After posting yesterday on campaign videos and campaigning below the cortex, I took a look at some vintage campaign commercials that contain absolutely no policy content.
Check out this 1952 Stevenson ad. "Vote Stevenson, Vote Stevenson, a man you can believe in son."
Two more below the fold...
I don't know if Obama's people are directly behind the production of this video or not, but they've definitely had the upper hand when it comes to visceral appeal. Think of this as a love song from a suitor and you can appreciate how powerful a campaign device like this can be. Betcha they're hoping a lot of Hispanic Texans are going to watch this during the next month.
The next one by Hillary's people would be great too... if she were running for president in the 1976. What were they thinking?
Maybe she's just trying to woo elderly Republicans.
And, I think Obama has the crucial 6 through 12-year-old demographic sewed up with this one.
One way to make everyone look (Click photo to enlarge).
D.C. cop enforces Washington's decency code. No more than 6 inches above the knee may be exposed. Meanwhile, 1922 was the year that a senate investigation into illegal cash payoffs for oil leasing rights began in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal.
[T]he relative success of countries like Denmark and Iceland is outstanding evidence that the best way to ensure high levels of welfare spending (in tiny, ethnically homogeneous countries) is to let the capitalism rip -- from the always interesting Will Wilkinson.
Lisa Schiffren at NRO suggests that it's only political correctness that stops us from seeing that Obama's biracial background means he could be part of a communist plot to take over the US government.
Ah, yes... the elevated discourse continues.
In results just released by Zogby, Obama outpolled Hillary Clinton 52% to 38%. Obama leads in all age groups except seniors and in all income groups except those earning under $25,000/year. Obama has a small lead among white voters, a larger lead among male voters and is tied with Clinton among women voters.
Zogby also found Obama running ahead of McCain with 47% to 40%. With the general election still 9 months away, the numbers for an Obama-McCain match up don't mean anything. But we may be seeing the end for Hillary in the latest polling figures.
So what's happening? The relentless efforts to define Obama's change mantra as style without substance are not impressing voters. The message to voters: "Obama is hoodwinking you." The response from voters: "No he's not. A change in style is exactly what we want."
Long Beach, California: Douglas Aircraft (photo by Alfred Palmer). Click photo to enlarge.
If you caught William Kristol's column today, you know about the meme he is promoting -- namely that, as the opposition party, the fatal flaw of the Democrats is that they have been excused from the responsibility for making decisions. Those irresponsible Democrats are contrasted with Kristol's ruling Republicans who must always ask "in such and such circumstances, what would you do?" Kristol gleans this insight from a 1942 Orwell essay on Kipling.
While there is a degree of truth to be found in Orwell's insight into the opposition, Kristol's admiration for the essay does not extend so far as to actually share this insight within the context of Orwell's broader portrait of Kipling. To a startling degree, Orwell's description of Kipling resembles men like Kristol. That description is not wholly flattering. Perhaps Kristol was hoping that his political comrades in the blogs would eagerly develop the self-serving meme without bothering to read an essay that should embarrass the man who cherry-picked an insight to serve his narrow partisan purpose. Or, maybe it's simply the case that, blind to his own troubling limitations, Kristol can't admit to a sense of kinship with the deeply flawed Kipling of Orwell's rendering.
Although Orwell correctly identified a flaw among some who are part of a privileged and secure opposition -- they can maintain a sense of virtue while relying on the ruling establishment to promote the uncivilized dirty work that affords them a more comfortable life -- he was not suggesting that the ruling establishment sees matters clearly, acts morally or judges wisely. This less politically useful dimension of the essay has escaped Kristol's attention.
As you read the following excerpts from Orwell's piece, think of Kristol, Neocons, oil, Iraq, Arabs and the Middle East:
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.
And see if you don't recognize a bit of Kristol in this:
How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling's is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling's contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow.
One major difference between Clinton and Obama: Hillary is an old school liberal in her approach to problems, while Obama has an appreciation for the dynamic activity of markets. Make no mistake, Obama is a liberal whose vision includes an active role for government in everyday life, but he is not a command and control liberal.
This key difference in the two candidates' thinking is exposed in their approaches to the mortgage crisis. Hillary believes that the mortgage mess can be cleaned up entirely by command from the top. Her belief rests upon the assumption that unintended consequences won't flow from her well-intended presidential edicts. Obama has a better understanding of the workings of markets, even daring to suggest that the government should not bail out every distressed borrower.
For decades in this country, Rodham-nomics was in the mainstream. The government, most Americans assumed, could solve any problem with some combination of money and an edict ordering the problem to go away. Today, more American's than ever understand that intentions are not the same as results. Without out a basic understanding and respect for the functioning of markets, even the most well-intentioned plans can end up greatly exacerbating the problems they are intended to remedy.
We saw evidence for Hillary's grand economic fantasies in her politically doomed 1990s health care plan. She says she has learned from her mistakes. Whatever she learned from that political debacle, it doesn't seem that she learned anything about economic principles, if we can judge her based on her plans to fix the mortgage crisis.
Steve Chapman discusses this key difference between Obama and Clinton:
[Hillary Clinton's] policy rests on the assumption that upon arriving in the Oval Office, she'll open the closet and find a magic wand. Obama, by contrast, acknowledges the bitter truth that when government regulators clamber into a carriage, it can easily turn into a pumpkin.
Their approaches to the problem are not an aberration but a symptom of a larger difference. Obama is not a staunch free marketeer, but he grasps the value of markets and shows some deference to economic laws. Clinton, however, tends to treat both as piddly obstacles to her grand ambitions.
Continued below the fold...
Continue reading "Hillary Versus Obama: Who Believes in Fairy Tales?" »
What would a 'President McCain' look like? Check out an interesting piece by a Chicago columnist, Tom Roeser, who had a long career as a Republican operative. Roeser is recounting a recent conversation with an old McCain pal:
[Roeser]: There is no doubt that McCain was once a conservative and did a lot of switching after the 2000 presidential race which he lost to George W. Bush. Did he experience an epiphany or something?
[McCain friend]: Not at all. The radical switch came as result of bad temper, rage, tirade and pique. You know John--... He is irascible, short-tempered, has a temper like a blowtorch. He was hotter than I ever saw him following that loss and he resolved to make Bush pay for his victory which he felt was the use of innuendo and rumors to make the case that he had fathered a black baby out of wedlock...
and
[Roeser]: Are we to suppose that the new version of McCain which is a recycling of the old-old McCain is the one we will see if he becomes president?
[McCain friend]: Yes. Listen here’s a guy who told Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to go f--- himself. A guy who called Arlen Specter an a------. Do you know who I think he would most resemble as president?
[Roeser]: Who?
[McCain friend]: Andrew Jackson. Combative, mercurial and thin-skinned, with Scotch Irish blood like McCain. He could hate with a biblical fury and change overnight.
If Ann Coulter helps anyone at this point, she helps Democrats with her portrayal of conservatives as mean-spirited clowns. I guess that isn't a problem for her now that she intends to vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain.
Here's Think Progress on Coulter's latest as she is speaking to the Young America’s Foundation at CPAC:
Hillary wanted [to change her campaign song to] “I am woman,” but it was already taken by Edwards.
and...
The best thing that had ever happened to the campaign of “B. Hussein Obama” was when he was born “half black.”
Some conservatives wish Coulter would just go away -- and, lately, some conservatives wouldn't mind too much if Limbaugh and Ingraham went with her.
"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here." -- Bill Clinton
I guess the Clintons have given up on African-American voters. Might as well go after the doughface Democrat vote, eh?
Gary Wills cautions us about a Clinton presidency. I didn't buy his argument immediately, but as I gave the matter some thought I realized that Wills is on to something. It is unquestionable that Bill Clinton would be a very active, powerful force in Hillary's presidency -- more powerful and unchecked than Dick Cheney and far more powerful than Hillary was in the first Clinton presidency. Does anyone believe that someone other the Bill Clinton would be Hillary's firm, second in command and, more significantly, that much of the former president's power would be exercised in ways designed to conceal his authority from public view?
From an article (America, 1-7-08) on Blair's reception into the Catholic church:
[Blair] was careful to keep his faith well below the radar as prime minister, for fear of being seen as a “nutter," he recently told a BBC documentary. It is a grand irony that in the United States, where Church and State are separated by high constitutional walls, it is helpful for politicians to speak often of God; whereas in Britain, where the Anglican Church is “by law established” and the state is officially Christian, it is very advisable for politicians to steer well away from the subject. “We don’t do God,” Blair’s press secretary, Alistair Campbell, once famously remarked. And in his interview Blair explains what Campbell meant.
“If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘Yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally,” he tells the BBC. “You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. They sort of [think] you maybe go off and sit in the corner and commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say, ‘Right, I’ve been told the answer and that’s it.’”
From the NY Times:
In 2001, the Bush administration used the impending recession as an excuse to cut taxes for upper-income Americans — the very group that had done so well over the preceding quarter-century. The cuts were not intended to stimulate the economy, and they did so only to a limited extent. To keep the economy going, the Federal Reserve was forced to lower interest rates to an unprecedented extent and then look the other way as America engaged in reckless lending. The economy was sustained on borrowed money and borrowed time.
The day of reckoning has come. This time we need a stimulus that stimulates. The question is, will the president and Congress put aside politics to get the job done? Read the rest here.
Here's a CNN debate Video Clip
Some highlights:
(Hillary criticizes Obama for speaking positively about Republican economic ideas. Obama accuses her of misrepresenting comments he made about Reagan and goes on the attack.)
Obama: While I was working on those streets [in Chicago] watching those folks jobs shipped overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.
Hillary continues: In an editorial board with the Reno Newspaper, you said two things... I have read the transcript. You talked about Ronald Reagan being a transformative political leader. I did not mention his name.
Obama (interupts): Your husband did.
Hillary: Well, I'm here. He's not.
Obama: Well... I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes. (ouch)
Hillary gets her legs back quickly and hits Obama with this zinger:
I was fighting against those ["bad" Republican] ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor -- Rezko -- in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.
Hillary also pounced on Obama for voting 'present' over 100 times as an Illinois state senator. The implication was that Obama was a negligent legislator whose positions were often unclear. Obama's response to the charge was nearly lost in the ensuing commotion. He correctly answered that voting present in the Illinois Senate is a way to say that you don't accept a bill as is, but that you might support it in modified form. Obama also shot back that he voted present over 100 times, but that was out of approximately 4000 bills he voted on while he was a state legislator. Hardly an abuse of the 'present' vote.
So, it was all very lively, but was there any substance behind the personal attacks?
Some, but not much. Hillary deliberately distorted Obama's comments about Reagan and was being completely disingenuous when she said that she hadn't mentioned Reagan's name. From the get-go, she was, of course, referring to Obama's comments about Reagan during his Reno interview. And, bringing up Obama's present votes in the Illinois Senate, as if he had been a negligent legislator, was a cheap and deliberate misrepresentation of Obama's record as a state senator.
But, Hillary's Rezko remark had more meat on it than most of the Obama faithful are willing to acknowledge. Like many politicians in Illinois, Obama has had his share of shady friends and patrons. As I've said before, Obama isn't as clean as Joe Biden thinks he is.
As for Clinton's work for Wal-Mart, it's true that Hillary reaped the benefits of global capitalism and free trade, although in Hillary's case the Wal-Mart job had much to do with the benefits of being married to a very prominent politician -- something the very well-compensated Mrs. Obama knows all about.
Finally, I, too, wonder which Clinton Obama is running against. After all, it will not be Hillary, but Bill, campaigning in South Carolina for the rest of the week.
Update:
Interesting... from Marathon Pundit: "Obama's wife Michelle once served on the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, whose biggest customer is--Wal-Mart."
Christopher Hitchens asks why the press is giving Huckabee a pass.
I've written previously about Obama's association with the corrupt characters who infest Illinois politics. The Chicago Sun-Times updates the story, reporting on documents filed in the federal corruption case against Tony Rezko:
Obama is not named in the Dec. 21 court document. But a source familiar with the case confirmed that Obama is the unnamed “political candidate” referred to in a section of the document that accuses Rezko of orchestrating a scheme in which a firm hired to handle state teacher pension investments first had to pay $250,000 in “sham” finder’s fees. From that money, $10,000 was donated to Obama’s successful run for the Senate in the name of a Rezko business associate, according to the court filing and the source.
Rezko, who was part of Obama’s senatorial finance committee, also is accused of directing “at least one other individual” to donate money to Obama and then reimbursing that individual — in possible violation of federal election law.
An excellent column by today by David Brooks:
People in my line of work try to answer certain questions. Why did Hillary surge after misting up in New Hampshire? Why have primary victories produced no momentum for the victors? Why did John McCain win among Republicans who oppose the Iraq war in both New Hampshire and Michigan, but lose among voters who support it?
