Box Turtle Bulletin now says it was a hoax:
Here is what we do know: a young man was brutally murdered, that he was mutilated and his head was cut off and dumped into a latrine. That much is true. But we have now confirmed that the young man had no connections with Integrity Uganda.
Were Weigel's emails leaked or hacked? Dave emails to clarify:
Just so you know, I am not disputing anything about JList with anyone in my interview with David Carr. He quoted me accurately, but what I was saying was that people shouldn't immediately turn this into some bloodless "media, what to make of it?" story. Someone, probably someone on the list, spent a lot of time digging into old off-the-record emails and unleashed a bunch of them to hurt my career. I called this "hacking," because that was the word that came to mind for someone digging around online, but I am not saying "a hacker" went after me. I don't know who did; I assume it was a member of the List, but who knows?
For some reason, I missed this NYT blog-post about the paper's decision to abandon the word "torture" to describe, er, torture. Bill Keller's response is an appalling piece of weaseling:
“I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”
In an e-mail message on Thursday, Mr. Keller said defenders of the practice of waterboarding, “including senior officials of the Bush administration,” insisted that it did not constitute torture.
“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and human rights advocates as a form of torture. Nobody reading the Times’s coverage could be ignorant of the extent of the practice (much of that from information we broke) or mistake it for something benign (we usually use the word ‘brutal.’)”
But words matter, and the only reason there is any dispute about whether waterboarding is torture is because "senior officials of the Bush administration” were trying to avoid prosecution for war crimes. It is the role of a newspaper not to mimic the propaganda of the powerful, or act as their legal defenders, but to use plain English accurately. The NYT always did this before 2002, so it has been caught red-handed caving into political pressure. The Washington Post is just as bad (and they have actually published brazen defenses of torture and hired a man as a columnist deeply implicated in the war crimes of the last administration):
“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration."
There you have the Cheneyism – "harsh interrogation techniques." The truth is: the NYT and WaPo did not avoid controversy; they plainly endorsed the Bush administration's lies. They put their own voice behind that of war criminals.
Howard Gleckman scores the unemployment benefits fight:
It is true…that those receiving benefits are somewhat less likely to accept a job offer than those whose aid has run out. However, most researchers find this effect is small, especially when jobs are very hard to get, as they are now. With work so scarce, few will turn down a job offer for the temporary pleasures of $300-a-week.
The funding argument is even harder to swallow.
I’d be more sympathetic with these new converts to fiscal responsibility if they were as enthusiastic about paying for extending $32 billion worth of special interest tax breaks as they are about funding the unemployment extension. If I understand correctly, these lawmakers insist that Congress fund every dime of added jobless aid, which nearly all analysts agree will help boost the economy. But they feel no need to pay for continuing these special interest tax breaks, which will not. They fret about unemployed workers who allegedly game the system to get jobless benefits but seem undisturbed by those businesses and individuals who do the same to maximize their tax subsidies. Politics is indeed a funny business.
Covering similar ground, Dylan Matthews researches the economic impact of unemployment benefits.
More and more vindication piles up with respect to the criminal attitude of Henry Kissinger.
He seems to have crumbled under the pressure, but the statement is truly weird:
Last year, after Bristol and I broke up, I was unhappy and a little angry. Unfortunately, against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true. I have already privately apologized to Todd and Sarah. Since my statements were public, I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize.
"Not completely true." Discuss. And what exactly was "not completely true"? He sounds like a dissident in a show-trial. I have, sadly, no idea of the reasons for this somewhat out-of-the-blue statement. Is he trying to win Bristol back? Is he trying to gain more reliable access to his son? Or is he just trying to create a better atmosphere for the rearing of Tripp?
I suspect, for what it's worth, that the Palins have used their real weapon against him – his love for Bristol and his kid – to coerce him back into line. For the record, nothing he said struck me as in any way far-fetched. And until he tells us what exactly wasn't "completely true", there's not much more to say.
Oh, and he was awesome on Kathy Griffin.
Is it going up?
From here. Adam Serwer analyzes:
Deportations in 2010 and 2009 were higher than at any time during the Bush administration — something that has to be viewed within the context of a declining undocumented immigrant population.Of course, when Bush wanted to press immigration reform, both Kyl and McCain were on board. Now they're attacking Obama for lax enforcement, even though he's taken a harder line on deportations than Bush ever did.
Felix Salmon takes a hard look at BP's oil-skimming exaggerations.
Sargent fleshes out his argument. He sees a short-term advantage:
Poll after poll shows that majorities think the GOP is more interested in obstructing the Obama/Dem agenda than in reaching a good faith compromise. Yet amid all the gridlock Congress's overall approval is at historic lows, and the generalized anti-incumbent fervor is expected to hurt Dems in the midterms. Indeed, in recent months the GOP has tied or bested Dems in the generic Congressional matchup. Republicans will argue that this shows that the public wants the GOP to stall the Dem agenda. But I think something else is going on: People don't seem aware that the GOP, in addition to wanting to obstruct the Obama/Dem agenda, is successfully doing so…
The Dish 