tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81741632024-03-09T07:51:41.672-08:00ShrillblogThe Offical Blog of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the ShrillUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1128125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-41415684479828237152011-03-30T17:05:00.000-07:002011-03-30T17:05:42.047-07:00Call me "Rip"We're <a href="http://uleak.it/?0ie">in the news</a> again!
Anyone want to play a game of "let's cut the national pension system's budget by 30% or it will be forced to cut its budget by 30%?"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-74188508982274428952011-03-23T23:42:00.000-07:002011-03-24T11:25:56.741-07:00Christy Romer Joins the Order of the Shrill<p>Another new inductee:</p> <p> <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/christy-romer-in-vanderbilt.html"> </a></p><blockquote><p><a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/christy-romer-in-vanderbilt.html">Christy Romer in Vanderbilt, by Brad DeLong</a>: Soon she too will join the Order of the Shrill:</p> <blockquote> <p> <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0311/Former_top_economist_Economic_inaction_shameful.html?showall"> Former top economist: Economic inaction ‘shameful’</a>: President Obama’s former top economic advisor sharply criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive action against unemployment.</p> <blockquote> <p>I frankly don’t understand why policy makers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families. I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them...</p> </blockquote> <p>“We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there,” Romer said, calling the 8.9% unemployment rate "an absolute crisis."</p> <blockquote> <p>If I have a complaint about policy these days, it’s that we’re not doing enough. That goes all the way up to the Federal Reserve, [which] could be taking more aggressive action. It goes to the Congress and the Administration – there are fiscal policy actions they could be taking. And don’t tell me you can’t [take those actions] because of the deificit because I think there are fiscally responsible ways...</p> </blockquote> <p>Romer suggested that extending the payroll tax break to the employer side of the payroll tax could spur the economy; she suggested that Congress simultaneously pass a comprehensive, long-term plan for reducing the deficit.</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><p></p> </blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-40963596394565305072011-03-21T00:13:00.000-07:002011-03-21T00:17:43.416-07:00Ryan Avent Joins the Order of the Shrill<p>Brad DeLong inducts a new member:</p> <blockquote> <p> <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/ryan-avent-makes-so-much-sense-that-he-joins-the-order-of-the-shrill.html"> Ryan Avent Makes so Much Sense That He Joins the Order of the Shrill, by Brad DeLong</a>: Ryan Avent:</p> <blockquote> <p> <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/03/guns_and_butter"> Guns and butter: About that deficit</a>: MARK THOMA has an appropriately succint post up today which reads in its entirety (and I hope he'll forgive my quoting the whole thing):</p> <blockquote> <p>We have enough money to pay for military action in Libya, but not for job creation?</p> </blockquote> <p>It's hard not to be cynical about government policymaking.... [B]oth Republicans and Democrats are committed to cutting the government's budget in the current fiscal year... threaten programmes with positive economic returns.... [F]ew party leaders are seriously discussing new spending on programmes with positive economic returns. America has substantial infrastructure needs—current spending is inadequate to simply maintain critical infrastructure at its current state of repair—and yet the odds of passing a new transportation law to replace the one that was scheduled to expire in 2009 but which has since been extended repeatedly, well, they're close to zero. Why? No one can agree on a way to fund new infrastructure spending.</p> <p>Libya poses no threat to America. It's far from clear that American intervention will yield positive outcomes for Libyans. And yet here America goes, launching massively expensive sorties....</p> <p>[M]uch of official Washington—Democratic and Republican leaders, along with policy intellectuals and op-ed pages—has acted as though an immediate fiscal crunch loomed. This was never true. American debt levels may be an issue by the end of the decade, but they aren't now, and deficits are forecast to fall sharply for the next few years. Bond yields have rarely been lower. The fiscal problem is long-term, not short-term. And yet dire fiscal scenarios have been used to sell painful short-term cuts, some of which were necessary but could have been accomplished later, many of which weren't necessary at all. Americans have been told, by the president of the United States and his chief Republican antagonists, that in hard times the government, like households, must tighten its belt. And then along comes Libya to put the lie to all of these assertions.</p> <p>The really, really troubling thing about this is that Washington will almost certainly ignore the inconsistency. I doubt any pundits will take the opportunity to observe that Washington leaders apparently don't actually believe that America faces immediate fiscal constraints (as it does not)...</p> </blockquote> <p>He is, of course, completely correct.</p> <p><em>Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ryan Avent R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!</em></p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-9989872648785366232010-01-03T02:27:00.000-08:002010-01-03T02:27:03.617-08:00David Brooks is Shrill!<p>Bobo goes bananas!</p>
<blockquote>
<p><i>Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.</i></p>
<p><i>But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.</i></p>
<p><i>Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.</i></p>
<p><i>Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation.</i></p>
<p><i>Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, David, may we suggest it's time for a different god? Hastur is accepting supplicants over in conference room 3.</p>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-5176664609023695152009-12-11T09:22:00.001-08:002009-12-11T09:22:06.181-08:00James Kwak: A Partisan Post: You Have Been Warned!<p><a href="http://baselinescenario.com/2009/12/11/a-partisan-post-you-have-been-warned/#more-5693">A Partisan Post, You Have Been Warned « The Baseline Scenario</a>Last night I read a post by Brad DeLong that made me so mad I had trouble falling asleep. (Not at DeLong, mind you.) There’s really nothing unusual in there — hysteria about the deficit, people who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit but suddenly think the national debt is killing us, political pandering — but maybe it was the proverbial straw.</p>
<p>First, let me say that I largely agree with DeLong here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am–in normal times–a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, let me tell you what I am sick of:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>People who insist that the recent change in our fiscal spending is the product of high spending, without looking at the numbers, because their political priors are so strong they assume that high deficits under a Democratic president must be due to runaway spending. And it’s not just Robert Samuelson.</p></li>
<li><p>People who forecast the end of the world without pointing out why the world is ending. Here’s Niall Ferguson, in an article entitled “An Empire at Risk:” “The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942.” But does he mention that the reason for the 2009 deficit is lower tax revenues due to the financial crisis and recession? No. Here’s Ferguson on the 10-year projection: “Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.” Does he mention that, as early as January 2008, that number was projected to fall to 22%, and the majority of the change is due to lower tax revenues? No.</p></li>
<li><p>People who posture about our fiscal crisis who voted for the Bush tax cuts — shouldn’t shame require them to keep silent?</p></li>
<li><p>People who say, like Judd Gregg, “after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us somewhere here in the United States, the single biggest threat that we face as a nation is the fact that we’re on a course toward fiscal insolvency,” as if this is a new problem, when it’s been around since 2004 (see Figure 1) — when, I might add, Judd Gregg was a member of the majority. (Tell me, was Niall Ferguson forecasting the end of the American empire in 2004, when everything he says now about long-term entitlement spending was already true? That’s a real question.)</p></li>
<li><p>People who say that we can’t pass health care reform because it costs too much, ignoring the fact that the CBO projects the bills to be roughly deficit neutral, ignoring the fact that the Senate bill has received bipartisan health-economist support for its cost-cutting measures, and ignoring the fact that our long-term fiscal problem is, and always has been, about health care costs (see Figure 2).</p></li>
<li><p>People who say the Obama administration is weak on the deficit (Ferguson refers to Obama’s “indecision on the deficit”, and he is gentle by Republican standards), when by tackling health care costs head-on — and in the process angering their political base — they are doing the absolute most important thing necessary to solve the long-term debt problem.</p></li>
<li><p>People who cite “financial ruin” purely, absolutely, incontrovertibly as a political tactic to try to kill health care reform (courtesy of DeLong and Brian Beutler)...</p></li>
<li><p>Joe Lieberman.</p></li>
</ol>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-89943248085712904512009-10-11T11:19:00.001-07:002009-10-11T11:19:01.671-07:00Dean Baker, Yog-Sothoth Professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University, on the Washington Post and the Stimulus<p><a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=10&year=2009&base_name=more_bad_mathbad_economics_at">Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect</a>: Given the quality of the economics reporting, parents would be well-advised to prohibit their children from reading the Washington Post so that they don't get confused on basic arithmetic concepts. The Post doesn't want more stimulus and is willing to say anything to push its case.