The truth is that many of the theories we come up with are bogus. They are based on the assumption that voters make cold, rational decisions about who to vote for and can tell us why they decided as they did. This is false.
In reality, we voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. “People often act without knowing why they do what they do,” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, noted in an e-mail message to me this week. “The fashion of political writing this year is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible.”
Nobody really knows how voters think, especially during primary seasons when the policy differences are minute, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the cognitive chain went something like this:
After seeing a candidate for 100 milliseconds, voters make certain sorts of judgments based on expressiveness, facial structure, carriage and attitude. Alexander Todorov of Princeton has found that he can predict 70 percent of political races just by measuring peoples’ snap judgments of candidates’ faces. Read More...
Matthew Yglesias writes in Washington Monthly:
Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling. And, when this sort of toughness and sparring becomes its own reward, the vacuity of the questioning is almost guaranteed. After all, if you asked a politician a serious, important question and got a perfectly good answer, then maybe, for a moment, you couldn't be tough. Instead, Russert relies on his crutch of confronting politicians with allegedly contradictory statements they've made—to highly monotonous effect. Read More.
I've had a similar reaction to Russert. I've lost interest in watching him play the same game with his guests, irrespective of party or ideology.
When asked to forecast the probability of a specific event happening, pundits tended to perform worse than random chance. A dart throwing chimp would have beaten the majority of well-informed experts.
Your school soccer team's star player tells you he wants to skip tonight's game because he needs to study for a test. The coach comes looking for him and asks you if you've seen him. If you betray him and tell the truth, your team will probably win the game, but if you lie and cover for him, he'll pass his test.
Children in China tended to rat him out, while North American children said they would lie and claim they hadn't seen him. Other questions presented an inverse scenario where in lying would help a team but harm an individual, and Chinese children chose to lie in these situations, whereas North American children told the truth. Lee chalks it up to the two cultures' different priorities: Chinese culture tends to emphasize the collective good, he says, while Western culture focuses more on the individual.
Stephen Chapman writes about the unacknowledged cost of keeping campaign promises:
Listening to the Democratic contenders, for example, is like listening to a 4-year-old tell Santa what she wants for Christmas—an array of cherished desires, and no sense that someone has to pay for them. Universal health insurance! Affordable college! Grants for child care! Money for schools! Every doll ever made by American Girl!
According to the non-partisan Web site PolitiFact, which assesses the accuracy of what candidates say, all the programs envisioned by Hillary Clinton would add about $174 billion a year in outlays. And that was before she unveiled a $70 billion fiscal stimulus plan Friday. Barack Obama, according to a November analysis in the McClatchy newspapers, has promised "at least $181 billion in new annual spending on middle-class tax cuts, health care and retirement and energy plans."
How would they pay for it all? Their prime source is repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest households. What they don't acknowledge is that those tax cuts are already scheduled to expire in 2010, helping to eliminate the deficit. But if the money is going to be used to close the fiscal shortfall, it can't be used to pay for new programs.Clinton says she intends not only to shower us with blessings but balance the budget. Can that be done? Of course—if she is prepared to raise taxes far more than she has let on.
Here's a recently unearthed conversation between Richard Nixon and Nixon's Chief of Staff H.R Haldemann reacting to John Kerry's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show with Nixon supporter John O'Neill (later of Swift Vets for Truth).
Nixon: Nothing you can do about it, obviously?
Haldemann: We've complained bitterly about the Cavett show.
Nixon: Well, is there any way we can screw him [Cavett]? That's what I mean. There must be ways.
Haldemann: We've been trying to.
It has been reported that Cavett was fascinated by the discovery of this material. Rumors at the time were that an inordinate number of IRS audits of employees of the Cavett Show were related to White House efforts to intimidate the late-night talk show host.
Bill Clinton isn't Hillary's only problem. A reader at the Daily Dish bristles with the kind of old-fashioned, liberal condescension that turns so many voters off to Hillary.
Obama won't earn my vote until he stands up to his boorish supporters, the boorish "Hillary Haters" of the Right, and the media. ...hostility and disrespect toward the women who, bearing the brunt of massive social change over the last 40 years, stepped up to the plate, accepted new responsibilities, and worked to create new and better conditions and opportunities for their sons and daughters. Obama would not be where he is today without 40 years of commitment from the liberal women, black and white, of Hillary's (and my own) generation. That unique "biography" that you claim as Obama's advantage isn't Obama's alone -- it is his mother's, too, and perhaps most of all.
In other words, Mr. Obama, you're a black man. You're nothing without our virtue. You thought you could be proud of the way you've lived your life? You thought you could be proud of your own accomplishments? Well, Mister, we're here to tell you that you're nothing. It's all about us.
And you know all that stuff about oppressive sexist values, Mr. Obama? We reject those values, except when it comes to defending Hillary. You can't treat her the way you treat the rest of your opponents. We expect a man to step up to the plate to defend Hillary's honor, because she's a woman and men are supposed to defend a woman's honor.
There's more:
I'd like to see Obama, if he gets the nomination, choose a woman VP... It would also help convince life-long Democratic women, like me, that Obama really is seeking to lead the country past the old politics of "culture war" -- so much of which has always been based in fear of the changing role of women in our society and economy -- rather than just exploiting that fear in new and more subtle ways.
Huh? Since when does choosing a running mate based on gender represent getting past the old politics of the culture wars? Obama isn't running on his blackness and it would pollute his message of change if people thought that he chose a running mate based on the old politics of identity. I'm not saying he should or shouldn't choose a woman as a running mate. I'm saying that he should not choose a woman (or anyone else for that matter) as an accession to the resentful demands of people clinging to the old politics of identity. One great positive about Obama is that voters sense that he is above that kind of politics; he's not running on resentment and he isn't laying guilt trips on voters. That's the kind of change he represents.
Hillary keeps protesting that she is about change because she gets things done in the real world, but that defense misses the mark. People want a change of attitude in politics. No matter how much Hillary does in the "real world," if she still represents the old values expressed by Andrew Sullivan's reader, then she is not about the kind of change that voters want.
In a post titled Bush Unemployment at 5.0%- Bad... Clinton Unemployment at 5.4%- Good, Gateway Pundit complains about bias in mainstream media analysis of unemployment rates during the Clinton and Bush years:
Something you will never hear from the mainstream news...
The average unemployment rate during the Bush years is running lower than during the Clinton years.
Gateway Pundit includes a bar graph (below) to document the media's well kept secret about unemployment rates during each man's presidential tenure:
But, when it comes to spin, GP's graphic is a case of the pot meeting the kettle.
Graphic depictions should bring interpretive clarity to numbers, but I've never seen a minuscule difference of 0.0088% in the unemployment rate appear to loom so large. The lower and upper values selected for the y-axis in GP's bar graph are severely constricted to magnify the appearance of small variations in unemployment percentages, thus creating a visual impression that unemployment was markedly lower during the Bush years compared with Clinton years. This is an old trick unworthy of someone complaining about biased media reporting. (Does anyone remember those Anacin commercials during the 1960s?)
But more problematic than his bar graph is the way GP collapses annual unemployment rates into incumbency averages that obscure context and trends during each man's time in office. So, let's examine the yearly figures since 1992 to see what GP has buried in his averaging of the data.
Look at the unemployment rate in the year before Clinton assumed office (7.49%) and check the rate in his last year (3.97%). Then look at the rate under Bush as of December 2007 (5.0%).
1992 7.49 Bush
1993 6.91 Clinton
1994 6.10
1995 5.59
1996 5.41
1997 4.94
1998 4.50
1999 4.22
2000 3.97
2001 4.76 Bush, G.W.
2002 5.78
2003 5.99
2004 5.53
2005 5.08
2006 4.63
Dec 07 5.00
You know the old expression, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." By collapsing the annual data into averages for entire periods in office, Gateway Pundit obscures what really happened to unemployment rates while each president served, leaving himself wide open to a charge of hypocrisy on the issue of spinning the unemployment numbers.
If we believe that unemployment rates viewed in isolation from other data are valid measures of a president's performance on economic matters, a more detailed examination of the data makes Clinton look spectacular while Bush appears merely to hold on. But, I'm not arguing that Clinton is responsible for the figures we see while he was in office, nor am I arguing that Bush is responsible for the numbers we see under his presidency. I am saying that Gateway Pundit's spin on the unemployment numbers smacks of the kind of biased reporting he finds so objectionable in the mainstream media.
Gateway Pundit post via Maggie's Farm
The Saudi government confirmed that it is has been holding a popular blogger for interrogation since December 10, according to the NY Times. The blogger, 32-year-old Fouad al-Farhan, has been an outspoken critic of corruption in the Saudi government. He has also written about the plight of Saudi political prisoners.
Mr. Farhan was one of the first Saudi bloggers to post in Arabic using his real name. He had been expecting his arrest, according to friends who continue to publish his blog.
Read more at Global Stories.
David Brooks offers an insightful discussion of Mitt Romney's candidacy in today's NY Times:
He [Romney] has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.
And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many...
And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences...
As I read the Brooks piece, I found myself thinking about Easy Cheese (aka Snack Mate, Cheez Whiz). For non-Americans, Easy Cheese is a cheese-like spread dispensed from an aerosol can. For years it was a staple of American college dormitory life because it would keep indefinitely without refrigeration. In the middle of the night, lacking other options, you might eat the stuff and think that it wasn't half-bad.
Mitt Romney's candidacy is just like Easy Cheese ― a market researcher's contrivance. Easy Cheese is so inauthentic that they have to call it "cheese food" to avoid running afoul of laws pertaining to the legal definition of cheese. I don't think it's possible to win an American presidential election by being the Easy Cheese candidate.
"If the French hadn't saved our asses in the revolutionary war, we'd all be speaking English right now." --Ed Brayton.
President Bush's proposed expansion of guest worker programs has been widely denounced by critics on both the left and the right, but in a fresh analysis, Kerry Howley argues that guest worker programs might be good for the both U.S and for "the world's poorest people."
“Give the Senate some credit,” James Suroweicki wrote in the June 11 New Yorker: “In shaping the current immigration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates.” Hates was an understatement. President George W. Bush had been pushing for some sort of guest worker program since before the 9/11 attacks, and as that idea inched closer to realization in 2007, his critics grew more vitriolic. Right-wingers who fervently believed the U.S. government would succeed in rebuilding the Middle East excoriated Bush for his starry-eyed idealism, and left-wingers who wanted amnesty suddenly came out against the entrance of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.
The New York Times complained that no worker should be sent home; National Review complained that no worker would go home. The New Republic said the plan fell within “the tradition of the African slave ship,” and the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which wants more deportations of peaceful undocumented workers, called it “morally dubious.” Continue Reading Kerry Howley (Reason, January 2008)
Bush might be right about an expanded guest worker program being our best alternative. I think that a substantial number of American's could be persuaded to an give expanded guest program a try, but I don't think Howley's analysis would persuade the discourse-dominating ideologues who insist on an America that replicates the America of their fantasies.
For better or for worse, ideologues are defending frames of reference they rely upon to make sense of all things political. With stakes like that, changing one's mind on a single political issue can seem like stepping into a moral and intellectual abyss -- and no one likes stepping into an abyss.
H/T: Will Wilkinson
Related post: La Shawn Barber's Fictional (ideologically-driven) History of Immigrants
The Barrister points to an interesting 2005 article by a war opponent who traces U.S. policy in the Middle East to key decisions made by Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter. The author, Andrew Bacevich, is a conservative professor of international relations at BU and a West Point graduate who served in Vietnam. He was the subject of much media attention in May 2007 when his son Andrew was killed serving in Iraq.
From The Real World War IV:
America's political and military efforts in the Middle East go by many names: War on terror. Clash of civilizations. Democratization. But our author argues that all of these undertakings grow from a fateful decision made decades ago that the American way of life requires unlimited access to foreign oil. Read More...
Chicago River, 1951. Click photo to enlarge.
That's the Merchandise Mart on the left. In square footage, it's one of the largest buildings in the world. Built by Marshall Field and opened in 1930, the Mart was sold to Joseph P. Kennedy in 1945. Eventually, the Mart was run by Kennedy son-in-law R. Sargent Shriver (father/father-in-law of Maria/Arnold), later by William Smith (father of William Kennedy Smith) and most recently by Christopher Kennedy (son of Robert F. Kennedy) who remains as CEO of the Mart for Vornado Reality Trust. In 1998, Kennedy's heirs sold the building and divied up over $500 million. They kept other commercial real estate holdings in Chicago.
A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but how should we think about conservative inconsistency on judicial activism? Is such inconsistency wise, self-deluding or just plain dishonest?
Take the case Justice Antonin Scalia who has no problem with judicial activism when he finds it convenient.
