Health insurance prices up

Up, up, up, everything's costing more and more. According to the LA Times (via Ezra Klein):

Workers with job-based coverage for their families saw earnings rise 3% from 2001 to 2005, while their health insurance premium contribution increased 30%, according to the study by researchers at the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota.

What I can't understand is why Republicans think that doing nothing about this sort of thing will win them elections.

Rice prices up 35% in SF

It's caused a run on rice in Chinatown:

At the Sun Kau Shing grocery, for example, 50-pound bags of long-grain rice were selling for $32 to $38 on Tuesday. That, customers said, was an increase of about 35 percent over a month ago. It was enough to stop amazed pedestrians in their tracks.

It appears that higher energy costs are part of what's driving the prices up:

Likewise, while California rice farmers have begun planting this year’s crop of half a million acres, the high prices may prove only enough to cover their increased costs of fuel and fertilizer, industry officials say.

“Diesel is up 40 percent, and fertilizer has doubled,” said Tim Johnson, president and chief executive of the California Rice Commission, a trade group in the nation’s second-largest rice-producing state, after Arkansas.

Pretty alarming.

What an anti-torture amendment should look like

Daydreaming about an anti-torture amendment to the Constitution, I decided I would peruse the internets to see what other people might have proposed along these lines. Surprisingly I couldn't find anything that looked authoritative, like from an anti-torture organization or a legal scholar or lawyer. And most of the ones I did find, disappointingly, were pretty much clueless from the standpoint of Constitutional panache.

Look. If you're going to write an amendment concerning something as morally fundamental as a ban on torture, you can't bog it down in half a dozen "Sections" and lump a laundry list of examples into each one. When James Madison authored the First Amendment, he didn't belabor the point with all sorts of examples of what kinds of laws might abridge speech or even what he meant by "speech", exactly--he just dashed off a single bad-ass sounding sentence, added in some extra commas (as was the style at the time), and had a sandwich.

It all makes sense when you realize that the literary parallel to the Bill of Rights is nothing less than the Ten Commandments. God knew if he wanted to get the point across it would have to be with an awesome-sounding bullet list--"I'm God! I'm the only God! Don't say my name! You can take Sundays off! And no killing!"--and that the mundane details could be safely left to the Talmud nerds. Madison followed suit, to satisfyingly dramatic effect--"Talk! Shoot! Fuck Redcoats, am I right? And no snoopin'!". See? It's wisdom*, distilled into Power-Point-sized chunks for easy consumption.

So, anyway, if we're not talking about some nerdy amendment like allowing an income tax, we'd better be making sure that it lives up to its rhetorical pedigree. That's why my version would look something like this:

Amendment XXVIII.
Congress shall make no law permitting the use of torture against any person.

There you go. All of the ticking time-bomb shit, all of the ambiguities about what counts as torture--those can all be sussed out by Supreme Court nerds. Indeed, sensibilities are bound to shift over time, and there's certainly nothing wrong with letting those emerge via Court decisions over the years. But this way, you're sending a clear message about where the United States stands on the issue of torture and human rights.

*Er, wisdom minus the whole slavery-is-bad bit. Both lists seem to be okay with it.

Re: Gas Tax Holiday

Via Yglesias, it looks like at least one reporter is actually calling bullshit on the "gas tax holiday":

Gas tax holiday

The best, tightest explanation I've seen about why McCain's--and now Clinton's--proposed "gas tax holiday" doesn't make any sense is at Krugman's blog:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving.

So the actual price of gasoline this summer is going to be what it's going to be, whether a portion of that price is paid to the government (in the form of a tax) or not. Eliminate a tax of 5%, and the price will rise 5%.

If you actually wanted to save the consumer money--which is what McCain and Clinton cynically claim the "gas tax holiday" will accomplish--you would have to introduce price controls. That is, you would have to have the government enforce some kind of maximum above which the price of gasoline could not rise. But of course, this wouldn't really work: though you'd save the consumer money, you'd also cause gas shortages that would hinder the consumer from getting gas at all.

At the end of the day, the price of gasoline is being driven up by scarcity--world demand is increasing significantly faster than world supply. No legislative gimmickry or tax holidays are going to change that basic fact.

Obama, at least, has had the backbone to speak this truth to the American people.

Building a case

Via Sullivan, Politico reports that House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. is going to subpoena the legal architects of the Bush policy allowing "harsh interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture): John Ashcroft, John Yoo, and David Addington. Conyers wants to question them about the genesis of the so-called "torture memos":

Conyers has asked the three men to appear before his committee to answer specific questions about the rationale and process behind drafting these controversial memorandums, particularly the recently released memo from March 2003 that gave military officials broader latitude to use extreme interrogation techniques.

My hope is that he is able to get them under oath and talking about how, exactly, the United States metamorphosed into a regime that can no longer proudly display awesome propaganda like this.

Clinton the underdog

I know it's William Kristol, and so anything he has to say about Democratic politics probably shouldn't count, but this just seems so crazy to me:

The fact is Hillary Clinton has turned out to be an impressive candidate. She has consistently defeated Barack Obama when her back was to the wall — first in New Hampshire, then in several big primaries on Super Tuesday, on March 4 in Ohio and Texas, and then last week in Pennsylvania, where she was outspent by almost 3 to 1, yet won handily.

Whoa there. When this thing started, Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite: she had name recognition, the vast Clinton Rolodex at her disposal, and she was perceived to be the "inevitable" nominee by the press and the party elite. Now she is the feisty, embattled underdog. That's quite a distance to fall--and hardly "impressive".

