Month: January 2009

Solangel Maldonado asks whether parents should lose custody of obese kids:

I believe that parents should make efforts to provide their children with healthy foods and regular exercise. However, I question whether parents who do not control their children’s weight problem should lose custody of their children to the state…Are we willing to hold that a parent who does little to address his child’s obesity has neglected his child in the same way as if he had failed to provide him with adequate nourishment or supervision? Courts and child welfare agencies are grappling with this issue.

In a recent case, In re Brittany T., a New York Family Court ordered the removal of a morbidly obese child from her parents’ home based on the parents’ consistent failure to comply with the court’s order that they take her to the gym 2-3 times a week and attend a nutrition and education program, among other things. Although the case was reversed on appeal, the New York Appellate Division did not hold that child obesity can never be grounds for neglect, but rather that, in this particular case, the Department of Social Services had not shown that the parents had willfully violated the terms of the court’s order. In fact, although Brittany had gained 25 pounds in five months, the evidence showed that her parents had taken her to the gym at least once a week, had met with a nutritionist, and had kept a food log for her. Yes, the food log reflected that Brittany ate “lots of chicken nuggets, lots of pop tarts, hot dogs, and pizza,” but the parents had maintained the log, as ordered.

Richard J Neuhaus – without irony – explains. He’s right that marriage is a manly act. His vehement dismissal of gay men’s right to it in the civil square is educative.

Larison is wary of "holding responsible" Palestinians for voting for Hamas:

The vital distinction between people and government will usually be blurred or erased for one of two reasons: the state needs to use the people as a shield against criticism, or a foreign state needs to reduce the population to an extension of the state in order to make war on it more completely. Realizing this should make us even more wary of rhetoric that invests democracy and elections with some moral significance. It should also warn us that the natural complement to valorizing popular sovereignty and democratic government is the demonization of entire peoples by identifying them with their political leadership in an indistinguishable mass.

Israel’s Central Elections Commission has banned Arab parties. Ackerman sighs. Yglesias calls it a "poorly timed PR move." Yaacov Lozowick says that the decision will almost certainly be overturned:

…the Arab parties will run in the upcoming elections, because the final say is the court’s. The decision of yesterday’s panel is certain to be struck down…yesterday’s vote was pure theatre, a win for all sides. The right-wing politicians who initiated the ban showed themselves fierce defenders of Zionist hard-wingery; the Arab MKs got to shout their worst on national TV, hoping this will encourage a larger percent of their own potential constituents to support them. The Left, most vocally Merertz, had the opportunity to distance themselves from the mainstream, which they’re having a hard time doing these days because on the main issue, the operation in Gaza, they can’t afford to be to critical since even their voters support it. Whoever dislikes the court will soon be given yet another reason to decry how it intervenes. A fine day was had by all.

Bush welcomes Obama the only way he knows how.

Shadi Hamid says that I am mistaken when I write: "What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield  power, their popularity collapses." Hamid:

It is not true that once Islamists wield power, their popularity collapses. An important, but often overlooked, distinction should be made here. Islamist parties that win power through the democratic process, at either the local or national levels, tend to actually be relatively popular. Islamists that come to power through undemocratic or violent means – the National Islamic Front in Sudan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the mullahs of Iran – tend to be unpopular. And they’re unpopular not necessarily because they are Islamist, but because they are authoritarian and brutal. (Similarly, the reason that the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes are unpopular is not because they are secular, but because they are authoritarian and, at times, brutal).

He has some interesting examples to counter me. But I don’t consider Turkey’s moderate and democratic Islamist parties to be equatable with Hezbollah or the Tehran regime. Hamid, moreover, makes an exception to his rule with Hamas.

I know. I know. I’m trying to move on. But if you are in any way still interested in the weird lies of Sarah Palin, and haven’t yet figured out what the hell happened last year, this email exchange published yesterday between Pat Dougherty, editor of the great Anchorage Daily News, and governor Palin, is fascinating. For some reason, governor Palin fired off an email to the editor furious that the ADN had run an AP story that stated that her kinda-son-in-law was a high school drop-out. It’s classic Palin: she insists that Levi Johnston is not a high school drop-out, even though, in the actual world the rest of us live in, he is. Dougherty handles that issue with hilarious dead-pan. But the fascinating part of the email exchange – and one that will no doubt interest Dish readers – is the following. (The emails are divided up into sections, but the whole thing can be read here.)

PALIN: [I]s your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig’s mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who’s already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?

DOUGHERTY: Yes, it’s true.

You may have been too busy with the campaign to notice, but the Daily News has, from the beginning, dismissed the conspiracy theories about Trig’s birth as nonsense. I don’t believe we have ever published in the newspaper a story, a letter, a column or anything alleging a coverup about your maternity. In fact, my integrity and the integrity of the newspaper have been repeatedly attacked in national forums for our complicity in the "coverup." I have personally received more than a 100 emails accusing me and the paper of conspiring to hide the truth. (I should note, however, that many people who commented on adn.com have alleged a coverup. Many of those were deleted as soon as we saw them, but many were not.)

I want to be very clear on this: I have from the beginning and do now consider the conspiracy theories about Trig’s birth to be nutty nonsense.

If that’s true, then why has Lisa Demer been asking questions about Trig’s birth? Because we have been amazed by the widespread and enduring quality of these rumors. I finally decided, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the "conspiracy theory that would not die" and, possibly, report the facts of Trig’s birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all. Lisa Demer started reporting. I don’t believe she received any cooperation in her efforts from the parties who, in my judgment, stood to benefit most from the story, namely you and your family. Even so, we reported the matter as thoroughly as we could.