And in this Right Wing News interview, an anti-ACLU attorney cites Justice Brewer writing for the majority in an 1892 Supreme Court decision. Jay, from Stop the ACLU exclaims:
This is a Christian Nation! And we ought to be damn proud it is! Because it is only in Christian Nations where you will find freedom of religion. We are a Christian Nation, and the U.S. Supreme Court said so. The Supreme Court in HOLY TRINITY CHURCH v. U.S. that this is a Christian Nation. That is our history. The history the ACLU wants to erase."
But a look at that opinion reveals that the rationale offered by Justice Brewer is hardly consistent with strict constructionism: Brewer wrote:
"These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation."
So what are we to think about a right-wing attorney citing this court opinion to support his own contention that the United States is a Christian nation? Has the right given up on strict constructionism in favor of the mass of organic utterances approach to the constitution?
Government and politics in Illinois have been rife with corruption at all levels for as long as anyone here can remember. Last week, I wrote about recent corruption scandals at Illinois state universities. I also mentioned that three of the state's last seven governors have gone to prison on felony convictions (a fourth was tried and found not guilty). Now the feds led by Northern Illinois district prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may be closing in on sitting Governor Rod Blagojevich (D), according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.
Blagojevich (left) is a political mediocrity who owes his improbable rise to a combination of family connection, the misfortunes of scandal plagued (now jailed) Republican former governor George Ryan and a very flexible conscience that has landed him in more than a few scrapes that betray his sleaziness.
On the day after I wrote about corruption at Illinois universities, one of Blogo's top advisers, Christopher Kelly, was indicted for tax evasion. Another Blogo pal, real estate and pizza magnate Tony Rezko, goes on trial this coming spring. The indictments fit a pattern we've seen before in Illinois. The federal prosecutor takes down a politician's close associates, squeezing them until they turn on each other and their big shot patron.
An Obama Connection
Readers outside of Illinois may recognize the name, Tony Rezko. Rezko is a longtime Barack Obama friend and patron who made a shady real estate deal with the senator. Even though I prefer Obama to anyone else running on the Democratic side, I don't think the man is as clean as Joe Biden thinks he is. Besides the Rezko deal, there are Obama's ethically questionable investments and Michelle Obama's mind-blowing, overnight pay raise from $121,000/year to $316,000/year right after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate. Her bosses said she deserved it. I guess they didn't notice that she deserved it until her husband became a U.S. Senator. It's not that anyone has suggested that accepting the raise violated the law, but it isn't exactly a sign of good ethical hygiene, either.
When people say that Obama transcends the usual divisive, partisan politics, they may not fully appreciate that it's because he cut his political teeth in Illinois where ideology and party affiliation are far less important than figuring out how to plug-in to what one Chicago columnist calls the combine uniting politicians of both parties in a culture of corruption.
Anyway, it's easy when discussing one Illinois political scandal to spin off into discussion of other scandals because there are so many scandals and the characters can all be linked in a big game of six-degrees of the federal pen. Actually, it's a much easier game to play than the Kevin Bacon version because there are, at most, only one or two-degrees separating any Illinois pol from the federal inmate population.
Next up for federal prosecutors may be the most slippery Illinois politician of them all, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. They've been taking down his friends, but Daley, who was once the state's top prosecutor, always makes sure that he doesn't know anything about deals and the city money that falls from the sky all over the people standing close to him.
Last week we learned of another beneficiary of Richard Daley's ignorance, the mayor's son, Patrick Daley. In 2003, 27-year-old Patrick and a cousin, Robert Vanecko, invested in a sewer firm doing millions in business with the city. The problem is that the contractor illegally failed to disclose Daley family interests in a firm raking in cash from city contracts. Patrick Daley was conveniently unavailable for comment when the story broke last week. He is preparing to ship out for duty in the Middle East. The younger Daley, who was previously employed by a private equity firm, abruptly sold his interest in the sewer firm and enlisted in the military shortly after it became known in 2005 that federal prosecutors were investigating city contracts awarded to mayoral cronies.
If you really want to understand Illinois politics and Illinois politicians, think of the friendly relationship between Richard Daley (D) and Jesse Jackson (D-Budweiser). In the right-wing media, the story is portrayed as a tale of Jackson's corruption, but it is more fundamentally about the way politics is conducted in Illinois. Jackson is silent on race politics when it comes to Chicago and Budweiser and the Jackson family lands a beer distributorship, a congressional seat and, more recently, an aldermanic seat. Jackson is just doing politics the way it's done in Illinois; he transcends the divisive approach whenever he's in town.
Update: Another Obama Connection
I see that Daley cousin, Robert Vanecko, turns up in the news again today in this story about the transcendent Barack Obama's role in securing money from a charity for a development project that netted Obama's ex-boss, Allison Davis, $700,000 in consulting fees. Obama admits that he failed to inform the charity of his relationship with Davis when he voted to fund the Davis deal. According to the article, Vanecko [the undisclosed beneficiary of city sewer contracts] is a business partner of Obama's [undisclosed] ex-boss, Davis. Davis is also a business partner of... Tony Rezko.
From an article in the Sunday NY Times featuring the notoriously tribal Québécois pitted against notoriously tribal Mulims and Orthodox Jews:
Viewed separately, the incidents seemed relatively insignificant. Members of a Hasidic synagogue here wanted a neighboring YMCA to block or tint the windows of an exercise room used by women. A Muslim girl was barred from playing soccer for wearing a hijab on the field. And, in Quebec, some Muslims and Orthodox Jews refused to deal with police officers and physicians of the opposite sex.
Then came the decision in late January by Hérouxville, Quebec — a town of French-speaking Catholics — to create a code of conduct for immigrants that prohibited, among other things, the covering of women’s faces except for on Halloween and the use of public stoning as a form of punishment. This despite the fact that there are no Muslims in the town and no modern history of stonings.
Yesterday, I offered the following thoughts about political identity:
Political identities always seem to demand moral inconsistency in exchange for club membership. I find that I can't call myself a conservative or a liberal anymore and I suspect fundamental corruption of anyone who reaches the fifth or sixth decade of life still wearing such a label without some sense of ambivalence.
In his column today, David Brooks said of Barack Obama:
Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.
I don't know if Brooks is right on Obama, but I agree entirely with one part of his observation: "the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual."
H/T: Andrew Sullivan
Sadly, No! gives us a pre-release peek at Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism.
From the jacket:
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a friendlier, more liberal form. The modern heirs of this friendly "fascist" tradition include The New York Times, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
I'm wondering how Jonah would characterize a person who gets paid to look "for really dirty stuff...Who was sleeping with who, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane--that sort of thing."
The quintessential Republican, perhaps?
Commenting on Alesina, Ichino, and Karabarbounis's proposal for a "man tax," Robin Hanson shows us that it's easy to find supporters for such a measure. Hanson also notices that a strictly utilitarian analysis could justify a height tax as well, yet no one seems to favor such a measure.
Of gender taxes, Hanson also asks:
if careful economic analysis had instead favored taxing men less than women, how many supporters do you think that proposal would have found, even among economists?
Let me take a wild stab at the answer to that question... None?
The NY Times is reporting that Saudi King Abdullah has pardoned a female gang rape victim known as the Qatif girl. The woman had been sentenced to 200 lashes for meeting privately with her ex-fiance, but don't get the idea that Islamic justice is anything other than a system of institutionalized evil run by a morally warped, primitive people. The underlying system of Islamic brutality that masquerades as justice remains intact and unquestioned.
Commenting on the pardon, the Saudi justice minister, Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Sheik, told Al Jazirah that the king fully supported the verdicts against the woman but had decided to pardon her because it was in the “interests of the people.”
Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who specializes in Saudi Arabia, said that this is a kind of “double message” that is commonly employed by the Saudi government.
“On one hand this tells people, ‘We support our system and we will punish you if you violate it,’ ” he said. “Yet he’s also showing mercy. Throughout, he’s making it clear that he is not disagreeing with the judge’s opinion on this sensitive issue of sexual chastity, but he believes that there is a higher interest to be served by the pardon, whether that’s relationships between Shiites and Sunnis, or international opinion.”
“Conservative scholars and judges will still take this pardon as a slap in the face,” Dr. Haykel continued.
“These decisions are always made like this, ad hoc, so that the core values and institutions of the Saudi state are not questioned or threatened.”
There is no word yet on whether the ex-boyfriend who was also gang raped would be spared the 90 lashes he was sentenced to for meeting privately with his ex-fiance. While the female victim's sentence ignited a storm of criticism in the West, liberal Westerners who are more interested in identity politics than justice were utterly indifferent toward the Saudi judge's punishment of the male rape victim.
For many liberals, woman-as-victim rather than justice-for-all serves as the basic interpretive template for the Qatif story. This isn't the least bit surprising. Political identities always seem to demand moral inconsistency in exchange for club membership.
I find that I can't call myself a conservative or a liberal anymore and I suspect fundamental corruption of anyone who reaches the fifth or sixth decade of life still wearing such a label without some sense of ambivalence.
Because, according to former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris, Hillary is appealing as an abstract idea but people don't like her once they get to know her.
Video H/T: Maggies Farm.
After nearly 30 years of evangelical-Republican fusion, O'Reilly blames the press for inserting religion into Republican politics. Is O'Reilly drunk?
O'Reilly (introducing segment): Have y'all noticed this talk about religion in the Republican presidential race, how could you miss it. As Dennis Miller astutely pointed out last night, left-wing publications like Newsweek can't wait to headline the religion factor when it comes to Republican candidates...
O'Reilly (talking to Tony Snow): They [the press] don't want to keep Christ in Christmas. They want that outta there. But they do want to keep Jesus in the Republican primary. Now I'm not a conspiratorial kinda guy, but CNN lifts in a guy with a bible, alright, pumpin' it into the camera as you just saw; Newsweek, cover story, Holy Huckabee with his hands folded; now you know what's going on here Snow. You know what these guys [in the press] are doin'.
O'Reilly knows that many Americans are fed up with religion in politics, but the role of religion in the Iowa Republican race is a big story. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and former minister, has surged among Iowa voters largely because of his appeal to Christian conservatives who are not comfortable with the other candidates for religious reasons. Huckabee's rise is linked directly to his religious beliefs. The press is doing its job by reporting on that. O'Reilly blames the messenger because he knows that many voters are turned off by a very real Republican-Evangelical connection, but the press did not invent this connection.
Did the press write and pay for the airing of campaign ads touting Huckabee's Christianity? Did the press tell Huckabee to suggest that Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers? Did the press tell Romney to make a speech about faith that upset even conservative pundit and FOX News regular Charles Krauthammer?
Republican strategists poisoned their own political well by injecting religion into politics. Now, O'Reilly wants his viewers to believe that the left wing administered the poison. That is a lie. As I mentioned yesterday, whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. Christians are supposed to know that.
Somehow Charles Krauthammer didn't see it coming.
I was surprised to see him there. The man can't possibly believe that he has a snowball's chance in hell of getting the nomination or winning the election.
Keyes comes off as increasingly bizarre with each election cycle. Obama knocked him over like a feather in the senate race in bellwether Illinois. So, why does Keyes continue to run for president every four years? Is it good for his business as a public speaker or is it merely the vanity of a man who must feel he is in the public eye? I could be wrong, but personally, I suspect vanity.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that administrators at Chicago State University purchased two copy machines worth $41,000 apiece for $250,000 from a company owned by the university employee charged with getting price quotes for the purchase of the machines. The machines were purchased for a grant-funded textbook project in Ghana.
Michael Vernon Warren, the university employee who made arrangements for the school's purchase of the machines, admitted that he did not disclose the fact that he was the owner of the company selling the machines. Warren enlisted a friend to act as his agent at the contract signing.
Defending his actions in a way that gives chutzpah a worse name than it already has, Warren explained:
"I was following what I perceived to be directions and directives coming from the university to do the research, to get someone to do the deal and when I did that, it was close to home. Meaning, I trusted me."
The Tribune reports that Warren refused to disclose how much money he made on the deal, stating "my margin is confidential for the moment."
Illinois universities have been plagued by scandal recently. Earlier this year, it was discovered that the president of Chicago State, Elnora Daniels, used university funds to purchase alcohol, family trips and personal entertainment without offering receipts or explanations for numerous expenditures unrelated to university business. After an investigation uncovered Daniel's misuse of a university credit card to pay for personal expenses, Daniel reimbursed the school approximately $8,600 although questions were raised about charges for far greater sums. Daniels offered a fascinating explanation for the misuse of her university credit card:
"Women do change purses ... They look for the card. It's not there so they pull out [another] card. ... That was two years ago and now I use my own personal card."
So let me get this straight; some of Daniels' purses contain university credit cards and some contain her personal cards. So, did Daniels charge university expenses on a personal card when she was carrying her personal card purse?
In the meantime, it was recently discovered that Southern Illinois University president and former Illinois State Senator Glenn Poshard had undeniably plagiarized large portions of both his master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation. Poshard justified his behavior saying that he was very busy with family matters and a run for the Illinois senate while he was in graduate school. He just wanted to finish his dissertation, he said. Poshard also claimed ignorance of the rules for citation -- a startlingly lame excuse for someone who feels entitled to hold the position of university president.
