled one of your memoirs “The Education of an American Maverick.”

What unhyped journalism looks like: Dow Jones Crosses Intrinsically Meaningless Milestone.

BBC-4’s Newswipe explains why news reports all look the same.

An Onion News Network panel discusses: How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers?

If you want to get actual facts about issues like the new nuclear agreement with Russia, you’re better off listening to a comedian than to Fox News.

Even Senator Coburn realizes you can’t take Fox seriously. BTW, as much as I disagree with almost everything else Coburn does, I have to give him credit for smoothing the waters here. A woman at a public meeting is worried that she’ll be put in jail for refusing health insurance, and Coburn not only calms her down, but goes on to say that Nancy Pelosi is a nice person.

A gay-friendly Presbyterian church in Houston was burned by an arsonist Thursday. Member Kevin Murphy reports: “We lost everything: two buildings, all our furniture, books, hymnals, a new piano, a wall of crosses from around the world and so many other things.”

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has an online petition asking Discovery Communications to drop its plans to air a “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” series. And Christie Wilcox writes Discovery a break-up letter:

How dare you be with her and try to tell me that you haven’t changed, that you’re the same science-loving, environment-protecting network I fell in love with?

April 12, 2010 – 2:21 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Meanwhile, in the Real World

I reject your reality and substitute my own. 
— Adam Savage, Mythbusters
In this week's Sift:
  • Propaganda Lesson: A Manufactured Scandal Evaporates. A conservative scholar tried to show us that the stimulus was a big Democratic slush fund. Instead, she demonstrated how corporate money turns into right-wing propaganda. Plus updates on other fake scandals: ACORN, Climategate, and the thousands of new IRS agents Obama's going to hire. It all leads up to a Rachel Maddow rant worth sending to your conservative friends.
  • Recovery, Sort Of. Technically, the recession has been over for months and the stock market turned around a long time ago. Now it looks like the economy has finally started creating jobs again — but not many of them. 
  • Catching Up With Pope Benedict. Not being very pro- or anti-Catholic, I lost track of the Church's pedophilia scandal several years ago. But when I heard people calling for the Pope to resign, I figured I'd better catch up.
  • Short Notes.  A California high school greets a hate group with song and celebration. Palin's April Fools joke. First thoughts about the iPad. Studies of lesbian birds. National Review convenes a white panel to figure out what's wrong with blacks. And more.
Propaganda Lesson: A Manufactured Scandal Evaporates
It's good to have Nate Silver on the job. 
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University recently published a study of how the stimulus funds were distributed. She noted that congressional districts represented by Democrats 

received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republican[-represented district]s were granted

Blogging at National Review's The Corner, she was more direct:

Unemployment isn’t a factor, but politics is. Your stimulus dollars at work.

From there it was all over the conservative blogosphere. Allahpundit on Hot Air wrote sarcastically:

I’m sure everything’s kosher: Surely a president who showed such fierce resistance to special interests during the ObamaCare process wouldn’t let political considerations affect his stimulus awards.

Pretty damning, right? At water coolers around the country the message was getting out: The stimulus was just a big political slush fund.
But then Nate Silver looked at what was happening under the hood of de Rugy's study. The congressional districts that received the most stimulus funding — they all contained capitals of large states: Sacramento, Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, and so on.
This, of course, makes perfect sense. A lot of stimulus funds are distributed to state agencies, which are then responsible for allocating and administering the funds to the presumed benefit of citizens throughout the state. These state agencies, of course, are usually located in or near the state capital. … 

The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is that state capitals are much more likely to elect Democrats to Congress for a variety of reasons. They are, by definition, urban (although some smaller state capitals like Montpelier stretch the definition). They are, by definition, home to large numbers of governmental employees, who may be more sympathetic to bigger government. They tend to be highly educated and often are home to large state universities.
Duh. A lot of stimulus money headed for conservative Texas passed through its state capital Austin, a liberal university town represented by Democrat Lloyd Doggett. Corruption? No, it's called federalism.

How could an academic researcher make such an obvious mistake? Well, who says it was a mistake? All in all, de Rugy's report is a pretty good example of how corporate money turns into made-to-order academic studies which turn into right-wing propaganda.

The Mercatus Center may have a university affiliation, but it was founded by Rich Fink (you gotta love that name), former president of the ultra-conservative Koch Family Foundations. Board members include Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and billionaire Charles Koch. Funding largely comes from Koch Industries, a private energy company. (Coincidentally, Greenpeace recently published a report on Koch Industries and its funding of global-warming denial, a topic then picked up by Rachel Maddow.) 

Veronique de Rugy is a career conservative scholar. Prior to Mercatus, she was at the American Enterprise Institute (a Koch beneficiary, according to Greenpeace) and the Cato Institute (co-founded by Charles Koch). She looks like an academic, but her bread is buttered by how well she pleases people like Charles Koch, not by her reputation for unbiased research.
Remember Climategate? Hackers stole data from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University, so that global-warming deniers could publish pieces of climate scientists' emails out of context and create the appearance of some sinister conspiracy.

I've mentioned before that Penn State did an investigation of its climate scientist, Michael Mann, who was implicated in the “scandal”. He was cleared of any dishonesty.

This week the Science and Technology Committee of Parliament chimed in with a report on its investigation. 

insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor [Phil] Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact.

Not that anybody is paying attention so long after the “scandal” made headlines. 
In both cases, a separate study is evaluating the scientific results themselves, and not just the researchers' honesty. (That's what “limited inquiry” means in the quote.) Those reports will appear later, when even fewer people are paying attention. When they report (as they will) that the case for global warming remains intact, even fewer people will notice.

So despite the eventual debunking, mission-accomplished for the propagandists: Several climate scientists have been smeared, the whole field has been put under a cloud, the victims have lost god-knows-how-many working hours responding to this distraction, and unknown numbers of scientists around the world have been intimidated into staying out of the public eye. All based on nothing. 

Good work, guys. I hear Koch Industries might be hiring.
Have you heard that the IRS will have to hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health-care mandate? FactCheck.org investigated and found that Republicans made that number up, based on more-or-less nothing. 

According to the USA Today, when the Massachusetts Department of Revenue began enforcing that state's similar mandate (conservative Republican RomneyCare being the model for radical socialist ObamaCare) “the state tax agency did not get extra staff or money for enforcement and has not had serious difficulties gathering the information”.
Remember the tapes of ACORN giving advice to the guy posing as a pimp? By promising not to prosecute on privacy-invasion charges, California Attorney General Jerry Brown got to see the unedited video rather than the fabricated final product. We already knew that James O'Keefe went into ACORN offices wearing a tie rather than the outrageous pimp outfit he edited into his videos. But Brown's official report gives us a new detail:

In each of [the] ACORN offices they visited together, Giles posed as a prostitute fleeing an abusive pimp, and O’Keefe posed as her boyfriend, trying to help her

That changes the picture a little, doesn't it?

If you've got friends and relatives emailing you the latest laundry list of conservative fantasy, I recommend sending them a link to this video: Friday Rachel Maddow went on a righteous rant against made-up stories, beginning with the ACORN-pimp scandal and moving on to a litany of other current and recent nonsense. She concludes:

What we're dealing with here is the unmooring of politics from facts. … It's the triumph of fake politics: advantage gleaned from stuff that's not real.  … Let's have the great American debate about the role of government and the best policies for the country. It's fun! It's citizenship. It's activism. It makes the country better when we have those debates. And your country needs you; it needs all of us. But two things disqualify you from this process: You can't threaten to shoot people, and you have to stop making stuff up.

Recovery, Sort Of
The economy gained 162,000 jobs in March. For most of the last few decades that wouldn't be worth noting, because it takes about 100,000 new jobs a month just to stay even with population growth. But it was the biggest gain in three years.

GDP started upward again in the third quarter of 2009, nearly nine months ago, and the Dow Jones has crept up to a post-recession high just short of 11,000 — still well below the 14,000 peak in 2007.

Don't expect a boom any time soon though. We're close enough to peak oil that production can't increase quickly. And while in the long term it should be possible to have economic growth without more oil, in the short term it isn't. So each jump in the world economy will increase oil demand. But supply won't increase (because it can't), causing a price spike that will dampen the economy again.

But we could have a bubble in something. With interest rates this low, everyone is tempted to find something to invest in. People are still scared, but they dearly want to believe they can do better than the 1/4 % their money market accounts are paying. It's only a matter of time before somebody cooks up a believable high-return-no-risk story, comparable to “real estate never goes down”. And then there will be another bubble.

Catching Up With Pope Benedict

I've been slow to take an interest in the Catholic Church's latest round of troubles. Priests abusing kids, the hierarchy more interested in avoiding scandal than in protecting the innocent — it's a lurid story, but we've heard it before. Since I was never Catholic and have little feeling one way or the other towards the Catholic Church, it took people calling for the Pope's resignation and the Vatican asserting his legal immunity to get my my attention.

If you're also a late-comer to the story, here's a timeline. The gist: Nobody has accused the Pope himself of abusing anybody. But in the last few months it has become increasingly apparent that he bears responsibility far beyond the vague he-was-in-charge kind. And he hasn't responded well.

The cases. Trouble for the Pope comes in three chunks, corresponding to three periods in his career. In Germany, where future pope Joseph Ratzinger was an archbishop from 1977 to 1982, Der Spiegel (literally “The Mirror”, Germany's equivalent of Time) has been exposing a widespread clerical abuse problem. The most damning case for the Pope is Father Peter Hullermann, who Ratzinger allowed to transfer into his diocese in Munich after accusations of abuse in Essen. Hullermann's therapist warned Ratzinger's diocese that Hullermann should be kept away from children, but the warning was ignored and the abuse continued.

Next, Ratzinger became a cardinal and took a job in the Vatican as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor to the Inquisition, the office in charge of internal church discipline. Two cases that came under Ratzinger's pervue were Father Lawrence Murphy, who molested boys at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, and Father Marcial Maciel of Mexico, founder of the Legion of Christ, who was accused of molesting more than 20 seminarians under his authority, as well as financial irregularities and fathering a secret family. Neither priest was ever defrocked. Both are dead now.

Father Murphy never faced any formal discipline for his actions. Maciel, who was a favorite of the previous Pope despite accusations of abuse, is a mixed case. Pope Benedict removed him from active service in 2006, but took no further action. Maciel died in 2008 at the age of 87, and the Legion of Christ is only beginning to acknowledge his faults. Benedict's defenders argue that at least he did something about Maciel after he became Pope.

Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Last May the Irish government released the Ryan Report, the result of a 9-year investigation into the physical and sexual abuse of children in government-supported orphanages and reform schools, most of which were run by Catholic monastic orders, especially the Congregation of Christian Brothers. The report concluded that

Sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions. … Cases of sexual abuse were managed with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation. This policy resulted in the protection of the perpetrator. … When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again. … The deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education towards the Congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring of the schools.

Benedict's reaction has been tepid. In a recent open letter to Irish Catholics, he sympathized but sounded distant, as if he wished the Irish well in dealing with a problem that has little to do with him:

Like yourselves, I have been deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light regarding the abuse of children and vulnerable young people by members of the Church in Ireland, particularly by priests and religious. I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.

Responses. That letter prompted a public reply from the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, who as a teen spent 18 months in a Dublin reform school. She wrote in the Washington Post:

To many people in my homeland, the pope's letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children. …

Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and in a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.

Other Catholics have circled their wagons around the Pope. The Vatican has begun a blame-the-media campaign focused particularly on the New York Times. The Catholic League took out a full-page ad in the March 24 Times with this conclusion:

Here's what's really going on. The Times has teamed up with Jeffrey Anderson, a radical lawyer who has made millions suing the Church (and greasing professional victims' groups like SNAP) so they can weaken its moral authority. Why? Because of issues like gay marriage and women's ordination. That's what's really driving them mad, and that's why they are on the hunt. Those who doubt this to be true need to ask why the debt-ridden Times does not spend the same resources looking for dirt in other institutions that occurred a half-century ago.

No doubt Der Spiegel, Sinead O'Connor, the Irish government, and the Archbishop of Canterbury all have similarly nefarious reasons for pursuing the issue.

A view from the outside. if you believe, as I do, that priests are people and churches are bureaucracies, the tragedy of all this remains but the shock goes away. Whenever you give people unsupervised power, some of them will abuse it. And if you put a bunch of abusers together in an organization, the bureaucracy will try to cover for them. Nobody should be surprised.

That pattern isn't new and it isn't uniquely Catholic. The Founders understood it well. To them, unsupervised power was the central problem of designing a government; that's what motivated the whole checks-and-balances structure in the Constitution.

Clerical abuse isn't a new or uniquely Catholic problem either. A few years ago I was researching the history of my own Unitarian Universalist denomination, and learned about one of our famous writers, Horatio Alger, whose rags-to-riches stories made him one of the best-selling authors of the 19th century. Fiction, it turns out, was a second career for Alger; he started out in the Unitarian ministry. At his first parish he was accused of molesting two teen-age boys, and was allowed to leave town without scandal on the condition that he leave the ministry as well. (The hope that good deeds can make up for a clergyman's past wrong-doing is the subject of his poem Friar Anselmo's Sin.)

Alger's story points to what the uniquely Catholic problem is: the monolithic structure of the Church. Alger's parish was self-governing, so he was answerable to people, not just to a God that he himself could claim to speak for. So while Alger was never tried as a criminal, he wasn't allowed to make a career out of sexual abuse either.

The Catholic Church still hasn't grasped what the Founders knew in the 18th century: A system without checks and balances is not built for human beings. So unless God is ready to take a more hands-on approach to running the Catholic Church than He ever has in the past, some fundamental restructuring is in order. Until that happens, the lesson has not been learned.

Short Notes
If you're looking for something upbeat to watch, check out what happened when an anti-gay hate group picketed Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

April 1 premiere of Sarah Palin's “Real American Stories” on Fox News was an unintentional April Fools joke. The Fox web site said the guests would “speak to Palin”, but it turns out the headliners never met Palin. She was just the studio host for canned interviews, some done years ago.

Hip-hop star LL Cool J was supposed to be on the guest list, but got pulled after he tweeted:

Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW.

