Month: November 2008

This is a good idea:

There’s been a lot of discussion about how to address those responsible for the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s extralegal responses to the terrorist threat. Regardless of how he approaches the guilty, I’d like to see President-elect Obama honor the JAGs, pro bono lawyers and civil liberties groups who pushed back against the excesses and in so doing defended us all against them. It would be a strong symbolic rebuke to those who, for reasons of political cohesion at a time of crisis, might not be immediately prosecuted themselves.

I nominate Ian Fishback.

Every Republican primary season, we are told by every candidate that he or she will go through the budget with a tooth-comb and eliminate waste. And after eight years of insane Republican spending and borrowing, it takes a terrorist commie radical to say it after he gets elected. We’ll see, of course. But if Obama does it, he will be second only to Bush in destroying the GOP as a fiscally conservative brand.

Gold diggers are struggling:

Sophie sighs and sips her Pinot gris. "It’s getting harder and harder to find a good man," she says. "Everyone is looking for handsome, rich and charming men but there are less and less of them to go around." Since the financial markets started collapsing back in March, wealthy Prince Charmings, already an endangered species on the nightlife scene, have become almost completely extinct. The handsome ones aren’t charming, the charming ones aren’t handsome and many of the rich ones are now poor….

(Hat tip: John Carney)

Scott Horton:

The problem isn’t John Brennan’s lack of credentials. He was a career intelligence operative who gets consistently strong marks for his effectiveness and intelligence from people who have worked with him. But he has a critical shortcoming: his completely ambiguous and inconsistent views about the CIA’s use of torture and torture by proxy as techniques. As a company man, Brennan was quick to justify and support what was done. As an “independent” analyst for broadcast journalists, he also provided support and cover for practices from waterboarding to the use of psychotropic drugs. As an adviser to the Obama campaign, Brennan experienced an unconvincing epiphany and came to reject President Bush’s “program” along the same lines as his boss. The timing and circumstances of Brennan’s conversion suggest that it was dictated by political expedience and not ethics.

Does one have to remind the Obama peeps of their campaign slogan: change we can believe in?

Everyone has a gun:

Here’s the top five [gun ownership rates] : US at 89 small arms per 100 people, Yemen at 55 (a gun-&-knife-toting culture without peer in the uncivilized world, but we still kicks their asses!), Switzerland at 46 (who knew?), Finland at 45 (still expecting the Russians), and Serbia at 38 (just got in the habit, I guess).

But they have to protect themselves against the Islamist, terrorist, Marxist revolutionary who just got elected president, right? And a hell of a lot of hunting.

Having destroyed his reputation in the fall campaign, John McCain now faces a serious challenge in his home state. The Tucson Citizen is getting pissy:

In 2007, The Washington Post reported McCain skipped 251 of 446 voting opportunities of the 110th Congress. McCain missed more votes than almost anyone in the Senate, second only to the senator who suffered a brain hemorrhage in late 2006. Guess what? The guy with the brain injury, Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., recovered and returned to Congress. Our senator now boasts the worst record, having missed 64 percent of 656 voting opportunities.

This is from an interview with a very experienced and committed African-American lesbian activist in California:

Did anyone come and say, “Hey, we need to do outreach in the African-American community together?”

Absolutely not, in fact the message I got from a key person in the No on 8 campaign was that the black vote was really going to be insignificant.

It’s not enough, that it wasn’t going to be an issue because we are not a majority of the vote, even though they knew that a large number was going to come out to vote for Obama. It wasn’t a fear because they didn’t feel like the numbers were going to affect (Prop 8 ) either way.

When did you have that conversation?

It was a month prior to the elections. It was a concern after, I believe, the L.A. Times or the New York Times came out implying that black people will be coming out in grater numbers and it was going to affect Prop 8 because of the black vote and the fear of that. From there, I was like, “Okay, how can I get involved?” It was dismissive. It was kind of like it didn’t matter.

Fallow highly recommends reading "America’s Defense Meltdown" (pdf). Here’s a bit from Chapter 11: Understand, Then Contain America’s Out-Of-Control Defense Budget:

…it is not that the defense budget adequately supports our irrelevant, even counterproductive forces. For that to be the case would be a significant improvement. Instead, to promote armed forces that fight the wrong type of war in the wrong places – liberals, moderates and conservatives in the Pentagon, Congress, think tanks and the White House have over time constructed an edifice that makes our forces smaller, older and less ready to fight, all at dramatically increasing cost. And, we have done so with a system that, quite literally, does not know – or apparently care – what it is doing.

There are 271 more pages where that came from. It’s just as well we face no serious global rival, isn’t it? Fallows says, " Read these between football games over the weekend. You won’t be sorry."

This sleazy.

As we try to absorb the latest impossible-to-absorb news from governments in London and Chicago and watch Paulson gamble on ever more expensive intangibles, we are left with what Fareed explained recently thus:

I’m betting that, in the end, the world’s governments will win this battle against fear. They have potentially unlimited tools at their disposal, especially if they act in concert. They can nationalize firms, call bank holidays, suspend trading for weeks, buy up debt and equity, and renegotiate home mortgages. Most important, the American government can print money. All of these tools have long-term effects that are extremely troublesome, but they are nothing compared with the potential collapse of the financial system. And Washington seems to have recognized that it must do whatever is required to shore up that system. Big questions remain. What will it take to stop the fall? How costly will it be? How long before the rescue plan starts to have an effect? But at some point, the panic that gripped world markets last week will end.

I think Fareed wants to reassure me here. But he doesn’t. It seems pretty clear that he is right about the real causes of our current crisis: private individuals and government at all levels have lived far, far, far beyond their means for more than two decades. The debt was so reckless and so immense that it now threatens to destroy the entire financial system. That’s what electing George W Bush twice has done for us. But then we are told that this threat requires us to do even more of the borrowing and spending before we can begin to get ourselves back in balance again. The unchallenged doctrine of the day is that: doing nothing would provoke a worse collapse than necessary and so we have to make our fiscal situation much worse now in order to make it much better later. Why am I not convinced?

Like most of you, I am not an economist although I try to make as much layman’s sense of it all as I can and am not completely ignorant of history. But the radicalism of the current policies pioneered by Paulson and Brown and now getting even more outlandish seems to me to have two potentials: to somehow drag us out of this without an almighty crash now but make the recovery from debt even more arduous, or to add unimaginable mountains of debt to our current plight and still not manage to avoid the crash, thereby making it all much worse. The abandonment of any sobriety in this moment is disturbing. Evceryone is acting as if the worst thing that could possibly happen is that we should all feel the full impact of the massive fiscal recklessness of the past decade.

Why? Why does the world owe us a soft landing after the insanity of the last decade? Haven’t the excesses of the past shown that it is only through such market discipline that we will ever avoid the easy path of borrowing out of greed? Yes, innocents will suffer terribly, and many of the guilty will escape. But that is life: we can and should try to help the poorest, but avoiding our collective responsibility for this insanity seems a very bad signal to send to ourselves.

The truth is: we had this coming. We deserve it. And we deserve leaders who are able to tell us that.