Markiarchy

Some Things I Didn't Know About the US Constitution

2009-05-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was just looking at some stuff about the US Constitution on wikipedia, and learned a few interesting things.

I did not know that the most recent amendment to the Constitution, the Twenty-Seventh, was originally proposed in 1789 but only ratified and added to the Constitution in 1992, over 200 years later! Unless a time limit is specifically placed on the ratification of an Amendment, it apparently remains before the States forever. In fact, there are apparently some Amendments still technically awaiting ratification, including the Titles of Nobility Amendment (approved by Congress in 1810 which was ratified by 12 States) and the Child Labor Amendment (approved by Congress on 1924 and ratified by 28 States). Apparently, if 26 more States ratified the Titles of Nobility Amendment or 10 more the Child Labor Amendment, they would become part of the Constitution. Who knew?

The first amendment proposed to the Constitution, called the "Article the First," which wasn't adopted, set how many people a Representative in Congress could represent in his or her district. Had the Article been adopted, with the current US population, there would be around 6,000 members in the House of Representatives! People think Congress doesn't do much now, can you imagine?

Right now there's a bill stalled in the House to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives. It's probably unconstitutional, since the Constitution doesn't allow for non-States to have voting members in Congress. What I didn't realize is that a Constitutional amendment was proposed back in the Seventies to give DC a representative, but it failed to get ratified before it expired in 1984.

The Constitution requires an Amendment to be ratified by three-fourths of the States (either by the legislature or by a constitutional convention in each State). It doesn't say anything, however, about whether a State can rescind ratification after it has ratified an Amendment. Congress has decided that they can't, and the Supreme Court has ruled that it isn't something the Courts can decide. So, as it stands, it appears that States can reject an Amendment at first but then later ratify it, but they can't rescind ratification once given. Interesting.

Just some things I didn't know.

Congress, Taxes, and the AIG Bonuses

2009-03-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

In a rare instance, I agree with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The plans in Congress to tax up to 90% of the bonuses AIG just gave out should not be allowed and are not, in my mind, constitutional. Now, that is not to say that it isn't obscene that a company that took billions in taxpayer money should be giving huge bonuses to its executives on the taxpayers' dime, or that it isn't obscene for people who drove our economy into the ground are being rewarded for it. But the problem is that the offender is AIG, not the people who got the bonuses, and that Congress gave away so much taxpayer money with so little control in the first place.

But to go back now and tax away the money from those bonuses, which were given out in a private transaction between a private company (since Congress didn't "nationalize" AIG when it gave AIG all that money) and private individuals, is absolutely ex post facto lawmaking and is not only tantamount to a bill of attainder but is a bill of attainder if the term is at all meaningful. The US Constitution specifically meant to keep Congress from passing laws to punish acts that weren't illegal when taken, and taking a bunch of someone's money is a punishment. The Constitution doesn't say anything about the prohibition against ex post facto lawmaking only applies to "criminal" law and doesn't say, "You can't put someone in jail retroactively, but take their shit all you want."

And the idea that a bill of attainder -- meaning a bill that essentially convicts and punishes someone without trial -- is only a bill of attainder if it applies to a small group is nonsense. Attaining everyone doesn't make it any less a bill of attainder. And bills of attainder were specifically a way of taking someone's property without them having been convicted of anything, which is what this "tax" is.

I understand the legal arguments by which a "tax" isn't a punishment, and so doesn't invoke ex post facto, and that a bill of attainder has to be more narrow than all these people who got these bonuses. But those arguments are just a way of weasling around the prohibitions that the Constitution plainly puts in force. They aren't good faith arguments; they are arguments for allowing the government to get away with something it isn't supposed to get away with.

The fact that these bonuses are unjust doesn't make them illegal, and if they aren't illegal, the government has no business trying to take them away. Do we really want a society where if there's enough furor over the money you have earned (yes, "earned" in the loosest possible sense here, but still), the government can become the tool of the mob and take your money or property away? Because that's a power that won't always be used justly, trust me. Just look at the injustices we've seen in the use of eminent domain.

Getting It Wrong...

2009-02-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

I'm not familiar with any of Yuval Levin's other work nor "Commentary" magazine which he apparently writes for, but (via Volokh) this article on Sarah Palin's legacy ensures I will be unlikely to read either again. The wrongness just oozes from his article and his analysis is inaccurate on almost every level.

Before her elevation, Palin had not been known as a combatant in the cultural battles of recent years... She was a good-government reformer with social conservative leanings, not the other way around.

Yes, yes, of course. That is very true. In fantasy land. Let's take a look at her actual record. According to Time, in this September article, Palin:

Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors... While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys' club, Stein [the mayor of Wasilla Palin unseated] says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners' rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice). "It got to the extent that — I don't remember who it was now — but some national antiabortion outfit sent little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her," he says.

and...

Vicki Naegele was the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the
time. "[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race," she recalls, "but it turned into something much different than that." Naegele held the same conservative Christian beliefs as Palin but didn't think they had any place in local politics.

"I just thought, That's ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion," says Naegele.

And, as we now know, she tried to have Wasilla's librarian fired because the librarian opposed Palin's attempts to ban books that didn't conform to Palin's Christian views. She also stopped paying for rape kits, a move which clearly put her on the front lines of "cultural battles." It's as if Levin wasn't paying any attention at all during the campaign. Or perhaps he wants to ignore things that don't comport with his premise.

And to the idea that she was a "good-government" reformer? She was under investigation for ethics violations for conduct as Governor of Alaska at the very moment she agreed to be McCain's running mate! She was accused of trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from his job as a State Trooper, and then firing the Public Safety director when he refused. We now know these allegations were true. Using one's office to settle personal scores does not make one much of a "reformer." That, in fact, is exactly the kind of thing that "reformers" oppose.

We were told that Palin was opposed to contraception, advocated teaching creationism in schools, and was inclined to ban books she disagreed with. She was described as a religious zealot, an anti-abortion extremist, a blind champion of abstinence-only sex education. She was said to have sought to make rape victims pay for their own medical exams, to have Alaska secede from the Union, and to get Pat Buchanan elected President. She was reported to believe that the Iraq war was mandated by God, that the end-times prophesied in the Book of Revelation were nearing and only Alaska would survive, and that global warming was purely a myth. None of this was true.

"None of this was true," Levin blithely asserts, to make his point. Except for the part that it was true. She did try to ban books, did support abstinence-only education, did make rape victims pay for their own rape kits (perhaps Levin is trying to pull a fast one by distinguising "medical exam" from "rape kit" here). Perhaps she didn't actually try "to have Alaska secede from the Union" but she and her husband were, in fact, affiliated with a political party who wanted to do just that. She did deny global warming and the church she attended for years in Wasilla did preach end-times prophecy.

Levin offers no evidence to contradict any of these facts. That's because he's lying.

There was a strong case to be made in her defense. Palin had as much foreign-policy experience as most governors do... And while Palin seemed out of her depth in several television interviews, she was extraordinarily effective on the stump, was a quick study, and proved to be at least an even match for Joe Biden, a six-term senator, in the vice-presidential debate.

Er... where to begin? First off, Palin's lack of foreign-policy experience became a center of controversy for two basic reasons that Levin is choosing to ignore. One, McCain had made Obama's foreign-policy inexperience a centerpiece of his campaign, so it naturally became a focus of criticism when McCain chose a running mate with even less. It created the legitimate question of why it was important for Obama to have foreign-policy experience but not the VP pick of a 70+-year-old candidate with past cancer problems? And, two, because Palin's argument in response to questions about her foreign-policy experience was to make stupid claims like the fact that Alaska is close to Russia makes her a foreign-policy expert. Her defense of her foreign-policy credentials was ludicrous and exposed how woefully unprepared she was to deal with foreign policy.

And I like how Levin breezes past how badly she performed in television interviews and how that, as much as anything, exposed her incompetence and invited criticism. Even conservatives were saying she should step aside after she showed that she had no freakin' idea what the hell she was talking about. It was not just "the Left" that was shocked that a candidate for major office was so unprepared to even discuss the issues of the time, it was everyone but the most ideologically bent crazies on the right. Her failures in those interviews weren't just a blip that wasn't important, to be easily overshadowed by her stump speeches (which were effective mainly when she was lying and distorting Obama's relationship with Ayers and his supposedly being a secret Muslim).

And I'm not sure what world Levin lives on when he says Palin was "at least an even match for Joe Biden." Wha? I seem to recall that Palin was roundly considered to have lost that debate, even by conservatives. She certainly didn't perform well enough to counter the negatives coming from those interviews.

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear.

Yes, yes, that was "the Left's" (note the capitalization) problem with her. Not that she lied right off the bat in her introduction to the nation, when she claimed she'd said "Thanks, but no thanks" to the "bridge to nowhere" when, in fact, she'd pushed for it, along with tons of other earmarks from the Federal government. Not that she shit all over the hard work people are doing on the groung all over the country when she made fun of community organizers. Not that she portrayed herself as a reformer even as she was being investigated for misusing her office to settle a personal score. No, none of that was the reason the "the Left" became angry. Not at all. It was because she was "confident" and "politically effective." Because, you know, "confident," "effective" politicians spend all their time complaining about how eeeevil Katie Couric is as an excuse for why she couldn't answer tough questions like "what do you read?"

In fact, as Levin himself notes, Palin "She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the 'the real America' she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her." Perhaps stupid, wrong generalizations of anybody who reads the news being a "latte-sipping" person who isn't a "real American" is the reason "the Left" didn't like Palin, not her being "confident" and "happy." Do you think?

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

Ah, that's it! It was her "failure to speak the language" of the elites that was the problem. Yes! Because only elitists read the goddamned newspaper to stay apprised of world events. It's so "elitist" to think a person who wants to run the most powerful nation in the world, whose reach spans the globe, would have interest in knowing what the hell is going on in the world. Yeah. She didn't speak the high-flying rhetoric with the command of, say, Joe Biden. Uh-huh. Biden doesn't exactly speak like the professor from "The Paper Chase" either. It wasn't that Palin didn't "speak the language" of the elite that was the problem. It was that she didn't even speak the language of a normal person. She spoke the language of a goddamned idiot and said things that didn't even make a tiny bit of sense. That is what "rendered her unfit for high office." The fact that she was a freakin' moron.

Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

No, the problem wasn't that Palin hadn't worked "hard for years to master the language... of [the] upper tier," it was that she hadn't mastered language, full stop. She spoke in word salad. It wasn't that she wasn't saying the right things "within the bounds prescribed" by the elites' "view of the world," it is that her language and suppositions were fucking incoherent.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Okay, I'll bite. Which of the "hard lessons" of Palin's life would have prepared her to deal with the banking crisis we're facing, for instance? Did she get burned on a credit default swap? Did she hold a bunch of mortgate-backed securities that she now couldn't figure out a proper value for? Which "hard lessons" taught her whether a macroeconomy like the US will best be served and kept from depression by tax cuts or government spending?

Let's reword Levin's idiotic claim here and we will see how dumb it really is. Who would agree with this claim?

Applied to medicine, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that surgery is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and medical fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

I'd be very interested to see if Levin thinks that the "prudence" Palin gained from "life's hard lessons" will be sufficient for her to safely remove his gall bladder. If not, then I would submit he doesn't really believe the bullshit he is spouting, because there is no way in hell being President, which requires one to make decisions in a wide range of areas, is so much less difficult than being a surgeon that anyone, no matter how unprepared, can just "jump in."

And let me make this supposedly "unstated" assumption a stated proposition: yes, governing does require a great deal of "knowledge" and "expertise," and if Levin is seriously suggesting otherwise, then I wonder why he bothers to write articles at all, since if the Presidency doesn't require those things nothing does, and why, then, would anyone care to about anything Levin writes anyway?

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

She isn't "clearly, highly intelligent." If it were so clear, it wouldn't be such a contested premise. Which it is, whether Levin admits it or not. She's a goddamned moron, which even many conservatives ended up having to admit.

Levin ends his piece by making the claim that the real problem wasn't Palin's: it was that the McCain campaign didn't have anything to say. Well, that, indeed, was a problem, for both Palin and McCain. But using that as an excuse to ignore Palin's other significant faults is to be willfully blind.

As Levin clearly has chosen to be.

Reasonable Criticism

2009-02-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

On "All Things Considered" on NPR yesterday, they interviewed South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint and asked him about the withdrawal of Daschle and Killefer from their nominations and if it was an embarrasment for the Obama administration. He was actually very fair in his assessment and, contra Limbaugh, he expressed support for what the administration is trying to do.

DeMint could have been full of it, just playing politics, but since I am so critical of Republicans I think it is only fair to point out when they are reasonable and fair in the criticisms and don't act like huge douche bags. DeMint's interview yesterday was an example of reasoned and fair political discourse and it should be applauded.

I don't know if you can hear it online, but it was on the 2/3/2009 episode.

Lobbyists and Ethics

2009-02-04T12:15:00.001-08:00

I'm a bit disappointed by how the Obama administration is handling its policy on lobbyists. They've already given a waiver to a guy who lobbied for Raytheon to be a Deputy Secretary of Defense, another for a guy to be the Assistant Press Secretary (I believe), and, of course, as is now big news, Tom Daschle, the pick for Secretary of Health & Human Services, was essentially a lobbyist since his ouster from the Senate.

I've heard a lot of commentators on NPR note that "You don't want to pass up the right person just because they were a lobbyist. Your rules can't be so inflexible," or something to that effect.

Wrong.

Here's the problem with what that line of thinking, which is the one the administration is taking. The problem is that if you give waivers to former lobbyists because they are "the right people," then you take away the disincentive for those people to become lobbyists even if they want to serve in government in the future. And then you won't really be keeping lobbyists out of government because everyone you want will have been a lobbyist and you'll still end up waivering them. Only by taking it on the chin, and being willing to sacrifice in having to give up some of the people you want, and not hire any lobbyists can you actually change the revolving door of lobbyists in government. Because then you have created a true disincentive for people who want to serve in the future from taking lobbying jobs, and then you won't have to waiver people all the time and moot your anti-lobbyist policy. Because the "right people" won't have been lobbyists.

But if you start off, right off the bat, not taking a hard line and making exceptions, then no one is going to take the new policy seriously, no one will be deterred from becoming a lobbyist, and nothing in Washington culture changes. A radical policy change like this won't work unless, at least at first, you really stick to it, to the letter. If you are wishy-washy, then everyone knows you're not serious and that when push comes to shove, you're going to do what everyone else does and pick the person you want regardless.

Some people are saying that Obama is now "being confronted with the reality" and seeing that he can't really do what he said he would in his high-flying campaign rhetoric. But that doesn't make any sense at all. Anyone could have seen that putting a 'no lobbyist' policy into effect and actually sticking to it would have a cost. There would be some pain. I knew it. Obama should have known it. And he shouldn't have said he would keep lobbyists out of his administration if he hadn't already weighed the cost and decided to pay it. The "reality" here isn't a surprise and should have been easily foreseen and considered.

Of course, there's always the possibility that, in fact, Obama did make that calculation and then changed his mind after he won. I wouldn't be happy if that were the case, and I doubt we will ever know, but it wouldn't be surprising, either. It's a well-known and common psychological phenomena that you truly believe one thing at one time, say, when you are in a campaign to become President, that just doesn't seem as important anymore once you aren't worried about winning and losing. Because, as someone who isn't President, you of course look askance at the President hiring lobbyists, and worry if that will create conflicts of interest. But once you are President, you know (you feel) that, of course, that's true for other people who become President and hire lobbyists, but that your own motives are pure, so it's okay for you to do it.

But, of course, that's what every President thinks, what everyone thinks when it's them and not someone else. Everyone thinks everything is different when it's themselves. When you are in charge of the Home Owner's Association (HOA), of course you think the HOA works impartially and anyone who complains about their treatment is a whiner. But when someone else in charge of it, suddenly you realize that HOA has too much power and that the fine they just gave you wasn't fair...

But I do give Obama credit for admitting that he "screwed up" and taking responsibility for the poor choices he made in some of his choices for appointments. Conservatives are crowing all over the internet right now about it and acting as if somehow this is a bad thing. But it isn't. Conservatives seem to forget that one of things that most frustrated liberals during Bush's regime was that he never took responsibility and never admitted he was wrong. Which meant there was no chance of him changing failed policies. Obama admitting he "screwed up" doesn't mean Obama is a hypocrite and that liberals were taken by him. It means he realizes he fell short of what he said he would do and knows it. Hopefully he will do better. But, if nothing else, at least we know he knows he made a mistake. That's pretty earth-shattering at this point after the last eight years.

Still, I think he should reassess these waivers. Sure, some people say that now we need the best people and can't afford to turn people away, but there will always be a reason to say that. Crises are the best times to change things, and I think Obama may regret squandering this opportunity to make lasting change.

Batman Eats Sushi?

2009-02-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

I had heard from some guys from Virginia who I have done costume events with that it is illegal for adults to wear masks in public except on Halloween. That seemed like a crazy law to me and I wondered about its constitutionality and how often it was enforced.

Well, it appears there is such a law in Florida, and it is, indeed, enforced. A guy dressed as Batman was arrested in Tampa while eating sushi sitting on a curb. Apparently the law, which dates back to 1951, had its origins in wanting to keep the KKK from wearing their hoods. From the article: "The law is part of a section of Florida Statutes relating to criminal anarchy, treason and other crimes against public order."

In what sense is the wearing of a mask, and masks are, after all, terribly comfortable,* "criminal anarchy" (whatever the hell that is), treason, or a "crime against public order?" By simply hiding one's face one creates lawlessness? One gives aid and comfort to one's country's enemies? One somehow creates chaos? Just because someone chooses to cover his or her face?

The modern argument, voiced elsewhere, is that people can commit crimes wearing a mask and not be identifiable on video. So, I guess, anonymity is bad because someone could commit crimes and be difficult to identify, so therefore, despite the absence of criminal intent on the part of any particular person choosing to wear a mask, the wearing itself must be criminalized. How, exactly, is that different than prior restraint in terms of freedom of speech? It may be more difficult to catch someone wearing a mask if he or she commits a crime, but how is it consistent with freedom to then forbid anyone from wearing a mask, just in case?

Further, if the argument is true that gun-control opponents regularly make about guns, that if we make guns illegal criminals only law-abiding citizens will obey the law and criminals will end up being the only ones with guns, then why doesn't that logic apply here? After all, criminals won't leave the mask at home when committing crimes because of this law, so the only people who won't be able to wear masks are law-abiding citizens. Only criminals will have masks. But I wonder how many NRA supporters would be willing to defend the right to wear a mask, even though the principle is no different.

I mean, heck, we might as well go whole-hog, right? Not wearing your name and address barcoded on your forehead might make it hard to catch you if you commit a crime, so why not require that? Or a chip implanted in your butt cheek that radios your location to the police 24/7 in case you do something wrong? If we're all possible criminals whenever the police don't know exactly who we are and what we're doing, then why not? Why not require everyone to wear a sandwich board with their name on it in neon letters? Or just put a 24/7 webcam on every single person so that the police can know who you are and what you are doing in case you do something wrong.

This guy should tell the court that Batmanism is his religion and he has to wear the Batman suit as part of it. That'd make it more difficult for them to nail him on this stupid law. I doubt police would arrest a Muslim woman with her face covered and I'm pretty sure no court would rule that you can arrest a woman just because she covered her face in public for religious reasons.

And no, BTW, I don't know why this guy was wearing a Batman suit in the middle of the day to eat sushi on the curb. And yes, it is weird, but weird and criminal are not (and should not) be the same thing. What kind of freedom do we really have, seriously, if you can't wear a stupid Batman costume when you want? Jeesh.

* In The Princess Bride, when Fezzik asks Wesley, wearing his Dread Pirate Roberts outfit, why Wesley is wearing a mask, Wesley replies, "They're terribly comfortable. I think soon everyone will be wearing them."

Oh, the Irony...

2009-02-02T12:24:00.001-08:00

Kurt Warner, "born again" Christian, doesn't believe in "superstition."

Because, of course, as every sane person knows, the number 13 isn't unlucky, but failing to believe that a Bronze Age Jew is your personal savior and the son of an omnipotent, unseen god will lead your soul to be damned to eternal torment after you die.

Uh huh.

Again With the Faith-Based Initiatives...

2009-02-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

Posting over at Volokh Conspiracy about the topic reminded me that I hadn't mentioned here that I am really pissed off that Obama has decided to continue the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. I condemned the whole idea when Bush proposed and implemented it, and it's still bad policy under the Obama administration.

It's been a while, so just as an update, I oppose government support of faith-based initiatives because the whole idea inherently involves government choosing to support one religious group over another, thereby endorsing some religions over others. Does anyone doubt that Christian groups, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish groups, will get most (if not all) the grants? Does anyone doubt that, say, Wiccan groups will have much if any chance of getting any of these grants? What if a Satanist group applied? Of course, no matter how good the proposal, Satanists will never get any of these grants. Supplying money to religious groups cannot but end up in government endorsing some religions over others.

Further, without an enormous amount of meddlesome oversight, there is no way to ensure that religious groups don't use these funds for proselytizing, or to ensure they don't proselytize those who avail themselves of government-funded faith-based programs. And, in fact, since these programs started, investigations show that, indeed, this is exactly what happens.

Besides, it's a bizarre entanglement of government and religion for government to be trying to monitor whether religious groups are proselytizing or not anyway. Religious groups should be free to proselytize all they want, and only because of the lure of government money are they even in a position where they are expected not to do so. It's like the government is bribing religious organizations not to do what they exist to do in the first place.

Let me note here that I do not think that all faith-based programs, when privately funded, are bad. Catholic Charities, for instance, does excellent work, and if any religious group deserved government support, it does. In my work with them when I was with the American Red Cross, I not only found their programs well-run and filling an important need, I saw no evidence they used the charity to push a religious agenda and I never once saw or heard of them proselytizing clients (at least locally).

But it is still an impermissible entanglement of government and religion for the government to fund Catholic Charities, no matter what I think of their work. It's a violation of both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment, and should be done away with.

Obama should close the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. He is wrong not to do so.

Taxes, Taxes, Taxes...

2009-02-02T07:57:00.000-08:00

What is it with all these bigwigs not paying their taxes? Tim Geithner blamed TurboTax for his failure to pay his taxes when he was working for the IMF, Daschle somehow didn't pay $120,000 in taxes... What, exactly, is the problem? If the problem is the tax code is too difficult, then these are the people in a position to do something about it, right? Daschle was in Congress, after all, and Geithner will be in charge of the IRS.

Just like all this business with every nominee seeming to have a housekeeper or nanny who is an illegal immigrant. If the politicians who make the laws can't keep them straight, then maybe there's a problem with the law, no? Maybe they'd want to do something about it?

Truth is, though, important and rich people don't worry about these things because they know, outside of a confirmation process, they'll never be called to account for them. The IRS spends almost all its time auditing lower class and lower middle class tax returns because it's easier to squeeze money out of people who can't afford a lawyer and don't know how to fight the system. They don't audit people like Geithner and Daschle. It's too much of a hassle.

It's another example of how the laws really only apply to the little people.

Well, unless you screw up so big they finally don't have any choice but to act. See: Bernie Madoff.

Better Not Go There...

2009-01-30T11:39:00.001-08:00

Apparently, in addition to poker being illegal in South Carolina, so is every card game but whist and any game that uses dice. Wow. That's most of the games I play. I mean, I expect poker to be illegal most places, but D&D, Family Business, Guillotine, Uno, Monopoly, Risk? No Warhammer 40K, no Battletech, no Advanced Squad Leader, no Rail Baron? No Star Fleet Battles?*

No collectible card games, obviously... No Magic, Pokemon... I think Mage Knight (apparently now defunct, according to wikipedia, which I didn't know) and Hero Clix would be okay.

Just about all roleplaying games but Amber, Nobilis, and live-action games where you use rock-paper-scissors would be illegal. Most (but not all) boardgames too, depending on how you interpret whether a games is a "game with cards," as the statue reads. That would eliminate a lot of games where there aren't any dice and aren't cards in the traditional sense, as in cards you play. That is to say, games where, say, your character is described on a card but you don't "play" the card, for instance. I know there are good examples of such games, but of course I'm not coming up with one...

Well, not a board game, but the game of Mafia (also called, apparently, 'Werewolf' or 'Assassin') is one. The players are each given a card to secretly tell them what side they are on (the game is about trying to eliminate the other team, but only the smaller team members know who is on their team, the other other side is guessing). The only point of the cards is to randomly (and secretly) assign teams. It can be played without cards, with slips of paper, for instance, instead, which I doubt anyone would construe as "cards," but if you buy the commercially available version of the game, it uses cards.

So, is Mafia illegal if you buy the game and use the cards, but not if you use slips of paper? The cards aren't "played" in the traditional sense, in that you don't take tricks with them or anything like that, but it still, technically, if you buy the commercial version of the game and play it, you would be playing a "game with cards," wouldn't you?

Civilization! That's it, right? No dice, as I recall. But it has card decks for random events and such. Technically illegal, I guess, even though it isn't a "game with cards" in the traditional sense. Someone over at Volokh suggested Carcassone, but I've only played it once years ago, so I don't remember. (I, and the other guys I played it with, thought it suuuuuuuucked). Kremlin! I think Kremlin is a good example as well.

So let's see. Stratego, I think, would be okay. No cards. Unless it runs afoul of another clause in the law about the board being a "gaming table." Connect Four. Toss-Across. Hmmm... Battleship? It doesn't have any cards, does it?

Craziness. I presume that police in SC aren't on constant stakeouts outside gaming stores down there (I presume they have some gaming stores, right?), so I doubt the law is being enforced outside of poker and gambling, but man! Stay away if you're a gamer. I mean, you never know when the local DA and sheriff will be guys who really hated nerds in high school...

* And here I didn't even know I was a teenage criminal. But apparently I was, because I played Star Fleet Battles in South Carolina on a number of occasions when I was a teenager visiting my friend Paul down in York, SC...

Bipartisanship?

2009-01-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

In keeping with his promises of bipartisanship and working with Republicans instead of against them, President Obama met with GOP leaders in the House and Senate this week to get their opinions on the proposed stimulus package. Though the media spent a lot of time reporting how Obama had ended discussion on one point by saying, "I won," the meetings were apparently very cordial and productive, even according to GOP leaders. The bill was even amended to be more to Congressional Republicans' liking.

In return, House Republicans repaid the President's attempt to reach out to them by voting against the President's stimulus package unanimously yesterday, in a move John Boehner, apparently not ironically, called "bipartisan." I don't think that word means what Boehner thinks it means. That aside, the question now is whether Obama was foolish to try to include Republicans in the first place, and whether he should now seek to return the bill to its original form and take out the concessions put in to appease the House GOP members.

But first, let's consider the reasons why this may have happened. On Morning Joe this morning, NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd noted that one of the reasons this may have happened is because most of the moderate Republican House members aren't in the House anymore, having been defeated by Democratic rivals. The remaining House GOP members tend to be from very conservative districts and, according to Todd, and thus the most ideological. If this is true, and I suspect it probably is, then the sweep of the Democratic victory in last fall's elections, on the coattails of President Obama, may have ironically had unintential effect of making it very difficult for Democrats to work in a bipartisan manner with Republicans.

There's a good parallel, I think, between this situation and what has been happening in the medical world with antibiotics the past sixty years. Antibiotics, when used improperly, will destroy all the easily-killed bacteria and leave the bacteria most resistant, which is how we get antibiotic-resistant strains that antibiotics then can't cure. The Democrats, in the last election, essentially did the work of the antibiotic -- they "killed" off the moderate Republicans, the ones that they could have worked with, and left behind only the far right Republicans who won't work with the Democrats. The Democrats basically created, as an unintended consequence of victory, a GOP House caucus that will actually be more difficult to work with and less interested in compromise than before the elections, despite the election resoundingly showing broad support for a change in policy away from what the ideological Republicans advocate.

So, on his way to the White House, Obama promises bipartisanship, leading to Democratic victories sweeping moderate House Republicans out of office, and thereby creating a House GOP caucus uninterested in bipartisanship. Unintended consequences indeed. So, where from here?

I don't think Obama made a mistake in reaching out to House Republicans, even though he got slapped in the face in return. Obama promised bipartisanship and, I think, genuinely wants to govern with bipartisan support. I think making the attempt to bring the House Republicans in was worthwhile, in that it will be easier for the administration to deal with the crises facing the nation if the Republicans are working with the administration instead of against it, contributing to policy instead of obstructing it. There was a risk involved with reaching out, obviously, the risk that exactly what happened would happen, that the Republicans would slap the hand Obama reached out to them and then disingenuously try to spin the administration's attempts at compromise as "partisanship." But, on balance, I think the risk was worth the potential reward, even though it didn't work out.

I think, however, that Obama almost certainly has to take back the compromises he made with the House Republicans now that they have unanimously voted against the bill. He can't afford to let his desire for bipartisanship be construed by the House GOP members as weakness, and can't afford to let them get what they want at no cost, since the whole point of voting against the stimulus package is to be able to blame the Democrats if it doesn't work or work well. He has to make the point clear that compromises are given in return for support, not for free. Obama may want a new era of bipartisanship, but there can't be bipartisanship unless both sides are willing. He can't enable the Republicans by letting stunts like this work in the name of bipartisanship, or else he'll just encourage the House GOP not to work with the administration in the future. Bipartisanship comes from mutual respect, not capitulation. And I fear leaving the compromises to stand despite the GOP's actions would be tantamount to just that.

