Month: September 2008

Lessig On Palin

Understanding the difference between performance ability and qualifications for the presidency. Well worth 12 minutes of your time. The Palin nomination is without historical precedent for her total lack of any salient qualifications as well as her refusal to engage the press in any meaningful way in a national election campaign. Truly surreal and utterly without precedent. Just listen to Lessig go through the history of the vice-presidents. Palin’s candidacy is a national and global farce.

The Geneva Conventions Apply When We Say So

The ACLU blog has more on yesterday’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decision:

When the ACLU and others first requested access from the government to the now-infamous photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the government responded that disclosure would be an "unwarranted invasion of privacy" of the detainees in the pictures. According to the government, the detainees’ privacy justified keeping the photos from the public, even if—as the ACLU requested—all identifying features in the photos were obscured. Not surprisingly, both the trial and appellate courts rejected the argument. After all, if you cannot recognize the detainees in the pictures because their faces and distinguishing features have been replaced by black boxes, how can their privacy be at stake?

What is surprising, however, is the government’s partial reliance on the Geneva Conventions to make this argument.

The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions protect prisoners of war and detained civilians from "insults and public curiosity." (An extreme example of subjecting a prisoner to "public curiosity" might be parading that prisoner in shackles down a street lined with jeering civilians.) The government argued, in the court’s words, that "a photograph of abuse is so humiliating that its dissemination always opens the detainee to ‘public curiosity.’"

The argument is surprising, of course, because the same administration maintained for years that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to any of the detainees in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. It is surprising because the same administration relied upon its determination that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to justify its use of barbaric and inhumane interrogation methods in the first place. It is surprising because there would be no photos of abuse to request had the government cared this much about the Geneva Conventions before the abuses occurred and the photos were taken.

Meltdown Blogging

57 percent of Americans support the bailout. Yves Smith:

The sorry fact is the US has consumed at an unsustainable level. We need to reduce consumption and increase savings (and reducing debt is a form of savings). Reduced consumption means a fall in GDP. In Britain, which is going through its own credit crunch, the officialdom has said that the public will experience a fall in living standards. Why are we unwilling to accept the inevitable?

James Pethokoukis talks down Michelle Malkin et al, a group he dubs the "MellonHeads":

Rather than risk a financial collapse, the MellonHeads might want to spend more time making the case how big government caused a mess only big government can fix and how we can avoid a repeat.

Krugman:

…the plan only helps the financial situation if Treasury pays prices well above market — that is, if it is in effect injecting capital into financial firms, at taxpayers’ expense.

What possible justification can there be for doing this without acquiring an equity stake?

No equity stake, no deal.

Yglesias doesn’t understand why Paulson needs all $700 billion right now:

If congress feels like taking Paulson at his word, they can appropriate some fraction of $700 billion deemed adequate to tide Paulson over until November, add on a second stimulus and some measures to start reorganizing mortgages, and then let everybody keep studying the issue. Then if Paulson wants more money after the election, he can send a request that’s coordinated with the president-elect’s transition team to the lame-duck congress. Why should a rushed process commit us to spending months from now?

Mike Shedlock:

Bernanke is a liar. You know it, I know it, and Bernanke knows it. The idea that taxpayers are going to get "good value" of out $700 billion of pure garbage is insanity, especially if those auctions are rigged.

Robert Reich:

Congress should drive the hardest deal it can with Wall Street. But Congress also needs to pay direct attention to Main Street. It should extend unemployment insurance, freeze mortgage rates, and pass a stimulus package that generates more jobs.

Unless Americans on Main Street have more money in their pockets, Wall Street’s bad debts will continue to rise — which means the Bailout of All Bailouts grows even larger, which means taxpayers take on even more risk and cost.