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.

Correction

In a recent post I asserted that the Democrats were likely to pick up seats in the midterms. However, Nate Silver thinks otherwise:

As I've been telling people all week here in Pittsburgh, there's ample reason for Democrats to be worried -- perhaps deeply so -- about 2010. Without major intervening events like 9/11, the party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections -- since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties. Democrats have substantially more seats to defend than Republicans, particularly in the House. They appear to face a significant enthusiasm gap after having dominated virtually all close elections in 2006 and 2008.

...

The Senate picture is a bit brighter for them, but they are probably more likely now to lose seats in the chamber than to add to their majority, in spite of the spate of Republican retirements in Ohio, Missouri and other states. In a wave-type election, a net loss of as many as 4-6 seats is conceivable.

Actual information about health care reform

Phil (dig the Hawaiian-Punch-esque design of the Percolator website, btw) writes in:

With everybody on the news going apeshit about the Health Care Reform Bills, it's easy to get confused. Crazed town-hall meetings, bizarre terms like "Government Death Panels" being coined, how all this is affecting Obama's approval ratings, for fuck's sake; it's obnoxious. It seems like the story is about all the different kinds of reaction to the bills, but I haven't really come across a clear explanation of what's supposed to actually be in these bills. It's frustrating. So for those of us still confused as to what's actually in the Health Care Reform Bills, I came across this today:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/aug/13/health-care-reform-simple-explanation/

So far, this seems like the clearest, simplest explanation of what's supposedly in these health care reform bills and some of its major controversies. This is by no means a complete explanation -- one glaring ommission: a description of exactly how the government-run public option intends to make its coverage decisions. But I'm at least happy to see this very basic explanation after all this freaking time.

One little note about a point in the actual article: It says that conservatives "argue that employers, motivated by cost, will drop their coverage and send their employees to the public option. Some believe it's a stalking horse for an eventual single-payer system; others believe it's simply unfair competition for private providers." Well, whatever happened to the unyielding conservative faith in the free market? If private providers were so worried about losing business to the public option, wouldn't they just lower their costs or provide much better coverage to stay competitive? Or is there some sort of basic economic principal that I just don't know and am not applying to this situation? I just don't buy this argument.

Also, is Politifact worth a damn? I'm not a news junkie or anything, but I'm always a little wary when my news comes from sites I know almost nothing about. Well, I'm always a little wary regardless.

Thanks for the link; it looks like a pretty useful summary of the key aspects of the proposals currently circulating in Congress. As far as Politifact, I haven't heard of it either, but on the face of it seems to be a pretty legit fact-checking outfit.

I think you're right about the conservatives' arguments against the public option not adding up: they want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they like to say that government-run insurance would be a disaster: it will be run as poorly as the DMV and the Post Office! they say. On the other hand, they claim that a public option will put the private insurance companies out of business by out-competing them. Presumably they think that the government-backed plan will be tax-payer funded and so be able to charge below-market-rates, thus crowding out the private insurers--but this isn't true, according to the Politifact article, which says

Congress is negotiating now to put safeguards in place so the public option competes on even footing with private insurers. Those include requiring the public option to finance itself through customer premiums (i.e., no taxpayer subsidies) and to make it negotiate like any other insurance company on what it pays doctors and health-care providers.

So long as the public option is implemented with these constraints, I don't see how it could be that it will have an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

(A brief aside: it didn't look like this was mentioned explicitly in the article, but it seems that the public option will only be an option within the exchange that is set up for people who don't have employer-based insurance. So if you have employer-based insurance, you won't even be able to access the public option. That said, it could very well be that once the exchange is set up, employers will abandon health insurance benefits en masse, letting their employees partake in the exchange instead.)

In any case, in my opinion the go-to source for intellectually honest health care blogging from a progressive perspective is Ezra Klein's blog. It's quite good about actually explaining the various health care proposals, rather than people's reactions to them.

PS: I should mention that Carlos and Harinder know boatloads about all this stuff. Maybe it'd be kind of fun to do some informal interviews with them and share their opinions... at the very least, it'd be the rare instance of actual domain knowledge exhibited here on the blog.

(Photo by a.drien)

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.

The evolution of sports hatred

From TNC, a good insight:

Jim Johnson died a couple weeks ago. For those that don't know, he was the defensive coordinator for the Eagles, and for my money, the best in the league over the past five years or so. I hated Johnson. Arguably no man ruined more Sundays for me over the past decade.

The thing I love about sports, though, is there's always this moment when hatred transitions into respect.

For me, this is exactly what happened with Michael Jordan. I hated Jordan all through the 90s for what he and his Bulls did to the Lakers in 1991*, and also just generally because he won every damn title. I rooted against the Bulls every year, and was glad when the Rockets were able to take back-to-back titles during Jordan's first retirement.

But of course, after that dynasty ended, and the Shaq-Kobe era began, the hatred turned into respect, and I acknowledge him as the greatest to play the game. I even own Jordan to the Max, and am seriously considering getting a pair of Jordans, if I can find any that aren't too horribly expensive.



