Month: July 2006

You think bilingualism is new? Check out this political ad from 1960 for JFK. Jackie speaks Spanish for Hispanic voters.

Cleveland, Ohio, 1 am.

Another one gets electrodes up his nose. Sexy pic, by the way.

And he has a blog.

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky. Linguistics will never be the same.

A reader writes:

"Actually, I don’t consider you a conservative anymore either, for the same reasons I don’t consider myself one anymore. In this day, in this country, to be a conservative is to buy into a program of relativism and deconstructionism (scientific knowledge in evolution and climate science is just one "perspective" or is totally unreliable because scientists are a bunch of liberals and science is just a political agenda). To be a conservative is to believe that good government rests on the personal character and godliness of an unshackled executive, not on the time-tested processes and institutions of democracy. To be a conservative is to let your worst enemies dictate your moral values. To be a conservative is to believe that insufficiently conservative judges are enemies of America and should be eliminated or marginalized as illegitimate.

Above all, to be a conservative is to use the power of the government to Christianize Americans and the US government to the greatest extent possible.

Andrew, today liberals are the better defenders of the enlightenment. Conservatives are the enemies of the enlightenment. So you want to cut entitlements? Pardon my French, but big fucking deal. You want to cut entitlements because you have weighed the evidence of their effectiveness and found it lacking. You’re still part of the democratic machine and you still respect democratic reasoning.

Conservatives aren’t as quaintly obsessed with evidence and balancing costs and benefits as you are. They want to cut benefits on principle, no matter what. They want to slash taxes as a first principle, expensive wars and basic human decency be damned. They are not rational decision makers in the sense that they distinguish between effective and ineffective programs. The slash taxes, period – no thinking required.

And – this isn’t a minor point – they don’t actually cut entitlements. They expand them. So there goes that argument.

My choice – and yours – is to join up with a reality-based community that trusts expertise, democratic processes, and established institutions and makes fact-based decisions (these days called liberals), or to join up with a community of relativistic mystics who are not open to reason or persuasion, distrust democracy, reject standards of behavior because they believe themselves to be inherently godly, and have no use for traditional democratic institutions. These tradition-despising relativistic mystics we call conservatives.

Andrew, you and I have much more in common with the liberals. Because they’re more conservative."

Waterboarding isn’t torture, but the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling is. Money quote:

The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan – and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden – the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples." [My italics].

The word is deliberate and the logic for an unaccountable, unchecked executive power inescapable. Yes, there is such a thing as emergency power. But when the emergency is permanent, when the war is defined as indefinite, when it ends only when the executive says so, then we are talking about something different: a reordering of the constitutional system to create a neo-monarchy, licensed indefinitely to torture, capture, wire-tap and imprison, regardless of the rule of law, or the guilt or innocence of its victims. But, hey, that’s now the conservative mainstream, as I have been forced to recognize. I might as well get used to it.

Front yard, Duluth, Georgia, 10 am.

Jonathan Rauch has an idea to reinvigorate the Bush presidency: a gas pact. Money quote:

Here is the idea: Propose an international treaty whose signatories would agree to eliminate gasoline from their transportation systems by a date certain — say, in 30 years. Seek initial support from Europe and Japan, but open the treaty to any country that cares to join. Specify only that the treaty should allow signatories to reach the goal in any fashion they please and that it should allow for tradable credits against whatever interim targets it sets. That way, countries can act at different speeds and in different styles. Then let the negotiations begin.

Sane, market-oriented, empirically sound policy. What will today’s conservatives say?

From the Lamont-Lieberman debate:

LAMONT: Look, you want to boast about how many earmarks you bring to the state of Connecticut? Alaska gets 10 times what we do. We’re not doing very well on that front. But more importantly, I think we should outlaw these earmarks.

(CROSSTALK)

LAMONT: Hear me out, sir. I think we should outlaw these earmarks. I think they corrupt the political process. I think they are written by lobbyists and they’re wrong.

LIEBERMAN: Try to explain that to the (inaudible).

LAMONT: I think these things should go through the congressional process. Sir, you have been there for 18 years. You support the earmarks, you work with the lobbyists, and that’s what needs to be changed.

LIEBERMAN: The earmarks are great for Connecticut.

The food in this restaurant is so awful. And such small portions!