Especially in light of the more ideologically polarized House GOP caucus now in the Congress. The remaining House GOP members are the ones who will do things like the stunt they just pulled, who will leap upon perceived weakness, and who will try to spin whatever Obama does in terms of their ideological battle. They're a virulent group and they can't be allowed to fester or Obama will spend the next four years battling over and over with them, when a firm response now might make the Republicans think twice about becoming the permanent minority party and decide to take advantage of what the Democrats didn't have for the past eight years: a President in power who isn't actively thumbing his nose at them at every possible opportunity.

Gave Me Vertigo...

2009-01-28T10:37:00.000-08:00

If you get a chance, fire up Google Earth and go look at an island called Tristan da Cunha. It is supposedly the most remote archipelago in the world, and people actually live there. The mail only comes once a year! They apparently only have one phone and one fax line. (Though I have to think with the advent of satellite that this will change). The one radio station broadcasts the BBC World Service four days a week. The people live on one little slice of the island because most of it is too steep, since it's the top of an oceanic volcano. To get an idea how remote this place is, the nearest other island is called, I am not making this up, Inaccessible Island.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up is that looking at Tristan da Cunha on Google Earth actually gave me vertigo. It's so remote from anything else and all, it just seemed like I was going to fall into the ocean just looking at it. And people really live there!

Take a look if you get a chance.

Projection

2009-01-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

Wow. Reading comments to posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy has really been enlightening since Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress have come into power. The level of projection on the part of conservatives posting there is absolutely amazing.

For instance, a good example is a claim made by one commenter that the left is all about ideological hiring because they can't compete on merit with job candidates from the right, but the right is all about hiring due to merit. Uh, yeah. That's why there are all those investigations going on about corrupt, illegal, ideologically-based hiring practices at the Bush Department of Justice where applicants were denied positions entirely based on their political views. Or how the personnel for the coalition transitional government in Iraq after the invasion were chosen not for their experience or skills but for the ideological leanings. (If you recall, applicants for positions doing things like restoring clean water to Baghdad were asked about how they felt about Roe v. Wade as a job qualification).

The comment was in response to a post about lawsuit being brought by an applicant to a law writing professorship at the University of Iowa. The applicant is claiming that she didn't get the position because of her political leanings -- she is a conservative and the interviewers were mostly liberals. The comments devolved, of course, into a whole screed about liberals controlling academia and keeping conservatives out and blah, blah, blah. As I have noted before, conservatives aren't well represented in academia for one simple reason: they don't become academics. If they want to be better represented in the halls of learning, more of them should become academics and fewer should sit around bitching about how liberals dominate academia. If difficult, crappy working conditions for poor pay and little prestige doesn't motivate conservatives, well, that's not the problem of the liberals who are willing to work under those conditions, now, is it? It isn't ideological discrimination that keeps conservatives out. It is self-selection.

But really. After the well-documented cronyism of the Bush regime, after Alberto Gonzales, the US Attorney firings, the attempt to put Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court, Mike Brown as head of FEMA, and other examples too numerous to count, conservatives actually have the nerve now to claim that the right is all about meritocracy and the left is about ideological purity? Methinks they doth protest too much! Lord!

There are lots of other examples of projection going on in the comments at Volokh, but you get the point. There really are these conservatives sitting around who think that Bush didn't really do anything wrong and even though liberals like myself can point out all the objectively-confirmed ways in which Bush fucked up and fucked us over, that it's really just "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and we really just hate him for no reason but to hate him. And this is how: they project and ignore reality. If those making these claims were to actually look at the facts, it would shatter their reality and they'd have to admit that conservatives have been the ones committing most of the sins they are decrying, not liberals, at least for the past eight years. So they close their eyes, forget about reality, and settle into their safe little cocoon not to come out until there's a new Republican President.

Jeesh.

Couldn't You Load Your Gun First?

2009-01-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a pretty ardent defender of 4th-Amendment rights here in the US, and I think, in general, that 4th Amendment rights have been eroded to next to nothing by the Federal Courts. And, while I hate guns and gun violence, I have become more of a defender of the 2nd Amendment as well, because I choose not to be a hypocrite and pick-and-choose which rights in the Bill of Rights I think are important.

But still, even I have to side with the police that they have enough reasonable suspicion to pull you over if you take both hands off the wheel to load your gun while you are driving! I mean, come on, you can't load your gun before you get in the car? Or at least when you aren't moving?

I'm pretty sure I would suspect that someone who was in such a hurry to load his gun that he couldn't pull over to do it might, just might, maybe, be planning to shoot someone from the car. Very shortly. Perhaps.

So, a tip to all you would-be criminals out there: Load your gun before you leave the house. You'll feel so much better you did!

Hat tip: The Agitator

Oath

2009-01-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

It doesn't exactly matter now, as Obama took the oath again yesterday just to be sure and silence those critics who claimed he wasn't President because of the bungled oath on Tuesday. But, just as a point of fact, those people are wrong. Obama was President at noon on January 20th regardless of whether he took the oath or not. What he could not, technically do, was exercise the authority and powers of the Presidency without the oath.

The Constitution, in Article II, states: "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"

Note what it says: Before he enter on the Execution of his Office...

That's a bit different than saying, "Before he becomes President..." Some have argued that the Office and its powers are the same, and that the Founders therefore meant, essentially, "Before he becomes President...", in disregard for the actual text.

But, supposing we humor them, it still doesn't matter. Because the Twentieth Amendment, ratified in 1933, provides that: "The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January... and the terms of their successors shall then begin." Even if the original text of Article II really meant that you couldn't become President without taking the oath, even though that's not what it says, in light of the Twentieth Amendment it is clear that Obama became President on noon of January 20th. The Twentieth Amendment doesn't mention anything about an oath.

However, technically, I do believe that Obama didn't actually have authority to exercise the powers of the Presidency until he took the Oath, subject to Article II. So, while it is untrue that there was ever a gap in Presidencies, there was, technically, a gap during which no one had authority to exercise the powers of the Presidency. Even though there was a legal Vice President, Joe Biden, and failing to take the Oath could certainly count as a "disability" that would allow Obama to be removed from office if he refused to re-do it, there's still a process Biden would have had to go through before he could assume the duties of the President, including, of course, taking the Oath himself.

Interesting little tidbit of constitutional law there, but I think, reading the text, you'd have to really want to read something into it to get out of what is there that Obama ever wasn't actually President after noon on Tuesday.

Shirtsleeves

2009-01-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Pat Buchanan and some others have been stirring up some shit over the pictures of Obama in his shirtsleeves yesterday in the Oval Office. The complaint seems to be that the tradition is that the President and anyone entering the Oval Office be wearing coat and tie, as if Obama is making a sudden break with tradition.

But, just as a point of fact, I know that this tradition was broken at least sixteen years ago, because it wasn't followed in the Clinton administration. When the Bushies came into office eight years ago, one of the immediate changes Bush made was to reinstate the more formal coat-and-tie rule. Obama is just reverting to what had been before Bush took office, not reversing years of tradition.

Point of fact.

(I remember reading articles about this in Bush's first days in the White House, because there wasn't much else going on but that thing with the plane in China. At least, not much going on we knew about, because of the Bushies' famous secrecy that we weren't aware of yet).

NSA Wiretapping

2009-01-22T06:32:00.000-08:00

On Countdown last night, a former NSA analyst revealed that the NSA's wiretapping program was much broader and vaster than previously suspected. It included collecting and monitoring, according to this source, the metadata from all electronic communications in the US, whether it had a foreign component or not, as well as monitoring the communications of some organizations, such as news outlets, on a 24-7-365 basis.

Unfortunately, from what I have learned from reading about cases over at Volokh, the case law regarding whether the collection of metadata constitutes a "search" for 4th Amendment purposes is unsettled. So, if the analyst's accusations are true, then the Bush regime was certainly lying about the scope of the NSA wiretapping and about it use in cases of purely domestic communications. It is not clear to me, from what I understand of the case law, however, whether collecting metadata like this without a warrant would be considered an illegal search or not. If the NSA has been (and is) doing this, then they are clearly using the shortfalls in the law's ability to keep up with technology and skirting on the edge of legality. And, in the end, the courts may end up deciding that searching metadata is illegal, and then the NSA's actions would definitely be not only creepy and sinister but clearly against the law and Constitution.

On the 24-7-365 wiretapping of certain organizations and groups, apparently, according to this source, the NSA had a novel excuse for why it was doing this: it had to tap these particular organizations 24-7 in order to be sure they weren't accidentally tapping them when they didn't want to. That's right: the claim is that they only monitored these sources 24-7 in order to be sure they knew what communications were from them so they could avoid intercepting their communications when they didn't mean to. They aren't reading your mail... they're just opening all of it to make sure they don't accidentally read it...

We'll see what comes of this. Right now, of course, all we have is one uncorroborated source for the story, and claims that, at least in part, may not actually rise to illegality, though they should. But the idea that the NSA is even gathering the metadata on literally every single e-mail, fax, phone call, and internet search done by every American is creepy enough on its own.

I hope this isn't true. And if it is, I hope it is stopped and someone gets punished. We'll see.

Note to Keith Olbermann

2009-01-22T06:23:00.001-08:00

As if there's any chance he would read this post, but...

I think you need to drop count of how many days it's been since Bush's "Mission Accomplished" posturing now. I think 'Still Bushed' is okay, because there's so much that needs to be explored about what happened during the Bush regime. But since the Bush regime is out of power now he has officially and finally failed to accomplish the mission in Iraq. He can't accomplish it now, so there's really no point in continuing to pile up the tally of days since he claimed he did. He failed. I think your point has been well and truly made.

Not that it's not an important point. It is. But I think this particular sin of Bush's is one that doesn't play well to keep pointing out once he's not in power. I think it's time to come up with something new. I think you're just playing into the hands of those who claim you're a left-wing ideologue with this one. It just doesn't play right now, even to me, so it's really not going to play well with others.

Dream Team?

2009-01-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

During MSNBC's pre-inauguration coverage yesterday, there was a hand-drawn sign in the crowd that read, "Obama + Biden = Dream Team." And I couldn't help thinking to myself, really?

Presumably, such a sign implies the person displaying it wanted Biden as VP before he was picked. In fact, this person was worried that Obama might not pick Biden, because then it wouldn't be the "Dream Team."

Obama + Clinton? Not the "Dream Team."
Obama + Evan Bayh? Not the "Dream Team."
Obama + Tim Kaine? Not the "Dream Team."
Obama + Chris Dodd? Not the "Dream Team."
Obama + Chuck Hegel? Not the "Dream Team."

If truly Obama + Biden is this person's "Dream Team," then no one else but Biden would have done. If Obama had picked Bayh, that person would have been like, "Crap! It's all going downhill now. He should have picked Biden. Then the ticket would have been perfect. Obama would have rolled to election. There's only one person who can rocket the ticket to victory: Joe Biden."

I mean, I like Joe Biden. My girlfriend liked him for the primaries (though he was out, like my personal favorite, Dennis Kucinich, before we got to vote in the primaries anyway). He's a fine pick, he'll do a good job if tasked. He's entertaining. His gaffes probably didn't help the campaign, but obviously didn't hurt it much either. (Though now his wife seems to be getting in on the action.) Nothing wrong with him.

But even my girlfriend, a Biden fan, couldn't get on board with the idea that anyone was really thinking that adding Biden to the ticket with Obama would put the ticket over the top and turn it into a "Dream Team."

I mean, c'mon. Do you think historians a hundred years from now are going to be talking about how critical Biden was to Obama's success?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Obama's Inauguration

2009-01-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've really sat and watched a Presidential inauguration live before. If I did, I don't recall it. So Obama's may be the first one I watched live. So that may color my impressions. Of course, the fact that it was a snow day may have colored them too, since I got to stay home and watch.

It all seems too much like a coronation rather than an inauguration to me. Too much ceremony for someone taking on a job that is, in theory, simply the principle servant of the people.

Man, did Roberts bungle that oath! Probably the biggest audience he'd ever have and he couldn't get it right. That's gotta sting. But at least he didn't wear that weird gold-trimmed Chief Justice's outfit Rehnquist designed. I give him points for that.

Obama's speech I rate as a near miss. He almost hit all the right notes. He almost broke through my cynicism that he's just a man and there's only so much he can do. But not quite. The speech was good, but not great. Not a disaster, but not the Gettysburg Address either. Also, it seems to be that there must have been a section taken out right after he says something like "they say the next generation will have to settle with less" and that the US is in decline, because he followed that up with his "we will meet those challenges" bit. But after raising the specter of the US being in decline and future generations being worse off than now, I thought it was necessary for him to directly address both and say, "No, the US won't decline, no the next generation won't be worse off than their parents" or somesuch. It felt like the part where he did that was left out.

But Obama did specifically mention "nonbelievers" in his speech as part of the American body politic, in contrast to George HW Bush, who said we shouldn't be citizens. I applaud Obama being willing to acknowledge us nonbelievers on an international stage like that.

The coverage on both MSNBC and CNN was vacuous. I turned to CSPAN for part of the time. But I don't really blame the pundits and reporters... there just isn't enough to say to fill the time with all-day coverage like that. There's no way to avoid ending up saying the same things over and over and saying the most obvious, trivial stuff, if you have that much time to fill. It's a symptom of the 24-hour news cycle, I suppose, and our need for continuous coverage. But I couldn't handle it after a while. Eventually, instead of watching the parade, I switched over to USA and watched some of the House marathon, because I couldn't take it anymore.

I wasn't as happy as I thought I would be watching Bush fly away. I think I would have been happier if the Democrats had defeated him four years ago and sent him packing. But he wasn't beaten, he got his two terms and gets to fade away into the sunset. Glad to be rid of him, but it was kind of anticlimactic.

All the prayers, especially Rick Warren. Bleagh. Do you really need to remind me so many times that the most powerful people in the world actually believe they need the blessing of their invisible friend to do their jobs? Jeesh. It was a lot to sit through.

I'm glad I watched. I might not have the chance to witness such a historic event as it unfolds again. Hopefully the optimism shown at the inauguration will be repaid in the next four or eight years.

Executive Powers

2009-01-21T08:58:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of talk and argument going on around the net about how now all the Republicans who trumpeted executive power during the Bush regime will suddenly embrace checks-and-balances now that Obama holds the reigns, and contrastingly how Democrats who have been wailing about Bush's expansion of executive power will suddenly be okay with those same power being wielded by Obama.

Already, we've seen John Bolton and John "the President can torture anyone he wants" Yoo do that exact about face in suddenly arguing that we need to reign in the President in this NY Times editorial.

So, I will come out right now and say where I stand: the powers Bush claimed and exercised that I argued were illegal and unconstitutional under the Bush regime are still illegal and unconstitutional under the Obama admininstration. I do not want any President having or using them, no matter his or her political party.

I'm no more comfortable that Obama can now, for instance, designate US citizens as "enemy combatants" and hold them indefinitely than I was when Bush could do it. It was wrong when Bush claimed the power and used it. It is wrong for Obama to have it and would be wrong for him to use it.

And I'm not comfortable with forgetting about the precedents Bush set now that Obama is in office. "Obama won't do that" isn't a comfort to me. For one thing, I can only hope Obama won't use those powers. For another, those precedents are still there whether Obama uses the powers or not. I don't want future Presidents to have those powers either.

My position on those powers us unchanged. The President should not have them, and it matters not whether there is an (R) or a (D) behind the name of the person currently occupying that office.

One Other Point

2009-01-16T12:53:00.000-08:00

Regarding Bush's legacy. To all the people who say that Bush's most important accomplishment is that there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11: Why does he get credit for that but not blame for 9/11?

Don't tell me it was unprecedented. Hell, one of the two targets of the attack, the WTC in NY, was one they had attacked before.

Don't tell me the Bush administration wasn't forewarned. Not only is the evidence overwhelming that the outgoing Clinton administration tried in vain to warn the incoming Bush regime that Al-Qaeda was the biggest threat to US national security, not only did terrorism experts who transitioned from the Clinton to Bush teams warn the Bush regime about Al-Qaeda, Bush, as we all know, was even personally briefed on Bin Laden's plans to strike on US soil.

So I just want to know why Bush gets credit for the lack of attacks during his Presidency since 9/11 but a free pass for 9/11. That's all. Do you get a free one before they count or something?

Seriously. I want to know why Bush gets credit for some parts of his term but not blame for others. If he gets the credit for keeping us safe for the past seven years, that has to be balanced against the colossal fuckup of allowing the worst terrorist attack on US soil in modern history. Even if we give him credit for the safe years, he's still like the bodyguard who has done a bangup job ever since that time he let his client get shot in the face. Sure, he's been great since then, but that whole face thing was still a pretty big screwup...

Should Obama Investigate the Bush Regime?

2009-01-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

So, on Olbermann and other places, the debate has been raging over whether Obama should investigate Bush, Cheney, and the Bush regime for war crimes, or whether it is better not to start an investigation that will likely become a bitter partisan struggle that will end up distracting the new administration from implementing its agenda, especially in these difficult and challenging times. On the one hand, how can we let those who authorized abuse and torture go free? On the other, what's past is past, and shouldn't we move on and focus on the present rather than digging up the past?

I've heard some variation of the second argument, that we need to focus on moving forward and facing the challenges ahead of us instead of looking backward, from a number of sources, including Obama himself. This argument, if I may be so bold, is bullshit. If going back to look at the past to see if crimes have been committed is to waste resources and effort that could be used to go forward, then we should fire every judge and district attorney in the nation, we should close down the Justice Department, FBI, and every police department, and use all the money elsewhere. As a lawyer (don't know her name) said on Olbermann the other night, that line of argument sure as hell wouldn't work in court for someone accused of bank robbery. Why in the hell would it work for someone accused of war crimes?

Unless the point here is you can get away with anything as long as your crime is big enough, sensational enough, rare enough, and you are important enough, that to try you for your crimes would create a big sensation or be too much trouble that no one wants to bother. But that's a different argument, isn't it? It's the real argument being made, though. Just no one wants to make it explicitly, because it's not a very pretty argument. It was an ugly reason for Ford to pardon Nixon, and it wouldn't be any less ugly a reason for us to turn a blind eye to the Bush regime's crimes either. It turns the whole notion of justice on its head. The less powerful a person is, the less harmful the crime, the less important it is that he or she face justice. Conversely, the more important the person, the more harmful the crime, the more important it is that he or she face justice. The fact that it is easier to prosecute the powerless for trivial crimes than the powerful for heinous ones is not an excuse to give the powerful a pass. In the overall scheme of things, it doesn't matter that much if a given 7-11 clerk shoplifting a DVD player from Wal-Mart gets tried and punished or not. It matters a hell of a lot if a President who presided over war crimes walks away scot free or not. In terms of US standing in the world, US credibility, how effective US foreign policy will be in the future (especially in terms of US pressure on other countries on human rights issues), whether enemies in future conflicts with the US will obey the Geneva Conventions with regard to capture US soldiers or not, whether precedent is set that the President is above the law and can violate International Law at will, etc.

So, frankly, I think we have to firmly reject the argument that we shouldn't focus on the past and worry about the present and future. It undermines our whole system of justice and concept of holding people accountable for their actions, because those making the argument give us no reason why it applies now, to war crimes, but not at other times, to the bank robber or shoplifter. Absent such an argument, we are left with nothing but arbitrary special pleading that this particular set of crimes committed at this particular time is in the past and should be left there, but that crime committed at that particular time should be investigated and prosecuted.

So, then, what about the argument that the new administration can't afford a bitter partisan struggle that will hinder efforts to deal with all the problems facing the nation? This argument has some merit to it, but in the end, I think it's really just faintness of heart and failure to accurately assess the benefits of war crimes investigations and prosecutions in both political and non-political terms. I think it is the same mistake Nancy Pelosi made in refusing (and ruling out a priori) to impeach either Bush or Cheney. Yes, undertaking war crimes investigations and prosecutions is a huge gamble that will take a great deal of political capital and involves a great deal of risk. Certainly there will be charges of a partisan witch hunt leveled at Obama and his administration and it may become more difficult to cooperate with and work on a bipartisan basis with Republicans during the investigation and any subsequent trials. Thought not as much difficulty as one might think, given Obama's popularity and the fact that a lot of the more ardent supporters of torture are gone from Congress now, and a lot of the remaining Republicans are those who never were comfortable with "enhanced interrogations" like McCain and Specter and who won't hesitate to work with Obama just because of ongoing war crimes prosecutions against former Bush regime officials.

Plus, I think that the popularity of "enhanced interrogation" techniques has plummeted outside of the extreme right and FOX News pundits, and I think Obama could really make it difficult for the Republicans to oppose his policies in retaliation for war crimes investigations and trials by using his great talents as a communicator to make clear to the American people that war crimes trials are one thing that truly are beyond politics, unlike all the other things that this claim gets made about.

But look at what the nation gains for the risk Obama takes: a break with and an utter repudiation of the foreign policy of the Bush regime that even Obama's own election cannot completely make, including Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, Gitmo, the invasion of Iraq, the "axis of evil" speech, US failure to respect the Geneva Conventions and International Law, the whole "enemy combatants" farce, and disrespecting habeus. Bush's foreign policy would become an aberration, his acts once and for all judged illegal and thus unrepeatable, a corrupt regime acting outside its authority and thus illegitimate. Without investigations and trials, the US can say what it wants and Obama can do everything else in his power to mitigate and repudiate Bush's policies, but everything Bush did will remain legitimate acts of the US government that are only a change in the direction of the political wind away from happening again.

But by forever rejecting the Bush legacy the US can regain its moral standing, it can prove to the rest of the world that it holds itself and its own leaders to as high a standard as it holds other nations, that it corrects its own mistakes, and that no President, past or future, is above the law to act as he or she will without consequence. The leverage the US will gain to accomplish its foreign policy goals and the prestige the US will gain by actually living up to its ideals and rhetoric will be of great enough benefit to the nation and the Obama administration that, on balance, they are worth the political risk of initiating war crimes trials and investigations.

And that's not factoring in the simple moral imperative that it is immoral and wrong to let the people who abused our collective power, trust, and goodwill to do the things the Bush regime did in our name go unpunished. Bush once again insisted in his farewell speech that, though it "makes some uncomfortable" when he talks about it, that there is good and evil in the world. While Bush himself may not be an evil man, he presided over an evil regime and it is up to the rest of us, as Americans, to show the rest of the world that we do not take kindly to evil done in our name.

So, in the end, while I am sympathetic to the argument that going after Bush and his regime for war crimes won't help us deal with our current problems, I think this calculation is wrong. I think, in the end, that the US will be better off for investigating and prosecuting those who have committed such crimes, and we will find that though there may be some cost in the short-term, the benefits far outweigh those costs in the end.

Bush's Farewell

2009-01-16T07:33:00.000-08:00

Against my better judgment, I watched Bush's farewell speech last night. Like his final press conference earlier in the week, I mostly found myself wondering if I'd somehow managed to tune into a speech being given by an alternate reality Bush in which his policies had actually worked and made sense. He clearly has not and never will accept a shred of responsibility for the cavalcade of disastrous mistakes he's made over the last eight years and won't suffer a moment's regret over them.

I was almost literally stunned during his press conference that his idea of something he might have done differently during Katrina was land Air Force One somewhere in the affected area instead of doing a flyover. I have no fucking clue how he thinks that would have helped or why he thinks that would have been better. He may actually be stupider and more vacuous than even I, a firm believer since before his election as President that he was -- with no hyperbole -- a moron, thought, if this is a good example of his hindsight and what he thinks about when he thinks about how he could have done a better job.

Christ.

And he actually tried to take credit for a quick Federal response by using the rescue of victims from the roofs of homes by Coast Guard helicopters as his example. Except that those Coast Guard helicopters weren't part of any organized Federal response stood up in response to Katrina. Those Coast Guard helicopters responded independently as part of the Coast Guard's normal mission.

You see, the Coast Guard is always ready to do stuff like that, because their job is to like, you know, guard the goddamned coast, which kind of entails being ready at a moment's notice. The Bush regime didn't have a damned thing to do with it. The Coast Guard's mission was exactly the same under Clinton and they'd have done the exact same thing then, they'd have done the exact same thing if Gore had been President, and they'll do the exact same thing if something like that happens under Obama. The part Bush and his political appointees did have control and responsibility for, the part of the Federal response that isn't automatic and needs to be coordinated, the FEMA part, the Homeland Security part, the National Guard part, all that, well, that's the part that got screwed up, jackass. You don't get to take credit for the one part that happens automatically just because it is the one part that worked.

But, back to the speech, he sort of had this paternalistic, self-satisfied, almost condescending thing going on that I probably should have been pissed off about, but somehow, now that he's finally about to retire to being brush-clearer-in-chief, just reminds me of the fact that he's only acting like he knows what the hell he's talking about. That, though he thinks he's kind of wisely reiterating the past eight years from his priveleged vantage of knowledge from on high, he's really just reciting false talking points that he has come to believe are true. He's the emperor standing naked before us, but he's the only one who doesn't realize he has no clothes.

In fact, the speech made me realize that, given how we all, to a greater or lesser extent, rewrite out memories, consciously or unconsciously, Bush almost certainly believes things about himself that are clearly untrue to the most casual outside observer. It occurs to me that Bush almost certainly believes that he did not freeze in that school the morning of 9/11 in front of all those kids. I mean, he clearly did. You can see it on his face. When he's told a second plane hit the towers, he freezes up like spit in Antarctic wind. There's nothing going on behind his eyes. I think he understood, probably, that it was a terrorist attack at that point... it was pretty impossible not to (though after the Katrina 'landing Air Force One' thing I can't be sure). I'll give him that much, anyway. But there's not another damned thought in his head. There just isn't. But I'm telling you now, that Bush doesn't remember it that way. Truly, truly doesn't remember it that way. Not in a bullshit, lying to himself but knows better sort of way, either, but seriously. Things he didn't think of until hours or days later, he now thinks were running through his head in that very moment, right then, holding that children's book in that school. I just know it. No one can lie to themselves as well as Bush would have to to believe what he believes. And I'm telling you that I'd bet a lot of money on the fact that Bush believes that his mind leapt into action in that moment, the morning of 9/11, and that he didn't freeze, and you will never, ever convince him otherwise, because that is how he truly remembers it.

Amazingly, though, out there in the blogosphere, Bush still has his defenders. The people who think Bush did a great job and people like me just don't want to see it because of how much we hate Bush because we have "BDS," or Bush Derangement Syndrome. They, like Bush, talk about how Bush will be vindicated someday by history. Perhaps. It's always possible. But I wouldn't put money down on it. The evidence is pretty firmly against it, enough so that the people who make that claim are really making it on little more than wishful thinking. But it is still amazing to me how some people can really look at Bush's record and think that anyone who finds it lacking must be ideologically biased not to see that it is excellent. People who watched his speech last night and spent the whole time nodding in agreement with everything he said. Yes, it's true, there are people, who were, at the exact same moment you (if you did) and I were watching Bush's self-serving, unintentionally ironic, reality-defying speech, who, as far as they were concerned, were appreciatively watching an accurate, truthful, and heartfelt summation of Bush's legacy. It's true.

I would like to note, on the occasion of his departure, for the record, that Bush does have two accomplishments for which he deserves praise, and so I, not being deranged, will give him said praise. Firstly, he promised an increase in foreign aid for AIDS sufferers in Africa, and he did greatly increase that funding far beyond what any other President has committed. According to NPR and the BBC, Bush's AIDS programs in Africa have saved countless lives, and he deserves to be lauded for this. Secondly, though I fear that this accomplishment will come to naught as it will likely be cancelled by a cash-strapped Obama administration due to the tough economic climate, Bush did direct NASA to begin work on manned missions to both the moon and Mars. And while this may just seem like something I like because I am a science fiction geek that isn't really important, in truth, in the long run, there is nothing more important to the future of the human race than making sure we aren't all living on the same planet. Because another extinction-level event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs isn't only likely but inevitable, and if we have all our eggs in one basket, it will be the end of us.

Now, some may wonder why I don't include the surge in Bush's accomplishments. Perhaps some would think I am unwilling to admit I was wrong about the surge, since I vigorously opposed it, and yet things are, by all accounts, in much better shape in Iraq since the surge took place. But I am willing to admit when I am wrong. I just don't know if I'm wrong here or not. The truth is that I don't know if the surge worked. And, whether he admits it or not, neither does Bush, and whether they admit it or not, neither do the neocons. Why not? Because, at the same time the surge started, the US military also started paying Sunni insurgents to stop fighting us and start fighting Al-Qaeda. Now, that's not necessarily a bad idea. It's not clear yet how that, ultimately, is going to work out, because it's not clear how long we're going to be willing to keep paying the Sunnis and what they might do after we stop paying them not to fight us. But the point is that I opposed the plan I was told about: the surge. I'm not sure what I would have thought about the surge + paying Sunnis not to fight us. And the people on the right who argued for the surge who now claim the surge worked? They were supporting the surge, not the surge + paying Sunnis not to fight us. I'm not saying it was illegitimate for the Bush regime to change its strategy or to use a multi-pronged strategy; it certainly was. It's actually wise to do so. (Though, once again, I'm not necessarily endorsing the ones they actually chose). But it does change the landscape of the debate in a way that makes talking about "the surge" as an independent entity mostly meaningless. We can debate about the Bush regime's overall strategy for the past two years or so, but to talk about the surge as a discrete event borders on the ridiculous. That's why I haven't done so, won't, and haven't.