Despite his egregious academic misconduct, Poshard was allowed to keep his job as the university president having agreed to "fix" his dissertation. And it gets worse. Besides Poshard, a number of other high ranking university officials were also accused of plagiarism when the Poshard scandal broke.
An aside to the Poshard story: in 1998, Poshard ran for Illinois governor as a Democrat against Republican George Ryan who now resides in a federal penitentiary for crimes he committed when he served as Illinois secretary of state during the 1990s. George Ryan is the third Illinois governor to be jailed since the mid-1970s and some believe that US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald could be working diligently to find a new home for number four. (Seventy-six other individuals have also been convicted in connection with Ryan's criminal activity.)
And, this past September, Tom Dempsey, the director of the U of I Police Training Institute resigned after the disclosure that he was seeking employment with Blackwater security at the same time that he was handling contracts to provide Blackwater employees with training at the University.
Nothing about these stories surprises me after my experience working in the University of Illinois system for a brief time. The university is a playground for incompetent, self-serving careerists who don't give a damn about students, education or professional excellence. The conduct and motivations of many (if not most) of the university employees I've known make a mockery of the manifest liberal values they espouse.
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom... Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religious endure together, or perish alone."
Romney's platitude-laced flattery was supposed to change the minds of evangelical Christians who regard the candidate as unfit to hold office because of his religious beliefs. I suspect that most will continue to see Romney's Mormonism as a deal breaker.
Question: How does Islam fit into Romney's religion = freedom paradigm?
Andrew Sullivan argues that it is. Here is his thought provoking post.
I have no problem with criticism of the U.S. government, but the romance with Hugo Chávez is perverse. Missing from this little rant about America's anti-democratic behavior is any mention of Chavez's failed 1992 coup attempt:
Steve Chapman has more about Chavez's inane decrees, his thoroughly discredited economic views and the fools in Venezuela who are about to vote for an end to their own democracy.
From an interesting post written by Pete Abel at The Moderate Voice:
Google didn’t give up on its fight and eventually succeeded in accomplishing something AT&T could not. Google convinced the Internet grassroots (including many bloggers) that this issue was not really a fight between titans, but a fight between one group of titans (the major ISP’s) and average people — people who wanted nothing more than to express themselves via the Internet. Thus motivated, the “netroots” (not all of them progressives, in this case) applied a constant drumbeat of pressure on Washington, slowly persuading one lawmaker after another that their fears were real.
Today, their cause is championed by the likes of Barack Obama, a lawmaker and candidate whom I generally respect. Unfortunately, there are at least two problems with proposals like those from Obama. First, they largely fail to distinguish between flagrant censorship and legitimate network management. Second, by curtailing the latter, they could have the exact opposite of their intended impact.
Related: Obama supports net neutrality.
This is disturbing, but it isn't a complete surprise.
"Compare two potential races next year: Clinton vs Giuliani or McCain vs Obama. One would bring out the worst in us; the other would move this country forward in desperately needed ways." --Andrew Sullivan
but the right wing blogs have thus far been strangely subdued about this example of Islamic evil. You'd think they'd be shouting about it from the rooftops.
After venting my cranky spleen on the left and multiculturalism, I'll let publius at Obsidian Wings explain what bugs me about the right with his insightful post on race and the Republicans.
A few comments on the Left in the news...
Hunger strikers at Columbia University want to take back the university, never mind the fact that it didn't belong to them in the first place.
Five Students at Columbia University began a hunger strike five days ago as part of a series of actions in order to get the University to Agree with their demands. The demands were created and consensed apon [huh?] by various student groups and students in an attempt to create a University where man worlds can exist. Where critical examination and the wellbeing of students and the community are held in higher priority than profit and public image.
One demand of the striking students is the reorientation of a core curriculum they deem too Eurocentric:
Columbia's Core Curriculum has been criticized for decades for not only its Eurocentrism, but its marginalization of nonwhite peoples within the West, and the issues of racialization and colonialism. While there have been additions throughout the years of a Major Cultures requirement, and individual texts such as The Souls of Black Folk, The Wretched of the Earth, and the Haitian Revolutionary Constitution, these efforts to remedy the Core have been insufficient in concept and execution.
The five strikers are prepared to stay on a hunger strike "as long as necessary" or about 2 1/2 weeks depending on how you interpret this statement from their spokesperson:
"We're prepared to stay as long as necessary through the Thanksgiving holiday, but we're hoping the university doesn't let it come to that point,'' [hunger striker Emilee] Rosenblatt said.
A friend of mine who has had a two-decade-long belly full of self-important students, university "counselors" and student affairs administrators couldn't help but notice Ms. Rosenblatt's Anglo-Americentric use of the term "Thanksgiving holiday" as a time marker. Shame on you, Ms. Rosenblatt. You should know better.
Rosenblatt also complained about "the lack of any response from University President Lee Bollinger." I know exactly how she feels. My mother used to totally ignore me when I held my breath as a child.
Other demands by the strikers read like a jobs program for otherwise unemployable university graduates who eschewed those awful Eurocentric classes when they were pursuing their own university degrees.
We demand more advisors and counselors for cultural groups, students of color, the LGBTQ community and communities of faith, with student involvement in the hiring process of said personnel.
We demand a Vice Provost for Multicultural Affairs to administer and direct the University's policies affecting students within all the schools of the University.
We demand institutionalized, mandatory, full day workshops on issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power and privilege for all incoming faculty, and public safety; and that the training focus on anti-oppression, rather than sensitivity and diversity.
Lovely... they want to open a compulsory ideological re-education camp. Too bad Pol Pot isn't available as a project consultant.
Here is a radical suggestion for the strikers. I'm sure that at one time you were very happy about getting into one of America's top universities. If that wasn't the case, why would you have applied to Columbia in the first place? Okay, so Columbia turned out to be too Eurocentric for your highly discerning pancultural tastes. I understand.
There is a simple solution: transfer to another college. I transferred as an undergraduate so that I could attend a school more to my liking. I was very happy with my decision and I thank my lucky stars that I had a great academic experience. There are thousands of colleges and universities out there. Open-minded cultural egalitarians like you were probably never going to be comfortable attending one of America's most prestigious universities anyway.
Would you consider the University of Haiti? After all, Haiti is the home of the Haitian Revolutionary Constitution. No, the University of Haiti isn't an Ivy. I don't think it's even a private university, but consider that it could be an enriching cross-cultural experience for you. And, far more important, your presence could be so enriching to Haitians who are dying to meet an open-minded American who purpsosely gave up a coveted spot in the advantaged world of the Eurocentric Ivy League to join them in the struggle. Yes, I know the Haitians speak a Eurocentric language, but it's way too hard for most westerners to learn to speak a non-European language, anyway.
Striker Update:
Plans for the strike to continue as long as necessary hit a frightening bump when Barnhard sophomore Aretha Choi was taken away on a stretcher three days into the strike. Ms Choi availed herself of assistance provided by Eurocentrically-educated paramedics and physicians before returning to her dorm room. She will not continue with the strike for "personal medical reasons."
Revolutionaries just aren't what they used to be.
Bloggers are quoting Joe (sic) Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, who claims that global warming is "the greatest scam ever."
So writes Joe [sic] Coleman founder of the Weather Channel:
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental wacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.
First, I must mention that the aging meteorologist turned businessman is named John Coleman, not Joe Coleman as it has been widely reported in the conservative blogosphere today. The wisecracking John Coleman was for many years the popular, irreverent local weatherman at WLS-TV, the ABC affiliate here in Chicago. After leaving WLS, Coleman did a stint with the network (at GMA) in New York for a few years.
I've never commented on global warming (human-caused or otherwise) before and don't intend to take a position on it now. I find much of the blog discussion on the subject to be patently asinine. I'm not a meteorologist, nor am I an environmental scientist, so my own confidence in my opinions on the subject is quite limited. I notice, however, that a similar lack of qualification doesn't seem, in the least, to dampen the sense of utter conviction expressed by so many on the subject of global warming.
Some of the bloggers who are enthusiastically quoting "Joe" Coleman today seem to think that owning a television network makes Coleman a credible source for scientific information. I don't know his educational credentials, but John Coleman is a TV "meteorologist" and businessman who got into on air work because of his easy and entertaining on camera presentation. For all I or anyone quoting him today knows, John Coleman might have no more than BS in meteorology earned 50 years ago. Coleman's notoriety has nothing to do with his credibility as a scientist.
TV's "doctor" Phil (McGraw) holds a doctorate in psychology. I suspect that McGraw earned his degree much more recently than John Coleman earned his. I can assure you that anyone confidently crowing about something Dr. Phil said as if the celebrity therapist is a credible social scientist would be dismissed as uninformed (I'm choosing my words with great kindness now) by 99% of the psychologists in the U.S. Yet bloggers who don't even know that the TV weatherman's first name is John are citing Coleman approvingly because he agrees with their politically-driven opinions on global warming.
Not being a meteorologist or an environmental scientist, I don't have first-hand knowledge of the scientific literature on the subject, nor am I equipped to critique that research, but at this point it isn't difficult to surmise that there are many scientists who believe that global warming is occurring and there are many who believe, to varying extents, that human activity plays a part in global warming. Thanks to the constant attacks on these scientists by their lay critics, I'm reasonably confident that these scientists exist, probably in very large numbers given the fury of the lay opposition.
Posts quoting the mad ranting of someone like John Coleman only further cement the perception that critics of global warming arguments don't know or care who they cite as long as that person agrees that global warming is a hoax. On the surface, at least, with every passing year, the entire debate bears increasing resemblance to the imaginary scientific debate over evolution and 7-day creation. While Coleman's conspiracy theories might be pleasing to the ears of his recent crop of admirers, his dismissal of all scientists who disagree with him as conspirators and wackos leaves both Coleman and his newfound admirers sounding more like dismissible ideological cranks than serious contributors to the discussion.
Update
From John Coleman's bio:
John Coleman has been a TV weatherman since he was a freshman in college in 1953 and TV was brand new. He still loves predicting the weather and relating to the television viewers. "I also love working at KUSI NEWS", he adds. "It is a rare thing; a locally owned and managed TV station. And, there are dozens of wonderful people who work here."
John has predicted and shoveled his share of snow. He has been a TV weatherman in Champaign, Peoria and Chicago, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and New York City. For seven years he was the weatherman on "Good Morning, America" on the ABC Network.
John also cooked up the idea of a cable channel devoted to nothing but weather and spent six years developing "The Weather Channel" on cable. "That's my baby", he says. "The bad guys took it away from me, but they can't steal the fact that it was my idea and I started it and ran it for the first year."
After reading Coleman's bio, I'm thinking that TV weatherman is probably the most accurate way to describe his qualifications.
Should we be surprised by Kerik's indictment? Kerik has always had thug written all over him, but the inclination to identify with the aggressor caused many to treat this showboating bully as if he were a good guy. That he was a police officer only attests to the fact that law enforcement agents and criminals are sometimes little more than different sides of the same psychological coin.
And, Kerik's pal Giuliani is another example of a guy who oozes thuggery. If we ignore this, we do so at our own peril. Giuliani gets a great deal of mileage out of his handling of crime in New York, but I suspect that even Stalinists weren't half bad at controlling street crime during their heyday.
The LGBT "community" is a left-wing political invention. Say LBGT enough and some people will believe it's a real community.
Andrew Sullivan vents on the subject.
Has Musharraf been playing the US?
During an interview with Tavis Smiley yesterday, author Lawrence Wright said as much. Wright argues that military leaders in Pakistan are targeting progressive political opponents while siphoning off U.S. aid to build their personal fortunes. According to Wright, Musharraf and his supporters in the the military don't really want to get Osama bin Laden or the Taliban forces in Pakistan because massive American aid would end if the military crushed the extremists.
In the meantime, Benazir Bhutto has said that she will aggressively pursue Islamic extremists if she is chosen to head the government in Pakistan's upcoming elections. If Wright's assessment of the situation in Pakistan is correct, then it is understandable that both the military leadership and Islamic extremists in Pakistan would vigorously (and violently) oppose a leadership role for Bhutto.
Does this mean that Bhutto is one of the good guys, or is she merely an opportunist standing against extremism to gain the support of the US government in her bid to return to power? Matt Yglesias says that the old corruption charges against Bhutto hold water and that the former prime minister and her husband are unusually corrupt [even] by Pakistani standards.
Related:
This author argues that Musharraf doesn't want to wipe out Taliban militants in Pakistan because they are underming Afghan stability. Musharraf fears an alliance between a stable Afghanastan and India.
It's the news we've all been waiting to hear: dough-faced, right-wing, Australian pundit, Andrew Bolt, has announced our victory in Iraq. Thank goodness! The neocons have been vindicated, the liberals have been defeated and the troops are coming home.