</p>
<p>The lead editorial tells readers that: "government has managed to blunt the recession, but at a cost -- a higher national debt burden, which future Americans must pay off by working harder and saving more than they otherwise would have." Actually, future Americans will own the debt that will be paid off. This is not a generational issue, it can be a distributional one.</p>
<p>There is a point that some of the debt is held by foreigners. This will be a burden on the country, but the issue here is the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. If we had no government debt, but foreigners bought up $4 trillion of private capital in the United States, it would pose the same burden on future generations as if foreigners bought up $4 trillion of government debt. Remarkably, the Post is not concerned about the trade deficit and the burden it poses on future generations and actually does not want the cause of the deficit -- the over-valued dollar-- to be fixed.
</p>
<p>The Post also gives the bizarre argument that:we should wait on further stimulus because "the government still hasn't run through half of the $787 billion in tax cuts and spending increases enacted this year." Of course, for those of us who passed our third grade arithmetic class this argument is just plain silly.</p>
<p>The stimulus is already being disbursed at its maximum rate and therefore having its full impact on the economy. The additional spending will provide no further boost.
</p>
<p>To see this point, imagine my rich uncle promises to give me $2,400 over two years in installments of $100 a month. I may originally be slow to change my consumption, but after 3 or 4 months I will likely have fully adjusted my spending in accordance with this monthly gift of $100. Once I have reached the 8th month, I will almost certainly be at my maximum spending rate, even though two thirds of the gift is yet to come.</p>
<p>This is where we stand right now. We have spent close to 40 percent of the stimulus with more than 60 percent yet to come, however the rate of spending will not be increasing from this point forward. Therefore, it will provide no further net boost to the economy. People who write editorials for major newspapers should understand this fact.
</p>
<p>It is worth noting that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections showing a 10.2 percent unemployment rate for 2010 and a 9.1 percent rate for 2011 include the impact of the stimulus. Perhaps the Post's editors know something that CBO doesn't, in which case they should share this information with their readers.</p>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-4260401757527212642009-10-10T14:35:00.001-07:002009-10-10T14:35:54.541-07:00Miskatonic University Bulletin: Fall 2009<p>The leaves are turning here in Arkham, Massachusetts, as we welcome to his padded cell our new Dread Cthulhu Professor Health Policy, Thomas Levenson. Watch his mad ululations beneath the uncaring stars:</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://inversesquare.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/its-not-that-mcardle-cant-read-its-that-she-cant-wont-think-part-four-and-last-thank-fsm/">It’s not that McArdle can’t read... it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part four (and last, thank FSM). « The Inverse Square Blog</a>: OK, by now it’s clear that this is overkill.  One post by Megan McArdle does not need this kind of rant; it’s like using a howitzer to plink a tin can off a fence.  [For grotesque demonstration of my logorrhea problem, check out parts one, two, and three of this series]
</p>
<p>But in some sense, all I’m doing is channelling my inner John Foster Dulles:  McArdle, and her ilk are not going away.  Sadly, no amount of day-by-day debunking seems able to evoke the kind of respect for their claimed craft that would produce even a smidgeon more care and honor in their ongoing attempt to write into reality their unexamined assumptions.  So, after Dulles, consider this a kind of blogospheric massive retaliation, an attempt to shock and awe the recalcitrant into the virtues of intellectual honesty.
</p>
<p>Which brings us to one more thing that McArdle did not do in her attempt to recruit what she claims as the gold-standard of authority, the academic literature, to bolster her assertion that any attempt to control drug expenditures in the US medical system is tantamount to a pact to kill nice old people...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Levenson R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-5964243296950767882009-08-25T22:05:00.004-07:002009-08-25T22:10:27.640-07:00David Frum is Shrill!<p>Former Bush speech-writer David Frum is, dare we say it, <a href="http://www.theweek.com/bullpen/column/99474/The_reckless_Right_courts_violence">Shrill and Unbalanced!</a></p><blockquote><p><i>All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.</i></p><p><i>And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.</i></p><p><i>...</i></p><p><i>Newt Gingrich tweeted: "The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired."</i></p><p><i>I don't think the former speaker could tweet such a thing today in good conscience. The person who drafted that homeland security memo has gained very good reason to be worried. The guns are coming out. The risks are real.</i></p><p><i>It's not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.</i></p></blockquote><p>David, welcome!</p>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-42513310483503623682009-08-20T11:20:00.002-07:002009-08-20T11:28:32.273-07:00Joe Klein is losing itTime was we'd expect Joe Klein to reliably mutter something about being liberal before launching into a broadside against everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. <a href="http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1917525,00.html">This time is past</a>:<div><blockquote><p><i>...The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.</i></p><p><i>It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. ... There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.</i></p><p><i>A striking example of the prevailing cravenness was Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has authored end-of-life counseling provisions and told the Washington Post that comparing such counseling to euthanasia was nuts — but then quickly retreated when he realized that he had sided with the reality-based community against his Rush Limbaugh-led party. ... Why are these men so reluctant to be rational in public?</i></p></blockquote></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-19356777001267678222009-08-19T09:25:00.001-07:002009-08-19T09:25:34.012-07:00Nonpartisan Tax Professor Dan Shaviro Is Now Shrill!Welcome, Dan! Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl Ftagn!! The deep-fried shoggoth tentacles are on the right. And the 65 million B.C. vintage of the chardonnay is from Hastur the Unspeakable's private cellars...
<blockquote>
<a href="http://danshaviro.blogspot.com/2009/08/healthcare-reform.html">Start Making Sense: Healthcare reform</a>: The current debate's lack of coherent content has been quite startling, and indeed dismaying insofar as one naively hoped for better.
I generally support what the Obama Administration is trying to do (though sometimes what that is, isn't entirely clear). In 1993, I was unsympathetic to the Clinton plan, but since then my view of how well the U.S. healthcare market functions has darkened. More on that in a moment. Unfortunately, I don't think the Administration has conveyed any clear sense of what it is trying to do, or why.
Concerning the other side in the debate, perhaps the less said, the better. I really can't say anything temperate at this point.
What is the set of problems to which the Administration's healthcare reform proposals might, with luck, be an at least partial solution? Brad DeLong once put the point quite crisply (in his moderate rather than shrill persona). To liberal economists, the big problem is adverse selection. To conservative economists, the big problem is moral hazard. And I myself would say they're both right, plus there also are externalities.