This cannot possibly be right

A spokesperson for ATT speaks at a conference:

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

What?! That's gotta be a typo or something... it's like some kind of Moore's Law on crack.

Responding to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has an op-ed today that makes a couple of points defending Hillary Clinton and a couple of points questioning Barack Obama. As a dutiful Obama supporter, I'll try to make arguments against some of his points.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation.

This is the common misunderstanding of Obama's rhetoric when content is confused with process. When Obama talks about "transcending" partisan differences, it does not mean that somehow everyone will hew to the same ideological line, or that ideological differences will go away. Rather, it means that the process of politics will be executed in good faith, and that the opposition will have its voice be heard and not be shut out of the process, encouraging pragmatic resolutions to the immense problems our nation faces: the Iraq War, the upcoming recession, health care affordability, rising energy prices, global warming, terrorism, etc. There is nothing "magical" about any of this, and there is no rule that says that only Obama is capable of achieving it. Clinton could have chosen this route of conciliary and empathetic politics, but instead has opted for 90s-style ultra-partisan warfare politics and its incessant "fighting" of the "Republican machine". This difference in political methodologies between the candidates is a substantive one. As Clinton herself demonstrated in the early 1990s with the 'Hillarycare' debacle, the wrong political strategy can doom even the most well-thought-out policy.

Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

If the implication is that this was the Obama campaign's prediction of how things would go, then it is wrong. In fact, the Obama campaign has for a long time been soberly predicting that Obama's margin of victory would not be large and that there would be absolutely nothing easy about toppling the Clinton machine. So there is more humility to the Obama campaign, I think, than Krugman lets on.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states.

It has always been predicted that Obama would lose big states such as Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (at around Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign itself predicted losses in these states by 4, 7, and 5 percent, respectively). This is part of the reason why Obama's campaign strategy has been to capitalize on lopsided margins in smaller states and/or caucus states where superior organization pays off.

And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

Tellingly, no citation. In the helpful metapoll over at RealClearPolitics, it shows that Obama is polling on average 1.5 points ahead of McCain, and Clinton is polling 0.6 ahead. In other words, even though the Democrats are currently campaigning against each other, they are both essentially in a dead heat with McCain (good news for Democrats). So I don't know where Krugman is getting his polling data from.

According to many Obama supporters, it’s all Hillary’s fault. If she hadn’t launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you’d think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn’t. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

I agree with Krugman that many Obama supporters overstate the damage done by Clinton's attacks, and tend to exaggerate the actual negativity of the ads themselves. At the same time, though, I don't think it makes sense to judge the negativity of Clinton's ads by using Republican attacks as a yardstick. Even if a Clinton attack is substantively less negative than a Republican one, the fact that it is uttered by a fellow Democrat can make it far more damaging. For example, the suggestion that Obama is less prepared to be President than John McCain is very damaging coming from the mouth of a leading Democrat, but is par for the course coming from a Republican.

Moreover, I think Krugman and Clinton supporters in general should be on guard against facile arguments of the type "what Clinton did was justified in the primary because Republicans will do the same thing in the general". To a certain extent it's fair--and in fact desired--for primary candidates to take off the gloves a little bit and go after each other's weak spots, especially the ones that will likely be exploited in the general election. Hillary's prevarications, Obama's preacher--bring it on. However, as I argue above, there are some attacks that cannot be made by Republicans, that can only inflict pain because they are uttered by Democrats. It doesn't make sense to say of these Democrat-on-Democrat attacks that they are some kind of precursor of what is to come in the general election, and therefore fair game.

[M]aybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.

I agree absolutely with Krugman: the majority of the sorts of "troubled" working-class families described above are going to favor Clinton's no-nonsense wonkish approach over Obama's admittedly airy-fairy rhetoric of "change" and "transcendence". No one's saying that Clinton doesn't have strengths--indeed, I think Obama has learned from Clinton that often times conveying wonkish competence and mastery of details can be more comforting than high-flying oratory. However, just because these voters prefer Clinton to Obama does not mean that they will prefer McCain to Obama. If these voters are really as policy and detail minded as Krugman suggests, then they will certainly choose any Democrat over any Republican in the general, come what may. The same is not necessarily true, however, for many Independents and new voters who do respond to Obama's soaring oratory--which is why I think Obama is better positioned than Clinton to win the general election in November.

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton’s health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can’t afford. It was as negative as any ad that Mrs. Clinton has run — but perhaps more important, it was fear-mongering aimed at people who don’t think they need insurance, rather than reassurance for families who are trying to get coverage or are afraid of losing it.

To say that Obama "has put far more energy" into attacking Clinton than promoting universal coverage is, I think, an obvious exaggeration. But I do agree that the particular attack ad that Krugman refers to was an inexcusable misrepresentation of Clinton's health care proposals, and should never have been run.

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

I think the Democratic candidate will be able to portray him or herself and the party in all the ways Krugman wants them to be portrayed, whether it's Obama or Clinton. What we're seeing here is the kind of myopia and cognitive dissonance that the long and bitter primary tends to cause amongst Democrats: we tend to lose sight of the fact that both candidates--though different in their political styles and what they emphasize--are overwhelmingly more the same than different, with almost no significant policy differences between them. Moreover, there is no tension between Obama's project of a "new politics" and the idea of building on "a grand tradition" of the Democratic Party, so long as we remember to distinguish between the content of policy proposals (which build on tradition) and the process of getting those policies passed into law (which requires "new politics").

