Frankly, the country would be better off if Dems were 100% certain that they would lose seats in 2010. That would light a fire to get this stuff done -- and would convince the "centrists" to quit being so wankerous.It seems to me that publius is mistaken in his assumption that most people think the Democratic agenda--this stuff he wants to "get done"--are Good Ideas with net pluses across the board. Many aren't so convinced. In particular, centrists. If Democrats were 100% sure they were losing seats in 2010, I'd expect centrists to be more "wankerous". It's only under the expectation of further Democratic hegemony that centrists have a strong incentive to go with the progressive flow despite their misgivings.
"Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn’t say enough about Hamas' so-called "endorsement" of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country's election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country."Somewhat tangentially, I'm reminded of an Orwell quote:
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
[The role of the CRA in the financial meltdown is] understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences. . . . Regardless of how much causal blame you assign it, the financial crisis has certainly proven that the CRA seems to have been a very, very bad idea.publius isn't having it (bold mine):
Essentially nothing in that excerpt is true. Felix Salmon and Ryan Chittum hopefully put the stake through this argument, but it keeps appearing (the Chittum post is more comprehensive). To sum them up -- the bad loans at the heart of the meltdown came overwhelmingly from unregulated, non-bank lenders who weren't even covered by the CRA. In addition, the CRA loans did very well. And there's basically not a shred of evidence that the CRA led to the meltdown. And you can't evade that 100% lack of evidence by citing vague "mentalities" and drawing imaginary causal lines constructed entirely of ideology.
My biggest difference with neoconservatives concerns attempts to create democracies by military force. I do not believe that it is impossible to do this: we did it in Germany and Japan after World War II. But in that case, we had a really good reason both to occupy Germany and Japan: namely, the fact that they had attacked us, and they had lost. Similarly, we had a decent reason for trying to recast their political institutions: those institutions were partially responsible for the fact that they had just started a world war.She goes on to discuss Iran and Iraq as poignant examples.
Creating a democracy requires the active participation of a lot of people in the country in which you are trying to create it, and you are unlikely to get this participation if those people regard your presence not just as undesirable, but as illegitimate. People tend not to regard our occupation of a country as illegitimate when they attack us, and they lose. But they do tend to regard it as illegitimate when we invade simply because we think they should have a different form of government, even if they themselves do not much like the government they have. For this reason, I think that even if we had the right to invade a country for the express purpose of creating a democracy, that invasion would be virtually certain to fail.
I want to reiterate my personal moral opposition to legal late term abortions. I understand the awful tragedies and complexities involved. I know too that most of these children would die soon anyway - or be subject to grueling operations with many risks. I just find the ending of human life to be something we avoid as much as we possibly can. And we need to find many more ways to facilitate contraception, the morning-after pill, and adoption to make these tragedies much rarer than they are.Mark Kleiman is befuddled:
Sorry, I can't make sense of this. "Contraception, the morning-after pill, and adoption" are relevant to the problem of fourteen-year-old girls who conceal their pregnancies until they start to "show." (Even then, it takes a colder heart than I can master to say to a middle-school girl who is carrying her father's child that she has to go through the pain —and, at that age, danger— of childbirth to bear her half-brother.)A Dish reader wrote:
But the whole "safe, legal, and rare" formula offers nothing to women who are carrying fetusus which, if carried to term, would face short, agonizing lives, or women whose pregnancies will kill them if not terminated, or women whose fetuses die inside them. (Yes, doctors are afraid to do dilation and extraction — the famous "partial-birth abortion" — even when the fetus is already dead.) Making late-term abortion illegal condemns them to horrors no one should have to face, and I for one don't have much patience with those willing to impose those horrors on others in order to salve their own consciences.
What Dr. George Tiller was doing (as one of only three physicians in the country) desperately needed, and needs, to be done. An appropriate memorial to him, and rebuke to his killer and those who egged his killer on, would be to enact policies to make certain that the services he had the courage to provide will be provided by others.