On adverse selection: Anyone who is facing uncertain healthcare expenses ought to want insurance, smoothing out the actual cost towards the expected cost. Our healthcare market does not work well to solve this problem, and that's a big reason for the millions of uninsured. The tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance contributes to this, by making risk pooling much harder for the people left over after these generally healthier groups have been cherry-picked out of the pool (so to speak).
Adverse selection, making fairly priced insurance unavailable, is inherently a big problem in healthcare if the government doesn't somehow mandate pooling, given that people often will know more about their expected future health than insurance company doctors will be able to learn. But the system created by tax benefits certainly has made things worse.
Myopic or irrational failure to insure (until it is too late) when one should have also is a problem. Likewise, the prospect of free care in the ER if one has a crisis may create an individually rational reason for under-insurance, but involving a fiscal externality. When you count as well the adverse effect on risk-pooling of people's staying out of the insurance market (contributing to adverse selection), there's a good case for mandating health insurance coverage, just as Social Security effectively mandates retirement savings.
>There is an argument on the other side - why give me (or make me buy) something that costs $X if I value it at less than $X - but while that's often a good argument I personally would reject it on balance here. Note, however, that this argument applies equally to making me buy something for $X and giving it to me for free (since in that case we could simply have given me the $X instead). And the question of whether I pay the $X or get it for free is simply an input to the overall issue of post-tax and transfer wealth distribution in the society (which is not to diminish its importance, but just to put it in the proper larger context).
>And finally, mixed in with adverse selection (though conceptually distinct) is that we may favor redistribution from those facing low expected healthcare costs to those facing high expected costs, in particular to the extent that brute luck rather than choice underlies the difference. Thus, mandatory insurance for which everyone was charged the same amount might be defended as combining a solution to adverse selection with a deliberative redistributive policy. By the way, lest this sound a bit lefty, it is distributionally equivalent to what the George H.W. Bush Administration would have proposed it if Bush I had won the 1992 election, via risk-adjusted subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance.
>OK, on to moral hazard. One key reason the U.S. healthcare system is so wildly expensive relative to the benefits provided (where the comparison is other economically advanced countries, where people get comparably good healthcare for much less) is that we have half of a free market system, in effect - which can be worse than no market system at all. Consumer demand drives the market, but it is largely the demand of subsidized consumers who are not actually paying at the margin for what they get. Suppose that in the market for groceries or cars we had consumer demand in the driver's seat (as we do), except that people didn't actually have to pay for what they purchased (or maybe they just had a small co-pay). Whole Foods and GM might like this, but it wouldn't be good socially. Yet in healthcare, that's effectively what we have, much of the time, for people on Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided health insurance that overpays at the margin (relative to the optimal insurance level) due to the distorting effect of the tax subsidy.
Perhaps the food or cars analogy overstates the problem in a couple of respects. Good food and cars are fun in themselves, getting healthcare isn't and hence I'd generally only do it out of the belief that my health will benefit. Plus, doctors to a large extent tell healthcare consumers what to do. But the latter is actually a big part of the problem - they don't bear the marginal costs either, and have some reasons of both ideology and self-interest (earn more fees or practice overly defensive medicine) for recommending treatments that aren't actually worth their cost to the patient.
So we have a terrible healthcare system that surely could be vastly improved. I take the Administration to be addressing the adverse selection problem by extending health insurance to the uninsured population. Also, it may want to address under-treatment of this population (which exists alongside over-treatment of others), which I think of as a distributional issue, because being sick and treatable, but unable to afford the treatment, should raise one's estimate of the marginal utility that a transfer via free provision of the needed service would provide.
The Administration would also perhaps like to address the moral hazard problem, which is a key input to the horrendous problems of long-term fiscal unsustainability that the U.S. currently faces. Many observers are skeptical, I would guess rightly, of the progress that the current proposal would make on this front. Unfortunately, addressing it really requires bipartisanship, since cutting benefits is politically unpopular. And the Republicans couldn't make any clearer their unwillingness to cooperate in any sort of good faith effort to address waste and put healthcare outlays on a sustainable path.
One of the many offensive and odious aspects of the Republicans' hateful lying about death panels and the like is that they are actually the ones who want to provide less treatment. For those among them who are sane and believe in civil society, this mainly reflects concern about moral hazard and/or a libertarian distributional view. The rest, apparently a large majority of their number, do not bear discussing.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-29868783360247015382009-07-17T09:41:00.001-07:002009-07-17T09:41:09.600-07:00Spencer Ackerman's Sober, Measured Take on John YooA measured, appropriate, sober take:
><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/51319/john-yoos-defense-of-himself-is-as-persuasive-as-most-of-his-legal-opinions">John Yoo’s Defense of Himself Is as Persuasive as Most of His Legal Opinions</a>: This is your horrible, dystopian future: John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel official who had a hand in crafting the Bush administration’s detentions, interrogations and warrantless surveillance abuses, writes endless and endlessly misleading defenses of himself. Some people die because of Yoo’s cavalier relationship with the law — about 100, actually — and others get law school sinecures and limitless op-ed real estate to explain away what they did. Few people write so much for so long with so little self-reflection. You’ll be reading these op-eds in the nursing home. Yoo’s latest comes in response to Friday’s report from five inspectors general about the warrantless surveillance and data-mining escapades of the Bush administration. Welcome to your future.
>Yoo starts things off with his typical flourish of disingenuousness:
>>Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and entering Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters. What better way of detecting follow-up attacks? And what president — of either political party — wouldn’t immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers?
>>Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve.
>Those inspectors general, in Yoo’s imagination, aren’t overworked bureaucrats in wrinkle-free shirts, cotton Dockers and overgrown haircuts, buried under endless reams of paper. They’re useful idiots for Osama bin Laden. In truth, the reason why the inspectors general don’t entertain that scenario is because it’s absurd. If the intelligence community knew what the “electronic communications” signatures heading into and out of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters were, they could very easily obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, because they’d possess individualized suspicion. This is an unproblematic case, fitting easily under the aegis of the law on Sept. 12, 2001.  It has absolutely nothing to do with what the inspectors general call the “President’s Surveillance Program.” That’s also why the battery of Justice Department leaders like Acting Attorney General Jim Comey, Associate Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Philbin fought to rein in the surveillance activities — because they were overbroad and outside of FISA, which Congress explicitly made the “exclusive means” for conducting legal foreign surveillance. Yoo continues:
>>It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States.
>Actually, it’s absurd to think that a law like FISA does. Yoo cites the 9/11 Commission, saying it found that “FISA’s wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence” proved to be such a hindrance, but that’s a misrepresentation. FISA has no such wall. The “wall” was an invention of the Justice Department under Janet Reno to separate foreign-collected surveillance from criminal investigations, nothing even close to “live military operations,” and in practice that bureaucratic restriction went too far and inhibited necessary FBI-CIA collaboration. The Bush administration’s response wasn’t to get Congress to change FISA; it was to entirely circumvent it.
>>Clearly, the five inspectors general were responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination, not consulting the long history of American presidents who have lived up to their duty in times of crisis. More than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, domestic or international, of persons “suspected of subversive activities . . . including suspected spies.”