Yeah, but controversy raises ratings, right? Not so much.

Here's a hint about which way the wind is blowing: Now that he has won the Republican Senate primary in Illinois, Mark Kirk won't repeat his pledge to repeal the health-care bill.

The iPad is out, and Huffington Post collects a bunch of rave reviews. But they miss the less enthusiastic WaPo review, in which a woman with small hands complains that she can't find a comfortable way to hold the iPad. PCWorld lists iPad alternatives.

I have mixed feelings. The this-changes-everything hype goes right past me, but if a tablet can replace the laptop I usually travel with, great. And a big iPod could replace my living-room computer, which is mostly a media machine anyway. But I think the iPad's weight, price, and battery life make it a poor substitute for a Kindle. And as an long-time rebel against the Microsoft monopoly, I dislike the idea that iTunes has to manage all my media and all my software has to come from the Apple App store.

When Canada denies freedom of speech to right-winger Ann Coulter, who comes to her defense? Left-winger Glenn Greenwald. I'm sure she'd return the favor, right?

The NYT magazine has an interesting if somewhat lengthy discussion of homosexuality in the animal world. The slide show that goes with it is hilariously titled The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name. (It's a play on the closing line of this poem.)

Paul Krugman explains financial reform, making one main point: Breaking up the big financial institutions shouldn't be the central goal, because that just puts us back in the situation during the Great Depression, when the problem was small banks falling like dominoes.

He wants to focus on regulation, and not letting banks of any size take big risks. Those regulations also need to be extended beyond traditional banks to “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers. Anything that plays the role of a bank needs to be regulated like a bank.

A Florida urologist has posted a sign asking Obama voters to seek care elsewhere. The sign has no force — he's not refusing care to people who come in anyway. But folks who advocate for those “freedom of conscience” provisions in health-care laws should take notice: This is where that stuff leads.

Conscience provisions that single out specific issues avoid this kind of trivialization, but at a different price: The government privileges some people's consciences over other people's. The Hyde Amendment, for example, bans federal funding of abortions because people who abhor abortion shouldn't have to pay for it through their taxes. However, death-penalty opponents still pay for executions, pacifists still pay for weapons, and vegetarians still pay for meat inspectors. What makes a pro-lifer's conscience special?

National Review convened a panel of six experts to puzzle out why recessions still hit black people harder than white people, even though we solved that pesky race-discrimination problem a long time ago. The experts — all whites, for some reason — couldn't agree on what blacks do to make themselves more vulnerable to a bad economy. It remains a mystery.

April 5, 2010 – 11:50 am Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Victory Lap

Winning takes talent. To repeat takes character. — John Wooden

In this week's Sift … I wanted to move on from health care, but the rest of the world didn't. So this week we focus on the aftermath of a contentious struggle.

  • The Democrats: “Yes We Did!” This week we saw something we haven't seen in a long time: Democrats unapologetic about getting what they wanted. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, and a little wondering why things can't be like this more often.
  • The Republicans: Repeal and Judicial Activism. Now who's counting on unelected judges to legislate from the bench? And Phil Gramm explains the difference between liberal and conservative approaches to health care.
  • Violent Rhetoric and Violent Action. Right-wing anger took a violent turn, though not a deadly one yet. Is it too much to ask Republican leaders to just say no?
  • No Persians Need Apply. The WaPo's slimy criticism of Christiane Amanpour.
  • Short Notes. The Onion achieves universal news parody, but still can't outdo the Texas Board of Education. Scott Brown nominates Rachel Maddow to run against him. Sarah Palin seems not to know who the Founding Fathers are. How I got David Frum fired. And more.
The Democrats: “Yes We Did!”

President Obama is a basketball player, so he knows: When you break the other team's full-court press and get the ball across the half-court line, you don't just sigh in relief and wait for the defense to re-set. No, you take advantage of their gamble by going straight to the basket.

That's what he was doing in Iowa Thursday. (Highlight video here.) The heavy lifting was over and the final piece of the bill would pass Thursday evening. But he didn't let up. Instead, he started making the Republicans pay for their outrageous rhetoric and tactics:

There’s been plenty of fear-mongering, plenty of overheated rhetoric. You turn on the news, you’ll see the same folks are still shouting about there’s going to be an end of the world because this bill passed. (Laughter.) I’m not exaggerating. Leaders of the Republican Party, they called the passage of this bill “Armageddon.” (Laughter.) Armageddon. “End of freedom as we know it.”

So after I signed the bill, I looked around to see if there were any — (laughter) — asteroids falling or — (applause) — some cracks opening up in the Earth. (Laughter.) It turned out it was a nice day. (Laughter.) Birds were chirping. Folks were strolling down the Mall. People still have their doctors.

That's exactly the right tone. Don't try to trump the other side's ridiculous claims, laugh at them.

We would never have gotten this advantage if the bill hadn't passed. The Republicans could have kept up the nonsense and claimed that they deserved credit for averting Armageddon. Now they're like the preacher who promised his followers the end of the world on a date certain. The date has come and gone, and the world is still here.

The View From the Bleachers blog  and Bob Johnson on Daily Kos continue the mockery.

Will-I-Am's “Yes We Can” video gets updated with a hell-no-you-can't counterpoint from John Boehner.

What would the health-care debate had sounded like if both sides had tried to be reasonable? Probably like this conversation between Joshua Cohen and Brink Lindsey.

Sometimes a news host's ego eclipses the story. In this clip two months ago, Rep. Alan Grayson tells Chris Matthews exactly what is going to happen: The Democrats will pass a health-care bill using reconciliation in the Senate. Matthews not only doesn't believe Grayson, he berates, badgers, and attempts to humiliate him. Matthews accuses him of “pandering to the netroots” — lying, in other words, telling people like me what we want to hear even though he knows it won't happen.

Remember, this isn't Fox News, this is the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC.

The Republicans: Repeal and Judicial Activism
Friday's Wall Street Journal gave five Republican views of where to go from here. The most interesting is from Phil Gramm, who summed up the difference between Republican and Democratic health-care policy like this:

Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.

This quote is worth examining in some detail, because it really does capture the difference. Look at what's missing: First, to Gramm the problem is entirely cost; access doesn't matter. If people can't get coverage because of, say, pre-existing conditions, that's not Phil Gramm's problem. And meanwhile, during the decades-long struggle to control costs, tens of millions of Americans won't be able to afford coverage, and tens of thousands of them will die unnecessarily every year. But that's not Phil Gramm's problem either.

Now look at his cost-control choices. Both are variations on one idea: Somebody has to go without care. The only questions are who and how. Gramm thinks the who should be the people who have to scramble to meet a budget. He doesn't say that, but think it through: In his “system where costs matter” where else would savings come from?

Economizing on your health-care decisions is not like buying chicken instead of steak. It's more like buying the half-price dented can that might have botulism or eating the stuff in the refrigerator that is a little spoiled but probably still OK. Probably. It's a gamble, in other words. 

So you have a pain somewhere and your doctor says, “Probably it's nothing, but it could be cancer. We should do a test.” The test turns out to be expensive. In Phil Gramm's system, if you're rich you get the test, but otherwise you have to think: “Am I going to risk it?” A lot of cash-strapped people will take the risk rather than pay for the test, and some of them will die.

That's how Republicans cut costs: People die, but it's their own decision so it's OK. They gambled and lost. Not my problem. 

That's what it means to “empower families” in “a system where costs matter”: We'll push struggling families into gambling with their lives.

Here's the cost-control feature Gramm ignores: The system could be more efficient if the decision-making weren't so atomized. Think about vaccinations. A system-wide approach can wipe out a disease (like we almost did with smallpox and are trying to do with polio). That's a huge cost savings, but it takes a government mandate. 

An even better example is antibiotic-resistant hospital-bourne infections — a huge problem that costs billions and kills about 19,000 Americans every year. Individuals and families can't do much about it — my Dad picked up MRSA in a hospital after surgery this summer, and I don't see what we could have done differently. 

Well, there is one thing: We could have sent Dad to Norway for his surgery, because Norway (one of those “socialist” countries whose example is supposed to scare us) has MRSA pretty well whipped. They did it by cutting down the unnecessary use of antibiotics.  Fewer antibiotics in the environment means fewer chances for resistant bacteria to evolve. They don't cure MRSA any better than we do, but they prevent it.

The Dutch also control MRSA using a “search and destroy” strategy that tests everyone who enters a hospital. That, again, is a “socialist” solution: Most MRSA carriers never get sick and have no individual motivation to pay for a test, but you force tests on them anyway. It works.

Did I mention that Norwegians on average live two years longer than Americans? And that they spent $4763 per person on health care in 2007, compared to $7290 in the US? (For the Dutch it's 1.6 years and $3837.) Republican-style individual decision-making can't get you there; it just trades off cost against survival. To improve both you need a system-wide approach. You need to deal with the public health problems, not just the individual health problems.

Republican state attorney generals are filing suit to have the bill declared unconstitutional, because the Constitution does not empower the government to require people to buy private-market products like health insurance. There's really no precedent for such a ruling, but Republicans must be hoping that the conservative judicial activists on the Supreme Court will ignore precedent and rule based on their ideology, as they did in the Citizens United case or Bush v Gore.

As far as constitutionality and the Founders' intent goes, Joe Conason points out that George Washington signed a bill with an individual mandate. The Militia Act of 1792 requires each able-bodied male of military age to 

provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges …

The overall Republican narrative is that Obama is an extreme left-winger: socialist or even Marxist or totalitarian — like Stalin or Hitler. 

Health care has to be shoe-horned into that narrative, because Obamacare is almost entirely built from ideas that Republicans had back in the days when Republicans were sane. Senators old enough to have supported the 1993 Heritage Foundation plan — Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley and others — have been spinning wildly to explain why they now think that their old proposal is unconstitutional. Their defense seems to be that nobody worried about the Constitution back in 1993, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Grassley told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell: “I don't think anybody gave it much thought until three or four months ago.”

Mitt Romney has the even-harder problem of explaining why his 2006 Massachusetts health plan was good, but the Obama plan (basically just a bigger version of the same thing) is horrible. The difference he points to: His plan was bipartisan. Matt Yglesias responds: Obama's plan would have been bipartisan too if people like Romney had supported it.

I'll just tell you this, if this [health-care bill] passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented, I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica.

Buh-bye Rush. Send us a card. BTW: Costa Rica is a good choice. They have universal health care and they let foreigners buy in cheaply. They also have no armed forces, so you never have to worry about some crazy president starting a war for no reason. You'll love it.

The Congressman who shouted “baby killer” at Bart Stupak has been identified: Republican Randy Neugebauer of Texas. He has apologized to Stupak, but is also raising money based on his outburst.

Violent Rhetoric and Violent Action
Another reason to respond with humor rather than anger is that the anger is already out of hand.
Passage of health-care reform sparked a wave of vandalism against Democrats in Congress: broken windows at several congressional offices, and (a little bit more scary) a cut gas line at a house that right-wingers thought belonged to a Democratic Congressman but actually belonged to his brother. One Missouri Democrat found a coffin outside his home.
Rachel Maddow led with this story two nights in a row. Only in retrospect will we know whether that was prescient or an over-reaction. If this spirals up to an Oklahoma City bombing or a JFK assassination, it was prescient. If occasional vandalism is the extent of it, Rachel (and a few other people on the Left) over-reacted.
Here's what is beyond dispute: 
  • Conservatives like to use violent metaphors in their rhetoric. So Sarah Palin talks about “reloading” and puts up a map with “targeted” congressional districts in crosshairs. (Even the View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck — inexplicably left off my list of blonde conservative female pundits last week — described this as “despicable“.) Democrats also use fighting metaphors, but usually stay away from more graphic ones involving weapons or military tactics.
  • In this era, right-wing crazies are more violent than left-wing crazies. That hasn't always been true, but it has for a few decades now. If there are left-wing militias groups training for revolution, I haven't seen them. Lefties don't shoot people in churches (not just here, but here), and we aren't making heroes of the people who do. We haven't dive-bombed offices we don't like or shot up museums lately.
What's at issue is the connection between metaphoric violence and physical violence. A recent NYT article minimized the relationship. While admitting the possibility of riling up an occasional “lone wolf”, Benedict Carey says:

the psychological distance between talk and action — between fantasizing about even so much as brick heaving and actually doing it — is far larger for a typical, peaceable citizen than many assume. 

Still, Republican leaders haven't just just pooh-poohed the connection, they've leaned towards justifying the violence. Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, responded to the IRS kamikaze by repeating his criticisms of the IRS. And Scott Brown said, “No one likes paying taxes.” John Boehner did say that violence was “unacceptable”, but only after sympathizing with the motives of those who threaten:

I know many Americans are angry over this health care bill, and that Washington Democrats just aren't listening

Eric Cantor tried to turn the attack around: He accused Democrats of “fanning the flames” by complaining about the threats against them. And he claimed (falsely, as it turned out, reminding some bloggers of Ashley Todd) that his offices had been targeted too. Democrats offered a vanilla bipartisan civility agreement, which Republican leaders refused to sign.
Digby nails this behavior: It's a wife-beater mindset. Democrats have been “asking for it” by daring to vote for something they believe in and carrying out the platform they ran on. 

It's hard not to connect violence with beliefs that would justify a violent response. Several people have asked me about the Harris online poll with bizarre results. 41% of the Republicans answering the poll say they believe Obama “wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.” 24% even agree that “He may be the Anti-Christ.” I take this with a grain of salt because, as Newsweek points out, the poll design was virtually guaranteed to exaggerate agreement.

No Persians Need Apply

ABC announced that veteran CNN international reporter Christiane Amanpour will be the new host of its Sunday-morning show “This Week”, starting in August. She replaces George Stephanopoulos, who has moved on to “Good Morning America”.

What makes a good anchor for an interview-and-commentary show is highly subjective, so it's not surprising that people have many reactions to this announcement. But the column WaPo's TV critic Tom Shales wrote has some ugly undercurrents that Glenn Greenwald noticed and brought to the surface. Shales first observes:

Supporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies.

