Month: April 2009

One of Drum's commenters suggests Google Voice as a solution to the voicemail conundrum. Video above from the Google blog.

In the process of dismantling George Akerlof and Robert Shiller's new book, Richard Posner evaluates the Obama administration's economic maneuvers thus far:

We will discover soon enough whether the measures taken by the Obama administration are reviving the animal spirits of producers and consumers. The intentions are good. But the lack of focus, the partisan squabbling, the dizzying policy oscillations, the delays in execution, and the harassment of bankers are bad. By increasing the uncertainty of the business environment, these things are dampening the animal spirits–the courage to reason and act in the face of an uncertain future.

The NYT poll shows real gains in the number of Americans thinking the country is back on the right track. It's now higher than at any point since 2005, when the full impact of two terms of Bush and Cheney began to sink in. The broader number with more polls is above. Money NYT quote:

The percentage of people who said the economy was getting worse has declined from 54 percent just before Mr. Obama took office to 34 percent today. And 20 percent now think the economy is getting better, compared with 7 percent in mid-January.

The Republicans are at record lows. And they deserve it. The blast of nasty negativism and total lack of substantive alternatives are signs of a continuing death spiral, made more fatal by the denial still fomented by the Fox-Drudge-Pajamas cocoon.

From the Iowa senate today:

Sometimes, you wonder just what the far right really does believe. And then you find it:

Torture has been illegal for a number of years, and President Bush insisted just as strongly as Obama that the U.S. does not torture. There was a legitimate debate about waterboarding, which does no physical injury, and which I do not believe constitutes torture. But according to press reports, only two or three top-ranking terrorists were waterboarded, none after 2003. And waterboarding has been banned by the U.S. military since 2006. So what was Obama's purpose in implying that until he came along, his own government was engaged in torturing prisoners? His speech was carried live by Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, broadcast into countries where "torture" doesn't mean getting your face wet. Obama at least impliedly exaggerated the supposed sins of his predecessors and the "change" brought about by himself. Why? For what purpose? Isn't the campaign over?

This is John Hinderaker, someone who has apparently managed to block out the dozens of reports, including the latest from the Red Cross, in which there is no longer any doubt about the United States' use of torture under the Bush-Cheney administration, against domestic law, international law, and the Geneva Conventions.

To take the bizarre constitutional and legal claims of a man like John Yoo as dispositive – against the entire body of history, law, and morality that proves otherwise – is an act of ideological bravado, not a serious empirical or moral claim. He also seems to believe there is a legitimate debate about waterboarding, where in fact, no serious legal or military body has ever questioned its status as a torture technique, until the Bush administration came along.

But this is what we're dealing with – and why a full accounting of what the Bush administration did, and what it got from its actions, is long overdue. We need all of it – techniques and alleged intelligence procured from them – on the table. The campaign is indeed over. But America isn't. We can repair this appalling damage – but only with fact, truth and witnesses.

Greenwald strikes the right tone:

It’s unclear whether the claims of Horton’s source are true.  It sounds more like a responsibility-shifting excuse than anything else — a way of blaming Republicans rather than Obama officials for the failure to disclose these memos — but it doesn’t matter in the slightest if the claims are true.  There is absolutely no justification whatsoever to continue to conceal these memos, and the fact that the GOP will stomp its feet and obstruct nominees doesn’t come close to constituting an excuse for ongoing concealment.

I don’t personally have any real objection to the Obama administration’s desire to have a few additional weeks to try to figure out how to manage these internal controversies and political storms over the memos’ release.  Though frustrating, short delays of this type are tolerable, even reasonable.  But ultimately (and sooner rather than later), full disclosure of these documents  — meaning with nothing other than the most minimal redactions to protect sources and identities of cooperating foreign agencies — is absolutely necessary.   There is no excuse for any other course of action, and a failure of full disclosure here would almost certainly be the most egregious act taken thus far by the Obama administration (and there have already been several such acts) to help keep concealed compelling evidence of Bush crimes.

A reader writes:

I am a Kenyan man living in Raleigh NC and I happened upon an entry on your blog today. You might find this a bit esoteric but I felt compelled to clarify it:

“And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers”…..

No one wants to be the one to correct Bob Dylan but Barack Obama's father was not a Bantu, he was a Nilote, one of the three major ancestral groups of people from which most of Kenyas population is derived from. Barack Obama Sr was of the Luo tribe and any suggestion that Obama is a Bantu would be met with howls of laughter in Kenya. The Maasai tribe has Bantu origins and there is no one in Kenya that is a Griot.

Griots are from West and Central Africa. Luos primarily fish for a living and fish is a major part of their diet and the stereotype about them is that due to this high consumption of fish, they are very intelligent. Any health manual today correctly links high Omega-3 consumption with a boost in brain power. Luos do not raise cattle or kill lions, the Maasai do that.

Lastly, a peripheral aside, I am a gay man currently struggling with self acceptance. I love your blog and urge you to keep up the good work. I look forward to the day when I will be out and live as who I am. I am not there but will get there soon. Pray for me.

A reader writes:

I favor marijuana legalization, but I am a little concerned about your recent posts highlighting self-written profiles of pot users portraying themselves as responsible citizens. I do not smoke marijuana now, but I did smoke it as an undergraduate in college. I quit for a reason – and I remember that reason quite well.
 
Around the time crack hit the streets, I saw a magazine cover story on the so-called war on drugs (I believe it was Time magazine, some time in the mid-eighties). The cover had a picture of a burning building, and the article had graphic pictures of dead bodies resulting from police raids and/or turf wars between dealers.

In an instant, it struck me that every dime I spent on pot was going into the hands of a criminal….and that even if my own dealer was a non-violent guy, all that money was eventually winding up in the hands of very dangerous people. The recent violence in Mexico involves trafficking primarily in marijuana – not crack. These are people who behead other people. When I saw that article and had that sudden intuition, I never paid for pot again, and quit smoking other people's pot very soon thereafter. 
 
I believe there are instances where civil disobedience to unjust laws is morally justified. However, it is hard for me to accept that the pleasure derived pot provides proportionate reason to fund killers. As long as pot smoking is illegal, I believe it is irresponsible to promote flagrant disregard for the law. Every penny spent on those illegal drugs eventually goes to very bad people – terrorists, torturers, and murders!

In many ways, the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, most other papers and the main networks all played their part in pushing the US into the realm of the rogue state. From Mark Danner's report on the torture of disappeared terror suspects:

It is a testament as much to the peculiarities of the American press—to its “stenographic function” and its institutional unwillingness to report as fact anything disputed, however implausibly, by a high official—that the former vice-president’s insistence that these interrogations were undertaken “legally” and “in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles” continues to be reported without contradiction, and that President Bush’s oft-repeated assertion that “the United States does not torture” is still respectfully quoted and, in many quarters, taken seriously.

That they are so reported is a political fact, and a powerful one. It makes it possible to contend that, however adamant the arguments of the lawyers “on either side,” the very fact of their disagreement makes the legality of these procedures a matter of partisan political allegiance, not of law.

When future generations ask how this happened, the corrupted and coopted press will be part of the reason why.

Or fun with iPhoto. More here and here.