So I think Krugman's criticisms of Obama are overblown. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the article in general: with Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and even David Brooks cheerleading for Obama week in and week out and bashing Clinton, a Clinton supporter like Krugman must feel obligated to balance out the scales a little bit on the NYT op-ed pages.

Merriam-Webster is behind the times

Their "Word of the Year" would have been appropriate--like 10 years ago.

So quintessential it hurts

I've started to come around to the conclusion that at least some internet content is somehow automatically generated by the very nature of the internet itself. For instance, I kind of arbitrarily ran into this awesomely banal comment on some stupid article about video games:

i think that unreal was the greatest game eva made!

Ah. That's the stuff. I mean, it's gotta be self-generated, right?

It's official

I fucking sick and tired of the campaign, the media, politicians, and every other power-wielding retard. I need to take a break. Apparently, so does David Brooks.

I mean, for chrissakes--fuck.

An excellent point

A letter to the editor in the Washington Post makes the point that John Yoo--author of the infamous "torture memo" that gave legal sanction to prisoner abuses at the hands of the Bush administration--should not have his actions shielded in the name of academic freedom, because the offending actions were nonacademic and, indeed, nonpublic:

[Yoo] did not write this memo to express an opinion to the public.

On the contrary, he and his colleagues did everything in their power to keep the memo a secret for as long as possible. It was not "speech"; rather, it was a tactical document designed to encourage an activity globally considered to be illegal.

Berkeley should defend absolutely the right of its tenured professors to publish or state publicly any opinion. But when a member of the faculty has demonstrated a complete lack of legal ethics -- which actually and predictably leads to human rights abuses -- that individual is clearly no longer fit to teach the law to future generations of Americans.

I'm still not sure I agree on the merits that Yoo should be fired--in the end, you would still be firing him just for having a particular legal opinion. However, I think this does persuasively show that if you are going to defend him, it can't be because of concerns about academic freedom.

Off by infinity

From the AP:

The leader of Hamas says his Palestinian militant group is offering Israel a 10-year truce if it withdraws from all lands it seized in the 1967 war.

Uh, how about an infinity-year truce?

The same mistake again

I'm getting pretty tired of seeing this error in reasoning:

Obama's recent problems have caused some Democrats to worry about his chances of winning the general election. His performance in Ohio, they argue, where he won only a handful of counties and lost some by huge margins, will make his prospects there difficult, they say.

A candidate's performance in a primary does not imply anything about how that candidate will do in a general election. Just because Obama lost to Clinton amongst Ohio Democrats does not mean that Obama will lose to McCain amongst all Ohio registered voters. I wish the Washington Post and other media outlets would stop uncritically echoing this fallacious Clinton argument.

EDIT: The quote is actually taken from Dan Balz' campaign blog, and not from a regular Post article--so it seems in this instance that my issue is with one writer in particular, not the whole editorial board of the Washington Post.

Wisdom: received

From David Brooks' infuriating op-ed:

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values.

Do they? We all know that the media presumes that these events are meaningful to voters. I mean, after all, if Dukakis loses the election after appearing silly in a tank, then it follows that Dukakis lost the election because he appeared silly in a tank. I mean, there's no logical fallacy with a fancy Latin name lurking anywhere in that reasoning, right?

Clearly, when any candidate loses an election, the loss can be attributed to whatever gaffe that candidate committed that the media played up the most. Based on this, Brooks' assertion that voters care about shared-values-and-life-experiences clues cannot be denied. Oh, and also: knowing how to bowl is sufficient for two people sharing the same "life experience".

I see nothing wrong with any of this.

New slogan for gingerale

Okay, clearly I've been drunk for the last 5 posts, but I've got to get this off my chest. I've got a new slogan for gingerale:

Gingerale: it's good for what gingers ya!

Guys. This is it.

Obama ex post facto

He looks a lot better after the debate--and is having a lot more fun:



UPDATE: Shamefully, I was too white to pick up the subliminal pop-cultural reference. Which probably means that, therefore, Alex is less white than me. Oh man.

Humanity busts out--again

First man on the moon. Now, this.

Via Sullivan.

Meanwhile, wolves are like: "We don't even know what a pants is!" Pshh.

Last one

Man, you can tell what I did tonight. Some--and I never thought I'd be saying this--Classic Edwards:

And while we're at it...

...the lovely Mrs. Obama:

Ed Rendell, ladies and gentlemen

The governor from Pennyslvania struts his earthy, no-bullshit stuff:

A depressing view of a journalist's job

David Brooks had an uncharacteristically off-base comment about tonight's Democratic debate:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

Wrong, David. Though the journalist's job often entails making politicians uncomfortable in a variety of ways, this sort of gotcha-game is not the journalist's job per se.

It is not helpful to "expose" a "contradiction" of some candidate when there is nothing at stake besides making the candidate look momentarily foolish; there's got to be some substantive and pressing issue that the interrogation is leading up to, some civic payoff. Thus, grilling Hillary Clinton about her sniperfire remarks is fine but only if it's leading up to some hard questions about just what her claims of experience amount to; and hammering Obama on the Wright issue is appropriate so long as it serves as an entry point into what Obama's views of race are. But lingering for 45 minutes on this stuff with no substantive upshot is nothing more than the fetishization of insider campaign politics.

