Off to Burning Man

Well, I'm off. I'll be back in a week. Don't burn the place down.

(Photo by Jesse Wagstaff)

Orrin Hatch jumps the shark--and jumps it hard

Via Sullivan.

The wars

Bob Herbert had an excellent column yesterday about how Americans have seemingly put out of mind the gruesome reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Near the end, though, he makes a point that I've been thinking about lately:

If we had a draft — or merely the threat of a draft — we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don’t have a draft so it’s safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people’s children are going to the slaughter.

My intuition is that there is a lot of truth to this. War has been decoupled from its awful costs: no one's child will be forced to die overseas, and no one has even paid any extra taxes to keep the war effort going. More than that: news about the wars isn't very prevalent in the press. And even when there is a story concerning the war, it is presented in a detached, sanitized manner, with graphic images and human grief left out of the story. Instead of melted bodies and panicked civilians running for cover we get video game stuff: military men making decisions, maps with arrows, footage of jets taking off.

Since the costs of the wars aren't registering with the American people, there is no real effort to get serious about evaluating their benefits. The common American is afforded the craven luxury of cheerleader nationalism: fighting wars just to win them, chalking up more victories for our big nifty war machine, shaming the hell out of any hippy killjoy who questions or protests what is going on. Pundits get to thoughtfully frown and discuss Serious Issues, politicians get to solemnly pledge to Defend the Nation. But it's all so terribly gruesome, and all being borne on the backs of so terribly few.

(Photo used without permission from this site, which contains many extremely graphic images from the Iraq war.)

Learning about the Church Committee

Via Ackerman, a very good, not-too-lengthy article on government secrecy and how the Church Committee worked to reign it in in the 1970s. Very much worth reading if you are at all interested in government secrecy/civil liberties issues and the current political dilemma facing the White House about whether to pursue investigations into Bush-era abuses.

RIP Ted Kennedy

It's Caturday

I don't normally do this sort of thing, but damn--these are hilarious.

It reminds me of the climatic scene in Wizard People Dear Reader:

I...am a beautiful animal! I...am a destroyer of worlds! I...am Harry fucking Potter!

And for once, dear readers--the world was silent.

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.

Throw down the gauntlet, draw a line in the sand, etc.

Remember how, during the Presidential primary and general election, many of us were moved by a profound sense of urgency to do things like donate money and make phone calls to get Obama elected? Well, this would probably be a good time to get into that mentality again, because health care reform lies in the balance.

The Obama administration has signaled that it is willing to use the public option as a bargaining chip to get health care legislation passed, which has touched off a bit of a revolt on the progressive left. Even though I think that Obama is basically right substantively when he says that the public option is just one part of the overall reform and that it doesn't make sense for the legislation to live or die by the public option, it is also true that the left needs to--at some point--assert itself and take a hard stand if it is to have any influence on the final legislative product. The public option is just as good a rally-point for this as any other.

An organization called ActBlue is targeting specific Democratic House members and 1) getting them to pledge to vote 'No' on any bill that does not contain a public option, and 2) rewarding this behavior with donations. The idea is that if we get a large enough block of Congress to believably commit to this, then it will become a "political reality" that no bill can pass without the public option, and Rahm will have to factor this into his calculus the next time he goes to deal with the centrists and the Blue Dogs. Anyway, today I donated some money to their cause; you can do the same here.

For your safety

Once again, evidence is released that confirms that the Bush administration blatantly violated the Geneva Conventions and United States law:

A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

The law was broken. Who will be investigated? Who will go to jail?

Who am I kidding? No one will be investigated or held accountable for this--with the exception, maybe, of a few low-level scapegoats. The United States has become unmoored, in a very profound way, from its liberal founding principles (or maybe I'm being naive: maybe it has been unmoored for a very long time, or was never moored in the first place). There is no longer even an expectation of justice at the highest levels of government.

But ultimately this isn't a failure of the government to democratically represent the people; it's a failure of the people to collectively behave in a civilized manner. As it is, too many Americans practice a sort of aggrieved barbarism that results not just in the lack of condemnation of moral outrages such as unnecessary wars and torture, but an exultation of them. It is a remarkable and sickening thing to behold.

Overdraft "protection"

A good editorial from the NYT, which rightly calls out the abusive banking practice known as "overdraft protection":

Some bankers claim the system benefits debit card users, allowing them to keep spending when they are out of money. But interest rate calculations tell a different story. Credit card companies, for example, were rightly criticized when some drove up interest rates to 30 percent or more. According to a 2008 study by the F.D.I.C., overdraft fees for debit cards can carry an annualized interest rate that exceeds 3,500 percent.

