Month: February 2010

Robert Wright is overly pessimistic, I hope, about new technology:

The division of readers and viewers into demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by them. Then pollsters barrage legislators with the views of constituents who, having been barraged by these stories, have little idea what’s actually in the bills that outrage them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America.

The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn’t travel faster than a horse.

It is not as if governance is easier in nations with little internet use. Jack Balkin blames the filibuster more than the internet.

"These figures highlight a massive failure of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats among the nation's political elite. Given the amount of political chatter about the budget in recent years, it is almost beyond comprehension that neither party has seen fit to highlight the basics so that the American people can make reasoned choices on the fundamental issues before them," – Scott Rasmussen.

He's absolutely right. The fundamental question in this country right now is how to get our fiscal house in order. When Democrats and Republicans refuse to be honest about the real choices in front of us, when they fail to educate the American people about the brutal reality ahead, they are guilty of professional negligence.

If Republicans want to balance the budget by spending cuts alone, then they have a clear responsibility to say what they intend to cut in Medicare, defense, and social security, and how. If Democrats want to balance the budget by tax hikes alone, then they need to walk the walk as well, and tell us which taxes and how much. My view is that the obvious – obvious – sensible solution is to do a bit of both and argue reasonably about the balance. But we need to do so now.

And in my view, it is the job of the president to insist on this. He's the leader. He should give a speech directly explaining to the people what our choices are. He should become Perot. He should make his case for a mix that tends toward tax hikes and protecting entitlements. And then engage the GOP on the specifics.

That truly would be "Goodbye To All That." That truly would be leadership.

Moses, a gay Ugandan who hides his face for fear of imprisonment or death should he be denied asylum and forced to return to Uganda, speaks about the criminalization of homosexuality:

Box Turtle Bulletin has more details on the press conference:

Frank Schaeffer’s presence is particularly notable. His father, Frances Schaeffer, was a very influential and conservative theologian who rejected modernism in all its theological forms. His book, The Christian Manifesto is credited — or blamed — for inspiring the rise of the Christian Right as a political force, as well as the rise of Dominionism as a theological one. His son, Frank, grew up immersed in the work of his father, and in his book Crazy for God, Frank described his own role in pushing religious leaders to tackle abortion in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But over time Frank became disillusioned with the movement his father helped to inspire, and came to the conclusion that the Evangelical right had distorted his father’s teachings beyond recognition. He is now a critic of the very movement he and his father helped to establish.

Josh Pasek thinks that the GOP is not quite as toxic as this poll would suggest:

Given that 10-20% of respondents tend to agree with any statement (likely due to social norms), I went through the survey mentally subtracting 15 percentage points from every "yes" answer.  That does leave some shocking numbers — particularly as acquiescence tended to indicate support for gay rights, sex education, etc. — but suggests that Birthers, for instance, may be outnumbered in the party (a slight consolation at best).  I'm not saying this to suggest that the opinions being expressed even with a correction are reasonable, but I worry that not addressing this kind of issue is the reason so many people out there are skeptical of survey results in the first place.

I've been thinking about what seems to me a double standard in my treatment of vice-presidential frauds, with respect to Sarah Palin and John Edwards, and trying to figure out where I went wrong. No, I'm not backtracking on Palin: all I regret is not being able to expose her for real yet. But I'm a blogger not an investigative reporter; my job as I see it, is to make sense of the facts on the table and disseminate them, not to do the vital legwork to get new facts. And there's also the obvious fact that Palin was a total unknown and we had only two months to figure out who she was, especially since she wasn't vetted by McCain in any serious way. But Edwards came closer to power than Palin did in the end – Bush's second victory was nowhere near as decisive as Obama's. And we know now what a narcissistic creep and liar he was. I don't believe that politicians should be saints, but I do believe that character matters, which is why my favorite presidents remain Reagan and Obama.

So why did I let it go? My first reason is my leeriness of investigating people's sex lives. I had my own ransacked a decade ago and it was a brutalizing experience. The exposure of such intimate thing coarsens our discourse, violates human dignity and should, in my view, be done only if massive hypocrisy is on the table and the person is more than just a minor public figure. That's why I've long opposed outing people.