>You know what law, passed in 1978, didn’t exist when FDR was president? Yoo goes even further, and takes selective quotations from Jefferson and Hamilton to suggest that his long-discredited theory that presidents have king-like powers during times of war, and yet he never comes out and says it, because even in The Wall Street Journal people can recognize absurdity.
>What’s amazing about Yoo’s caustic attack on the inspectors general report is that the report itself embarrasses Yoo but does little else. There’s no suggestion of prosecution, no recommendation of additional investigation, no harsh language. It says simply that Yoo says what he says in this op-ed and that his superiors at OLC were cut out of that loop. That’s all. Yoo’s not even in danger, if reports about Attorney General Eric Holder’s potential new investigation are to be believed, of moving into the crosshairs of the Justice Department. Today’s attack on the inspectors general is Yoo’s response to having his own words quoted back at him. Which, perhaps, is insult enough. It’s like seeing the next 30 years of your life unfold before your horrified eyes.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-33557834439510295362009-07-15T08:47:00.001-07:002009-07-15T08:47:27.307-07:00Tom Levenson, Driven into Shrillness by Tom Friedman Once More...<a href="http://inversesquare.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/dog-bites-man-tom-friedman-mischaracterizes-us-interventions/">Dog Bites Man: Tom Friedman Mischaracterizes US Interventions. « The Inverse Square Blog</a>: Atrios sent me in search of Tom Friedman’s latest, and, like its author, it’s a bizarre piece of work. Backstory: back in the dawn of time, when giants still walked the earth (Mays in center field; McCovey at first base, Marichal on the mound), and humans preserved their communications in scratches on clay, Tom Friedman was a real reporter and a good one. He spent time in country, he worked sources, he could write. Somewhere along the line, though, during the Clinton years, I believe, he seems to have convinced himself that his wealth of experience had given him the key to all mythologies. Hence such trifles as his “argument” that we should invade Iraq to show that the US could punch somebody,[1] the endless iteration of “Friedman Units” and so on.
And now, with the war in Iraq now in its Pilate phase... Friedman comes up with a column that captures so many of his deficiencies in one place. There is the complete abandonment of the reportorial function. He doesn’t talk to folks, he tags along (his phrase) with US JCS Chairman Admiral McMullen. Nice company, to be sure, but not that in which you will find unvarnished opinions being expressed. He doesn’t seem even interested in testing his assumptions against any possibility of contrary information anymore:
>In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us?
Wonder? WONDER? You’re a journalist — or rather you used to be! You don’t blow wonder through your ass. You go find out what they have learned from us. But no…that would be (a) heavy lifting and (b) dangerous... so much so that it might render this kind of conclusion not merely pathetic, but simply unsayable:
>We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.
Well, how much have we and they accomplished? Some, I’m sure…... ut given this kind of news, buried in what used to be called the b section, but popping up with depressing regularity, perhaps not as much as Friedman’s breezy tour with the brass may indicate. And in any event — how is it possible that a Serious Foreign Policy Thinker™ no matter how burnt out, overly comfortable, and generally hackified could actually bring himself to write such a Hallmark Card notion: that the events of the last six years (12 F.U.s, if you’re counting) are coming to rest in a satisfactory state because, hey, we can all work together?
I guess there is a thread of naivete left to me. I grew up thinking that there was something special about the New York Times. I met Tony Lukas when I was 18, Tony Lewis some time later — and people like that impressed me for the fire they had, that seemed to come from that newsroom. You didn’t get comfortable there, it seemed to my juvenile eyes. Even when you got big, you felt the pressure the place forcing you to make that last call to get it right. I know that’s a fantasy, and I’m sure it was never as true as I wanted it to be. And even with the decline of the Times (Judith Miller, anyone... Ross freaking Douthat?) it’s still better than the whatever that other emblem of journalistic moxie, the Post has become. But that’s kind of like saying that liver is better than spam… But still... Friedman could once actually do the job he mails in now. It’s painful to watch. He should pack it in. Otherwise it’s just going to go ever further down hill. For, in this column as in this post, he and I save the best/worst for last. If Friedman hopes to hang on above Kristol territory, he has to find a way to stop writing stuff like this:
>After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys.
Except, of course, we did not invade Bosnia. The American led NATO intervention in the Bosnian War occured in 1995, just as Friedman was making his ultimately disastrous move to the NYTime’s Opinion pages, so he perhaps may have been distracted, but the military action taken by the US and its allies consisted of 3515 aerial sorties: a hellacious bombing campaign.
If this seems like a distinction without a difference, think again: many DFHs without Friedman’s bully pulpit tried to suggest that the range of analogies being drawn to justify the Iraq War back in 2002-2003 were false. Iraq wasn’t Japan in August 1945; Bagdad was not Berlin; displacing Saddam was more like witnessing Tito’s death and the start of the Yugoslav disintegration than it was our ratification of Balkan partition in 1995 — and not much like that either. Friedman chose then not to know any historical complexity. He still does. And as he continues to scrabble to find justifications for his own disastrous cheerleading for the Iraq war, he’s willing to get basic facts wrong to prevent the slightest dissonant fact from disturbing the eternal sunshine of his mind. If it were me, or any other mere blogger, or even one of the deranged commenters at Redstate thus deluded — who cares. But despite the evident decline of even the flagship mass media organizations, the power that comes with the NYT platform and the inertial weight of Friedman’s own brand means that when he says stupid sh-t, he can get people killed. And that’s why this matters.
----
[1] From Wikipedia:
>In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2003, Friedman said:
>>What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.[23][24][25] ..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth...
>Similarly, in NPR’s Talk of the Nation, September 23, 2003:
>>...and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-9219909238837200512009-05-21T18:02:00.001-07:002009-05-21T18:07:35.608-07:00And...<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104045.html">we're back!</a>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-4816775266771934042008-10-03T01:40:00.004-07:002008-10-03T02:01:36.731-07:00Shrillblog: The Israeli EditionWhile we here at the Order generally focus our arts upon domestic shrillness, we are not without appreciation for such activity in far away lands--and especially so when it involves a country's leader gettin' all shrill and unbalanced his own bad self.
Or: Ehud Olmert is <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/world/middleeast/30olmert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin">shrill and unbalanced</A>:
<BLOCKQUOTE>Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.
<P>He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.
<P>In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.
<P>“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>There are some of us at the Order that believe this sort of shrillness may become a pattern of world leaders as they exit the stage, taking a strong adversarial stance agaist what they've been doing for the bulk of their political careers.
