Not since Bill Clinton's star appearance in NBA Jam has a president been more associated with the game of basketball

In all the hubbub about Obama being the first black president, you sometimes forget that he's also our first president who's into basketball:



Pretty rad. Politics aside, how fun would it be to play a pick-up game with this guy and, like, Reggie Love?

Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

Forehead slapping time

So, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. But why? Not only has he only been in office for less than a year, but:

• he's still got the two wars going, and they are far from resolved.
• he will not be able to close Guantanamo when he said he would.
  
• he's completely reneged on his campaign promises of transparency and accountability for Bush-era abuses, including civil liberties and torture. See here (via Harinder) for an account of how Obama--with the help of a Democratic Congress--is actually continuing the war on transparency that began with the Bush administration.

Worst of all, this sort of thing will give Obama the cover to continue Bush's policies, making it harder to hold his feet to the fire on the campaign pledges he's broken. The whole thing is really heart-rending, really, because it likely means that we're just stuck with this awful, brutal, secretive government for a long time to come--a government that infantilizes its citizenry, assuming the role of arbiter of what we need to know.

Ultimately, though, the blame resides with the citizenry itself. The idea that our government tortures people and acts upon information gathered from torture is no longer seen as something dispicable, morally reprehensible, and a practice that characterizes only the most brutal and oppressive regimes. Instead, it's seen as a mere partisan talking point--a point on which reasonable people can disagree. But it's just awful. It proves that we are a savage people.

PS: This reminds me of when Micheal Moore won the Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11, which was not a particularly great film in any respect. It was pretty obvious that the Cannes people just wanted to make a melodramatic "statement". This seems like the same sort of thing--hey, let's stick it to Bush, they probably thought. Let's reward America for doing an about face and rejecting the Bush worldview. In the end, though, they just ended up stupidly endorsing a slew of positions held by Obama that are indistinguishable from those held by Bush. Ack.

Back

Well, I'm back from The Burning The Man. I was a little bit in suspense coming back, since I hadn't had access to any media whatsoever, and lots of crazy stuff can happen in a week (for example, Katrina happened during Burning Man--so when my friends got back from it, there was this whole crazy "Um, New Orleans was destroyed while you were gone" talk). But alas, things seemed to have been churning on like normal.

About the speech tonight, I will say that I side with Matt Yglesias with regards to the heckling issue:

Personally, I sort of liked Rep Joe Wilson’s idea of introducing British-style heckling to the halls of congress; totally disrespectful and out of step with American tradition, true, but their tradition is better. Unfortunately, Wilson was also lying about the point at issue and will thereby set back the cause of heckling by decades.

I would add that I think there probably used to be a fair bit of heckling back in the old days, when Congress behaved more or less like a country bumpkin version of the Drones Club.

Also, I think this wins for best description of what went down as the heckling was going on:

All eyes turned in the South Carolina Republican's direction -- including Obama's, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's and Vice President Joe Biden's.

Wilson, looking agitated, leaned forward and began tapping away at his BlackBerry, as if he were Googling up proof that the president had, in fact, lied.

"Shame on you!" shouted someone from the Democratic side. "Throw him out!" shouted someone else. First Lady Michelle Obama, seated behind and above Wilson, seemed to mouth a drawn-out "damn" at the scene unfolding before her.

That's pretty good.

An independent AG at last?

Just when I thought all hope was lost, it looks like there will be the possibility of prosecutions after all:

President Obama does not intend to voice his preference for whether anyone is prosecuted from prisoner abuse cases, a White House spokesman said Monday, and will allow Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to make the decision.

And that's as it should be. The question now is whether Holder has the guts to allow the investigation to go up as high as the evidence leads.

EDIT: Maybe I shouldn't have been so optimistic. The crucial thing is whether or not Holder will be leaving the door open for criminal investigations and prosecutions of the OLC lawyers (and, for that matter, Bush and his cabinet). It looks like Holder is implicitly foreclosing on this possibility: you can hardly make the case that the OLC memos were written in bad faith and, therefore, invalid, if you are also treating those memos as the established law of the time in order to prosecute low-level interrogators for breaching them. Sigh.

Obama vs. the Right

Krugman's new column makes the case that Obama's attempt to be post-partisan and bring Democrats and Republicans together was naive and mistaken:

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

...

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

...

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

...

