Month: April 2009

Here's the local paper's summary of the cause:

Joseph, a regular Republican candidate for the House of Delegates, rattled off a list of taxes Americans pay. State income tax. "No more!" chanted hundreds of protesters from a crowd of umbrellas and American flags. Sales tax:  "No more!" Gasoline tax: "No more!"

So a protest against government debt actually proposes abolition of several major revenue streams … and no spending cuts. If you want to know what's wrong with the right, you'd be hard put to express it more acutely. Then there's the agenda in the crowd:

Ralliers held signs saying, "Mr. President, Stop Stealing from My Piggy Bank" and "Revolution is Brewing." Other signs said "Imagine No Liberals," "Obama: One Big Awful Mistake America," "We are a Christian Nation," and "Read 'Atlas Shrugged.'" One man held a flag picturing an assault rifle that said "Come and Take it." 

The rally ended with a prayer where the Rev. Brandon Hudson asked God to help West Virginia add a marriage amendment to its state constitution.

My bad. Glenn Reynolds did indeed mention the NSA spying scandal. The NYT reports today:

The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects.

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

What is Reynolds' spin? "Change you can believe in." So the apparatus set up under Bush, with abuses that reach back into the Bush administration, are described as entirely a function of Obama's taking office. In fact, the review that found these abuses, started at the end of the Bush administration but continued through the current one. Ah, yes, that principled libertarian. If Republicans do it, it's patriotism. If Democrats do it, it's dictatorship.

There's pushback, it seems, against using the Spanish legal system to try US officials who conspired to commit war crimes by torturing prisoners in the war on terror. The core reason:

"If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out," Conde-Pumpido said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. He said a trial of the men would have turned Spain's National Court "into a plaything" to be used for political ends.

But this is a strange standard. It means that you only prosecute those low down the totem pole who carried out orders, while exempting the high officials who ordered it.

This is, of course, what the Bush administration has done throughout when it has been forced to concede some error. That's why all the internal reports into Abu Ghraib were instructed not to look up the chain of command to determine who was responsible for the torture. Yes: in the military, investigators were told they couldn't follow the chain of command! If anything, it seems to me that it's the architects of war crimes who deserve the most scrutiny and the severest punishment. Those who treat the rule of law as a plaything to expedite smashing someone's head against a wall or hanging them from shackles until their joints give way: they seem to me to be worth prosecuting. I regard Yoo and Bradbury as morally more culpable for this evil than those CIA agents who carried the gruesome torture sessions out.

But the Spanish are right about one thing: this should be an American concern, if this country still believes in the rule of law. We will find out today if president Obama does.

A reader writes:

Americans already tolerate rationing – health care in the USA is stringently rationed by price and employment status. If you are not wealthy, or your job does not provide health cover, you miss out on health care.  This form of rationing is dire compared to having to wait some months for non-critical surgery under a universal insurance model as you might in Canada or Australia. Under the current system in the US, many people (40 million) receive insufficient care and face early morbidity and mortality or are bankrupted, both of which have serious, long term economic impact. Under a universal insurance system, the people at the bottom of the pile have to wait a bit for non-critical care.  There really is no comparison.

Even more, permitting a free market in health services is nonsensical. Nothing in the world, as yet, can beat death; but most people faced with death would give everything they have for an extra day, or week, or year, or decade, of life. Material things are worthless in the face of death. That's the problem with a free market in health services.  The wealthy will pour everything they have into high intensity, high tech, high cost, but in the end marginal extensions to their lifespan. That's why the US pours more money into healthcare than any other nation, to achieve an overall lower lifespan and health outcomes than its peers.

Health expenditure is most efficient and has the greatest impact when directed to prevention and timely, high quality primary care. Such a strategy is almost impossible in the US health system as it is currently configured.

And why should we have a problem with free people choosing to "pour everything they have into high intensity, high tech, high cost, but in the end marginal extensions to their lifespan"? And isn't the market a more neutral and less politically manipulable form of rationing than government? I think you really do have to live in a socialist system to see how rational it looks from the outside and how mediocre, passive and bureaucratic it feels from within.

Ross defends the tea parties:

…here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.

They’re absolutely right to be alarmed about the deficits and debt. But the alarm should be judged in relation to the seriousness of their proposals to confront it. And those, alas, are so far unserious. When the tea-party movement offers a specific manifesto for bringing the country back to fiscal balance with no tax increases, I’ll take them seriously. Until then … I just hope you all feel better today.

Only a day after a massive, sustained and widespread outcry on the bloggy right about the DHS convening a study to worry about right-wing extremism, we get news of illegal and excessive wire-tapping under Bush. Not a single right-wing blog I can find via Memeorandum has commented. If you think the right is sincerely concerned about civil liberties for all in this country, this is not encouraging. But let's not lose all hope. I'll post any comments on conservative blogs or sites protesting excessive surveillance of US citizens when the Republicans were in power.

The last few months have been particularly bad:

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

And yet, for some unaccountable reason, Michelle Malkin doesn't complain this time.

Be afraid (best parody out there):

Is also Corby Kummer's. My own recent preference is Starbucks' London Fog (unsweetened), which reminds me of my mum.