Month: January 2011

Chuck Neubauer has a fascinating reported piece on defense superlobbyist Paul Magliocchetti:

Shedding light on the little-scrutinized practice of lobbyists courting members of Congress through legal charitable donations, the papers show Magliocchetti gave more than $200,000 to the favorite charities of the congressional earmarkers and other members of Congress.

That kind of thing makes them more receptive to your Pentagon-related clients. Ponder, if you will, what Congressman Murtha's affinity for classical music cost us:

Ledger entries show Magliocchetti gave a total of $52,530 in four years to the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was a favored charity of Rep. John P. Murtha, a Democrat who lived in Johnstown, Pa., and chaired the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. Murtha obtained 16 earmarks for Magliocchetti's clients in fiscal 2008 and six in fiscal 2009 worth a total of $54.3 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Murtha's wife, Joyce, has been described as a major booster of the symphony, an important cultural institution in Johnstown. The congressman tried to revive the one-time dying steel town with federal earmarks and with help from defense contractors and lobbyists he aided. Several defense contractors who benefited from Murtha's help also became symphony sponsors, according to published accounts. Murtha, who died in February, also supported the symphony, using $14,400 in campaign funds for tickets and advertising during the same period.

For more than a decade now, religious fundamentalism has been the driving force behind global events. If you see it as the underlying cause of 9/11, then our response to that event has not, alas, seemed to help. Yes, we have constructed a national security state that, at enormous financial and constitutional cost, has kept the worst from happening for longer than anyone was predicting in, say, 2002. And yes, Iraq has emerged from the abyss of dictatorship and then anarchy into an extremely fragile authoritarian-democratic state. The Taliban, moreover, have not won back Afghanistan. The worst excesses of the Bush-Cheney executive have been ended, if not purged.

And yet when you look at Iraq, you cannot but see the lethal power of Shiite fundamentalism. Watching the videos of Moqtada al-Sadr's return, one sees close-up what cultic theocracy can be. There is some kind of intense reverence for a man qualified solely by nepotism to be a demi-god. In Pakistan, the response to the appalling assassination of Salman Taseer has been a chilling demonstration of the power of Islam against core liberal values such as freedom of speech. The stain of blasphemy still seems to be a critical value of not just the Islamist but increasingly the Muslim world. In Egypt, everything the neocons warned about Arab autocracy is being proven true: it can incubate and propel Islamism rather than stifle it. But democracy's impact in Iraq, where it is now associated with both chaos and Shiite radicalism, and in Gaza, where it empowered Hamas, hardly shows a promising way forward. In Israel, the politics cannot be understood any more without a deep understanding of the increasingly powerful religious parties and their expansionist goals. In every cycle, fundamentalist religion is winning and secular moderation appears to be waning.

There may be little hope for intervening in this process. In a decade, we have learned the hard limits of control and the very modern reach of religion released from culture and tradition.

This is not our story. But it is driving our narrative. It will, one fears, for the rest of our lives.

(Photo: Pakistani Islamists chant slogans and wave flags as they gather outside the residence of arrested Pakistani bodyguard Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, the alleged killer of Punjab's governor Salman Taseer, during a rally to support him in Rawalpindi on January 7, 2011. By Amir Qureshi/Getty.)

Pivoting off a post by Ezra Klein, Douthat mulls the pitfalls of libertarianism: 

We don’t live in the world that libertarians would have built, or anything remotely like it, and this can make the libertarian perspective immensely valuable in our political debates — as a corrective, a critique, a shove against the status quo and an oar against the tide. But it’s also true that certain libertarian ideas (like any kind of political ideas) need to work together in order to work, which means in turn that an incrementalist libertarianism can lead to policy trainwrecks — giving us lower taxes without the spending cuts required to pay for them, or private profits in boom times but socialized losses when the crunch comes, or a health care system that’s neither statist nor free market, but a failed combination of the two. There’s a danger, in other words, in a libertarianism that’s just powerful enough to win the easiest victories (and the ones, as Klein says, that entrenched interests have their own reasons for supporting), but not potent or serious or savvy enough to win the victories required to make its reforms actually work out for the best.

Thanks to a California Supreme Court ruling, if you’re arrested in the state, police can search the contents of your cell phone at will:

The court cited a number of previous cases wherein defendants were arrested with all manner of incriminating objects—heroin tablets hidden in a cigarette case, paint chips hidden in clothing, marijuana in the trunk of a car—which did not require a warrant to obtain. The court said that the phone was “immediately associated” with Diaz’s person, and therefore the warrantless search was valid.

The decision was not unanimous, though.

“The potential intrusion on informational privacy involved in a police search of a person?s mobile phone, smartphone or handheld computer is unique among searches of an arrestee’s person and effects,” Justices Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno wrote in dissent.

