Harry Joe at Margin of Error runs the numbers:
With current polling in conjunction with Bafumi et al.’s paper predicting a Republican national vote between 53.6% and 54.7%, the Republicans could easily gain 50-60 seats from their current 178. Gains of greater than 60 seats also look quite possible. Even in the best case scenario for the Democrats, it would seem that holding the House would be very, very difficult.
(Hat tip: Chait)
Abe Foxman from the ADL, according to this Twitter feed from the Jewish Council on Public Affairs meeting in Texas:
@ADL_National’s Abe Foxman calls @dailydish’s Andrew Sullivan "an example of someone who is educated & an anti-Semite"
A reader writes:
Obviously, I spend a lot of time reading you, and you do get pretty worked up sometimes. So the question of whether or not you're too emotional has arisen for me, it's something I've thought about. Whenever I do think about that, I always come back to the same thing: you're usually right, and your positions tend to be informed by what
seems to be to be a spirit of decency.
For example, I thought you got a little bit carried away with your enthusiasm for the green movement in Iran. I'm not sure it will be good for the people — the ultimate result is probably going to be a much more robust totalitarian state, systems that are better able to suppress dissent. But on a human level, you were so obviously connected to the people and what they were trying to accomplish that it seems like a really awful thing to criticize you about. You'd be a worse person if you didn't have the reaction you did.
You get really upset about torture. But what's the appropriate response supposed to be? Are we supposed to be jaded, and calm and collected? Fundamentally, the problem is that this terrible, immoral thing happens and no one gets upset. You're not the one who is broken there — it's everyone else. I'm absolutely certain of that.
The discussion that's taking place around you with respect to Israel is very significant. You have a lot of energy, you write very well, and you have as much space as you need to defend yourself. And you are very obviously not an anti-semite. The more they go around and around with you, the more it's going to become clear that there really are problems with Israel's behavior. I don't think Netanyahu and the settlers are any better for Israel than Cheney was for the US.
The only possible ways forward for them have to start with them listening to people like you. They're a long way from being ready to do that now. So I think that in a substantial sense, you're more pro-Israel than the hawks. I'm sorry this stuff is coming at you personally, but I think that your standing up to it is a form of public service.
I appreciate the wave of personal support from many quarters. I write things sincerely. Always have always will. And I do not believe that feeling is always antithetical to thinking. It can be; but sometimes it is critical to feel if one is able to think as a decent human being.
More seniors are toking up. It can sure help with back pain and other ailments of getting older. Joe Klein thinks that we "are in the process of a back-door legalization, sweeping from the libertarian west to the east." I watched Bill Maher's new stand-up the other night. I love the idea that marijuana use is one dividing line between free societies and Islamist ones:
"I want to live in a country where being stoned is a good thing, not a bad thing."
A reader writes:
We've corresponded before (I authored your e-mail of the year for 2009 — thanks again). As I think you may recall: I am an attorney with the Department of Justice, and a senior trial attorney and civil servant — just as Jennifer Koester Hardy was. (And my opinions here are mine alone, and not the Department's). You wondered why Hardy's name was redacted from the torture memo, while Yoo's, Bybee's and others' were not. I think I understand why.
The Department recognizes the difference between a line trial attorney, who is a career civil servant, and political appointees such as Yoo et al. and other senior management. The Department has guidelines and rules that place more responsibility on managers and supervisors than on line trial attorneys, who are, I think, not deemed ultimately responsible for policy decisions or even significant trial strategies. This is unsurprising, and it is true of most of the legal profession (the rules of professional conduct, in fact, place additional responsibilities on partners than on associates they supervise in private law firms). I think within the Department (as in most agencies and in every law firm I have been associated with), there is a culture that seeks to protect the inexperienced attorney from the results of bad decisions that are the responsibility, at the end of the day, of someone else. So I think that is at the heart of it.
But your post made me question why I was outraged by your decision, some months ago, to "out" the name of the trial attorney who wrote the controversial DOMA brief, and why I am not outraged that Hardy's name was revealed by bloggers (and let us hope that whoever was responsible for redacting the OPR memo is not responsible for redacting national security information — sloppy job, that).
There are two reasons. First, the trial attorney who drafted the DOMA brief relied on established legal precedents from numerous courts.
People may have shouted from the rafters that his arguments adopted every right-wing talking point and made arguments with too much, I don't know, advocacy, but no one ever said there wasn't legal support for the arguments he made. Second, it was, after all, a piece of advocacy — an argument made within an adversarial system where both sides argue their sides zealously, and the decision is rendered by the judge or jury.
Hardy's case is different. As the OPR report points out, the legal research was bereft of sound judgment, sound analysis, or sound conclusions. The memos were also not advocacy — OLC memos are intended to provide independent legal analysis. These memos, as OPR found, were heavily slanted towards a predetermined conclusion.