<P>Works for us. We just like the shrill. We <I>needs</I> it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-69229875831157837642008-09-15T22:05:00.004-07:002008-09-15T22:09:20.518-07:00Karl Rove is Shrill?<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lor25g9v84s">Um</a></p>
<p style="font-size: 50%"><em>No, Mr. Rove is not eligible for membership in the Order.</em></p>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-60992738162108393192008-09-03T18:35:00.001-07:002008-09-03T18:36:30.159-07:00Republicans are Shrill!Wait, <a href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/Noonan-and-Murphy-Caught-o-by-Rob-Kall-080903-458.html">what</a>?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-37056654093281850552008-08-11T10:20:00.001-07:002008-08-11T10:20:28.894-07:00Barry Ritholtz Is Shrill!!<p>Barry Ritholtz, at The Big Picture:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/08/august-2007-ben.html">The Big Picture | Really Bad Call: SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns</a>: What we are looking for is stupendous, horrific, jumbo money losing stupidity. Which brings us to Ben Stein.</p>
<p>know I swore off Stein a year ago, but I stumbled across this piece from 12 months ago, I had to remind you of exactly how myopic and, well, just plain incompetent the guy is: From August 2007 Ben Stein: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns:</strong> The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account. But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can read it paragraph by paragraph and discover something wonderfully wrong in almost every sentence . . .</p>
<p>Really, why the hell does the NYT insist on publishing this guy? He is a political hack, a terrible economist -- and an enormous money loser. And thats this week's Really Really Bad Call...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>And here is the original from Ben Stein:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/yourmoney/12every.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print">Chicken Little’s Brethren, on the Trading Floor - New York Times</a>: THE job of an economist, among many other duties, is to put things into perspective. So, because I am an economist, among other duties, here is a little perspective on the recent turmoil in the stock and bond markets.</p>
<p>First, when the story of this turbulence is reported, the usual explanation mainly has to do with some new loss in the subprime mortgage world — the universe of mortgages and mortgage-backed instruments related to buyers with poor credit histories or none at all.</p>
<p>Here is the first instance in which proportion tells us that something is out of whack:</p>
<p>The total mortgage market in the United States is roughly $10.4 trillion. Of that, a little over 13 percent, or about $1.35 trillion, is subprime — certainly a large sum. Of this, nearly 14 percent is delinquent, meaning late in payment or in foreclosure. Of this amount, about 5 percent is actually in foreclosure, or about $67 billion. Of this amount, according to my friends in real estate, at least about half will be recovered in foreclosure. So now we are down to losses of about $33 billion to $34 billion.</p>
<p>The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account.</p>
<p>But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.</p>
<p>Much more to the point, the fears and terrors about subprime mortgages have helped knock off 6.7 percent of the stock market’s value in recent weeks. This amounts to about $1.1 trillion, or more than 30 times the losses so far in the subprime market. In other words, these subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems.</p>
<p>The disconnect goes even further. The Dow Jones industrial average has been heavily moved by fears about the subprime market. But how are most of the Dow 30 affected by subprime mortgages in any meaningful way? No Dow company is short of liquidity, and consumer spending is still strong.</p>
<p>Foreign stocks, especially in developing countries, have been hard hit, and this is supposedly connected with a “repricing of risk,” which in turn is connected with subprime mortgages. But how are the risks in Thailand or Brazil or Indonesia intrinsically related to problems in a housing tract in Las Vegas? The developing countries are fantastically strong and liquid. Why should problems at a mortgage company in Long Island have anything to do with them?</p>
<p>European stocks have also been hard hit, and this has to do with relatively small amounts of subprime in some European banks. On a global scale, the numbers in Germany and France are minuscule for subprime exposure. For European markets to fall on subprime issues makes no sense.</p>
<p>News last Thursday that a small amount of unpriceable subprime mortgages was in a BNP Paribas fund in France sent the markets in Europe and the United States sharply lower. Why? The losses in France are at most in the single billions, while the losses in United States markets alone were in the hundreds of billions on the BNP news.</p>
<p>Then there is the supposed “drying up” of credit for private equity deals because of fears of risk. But this is also puzzling. I can’t think of a single recent major private equity deal in which the bonds have defaulted.</p>
<p>More to the point, suppose that all private equity deals were stalled for a year. Why should this affect the Dow? None of companies in the Dow 30 is having trouble raising cash. And suppose that all private equity deals went away for good. Taken together, they are not all that big a piece of the United States economy. Why should they put the markets of the richest nation in the world, as well as all of the world’s other markets, into turmoil?</p>
<p>Then let’s take a peek at Bear Stearns. This venerable and clever financial house has taken some major hits on subprime mortgages lately. That is sad for the stockholders (I am a very small stockholder), and the price of Bear Stearns stock has tumbled.</p>
<p>A little over a week ago, news about Bear Stearns’ liquidity issues lowered the its market value by about more than $1 billion in one day. That is a big hit to a single company, to be sure, but then came the shocker: that news also helped wipe out hundreds of billions off the total value of United States stocks.</p>
<p>MY point is this: I don’t know where the bottom is on subprime. I don’t know how bad the problems are at Bear. Yet I do know that the market reactions are wildly out of proportion to the real problems that have been revealed. Maybe there is some giant thing hiding in the closet that might rationalize the market’s fears. But if it’s hidden, how can the market be reacting to it in the first place?</p>
<p>More will be revealed, as the saying goes. But recently, investors have been selling out of all relation to what we know. Reassurances in word and deed from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped calm the markets on Friday. But recent events are a disturbing commentary on the power of fear.</p>
<p>This economy is extremely strong. Profits are superb. The world economy is exploding with growth. To be sure, terrible problems lurk in the future: a slow-motion dollar crisis, huge Medicare deficits and energy shortages. But for now, the sell-off seems extreme, not to say nutty.</p>
<p>Some smart, brave people will make a fortune buying in these days, and then we’ll all wonder what the scare was about.</p>
</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-61197208276863780702008-08-02T14:49:00.001-07:002008-08-02T14:49:51.556-07:00"He Doesn't Seem Like a Serious President"<p>Andrew Sullivan has a shrill moment: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/how-shitty-was.html">How Shitty Was McCain?, by Andrew Sullivan</a>: Yes, the last couple of weeks of the campaign, even from my remote perch, were pretty uninspiring on the GOP side. Here's my brief take, for what it's worth. ... The arrogant-celebrity meme is a variation on the usual Rovian fare: empty of actual policy substance but evocative of playground loyalties and resentments. Basically, McCain called Obama a girl, to appeal to the jocks, and then called him arrogant to flatter the nerds. Paris Hilton is a two-fer. Choosing a female celebrity is integral to the usual attempt to feminize the Democrat. I could see nothing racist whatever in the message, mind you, but it was, as Weaver noted, pretty asinine. </p>