Related: Carpetbagger Report; So We Can Bring the Troops Home Now, Right?; Iraq: A Long-Run Victory?
From an interesting article on Pakistan's complex political dynamics and Musharraf's relationship with the United States:
When the epitaph of the Bush era in Pakistan's contemporary history finally gets to be written in a year's time, there will be a complex, engrossing story to tell. Bush began reasonably well in 2001 by threatening to bomb the daylight out of Pakistan and to dispatch that country to the Stone Age. His threat of shock and awe indeed worked. Musharraf quickly fell in line in the "war on terror". The world community applauded Bush. But in the process, Musharraf ensured his regime gained international legitimacy.
Also, Musharraf promptly put a price tag on Pakistan's role in the "war on terror". He negotiated hard. And he extracted out of the Bush administration in bits and pieces over the past six years a staggering amount of US$10 billion as assistance. That kept the Pakistani economy going, the army well equipped and his support base intact.
Of course, he took care to endear himself and the Pakistan army as an indispensable ally to Bush. As time passed, like a skilful commando, he began walking a fine line - in and out of the "war on terror" - almost unnoticed, as he pleased. Certainly, Bush noticed but had to pretend he didn't. There was no other option. Bush was preoccupied in Iraq, and Musharraf knew that as well.
In fact, Bush, who once saw Russia's President Vladimir Putin's soul in his deep blue eyes and liked it, has no choice but to keep insisting he is on a "hunt" with Musharraf in the Hindu Kush. Now, with a much-weakened Bush presidency almost entering a lame-duck phase, it is only natural that Musharraf feels he must look ahead. He will know by now as well as anyone that his number one public liability within Pakistan is his close association with the George W Bush presidency.
But continued US backing remains vital for Musharraf's regime. How he reconciles the conflicting interests remains to be seen. One thing is for sure. None of Pakistan's previous military dictators had such mastery over the art of the possible. Read More
No, I'm not talking about the al-Qaeda. I'm referring to the USDOJ thugs who have shown their contempt for our freedom and our law by censoring (in the name of national security) this quote from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. H/T: Dennis
Douglas Fairbanks & Charlie Chaplin at the Treasury Building on Wall Street promoting Liberty (War) Bonds (1918).
Liberty Bonds were part of an aggressive campaign to finance America's effort in the First World War. Celebrities, including Fairbanks and Chaplin, made numerous public appearances encouraging Americans to buy bonds as an act of patriotism. At his own expense, Chaplin also made a film short in support of the drive.
In 1952, at the behest of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the INS showed the English-born Chaplin America's gratitude by revoking his re-entry permit while he was on a brief trip to England. Chaplin's liberalism motivated the effort to keep Chaplin out of the US. Although he had lived in the United States legally for nearly 50 years, Chaplin's American wife and American children had to leave the country in order to keep the family together.
Perhaps these Customs and Border Protection agents were reacting to some little-publicized epidemic of drug smuggling by Finnish folk-singers, but if this report is correct these cops sound more like the Stasi than they do a policing agency in a modern democratic state.
I wonder if the CBP is this serious on the southern border?
A website with ties to the Israeli military is warning that al Qaeda is planning a November 11 launch of a cyber-jihad against "Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites." The article at debka.com says that al Qaeda plans to expand the operation until hundreds of thousands of cyber-mujahideen have been enlisted in the operation. Read more...
Jacob Sullum at Hit & Run notes that federal sentencing policy was intended to reduce disparities in the sentencing of individuals convicted of similar crimes by eliminating judicial discretion from the sentencing process. In practice, Sullum says, discretion has been transferred from judges to prosecutors.
Sullum sees a serious problem with this transfer of sentencing discretion. "At least judges are supposed to be neutral referees, rather than advocates for one side."
You might disagree with a progressive tax sytem, but Warren Buffet is right. The current system is not progessive.
The Agonist exposes the disingenuous criticism of Buffet.
The Brits are doing the right thing. I hope the U.S. government does as much.
From the Times Online:
In a written statement to the Commons yesterday, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, set out the details of the assistance to Iraqi interpreters and other staff who will be offered the chance to resettle in Britain or receive cash to help them to relocate in the region.
After reading through the Government’s statement, one senior interpreter was left speechless with relief. “For me, this decision means that the British Government has saved the lives of two children and a lady,” said M. Saraj, referring to his wife and two young children. “I think that they have appreciated all the efforts we have made, according to what I am reading. Thank you for the British Government, they have respected our rights. I have no words.”
In his statement, Mr Miliband acknowledged that Britain owed “our Iraqi staff an enormous debt of gratitude for their dedicated service”.
And so does The Agonist.
I don't know much about this issue, so the following is just a thought. In general, I don't like to see many restrictions on businesses, but when it comes to local phone and cable companies that were established as government protected monopolies, unfettered private control over the last miles of communication pipeline worries me.
Is she an attention-seeking menace, does she have some personal ax to grind or is she a good citizen who, at great personal risk, wants to expose corruption at the top levels of American government?
The most gagged person in American history, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, says she is ready to spill all to any network that will let her do so in an unedited interview. Edmonds says she is ready to name names, reveal post 9/11 cover-ups and even face criminal charges for doing so.
National security surely requires that governments keep certain matters secret, while government officials often survive on cover-up and obfuscation of the truth to protect their own hides. It is also inevitable that government officials will attempt the latter in the name of the former. 9/11 has given government officials a more compelling pretext for this bait-and-switch than they have enjoyed in many years.
Edmonds' insistence makes me wonder what she wants to say.
A dysfunctional liberal media operating like a defective conscience is smitten with an Evangelical Republican.
Like anyone else, I criticize the press, but I've never considered the press sick because the composition of reporting fails to adequately reflect my personal perspective on the world. But, the press as defective object seems to be a preoccupation with many politically fringy characters, whether they are left-wing extremists, right-wing extremists, religious extremists or 9-11 truthers.
This is understandable since being on the fringe can entail a troubling sense of vulnerability to being branded or dismissed as a disturbed person, particularly if one doesn't recognize one's own fringiness. To be clear about this, it isn't that I don't consider myself fringy. I do. But, that is why I don't expect the press to report things the way I see them.
But many on the fringe can't accept an honorable place as an outlier. Instead, they hope that withering condemnation will marginalize an occupationist middle that is sitting in the cultural space that rightfully belongs to their own brand of the edge.
Even though I'm on the edges, the idea of letting the edges displace the middle scares the heck out of me. There is plenty, in my opinion, that is wrong with American cultural and political life, but America's messy (the fringe might say feckless) middle seems to make it a very decent, sometimes great behemoth that eats up its crackpots before things go so far that there is no turning back. Granted, as it has happened in the past, the fringes have done considerable damage lately, but the behemoth middle has been eating well again, which is why some on the edges might feel disheartened.
One difference between Obama and Hillary:
[Obama] leads all candidates in donations received from donors affiliated with the military... Hillary leads all candidates in donations from private defense contractors. Read More
Will Giuliani give the federal Government what he gave New York City?
...Giuliani watchers already understand that Rudy is a hothead and a grandstander, even a bit of a dictator at times. These qualities have dominated the story of his mayoralty that most people know. As that drama was unfolding, however, so was a quieter story, driven by Giuliani's instinct and capacity for manipulating the levers of government. His methods, like those of the current White House, included appointments of yes-men, aggressive tests of legal limits, strategic lawbreaking, resistance to oversight, and obsessive secrecy. As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don't apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances. That's why, of all the presidential candidates, Giuliani is most likely to take the expansions of the executive branch made by the Bush administration and push them further still.
Yesterday, I posted a summary of the Frontline-Iran report written by this blogger.
A commenter in that blog offered this astute observation:
when the President of Iran was a reformer like Kahatami and the U.S. had the opportunity of making some real progress with our relations, he and his office were dismissed by Georgie [Bush] as figureheads and that the Mullahs were in charge. Now that someone as off balanced as Ahmad whats his name is in office, all of the sudden the President of Iran has become the 12 foot tall death dealing Persian Warlord from '300'.
I found a quick-and-dirty summation here:
The documentary basically walked through the timeline of the US and Iranian relationship post 9-11 through today, and why the war drums are gaining volume.
The most alarming point of discussion is basically how the Bush Administration knocked out the reformers in Iran. The Reformers, who were in charge on 9-11, condemned the attacks and sent help in Afghanistan. The Iranians, we're told, were instrumental in the topple of the Taliban and solidifying the various rebel groups in Afghanistan. The US however, realized that they had their own issues and intentions in allowing the US to succeed there. The relationship soured after rumors and intel suggested that Sr. Al QDah officials snuck into Iran and were being protected in Tehran.
"Axis of Evil" comment. Not exactly good for the reform movement.
They reformers again offered their assistance again in Iraq. This was dismissed out-of-hand by the Bush Administration. The US would not need Iranian help in taking out Iraq. They were right... at first.
After the initial success in Iraq (ah, let's say the first week) the reformers took their biggest leap. Their last chance at building a relationship with the Great Satan. They sent a 'fig leaf fax' to the White House. The offer basically said, we'll leave Israel and you alone, give up terrorism and our nuclear program - but you gotta leave us alone.
Nope.
The reform movement was killed. Mock Mood brought in. Iranians have had the upper hand ever since. And, judging by the tone of the documentary, they are both ready to meet their makers.
And since both leaders believe they are working directly for their Lord, and have been swinging the phrase "WWIII" around, you might want to refresh your bomb shelter's can goods.
Quick and Dirty Reaction:
The only alteration I would make to this summary is in the last line. Given Iran's thinly veiled threats of retaliation against Israel (our missiles can reach every inch of the Middle East), it is the Israelis rather than Americans at home who are at the greatest risk in any apocalyptic showdown.
No doubt, the increasingly fringy right will simply dismiss as lefty extremist propaganda the significance of the administration's strategic blunders and the lost opportunities for progress on Iran discussed in the Frontline piece. But Americans have grown weary of the hard right branding all challenges to its omniscience as the handiwork of America-hating socialists. After watching the Bush administration make so many spectacularly bad calls in the Middle East over the past 5 years, few Americans have confidence in the judgment of Bush-Cheney, the Neocons and their cheerleaders in America's shrinking armchair army, no matter how loud and morally self-righteous their assertions that only they understand the nature of the threats and the dangers that lie ahead of us.
As Dick Armitage suggested during portions of an interview broadcast last night, in his thirty years involved in Middle East affairs, the actions of the United States might not have always been viewed favorably in the Middle East , but the United States was never viewed as incompetent. According to Armitage, that has changed in the past five years.
With good reason.
Touting his accomplishments as mayor Tuesday while on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Giuliani crowed, "I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent, so I have my own set of qualifications."
Politicians just can't keep their grubby mitts off of anything:
From Italian blogger, Beppe Grillo:
The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.
Blogs are being born every second, anyone can start one without a problem and they can write their thoughts, publish photos and videos. In fact, the route proposed by Levi limits access to the Internet. What young person is going to submit to all these hoops to do a blog? the Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.99% would close down. The lucky 1% still surviving on the Internet according to the Levi-Prodi law would have to respond in the case of the lack of control on defamatory content in accordance with articles 57 and 57 bis of the penal code. Basically almost sure to be in prison.
According to Grillo, a draft of the measure has already been approved by the Italian parliament.
Andrew Sullivan posted excerpts from an interesting reader email examining the possibility that we are in the midst of a major political realignment as blueprints for the political coalitions of the past four decades disintegrate. More here...
Certainly, the Republican coalition has disintegrated because conservative latecomers from the Christian right, as well as a substantial proportion of neoconservatives, could never truly accept that they were part of a conservative CO-alition. Instead, they sought to redefine conservatism to serve their fetish-y special interests.
With a deft motion, Tsukioka, a 29-year-old fashion designer, lifted a flap on the front of her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet fully open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers - by disguising herself as a vending machine. Read More...
Not very convincing. It looks like a "disguise" Michael Jackson might wear. Besides, I see the potential for a seriously uncomfortable moment with a thirsty assailant.
Rudy Giuliani's page: pretty funny stuff here.
The Auchincloss Family (1946). From back, L-R: Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy), Yusha Auchincloss (recent photos: 1, 2, 3), Nina Auchincloss, Carline Lee Bouvier (Radziwell), Janet Lee Auchincloss (holding baby Janet Auchincloss), Tommy Auchincloss, Hugh D. Auchincloss.
Andrew Sullivan is right to sneer:
Buried beneath the blather, Scott Johnson is clearly accusing Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership of raising the Armenian genocide resolution at this time to sabotage the war effort in the Middle East. Charles Krauthammer aired the "stab-in-the-back" meme only to dismiss it - an act of Insta-level passive aggression. But Powerline goes there:
I doubt that stupidity is a sufficient explanation in this case.