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

I think this article is good at showing why Barack Obama is President of the United States and Paul Krugman is not. The thing is, let's suppose that Obama "took off the gloves"--that he changed his tone to be more "outraged" and "passionate". What would this actually accomplish? Would it make Democratic Senators more motivated to pass legislation? Would it stop Glen Beck from doing his crazy Howard Beale act? Would it make ignorant, hysterical old white folks in town hall meetings any less ignorant or hysterical? I mean, game this out a little bit: what would be accomplished by adopting a 90s-era bunker mentality? Not much, so far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, there is an advantage to remaining calm, reasonable, amiable to negotiations--it's just that the advantage isn't really apparent until later. Remember, this isn't 1993: it is not as if conservatism is on the rise and the White House is merely trying to stand athwart things and yell "stop". Quite the opposite: Obama was voted in on an actual majority, not Clinton's 1992 plurality. The Bush years have discredited conservatism. What we're seeing now is the rump of the Republican party being particularly vocal. But Obama is still popular. The Democrats have huge majorities in Congress, and are showing no signs of weakness for the midterms--they might even gain seats. And the Republicans are alienating themselves from non-Southern-white America.

Moreover, everyone knows that health care reform--in some form--will pass. It may not be very good, from a progressive perspective--there may be no public option, it may be toothless in a bunch of different ways--but it will surely be a significant improvement over the current system, including provisions such as making it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage for preexisting conditions. This will matter to a lot of people--and they will remember how the Democrats worked to improve their lives, and how the Republicans did nothing but scream and obstruct--and how, even in the 8 years before Obama, Bush didn't do a thing to reform health care. And they will conclude that Democrats are the "adults in the room"--and will vote to keep them in power.

So, to conclude: just because Obama is failing to end bitter partisanship doesn't mean he should stop trying to end bitter partisanship. The Republicans refuse Obama's olive branch at their own electoral peril.

EDIT: Apparently, Bill Clinton concurs.

I can't get over how stupid this is

Apparently, Obama went for the red-blooded-American choice, a Bud Lite. Can you imagine the shitfit the far right would have had if he had chosen something even vaguely fancy, like Crowley's Blue Moon? Or a Red Stripe?

Ugh. I can feel my brain shriveling from all this. I'm stopping now.

Gatesgate reaches farce levels, so now I *have* to talk about it

I was looking forward to never saying a word about this ridiculous Henry Louis Gates business, but the absurdity of the situation has forced my hand: apparently, Obama has invited Gates and the cop to the White House to talk the whole thing out over some beers. You know, like the pat conclusion to some TGIF-lineup sitcom.



Meanwhile, healthcare reform hangs in the balance...

The crux

Obama says:

We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government.

And he also says this:

In short, there is a clear and compelling reason to not release these particular photos. There are nearly 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm's way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as Commander-in-Chief. Nothing would be gained by the release of these photos that matters more than the lives of our young men and women serving in harm's way.

So the basic principle that Obama outlines is: if releasing information will endanger "the lives of our young men and women serving in harm's way", then it should not be released--even if the information reveals government law breaking.

But this seems perverse to me. If you allow the executive branch to evade accountability by claiming that evidence released will endanger the troops, then the executive branch will simply cook up various rationales to justify the protection of damning evidence. What you need is an outside authority determining if the threat described by the executive branch is 1) legit and 2) of sufficient severity to offset the public interest in holding the executive branch accountable for its actions. It's not clear to me that Obama lays out such a mechanism.

Moreover: what if the release of information really will endanger the troops, and also reveals serious law breaking? Do these laws simply go unpunished? Is there some mechanism for seeking justice "behind closed doors"? Or does law breaking that falls into this category receive a free pass?

That rule of law thingy

Ted Sorenson--a John Kennedy advisor--addresses law students:

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

“Our current wonderful president cannot promise the CIA practitioners of torture that they will not be prosecuted,” he said.

Right. And yet you never heard so much as an "Um, he can't do that" from the establishment punditry when Obama made his royal proclamation.

"This chapter is over."

Peggy Noonan--lately of "just keep walking" fame--lays out the case for not prosecuting Bush war crimes:

Mr. Obama has had great and understandable difficulty in balancing competing claims regarding how to treat government information on prisoner abuse. The White House debated, decided to release Bush-era memos, then said they wouldn't allow anyone to be prosecuted, then said maybe they would. It was flat-footed, confusing. The only impressive Obama we saw on the question this week was the one described by "a senior White House official" in the Washington Post. He or she was quoted saying, of the internal administration debates, that the president was concerned that a 9/11-style commission "would ratchet the whole thing up," and "His whole thing is: I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don't need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and relitigate this."

This misses the point. Of course, it's good that the Bush era of secret executive laws and illegal torture is over--but there remains no good reason to believe that such a chapter couldn't happen again. That is the whole purpose of investigating and prosecuting these crimes, beyond achieving simple justice: it would set a precedent that circumventing the Constitution and violating important US laws prohibiting torture results in going to jail. Obama can ban things and end chapters all he wants, but it's not going to stop a future President from "going to the dark side".