*This was the year I became cognizant of sports--a heartbreaking year for LA fans, it would turn out, as the Lakers lost the championship and then Magic announced he had HIV. Meanwhile, the Dodgers missed the playoffs by one friggin' game. And both teams proceeded to suck balls for basically the rest of the decade. This all goes a long way towards explaining why my favorite Laker ever is Sedale Threat, and my favorite Dodger is Brett Butler. (I wasn't really into hockey, but it didn't help that that Montreal beat the Kings for the Stanley Cup in like 1991 or 1992. Which reminds me: Marian's mother was telling me that one time not too long ago she randomly ended up eating lunch with Marty McSorely. But I digress...)

In the world of real people

Lindsay tele-attends a health care town hall and lives to blog about it.

Like rain on your wedding day

A health reform protester gets injured while disrupting a town hall meeting--but doesn't have health insurance to cover the injury:

...Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was laid off recently and has no health insurance.

Via @imchriskelly.

The case for healthcare reform, in a nutshell

From Sullivan, what I think, in the end, is the single most persuasive argument for healthcare reform that one can make to a conservative:

One final thing: most Americans do not want people dying in the streets.

If you have guaranteed emergency room care for the uninsured at public expense, you have already effectively socialized medicine. It makes no sense not to bring these people into the insurance system, and to offer less expensive, long-term preventive healthcare.

That, to me, is it right there. We already socialize an ER visit for someone who can't pay--a free market, in that case, would just be letting the person die. And that's unacceptable to us. But by the time you're socializing the ER visit, which is very costly, it makes more sense to let that person have access to the much less expensive routine care that can prevent that costly ER visit in the first place.

Stupid sherifs arrest many Moors

Via Ezra Klein, a pretty great little 3-act play.

Um--can't we just pay you to not bomb us?

In a post from Yglesias, a pretty striking statistic: the US is slated to spend $65 billion this year in the war with Afghanistan, while meanwhile the total GDP of Afghanistan is only $12.5 billion:

If Afghanistan’s total output is only worth $12.5 billion, then think about how much you might be able to accomplish with $6.5 billion a year in bribes rather than ten times that amount in defense expenditures.

Incidentally, from my experience of playing real-time strategy games, if you're fighting a much more powerful enemy, having them outspend you by several orders of magnitude in a battle of attrition is a really, really good position to be in.

Doesn't bode well.

Quote

Economics is a useful discipline. But it's not a decoder ring. And it's not a substitute for discipline-specific knowledge.

-Ezra Klein

The "gods" of the South

TNC's been doing some quality ruminations about the Civil War and white supremacy; you'd do well to check out his latest, which talks about the interesting idea that white supremacy was about white Southerners turning themselves into gods:

What occurs to me is that some time around the early 19th, late 18th century, a portion of this country decided to make themselves into Gods. They were not the first. And they aren't the last. But I can't get past the simple thrill, the utter charge man gets from dominating man. Southerners referred to white supremacy not just in economic terms, but as a lifestyle. Slavery did not just mean the right to exploit another man's labor, it meant utter and complete dominion over him, his wives, his children and all of his friends.

You could end his life in all manner of ways. Kill him, then take his woman as your own. Sell him, then take his woman and his daughters as your own. Keep him there, and do the same. It oversimplifies things to say, their would be no repercussions--but no one could stop you. In your own eyes, by birth-right, you would be Godkin.

I'd go further, and say that white supremacy was not just a lifestyle for Southerners, but an ontology. It was part of how they situated themselves in the cosmos--as demigods who walked the earth, who adhered to their own peculiar codes of chivalry, honor, and beauty. It's just like the prologue to Gone With the Wind:

"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South….Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow….Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave….Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…."

I think this also helps explain why white Southern conservatives are seemingly in a perpetual state of being aggrieved about one thing or another: to them, it's not just that the political or even cultural situation isn't what they want, but rather, that the universe itself is deeply unjust, deeply flawed. In their imagination, 150 years ago they would be in an overclass--they would be special, priviledged, and lead lives of nobility--worthy lives. But this universe has been perverted--by outsiders, the Northerners, the liberals--and turned completely upsidedown. The beautiful, noble creatures, once gods, now languish on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The slaves have been elevated above them, and now even rule over them. They are victims of a fickle, unjust universe. And so when they come together to exert political power, it is to complain, to commiserate--basically, to lament the passing of the Old South of their imagination.

Bill Clinton all but cures cancer and rescues a stranded kitten in trip to North Korea

Check out this lede:

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton arrived in the United States Wednesday morning after a dramatic 20-hour visit to North Korea, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea’s reclusive government and dined with the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-il.

Wow! I'd go so far as to say it was a Picard-esque performance.

Quote

"Will Smith didn't always write songs about aliens and his kid. "Summertime" wins."

-Commenter J.W. Hamner over at TNC's blog

Worst cover ever

Via Sullivan.

Using pizza to confirm hypotheses, and other notes

• Through a happenstance of social networking that is entirely too complicated and obnoxious to explain, I came across this account of someone who is 1) very smart, 2) very paranoid, and 3) on shrooms. It's brief; read it.
• A heart-warming story in the NYT about a few dozen homeless men building a boat to prove their worth to society.
• Today Marian called me out on quoting a line from an Ezra Klein post (it was "that's, like, her journey, man"). I don't know what that says about us.

(Photo by Tracy Hunter)