<p>Less asinine was McCain's two-pronged lie that Obama would rather lose a war than a campaign and that he snubbed injured troops in Germany. The former is repulsively low-life and you can tell McCain knows it because he has a weird habit of saying it and then grinning broadly and humming a little to himself as a semi-laugh. He doesn't own the statement even as he says it. The statement itself is about as uncivil as it is possible to be, close to calling him treasonous, right? And the troop snub jibe is simply, demonstrably untrue, as the McCain camp was forced to semi-concede. So McCain's main moves these past two weeks have been either childish or disgusting, and both times he has signaled he didn't really believe his own message. He doesn't seem like a serious president to me. </p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-73178820322607524762008-07-30T18:44:00.001-07:002008-07-30T18:44:48.472-07:00Kevin Drum Is Shrill<p>He says that Dana Milbank needs to be moved to the class of people who have jumped the shark, nuked the fridge, become an ex-journalist. I agree.</p>
<p>Kevin:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014195.php">The Washington Monthly</a>: PAGING MAUREEN DOWD....I saw this Dana Milbank piece last night but didn't bother commenting because it was late and life is too short. Milbank occasionally does good work, but basically he's ruined himself by his relentless quest to turn himself into the Washington Post's Maureen Dowd, and this piece was right in the Dowdian strike zone: snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment. If Dowd were the only person who wrote this stuff it would be bad enough, but the fact that she's influenced a whole generation of wannabes is what really makes her style so malign.</p>
<p>At any rate, it turns out that Milbank's piece is not only snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment, it's also wrong. Milbank Dowdified his Obama quote because it was the only way to get it to fit his storyline. In a bizarre and karmic way, I guess that's appropriate.</p>
</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-50717627222727381802008-07-11T17:59:00.001-07:002008-07-11T18:00:46.269-07:00"I am Not Paid Enough to Deal with This Lying bullshit"<p>Brad DeLong is justifiably shrill:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/07/every-time-i-tr.html">Every Time I Try to Crawl Out, They Pull Me Back in, by Brad DeLong!</a>: </p>
<p>You know something?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hate yelling shows.</p></blockquote>
<p>No, that is not right:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I HATE YELLING SHOWS!</p></blockquote>
<p>No, that is still not right:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>I HATE YELLING SHOWS!!</b></p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe this will do it:</p>
<blockquote>
<h1><span style="COLOR: red"><b>I HATE YELLING <br /><br />SHOWS!!!!</b></span></h1></blockquote>
<p>Called on forty minutes' notice, I trot over to the J-School studio to be a talking head on BBC/Newsnight about Fannie and Freddie. I have my talking points ready:</p>
<p>...[<a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/07/every-time-i-tr.html" target="_blank">extensive list of points</a>]...</p>
<p>In short, I trot over to the J-School TV studio as part of the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus, intending to carry water for Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson.</p>
<p>And what do I find also on BBC/Newsnight when I get there? </p>
<p><b>I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!! I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!!!</b> WHO HAS THREE POINTS HE WANTS TO MAKE:</p>
<ul>
<li>Barack Obama wants to take your money by raising your taxes and pay it to the Communist Chinese.</li>
<li>Oil prices are high today and the economy is in a near recession because of Nancy Pelosi: before Nancy Pelosi became speaker economic growth was fine--and she is responsible for high oil prices too.</li>
<li>Economic growth is stalling because congress has not extended the Bush tax cuts. Congress needs to extend the Bush tax cuts, and if it does then that will fix the economy, and if it doesn't then the economy cannot recover.</li></ul>
<p>I am not paid enough to deal with this lying bullshit. I am not paid enough to deal with Grover Norquist and his willful stream of defecation into the global information pool. </p>
<p>It is as Paul Krugman says somewhere: Grover Norquist's M.O.--George W. Bush's M.O.--the entire Republican Party's M.O. these days is (a) find a problem (i.e., financial crisis and threatening recession), (b) find something you want to do for other reasons unrelated to the problem (i.e., extend the Bush tax cuts), (c) claim without explanation that (b) will solve (a), and so (d) profit--because Peter Cardwell of BBC/Newsnight is too busy being the objective journalist referee of the yelling match to do his proper job and say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Come, come, Mr. Norquist, are you serious? Your claim to believe that Nancy Pelosi's actions are responsible for the rise in oil prices is risible!</p></blockquote>
<p>OK. Calm down. Adjust my meds...</p>
<p>Mr. Paulson? Ben? Are you there?</p>
<p>I have been carrying water for the two of you for a year now, as you have tried to do your jobs and contain the ongoing slow-motion financial crisis. Lots of us have been carrying water for you. Now you owe us a favor.</p>
<p>Will you please call John McCain Saturday morning. Call him jointly. Tell him that there is serious public business that needs to be done, and that pseudo-ideologues like Grover Norquist are not helping.</p>
<p>Tell him that unless he can control the swine like Grover Norquist and his ilk who work for him, that both of you are going to, Monday morning:</p>
<ul>
<li>announce your support for Barack Obama for president</li>
<li>announce your change of affiliation from the Republican to the Democratic Party</li></ul>
<p>You owe it. You owe it to me after that TV appearance. You owe it to all of us in the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus. You owe it to your country. You owe it to the world.</p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-10944788326641528842008-07-09T15:34:00.001-07:002008-07-09T15:34:39.609-07:00John Scalzi: Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast<p>From the shrill John Scalzi:</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=989">Whatever » Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast</a>: Folks have been asking me in e-mail if I had any thought about Jonah Goldberg’s recent assertion in the LA Times that Barack Obama’s proposed requirement of public service for teens and college students is not unlike slavery. The answer: No, not really; once the man declared that Mussolini was really a Socialist all his life, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary (Mussolini leaving Italy’s Socialist party, founding the Fascist party as an explicit right-wing refutation of Socialism, ordering the murders of prominent Socialists and then bascially daring anyone to do something about it on the floor of the Italian parliament) I recognized that Jonah Goldberg is kind of like the conservative movement’s special younger brother, the one that drank a pint of lead-based paint at age six, utters sentences where the verbs and nouns don’t quite match up, and gets moody and throws things when you gently try to explain that actually, no, goats did not land on the moon in 1983. In this context, of course Jonah Goldberg would suggest youth public service contributes to a “slave mentality.” It would be surprising if he hadn’t, frankly. It doesn’t mean such an attention-seeking comment merits serious consideration on my part.</p>
<p>(No doubt Mr. Goldberg’s rejoinder to this would be to point out that the book in which he gets lots about fascism wrong has racked up some lovely sales numbers; the obvious rejoinder to this is: well, you know. At this point on its downslope into minority, the conservative movement has a lot of special younger brothers.)
</p>
<p>That said, while I don’t want to have to unpack Goldberg’s nonsensery, I would commend to you Stephen Bainbridge’s take on Goldberg’s column, as an example of someone who is a conservative with libertarian leanings, has serious reservations about Obama’s plan, and, heck, even hauls out the “S” word, yet does not descend into paint-quaffing madness. Aside from the quality of Professor Bainbridge’s comments, it’s worth noting the small irony that Goldberg’s platform for his gouting silliness is a newspaper, while Bainbridge’s rather more sensible discussion is hosted on a blog, and yet it’s the electronic medium that gets hammered for hosting bloviating ninnies. Funny about that.
