Free Exchange puts the one percent decline in context:
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a smoker himself, has a tongue-half-in-cheek post on taxing smoking as a way to reduce health care costs and the federal deficit:
He's got a point:
[If] you want to disincentivize smoking through sin taxes, that’s perfectly fine. It’s okay to have public policy that disincentivizes bad things just because they’re bad, without having to make budget projections over the next 30 years. I’m willing to pay extra to feed my addiction. But don’t lie about the real reason you’re doing it.
The ungrateful volcano sputters ominously.
Dreher reads a hell of a lot into a two-sentence post from yesterday linking to his post about trangender people and those who want to have limbs amputated for non-medical reasons:
Forgive the jerking knee. But when a transgender person encounters someone from the Templeton Foundation, there's a reason for it to jerk. There is a genuine issue here, I shouldn't have been so snitty, and a Dish reader, who approves sex changes and amputations helps out:
I work as a psychotherapist on the Transgender Clinical team at a prominent GLBT health center. I think Dreher raises a very good point about these folks who have issues with their limbs and matters of autonomy.
I saw a very compelling documentary about these people and the one doctor—somewhere in Europe—who actually provided the surgery they so desperately believed they needed. The establishment eventually shut him down for providing this care but before they did, he operated on a number of patients and my sense was this surgeon wasn’t a quack. He followed a very similar protocol as we do in assessing transgendered individuals before approving hormone treatment or surgery, making sure there wasn’t some other significant mental illness that made the treatment contraindicated. The people with these limb issues were “normal” in every respect, with no evidence of mental illness, except for this profound dysphoria regarding their limb. These patients simply knew that they would receive relief once the limb was gone, and sure enough, they were much happier afterwards.
Who knows why this happens to people. These phenomena simply aren’t understood and I don’t know if they ever will be—at least not in our lifetime. I have all sorts of metaphysical explanations that I’ll keep to myself, but in the mean time, isn’t it only right to help these people?
You write that these people want to have their limbs amputated “needlessly” but who gets to define “need”? I assume that you meant to suggest that these limbs are otherwise healthy and fully functioning, but the same can be said for trans men who want to have their female breasts removed or trans women who want to have their male genitals removed.
I share all this because I’m what’s called a “gate keeper”. Trans clients need letters from people like me to start hormone therapy or to have surgery, and trust me; it’s not a fun position to be in. My desire is always to help and I don’t enjoy having this kind of power over people’s lives. No health care provider wants to play “gender police". I’ve often commented amongst my colleagues about the similarities between these two populations and about how to make these decisions that so significantly change people's bodies and lives. As our team has evolved over the years, we’ve struggled with countless cases in making the decision to approve someone for treatment. What the field in general is coming to is a place where we assess that the patient is not otherwise mentally ill and that they are fully competent to make this decision for themselves. I don’t think we can do much more than that. I think that same determination should be made with limb dysphorics.
And it has nothing to do with his race. Via Benen. What it also means – now that the GOP is an almost entirely Southern party – is that the Republicans cannot really take this on. 58 percent – a clear majority of Republican voters – either don't believe or are unsure about whether Obama is legitimately the president of the United States.
A turn-around in the second quarter. My own suspicion is that a huge amount of Obama's numbers right now are a function of the economy. I have no idea where it's headed – and there are still rapids ahead. But this has got to encourage the administration a little.
This is pretty funny in retrospect:
Mudflats looks at the latest polling:
Oh, it looks like those halcyon days of the 89% approval ratings are a thing of the past. Now we can say that more Alaskans disapprove of the ex-almost-one-term-governor than approve of her.
Wouldn't it be awful if Mudflats simply collapsed under the full weight of the vindication?
"Why was Mohammad Jawad tortured? Why did military officials choose a teenage boy who had attempted suicide in his cell less than 5 months earlier to be the subject of this sadistic sleep deprivation experiment? Not that anything would justify such treatment, of course, but at least in the case of the other detainees known to have been subjected to sleep deprivation, they were believed to possess critical intelligence that might save American lives.
Unfortunately, we may never know. I’ve asked to speak to the guards who actually carried out the program, and I’ve been denied. In the absence of information to the contrary, which the government would surely provide if it existed, we are left to conclude that it was simply gratuitous cruelty.
The government admits that Mohammad Jawad was treated “improperly,” but offers no remedy. We won’t use any evidence derived from this maltreatment, they say, but they know that there was no evidence derived from it because the government didn’t even bother to interrogate him after they tortured him. Exclusion of non-existent evidence is not a remedy. Dismissal is a severe sanction, but it is the only sanction that might conceivably deter such conduct in the future.
February 7, 2002. America lost a little of its greatness that day. We lost our position as the world’s leading defender of human rights, as the champion of justice and fairness and the rule of law. But it is a testament to the continuing greatness of this nation, that I, a lowly Air Force Reserve Major, can stand here before you today, with the world watching, without fear of retribution, retaliation or reprisal, and speak truth to power. I can call a spade a spade, and I can call torture, torture.
Today, Your Honor, you have an opportunity to restore a bit of America’s lost luster, to bring back some small measure of the greatness that was lost on Feb 7, 2002, to set us back on a path that leads to an America which once again stands at the forefront of the community of nations in the arena of human rights. Sadly, this military commission has no power to do anything to the enablers of torture such as John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Robert Delahunty, Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, David Addington, William Haynes, Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for the jurisdiction of military commissions is strictly and carefully limited to foreign war criminals, not the home-grown variety.
All you can do is to try to send a message, a clear and unmistakable message that the U.S. really doesn’t torture, and when we do, we own up to it, and we try to make it right. I have provided you with legal authority for the proposition that you have the power to dismiss these charges. I can’t stand before you and say that you are legally required to do so. But I can say that that it is a moral imperative to do so, and I ask that you do so," – Major David J. R. Frakt, in his closing argument in favor of dismissal of the case against Mohammad Jawad.
Jawad was ordered released from the Gitmo torture compound yesterday after years of abuse, cruelty, sadism and torture authorized by the president of the United States, George W. Bush. Staggeringly, the Obama administration is resisting his release and threatening a criminal charge.
That's why we supported Obama, right?
I'm biased since they are both old friends. But they are not Steynian hysterics; and not authoritarian conservatives. They are, at core, liberal-minded conservatives who are deeply alarmed at the enabling of Islamist illiberalism in Europe. There was a great review of Chris' vital new book in the NYT today. When so many very smart and decent people are worrying we should worry. I'm less pessimistic than they are, because I have perhaps a little more faith in the attractiveness of Western freedom for the next generation of Muslim Europeans; and I have grown weary of the Straussian view of the decadent, hopeless West. But they make a strong case for vigilance. Here's a link to Bruce's book.
(And Chris has been prophetic before. See this piece from a decade ago about the right. Michael Lind got this too. And yours truly. But not everyone saw the right's collapse at the hands of the South looming.)
The Dish 