Fair enough, though supporters of anything have a tendency to see accurate reporting as bias against them. But then the next paragraph begins:

Amanpour grew up in Great Britain and Iran. Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity

To understand why Glenn calls this “slimy”, flip it around. The job's other major candidate was Jake Tapper. How slimy would it be to raise unsubstantiated questions about a pro-Israel bias and then immediately mention Trapper's ethnic background (Jewish)? 

If somebody wants to argue that Amanpour is anti-Israel, fine: Cite examples. Give evidence. But in America a reporter's ethnicity is not evidence of bias.

Short Notes
The Onion parodies every cable-news story simultaneously in Breaking News: Some Bullshit is Happening Somewhere. 

It  also demonstrates how hard parodying the Right is these days. Their list of changes to the Texas textbooks doesn't sound any crazier than the real ones. Extra credit question: Is this from the Onion or the real Texas standards?

A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.

New Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has been trying to raise funds based on the false rumor that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (who lives in Massachusetts) is going to run against him — a rumor he never bothered to check out by calling her. Since her on-air denial, he has not backed off, telling a talk-radio host “Bring her on.” (To which Rachel says: “Bring what on?”) He also hasn't returned her calls or responded to her invitation to come on her show. Rachel responds:

I guess Scott Brown is going to be one of the politicians who makes stuff up to raise money instead of dealing with real issues.

Since my father-in-law went to a nursing home, my wife has been getting his mail. So I have read Sarah Palin's latest fund-raising letter. It's strikingly vacuous, even for her: She favors “the ideals of our Founding Fathers” but doesn't say what any of them are. She's against “Liberal politicians … trying to re-write the U.S. Constitution” but doesn't say what part is being rewritten or by whom. She's also against “politicians who want to take away our basic rights” … whatever they are.

I'm reminded of an Onion article I've linked to before: Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.

The letter gets a little confusing when Sarah endorses “a return to the values our Founding Fathers fought and died for” since the Founders are usually considered to be the people who survived the Revolution long enough to write the Constitution or otherwise participate in the early days of the Republic. (As far as I know, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin all died in their beds.) But my confusion comes from over-thinking. This is just evolution at work: Pieces of one buzz-phrase mate with another to produce something new.

Gee, it's like conservatives read the Sift or something. Last week I pointed to David Frum as a conservative who was making sense. Thursday he lost his job as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. (Most complete coverage here.)

Best Frum quote: “Republicans originally thought Fox News worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

It's 90 minutes long — an hour of talk and a half-hour of questions — so don't get started if you don't have some time, but Rick Perlstein's talk at Vanderbilt last Monday is very insightful and interesting. Perlstein is a historian (author of Nixonland), and he's describing his historical model of how transformational presidents — FDR, Reagan — did it. He doesn't think Obama is following that path.

The contrast between today's tea-party Republicans and Republicans from not-so-long-ago came out Saturday on Mike Huckabee's show. Huckabee was trying to get James Baker, Chief of Staff and Secretary of State in the original Bush administration, to condemn Obama's handling of the Israeli settlement issue. Baker refused to run with the Israel-is-always-right ball, and instead gave Huckabee a history lesson.

Another long-term price of the second Bush administration's follies: British lawmakers want to end the “special relationship” that has let the U.S. call the shots in Britain's foreign policy.

March 29, 2010 – 1:38 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Party Like It’s 1935

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.  — Franklin Roosevelt

In this week's Sift:

  • Did We Win? President Obama might sign a health-care reform bill as early as tomorrow. The Senate still has some stuff to fix, but reform is going to be a reality. After a yearlong process of argument and compromise, what should we make of the final product? First, don't think of it as a final product.
  • Next Up, Financial Reform. So far, we've done remarkably little to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown. This is going to take more than one Sift to cover, but let's get started.
  • Short Notes. My talk about the Sift. Subway-adapted stray dogs. Jon Stewart does a great Glenn Beck imitation, while Stephen Colbert nominates Beck for pope. Strife on the Right. Why dark matter is a liberal plot. Seven years in Iraq. And more.
Did We Win?
The Senate health care bill passed the House late Sunday night 219-212, with no Republican yes-votes. The process is not completely over, because the House also passed “fixes” to the bill (which the Senate will now consider through the reconciliation process that blocks a filibuster), and both bills must then be signed by President Obama. But this was the key step. Obama's signature is a foregone conclusion, which means that some kind of health reform will now become law. Probably the Senate will follow through on the fixes, and we'll wind up with something close to what Obama put forward a few weeks ago.
Does that mean liberals won?
This debate has been going on for more than a year now. From the outset, the liberal idea of a single-payer system (Medicare for everybody) was off the table, despite the fact that it would almost certainly work better. (France and Germany have single-payer systems. They get better outcomes for half to 2/3rds of the per-person cost we pay.) For much of the year it looked like we might get a public option, a Medicare-like system to compete with private insurance companies, but we didn't.
The details of the bill picked up further conservative compromises along the way (in exchange for no Republican votes) but the outline stayed close to the system Mitt Romney set up in Massachusetts: an expansion of Medicaid to cover more of the working poor, a mandate that everybody else buy private insurance (with the help of sliding-scale government subsidies for much of the working class), and state-by-state exchanges where individuals can buy policies at rates similar to what group policies cost, without lifetime limits on benefits or the possibility that they will be excluded for pre-existing conditions.
A single-payer system might have put health-insurance companies out of business and a public option would have limited their profitability, so they come out well. (The price of UNH stock roughly tracks the upward path of the Dow Jones average over the past year, beating it slightly.) The CBO estimates that 23 million will remain uninsured, about a third of them illegal aliens. Many of the rest would become eligible for Medicare if they became seriously ill.
So did we win?
With all the compromises and might-have-beens, it's easy to lose sight of the Big Picture, but yes, we won. The Right's government-takeover rhetoric was always overblown, but this bill is an important step in establishing the social principle that the health-care system is the government's responsibility. The market will continue to play a major role in health care, but it will be a tool that works within a system defined by the political process, rather than the ultimate definer and implementer of all policy.
That principle is very important looking forward, because the status quo was not sustainable much longer. American health care is half again as expensive as most other wealthy countries', and getting worse. We will have to come up with ways to control costs. In a market-defined system, costs would be controlled by letting poor people die. You can dress it up, but fundamentally that's what it would come down to. In the kind of system the Right wanted, less affluent families would always be tempted to gamble: Maybe that ache means nothing; maybe Susie's cough will go away on its own. Most of the time the gamble would be won, but when it was lost people would die.
Now we're going to have to focus on controlling costs at the system level. That won't be easy, but the other countries get it done and we will too.
It's not a ride-off-into-the-sunset victory. The insurance companies will find ways to abuse this system, and the hard work of controlling costs without killing poor people (or anybody) is still to come. But we're headed in the right direction. Think of all the tinkering Social Security has needed over the decades, and still needs. 1935 was just the beginning, not the end.

It's not nearly as momentous as the passage of Medicare in 1965 and won't fundamentally alter how Americans think about social safety nets. But the passage of Obama's health care reform bill is the biggest thing Congress has done in decades, and has enormous political significance for the future.

On the politics of this bill, David Axelrod sums up my thinking:

This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass. They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition, “We don’t think you should be covered.”

If the bill didn't pass, then Democrats could be portrayed not only as sinister, but ineffective as well. An able villain earns a grudging respect, but a bumbling one deserves only contempt. And the new Obama voters who turned out in 2008 would have learned that the cynics were right — voting doesn't change things.

Now Obama inherits a frame that benefitted Bush: You may not agree with him, but he has stuck by his beliefs and gotten something started. Now the country needs to make it work.

If the Republicans do make repealing healthcare reform the centerpiece of their 2010 campaign, it won't be the first time they've tried this tactic. Pledging to repeal Social Security is how Alf Landon defeated FDR in 1936 … in Maine and Vermont. The other 46 states and 523 electoral votes went for Roosevelt.

The final days of the health-care debate brought more of the kinds of deceptions we've been seeing all along. There was, for example, the survey supposedly conducted by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in which 46% of primary care doctors said that reform might cause them to quit.
Except … it wasn't the NEJM. The survey was published in a somewhat less prestigious publication: a free newsletter called Recruiting Physicians Today. It was conducted by a medical recruitment firm, which claimed that the survey established the increased need for medical recruitment firms after reform passes. So: a firm you never heard of published a survey in a free newsletter claiming that its services would soon be in high demand. Very newsworthy.
Nonetheless, this falsely-attributed “NEJM survey” was all over Fox News for most of a day.
Another fraud was the Democratic strategy memo that Republicans tried to make an issue of. This C-SPAN exchange is classic, as Rep. Weiner of New York calls out the Republican representative who just referred to the memo on the floor of the House. No one seems to know where this purported memo came from or who wrote it, but that didn't stop Politico and other news outlets from publishing it. And once they have, of course, the Republican leadership can blame the press for any misinformation.

One of the more interesting stories in the closing days of the health-care debate has been the struggle between single-issue anti-abortion Catholics and Catholics who recall Matthew 25:31-46. (“I was sick and you looked after me.”) 

On March 11, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement to be inserted into church bulletins. It denounced “those who insist on reversing widely supported policies against federal funding of abortion and plans which include abortion” and asked Catholics to call their representatives in Congress. USCCB president Cardinal Francis George followed up on Monday with this judgment:

the flaws [of the bill] are so fundamental that they vitiate the good that the bill intends to promote. 

In a rare move, the leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 American nuns undercut the bishops in a letter sent to members of Congress. It lists the virtues of the bill, and says:

despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions.

The head of the Association for Catholic Hospitals (also a nun) has come out for the bill too. I'm not sure how Catholics are reacting, but from the outside the bishops look like old bachelors for whom female health is a theological abstraction.

One thing you have to give the anti-health-care protestors, they stayed classy. Here they yell racial and sexual insults at congressmen, and here they humiliate a man with Parkinson's. But why should they show more restraint than members of Congress, one of whom yelled “baby killer!” at Bart Stupak on the floor of the House after Stupak's last-minute abortion compromise.

That's the point missing from all the Bush-critics-were-crazy-too articles: Leading Democrats were embarrassed by the more extreme Bush critics (like the Bush-knew-about-9-11 conspiracy theorists) and did their best to distance themselves. But elected Republicans won't distance themselves from the crazies, and many urge them on. And the supposedly liberal media never fanned the flames of craziness the way Fox News does now.

Speaking of the Stupak compromise, it appears to be a face-saving way to resolve a trumped-up non-issue. The nuns were right: The health-care bill never provided the federal funds for elective abortion that critics claimed. So an executive order re-iterating that no federal funds will go for elective abortions has no real consequences.

Salon's Alex Koppelman nominates a Michelle Bachman – Steve King article on Politico for worst op-ed ever. The lowest of its many low moments is when it feeds the bizarre keep-government-away-from-my-Medicare notion:

Obamacare cuts a half-trillion dollars in health care for seniors to lay the foundation for socialized medicine.

This isn't some confused protester with a sign; this is two members of Congress purporting to defend Medicare against socialized medicine. In writing.

I'm often asked if I find any reasonable conservatives to listen to. Well, David Frum is making a lot of sense:

Some [Republican] leaders were trapped [on health care]. They were trapped by voices in the media that revved the Republican base into a frenzy that made dealing impossible. I mean, you can’t negotiate with Adolf Hitler, and if the President is Adolf Hitler, then obviously you can’t negotiate with him.

Next Up: Financial Reform
The health-care debate has taken up all the airtime, but there's also that little question of how not to repeat 2008's financial meltdown. Up until now I've been negligent in covering this topic, mostly because I haven't found good articles to link to.

I promise to do better. Let's start by framing the problem that re-regulation needs to solve: De-regulation was always a little bit of a myth, because everyone knew that if things got bad enough the government would have to step in, as it ultimately did. So we had the worst of both worlds: A fictitious free market continued as long as times were good, but the taxpayers were left holding the bag when times turned bad. 

I find this metaphor useful: Imagine a gambler with a bagful of somebody else's chips. If he wins he keeps the winnings, but if he loses they weren't his chips anyway. That's the situation that the big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs were in. So naturally they made big risky bets, and when those bets paid off they took home a lot of money. When the bets went bad, the government bailed them out.

It would be satisfying to send people to jail for this. But that's probably impossible, because there's no meta-law against taking advantage of laws that Congress has rigged in your favor. There's not even a law against asking Congress to rig laws in your favor in exchange for your support, as long as the quid-pro-quos aren't too explicit. So the best we can reasonably hope for is to write a better set of laws this time and have somebody actually enforce them. That may even be more than we can reasonably hope for.

The basic idea of re-regulation ought to be this: The bigger a financial institution gets, the more regulated it is, and the fewer risks it is allowed to take. If an institution is truly too big to fail, it should be also be too big to take risks.

Bankers wouldn't like to be limited like that, and so they'd be motivated to split companies up when they got close to regulatory limits.

After some Googling around and other stuff that passes for research, it looks like the best online source for keeping track of this stuff is a blog called Naked Capitalism. In this post, for example, guest blogger Frank Partnoy examines the examiner's report on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and concludes:

The Valuation section is 500 pages of utterly terrifying reading. It shows that, even eighteen months after Lehman’s collapse, no one – not the bankruptcy examiner, not Lehman’s internal valuation experts, not Ernst and Young, and certainly not the regulators – could figure out what many of Lehman’s assets and liabilities were worth. … When the examiner compared Lehman’s marks on these lower tranches to more reliable valuation estimates, it found that “the prices estimated for the C and D tranches of Ceago securities are approximately one‐thirtieth of the price reported by Lehman. (pages 560-61) One thirtieth? These valuations weren’t even close.

Jon Stewart gives a pretty good explanation of how the meltdown happened. And of course there's always the classic Bird and Fortune routine from the early stages of the real estate bubble.

Lawrence Lessig attends a conference on re-regulation and concludes that everyone (except Elizabeth Warren) is still in denial about the real problem: the way our political system is financed.

as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. … Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can … fund the next cycle of campaigns.

Short Notes

The text of my talk about this blog, Sifting the News, is online now.