Which leaves treason, right? -- The Daily Dish
It's difficult to believe that anyone in Washington is in the dark about Pelosi's motive for pushing the resolution. The Congresswoman has a long history of pandering to Armenian-American voters in her district. At a 1998 fundraiser given in her honor by the Bay Area Armenian National Committee, Pelosi expressed strong support for continuing a ban on US aid to Azerbaijan ([Article 907) -- a ban which was supported by the Armenian Nactional Committeee:
In her remarks, Nancy Pelosi stressed the importance of the direct role the ANC and the Armenian-American constituency plays in its constant communication with her office. "We won by 49 votes , people thought we’d lose, the reason we won is because of you, because of your grassroots participation, education of members, and because of the clear case you make to us because it is in the interest of the United States to have a principled policy towards Armenia."
Pelosi also criticized "Jewish American organizations" (creepy) and big oil (easy) for their opposition to continuing the ban on aid:
Pelosi’s presentation enthralled the group of young and old with her enthusiasm and sense of justice on this issue. She questioned the involvement of the Jewish American organizations in their opposition, criticized the U.S. oil lobbyists for their economic arguments and neglect for human rights, and reprimanded the influence Turkey plays in the Administration’s discriminatory position. Congresswoman Pelosi stated that the ANC’s list of principles as to what should happen in the region are consistent with national interests of the United States, "We want to do everything we can to have peace with justice in the region and respect for political integrity of Nagorno-Karabagh and Armenia….
And, the fundraiser ended with ANC organizers urging support for Pelosi in the upcoming congressional election:
"We can maneuver all we want in the House, but can not succeed without your mobilization…. You give ammunition, inspiration, and courage to us to fight on your behalf {said, Pelosi]" The evening ended with the ANC-SF recommending to all those present and their friends and family to vote for Nancy Pelosi on November 3rd.
Columbia University's own Ahmadinejad is Palestinian Christian Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History. James Kirchick reports:
According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.
H/T: Ed Brayton
David Bernstein (Volokh) points out a glaring contradiction that haunts the neoconservative movement:
The irony is that the other, domestic policy wing of neoconservatism, the wing that focused on the failures of the Great Society, got its reputation and influence by explaining that good intentions (as in failed Great Society programs) aren't enough, and that throwing government resources at problems not only isn't enough, but is often counter-productive. Idealism is one thing, but as non-neoconservative P.J. O'Rourke puts it, giving the government money and power is like giving car keys and whiskey to a teenage boy. Foreign policy neocons like Muravchik sound just like the domestic liberals their domestic neocon brethren delighted in attacking in the 70s and 80s: "it wasn't our policy that failed, much less our ideology, we just need to redouble our efforts, maintain our idealism, and give the government more money and power."
Neoconservatives and liberals share much more in common than they would care to admit:
Michael Moss wrote an article in the NY Times about English language websites that offer support for militant Islamic views. In his piece, Moss discussed a thoroughly repugnant 21-year-old Muslim nutjob, Samir Khan, who runs a militant Islamic website from the home of his chagrined parents in Charlotte, NC.
I decided to search for more information on the Times story and was quickly reminded that self-important nutjobbery is rarely a one-sided affair. It seems that in some sectors of the Pajamas Media world it is believed that the NY Times should get clearance from America's pitchfork and lantern ePatriots before it runs a story.
I had expected to skip any reference to the Ann Coulter-Donny Deutsch exchange on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, but this comment from one of Coulter's "friends" left me scratching my head:
Danny [sic] Deutsch in short is an angry anti-Christian bigot, looking to make a name for himself by biting into Christian icons. Pretty sad way to attempt to "scratch your way" into the "big time."
Coulter is considered a Christian icon? Not among any Christians I know and I know a lot of them of all political stripes as well as some of no political stripe whatsoever. And I'm not a fan of [D-O-N-N-Y] Deutsch, but as for making a name for himself and scratching his way into the big time, Deutsch is the chairman of a $3 billion company. True, Donny Deutsch hasn't expressed his perfection by dating Bob Guccione, but Deutsch seems to be scratching out a niche for himself with a television show and a sizable personal fortune.
The Barrister comments on Erich Fromm and human ambivalence about freedom.
This is a rich subject well known to psychoanalytic thinkers. The human psyche must continuously deal with conflicting wishes and regressive pulls toward more primitive ways of relating to the world around us. These conflicts and the mental compromises we make to deal with these conflicts occur, to a large extent, unconsciously, but they have enormous implications for the kinds of lives we lead and the societies we construct.
Perhaps this neocon blogger would have us believe as much:
At the moment, it is fair to say that Civilization is threatened by radical Islam, a supremacist, racist, anti-Semitic ideology based on the Koran. While it is proper and expectable that any religion believe that it offers the best and most fitting avenue to approach God, only Islam insists that anyone who raises questions about it deserves death. This leads to such quaint customs as beheading infidels, heretics, and apostates, and suicide bombing, which the Arabs did not invent but have gone a long way toward perfecting. It also suggests a commonality of outcome for Israel and those other nations most at risk from the depredations of Imperialist Islam. -- Shrinkwrapped
Shrinkwrapped's comments reminded me of a statement attributed to former G.M. Chairman, Charles E. Wilson who conflated the interests of his company with those of the United States as a whole when he said "what's good for General Motors is good for the country." Is it any surprise that it was the chairman of G.M. rather than the chairman of Chrysler who made that statement?
29-year-old John Kennedy campaigns for a congressional seat in the election of 1946. Seen here left to right are Ted Williams, Eddie Pellagrini, JFK and Hank Greenberg at Fenway Park, Boston.
In playoff news: Chicago Cubs merchandise is being recalled because of high risk of choking.
Yesterday, I posted a quote from Paul Krugman's column on the "personality type" attracted by the modern conservative movement. Krugman describes an attitude of petty cruelty that many modern conservatives flaunt as if it were a badge of honor. Krugman further asserts that "if you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong [in the conservative movement]."
There is truth in Krugman's observation (think Ann Coulter as a graphic case in point), but it would be a mistake to assume that liberals are fundamentally more decent in their underlying intentions.
One reader offered a trenchant insight into conservatives, liberals and their respective identifications with the downtrodden. I thoroughly agree with this observation:
For every conservative who ridicules a disadvantaged person, there's a liberal who gets a charge out of feeling superior to one, and there are more than enough of both to go around. Of conservatives, Krugman writes, "If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong." To the same extent, I would add, liberals don't "identify with the downtrodden," they patronize them.
Paul Krugman is on to something when he says of conservatives:
...modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in.
Krugman isn't simply making all of this up out of thin air. Callousness that frequently degenerates into open cruelty has been embraced by too many conservatives in recent years. But, I have a problem with Krugman's piece. Cruel humor is not the only way to be cruel. Although there is truth in his observation about modern conservatism, one might incorrectly infer from it that the underlying heart of the average liberal is somehow a better one than the heart of the typical conservative. I don't believe this for a moment. Nothing about my personal experience with liberals tells me that they are more genuinely compassionate, empathic or principled than conservatives. I think they're simply more apt to misrepresent even their most base intentions as altruistically driven idealism.
David Brooks writes about Burkean conservatism and the Republican collapse:
the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”
The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan....
...over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.
The Cuban hospitals Michael Moore didn't see: Viva Fidel y la revolucion. H/T: Bird Dog
Dawn Turner Trice argues for examining the shades of gray in this case.
Should morally principled people exert themselves analyzing the shadings of moral degeneracy? Do you crave justice more for Iraq's Shia thugs than you crave it for Iraq's Sunni thugs? Was cracker Justin Barker beaten to a bloody pulp or was he merely battered and bruised? Did Barker hang the nooses on the “white’s only” tree or was he merely a friend of the primitive punks who hung those nooses? Did Barker provoke his attackers by ridiculing the black student who was beaten by his friends? Did the berserk black students actually intend to beat Barker to death or did they merely intend to beat him to within an inch of his life? Which thugs received harsher treatment and what role did race play in determining whose evil would draw the harshest treatment?
It is difficult to care about a situation in which all involved appear to have acted in a morally repugnant manner. Without a scintilla of evidence that anyone involved in this, white or black, attempted to navigate these events using a working moral compass, it doesn't seem quite right to worry from afar about the refined application of justice.
The Chicago Tribune ran a disturbing story about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war. Forty years later, survivors are still spitting mad.
For [Marine Staff Sgt Bryce] Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.
"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!"
Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.
Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.
As the Tribune tells it, evidence that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship is substantial. If the attack was intentional, the question remains why attack an American ship? The Tribune offers speculation, but nothing solid.
Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his activities."
Ed Brayton's discussion of the Thomas-Hill story explores the powerful tendency of ideologues on the left and the right to poison our political discourse by making attributions of fact based upon ideology even when the relevant facts simply can't be determined with confidence. Both the left and the right proceed from the certainty that Hill-Thomas confirms what they already know: the other side is evil.
But, both sides know the facts behind Hill-Thomas in the same way that Ahmadinejad "knows" that the holocaust didn't happen and that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Regardless of how flimsy or contrary the data might be, ideology predetermines the facts.
I haven't read the book and don't intend to read it, but it has been impossible to avoid hearing about it.
Last night I saw the very strange Mike Gravel suggesting something sinister about AIPAC's role in Kyl-Leiberman. The facts will dribble out, he said in a creepy, offhanded way to interviewer Ray Suarez. That was followed by a local reporter interviewing a red-faced Abraham Foxman who repeatedly used the words "bigot" and "antisemitism" while he insisted that critics of American policy on Israel are not subjected to unfair moral attacks.
On the net, Jeffrey Goldberg gets his hands on Mearsheimer and Walt, followed by David Weigel who begs to differ.
Without a doubt, anti-Semites will be pleased by M&W's central claim that AIPAC exerts an outsized influence on American policy, but the habitual smear-and-destroy tactics employed by neocons and authoritarian conservatives leave me skeptical about the motivations underlying claims of antisemitism directed specifically toward Mearsheimer and Walt. Since the political right reflexively brands its political opposition with charges of intellectual, psychological or moral degeneracy, such charges tends to lose currency with reasonable people. Too bad the right has so cheapened the discussion in recent years that such a serious accusation must as a matter of course be taken with a very large grain of salt.
It wasn't a pro-Islamic fundamentalist rally.
Pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden (1939).
There has been plenty of hysterical bloviating over Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia, but it isn't clear that his appearance there will have meaningful consequences -- just a lot of armchair theorizing that isn't acknowledged as such. I haven't heard anyone say that they've changed their opinions on U.S.-Iran relations, Iran's nuke program or, for that matter, on the nature of evil.
In a previous post I wrote about duper's delight -- the experience of pleasure betrayed by the smile of a lying psychopath.
Every time he evades the truth or tells an outright lie, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad busts an idiotic smile for his audience. His stupid grin expresses a moral perversion extending beyond the psychopath's simple pleasure in the power of deception. He takes obvious delight in making offensive claims that are so transparently false his audacity shocks the moral sensibilities of his listeners.
Ahmadinejad knows we don't believe him when he speaks. Our belief is not what he wants. Listening to him and watching him even briefly, it becomes abundantly clear that he is gratified by a sense of diabolical power that accompanies his ludicrously, offensive statements.
Life expectancy for political leaders like Ahmadinejad tends to be short. Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is a Persian noose or an Iranian manufactured bullet that wipes that shit-eating grin off his face permanently.
According to this account from David Mendell's new biography of the candidate:
Late at night, during one tour of (downstate Illinois), I was riding shotgun in a car trailing Obama’s black SUV amid the campaign caravan….
As we motored along the dark, flat country roads of Illinois, I spied a small orange-lighted object fly from the passenger window of Obama’s SUV and smack into the road ahead of us, briefly bouncing along the pavement until it disappeared beneath our car.
(Campaign Press aide Tommy) Vietor, understanding the magnitude of Obama’s well kept secret and the potential consequences of its revelation to a reporter, immediately turned his head my way to see if I had noticed what was obviously a cigarette butt discarded by Obama…..
Only half-awake and tired, I lacked the energy to mention what I had seen and open a conversation about it….Several minutes later, however, out flew another orange cigarette butt….
After another several minutes, out popped another. Again Vietor turned my way, looking ever more worried as Obama flicked each cigarette from the SUV. “You know, Tommy, I’ve known for a long time that Barack smokes,” I said.
Time Magazine reports that Senator John McCain was enthusiastically applauded when he told a crowd gathered at a New Hampshire VFW hall that MoveOn.org should be thrown out of the United States. McCain is quoted as saying:
"It's disgraceful, it's got to be retracted and condemned by the Democrats and MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country, my friends."
Regardless of what one thinks about MoveOn.org, thoughtful persons should recognize that McCain appealed to an authoritarian inclination to silence or eliminate those with whom one disagrees. That the crowd reacted enthusiastically to his comment only adds to a troubling perception of a compromised man playing to a mindless mob.
