Month: May 2010

Sorry, Mr. Cleese. The PR Parrot Is Still Dead

Pivoting off a post by Hertzberg, Bernstein considers reform of the British electoral system:

[T]he ultimate goal of a political system cannot be to accurately reflect the strength of each party in parliament, much less accurately reflect the strength of all the views of the citizens in parliament, which is essentially impossible anyway.  No, what matters more is whether the government is responsive to citizens.  The composition of parliament is a means to that end.  So in a basically majoritarian system, a method of translating votes into seats that magnifies majorities isn’t inherently problematic.

His verdict:

[O]n electoral reform, my instincts are to be cautious unless there’s a clear violation of democracy that needs to be remedied, such as the massive rural bias that the US remedied with one person, one vote in the 1960s.  I don’t see anything close to that in using first-past-the-post instead of p.r.  That’s not to say that I’d be against reform, but I’d recommend proceeding cautiously.  You don’t want to be (if I can slip in a baseball comparison here) a Bud Selig, constantly changing the rules to react to the latest complaints. 

Meanwhile, Simon Schama all but has an orgasm in the New Yorker over p.r.

I have to say the way some get worked up about this – I’m talking to you, Rick – baffles me. If I were the Lib-Dem leader, I’d be angling to be the second of two parties, not a permanent coalition party of either. And I have a feeling that the potential parliamentary wrangling that will start on Friday will remind Brits of why their system is not so bad after all.

Scenes From The Drug War

Above is video from a February raid in Missouri. Balko captions:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

And advocates:

I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Hewitt Award Nominee

"My question is – and this is something I personally don’t understand – if it’s a naïve question then I apologize: in light of what Obama has done to leave us vulnerable, to cut defense spending, to make us vulnerable to outside enemies, and to slight our allies, how (pause) – what would he have to do differently to be defined as a domestic enemy?" – a questioner of Eric Cantor at a Heritage Foundation event.

Cantor refused to call the president a domestic enemy and received boos from the crowd as a result. Yes, the right has gone mad. This is not a tea-party event; it's a Heritage Foundation lunch.

The Ghost Of Cameron Future?

My ferociously anti-Tory friend, Johann Hari, lobs another rhetorical grenade at the Etonian facade of the New Tories. Johann thinks Thatcherism is about to make a come-back:

The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It's a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same. It's as if Marie Antoinette called in Max Clifford, and he told her to stop saying "Let them eat cake" and start saying: "Let them form a workers' co-operative to distribute cake on a voluntary basis."

Meanwhile, Britain's debt piles higher – because 13 years of Labour's reckless spending has neither solved the country's social problems nor stabilized the country's economy.

On “Tea-Bagging”

Grover has a conniption:

"This remark is the equivalent of using the 'n' word. It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk. It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means. The public thought we reached a new low of incivility during the Clinton administration. Well, the Obama administration has just outdone them," ATR president Grover Norquist tells Inside the Beltway.

Over to you, TNC! I think the long, awful history of white guys getting lynched for dipping their pendulous scrota in places where they are consensually welcome needs … reparations, anyone?