But there is also this, and this, more than anything, is the part people need to think about. The OPR memorandum states that Hardy was assigned the case, and in doing so implies that she is an involuntary fellow traveler with Yoo and Bybee, and thus worthy of redaction. I am skeptical about that.
It may have been that because of her background as a gifted Yale law graduate and because she had shown real talent, she was assigned this most politically important matter. After all, you pick your best and brightest. But it is also the case, as has been well documented, that the Department under Ashcroft and Gonzalez sometimes picked the best and brightest from an ideological perspective. See Goodling, Schlozman, etc.
I know that there are and were plenty of good, honorable, non-ideological people in OLC at the trial attorney level. Was it happenstance that this attorney — active in the Federalist Society, someone who clearly matched up with Yoo in ideology (they worked together to produce a law review article after the torture memos were produced) — was picked for this assignment? Or was it by design, taking into account her ideological perspective? I know how I come down on that (but it is certainly a question Senator Leahy should ask). And if she was picked because of an ideological perspective, isn't that indicative of Yoo's intention to produce, how shall we say, the most narrow of analyses (an intention David Margolis, who overruled the OPR's ultimate conclusion, said was lacking?).
Hardy was in the thick of it. She raised some doubts about some of the approach taken by Yoo (see the footnote at p. 50 of the OPR memo, regarding her conclusions of the "implausib[ility]" of certain defenses that could be raised), and yet she signed off on what can only charitably be called egregiously poor legal analysis. She handled briefing and fielded questions from senior White House officials. And she never said boo.
Hardy deserves her place in the sun, and in history. I would expect the same if I were in her shoes.
He later writes:
One more item about Koester. Check out the attached court document at page 6. It mentions Jennifer Koester, who served as counsel to the Department of Defense after leaving the Department of Justice. It mentions that she was working on instructions for the newly formed military commissions.
Chilling.
So the NYT goes with:
Zazi Pleads Guilty in Plot to Bomb Subways
And no one thought of:
"Zazi dans le Métro"?
The Dish was recently taken aback by a document emailed to us showing that the age of sexual consent in Vatican City was – wait for it – twelve years old. We didn’t believe it. So we tried to nail down the precise facts. Here’s the email we eventually got from the Italian embassy (the Vatican embassy wasn’t, er, much help) regarding age of consent laws:
Vatican State has its own criminal system based on the former Italian criminal code (called “Zanardelli Code”, issued in 1889). Art 331 (1) of this code provides that the age of consent is set at 12 years old, but according to Art. 331 (2) when there is a relationship of dependence (like teacher/student/ etc.) the age of consent is 15 years.
This law applies to criminal suspects arrested in Vatican City. Whereas, if a sexual offence occurs in Vatican State but the suspect is arrested in Italy, he/she is tried under Italian criminal law, based on Italian Criminal code called “Rocco Code”, issued in 1930. According to article 609 quarter of this code, the age of consent is set at 14 years old or 16 years old if there is a relation of dependence. There is an exception to this rule: having sexual intercourse with a partner aged 13 doesn’t constitutes a sexual offence only if the age difference between the two individuals is not more than 3 years.
Should you need more information, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Best Regards,
Sara Porro
Matteo Orlando
Consular and Justice Affairs Office
Embassy of Italy
Here is a chart of ages of consent from around the world. The only other countries with an age as low as 12 are Angola, Mexico, Philippines, and Zimbabwe. The lowest age in the US is 14 (Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa). Here is a chart from a different source, with some discrepancies.
Nate Silver seconds Bernstein:
[T]he decision to proceed aggressively on health care had been made at least by early April, at a time when Obama's approval rating was about 60 percent and what few polls there were indicated a general desire for reform. The bigger mistake — and I've been saying this since at least last June — may have been in giving the Congress so much latitude to craft its policy, which resulted in an extremely protracted process and news cycle after news cycle in which the lead story was Democrats yelling at one another.
"It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America. … I don’t know if his grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. … It is intrusive and we can do a better job without them entirely," – Congressman Steve King (R-IA).
I’m overdue for the response I promised and so much is going on. But here goes.
Jon Chait is absolutely correct that I have moved very far from the hardline neoconservatism I held in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And I think he is right to say that my previous view of the subject, informed by years of marination in the topic at The New Republic, combined with a long-held commitment to the defense of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust, was, in many respects, brittle. It was also not as well-informed as it should have been, although editing TNR for so long meant I was probably exposed to more argument and rhetoric on the question than most people in a lifetime. My core interests were elsewhere and still are. But my concern for Israel – and admiration of her remarkable achievements in economics and science and technology and the rule of law – has always been deep.
