Month: April 2009

A reader writes:

The response from Just One Minute that you published, accusing you of "miss[ing] the point", is itself an almost pure expression of missing the point. Money quote: "…attempting to criminalize non-violent political dissent …is deeply problematic even if they do it with all the proper warrants."

Here's what's missing from their crack analysis – if indeed "they do it all with the proper warrants", then that strongly implies that there is a reason to suspect criminality. That's precisely what a warrant is, and why it's so important. How is it that they don't see this?

Look at it like this – let's say that I'm a decent, moral, and productive American who nonetheless fosters a deep distrust and maybe even active dislike of a large and powerful federal Government – maybe I even occasionally feel compelled to publicly and loudly express my social and political frustrations at events sponsored by Fox News. Also, I  enjoy dressing up like a soldier and shooting up trees on the weekends, and I happen to own a small arsenal of weaponry.

Of course it would be an injustice to accuse me of criminal behavior without any further evidence or just cause (to say nothing of what a sick abomination it would be to indefinitely detain and/or torture me absent any such evidence, and without any legal redress). Of course that would be wrong. No reasonable and decent person believes otherwise. It sucks when innocent people are accused, much less convicted, of crimes that they did not commit.

Now, let's also say that I am also prepared to willfully and cheerfully grant the the authorities -  those very same authorities against whom I regularly express such animosity and distrust – the express permission to ignore, at their whim and entirely without mitigation or oversight, the critical protections against unreasonable search and seizure afforded to me by the Constitution of the United States and the fundamental intuitions of western jurisprudence dating back to the Magna Freakin' Carta.

Well, then, it certainly seems fair to ask – is it more, or less likely that such a miscarriage of justice will occur?

I remain utterly gobsmacked that adult Americans in the 21st century can be so obtuse to the dangers of tolerating and even codifying such unmediated exceptions to due process. I don't think that it's hypocrisy, per se, so much as it is a willful ignorance, a blinding stupidity, or at least an expression of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty.

Ta-Nehisi is disappointed in the American people.

I haven't quite recovered from this Nineteen Eight Four parallel but here's another, noted by David Cole:

"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," – Dennis Blair, yesterday.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen," – the first sentence in George Orwell's classic novel of the security state, 1984.

A reader writes:

You keep trotting out this argument that boils down to "I've lived under a nationalized health care system, you haven't. Trust me, it sucks." And for all I know, when you last lived in the UK, maybe it did suck. But as an American who's been living in the UK for the last six years, I can tell you my experience with the NHS has been almost completely positive. The doctors are professional, the facilities are clean, and I always can get help immediately. Two times I've had to dash out the door the moment after arranging an appointment to get there on time. The level of care for me has been indisputably superior to what I had in the US, even with good insurance.

 

Jack McHugh is still unsure about the market rally:

It’s been said, and I agree, that trying to foster sustained growth in an economy weighed down by too much debt is like trying to start a sustainable fire using wet logs. The matches and gasoline (some stimulus and a low funds rate) didn’t work on our debt-soaked economy, so Mr. Bernanke is resorting to the blowtorches and rocket fuel (a lot of stimulus and quantitative easing). I don’t know enough about the chemistry of combustion to accurately predict what will happen next. But my advice would be to stand well back and wait to see what happens next. I’ll risk being underinvested during this rally. Even if he’s successful, Mr. Bernanke might set fire to more than just the logs.

Graph by Doug Short.

Julian Sanchez thinks I've been too hard on the tea parties:

I think Andrew Sullivan puts it a bit too strongly when he suggests that it’s pointless to complain about excessive spending unless you’ve got a detailed notion of what you want to cut. It probably makes sense to stress that there’s popular discontent with  a general lack of fiscal restraint, rather than with any particular set of budget items. Certainly there’s no coherent policy program detectable at these rallies, but a big public demonstration doesn’t seem like a terribly good venue for laying that out anyway. If events like these serve any useful function—my suspicion is that they don’t, but one lives in hope—it’s in moving people from anger to engagement, preparing the ground for more useful and targeted activism down the road. I’m waiting for signs they’re actually moving people past the “anger” stage.

I'd be happy with just some vague declarations of what they'd like to cut – say entitlements and defense. The pork thing is irrelevant in the grand scheme of fiscal balance. How about a two-point plan? Or is that too much to ask?

Ryan Avent, who has taken over Felix Salmon's old gig blogging at Portfolio, is worried about the administration's stress tests:

…if the administration releases information suggesting that the tested banks are all basically fine, then the data is worthless. Markets will go on speculating on which banks are in the most trouble (and possibly be more pessimistic, generally, based on the government's bungling of the tests). If the administration provides meaningful information of any kind, on the other hand, markets will naturally assume that the weakest looking banks are the weakest banks, and will begin trading accordingly.

Felix Salmon interjects:

The way out of this problem I think is for the government to recapitalize the weakest banks before it releases the stress-test results, and then to release post-money stress tests showing that, as a result of its recapitalizations, all the tested banks are basically fine. It’s a risky strategy, but I don’t think Treasury has much choice at this point.

You might want to re-read this article from 2005:

At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press.

National Journal's survey of influential Democrats and Republicans shows movement toward marriage equality.