In Moscow, the stray dogs have learned how to use the subway. I know it sounds like the start of a joke, but would ABC News lie about something like that?
Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel turned on Sean Hannity this week, charging that his fund-raising for Freedom Alliance (a charity that is supposed to benefit wounded veterans and the children of soldiers killed in combat)  is “a huge scam”. David Frum was one of the few conservatives that didn't either ignore the story or reflexively jump to Hannity's defense, but now his FrumForum says there's nothing to it either.

No surprise, given some of the outlandish things Schlussel has said about liberals. But if conservatives are going to start eating their own, I'll happily pull up a chair and pop some corn.

And I know I shouldn't be criticizing female bloggers and pundits based on their appearance, but is there a factory somewhere that churns out conservative blondes? There's Schlussel, Ann Coulter, Megan Kelly, Laura Ingraham, Liz Cheney, Gretchen Carlson, and I could probably go on. Did Michelle Malkin have to get a waver or was she grandmothered in?

Jon Stewart was great the other time he did a Glenn Beck impersonation, but Thursday night was the best yet. 

And let's not overlook Stephen Colbert's response to Beck's attack on “social justice” churches. He interviews Jesuit Father Jim Martin, and asks the question we all wonder about: “If I help the poor, what's in it for me?” Colbert also asks Father Martin to speculate on Beck as a future pope, noting that “he seems so comfortable telling Catholics what to do.”

We all know that they crash-test cars, but I'd never thought about crash-testing a helicopter.

President Obama went on Fox News Wednesday, and was treated with an unprecedented level of disrespect by interviewer Bret Baier, who persistently interrupted and talked over him. Media Matters compares Baier's Obama interview with his Bush interview, where he asked such stinging questions as “What are you reading now?”

I'm sure you already knew that evolution and global warming are hoaxes put out by the evil liberal scientific community, but I'll bet they slipped dark matter right past you. Have no fear, the Conservapedia (the conservative movement's answer to the hopelessly liberal Wikipedia) is on the case. It has noted that a new set of experiments “may disprove liberal claims that 'dark matter' comprises 25% of the universe.”

Steven Andrew is puzzled by how dark matter became a liberal/conservative thing, writing:

I'm aware of no split in the cosmology community on Dark Matter vs. [Modified Newtonian Dynamics] that falls neatly across a progressive-conservative axis (Probably because there isn't one). 

But that's because he hasn't read the Conservapedia article on dark matter. Without dark matter, you see, there are cosmological conundrums that require the direct intervention of God. So dark matter is just one more pitiful attempt by liberal scientists to hide the holes in their godless universe.

Either that, or it's a government takeover of 25% of the universe.

Brave New Films commemorates the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

The NYT public editor reviews its coverage of the ACORN-pimp video, finds a number of failings in the Times' coverage (all damaging to ACORN), and then concludes:

It remains a fascinating story. To conservatives, Acorn is virtually a criminal organization that was guilty of extensive voter registration fraud in 2008. To its supporters, Acorn is a community service organization that has helped millions of disadvantaged Americans by organizing to confront powerful institutions like banks and developers.

If only our universe contained “facts” that could be ascertained by “reporters”. Then newspapers could spread knowledge rather than just repeat opinions from both sides.

John King's new show on CNN starts tonight. It will include Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative blog RedState. This was supposed to be a “straight news show” about which King has commented:

I think what is troubling in part of our business is you have people on news shows who start the conversation with a bias.

Erickson, who has twittered that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a “goat-fucking child molestor” and characterized Michelle Obama as a “marxist harpy” should fit right in with that no-bias agenda.

Conservatives think it's unpatriotic to agree with a foreign country in a dispute with the U.S. government — unless there's a Democratic administration and the country is Israel.

March 22, 2010 – 3:33 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Siding With the Oppressor

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

In this week's Sift:

  • Is Justice a Christian Value? Glenn Beck thinks not. Jim Wallis is trying to call him to account.
  • “Under God” Yet Again. Michael Newdow's first suit against the Pledge of Allegiance made it to the Supreme Court, where it got thrown out for procedural reasons. Now he's back.
  • Richistan. Do the rich really live in another country? Robert Frank and Paul Krugman show us the new Gilded Age from two different angles.
  • Short Notes. A corporation announces that it is running for Congress. What corporate personhood might do to human personhood. The Cheney government in exile. Two creative ideas for avoiding gender discrimination. Bye-bye James Dobson. Why don't Republican sex scandals stick? Plainfield, NH takes a plain stand on same-sex marriage. Bachman keeps calling for revolution. Lack of health insurance really does kill people. You still suck at Photoshop. And more.
Is Justice a Christian Value?
Glenn Beck and the don't-call-me-liberal evangelical leader Jim Wallis (author of God's Politics) are having a throw-down. It started with Beck urging his listeners to leave churches that preach “social justice” because those are codes words used by the Communists and Nazis.

Wallis responded with a blog post saying:

Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches, so I say Christians should leave Glenn Beck. I don’t know if Beck is just strange, just trying to be controversial, or just trying to make money. But in any case, what he has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith, and Christians should no longer watch his show.

Jerry Falwell Jr. (president of Liberty University, which was founded by his father, the late Jerry Falwell) came in on Beck's side. In a great piece of anachronism, Falwell said that Jesus wasn't interested in politics:

Jesus taught that we should give to the poor and support widows, but he never said that we should elect a government that would take money from our neighbor's hand and give it to the poor.

Of course, if Jesus had talked about elections, no one would have known what he was talking about, because King Herod and Pontius Pilate didn't hold elections. So it makes just as much sense to claim that Jesus did call for electing such a government, but the disciples were too confused to write it down.

Wallis wants to debate the issue on Beck's show. Using my amazing prophetic powers, I foresee that this is not going to happen.

In another week or two I'm going to review Jeff Sharlet's The Family, which highlights this very issue. Everybody agrees that Jesus preached obedience to certain ethical principles. But there are two different ways to view this. Jim Wallis' branch of Christianity pictures the virtue as lying in the ethical principles, while Glenn Beck's branch pictures the virtue as lying in the obedience.

The two conflict when you start to talk about re-making the social and economic order in accordance with Christian ethical principles, because in order to do that, you have to disobey the current Powers That Be.

Full disclosure: I've already taken a position on this issue. I think there is a fundamental injustice at the root of our property system, and that individual charity is not sufficient to fix it. What's more, Beck's hero Thomas Paine agrees with me — as I explained at Chapel Hill last fall in a sermon called Who Owns the World?

“Under God”, Yet Again
Michael Newdow is back with another suit against including under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. His previous suit reached the Supreme Court in 2002, only to be dismissed on procedural grounds that didn't touch the underlying issue of whether the current Pledge violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Friday, his new suit lost on the appellate level, after having won at the district level. Probably the whole thing is headed for the Supremes again.

I wasn't surprised that Newdow lost 2-1, but I was disappointed in the reasoning of the majority opinion. 

The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded and for which we continue to strive: one Nation under God—the Founding Fathers’ belief that the people of this nation are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights

… The Pledge reflects many beliefs held by the Founding Fathers of this country—the same men who authored the Establishment Clause—including the belief that it is the people who should and do hold the power, not the government. They believed that the people derive their most important rights, not from the government, but from God:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence, 1 U.S.C. § XLIII (1776) (emphasis added).

The Founders did not see these two ideas— that individuals possessed certain God-given rights which no government can take away, and that we do not want our nation to establish a religion—as being in conflict.

The majority wants to consider the Pledge recitation as a whole, and not the specific phrase under God, which was added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954. (In God we trust became the national motto two years later, though it had appeared on money as early as the Civil War.) As a whole, the majority opinion sees the recitation as having a patriotic purpose, not a religious one. And they imply that finding for Newdow and removing under God from the Pledge would somehow infringe the rights of believers.

this case presents a familiar dilemma in our pluralistic society—how to balance conflicting interests when one group wants to do something for patriotic reasons that another groups finds offensive to its religious (or atheistic) beliefs.

I could imagine a reasonable defense of under God, but this isn't it. This is more of a Texas-Education-Commission position than something I would expect from an appellate court. The original Pledge, without under God, is just as patriotic as the current Pledge. So the majority is really claiming that Congress can insert bits of religious ritual into patriotic observances, as long as the overall character remains patriotic.

I don't see how anyone can argue with Judge Stephen Reinhardt's dissent:

Were the majority to engage seriously with the history of the Pledge, it would be compelled to recognize beyond any doubt that the words “under God” were inserted with the explicit and deliberate intention of endorsing a particular religious belief, of compelling nonadherents to that belief to pronounce the belief publicly or be labeled un-American, and of instilling the particular religious view in America’s youth through daily indoctrination in the public schools.

Here's my question: Does under God serve any purpose other than rubbing atheists' and polytheists' noses in the dirt? Having mindlessly recited the Pledge many times while growing up, I doubt it changes any child's theology. And if you doubt that it does rub noses in the dirt, try saying the Pledge with other phases, like under the gods or under Goddess or under no God.

To take that thought experiment one step further, picture this: It's 100 A.D. and Christianity is just starting to take off. So the Emperor Trajan decrees that all children must start their day by reciting a pledge that Rome is “one Empire, under the gods”. If you're a Christian, do you let your children say it?
Richistan
I recently finished the book Richistan by Robert Frank. Frank is the WSJ's reporter on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, who have become such a closed and cut-off society that Frank regards them as a country unto themselves (hence the title). The book is from 2007, so pre-crash and a little out of date. But it's a quick read and a lot of fun.

I bring it up because it makes a nice pair with Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, also from 2007. They report the same story from two different angles. The story is that vast American fortunes were built during the Gilded Age (late 19th century), but then the New Deal changed government policies in a way that discouraged the creation of new fortunes and diminished the ones that already existed. In the 60s and 70s, the rich were largely Old Money and demoralized — it wasn't cool to flaunt your wealth. But policies changed with Ronald Reagan, and a new Gilded Age started. Inequality grew, new fortunes were made, and the rich are now ascendent again — you can't be too rich or too ostentatious about flaunting it.

Krugman tells this story from a macro-economic view, with graphs and statistics. Frank gives you the ground-level view, interviewing rich people and showing how the culture of Richistan has changed in the last few decades. But it's the same story.
Short Notes
Yesterday I gave a talk about how and why I do the Sift, and I promised people a link to a text version. Preparing the text has turned out to take more time than I have, given that I'm putting out the Sift today, so that link will have to wait until next week.
In a great response to the Supreme Court's corporate-personhood decision in the Citizens United case, Murray Hill, Inc. has announced that it is running for Congress: “Now that democracy is truly for sale, Murray Hill is offering top dollar.”

I look at corporate personhood from a more spiritual perspective in my latest UU World column. I pull back and look at what the long-term increase in corporate power has been doing to us as people. I find it not quite infantilizing, but certainly toddlerizing:

As corporations’ power to shape our society increases, I expect to see my toddlerization increase as well. The portion of my life in which I am expected, encouraged, or even allowed to act like an adult will continue to shrink—slowly, perhaps even invisibly, on a day-to-day basis. But decade-to-decade, how will it change me? Generation-to-generation, how will it change the human race? 

The Texas Education Board marches on, approving new fundamentalist-conservative standards in social studies.

Tired of men staring at your chest instead of looking you in the eye? Try this.

Or, if you believe that being a woman is holding you back in your web-based business … just take a man's name. Who's going to know?

It's been a while since I've linked to an episode of You Suck at Photoshop. Donny explains the Vanishing Point tool, because we all need to vanish sometimes.

Every now and then David Brooks does more than repeat conservative talking points:

Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

New York magazine has a profile of “The Cheney Government in Exile” — including Liz Cheney's political prospects.

Polls are turning in the Democrats' direction on health care.

Tom Toles comments on passing health care reform by majority vote.

In the wake of Eric Massa's resignation, Matt Yglesias wonders why John Ensign is still in office.  And Steve Benen examines the larger point that Republican sex scandals don't stick.

It's not just scandals, it's family values in general: Rhetoric replaces behavior. It's hard to imagine, say, a Democrat with multiple divorces being discussed as a viable presidential candidate, as Newt Gingrich is and Rudi Giuliani was last time around. And you'll never convince Palin fans that she wasn't persecuted, but it's just unimaginable that an little-known Democratic VP candidate could have survived the revelation of an unmarried pregnant teen-age daughter.

It looks like we won't have James Dobson to kick around any more.

Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to balance the budget by slowly throttling Medicare (while cutting rich people's taxes and raising everybody else's) may have one other problem: It doesn't balance the budget.

It's an article of faith among the anti-gay-marriage crowd that the New Hampshire legislature overstepped itself by allowing same-sex marriage in this state. They're sure the people don't want it, so they started a movement called “Let New Hampshire Vote” to get local town meetings to pass a warrant saying:

The citizens of New Hampshire should be allowed to vote on an amendment to the New Hampshire Constitution that defines “marriage”.

Well, that article came up in the small town of Plainfield, but it got amended so that instead Plainfield will write a letter to the governor and legislature

commending them for passing and signing into law legislation affirming marriage equality for all New Hampshire residents.

The commendation passed 185-40. The people of Plainfield have spoken.

Rep. Michele Bachman says that passing health care reform through the reconciliation process (which is already of mis-statement of the Democrats' plan, as I explained two weeks ago) is “illegitimate” and says “We don't have to follow a bill that isn't law.” Because, as we all know, government-mandated health care is the end of freedom in America. If we sit still for it, we'll become one of those communist dictatorships like Canada.

Speaking of Canada, Sarah Palin reveals that when she was a girl, her family used to cross the border to get health care in Canada. No wonder she's so opposed to “socialism”, having seen it close-up like that.

Johann Hari in the Nation writes a strong indictment of mainstream environmental groups. Quoting Christine MacDonald, author of Green, Inc.:

Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them.

 A recent article in Atlantic suggested that insuring the uninsured might not save lives. Harvard Professor J. Michael Williams looks at a more complete body of evidence and concludes this about the number of lives that universal health care could save each year:

A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands.

Slate reviews Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I get the impression of an author who would love to have an ax to grind, but can't find one that's convincing to her. (I may have to read this book.)

