Month: April 2011

A cavalcade of "toe-curlingly bad analogies", from the Spectator (in London). Some beauts:

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

She gazed at him as lovingly as if he were her ear-lobe, replete with a diamond-encrusted earring, as reflected in a Parisian mirror.

Her manner became so suddenly grim it was as though she had injected all of Aberdeen directly into a vein.

He clumsily tried to fold her into his arms, a bit like folding a bottom fitted king-size sheet but not getting it right and starting over and getting it wrong again and finally saying oh the hell with it.

He was as angry as an eight-year-old who spends six hours building a Lego battleship and then his three-year-old sister smashes it to pieces and stomps on it so he whacks her and he gets severely punished.

Dan Ephron checks in on Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas:

U.N. votes don’t make 500,000 Jewish settlers suddenly disappear from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And Netanyahu is unlikely to just hand over the keys. … For the statehood resolution to have more than just symbolic impact, Abbas would have to come back from New York and assert sovereignty over the territory the U.N. just handed him. But that would entail confrontational measures—for instance, ending the security cooperation with Israel. Abbas told me that’s a path he will not take.

Game, set and match to Israel's far right government and settlers. And the public humiliation of Obama for daring to cross the pro-Israel lobby will reverberate for years if he does not find a way forward. Obama is usually so cautious. On this he showed courage. That'll teach him, won't it?

(Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs the weekly cabinet meeting on April 17, 2011 in Jerusalem, Israel. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

Dave Weigel thinks the unending Trig rumor can't be blamed on the media:

Jason Linkins puts this in the right context: "As with Birtherism, the way you translate 'the media failed to diligently investigate the truth" is to say "the media, after sufficient investigation, failed to deliver the story that all the conspiracy theorists wanted.'" Both conspiracy theories have been flogged to death by reporters, and why wouldn't they be? Who wouldn't want to be the reporter who proved that essential facts about some politician's life had been covered up?

I have no evidence that these stories have been "flogged to death" by reporters. Does Weigel? Pray tell. Who? For what outlet? He's a reporter and he admits he never bothered to look into this – because the Democrats hadn't made it an issue! There's the MSM for you. I've been struggling to write a long new post on this entire thing, and am almost happy with it. Incoming …

Kevin Drum reads an IMF study on oil prices and demand. The data suggest even a large gasoline tax isn't likely to cut demand significantly. For the rich world:

In the short term, a 50% price increase [in the price of oil] produces a 1.2% decrease in consumption. In the long term, it produces a 4.7% decrease.

Jim Manzi nods:

[T]o the extent that we continue to progress in making non-fossil-fuels technology cheaper and more effective for an ever wider array of applications, we can accelerate the ongoing de-carbonization of our economy. The idea of economists to use artificial scarcity pricing to do this is aggressively marketed in blogs, magazines and TV shows, but is extremely unlikely to work, because the current price elasticity of oil is so low. The work of engineers and physical scientists, however, is likely to be determinative.

Bummer. But it could help finance the wars waged in part because of the salience of the Middle East to oil supplies.

I do not doubt the rank injustice in Gitmo. But I also do not doubt the Obama administration's genuine political and security dilemma. Fewer than 20 Gitmo inmates could be tried under civil law, because there's sufficient non-tortured evidence to make the case against them, and around 150 are clearly innocent prisoners possibly radicalized by imprisonment and thereby potential dangers to American lives, if released. In the middle, there are – and have been – all sorts of possibilities. The nightmare scenario is this one:

In 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan [from Gitmo] — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.

Imagine if that happened under Obama. The GOP would go off its rocker (even as they uttered not a peep when it happened under Bush). At the same time:

At least 150 people are innocent Afghans or Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs and drivers who were rounded up or even sold to US forces and transferred across the world. In the top-secret documents, senior US commanders conclude that in dozens of cases there is “no reason recorded for transfer”.

How does the US continue holding these innocents and remain somehow committed to Western principles of justice or even fair rules of detention in a just war? Then there's the case of an al-Jazeera journalist, detained for being allegedly an al Qaeda courier, but questioned solely about … al-Jazeera. Greenwald has, as often, a must-read in his case.

This is the bottom line:

The United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times.

Viewed with judges’ rulings on legal challenges by detainees, the documents reveal that the analysts sometimes ignored serious flaws in the evidence — for example, that the information came from other detainees whose mental illness made them unreliable. Some assessments quote witnesses who say they saw a detainee at a camp run by Al Qaeda but omit the witnesses’ record of falsehood or misidentification. They include detainees’ admissions without acknowledging other government documents that show the statements were later withdrawn, often attributed to abusive treatment or torture.

This we were told by the war criminals in the Bush administration were "the worst of the worst." Some were. Most were nothing of the kind. As with the debt, the war, and the economy, we are still trying to emerge from the Bush-Cheney wreckage. The damage they did to their own country and the world will live on for the rest of our lives.