When I was pregnant with my second child, this is what happened to me. I was in the middle of the "feel good" sonogram at 21 weeks when the technician made a funny face and said that she was having difficulty getting some measurements. Her supervisor came in and took over, after asking me whether I had any other children and whether they were normal. And then I spoke with the radiologist, who was blunt and dour, and helped me get an immediate referral to Children's Hospital, where, several specialized sonograms later, we got as grim a verdict as I could possibly have imagined: a severe brain defect, a severe heart defect, other highly unusual but not easily interpreted "signs" of impairment, including structural or neurological deficits associated with swallowing and other motor functions. It all pointed to chromosomal anomaly, but, too bad for me, it wasn't possible to get definitive diagnosis in the time frame I had to make up my mind to obtain a legal termination.I found this enlightening, and I urge you to read Mark's first link, by hilzoy, who gathers more such stories.
My choices were to do nothing, undergo termination with less than definitive diagnosis, or wait for the definitive diagnosis, and then go to New York or Colorado, or, I guess, Kansas.
Technology has made the chromosomal test a lot quicker than it used to be. My doctor was very helpful -- telling me to consider what I would do if the amnio cam back normal, because even if chromosomally normal, we were looking at a grim prognosis. I also had the help of a genetics counselor who told me that she often found herself in the position of trying to keep people from overreacting in the face of alarming information -- accentuating the positive, if you will, but she had to admit that in my case, there was no positive information. So we did what we could to sort out the information we had, and we realized that there was almost no chance that the baby would live.
If she lived at all, she was destined for debilitating and probably inexplicable pain and suffering (at least three and probably more major surgeries), and a short life. There would never be any surgery for her brain defect, and if she was chromosomally abnormal, most doctors would refuse to do surgery, and she would simply be allowed to die. When we scheduled the termination, they did an amnio to get the definitive diagnosis, which turned out to be a rare and unsurvivable trisomy (#22 if you are interested -- it is so rare that the geneticist got a little excited because she had never personally seen it). The last time I saw her on the sonogram screen, her heart rate had decelerated to below 100, which is abnormal for a fetus. I believe that she was sustained as far as she was by me, and that she was already starting to die.
I was haunted for a while that I had to decide before I knew for sure that death was inevitable, and once I got over the grief of having done that, the experience only deepened my belief that abortion should be the province of individual men and women. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I have concluded that a decision to undergo abortion or continue a pregnancy is often made instinctively, with a nearly primal conviction that it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Trying to impose a rigid moral framework based on an extreme notion of equality of personhood doesn't even begin to speak to the complexities of what most people experience when trying to decide this question for themselves.
Clearly the party needs to raise its level of discourse and take liberalism seriously; mere socialist monikers aren't going to fly. The conceit that government intervention is a force for good leads to many bad ideas, and if conservatives keep resorting to name-calling instead of explaining why economic populism does not work well, they won't be persuasive.I have just concluded a special extraordinary session of me, in which I unanimously adopted the following resolution:
WHEREAS the Urban Dictionary defines "Poopyhead" as "The single most offensive thing you can call someone. It's like the atom bomb of arguments. Men fear it's omnipotent and awesome power. It it literally unmatched and all humble themselves in the presence of it's divinity. Few have survived to tell of it..." [sic];
WHEREAS the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, is deserving of any number of schoolyard epithets;
WHEREAS something has to stop them from making fools of themselves, and neither reason, decency, good sense, nor the prospect of an endless series of electoral defeats seems to do the trick;
WHEREAS the time therefore seems ripe to deploy "the atom bomb of arguments"; therefore be it
RESOLVED: that I, the member of me, recognize that the Republican Party is dedicated to reorganizing American society along poopyhead ideals; and be it further
RESOLVED: that I, the member of me, do call upon the Republican Party to be honest and truthful with the American people by acknowledging that they have devolved into a party of schoolchildren and should, therefore, agree to rename themselves the Grand Old Poopyheads.
"Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work."Conor deadpans:
I’ve never found myself arguing that Nazis were actually pretty harmless, let alone trying to prove my point by asserting that unlike the Nazis, really bad guys kill at least 3,000 innocent civilians. If I ever do, I’ll consider it a red flag signalling that perhaps my argument is absurd.How long 'til the pro-torture right earns a world record in flying leaps over the proverbial shark? Or do they have it already?
the thing i find particularly abhorrent about GOP's current talking point du jour about guantanamo detainees somehow being super villains is, well, they're painting them as super villains! think about how that raises their stature around the world, especially in the yes of an adoring radical islamic population. if we simply treated them as nasty, antisocial thugs, that we catch, prosecute and then lock away to a life of nothingess in a supermax prison somewhere, they suddenly become all the less dramatic and look more and more like simple misguided murderers. we elevate these people to an exalted pedestal of evil at our perilYes, I think an essential part of defeating terrorism is to, uhm, not be ridiculously terrified and treat them like common criminals. Terrorist want us to overreact and do stupid things like invade an 'axis of evil'.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.publius:
[..] part of the explanation, methinks, is simply that many evangelicals viscerally despise Democrats. And opposing torture has become "something Democrats do." So naturally, that opposition must be opposed.We must waterboard to protect unborn children from terrorists and democrats.
Sullivan has some initial thoughts up here:My U.S. Senator, Russ Feingold:
I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross’ debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect.
The legal memorandum for the CIA, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, reviewed 10 enhanced techniques for interrogating Zubaydah, and determined that none of them constituted torture under U.S. criminal law. The techniques were: attention grasp, walling (hitting a detainee against a flexible wall), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding.
The Obama administration has made today a good news-bad news day for civil libertarians. On the one hand, the administration has decided to release four controversial memos prepared by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration…
…However, in the same statement, Obama says one thing that will not warm the hearts of torture opponents: CIA agents and officials responsible for waterboarding will not be prosecuted.
I wonder, what is the statute of limitations on war crimes? Torture? Defaming the American Constitution? How Obama can grant immunity on this is simply beyond me.
In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.
The more one reads of this, the harder it is to credit Obama’s statement today that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.” At least when it comes to the orders of our highest government leaders and the DOJ lawyers who authorized them, these are pure war crimes, justified in the most disgustingly clinical language and with clear intent of wrongdoing. FDL has a petition urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings should commence.
Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied.
"The president has stated that it is not his administration's intention to prosecute those who acted reasonably and relied in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice. As I understand it, his decision does not mean that anyone who engaged in activities that the Department had not approved, those who gave improper legal advice or those who authorized the program could not be prosecuted. The details made public in these memos paint a horrifying picture and reveal how the Bush administration's lawyers and top officials were complicit in torture. The so-called enhanced interrogation program was a violation of our core principles as a nation and those responsible should be held accountable."Update: More via Kain...
Here’s what Attorney General Holder said today in his statement: “Holder also stressed that intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and relied in good faith on authoritative legal advice from the Justice Department that their conduct was lawful, and conformed their conduct to that advice, would not face federal prosecutions for that conduct.”
…So — doesn’t that mean that if there were IC officials who did NOT act reasonably, did NOT act in good faith, and IGNORED the OLC’s advice — that if evidence were to come out that some folks did this — that they could be subject to prosecution?
On this one, the right side won.
A quick skim suggests that very little of significance was redacted. I am quite pleased with the Obama administration’s actions here. While some are upset that the guys who were “just following orders” will get off, I’m pleased to see some evidence come to light regarding the people who actually gave orders. Now, wouldn’t it be absolutely delightful if we could use this evidence to punish those who gave the orders? One can hope…
It seems like mostly good news to me - perhaps my initial worry over the immunity was overblown….
Andrew asks:
Did the decision by the Spanish to relent on their war crimes prosecution have anything to do with the decision by the White House to release the OLC torture memos in full - with merely proper names redacted?
If so, that makes almost no sense to me at all. If anything, releasing these memos should give the Spanish courts a stronger case. The only way I can see that making any sense is if American courts had some plan to take up the cases instead, and I am going to once again play the cynic and suggest that such is not to be…at least not any time soon.
The OLC memos released today make for chilling reading. They also make it clear that we’re talking about interrogation methods that were whipped up by a group of people who were incredibly eager to torture some of their fellow human beings. They reflect the mindset of a group that regards the legal prohibition on torture as really sad, and thus something they need to find a way to get around. They achieved this by first concocting this weird definition of torture and then deviously coming up with all kinds of ways of torturing people that don’t fit the definition.