March 15, 2010 – 2:55 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Flashbacks

I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five [people] that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. — Senator Joseph McCarthy, 9 February 1950

So who did President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder hire? Nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees. Who are these government officials? Eric Holder will only name two. Why the secrecy behind the other seven? Whose values do they share? Tell Eric Holder: Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al Qaeda 7. — from “Who Are the Al Qaeda Seven?” video by Liz Cheney's “Keep America Safe”, 2 March 2010

In this week's Sift:

  • The Party that George Built. Conservative writer Jonathan Rauch uncovers the original source of today's Republican message: Not Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater, but George Wallace. (Except that “racism … is marginal in today's GOP.” Thanks for clearing that up, Jonathan.)
  • The Power of One Senator. Jim Bunning blocking an important piece of legislation is just the latest example of how much power a lone senator can wield. How does that work exactly?
  • Health Care and Public Opinion. Republicans are shocked that President Obama would continue pushing a bill that polls badly. But ignoring the polls was a virtue when Bush was president. Or, as Dick Cheney summed it up: “So?”
  • Changing the Tone. Those who say Obama hasn't changed the tone in Washington have forgotten what the old tone was. Liz Cheney reminds them.
  • Short Notes. Breaking news from Tom Friedman: Intel execs want tax breaks and subsidies. Obama gets a midnight visit from all the SNL presidents. National Grammar Day. Creationists join up with global-warming deniers. Stephen Colbert pimps up an interview with Sean Hannity. Same-sex marriage is legal in two more North American capitals. And more.
The Party That George Built
An important article in the National Journal discusses George W., the guy nobody talks about any more, the one who made the Republican Party what it is today. No, not George W. Bush — George Wallace. 

In It's George Wallace's GOP Now, conservative Jonathan Rauch cuts “the history of the modern Republican Party” down to one sentence:

Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller got into an argument and George Wallace won.

What disturbs Rauch is that Wallace was not a conservative at all, but rather a “right-wing populist”. He describes Wallace as exploiting “a deep sense of grievance” against “elites”, but notes that

What Wallace did not do was frame a coherent program or governing philosophy.

He cites parallels between Wallace's rhetoric and Sarah Palin's, while noting that Palin is typical of today's GOP. 

like Wallace and his supporters 40 years ago, today's conservative populists are long on anger and short on coherence. For Wallace, small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they can't.

Two comments: First, this rhetoric works because most voters have a very distorted idea of what the government spends money on. Angry tea-partiers would happily cut foreign aid to countries that hate us, bureaucrats who do nothing all day, social services to illegal aliens, grants that support blasphemous art exhibits, welfare for able-bodied men too lazy to work, and all those $500 screwdrivers at the Pentagon. They've convinced themselves that stuff like that adds up to about half the budget.

Second, the ideas in Rauch's article are all cribbed (without attribution) from Ron Perlstein's Nixonland, which I reviewed a year ago. The real significance of Rauch's article is to launder Perlstein's liberal insights for use in conservative conversations.

A big piece of that laundering is to dismiss the racism that figures prominently in Perlstein's analysis. Getting racism out of the discussion is so important that Rauch does in it the second paragraph: “racism … is marginal in today's GOP.” This style of laundering was summarized by conservative strategist Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview with Bob Herbert:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.

Today's conservative says “English only” or “illegal immigrant” or “Obama's a Muslim” or “Where's his birth certificate?” or reserves the word terrorist for Muslims, preferably swarthy ones. But they don't say “spick” or “nigger” or “camel jockey” in public, and they don't stand up and yell “Segregation forever!” like Wallace did, so they're not racists or any other kind of bigot. (Among themselves, though, they still think racism is funny. Still.)

Seriously, if you're building your appeal on the fears and resentments of whites — and make no mistake about it, the Tea Party rallies are almost entirely white — you have to be blind not to see that a lot of those fears and resentments concern race.

Matt Yglesias critiques Rauch, saying that right-wing populism's place in the conservative movement is not some new trend.

When the prejudices of the sociocultural minority clash with the interests of economic elites, as they do on immigration, then we see splits inside the movement. But ordinarily business conservatism and right-wing populism work together extremely comfortably and always have.

Politico got its hands on a slide show prepared for Republican National Committee fund-raisers. On the Motivations to Give slide, #1 on the list is “fear”. Another slide asks: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the Senate, or the House … ? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!” Politico comments:

Manipulating donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly unique to Republicans or to the RNC – Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms – but rarely is it practiced in such cartoonish terms.

My reaction: It's a real shame that the RNC can't “sell … the White House” any more.

The best response I saw was from WaPo's Kevin Huffman. (Maybe that's why he won the “America's Next Great Pundit” contest.) He offers the RNC genuinely constructive advice that is so obvious as to become satire:

[I]n the context of donor targets that are visceral, reactionary and motivated by fear, it makes sense to portray your opponents as scary, cartoonish radicals. Nonetheless, my suggestion, based on some grainy footage I saw recently of Ronald Reagan, is to consider a more optimistic frame. This might be off the wall, but hear me out: What if the RNC developed a couple of serious policy initiatives and then messaged them as concrete reasons for people to support you? I'd be happy to look at any ideas, if that'd be helpful.

Rachel Maddow's response to the RNC slides was pretty funny too. The whole idea that portraying Harry Reid as Scooby Doo is scary … well, that's scary in a different way. Or, as Rachel put it in her teaser for this segment, “Roo?”

North Carolina Republican Rep. Sue Myrick faced her Muslim constituents last week and answered questions about why she wrote a positive foreword for a Muslim-bashing book, describing its author as “a great American”. Like the Republicans who aren't racists, Myrick isn't anti-Muslim. She's just against (as the book's subtitle puts it) “the secret underworld that's conspiring to Islamize America.” In the past she has raised suspicion about the Middle Easterners “who run all the convenience stores across the country.” But she can't be a racist because, as she notes, “I've got Arab friends.”

The Power of One Senator
In Terry Prachett's Discworld novels, he describes the semi-benevolent dictatorship of his capital city as a one-man one-vote system: “The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” 
Sometimes the Senate seems that way, like last week when Senator Jim Bunning single-handed delayed a bill to extend certain emergency economic measures. Tuesday, Bunning backed down and the bill passed by a wide margin (78-19) — but not before 100,000 Americans saw their unemployment benefits interrupted, 2000 workers had to stop working on transportation projects, and doctors temporarily faced a 21% drop in Medicare reimbursements. (The WSJ editorial page loved this bit of obstruction, calling it Jim Bunning's Finest Hour.)
If you're like me, you heard the what of the story, but you're still a little fuzzy on the how. How can one senator stop something that 78 other senators want to vote for? Ditto for the holds Senator Shelby put on about 70 Obama nominees who still had not been approved by the Senate. How did he do that? (Shelby also backed down on February 9, and 27 nominees got confirmed by unanimous consent on February 11. Other confirmations have trickled in since, usually by wide margins.)
Filibusters may not make a lot of sense from a democracy standpoint, but at least I understand the rules: The Senate can keep debating a bill until 60 senators support a resolution calling for an immediate vote. So any 41 senators can keep a bill in the Never-Never-Land of endless debate. But one senator? How does one senator get so much power?
The mainstream media has been almost totally remiss in covering how this works, but fortunately David Waldman explained it all on DailyKos nearly two years ago, when Senator Coburn had holds on 100 bills. The key is timing. Long-term, one senator can't prevent the Senate from doing what 60+ senators want, but the machinery for working around a hold takes about a week and is a big headache for the majority leader (who is supposed to keep the Senate's business running smoothly). So if a bill is coming down to the wire and requires immediate action (as the Bunning bill did), one senator can guarantee that the Senate will miss the deadline. 
Here's the main idea: The Senate's formal rules are unbelievably cumbersome, but most of the time they're not used. Instead, other than the major votes on contentious issues, most Senate business gets done by unanimous consent. Essentially, the majority leader suggests to the Senate: “If nobody objects, let's just skip all the rigamarole and cut to the chase.” Usually nobody does object, because (as I explained last week) the Senate traditionally has worked by gentlemen's agreement rather than according to its formal rules.
A hold happens when a senator informs the majority leader that s/he plans not to go along with unanimous consent on some piece of business. The senator could have a legitimate reason. For example, maybe the majority leader has made a mistake by treating this item as routine business, because some serious issue is lurking under the surface. Or maybe there is no hidden issue, everybody knows exactly what's going on, and the senator is just being a jerk — as Bunning, Shelby, and (to a lesser extent) Coburn all were. Then the majority leader has to decide whether it's worth his (and the Senate's) time to blast through the hold via the official procedures. Often it isn't.
None of this is in the Constitution, which says only: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” Early on, the Senate set up its rules to give each senator a lot of consideration, with a corresponding gentlemen's agreement that senators would use their individual power responsibly. That unwritten agreement was enforced by the small size and clubbishness of the Senate. (Originally there were only 26 senators. By contrast, a single committee in today's House of Representatives might be twice that size.) Every senator had a one-on-one relationship with every other senator, and they all understood that it was a bad idea to annoy the other club members for no good reason.
Senate rules have been amended at various times since, but the basic idea — individual power exercised under a gentlemen's agreement of good behavior — has stuck. Sadly, that's all breaking down now, and has been for decades. Eventually the rules are going to have to change, because more and more senators don't care about their relationships with other senators and enjoy the attention they can get by being jerks. (Bunning hasn't had this much publicity since he pitched a perfect game in 1964.) Changing the rules is hard, though, because it means that individual senators of both parties are going to have to yield some of their power to the Senate leadership. They are understandably reluctant to do that, especially since they know that this could all work if senators would just behave themselves.
Health Care and Public Opinion
As the Democrats move towards final passage of health-care reform, Republican objections are getting more shrill. I find it particularly odd how horrified they are that Democrats might ignore polls (especially this one by Fox News) showing that a majority of the public doesn't want the bill passed. This constitutes “ramming” the bill “down the throats” of the American public.
When they were in power, Republicans thought that ignoring polls was a virtue. In March of 2008, when ABC's interviewer pointed out to Dick Cheney that the American public overwhelming thought the Iraq War was not worth fighting, Cheney famously replied: “So?” During the 2000 campaign, Bush said:

I really don't care what the polls and focus groups say. What I care about is doing what I think is right.

In those days that was considered Leadership, and Republicans cheered it as courageous and principled. But when President Obama does it, it's “a defiant 'screw you' to the nation.”
I'm with Nate Silver on this. I think the public does oppose the bill, but they do so because they think it raises the deficit, is a government takeover of health care, funds abortion, and creates death panels that will pull the plug on your grandmother — all of which are false.
Here's the thing about getting people not to do stuff by lying about it: If you succeed, you're never caught in the lie. If I tell you that Sesame Street is a nasty, violent, horrible show, and as a result you never watch it — then you'll never find out that I lied to you. 
That's what happened to the Clinton health care program. Republicans and the insurance industry told amazing lies about it, and they paid no price for those lies because the public avoided the experience that would have proved them wrong. To this day, what the public remembers about Hillarycare are the false reasons why they didn't like it.
If health-care reform doesn't pass this time, the same thing will happen — and in November the voters will punish all the Democrats who voted for those horrible death panels. But if it does pass, then media coverage will swing from the he-said/she-said stories about funding abortion to stories about what the bill actually will do. People will find out how the bill affects them, and most of them will like it.
And that's why the Republicans are getting so shrill.

Senator Byrd, widely considered the Senate's foremost expert on its own history and procedures, explains why the plan to use reconciliation in health-care reform passes muster.

Check out Jon Stewart's take on the health-care debate and its coverage.

Changing the Tone
President Obama's pledge to “change the tone in Washington” is usually interpreted as a commitment to bipartisanship, and then judged to be a broken promise: Either Obama was naive to think he could work with Republicans, or he hasn't tried hard enough. 

That framing only works, though, if you forget what the tone was during the Bush administration, when critics of Bush policies routinely had their patriotism questioned. Obama really has changed that tone: He treats Republicans like loyal Americans, even when they won't compromise with him.

If you want to remember what the old Bush-Cheney days were like, check out this new ad by Liz Cheney, in which Justice Department lawyers who previously represented detainees in Guantanamo are referred to as “the Al Qaeda 7” — an attack that even many conservative blogs say is unfair.

I'm glad the TPM article on this brought up John Adams, who defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre and called it “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” That's the true American tradition. Liz and her father can have Joe McCarthy on their team; I'll take John Adams. 
Short Notes

Something struck me wrong about Tom Friedman's column Wednesday, but it took Matt Yglesias to nail it down for me:

it’s really remarkable that we live in a world where talking to the CEO of a large company [and then] reporting that the CEO wants tax breaks and subsidies for his firm counts as serious political commentary. Read today’s Tom Friedman piece and watch in amazement as he doesn’t even consider the possibility that [Intel CEO] Paul Otellini’s ideas might be motivated by anything other than a disinterested concern for the welfare of the American people.

Funny-or-Die assembles all the presidents since Ford (well, their Saturday Night Live equivalents, anyway) to buck up Obama's courage for taking on the banks and re-regulating finance.

Thursday was National Grammar Day, with a music video and everything. That got Kevin Drum talking about the related subject of punctuation, which we take very seriously here in New Hampshire. Punctuation is the only difference between “John Lynch, the governor” and “John! Lynch the governor!”

The last thing I edited out of last week's Sift (to keep the word-count down) was an article about how creationists and global-warming deniers are getting together in one big anti-science coalition. I was just 48 hours ahead of the New York Times, which covered the same subject Wednesday.

This fits very well into the Perlstein-Rauch analysis I was describing above, because both creationism and global-warming denial depend on populist resentment of the scientific “elite” and a corresponding conspiratorial view of how the scientific community works: Scientists look down their noses at ordinary people while they push their own God-denying world-socialism-promoting agenda.

Scientists have a hard time responding to this populist resentment, because they can't honestly claim to respect the people who advocate it. Concerning both evolution and global warming, the anti-science lobby wants to force public schools to “teach the controversy”. But from a scientific point of view, both issues are part of the eternal controversy between Knowledge and Ignorance. The whole point of having schools is to help Knowledge win that argument.

Stephen Colbert follows up on the revelation that the ACORN-pimp-advising video was edited by doing an edited interview with Sean Hannity.

