Did Monica Goodling just acknowledge breaking the law in pushing partisan considerations while hiring/firing US Attorneys? I might have missed the context, but it sure sounded like it.
[3:10 pm] Damn. They’re using Goodling to hang Gonzales. Goodling’s lawyers and the Republicans are freaking out. Goodling has asked to speak with her lawyer. [3:15 pm] Confusion about parliamentary rules while they look for a clerk to record a vote on the line of questioning concerning Gonzales.Archives for 2007
Your Stories Reveal Who You Are
Back in the days when people hung out in parlors and played mind-expanding games, this could have spawned some very interesting evenings.
[I]n the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.[…] During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. […] In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption.
[…] “We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
The article reviews several semi-overlapping studies on the interplay between our personal narrative, our life and our character so I had a hard time choosing just one chunk to excerpt. If you adamantly insist on not reading the whole thing, cross the flip to find out about the surprising value of revisiting the past from a third person perspective.
Uh, Maybe They’ll Both Lose?
When an ostensible ally like Lebanon faces down surprisingly fierce resistance from an al Qaeda-affiliated group of radical Sunnis, it hardly seems unreasonable to ask for a little help from America. On the one side is a democratic government who we enthusiastically supported when they ripped themselves free of Syria’s grip. The guys theyre fighting attacked us on 9/11. Every day the friends of these militants blow up Americans and destabilize Iraq. Lebanon has them cornered and fighting out in the open, an opportunity that most American units have not seen since the Republican Guard folded. Everything points to a ludicrously easy call.
The United States said it was considering an urgent request from Lebanon for more US military aid to battle Islamist fighters and warned Syria against meddling in its neighbor’s affairs.
State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said Lebanon’s government had asked for additional funds as fighting intensified, but declined to name an amount or predict when a decision would be made on the request.
Huh. Given the property damage from the recent Israel war I think one could call our existing aid something akin to life support. God knows if we can afford to essentially throw $12 billion in c-note bricks out the back of a low-flying cargo plane we can afford to next-day air some sort of aid to the Lebanese. I’m fairly sure that Israel would appreciate it.
What’s going on? Let’s ask Seymour Hersh.
Last March, Hersh reported that American policy in the Middle East had shifted to opposing Iran, Syria, and their Shia allies at any cost, even if it meant backing hardline Sunni jihadists.
A key element of this policy shift was an agreement among Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national security adviser, whereby the Saudis would covertly fund the Sunni Farah al-Islam in Lebanon as a counterweight to the Shia Hezbollah.
[…] When asked why the administration would be acting in a way that appears to run counter to US interests, Hersh says that, since the Israelis lost to them last summer, “the fear of Hezbollah in Washington, particularly in the White House, is acute.”
As a result, Hersh implies, the Bush administration is no longer acting rationally in its policy. “We’re in the business of supporting the Sunnis anywhere we can against the Shia. … “We’re in the business of creating … sectarian violence.” And he describes the scheme of funding Fatah al-Islam as “a covert program we joined in with the Saudis as part of a bigger, broader program of doing everything we could to stop the spread of the Shia world, and it just simply — it bit us in the rear.”
So now we’re arming the institutional pals of the guys who attacked us on 9/11 because we need them to counterbalance Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah and Iran have massively gained in mideast stature because we removed the premier Sunni power in the region (also, conveniently for al Qaeda, no friend of bin Laden) and replaced him with Iran-friendly Shiites. Sort of finishes the circle, doesn’t it? Assuming that invading Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (unlikely but hell, they all claim it does), that basically means that everything that we did since jilting the Afghan war went directly to serve not one but both of our major adversaries in the mideast, al Qaeda and Iran. We basically rewarded them for attacking us. Our leaders have pulled off a disaster hat trick that may yet put the Athenian Syracuse expedition to shame.
***Update***
Memo to practically everybody in broadcast news – please stop referring to the Palestinian militants as al Qaeda affiliates if you don’t know whether that is true. Via a commenter, this mideast expert thinks that everybody is pulling that particular datum out of their ass.
Even In Death, Falwell Inspires Christian Values
***Update***
Ten bucks to the first reader who finds a major media outlet referring to this kid as a “terrorist.” He had real bombs, right? That makes him farther along than the last several terror busts combined. The New Jersey paintball gang couldn’t even burn a DVD. Twenty to anyone who points out a rightwing blogger arguing that since detergent is a chemical, the kid techically made a chemical weapon.
Even In Death, Falwell Inspires Christian ValuesPost + Comments (42)
A Tuesday Moment of Zen
If I tried this with Tunch, I would be bleeding for a week:
Birth Certificates for the Stillborn
This will come across as callous and unfeeling, but this makes absolutely no sense to me:
Last summer, three weeks before her due date, Sari Edber delivered a stillborn son, Jacob. “He was 5 pounds and 19 inches, absolutely beautiful, with my olive complexion, my husband’s curly hair, long fingers and toes, chubby cheeks and a perfect button nose,” she said.