So, anyway, how to sum up eight years? I could go on and on: Gonzales, US Attorneys, Katrina, Abu-Graib, Gitmo, warrantless wiretapping, Patriot Act, Harriet Miers, Halliburton, Rumsfeld's incompetence, the infamous Bin Laden daily intelligence brief, intelligence failures about WMDs in Iraq, Bush gazing into Putin's soul, Cheney shooting a guy in the face, failing to capture Bin Laden, military tribunals, unconstitutional "faith-based" initiatives (that look like they're here to stay), ban on stem-cell research, attempting to destroy social security, squandering a budget surplus and running up an enormous debt, "free speech" zones, the housing bubble, Cheney claiming executive powers for the VP but that the VP isn't in the executive branch, the "axis of evil" speech, letting North Korea get nuclear weapons, failing to engage with Iran and squandering the goodwill of the world after 9/11, signing statements, attempting to do away with habeus corpus, flouting the Geneva Conventions, extraordinary rendition, "losing" e-mails, abuse of executive privelege, the Valerie Plame scandal, push-polling, false claims of voter and registration fraud, illegal political hiring at the Justice Department...

And I'm sure I could think of more. But the fact is that The Onion, in one of its amazing moments of prescience, summed up the Bush regime before Bush even took office, way back in 2000, with an article with a headline that could not have been more perfect:

BUSH: OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY IS FINALLY OVER

As An Example...

2009-01-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

In this post over at The Agitator, a libertarian blog that I agree with more often than Volokh Conspiracy but still disagree with about half the time, the author takes "evangelical" atheists to task:

I’ve never really understood the evangelical atheists’ obsession with removing the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.
Seems to me that the real problem here—whether you’re atheist, agnostic, or devout—is the idea that we’re forcing school kids to take a loyalty oath to a swatch of cloth.

I won't get into the whole issue of why the phrase "evangelical atheist" is nonsensical and focus on the issue I want to use this as an example of: how often I notice criticism leveled at a particular person or group's opinion or position because it isn't the position those leveling the criticism would take. Instead of actually pointing out a flaw of position X, this form of argumentation seems to assert that those who voiced position X really should have taken position Y, and so position X is wrong or inadequate. We aren't told why, of course, position Y is better, of course. It's so obvious! Anyone can see it. Simply by pointing out the existence of position Y, it seems, those leveling the criticism seem to think we will see how it superior and agree.

The Agitator asks, "Why are atheists appalled by forcing school kids to utter the phrase 'under God,' but seemingly unbothered by requiring them to pledge a loyalty oath to their government?" Why wouldn't they be? What do the two things have to do with each other? The Agitator, whose bailiwick is libertarianism and anti-statism, is quite naturally bothered by a loyalty pledge to the state whose excesses and encroachments into the liberties of the people he chronicles on a daily basis. He's an agnostic, not an atheist, and religious liberty doesn't seem to be one of his major focuses. On the other hand, an atheist (or a theist) whose main focus is on religious liberty is naturally going to be more concerned with the "under God" part of the pledge and its infringement on religious liberty, and its indoctrination of kids into unthinking religosity, then the loyalty oath part of the pledge.

There was a sketch on "Mr. Show" once where that was about white people appropriating and profiting from black culture. It was pretty funny. A friend of mine, at the time, said of the sketch, "Yeah, that's great, but they didn't have the balls to point out all the ways black people appropriate and profit from white culture, did they? No, that might get them into trouble." I didn't follow up on that comment, because I didn't want to get into an argument about racism with him at that moment, but the point is that he acted as if, because the show could have done some other sketch he thought they should have done that would have reflected his opinion, that somehow the opinion in the sketch they did put on was automatically invalidated. Without him having to make an argument, just like The Agitator didn't actually make an argument why we should be more bothered by kids being forced to make a loyalty oath to the state than one to an invisible magical friend. Neat trick, that.

Taken a bit further, that rhetorical trick can invalidate almost anyone's opinion on anything. Go to a protest about gay rights and ask everyone why they don't care about breast cancer and women's health. Go to a Komen walk for breast cancer and ask them why they don't care about genocide in Darfur. Go up to the people who volunteer at the pet shelter and ask them why they don't care about homeless people. No matter what good people try to do, you can always point out they could be doing some other good. No matter what someone cares about, you can always point out they could care about something else.

It's sort of ironic, in this particular case, that a libertarian is making the implicit argument that everyone else should, by default, I guess, care about the same issues he does. He may not want goverment telling us all how to think, but he certainly doesn't show a lot of respect for others' right to think for themselves and not think like him, does he? Especially when he uses derogatory terms like "evangelical" atheist.

Jeesh.

Hamas and Democratically-Elected Governments

2009-01-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

One further thought while I'm thinking about Gaza and Hamas. I've been hearing from a lot of people ever since the Palestinians elected Hamas and Israel, the US, and the EU put sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, since Hamas has not renounced its stance that Israel does not have the right to exist, and the US considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization. I hear a lot that this is wrong, that this is a rejection of democracy, that the West shouldn't have asked for democracy then rejected the results. Since the West wanted the Palestinians to have a democratic government and Hamas was elected to power democratically, the West is hypocritical not to "accept" the decision of the Palestinian people and be willing to deal with Hamas.

Regardless of the merits of whether Hamas should, indeed, be considered a terrorist organization and whether or not the refusal of the US and other nations to deal with Hamas (the organization, apart from the government) is appropriate, the basic argument, that by promoting democracy the US and EU somehow commit themselves to deal with whatever government another nation elects, as long as it is elected democratically, is, in my opinion, absurd on its face. A democratically-elected government can take all sorts of forms and shapes, all sorts of positions, and can be an enemy or friend of other democratic states. I see no reason that support of democracy as a concept and a governing principle automatically must include support for every choice made democratically in every democratic state.

Further, I reject the notion that the US, EU, and Israel choosing not to deal or have relations with a Hamas-led, democratically-elected Palestinian authority government is a "rejection" of democracy or a rejection of the choice of the Palestinian people. It is simply a consequence of the choice the Palestinian people have made in choosing their leaders. Nothing about the concept of democracy compels other democratic nations to ratify or support the choices of the people of another nation. Witholding aid and support, which is the main US policy adopted in response to Hamas' electoral victory that I have heard criticized, is the US choosing not to ratify or support the particular choice of leadership the Palestinian people made when they chose Hamas to lead their government. It is not an idictment of democracy in general, simply an indictment of this particular democratically-made choice. Getting to choose your leaders also means having to live with the consequences of those choices. If you get a whole shitload of foreign aid from a nation that considers one of the parties running in your election a terrorist organization, and that foreign aid will probably stop if you elect that party, then you, the people, as voters, are choosing to accept that consequence when you choose to vote for that party.

That doesn't mean it isn't a sucky choice when there are only a couple of legitimate choices and the other one is hopelessly corrupt (as was apparently the case Fatah, which was one of the main reasons Palestinians voted for Hamas). But democracy also sucks sometimes and involves hard choices. And I don't mean that in a flip way: I don't think democracy works all that incredibly well in the US, either, and there are lots of things that should be changed here that never will be because the system won't allow it. But, nevertheless, the Palestinian people had the choice whether or not to vote for the party that was considered a terrorist organization by other nations that provided critical aid to Palestine and its people. They chose to do so. It would be a perversion of democracy to take away their right to make their own choices and live with the consequences for the US and EU act as if the Palestinians were little children who didn't understand the consequences of their own actions and act as if they didn't elect leaders who did not recognize the right of Israel -- Palestine's putative partners in the peace process -- to exist and were (according to the US) terrorists.

The US, EU, and Israel did not "reject" the results of the Palestinian elections. They accepted the results and reacted accordingly. They did not "reject" the democratic will of the Palestinian people nor did they "reject" the democratic process. They accepted both and reacted accordingly. As nations do when other nations act and change governments.

Democratic nations can and do clash. They can and do have competing interests. If someday the entire world had only democratic nations, we would not see an end to conflict and strife between and within nations. We would not see an end to repressive regimes, terrorism, religious persecution, racial intolerance, or wars of conquest. All those things can happen in democracies. If North Korea became a democracy but one still bent on conquering the South and threatening the US with possible nuclear strikes, should the US really change its policy toward it just because it became a democracy? Would that make sense? Would failing to engage with a newly-democratic but still meglomaniacal North Korea mean the US was hypocritical an anti-democracy and didn't "respect" the choice of the North Korean people?

When/if we leave Iraq, there is, in my opinion, an excellent chance that they will establish a democratic Muslim theocracy. That's what the Shi'ite majority wants, I think, and what many of the Kurds and Sunnis are afraid of, and one of the reasons they aren't excited about democracy. Because democracy doesn't have to be Jeffersonian. It can come paired with a lot of things Americans wouldn't, by and large, recognize as democratic: theocracy, communism, radical authoritarianism, etc., etc. Lots of people here in the US would like the US to be a Christian theocracy. Still a democracy (well, a republic, technically), but one ruled explicity by Christians by Christian tenets. Democracy doesn't forbid that. Democracy is fine with that. The Constitution and the First Amendment forbid it. Not Democracy.

Democracy comes in lots of forms. Expecting the US and EU to support them all is naive. And, if the Palestinians truly expected to be able to elect a group like Hamas into power and there to be no consequences, well, they got a chance to learn a lesson in democracy: elections, votes, and choices have power, and consequences. Use them wisely, because you will have to live with the results.

Y'all Probably Already Know This, But...

2009-01-12T10:50:00.001-08:00

In this post at Volokh Conspiracy the poster makes the frequent but inaccurate claim that the Nazis were democratically elected to power in Nazi Germany. I've probably already covered this territory here before, but since I wrote a rather lengthy comment over there, I thought I would repost it here:

_________________________________________

The OP makes an inapt comparison between voters in Germany voting the Nazi Party into power and Palestinian voters voting Hamas into power. As detailed in Henry Ashby Turner Jr.'s book Hitler's Thirty Days To Power, the Nazi Party never won a majority in any national election in Germany and Hitler was never elected to any government post. But, though in December of 1932 he looked to be finished politically in Germany, through a series of inspired back-room political dealings and gross miscalculations and undersestimation of him by by his political enemies, Hitler managed to get himself appointed Chancellor of Germany by aging and ailing President Hindenberg (Hindenberg, the President, incidentally, was elected).

Sure enough, after Hitler managed to consolidate power, set fire to the Reichstag and kicked most non-Nazi members of the legislature out, and then assumed the duties of both the President and the Chancellor without an election when Hindenberg died, he became wildly popular and probably would have won an election, but in the event, the fact is that the Nazis never won a national election in Germany, never won a majority of seats in Reichstag, and never won an election for President. Hitler took power by getting an aging and addled war hero President to appoint him to the Chancellorship. The Nazis were not elected democratically, though they eventually enjoyed wide support.

Though, since many of the economic policies and reforms that Hitler got credit for after he ascended to power were actually put in place by preceding Weimar governments, it is unlikely that the Nazis would ever have ascended to power without having it handed to them by Hindenberg. Once in power, the Nazis greatly benefited from being at the top to create support they could not have garnered otherwise.

One further note: Though at various times and to various levels of effect the Nazis played down their antisemitism when it suited them, they were never all that shy about their intention to destroy European Jewry. As a commenter above noted, the failure wasn't in the Nazis making the destruction of the Jews a plank in their policy, but rather in the world believing the Nazis would actually follow through on it.

Or, in some cases, a failure in the German people and the world to do its homework. For, while Hitler did spell out his intention to destroy the Jews (referring to them as a bacillus to be wiped out) in Mein Kampf, and post-1933 a majority of German homes (and the homes of every Nazi Party member) contained a copy of the book, it was so poorly written, boring, and difficult to get through that it was commonly joked amongst high-ranking Nazi functionaries that it was the most-purchased but least-read book in the Reich.

In any case, comparing the Palestinians electing Hamas to the Germans electing Hitler and the Nazis is an inapt comparison that fails to make the original poster's point. Nazi Germany is an example of a democratically-elected government turning power over to a violent, dictatorial government, ala Star Wars, not an example of the people of a democracy choosing an organization with a history of terrorist activity as its democratically-elected government.

Israel and Palestine

2009-01-12T07:23:00.001-08:00

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, a site I enjoy even though I disagree with a great deal of what is posted there, especially in the comments, has become a hotbed of controversy over the recent Israeli bombing and ground attacks upon Hamas in the Gaza Strip.* Partisans on boths sides have been demonizing the other, and I've learned all kinds of interesting things, like the fact that CNN has secret Hitlerian plans to destroy the Jews and bring about a new Holocaust, that the ICRC is ardently anti-Jew, and the fact that no one is in the streets protesting the Sri Lankan government's attacks on the Tamil Tigers is proof that opposition to Israel's attacks in Gaza is really just thinly-veiled anti-semitism. Oh, and that the left thinks that Palestinians are "soft and cuddly" and all want Hamas to win.

I personally have two acquaintances who are on opposite sides of this conflict, ideologically. One sides with Israel, thinks Israel can do no wrong, while the other is the same with the Palestinians. Frankly, I never really need to discuss the latest events in the region with either one, because I can pretty accurately guess each one's opinion in advance. For instance, when Israel began its most recent bombing campaign on Gaza, I correctly predicted that my pro-Israeli acquaintance would argue that no sovereign nation could fail to protect its citizens and allow rockets to rain down on them without responding. And I correctly predicted that my pro-Palestinian friend would note how ineffective the rocket attacks had been and therefore call Israel's attacks disproportionate to the threat. I can pretty much see the arguments and points for both sides and see why the arguments for both sides are compelling to those advancing them. (I also pretty much nailed each one's counters to those arguments as well, but I won't go further with this, as it isn't my main point).

I also see why none of those arguments matter in the least and those expending great amounts of time and effort making them are wasting their effort. There's a reason that, though I have a great deal of affinity for Israel and the plight of the Jewish people, before and after the destruction of the second Temple, during the Diaspora, before and after the Holocaust, given the study I have done for my writing and the fact that they have suffered over two thousand years of persecution at the hands of Christians from religiously-motivated antisemitism, I still have trouble getting too worked up over the latest events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and don't really strongly support one side or the other.

The reason is that the conflict cannot be solved because the two sides have mutually exclusive goals. At least, the more radical elements on both sides do, and those radical elements will be sure to scuttle any peace that compromises on those mutually exclusive goals. This has already happened on several occasions. And, as such, peace is essentially impossible.

A few examples of these mutually exclusive goals are: both sides must control all of Jerusalem; both sides must control the Temple Mount; both sides must have the Galilee; etc., etc. Any peace deal, for instance, in which either side gives up control of any part of Jerusalem will be scuttled by the radical elements of its own side. Guaranteed. Neither side will relinquish control of Jerusalem. Neither side will relinquish control of the Temple Mount. (Even now Jewish radicals seek to retake the Mount and raze the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque).

So, the ceaseless arguments about what is best for peace and two-state or one-state solutions and how best to neuter Hamas and whether it is better for Israel to deal with Hamas or Fatah are all pretty much pointless, because, ultimately, the whole idea that peace between the two sides is a fiction. Hamas, by refusing to recognize the right of Israel to exist, is simply refusing to deny the truth, to play make-believe. (Though I think they are wrong, of course, and I believe Israel does have a right to exist). They are simply saying straight out what is true of many Israelis and Palestinians, that there is no real way for them to coexist due to their mutually exclusive goals.

Does this mean that all Palestinians and all Israelis feel this way? That none of them desire peace? That there aren't many, perhaps even a majority, who would compromise on these mutually exclusive goals for peace? No. It doesn't. But the problem is that in the highly charged atmosphere of conflict it only takes a few radicals to lob a rocket or blow up a school to derail any peace initiative. And neither side can control its radical elements sufficiently to prevent this from happening.

So, in the end, I don't get too worked up about who is right and who is wrong with any particular action, incursion, intafada, or whatever in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I see it as another chapter in an unfolding, probably never-ending tragedy that is going to just continue eating up lives probably for as long as I live and long after that. I see no particular reason to argue about who is right or wrong in this particular case. Both are right. Both are wrong.

And as far as I can tell, they always will be.

* Did you know that a kind of light, airy fabric called 'gauze' originally came from Gaza and is where we get the word gauze?

Darth Cheney Strikes Again

2008-12-17T12:21:00.001-08:00

So, in a recent "exit" interview, the gift that keeps on giving, Dick "Darth" Cheney, finally admitted what those of use who don't believe everything we read on the Drudge Report or hear from Hannity or Rush Limbaugh have known for years: All the reasons we were given in 2002 for going to war with Iraq were just excuses. They were going to invade Iraq anyway. Rove and Bush have been trying not to give away the game, saying that maybe we wouldn't have gone to war if the intelligence had been better. (Even though we actually had that better intelligence and they just ignored it).

But Cheney, the guy who, after all, is the one who went over to the CIA and stood over analysts' desks until they wrote what he wanted them to write, is blowing Rove's and Bush's story. In his interview Cheney just came right out and admitted that they would have went to war no matter what the intelligence said. Even if we'd know for sure he didn't have any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons? Yep. Why? Because Saddam wanted them. Because Saddam had plans to make them again sometime in the future! Not because he had an active WMD program, mind you, but because he fantasized of having one again sometime, someday. That was enough, according to Cheney. Oh, and because, according to Cheney, Saddam was going to make chemical and biological agents, put them in perfume bottles, and send them to America! Oh no!

That not only sounds like the plot of a Batman movie, it was the plot of a Batman movie. You know, the first one, with Michael Keaton, cleverly named Batman. The Joker did put nerve agents in cosmetics and grooming products.

But get this: Cheney acts like we knew Saddam was planning to unleash this eeeevil yet unlikely plot when we went to war and it factored into the Bush regime's thinking at the time. But they didn't know. This little piece of high-school level revenge fantasy that Saddam had dreamed up wasn't discovered until after the invasion, and was only brought to light in the Iraq Study Group's report several years later.

So, even if we are to take seriously the idea that the Joker aka Saddam was really thinking about trying this B-movie terror plan, which would almost certainly fail for a whole host of reasons not worth going into here, and that his daydreaming about such a dumb plot actually constitutes a legitimate reason to invade a country, bomb the living shit out of its people, and send them on a path of chaos and civil war they are still struggling with six years later, it still doesn't matter, because despite Cheney's justification is anachronistic because we didn't know about this dipshit plan back in 2002!!!

Notwithstanding that if a bad guy wanting WMDs and fantasizing about having a WMD program someday is reason enough to invade his country and topple his regime, we'd be running all over the world invading countries at the drop of a hat. Hey, maybe that's why we invaded Iraq instead of North Korea! Saddam just wanted a nuclear program and dreamed about having one when he jerked himself off. Kim Jong-Il actually had one. So he didn't qualify. We only invade countries whose leaders wish to have a WMD program, apparently, not those that do. That'd also explain why we invaded Iraq but not Iran, right?

But, while his latest goalpost-moving justification is bullshit, Cheney has finally accidentally told the truth for perhaps the first time in his eight years in office. He has admitted the ultimate truth behind the disastrous military adventure in Iraq, one it took over half of the people of this country six years to grasp: The Bush regime and the neocons running it invaded Iraq because they wanted to. 9/11 and the "war on terror" was the excuse, not the reason. WMDs, yellow cake uranium, ties to Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin-Laden, those were just excuses too. The neocons didn't like Saddam, they wanted his oil, they wanted to go on a military/nation-building/democracy-creating/oil stealing adventure, they wanted to do it in Iraq, and they did. And Cheney has finally let the cat out of the bag.

He admitted we would have gone in even if we'd had the correct intelligence. What more do you need to know?

Oh, and by the way, he also admitted to personally sanctioning torture. Which, by our own rules, laws, and traditions, let alone international law, is a war crime. Very, very lucky for Cheney we haven't signed on to the International Criminal Court. But I do seriously wonder if Cheney will not be able to travel abroad anymore after he leaves office for fear of being arrested for war crimes, like Kissinger. I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe he'll be exempt because he's a former VP and no country will dare to piss off the US by arresting him, or maybe they won't want to take the chance of starting an international incident since they'd have to deal with his secret service detail (I don't think Kissinger has one, does he? Cheney certainly will as a former VP, right?)

It'll be interesting.

Joe Scarborough in a Lather

2008-12-17T08:06:00.000-08:00

On MSNBC's Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough has been in a lather over the media's supposed "failure" and "bias" over the fact that the media sent people to Wasilla to pore over Sarah Palin's record and didn't send people to Chicago to check out Obama's links to Blagojevich or to check out Rahm Emmanuel's claim this summer that he and Obama ran Blagojevich's gubernatorial campaign, a claim from which he has since backed off of.

Which is just stupid. Here's why.

First: The media was already in Chicago all in a lather over Obama's links to William Ayers. Second, though Blagojevich was known to be under investigation at the time, then, as now, it was known that Obama's ties with Blagojevich were never very close. Third, whatever Rahm Emmanuel said in the summer wasn't going to draw as much attention as whatever Sarah Palin said when she became the VP candidate because Emmanuel wasn't on the goddamned ticket! Sure, now Emmanuel's claim seems significant, either because it indicates stronger ties to Blagojevich or because Emmanuel was exaggerating his and Obama's importance in that campaign (or, as Scarborough says, because Emmanuel was "lying.") And, because now we know Emmanuel is Obama's Chief of Staff pick, which, of course, we didn't know back then, and so, Emmanuel wasn't all that important back then.

If we give Scarborough that Emmanuel lied about his and Obama's role in Blagojevich's gubernatorial campaign, at the time Emmanuel said it, of course it didn't trigger as big a media frenzy as lies Sarah Palin told. Emmanuel wasn't on the ticket! So why would anyone care? Oooh, big story: Illinois Congressman with ties to Obama lies about him and Obama running the campaign of some Governor you've never heard of. Whoa! Hold onto your seat. That sure is as big a story as, oh, say, the Governor of Alaska, plucked from obscurity, put on the Republican ticket as the VP candidate, suddenly thrust into the spotlight, standing in front of a nationwide audience at the Republican National Convention and personally lying directly to the nation about how she said "no to that bridge to nowhere." Sure, it's just bias that caused the media to jump all over her history and career when she was under investigation for ethics violations at the time she was nominated and also started off lying about her record right off the freakin' bat but not to jump all over a lie made by a congressman who wasn't even on the Obama ticket that wasn't backed up by the Obama campaign and therefore had no real relevance to the campaign at all.

Sure. It's just bias. The media never spent any time poring over any of Obama's past and connections at all because he is a Democrat. They never spent any time on Reverend Wright or on William Ayers or his time as a kid in Indonesia and whether he was a Muslim and attended a madrasseh when he was a kid. Not at all, no. They let all that go because he was a Democrat. And they only sent people to Wasilla to look into Palin's record because she was a Republican and the media are biased and out to get her, not because she was obscure, not because no one knew who she was and so finding out was legitimate news, and certainly not because she'd only been on the national stage for five seconds and yet was already lying about her record and was already under an ethics investigation in Alaska. No, couldn't have been.

Because the only reason the media would treat one politician differently than another is party affiliation. The fact that one politician came onto the scene and immediately drew a bull's eye on herself has nothing to do with it. The fact that one politician immediately lost any possible benefit of the doubt she might have had with media or the general public by blatantly lying about her record in her first national appearance has nothing to do with it. The only possible explanation, according to Joe Scarborough, is bias.

Come on. The media went after Obama when they could and when there was a story. The media hounded Sarah Palin -- and, admittedly, they did hound her -- from almost the moment she stepped onto the national stage for one reason and one reason only: She gave them so much material to work with. She gave them story after story after story. There wouldn't have been a gaggle of reporters in Wasilla if she hadn't made it so obvious there was a gold mine of stories there.

But, what, exactly, would the story have been if the media had "gone to Chicago" to investigate Emmanuel's assertion about Blagojevich's campaign like Scarborough insists they should have done? They would have learned that, in fact, Obama and Emmanuel didn't really run Blagojevich's campaign. Woo! Big story. Wow. That'll light up the front page. Congressman lies to aggrandize himself. News at eleven. Where do you go with that?

Dumb Thoughts

2008-12-16T10:20:00.000-08:00

A few dumb thoughts that occurred to me on or around the election...

If, when Obama visited Bush at the White House, he suddenly lunged at Bush with a knife and tried to kill him, who would the Secret Service shoot? Conversely, if Bush lunged at Obama with a knife, who would they shoot? No points for answers like, "They'd try to separate them." Assume they have to shoot one to save the other.

Does the President get to pick his own e-mail address? That would rule. I'd pick something like Vader27@whitehouse.gov.

Can the President pick his own Secret Service codename? I know they always say that "The Secret Service has picked the President's codename," but they never say how they pick it. That is to say, do they really pick it, or do they ask the President what he wants? Because if I were the President, I would totally pick "The Pump." That be awesome. For four years (because, clearly, if the things on this list are what I am thinking about, I'm not getting reelected), the Secret Service guys will have to whisper into their little radio thingies, "The Pump is moving." Tee hee!

If I were President, every so often, I would go out into the West Wing and go into some functionary's cubicle and stand behind him (or her) while he tries to work. I would stand there for like half an hour. I wouldn't say anything. If he asks me if I need anything, I'd be like, "No." Then I'd just leave and never mention it again.

If I were President, I would start an edit war in Wikipedia under a pseudonym over my own article by constantly putting false and vicious rumors into it. I would never let my defenders know that it was me they were trying to protect my article from.

Does the President have to follow the White House computer use policy? That is to say, will the President get in trouble for surfing for porn or playing online poker on White House computers? I don't mean political trouble, like it getting out into the papers. I mean, will he get cited somehow by the IT guy or someone for violating the policy? Will he have his password taken away?

Does the President have administrator privileges on his computer in the White House? (I'm given to understand that Obama will be the first President to have a computer on his desk, so this question may not be answerable yet). Or does he have to ask the sys admin any time he wants to load software on his computer?

Joe Biden famously rides the train back and forth to Wilmington, DE, every day when he's working in Washington because he's the only Senator with no residence in DC. If I were him, I would keep riding the train every day to Wilmington (yes, I know the VP's residence is in Annapolis, but that's not as far so it's not as funny), just so that every damned day the Secret Service has to clear the train, check it out, ride the train with me, etc., etc.,

You know what would be, for me, the most amazing thing about being President, the thing that would almost make it worth it? It's that when you tell someone to do something, they have to do that shit. I'm not talking about abusing your power or doing stupid things. I mean, like seriously, there's not many other jobs where people really have to do what you tell them. People can quit, sure, except military people, but they aren't going to. Even if you are the CEO of some big company, if you tell your people they have to work over the weekend or make them stay all night to prepare something too many times they'll quit. But when you are the President and you say, "I need to have an analysis of all these options on my desk in the morning," and it's 6 pm, those people aren't going home. They have to do that shit. They're going to be there all night and there's going to be an analysis on your desk in the morning. It would be nice to be able to think big picture and know that stuff like that is just going to get done. It doesn't seem like power, but in a sense, that is real power, the most real power the President has. Within the White House, his word is law, and when he wants something, that shit gets done. Period.

Second Stringers?

2008-12-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

My first thought, in relation to the incident of the Iraqi reporter throwing his shoes at Bush, was apparently the same as everyone else's: I was impressed at how quick Bush's reflexes were. (Best joke on this topic from The Rachel Maddow Show last night: "To dodge the shoe, Bush did something he's never done before-- lean to the left.")

The second thing that occurred to me was to wonder where the hell the Secret Service guys were? I mean, okay, you're not expecting the guy to throw a shoe ("Honestly, who throws a shoe? That really hurt!"), so I can forgive the first one, but the guy manages to take his other shoe off and throw it before a Secret Service guys gets anywhere near him? What the fuck?

I mean, if that guy had a gun, or even a bunch of poison darts in his pocket he could have gotten like ten shots or throws off in that time! Isn't the President's Secret Service detail supposed to be more on the ball than that, especially when the President is in a dangerous place like, oh, say, Iraq???

I'm wondering if Bush has the second stringers now and Obama has the first stringers. Do you think? Are the young guys ready like coiled springs to leap into action in Chicago and the old guys about to retire with bad knees thinking about their pensions traveling with Bush?

One wonders.

That's What Unions Are For

2008-12-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

I just had to post after my long absence because it's been bothering me that Republican Senators like Mitch McConnell seem to think they're making some important point by constantly highlighting that workers unionized auto workers represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) working at big three auto plants make a higher hourly wage than non-unionized workers working at foreign-owned plants.

Well, freakin' duh! The whole goddamned point of forming a union to represent workers through collective bargaining is to get better wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions. The UAW would be a pretty shitty union if it didn't get its workers better pay and benefits than non-unionized workers in foreign-owned plants. In fact, there would be no reason for the UAW to exist if it didn't, because there would be no benefit. It isn't surprising that UAW workers get paid more than non-unionized workers; it would be surprising if they frickin' didn't!

Which is beside the point of whether UAW workers get so much in pay and benefits that the prevent the big three from being competitive and profitable. And McConnell knows it, because though he wants us to believe that is the problem he's addressing, it isn't. That isn't the argument McConnell and his cronies are making.

No, McConnell wasn't saying he couldn't support a bailout of the big three auto companies unless the UAW agreed to cuts in workers' pay to a level that would allow the big three to be competitive with foreign-owned automakers... No, he said that he would only support the bailout if the UAW was willing to reduce workers' wages to the same level as non-union workers in foreign-owned plants like in his state.