Point-counterpoint

There is quite a remarkable opinion piece in the Post--Mahmoud al-Zahar, founder of Hamas, has a column. What's more, the Post itself has an accompanying editorial that effectively rebuts what he says and condemns him as a terrorist. Kind of a weird case of having it both ways, I think. Their rationale for publishing the column:

We believe Mr. Zahar's words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process.

Fair enough.

Unfamiliar game

A good article about how the markets of today are fundamentally out of whack. The first-and-last:

When a young Jack Nicklaus won the 1965 Master's Tournament, golf legend Bobby Jones said Nicklaus was "playing a game with which I am not familiar." I have the same feeling about today's financial markets.

This is not capitalism as I learned it. Rather, for the past three decades financial engineers have been playing a game with unlimited upside reward and, thanks to the Federal Reserve and the White House, limited downside risk.

...

In the words of Fortune Senior Editor Allan Sloan, "Private profits, socialized losses."

Something has to change; a free market economy undergirded by unregulated players that are considered "too big to fail" ain't really free, in my opinion.

Not the most persuasive approach

Kristof's op-ed on how the effects of climate change reach beyond immediate geological consequences like rising sea levels is hampered, I think, by the sorts of examples he chooses. First he talks about how droughts are correlated with an increase of witch-burnings in rural Tanzania--and later he talks about how drought might have helped trigger the civil war and genocide in Sudan.*

While I think it's right to focus on the geopolitical consequences of climate change, where entire regions are threatened by changing agricultural conditions and waning supplies of water, I don't think it makes sense to highlight examples in which most of the harm is caused by the unrelated ignorance or brutality of people. I mean, climate change isn't causing people to believe in witches in Tanzania or causing soldiers in Darfur to rape and kill. People not already on board with the arguments about climate change will see this article as one more example of liberal hysteria over global warming--and they will also see a healthy dose of the liberal penchant for facile attributions of the world's problems to objective phenomena rather than human choice.

*Kristof weasels back out of the Sudan claim after making it, but it's a rhetorical bell that can't be unrung. Judge for youself: "Ethnic conflict in Darfur was exacerbated by drought and competition for water, and some experts see it as the first war caused by climate change. That’s too simplistic, for the crucial factor was simply the ruthlessness of the Sudanese government, but climate change may well have been a contributing factor." Why even put this paragraph in there in the first place?

Increase unemployment benefits, infrastructure spending

From Calculated Risk, an interesting interview with a Nobel-winning economics professor. Key points that I saw:

• We're in the worst recession since the Great Depression
• There needs to be a more cost efficient stimulus package--increasing unemployment benefits is a very effective stimulus
• The federal government needs to shore up state and local governments, who will be seeing lower revenues from taxes--in particular there should not be insufficient infrastructure spending

The video:

Vujacic in a nutshell

I've been meaning to post this quote from a Bill Simmons column where he hilariously describes the Lakers' evil 3-point specialist:

Unsung hero: Sasha Vujacic, quite possibly the league's best bench player of anyone who plays 20 minutes or less. He's a feisty defender, he shoots 40-plus from 3-point range, he can guard anyone and play three positions, he's a legitimate threat to get punched in the face during the playoffs and, if that's not enough, I'm almost positive that he's wearing some sort of hair net. We haven't had a so-much-fun-to-hate-him playoff villain like this guy in eons. He's like Bruce Bowen crossed with one of John Lithgow's henchman in "Cliffhanger."

Spot-on.

"History will not judge this kindly"

The internets are a-buzz over a big report from ABC News that reveals that people at the highest levels of the Bush administration gave detailed instructions to the CIA as to which methods of torture could be used against detainees:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News....

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding....

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

What's more, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and the Justice Department withdrew what had been the legal sanction for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture), Rice went ahead and approved the techniques anyway for a suspect being held in Asia:

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

There is absolutely nothing in the ideology or history of American conservatism or the Republican Party that condones the unilateral use of torture by the executive branch of the government. Republicans and Democrats should therefore feel free to unite in their condemnation of the Bush administration's excesses in a way that transcends the partisan squabbles of the moment and re-asserts the American people's basic sense of decency and humanity.

Superman is a dick

I kind of forgot about this website, but it's still classic. You can't beat stuff like this:

NYT Lomanizes Chris Matthews of "Hardball"

This Times piece really makes Chris Matthews look like a sad sack of shit.

McCain's ad

The blogs are pretty critical about McCain's first general election ad, fretting that "McCain doesn't have a general election message strategy":



Personally I think the no-message concern is a little bit too insider and meta. Normal people (and even most political junkies) don't give a crap about what a candidate's "message" is, and one ad doesn't necessarily signify anything about the campaign in general. So I think the reactions are overblown.

That said, it is a bit curious for its lack of substance. I suppose it's a complement to McCain's so-called "biography tour", where he emphasizes his ultra-patriotic history of service to the country--which, I think, is fair enough.

However, I think he ought to be careful about how he presents his stint as a prisoner of war. It would be bad if he flaunted it and made too much of a political object out of it, like how John Kerry jumped the shark with his "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty" schtick. At the end of the day, "vote for me because I was tortured" is not an argument that makes any real sense.

The Raping of Dr. Seuss

Sometimes The Onion goes righteous--and it's pretty damning when it does.

Rising food prices

Paul Krugman has a post and recent op-ed about an emerging crisis: food inflation. Krugman notes that

[r]ice, the staple food for half the world, gained 2.4 percent to $21.50 per 100 pounds in Chicago, double the price a year ago.