A once moderate Republican, McCain has repeatedly sidled up to the authoritarian branch of the party because appeasing authoritarians has become the linchpin of Republican victory over the past thirty years. After being smeared in the 2000 primaries by the Bush team's dirty race politics, the war hero has recognized that the path to victory in his party demands a roll in the filth along the way.
Is anyone surprised by anything Alan Greenspan has to say about the Bush administration in his new book? Greenspan has long been a libertarian Republican. And as a member of Ayn Rand's salon in its heyday, I never imagined that Greenspan found much to admire about Bush's presidency. Rand herself would likely have held Bush in contempt for his lack of intellectual curiosity, his venal cronyism and his "subjectivist epistemology."
For those who may not have seen the widely circulating prepublication quotes from Greenspan's book, here are a few:
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
“‘Deficits don’t matter’, to my chagrin, became part of Republicans’ rhetoric.”
“My biggest frustration remained [President Bush’s] unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending.”
“The Republicans in Congress lost their way. They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”
“Most troubling to me was the readiness of both Congress and the administration to abandon fiscal discipline.”
Brian Williams: "Over the last two days of testimony, you mentioned al-Qaeda, by our count, 160 times. Now for a lot of Americans, al-Qaeda - that's the guys who flew those planes into the buildings in New York, and Washington, and Pennsylvania. Explain what you mean — because al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't around that day."
General Petraeus: We do not label them all al-Qaeda and we have tried very hard not to imply that or to state that.
Maybe the general has suffered one too many combat-related concussions. What else could account for his inability to stop saying al-Qaeda?
Yesterday, Brett Darrow met with Saint George, Missouri police chief Scott Uhrig to discuss Sergeant James Kuehnlein's abusive behavior during an encounter with Darrow in a commuter parking lot. According to Darrow, the video from Kuehnlein's cruiser dashboard has mysteriously vanished. This is not a surprise. Police videos that incriminate police officers have a tendency to disappear when allegations of police misconduct surface. I suspect that most videotaped exposure of police misconduct comes from citizen owned equipment just as it did in the case of Sergeant Kuehnlein and Brett Darrow.
Abusive police officers may lament their increasing vulnerability to exposure by video cameras, but the emergence of cheap, compact video technology is a good thing for police officers and citizens. Videotape is often used to support the prosecution of criminals and the possibility that a citizen has video equipment can only encourage police officers to maintain a professional attitude while on the job.
Videotape can also clear the innocent which is not only right, but part of good police work. While I don't favor placing government cameras everywhere, they are appropriate in police cruisers and I believe they should always be employed during interrogations where abuses are commonplace. While not a perfect solution to misconduct, taping police encounters with the public whenever possible represents a great advance in the effort to protect both the police and the public from wrongful accusations related to interactions between cop and citizen.
Although officers have accepted and even embraced the presence of video equipment in cruisers, detectives still have mixed opinions about videotaping interviews start to finish. Some investigators who oppose the use of cameras claim that videotaping may cause interviewees to clam up. This may be true, but cameras protect interviewees and suspects from the very serious problem of abusive interrogations leading to false confessions.
Here is where I part company with many bloggers who feel the need to qualify their comments on this subject with deferential praise of police officers in general. I have personally and professionally known police officers, detectives and departmental officials at all ranks in the city of Chicago and the suburbs. Abusive behavior by police officers in the field is a serious problem, not because of a few bad apples but because it is widespread and entrenched. Police officers vehemently deny this publicly, but talk about it privately. Prosecutors know this goes on and take the attitude that as long as they are not told about it they can ignore it. I assume that many judges know about it as well because many come from the local prosecutorial ranks.
Besides having personal knowledge of such conduct, serious misconduct during interrogations is chronic and well documented in Chicago where police have a long history of beating citizens (including innocent citizens), coercing false confessions and using torture as late as the 1980s. Police routinely go off on citizens who assert their rights and they routinely arrest citizens on false charges. Sergeant Kuenhlein's verbally abusive, illegal threatening behavior in the Brett Darrow videotape was not atypical. It is commonplace.
Although I don't know Sergeant Kuehnlein's age, I've been told that the problem in the field lies mostly with younger male officers. That problem has been exacerbated in recent years as many younger officers have gotten heavily into the aggression-stoking weightlifters subculture. What no officer has admitted to me but what I strongly suspect based on appearances is that the problem has been further compounded by pockets of steroid abuse among younger cops who hit the weights. I have certainly known police officers who admitted to using testosterone pro-hormones prior to the legal ban on these substances early in 2006.
One police officer I knew (outside of a therapeutic context) who used these substances was a big guy who benched close to 400 lbs. He was always a very pleasant and even-keeled fellow around me. He had even been quite critical of fellow officers who mistreat the public saying that he looked at citizens and would think to himself "she could be my mother or he could be my brother." I was surprised one day when he told me about grabbing the arm of a kid of about 13 for giving him lip and dragging the kid down the street alongside his squad car. The panicked boy screamed as he tried to keep up with the car, his arm clamped in the iron grip of Officer Terminator.
Okay, some people might do this to a younger brother, but that is not what I was thinking this police officer meant when he said that he tried to think about citizens as family members. His dangerous and illegal stunt may or may not have diminished the possibility of this kid giving lip to police officers in the future, but I doubt it will have the slightest positive effect on any propensity this kid may have to engage in criminal conduct. It might, however, make him less likely to "snitch" to police during an investigation of a serious crime. I should add that I doubt my "good cop" acquaintance of several years would still be a police officer if this stunt had been caught on tape.
As I said in my original post on the Kuehnlein incident, human beings are not good with power. Among those who have power there is a tendency to abuse it, while the defensive tendency to identify with the aggressor is one significant factor behind excessive public tolerance of police misconduct. Deferential glorification of aggressors provides a sense of safety from aggression, but it also emboldens the aggressor. But, videotapes can't identify with the aggressor. That's why videotapes like Brett Darrow's can be helpful to promoting better police work while also guarding the rights of citizens.
Update: In an interview with radio station KMOX Saint George Police Chief Scott Uhrig suggested that driver Brett Darrow baited Sergeant Kuehnlein:
Just the normal person doesn't respond to questions... you know... that he [Darrow] did and with that I find that rather strange.
Chief Uhrig is right. "The normal person" doesn't respond this way to a police officer. Normal persons are usually afraid to assert their legal right to privacy while alone in an empty parking lot with a police officer who is challenging that right. That's why Kuehnlein blew up. Darrow did not show the fearful deference to which Sergeant Kuehnlein is accustomed when he demands that a citizen forfeit his legal rights upon Kuehnlein's demand that he do so. As Chief Uhrig clearly knows, most normal persons are afraid of his officers in these situations.
I don't care if Keuhnlein was baited or set up. Police officers frequently behave this way when citizens refuse to cede their legal rights. More officers should be set up until such behavior is no longer an acceptable part of police culture.
Uhrig also acknowledged that the dashcam tape is missing and says that Kuehnlein told him the dashcam "had a glitch" on the night of the incident. Uhrig says he has checked the dashcam and it is apparently glitchless now.
19-year-old Brett Darrow has a history of run-ins with the police. He was once assaulted by a drunk off-duty police officer, arrested, cleared and subsequently paid a settlement by St. Louis County. Darrow keeps a police scanner and video camera with a relay to a secure source in his car. He has captured some interesting encounters with police on his mobile system.
In the first video below, Darrow is stopped at a Saint George, MO police drunk-driving road block. He lawfully asserts his Fourth Amendment right not to discuss his personal travel business with a police officer. His car is searched illegally and he is detained until he informs the police that he has videotaped the stop. There are long audio blanks in this video (a time marked transcript is here). Darrow is cool under pressure and does nothing other than assert his legal right to refuse to disclose to the state his personal plans for the evening. Nonetheless, I suspect that some right wing Daddy staters who deplore the left wing nanny state will blame Darrow for the illegal search conducted by police officers in this video. But all Darrow did was refuse to provide the police with information to which the state has absolutely no right.
In the next video below (the audio on this one is much better -- transcript here), Darrow pulls into a commuter parking lot which is empty except for a Saint George, MO police car. Saint George P.D. Sgt. James Kuehnlein asserts that he is investigating Darrow as a suspicious person who might be planning to break into cars even though Darrow drove right by the police officer into an empty lot where he remained in view of the officer. Kuehnlein also accuses Darrow of driving erratically and failing to use his turn signal. The video plainly shows that Darrow used his turn signal.
It is clear that Darrow doesn't like being interrogated by police when he hasn't committed a crime. Kuehnlein repeatedly threatens to bring false charges against Darrow because of Darrow's attitude. Once again, Darrow is probably spared an arrest after revealing his secure source video system.
Many people on the political right complain loudly about hate crime laws that "criminalize bad thoughts" about minorities, even though they are conspicuously quiet (or apologists) when it comes to arrests on false charges stemming from presumed bad thoughts about government goons with badges. The underlying consistency behind such apparent hypocrisy is defensive identification with the aggressor -- the sine qua non of the authoritarian character. I hasten to add that authoritarian leftists are probably just as plentiful as right wing authoritarians. Human beings just aren't very good with power.
InterVarsity Press announced the upcoming publication of a study that finds a high rate of religiously mediated change in sexual orientation:
In September, InterVarsity Press will publish the results of a longitudinal study conducted by researchers Stanton L. Jones (Wheaton College) and Mark A. Yarhouse (Regent University). Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation directly addresses two of the most contentious and disputed questions of our day—Is change of sexual orientation possible? and Is the attempt to change harmful?—and the findings of the study appear to contradict the commonly expressed views of the mental health establishment. InterVarsity Press will hold a press conference at the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) World Conference on September 13, 2007, in Nashville, Tennessee, to announce the results of this study.
In a joint statement, Jones and Yarhouse explain the reasoning for their research: "We are evangelical Christians committed to the truth-seeking activity of science. In conducting and reporting this study, we took seriously the words of one of our heroes, C. S. Lewis, who said that science produced by Christian persons would have to be 'perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.' "
From Robert Draper's new book Dead Certain:
Draper also quotes then-Governor Bush talking about homosexuality, saying it shouldn't be part of public discourse. Quote, "I wouldn't appoint someone based on their gaydom. Or gayhood. But I don't know, it's none of my business."
Yep, he's our president.
Yesterday, Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Kim Barker reported on the growing problem of opium and heroin addiction in Afghanistan. We may be struggling to keep the supply of oil flowing freely, but there is more than enough heroin for everyone now.
By Kim Barker
Tribune foreign correspondent
September 6, 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan
Sabera came to the new treatment center for female drug addicts with a plan. In five days, she would check in along with her daughter, and this time she would leave heroin forever.
And then Sabera went home. Within minutes she started smoking the brown powder on a small canoe-shaped piece of foil. So did her two children. Her son, Zaher, is 14. Her daughter, Gulpari, is 12. The family slumped on cushions against a wall. Zaher barely held his eyes open, rubbed his stomach and muttered, "God, God." Gulpari cuddled against her mother. Their fingers were black with tar.
"I feel very sad about it," said Sabera, who has no last name, like many Afghans, and guesses she is about 45. "It's my fault they're addicted. It's my fault they can't quit."
In this land where more opium and heroin are produced than the entire world consumes, Afghans are increasingly hooked on their own product. And now, Afghan doctors say, more and more women are using the drug, desperate to escape depression or pain. The women suck on pea-sized pieces of opium beneath their tongues, chew it or drink it with tea. Like Sabera, some have started to smoke heroin, which is more refined than opium and considered much more addictive.
Often, mothers take their children with them. They give the skin of the addictive poppy fruit to hungry babies to make them feel full, the mothers say. They blow smoke in the mouths of crying toddlers to quiet them -- a practice that public-service warnings try to discourage. Or, as Sabera says she did two years ago, they say yes to children who wonder what their mother is doing and want to try it.
In July, responding to the capital's growing problem, a new drug treatment center opened for women in Kabul. It is the city's eighth treatment center to open since the fall of the Taliban, which largely banned poppies, and is the first in-patient clinic that treats only women.
"There are families where the whole family is using heroin," said Dr. Shaista, the coordinator of the government-run Sanga Amaj Drug Treatment Center, which keeps patients for a month and then gives follow-up treatment.
"Nobody stops it. Nobody bans it. The police are there, but they do nothing. In every corner of the city, people are selling heroin," Shaista said.
For generations Afghans have grown poppies in the country's arid climate, but they traditionally didn't use heroin. Instead, raw opium was exported and refined into heroin for sale in the West.
Since the Taliban was toppled in 2001, poppies have threatened to carpet much of Afghanistan's agricultural land, especially in the south. And increasingly, heroin is being processed inside the country, according to the United Nations and local authorities.
The annual poppy survey by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, released last week, showed yet another record-breaking year for poppies in Afghanistan, which now is nearly the world's exclusive supplier of heroin. No other country has produced narcotics on such a scale since China in the 19th Century.
