Month: January 2011

Greenwald fumes:

 What Galston is doing here is what the American political class reflexively does in the wake of every tragedy:  it immediately seeks to exploit the resulting trauma and emotion to justify all-new restrictions on basic liberties (such as the right not to be locked away against one's will in the absence of a crime or a serious threat to others) and all-new government powers.  Every traumatic event — in the immediate, emotionally consuming aftermath –  leads to these sorts of knee-jerk responses.  

Mike Konczal offers a different solution than Galston:

The latest research finds that “the mentally ill account for 16 percent of the prison population, or about 350,000 people on a given day; their true numbers may be twice as high….The solution is not merely to improve the woefully inadequate mental health treatment of prisoners. It is “to improve and expand community mental health treatment” on the other side of the prison walls. But how many blue-ribbon panels have already told us that?”

Ethan Zuckerman poses the question:

What’s fascinating to me is that the events of the past three weeks in Tunisia might actually represent a “Twitter revolution”, as has been previously promised in Moldova and in Iran. There’s been virtually no coverage of the riots and protests in the thoroughly compromised local media – to understand what’s going on in their country, many Tunisians are turning to YouTube and DailyMotion videos, to blogs, Twitter and especially Facebook. The government hasn’t made it easy to access these sites – not only are several social media platforms blocked, they appear to be conducting phishing attacks on users of Gmail, Facebook and other online services. …

So why isn’t the global twittersphere flooding the internet with cries of “Yezzi Fock!” (the rallying cry of the movement, which translates as “We’ve had enough!” in local slang)?

Perhaps we’re less interested because the government in danger of falling isn’t communist, as in Moldova, or a nuclear-armed member of the Axis of Evil, Iran? Perhaps everyone’s read Evgeny Morozov’s new book and followed his path from celebrating the Moldova twitter revolution to concluding the internet is most useful for dictators, not for revolutionaries? …

I don’t know whether most people are missing the events in Tunisia because they don’t speak French or Arabic, because they don’t see the Mahgreb as significant as Iran, because they’re tired of social media revolution stories or because they’re mourning the tragedy in Tucson. I’m disappointed and frustrated, not just because I care deeply for Tunisian friends who have been working for justice in their country for years, but because real change in the world is a rare thing, and it’s a shame that people would miss the chance to watch it unfold.

(Photo: People hold Tunisian national flags as they demonstrate against Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 12, 2011 in Marseille, southern France near the Tunisian consulate. Anger over a government crackdown on protesters in Tunisia grew today as a union official said 50 people were killed in three days of violence, more than double a toll issued by the Interior ministry. By Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty.)

The delicacy with which this is put actually cracked me up. Yeah, it's JPod, that icon of rhetorical restraint:

Sarah Palin has become a very important person in the United States. Important people have to speak with great care, because their words matter more than the words of other people. If they are careless, if they are sloppy, if they are lazy about finding the right tone and setting it and holding it, they will cease, after a time, to be important people, because without the discipline necessary to modulate their words, those words will lose their power to do anything but offer a momentary thrill — either pleasurable or infuriating. And then they will just pass on into the ether.

If she doesn’t serious herself up, Palin is on the direct path to irrelevancy. She won’t be the second Ronald Reagan; she’ll be the Republican incarnation of Jesse Jackson.

Does JPod realize that the Dish made that analogy a long, long time ago? Back when he was touting the new Esther?

From Peter Aldhous:

The earthquake that struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on 12 January 2010, was unremarkable in seismic terms — barely making the year’s top 20 most powerful quakes. But it was one of the most deadly seismic events in the past four decades, serving as a reminder that the scope of these disasters is defined not by the scale of the Earth’s unleashed fury, but by overcrowding in poor urban areas and lax or poorly enforced building codes.

(Hat tip: Flowing Data)

It's strong, as Will Wilkinson shows as he ponders post-Tucson legislation:

Some of these proposals may have merit, but no more now than on Friday. The issues they address have become no more urgent. Sadly, people are shot to death every day. The odd and the infirm roam our streets. Some of them buy guns and use them. With the incarceration of Jared Lee Loughner, the odds of crazy people shooting and killing officeholders (and untitled, less newsworthy human beings) has gone down, not up. There is no more reason now to deliberate publicly about mental-health and gun-control policy. Indeed, there is every reason to postpone deliberation and debate until we recover from the panicked burst of irrationality and high emotion predictably induced by a highly-visible but singular, largely ungrokkable enormity…

Be especially wary of laws whose titles include the name of a victim.

Weigel notes that by "this time in the last presidential cycle, 14 candidates had jumped in". Joyner blames the delay largely on Palin:

Given Palin’s ability to suck all the oxygen out of the room — she’s far and away the potential Republican candidate most able to attract media attention — other candidates have to be hesitant to commit themselves before gauging her intention.  And, certainly, Palin has no need to rush things, since she already has the name recognition and fundraising ability from the outset.

Glenn Greenwald, whether you agree with him or now, is a tireless inspiration for the whole idea of a blogosphere that can find and champion new voices, without enmeshing them in the web of partisan interests, groupthink, think tanks, magazines, newspapers and corporate media. To do his work and be able to make a living, he asks readers to chip in once a year. You can donate here.

"Does anyone else see the irony in this tragedy? In Arizona, the state that has been the de facto "face" of recent political gay bashing (DADT-McCain) and racism (their highly controversial immigration law), a white straight man shoots a female Jewish member of congress who then has her life saved by a gay Hispanic American. It's poetic," – "John" on Towleroad.

A harrowing video of how far our discourse has sunk. It's important context for what we must now address.

David Boaz has written an excellent summary of the controversy over gays at CPAC.