</p>
</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-23689568876759804242008-07-07T09:52:00.001-07:002008-07-07T09:52:27.404-07:00Washington Post Death Spiral Watch<p><a href='http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/the_difference_4.php'>Matthew Yglesias</a>: <strong>The Difference:</strong> If conservatives want to argue that Barack Obama's been flip-flopping on Iraq, I'll disagree but I could see what they mean. Charles Krauthammer, however, can't seriously believe that Obama's been "assiduously obliterat[ing] all differences with McCain on national security and social issues" since the end of the primaries.</p><p>Consider such non-obscure points as John McCain is pro-life and has said he wants to appoint judges who will restrict abortion rights, whereas Barack Obama is pro-choice. John McCain favors an amendment to California's constitution that would take back gay and lesbian couples' newfound marriage rights whereas Barack Obama opposes such an amendment. Barack Obama opposes a permanent American military presence in Iraq whereas John McCain favors it. Barack Obama thinks torture is wrong even when the CIA does it, whereas John McCain thinks it's great for the CIA to torture people. Barack Obama favors good-faith high-level negotiations with Iran, whereas John McCain wants to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." One could go on, but it hardly seems necessary -- the only question is why The Washington Post thinks it's a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-1863087557262552992008-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:002008-07-06T19:41:19.053-07:00Hilzoy Speaks Ill of the Living<p>She speaks ill of all those conservatives who praise Jesse Helms, that is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all. </p>
<p>More below the fold. Note that I have largely restricted myself to conservatives' own words (and not random bloggers, but people and magazines with some standing in conservative circles), and to Helms' words and actions.</p>
<p>For my part, I'll just echo <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/the_helms_legacy.php">Matt</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that <em>Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.</em></p>
<p>And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies."</blockquote></p>
<p>And <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=07&year=2008&base_name=helms">Ezra</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/competing_visions.php">liberty</a> of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?"</blockquote></p>
<p>Some conservative reactions:<br />
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/07/20080704-2.html">George W. Bush</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.</p>
<p>Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called "the Miracle of America." So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: "The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven." Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/07/04/reactions-to-the-death-of-sen-helms/">John McCain</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/07/04/reactions-to-the-death-of-sen-helms/">Mitch McConnell</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080704/pl_nm/usa_helms_dc">Trent Lott</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"He was one of the giants of the '80s and '90s in the United States Senate"</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/jesse-helms-dies-at-86/">Bob Dole</a>:<br />
<blockquote>“He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjQyN2RhZmEzNGFhYmJmYTY2M2MxMzA3MGFlZGMwMDk=">The Corner</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Death of a Conservative Great [Mark R. Levin]</p>
<p>I wish the Helms family peace, and I thank Jesse Helms for helping to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, being a warrior against the Soviet Union and for the release of Soviet Jews and other abused minorities, and being a voice for millions of unborn babies. </p>
<p>I have noticed some of the smears lobbed at William Buckley in other places since his death; Jesse Helms is in for even more of it. Other prominent conservatives will face the same. Unfortunately, such is the nature of these things now."</blockquote></p>
<p>The Weekly Standard reposted <a href="http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/008/585mqmat.asp?pg=2">this article</a> in response to Helms' death:<br />
<blockquote>"Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan's success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn't have happened without Helms's bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What's missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt."</blockquote></p>
<p>The <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2008/07/04/jesse-helms-1921-2008/">Heritage Foundation blog</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator and Conservative Champion, Dies</p>
<p>Conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, 86, a truly great American and champion of freedom, died at 1:15 a.m. today. Helms, who gave our country three decades of service as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, was ill in recent years.</p>
<p>Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.”"</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121521073192129407.html">John Fund, WSJ</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"If Ronald Reagan was the sunny and optimistic face of modern conservatism, the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar of it was Jesse Helms, who died yesterday at age 86."</blockquote></p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/07/05/jesse-helms-rip/">American Conservative's blog</a> cites, without comment, someone saying:<br />
<blockquote>"On Capitol Hill, conservatives had no finer champion than Jesse Helms, the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina."</blockquote></p>
<p>Commentary's blog <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/halper/14521">reposts</a> an old <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewpdf.cfm?article_id=7920">article</a> (pdf), which says, among other things:<br />
<blockquote>"Yet the "racism" of which Helms is accused turns out on inspection to consist of nothing more than an opposition to quotas and other forms of racial preferences."</blockquote></p>
<p>Commentary's blogger adds:<br />
<blockquote>"His controversial political career has been chronicled in numerous obituaries, but few recall the severity of the demonization to which Helms was subjected by many liberals–who accused him of being a one-man “pantheon of evil.”"</blockquote></p>
<p>See below to judge Helms' racism, and whether he was just a "controversial figure" who was "demonized" by the left. The quotes below might also provide some useful background for judging <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODhjYWIxMjcyODM3ZWVkNzA0MzU1NjU1MWI0MjY1YWE=">this</a>, from The Corner:<br />
<blockquote>"The first sentence of the NYT obit:<br />
<blockquote>Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.</blockquote></p>
<p>He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them."</blockquote></p>
<p>And, of course, <a href="http://redstatenetwork.com/tags/jesse_helms">RedState</a>: <br />
<blockquote>"He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed."</blockquote></p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself. As you read them, bear in mind all those lovely quotes above, the ones about how he's a conservative champion, a fighter for conservative ideals, etc. They said it, not me. Like Matt Yglesias, I would have thought it was a completely unjust smear against conservatism to have said any such thing. [UPDATE: To be clear, what I would have thought was unfair was not to take him as a part of the conservative movement, but to think of him as an exemplary figure or a champion. END UPDATE.]</p>
<p><strong>On <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04E4D71F31F930A15752C1A962958260">respect for the President</a></strong>:<br />
<blockquote>"Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard.""</blockquote></p>
<p><strong>On <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-helms5-2008jul05,0,1728319,full.story">race</a></strong>:<br />
<blockquote>"From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."</p>
<p>The campaign's further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. (...)</p>
<p>But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." (...)</p>
<p>In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us.""</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/334586">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Helms warned that, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."</p>
<p>He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King's death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner.</p>
<p>He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and "moral degenerates."</p>
<p>As the movement gathered strength -- and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased -- Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.""</blockquote></p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/334586">personal favorite</a>, worth remembering when you read things about how courteous Helms was in person:<br />
<blockquote>"When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries."</p>
<p>Then, emphasizing the lines about how "good" things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang "Dixie.""</blockquote></p>
<p>And another:<br />
<blockquote>"His disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him."</blockquote></p>
<p>Humorous? <i>Referring to any black person as "Fred"??</i></p>
<p><a href="http://www.blackpressusa.com/news/Article.asp?SID=3&Title=National+News&NewsID=4342">And</a> (Helms himself, h/t Majikthise):<br />
<blockquote>“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1871">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE6DB1031F935A1575BC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-07-04-helms-obit_N.htm?csp=34">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>""Martin Luther King repeatedly refers to his 'non-violent movement.' It is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima.""</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj9609&article=960924">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. (...) Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/28-07052008-1558897.html">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Helms said, "Dr. (Martin Luther) King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior." He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.""</blockquote></p>
<p>Later, his views had not changed. (This is a <a href="http://www.unctv.org/senatorno/peopleevents/people1.html">transcription of a video</a>; it doesn't say when the interview it shows is from, but I'd guess the late 80s or 90s, from his appearance. It's the video linked under Martin Luther King.)<br />
<blockquote>"I thought it [the Civil Rights Act] was very unwise. It was taking liberties away from one group of citizens and giving them to another. I thought it was bad legislation then, and I have had nothing to change my mind about it."</blockquote></p>
