Month: February 2010

Chris Good has the latest polling wrinkle. Many Americans are capable of distinguishing between their own moral beliefs and the capabilities of professional soldiers. This is called live and let live. It used to be a conservative value before the Christianist operators took over the GOP.

Another insight into John Yoo’s view of presidential power:

These included Yoo’s findings in the memorandum that: 1) the Fourth Amendment would not apply to domestic military operations designed to deter and prevent future terrorist attacks; 2) “broad statements” suggesting that First Amendment speech and press rights under the constitution would potentially be subordinated to overriding military necessities; and 3) that domestic deployment of the Armed Forces by the President to prevent and deter terrorism would fundamentally serve a military purpose rather than law enforcement purpose and thus would not violate the Posse Comitatus Act.

And so the president’s powers are limitless – suspending First and Fourth Amendments – in the United States itself in a war with no end.

I’ve often been accused of hyperbole on this stuff over the years. But look at the vagueness of the justification – a tyranny is legal in America, according to Yoo, merely in order to “deter” terrorism. What he is advocating – what Cheney was advocating – was the abolition of the idea of limited government in America. So long as America was governed by these secret memos, we were not living under the Constitution at all.

Where were the tea-partiers then? Where were the constitutionalists then?

A new video has surfaced, apparently leaked by a member of the Basij (itself an encouraging sign), that shows the late night assault on the University of Tehran by the junta’s thugs. A reader explains:

The BBC Persian reporter in London explains how the Basij try to enter the dorms a few times and they fail at first as the students resist with rocks and whatever they can throw … but the Basij finally force their way in and the indiscriminate beating begins. You can even hear the more humane ones of the attackers asking others to stop beating defenseless people they arrest.

If you are squeamish, do not click play:

Five students were killed that night.

"The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. … In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest," – Virginia delegate Bob Marshall.

Finally, we are getting somewhere:

Suderman – surprise! – is against letting the government review and reject insurance large health insurance premium hikes:

[T]he problem, of course, is that what constitutes excessive or unreasonable isn’t easy to define. I was at a conference with a number of lawyers this weekend, and one of them joked about how great words like “reasonable” were for the profession. (How many lawyers does it take to define what “unreasonable” means? Well, how many do you have?)  The idea is to create some legal wiggle room, but you tend to end up with absurdly circular definitions like Arizona’s, which defined excessive insurance rate hikes as those that “are likely to produce an underwriting profit that is unreasonably high.” It’s excessive if it’s unreasonable! Unreasonable if it’s excessive! Feel free to ride this definitional merry-go-round until you puke. 

Tyler Cowen is confused.

Larison points out that Millennials continue to overwhelmingly favor the Democratic party. Douthat worries:

In a way, these figures should make small-government conservatives a lot more nervous than they make partisan Republicans. After all, you can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 constituency — they’re well-informed, they turn out to vote, and there are more of them every day. But…the concerns of [the GOPs] central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements. (There’s a reason that even South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, in the midst of a CPAC stemwinder, paused to allow that one of the things government “has” to do is “keep our promises to our seniors.”)

Drum chimes in:

[The GOP's] earlier embrace of social fundamentalism was largely responsible for driving away young voters in the first place, and now, left only with a core of middle-aged and elderly voters that they need to keep loyal, they're likely to pursue policies that push the young even further away. This might produce occasional victories, but no political party can survive this kind of vicious cycle in the long run. Having long since alienated blacks, Hispanics, and virtually the entire Northeast, Republicans can hardly afford to permanently lose young voters as well. The white South and the elderly just aren't enough to sustain a national party.

But they are enough to sustain a cable news channel. Keep riding that Ailes tiger, guys. He's already told us what his core principle is: ratings, not conservatism.

Weigel's take:

Paul’s victory in an unscientific straw poll revealed plenty about the state of conservatism. Narrowly, it revealed that Paul’s quixotic 2008 bid for president created a significant and growing movement of libertarian-minded teens and twentysomethings whose role in the conservative coalition will become more clear outside of CPAC. More broadly, it provided a look at the ideological hardening going on within the conservative movement as it girds for the 2010 elections. According to some polls, the Republican Party is on track to recover control of Congress and have a voice again in how America is governed. At CPAC, there was far less attention on how the party would govern America than on the need to disavow its past, popular embraces of “big government” — and on the need to embrace a hardcore libertarian philosophy that views environmentalism and the progressive movement as fatal threats to freedom.

Friedersdorf whacks Andy McCarthy and Marc Thiessen:

Mr. Thiessen seldom writes a post without asserting that if everyone would only read his book, Courting Disaster, the strengths of his argument would be apparent. I am certainly amenable to reading books written by folks with whom I disagree, but time is limited. And every time I see an argument this weak — Mr. Thiessen obliviously asserting that captured soldiers in traditional wars can’t withhold information about planned attacks, whereas terrorists can — I think to myself, “No, his doesn’t seem to be a book length effort worth my time, no matter how many occasions he plugs it on The Corner.”

I am going to try and get through it soon. I can only hope that he has deliberately presented the weakest and most transparently ludicrous arguments out front in order to lure readers in to the deeper subtleties within. He surely cannot believe his public defense of these war crimes can be taken seriously as an intellectual or moral matter.