Month: October 2010

The Balloon Juice gang is upset by this post. E.D. Kain complains:

[H]ere’s the thing about rich people working hard: yes, many of the rich people in our society worked very hard to get where they are today. But even if they did run the fastest, many also started much closer to the finishing line than their poor or working class counterparts. Having even a normal middle-class family gives someone an enormous leg up…  The upper class, meanwhile, has built-in business and academic connections and a whole host of other perks and benefits that help hard working upper class kids succeed.

His fellow blogger Doug J pulls no punches:

Why the fuck does it matter what Democrats are willing to acknowledge about how hard some rich people work when they’re not proposing a marginal tax rate much over 40%? For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we don’t tax rich people much, now we have to get down on our knees and tell them how great they are for working so hard? And what would fellating these geniuses accomplish anyway?

Doug J – with his snarl at the rich – proves my point. As a moral matter, I see no reason why people who work hard shouldn’t keep as much of their earnings as possible, and the only reason to tax them is to provide a safety net for the unlucky and sick and poor, and to fund essential functions of government (defense, law and order, public works, education, basic scientific research, etc). But my real point was about making the case for the necessary evil of such taxation in a civil and constructive way. James Joyner gets this right:

The reason people like Andrew and myself wish the basic fact that most high earners got there through the dint of their own efforts acknowledged in the debate is that it’s crucial to a civil society.

We need a lot of money to fund a lot of public projects.  That would be true even if we just funded the ones that 85 percent of Americans agreed absolutely had to be funded.  And people with money are, by definition, going to have to pony up most of it.   But to confiscate it from the successful without acknowledgment of the sacrifice this entails is to court resentment.

Amen. In turn, James gets attacked for using the term “confiscate” in the passage above. And I agree with him again:

If I’d equated taxation with theft, as some do, I’d see the reason for irritation.  But that taxation is a confiscation of resources should be obvious.

I too am a conservative who can live with higher taxes because of the need to address the mounting and unsustainable debt – but only with serious cuts in entitlements and defense at the same time. And I find the rhetoric demonizing the “rich” to be counter-productive, uncivil, and revealing a mindset of envy not pragmatism.

For now, at least. Silver's horserace crack:

The model gives Republicans a 17 percent chance of winding up with at least 51 Senators after Nov. 2. That’s essentially unchanged from our previous update, from last Wednesday, when they were given an 18 percent chance.

The system determining the guilt or innocence of many prisoners still detained at Gitmo has long been haphazard. One prosecution recently collapsed because the judge was honest enough not to admit testimony procured through torture:

“The government has failed to prove that [the witness’] testimony is sufficiently attenuated from [Ahmed Khalfan] Ghailani’s coerced statements to permit its receipt in evidence.”

The defendant, however, accused of bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, could still be indefinitely detained for life until the formal end of war between the US and al Qaeda. But the latest case is more surreal.

It involves one Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, whose release from custody was ordered earlier this year by Judge Henry Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy effectively demolished the credibility of many government witnesses and pointed out big discrepancies in its case. The ruling was published, then suddenly withdrawn, then re-published with vast amounts of the ruling stricken from public view. The redactions were not solely to prevent release of classified information, but to omit the key findings of the case against the government. Some were obvious attempts to mislead. Money quote from a must-read, and disturbing story by ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer:

The government maintains that Uthman was in Afghanistan to fight for bin Laden; Uthman has claimed he went there to teach the Quran to children. Some facts of his story are not in dispute, some critical ones are. They look different depending on which of Kennedy’s two opinions you read. Kennedy’s original opinion noted that Uthman was seized in Parachinar; that he reached the town after an eight-day trek from the Afghan town of Khost, nowhere near Tora Bora; and that his journey to Pakistan began around Dec. 8, 2001. Those facts make it difficult to portray Uthman as a fighter in a battle that took place between Dec. 12 and Dec. 17 at Tora Bora. Two footnotes in the original opinion note that the government does not contest that Uthman was taken into custody in Parachinar. Both were removed in the second opinion and Kennedy substituted wording to write instead that Uthman admitted he was seized “in late 2001 in the general vicinity of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.”

This is not classification; it’s deception. And it may well be the tip of the iceberg in the 48 cases where the US has decided that a prisoner cannot be prosecuted (torture taints everything; witnesses are highly unreliable or tortured themselves) but cannot either be released, for fear that if he weren’t radicalized for terror before detention and torture, he sure is now.

TBogg summarizes the former CEO's fiscal plan as described to Chris Wallace:

1. Post every agency budget on the internet
2. ?
3. Balanced budget!

Obscure, hardcore South Park parallel (hence headline) here.

The spoils of a seven-candidate New York gubernatorial debate:

Amy Davidson watched the whole thing. Pretty awesome. Beard a little complex for my taste, however.

We've reached the logical conclusion of the right wing smear machine. The first sentence of this World Net Daily piece reads like a parody of life inside the information bubble:

PALM BEACH, Fla. – With Halloween less than two weeks away, radio giant Rush Limbaugh took a brief moment today to say President Obama looks "demonic" in some wire-service photographs posted online at the Drudge Report.

