Month: February 2011

John Yoo, who believes that presidents are sometimes empowered to order the massacre of a village or the crushing of a child's testicles, has a post up at Ricochet arguing that president Obama "misunderstands his constitutional role"  and "continues to display his misunderstanding of the constitutional order." How?

…by repeatedly inserting himself into matters reserved to the states and localities, such as the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, the location of a mosque near ground zero in New York City, and much of Arizona's immigration bill.

And by "inserting himself," Yoo means that he comments on them. It's certainly reasonable to argue that Obama shouldn't comment on these matters. It's just a little much coming from a man whose legal reasoning about a president's constitutional role allowed a president to seize any citizen or non-citizen at will anywhere on earth and torture them. Here's Yoo's credentials, according to his own former overseers:

The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture.

Even the man who rescued Yoo from being disbarred conceded that "Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power."

So naturally he now makes his living as a law professor and is taken seriously as a pundit writing on the subject of the executive's role in government. And can actually say that merely speaking out on a topic of public debate, a president is constitutional over-reach! And naturally, Paul Wolfowitz has the gall to call for invading another Middle East country. And Don Rumsfeld refuses to cop to his own war crimes. If you are a part of the partisan right, nothing matters except your team.

Clive Crook has an excellent summary of the actual issues involved. When a fiscally conservative governor has lost Clive Crook, he's really gone overboard.

Don't miss the Dish's round-up coverage of developments in Libya over the last twelve hours. It's here.

A primer:

Libya is one of the most tribal nations in the Arab world – a country where clans and alliances shape the political landscape. Tribal structure has played a crucial role in the country's history. Al Jazeera's Dorsa Jabbari takes a look at the country's tribal system.

Der Spiegel has more.

"How can a leader subject his own people to a shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs? How can a leader bomb his own people, and afterwards say 'I will kill anyone who says anything?'" – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Qaddafi.

Lynn Vavreck presents a study on TV habits and political affiliation:

When we examine the viewership of each show … interesting partisan composition emerges.  Republicans make up more of the share of the audience for NCIS (48%) and Criminal Minds (41%), while shows like Desperate Housewives (55% Democrats), The Mentalist (54%), and CSI:Miami (50%)  are much more likely to be composed of Democrats than Republicans.  Extreme Makeover is a pretty even mix of partisans from both parties.  Where there are differences, they are significant, at least in a statistical sense.

What’s interesting about these trends in television viewing is the similarity between the programming of shows like NCIS and CSI:Miami – both shows are about forensic science and criminal investigations – yet, partisans somehow manage to sort themselves into the shows in a systematic way.

Robert Krulwich got fooled by the above video (actually just an art project). But, he argues, the prospect of employing bees to find illegal plants isn't so unrealistic:

At first I was irritated by being duped by a news-like video. Then, thinking it over, I got the uncomfortable feeling that Waithe's fantasy doesn't seem all that far-fetched. I'm (vaguely) OK with DNA testing, scent-chasing bloodhounds, police-aiding psychics, but somehow, turning social insects into police intelligence units seems just crazy enough, just do-able enough, just attractive enough to the police, that one day we may have to actually cringe when a bee comes wandering through the kitchen window.

John Barry describes how dictators maintain power:

[T]he real key to regime survival has been what RAND Corporation analyst James Quinlivan calls “coup-proofing.” In an influential 1999 study, Quinlivan itemized the basic safeguards for dictatorships. First: Consolidate an inner core bound to the regime by “family, ethnic, and religious loyalties”—in essence, a mafia, with goodfellas in various guises protecting the big guy’s back (and their own; if he goes down, so do they).

Second: Create a parallel military devoted to regime protection, like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which does the supreme leader’s bidding while the remnants of the shah’s army stand by. Third: Maintain multiple secret police, security, and espionage services that spend much of their time keeping each other in check.

And the regular army still has to be bought off. … Coup-proofing isn’t cheap. The region’s big oil producers can usually afford it, especially when crude prices are as high as they are now. Regimes without substantial oil reserves tend to rely on foreign patrons.

Andy McCarthy defends his work on the Patriot Act:

Concerns about “John Doe” warrants — i.e., roving wiretap authorizations that do not name a specific person or place to be surveilled — have been discussed since 2001… although we’ve now had this provision for close to a decade, civil liberties advocates like Mr. Friedersdorf and Cato’s Julian Sanchez still have to couch their objections in the subjunctive mood: the warrants “raise the possibility” of overbreadth abuses “disturbingly similar to the ‘general warrants’” prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. That is, although the Patriot Act has been examined, debated, and reauthorized a number of times since its initial passage shortly after 9/11, critics still have no concrete record that roving taps have been systematically abused, so they have to raise potential abuses that never seem to materialize.

In a lengthy response, Julian Sanchez objects:

Just in fiscal 2008, the FBI alone collected 878,383 hours (or just over 100 years) of audio, much of it in foreign languages; 1,610,091 pages of text; and 28,795,212 electronic files. A recent review of FBI backlogs by the Office of the Inspector General found that fully a quarter of the audio collected between 2003 and 2008 remained unreviewed (including 6 percent of counterterror acquisitions and 31 percent of counterintelligence acquisitions, the two categories covered by FISA wiretaps). Let that sink in for a second: They have literally years worth of audio material alone that the Bureau itself can't be sure of the contents of, never mind any kind of independent oversight body.

…[M]eaningful after-the-fact oversight of the fruits of FISA surveillance is a chimera. The issue is not just that the safeguards here are less stringent on the front end—in this case, the absence of the requirement that roving taps name each individual target—but that many of the the back end safeguards are missing too. Sometimes, of course, it is possible to catch abuses on the backend, but the reality is that if they do occur, there's a good chance we won't know about it.

Keith Schneider maps it:

[Geographer Huo Youguang] explained that the two most important natural resources that are needed to support China’s development in this decade—water and energy—are defined by what he called a “geographic mismatch.” The new energy reserves are in the dry north. The available water to develop them is in the rainy south.

The story has some amazing stats, like this:

Though China’s economy has grown almost ten-fold since the mid-1990s, water consumption has increased 15 percent, or 1 percent annually.