Month: January 2009

By Patrick Appel

Hilzoy beams:

…the people who have been appointed to two of the most senior positions in the OLC, which (basically) tells the Executive branch what is legal and what is not, have explicitly and publicly rejected some of the Bush administration’s central arguments in support of its expansive view of executive power. It’s hard for me to see how they could reverse themselves on that score with a straight face, or why Obama would have appointed them if he had the slightest intention of adopting the Bush administration’s views on this topic.

Both of these developments leave me feeling pretty hopeful.

By Patrick Appel
Ross has a good idea:

One would hardly expect Dick Cheney to endorse his own prosecution. But I think there’s a reasonable case that given what I take to be his own premises about the torture debate – that the acts of interrogative violence the administration employed were justified by the stakes involved and the intelligence they produced – the outgoing Vice President should support an investigative commission charged with assessing the consequences of the Bush Administration’s detainee policy.

Time and again, Cheney has insisted that any gains the U.S. has made in its efforts against Al Qaeda have depended on information from "high-value" detainees like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah that could only be extracted through extreme measures. But so far, the evidence marshaled to support his contention has been distinctly limited – and most of the insider-ish testimony on the subject, usually filtered through the work of the administration’s critics, has tended to support the argument that torture is both morally wrong and largely ineffective. This is a high-stakes debate, to put it mildly. And if Cheney (or any of the many conservatives who share his perspective) believes what says he believes – if he thinks the future security of the United States depends on a willingness to take a consequentialist approach to, say, the waterboarding of leading terrorists – then he ought to be willing to advance a public and detailed case, before an independent commission, that the consequences were and are worth the moral costs.

by Chris Bodenner
While film critics (such as Chris Orr) noted the movies’ similarities long ago, they can’t do them more justice than this:

By Patrick Appel

The Europeans don’t want to send more troops:

Less than five percent of those polled believed that European countries should send troops to Afghanistan as a gesture of solidarity with Obama.

It will be interesting to see whether Obama will be able to change those minds in the coming year.

by Chris Bodenner
Too late to get one for the inauguration, but:

By Patrick Appel

Via John Cole, a CBO study on the stimulus bill:

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of President Barack Obama’s plan found that most of the approximately $355 billion in proposed discretionary spending on highways, renewable energy and other initiatives wouldn’t be spent before 2011. The government would spend about $26 billion of the money this year and $110 billion more next year, the report said.

About $103 billion would be spent in 2011, while $53 billion would be spent in 2012 and $63 billion between 2013 and 2019, the report said. Republicans said the analysis showed that the plan, unveiled last week by House Democrats, won’t get money into the economy quickly enough.

Yglesias makes a recommendation:

…insofar as lawmakers are interested in sneaking some 2011 and 2012 transportation infrastructure spending into this bill they may as well forget about shovel readiness and identify useful transit and intercity rail projects.

by Chris Bodenner
In his linguist take on Obama’s speech, McWhorter examines the broader impact of Black English:

It has become an unofficial lingua franca for young Americans of all colors. It is not uncommon to hear a group of teenagers speaking in Black English, and find when they pass by that they are actually Latino, Asian, or with the cohort under about 25, white. … If the only way he could speak was in some degree of black cadence, he would not have been elected. In being so deftly bidialectal, Obama can speak to all of America in a way that neither a John Edwards nor a Jesse Jackson ever could. What’s interesting is that his black style–wielded sparingly, to be sure–is useful in reaching quite a few whites.

By Patrick Appel

If he lives long enough, maybe:

…the record suggests there are some things a President can do to boost his long-term value. Of all his predecessors, Bush may have the most to learn from Hoover, the one to whom, given the current Great Recession, he is increasingly compared. Bush may not be popular, but there aren’t crowds calling for him to be hanged or accusing him of raiding Fort Knox before fleeing the country. Hoover left office in an even deeper hole than Bush, but he had the great advantage of a strong constitution. He lived another 31 years, during which time he was among the greatest champions of children this country has ever known. He drove the growth of Boys Clubs of America, the creation of UNICEF; he led the campaign to get food to millions of civilians who faced a catastrophic famine after World War II. That’s what he was good at — fixing things like the engineer he was. By the time he died, he had tamed his critics and turned up as a regular on Gallup’s list of the most admired men. How’d he do it? "I outlived the bastards," he said.

by Chris Bodenner
A more inspired (and prescient) use of kids as "political props":

By Patrick Appel

The Walrus’s Jon Evans whacks Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project, which laid off half its staff last week:

…the whole idea of distributing laptops to poor children was completely misguided to begin with. Did the OLPC braintrust think they were bringing modern technology to the Third World? They were years too late; it’s already there, in the form of the not-so-humble-any-more cell phone.

[…] What Negroponte & co. should have done was One Smartphone Per Child; a smartphone is not much different from a netbook that can connect to both cell networks and Wi-Fi, and has GPS…and that you can also use as, well, a phone. But alas, OLPC suffered from a failure of imagination from the very beginning. I hate to say it, but despite all its PR glory and good intentions, it was never more than a bad implementation of a bad idea, and its eventual failure was all but inevitable.