So I steered clear out of this sensitivity. I barely covered the Tiger Woods stuff for those reasons, and even came to defend Clinton in the end because of the callousness and fanaticism of Ken Starr. But there was something else at work here in the case of Edwards, I suspect.

It just seemed too awful for me to believe. I mean his wife, whom I took to be a very decent person, had terminal cancer. Although adultery is extremely common – especially among people disturbed enough to seek political office – I dismissed it too easily. I mean his wife was confronting death on a daily basis. I just couldn't believe a husband could do that to his wife then. I also felt protective toward Elizabeth, feeling that investigating this would be deeply hurtful to a woman faced with mortality. Maybe my own brushes with mortality affected me in this as well.

In all this, of course, I was wrong. It really was that bad, and if Game Change is to be believed (and I think it broadly is), it was even worse. My mistake as a journalist was in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials that it is not my job to make. My job is to assume nothing and to trust nothing until verified. One doesn't have to pry; but when rumors emerge, we should not be deferent with public officials. We should ask questions.

With Palin, people assumed that because she was a governor, she had a baseline level of competence, logic, general knowledge and mental stability. Wrong. On the Trig stuff, it was just too absurd to doubt her story, however factually implausible it appeared. With Edwards, people assumed that his own good looks, and his much less glamorous, though still lovely, wife implied a marriage of depth and love. We assumed that the shared loss of their son had bonded them for ever (while of course the evidence often suggests, tragically, that losing a child is a death-knell for many marriages). We assumed that he wasn't one of the biggest assholes on the planet.

So we didn't go there. But he, like Palin, could have been president of the US at some point. And we barely knew him. I want to apologize to my readers for dropping this ball. And congratulate the National Enquirer for following the facts where they eventually led.

There's courage in that. Pulitzer-level courage.

(Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty.)

A reader writes:

You should know there is a popular misconception about Miranda.  If the FBI gave the Miranda warnings to the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, it made a grave mistake.  I say that as one who has guided police investigations for years.

The Supreme Court created the Miranda Rule pursuant to the 5th Amendment which prevents the government from using evidence against a person obtained through compulsion of that person.  (The right against self-incrimination.)  If a government investigator is seeking to have a person incriminate himself, then he must first give the person the Miranda warning.

But in the case where you do not need evidence from the person to prove your case then you should not give the Miranda warnings. 

You should interrogate the person for as long as you reasonably can so that you can elicit as much information as possible.  You will not use the information against that person but only as intelligence to understand more about the person, his operation, and his associates. Unfortunately, criminal investigators are apparently unable to grasp that simple concept so they routinely provided the warnings depriving themselves of other useful information.

Ironically the Republicans are right for the wrong reason when they complain that the underwear bomber was given his rights.  He should not have been given it because there was enough evidence at hand to convict him.  There was nothing needed from him.  It was not because he was a terrorist that he should not have received these warnings.

To understand this better, there is a case where a burglar was caught inside a building in the act of jimmying a safe.  The cops arrested him.  They did not give him the Miranda warnings.  When he came to court he asserted as a defense the failure of the cops to give him the warnings.  His defense was laughed at because nothing he said – in fact he kept his mouth shut – was used against him.

Leiden, Netherlands, 9.34 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.

So we have two stories out there. The first is that Fox News fembot Sarah Palin called Senator-elect Scott Brown to congratulate him on his election victory that night. But …

In a Jan. 28 interview with the Associated Press, Brown said he didn’t know Palin, had never spoken with her and that she never reached out to him.

After Palin insisted she did too call him,

A Brown aide said the call from the former Republican presidential candidate "had completely slipped his mind," and added that it was very nice of her to make the call.

This is very strange. There are two possibilities.

Either Scott Brown was fibbing because any proximity to Palin is political death in Massachusetts. Or Sarah Palin is hallucinating again, and trying to insinuate they are pals, when they are not.

My problem with the former scenario is that a) no one would forget if the Wasilla whack-job called them up and spoke with them on their night of victory and b) a congratulatory phone call does not hurt Brown at all. I mean he would only have been polite.

Which leaves the possibility of an odd lie. There's one way to clear this up, of course. Can Palin release the phone record of the call? Or is that as inaccessible as her medical records?

Will Sarah Palin condemn Rush Limbaugh for calling congressional liberals "retards"? Deep breath. Will she demand that he be fired?