Production exceeds demand
Opium production in Afghanistan now exceeds the world's demand by more than 3,000 tons, the report said, adding that this year's harvest may kill, directly and indirectly, more than 100,000 people in the world.
As the amount of poppies has skyrocketed, more Afghans have started using the drug.
Almost 1 million Afghans use drugs, from illicit prescription drugs to heroin, according to a recent study by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics, or 1 in 32 Afghans.
About 7 percent are children, and 13 percent are women, ministry spokesman Zalmai Afzali said. Last year there were 13 treatment centers in the country. Now there are 27.
"And still these are not enough," Afzali said.
The situation has gotten so bad that the head cleric at the Shrine of Ali in Kabul has started lecturing against drug use at Friday prayers and allowing treatment centers to advertise over mosque loudspeakers.
"The problem is increasing every day," said Sayed Yasin Alawi, the cleric. "If you sit on a bus, if you go to the mosque, people are talking about it. It's just getting worse and worse."
The reasons are varied. Drugs are everywhere here, and they're cheap. Sabera or her son has to walk only 20 minutes and spend only $2 to get the family high.
Many returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan also have come home as addicts, doctors say. In remote areas opium may be the only medicine available. In cities a doctor's visit costs more money than opium or heroin.
"My husband always told me not to take it," said Zahra, 45, a handkerchief vendor at the Shrine of Ali who started treatment for opium addiction Aug. 18. "I told him, 'You don't make enough money for me to go to a doctor. What am I supposed to do? This is the only thing that makes my pain go away.'"
More women addicts seen
Doctors and social workers say they see more women using drugs, or at least, seeking treatment. At the New Life Center, which treats mostly men but has an out-patient program for women, 123 women had signed up a year ago. Now, 865 women are registered.
Sabera said she started using opium after her husband, a cleric, died of a heart attack four years ago. She was depressed, she was poor, she was in pain. She moved on to heroin.
Her daughter, Gulpari, started smoking when she was 9 or 10. "She just came and sat beside me and said, 'What are you doing?'" Sabera recalled. "I said, 'It's not a good thing.' She said, 'If it's not good, why are you doing it?' Finally I gave her some, and day by day, she got addicted."
Then her son, Zaher, started. The family now lives for free in a tiny storage room at the home of a family friend who took pity on them. Sabera begs, sometimes with her daughter's help. Zaher is too weak.
The two children are skinny, wasted, high. They said they want to quit, but one attempt a year ago failed.
"I hate this habit I have," Gulpari said. "I hate this life."
Related stories: Opium production reaches record levels, U.N. Drug Agency Urges Greater NATO role in combating production and trafficking,
Check out this new addition to the out-of-iraq blogger's roll. 22-year-old Alex is just completing a tour in the Iraq.
Also take a look at Paul Krugman's piece on General Petraeus, congress and the White House. I can just imagine the right-wing guardians of truth, fingers sticking in their ears... "la, la, la, la, la, la, la... New York Times... la, la, la, la..."
From Shrinkwrapped:
"The primary misunderstanding of Freud and Psychoanalysis, a misunderstanding that continues to be propagated by the forces of Therapism, concerns the locus of responsibility for our behavior. Freud's greatest insight was that to a large extent our manifest behavior is the outcome of compromises among many impulses and inhibitions, most of them unconscious, which sum and move us to action. As such, the goal of Psychoanalysis has always been to make us more aware of our hitherto unconscious motivations so that we can take more responsibility for our behavior. Therapism does the exact opposite; it attempts to relieve us of responsibility by assigning motivation and blame to all sorts of agencies (parents, society, brain chemistry) which are by definition outside the realm of our moral agency.
"It is a small step from such thinking to enabling and encouraging the government to tell people how to live, how to raise their children, and how to think. As Neuroscience enlarges our understanding of the biochemical and physiological underpinnings of behavior, those who have done so much to diminish moral responsibility will be in a powerful position to mandate proper thought. The dangers are real and growing."
The Money Quote:
"And here is the dirty little secret at the heart of Therapism: Those who press the Therapism ethic are unknowingly pursuing their own unconscious desires, for power, control, and a host of other hidden wishes. They imagine their motives are pure but the unconscious exists even within those who wish to help you 'for your own good'"
It would not be excessive to say that in many if not most sectors of the mental health industry, the pursuit of unconscious desires for power, control, and a host of other hidden wishes is epidemic. This can be seen, for example, in many university counseling centers where serious study and discussion of unconscious mental processes has become taboo (especially among counseling psychologists). In the name of egalitarianism, discussion of unconscious processes is derisively dismissed as the "medical model."
In fact, fiercely guarded ignorance of unconscious processes frees these practitioners to behave in self-serving, destructive ways that seriously diminish the quality of assistance that can be offered to students while also damaging the quality of professional peer support, consultation and clinical training available in these settings.
Over the past 20 years, the venom directed toward depth approaches to psychotherapy has increased in tandem with a growing sense of entitlement to career advancement that is most often reflected in unabashed political exploitation of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual-orientation. These issues typically serve as cover stories for individuals pursuing fulfillment of an assortment of unsavory conscious and unconscious wishes.
Larval Subjects points to an online book on authoritarianism. He finds the chatty style a bit irritating, but he says the material is interesting. I agree on both counts. Check out chapters 3 and 4.
Ordinarily, I don't like to quote so extensively, but this (from jurassicpork, Brilliant at Breakfast) is just too quotable to be ignored:
Hannah Arendt would’ve described this administration’s increasingly Byzantine dealings as “the inanity of evil.” There’s really no other phrase to describe it.
In describing the nondescript, guilt-free testimony of Adolph Eichmann to an Israeli court as “the banality of evil”, Arendt gave future generations a cautionary tale in miniature as to how easily we can coexist with evil even when it rears its innocuous-looking, balding head. However, she unintentionally left us unprepared for another kind of evil that’s comfortably nestled like a camouflaged snake in what passes for American culture: The inanity of evil.
By this, one can infer that the current administration runs like a crippled Ratso Rizzo in a universally-inhabited dream world of shifting sand, where traction, grace or a step is never lost and bad never happens or, at worst, is casually acknowledged and pre-emptively written off. Indeed, George W. Bush has become quite adept at neutralizing current and future criticism of the war in Iraq by coldly predicting that US casualties will be heavy in the month of August and that’s merely the cost of doing war.
But that’s but one of the many Protean rationales and objectives that one could not have predicted from an administration and army of flacks and drumbeaters who’d assured us in 2003 that US troop casualties would be kept to a bare minimum, that Iraqi civilians would be spared from senseless destruction ("the sheer humanity" gushed Rumsfeld) due to the quasi-divine level of technology of our laser-guided missiles and smart bombs.
Then, after being told to be patient while we await the good news from Gen. Petraeus this September, we were then told not to raise our expectations or expect too much from the man who'd said from the outset that the surge "had a one in four chance of suceeding." The turnaround time from lofty promises to lowered expectations is getting alarmingly more brief.
The most disturbing aspect of this war is not merely the constantly metamorphosing impetuses for invading and occupying Iraq but that the administration never makes it a point to remind us that these expectations have been lowered, that they’d once made pie-in-the-sky promises that Iraq’s war would cost one billion dollars and would be paid for by their own oil revenue, that we could mop up the place with 135,000 troops and be back home by the 4th of July 2003, that we’d be greeted as liberators, that democracy would take root and become the political gold standard for the Middle East.
This constant revisionist mindset, accompanied by the paternal invocation of, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing” fits like a velvet glove over an iron fist with a criminally deferential press and an American “culture”, for want of a better word, that embraces the catchphrase of, “It’s all good.”
Iraq war hawks warning the rest of us about the lessons of Vietnam.
Rock buffoon Ted Nugent waves what looks like automatic weapons in the air and tells Arnold and Obama to "suck on these" and tells Hillary Clinton to "ride these."
It's all vaudeville, but you can bet that if it was Hollywood buffoon Alec Baldwin waving those weapons, telling John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney to suck on these, Sean Hannity would be demanding Baldwin's immediate arrest and Bill O'Reilly would call for a boycott of advertisers who sponsor 30 Rock.
Original video shot by Kevin Caroll at the Feather Falls Indian Casino in Oroville, California on 8-22-07.
The Onion locates the line between being morally better and being an idiot: Bush Censured in Effigy.
The NY Times reported on a story dating back to the end of 2002 when Northwestern's psychology department chair, J. Michael Bailey, published The Man Who Would Be Queen. I haven't read the book and my local Border's was sold out, so I've ordered a copy. My comments below are offered tentatively, based upon what I've picked up in the past few years in the press. After I' read the book, I'll repost on any of the material details I may have gotten wrong.
From what I've gathered through a number of articles in the local press, Bailey argued that there are two types of male-born transgendered persons. The first type, which includes most males who seek gender reassignment surgery, are men who have felt like girls and women for most or all of their lives. They are typically more feminine in manner and seek sexual reassignment early in life. Bailey contends that a second, much smaller group, identify as heterosexual males for most of their adult lives. Quite often, these men marry, raise families and are even regarded by their peers as very masculine men.
Bailey says that this smaller subset of transgendered persons find the idea of having their own female genitals sexually exciting, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as autogynephilia. According to Bailey, autogynephilia distinguishes the motivation of these later-in-life transgendered men from the larger group of male-born transgendered persons who have always identified as women.
Bailey has suggested that autogynephilia represents a reparative effort to address narcissistic injury by making the object of erotic love part of oneself. That may sound wacky to some people, but I have seen heterosexual men who report this experience as a sexual fantasy that seems to appear during prolonged periods of narcissistic deflation, only to disappear entirely during periods when they are more narcissistically intact and stable. I have no idea if Bailey is right about autogynephilia applying to the motivation of a significant number of transgendered persons, but I have little doubt about his formulation being rooted in psychological phenomena that real people report.
Continue reading "The Thought Police: Discussion Of Autogynephilia Is Strictly Prohibited" »
I'll bet you didn't know Egypt is peaceful and secure because of female genital mutilation:
"If a girl is not purified, she will just go hook up with men. This protects women's honor. Otherwise it will become just like America here and girls will go with guys," said Asma Said, a 16-year-old secondary school student.
"Those who say it doesn't happen are lying 100 percent. There is not one person here not circumcised, and it will continue."
She like many of the schoolgirls in Maghagha who spoke to Reuters said they supported the practice, even if they were frightened of having it done.
The only girl who spoke against the practice was shouted down by her classmates until she conceded that genital cutting was a necessity.
"No one can get married without it," said the girl.
Another classmate, 15-year-old Nesma Radi, chimed in: "Egypt lives in peace and security because there is circumcision."
Maybe all those Shia and Sunni murderers would settle down if they could just be certain that they've mutilated every last little girl in the Middle East.
Vaughan at Mind Hacks discusses a Time Magazine report on the introduction of behavior detection officers at U.S. airports to identify potential terrorists. According to the Time piece, officers will rely, in part, upon analysis of facial expressions and micro-expressions.
Psychologist Paul Ekman has been researching facial expression for over four decades. Ekman coined the term "duper's delight" to refer to facial expressions that betray psychopathic pleasure taken in duping others.
Several months ago, a video of George Bush telling George Stephanopoulos "we have never been stay the course" circulated widely on the internet. I thought it would be interesting to watch that video again with the notion of duper's delight in mind. There is no question that Bush's statement was an impulsive lie. That was documented endlessly at the time. What is of interest to me about this video is the micro-smirk suggesting that he experienced pleasure in telling that lie.
WTF is this all about?
Coming from Cheney, the insights into Iraq are jaw-dropping. Yes, the simian tone, the micro-sneers and the palpable certainty are so... Cheney. It almost makes me want to say he's wrong, but intellectual honesty requires an acknowledgment of indisputable facts. I never thought I'd say this:
Cheney is right.
Ed Brayton has been following the Mark O"Hara case. Recently, the Florida appeals court tossed out O'Hara's drug trafficking conviction. O'Hara was serving 25 years for merely possessing 58 Vicodin tablets from a legally obtained prescription. The prosecutors did not offer a shred of evidence that O'Hara was engaged in drug trafficking. Now prosecutors intend to refile charges even though the appeals court has called the original charges "ridiculous" and "absurd."
This reminds me of the Manhattan prosecutor's handling of the Palladium murder case. Detectives working on that case were deeply disturbed and flabbergasted by the prosecutor's determination to keep innocent men in prison for life, yet fossil D.A. Robert Morgenthau's office insisted that one of its prosecutors argue, against his own better judgment, that the innocent men should be kept in prison for life.
Both of these cases may represent instances of Dr. X's dictum which says that any occupation or office meant to be used for good attracts a significant number of people who revel in doing bad things. Power is attractive to sadists and, for sadists, the pleasure of crushing others, body and soul, is multiplied by the knowledge that they can destroy idealism, pu