The sudden shift from what she called “a perfectly wonderful healthy pregnancy” to delivering a dead infant was unfathomably painful, said Ms. Edber, 27, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Daniel.
“The experience of giving birth and death at the exact same time is something you don’t understand unless you’ve gone through it,” Ms. Edber said. “The day before I was released from the hospital, the doctor came in with the paperwork for a fetal death certificate, and said, ‘I’m sorry, but this is the only document you’ll receive.’ In my heart, it didn’t make sense. I was in labor. I pushed, I had stitches, my breast milk came in, just like any other mother. And we deserved more than a death certificate.”
So Ms. Edber joined with others who had experienced stillbirth to push California legislators to pass a bill allowing parents to receive a certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth.
In the last six years, 19 states, including New Jersey, have enacted laws allowing parents who have had stillbirths to get such certificates. Similar legislation is under consideration in several more, among them New York. More than 25,000 pregnancies a year end in stillbirth, generally defined as a naturally occurring, unintentional intrauterine death after more than 20 weeks of gestation. A cause for the death is usually not determined.
To thousands of parents who have experienced stillbirth, getting a birth certificate is passionately important, albeit symbolic.
I understand losing a child at birth or before birth is horrible, I see absolutely no reason that a legal administrative document should be given to people simply for symbolic reasons, and, to boot, it is sort of creepy. Additionally, I am sure that the right-to-life groups will seize on this for more legislative advances in their war on abortion.
Defining Down Privacy On The Net
Every time the ACLU defends neo-Nazis or the ADL supports gay rights a critic like Ed Morrisey scratches his chin in disbelief. Don’t we hate Nazis? Don’t Orthodox jews disapprove of gay people? Why defend them? Critics like Ed never seem to pick up that Ed Morrisey doesn’t get to choose who will be the next group to arbitrarily lose its rights. Times change. Some day rightie bloggers who defended an administration that commits torture and repudiates habeas corpus could find themselves an isolated band of social pariahs thanking jeebus that the ACLU won’t let the state sever their internet connection. I honestly doubt that Morrissey has thought much about what it might feel like to live on the other side of that angry pointing finger. It could be my Jewish heritage, but Abe Foxman and I have thought about it.
Anyhow, when the state really wants to stretch its legal authority it usually packages the new powers with some indefensible subgroup, usually sex offenders*. To be clear I don’t have a problem with keeping closer tabs on these guys than most other criminals. Some ideas sound perfectly fine, for example tracking serial offenders after they’re released, keeping child molesters away from schoolyards and chemical castration for the worst cases, since it’s fairly hard to expand those powers to the rest of us. In other cases the state is obviously just using fear of child molesters as a cynical selling point to grant themselves a new power that in reality extends to practically everybody. The Bush DOJ, including and especially the newly sainted John Ascroft, practically invented that gambit.
I am having a hard time deciding on which side of the fence this new development falls.
MySpace said Monday it has begun to release data to state justice officials on convicted sex criminals it finds using the youth-oriented social networking website.
The move ends a standoff between MySpace and top prosecutors from eight US states that had demanded the identities of sexual predators who have posted their profiles on the News Corporation-owned website.
The state attorneys general gave MySpace a deadline of May 29, 2007, but the company responded that it was barred by law from revealing the data.
[…] MySpace is providing what it knows of sex offenders on its website for criminal investigations and probation or parole proceedings, according to Mike Angus, general counsel of News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media.
On the first hand it makes perfect sense to keep likely predators out of a social site for kids. I don’t have the reference at hand but I seem to recall a recent study reporting that something like one in two (?!) kids who use social network sites has been inappropriately propositioned. Obviously the state needs flexible new ways of dealing with the mind-bending opportunities that the internet offers to pedophiles with poor impulse control, and I’m totally in favor of MySpace scouring its registrations for known offenders. I could even support a law requiring it, although I could be convinced either way. The problem is that once the tap between MySpace and the state has opened a hair, what mechanism exists to make sure that it doesn’t open a bit more? The next time they will come back looking for some guys who might be terrorists, then some guys who might know a terrorist. Eventually they could stop bothering to give a reason. That is more or less what the FBI has already acknowledged it did with our telephone records.
As I understand it the question of online privacy is still somewhat a legal wild west, and I don’t blame state for trying to bias the issue in a direction that makes doing their job easier. But I think that we should all pay attention when it happens, and we should deal with the question separately from impossibly charged distractions like terrorists and child molesters.
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On the third hand I have absolutely no conflict about hamfisted power grabs like this. True to form Alberto Gonzales used a jackalope issue (copyright infringement? yeesh) to package a ridiculously broadly-defined set of powers that would essentially let him scan around where he wants for whatever he wants. I don’t know why the admin wants that power when they already think they have it (Addington, Yoo), but there’s no reason why Democrats should play along.
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(*) After 9/11, tarrists.