Which, as he well knows, would defeat the entire point of the union. The point for him wasn't making sure that the domestic automakers would be competitive in the future. It was to bust the union. That's what he wants. That's why he keeps disingenuously acting like somehow the fact that UAW workers earn more than non-union workers is somehow wrong or dishonest, when, as he well knows, it's exactly what we would (and should) expect.

Maybe the UAW has negotiated too good a deal. Maybe the legacy costs of retirees that the domestic automakers are paying plus better wages and benefits are making it difficult for them to compete with foreign automakers without those costs. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that's really the problem. If domestic cars were better made and more reliable, if they had better warranties, if domestic dealers and service representatives weren't such scumbags, then more people would buy domestic. But for well-nigh thirty years no the management of these companies have been making bad decisions. They didn't start making more fuel efficient vehicles after the oil crisis in the 70s, and, in fact, lobbied for the loophole that let them build SUVs and avoid fuel efficiency standards (and also pushed through tarriffs that made SUVs profitable). They failed to make their vehicles as reliable and as high quality as foreign vehicles. And they failed to adapt to a changing marktplace. Further, even if the sweet deal the UAW has were the one of the main problems the domestic auto makers are facing, that would be management's fault too, because they were the ones who negotiated such a shitty deal for the automakers with the union!!!

The fault, then, lies with the automakers and the management of those companies, not with the union. The union's job is to get the best deal it can for its workers. We all have the right to negotiate the best possible deal for our employment with our employers and auto workers are no different. Maybe now that the automakers are facing ruin the UAW will have to and should have to make concessions to keep the companies afloat, but that should be as part of overall cutbacks and as part of a cooperative effort with the companies, not as scapegoats and not as a hostile effort forced on it by the management that drove the companies into the ground and not by a hostile Congress or administration that blames the auto workers for the demise of the auto industry while never once questioning the pay of hedge-fund managers and other white-collar Wall Street assholes who had a lot more to do with the failures in the financial industry than the UAW and its workers do with the failure of the auto industry.

Anyway, McConnell, shut the fuck up and stop acting scandalized that workers who have the advantage of being part of a union make more money than the poor bastards in your state who aren't in a union. You and I both know that's why workers form unions, that's what unions are for, to empower workers to get fairer and better wages and working conditions, and you and I both know that's why you want to break the unions: because your real constituents are rich assholes like those guys on Wall Street you gave all that money to, and you aren't scandalized at all about how much a UAW worker makes. You just want to make sure the rich people get to keep more of their money and have to pay the poor people who make their cars less.

Keith Olbermann

2008-07-21T09:29:00.001-07:00

I read in a blog recently that Keith Olbermann, who hosts the show Countdown on MSNBC, had turned his show into the left-wing equivalent of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly. That Olbermann had become so blatantly partisan that he had lost all credibility and had sunk to Limbaugh's and O'Reilly's level. I hadn't watched Olbermann in a while, so I decided to watch a little and see what I thought.

Naturally, when I started this experiment, Olbermann was on vacation and the show was being guest-hosted by Rachael Maddows (I believe is her name), whose regular job is hosting a radio show on the clearly left-wing Air America radio network. That Olbermann chose her as his guest host did seem to be prima facie evidence of a strong left-leaning bias in the program.

When Olbermann got back, I watched, and here's what I found.

Countdown is clearly a show coming from the left. Olbermann pillories Republicans and conservatives and defends Democrats and progressives fairly unrepetently. I don't see much of an attempt to present a balanced picture.

Despite this, I think it is wrong to call Olbermann the left's answer to Rush or Hannity or O'Reilly. Because, though Olbermann's show shares with those hosts' shows a slanted political view, there is one big difference that I was able to discern: While Olbermann does choose stories that present the left in the best light and the right in the worst, Olbermann doesn't blatantly lie and make shit up to make his point.

I didn't find that anything Olbermann said was false or untrue. From what I saw, he doesn't intentionally decieve the audience in order to get them to believe what he is saying. He certainly does choose his stories with an eye to supporting the positions of the left, but he chooses real, true stories to present. He chooses the best of the true stories out there that support his view of things.

It's not unbiased journalism, to be sure. There's definite glee in how Olbermann points out the mistakes Republicans (particularly McCain) make and a definite protective edge in how he refutes the bullshit that is said about Obama. But, by and large, he doesn't seem willing to lie on a nightly basis to make his point,* in contrast to the right-wingers I've mentioned above.

Now, I don't know if that's because Olbermann is a better person, or simply because, as a quote I have used before says, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." It may be that Olbermann doesn't have to lie to make his point. I'm not sure. But I think it is inaccurate to call Olbermann the "O'Reilly [or Limbaugh] of the left," because the fact that Olbermann isn't a lying sack of shit like those guys are is a significant difference. (To me, at least).

So, to say that Olbermann, due to his obvious bias, has no more credibility than an O'Reilly or Limbaugh is to say that it makes no difference if one tells the truth or not. Whether one has a political bias or not isn't the most important thing in terms of credibility, to me. I'd give more credence to someone biased but who tells the truth than someone who has no discernible bias but spews bullshit all the time.

* I'm not saying that Olbermann has never been wrong, or even that he's never said anything that turned out to be untrue. I'm saying that, from what I could see, Olbermann isn't habitually lying his ass off, making bunches of untrue assertions night after night, as O'Reilly, Rush, and Hannity do. You only have to watch, say, O'Reilly for about a minute before he says something that is blatantly false, something that has been completely and utterly refuted, something he can't possibly say over and over again without knowing it is complete and utter bullshit.

Poker is a Harsh Mistress...

2008-07-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

I've been playing a lot of online poker for the past six or eight months. Mostly no-limit Hold 'Em tournaments. I mostly lost at first, then I studied, read a lot of books, spent time looking back at my hand history and figuring out what I was doing wrong. Then I went through a long period where I pretty much broke even, giving back what I won in one tournament through the buy-ins to all the others I didn't win.

Now, I've moved up to being a (marginally) winning player. I am up around $4000 in the past two months. I cashed in seven tournaments in three days at one point. I have won a number of tournaments, including on where I picked up $2700 and one where I won $1295. Just last friday I came in fifth in a small $3 buy-in tourney where I picked up $350.

What's frustrating, though, about improving as a player is that the better you play, the more bad beats you take and the fewer you give out. After all, a bad beat is when you have the best hand compared to your opponent but then your opponent catches whatever miracle card he or she needs to beat you. In order to give your opponent a bad beat, you have to have made a bad play and gone in with the worst hand. So, the better you play, the less often you are playing with the worst hand, and the less often you can give out a bad beat, while you have more opportunities to take one.

But the worst is the beats you just really couldn't see coming, the hands that, even looking back, you can't figure out how you could have gotten away from. Case in point: This weekend, I bought into a relatively small $30 tourney, thinking that the high buy-in (relative to what I usually play) was worth the risk because I had a better chance against fewer players. Well, I lasted exactly one hand.

I had AK off-suit in early position and made a raise of 2 1/2 times the big blind. I had one caller, the big and small blinds folded, and we went to the flop. The flop comes 3 - 10 -A. I flopped top pair and top kicker. I bet about 2/3 of the pot. My opponent called. At this point I'm putting him on middle pair or maybe an Ace with a worse kicker. The turn comes another A! I check, hoping to induce a bet with my trip As, and my opponent obliges. I raise him. There are enough chips in the pot at this point that I'm willing to take it down right there.

He re-raises. I re-raise, and he goes all-in.

All-in? What? So I'm trying to figure out what he could have. He just called me before the flop. So, he probably doesn't have some big pair that I could beat like KK or QQ, since he didn't raise me. He didn't raise me on the flop, either, like I would expect he would if he had something like AT or A3, since those hands would be vulnerable and unwise to slow-play when I bet pre-flop and on the flop. Could he have called a pre-flop raise with something like T3? It's the first hand, so I don't have a read. Maybe. He's in it deep if he did.

But most likely, I'm thinking, he probably has something like AQ or AJ. He's got three As now and thinks he has the best hand, but I have him out-kicked.

Besides, how can you get away from three As? I call.

And, of course, he turns over pocket Ts for a full house, Tens full of Aces. For the uninitiated, the chances of flopping trips with a pocket pair are about 22.5 to 1 against, so the odds weren't high that he had TT or 33. And not very many people have the nerve to just smooth-call when they flop three of a kind and there's an overcard (the A) on the board. Most players (in my experience) would re-raise on the flop, wanting to see right then if I had an A or not.

So, anyway, the river is a blank and I'm out. Maybe a better player than me could have gotten away from that hand, but it's awfully hard to fold trip Aces. Especially online, where players are so aggressive and people often are willing to go all-in on the first hand on a stone-cold bluff.

So, I didn't feel that bad about it. But, it was a little exasperating when it happened again on Sunday.

I'm in early position on the second hand with AK off-suit again. I raise, the small blind folds and the big blind calls. At least I had position. The flop comes 4 - A - 8. My opponent checks. I bet the pot. My opponent calls.

The turn comes with another A. My opponent checks. I bet about half the pot. My opponent comes over the top all-in.

And I'm sitting there, like, what the hell? Come on, he couldn't have pocket 4s or pocket 8s, could he? There's just no way. Two people hitting a 22.5 - 1 card on me in two days? Is that more likely, or is it more like that he's bluffing or has AQ, or AJ? Can I get away from trip Aces?

Well, I already told you I couldn't. He had 44, giving him a full house, fours and aces. River is a blank and I'm out again.

Those are the hands where you look back and try to figure out how you could have gotten away from them. I mean, I can lay down pocket As or KK when I know I'm beat. I can lay down a full house when I've put my opponent on a better full house. But heck, if you aren't willing to go to war with trip Aces and top kicker, when will you go to war?

Ah, the poker, she is a harsh mistress. She punishes bad play and good play when it suits her.

Communism and Atheism

2008-07-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

If you are an atheist, you hear the old canard about how "atheists" were responsible for all the atrocities of the twentieth century. Neglecting the fact that Hitler was Catholic and never renounced his faith and that the Japanese who participated in the rape of Nanking weren't atheists either. But even if we're talking about explicitly atheistic regimes like those of the Soviet Union and communist China, the fact that those regimes were (are) atheistic doesn't prove that atheism inevitably leads to atrocities nor that atheism is inherently destructive.

Because atheism is nothing more than lack of belief in a god or god(s). Just because Stalin and his minions lacked belief in a god or god(s) isn't proof that that is the reason they committed the atrocities they committed. Just because someone is an atheist doesn't mean that you can attribute everything they think or do to the fact that he or she is an atheist. In order to do that, you'd have to show a causal link of some kind between the person's atheism and those acts. Just saying, "Person A is an atheist and did bad things, therefore Person A did bad things because he or she is an atheist" does not make it so.

To demonstrate why this must be true, let us consider that Stalin was also (to my knowledge) not a collector of stamps. He did not participate in philately, the hobby of stamp-collecting, and as such, could be dubbed an a-philatelist (non-stamp collector). Can we then say that a-philately is the cause of the atrocities Stalin committed, and that only an a-philatelist regime could those atrocities happen? Could we say that a-philatelists are responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century? After all, (as far as a I know), none of the great dictators of the 20th century was a philatelist. Not Hitler, not Pol Pot, not Stalin, not Idi Amin...

But, obviously, the fact that none of these men collected stamps cannot be assumed to be the cause of their disregard for human life without further evidence. The fact is, people do things because of what they do believe, not as much because of what they don't believe. All that being an a-philatelist means is that you don't collect stamps. It says very little about what you do do. In the same way, being an atheist means you lack belief in a god or god(s). It says something about what you don't do (worship a god or god(s) or subscribe to a theist religion) but it says very little about what you do do.

Stalin killed because he wanted power and believed he had a right to it. Hitler killed because he believed the Jews and other undesirables were enemies of the German people and were undermining the rightful ascendance of the Aryan people to world domination. Japanese killed Chinese during the rape of Nanking because they believed themselves superior. They did those things because of what they believed, not because of what they didn't believe.

To posit that atheism was the cause of the tragedies perpetrated by atheistic regimes in the 20th century, we would have to see a marked departure from what we have seen from theistic regimes throughout history. That is to say, if theistic regimes never perpetrated mass killings and atrocities, and atheistic regimes did, then we'd have some evidence that atheism was the cause of those atrocities. However, since atheistic regimes seem to differ little from theistic regimes in terms of bloodthirstiness, especially when we consider the fact that the Nazis were not atheists even though the Soviets were, it's difficult to make the argument that atheism was the cause.

As a poster on a blog I read wrote recently, "Vikings breathed air and raided villages and killed the inhabitants. Therefore governments headed by people who breathe air must all be raiders of villages and murderers."

Only Half?

2008-07-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

My mother, arguing against a progressive tax regime wherein the wealthiest pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than do the poor, often says something like, "Well, if you just take away rich people's money through taxes, there's no incentive for people to become entrepeneurs or take risks to get rich, so nobody will do anything and the economy will collapse."

And that's just stupid. Go up to thirty people and ask them what they'd do for a ho-jillion dollars (a million, a hundred million, whatever bunch of money you want to use). Then ask them what they'd do for half a ho-jillion dollars. See how many of them say, "I'd give my left arm for a ho-jillion dollars, but fuck, I wouldn't get out of bed for half a ho-jillion dollars. If I'm only getting half a ho-jillion dollars, I might as well keep working at Burger King for $6.00 an hour." Or even try a third of a ho-jillion dollars.

Guess what? I don't think there are very many people who would take a risk or try to make it big with a new idea for a ho-jillion dollars who wouldn't do it for a third of a ho-jillion dollars. Sure, they might not be happy about the idea of the government taking two-thirds of the money they earned -- who would? -- but it doesn't alter the basic fact that few would be dissuaded from trying to get rich because they'd only get to keep $1 billion dollars if they managed to earn $3 billion dollars.

Of course, my mother's argument also neglects the fact that the wealthier one is, the more one disproportionately benefits from government compared to those who are poorer. Poor people pay taxes to support police forces who often oppress and abuse them, to pay for services that they can only use if they pay additional fees they can't afford*, and to keep in place a legal system that creates immense barriers when they try to compete with the already established wealthy. Whereas government protects the assets of the rich, provides services from the police and other agencies that poor people can't dream of**, provides corporate welfare for their businesses so they can rake in bigger profits, and gives access to the decision-makers resulting in the system continuing to be gamed in their favor.

No one likes taxes. And I'm not sure that it isn't wrong for the government ever to get to keep more of the money someone earns than they do. But the idea that the rich should shoulder less of a burden for supporting government than poor people who can less afford it and also benefit from it less is just ridiculous. For the reasons outlined above as well as many others.

* Like when they charge entrance fees at National Parks. We all pay for the parks with our taxes, but if you can't afford the fee to get into the park, then you don't get to use what your taxes paid for at all. Or roads, really. Your taxes pay for the roads, but if you can't afford the fees for a driver's license, car registration, and insurance, then you aren't allowed to use roads you paid for.
**For instance, when JFK, Jr.'s plane went down off the coast of Massachusetts, the state and Feds mobilized a massive emergency search-and-rescue operation, a huge cost in terms of both money and manpower. No effort on that scale would have been launched if you or I had been flying that plane, let me tell you. The Coast Guard would search for a few days and then the search would be "called off" and that'd be it. There'd be no way that state emergency management, for instance, would be involved if you or I were in that plane, but state emergency managent went into full operations when JFK, Jr.'s plane went down. (I know this from talking to people I worked with who worked that operation).

The Good Ole Days

2007-10-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

I haven't mused here in quite a while, so let's muse a bit, shall we?

I was listening to a local NPR show today which was focusing on the so-called "hook-up" culture now (supposedly) pervading college campuses. The guest was making the case that relationships are (like, totally) out amongst young adults these days, with no "courtship" (the show's word) going on, but rather college kids are just having lots of one-night stands and such.

My first thought, of course, was-- Why wasn't it like that when I was in college?

My second was-- Hey, wait, it was like that when I was in college, just not for me.

My point here is not to wax poetic about all the poon-tang I missed out on because I was a shy, withdrawn, nerd in college, though I could if you really want. But no, I'm getting at something else.

It occurs to me that kids have always spent much of their youth "hooking-up" and that I'm unclear what, exactly, has changed, or why anyone would even think it had. It's common, across the span of human history for each generation to think that successive generations are crazed, immoral beasts about to bring down the collapse of civilization, sort of like how my parents' generation thought '80s heavy metal music was an indication of inevitable moral decline.

Every generation thinks they are living in the "end times" and that "things are always getting worse" and dreams of some mythical "golden age" either of their youth or of some idealized past. You know:

Old person: "It wasn't like this in my day. We didn't listen to the rap music and wear short skirts. We had discipline and dignity and every day a rainbow appeared overhead..."

But, at the exact same time, as each generation gets to child-rearing age and starts having kids, they also think they know everything, have seen everything, and that nothing their kids experience or feel could possibly be unique. You know:

Child: "You just don't understand!"
Parent: "Oh, I understand! I was young once just like you! There's nothing about your life that is unique or that I haven't already been through!"

We've all heard these kinds of things before, from our parents, or perhaps from friends who have become parents, or even you've said them to your kids yourself. But what I find interesting is that, quite often, I think adults hold these two views simultaneously without even realizing it. The same parent who poo-poos the idea that his or her child could possibly have thoughts or feelings he or she hasn't already had turns around and goes off about how he or she can't understand kids today and why they all think they need a cell phone. Those "kids today" are either just carbon copies of their elders, or completely alien, depending on what mood the parent happens to be in.

Well, here's what I think: Things change, but not that much, and certainly not as much between generations as the generations think. I have a really hard time believing that college kids are "hooking-up" and eschewing relationships more now than they were in my day, or in the sixties, or really whenever.

If humans didn't like casual sexual encounters, there wouldn't be so many prohibitions on sexual activity in ancient religious texts like the Bible. Some guy on the NPR show was talking about how casual sex was the result of the weakening of marriage, as if marriage is the natural state and sleeping around is the new innovation. Of course, the truth is that marriage, a societally-sanctioned and enforced contract between two people to be faithful and monogamous, is almost certainly a response to rampant promiscuity, not the preexisting condition it decays into.

If there is any difference between today's "hook-up" college culture and the culture when I went to college, it is simply that there's now a new term -- "hook-up" -- coined for it, which makes it easier to talk about. It's easier to say, "I hooked up with him" than to say, "I fucked him," just like it's easier to say "collateral damage" rather than "murdering innocent civilians." There's probably very little difference in how much sex kids are having. They're just talking about it more.

I don't think this generation is more immoral, lazier, or made of weaker fiber than mine. Their experiences, on the whole, are very similar. Sure, not exactly the same, but is the difference between arguing with your parents about how you want a cell phone that different from arguing with them about how you need your own phone line or arguing with them that you want to hike over to the next farm to see your best friend? Not really.

But I do wonder how it comes about, the psychology of believing both that kids are alien and yet that you know more about them than they do themselves. Of believing that their experiences are trite and no different than your own, but that they still are utterly different than you were.

Why Do Obama and the Mainstream Media Hate America?

2007-10-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

The latest Obama-related flag flap (pun intended.... heh) is that Obama apparently failed to place his hand over his heart during a rendition of the National Anthem, because he hates America. Worse still, is that despite there being no more important news in the world, the mainstream media failed to drop its coverage of the clusterfuck in Iraq, the looming war with Iran, and the failure of the so-called War on Terror to cover 'Anthemgate!' Good lord!

This summer, I was a participant in a 4th of July parade, in full Jedi costume, and at the post-parade picnic they played the National Anthem. I wasn't really sure what to do... after all, in character, my allegiance is to the Republic, not to the US... :^)

Worrying about that is about as stupid as worrying about whether Obama did or did not put his freakin' hand over his heart. Jeesh. It's a dumb PR move, certainly, but doesn't really speak to the man's patriotism one way or the other, and if you can't see that, then I have some land on Tatooine to sell you...

In All Fairness...

2007-10-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

Just to be clear, I think the earmarks Republicans try to insert into bills are usually much more evil and egregious than the Democrats, though neither side should indulge in this odious practice. For instance, Republican Senator and fan of prostitutes David Vitter tried to earmark a hundred grand for a group to push creationism in the schools. No, really.

He withdrew it while still arguing that it was constitutional (hint: it wasn't... that's why the Founders made it the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights), but it's really reprehensible that he put it in there in the first place. Trying to use tax money to lie to schoolchildren and indoctrinate them into your own religion is in a whole other class than trying to use tax money to tell the truth (as much as can be done, given the amount of drugs done at the concert) about a historical event called Woodstock. One violates the constitution. One doesn't. (Hint: The one that is illegal has less to do with Jimi Hendrix than one that is legal).

Why? Why? Why?

2007-10-19T13:22:00.001-07:00

Why in the hell would you even make the kind of remarks that Justice Department voting rights chief John Tanner did recently? He said that voter ID laws, which are thought to disproportionately affect elderly voters who are more likely to lack proper ID, don't affect minorities as much, since they usually don't live to be elderly.

Even if that were true, what in the hell would possess you to say it? How is that possibly going to be a good idea and work out well? Even if it is true, the best interpretation of it is going to be basically be, "Minorities die young because the system screws them, so, why do they care if we screw old people? They aren't going to be old people anyway." Can you imagine that logic in regular life? "It doesn't matter that they're paving over the park you used to like to play in, because they'd already decided not to let people like you into the park anyway." Wow. That would really make me feel better, let me tell you.

So, John Tanner of the Justice Department, for saying something that even an autistic 3rd-grader who is obsessed with Home & Garden TV would know was going to get him in trouble, I award you the 3rd Ed Renner prize!

Congrats!

Idiot.

The Mote In Your Own Eye...

2007-10-19T13:11:00.001-07:00

Okay, Democrats in Congress, knock it the fuck off. You said you were going to do something about all those damned pork-barrel spending earmarks most of the electorate hate so much. Almost no one, except for maybe hard-core Democrat supporters, believed you. Yet, still, after so much bullshit with Bush, a lot of left-wingers went out on a limb and gave you the benefit of the doubt and defended you when everyone, from centrists to far-right batshit wackos, said you were full of it.

So, stop being fucking full of it! I know that it is traditional Washington politics to crap all over the other party's earmarks when they control Congress, promise to do something about them if you get into control, and then promptly line up at the feed trough when you do get into power. It pisses me off enough that you congressional Democrats are following that script so perfectly, but do you really have it to make it so goddamned easy for the right to paint you as tax-and-spenders? Yeah, I know the Republicans do it too, that they are tax-and-spenders as much as you are, but Democrats are the ones trying to live down that reputation, not Republicans, and you just give the Republicans ammunition when you pull crap like this.

I mean, come on. How, exactly, did you think you were going to defend Federal funding for a freakin' Woodstock museum? Did you really think there was any way that wasn't going to look like the big frickin' piece of bacon it obviously is?

I don't want to hear another goddamned word out of you Democrats about how the Republicans spend our money until you clean up your own goddamned house. Until you do that, you are just handing the Republicans a gift that will keep on giving for years and years... You may as well be hanging a sign around your own necks that says "tax-and-spenders."

Jeesh.

Fact Checking Spreads Myths?

2007-10-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

Paul clued me in on an article where factcheck.org defends itself from the Washington Post's claim that debunking political myths actually helps spread them. The theory is that, for instance, when the Bush regime was working hard to mention Iraq and 9/11 together as often as possible to create a false impression that those two were connected, those like factcheck.org who were pointing out there was no connection between the two ended up mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together just like the regime, reinforcing the idea that Iraq and 9/11 actually were connected.

You see, according to cognitive neuroscience, people often remember things they have heard mentioned together, but forget whether they are positively or negatively correlated. That is to say, in the sentence, "Iraq was in no way responsible for 9/11," many people remember that Iraq and 9/11 were mentioned together but forget that the sentence said Iraq and 9/11 weren't actually connected. Or, rather, they remember, "Iraq was in no way responsible for 9/11."

But I agree with factcheck.org that the danger of further creating an impression that Iraq was involved in 9/11 when debunking the myth that Iraq was involved in 9/11 is not as great as the danger in not making sure that the truth gets out there. For one thing, while most people hear at least some news and are likely to hear the Bush regime mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together all the time, few probably of those people read and have a chance to have their impressions reinforced by factcheck.org. But, on the other hand, some people, like me, who go to the lengths to try not to be influenced by rhetorical tricks like these, and who want and need to know the truth, need a place to go to find it.

That is to say, if in order to keep the general public from further believing in a falsehood we make it impossible for those of us interested in learning the actual truth from learning that truth, we're making a huge mistake, in my opinion. We can't necessarily stop a myth from being started, spread, and reinforced through repetition, but we can put out the truth so that those who want to know it can. There's little evidence that fewer people will fall for repetition if no one like factcheck.org is out there clearing up falsehoods, but I know for sure some people will be unable to learn the truth if they aren't.

I Am Going To Build a TARDIS in My Backyard

2007-10-17T13:11:00.001-07:00

I downloaded plans for how to build the various Police Boxes that the Doctor's TARDIS has taken the form of over the years and am going to build one in my backyard, now that I have bought a house and have a backyard. I figure I can use it as a garden shed as well as to travel in time and space.

Don't know quite when I will get started, but I'll update my progress on this blog whenever I do.

If It Looks Like a Crime, It's a Crime...

2007-10-16T07:13:00.000-07:00

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, check this out: In Illinois, citations are being issued to bars that host free poker tournaments, because, according to a spokesman for the state liquor commission, "The appearance is that gambling is occurring, even if it's not."

That's right. In Illinois, all that's required for you to get cited and fined is the appearance of a crime, not an actual crime, all that "innocent until proven guilty" be damned. Because it might take more work for investigators to determine which games are being played for money and which aren't, no one can play.

In so many ways, including how drunk driving laws are written and enforced, the whole basis of the American legal system is being turned upside down. By default, anything that isn't specifically proscribed by appropriate laws passed by a legislature of duly elected representatives of the people is allowed. That is to say, there has to be a law against an activity for the government to have the right to regulate and/or prohibit it. There's no provision for disallowing activities that authorities think appears to be similar to a proscribed activity. If the government can disallow any activity that appears to be similar to an illegal activity, there's essentially no limit to what they can (and do) prohibit, and anything can (and will) be declared illegal even though no law makes it so.

The burden is on the government to show that you've done something illegal, not on the individual to prove they haven't. Presumption of guilt is anathema to the US legal system, and yet it is becoming more and more common, as this instance indicates. Sanctioning a legal activity on logic like Illinois', that "Usually when you're playing poker, you're gambling," is a bunch of crap. It doesn't matter what is usually the case if it isn't the case in a particular instance. Just because other people play poker to gamble doesn't mean you shouldn't be allowed to play it for free. The government shouldn't be able to sanction a legal activity because other people are engaging in the activity in an illegal way. That's holding one person responsible for the actions of others, and that isn't how the US system is supposed to work.

Is the SCHIP Controversy As Good For The Dems As It Seems?

2007-10-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

So, on this whole children's insurance thing that the Democrats are fighting (some*) Republicans over. The standard wisdom amongst commentators seems to be that this is a political boon for the Democrats, to be able to portray the Republicans as being against children's health care. And I can see how that might play well, but I also see how it might not.

After all, despite a Republican President and Congress inheriting a balanced budget and then creating the biggest deficit in US history, the Republicans still run campaigns as if they are fiscally responsible and the Democrats are "tax and spenders." But that's been bullshit for years now. In truth, both parties are now 'borrow and spenders,' and the main difference is in what they will spend all that money on, not how much they will spend.

Now, the Democrats have been, in fairness, a little more fiscally responsible in the years since Bush Sr., with Clinton leading the charge to balance the budget and fighting against tax cuts at times when spending is increasing. But not much.

And now, the Democrats have the opportunity, given the massive spending of the current regime and former Republican congress, to expose what a farce the Republican claims of being for "small government" and "fiscal responsibility" are. But I think, maybe, just maybe, they are squandering that opportunity by harping on this SCHIP thing.

After all, by making an issue out of how the Republicans don't want to spend more money, even though it is on children's health insurance, the Democrats may be reinforcing in the minds of the people that the real battle here is the age old one: Dems want to spend money and Repubs don't. And, while it is doubtful that the image of Republicans as being against children's health will play after the conclusion of this particular battle, the feeling that the Democrats are still for taxing and spending may.

I'm just saying that it might not be wise to squander the long-term political gain -- exposing Republicans for being as prolific in spending money as the Democrats -- for the short-term gain of painting Republicans as anti-child.

I'm not as sure about this as I am a lot of the things I post here. It's a thought, but I'm not sure if it's a good one or not. We'll see, I suppose. Comments welcome.

* To be fair, lots of Republicans voted for the SCHIP bill and it has a great deal of bi-partisan support, though a solid contigent of Republicans still oppose it.

Inherently Immoral?

2007-10-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

From what I understand, one of Christopher Hitchens' saws is that religion is inherently immoral. I'm not exactly sure what his arguments are (I haven't yet had a chance to read his book "God Is Not Great"), but I don't think I can go along with him on this.

It seems to me that religion is neither inherently moral or immoral. It's just irrational. Irrational beliefs, as I have said many times on this blog, inevitably lead to irrational behavior, and often immoral behavior too. But in and of itself, absent the human ability to turn any idea, thought, or tool into a weapon or a reason to destroy, I'm not sure religion is any more inherently immoral than a hammer, which can be used as both a tool to build and a weapon to destroy.