Several weeks ago, when we considered the information Lisa had gathered, we decided we didn’t have enough of a story to accomplish what we had hoped. Lisa moved on to other topics and we haven’t decided whether the idea is worth any further effort. Even the birth of your grandson may not dissuade the Trig conspiracy theorists from their beliefs. It strikes me that if there is never a clear, contemporaneous public record of what transpired with Trig’s birth that may actually ensure that the conspiracy theory never dies. Time will tell.

PALIN: And, oh, I could go on . . .

DOUGHERTY: Governor, I would encourage you to go on. I cannot address your concerns if I do not hear them. Perhaps after reading this you will conclude that the facts are not exactly as you thought, or that there was more to these issues than you knew. I hope you see that we have tried hard to practice sound journalism. We may have trusted the accuracy of the AP too much, but I won’t know that for sure until you confirm that Levi will graduate from high school. When we heard that you were upset about Lisa’s inquiries, we immediately extended an invitation to your office for you to meet with me and other editors so we could explain our interest in the Trig matter, and answer any other questions you might have. As far as I know, that invitation was never acknowledged.

We remain willing and available to meet with you to discuss these or any other issues. I would be happy to meet with you one on one, as would Pat Doyle, or as part of any group of editors and publisher you would like. Based on our experience, I do not think it would be constructive to include Bill McAllister, but that’s up to you. If I have not addressed your concerns fully enough, please let me know.

Sincerely, Pat Dougherty

My italics. No word back from Palin yet. But I’ll keep you posted.

You too can buy some here in three handy sizes. And brush up on your Tennyson, motherfucker.

Take one paragraph from the cover-story by Stu Taylor and Evan Thomas now on newsstands:

The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems. America brought untold shame on itself with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. It’s likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported.

Let’s unpack this. They start by telling the reader that "torture" is complicated. They paint a picture in which what happened was that Dick Cheney’s "robust" attitude toward prisoners somehow filtered down and became much more extreme at the bottom. And so you have a sensible patriotic vice-president trying to save America, foiled by improvising sadistic amateurs at the bottom, who even went so far as to use electric shocks.

This narrative, to put it bluntly, is a lie.

There were no electric shocks, to my knowledge, at Abu Ghraib (or even Gitmo, so far as we know). There were just fake electric wires designed to fool a hooded, terrified prisoner that he was in danger of being electrocuted. But Taylor and Thomas introduce this cartoonish torture that never happened to contrast it with Cheney’s allegedly more moderate measures. That way, they can bypass the bleeding obvious: there was no distinction between the techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib and what Bush and Cheney specifically authorized.

Most of the abuses at Abu Ghraib – forced nudity, use of dogs, mock executions, stress positions, sleep deprivation, repeated beatings – were all authorized SERE techniques, rendered an indelible part of America’s value system by president Bush. They were inflicted on individuals who were subject to no due process, a vast majority of whom were innocent – again in line with the Bush-Cheney policy of seizing individuals without trial and torturing them for information.

A simple question: If these torture techniques brought "untold shame" on the United States, then why exactly is Newsweek effectively defending them? Look at the photo above. This is what Cheney and Rumsfeld authorized in order to soften up prisoners before interrogation. Does Jon Meacham, who continued to defend the Cheney line this morning, think that Lynndie England dreamed up this strange scenario all by herself? You think she figured "fear up" as a SERE technique out by telepathy?

Taylor and Thomas defend "enhanced interrogation." Therefore they defend the bulk of what happened at Abu Ghraib. There is no logical alternative. Over to Wikipedia:

Experts Marty Lederman, H. Candace Gorman, Arthur Bright, Scott Horton and Nat Hentoff have reported that blogger, political commentator and former editor of The New Republic Andrew Sullivan claimed that "enhanced interrogation" bears remarkable resemblance to the techniques the Gestapo called "Verschärfte Vernehmung," for which some of them faced prosecution in Norway after World War II and were "found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death."^{[21][22][23][24][25][4][26][27][28]} Besides the similarity of the practices, the German term "verschärfte Vernehmung" itself literally translates as "enhanced interrogation". These techniques included the simplest rations, a hard bed, a dark cell, deprivation of sleep, exhaustion exercises, and blows with a stick.

A 1948 Norwegian court case^[29] described the use of hypothermia identical to the reports from Guantanamo Bay. Sullivan and Gorman contend that the defense used by the Nazis for applying the techniques "is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration." Most notably the concept of unlawful enemy combatant is invoked avant la lettre to justify its implementation on "insurgent prisoners out of uniform", and notes the identical logic propagated by John Yoo today.^[21][23] The so called "ticking time bomb scenario", as rationale for allowing torture, had its precursor in the Gestapo’s "Third degree" measures.^[26] According to The Christian Science Monitor:

But while the Nazis’ interrogative methods were found to be torture, The New York Times writes that the Allies’ methods at the time were far more effective and far less abusive than those the United States uses now.^[4]

This is what Bush and Cheney authorized. Period. We see it all over the world, in obvious places and secret ones. It was set out in memos. It was pioneered at Gitmo and in secret sites and then it was transferred to Gitmo under Rumsfeld’s orders. If Taylor and Thomas want to defend Bush’s policies – and argue that they never amounted to violations of US law and the Geneva Conventions – then they have to defend the techniques at Abu Ghraib. I could respect their position more if they were candid about this. But the minute they are candid, their de facto support for abuse and torture of prisoners is unmissable.

Ta-Nehisi does some reporting on prop 8 polling and the black vote. On this we agree:

What we need (the we being socially liberal blacks) are people in the black church, who know the church (that disqualifies yours truly) and can engage other black people in the debate. We have a very powerful incentive to do so–our silence is killing us.