Month: February 2010

Obama is going to hold a health care summit with the GOP. Cohn's reaction:

Republicans have been complaining that Democrats locked them out of the process. And large swaths of the public seem to agree, even though the argument seems plainly untrue, given the exhaustive efforts Obama and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus made to accommodate Republicans. The public forum will give the GOP one more, high-profile opportunity to air their views–and, no less important, it will give the public a chance to see which approach to health care they really prefer.

My only complaint about it: Democratic leaders will apparently be joining Obama and the Republicans at the public forum. To be perfectly honest, I think Obama can make the case for Democratic reforms on his own. Then again, if there's going to be a truly open discussion, I suppose both parties have to be present.

I agree with Jon. Keep the Dems out of it. Just looking at them makes me ill. And call these GOP phonies' bluff. GOP leader Palin's only solutions to soaring healthcare costs and 40 million uninsured and millions more denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions on Saturday night were: being able to purchase insurance across state lines and tort reform. That's it. Seriously, that's it.

Sargent's thoughts here. Ezra's here.

Jennifer Senior carefully explains why IQ tests for toddlers are worthless, or worse. David Shenk highly recommends the article:

Intelligence is a process, not a fixed, gene-determined, thing. This process begins very early on, before we can even really see it, and we therefore often confuse these early, invisible stages with some sort of innate giftedness. Then we test kids and report the results as innate differences — this one is gifted, this one is not. This one has extra promise; that one does not. We send the "gifted" ones to good schools with small class sizes, better-trained teachers, better infrastructure, better relationships with parents, and higher expectations. We send the apparently-unpromising kids to under-funded, teach-to-test schools with minimal expectations. 

And then we tell ourselves that we live in an educational meritocracy. Jennifer Senior's piece helps expose that fallacy.

 

By artist Walee, for Beaux Arts Magazine. Via LikeCool.

Of course she won't:

PALIN: I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel has been reported, did say that. there is a big difference there. Again, name-calling, using language that is insensitive, by anyone, male, female, Republican, Democrat, is unnecessary. It’s inappropriate. Let’s all just grow up.

So how about Coulter, Ms Fox Contributor only being interviewed on Fox? Or is it okay to call the first female Speaker of the House "mentally retarded"?

My column this week in the London Sunday Times is on a story the US MSM has so far decided not to delve into more deeply. I believe the weird lacunae in the Pentagon report on the alleged suicides, carefully examined by the Seton Hall Study, and reported in extreme detail by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine, merit much more scrutiny than they have so far gotten – and it remains instructive to me that, apart from one small AP story, only the foreign press is interested:

During the night of June 9-10, 2006, something nightmarish happened in the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Three prisoners, we were told, had committed suicide simultaneously by hanging themselves in their cells. Rear Admiral Harry Harris explained it thus: “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us.” A Bush administration official said the suicides — one by a man captured at 17, charged with no crime and scheduled for release — was “a good PR move”. At the time I remember thinking how off-key that sounded in response to three suicides. But then I moved on. The US Naval Criminal Investigative Service took two years to complete an inquiry which came to the same conclusion as Harris immediately after the event. There have been many suicide attempts at Gitmo and hunger strikes. And collective suicide by terrorists is not unknown. Members of the Baader Meinhof gang killed themselves in Stammheim prison in 1977. But that was accomplished by gunshots, impossible in such a tightly controlled jail as Gitmo. And the Alpha Block where their bodies were allegedly discovered is supposed to be closely monitored, with guard checks of every cell required every 10 minutes. There were five guards for 28 prisoners. And yet the NCIS report found that the bodies were not discovered for two hours. More to the point, none of the guards on duty was ever disciplined for negligence, a baffling decision after such a massive and embarrassing breach in protocol.

The NCIS report was 1,700 pages long and heavily redacted. It was released only by court order through a freedom of information request. Last autumn a group of students at Seton Hall University law school undertook a thorough assessment of the report and found its conclusions incredible. I’ve read the full report. It’s bizarre.

The report claimed that the three men — not in adjoining cells — braided a noose from their sheets or clothing, attached them to the top of a wire mesh wall, hung sheets to prevent the guards seeing into their cells, bundled other sheets up to make it look as if they were in bed, bound their own hands and feet, tied cloths over their faces like a mask to muffle any sound they might make as they died, then climbed onto their sinks, or by some other means hanged themselves, swinging there for two full hours before being found. When discovered, the military said that rags were stuffed down their throats. They claimed these were the remnants of the cloth masks which had been “inhaled as a natural reaction to death by asphyxiation”.

For the Obama administration’s decision to “move on” from re-examining the case, read on here.

(Photo: Google Earth picture of a facility, allegedly known as “Camp No”, outside the perimeter of the main detention camp, where Gitmo guards say they saw prisoners being taken to on a regular basis.)

Wellington, New Zealand, 6.50 am.

The book, The View From Your Window, with 200 of the best window views published by the Dish over the last three years, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk with a foreword by Andrew Sullivan, can be previewed here and ordered here.

For my readers – male and female – who are not into the Superbowl, but like looking at hot guys not on so many steroids they look like cattle in lycra, this has to be the coolest ad I’ve seen in months. It’s for Wrangler’s Blue Bell fashion brand. If you’re a gay man or heterosexual woman, it’s particularly awesome. You get to interactively toss Tony Ward around and even rip his shirt off. Ward, if you recall, is Madonna’s former baby-daddy. And the one thing you can say about Madonna is that her taste in men is flawless.

Seriously, seriously: way hot and fun. And the music is awesome.

Adland archives 38 years of Super Bowl commercials. This one counts as two (do you know what I am saying?):

Another Dish fave, after the jump:

Was Rudy paid for this one?

The alleged connection has largely been debunked.

In a phrase: AIPAC’s foreign policy, with Cheney’s torture regime in place, to back it up. She has already stated that she wants more Israeli settlements and more Israelis in the West Bank, and is now hinting that she would also like a full-scale war with Iran:

WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama would be to defeat in 2012? PALIN: It depends on a few things, say he played — I got this from Buchanan — say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decide to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel–which I would like him to do. That changes the dynamics of what we can assume will happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, Obama would not be elected. WALLACE: You’re not suggesting that Obama would cynically play the war card?

PALIN: I’m not suggesting that, I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change if he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and secure our allies. I think people would shift their thinking a bit.

When she was first asked about foreign policy – before she was Kristolized by Randy Scheuneman – she said she wanted an exit plan for Iraq and had only heard about the “surge” “on the news.” Now she is a paid-up neocon fanatic. Notice that in her view, Obama is not actually supporting Israel at the moment.

And yet Israel pre-emptively tried to kill Obama’s attempt to reach out to the Muslim world by the brutal, polarizing Gaza campaign, has adamantly refused to freeze all settlements on the West Bank, and has done its usual brilliant job of lobbying the US Congress to prevent any leverage over the country. In Jerusalem, recently, two US senators, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, openly told the Israelis that they had the power to prevent Obama from conducting foreign policy with respect to Israel, if it conflicted with the  agenda of the Israeli government. Obama’s clearest failure, in fact, in his first year is in trying to budge Israel from its suicidal path.

Notice also that the only “tough” position for Palin is war and the threat of war. And remember this statement from earlier this year:

I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

The American president has no right to pressure Israel to advance America’s interests. No right! No wonder Kristol is so in love. 

(Photo: Gaza under Israeli aerial bombardment a year ago. By David Silverman/Getty)