Month: May 2011

Tomorrow Britain will vote on whether to change its voting system. Harry Joe Enten argues against the alternative vote (AV). How AV works:

Alternative vote (AV) is a type of preferential voting in which voters are asked to rank the candidates from first to last. The basic idea is that if no candidate is the first choice of 50% + 1 voters, then the candidate who received the fewest first place votes is eliminated. This candidate's voters then have their votes reallocated to the candidate they ranked second. This reallocation process continues until one candidate achieves 50% + 1 votes (more on this later). A majority is achieved (or so we think)!

Among Enten's criticisms:

If AV actually encourages more third-party voting (which is debatable) as some AV supporters suggest, then it really is possible than many Britons will not rank every candidate. If they do not rank every candidate, then we could get a winner who does not have support from 50% + 1 of the voters.

This last example is typical of AV's failure to deliver. AV gives voters a false sense of security that they are in greater control of the electoral process. In reality, they are in less control and cannot truly be sure what their vote truly means.

A reader writes:

Please stop with the Rush posts.  He feeds on attention – whatever he was doing yesterday he did specifically so people would talk about it.  So please, for the sake of all that is good and holy, stop giving him what he wants.

Another writes:

I had hoped that the departure of Conor Friedersdorf from the Dish would bring the frequency of Limbaugh posts back down to pre-Friedersdorf levels (I noticed a big uptick when he came aboard last year). Conor has built his blogging career on bashing the most predictable strawmen of the conservative base, namely Limbaugh and Mark Levin, and such easy rhetorical targets shouldn't have a place in the productive discourse of the Dish (save for the occasional Malkin or Moore Award).  Every Limbaugh post holds the same boring message of Obama bashing and race baiting, which lowers the standards of your site. Can't we just ignore the nihilistic blowhard once and for all? You did so with Coulter.

One reason I was so glad Conor came here was his vigilance on these very powerful and utterly noxious voices guiding the GOP base. We follow his lead still because, alas, this is the most powerful voice in the Republican party right now. We cannot understand it unless we understand him. He is their id, the key to what they truly believe.

But we will try not to give him any more attention than this requires.

A small detail from Abu Ghraib that I did not know till now:

The soldiers used markers to write serial numbers on the back of the prisoners’ necks.

Like cattle or Jews in Nazi camps. This was America.

David Sirota criticized celebrations of bin Laden's death. R.M. at DiA counters:

Were the crowds outside of the White House celebrating bloodshed, or were they celebrating a perceived end to the bloodshed caused by Mr bin Laden (however wrong that assumption may be)? Were they rejoicing in a man's death, or rejoicing in the fact that this man can no longer cause death? In my observation, the crowd was not so bloodthirsty. "We did it" was the common refrain I heard from those nearby, not "we killed the bastard". Had we captured Mr bin Laden alive, I believe there would have been nearly as much jubilation. Would it still have been wrong?

Nate Silver keeps his eye Obama's approval ratings:

On average across the five surveys conducted entirely since Bin Laden’s death, Mr. Obama’s approval rating is 50 percent, and his disapproval rating is 46 percent. By comparison, Mr. Obama’s numbers had been roughly the reverse of that — 45 percent approving, and 50 percent disapproving — based on polls conducted before Sunday night, according to the Pollster.com trendline.

The roughly five-point improvement would be the low end of broadly similar historical events.

What's staggering to me is how the right insisted, immediately after Obama's inauguration, that all responsibility in the war on terror was now his, just as responsibility for the debt was now his, and the near-depression was now his. Any errors, even minor ones, were plastered on his face.

But more than two years later, the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden is primarily George W. Bush's doing.

Unfuckingbelievable. Except, of course, it isn't.

My take on the pro-torture right's absurd argument that Bush's torture was integral to Obama's coup is here.

Obama says he won't release the OBL death pictures. Expect more Photoshopped images like the one below, sent by a Dish reader, to surface:

A British perspective on the biggest meep-meep week yet in this president's administration:

Obama did more than quell the screechings of the wingnuts, chat-show rabble-rousers, the Birthers and those we should term the Placentas (the After-Birthers who have now progressed to post-certificate conspiracy theories to question his legitimacy). He reminded the world why it fell in love with him in the first place….

People have criticised him for being "professorial" as well as arrogant. They will do so no longer. He pondered for months, studied the research, weighed up the evidence, and reached the right conclusion. This is one cool, tough prof, and the lesson he has taught by example won't quickly be unlearnt. In asymmetric warfare against a stateless enemy, invading sovereign states and slaughtering civilians is not the way to go. You don't punish the guilty by killing the innocent. You do so by killing the guilty.

Yahoo reveals recent search trends:

Searches on Sunday for Osama bin Laden spiked nearly 100,00% on Yahoo!, also making him the most-searched person of the day. Nearly 1 in 5 searches for “osama bin laden” are by teenagers, many of who grew up during the war on terrorism. 25% of searches overall for Osama came from those under 24.

Image via Jamelle Bouie, who adds:

[I]t's sobering; not because it reveals anything profound about our educational system or the attacks on 9/11, but because it points to an absolute truth: for each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 — the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls — isn't even a distance memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

“I am speaking of a special situation now, I am speaking of a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see–this is what happens–first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. This is how you get the truth,” – Colonel Joll, from J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

I think this is the argument being thrown about now by the Bush administration’s war criminals. If you systematically destroy a prisoner’s body and soul, eventually some grain of truth can be found in a beach of lies.

We didn’t have to wait for the barbarians, of course. For some of them were already in the White House. And some of them are still spinning the New York Times.