Moreover, and probably more importantly: the decision of whether to prosecute war crimes shouldn't even be a political decision, and certainly not a decision made by the President. The Bush years has acclimated everyone so much to the idea of a politicized, non-independent Department of Justice that we forget that all this is Eric Holder's call, not Obama's--and that it is, in fact, inappropriate for Obama to even weigh in with his opinion as forcefully as he has.

PS: As a sort of meta-comment on all this, an interesting thing to consider is this: suppose that Obama's intention actually is to prosecute war crimes to the full extent of the law. What would a good strategy be? Certainly, it would be to appear to be reluctant or even opposed to prosecuting them, so as to avoid giving the appearance of partisan retribution. Then Obama can stand aside as the process grinds forward, sympathetically throwing up his hands and saying "what can I do? The DoJ is independent and apolitical." This would give the whole process maximum legitimacy.

So my point is, even as I criticize Obama for his position on this issue, I also acknowledge that his actions underdetermine his true intent, and we will just have to see how things unfold--and keep pushing for prosecutions.

Obama's riddle

For some reason I found myself watching today's White House Press Corps briefing, which consisted pretty much of 45 minutes of grilling about Obama's position on prosecuting war crimes. Here's the three propositions that the Obama administration appears to be clinging to:

1. The rule of law will be upheld; no one is above the law.
2. No one who carried out torture will be prosecuted if they were acting in good faith in compliance with the OLC memos.
3. The Attorney General will make all legal interpretations and prosecution decisions, independent of President Obama's influence.

So, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is saying that (1) and (2) do not contradict, because anyone who is in compliance with the OLC memos is adhering to the law. But the problem here is that this view rests on a specific legal interpretation--namely, an interpretation that says that OLC memos are as good as law, even if they're written in bad faith and egregiously incompetent. But according to (3), Eric Holder determines legal interpretations, not Obama. So it seems that Obama cannot assert (1) and (2) without contradiction unless he violates (3) by assuming a specific legal interpretation.

In other words: the Obama administration is either full of shit, doesn't know what it's saying, or both.

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room

In case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend taking a look at the International Committee of the Red Cross confidential report that details the torture of prisoners held in US captivity. The ICRC is tasked by the Geneva Conventions to provide an objective analysis of the treatment of prisoners, and if violations of the Conventions are discovered, the country in question must proceed with an investigation or else violate the terms of the treaty. Typically these reports are confidential to encourage government cooperation, but this report was leaked to the New York Times.

The report details the abusive treatment of 14 different detainees. All the claims are "alleged" because they are based on interviews with the detainees themselves (and I think some US officials as well), but there is not much doubt as to the authenticity of their accounts because of their high level of detail and consistency with one another.

Especially gripping are the excerpts from interviews (Annex 1 and 2 in the report), which give you a true idea of how far off the deep end the United States went in prosecuting the "war on terror". An excerpt of the excerpt:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room.... After some time...I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.... I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go the toilet, which consisted of a bucket....I was given no solid food...while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit...Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day....

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face....

Later, the "real torturing" starts:

I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles....

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply....The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

He then goes on to explain that he was routinely waterboarded after that, as well as beaten by being slammed into the wall with the towel as described above. The account of the worst of the treatment ends with this chilling, Nazi-esque image:

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.

The United States tortured, and these actions were authorized at the highest levels within the Bush administration. They were done in accordance with secret memos of dubious legal merit that were drafted by the President's lawyers--memos that were kept secret not just from the public, but from the other co-equal branches of the government. We now know that for seven years since the attacks of September 11, the executive branch continuously and systematically flatly breached the Constitution of the United States--by violating the Fourth Amendment, by internally declaring for itself the power to violate any other number of provisions in the Bill of Rights (including those contained in the First Amendment), by assuming for itself the power to unilaterally strip citizens of their habeas corpus rights, by violating the United States' obligations under the Geneva Conventions...

If these deeds go unacknowledged, let alone unpunished, it means that the Constitution is de facto non-binding. It means that everything that America proclaims itself to be, at it's core--a free nation, a nation of laws--is a simple factual untruth, because it will be the case that any President who has the will can violate those freedoms and ignore those laws without consequence.

So I am now watching the Obama administration with extreme interest, and hoping that he understands the following: that after this serious a bout of lawlessness and quasi-despotism, reinstituting a proper liberal democratic regime is not enough--that he must pro-actively take steps to address what happened in the previous administration, and establish a precedent that such lawbreaking at the highest levels of government will have consequences. If he does not, then he reveals himself to be not a President but a Napoleon--a benevolent dictator who chooses to allow us our freedoms and who chooses to circumscribe his own power in accordance with the Constitution, but is by no means actually required to do any of these things.