Same-sex marriage became legal in two new capitals this week: Washington D.C. and Mexico City. Officials at the National Weather Service report that the sky has not fallen.

March 8, 2010 – 1:28 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Nasty Days

Let me tell you now: it is still morning in America. It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding-hung-over-vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day, but it’s still morning in America.

— Glenn Beck, CPAC Keynote Address, 20 February 2010


In this week’s Sift:

  • The Health-Care Reform Endgame. Bipartisanship is dead, but the Democrats can pass reform on their own. It gets more complicated than your civics teacher ever described, but it’s possible. Plus: some historical perspective on how this fits into the long-term breakdown of the gentlemen’s agreements that used to keep Congress on track — closing with the image of heads on spikes.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for The Long Descent by John Michael Greer. Because if you can learn to think reasonably about the end of civilization as we have known it, everything else should be a snap.
  • Short Notes. Speaking of heads on spikes, Digby starts fantasizing about guillotines. Drinking While Brown is a crime in Texas. Vote Whig! Glenn Beck explains why businessmen deserve our sympathy more than the people they fire, making Bill O’Reilly sound reasonable by comparison. And more.
The Health-Care Reform Endgame

Here’s where we are on health-care reform: The House and Senate each passed similar bills some while ago, but they’re not identical. In the basic-civics, how-a-bill-becomes-law process, a conference committee with members from both houses would iron out the differences, so that the identical bills could be re-passed in both houses. That course has been blocked by the Scott Brown election, because now the Republicans have the 41 votes they need to support a filibuster if a conference-committee bill comes back to the Senate.

The next obvious course would be for the House to pass the same bill the Senate already passed. Then you don’t need to go back to the Senate, because they already passed that bill. The question is whether the House has the votes to pass the Senate bill as is and let it go at that. The answer is probably no; the House only passed its own bill by five votes (220-215), and it really needs some of the concessions a conference committee would have worked out if it’s going to hang on to that small majority.
That’s the real point of the 11-page proposal President Obama came out with just before the televised Health Care Summit with the Republicans. It outlines a compromise proposal between the House and Senate bills (heavily weighted towards the Senate bill). In essence, the White House is doing the work that a conference committee would do in the ordinary process.

From there it might go like this: The House passes the Senate bill with the promise that the Senate will agree to the fixes outlined in the Obama plan. The Senate bill becomes law, but before it takes effect it is fixed by a second bill.

But now we have the filibuster problem again, because the Senate still has to vote on the second bill. But the second bill (i.e., the difference between the original Senate bill and the Obama plan) has been designed to fit through a filibuster-proof Senate procedure known as reconciliation. So it could pass the Senate with only 51 votes rather than 60. There’s some trickiness about the timing of all this (in particular how the House can be sure that the Senate won’t just walk away from the deal after its bill becomes law), which leads to some further legislative arcana described here.
Still, it can work, and it might.
So that leads to an obvious question: If the Senate has a procedure for passing bills with 51 votes, why didn’t it do that to begin with? We could have skipped all that nonsense with Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. Ezra Klein explored this back in August, and came to the conclusion that full-scale health reform couldn’t be made to fit within the rules associated with reconciliation.
And this points out the fallacy of the main Republican talking point against this plan, as expressed in the Wall Street Journal by former Majority Leader Bill Frist:

Using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform would be unprecedented because Congress has never used it to adopt major, substantive policy change. The Senate’s health bill is without question such a change: It would fundamentally alter one-fifth of our economy.

Frist ignores one basic fact: The Senate already passed health-care reform without reconciliation. So nobody is talking about “using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform.” Reconciliation would just be used for the second bill, the small number of changes necessary to fulfill a deal with the House. And that’s not unprecedented at all.

That’s the legislative nitty-gritty. Now let’s back up and get some context. The bigger picture of what is going on is this: For decades, the conventions, traditions, and gentlemen’s agreements that made Congress work smoothly have been breaking down, with the result that more and more things happen strictly according to the rules — as power plays, in other words.

To see the difference, compare the Nixon impeachment with the Clinton impeachment. Everyone involved in the Nixon impeachment appreciated that the process had to meet the judgment of history. Both parties did their best to avoid partisan excess: Democrats appointed a two-time Nixon voter to lead the investigation, and 6 of the 17 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted for impeachment.
The Clinton impeachment was a circus by comparison. Republicans spent most of Clinton’s two terms looking for some excuse to impeach him. Their investigation started with the Whitewater real-estate deal, and when that didn’t produce results they kept coming up with new “scandals” until one stuck. Democrats resisted, and the process consisted of one nearly party-line vote after another. Fifty Republican senators and zero Democrats voted for conviction, falling short of the necessary 67 votes.
All the same, no rules were broken. The Constitution gives the House the power to impeach the president. The Republican majority wanted to, so they did. Democrats had enough votes in the Senate not to convict, so they didn’t.
Look at the filibuster in that light. It’s not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but follows from Senate rules adopted in 1806. The first actual filibuster didn’t happen until 1837, and they remained rare until the 1970s. The rules didn’t prevent them, but filibusters were ungentlemanly, so they only happened in extreme circumstances. As this graph shows, the number of filibusters has shot up in the last few decades, no matter who controlled Congress.
In the current Congress, you can take for granted that the Republicans will filibuster anything they didn’t propose themselves, because they can. It has become common to hear journalists say “It takes sixty votes to get anything done in the Senate” — a statement I’m sure the Founders would have found shocking. The Constitution defines a few circumstances (like constitutional amendments) that require supermajorities, and we can assume that the Founders intended a simple majority to suffice in all other cases.

Reconciliation is an ungentlemanly solution to the filibuster problem, a power play. But again, no rules are being broken. And the alternative is what? To accept that Republicans can do anything within their power, but Democrats have to be good sports?

Even so, I wish more people would read Colleen McCullough’s historical novel The First Man in Rome. It deals with a similar period in the Roman Republic, when the traditions and gentlemen’s agreements of the Senate were breaking down. By the end, Marius is mounting the heads of his enemies on spikes in the Forum. But the escalating provocations have gone back-and-forth so gradually that you can’t draw an obvious line and say, “This is where it should have stopped.”

Most embarrassing line of the health-care summit: Eric Cantor talks about “people who are allegedly wronged by our health-care system”. Allegedly?

Glenn Beck’s CPAC speech is worth a look, if you want to understand where a lot of people are coming from:

We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right, you can speak out, you can disagree with me, you can make your own path. But I’m not going to pay for your mistakes, and I don’t expect you to pay for my mistakes. We’re all going to make them, but we all have the right to move down that road. What we don’t have a right to is: health care, housing, or handouts.

Caring for sick people is “paying for their mistakes.” They “make their own path,” so they need to be allowed to fail (and maybe die), so they can learn to do better.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …
… look for The Long Descent: a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age by John Michael Greer. Because you need to have some high-quality pessimism in your head. Seriously. People without high-quality pessimism either get depressed when things look bad or cling to optimism out of sheer panic. In either state it’s hard to think clearly about things.
The Long Descent is a book of clear thinking about the end of civilization as we have known it. And its main point is this: It takes a long time for a civilization to collapse. You don’t go straight from high tea at Buckingham Palace to Mad Max.
Look at Rome again. The peak of the Roman Empire comes during the reign of Trajan, the second of the Five Good Emperors. He dies in 117. Rome itself doesn’t fall to the barbarians for another 350 years. And that’s just the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the east, the Byzantine Empire hangs on for another thousand years after that. There were still Caesars in Constantinople until the Renaissance.

Got the picture? Just because you think we may be headed down the Big Hill, don’t list the good tea set on Ebay just yet. You might get a few more sips in.

Myths. Greer is at his best early in the book when he goes meta and explains why most of our thinking about the end of the industrial age is so misguided: We’re not looking at facts and theories at all. Instead, we’re having an argument between two diametrically opposed myths. The Myth of Progress says that collapses or long-term declines are impossible now. Something magical happened in the 1700s, and now we’ve got no place to go but up. Science and technology always improve, and so life in general will always improve too.
On the other hand, the Myth of Apocalypse predicts that someday soon our sins will catch up to us in one big, nasty punishment. It’s like Mother Nature saying, “Wait until your Father gets home.”

This Progress/Apocalypse argument may cloak itself in all sorts of science and pseudoscience, but fundamentally it’s a religious dispute. Things will turn out a particular way because they have to. On the Progress side, science is the superhero who will never fail us. On the Apocalypse side, there’s no way we can get away with all the crap we’ve been doing. (That’s why, if you listen closely to some prophets of Apocalypse, you will hear a perverse joy in their visions of doom. They sound like Jonathan Edwards describing the tortures of Hell.)

How Collapse Works. Not only doesn’t civilization collapse overnight, it also doesn’t go straight downhill. You have a jolt and spiral downward for a while; then society regroups and even rebounds a little until the next jolt.

Greer explains the decline process like this: At its peak a society builds a larger capital base than it can maintain. From then on, the deferred maintenance periodically comes due in some big failure, which cascades through the system until things settle down at a lower level. Then the pattern repeats: The lower capital base generates enough resources to maintain itself day-to-day, but not long-term — eventually leading to the next big failure.

Compare post-Katrina New Orleans to a rising city, like London was when the Great Fire hit in 1666. For London (and for Chicago after its fire in 1871), the disaster was also an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better. But New Orleans is only sort of rebuilding. The touristy parts are back, but much remains in ruins. Poorly maintained levees caused the Katrina flood, and you have to wonder what long-term maintenance the city’s lower tax base can’t cover now. How will that lead to the next disaster?

Why Now? Greer believes that what changed in the 1700s was simple: We figured out how to tap the energy of fossil fuels. Now those fuels are running out, so the Fossil Fuel Age is ending, taking progress with it. We can adjust to the new era of decline, or we can try increasingly crazy schemes (like shale oil) to try to deny it.

Greer promotes the Peak Oil Theory, which I’ve described before. A well-established principle in the oil industry says that an oil field’s production peaks when about half the oil has been pumped out. The geologist M. King Hubbert speculated that the same principle holds on larger scales. He correctly predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the late 1960s, something none of the other experts expected. Since his Hubbert’s death, people have been using his techniques to predict when global oil production will peak. Estimates range from about now to as late as 2050, and some people reject the theory entirely.

Peak oil fits well with Greer’s long-decline vision, because it’s not as if the pumps all run dry one day with no warning. Instead production peaks, and no matter what new techniques people come up with, they can’t get oil out of the ground as fast as they used to. Over decades, oil becomes increasingly rare and expensive, and all the economic processes that depend on cheap oil work less and less well. (Greer is a little less convincing when he explains why no other form of energy will fill the gap. He’s not obviously wrong, but his conclusions are more speculative.)

Personal strategies. The Myth of Apocalypse leads to the Myth of the Lone Survivor. (Lot escapes from Sodom to live in a cave. Noah and his family survive on the ark. Jor-El saves his infant son from the destruction of Krypton by rocketing him to Earth.) Apply the Lone Survivor myth today and you get survivalist fantasies about cabins in the wilderness stocked with food and gold and weapons. But Greer believes that if you look at things realistically rather than mythically, you’ll picture something completely different.

First, civilizations fall from the outside in. As Roman power declined, the best place to be was Constantinople; the periphery fared much worse. Unpopulated areas become bandit territory, so you’d better have a lot of weapons if you’re planning to hang onto your stocks of food and gold. In contemporary countries that have had actual declines, like Iraq after the invasion or Russia after the Soviet collapse, the best place to find food, electric power, and medical care was near the capital.
Second, stockpiles of goods just carry forward the Fossil Fuel Age illusion that strength comes from owning things. What will really save you in the long decline are skills and relationships. In other words, what can you do and whose plans do you fit into? What community will claim you as a member? Somebody in town who can set broken arms or keep old machines running will do a lot better than a survivalist Rambo in the hills.
Finally, prepare for decline, not apocalypse. Not: “Could I live without electricity?” but “How would I live if electricity were unreliable and expensive?”

In short: Learn some useful skills, figure out how to be happy at a lower level of consumption, and develop relationships based on real loyalty rather than expedience. Oh, and try to develop a habit of thinking realistically rather than mythically. That’s not bad advice even if civilization muddles through somehow.

Short Notes
Fannie Mae lost $74 billion last year, up from $60 billion the year before. That makes AIG’s $11 billion loss look small. A lot of this money eventually winds up bailing out the big banks and Wall Street firms, many of whose deals were insured by Fannie Mae or AIG. Meanwhile, Morgan-Chase CEO Jamie Dimon whines about a bank tax proposal, causing Digby to comment: “For the first time in my life I’m really beginning to understand why the French went so nuts with the Guillotine.”
Huffington Post collects 16 bad headlines that actually ran. Several are unintentionally sexy, and others suggest false interpretations, like the Boston Globe’s “Man Executed After Long Speech”.

A fascinating example of how different things are considered too risque in different countries: Paris Hilton’s commercial for Devassa beer is too much for Brazil. Brazil? How could anything be too much for Brazil, where bikinis are constructed with nanotech? But it’s not a question of less or more, it’s just different.

This may sound like a clip from Ron White’s “They Call Me Tater Salad” routine, but in Texas a cop can walk into a bar and arrest you for being drunk. No one has to complain and you don’t have to be causing any problems. Giving the police that kind of discretion is bound to lead to abuse, and Mother Jones says it does. Remember the crime of Driving While Black? You can add Drinking While Brown to that list.

But surely police wouldn’t do anything like that. They also wouldn’t murder people trying to get away from Hurricane Katrina and then cover it up. Would they?

If you’re so fed up that not even the Tea Party does it for you, try this. The DespairWear collection (“Clothes make the man. These clothes make the man sad.”) also includes a good anti-TARP shirt.

When you get Bill O’Reilly off his own show, he almost sounds reasonable. (HuffPost pitches his Palin remarks, but that’s a small part of the interview.)

Another snippit from Beck’s CPAC speech:

Small businessmen who work hard, they put their last dollar into it. And if they succeed, they’re demonized and penalized. Why? … When you’re in a small business you feel it when you have to let Sally go. You feel it when you have to let Bob go. How many small businessmen have look in the eyes of their employees with tears and said, I’m sorry. I’ve tried everything I can. Those are the people that are truly, truly struggling. And those are the people that nobody is even noticing anymore. Right?

