An Egyptian anti-military protester shows spent bullet casings during clashes in the Abbassiya district of Cairo on May 2, 2012. Thugs attacked an anti-military protest near the defence ministry in Cairo and at least 20 people were killed, officials said, in the politically tense run-up to the first post-uprising presidential election. By Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty.
Stephen King's call for the rich to pay more taxes has gone viral. You can see why:
I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar.
His response to those high-income Americans:
It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.
Jacket Copy points out that King's net worth is around $400 million. Will Wilkinson goes toe-to-toe with King.
[Re-posted from yesterday, with many more questions added by readers]
Bruce Bartlett, the conservative economist and apostate Republican, is a long-time compatriot of the Dish. His newest book, The Benefit and the Burden, was recently covered here. Noah Kristula-Green offers an overview:
[It] starts off as an examination of America's tax code. Once the book concludes, it has gone from explaining how the IRS got started to laying out a plan so that American can avoid an oncoming fiscal calamity. It is to Bartlett's credit as a writer that he makes this topic accessible, while showing great aplomb in dismantling many of the myths and misconceptions that exist about taxes. … Bartlett writes about the many problems with the current American tax code with an eye towards his ideal system: a tax code that is not held hostage to the whims of the business cycle, that can raise enough revenue for the government, and which is not riddled with market-distorting exemptions. This leads Bartlett to endorse a Value-Added-Tax both for its inherent benefits and because he believes it can raise enough revenue to prevent the oncoming entitlement crisis.
To submit a question for Bruce, simply enter it into the field at the top of the Urtak poll (ignore the "YES or NO question" aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). We primed the poll with a handful of questions you can vote on right away – click "Yes" if you are interested in seeing him answer the question or "No" if you don't particularly care. We will air his responses soon.
The Scream by Edvard Munch sold for an astounding $120 million yesterday. How Felix Salmon understands the price:
[W]hat people are buying, when they buy one of these pieces, is a cultural icon, something instantly recognizable. As Clyde Haberman says of the Scream, “if you’ve never seen a tacky facsimile of it, there’s a chance that you have also never seen a coffee mug, a T-shirt or a Macaulay Culkin poster”. … Whatever was being bought, here, it wasn’t really art, in any pure sense. It was more the result of a century’s worth of marketing and hype.
(Photo: People take photos as Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' is auctioned at Sotheby's May 2012 Sales of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art on May 2, 2012 in New York City. The masterpiece is one of four versions created by Munch and the only one that is privately owned. The masterpiece sold for over $119 million. By Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In a Malkin-worthy effort, Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson accuse Chris Christie of "repeatedly" siding with "some nasty [Muslim] characters." (One commenter translates: "So basically, Christie isn't bigoted enough to be a Republican Vice-President?") Matt Duss rolls his eyes:
Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.
His official reason for a clear obstruction of justice is the following in his Sixty Minutes interview:
Rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.
Stahl: Protect them from what?
Rodriguez: Protect them from Al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.
But it is routine for such tapes, as with photos, to be ruthlessly redacted and the faces of servicemembers or CIA agents blurred or blotted out before they even get near public view. So this is obviously untrue. The reason he destroyed them – even though they could have resolved permanently the specific elements of the torture authorized by Bush and Cheney – was, it seems to me, precisely because they would have shocked the world and shocked America.
When apologists for war crimes, like Mark Thiessen or Mike Mukasey, insist that American waterboarding was not like Khmer Rouge waterboarding, or that US stress positions were different than Chinese Communist stress positions, or that US use of hypothermia as a torture weapon was different than the Gestapo's, they can do so without any threat of being proven visually wrong. And visuals matter, as we found out at Abu Ghraib. But there we only saw still photos of prisoners being tortured along the precise lines laid out by Cheney; watching live-action tapes of waterboarding would have brought the reality of torture – and the rank incompetence and brutality of the torturers – into stark relief. It would have destroyed any remnants of Bush's and Cheney's reputation and America's moral standing in the world.
It would have forced the American people to realize that their leaders really were and are war criminals. And that would have serious legal implications for the lot of them. Scott Horton notes how Rodriguez, whose career was predominantly on the "dark side" in Latin America, must have been aware of how, over time, war criminals who left office with tight legal immunity ended up swamped by the physical and visual evidence of their crimes and the public turned on them:
Jose Rodriguez watched all of this happen. He would certainly appreciate the power of these historical precedents and the likelihood that the ninety-two tapes, if released, would come back to haunt him, and quite possibly send him to jail. That, I believe, is why he destroyed them.
Me too. But it is vital – vital – that we remember the many who resisted the torture program, from the FBI and the military to the CIA and the State Department. Few were as brave as Ali Soufan, a professional interrogator of terrorists who was shoved aside for the Cheney thugs to do their evil work – and then destroy the evidence of something they claim to be proud of. He just got the Ridenhour Prize. Here is a must-see extract from his speech in receiving it:
The war criminals are on notice. We won't forget. And we will bring you to justice one day – as history already has.
Peter took on his "most McCarthyite" reviewer last night. You can watch (almost) the whole thing here. From Dan Klein's write-up:
The debated proposition, “Zionism is failing and American Jews are hastening its decline,” perhaps inevitably became entwined with Gordis’ critique of Crisis, with each men rehashing their points. Gordis, in particular, cited passages to accuse Beinart of a double standard, saying that he was “a realist with Israelis, and a romanticist with Palestinians.”
Beinart retorted that he had in his book pointed out failures in Palestinian action, but that the argument was in fact moot. “Even if I conceded every nasty thing about the Palestinians that you could say, it is still not Palestinians who are paying Israelis to go across the Green line and settle there,” he argued. “It is this Israeli government that legalized settlements. We’re not talking to the Palestinians because this government has no interest.”
He had a good week. He hasn't seen these levels since the capture of Bin Laden, and before that, for two years. Here's the comparison with Reagan's numbers:
At this precise point, Reagan was at 52 percent approval and Obama is at 51 percent.
Greg Sargent asks if the GOP nominee will pledge to reverse Obama's executive order.
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