Of course, in a way, this is already a lost cause, because I am reduced to pleading to the executive branch to enforce the Constitutional limits of executive power. Just as a legitimate democracy can't be founded by executive decree, a broken democracy can't be relegitimized by executive decree--because the ultimate source of democratic legitimacy is not the decree of a single will, but the consensus of many wills. Sadly, there does not seem to be a sufficient consensus in 21st century America--neither amongst the public, the press, nor the members of Congress--that basic tennants of democracy such as the rule of law and due process are not mere suggestions, but real and rigourously enforced contraints on power.

Sheer excitement

This part of an exchange between Obama and the astronauts in the international space station is, I think, pretty funny:

THE PRESIDENT: ...Can I ask, how exactly do you end up installing these solar panels? What's involved? Somebody want to give us a rundown on how you go about doing it?

MISSION SPECIALIST SWANSON: Yes, sir. First it comes up on a truss segment, about five feet long. We use a robotic arm to attach it to the -- into another truss segment.

I can't help but think that Swanson sounded somewhat defeated as he finished that last sentence. You expect space to be grand and amazing, but in reality you just end up spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with trusses.

Obama having it both ways with tax rates

I just got done watching (the rather dull) Obama news conference, and something caught my attention about Obama's position on the tax deduction for charitable giving:

And what we've said is: Let's go back to the rate that existed under Ronald Reagan. People are still going to be able to make charitable contributions. It just means, if you give $100 and you're in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able to write off 36 percent or 39 percent, you're writing off 28 percent.

...

And so this provision would affect about 1 percent of the American people. They would still get deductions. It's just that they wouldn't be able to write off 39 percent.

In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize -- when I give $100, I'd get the same amount of deduction as when some -- a bus driver who's making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year, gives that same $100. Right now, he gets 28 percent -- he gets to write off 28 percent. I get to write off 39 percent. I don't think that's fair.

So Obama seems to be arguing for tax deductions to be "flat"--for a person making $50,000 a year to receive the same percentage deduction on charitable giving as a person making $500,000. But this is just the converse of the flat tax! The same logic that argues for a progressive tax structure on the disincentive side also argues, conversely, for a regressive tax structure on the incentive side. In other words: if we can tax Bill Gates a higher rate because giving up 39% feels way less painful to him than it does to me, then we must also incentivize Bill Gates at a comesurately higher rate, because his gaining 28% feels way less pleasurable to him than it does to me.

(Related post here.)

All of civilization is riding on a <5% difference in the top marginal tax rate

I guess it's not wise to take these things too seriously, but honestly:

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

In Rand’s novel, creative people (the “Atlases” of the title) are hounded and punished for their labor by an oppressive, socialistic state. In response, they retreat from society to a hidden enclave where they watch civilization’s slow collapse.

Look: Obama isn't seizing haciendas and turning them over to The People. He's increasing the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39.5%. He's increasing the capital gains tax from 15% to 20-28%. As for the top marginal tax rate, it is still very low by historical standards:

I mean, if this is end-of-the-world socialism, then what do you call 1960, when the top marginal tax rate was 90%?

Liberal Lieberman

Looks like I had it right all those months ago about the much-maligned Joe Lieberman. From Joe Klein:

It seems Lieberman played a crucial role in talking several Republicans off the ledge, thereby vindicating President Obama's refusal to be vindictive toward the Connecticut Senator, who had some nasty things to say about Obama and Democrats in general during the presidential campaign. Lieberman has always been a moderate-progressive on economic issues so his vote should not be a surprise--but his active lobbying for the bill has to be considered directly attributable to the grace with which Obama treated him. Those who wonder about the President's efforts to be nice to Republicans--a singularly ungracious lot, cult-like in their devotion to failed economic policies past--should bear this particular example in mind as we go forward.

Lieberman is as liberal as the next Senator when it comes to the economy, health care, and energy.

For SOCES eyes only

This is going to sound weird but--does President Obama remind you, somehow, of Mrs. Sima? It's something about the way he tilts his head, or maybe the halting way he talks. And maybe his mouth too.

I dunno. Just try to remember Mrs. Sima when you watch footage of the news conference, and see if it rings any bells:

I cry out for magic

This ad is pretty silly:


I like the idea that the "Barack the Magic Negro" controversy is actually about Obama's magical powers.

Getting used to it

Man, it's almost jarring to hear this coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States:

“Starting today,” Mr. Obama said, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

This is going to take some getting used to.

I've been thinking for a while now that never in my life has the US government actually been on my side: even during the Clinton years, Newt controlled the agenda, and anyway, Clinton was busy reinventing the Democratic Party (which meant granting lots of concessions to the Republicans). But now we have a genuine liberal Democratic majority in Congress and a liberal in the White House, and the Reagan era is definitely over. So it's nice to finally see what the US government looks, acts, and sounds like when it's being run by my guys from top to bottom.