As you'd expect, this is afflicting not just industrialized nations like the United States, but poor countries as well. More important, it is causing big grain exporting countries to hoard their supplies to make sure they cover the needs of their own citizens first, which in turn causes a "run" on grain--the dwindling supply raises prices, which adds to the panic, which causes more hoarding, which raises prices, and so on, in a vicious circle.

MVP

Ok:

Since it's pretty much a toss-up between the two, I'll say that if the Hornets win the West, Chris Paul should get it, and if not, then Kobe should. In both cases they are absolutely the engine that drives the team, and both teams are championship-caliber.

Though LeBron's putting up ridiculous numbers, his team just isn't good enough and besides, it's in the East. And though KG just is the Celtics, I think that his individual contributions just aren't pronounced as they are with Chris Paul and Kobe.

Really, though, I think they should wait until after the Finals before selecting an MVP, and make the MVP award applicable to the whole season + playoffs. Screw this Finals MVP bullshit. The separation of the two awards leads to some ridiculous results, like Steve Nash winning MVP twice despite the fact that he was never even able to get his team to the Finals (let's not even talk about Dirk Nowitzky last year). It should be the case that, more often than not, the player who wins MVP is on the championship team.

Also: none of this meta crap. None of this "we owe him one" or "he'll have plenty of time in the future to win one" stuff. It's this sort of twisted thinking that somehow resulted in Charles Barkley winning the MVP ahead of Michael Jordan at the height of the Bulls' reign (and, in 96-97, Jordan again being denied in favor of Karl Malone). If one dominant player leads his team to the championship six times, he should get the MVP six times.

Now, obviously, if the MVP were awarded like how I'm proposing, there wouldn't be any great controversy here. We'd wait for, say, the Hornets/Lakers to collapse in the second round and then vote in Kobe/Paul. But instead we have this endless brow-furrowing over who is the most valuable player in the regular season--as if the regular season counted for anything when considered apart from the playoffs.

Clinton busts out

I'd be remiss if I didn't pass along this Clinton bust-out. She definitely knows her stuff and can communicate her mastery of a subject better than any other candidate:


(Hat tip: Sullivan)

A taste of what the Chinese government has to offer

Reading a story about European protests against China--and the Chinese government's reaction--really shows just how petty and silly oppressive regimes are when you get right down to it. Here is China getting all huffy about the torch:

"We express our strong condemnation of the deliberate disruption of the Olympic torch relay by 'Tibetan independence' separatist forces, who gave no thought to the Olympic spirit or the laws of Britain and France," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement posted at www.fmprc.gov.cn.

"Their despicable activities tarnish the lofty Olympic spirit."

I would hate to go to China's house for a party and accidentally knock over a lamp. I would probably be strongly condemned and then told that my despicable party foul tarnished the lofty spirit of the party.

Of course, China also tried to distort reality, but it's kind of quaint to watch them try to pull the wool over the eyes of a non-Chinese audience. Don't they know their powers don't work here?

Officials in Paris on Monday were forced to extinguish the Olympic flame and carry it by bus when anti-China protesters tried to seize it....

Jiang also took issue with reports that said officials in Paris were forced to extinguish the flame, saying the relay was temporarily changed there to safeguard the security of the torch.

"The reports by foreign media are false in claiming that the Olympic torch was forced to be extinguished during its relay in Paris," she said.

God forbid the people of China--full-grown adults, mind you--discover the awful, terrible truth--that the Olympic flame went out. Why, if word of this got out, the very nation could crumble and fall within a fortnight.

All this just makes me doubly-glad I live here in America, where--thanks to freedom--the government can't get away with telling bald-faced empirical lies to the public. Well, maybe trivial things will slip through once in a while, like one politician's exaggerated anecdote about being subjected to sniperfire ten years ago--but for the really big and important things, we are a well-honed skeptical machine of fact-checking and cross-examination. No empirical falsehood gets by us when it comes to the serious stuff.

Wait--oh right. Fuck.

In defense of caucuses

I posted a response to this Yglesias post. It seemed worth it to reproduce it here:

For the record, my preference would be for the nomination to be decided through a series of closed primaries...

Does this mean that MY is against caucuses? While I agree that caucuses are weird and definitely less democratic than an ordinary primary, it seems to me that being democratic is not necessarily in the party's interest when it comes to selecting a candidate. The reason is because the purpose is not just to elect a candidate for president, but also to build and strengthen the party.

Whereas primaries reward the candidate with the broadest, most horizontal popular support, caucuses reward voter intensity and organization (vertical popular support). I bet that in the smaller states--or just any state whose priority is growing the ranks of the party--having this intensity and organization is more important for a candidate than having broad popularity within the current base of the party.

I agree that the schedule should have a round-robin element to it to make things more fair for the different regions, and that the schedule should be contracted at least somewhat. But a short election cycle consisting of just primaries seems too geared toward ascertaining the will of the current base of supporters, and not geared enough toward growing the party and improving organization.

Indeed, for all of the complaining you hear on the internets about how bad for the party the long primary season is, it's mostly couched in hypotheticals--Democrats might not vote if their primary candidate loses, McCain could pull ahead as he consolidates his base while the Dems bicker, etc. But the benefits of the long, drawn-out primary are very real: voter turnout for the Democratic contests is breaking records and dwarfing Republican turnout, and more people are registering Democrat than Republican.

Hillary and BSG

You are capable of setting aside your fears, setting aside your hesitation ... and even your revulsion. Every natural inhibition that, during battle, could mean the difference between life and death.

When you can be this -- or as long as you have to be -- then you're a razor."

