Month: December 2008

Dubi Kaufmann has made a plugin that will allow anyone to "Obamafy" photos. Someone please do Hillary.

Jon Swift urges Bush to pardon stampeding Wal-Mart shoppers.

Conor profiles Greg Packer, the most often quoted man on the street:

Our "authentic" man on the street is in a sense our elitist notion of Everyman: he dresses sloppily, wearing rumpled tee-shirts and baggy, formless shorts as Mr. Packer does; he holds a bunched up newspaper, and speaks nothing like a spokesperson or a pithy sound-byte man, but punctuates his sentences with the ums and uhs of the American vernacular, imperfections reporters excise from Greg Packer quotes as a courtesy to our source and our readers.

The curse words that slip into Mr. Packer’s sentences when he is exercised only aid his blundering seduction, which culminates in an uncanny ability to speak on any subject and articulate without fail whatever sentiment New York City reporters expect John Q. Public to express.

At the heart of the financial crisis are loans that were fatally misjudged. Who will ever believe ratings agencies again? And if you can’t believe them, how will lending come back on anything like the previous model? Mark Thoma suspects the worst:

Big shocks don’t necessarily shake the informational foundations of markets. There can be an event that occurs in the tail of the distribution of possible events that is viewed as just that, an unusual, costly event, but not one that fundamentally upsets our understanding of how the world works while at the same time undercutting the informational flows we use to understand these markets. I don’t think the dot.com crash, for example, caused us to question the reliability of the information we receive the way this episode has. After the crash, we still thought we understood how to use models to process reliable information. But this crisis has destroyed confidence in the information and the models we use, and it won’t be easy to bring this back.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of president George W. Bush is his inability to actually take responsibility for anything. I’m not sure quite where this comes from – daddy, drink or denial, or some gruesome combination of the three – but check this out:

I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Observe the passive constructions. The description of others. "People in my administration." "Prior to my arrival." Everyone got it wrong but him, the one person ultimately responsible for getting it right. And then this stumble backwards into the truth:

I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it — (laughter) — but, look, in this job you just do what you can.

He sure did, didn’t he? We can also conclude from the interview that his decision to authorize the torture of prisoners from the Oval Office did not compromise his principles. And you know what? I don’t think it did.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)

Bainbridge believes appointing Doug Kmiec as ambassador to the Vatican would be an insult to the church. Henry Farrell is puzzled:

In principle, the appointment of Kmiec should be no more or less insulting to either the Vatican (as a state governed by the Catholic church) or to the Pope (as head of the Catholic church) than the appointment of any other Catholic. Very obviously, Kmiec’s appointment might be construed as an insult to a particular (and quite powerful) conservative faction within Catholicism – but in the absence of a formal church statement to the contrary, that faction’s opinion of Kmiec’s position is no more binding than any other opinion within Catholicism’s internal debate on these issues.

Now there certainly is a prudential issue – to the extent that the Pope is (as he likely is) highly sympathetic to the conservative faction, Kmiec’s appointment might not be politically well-judged. But that’s an entirely different question to that of whether Kmiec’s appointment would be an insult to the church, which is what I understand Steve’s position to be. By the church’s own rules, I simply don’t see any grounds for judgment that Kmiec is a better or worse Catholic than any other person, and hence I don’t see where the insult lies. But perhaps there is something I’m not getting here.

Nope, you’re right, Henry, in principle, but Benedict sees abortion as the central crime of our time. A theocon Pope is unlikely to be hapy with the pro-life anti-theocon, Kmiec. Still, there’s surely close to zero chance of this panning out. Michael Sean Winters is just winding them up.

Roger Stone coughs up what is fast becoming the conventional wisdom on the reasonable right:

Between the Bush Administration’s spending, their right wing social agenda, and their assault on civil liberties, this Administration cannot be considered Conservative in the classical sense. True Conservatives support fiscal conservatism on spending as well as low taxes, don’t want Big Brother Government listening to our phone calls and don’t want the government making decisions in our private lives. Bushism and Conservatism should not be confused.

Read all about it.

The esteemed Judaic scholar has a guide for how to survive in a terrorized hotel. Ross proposes a book deal.

Listen to Jack Balkin civilly dismember Eric Posner’s purported defense of Bush. In fact, Posner was defending what Bush should have done if he were halfway honest and halfway respectful of the Constitution. There is no defense of what Bush and Cheney actually did on interrogations.

A historian reader writes:

This is from Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 1462, a 12th-century English collection of various medical and herbal texts. Note that next to the illustration of cannabis it includes both its name in Latin (Nomen istius herbe…) but then also, in English, "wilde hemp."

Decriminalizing cannabis would not be a radical departure from the norm of human history. It would be a return to it.