They went on to argue that the court majority’s opinion would allow police “carte blanche, with no showing of exigency, to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee’s person. The majority thus sanctions a highly intrusive and unjustified type of search, one meeting neither the warrant requirement nor the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

This gives police quite an incentive to arrest suspects and mine whatever can be gleaned from their smart phone. Burners won’t be going away any time soon.

Blogger Bill Zeller took his life last Sunday. In his suicide note he wrote that his "first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly" and that this "darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog". He continued:

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contanimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Julian Sanchez calls the note possibly "the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read":

[Zeller] had never told a soul about [the rape or darkness] both because he was convinced that nothing could help and because he couldn’t bear the prospect of being “forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am.” …

First, if there’s anyone reading this who’s living with the kind of pain Bill writes about, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) has an anonymous online hotline that is designed to be absolutely confidential, and staffed by people specifically trained to help people work through the consequences of sexual abuse. It would be too glib to say that reaching out will help but lots of survivors who once felt as hopeless as Bill did have found that it did for them. It’s presumptuous to think one can judge what is too much for another person to endure, but it seems doubly tragic that Bill made his decision without at least trying to talk to someone first. I can’t pretend I’m able to imagine how insanely hard it must be to take that step, but given the alternative, I have to believe it’s worth the gamble even if the odds seems slim.

A reader writes:

I agree with the reader who wrote that parenting is not for sissies, and that anything and everything can go wrong, regardless of how your children come into your life. But I want to address a little-discussed aspect of adoption – the parents who give their adopted children "back".

My husband and I had to sign an enormous number of forms stating that we would not hold our agency responsible if anything was "wrong" with our daughter. When I asked about this, I was told this was in response to the people who had tried to "unadopt" because their children who, though appearing healthy at the time of adoption, had gone on to develop cancer, learning disabilities or other problems. A friend of mine who is a lawyer has referenced cases she has worked on regarding this as well, including a case where the parents and the child flew to the child's birth country, checked in to the hotel, and the parents abandoned the child on the streets and returned to the States. Their reasoning? She was turning into a difficult teenager.

It seems like so many people now have this idea in their heads about what their lives will be like, and when things don't turn out that way, they bail. I'm not trying to minimize the families who dealt with unethical adoption agencies – everyone needs to be honest at the start. But no one can control what will happen in life. Our son, who is not adopted, might end up inheriting my mother's cancer genes. I can't control that. Our daughter, who is adopted, may end up in a car accident and on a feeding tube. But that's life, and that's what happens when you deal with human beings.

Any time you deal with humans, you toss the dice with Fate. That's how it is. And we all know who is going to win.

Another writes:

I am white and my late wife was black. We had two children and wanted to adopt another. A three-year-old girl was placed with us, instead of with her white preschool teacher, who knew her well. Four months later, things collapsed. She had many difficulties that were papered over initially, then described as due to our inadequate parenting style. In the end, we couldn't keep her without damage to our other two kids. Needless to say we weren't interested in risking this trauma again. Twenty years later, I still think of her with sadness.

Kevin Drum compares the demographic futures of various countries. Of interest:

By 2030 [China will] have a greater proportion of the elderly than the United States.

Felix Salmon notes that the number of long-term unemployed Americans is still rising:

A reader writes:

Grover Norquist's wife, Samah, is a Kuwait-born daughter of two Palestinians. I'd say that that makes the Muslim 5th Column slur even more vile, as it's a personal attack on immediate family, rather than on the man himself.

Side note: Within a half-hour of this post going live, a Dish reader updated Norquist's Wiki page with his self-description as a "boring white bread Methodist".

Glenn Greenwald relates the story of an 18-year-old American citizen arrested in Kuwait for unknown reasons:

Mohamed says he was repeatedly beaten with a stick on the bottom of his feet and his palms, hit in the face, and hung from the ceiling.  He also says his captors threatened him with both the arrest of his mother and electric shock, and told him that he should forget his family.

He still does not know why he was detained and beaten, nor does he know what is happening to him now.

Indeed, although Mazzetti writes that he was detained and beaten by Kuwait captors, Mohamed actually has no idea who was responsible, and told me that at least some of the people interrogating him spoke English.  He has been told that he will be deported back to the U.S., but is now on a no-fly list and has no idea when he will be released.  American officials told Mazzetti that "Mr. Mohamed is on a no-fly list and, for now at least, cannot return to the United States." He's been charged with no crime and presented with no evidence of any wrongdoing.

If this were being done to a white kid by Castro or the Chinese or the Iranians, Americans would be up in arms and demanding answers. But a kid named Mohammed arrested by an ally in the War on Terror? Suddenly everyone defers to authority.