And Limbaugh himself is beyond parody:

"These pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly," Limbaugh said as he opened his program.

"There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look," he remarked about the president who has been campaigning for the re-election of fellow Democrats. "It is strange that these pictures would be released … it's very, very, very strange."

I got an email on these lines as well. I guess it will help the Christianist turnout. What next, the anti-Christ? Oh, wait …

Rand Paul fights back:

Chait is saddened by the new ad:

The data points cited by Conway are true; what's gross is the insinuation that if you're not Christian there's something wrong with you. Paul, predictably, has chosen to attack the facts of Conway's charge rather than the insinuation. Thus we have a debate between a purveyor of religious bigotry and a liar.

The original ad has – sigh – split liberal bloggers. What I find telling is that these allegedly political ads are the logical conclusion of a party that is now essentially a religious organization. Of course they are going to trade charges of heresy or sin. They're throwing the Ten Commandments at each other. It's worshipping false idols or bearing false witness. What they do in government is almost irrelevant. Theda Skocpol defends it:

One reason that Dems do not seem to be able to play hardball — in a viciously hardball political world — is that Dems often lack conviction or the will to be eloquently honest (for example, on taxes). But an equal problem is that when someone does play hardball, the rest of the prissy liberal Mugwumps tut-tut them about it.

Ezra Klein counters Skocpol:

I have two problems with the ad: First, it takes thinly sourced college pranks and sells them as a calculated and conspiratorial assault on Christianity. The words "secret society" are in the ad. The word "college" isn't. Convincing people that your enemy is part of a secret society bent on destroying or blaspheming Christianity does not put you in particularly good historical company. And in general, I loathe watching every utterance anyone has ever made — no matter if it is 25 years old — become fair game for an attack ad. This is why smart, decent people do not want to run for office.

Then there's this question of "hardball." This is broader than the Rand/Conway race, but what, exactly, is the evidence for the widespread Democratic belief that Republicans are ruthlessly effective tacticians while they are wilting violets?

Yglesias doesn't understand what the big deal is. He excuses the ad by calling it "accurate."  He agrees "that the implication that unorthodox religious belief should disqualify one from office is ugly, but it’s an implication that I think is extremely common in American politics." Further:

[W]hat I find most striking about the Conway-related outrage is the lack of outrage over the torrent of xenophobic China-bashing ads we’ve seen from candidates of both parties throughout this campaign season. Accusing one’s opponent of transferring economic opportunities from the United States to China (sometimes India) is a major feature of a huge number of 2010 campaigns. These attacks tend to be factually misleading, and also promote the widespread by definitely wrong misconception that the US and China are engaged in a zero-sum contest for prosperity. What’s more, even granting the factual and analytic premises of these ads their ethics is clearly mistaken. If it was the case that the US and China face zero-sum competition for economic resources, transferring resources from rich America to poor China would be morally praiseworthy.

Serwer doesn't like the ad, but thinks opposition to it is overblown. He lists other offensive ads from this cycle.

One reason I cannot take the Tea Party seriously as an actual small government movement is that they are not campaigning against nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, were overwhelmingly silent as Bush expanded the entitlement state far more recklessly than Obama, but above all their indifference to the claims of Bush and Cheney about executive power. All this "Don't Tread On Me" stuff is something I sympathize with, along with romantic ideas of individual freedoms protected by the Constitution.

But where were they when a US president seized a US citizen on American soil, made unsubstantiated charges against him, locked him away with no due process and tortured him until he became a quivering wreck of a human being? AWOL. Do you think they'd be AWOL if Obama did that to a white American citizen? And claimed he had inherent right to do so regardless of the other branches of government, habeas corpus or the rule of law?

Wendy Kaminer agrees:

Never mind the unaccountable power to detain, interrogate, and even assassinate people, without due process, adopted by both Bush and Obama. Never mind the shadow government spanning both administrations described by the Washington Post in its essential and largely ignored expose of the post 9/11 security state. You can only refer to the Tea Party's "devotion to limited government" with a straight face if you pay no mind to the awesome power of the 21st-century imperial presidency, which Tea Partiers and other right wingers from Christine O'Donnell to Liz Cheney support.

Justin Logan issues a challenge to Bill Kristol and friends:

I extend the offer of an open, public, live debate to the Defending Defense people:  Let’s debate the security of the United States, the strategy to best protect it, and the resources needed to fund the strategy. Any time, any place.

The overarching problem in this debate is that the big spenders keep inserting the red herring of defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP into the debate.  This is relevant only as it pertains to their claim that “current levels of defense spending are affordable,” but last time I checked the mere fact that something wouldn’t, in itself, bankrupt the country is not a sufficient conservative justification for a government program.

Propagandists rarely agree to public debates. But it would indeed be great to have one. Why doesn't Fox have a debate between a pro-defense spending conservative and a fiscal realist who thinks we have to retrench? Oh, never mind. CNN?