-Admiral Helena Cain, Battlestar Galactica: Razor

I was thinking about this scene, and I had to ask myself: is Hillary...a razor??!!?!

(Hat tip: this site)

I was in it for the money

The New York Times has an article about the recent surge of popularity of the Philosophy major for undergraduate students. As with most newspaper articles about things outside of its core competencies, it doesn't really get it right ("...classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy..."--huh?), but I guess that doesn't matter so much. Most philosophers would undoubtedly agree that more people doing philosophy is a good thing.

By the way, "debating the metaphysics of the Matrix" for an hour with a bunch of undergrads sounds like a terrible, terrible way to spend one's time.

What is honor?

Though I disagree with George Will's position on the housing/credit crisis, something else he mentions in that op-ed--something about John McCain--rings absolutely true:

McCain's only solecism is his loopy idea that mortgage lenders should make a "response" that is "similar" to General Motors' policy of interest-free financing immediately after Sept. 11. Patting himself on the back, as is his wont, McCain said he is too honorable to "play election-year politics" or "allow dogma to override common sense." Then he cast this issue as he casts too many issues, as a matter of patriotism, saying of lenders: "They've been asking the government to help them out. I'm now calling on them to help their customers and their nation out."

...

McCain practices the politics of honor: He thinks that whatever his instincts tell him is honorable must be so and that those who think otherwise are dishonorable. This makes him difficult to deal with but does no other harm, as long as it is kept separate from governing.

This indeed seems to be a pattern with McCain: he'll get it into his head that something is or isn't honorable/patriotic, and then get all bull-headed about it one way or the other. But the problem is, it is not as if he ever really explains exactly what he means by these classical virtues, nor how a particular policy position upholds them. George Will is right to question in what sense lenders owe borrowers lower interest rates as a matter of patriotism--if McCain is really committed to individual freedom and the free market, then lenders should be able to set interests at the market rate. It seems as though McCain is in the awkward position of advocating the principles of the free market, and yet condemning anyone who actually follows them as dishonorable or unpatriotic.

Maybe the purest example of McCain's arbitrary virtue-mongering is his bizarre fixation with banning Ultimate Fighting matches, even though his favorite sport, boxing, is clearly more brutal:

When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.

But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.

What is disturbing here is that McCain's reasons for wanting to ban Ultimate Fighting seem pretty unexamined--like he took one look at it, decided it wasn't genteel enough for civilized society, and so chose to do the "right" and "honorable" thing by trying to get the perceived barbarism banned. But I think he owes fans of Ultimate Fighting a reason as to why their sport should be banned besides merely that it disgusts John McCain.

But that's trivial. An issue that is actually important in which McCain's gut-instinct sense of honor comes into play is the Iraq War. He often frames withdrawal in terms of something that would be dishonorable to do--but the reasons why he thinks this is so are sort of ambiguous to me.

There seem to be two different rationales in play. The first is that--as an empirical matter--if we were to withdraw troops, then it would unleash chaos and genocide in the region. This would be dishonorable--not just because we would be causing harm to innocents, but because this action would constitute a breaking of an American promise to Iraqis that we would render unto them a functioning democratic society. Besides the fact that I might disagree with the empirical claim that it relies on, I don't really see a problem with this rationale--indeed, if for the sake of argument I grant the claim, then I agree with McCain wholeheartedly.

However, there seems to be another strand in McCain's honor rhetoric, one that is a lot more alarming: he seems to think that withdrawing from Iraq is dishonorable because it entails defeat, and that defeat is unacceptable in and of itself:

In a recent interview, Randy Scheunemann, who runs the McCain campaign's foreign policy shop, noted that "Vietnam had a huge impact on John." Obviously. Less obvious: "It's not about his personal experiences in the war as a POW," he said. "It's about leading a group of naval aviators [after the Vietnam war] when they had to cannibalize parts."

Mr. Scheunemann is referring to a chapter in Mr. McCain's life when in 1974 he took command of the Navy's largest naval air squadron in Jacksonville, Fla. Nearly 20 of the squadron's 50 jets had been grounded for lack of maintenance, and some hadn't flown in years. Mr. McCain eventually managed to get all his planes flying again, a professional triumph. But the condition of the post-Vietnam Navy turned out to be an abiding lesson to Mr. McCain about what happens to a defeated military.

For McCain, it is as though the ramifications of a defeat for the military are so dire that it is worth it to achieve a "victory" at great cost just to avoid "defeat". But this is sheer lunacy, a view of the world that could only come from someone whose life experience is overwhelmingly defined by the military life, by war, by victory and defeat. Most people in America are not life-long soldiers and don't care about these marshal notions, as such: no one wants to continue to send soldiers and money to Iraq just to achieve some abstract ideal of victory. If we do go to war, there better be a real substantive reason for it, like to protect national security or prevent ethnic cleansing--and if we find ourselves in a war in which no such objectives can be achieved, then we better withdraw. Some would call this defeat--and I suppose they would be right, generally speaking. But they'd be wrong to call it dishonorable. Defeat isn't dishonorable if it comes as a result of a valid realization that the war is not worth the fighting for; indeed, there can be nothing dishonorable, in my view, about valuing the lives of individuals in this way.

What would be great is if there were someone like Socrates around who could grill McCain on these questions about virtues. What Socrates would do back in ancient Athens is hang out in the public square and get into conversations with the local big-shots. He'd often start by asking them a simple-seeming question about a virtue--like "What is courage?" or "What is justice?" or "What is truth?"--and proceed to cross-examine them on it until his victim tripped up by contradicting himself. Often times Socrates' point wasn't so much to prove one theory or another, but to demonstrate that, though the public figure he questioned might talk a lot about this or that virtue, he couldn't actually give a coherent account of what it meant, exactly.

