Month: April 2009

John Nichols plays politics with the swine flu scare:

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse — with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

I take the point but a little less partisanship in a public health crisis is surely warranted.

Scrabble goes surreal:

Publius changes his mind about the court's role in introducing marriage equality:

…the Warren Court’s race decisions were admittedly a departure from traditional precedent and methodology.  But the injustice of American racial discrimination demanded a more aggressive response.  The courts acted – and scholars later supplied these principles (things like anti-subordination, which called for scrutiny of laws discriminating against racial minorities).

And that brings us to gay marriage.

The fundamental issue is whether discrimination against gay couples is so fundamentally unjust – so self-evidently repugnant to basic human dignity – that it justifies a more aggressive judicial response.  In other words, is today’s discrimination in the same category as the racial discrimination that led to Brown and its progeny?  That's the million dollar question.

And I say yes. 

Suddenly, it accelerates. And I fear it has nothing to do with breakfast habits.

The Susan Boyle YouTube – coming back at you:

More here.

A US-Mexico map.

Simon Johnson summarizes Larry Summers view of crisis:

1. All crises must end.  The “self-equilibrating” nature of the economy will ultimately prevail, although that may take massive one-off government actions.  Such a crisis happens only ”three or four times” per century, so taking on huge amounts of government debt is fine; implicitly, we will grow out of that debt burden.

2. We will get out of the crisis by encouraging exactly the kind of behaviors that “previously we wanted to discourage” two years ago.  It is “this insight, this view” particularly with regard to leverage (overborrowing, to you and me) that “undergirds the policy program in the United States.”

3. There is a critical need to support financial intermediation and to ensure it is adequately capitalized, with a view to the risks inherent in the current situation.  He then said, with a straight face, that the current bank stress tests are designed with this in mind.

4. Growth in the 1990s and more recently was based too much on finance (this appears to be a relatively new thought for Summers).  The high and rising share of finance in corporate profits “should have been a warning”.  The next expansion should be based less on asset bubbles and more on investment in key public services.

5. The financial regulatory system “in fundamental respects has been a failure”.  There have been too many serious crises in the past 20 years (yes, this statement was somewhat at odds with the low frequency of major crises statement in point 1).Simon, predictably, wasn't impressed.

Another good reason for an independent panel to get all the documents and lay it all out.

The latest from a Federalist Society conference call strategizing poitical and legal defenses for torture:

If they didn't think they were going to be murdered, they weren't "tortured". Yeah: that's exactly what the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture had in mind.

It doesn't look good.