Now, as my friend Paul points out, all humans are, at times and to a greater or lesser degree, irrational. One of my favorite quotes is that "humans are thinking machines, just not very good ones." And humans act and think irrationally for lots of reasons aside from religion. But the reason I particularly target religious belief and the religious for irrationality is that religion, in general, makes a virtue of irrationality, and is therefore inherently dangerous, but not necessarily inherently immoral.

What Republicans Mean By "Accountability" and "Rule of Law"

2007-10-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you're all aware already that the Bush regime is pretty intent on making sure that employees of good Republican-supporting mercenary companies like Blackwater USA* aren't limited in their indiscriminate use of deadly force against Iraqi civilians by anything as quaint as, oh, the law.

And you've probably already heard about the Blackwater USA employee, Andrew Moonen, who, while drunk, allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi on Christmas Eve of 2006. You may have heard how he was fired by Blackwater USA, but, being subject to neither US nor Iraqi law, was not prosecuted either here or there.

What you may not have heard -- I hadn't -- is that "two months after Moonen was whisked out of Baghdad, he got a job with Combat Support Associates, a Defense Department contractor that provides logistics support to U.S. troops at bases in Kuwait," and that "an Army criminal investigator... reported seeing Moonen in Baghdad" on February 13, 2007, less than three months after he shot someone there.

That's right. If you're a mercenary working for an American company in Iraq, you can get drunk, shoot and kill someone, and still end up working for the US government in basically the same job in just a few months, with basically no consequences.

And I love how Moonen's lawyer defends him in the above-cited article: "It seems that everyone has convicted my client when he hasn't even been charged with anything." That line of logic makes sense when someone is suspected of a crime here in the US, but since Moonen, as a US mercenary, was not subject to any laws at the time of the alleged shooting, it really proves nothing to say he hasn't been charged with a crime, since he can't possibly be charged no matter what he did.

And this, also from Moonen's attorney, is priceless: "Being drunk, yeah, maybe that's the basis for being fired. But I don't think it's necessarily inappropriate for another defense contractor to hire somebody because they happen to be drunk once in their life with some serious consequences."

Let me get this straight. Getting drunk, shooting, and killing someone shouldn't disqualify you from future employment as a gun-toting mercenary? If that's true, what the hell would disqualify you? I can't think of anything that is a better indicator that someone shouldn't be allowed to have a job requiring him or her to carry firearms than that they once got drunk, shot, and killed someone. Can you?

What world do these people live in? How does this comport with the supposed Republican reverence for "accountability" and "the rule of law?"

Wait, I know: The believe in "the rule of law" kind of like the Roman Senate did. It applies to everyone else, just not to them.

Awesome.

*Do you think they could have chosen a name that sounds like the evil corporation in a dystopian science fiction movie than they did?

Raw Sewage As Metaphor

2007-10-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

I have a cousin who has worked for the US government in Iraq. He was riding in one of the ubiquitous enormous black US government SUVs in a tunnel, and apparently a sewer main had broken and spilled raw sewage all over the road.

The SUV tore through the tunnel, naturally splashing raw sewage everywhere in its wake. Some poor Iraqi was driving along with his windows open, likely because his car didn't have A/C and it was like 115 degrees, and the SUV swamped him, splashing gallons of raw sewage into his car.

My cousin said that there was no reason he could think of that the SUV needed to tear through the tunnel and swamp that Iraqi car like that. The SUV, did, of course, have A/C, and they had it set to recirculate the interior air, so though some stench from the sewage did get into the SUV, it wasn't so bad that it was necessary to drive so fast.

And, if you know anything about cars and/or raw sewage, you know that smell isn't coming out of that Iraqi's car. His car, for all intents and purposes, was ruined, as likely were his clothes.

This was back before the insurgency started, mind you, back when they still thought they might find WMDs, back in the "Mission Accomplished" days. My cousin couldn't believe how callous American officials and contractors were in regards to the Iraqis, and he could see right away that doing things like splashing Iraqis with raw sewage was not likely to help us "win the hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.

And, I'm sure it occurred to that Iraqi, as he sat in his sewage-filled car, that he never had to drive through raw sewage under Sadaam. From his point of view, rightly or wrongly, the Americans came, messed up the infrastructure such that raw sewage was spilling into tunnels, and then they splashed it all over him.

I can't think of a more fitting metaphor for what the US invasion of Iraq has ultimately accomplished.

Except that now, instead of just splashing raw sewage on the Iraqis, Blackwater mercenaries are shooting them. That's apparently what the Bush regime means when they say that the US is making "progress" in Iraq.

I'd Be Exhausted Too...

2007-08-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

On NPR today, speaking of today's news of Alberto Gonzales' resignation, Noel Francesco, Assistant Deputy Attorney General under Bush Sr., said, "I suppose he's exhausted after seven years as White House Counsel and Attorney General."

Yeah, I gotta imagine that if I spent seven years ripping up the Geneva Convention, tearing down prohibitions against torture, stripping Americans of their civil rights, making the President into a king, and shredding the Constitution, I'd be pretty tired too. I mean, destroying a system of checks and balances that has stood (sometimes working better than others) for over two-hundred years isn't an easy task. After all that, who wouldn't need a break?

"Who Wants To Be A Superhero" Meets The Elders of Zion

2007-08-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure why I'm watching the second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero? It's not that good, it's quite cheesy, and they've upped the cheese factor bigtime this season. But, somehow, it's still entertaining, especially because there's so much crying. Yep. Every single episode at least one person cries. I think that's pretty funny. Every week I get to shout at the TV, "There's no crying in superheroism!!!"

But this week was really, really unintentionally funny. The bad guy supervillian left our heroes a note in which he implied that one of them was a mole or traitor. It was transparently obvious to me that this was a test, that there wasn't really a mole, and that the point was to see if the heroes would turn on each other. So, you wanna guess what they did?

They immediately suspected... wait for it...

...Mr. Mitzvah, the lone Jewish superhero in the group.

Yep, as soon as there was the slightest whiff that there was a mole in the crowd, the heroes picked out the Jew as the likeliest candidate. Now, to be fair, the reason they did so wasn't really because he was Jewish. He was actually the most circumspect of all the heroes and the least open, because he is (in real life) rich, and he didn't want the others to know, thinking they'd see him as a dilletante and not take him seriously.

But still, I just couldn't believe that no one thought twice about accusing the lone Jew in the group -- who carries a paddle with a Star of David on it as part of his costume -- of being a traitorous mole on national television. I just couldn't stop making jokes about how badly this could look for them if someone spun it the right way: "I don't trust that Mr. Mitzvah. It's like he's part of some shadowy organization trying to take over the world" sort of thing. I mean, you wouldn't have to try very hard to take some of what they said and make it sound very, very anti-Semitic if you really wanted to. Stuff like, "I don't know he just keeps to himself. He acts differently than everyone else," and the like.

I found it quite amusing. Especially since, as I deduced from the start, there wasn't a mole at all. It really was just a test to see if they would turn on each other. I mean, you couldn't set these people up to look like they are latent anti-Semites if you tried.

Not With A Bang, But A Whimper

2007-08-13T10:27:00.001-07:00

As I imagine most of you have already heard, Karl Rove is resigning at the end of the month. Supposedly, he's leaving politics, but I have a hard time swallowing that, and I wouldn't trust anything Rove says as far as I can throw him.

I'd like to be happy about Rove being out of the White House soon, but really, it doesn't matter. Rove is walking away because he's pretty much done all the damage he can do and now it's time to sit back and savor the chaos and destruction he's wrought.

Good riddance, certainly, but it's a little late to do any good, unfortunately.

Democrats Decide To Get In On The Act

2007-08-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

What act? The act of dismantling the Bill of Rights and letting fear of terrorism turn the US into an Orwellian state. While the Democrats resisted revising FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to allow the Bush regime to spy on Americans at will back in the Republican-controlled Congress, they have inexplicably given Bush that power now that they are in control.

That's awesome.

Why did the Democrats even bother to get upset or worked up over the abuses of the Bush regime's warantless eavesdropping program if they were just going to turn around and make it legal anyway? Fuck. Are we at the point where there's no one in either party who sees what even cranks like Pat Buchanan can see: that Americans are more at risk from their own government (by several orders of magnitude) than from terrorists?

The government could already spy on people without the people having any legal recourse, owing to a recent ruling that citizens only had standing to sue if they knew they'd been eavesdropped on, which of course is impossible since the government keeps that secret. But now the only check on the government, the FISA court, which is pretty much a rubber stamp anyway, won't have a role, and the only safeguard on abuse of power is for the executive branch to police itself. How wonderful. Hey, can we do that too? Who needs traffic cops? We can all just police ourselves, right? No one ever violates the law when they think no one is looking.

Oh, wait, that's exactly when people break the law.

Civil rights have absolutely no meaning if the government can violate them with impunity, no oversight, and no way for the people to know when and if their rights have been violated. We may as well just throw that anachronistic old Bill of Rights out the window.

Of course, if we do that, then what exactly are we fighting the terrorists for? They don't want democracy or civil rights, and apparently neither do we. Where's the conflict?

Over the past few years, when the Democrats were impotent and the Republicans could do all the evil they want, I think I hated the Republicans so much that I started to really believe that, since they were so evil, the Dems had to be good. Thanks for reminding me that the there's really no one representing me up in Washington, Democrats! Thanks for making me wonder if the people always saying that there's no difference between the parties are right.

Dammit.

Life After Death

2007-07-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but it occured to me today that when theists say that science doesn't know everything, like what happens after death, that they are begging the question. Only if we assume that something of a person's consciousness or subjective experience continues to exist after death can we even ask the question, "What happens after death?" Because, if one ceases to exist upon death, then naturally there is no after death to consider.

Typically, I answer the question, "What happens after death?" with the answer, "Nothing." But this answer, it occurs to me, implicitly accepts the premise of the question. It's like, say, someone were to ask, "After you make toast, what happens to the bread?" You could say, "Nothing happens to the bread," but that isn't entirely accurate. More accurately, there is no bread anymore for something to happen to. There's just toast. The toast was bread, the bread became toast, so to talk about what happens to the bread after it is turned into to toast is actually incoherent. A better answer is, "There is no bread for anything to happen to."

In the same way, a more accurate response to the question, "Well, what happens to you when you die?" is to say, "That question doesn't actually make any sense, since, after death, there is no 'you' for anything to happen to. It's like asking what happens to your car after it's sold as scrap. Things may happen to the parts, but there is actually no car for anything to happen to anymore."

Probably a fairly trivial point, but I like trivia.

Science Looks for True Explanations, Not Just "Natural" Ones

2007-07-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

I get so tired of creationists constantly claiming that science only looks for "naturalistic" explanations and therefore a priori excludes supernatural ones. That's a load of crap. Science looks for explanations that are backed up by evidence, and supernatural explanations are only ruled out because there is never any evidence for them.

When creationists say that science is just "methodological naturalism," tell them they're full of shit. Science is about finding actual explanations instead of fantasy explanations. The reason fantasy explanations are rejected is not because science rules out the supernatural, it is because the purpose of science is to weed out things that are untrue, and fantasy explanations are untrue. Untrue explanations never have evidence to back them up, and that's why science rejects them.

When creationists say that science rejects supernatural explanations because it assumes "naturalistic" causes, tell them they're still full of shit. Science makes the assumption that evidence will lead to correct answers. It's not the fault of science that evidence never leads to supernatural explanations: it's the fault of the facts, which are that supernatural explanations aren't true. That's all.

The Religious Right Doesn't Actually Care What "The People" Think

2007-07-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

In its quest to turn the US into a Christian theocracy, the religious right often criticizes judges who rule against them as going against "the will of the people," as if they actually give a shit about the will of the people. They don't. It's just a card they use when it happens to work in their favor, but when "the will of the people" isn't in accord with their theocratic agenda, they have no compunction about trying to override "the will of the people" and institute their agenda anyway.

Case in point. In Cincinnati, Ohio, two workers for an ironically (and gramatically incorrectly) named group Equal Rights Not Special Rights [sic] have been found guilty of using fraudulent names on a petition to get a measure repealing a law forbidding discrimination against gays onto the ballot. That's right: when there weren't enough people willing to sign the petition, showing that "the will of the people" was that the measure not be placed on the ballot, the religious right tried to cheat and override "the will of the people."

Just keep that in mind, folks. If you buy into the right's bullshit, believing that they actually care about the will of the people, don't be surprised when they continue doing what they are already doing: implementing their agenda regardless, even over the objections of the people. Because they don't give a shit what people think -- they think their invisible sky fairy has told them what is right and wrong and that listening to His will makes cheating and lying to get power A-OK. They think the people should listen to what they think their sky fairy says, not that they should listen to the will of the people.

Also, I love this whole "equal rights, not special rights" bullshit. Christians are already protected from discrimination under the law. So, how is it that when gays want the same protections they are asking for "special" rights? Wouldn't equal rights mean that they should get the same protection from discrimination as everyone else, including Christians?

Makes no goddamned sense.

The Senate After Dark

2007-07-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

Here's what I wish one of the Democratic Senators had said last week during the all-night debate about the amendment to require troops to start pulling out of Iraq in 120 days:

"This all-night debate is, as the Republicans keep saying, political theatre. Certainly, staying up for an all-night session isn't much sufferinc compared to the suffering of our troops in Iraq. But it's the worst suffering we can impose upon those Senators who are unwilling to put an end to this travesty. If we could impose a greater burden on them and ourselves for their continuing support for a failed policy, I would do it in a heartbeat. But there isn't. And though losing a single night's sleep is a pretty pathetic sacrifice compared to our troops', if we aren't even willing to do that, then what the hell good are we anyway?"

That's what I would have said, I think, had I been up there.

Low Expectations

2007-07-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

A recent intelligence estimate indicates that both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are back up to pre-9/11 strength despite the United States' six-year-long "war on terror," which, considering Al-Qaeda is the terrorist organization that planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks and the Taliban is the group who gave them a base from which to plan and carry out those attacks, is a pretty damning indictment of the Bush regime's policies in carrying out this so-called "war."

But here's how Bush spun the news: He said that both groups "would have been stronger" if not for what the US has done to combat terrorism since 9/11. In short, Bush is telling the American people, "Well, it could have been worse."

Wow. Bush's only defense against criticism of his conduct of the "war on terror" is to tell us that he has managed to contain the threat at to the same level it was at when terrorists perpetrated the worst terrorist attack on American soil in the nation's history??? To contain the threat to the same level it was at when the US wasn't spending billions of dollars and sacrificing thousands of American lives combatting worldwide terrorism? That's it? He thinks, somehow, that this proves he's doing a good job? That this is a good return on our investment?

It's like your house is on fire and the firemen come and kind of bumble around, sort of haphazardly fighting the fire as if untrained and drunk, while the Fire Chief goes out and gets more firemen and more equipment that don't seem to help much at all. After a few hours, your house is still on fire. The fire hasn't spread much, but it hasn't been extinguished either. When the firefighter tells you that despite tying up all the town's fire equipment and firemen at exhorbitant cost for the past few hours and yet failing to put the fire out, in what appears to be a case of gross incompetence, "Well, if we hadn't come, it would have been worse." Would you be happy with that level of peformance? Or would you say, "Well, yeah, but you haven't really helped much either. My house is still on fire. Aren't you supposed to, say, put it out or something?"

I'm not questioning whether the Bush regime managed to do something with the vast resources and powers of the United States at its disposal that hurt the terrorists and made them weaker than they otherwise would have been. Anyone who couldn't manage, if only by blind luck, to accomplish that while in charge of the world's lone remaining superpower in six fuckin' years would almost have to medically brain dead. A kid with Down's syndrome could manage that feat, the feat Bush is hanging his hat on.* No, the question is, were the strategy and policies adopted by the Bush regime as effective as could be realistically expected? Did they work as the regime claimed they would? Were those strategies and policies adopted for sound reasons?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The Bush regime's policies have been utter failures, squandering resources and lives with little or no return. Nothing has gone as the regime planned or as it claimed. The results have been far worse than predicted time and again, often disastrously so. And lastly, the regime set its course in the face of evidence rather than in accord with it, failing to consider important lessons of the past, failing to use available information and facts to form its policies, and ignoring the advice of experts. The mistakes made by the regime were, by and large, completely avoidable, the results predictable, and the decisions foolish. That's poor job performance, no matter how you try to spin it. Regular people get summarily fired for job performance like that.

And it's no different with the report on those 18 benchmarks set by Congress for progress in Iraq. None of the benchmarks was met, while there is only "satisfactory" progress towards eight of them. Bush trumpets this like a victory or a good job performance appraisal. But, the fact is, the Iraqis are failing to make even satisfactory progress in achieving 10 of the 18 goals.

And this is good news, according to Bush? Yeah, right. Bush has gone from practicing the politics of personal destruction to practicing the politics of lowered expectations. Real low, I think.

Not many are buying it, and that's a good thing.

*Oh, how I wish we could replace Bush and Cheney with some kids who have Down's syndrome. Seriously. They would almost have to be better, if only because, by making few decisions, they wouldn't make so many bad ones.

Republicans Hate The Disabled

2007-07-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

I am not making this up. Former US Surgeon General Richard Carmona, in testimony before Congress, said that his activities were interfered with by Bush political appointees pursuing a political agenda to the point that, "he was prevented from attending a Special Olympics event to talk about health and disabilities."

He said, "I was told I would be helping a politically prominent family, [and] why would I want to help those people?"

Yes, it's true. Because Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of Edward Kennedy, founded the Special Olympics, the Bush regime has apparently decided, politically, that supporting it wouldn't be supporting the disabled, it would be supporting Democrats. Yeah. Because everyone knows a Kennedy founded the goddamned Special Olympics. Oh, wait, nobody does. I didn't. Not until today.

Don't forget that these assholes are the ones out claiming that the Democrats want to stop the calamitous war in Iraq solely for political reasons. Even if this accusation were true, and I'm sure that for some Democrats it is and for some it isn't, it still isn't at all as low as boycotting the fucking Special Olympics because of politics. Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, man.

Not to mention that complaining that the Democrats wanting to stop the politically-motivated Iraq war for political reasons is pretty goddamned ironic. Hello pot, this is the kettle...

...you're black!

Religious Freedom = "Freedom" For Christians, Not Others

2007-07-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

When arguing for their theocratic cause, far-right Christians often talk about "religion" being kept out of schools or the public square, as if they are fighting for the rights of all religious people, not just Christians. They don't want Christian theocracy, they say, just more tolerance for religious views.

They're full of shit. Yesterday, Christians protested and disrupted an opening prayer being delivered by a Hindu chaplain in the US Senate. They fight so hard to make sure that it's okay to have religious invocations at government functions, but then get pissed if it's not a Christian invocation.

They aren't fighting for the rights of the religious, they're fighting to make the US a Christian theocracy, and they only want to put prayer and religious indoctrination in the schools if it's Christian prayer and Christian indoctrination.

Bush: White House Officials Are Above The Law

2007-07-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true. In his press conference yesterday, Bush admitted "that perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of [undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame]." Naturally, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, elected to execute and uphold the law, will go to any length to uncover criminal wrongdoing in his own backyard, right?

Not so much. Seems there won't be an investigation -- shock! -- and that Bush also doesn't understand what goddamned investigations are for, as he said, "I've often thought about what would have happened if that person had come forth and said, 'I did it.' Would we have had this endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter?"

You investigate, Mr. President, in order to find out who did it. You don't wait until they confess and then think about an investigation.

But, of course, Bush is lying there anyway, because he knows who did it, just like we all do: Rove and Cheney. He just doesn't care, because, as the title says, Bush is not too subtly telling us that White House officials are above the law.

Just like how he commuted Scooter Libby's 30-month sentence for being "excessive," despite that sentence being, according to sentencing judge Reggie B. Walton, on the low end of the sentencing guidelines, guidelines that the Bush regime just recently has been arguing should be upheld and made mandatory. Because, you see, the sentencing guidelines are only "excessive" for those above the law, that is to say, White House staffers, but not for everyone else, for whom they are fair and appropriate.

The Limits of Executive Privilege

2007-07-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, former Bush regime counsel Harriet Miers failed to appear before before the House Judiciary Committee in violation of a congressional subpeona, apparently because she was ordered not to appear by the president as an assertion of executive privilege. Now, as I have noted in the past, executive privilege is a really screwy thing, not really being actually granted to the president in the Constitution, and what it actually entails and what is covered have never been fully delineated.

Nonetheless, under even very liberal interpretations of what executive privilege covers, I don't see any way it can be construed to mean, as the Bush regime contends, that it can be used to immunize staffers from contempt of Congress charges for failing to appear. The president can probably invoke privilege to keep his aides from answering certain questions, but how can a staffer simply showing up at a congressional committee hearing possibly violate executive privilege? Clearly, it can't.

And, just like with the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate one's self, one can only invoke executive privilege in response to a question asking for information that is privileged. You can't refuse to come to court or appear before Congress just because you're afraid they might ask questions that you would have the right to refuse to answer. You have to show up and be asked such a question and then invoke your right to refuse to answer. You can't invoke a right in the absence of a threat to that right, and simply responding to a congressional subpeona is not, in and of itself, a threat to either Fifth Amendment or executive privilege rights.

Also, if the Bush regime's arguments were upheld, then Congress' oversight responsibilities as outlined in the Constitution would be completely impossible for Congress to fulfill. If the White House can immunize any of its staff from having to appear before Congress, then Congress can't possibly ever get information about wrongdoing in the White House. The president would simply never let anyone testify in front of Congress, which is clearly not within the president's powers, executive privilege or no.

Tucker Carlson Is An Asshole

2007-07-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

Last night, on CNN, Tucker Carlson had Michael Rectenwald, founder of the group Citizens for Legitimate Government, on his show. Rectenwald's group, apparently, are the ones who released the DC Madam phone list on which Republican Senator David Vitter appeared. Vitter, of course, being a supposed champion of marriage and "family values" is rightly being called the mat now for hypocrisy, especially since he shat all over Clinton for the impropriety of his affair with Monica Lewinsky as if were a bastion of morality and monogamy.

Well, Carlson, who I'm sure never questioned why Clinton's sexcapades were fair game, was all outraged that Vitter's private life should become public and then started asking Rectenwald about Rectenwald's personal and sexual life in an attempt to claim that somehow if Rectenwald's private life should be private Vitter's should too.

Of course, Carlson is too smart not to know how full of shit he is, and that's why he's an asshole. There are two reasons why Vitter's private life is fair game and Rectenwald's isn't, both of which Carlson is surely aware of. First, Vitter is a fucking public official and Rectenwald isn't. Whether the private conduct of public officials should be fair game or not is a valid point, but it wasn't the point Carlson was making. As things stand now, though, the private conduct of public officials is definitely fair game. But, secondly, and more importantly, hiring prostitutes is illegal in Washington DC, so evidence that a goddamned lawmaker in a position of great power and public trust is breaking the law is certainly not a private matter and is fair game.

Now, personally, I don't care if Vitter saw prostitutes and I don't think prostitution should be illegal. But, as long as paying for sex is a crime in Washington DC, it is certainly within the public's rights to know if a public official is paying for sex in DC. As a matter of course, you forfeit your right to privacy when you commit a crime, and since Carlson didn't have any evidence that Rectenwald had committed a crime in his personal or sexual life, there's no comparison between probing Vitter's private life and Rectenwald's.

And, of course, though Clinton committed perjury by lying about getting blowjobs from Monica Lewinsky, getting a blowjob in the Oval Office isn't a crime, so where the fuck was Carlson when Ken Starr was probing into Clinton's non-illegal private life? Try as I might, I don't recall any righteous indignation from Carlson then. And Clinton was being forced to testify under oath about his private sex life by the Republicans, which is worlds away from simply publishing a list of phone numbers of the DC Madam's clients that Vitter's number is on.

A-S-S-H-O-L-E.

Oh, Now You Want To Be Against The War?!?

2007-07-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

Because there wasn't anything on my TiVo that I wanted to watch this morning (okay, there was, but those shows were all "us" shows that I have to wait and watch with my girlfriend), I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, hosted by former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. And there he is, sounding almost like Keith Olbermann, making snide remarks about how just yesterday the Iraqi government had met none of the benchmarks set for them but that now the Bush regime is claiming they've met eight of the fifteen and how amazing it is that the Iraqis managed that in twenty-four hours, and about how the US could have used all the resources squandered in failed nation building in Iraq to actually fight terrorists.

Well, isn't it great that Republicans like Scarborough and Lindsey Graham have noticed what a clusterfuck Iraq is after only four years of supporting the disastrous decisions of the incompetent Bush regime? Isn't it great that now that things are so fucked up that only liars and the willfully blind could claim they're going well they have the courage to speak up and voice their opposition?

It's kind of like Bush drove our car into a muddy ditch, and for the past four years while Bush was spinning the car's wheels trying to get out but only digging them in deeper, these guys have been standing by and cheering him as the car got more and more stuck. Only now, when Bush has lit a match and set the goddamned car on fucking fire have they finally decided that the situation is so far gone that they can safely say that Bush's plan to get the car out of the ditch isn't working.

You know what I want the Republicans to do? Shut the fuck up. Don't grandstand and act like you've used your amazing vision to see what no one else can. Don't act like you didn't know Iraq was a disaster a long time ago but supported the strategy anyway because you thought it was politically to your advantage. Show a little goddamned humility, admit you were wrong, and start working with the Democrats to fix it. You don't have to suck up to the Democrats, assholes, 'cause lots of them supported the war for far too long too, and they don't have a great plan to fix things either. But don't act like you've been on the side of the fucking angels this whole time. Don't act like you didn't help and actively support getting the US into this mess.

Because those of us who actually did see what a fucking calamity this was going to be before the US invaded Iraq, those of us who didn't buy Bush's bullshit assertions about WMDs and Saddam's connection to 9-11, those of us who have been trying to get Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney and Bush to see reality and change course for the past four fucking years aren't buying your newfound conversion of conscience. You were for the war when you thought it was the right thing to do politically and now you're against it for the same reason. Admit it and move on.

And, for fuck's sake, stop taking snide potshots at the Bush regime from the sidelines as if you had nothing to do with what happened. You're not outsiders who could only stand by and watch like the rest of us. You are them, you are the ones who did this, and you don't get to snipe at the guy you put in power and supported now.

Fuck.

Your Government at Work

2007-07-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

Did you hear? According to a US federal appeals court, the government can violate Americans' rights with impunity as long as the government keeps those violations secret. Because, you see, in order to have what is called "standing" to sue the government over an illegal program that violates the citizens' civil rights, a citizen must be able to prove that he or she personally had his or her rights violated. Knowing that the government program, in general, is unconstitutional and violates our rights isn't enough. To sue, we must know whose rights, specifically, have been violated.

So, all the government has to do, according to this ruling, is simply keep secret any information about who was targeted by a program, say, for instance, who was illegally spied on by the Bush regime's warrantless wiretapping program, and the program can never be challenged in court.

In other words, the court ruled that the Judicial Branch has no role in keeping the Executive Branch in check if the Executive Branch keeps its excesses, or at least whose rights it violated during those excesses, secret.

Well, that's fantastic. Any right the government can violate with impunity is no right at all, and, as long as the government makes sure the citizens don't know whose rights the government is violating, the government can apparently violate any right they want.

I guess we never really needed those pesky "checks and balances" anyway, right? They're like the appendix, an extra organ that doesn't really do much and really isn't needed anymore.

Or so I gather.

Gonzales lied to Congres...

2007-07-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

...and in other news, the sky is blue.

Okay, so I don't suppose it is a shock to anyone that we now know Gonzales lied to Congress about whether the Justice Department had used the Patriot Act to commit civil rights abuses. Of course there were abuses -- when government is given wide-ranging powers with little mechanism for oversight like in the Patriot Act, abuses are inevitable -- and, of course, just like with the Attorney General's new power to appoint US Attorneys without Senate approval, Gonzales knew the Justice Department's spiffy new Patriot Act powers would be taken away by Congress if he admitted how those powers had been misused. So, naturally, he lied. It seems to be in his nature, along with most of the Bush regime's other political appointees.

Now, I don't understand how anyone with the slightest bit of sense didn't know that this would happen. I don't know how, therefore, anyone, citizen or Senator, could be stupid enough to support legislation like the Patriot Act for even a moment. But what I especially don't understand is how anyone -- liberal, conservative, whatever -- could not want to repeal the Patriot Act now that we have seen the government not only abuse those powers but also lie about those abuses in order to keep those powers.

Here's a new rule: Any power that high-ranking government officials are willing to lie about abusing in order to keep is a power the government should not have. If the government cannot make a convincing argument that, despite abuse of a power, it is still in the best interests of the people and the nation for the government to continue to have that power, then the government can no longer be trusted to have that power.

Lying about abuses of a power in order to keep that power is just about the best evidence I can think of that the government wants that power for power's sake, not for our sake. Nothing could be more clear.

This country was founded on the notion that the greatest threat to the American people was the American government itself. Perhaps we should spend a little more time protecting ourselves against the threat we do have power over, our own government. After all, while we can never make terrorists stop hating us, we can actually strip powers from our own government that are not being used in our best interests.

How Long Do We Wait?

2007-07-09T12:11:00.001-07:00

While all indications -- shock! -- are that the so-called "surge" of troops in Iraq is failing, all we hear out of the Bush regime is that we have to give the surge more time to work. "The troops only got there two weeks ago," they say.