So, forget Sally and Bob — the businessman who had to fire them is the one who really deserves our sympathy. And note the delusion of persecution: Who is demonizing successful small businessmen? Anybody?

March 1, 2010 – 12:33 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (20)

Sufficient Causes

We humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
In this week's Sift:
  • Meet Joe Stack. The media can't decide whether the Austin kamikaze was a terrorist or not, but they're sure he was crazy. I'm sure he was a terrorist, but his manifesto sounds disconcertingly sane to me.
  • Torture is Nobody's Fault. Nobody cares when Dick Cheney confesses to war crimes, and John Yoo gets off scot free. All in all, a bad week for the rule of law.
  • Short Notes. My town stands up to conservative slander. Coverage of the stimulus' first birthday lacks substance. A Lord's Prayer parody. The real Ronald Reagan opposed military tribunals. The rich get richer and pay lower taxes. Obama's outrages were OK when the white guy did them. And more.
Meet Joe Stack
I admit it. I came to the Austin-kamikaze story expecting to fit it into this larger narrative of right-wing violence: Sooner or later the more wigged-out conservatives start manifesting the figurative violence of mainstream conservative rhetoric.

I still believe that story, but I don't think Joe Stack is an example of it. I'm not even sure how wigged-out he was.

Crazy conspiracy-theory types have a writing style that gives them away. They're so overwhelmed by the power of their own thoughts that they can't imagine the reader's point of view. They strain for emphasis by WRITING IN ALL CAPS or inappropriate bold and italics or
 
OTHER 
BIZARRE 
FORMATTING.

They mix up the general and the particular, so that an abstract discussion of political philosophy suddenly turns into a denunciation of a boss, sibling, or ex-wife of no public consequence. They want to make sure history records not just that they were right about the direction of western culture, but also about that incident at the bar in El Paso.

If they're writing a suicide or martyrdom note, they often seem to be whipping themselves up to the deed, as if they were afraid of chickening out. And they aggrandize the deed itself: It is part of some messianic mission that will bring down the Powers of Evil.

Joe Stack's suicide note/manifesto does none of that. It is surprisingly readable. For example, his first line correctly anticipates the reader's state of mind:

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?”

Apparently Stack was a long-time anti-tax activist. He says that in the 80s he belonged to a group that tried to avoid taxes by using 

the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. … However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us. … That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0.

Throughout the piece, Stack's tone is alienated and embittered, but not irrational. He clearly believes that there is a corrupt power structure in this country, and that the people at the top (whether they are in government, business, unions, or churches) recognize each other's power and cooperate.

Is he wrong?

He contrasts the quick bailout of GM and the big banks with the slow effort to reform the medical system, where the insurance companies 

are murdering tens of thousands of people a year … It's clear [our political representatives] see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of corporate profits rolling in.

Bitter, yes. But do you have to be crazy to believe that?

About the plane-crash plan itself, he says very little — and nothing at all about his glorious martyrdom and the wonders it will accomplish. Instead, he seems quietly determined and claims only that other tactics will not work.

Nothing changes unless there is a body count … I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change.

Cynical, definitely. And immoral in his willingness to shed innocent blood to promote his agenda. And maybe, when the full story is told, we'll discover that he was crazy too. But nothing I've seen so far proves that.

The most ridiculous aspect of this story has been the media's uncertainty about calling it terrorism. The guy destroyed a civilian office building outside any war zone in order to produce “a body count” that would draw attention to his political agenda. That would seem to be a textbook example of terrorism — except that what terrorist really means these days is Muslim. That's why the Fort Hood shooter was called a terrorist, even though he targeted soldiers on a military base. (Strictly speaking, that should make him a traitor, but not a terrorist.) Glenn Greenwald elaborates. AtlanticWire collects a range of comments.

Just a couple days before the Stack crash, Fox was trying to make the University of Alabama shootings into an example of left-wing violence — despite a complete lack of evidence for any political motivation.

Senator Scott Brown gave his first post-election national TV interview to Neil Cavuto of (naturally) Fox News. (If you don't watch Fox you may not have noticed, but the network decided early on that the Haiti earthquake was boring and instead focused on promoting the Brown campaign.) 

TPM noticed Brown relating Joe Stack to his own voters, but I was more struck by what passes for an interview question on Fox. Cavuto asks: “Invariably people are going to look at this and say, well, that's where some of this populist rage gets you. Isn't that a bit extreme?”

So Cavuto imagines what “people” might say about Stack's attack, invents a response, and asks Brown to agree to that response. My question: Why does Brown need to be there at all when Cavuto can just interview his own imagination?
Torture is Nobody's Fault
It was a bad week for the rule of law. Last Sunday, Dick Cheney confessed to war crimes on national TV. Granted, he didn't say the exact words “I committed war crimes.” But he did say, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.” Previously, he had told the Washington Times “I signed off on it.“

Only among American neo-cons is there any doubt that waterboarding is torture or that torture of captured enemies is a war crime or that authorizing a war crime is itself a war crime. But Cheney's confession was a non-issue. The NYT combined the Cheney confession with Joe Biden's appearance on a Sunday talk show under the headline: Dueling Vice Presidents Trade Barbs. The WaPo had similar coverage.

If Cheney travels outside the United States, he may be brought to justice through extraterritorial jurisdiction, a legal doctrine by which any country can claim jurisdiction over war crimes that cannot be prosecuted in the home country. Or a country whose citizens were waterboarded under Cheney's signature may prosecute him. Barring that, he will remain at large. (You can sign a petition calling for Cheney's prosecution.)

And then Friday, the Justice Department finally released the 289-page report of its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR is the Justice Department's internal watchdog agency) on the “torture memos” written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee for the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Council (OLC). The OLC is the official interpreter of the law for the executive branch, and other members of the executive branch use its opinions as cover — if the OLC says something is legal, how are they supposed to know it isn't?

That's why it's particularly bad if the OLC becomes corrupt and starts justifying whatever the president wants it to justify, as Yoo and Bybee did. If the penalty for such corruption is not harsh, you can wind up in what law professor Jonathan Turley has called “Mukasey's Paradox” (after Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey):

Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

In other words, there are crimes but no criminals — like torture, which violates the Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, among other laws. But the torturers (and all those who had command responsibility over them, up to and including the president) can claim to have had the OLC's blessing. And yet the OLC is not responsible either. Everyone now admits the OLC's opinion was wrong, but so what?

That's essentially where we have wound up. The OPR report itself is highly critical of Yoo and Bybee. Each “committed professional misconduct” by failing to offer “independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice.” Yoo's misconduct is described as “intentional” and Bybee's as “reckless disregard of his duty”. (This is all on page 11 of the report.) OPR intended to refer these findings to state organizations that could have Yoo and Bybee disbarred as lawyers — which is already far too light a punishment, in my opinion.

However, the conclusions of the report (which were ready for release in 2008, but have been held up by various internal Justice Department processes) were set aside by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, who wrote a 69-page report supporting the statement: “I do not adopt OPR's findings of misconduct.”

So Yoo and Bybee walk away with no consequences whatsoever.

I have not read either report cover-to-cover. I may have more to say later.

Yesterday, General Petraeus came out against torture on Meet the Press:

I have always been on the record — in fact, since 2003 — with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have (perhaps) taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.

On hearing this statement, Matt Yglesias pronounced the death of the Petraeus for President movement.

it seems impossible at this point to imagine a Republican nominee who believes in the rule of law and humane treatment of detainees. And that, in turn, is obviously a sad state of affairs.

Short Notes

I'm used to national conservatives making up sensational nonsense, but recently a local conservative has been slandering my town's public schools. During a hearing of the New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee, Nancy Elliott, a Republican state representative from neighboring Merrimack, said that a Nashua parent had told her that fifth-grade students in Nashua were being shown pictures of naked men and told how anal sex is performed. Elliott blamed New Hampshire's same-sex marriage law for this outrage, rather than the true culprit: her own lewd imagination.

Fortunately, a Nashua alderman had the courage to call her on it: “Either turn in the name of the mother whose child was subjected to this alleged display of pornography to the Nashua Police Department, as required by law to protect the children, or recant and apologize publicly.” Wednesday Alderman Sheehan got her apology from Elliott, who admitted that she could not verify her claims.

The first anniversary of the stimulus produced a lot of commentary, but not much insight. I found a lot of he-said/she-said about whether or not the stimulus was a success, but not much factual analysis of what it actually did. (I'd like to see an updated version of this pie chart.)

In general, critics of the stimulus point to the fact that unemployment is higher than it was a year ago, and they tell anecdotes about wasteful spending — most of which are uncheckable.

Supporters point to the conclusion of just-about-every-economist-in-the-world that unemployment would be much worse without the stimulus.

I've been unsuccessfully googling around to find an original source for this parody of the Lord's Prayer. I got a version by email and have found other versions online, so I've cobbled the parts I like best together with some amendments of my own:
 
Oh Wall Street, which owneth Congress,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy lobbyists come.
Thy will be done
in legislatures as it is in boardrooms.
Give the unemployed this day no daily bread,
and forbid the homeless from trespassing, lest they bother us.
Lead us not into compassion,
but deliver us from socialism.
For thine is the loophole and the earmark and the bailout
forever and ever.
Amen.
It's official: The very rich have been getting richer and paying lower tax rates. The government's report on the top 400 taxpayers showed that their inflation-adjusted incomes have increased 399%  from 1992 to 2007, while the bottom 90% of taxpayers saw an increase of only 13%. Meanwhile, the 400 paid an average tax rate of 16.6% in 2007 — less than rate they paid in 2006 and less than the rate paid by those making a thousand times less.

Back when I first analyzed the Palin phenomenon in September, 2008, I predicted she would have trouble with “the other Republican base” — not the working-class evangelicals, but the suburban professionals. At the time I fantasized what Barbara Bush might be thinking, but George Will would have worked just as well.

He still does. Thursday, George wrote the pretty much the same thing about Sarah that I wrote Monday.

Glenn Greenwald calls attention to the opposite media treatment of two similar events: It's bad for protesters to wave Mexican flags, but good for Sarah Palin to sport an Israeli-flag pin.

Ron Paul won the straw poll at the Conservative PAC convention Saturday with 31% of the vote. Romney got 22% and Palin 7%. Remind me again how popular Palin is.

Breaking news from the Onion News Network: The newly crowned Miss Teen USA declares herself beauty queen for life after executing several judges: “Opposition to my rule will be, like, totally crushed.” 

ONN also covers the protests against Minnesota's proposal to ban marriages between people who don't love each other. Says one protester: “Beth and I have been seething silently in front of the TV for years. You can't tell me that's not marriage.” 

At some point conservatives are going to have to decide how far to ride the energy of the lunatic fringe. Michael Gerson is already starting to worry.

These days racism always claims to be about something other than race, but whatever was OK when the white guy did it is outrageous when the black guy does it. Case in point: President puts feet on historic desk.

Oh, and now that we have a black president, we need an organization of military officers pledged not to follow unconstitutional orders (founded March, 2009). This apparently was not necessary under Bush and Cheney.

I know they can make up anti-Obama stories faster than anyone can check them, but you have to try sometimes: Obama actually did not use a teleprompter to talk to elementary school kids.

The comedians at Second City Network suggest a different way to make the point I wrote about last week: Climate is not weather.

Two interesting articles about the practice of journalism: (1) Michael Kinsley (Atlantic) claims that the conventions of newspaper-writing make stories much longer and harder to follow than necessary. And (2) George Packer (New Yorker) says that if the subject were war or finance, we would never accept the vapid stuff that passes for analysis of American politics:

A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.

Harper's Scott Horton interviews Will Bunch about his book: Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. The most interesting paragraph:

And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

Bremer was Reagan's Coordinator for Combating Terrorism at the time.

The New York Times Magazine had a long-but-worth-it article asking How Christian Were the Founders? It starts with the largely successful efforts of Christian fundamentalists to make Texas history texts say what they want: “that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts.” And then it examines how accurate that position is.

Answer: It's complicated. Christianity and the Bible were indeed important to the Founders, but it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that 18th-century Christianity was all one thing — namely, fundamentalism. The Founders interpreted the Bible in various ways, just as we do today. And ultimately you have to explain this: They could have referenced God or the Bible in the Constitution, but they chose not to. That couldn't have been an oversight.

I wish the article had made this point: In addition to Christianity, there was also a strong classical Roman influence on the Founders. They often wrote under Roman pseudonyms. (The Federalist, for example, was a originally series of newspaper articles signed “Publius” rather than Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.) And their ethical ideas had as much to do with Greco-Roman Stoicism as with Christianity.

Apropos of nothing: a hilarious story of what happens when your 2-year-old gets his hands on something totally embarrassing.

Former Senator Rick Santorum understands why Admiral Mullen and other military leaders want to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military: “I'm not too sure that we haven't so indoctrinated the officer corps in this country that they can actually see straight to make the right decision.”

That's because anyone who disagrees with Santorum can't have an actual reason, and because it's inconceivable that the head of the Joint Chiefs might know more about the military than Rick does.

According to the Wall Street Journal, female MBAs aren't keeping up with male MBAs. Prioritizing family over career may account for some of the long-term problems, but the bad first jobs are hard to explain without invoking discrimination.

Sunday the WaPo's Dana Milbank published what amounts to a fan letter for Rahm Emanuel, blaming every problem of Obama's first year on not listening to Emanuel. In response, Cynk Uygur does some interesting speculating: He figures that Emanuel is on his way out, and Milbank is publishing Rahm's parting shots for him.

Time will tell on that. But I have to comment on this Milbank assertion:

Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn't: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

After 10 years it's fair to ask: What “big things” started as bite-sized Clinton proposals? Seeing none, I draw the exact opposite lesson: Bite-sized proposals fritter away your supporters' energy. Being too small to affect most voters, they just validate the conservative view that government can't solve our problems. I give Clinton credit for being a good executive (at least by comparison to W). But he left the Democratic Party no Clintonism to run on — no long-term vision, no inspiring ideas, nothing to organize a movement around. That's why the Democrats got pounded in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

More details of the smear against ACORN are coming out.

