Month: February 2010

To make you drink:

The results show that high level volume led to increase alcohol consumption and reduced the average amount of time spent by the patrons to drink their glass.

Matt Yglesias calls Joe Stack a tea party populist:

As you probably know, a white guy entranced by an extremely [sic] version of Tea Party-style right-populist paranoia deliberately crashed an airplane into an IRS building in Texas yesterday.

Ackerman goes further:

What Yglesias fails to understand is that the ideology Stack subscribed to is the problem. All across the country are sleeper cells preaching hatred of the tax code, gathering in public to denounce the results of a democratic election and sow the seeds of sectarian violence. They even have a major television network sympathetic to their sick agenda. The threat is there for all to see.

Steven Taylor counters, effectively:

[W]hile his anti-tax, anti-bailout rhetoric might fit broadly under the Tea Party rhetoric, his anti-George W. Bush, anti-religion, pro-health care reform rhetoric decidedly does not.  As such, trying to associate him with “Tea Party-style right-populist paranoia” is unfair and incomplete.

Jonathan Capehart acknowledges that Stack is an ideological mutt but still uses him to whack the tea party activists:

Stack didn’t like much of anything or anyone. He railed against President George W. Bush, Wall Street, insurance companies and capitalism, to name a few. That he ends his suicide note with an apparent nod to communism doesn’t disprove the larger point. Stack was raging against a system he thought was unfair and contributed to his economic insecurity. There are extreme elements on the far right roiling with this same rage that must be called out before they root themselves further in a broader movement that has legitimate concerns about the federal government and the direction of the country. Michael Gerson does an excellent job of that today. Others must follow. We ignore others like Stack at our peril.

Right-wing Joe Stack fan pages on Facebook have popped up, which underscores Capehart’s concern. Yves Smith worries:

Note that he sees his violent response to his economic plight as a political act, a blow for freedom. I am certainly not advocating this course of action. But others start connecting at least some of the dots this way, seeing their financial stresses not as the result of bad luck or lack of sufficient effort, but as an indictment of the system. Given the breakdown of communities (for instance, the fall in involvement in local civic groups and shortened job tenures, both of which lead to weaker social ties and greater isolation), the odds that the disaffected will turn to violence is greater than in past periods of stress.

"I just hope that when all of this comes out, the institution doesn't take the hit, but rather the hit is taken by those individuals who occupied positions at OLC and OAG and were too weak to stand up for the principles that undergird the rest of this great institution," – Deputy AG Jim Comey, in an email to Chuck Rosenberg, p. 144 in the OPR Report.

Below is the report in full (with some really disgraceful redactions).

All next week, I hope to examine it in detail – with your help.

So many of you are lawyers and will be able to analyze this better than I can. Please email us with any things that leap out at you, any things we might miss (just put OPR in the email subject line to make it easier) . The same, of course, goes for non-lawyers – just citizens and human beings.

This will become a critical piece of information for history and for future prosecution of the war criminals involved. Please help us expose it – in all its aspects – to as many people around the world as possible. The Dish has the kind of readership now in which this can make a difference, push critical points high up in Google searches, bring the disgrace of the last administration to every corner of the world – because you know the MSM cannot and will not do that.

Let's show what the blogosphere can do. Have at it:

OPR Report On Torture Memos

Bruce Bartlett examines the latest inanity of Glenn Reynolds.

Adam Robinson explains how small publishers actually lose money selling through the world's largest bookseller.

(Hat tip: The Rumpus)

GOProud's Jimmy LaSalvia wants to know.

It is the lynchpin of the legal case for prosecuting the war criminals of the last administration. We have known for a while that the Justice Department's old guard was going to protect itself and even those who violated basic norms of legality and morality within it. We have known for a while that president Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors – which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama's election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned.

Whether this betrayal is a prudential and reluctant attempt to play a long game, to avoid, Lincoln-like, a deeply divisive and explosive political war for the sake of the country; or whether it is a cynical and Clintonian form of rank and cowardly opportunism (yes, Rahm, we know who you are), will surely become clearer in due course. I certainly hope the former. I believe the president knows what occurred, and his repeated public use of the word "torture" for the policies of his predecessors is a way of telling the world and future prosecutors in the US or around the world what Cheney and his team did. For the record. Deep down, I still trust him on this, in what is an awful and potentially explosive situation.

Holder has restricted the investigation of the Cheney era war crimes to those that went beyond the torture "legally" allowed by the OLC memos. But it remains possible that once you start pulling on that thread, any serious legal investigation will find it impossible to make such absurd and semantic distinctions when the guiding laws and treaties are so abundantly clear that such distinctions are absurd.

To take one simple obvious example: If we know for a fact that all legal precedent in the US and the world requires one incident of waterboarding to be prosecutable as torture under any circumstances and we also know that the Cheney team subjected someone to it 183 times, I find it simply impossible that any DOJ investigation can somehow only look at instances beyond those authorized by Cheney … without making a mockery of the rule of law and the Justice Department itself.

So I remain convinced that this matter is not over, even though the way in which the DOJ has now softened and protected the clear and political manipulation of the law by lawyers sworn to uphold it remains a travesty, a disgrace, an abomination, another example of how the government treats its own members in ways it would never ever treat anyone else.

That Lynndie England went to jail for doing things that John Yoo made legal, and Yoo does not even face disbarment, tells you all you need to know about the current state of justice in America. In the end, the current president and attorney-general have assented to this massive injustice. The responsibility is theirs'. But the arc of history is long. And justice will come in the end. Of that I am sure.

I'm exhausted this weekend so please give me time to read the full OPR report carefully before commenting on it. Its details may be so damning, the facts it has assembled so glaring, that the gloss we have heard – leaked, cowardly, on a Friday afternoon – may soon be exposed as such a travesty of the evidence within that what dismays me this morning may encourage me soon.

So let me merely say this: I believe in America. I believe it is still here beneath all this. I believe it will come back. But I also believe it is the duty of all of us who love this country to make sure it does.

That means you as well as me.

Remember: we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Pam Epstein compiles Craigslist-like ads from the New York Herald:

Liederkranz Ball — Beautiful young girl with rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes under black mask and laughs like a siren: wore wine-colored satin domino, pearl headdress and jewelry; white camellias; waltzed like a fairy with tall Spanish gentleman; gentleman of high social reputation asks the liberty of an honorable introduction. Address Strictly Honorable, Herald uptown office.

Feb. 16, 1879

(Illustration from Flickr user "T"eresa, via Neatorama)

Eric Puchner finds them even among "very gifted writers":

The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel. An early version of Portnoy’s Complaint was called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. At various times, Catch-22 was called Catch-18, Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. And some classic novels have stood the test of time, despite having terrible titles. (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, never fails to make me giggle.)

In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it.

Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of. So, based on years of teaching, I’ve compiled the following list of Titles to Avoid.

Continued here. The Second Pass flags the upcoming Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. (Last year's winner: The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.)