Well, first off, the surge started in January. Only the last brigade of troops in the surge arrived recently. The first troops arrived six months ago. Despite what the regime claims, the surge has been going on for six months, not two weeks.

But, more importantly, how much longer can we wait while Bush runs out the clock on his presidency by asking us to wait and see if his new dipshit strategy will work any better than his last one? How long do you let a guy keep working on your garbage disposal even after he made your pipes burst and flooded your kitchen with sewage, just because he says, "Wait, wait, I've got a new idea. Give me a minute to try it..."? How long do you sit listening to the ominous rumbling in your pipes while the guy says, "It hasn't been long enough. Just wait and see," while you're standing ankle-deep in water and muck?

Because that's exactly what Bush is asking us to do now. To trust him, give him a chance to let his new plan -- the plan the regime is already lying about by claiming it only started two weeks ago -- work, even though we're more like neck deep in the shit because of his past errors in judgment. I mean, where does it end? Because Bush will just come up with a new flawed strategy after this one and say we have now should wait until we see what happens with that one before Congress or anyone else should step in. And another after that, and another, until Bush's term ends and he can hand off this clusterfuck to the next President.

We don't need to wait to see if the surge will work. We knew before the regime implemented the surge that it wouldn't work, we have six months and counting of evidence that it isn't working, and we have no reason to give the Bush regime the benefit of the doubt that they have a plan to make it work.

Rhetorical tricks like "wait and see" may work on the Faux News-watching mouthbreathers, but don't let it work on you. Bush is incompetent, he doesn't listen to his commanders, and he's just running out the clock. There's no reason to let him continue with this disastrous course of action.

"Free Speech Zones"

2007-07-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

This sort of thing really gets my goat up. I'm an advocate of gay rights and I wish that Christians and bigots -- and bigots hiding behind Christianity as an excuse for their own bigotry -- didn't feel the need to protest at gay pride events. I don't know why they give a shit which consenting adults other consenting adults have romantic relationships with. Nonetheless, they have the right to protest and speak their piece, just like everyone else. "Free speech zones" are nothing more than prior restraint on free speech and cannot be allowed in a free and politically active society.

I am using this particular example to make my point on this clear: I don't support free speech only when I agree with it. I support free speech universally, for those whose opinions I endorse and those whose opinions I loathe. I am no less enraged by anti-gay protestors being faced with ridiculous, arbitrary rules like the one mentioned in the linked article, where police told anti-gay protestors, "bigger people could carry bigger signs than smaller people - it all depended on how big your torso was," than I am when it is those espousing liberal views being restrained.

If we are willing to take freedom of speech away from those we disagree with, we have no freedom of speech. It's that simple.

Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Justice For Some...

2007-07-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

Well, the leader of the party of "personal responsibility" has commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. It means Libby, who lied to investigators and a grand jury about his knowledge of a White House leak of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, will not spend a day in jail.

That's right. The Federal government will send you to jail for using medical marijuana legally prescribed to you under state law in Oregon and California, but if you lie about your knowledge of leaking classified information about an undercover CIA operative -- you know, one of the folks on the front line of the so-called "war on terror" -- you won't spend a day in jail. Awesome.

That's justice in the United States of America in 2007 under the Bush regime.

Of course, the White House is trying to spin how the commutation doesn't remove the conviction from Libby's record like a full pardon would, affecting his career and future, and how Libby will still have to pay a $250,000 fine.

But, of course, that's bullshit. For one thing, the conviction isn't going to stop Libby from getting top dollar gigs as a political consultant for conservative causes, as a TV pundit, or on the lecture circuit. He'll make more doing one speech than you or I make in a year. He'll make enough scratch to pay that fine in a week, if he even ends up paying it at all. After all, all those big dollar conservative supporters will probably help their friend Scooter out, and even if they don't, the smart money is on Bush totally pardoning Scooter after the '08 election, when it won't be as politically dangerous.

No, Libby isn't going to pay a damned cent or spend a day in jail for helping to cover up a crime that strikes at the very heart of the ability of the US to defend itself and prevent future mistakes along the line of the cluster fuck in Iraq. And, of course, Karl Rove, who almost certainly was the one who decided to leak Plame's identity, won't ever step into a courtroom to answer for acts that, even under a charitable interpretation, could easily be considered treason.

When the Republicans say that they are for "personal responsibility," remember that what they mean is personal responsibility for you and me, and all the other small fries out there who don't have multimillion dollar bank accounts and tax shelters in the Caymans. But not them. Not Bush, or Cheney, or Rove, or Gonzales, or DeLay, or Rumsfeld, or Rice, or any of the other people who have fucked up our country and then blamed their failures on everyone else. Not them. Not Scooter Libby.

Just you. And me.

This Is What I've Been Talking About

2007-06-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

Remember all the times I have pointed out that the 1st Amendment right to freedom of religion protects Christianst too? And how often Christians poo-poo that sentiment and claim that "freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion?"

Well, the religious right in Virginia should have listened to me. They went to court last year to force the Albermarle school district to allow religious literature to be sent home with kids in the form of "backpack mail." Previously, the district had not allowed sectarian literature to be included. Guess what's happened now?

So, the Religious Right got what they wanted from the federal courts (the same federal courts they accuse of “kicking God out of the public schools”) and now they’re hopping mad…again.

World [Nut] Daily reports that the Albemarle School District is under attack by a Religious Right group for sending students home with flyers for Camp Quest, an overnight summer camp for young atheists, agnostics and freethinkers.

Yep, that's right. The religious right won the right to send religious flyers home with kids, but now they're pissed that other groups than Christians are taking advantage.

I told you so. The religious right thinks "religion" only means Christianity, so they fight and fight to get "religion" put into schools and other public places, without a thought to the fact that "religion" means any and all religions or points of view on religion.

The hypocrisy is breath taking. Have these people never heard of Pandora's Box? There is wisdom outside the Bible and fundamentalist preachers, folks, and perhaps they should look into some of it.

Jeesh.

This Time, I Mean It

2007-06-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

I know I've said many times that this or that thing is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I really, really mean it this time. Get this:

In 1994, an Air Force lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Base I worked at at that time, asked for and got serious consideration for a proposal to build a bomb that would turn enemy soldiers gay.

I am fucking serious. Check it out.

Because, of course, "teh gays" are so totally unable to control themselves that they will naturally to stop fighting so they can have a big gay orgy right then and there. Aw, yeah.

Our military considered spending money on a gay bomb. That is now officially the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

What Brownback Thinks About Evolution...

2007-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

...is almost entirely based on ignorance of what evolution actually is. In a recent NY Times Op-Ed column, Brownback says some amazingly nutty things and displays a shocking ignorance of the basic difference between faith and reason, science and making shit up. He also starts from some reasonable premises then comes up with utterly illogical conclusions. Take this, for instance:

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason.

Fair enough. Since faith and reason are in direct opposition to each other, as I have argued many times on this blog, it isn't really possible to drive a wedge between them. There's not enough liking them together. It would be like trying to drive a wedge between the US and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two.

W-Wha?? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Reason forbids jumping to conclusions that satisfy one's emotional needs in disregard of available evidence. Faith is jumping to conclusions that satisfy one's emotional needs in disregard of available evidence. There is nothing but contradiction between the two. They are two separate, mutually exclusive methods for learning about the world. What Brownback is saying is kind of like saying there is no contradiction between passive resistance and suicide bombing.

The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths.

Brownback is confused, I think. If faith dealt only with "spiritual" truths, in contrast to material or natural truths, then there would be no conflict between science and faith.* After all, since "spiritual", in this context, pretty much means immaterial, and, as noted by Thomas Jefferson, to talk about immaterial things is to talk about nothings. That is to say, if faith only dealt with spiritual, or nonexistent, things, then it would not conflict with science. However, since the faithful often use faith to justify belief in facts or events that happened in the material world, such as, for instance, that Jesus literally resurrected Lazarus or literally rose from the dead, it manifestly is not concerned only with the spiritual world, but in the material world and the interaction between the two worlds. And Brownback knows it, as we will see.

The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

Let's hope Senator Brownback never took a logic class in college, because he obviously didn't learn anything in it if he did.

A: "Faith and science are complementary and do not contradict each other."
B: "How did you determine that this is so?"
A: "The spiritual order and the material order were both created by the same God."
B: "How do you know this? And why does this mean they can't be contradictory?"
A: "I know God created them both through faith. I know they can't be contradictory through faith."
B: "So, you're using faith as the evidence for your claims about faith, and you also used something you believe on faith to justify something else you also believe on faith?"
A: "Yes."

Awesome. That's just as good as the 'ole, "The Bible is the inerrant Word of God. How do I know? The Bible says so."

In essence, Brownback's argument is, "Science and shit I make up can't conflict because I don't think they do."

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us.

Well, about everything but faith, of course, because if people of faith were rational about faith, they wouldn't be people of faith now, would they?

At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question.

This is true. Some questions can't be answered, for instance, nonsensical ones like, "What color does the sky taste like?" But I'm not sure how this is relevant to the discussion, because, while faith can provide an answer to any question, it is only because faith can be used to justify any answer to any question. Faith can give us countless, often contradictory, answers to any given question, but almost all of them will be either meaningless or wrong, and, through faith, there is no way to discriminate between wrong or meaningless answers and true ones.

Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less.

Ah, yes. Of course. Faith purifies reason of its foolish insistence upon using a logical process, based on evidence, to draw conclusions, by adding the elements of jumping to conclusions without evidence and making shit up that reason lacks.

That is to say, "[f]aith seeks to purify reason" of its vulgar reasonableness. Sort of like how a bullet to the heart purifies one's life of its vulgar living, so that we might live better. Makes sense, right?

Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values,
meaning and purpose.

What a common unfounded, and untrue assertion, Sam! Faith can lead us to accept any set of values, any sort of meaning, and any purpose, and therefore gives us understanding of none.

More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.

Another unfounded assertion, and gibberish at that. Why can't science help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love, exactly? For instance, scientific studies on poverty often do, in fact, help us understand the breadth of human suffering. But I'm not really sure how faith helps us do either of these things, since faith supports all claims equally. For instance, through faith I could arrive at the conclusion that humans are actually incapable of love, but I could just as easily arrive at the conclusion that human love is so important that I should kill if I am denied it. How does that help us understand "the depth of human love," exactly?

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

The heart of what issue? Since evolution is not just a theory involving small changes over time within a species, but much more, and also does not necessarily exclude a "guiding intelligence," Brownback isn't just presenting a false dichotomy, but is asserting that the choice is between one strawman or another. And, because of the way he couched this assertion, it is clear that he knows that he is presenting strawmen as well.

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today.

This is just stupid. For one thing, almost no biologist working in the field today accepts what Brownback calls "classical Darwinism." As all theories do, the theory of evolution has changed as new evidence has been collected, and the basic structure of the modern theory of evolution is accepted by virtually all those working in the field. Punctuated equilibrium is not a whole separate theory of evolution, but a modification to the modern theory that some accept and some don't, but what those "feuding" over punctuated equilibrium agree on is much more vast than what they disagree on.

As such, Brownback presents a false dichotomy. The theory of evolution, at its core, is the theory that natural selection coupled with random mutations is the process through which all extant life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor. This is held to be true by virtually all evolutionary biologists and is not controversial nor is it in dispute, and, as such, it is, for all intents and purposes, the "single theory of evolution" Brownback denies exists.

Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

Evolutionary theory does not raise the question of "whether man has a unique place in the world." Some, like Brownback, feel that, if evolutionary theory is true, man will lose his "unique place on the world," but that is their interpretation, not a prediction of evolutionary theory itself. Evolutionary theory is not necessarily inconsistent with any particular view of man's place in the world, only with Brownback's interpretation of it.

And, of course, evolutionary theory specifically denies that man is "merely the chance product of random mutations." Random mutations, in and of themselves, would not likely have produced humans. Random mutation plus natural selection, however...

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

No, no, no! Evolution tells us that humans are the result of random mutations and selection pressures, not a "historical accident." Humans were not a necessary outcome of evolution, but they could also not come about by "accident" either. Natural selection, as its name implies, is not a random process, but a process by which those organisms best able to adapt to their environments pass on their adaptations to their descendants. Natural selection is not the process of randomly picking which organisms fail and which succeed, but rather selecting for those specific traits that better allow organisms to survive. There is an element of chance involved in evolution, but it is not "random" and does not require "historical accidents."

Further, the theory of evolution does not dismiss the possibility of divine causality. It also does not require divine causality. In fact, it is mute on the whole topic of divine causality.

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves.

That's fantastic, Sam. Since the theory of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the origins of the universe, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, but...

There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him.

So, Sam, according to you, a being about whose motivations we cannot know ("God works in mysterious ways"), about whose nature we cannot know ("Who knows the mind of God?"), and about whose existence you can provide no evidence ("One must come to God through faith") sustains "creation -- and indeed life" in a manner which, you admit, you don't really know, and that's the reason you dismiss the evidence for evolution? Because a being you don't really know much about who you think exists did something somehow that you don't know much about through a process you don't really understand, evolution must not be true? Wow. What a convincing argument. Awesome.

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

First off, in proposing and supporting the theory of evolution, scientists did not "venture far beyond [the] realm of empirical science." Evolution is empirical science, as empirical and evidence based as physics or chemistry, and the fact that you draw philosophical conclusions from it, Sam, which are not in theory itself, does not change the fact that it is still empirical science.

Secondly, while some scientists may have some "philosophical presuppositions," the theory of evolution doesn't. It is simply an explanation of speciation that is consistent with the available evidence. Once again, the philosophical conclusions you draw from evolution are yours, not the evolution's, and it is not based on them nor does it presuppose them.

As such, questioning a valid scientific theory backed by copious evidence because you have "philosophical" issues with what the theory indicates is as anti-science as it is possible to be! Science is the process of learning about the world by gathering and interpreting evidence. To discard the results not based on better evidence but "philosophical" worries is to destroy the very purpose and usefulness of science.

Biologists will have their debates about man’s origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table.

Sure, people of faith can bring a great deal to the table, but, unlike Brownback implies, not because of faith, but rather in spite of it. Faith itself, however, can bring nothing to the table, which is what Brownback means to argue, as I have argued above.

For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. As science continues to explore the details of man’s origin, faith can do its part as well. The fundamental question for me is how these theories affect our understanding of the human person.

What discussion? If he means a discussion of things people want to be true, fine. But if it's a discussion about what actually is true, faith is necessarily excluded, since, as I have noted, it gives us no tools to discriminate bullshit from reality. As such, how, exactly, can "faith... do its part"? What can faith add to the discussion other than irrelevant claims with no evidence to back them up?

And, of course, Brownback is being disingenuous in the final sentence of that paragraph. Scientists are interested in how scientific theories affect our understand of humankind. But Brownback isn't talking about taking knowledge gained through science and using it to refine our understanding... he's talking about rejecting scientific theories and the evidence upon which they are based if he doesn't like the implications. Not, note, based on whether the theories are true or not.

The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded.

What fundamental truth? That each person has a unique and special place in creation, I'm guessing? And, if that's what he means, what the hell does that mean? And how, exactly, does the theory of evolution or science undermine it? (Hint: It doesn't). And what does this "truth" need to be safeguarded from? Certainly not other things that are true, like those discovered by science...

I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos.

What theory does he mean? Not any scientific theory, certainly, or evolutionary theory in particular, since they don't "seek to undermine man's essential dignity" or our "unique and intended place in the cosmos" at all. They're just explanations that best fit the available evidence. That's all.

I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.

Well, hooray for you, Sam, but until you have some evidence for these beliefs, evidence that conflicts with scientific theory, and can present it, then I really don't care and they are irrelevant to whether or not evolutionary theory is true.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome.

Do tell!**

Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

Hmm. We know this "with certainty?" How do we even know there is a "created order," let alone know humankind's place in it? Oh, right, we know it through the certainty of faith, that is to say, we know it with certainty because we wish it to be true. And, of course, since Brownback believes so badly that humans were "not an accident," they must reflect a unique "image and likeness." How does Brownback know this? Because he believes it. Why does he believe it? Because he wants it to be true.

Case closed! Of course, since evolution neither claims humankind is the result of an accident nor that humans do not have a "unique" "image and likeness," this is yet another irrelevant non sequitir.

Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge.

That is to say, no matter the evidence, any scientific fact that Brownback likes is a "welcome addition to human knowledge," but if Brownback doesn't like it, then it isn't. That is to say, if scientific facts and the available evidence point to a conclusion Brownback doesn't like, he thinks we shouldn't consider whether it is true or not, but rather should discard it in favor of Brownback's "truth." And, since Brownback's "truth" is just things he wants to be true, we should essentially let Brownback decide what is true and what isn't by fiat.

Yeah, that sounds great. Sign me up for that.

Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Anything that conflicts with my belief in the magic sky fairy should be rejected as anti-sky fairy propoganda, and therefore not science. Why is it not science? Because it is anti-sky fairy propaganda. How do we know what is anti-sky fairy propoganda? Anything that conflicts with my belief in the magic sky fairy.

Facts aren't just facts and either true or not based on whether evidence supports them. No. Any fact that Brownback doesn't like, no matter what underlies it, is, by definition, anti-sky fairy propaganda. What is and isn't science isn't determined by observation of the observable world and empirical evidence, but what Brownback declares it.

Uh-huh.

And this guy gets to be part of making laws???

* Notice how he suddenly switched from talking about "reason and faith" to "science and faith," as if they are interchangable? Guess what. They're not.

** I'm pretty sure he is willing to leave "no stone unturned" because he plans to carve the Ten Commandments into each and every one of them.

In Which I Vomit in My Mouth Just a Little

2007-05-23T11:44:00.001-07:00

I suppose most of my readers are aware of this bizarre story by now, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention if not.

Back in 2004, Ashcroft, then still the Attorney General, was sick in the hospital, desperately ill. He'd turned over authority to then Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Well, the Bush regime was at that moment trying to get the Department of Justice to sign off on the NSA domestic wiretapping program, which, apparently unbeknownst to the White House, both Comey and Ashcroft had decided had crossed a line and become illegal.

Yes, you read that right, but to repeat (cue vomit): The Bush regime's domestic wiretapping program had gone so far over the line that true-believer John motherfucking Ashcroft thought it was over the line. The guy who is so conservative that he covered up the bare breasts of a statue of Justice was the one on the side of civil rights against the regime. That is just goddamned amazing to me. How far to the right do you have to be when both John Ashcroft is to the left of you? Somewhere between Hitler and Attilla the Hun, I think.

But the story gets even more bizarre. When Comey told the White House he wouldn't sign off on the wiretapping program, the White House sent Abu Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft's hospital bed to overrule Comey even though it wasn't clear at the time if Ashcroft was going to fucking live or not. That is to say, the White House wasn't satisfied that the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the 2nd-ranking legal official in the US government, thought the wiretapping program was illegal, so they wanted a second opinion from the highest ranking official, even though he was in the hospital so incapacitated he'd handed over his authority to his deputy.

Which shows just exactly how much the Bush regime cares about the "rule of law" that conservatives like to crow about. They were so ideologically driven to violate the rights of Americans that they were willing to lean on a sick man to get the answer they wanted rather than accept the right answer.

Anyway, Comey heard about how Abu and Card were on the way to the hospital, so he hurried there and got there first. He had some FBI agents with him and when he entered Ashcroft's hostpital room to join Ashcroft's wife, he told the FBI agents not to let anyone from the White House remove him. That is to say, the acting Attorney General of the United States was worried the White House might bring guys (presumably Secret Service guys, since they're under Treasury and don't report to the Attorney General) to physically remove him from the room while they tried to do an end-run around his duly-delegated authority, worried enough that he was willing to order FBI agents to confront other government agents in order to prevent it.

Sort of like what happens in the Third World or a banana republic, not the US, no?

Anyway, basically, Ashcroft was totally out of it in pain, but when Abu and Card arrived and pressed him on the wiretapping issue, he first explained to them -- apparently coherently, despite being incoherent moments earlier -- why the wiretapping program was illegal, and then said, "But it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not the Attorney General. There's the Attorney General," and pointed at Comey before becoming incoherent again.

And then, when the regime showed its utter disregard for the rule of law by ignoring the opinion of the Department of Justice that the wiretapping program was illegal and renewing it anyway, Comey told Ashcroft he had to resign over the issue and Ashcroft decided to resign as well.

Yes, folks, the Bush regime is so wacked that an authoritarian nutjob like John Ashcroft decided he had to resign because the regime had gone too far in violating Americans' civil rights. John Ashcroft is a libertarian compared to these assholes.

This story, as crazy and movie-like as it is, which probably should depress me with its look into how close to a banana republic the US really is, and how easily it could become one, somehow gives me a little hope instead. If even extremist ideologues like John Ashcroft can be pushed far enough that they have to stand up for civil rights and the Constitution, then maybe there's hope. Maybe not everyone, even on the extreme religious right, is completely devoid of scruples like Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Gonzales are, and maybe this was just the perfect storm of utterly amoral people being in power at once. Maybe, as bad as another far-right administration would be, it won't be as bad as this one, because there just aren't enough completely amoral conservatives out there. I mean, Ashcroft sure looked and acted like one, but when the chips came down, he did the right thing, in at least this particular instance. Maybe there just won't be enough of the utterly amoral religious conservatives around to give us another Bush regime.

One can hope, right?

In Case You Missed It...

2007-05-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

Voter fraud is Rovian Republican bullshit meant to discourage poor and minority voters from going to the polls because they tend to vote from Democrats. Not only did the Bush Department of (In)Justice look and look and look for cases of voter fraud to prosecute and even fire US Attorneys who weren't aggressive enough in hunting cases down, without finding even "a single prosecutable case across the country," but -- under Rove's orders I am certain -- the Republicans even set up a bogus think-tank called the American Center for Voting Rights to legitimize the notion that voter fraud was widespread. Having served its function, the think-tank has now shut its doors, as does any front organization once the scam has been perpetrated.

Republicans like to talk about all the fake names that people register to vote and how the voter rolls don't get purged enough to keep fake names off them. Fair enough. There are fake and fraudulent names on voter rolls. But that doesn't mean those fake names are actually being used to vote. That's a whole other thing. Sure, you can be a wiseacre and register Mickey Mouse to vote, and you'll never get caught and it'll be funny. But if you show up at a polling place and try to vote as Mickey Mouse, you're going to get arrested. There's no risk to putting in a false registration, and it's easy. That's why it happens a bunch. But actually trying to vote on a fraudulent registration involves actual risk for almost no gain -- unless you've got thousands of people to do it with you it won't really accomplish anything -- and so it just doesn't happen.

As the article referenced above points out, showing up at the polls to place a fraudulent vote just doesn't make any sense. If you were going to try to swing an election with fake voters, you'd do it with absentee ballots, since the risk is so much lower and one person (or a few) can send in hundreds or thousands of fake ballots. A few people can't go to the same polling place dozens and dozens of times, even without strict identification requirements, without getting noticed. And, in fact, absentee ballot fraud has been found in the US while voter fraud at the polls hasn't.

But, of course, all this is beside the point to the Republicans. They're going after voter fraud and not absentee ballot fraud not because they're not actually worried about either, but because they can intimidate minorities to keep them from voting by passing strict voter ID laws. They aren't pushing absentee ballot fraud laws because they won't help intimidate minority voters.

So don't fall for the line that the Republicans care one whit about voter fraud. They don't. In fact, they know it doesn't happen. It's just a useful tactic in their game of trying to jimmy the system so that the US is no longer a Republic (if it even still is) but a Republican oligarchy.

After all, the Republicans don't seem at all concerned about all the problems with the new voting machines losing votes, mistabulating votes, and failing to register cast votes, even though those allegations are actually widespread and backed up with significant evidence. Why? Because most of these problems happened in Democratic-leaning districts and helped the Republicans. They don't care about fraud. They care about rigging the system so they can keep power.

Oh, and it's not like it's any accident that most of the voting machine errors happened in Democratic-leaning districts where Republicans were in charge of the elections commissions. But that's another story.

It's True: I Look Upon Christianity With "Distain"

2007-05-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

I now know that atheists want society to "distain" Christianity, thanks to Chuck Norris! I don't know what "distain" means, but I assume it's like when PETA threw fake animal blood on fur-wearers. Maybe we use wine instead (because it's the blood of Christ, see?)

We also, according to the Chuckster, want to make Christianity's "components" illegal. I'm not entirely clear what that means, but I must be for it, 'cause Chuck said so, right?

Eroding and erasing theistic language in culture is a growing trend.

Really? Wow. It seems to me that I hear God mentioned, thanked, praised, and worshipped on TV, in movies, whenever an athlete is interviewed after a big game, in almost every political speech, on our currency, on the street, and on business signs all the time. Hmm. What am I missing?

Oh, right. For fundamentalist wackos like Chuck, "culture" is the same as "government," and it isn't enough that there's a church on every corner in most cities and towns across the US and that every other car on the road has a Jesus fish on it. No, everyone, all the time, has to be constantly exposed to Chuck's religion, and if government isn't explicitly doing so, then his religious "freedoms" have been violated. 'Cause, you know, religious freedom really just means the freedom for Chuck to use the power of the government to coerce those dirty atheists into believing the Truth. Right, Chuck?

Earlier this year George Washington dollar coins were not only inscribed with the words "In God We Trust" on their edges, but many excluded them entirely! Such minting modifications are a flagrant defiance against theism and a public reflection of the place God is now relegated – to the fringes of society.

Yeah, because having your God explicitly mentioned on the currency every citizen has to use to conduct his or her daily business isn't enough... it has to be on the face, not the edge, because otherwise Christians might forget about God when paying for ice cream and become an atheist, all because they had to look at the fucking edge of the coin to see His name! The barbarity!

And there were not "minting modifications" resulting in some coins lacking the inscription. It was a mistake. Not a fucking conspiracy. Sometimes the post office prints stamps with airplanes upside down. No one screams bloody murder and accuses the post office of being anti-gravity. (Well, not that I know if, anyway...) In truth, I believe it is unconstitutional for the US Mint to put "In God We Trust" on our currency, but the Mint isn't secretly run by atheists leaving the motto off the coins and trying to legislate atheism. I venture to guess that most employees of the US Mint, along with the political appointees and politicians above them, are, in fact, Christians, and not particularly disposed to the destruction of Christianity in the US.

Secularists of course have made repeated attempts to rid "under God" from "The Pledge of Allegiance."

Only since 1954, when theists got those words added. Was the US a nation of atheists before then, Chuck?

I was also grateful to read in the Dallas Morning News May 1 that the House also embraced legislation "that seeks to clarify the rights of Texas public school students to offer public prayers at football games or graduation, hand out religious messages or hold religious meetings during the school day if they want."

This legislation and your gratitude, Chuck, are just pieces of political theater, and I suspect you know it. The rights of students to pray and engage in religious expression are already clear. They're allowed unless they disrupt learning. It's called the 1st Amendment. What is not allowed, Chuck, is for the school to endorse a particular religion. That's all. Prayer has never been banned from schools in the US. Coerced prayer is.

Another example of atheistic advocacy can be found in the 10,000-member Freedom from Religion Foundation initiation of a Supreme Court case, which asserts that President Bush's faith-based initiatives pose a violation of the wall of separation between church and state.

Just "culture" is the same as "government" to nutjobs like the Chuckster, a "constitutional challenge" is the same as "atheistic advocacy." Chuck may or may not know that some of the most fervent supporters of the 1st Amendment, the foundation on which the wall of separation between church and state, was built, were Baptists. They didn't like being discriminated against by other Christian sects through the power of the government. So, I guess they would be atheists too, eh Chuck, since they were engaged in the "atheistic advocacy" of supporting the wall of separation between church and state? I suppose the Jews of Newport Rhode Island, who Washington wrote a letter to while President guaranteeing them freedom of religion in the US, were also advocating atheism? And Washington, too, for his guarantee? In fact, Chuck, by your logic many of the Founding Fathers were engaged in "atheistic advocacy" by signing onto a document including the 1st Amendment. That kinda works against your side's whole "the US was founded as a Christian nation" theme, doesn't it?

Oh, and by the way, whether you like it or not, Chuck, faith-based initiatives are a violation of the 1st Amendment, and trust me, lots of religious folk, like all those who aren't getting any of the plum guv'ment money because they don't have the right faith, agree with me.

Atheists also received a proverbial shot in the arm by locating a representative and advocate of sorts in Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who "is the first member of Congress – and the highest-ranking elected official in the country – to make known that he is a nontheist."

Lordy, lordy, ma, get the shotgun! The world's a-commin' to an end! They's an ah-theist in them 'thar Congress!

First off, Stark isn't an atheist, he's more of an agnostic. Also, since atheism isn't a religion but rather lack of belief in a god or god(s), there's not much to give a "shot in the arm" to. But, even if we define militant atheism of the sort practiced by Dawkins, Sam Harris, and to a lesser extent myself, as a movement, it's hard to see how it's a big shot in the arm to find out that one of 435 Representatives, that is, 0.0023% of that legislative body, is willing to openly admit to being a non-theist. And that's not even considering that the percentage in the US Senate is still... zero, as is the percentage on the Supreme Court, and the percentage of openly non-theist Presidents. Don't worry, Chuck, the world ain't comin' to an end just because one guy in the legislature doesn't believe in your sky-fairy.

