Month: January 2009

Yes: they’re English – deadpan in techno.

(Hat tip: Dan Savage)

Beagle. Puppy. Yoga.

We take it for granted. In China, not so much. Liu Xaobo was arrested last December for signing a petition calling for peaceful reform of the Communist dictatorship. PEN is organizing online to seek Xaobo’s freedom. You can read the text here. More info, including a sample letter to the Chinese government, here.

Steve Coll dreams:

…how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic’s health, is in jeopardy? I’m sure that Williams-generated nostalgia in the emotional lives of wealthy people is hard to underestimate, but still…

Felix Salmon adds his own two cents.

"Mr Thiessen has written in to let us know that he certainly does not consider "enhanced interrogation" or the treatment of Abu Zubaydah torture, and we should not have implied as much. ABC News has reported that Mr Zubaydah was "slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds [sic] he begged for mercy and began to cooperate". (Mr Kiriakou says it took about 35 seconds.) So, for the record, we want to clarify that Mr Thiessen should not be attributed with the argument that torture is effective because he does not believe that these techniques are torture. The Economist disagrees on that last point," – The Economist.

Thiessen’s position is that of the Gestapo. The United States has executed war criminals who once did exactly these things to prisoners.

Nate Silver notices something I hadn’t:

It’s not just the goose egg that the House Republicans laid on the Democratic stimulus package yesterday: Boehner’s Boys have been equally uncooperative on other matters. Case in point: a bill yesterday to delay the transition to digital TV.   This measure was approved unanimously by the Senate; every Senate Republican gave it the green light.  But 155 out of 178 House Republicans voted against it, which resulted in the measure’s defeat since a two-thirds majority would have been required for passage under the House’s suspension of the rules.

Or, take the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a seemingly fairly popular/populist (if not inscrutable) piece of legislation on gender-based pay discrepancies. This was something that Barack Obama whacked John McCain on on the campaign trail, with McCain offering little rebuttal. In the Senate, five Republicans — out of 41 — voted with the Administration on Ledbetter, including all four Republican women. In the House, just three Republicans did — out of 178.

The presidential daily briefing evolves:

Obama is said to be taken with Summers’s intellectual nimbleness; it’s not hard to imagine how the Harvard Law-grad president might be flattered to receive a daily economic briefing from the former president of Harvard, a ritual that began shortly after the inauguration.

This is from Noam Scheiber’s new piece defending Geithner’s clout. Worth a read for the junkies.

Or not so lucky? Joe Klein grades Obama’s first week:

Obama will win a great victory on the stimulus plan. But it will be his last for a while. By June, there will be grousing that Obama hasn’t pulled us out of the recession yet. By December, there will be complaints that his diplomacy hasn’t achieved breakthroughs. The President’s best-case scenario is similar to Reagan’s: that the bad news will begin to dissipate by the midterm elections of 2010, limiting the Democratic losses, and disappear entirely by 2012. Reagan was lucky in that way. Obama is facing more difficult problems and might not be so lucky. But at least, for the moment, he is paying his public the great compliment of taking his job seriously, focusing on the long-term substance rather than the bread and circuses that masqueraded as leadership in the recent past.

Of course it is. That’s no reason to ban it, control it or worry too much about it. Bruce Schneier tells everyone to take a deep breath:

Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven’t seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water, and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are – by and large – small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular. And while terrorism turns society’s very infrastructure against itself, we only harm ourselves by dismantling that infrastructure in response – just as we would if we banned cars because bank robbers used them too.

A reader writes:

You write that you yourself would have voted against the stimulus bill; and then, a few posts later, observe that the unified opposition of House Republicans indicates that the "remaining rump will seek ideological purity and attack the president from the get-go."

That’s not the debate to which I listened yesterday. What I heard was a Republican Party united in its opinion that the stimulus package was misguided, but reluctant to attack either the motives or the character of its chief proponent. That’s a striking change in tone and rhetoric.

To be sure, Speaker Pelosi came in for a fair amount of abuse. And there’s no doubt that the rump party is more extreme. But I don’t want a Washington in which partisan disagreements disappear. I want a Congress in which disputes center on the substantive merits of legislation. I want a basic presumption of good intentions to prevail, and for each side to listen to and learn from the other’s arguments.

By those measures, this first package was a success. It included more tax cuts than Democrats were initially inclined to favor, because Obama listened to those critics on the right pressing for a more immediate stimulus. The President journeyed to Capitol Hill to exchange ideas with his opponents, and the tone of that conversation was open and respectful. The idea of changing the culture of Washington isn’t that bills should garner unanimous support, or even a strongly bipartisan majority. It’s that legislation should reflect the best ideas of both sides, and that debate should be respectful. We’re certainly not there yet, but I’d say we’re making good progress.