Month: May 2009

An Email From Montana

A reader writes:

This gay Montanan agrees with your dissenter. The only way we would get protection as LGBT people in this state is if it is granted federally. I have personally witnessed the bigotry and violence of living in this beautiful place. I've also been a part of significant change here. However, I personally have known at least three young men and women who have been beaten because of perceived sexual orientation in the last 6 months. I am all for trying to change the system from within, but I don't want to have to look into the face of another battered youth while we wait.

I must say that this kind of testimony affects me. How could it not? But Wyoming had no hate crimes law and still put Matthew Shepard's murderers away for life. I don't doubt this bill will pass. I will be very interested if it is ever used. Another reader writes:

As a native Montanan, I can say that Montana is very much a libertarian-leaning state: “You stay out of my business and I’ll stay out of yours.” Montana is backward in a lot of ways (hence the fact that I live elsewhere now) but to assume that because it is a big, rectangular state the people there are more likely to commit hate crimes is just absurd.

The NYT “T-Word” Watch

They're still scrambling at the Gray Lady to describe reality. Check this post out. "Brutal interrogation" is now "harsh questioning" or just "interrogation techniques" or "tactics now found to be questionable." The commenters, of course, use the plain English term "torture" immediately, because outside of the MSM, English is still used to mean what it has always meant.

I know there is some dispute about some of the methods used and the NYT is trying to be scrupulous. This is not crazy, and it's fair for some media outlets to lag behind blogs. But we all know and no legal authority has ever questioned that waterboarding someone 183 times is torture. For the NYT to keep denying this, to keep disseminating untruth in the guise of even-handedness is intolerable.

Why not use the inclusive term "torture and abuse" to describe the totality of Bush's interrogation policies? Why is that not even-handed enough?

And when is the NYT going to grow some?

Why Obama Opposes A Truth Commission

Marc reports:

In the [Obama administration's] view, a commission would expose secrets without any means of determining whether they're properly protected or not, and they've been warned that the nation's spy services would simply cease to function effectively if they're forced to surrender exacting details about their immediate past conduct. The administraiton further worries that the Commission would be carried out in the context of vengeance and would not focus the rage on lessons learned for the future. This, again, is the point of view senior administration officials; it may or may not be my own.

Helmets, Ctd

A final harrowing e-mail on the subject:

About 10 years ago I was driving to work because, although I usually ride my bike to work, my wrist had been fractured when a car had hit me from behind at 40 mph a week earlier. (Luckily, I had my helmet on and although it and my bike were bashed up, I only had the wrist fracture and some deep gravel scratches on my back and shoulder.) I was stopped at a light, one car from the intersection, and a bicyclist ran the light on the cross street, grinning at those of us still stopped at the just-changed light, because he knew that we saw him and would wait.

I rolled down my window to yell at him and instead said, “Shit,” out loud because in doing so I saw – in my side mirror – a van coming up from behind me fast in the other, unoccupied lane.

The driver of the van saw only some old fogies still stopped at a light that had changed, and intended to zip right through. The cyclist could not see him and he could not see the cyclist, due to a truck in the left hand turn lane. The cyclist’s head was pulped on the asphalt from the impact (both legs broken too) and he convulsed and died about 10 minutes later as I was trying to give him first aid. There were blood and brains oozing out of the back of his head.

If he had not been hit and died, he (a 24-year old Coast Guard Academy graduate, who was a chemical engineering graduate student, a skydiver and a SCUBA diver; I talked with his parents later, who lived several hundred miles away) probably would have told me that it was none of my business whether he ran the light and didn’t have a helmet on. However, it was my, as it turned out, and for years I had recurring nightmares about it and was fearful of riding in traffic again.

All right. I give in.

Face Of The Day

CRISTJoeRaedle:Getty

Florida Governor Charlie Crist answers a question from the media at the Governor's Hurricane Conference at the Broward County Convention Center on May 14, 2009 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Earlier in the week the Republican Governor announced he would seek the nomination for the open Florida Senate seat in 2010 after Senator Mel Martinez said he would not run for reelection. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Will The CBO Play Along?

David Cutler, a Harvard economist who worked on the Obama campaign, argues that healthcare reform will save money in the long run:

Health care reform will require additional revenues in the short run. Over the longer-run, however, health system savings are greater than most estimates of covering the uninsured, and reform should be able to pay for coverage expansions as well as contribute to long-run deficit reduction.

David Leonhardt wonders how this will hold up to scrutiny:

It’s going to be interesting see whether the Obama administration tries to make a version of this argument to pass a health-care reform bill — and whether the Congressional Budget Office, which will be responsible for coming up with the all-important budget number for the bill, will buy the argument.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

I’m sorry, but President Obama is going to break your heart on this one.  He is not playing some long game, rope-a-dope, clever strategy which will allow him to ultimately expose Bush’s war crimes and prosecute them.  In fact, he is going to do everything he can to squash all of this.

Imagine what such prosecutions would entail:  years of courtroom drama, depositions, lawsuits and counter-suits; the long parade of powerful and high ranking ex- and current members of government, including a goodly number of Democrats, being called on the carpet and having to testify against one another; the enormous rancor and bitterness.  This would be Watergate on steroids.  And imagine the shot in the arm this would give the zombified Limbaugh Right.

The prosecutions you are asking for would simply swallow the Obama presidency whole.  It is the kind of energy draining, oxygen consuming drama that is the nightmare of every president. It would come to define his presidency in the same way the Hostage Crisis defined Carter’s and there is zero chance he will opt for this.

President Obama is making a realistic, cold, clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis.  This is the choice:  Does he fix the economy, fix healthcare, get a handle on the two wars he’s dealing with, or does he prosecute Bush era war crimes?  He has chosen his agenda and is asking us to choose that to.