<p>Helms also "<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4271733.ece?token=null&offset=12">staged</a> a filibuster against the establishment of a national holiday to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, having called King a communist and a sex pervert", and "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/04/obit.helms/index.html">was</a> one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Greenberg-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said."</blockquote></p>
<p>One of his home state papers <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/story/1131456-p4.html">sums it up</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century's social movements -- the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.</p>
<p>Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.</p>
<p>He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue."</blockquote></p>
<p><strong>On <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/politics/00helms.html?pagewanted=all">gays</a>:</strong><br />
<blockquote>"He fought bitterly against federal financing for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.</p>
<p>“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”"</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www2.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0801.kilgore.html">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. (...)</p>
<p>But other aspects of Helms's personality cannot be ignored, particularly his venomous assault on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and his virulent hatred of gays and lesbians. For years, as part of his campaign against the NEA, this "courtly" Christian carried around portfolios of homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos and showed them to reporters and (male) citizens with the question, "How do you like them apples?" And as late as 1995, when an old friend wrote him to recommend compassion for people like her gay son, who had died of AIDS, Helms wrote back to say, "I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activities.""</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/politicians/helms/story/1130666-p3.html">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"1993: On the nomination of a gay rights activist to a federal post: “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian. She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.”"</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801620.html">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton's nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, "because she's a damn lesbian." When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress."</blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2247518/Jesse-Helms.html?pageNum=3">And</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"The Bible is unmistakably instructive on the sin of sodomy," he declared in 1994. "I confess I regard it as an abomination." Aids, he suggested, was acquired through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" and he became an ardent opponent of government funding for Aids research and education. In 1987 he described Aids prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."</blockquote></p>
<p>In his own <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080721/duggan">words</a>:<br />
<blockquote>"The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."</blockquote></p>
<p>And:<br />
<blockquote>"Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)"</blockquote></p>
<p>(Take that, Ryan White!)</p>
<p>On foreign affairs, he was an almost wholly malign force:<br />
<blockquote>"His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides debate, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. (...)</p>
<p>Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: The Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence."</blockquote></p>
<p>He also had a thing about governments with death squads, and the appallingly brutal South African-funded guerilla groups in Angola and Mozambique. He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>And here's a random quote from 1966 (cited in the Boston Globe, 11/21/1994), just because I like it:<br />
<blockquote>"The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug."</blockquote><br />
</p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-53709935964361765952008-07-02T11:10:00.001-07:002008-07-02T11:10:36.800-07:00The Abyss Has Drilled Fracking Laser Holes in Our Skulls with Its Stare...<p>Gary Farber:</p><blockquote> <p>We've always known that our current torture regime came from back-engineering the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training given some U.S. military personnel intended to enable them to resist the horrible tortures used by the KGB, Chinese Communists, and other historical enemies of the U.S. whose morality we condemned for their willingness to engage in torture. That's old news. Now we have documentation of exactly whom we've copied: yes, the Chinese Communists. Isn't that lovely? Scott Shane reports:</p> <blockquote> <p>The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”</p> <p>What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.</p> <p>The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency....</p> <p>The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities....</p> <p>Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects. The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”</p> <p>The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance”...</p> </blockquote> <p>How evil have we become? </p> <p>The abyss has drilled fracking laser holes through us with its stare. </p> <p>Remind me why we were the good guys in the Cold War, and WWII, again? The guys who wrote the Nuremberg Principles? </p> <p>Please tell me; I really could use a reminder now. </p> <p>And I'd like to know how we can regard ourselves as the same people any more. I'd really, really, like to know.</p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174163.post-13924182442290082272008-06-26T15:01:00.001-07:002008-06-26T15:01:55.310-07:00Marty Lederman Gets Shrill on John Yoo<p>Marty Lederman on John Yoo:</p><blockquote> <p><a href='http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/06/john-yoo-testimony.html'>Balkinization</a>: John Yoo Testimony: Here are John Yoo's prepared remarks for the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this morning. (I don't believe David Addington is submitting a prepared statement.) CSPAN covering it live here. I'm out of town and don't have time just now to blog in detail about this statement, except for a handful of very quick reactions:</p> <ol> <li><p>John claims that the 2004 Levin torture memo, which superseded his 2002 OLC opinion, concluded that all interrogation methods OLC had previously approved as legal "were still legal." We now know that that's dead wrong. As Levin testified before this same committee last week, the footnote in question, which Attorney General Gonzales insisted that OLC include, merely indicated that the writers of the 2002 memos -- i.e., John Yoo -- would not have changed their bottom line, even if they had employed Levin's analysis. Levin himself, however, was uncertain about the legality of some of the CIA techniques, and was in the process of reviewing them when he was effectively removed from OLC.</p></li> <li><p>John is testifying that his torture memos could have had no bearing on the abuse that took place in Iraq, because "the Geneva Conventions provided the relevant rules for the war in Iraq." There are several problems with this statement. Most important is that OLC itself, when John was there, had advised the Pentagon that the Fourth Geneva Convention did not protect "unlawful combatants," which includes most if not all of the insurgents in Iraq. (See page 4 of the April 2003 DOD Working Group Report.) As Jack Goldsmith reports in his book, the very first thing he decided when he arrived at OLC in October 2003 was that the Fourth Geneva Convention did protect Iraqi civilians -- a decision that hocked and dismayed the White House. It is fairly clear (as reflected in the Working Group Report) that until that time, the Administration, based presumably on John's own advice, was acting on the assumption that the insurgents in Iraq were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. This explains why, according to several reports (most importantly those of Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer), the Pentagon and CIA placed Special Forces and CIA operatives in Iraq in 2001 or 2002, whose basic instructions were that there was no law -- certainly not Geneva -- that protected detainees, and that the "gloves were off" and that they could engage in widespread, wanton abuse and cruelty. Which they did. (And as the Fay, Jones and Schlesinger Reports found, and many accounts attest, the conspicuous abuse by CIA and Special Forces in Iraq was an important contributing factor to the breakdown of ordinary norms among the regular military forces, as well.) The Pentagon and CIA would not have given these forces the green light to abuse prisoners if OLC had not previously advised that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any relevant statutes stood in the way of such abuse. Finally, John's broad Commander-in-Chief override theory, which was a prominent part of the DOD Working Group Report, and which was briefed to General Miller on his way to "GTMOize" Iraq, obviously conveyed the message that the President could ignore any applicable statutes and treaties, even if they would otherwise apply. John's legal advice, then, was a fairly direct cause -- certainly a necessary cause -- of the abuse in Iraq in 2002 and 2003.</p></li> <li><p>John stresses, as he has in the past, that he was without much guidance in interpreting the federal torture statute, since there had not been any prosecutions under it, or any court cases construing it. But the virtually identical definition of "torture" is included in statutes governing removal of aliens and asylum applications, and that definition had received extensive treatment from courts under those statutes (which were also enacted in order to implement the Convention Against Torture). The INS and the State Department, therefore, had very extensive knowledge and expertise on the question. And yet those experts were cut out of the loop -- they were not consulted on the OLC opinion. Indeed, John's testimony states that the NSC ordered OLC not to discuss its work with the State Department! -- something that is in itself fairly scandalous.</p></li> <li><p>John states that his 2002 torture opinion was "reviewed, edited and re-written by the assistant attorney general in charge of the office at the time [Jay Bybee], as is the case with all opinions that issue from OLC." John is correct that virtually all written OLC opinions -- certainly those of great importance or dispute -- are at the very least reviewed by the AAG. How, then, does he explain the fact that two of the most momentous OLC opinions has ever issued -- the September 25, 2001 Opinion on the President's war powers and the March 14, 2003 opinion informing DOD (over the vociferous objections of numerous DOD lawyers) that its interrogators had virtual carte blanche to ignore federal statutes -- were signed by John Yoo himself (a mere deputy), rather than by the head of OLC (Dan Koffsky in 2001; Jay Bybee in 2003)?</p></li> </ol> <p>Posted 8:42 AM by Marty Lederman [link] </p></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com