But all that this business about trapping someone in a confined box with insects shows is that the definition is wrong. The bug box, the slap, the stress positions, the waterboarding, etc. have all the hallmarks of torture. If they were done to your dad, you would call it torture. But some folks who are both creative and demented managed to come up with a bunch of ways of torturing people that didn’t fit the weird definition of torture they dreamed up.
Greenwald (again):
Finally, it should be emphasized — yet again — that it was not our Congress, nor our media, nor our courts that compelled disclosure of these memos. Instead, it was the ACLU’s tenacious efforts over several years which single-handedly pryed these memos from the clutched hands of the government. Along with a couple of other civil liberties organizations, the ACLU (with which I consult) has expended extraordinary efforts to ensure at least minimal amounts of openness and transparency in this country, something that was necessary given the profound failures of these other institutions to do so.
Update IV:
Not really an update. Still deafening silence from the Right. Only Charles Johnson who writes on the CIA immunity:
This breaking news is going to drive the left completely crazy. (A short drive.)
I guess everyone is so busy Tea Partying like it was 1981 that real news - real revelations about American war crimes - are just falling by the wayside. When they do finally emerge from their cave, what apology for the Bush administration do you suppose they’ll offer?
Anonymous Liberal:As I’ve said many times here before, the most culpable parties in this whole disgusting affair are the lawyers. Their job was to stand up for the rule of law, to tell the Dick Cheneys of the world that what they wanted to do was clearly illegal. They didn’t do that. Indeed, they went to elaborate lengths to give their legal blessing to conduct they had to have known was illegal.
I know many of you disagree with me on this, but I think Obama did the right thing by promising not to prosecute CIA officers who acted in accordance with the OLC’s prior advice. Given the kind of things these folks are asked to do and the important missions entrusted to them, they have to be able to rely on the legal advice they’re given by the government. If we start prosecuting people for conduct they were specifically advised was legal by the OLC, it will severely hamper our ability to conduct future intelligence work. No one will trust the advice they are given, they’ll worry that the rug will be pulled out from under them at some point down the road. That’s an untenable situation.
The people who should be punished are the people who gave the advice. The lawyers. The Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and David Addingtons of the world. Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos today. It is now up to us to make sure they generate the degree of outrage that they should.
Oh, and I found a Redstate reaction from Jeff Emmanuel:
Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.
The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.
Damn co-opters! First you co-opt the word “marriage” and now the word “torture!” By the way, is “beheading captives on video” really considered torture? I thought that was murder…
It’s interesting that Jeff thinks the only forms of torture that ought to be called that are the sort that essentially just almost instantly kill the victims. Been watching too many Saw movies there Jeff?
Ambinder again:
Senior administration officials have made it clear to me: neither President Obama’s statement nor Attorney General Holder’s words were meant to foreclose the possibility of prosecuting CIA officers who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.
Spencer Ackerman:
The point is that the depths of this story are still unexplored, and only a congressional investigation, with appropriate subpoena power, can get at the truth. That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling for; that’s what Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) is calling for. It’s not a question of a witch hunt, nor is it a backdoor way into prosecutions. It’s about closing this ugly chapter in American history. Leaving questions unresolved ensures that can never happen. If it’s the case that CIA officials are culpable for the torture, they should be held appropriately accountable; the same goes for Bush administration officials. The only blanket statement that’s appropriate in the wake of these memos is that torture is unacceptable, illegal and un-American.
- Spending. Our budget gives priority to national defense and veterans' health care. We freeze all other discretionary spending for five years, allowing it to grow modestly after that. We also place all spending under a statutory spending cap backed up by tough budget enforcement.Yglesias comments:
If, superficially, this seems like a warmed-over version of the McCain campaign economic agenda that the voters rejected just a few months ago, you need to pay more attention—McCain was just calling for a one-year freeze on discretionary spending after which reductions in government outlays would be achieved by magic. Ryan, by contrast, is proposing a five-year freeze.It's totally unserious. Cutting spending during a recession caused by a crisis of demand (not supply) is crazy anti-stimulus, and after the recession plenty of programs the public considers valuable will need more money. If we want to cut spending post-recession it basically needs to be done by ending unhelpful programs, not underfunding across the board. But that's not as pretty sounding as a "spending freeze" (which is really an increasingly large cut due to inflation). And when you propose cutting specific programs their interest groups lash out at you, so polticians are often unwilling to single them out unless they think the name sounds silly enough (recently mentioned in GOP speeches: mice control, bear DNA research, volcano monitoring)
Basically, you can imagine a school that today is serving a certain number of children and has a certain budget. Well, over the course of five years the population will grow and the number of kids in that school will also increase. But the school won’t get any additional money. Instead, because there’s inflation, the school will actually be getting less money even as it needs to teach more children. And so on across the board for federal programs. If you think that there’s literally nothing in the entire federal budget that’s useful, this may strike you as an appealing idea.