One more point, Chuck: Stark almost certainly isn't the first, or last, non-theist in the US Congress. But the narrow-minded intolerance of religious bigots like you keep such politicians from being open about their beliefs, since you'd like to stone them if you could, and certainly wouldn't vote for them. In fact, Chuck, in terms of bigotry and hatred of those who don't believe as you do, I'd have to say Christians in the US take the cake. You're complaining that 45% of Americans might consider voting for a non-theist as if they wanted to rub shit all over the Bible, but almost every atheist who votes has, does, and will vote for theists. You see, we understand that one's belief or non-belief in a sky-fairy isn't the most important thing to consider when choosing leaders. When you make it the most important thing, you end up in the kinds of clusterfucks our good friend "God speaks to me" George Bush has created.

But yes, Chuck, one freakin' non-theist in the Congress is surely the beginning of the end for Christianity being legal in the US. Right.

By the way, Chuck, one point of order. I'd like to see theism and belief in the supernatural fade away like the belief that bleeding someone with leeches will cure them of cancer. But I don't want nor do I intend to advocate for laws forcing theists -- or anyone else, for that matter -- from giving up or changing their beliefs to suit me. I want to convince theists they are deluded, certainly, but I don't want to tear down the 1st Amendment that protects Christians as well as atheists to do it. Take your strawman caricature of atheists as evil people who want to torture and burn Christians at the stake somewhere else, Chuck. We ain't buying it here.

His election stands in stark contrast to the wishes of our Founding Fathers, who
encouraged American citizens to vote Christians into public office. As John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, wrote to Jedidiah Morse on Feb. 28, 1797, "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers. And it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians
for their rulers."

I am going to show a bit of... faith here, or perhaps just laziness, by not taking the time to look this quote up to ensure it is genuine. Many similar quotes have turned out to be Christian and/or creationist inventions, but I will take this quote as accurate for the sake of argument.

So what? Madison thought it was a violation of the separation of church and state for there to be a House or Senate chaplain. The Founding Fathers weren't a homogeneous bunch, Chuck. The words of one Founder can't just be taken as the views of all the Founders. That's why, above, when I discussed the Founding Fathers, I said "most," because certainly some of the Founders were not in support of the separation of church and state. As a whole you could say they were for at least a certain level of separation and freedom of religion, since they included the 1st Amendment in the Constitution, but even those in support of the 1st Amendment varied greatly on what they thought it should mean, to whit Madison on one end and those who thought it just prohibited a national, government-backed church on the other.

And, in this case, Chuck, history is clearly against you, since the Founders put into the Constitution a clause preventing any religious test for holding office in the US. Certainly, if the Founders, as a group, wanted only Christians to be able to hold political office, they wouldn't have made a point of disallowing religion being used as a test of worthiness. Perhaps John Jay felt it best that the US elect Christians to office, but apparently not enough to ensure it by making it mandatory. But to say that the thoughts of John Jay, one of the Founders, in this one letter constitute the "wishes" of the Founders as a whole is ludicrous given what they actually decided to put into the document upon which the law of the land is based.

Chuck then goes on a screed against hate crimes legislation, claiming that it would allow clergy to be "accused as an accessory to a hate crime, after he preached to his church on Sunday about the woes of same-sex marriage and discovered on Monday one of his congregants got in a fight with a homosexual co-worker as a result of a moral altercation?"

That's just stupid. Most members of Congress are Christians, dumbass, and they aren't out to pass laws that would criminalize a sermon condemning homosexuality as immoral, less charge such a clergyman of a crime. Further, while I think such a sermon is bigoted and immoral, as would be the preacher who gave it, I still don't think it should be a crime. You see, Chuck, I don't just pay lip service to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I actually believe it. So, while you would like non-Christians silenced and pushed out of public life, to use the power of government to further your faith and coerce others to accept it, and to institute religious test for holding public office, I don't want the government to silence even speech I find offensive.

The guy who started a fight with a homosexual co-worker, however, should be charged with a crime, and further, don't you dare try to make it seem that it is okay to attack others whose lives you think immoral by calling it a "moral altercation." It isn't moral to discriminate against, physically assault, or denigrate homosexuals for their homosexuality, no matter your moral feelings on the subject. The cause of morality isn't furthered by committing immoral acts, no matter how justified your bigotry makes you feel. Unless you are willing to call white racists getting into fights with blacks "moral altercations," then shut the fuck up. Because racists are just as sure of their moral superiority as you are, Chuck, and just as wrong.

Further, I doubt you'd buy it if I got into a fight with a preacher for preaching hatred of homosexuals, despite my strong moral conviction that spreading hatred is wrong. I'm sure you'd be the first in line to laugh in my face if I called it a "moral altercation." Well, Chuck, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so if fundamentalists fighting with homosexuals isn't assault but just a "moral altercation," then when I bitch slap the next Christian who says gays shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else, it won't be an assault. It'll just be a "moral altercation."

The Earth Revolves Around The Sun and Other Atheist Lies

2007-05-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

According to this blogger, writing in support of right-wing presidential candidate (and, it appears, possible Holocaust denier) Sam Brownback, we commie pinko atheists who hate America are also the ones perpetuating the lie that the Earth orbits the sun rather than the other way round. A lie clearly falsfified by "empiricism," the author tells us, since "If it [the Earth] moved, we would feel it moving."

Plus, did you know that math can magically make things happen? It's true: "The earth moves only thru [sic] abstract, abstruse, and esoteric mathematics invented to make it move." Just by inventing new mathematics, we can apparently push entire planets around! Who knew?* I should have spent more time on my calculus classes...

Then, in the comments, this blogger gives us a gem, by way of responding to a comment that literally interpreting the Bible to mean that the Earth is stationary would also mean accepting that bats are birds: "Bats are birds, they fly. They may be mammals in one sense, but in the sense that they have wings, and all winged non-arthropods are birds, they are birds." Priceless!

The jury is out on whether this site is parody or not. I have to say it is disturbing how hard it is to tell loonies from satirists on the internets. Maybe I'll ask teh Goggle.

* All right, dumb question. The Logopolitans, of course.

Money Quote

2007-05-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen.”

--Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense

That's how blatant your earmark of Federal funds for a project that benefits you personally would have to be in order for the House Ethics Committee to rule your actions unethical.

Jeez.

Not Just Wrong, But Utterly Wrong...

2007-05-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

I read a post in some blog yesterday that was so utterly wrong that I'm not going to dignify the blog by linking to it. The post said something to the effect of, "But, of course, lefties are so busy hating President Bush instead of the terrorists who want to kill us, just because Bush hasn't been a great leader..."

The stupid! It burns!

All right, all you neocons out there, let me explain something about reality to you: The terrorists are going to keep hating me and wanting to kill me whether I hate them back or not. The fact is, nothing I feel about them is going to change how they feel and what they want one way or the other. So, whether I hate the terrorists or not really doesn't matter a damned bit in the real world.

Secondly, hate isn't a limited resource in this world. Trust me. There's more than enough to go around. And the production of hate isn't on the decline. The Bush regime is creating gobs and gobs of it in Iraq even as I write this. Even if hating the terrorists were important, which it isn't, I'm perfectly capable of hating them and Bush at the same time. It's not like walking and chewing gum, for the love of...

But the reason many of us on the left, including me, focus most of our ire on Bush rather than the terrorists is because Bush's job is to make me safer from the terrorists, but instead, he's made things worse, created more terrorists, and put the US -- and Americans like me -- at greater risk. And, at least in theory, since the President of the United States represents the people of the US, people like me, and is acting in my interests, I have a definite stake in what he does, how he does it, and in making sure he knows when I think he's fucking up. I am not the terrorists' boss and I know they aren't going to listen to me. But I am one of Bush's bosses, and even though it is clear he isn't going to listen, I have a duty to make my voice heard when he is acting against the nation's interests. And I'm not responsible for what the terrorists do, but I am, as a citizen of this republic, responsible for what Bush does in my name.

The terrorists were never responsible for acting in the best interests of the people of the US. Bush was, and he failed utterly. I can't hold the terrorists responsible myself; I don't have that power. I can only hold them responsible and act through the government, through President Bush, and as my representative he has done more to help the terrorists than they could have dreamed with his disastrous policies. For failing to do what needed to be done to protect the US from the terrorists, for failing to hold them accountable, for getting us into a war that had nothing to do with terrorism and has created a failed state which is now a breeding ground for more terrorists, Bush has failed the country and failed me. In my name, he let the terrorists win. And that's why I focus my ire on him: The terrorists were never going to give up and stop hating and wanting to kill me, but Bush could have made me and the US safer. And he didn't.

Hating the terrorists is just something bullshit neocon pseudo-patriots do to make themselves feel better about how badly they have fucked up this country and the world. But it's meaningless, useless, pointless, and it is nothing more than mental masturbation. Only speaking out against the failed policies of our government is it possible to change course and hope for things to eventually get better, and if the left "hates" Bush, it is only because he was the one who carried the responsibility to use our collective power to make things better and he didn't. He acted in his own self-interest instead and fucked the rest of us over. And he's still in charge, still fucking things up right fucking now, and I hate him because he won't change course, won't do what is right, won't do anything to make things better, and worst of all, won't admit his failures and incompetence and step down (along with Cheney) and get the hell out of the way.

But maybe, just maybe, if I complain enough, speak out enough, voice my ire enough, something will change. Not likely, but it's way more likely than my hating the terrorists will change anything. The chances of that are exactly zero.

There is no logical reason to care about whether the left hates the terrorists or not. As long as the left doesn't want to be killed by the terrorists -- we don't -- that's all that matters. Not to see that is willful stupidity and logically incoherent.

I Told You That You Should Really Avoid Magical Thinking...

2007-05-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a perfect example of what I have been talking about, how accepting one bullshit thing on faith can make you more apt to start accepting other bullshit things too: As part of his campaign to get the same suckers who send him money to buy his energy drink, Pat Robertson -- 76 year old Pat Robertson -- claims that his drink allows him to leg lift two-thousand pounds.

That's right. 2,000. Two, comma, and three zeroes. Two-thousand. A 76-year-old man.

Notwithstanding that the world record is 1,335 pounds, and the guy who did that burst the capillaries in his eyes doing it. But Robertson claims he can beat that record by 665 pounds and not burst a single blood vessel.

Who would possibly believe that? Oh, that's right. The same people who believe he has a direct line to God, that God tells him things like how hurricane Katrina was God's judgment because of "the gays" or how soon the apocalypse is coming, even though he's never right, or that he can heal you by touching you. Once he gets you to believe he has Jesus powers, why not believe he has super-strength too?

And yes, Robertson is a loon and a con-man and would be with or without religion. Christianity didn't make him a loon and a con-man, I'm willing to concede. But it's kind of like the first person to try to open a stubborn jar: It loosens them up. Makes them more credulous, more willing to believe. And also gives a false sense of authority and credibility to someone who shouldn't have any: He's a man of faith, a man of God! He couldn't be lying to me!

Or else Robertson really is a superhero. I can't wait to see him in spandex.

The Right Decision

2007-05-16T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not fan of the British royal family. Not a big hater, either. Don't care about 'em much either way. And I'm certainly not a fan of the rich and powerful getting out of military service while the less fortunate don't.

But I think it's the right decision not to send Prince Harry to Iraq. For one thing, though all the troops in Iraq are in harm's way, he'd be such a big target that I have to think he'd almost certainly end up getting killed. It's fair for the rich and powerful to share the risk, but not necessarily to take a vastly greater risk like Harry would be doing.

Plus, he'd be such a danger to his comrades. He would put them in much greater danger as well, and that just doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

I don't like letting someone get out of his responsibilities just for being rich or famous, but in this case, I think I have to agree that, on balance, it wouldn't be fair to Harry or his compatriots to send him to Iraq. I could be wrong on this one, but that's how I see it.

Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Ass On The Way Out...

2007-05-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

According to CNN, Wolfowitz's tenure at the World Bank is about to end, and, to quote Yoda, "Not short enough it was." I don't have the slightest bit of sympathy for this asshole, even if I ignore the fact that he was the principal architect and proponent of the ongoing disastrous clusterfuck in Iraq.

Just focusing on his World Bank adventures I still can't stand this asshole. First off, he was appointed to head up the World Bank by Bush, even though he was vocal in expressing his feeling that there was no need for the World Bank, for the same reason Bush appointed Bolton as his ambassador to the UN: To destroy it from inside. Wolfowitz's job was to grind things to a halt at the World Bank and weaken it to make it an easier target for being done away with. And he did a good job, too, since he spent most of his time going around the world telling everyone how the World Bank had fucked up and how it wasn't making things better but rather making them worse, without detailing any plan for fixing it.

Oh, wait, he did have one stated goal apart from his unstated one of destroying the Bank: To end corruption. I guess he got his girlfriend a plum job at the State Department, with a huge tax-exempt raise and a guarantee she'd get good performance appraisals no matter her actual performance, by way of demonstrating his crack-down on said corruption, things like nepotism and giving personal favors. Yeah. Because the best way to show that you're against corruption is to violate ethics rules in setting your girlfriend up in a cushy job.

If you come in on an anti-corruption platform, you have to be totally clean. That's the gig. You can't even brook the appearance of a conflict of interest, let alone use your position to get favors for your girlfriend. And you certainly can't talk tought about ending corruption and then whine when you get caught doing something inappropriate. You can't expect others to follow the rules, respect ethical boundaries, and take responsibility for their actions when you don't take any responsibility for your own. I already knew Wolfowitz was a horrible liar and self-deluded fool, but now we can add hypocrisy to his list of selling points. It's hard to run an organization on an anti-corruption platform when you're revealed to be a huge fucking hypocrite.

Some of the Western European nations have threatened to stop letting the US pick the World Bank president over the whole issue of how the Bush regime has supported Wolfowitz despite the obvious need for him to be fired or step down for the good of the Bank. I think they're right and should stop letting the US pick the World Bank president. The only way to curb abuses of power by future US administrations is to start reigning in this one. I think it will be good for everyone, including Americans, for the US to have get a smack on the nose with a newspaper for our arrogance.

With Wolfowitz, I think we should kick him in the balls. A lot.

Polls Are Like Guns... They Don't Lie, People Do

2007-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

This poll supposedly shows that 35% of Democrats believe that Bush knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were going to happen and that, therefore, Bush was "in on it," in the words of Jonah Goldberg, and that "a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds."

If it were true, I would say that the Democrats who truly believe Bush was "in on it" are, indeed, batshit crazy. Further, I would tell them that they are as deluded as the right-wing "faith-based community" and to get their heads out of their asses. The Bush regime scheming to cause or allow 9/11 to happen would not only be freakin' impossible to keep secret for this long, but would be too big a political gamble even for Rove and his gang: If they got found out, they might be literally crucified, tarred-and-feathered, or drawn-and-quartered, and it would probably be the end of the GOP. No, even if I believed that Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld were so evil they would actually do such a thing, which I don't -- they're evil, but not that evil -- it would just be a political risk beyond risky and desparate, and the regime didn't need to make such a desperate move in 2001. They just didn't.

However, I don't have to say any of those things, because the poll doesn't actually tell us what Goldberg wants us to think it does. It doesn't tell us whether even a single Democrat thinks Bush was "in on it" or whether his regime conspired to cause or allow 9/11 to happen. Because the Democrats polled weren't asked about that. Here's what the respondents were actually asked:

Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?

Which, Mr. Goldberg, I'm afraid is not the same thing as asking them if Bush conspired to cause the attacks or allow them to happen. No, this poorly-worded question only tells us that 35% of respondents to the poll who were Democrats think Bush may have known something that related to the 9/11 attacks at some point before they happened.* Respondents could easily interpret the infamous pre-911 Presidential briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike inside America" as "advance" knowledge, for instance, and not be even vaguely considering that a 'yes' answer would be used to imply they believed in a conspiracy. In fact, in that sense, I do believe Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and may well have answered 'yes' myself if asked that question without further context.

Or, one could believe that Bush knew about the attacks before the planes hit the towers but after the planes were in the air, and that it was too late for him to do anything when he learned.

Since the question does not specify what the respondent thinks Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks prior to the attacks nor when the respondents thought he knew it, Goldberg is out-and-out making shit up and lying through his teeth when he claims that the "most common" reason respondents answered 'yes' is that they think "Bush craftily enabl[ed] a terror attack as a way to whip up support for his foreign policy without too many questions." Goldberg doesn't know if this was the reason anyone answered 'yes,' let alone that it was the "most common" reason.

Simply put, he's full of shit.

Later in the article, Goldberg tries a sleight-of-hand to make himself look less like a lying sack of shit and more reasonable. He says:

So then there's [the] option... [that] the poll is just wrong. This is quite plausible. Indeed, the poll is surely partly wrong. Many Democrats are probably merely saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they're just answering in a fit of pique. I'm game for [this] option...

Wait, you say. Didn't he just agree with you?

No. Notice the sleight-of-hand. He admits that the Democrats might have said 'yes' for a different reason than the one he asserted earlier, but he doesn't admit that the poll doesn't support his claim and that he just made it the fuck up... No, he says that maybe "the poll is just wrong," [my emphasis]. The poll can't be right or wrong on this issue, because the poll doesn't say anything about it one way or the other! Why is Goldberg trying to pull the wool over our eyes? Because otherwise he couldn't use it to call other polls, polls he doesn't like, into question:

But if we're going to throw this poll away, I think liberals need to offer the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to data that are more convenient for them. For example, liberals have been dining out on polls showing that Fox News viewers, or Republicans generally, are more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Now, however flimsy, tendentious, equivocal or sparse you may think the evidence that Hussein had a hand in 9/11 may be, it's ironclad compared with the nugatory [?] proof that Bush somehow permitted or condoned those attacks.

Oh, snap! Oh, wait, no! He's full of shit again. We don't have to "throw this poll away" to reject the notion that 35% of the Democratic respondents believe Bush was "in on" 9/11, because the poll doesn't fucking say that! Goldberg did! As such, the amount of evidence that Hussein had a hand in 9/11 compared to the evidence that Bush did is utterly irrelevant and we do not, in fact, have to give the "benefit of the doubt" to results of the polls Goldberg wants us to ignore.

Further, even if this poll said what Goldberg claims, his argument is just stupid, because we can reject the results of a single, unverified or duplicated poll without calling into questions the combined results of the dozens of polls that all indicate that Republicans and Faux News viewers believe, after the Bush regime repeated the lie in the media thousands of times, that Hussein was involved with 9/11. You'd need a bunch of polls all indicated that Democrats think Bush was "in on" 9/11 with an amount of data commensurate to that supporting the 9/11 Hussein polls for us to even consider this argument.

Goldberg is a lying bag of ass.

Also, it bears noting that the pollster who conducted the poll, Scott Rasmussen, is a right-winger and has written articles for WorldNut Daily. We cannot, of course, commit the ad hominem fallacy of ignoring his data out of hand because of who he is. However, since we also know from vast amounts of research on polling that polls are very sensitive to factors that don't show up in the numerical results, factors like the inflection or tone of voice the pollster uses when asking the question or how the pollster determines who to call for his sample, and since we already know Rasmussen asked a poorly-worded and vague question -- not a good sign for a professional pollster -- I think we are right to be cautious about anything we draw from this poll.

Hat tip to denialism.

* Goldberg also falsely implies that "most" Democratic respondents said 'yes' to the question, thus trying to mislead us about the actual numbers presented by the poll results as well as what they mean. Plus, he later just makes up a number that isn't presented in the poll data when he says that "61% of Democrats polled consider it plausible or certain that the U.S. government would let [9/11] happen." That's bullshit. 35% of Democratic respondents said "yes" to the question about whether Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and 22% said that the CIA had advance knowledge of the attacks. Neither are a majority nor do they match Goldberg's magic "61%" number he got from his ass, presumably.

It's Not My Fault I Don't Believe in God, Since There's No Free Will

2007-05-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

I wasn't aware that "Darwinian orthodoxy denies the reality of free will," but thank god those wise intelligent design (ID) creationists revealed that well-kept secret. A secret so well-kept, in fact, that apparently the Freemason-like secret Darwinian society must only give that information out to the Darwinist Grand Masters, people like Dawkins and Gould, since I wasn't aware of it. I guess I'm just a poor dupe of the the "evilutionists."

Oh, wait. It isn't scientists, by and large, who claim that the theory of evolution is incompatible with free will. Theists are the ones who generally make this claim, based not on any evidence, but on philosophical arguments (or, perhaps, sophistry). Scientists, favoring making judgments based on evidence rather than faith (read: wild-assed guess), have debated the issue of whether humans and other organisms have free will, but have, by and large, held off on drawing conclusions until more convincing evidence was obtained.

The study the ID creationists cite shows evidence that free will may, indeed, exist in fruit flies, and thus possibly in other organisms. This is in no way in conflict with the theory of evolution. And, if it were, scientists would have to rethink the theory in accord with the new evidence, not abandon the theory entirely, as evolution is a robust theory that does not hinge on any one piece of data. The results of this study certainly give no support to intelligent design creationism.

Further, as I have argued before, free will is, in my opinion, incompatible with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of God. In a material universe, things can be undetermined and random, since no one is determining what happens. But in a universe whose existence is contigent, from moment to moment, on an omniscient and omnipotent God who exists outside of time and both knows and determines the state of each molecule and particle in existence, and sets all the factors that could affect the behavior of creatures living in that universe, including the personalities, abilities, and propensities of every living being, nothing can happen that is against God's will. As such, everything that happens is God's will and only God's will, because His will cannot be abrogated, and so there can be no free will, as all beings living in such a universe must always do as God wills and can never do otherwise. While theists like to argue that we can, in fact, do things that are not what God wishes us to do, that just pushes things back one step and postulates a God that has dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities), as we can only do something God does not wish us to do if God wishes us to, so God would have to both wish and not wish us to take that action. Of course, since nothing can happen that an omnipotent being does not wish to happen -- as being all-powerful necessarily entails the power to prevent anything one does not wish to happen from happening -- this is logically impossible. As such, either there is no omnipotent God or there is no free will. Both cannot exist.

Trumpeting evidence of the existence of free will does not actually help the ID creationists at all, though they don't realize it. Because a material, non-supernatural universe is consistent with free will or lack thereof, but the Christian God who is the unnamed "designer" of intelligent design theory isn't.

We Fired You For Stuff We Didn't Know About When We Did It

2007-05-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

Representative Chris Cannon (R-UT) is a big fan of time travel, apparently, because he thinks Justice Department officials traveled back in time to fire someone for something they didn't know about when they actually fired him.

Cannon is claiming that the Justice Department was right in firing US Attorney David Iglesias because a couple of weeks before they fired him, he received inappropriate calls from members of Congress who pressured him to bring indictments against Democrats prior to the November 2006 elections, in order to influence those elections -- but Iglesias didn't report the calls, as apparently required by Justice Department regulations.

However, the Justice Department supposedly didn't know about the calls when they fired him. According to Cannon's logic, if you do something for an inappropriate reason, and then later you learn something that would make a better reason, it doesn't matter why you did it in the first place. The reason you dug up later trumps the actual reason you did it.

Naturally. I mean, if a cop shoots someone just because he doesn't like him, but later it turns out that the guy the cop shot was a criminal, then it's okay that the cop shot him, right? Perfectly reasonable.

But Cannon's logic is even worse than that. The reason Iglesias was fired in the first place is because he wasn't willing to violate his professional ethics and Justice Department regulations by bringing politically-motivated indictments at times beneficial to Republican politicians. And part of the case against him in that regard is that he didn't bow to the pressure put on him by the members of Congress who called him, and causing those members of Congress to complain about him to the Justice Department.

So, in essence, Cannon's argument is that even though Iglesias was fired for not bowing to inappropriate political pressure, his failure to report that inappropriate political pressure to the people who fired him -- for refusing to bow to that pressure -- puts Iglesias in the wrong and he should be fired.

What?!? I almost need a diagram to make that even make sense.

Can it be any clearer that the Republicans don't live on the same planet as the rest of us? How did Cannon even come up with this tortured rationalization anyway? To paraphrase Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, "No human would argue like this."

Torturing for Intelligence

2007-05-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

I was watching Boston Legal with my girlfriend last night (yes, dumb show, but kinda funny, and it has Shatner) as they had a military guy on the stand making the standard argument the neocons have been making for several years now: We must kidnap and torture people to get intelligence that will save American lives and prevent then next 9/11.

And something occurred to me. Something other than the well-known flaw in this logic that information gained through torture is extremely unreliable. Something other than the fact that experts and those involved in "interrogating" prisoners have come forward and admitted that no actionable intelligence has been gained in this way.

No, what occurred to me is that we actually did get the intelligence we needed to prevent 9/11 and torture wasn't necessary to do it. The 9/11 commission's report as well as media investigations have shown that the FBI had the intelligence but that it was ignored by those who could have done something. 9/11 didn't happen because we weren't kidnapping and torturing people to get intelligence. It happened because we didn't do a good job of interpreting and acting on the intelligence we had.

So the argument that we can only prevent another 9/11 and save American lives by torturing people for intelligence doesn't make any sense at all even in a practical sense, leaving aside any bleeding-heart issues of morality or law. Our existing intelligence gathering methods prior to 9/11 worked. That's the bare fact of it.

Torture wasn't necessary then, and it isn't necessary now. Even the utilitarian argument for torture fails utterly. When you add back in the fact that torture doesn't produce good intelligence, that torture and extraordinary rendition are against the law and violations of the Geneva Conventions, and that torturing prisoners and stripping them of their civil rights is morally wrong and against the values on which the US was founded, there's just no excuse at all.

None.

Talk about "Tools..."

2007-05-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

I think maybe violence isn't the last refuge of the incompetent. I think maybe it's religion. Check this blog post out: a Christian unable to refute the logic of an atheist's argument about why people should get to follow their own consciences with regard to abortion replied by saying, "LOGIC IS THE TOOL OF SATAN!!!"

That's right. Logic, one of the most basic tools in the toolbox of discriminating what is true from what is complete bullshit, is casually rejected as an invention (or at least "tool") of an invisible evil red guy with horns and a tail. By someone whose holy book includes a bunch of nearly incomprehensible stories called "parables" supposedly told by the son of the all-powerful ruler of the universe, who is also the god himself, stories which rely on... wait for it!... logic to make what little sense they do. If logic were really a tool of Satan, then why did Jesus use it? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also, if some Christians want to reject logic wholesale, I would like to know what they intend to replace it with. Because very little makes sense outside the realm of logic. How would one make decisions or determine what is true and what isn't? I suppose one could hope God would let you know, but even fervent Christians who aren't schizophrenics don't get advice from God on whether or not it makes sense to, for example, eat potato salad that's been sitting out in the sun for a few hours. Without logic to rely on, how could one come to realize that one's previous experience of eating potato salad that was sitting out and later getting sick is a good indicator that the same will happen this time? One has to make a logical inference to make that connection. Is Satan trying to keep Christians from eating perfectly good potato salad by making them think it has gone bad, perhaps?

Jeesh.

Maher and Hitchens: Twin "Ed Renner" Award Winners!!!

2007-05-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

I Tivoed a recent episode of Charlie Rose where he had on Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens (in separate interviews). Both interviews were very frustrating because both men went from being perfectly rational to going off the rails of sanity and saying things that were just batshit crazy.

Maher made a lot of good points about the irrationality of trusting Bush's and Cheney's predictions about what would happen if the US pulled out of Iraq, given that they have been 100% wrong in every other prediction they've made about what would happen there. And about how Bush is a "uniter, not a divider" only in the sense that he is uniting people who normally hate each other in hatred of the US.

But then he went on a screed about modern medicine, how 90% of all medications prescribed aren't necessary, how Western medicine ignores the "holistic" (ie, non-evidence based) approach to its detriment, how surgery (apparently in general) is a Bad Thing, that Western medicine has made no progress in the fight against cancer, and that most medical problems are caused by lifestyle and eating habits.

But the most nutty thing he said was something to the effect of, "Lack of aspirin isn't the cause of a headache," by way of argument (I can only assume) that you shouldn't take aspirin for headaches. That's pretty close to the stupidest I've ever heard. Lack of morphine isn't the cause of pain in gunshot wound victims either, but it sure helps. Drugs aren't just replacements for the "lack of" something in the body... they do lots of other things, like stimulating the body to produce things it needs, like preventing the body from producing things it doesn't, and regulating bodily processes that the body is failing to regulate itself.

As someone who has frequent headaches, sure, I wish I knew what was causing them so it could be corrected. But, in the meantime, when either the cause of someone's headaches is unclear or curing the headaches would involve too great a risk, pain relievers are not a completely irrational way of dealing with the problem. And lifestyle and bad eating habits are not, in fact, the cause of many ailments, despite what Maher would have us believe, though they are certainly the cause of many. Cancer appears to be endemic to our species moreso than others, for instance, even factoring for lifestyle, eating habits, and whatever carcinogenic effect the modern environment has. Most people who get cancer get it because humans appear to be particularly susceptible to cancer. End of story.

The fact is that doctors and medical schools, at least in the US, are more and more embracing holistic and homeopathic remedies, despite what Maher is claiming. Too much so, in fact, and the reason that Western medicine is skeptical about those things is because there's no evidence that most of it works. If most homeopathic or holistic remedies worked, trust me, doctors would be on them in a New York minute. And we know most of them don't work because researchers are studying them to find out. Researchers working on grants to do these studies who get no more benefit from showing that these remedies don't work than showing that they do and have no particular reason to lie.

