Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

“They all knew.”

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

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Archives for 2009

Palmetto pimp slap

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The (Republican) Speaker of the House in South Carolina puts governor Mark Sanford in his place:

It makes no sense for the governor to cherry-pick the funds he will accept — such as the $50 million to make buildings more energy-efficient that he requested the other week — and oppose money for teachers and law enforcement officers on so-called “philosophical” grounds. This is inconsistent with any kind of viewpoint and goes against what most people would consider to be common sense.

This philosophical rejection could mean the firing of 2,000 to 5,000 teachers, 700 prison guards being let go, three or four prisons closed and 3,400 convicted felons released onto the streets.

[….]

During these difficult times that have sent our unemployment numbers to a record-high 11.4 percent — and consistently among the highest two or three rates in the nation — our state is in need of a true leader. Someone who is prepared to govern with decisive action, not just political rhetoric and ideology.

It’s tempting to say it’s surprising that someone so lucid and practical would be Speaker of the House of a government as dysfunctional as South Carolina’s appears to be. But there are pragmatic people everywhere, thank God. The problem with the Republican party isn’t that all of its elected officials are loons (they’re not), it’s that they’re letting the inmates, er, I mean philosophers, run the asylum.

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

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What are the more-conservative approaches?

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From a profile of Elizabeth Warren, who heads up the panel in charge of distributing TARP funds:

While the bubbly and brilliant 69-year-old professor is a darling of Democrats, Warren has become the scourge of conservative Republicans, who question her panel’s exploration of more-liberal approaches such as nationalization and bank liquidation.

There really are three things that can be done with banks right now: (1) nationalize them, (2) liquidate them (either via a government-led taker-over or by letting them slide into bankruptcy), and (3) keep propping them up.

I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is best, other than believing — as nearly all sane people do — that letting banks like BoA and Citi slide into bankruptcy would be catastrophic.

It was only a few weeks ago that John McCain and Richard Shelby were chanting “let them fail” during the Sunday morning gabfests. And now liquidation is “more-liberal”?

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The cult of tough decisions

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Sully revisits one of the most shameful chapters in the Bush-Cheney torture saga:

The critical thing to remember is that the first person to be subjected to the torture program was not the person Bush and Cheney thought he was, gave up lots of useful (and accurate) information under traditional interrogation techniques, had no information that came close to the “ticking time bomb” criterion used to justify the torture program … and was brutally tortured anyway. More to the point, the idea that CIA officers were begging to use these torture methods is nonsense. They were forced to do so by higher ups.

[….]

Part of the problem is that the president had already bragged in public that Zubaydah was a central figure, and Ron Suskind has argued that the torture was ordered in part to save Bush’s face. Tenet denies that strongly. If it’s true, then president Bush, if he still has a conscience, must have a hard time sleeping at night.

Of course, it was reported again and again that Bush claimed to have no trouble sleeping during the war, that he did not give the appearance of having aged as LBJ did, and so on. It’s very unlikely that Bush has any trouble sleeping over torture.

And I don’t think the media infrastructure that remained silent about torture, when it wasn’t actively promoting it, has much trouble sleeping either.

You see, torture is a “tough decision.” The fact that it offends some moral sensibilities only makes the decision to torture that much “tougher” and more “courageous”. Choosing not to torture is just too easy. Privatizing Social Security is also a tough decision, whereas modifying it so that middle class Americans can continue to have a little dignity in old age, well, that’s just too easy. Similarly, raising taxes on those who can afford it while keeping them the same on the middle-class is an easy decision, while raising them a bit on the middle-class as well is a smart, tough one, even though it makes very little economic sense. Asking middle-class Americans to sacrifice more is always tough and courageous. Asking the wealthy to pay a little more is not.

“Tough decisions” have to come at least a little bit from the gut. They can’t be reasoned out with facts and figures. And they certainly can’t be the product of the “Hamlet-like” indecision that often plagued Bill Clinton. Most importantly, making tough decisions can’t bother the decision-maker too much, else they are more Carter-like than tough.

Bush’s decision to torture is regarded as tough, both by himself and by most of the Village. So there’s no need for anyone to lose any sleep over it.

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What fucking bullshit

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Yeah, yeah, I know I spend too much time reading the Washington Post online, but good Lord, you find some crazy shit there. From their Planet War blog moderator (no, I didn’t make that name up):

President Obama’s decision to release the so-called torture memos, over the strenuous objections of many of the senior national security and intelligence professionals, may go down in history as one of the most consequential of his first 100 days. The former Director of the CIA Michael Hayden and the former Attorney General Michael Mukasey argue strenuously that it was a mistake, and that it will hurt U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. There seem to be two principal objections to the Obama decision. One is that the release of the memos “tips our hand” to terrorists so that they can better prepare against interrogation techniques. When they know our methods precisely, they can better develop counters to them.

I think there is something to this concern, but only so much; presumably, one can develop counter-techniques to the counters, and so on, and so on. Even people who know exactly what they are getting into and exactly how far the interrogator will go, report that some techniques like water-boarding are so effective that there is essentially no plausible counter.

I am far more persuaded by the second objection: that the release of the memos will spur further witch-hunts which will produce an over-cautious intelligence and national security establishment. President Obama worried about this, and that is why he took pains to say he would not prosecute intelligence professionals who acted on the basis and within the limits of the guidance in these memos. But he left open the door to go after those who went beyond the memos, and that, of course, legitimizes more fact-finding to determine exactly what was done by whom. That is how Senator Leahy, who is keen to conduct such investigations, read Obama’s statement. But, as Hayden and Mukasey remind us, the bureaucratic response to such open-ended investigations is predictable: national security professionals will be even more cautious and even more reluctant to act going forward. Will such hesitation put America at risk? Candidate Obama repeatedly said that Bush policies made America less safe. If there is another terrorist attack, and if that attack can be traced to government failures due to an over-abundance of hesitation, will the charge apply to President Obama as well? What is your view?

I oppose speed limits because they make drivers too cautious. Why have any laws, really, since all they do is induce caution in otherwise law-abiding citizens?

These “intelligence professionals” know goddamn well that waterboarding someone six times a day for a month constitutes torture. What would caution mean here, that you only waterboard him twice a day?

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There’s protesting and then there’s protesting

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I did not protest the invasion of Iraq, although I wish I had. I opposed it, but not forcefully. This reader dissent at Sully’s speaks to me of the courage of those who did protest it:

We didn’t have a friendly media outlet promoting our every move. The media was hostile and interpolated us in a way that was unrecognizable. There was no anti-war blogosphere to speak of, even people like Josh Marshall over at TPM had bought into the rush to war (I forgive him). Move-On was active but nothing close to the force it would grow into. We were alone.

When I protested the war I was made out to be the scum of the earth. What must it be like to show up for a protest, denounce your Country, bad mouth the President, threaten armed revolt, and have your very own media outlet brand you a patriot.

I’m convinced — comparisons between tea-baggers and anti-Iraq war protesters really are absurd.

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