I wonder just how badly McCain would do under this kind of philosophical cross-examination. If the interview about the moral distinction between boxing and Ultimate Fighting is any indication, I'd say he'd do pretty poorly.

A landscaping dream deferred

Calculated Risk has an interesting post about how the credit crisis is affecting well-to-do homeowners, causing a shift from borrow-oriented spending to savings-oriented spending. I guess that's better behavior, but your heart has to go out to those who don't have a bunch of stock lying around that can get them out of a hole...

Live blog: crazy shizit in the Mission!

Guys--I'm sitting here in my living room and this white van comes careening down Mission and hits a parked car, then swerves onto Precita, screeching all crazy-loud and hitting something else. Now my roommate--who went down to look--says that practically all the cars on Precita are smashed, that people have been run over, and that he went screeching on down Precita going the wrong way...it's like he's on drugs, or has gone on a murderous rampage!

Holy crap!

PS: Fat lot of good a cop walking the beat would have done in this situation! We need cops in fucking tanks around here, boyyyyyy!

Looks like things have blown over--I'm gonna take a look at the carnage...

UPDATE: Ok, so I went down there to take a look at things for myself. About ten minutes after the initial activity, the first emergency vehicle arrived--a fire truck--and then a bunch of police cars. A whole bunch of people had come out of their houses and apartments to gawk, too.

From what I gathered from witnesses and overhearing the police interview people, the story is this: a young, short Hispanic dude got kicked out of Roca-pulco for general rowdiness. Then he got into a white van--it's not clear whether it was his own--and proceeded to careen down Mission and hit at least one car on that street. While this was happneing, a bunch of dudes came out of the bars--El Rio, Nap's, and Roca--to try to do something to stop him. Apparently after turning onto Precita he wanted to 3-point turn his way back onto Mission, but failed miserably and just kept on ramming a black car over and over. During this time, people on foot were banging on his windows trying to get to him in order to stop him. Eventually he headed down Precita again, away from Mission, hitting several cars--at least five that I saw--along the way. Then he ran into a pole or something down the street and tried to get away on foot, but the police chased him and caught him. His face was bloody and he had a dazed look on his face, like he was very messed up on drugs. Also: he ran over at least one person, who was taken away in an ambulance (but who was conscious--it looked like his leg was f'd up).

A lady who said she's lived on Precita for ten years says that this is about the fifth time that something like this has happened, although she says that usually the drunk driver has come down Precita from the other direction. I doubt those other drivers were as reckless as this one, though.

Basic fairness

I usually admire George Will for being a good and intellectually honest writer, but I think he really misses the main liberal concern over McCain's noninterventionist approach to the credit and housing crisis. Says Will approvingly:

[McCain] says "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers." For now, he is with Senate Republicans in opposing the Democrats' proposal to empower judges to rewrite the terms of some mortgages, an idea that strikes at the sanctity of contracts and hence at the ethic of promise-keeping that is fundamental to social life.

He goes on to criticize liberals as typically anti-market:

With the command-and-control propensity of contemporary liberalism, Clinton predictably advocates a policy that has a record, running from Roman times to the present, that is unblemished by success. It is the policy of price controls: Her proposed five-year freeze on interest rates would be a control on the price of money.

And concludes with a standard conservatives-are-all-about-
individual-responsibility-and-ipso-facto-the-free-market comment:

Obama says that McCain's (again, relatively) noninterventionist response to credit difficulties proves that he favors a "you're on your own" society. McCain, a center-right candidate seeking to lead a center-right country, should embrace Obama's accusation as an accolade, saying:

"This is the crux of the difference between the two parties -- belief in the competence, responsibility and accountability of individuals. When Obama characterizes my position as 'little more than watching this crisis happen,' he again has part of a point. The housing market must find its bottom, and no good can come from delaying the day that it does."

For all this talk of personal responsibility and the sanctity of the free market, it is amazing to me that Will doesn't so much as mention the 400-pound gorilla in the room: the Fed's multi-billion dollar bailout of Bear Stearns. There is widespread agreement--from economists of both liberal and conservative stripe--that it was right for the government to bail out Bear Stearns, because it and other firms in similar liquidity trouble are "too big to fail". That is to say, if Bear Stearns and other Wall Street financial institutions were allowed to sleep in the disheveled beds that they've made for themselves, the ramifications would be so extreme as to usher in a second Great Depression--causing a chain reaction of firm failures and a credit drought that would cause the economy to grind to a halt and implode (metaphors mixed: 4!). Since that would be a horrible disaster for everybody, it is widely agreed that, though doing so constitutes a "moral hazard"--i.e., would be rewarding bad behavior in the market--it is nevertheless necessary for the good of all to bail out these huge firms.

The liberal--or not even really liberal, just the common-sense question is: how can you justify bailing out the financial institutions while at the same time leaving individual homeowners to fend for themselves? It seems to me that basic fairness dictates that what is good for the goose is good for the gander: if you're going to bail out some players, you have to bail out all the players, irregardless of the accidental fact that some are "too big to fail" and others aren't. Sure, this consitutes a "moral hazard"--but isn't it true that your market morality has already been heavily compromised by the Bear Stearns bailout in the first place?