- Tax Reform. Our budget does not raise taxes, and makes permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax laws. In fact, we cut taxes and reform the tax system. Individuals can choose to pay their federal taxes under the existing code, or move to a highly simplified system that fits on a post card, with few deductions and two rates. Specifically, couples pay 10% on their first $100,000 in income (singles on $50,000) and 25% above that. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at 15%, and the death tax is repealed. The proposal includes generous standard and personal exemptions such that a family of four earning $39,000 would not pay tax on that amount. In an effort to revive peoples' lost savings, and to create an incentive for risk-taking and investment, the budget repeals the capital gains tax through 2010 for all taxpayers.The 10%-25%-15% figures are distributed well relative to each other -- flatter and better for the economy than anything Democrats will do for us -- but the total revenue is simply too low unless Republicans find a realistic way to cut spending that is not an across the board freeze. So you'd have to increase all those rates between 5-10% for this to work (15-30-20 or similar)
Meanwhile, the op-ed is a bit unclear on this point, but it appears to include a proposal to scrap Medicare in favor of a system of vouchers. The idea here is to “solve” the problem of health care cost inflation driving higher Medicare costs by replacing a guarantee of health care with a guarantee of a lump sum of money that would not grow as rapidly as the cost in health care. Basically, we would “solve” the problem of paying for senior citizens’ health care by just . . . not paying for senior citizens’ health care. Demonstrating a lack of commitment to the underlying principle, Ryan promises not to actually afflict anyone currently over the age of 55 with this policy. The hope is that everyone born since 1954 is too short-sighted to actually care about what fate awaits them upon retirement, while the guarantee of continued actual Medicare for those born before 1954 is supposed to immunize Ryan from their wrath.Hmm. Well speaking as someone born well after 1954, I would love to gradually phase out Medicare in a similar fashion. I don't think it demonstrates a lack of commitment to an underlying principle, I think it is the principle: get rid of Medicare, lower taxes, and let people manage their own health insurance. Medicare only appears to be cost effective because it underpays for proceedures, which in turn increases healthcare costs for everyone who's not on Medicare. That's part of why we have a healthcare problem in this country -- it's not because the government isn't covering enough people, it's because it's underpaying market rates for the coverage of some. But once you provide some people with "free" healthcare and conceal its real costs, that group loves and will never give it up. So this plan is a politically infeasible promise that I don't think they'll ever be able to deliver upon.
As near as I can tell, Paul Ryan and his staff just took the CBO projections that ended in 2019 and drew a random line, extending upward at about a 45 degree angle, until 2080. There's no real attempt to make it look scientific.publius:
Sigh. Crazy stuff.There’s a lot more that must and will be said about the GOP’s April Fool’s Day budget. But there’s one hilarious tidbit that needs mentioning.
As we already knew (because it was the one specific detail in the last “budget”), the plan has a massive tax cut for the wealthy – lowering the highest marginal rate to 25%. Higher-earning taxpayers can, however, voluntarily opt to pay the old higher rate.
Here’s the kicker – the GOP’s deficit assumptions assume that everyone will opt for the older higher rates. Take it away Steve Benen:
The hilarious angle to this is that the House Republicans run enormous budget deficits while assuming the top earners would voluntarily pay the higher rate.
Ryan Grim adds:A Republican budget committee aid said that the revenues assumed in the GOP budget are based on the current tax structure that resulted from those cuts.
In other words, Republicans are assuming that given the choice between a higher rate and a lower rate, Americans will choose the higher rate.
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