Most of these remedies just don't work. When herbs and such have some therapeutic effect, however, Western medicine admits it. Studies have shown that echinacea has some immune system benefit and that St. John's Word does act as a mild antidepressant. It wasn't covered up or ignored by Western medicine the way Maher claims. Though, I am sure, there are lots of Western doctors who do dismiss holistic medicine and homeopathy out of hand, regardless of the evidence, but if those things worked, Western medicine would eventually embrace them.

So, to you, Bill Maher, I reluctantly bestow the not-so-covered Ed Renner Award.

Then, there was Christopher Hitchens. Oh so rational with respect to why religion is bunk and why no one should believe in it. Oh so irrational with respect to the Bush regime and the war in Iraq.

Hitchens still, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes that we were justified in invading Iraq, that the invasion was a good idea, and that the US can somehow still salvage the situation if it doesn't pull out. I just can't imagine by what logical process he could possibly arrive at these conclusions. I mean, they're all just so wrong that I don't even feel I need to repeat the myriad of reasons why at this point.

I did agree with him that the Iraqis who have supported the US and democracy in Iraq are going to be ass-fucked when the US pulls out. But where Hitchens is nuts is that he actually thinks there's something the US can do to help them at this point. We can't. Those Iraqis were fucked the moment we deposed Saddam and there's no way we can set things right now. He's right that the US will be at fault for what happens to them to its eternal shame. But he's wrong that this can be avoided at this point. We can't.

So, for his steadfast idiocy in continuing to support a war that is obviously one of the biggest disasters in modern history, I also have to reluctantly award Christopher Hitchens with the Ed Renner Award as well.

Maher and Hitchens: So close to being great minds, and yet so far.

School Uniforms and Compulsory Military Service

2007-05-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

Whenever stupid shit like this happens, someone brings up the idea of school uniforms. I have a similar problem to school uniforms that I do to universal compulsory military service: one-size-fits all solutions inevitably screw anyone who the solution doesn't actually fit.

When someone proposes school uniforms, I always want to know what are these uniforms going to look like? Will girls' outfits and boys' outfits be different? What fabrics will they be made of?

There's no better way of teaching boys and girls stereotypical ideas about sex roles and that they shouldn't try to adopt the roles of the other sex is by making girls wear dresses while boys wear pants. If a little girl isn't allowed to wear pants, then why should she think she can be a scientist either?

And I want to know what the uniforms will actually look like and be made of, because I grew up unknowingly suffering from what psychiatrists term "tactile defensiveness." In my case, what that meant is that certain fabrics and types of clothes drove me (and still drive me) absolutely batshit crazy. For instance, for most of my life, any piece of clothing that touched my neck made me crazy. I just couldn't stand it. It was just the most damned uncomfortable feeling you can imagine. And before someone says, "No one likes wearing a tie," for a long time I couldn't wear a shirt with a collar at all because I then couldn't do anything but worry about the collar brushing against my neck.

The difference between how I felt wearing something touching my neck and how most people feel is like the difference between tickling a ticklish person and a non-ticklish person. To the ticklish person, the exact same sensory impulse that doesn't bother the non-ticklish person at all is extremely uncomfortable, solely based on how the brain interprets the sensation.

I went through a long period in high school where I could only comfortably wear two particular T-shirts I owned and nothing else. I've gone through other periods where I couldn't wear T-shirts at all, because of how they touched my neck (and to this day before I don a T-shirt I stretch out the neck). When I worked at a job where I had to wear a tie every day, I used to have trouble getting to sleep at night because I was so disturbed by the thought.

And lots of fabrics have been issues for me at different times. I have never been able to comfortably wear stiff cotton, including stiff or heavy cotton T-shirts. I had a denim jacket in high school that I had to stop wearing because the feeling of the denim against my arms started driving me crazy.

For these reasons, before I even consider solving the "problem" of kids wearing inappropriate clothing to school by instituting school uniforms, I want to know what, exactly, the uniforms will physically be like. And I want to know how the school will deal with kids who have issues or problems (including ones I didn't have, like allergies to certain fabrics) with the uniforms. I don't think it is right to solve the problem of group of kids X wearing inappropriate clothing to school on the backs of kids Y, who weren't the problem, who now have problems because of the solution, the uniforms themselves.

We always forget that when we change things, we often just shift the burden of who suffers from one person to another.

In the same way, those who advocate compulsory military service of the sort required in Israel, where most everyone* is required to serve two years in the military, are only considering the good it will do for some, not the harm it will do to others. Because, the fact is that the military is a very particular kind of environment in which only certain people thrive and others wilt. And you're going to have people who can't function in that environment and end up getting into trouble they never would have had otherwise, and that can ruin lives. Getting jailed for insubordination or getting a dishonorable discharge follows you forever. And some people who would have been able to function perfectly well in other settings will not deal well with military life and end up being marked for life because of it.

Not everyone is cut out to be a surgeon, or an air-traffic controller, to be in customer service, or to work in retail. We don't expect everyone to be able to do any job in the civilian world. Why would we expect everyone to be able to adapt to the military, which is really just another particular type of job?

So I'm very wary of these one-size-fits-all solutions to our problems. Typically those proposing them are people who either would do well in the new regime, or who never had to discover whether they would but assume they'd do great. They don't take into account the variability in peoples' dispositions and consider what the solutions they propose can do.

Maybe this is just me and I'm whining from personal experience of having trouble fitting in when faced with various circumstances in life. But I still think it's important to say, so I'm going to say it.

*Certain religious groups, such as Orthodox Jews who believe fighting is a sin, are exempt, but there are only a few such exceptions and temperament, as far as I know, isn't one of them.

Good Resource for Global Warming Skeptics' Arguments

2007-05-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

In case you end up talking to a global climate change skeptic/crank, here's a good site that lists most of the major denialist arguments and why they're bullshit.

Court Ruling on Religious Objections

2007-05-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Via Dispatches, the US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled on one of those asshole pharmacists who claim they shouldn't have to fill prescriptions for birth control pills because they have religious objections to birth control.

But this fucker was really up on his high horse: Wal-Mart tried to accomodate what this guy thinks a magic sky fairy wants from him by allowing him to only assist male customers or female customers not of child-bearing age, reducing the chance he would even be asked to fill a birth-control prescription. But that accomodation -- which Wal-Mart, much as I hate them, shouldn't have to make in the first place -- wasn't enough for Fuckstick McFuckerson. No. He thought he shouldn't have to work the counter or answer phones at all unless the customers were pre-screened by other workers!

That's right. His delicate religious sensibilities are such that he thought he shouldn't even have to risk coming into contact with the pure evil of a woman who has the nerve to take control of her own reproductive health. And get this: When he answered phone calls asking about birth control, this fuckwad would put the customer on hold and not tell anyone else about the call so that the customer wouldn't get served.

Fuck this guy. The 7th Circuit ruled appropriately, as far as it goes, in saying that Wal-Mart had indeed attempted to make reasonable accomodation for this guy's beliefs, but the what this guy wanted was an undue burden on his employer. But they didn't go far enough, in my opinion. Why the hell should Wal-Mart have to accomodate this guy's beliefs at all? I still don't understand by what right this guy can choose a profession that has duties -- to dispense medications, one of which is birth control pills -- that conflicts with his religious beliefs and then expect his employer to accomodate his choice. I mean, he didn't have to become a pharmacist, and moreover, he could have found some Christian pharmacy to work at where he wouldn't have to dispense birth control pills or at least some place willing to accomodate his extreme requirements. But he didn't. So fuck him.

Civil rights are a big deal to me, but I just don't see this as a violation of this guy's rights. And it's not just because it's a religious objection, either. I support equal rights for gays and lesbians, and I think they should be protected from discrimination based on sexual preference. But I don't think a gay or lesbian should be able to become, say, a priest in a church opposed to same-sex relationships then expect to be "accomodated" by not having to pastor to anyone who might say something mean about gays or lesbians. Dealing with people who oppose homosexuality would be part of the job in that case, just like dealing with those seeking birth control is part of a pharmacist's job, and in both cases the person shouldn't choose a job that has duties that conflict with his or beliefs or sexual orientation.

Fuck this guy. Wal-Mart should have been allowed to and should have fired him the first time he refused to serve a customer and that's the end of it, in my opinion.

Henry VIII and the Modern Republic

2007-05-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

So, my girlfriend and I have been watching The Tudors on Showtime. It's a show about Henry VIII as a young man, before he got fat, when he was athletic (to a degree*) and vital. While watching this recreation of a feudal society, albeit a post-Magna Carta one, with the King holding such vast power over the life and limb of his subjects and those with royal blood looking down on those without, regardless of the relative merit of each, I kept thinking, "Boy, I'm glad I'm living in a free society where things aren't like that anymore."

But then, an important politician's business here in NC burned down. And, despite the fact that this is the politician's private business matter and he or she should not get service from the state that anyone else wouldn't get, he or she clearly is. And I remember when I was in Massachusetts and they told me about how big the operation to find JFK, Jr. was after his plane went down, far in excess of what would have been done if, say, my plane had gone down.

And I wondered: How different, really, is the society I live in from a feudal one? I may, in theory, be free with equal rights to everyone else, but if, say, Oprah wanted to use my land for something, wouldn't she probably be able to use her money, power, and influence to get it? Didn't the Duke lacrosse case demonstrate the disparities in how the rich and poor get treated in the legal system, no matter your opinion on the ultimate outcome? Given that they had habeus corpus back in Henry VIII's time but it has been discarded here in the US for anyone the president labels and "enemy combatant," does the government and the president not have as much or more power over my life and limb than the King did in that day?

Am I less of a serf, more of a serf, or pretty much exactly as much of a serf as I would have been then? I'm not sure that I am less of a serf. I'm not sure that my freedom and "inalienable" rights aren't as contingent upon the goodwill of the government, the rich, and the powerful, as they would have been in the day, and aren't just illusions.

And somehow, I don't feel quite as superior when I watch the show anymore.

*He's actually kind of a loser. He gets his ass kicked in a wrestling match by the King of France -- France!, tries to pole vault over a river and ends up falling on his face into the river and nearly drowning, almost gets killed in jousting when he forgets to put his visor down, and loses in an arm-wrestling match to one of his Lords. He pretty much loses every athletic/physical contest he's in, despite the ads for the show showcasing how young and athletic he is.

Drugs and Informed Consent

2007-05-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

There's an article on the Denialism blog discussing whether or not drugs should be approved and regulated by the FDA or whether they should be unregulated to let informed consumers make their own decisions. One of the points of argument is whether or not the average person can be expected to really know enough about drugs to be truly informed. If not, some argue, then there is need for the FDA approval process to weed out harmful drugs.

Here's my take: Uninformed consumers of drugs are screwed, with or without the FDA.

Doctors make mistakes all the time. They have biases and blind spots like everyone else. They are also susceptible to the same marketing as consumers.

I've been to at least three doctors who completely botched diagnoses and prescribed inappropriate drugs. I have had doctors who were set on using a particular medication to the point that I had to change doctors to get a new medication, even after informing the doctor of the debilitating side-effects of the drug. I can't imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn't done the work and research to know when those doctors were wrong and when not to take the medications they prescribed.

Personally, I don't go to the doctor without being fairly certain of what is wrong with me. If the doctor has a different theory, I explain my theory to him or her and expect the doctor to defend his or her theory (if he or she doesn't accept mine). So far, I have always been right.

But the fact is that most people are not inclined to put in the work necessary to become informed consumers of drugs. And many people, in my opinion, wouldn't be able to make informed choices even with research. Many people just don't have sufficient critical thinking skills to make such decisions. That's a fact. I'm not sure I would encourage those people to take matters into their own hands: I personally know a lot of people who would probably end up killing themselves if they did. Those people have no choice but to rely on the expertise of doctors and agencies like the FDA.

But they're still screwed. A little less screwed with the FDA than without? I'd say so. I don't think the invisible hand of the market works well in areas where consumers are not well informed and so the idea of letting consumers decide which drugs should be on the market is likely a disastrous idea. It was pretty disastrous when we tried it before, and that's why we have the FDA.

But still, the issue of FDA drug approval or not is pretty insignificant next to the problem that most people don't know crap about what the hell is in all the colorful little pills they're taking.

The Pottery... Good God, The Pottery!!!

2007-05-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

Utterly off-topic, but I just have to share my anguish with the wider world. My girlfriend made me go to a pottery festival this weekend.

Let me be clear: Before the festival, I had no interest whatsoever in pottery.

After the festival, I now think I hate pottery, at least as an art form.

There were, I think, three types of pottery on display:

Stuff that looks like you could buy it at Wal-Mart. Boring, probably functional, and not at all worth wasting all of Saturday to go see.
"Face" pottery, that is, potter that has faces on it. Ugly-ass faces. Usually done in red. This is apparently some kind of North Carolina tradition, likely invented to keep people from moving here by convincing them North Carolinians are fucking nuts.
Weird-ass shit that isn't cool or interesting. Stuff obviously inspired by Cthulhu but not quite Cthulhu, and not different in an interesting way. Stuff that just looks like shards of broken pottery (that's what makes it cool, you see?) but is boring and mundane otherwise. And other such things.

The only thing worse I have been taken to, that I can think of off my head, was when my grandfather took me to a sauerkraut festival when I was a kid. It was worse primarily because sauerkraut made my vomit when I was younger. Literally.

I told a co-worker that the only way it could have been worse is if someone had been with us who punched me in the nuts every ten minutes or so.

Good god, the pottery!!!

Thanks, PZ!!!

2007-05-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't really done much -- okay, anything -- to try get visibility for this blog or to increase its readership. In some ways, I've never been entirely certain I want anyone but those I have invited here to read it, for fear I might censor myself out of fear of offending people if my readership were wider.

But I have taken the plunge, in a small way. PZ Myers at the excellent Pharyngula blog has graciously added Markiarchy to his blogroll! Pharyngula is an A-list blog and it might help bring some readers to my humble spot on the interwebs.

Of course, as PZ himself noted, his blogroll links to half the internet, so the gains will likely be modest. But, hey, every little bit helps, right?

My Uncle: Still a Crank

2007-05-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

I was on the phone with my ailing grandfather the other day. He doesn't hear well and talks to me on his speakerphone. My uncle Ed, who never moved out of my grandfather's house, lives up in the attic smoking weed, has given up on life, and sits around waiting for Jesus to come to take him to Heaven, overheard. He decided it was a good time to prove to me that, even after all these years, he can still bring the crazy.

I mentioned to my grandfather, unaware that Ed was listening, that I had attended a global warming rally. Ed took this admission as a throwing down of the gauntlet and he jumped right in. He asked me, "So, global warming is all because of humans and it's George Bush's fault, right?"

Now, since I tend to be much more reasonable in live debates than I am here, I said, "Well, I don't know that global warming is entirely caused by human activity. But, even if other factors are at play, a significant portion is, and that's the portion we can do something about. And no, it's not George Bush's fault. The problem preexisted his presidency, though he hasn't done anything to help."

Then he said something incomprehensible about albedo (he clearly didn't know what albedo meant but had heard Rush or Hannity mention it or something), before repeating, "So, global warming is all because of humans and it's George Bush's fault, right?"

I figured there were two possible explanations for this: He has alzheimer's, or he only knows the talking points of the conservative nutbags he listens to and so he needs my arguments to conform to the strawman they argue against or he's got nothing. That's a sign you're talking to someone who really understands the issues, when he or she desperately gets you to try and agree to his or her strawman characterization of your position! He obviously hasn't yet mastered the right's rhetorical trick of simply asserting that you agree with the strawman position no matter how often you point out you don't.

He then claimed that the left thinks the world would be better off "without people to mess everything up." That is to say, he thinks that liberals -- you know, those of us who spend so much time trying to defend others' human rights, promote equality, end racial injustice, end poverty, make sure the elderly get the medications they need, prevent and end genocides around the world, and help the disadvantaged get educations -- want to do away with humans entirely. Why, exactly, would liberals care so much about helping other people if they really thought humans were just a blight on the planet? Coming from my uncle to me, that comment was kind of like Genghis Khan telling Mother Theresa that she thinks the poor should be exterminated.

Then, he started in on -- and I am not making this up -- that maybe the Earth is closer to or farther away from the sun now than in the past, and that's the reason for global warming. When I told him that the Earth's average distance from the sun has been pretty constant for most of recorded human history, he said, "How do you know?" I started explaining to him that we have records remaining about the Earth's position relative to the other planets and the sun from various sources throughout the history of people gazing at the sky. But he didn't even wait for me to finish my explanation (proving that he didn't care about the answer in the first place, and only brought up the objection to try to stump me, not because he actually believed it) to move to his next point, the old saw of, "It's just part of a natural cycle."

I still don't understand how global warming deniers think either of these arguments help them. If, indeed, the Earth has moved closer to the sun and that is the cause of the increases in global temperature we are seeing, of if the Earth is just naturally heating up, does that somehow ameliorate the negative effects of the warming? It really doesn't. Natural processes can still destroy human civilization as we know it or cause mass extinctions that would wipe out humanity too. Were the citizens of Pompeii wiped out by the eruption of Vesuvius better off or any less dead because they were wiped out by a natural process? Not really.

I guess they hope that, by proving that humans aren't causing global warming, that human action can't do anything to curb it either. But that's crap too. If a natural process is moving the Earth toward a state where it will be difficult for human civilization to continue to exist, then we just have to sit around and say, "Oh, well. Them's the breaks"? If human contributions to the greenhouse effect are heightening or enhancing a natural process that is dangerous to human civilization, that means somehow there's no reason to do anything about the human contribution to the problem? We just have to say, "Well, it's bad anyway, so we might as well make it worse"? That's like deciding to take up smoking after you've been diagnosed with lung cancer.

(Aside: What's funny about global warming deniers is that we absolutely positively know that a runaway greenhouse effect can result in unlivable conditions on a planet of similar size as ours orbiting a sun like ours: It's called Venus, bitches.)

But then was the piece d'resistance, is one of the defining characteristics of the crank: Belief in a conspiracy theory. When I told my uncle that I accept the evidence that climate change is happening and likely caused by human activity, he asserted: "That's just because scientists are extreme left-wingers who want you to believe in global warming."

Now he's bringing the world-class stupid. This is like Michael Jordan flying from half-court to dunk the ball level stupid. According to my uncle, millions of scientists, working at hundreds and hundreds of universities, government agencies, private research facilities, and non profit groups, who have never met, come from all different linguistic, ethnic, ideological, backgrounds, in disparate countries around the world, have all somehow gotten the super-secret memo telling them to push the fantasy of global warming on the unsuspecting throngs. That the entirety of evidence compiled that indicates that global climate change is a reality was all faked for some reason by people who won't release the real data in order to continue the charade. And that they have faked up data that has fooled millions of very intelligent people like me who understand logic and science much better than my uncle or the right-wing blowhards he listens to.

Plus, what, exactly, would be the motive for this conspiracy? If global climate change really is just a conspiracy, who thought it up, and why? It couldn't be a simple explanation like that scientists are tree-huggers, because lots of scientists are working in the fields producing the chemicals, toxins, and machines that are destroying the planet in the first place. There's really no coherent motive you could ascribe to millions of scientists to fake a global climate change panic. Especially since there isn't agreement, even on the left, about what the hell to do about it! If this really were a conspiracy, you'd think the guys in charge would have disseminated a more coherent plan and that the good little conspiracy soldiers would all be pushing it, right?

Not withstanding that he's just arguing by authority: "Scientists are extreme left-wingers and therefore nothing they say matters." When the evidence and the truth aren't on your side, smear your opponents. Page one of the Karl Rove playbook. Not that my uncle would know that. I'm sure he's just parroting Rush or Hannity again.

It's funny how perfectly my uncle fits the definition of a crank. According to wikipedia, one of the nearly universal traits of the crank is that they "overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts." My uncle (I may have mentioned this in a previous post, if so, sorry!), after two semesters of a junior college program in GPS, an Associate's program, started lecturing me about GPS and how it works, as if he were an expert. At the time, I had a degree in electrical engineering and had worked on military GPS systems for the Air Force and designed communications/navigation systems for in Alaska for use by emergency management personnel up there. But his two semesters of junior college made him the expert, of course. (He did not, unsurprisingly, finish the program).

I think I shall pilfer an idea from some other blogs I like to read and create a special award I can hand out to the most stupid people that come across my transom. I will bestow upon my uncle the first of these awards named for him. I will make future awards as I see fit.

So, congratulations, uncle Ed, the first recipient of the Ed Renner Award! Let's give him a hand!

The Wisdom of Qui-Gon

2007-05-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

At a staff meeting the other day, the director of the agency I work for bestowed upon us workers some words of wisdom he got from his dreams. Some may have been cribbed from other places too. I wasn't quite sure. (His explanation was confusing and vague).

In any case, one of them was a long, only somewhat coherent rambling aphorism.

It took me a few seconds to tease out what he was trying to say, but when I did, I turned to a co-worker who is also a Star Wars fan, and said, "Did he just basically say, 'Your focus determines your reality?'" (Qui-Gon Jinn to Anakin Skywalker on a Coruscant landing platform, The Phantom Menace).

My co-worker started laughing. "That's exactly what he said."

Maybe next time he'll tell us that sometimes when you get scared, it can make you mad. And when you're mad, you can really start disliking other people. And disliking others leads to people getting hurt.*

*Yoda, also in The Phantom Menace: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

Engineers: Do They Deserve The Bad Rap?

2007-05-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

So, there's been a lot of talk across the scientific blogosphere -- particularly blogs dealing with evolution -- about how engineers tend to accept creationism at a much higher rate than scientists. The fact that many of the mouthpieces for the intelligent design creationism movement are engineers doesn't help things much.

The main theory of why engineers tend to be suckers for creationist arguments is that their work is primarily focused on design, in designing buildings or power plants or airplanes, or in analyzing existing designs, and that they therefore see design everywhere and thus fall for the Argument from Design almost as an occupational hazard. (A similar argument is made in regards to medical doctors).

I'd like to defend engineers. After all, engineers are trained in logical thinking and making decisions based on evidence, right? And, though I don't work as an engineer anymore, I have an engineering degree and have worked as an engineer and don't like my brethren besmirched.

But I don't think I can defend them. Because I have found that many, if not most, engineers tend to be logical and use critical thinking skills in their field, but abandon them like a case of gonorrhea in every other area. They say the most amazingly illogical, flawed, and poorly-reasoned things. They ignore logical arguments in favor of whatever their preferred belief is and are impervious to evidence.

Just like everyone else.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that engineers don't actually buy into creationism or other crazy ideas at a rate any higher or lower than other comparable groups, like scientists. If this is true, then why are they so castigated in the evolution community?

I suspect that it is because engineers think they apply the same critical reasoning skills outside of engineering as they do within engineering. They think they are more qualified to make judgments even outside of engineering and thus think their opinions are better than others'. As such, I think this breeds a certain arrogance that causes engineers to be more likely to forcefully voice their opinions and be willing to defend them to the death, no matter how little sense they make.

As such, I suspect that a study would find that engineers are not just better represented in the creationist community than those in some other professions, but also in the pro-science community. However, I suspect that, like doctors, engineers on the creationist side, the facts being against them and needing to employ any rhetorical trick to try to win arguments, are more likely than those in some other professions to argue by authority and say, "Well, I'm an engineer, and as an engineer..." to try to legimitize their craziness.

Creationist engineers aren't the problem. It's the 'creationist', not the 'engineer,' that drives the craziness.

More Jedi Stuff

2007-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't talked about Jedi in a while, and since they take up a significant amount of my brain power on any given day, it's about time I get back to them.

I was at a costuming event recently where a guy who is part of a Jedi stagefighting group told prospective members that, in lightsaber combat, "Jedi fight defensively, mostly blocking and not attacking. They just have to survive a fight to win. Sith are the aggressors. Jedi don't start fights, Sith do."

My immediate gut reaction was that he was wrong. When I thought it through, I was sure he was wrong. Let's first consider the claim that Sith usually start conflicts.

Episode I:

Darth Maul does start the first fight with Qui-Gon on Tatooine. One for the opposition. However, even though Darth Maul does stand in Qui-Gon's and Obi-Wan's way in the hangar on Naboo, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan actually attack him first and do start the fight. One for me.

Tally: Tie.

Episode II:

Obi-Wan and Anakin chase Dooku down with the intent to kill him. Anakin starts the fight. Obi-Wan protests, but not because he didn't want to start the fight, but because he wanted to move in more slowly. One for me.

After Dooku tries to crush Yoda and hit him with Force lightning, Yoda and Dooku leap at each other to begin the duel. I'll call this one even.

Tally: One for me.

Episode III:

Palpatine attacks Mace Windu and the other Jedi who have come to arrest him. One for the opposition.

Obi-Wan goes to Mustafar to kill Anakin and activates his lightsaber first, but technically Anakin does leap at Obi-Wan and attack him first. I'll give this one to the opposition.

Yoda attacks Palpatine in the well of the Senate. One for me.

Tally: One for the opposition.

Episode IV:

Once again, while Vader does confront Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan actually is the first to strike. One for me.

Tally: Even.

Episode V:

While Vader has lured Luke to Cloud City to capture him, Luke strikes at Vader first. One for me.

Tally: One for me.

Episode VI:

Though the Emperor does provoke Luke, he does attack the Emperor first (prompting Vader to parry). Two for me.

Tally: Two for me.

So, on the whole, we actually see Jedi start fights with Sith more often than the reverse. And, in many of these fights, the Jedi aren't the ones on defense (the Duel of the Fates, Anakin's and Obi-Wan's battle with Dooku, Yoda's battle with Dooku, Yoda's battle with Palpatine, Luke's battle with Vader in Episode VI). Jedi are certainly the aggressors in a number of these fights as well.

On the second point, that Jedi just have to survive to win a duel but a Sith must kill his or her opponent to win, is exactly backwards. Since there are lots of Jedi and only two Sith, and since the Jedi's loyalty is to preserving peace while the Sith's is to gain more power for him- or herself, the Jedi can die and still win if he or she eliminates the Sith and the threat he or she poses.

All of a Sith's plans, which are selfish and for his or her own aggrandizement, come to naught if he or she is slain by a Jedi. The Sith must, at all costs, survive in order for his or her goals to be realized, and therefore can win just by surviving. Slaying one Jedi won't help the Sith cause that much -- there are more -- but that Sith's cause is lost if he or she dies. But a Jedi who puts his or her own survival before stopping a Sith from escaping to do more evil has lost. A Jedi can win by sacrificing him- or herself for the greater good, but not by putting his or her life before the good of others.

I think the guy I was talking to let his preconceived notions of what a good-guy should be overcome what we actually see of the Jedi in the films themselves. Jedi can be aggressors without being aggressive. A Jedi can attack a Sith as a necessary act to preserve the greater good without being angry or succumbing to aggression, without flirting with the Dark Side. Professional detachment, one might say. And a Sith can fight a defensive battle to save his or her own skin while simmering with hatred and fear.

I probably spend too much time thinking about stuff like this. :^)

What's a Little Swooning Between Friends?

2007-05-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

Check this out (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars). A woman in Michigan is suing her charismatic church because she swooned and fell down in a fit of religious ecstasy and "no one caught her."

Apparently this is related to speaking in tongues and to being "slain in spirit," in which one falls to the ground as if slain (I think).

I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, she worked herself up into a fit and fell down, which is really her responsibility. And she knew that she was in danger of swooning if she went up to the altar, so if there wasn't anyone to catch people swooning, as she claims there usually is, then she shouldn't have gone up and risked herself.

Of course, on the other hand, the pastor is intentionally trying to get these people worked up into fits and encouraging them to writhe and fall down, and so the church should take precautions to make sure those who actually do so will be safe.

In fact, I don't think I'm ambivalent at all. I've just been falling for the false dichotomy. The fact is, both sides are wrong. Just because our legal system requires a winner and a loser doesn't mean there really is one. The woman is dumb for working herself up into a fit and falling down in the first place, and the pastor is dumb for encouraging people to swoon without sufficient safety precautions.

I say we send them both to the Island of Misfit Toys never to be seen again!

All those in favor?

Low-Functioning Pinheads?

2007-05-01T05:25:00.000-07:00

On the second episode of Bill Moyers Journal, Jon Stewart said something interesting:

There is I used to have a real disconnect, I think, with the administration, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I think it's suddenly become clear to me. They would rather us believe them to be wildly incompetent and inarticulate than to let us know anything about how they operate. And so, they do Constitutionally-mandated things most of the time, but they don't — they fulfill the letter of their obligation to checks and balances, but not the intent.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales, and you've been watching the hearings. He is either a perjurer, or a low-functioning pinhead. And he allowed himself to be portrayed in those hearings as a low-functioning pinhead, rather than give the Congressional Committee charged with oversight, any information as to his decision-making process at the Department of Justice.

To an extent, I think Stewart is right. I don't think Gonzales is quite as low-functioning as he appeared during his testimony last week. He almost certainly was lying at least some of the 60+ times he said he didn't remember something.

But I've also heard leaked reports that he's such an idiot that he couldn't keep his story straight even in the two months of practice sessions leading up to his appearing before the Senate. That his advisors despaired of how he would come off because he just doesn't really know what the hell is going on most of the time.

So, I have to say I see it more like this: Members of the Bush regime are low-functioning pinheads who are willing to appear even lower functioning than they actually are rather than give any information to Congress or the people. But they think they're doing what Jon Stewart thinks they're doing. They think they're just pretending to be low-functioning pinheads, because they don't realize that even low-functioning pinheads can act stupider than they really are.