To George Will's credit, it appears as though, if it were up to him, there wouldn't have been bailouts for anyone, Bear Stearns included. At least, that's what I glean from this comment from his appearance on This Week with George Stephenopoulos:

The Republicans have now put themselves in a bind because people now say look if you have Wall Street socialism, whereby you save Bear Sterns, or at least save JP Morgan to buy Bear Sterns, and you are thereby socializing the losses and keeping the profits private, why not help everybody. Soon we’ll hear from everyone in the country who has a student loan. This is,it’s a burden, help me.

Setting aside the empirical question as to whether or not this course of action would have caused Depression II--a result that I think we can all agree is a lot worse than violating "the sanctity of contracts" and, by way of slippery slope, inviting the collectivist ire of indebted grad students--I think Will is guilty of the same sort of ideology-induced fallacy that affects liberals who want troops out of Iraq just because they never should have been there in the first place. In both cases, the question is of the form: Given that x has already occurred, what should we do about y? You can't just give an ideologically-pure, pat answer that condemns both x and y. The answer needs to acknowledge that the fact that x has already happened complicates things, and that, pragmatically, this affects our decision about y. For the liberal on the Iraq issue, that means acknowledging the possibility that leaving Iraq could be way worse than staying; and for Will on the housing crisis issue, it means acknowledging that there is at least a problem of perceived unfairness with regards to bailing out Wall Street while ignoring Main Street.

Comment about cops

Matt Yglesias has a post advocating that there be more cops that walk the beat, as opposed to riding around in patrol cars. My comment here.

Absolut power

Upon reading Maureen Dowd's insider account of the drinking habits of the various candidates, I was struck by the prevalence of vodka as the go-to alcoholic beverage of the power elite:

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial)....

...[Obama] is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

Oddly, Hillary, a Tracy Flick Goodie Two Shoes growing up, is the only one who seems to be enjoying her vices.... Her campaign doesn’t deny that she likes to kick back, at the end of a long day, with a vodka on her plane.

I've heard that in the bartending world, the rap on vodka is that it's the sort of "universal solvent" of alcohols--tasteless, odorless, and good for nothing except getting trashed in a cut-to-the-chase kind of way. I wonder if the preference for vodka amongst powerful politicians comes from a desire for undiluted medicine that would cure them of the incredible stress and anxiety that comes with their occupation--or maybe the purity of the vodka is a delightfully crisp and refreshing contrast to the constant bullshitting that politics requires.

In either case, if it were me I'd be drinking scotch. I've always felt it to be nothing less than civilization distilled into a glass with two two ice cubes.

Democratic libel

In his latest column, Frank Rich correctly calls out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for misrepresenting John McCain's "100 years in Iraq" comment:

REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.

...

The Democrats should...stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.

This sort of distortion is especially disappointing coming from Obama, who is supposed to be committed to the raising the level of political discourse in this country. I hope that he issues a public apology to McCain and reiterates both McCain's views and his own in a fair-minded way.

Going out for an English

A classic sketch from a BBC show called Goodness Gracious Me:

The power of a good joke

It didn't even occur to me, but probably the single best way for Hillary to control the damage from her recent confabulations is for her to constantly joke that she is being fired at by snipers. On Leno, she did just that:

“I was worried I wasn’t going to make it,” she said as she walked onto the set (to the theme from “Rocky”). “I was pinned down by sniper fire at the Burbank airport.”

Now I think that's actually alright--it's pretty funny. And it really makes everyone who is harping on the whole thing look kind of frivolously over-serious.

I think the sort of prototypical instance of a saving joke in politics is when, in 1984, Reagan dispelled worries about his age with the following riposte against Walter Mondale in a debate:

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

It makes you wonder if there is, in theory, a joke good enough to dissipate any scandal, no matter how bad. Like, if Nixon could have gotten out of Watergate if he had just had a good enough quip. "Good evening America. I'd have brought Checkers out for this, but he resigned earlier today." Hmm.

No more *gate, please

I was perusing an article by Charles Krauthammer about how the press is going easy on Obama, and ran into an offhand reference to "snipergate"--i.e., the recent mini-scandal of Hillary exaggerating her story about ducking sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia.

Since Watergate--and especially with the Clintons throughout the 90s--we have been subjected to the newly-invented suffix -gate, used at first to denote an impeachment-worthy scandal but now used as tongue-in-cheek shorthand for any scandal whatsoever.

This has to stop. It's just not very clever, or pithy, or anything--it's just obnoxious, unoriginal, and hackish.

PS: Charles Krauthammer looks like a Koopa.

Izott better than PBS?!

An article by one Froma Harrop complains about Hillary-bashing in the press of late, including the coverage of the comment from Sen. Leahy that Clinton ought to quit for the good of the party. Here is the criticism:

The latest collapse started some days ago on what is normally a four-star destination for good journalism, PBS's "NewsHour." The news summary started off with this: "Clinton's fellow Democrat in the Senate, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, today urged her to leave the race for the good of the party."

The "fellow Democrat" also happened to be one of Barack Obama's most ardent supporters, but whoops, they forget to mention that. For days even mainstream media were portraying Leahy, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and other members of the Obama team as "elders" thinking only of the party.

I agree that, if true, that is some biased coverage of the Leahy comment. However, I can plead innocent to this crime. For I included this caveat in an earlier post about the comment:

It should be noted that Leahy is an Obama supporter, so it is not as if he has any kind of neutral-observer/elder-statesman gravitas here.

Dude! I'm like so even-handed.