February 22, 2010 – 12:10 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Dare to be Stupid

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? 
— Will Rogers
In this week's Sift:
  • Dare to be Stupid. What's the responsible thing to do with a story that should never have gotten the public's attention to begin with? Ignore it and it festers. Debunk it you run the risk of entering the debate and becoming part of the problem. This week I follow Weird Al Yankovic's advice and dare to be stupid by covering two stupid stories: How the D.C. blizzard disproves global warming, and why Sarah Palin is a serious presidential candidate. 
  • The Future of Books. As we wait for the iPad to come out and possibly revolutionize the e-book market, a lot of people are talking about the future of books-on-paper.
  • The New Slums. Timothy Egan finds the forerunners of future slums in the over-built ex-urbs of San Francisco. It seems unthinkable that suburbs could become slums. But a lot of inner-city slums were unthinkable once too.
  • Short Notes. My favorite Marine survives to a distinguished retirement. Conservative American Christians suddenly notice the need for universal human rights. Greece has precisely the wrong amount of economic sovereignty. Health insurance rates are headed up already. And more.
Dare to Be Stupid

One of the challenges of journalism is figuring out what to say about a story that, in a perfect world, nobody would pay attention to at all — or maybe they'd pay just a little attention before going on to more important things. (“Where's Obama's birth certificate? Oh, wait, here it is. Never mind.”) You know the ones I mean — stupid stories, ones that give you a bad feeling about the general public and whether you want to be included in their number.

The problem with not covering a stupid story is that it runs along stupidly without you, like a dog dragging its leash down the trail. Every day a few more people hear the story, and if no one debunks it, then the folks who aren't stupid but just don't have a lot of time to check things out — they start to think it's true and maybe even important. (“Oh yeah. I heard that someplace.”) 

If you do cover it, though, you're drawing even more people's attention to it. You're adding to the noise, convincing people that there is an actual “controversy”,  and getting distracted from the stuff that actually deserves thinking and talking about. For example, every prime-time minute spent debunking “death panels” was a minute taken away from people who can't get medical care or who get it and then go bankrupt paying for it. 

Anyway, this week seemed to have more than its share of stupid stories. Let's roll up the cuffs of our pants and step out into the middle of two.

Snow Disproves Global Warming. This was a big theme on Fox News, where they put a copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth outside their D.C. offices and watched it disappear as the snow accumulated. “I'm not sure in which chapter,” host Eric Bolling announced sarcastically, “Mr. Gore dealt with record snowfalls across the whole Eastern seaboard.” The conservative movement's flagship newspaper, Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, led an editorial with this paragraph:

Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science.

And the Virginia Republican Party thought the point was so persuasive that it based an attack ad on it.

Several sources — Bill McKibben, Time magazine, and so on — tried to respond intelligently, but to me they all sound like a guy giving his wife a perfectly rational explanation of why he's on the phone with his ex-girlfriend. The articles require readers to think, and meanwhile the visceral contradiction between warm and snow is being reinforced. 

For what it's worth, the intelligent discussion of the storm goes like this: Climatologists actually did predict that global warming would lead to more serious snowstorms. For example, last year's report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program says: 

Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

The atmosphere holds more moisture as it gets warmer, so precipitation of all sorts is likely to increase. If you live someplace that still gets below freezing occasionally, your odds of a major snowstorm go up rather than down. So warm and snow are paradoxical, not contradictory. (“Honey? What's wrong? Don't throw that.”)

By the way, this is also why Antarctic ice is still increasing. Global warming has two predicted effects on the polar icecaps: increased snowfall and increased melting. In the Arctic, melting is the stronger effect, but the Antarctic is still in the temporary period where increased snowfall is the stronger effect. A UN Environment Program report says:

Even if Antarctica were to warm in the future, its mass balance is expected to become more positive: The rise in temperature would be insufficient to initiate melt but would increase snowfall.

An even more intelligent point of view refuses to get into the snow-and-global-warming discussion at all, because weather and climate occur on such different time scales that it's foolish to mention them in the same sentence. (It's like claiming that I'm on a diet because I'm not eating at this particular moment.) No matter how much the planet warms over the course of our lifetimes, there will still be some cold days. Undoubtedly next summer there will be a heat wave somewhere, and I doubt that Fox News or the Washington Times will present it as evidence that Gore was right after all.

Rachel Maddow tried harder to explain the nonsense in laymen's terms, and even enlisted the help of Bill Nye the Science Guy. But I think the best answer is to laugh at it, as Stephen Colbert did. After showing some of the Fox coverage, Colbert described it as “simple observational research: whatever just happened is the only thing that is happening.” He went on to observe that it was dark outside, and concluded that the Sun had been destroyed.

The world has been plunged into total darkness. Soon all our crops will die, and it's only a matter of time before the mole people emerge from the center of the Earth to enslave us.

Sarah Palin is a Serious Presidential Candidate. Palin has been a non-stop stupid story ever since the 2008 campaign ended. She was newsworthy when she was the vice presidential candidate of a major political party (a party that became significantly less major because of her ticket's landslide loss). She was newsworthy in Alaska until she resigned after half a term as governor. Since then, not so much. She has no decision-making power, and her comments have not added a single quantum of insight to any issue. 

Nevertheless, I could have led with a Palin story almost every week since the election, and even I haven't been able to resist including an occasional short note about her, or her daughter (who is still on her pro-abstinence do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do tour of the country), or her daughter's baby papa, or her first-dude husband. The Palins absolutely should be on TV as a reality show. But news? No, I don't think so.

Palin's latest attempt to be newsworthy was to give the closing address at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, which was a stupid story in itself. Picture a similar party on the Left, without Fox News to promote it 24/7. Wait, we don't have to picture it — there's a Green Party. Any idea when their next convention is? And while we're at it: What's the name of the current governor of Alaska? You know, the guy who picked up the responsibilities that Sarah couldn't be bothered with. 

I've watched the speech; it's standard Republican boilerplate — unspecific pleas to spend less and repeated invocations of “common sense solutions” that are never spelled out. And it's delivered badly. The audience, which paid big money specifically to see Palin, kept trying to get excited, but she mostly stepped on their enthusiasm. To get a view from the other side of the spectrum, check out Adam Kleinheider's claim that Palin is trying to “hijack” the Tea Party movement and that her speech was “derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism”.

Anyway, this performance convinced the Washington Post's David Broder (supposedly the dean of political columnists) that we should “Take Sarah Palin seriously” and that Palin is “at the top of her game”. Of course, the same David Broder declared in early 2007 that “President Bush is poised for a political comeback.” A football coach would be fired for a call that bad, but there are no standards for pundits, particularly at the Post. Meanwhile, a poll in the same newspaper said Palin's unfavorability rating had hit 55% compared to 37% favorable, a new low. “Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.”

In other words, only the pundit class really wants her to run. (And Democrats.)

Palin has a base: disaffected middle-aged and elderly white working-class evangelicals. That's nowhere near a majority, even in a Republican primary, and so far there's been not the slightest indication that she can attract anyone else. Jesse Jackson in 1988 had more upside than Palin does now. In 2008, the more the electorate saw of her, the less they liked her. That's going to hold true in 2012 as well.

No matter how much coverage she gets, she's still not newsworthy.

Steven Colbert demolishes Palin's rationalization of why Rush Limbaugh can use the phrase “f**king retard” but Rahm Emanuel can't.

Palin pledged to plow her $100K speaking fee back into the movement, but hasn't said how. Maybe she'll donate it to her PAC, so that it can buy more copies of her book.

Whenever Palin gets off her prepared script, she's in trouble. In response to a softball question at the Tea Party convention, she said: “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” Is that what her policies depend on? Vote Palin and pray for a miracle?

2008's least newsworthy person, Joe the Plumber, now says John McCain “used” him and “screwed up my life.”

The Future of Books
Maybe it was the announcement of the Apple iPad, which will start shipping in late March, but something has caused another flurry of discussion about the future of books.

The New York Times noticed the decision of Cushing Academy to “give away most of its 20,000 books and transform its library into a digital center” and asked several experts to comment on this question: Do School Libraries Need Books? No one answers with a simple “no”, but the depth of the writers' support for printed books varies, along with their reasoning for that support.

To me, the most interesting point was made by several people. Nicholas Carr put it like this:

The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging the kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning.

I get that point if we're talking about web browsing on a computer, where a chat window might pop up at any moment and dozens of links are always available. But I've had a Kindle for almost a year, and what it does best is re-create the focused space of a book. 

Liz Gray talks about how inexpensive books are, but that's only true in certain ways. Books are cheap, but libraries are expensive. You could buy a Nook or an iPad loaded with the Great Books collection (nearly all of which are in the public domain and essentially free as e-books) far cheaper than you could buy the paper-and-ink collection from Britannica. Which is more economical depends on a lot of assumptions about how the texts will be used.

I was glad to see all the participants dismiss the idea that paper/e-book is an either/or choice, as if buying an e-book reader would be a complete mistake if it didn't replace all the paper in your life.

In a separate discussion, Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias make the link between e-books and the problem that so many nonfiction books are padded. Yglesias:

One reason I haven’t wound up using my Kindle as much as I thought I would is that it’s dramatically easier to flip/scan/skim with a paper book and an awful lot of books that are by no means bad books demand a lot of flipping/scanning/skimming. … [I]n my experience it’s reasonably rare for even a pretty good non-fiction book to be an absolute masterpiece of composition that demands to be read from beginning to end. And unfortunately the trend is toward less-and-less in the way of the kind of editing that produces really well-crafted books.

But since an e-book's length is just a number (and doesn't have the symbolic value of a paper-book's physical heft) Farrell hopes we'll see a new market for the short e-book:

Ideally, we will end up in a world where people won’t feel obliged to pad out what are really essays to book length in order to get published and compensated.

I might as well make my prediction about the effect of the iPad. Dedicated readers will still want to have a dedicated e-book device like an improved Kindle or Nook, precisely for the closing-off-the-world effect Nicholas Carr attributes to paper-books. But lots more people will get iPads as generalized entertainment machines, and they will each read a few books on them.

The New Slums

Timothy Egan has an important article on his NYT blog: Slumburbia. He describes some California planned communities that were built during the housing bubble. They're two hours from San Francisco and now it's hard to find people who want to live there. 

Now median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000 — among the most precipitous drops in the nation — and still the houses sit empty, spooky and see-through, waiting on demography and psychology to catch up. In strip malls where tenants seem to last no longer than the life cycle of a gold fish, the bottom-feeders have moved in. “Coming soon: Cigarette City,” reads one sign here in Lathrop, near a “Cash Advance” outlet. Take a pulse: How can a community possibly be healthy when one in eight houses are in some stage of foreclosure? How can a town attract new people when the crime rate has spiked well above the national average? How can a family dream, or even save, when unemployment hovers around 16 percent?

For half a century, it has been unimaginable that the suburbs could turn into slums. But many of the inner-city slums that we take for granted today (or are re-gentrifying) were once fashionable neighborhoods too.

Egan calls attention to another unexpected fact: The recovering west-coast markets are the ones with strict housing codes: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego.

The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums. Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.

Short Notes
If you've been wondering what ever happened to that Marine I wrote about in Supporting My Troop in 2006, I went to his retirement ceremony Friday. Steve goes out as a Chief Warrant Officer 4. (Warrant officer is a rank most people haven't heard of, because there aren't that many of them. It sits between officers and enlisted men. CWO-5 is the highest rank you can get by coming up through the enlisted ranks.) A general officiated and awarded him the Legion of Merit — it and the Medal of Honor are the only American medals that are worn around the neck rather than pinned to a uniform.

He's been back to Iraq and Afghanistan several times since I wrote about him, and from his emails I have picked up such un-actionable intelligence as the fact that Bagram gets cold in January. 

Some retirements are sad, but this one wasn't. Steve seems both proud of his career and happy that it's over. (He would have retired sooner if he hadn't been stop-lossed.) I share some vicarious pride, and I'm happy that no one will be shooting at him now. After he gets used to civilian life, I'm planning to point out how well decorated military veterans have done as Democratic candidates for Congress.

Glenn Greenwald and Digby both comment on this: The same people who think that foreign-born Muslims accused of terrorism should have no rights at all are outraged that white American Christians accused of kidnapping Haitian children may not be treated with full respect.

Whether this is due to hypocrisy (as Glenn says) or lack of empathy (Digby), you either believe in human rights or you don't. You can't expect anybody to take you seriously if you claim that other people have to respect the rights of people like you, but that people-not-like-you can be treated like animals. Digby:

It turns out that having a rule of law commonly respected the world over really comes in handy at a time like this. And every time the US government chisels away at our system of justice in the name of “protecting ourselves”, or some yahoo prattles on about how someone doesn't deserve the same rights as somebody else, that fundamental protection gets weaker and weaker.

Fasteddie9318 on DailyKos compiles statements from a number of such yahoos: Scott Brown, Judd Gregg, Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Charles Krauthammer. All of them talk about the administration's “decision” to “grant” or “give” rights to people accused of terrorism. Here's the point (with my added emphasis):

It seems that conservatives see the Bill of Rights as a list of generous gifts from our government to its citizenry, rather than what it is: a list of prohibitions on government action to restrict or deny rights that it recognizes as universal. By that [conservative misconception], there are no inherent human rights, and if rights can be given by a government at will, then they can also be taken away just as easily.

Newt Gingrich can't get his story straight about when we should treat terrorists as criminals.

Europe is discovering the downside of a currency zone that is bigger than any government: Greece can't devalue its currency (the Euro) and it can't count on help from the rest of the EU.

I'm waiting for the moral and fiscal watchdogs on the Right to condemn Blackwater billing the government for a prostitute.

Robert Reich's health insurance company just raised individual premiums 39%.

A new poll says Americans want gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. It's not even close: 57% – 38%. And 82% think the military shouldn't discipline gays who get outed against their will.

Last week's “Why are liberals so condescending?” op-ed in the WaPo was solicited by the editors, not volunteered by the author. That's your liberal media in action.

February 15, 2010 – 1:14 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)