Overdraft protection is really just a loan--a loan that occurs without borrower opt-in, that does not make the borrower aware of the loan's terms, and that comes attached with usurious interest rates. It needs to be regulated like any other kind of loan.

(Photo by The Consumerist)

It's time to blow your mind

You know how shocking it was when we all found out that the Joker from Batman: The Animated Series was voiced by Mark Hamill? Well check this out: you remember the episode where this nobody called Sid the Squid accidentally "offs the Batman"? Well it turns out that Sid the Squid was voiced by Matt Frewer--better known as Max Headroom!

Translation Party

A worthy little app. Can you reverse engineer the following famous song lyrics?

• Jude is a little worse than a sad song is a good idea
• The waterfall is not to follow
• Hold me closer tiny dancer

Well that last one didn't work too well.

Via @napoleoncomplex.

The problem with Peter Suderman's argument

Libertarian Peter Suderman deploys a familiar kind of argument:

No, I don't think this is a failure of leadership so much as a feature of democratic politics -- and a reminder of how unpleasant and unsatisfying to nearly everyone the business of politics can be.

Democratic politics is a messy business. It's disorganized and frantic and unpredictable and frustrating. Politics is a matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise....

...

Given my libertarian streak, I'd also add a final thought: The way to avoid the maddening convulsions of politics isn't to change them, or rise above them, or move past them, or transform them, or whatever the trendy term of art is on any given day. It's to avoid them -- and reduce their power to hold sway over how we live. And the more decisions about our lives and welfare we put in the hands of politicians, the harder that will be to do.

It's kind of a sly move that you get from many small-government types, that goes something like this:

1. Politics--the collective activity of everyone in the country deciding laws--sucks, and ends in sucky results.
2. It is better to have less of a sucky thing.
   
3. Therefore there should be "less" politics. (1, 2)
   
4. We should support policies that make government--and therefore, the sphere of politics--"smaller". (3)

There are a couple of problems with this argument. In the first place, (2) is not necessarily true--you may not want less of a sucky thing, if the alternatives are even suckier. There is ample empirical evidence that health care systems that feature more government involvement than ours are more efficient and lead to better results than our system. This doesn't mean that such a system wouldn't suck: it's just that it would suck significantly less than the status quo. To turn Suderman's invocation of Churchill on its head: single-payer is the worst health care system, except for all the others.

Second, if you delve a little further into (1), it becomes apparent that it doesn't make sense to use this claim about the activity of politics in general (which Suderman identifies as the "matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise" that accompanies law making) as a stepping stone to a claim about preferring a specific, first-order set of policies (i.e., libertarian ones). The reason is that, after a moment's reflection, we see that what is actually maddening about politics isn't the process itself, so much as the dismal first-order results it produces. If we lived in a world in which the shouting was every bit as loud, the dissent every bit as pitched, the deal-making, strategy, slippery rhetoric, and compromise every bit as unsavory--but political success, for all that, could actually be achieved--then it wouldn't be very maddening at all. The source of the frustration isn't that mean people on TV yell--it's that, despite sweeping Democratic majorities, meaningful health care reform still goes down in flames. Given all this, it hardly solves any problems to say that, hey, we should adopt a libertarian agenda since that will get this unsavory politics business out of our lives--because that's just coextensive with saying that we should abandon the (non-libertarian) first-order policies that I prefer, the very non-enactment of which is causing my resentment of politics in the first place.

So, nice try libertarians. But if you want to make your case for a specific set of policies, it's going to have to be a substantive one made on the merits, not this "hey-ain't-politics-a-drag-I-know-let's-abolish-entitlements-then-there-won't-be-so-much-politics" mumbo-jumbo.

The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves nears the end of his run

Glenn Beck's advertisers are pulling out--including big ones like Wal-Mart and Geico. Which means that his support is caving: I'm sure nearly everyone will stampede out of there in the next few days. I guess the craziness could only go so far before his corporate masters reigned it in.

To be honest, though, I'll miss it. It really was such a singular phenomenon--the bizarre way he would address the camera, his sudden outbursts of emotion that ended just as quickly as they began, his paranoid--and yet incredibly vague and meaningless--sloganeering. We surround them. It doesn't mean anything so much as faintly evoke some primal scene from 100,000 years ago, when our clan had the other surrounded.

In any case, I wonder what he'll do--whether he'll do the O'Reilly/Olberman thing and tone things down, or heroically banish himself into the wilderness, the bane of corporations and reasonable people alike.

Politifact.com

More Politifact: someone made a chart tracking the veracity of claims made by Democrats and Republicans in the health care debate.