(Photo: A Uighur Muslim detainee from China hides in a plywood hut in a compound at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on June 1, 2009. By Carol Rosenberg/Miami Herald/MCT via Getty Images)

I stand by my previous defense of the right of lawyers to represent clients without being targeted or pressured because of those clients. Without that, how would any mass murderer get a fair trial? But it behooves me to add that the conditions place by the House of Representatives on the law firm of King and Spalding were onerous and illegal in many states. Maybe that also contributed to the law firm's dropping the case. A reader adds:

King & Spalding should have never taken the case in the first place.  The firm is an 800+ lawyer international behemoth that touts its diversity credentials, including LGBT lawyers and issues, on its website and in its recruiting.  I doubt any pressure from gay rights groups had any effect at all; rather the firm probably realized that the $500,000 in fees would pale in comparison to the business lost by clients leaving the firm and the talent lost by LGBT and LGBT-friendly lawyers leaving the firm for other top firms.  There are thousands of small law firms with top flight talent around the nation that could take on this representation without alienating hundreds of employees.  In fact, since Paul Clement resigned from King & Spalding, it looks like he’ll take this representation to one of those firms (or start up one of his own).

Another:

My guess, for what it's worth, is that the King & Spalding statement on what happened is exactly right – Clement said he'd take the case without consulting with his colleagues, and once they were consulted they told him that it wasn't the kind of case they wanted associated with their names, thank you. Mr. Clement now has discovered something he may not have realized before, which is that he's not important enough to the firm that he will always get what he wants. This may have come as a rude surprise.

But I agree with you that the defenders of DOMA ought to be represented by good lawyers, if for no other reason than that it's better if you beat the other side's well-presented best arguments. That said, there are plenty of good lawyers at places like the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, who won't be constrained by having to worry about whether their other clients will be mad at them.

Another:

I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with an attorney defending DOMA and that hounding law firms to drop unpopular clients is a sad tactic. But to defend DOMA is not exactly on the same level as defending Guantanamo detainees or indigent citizens accused of committing crimes. The federal government is the "client" in the DOMA litigation, so quite unlike indigent defendants or detainees, it has an army of lawyers at its disposal in the Justice Department. The fact that the government is not using its own lawyers to defend DOMA, for its own internal reasons, does not place the act on the same footing as those we typically think of when we say that "everyone deserves a lawyer."

A reader writes:

Well, I suppose cultural forces could be at play, but I KNEW I was marrying wrong (as did everyone who knew me), but I thought he was the one man in the world who would never leave me (20 years later – turns out I was wrong!).  Insecurity and a belief that nobody would "love me forever" led me down the aisle (great sex was a factor, too). I don't feel like I've evolved much over the decades, and still fight my lack of sense of worth, but now I have a daughter of my own and I really, really want her to marry well.

Another writes:

Why are we taking these womens' reporting of their own inner states at face value?

A fantastic historian whose name I now forget once said that the problem with thinking about the past is that "we already know their future". I love that formulation. There is a clear cognitive bias – not just in doing history but is doing psychology – a bias that creates reasons from hindsight. It places us in control of events.

So women who are already divorced report that they "had a feeling" that things weren't going to work out from the get-go? I'm sure some of them did have that feeling. But I'm equally sure that some if not most of them are assigning themselves that feeling after the fact. That's not a woman thing. I'm a man and I do exactly the same thing. We always think we knew what was going to happen. That's how people get convinced they are psychic! But it doesn't make it so.

Also, Ms. Marcotte … who is she kidding? Her faux-feminist screed reads like something out of the 1980s, if not the 1960s. Are there societal pressures on women in their 20s? Of course, just like at any age, just like there are societal pressures on men at any age. (I promise, the hopeful/anxious looks on the faces of my aunts when they ask me if I have a girlfriend constitute pressure.)

But being an adult means resisting those pressures, and if feminism means anything, it has to mean that women are just as capable of resisting those pressures as men are. We have set up a society in which there are large pockets, at least, where anyone can live any way they want to live and nobody is going to say boo.

Another:

I'm reminded of the song Cath from Death Cab for Cutie, and especially its music video.

A reader writes:

Re: the post about Hannah Arendt and the lack of nuance when looking back at WWII. I was a friend of the late Henry King Jr., one of the last of the surviving Nuremberg prosecutors. He gave a talk at a local church a few years ago about his Nuremberg experience. During the Q & A, someone asked about the Soviet participation in the tribunal. How, the person asked, could the Soviets be included as arbiters of justice when they themselves were so unjust and ruthless to even their own citizenry?

Henry, dry sense of humor intact to the end, smiled and replied: "There really was no question about including the Russians. Since, let's face it, they won the war."

A demographic break-down.

Even if you’re a man by a sex-change operation, and heterosexual, you may soon be barred from civil marriage in the Lone Star state. All that matters is the definition of gender at birth, even though some decisions on that are inherently indeterminate. I see no way to understand this except as a way to intensify discrimination against transgender people. Even Iran has more compassion.