Month: July 2009

On The Birthers

So many readers are furious that I have dared to ask the president to show the original copy of his birth certificate. The reason for demanding it is the same reason for demanding basic medical records proving Sarah Palin is the biological mother of Trig.

Because it would make it go away and it's easily done.

I'm tired of these public officials believing they have some right to privacy. They don't. It's the price of public office. If you don't like it, don't be president. And for goodness' sake, don't run for president on a platform of transparency.

Lucia Whalen Speaks

She insists she never mentioned race and we know she told Crowley that the suspects could well be living in that house. So Crowley made the assumption that they were black and treated Gates as a criminal because he was a black man in a nice house. Meanwhile, Forbes points out the core issue here: freedom of speech. Crowley thinks he can arrest you for it. I think it's important to insist that that isn't true. But if you come across Crowley, it's worth remembering that if you insult him, he will arrest you. And you probably aren't as powerful as Skip Gates.

Captive To Corn

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is blocking the confirmation of Thomas Shannon to be ambassador to Brazil because Shannon has been critical of ethanol tariffs. Iowa, of course, is the corn capital of the US, while Brazil contains a bountiful source of sugar cane. David Rothkopf lays it all out:

There is not a single credible analyst of biofuels […] who thinks that corn ethanol makes a hint of sense. It is hopelessly inefficient and with every new development regarding next generation biofuels only grows more so. Brazilian sugar cane ethanol, the main target of the tariffs, is produced as much as eight times more efficiently. As such, it offers a cheaper, more abundant, more environmentally friendly alternative to American consumers at a time when one would have thought that concerns about reducing dependence on foreign oil and combating climate change would be at the forefront of our concerns.

But once again, America's electoral system rears its ugly head. So long as presidential campaigns begin in Iowa, Iowans like Grassley will use the system to put the interest of their state's three million citizens and the most vocal special interests within their midst like the corn lobby, ahead of the three hundred million or so of the rest of us.

Further, in so doing, Grassley seeks to preserve yet another dimension of America's system of farm protection and subsidies that costs tax payers tens of billions each year, forces food prices higher (according to the likes of Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz) and is the single biggest distortionary factor in the world trading system. […]

It is now July and the Obama administration does not have its own ambassador in Brasilia, capital of one the rising powers that is most important to us in the world. The guy who is there now, Bush's appointee Cliff Sobel, is widely regarded by Brazilians (and anyone else who is paying attention) as a joke whereas Shannon is seen as the crème de la crème of the U.S. diplomatic service and is a nominee viewed with great enthusiasm by the Lula administration. The Shannon pick said "Brazil is important." Grassley's move says "all politics is local."

Moving The Debate

Drum's thoughts on health care:

This hardly solves every problem.  In particular, it doesn't do much to rein in costs.  But if you combine (a) Medicare, (b) our current employer-based insurance regime, and (c) community rating along with subsidies for low-income families, you've essentially institutionalized universal healthcare insurance.  Not everyone will take advantage of it — there will always be a few people who go without coverage even if it's affordable — and you still a need a few other things like out-of-pocket caps.  Still, it's basically a statement that everyone in the country can and should be covered.  And once that becomes a cultural norm, it will never go away.

But how do you contain costs after you have mandated coverage? The health care industry will make more money if everyone is covered. If you don't make them commit to serious concessions, such as the public plan, this time around, how are you going to do that in the future? The answer, I'm afraid, is: you won't. Onto receivership for the US! But more people will be healthy as the dollar collapses and the economy implodes.

News From The Civilized World

The Daily Mail – a very conservative paper – celebrates openly gay soldiers in the UK. President Obama keeps firing his – and has no plans to stop persecuting them. That's why he was elected, right? To fire people solely for being gay and serving their country. He has the power to end it with a stop-loss order. But he refuses. The country supports ending the ban by over 75 percent. And here's the attitude of the Democrats:

Indeed, MREA (stop-loss option) does not even have the votes to get out of the Armed Services Committee, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of 36 to 25.

In the Senate, there's not a single sponsor. Every day Obama refuses to act, and with every gay person he personally fires, he legitimizes and entrenches homophobia.

Iraq And The Philippines, Ctd

David Silbey, author of A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War 1899-1902, weighs in on the Iraq-Philippines connection:

Taking the Philippines essentially put the United States and Japan on a collision course out of which it was hard to steer. This was not inevitable. At the turn of the century, Japan’s attention was towards the mainland of Asia and southeast Asia, and away from the broad Pacific that separated it from the United States. It was worried about Russia, China, and the European powers that held so much of mainland Asia. The Americans and Japanese got along rather well. During the Boxer Rebellion, when American and Japanese units served together, there was quite a friendly relationship between the two. American ships coaled at Nagasaki, where they played baseball games for Japanese crowds. There was an American naval hospital there for several decades. The relationship that was building was one similar to the United States and Great Britain, two growing naval powers separated by a large ocean that nonetheless had essentially decided NOT to be rivals.

The Return Of Betsy McCaughey

Greg Sargent says an old acquaintance is making the rounds:

I don’t know why people aren’t making more of this. As you’ve heard, some Republican leaders and conservatives have been attacking the Dem health care plan with a rather vivid claim: It could lead to “government-encouraged euthanasia” for the elderly. The leading hawker of this claim is one Betsy McCaughey, who points to a provision buried in the health care bill that would require Medicare to cover “end-of-life consultations.” …The current “euthanasia” claim by McCaughey and other conservatives was debunked yesterday by Talking Points Memo and Politico. But it’s likely to live on and will continue to be cited by Republican leaders and conservatives.

Maggie Gallagher Flashback

Good As You digs up a 1996 editorial by Gallagher calling DOMA too timid. Jim Burroway plucks out this bit:

[C]onsider what the bill, in its timidity, does not do: It does not ban gay marriage. It doesn’t even require that states that adopt gay marriage do so through democratic means. To the citizens of Hawaii, where a handful of lawyers appear poised to impose gay marriage on the majority, the federal government turns its back, offering no relief. A nation which a hundred years ago unself-consciously refused to admit Utah as a state unless and until it renounced polygamy, no longer has enough moral confidence to insist on a common culture of marriage. As I said: timid.

That slippery slope goes both ways.

Crowley’s Story

We already know he falsified the police report to say that he was warned of two black males with backpacks when the witness says she said no such thing. TNC also notes:

I'm very curious as to whether Gates actually made that "Your momma" crack. He is claiming that he did not.

The one common feature of much MSM discussion of this is treatment of Crowley's report as fact. The MSM again simply assumes that those with power always tell the truth and the media's job is to relay that.