Month: February 2010

This Charlie Cook interview is making the rounds. Jonathan Bernstein scratches his chin:

[It] won't be a mistake by Barack Obama or by the current Democrats in Congress; it would be a long-term mistake by Democrats for over half a century. Complaints, such as those by Charles Cook and Dana Milbank treat the attempt to pass comprehensive health care reform as a choice made by Barack Obama sometime after January 20, 2009.  But that's not right at all.  Barack Obama ran on health care reform.  It wasn't incidental to his election; it was absolutely essential. 

Not, to be sure, to the general election campaign, but to his nomination in the first place.  Without a firm commitment to health care reform, Barack Obama would have folded his tent immediately after the Iowa caucuses, if he had even managed to make it that far in the first place.  Democrats demanded it.  And the idea that Obama would have had a thriving presidency if he had dropped the key part of his nomination platform for no good reason is preposterous.

Yglesias also counters Cook.

Alex Knepper follows up:

[M]y insults and Ryan Sorba’s are not morally equivalent. He is wrong about what he is telling me: homosexuality is not a “lifestyle,” and it is not an ideology. This is not an opinion. And when he tells me that he wants to use the force of the state to ban sodomy — including oral sex, anal sex, and fetishistic sex among consenting married couples — he is advocating a regressive, authoritarian policy that has no place in conservatism, libertarianism, or any belief system that honors freedom.

As I told a radio host earlier: even assuming Sorba is right, he hasn’t a clue how to go about reversing homosexuality. In the meantime, he wants not for us to engage in loving, monogamous relationships, but to condemn us to loveless, sexless lives, devoid of passion, romance, and sexuality. I cannot fathom the warped sense of life that a person must possess to want to tell his fellow beings to deny such an essential part of what makes them human.

Megan adds her two cents.

Today we focused our Dishness on the OPR report. Reax here and here. Andrew punctuated its horrors and countered Ron Fournier over Cheney's role. Jack Balkin and Empty Wheel set their sights on the report's main culprit while Scott Horton revealed the redacted lawyer. We also gleaned insight from a Fallows reader and a Dish reader. Meanwhile, Yoo continued to shock and awe while Obama quietly executed the war on terror and dismantled DADT. Petraeus and Powell got his back.

In other coverage, Cohn conveyed the new Obama healthcare plan, Ezra assessed the politics, Hennessey found it to be a diligent compromise, and Chait anticipated a big GOP freakout (countered by Sprung).

Andrew saw hope in Paulites while other bloggers begged to differ.  We further exposed Ryan Sorba, and the rest was left to Dan Savage.  Instapundit got taken down over his default idea, Joe Klein offered advice to Obama on Israel, Kummer and Balko revealed the healthy side of Walmart, and we rounded up the latest on anti-bigotry in Africa. This is a great window.

— C.B.

I know the Dish has linked to this already today, but do yourself a favor and read Glenn Greenwald's devastating dismantling of the propagandists and liars who now dominate Bill Buckley's magazine.

Through the civilian courts, through active intelligence and surveillance and without the use of torture, the most dangerous terror plot since 9/11 was foiled. More to the point:

In recent weeks, Mr. Zazi had begun providing information to prosecutors as part of the initial stages of an agreement that led to his guilty plea on Monday, according to two people with knowledge of the case. The 10-page plea agreement was sealed by Judge Raymond J. Dearie, but the arrangement suggests that prosecutors believe Mr. Zazi can be a valuable source of information.

The idea that the United States has to resort to the tactics of totalitarian regimes to protect itself from terrorists is preposterous now and always has been. But notice too how the war on terror has a way of generating itself:

“I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the United States military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan,” he said.

Simon Brown from Morley, West Yorkshire, attends a visit by Prince William at St Dunstan's centre on February 22, in Llandudno, North Wales. Simon Brown was blinded by sniper fire in 2006, whilst on duty in Basra. St Dunstan's is a new centre open to support blind and visually impaired ex-servicemen and women. By Peter Byrne/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

Scott Horton reads the heavily and incompetently censored OPR report:

A good example of potentially illegitimate redactions are those concerning repeated discussions about drafting the torture memoranda, which involve an unnamed OLC lawyer in addition to John Yoo and Jay Bybee. On p. 258, we learn that this lawyer “was a relatively inexperienced attorney when the Bybee and Yoo memos were being drafted. Although she appears to have made errors of research and analysis in drafting portions of the Bybee and Yoo memos, her work was subject to Yoo’s and Bybee’s review and approval. We therefore conclude that she should not be held professionally responsible for the incomplete and one-sided legal advice in the memoranda.” One woman working directly with John Yoo at OLC at this time was Jennifer Koester Hardy, now a partner in the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In an apparent redaction oversight, Hardy is mentioned by name in a footnote. Why was Hardy’s name redacted? She played an obvious and important role in the production of the documents. She made serious errors, which appear to be driven less by flaws in research than by a desire to produce an opinion that had the conclusions that David Addington wanted. The failure to identify key precedents and the malicious misconstruction of precedent is as much her fault as that of Bybee and Yoo.

Emily Bazelon and TPM have more on Hardy.

"Shit My Dad Says" becomes a TV pilot starring William Shatner.

WonkRoom provides a chart showing how the Obama plan differs from the House and Senate bills. Keith Hennessey studies the plan:

Somebody in the Administration put a lot of work into this proposal.  It is extremely detailed, and it reads like a best effort to find a fair middle ground between two warring legislative bodies.  All that substantive work is subsumed by the apparent lack of strategic coordination and substantive agreement with Members of his own party.  The President’s staff appear to be trying to set up the Blair House meeting as a partisan debate, but Democrats are not yet unified.  Maybe the pressure of the Blair House meeting will bring Democrats together on substance?

I will believe that a reconciliation push is going to happen only when (a) Pelosi and Reid both definitively say that it will, (b) they announce agreement on a substantive proposal, and (c) a House floor vote has been scheduled.  Until then it’s just bluster.  For now I continue to believe there’s a 90% chance of no law.

Jack Balkin analyzes Associate Deputy Attorney General Margolis's "clever lawyering":

The moral of the story is not that legal argument is hopeless. It is rather that you should be careful that you do not demand the wrong things of it. Law works best when it relies on plausibility and reasonableness; when it requires certainty it often badly misfires, because lawyers are trained to upset certainty where ever they find it. That is what they do for a living. If Yoo and Bybee are guilty of something it is not they made objectively bad legal arguments. It is that they were toadies to power and facilitated torture. Professional responsibility rules are not well designed to deal with this kind of evil.