I never wrote much on the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict before I started blogging – but the decision to run a highly eclectic blogazine made it unavoidable in the Middle East wars of the new Millennium and prompted me to think about it some more and follow events more closely. Readers know I constantly link to writers who know much more about this issue than I do – from Laura Rozen to Jeffrey Goldberg to Marc Lynch to Juan Cole to Stephen Walt and Reuel Marc Gerecht and countless others of many different views.
My view of the question was also made much more brittle at the beginning of the last decade by what I thought were good faith efforts by the Israelis in the 1990s to forge some kind of peace rejected unreasonably by Arafat (although my view of Taba has become a little more complicated since I have read more on the subject). The 9/11 attacks – in their evil and traumatizing impact – immediately added a new level of of emotional intensity to the threat of Islamist terror in my mind and heart, and helped me identify with Israel’s confrontation with Hamas and Hezbollah more viscerally. To select via Google, as Chait does, various, extreme passages from that period is certainly legitimate as a debating point but not entirely fair, given the long, gradual and open self-correction and re-thinking I have gone through since then.
And it also critically ignores the major shifts in the world and the situation since then: the doubling of the illegal settler population on the West Bank, the catastrophe of the Iraq war and its ramifications for the West’s relationship with the Muslim world, the torture policy embraced by the US government against overwhelmingly Muslim prisoners, the move to the far right in Israeli public opinion (where approval of Obama once sunk to 6 percent), the effect of Bush’s blank check for Israel for eight years, the rise of Israel’s religious right, the influx of Russian immigrants, Obama’s promise as a bridge between the West and moderate Muslims, the brutality of the Gaza war just before his inauguration, and the intransigence of the Netanyahu government ever since over something as basic as mere freezing settlement construction that is already illegal. Chait writes as if the last decade had never happened and that therefore the shift in my position is somehow inexplicable, apart from some psychological inability to see nuance, or some general Manicheanism in my world view.
It would be more accurate to say that certain scales have fallen from my eyes with respect to Israel as they have with respect to the United States under the Cheney administration and its war crimes. And yes, I was moved by what I saw in Gaza, and appalled by the triumphalist neoconservative rhetoric over the dead bodies of innocent children and what I came to see as a grotesquely disproportionate response by a regional super-power, subsidized by a global super-power, armed with 150 nuclear weapons, to the war crimes of Hamas.
It is also true that I write emotionally at times, and my anger sometimes gets the better of me. But this is true of all of us. For example:
I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it … He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school–the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
Well, no one can claim that some of this anger isn’t merited, and I quite enjoyed the column as a rant myself. But there are glass houses and stones involved here.
More to the point, after graciously exonerating me from the insinuation that I am a bigot, Chait writes that Wieseltier wrote a “trenchant and persuasive dissection” of my evolving views. Note the word “persuasive”. And “dissection”. Really? Does Chait believe it is persuasive that, as Wieseltier claimed on the question of torture, for example, that
Krauthammer argues for his views; the premises of his analysis are coldly clear, and may be engaged analytically, and when necessary refuted. Unlike Sullivan, he does not present feelings as ideas.
Is Chait persuaded that my response to Krauthammer in TNR, The Abolition of Torture, was merely, as Wieseltier claimed, “feelings” presented as “ideas”? Does he think that my examination of the roots of “enhanced interrogation” has not been backed up by facts and legal precedents? Does he believe that my essay last summer was mere feeling? Does he think that my work over the last decade on this subject has not constantly been backed up by fact, argument, text, and historical precedent? Was Wieseltier’s piece really a “persuasive dissection” of these issues?
Does Chait think it was a “trenchant” argument by Wieseltier that my exploration of the question of just war in the context of Gaza was “calculatedly indifferent to the wrenching moral and strategic perplexities that are contained in the awful reality of asymmetrical warfare” when the Dish’s extensive and careful and thoughtful discussion of the subject can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here? Is this what Chait believes is “calculated indifference” to the complexities involved?
Is Chait persuaded by Wieseltier that my record on this blog and elsewhere has involved no “notion of the magnitude and the virulence of Muslim contempt for the Jewish world”, or that I have refused over the years to “give the whole picture”?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are real questions of a fellow blogger and former colleague who has endorsed as “persuasive and trenchant” the substance of an argument that is riddled with easily demonstrated untruths. If Chait is intellectually honest, as I believe he is, he will address these points, and refute Wieseltier on them one by one by one.
My response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s endorsement of Chait’s piece (which began with the sentence: “Chait says much of what I would say, but better”) is forthcoming.
(Photo: a schoolgirl in Gaza walking through the wreckage of Israel’s air assault in January 2009. By Olivier Laban-Mattei/Getty.)
Ackerman watched Thiessen on Morning Joe yesterday.
The Dish 