Under The Rightwing Rock

If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has not had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:

A terrible event – but I don’t want anyone to call it an “act of violence” or “a terrible tragedy”. It was an attack – one or more men decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right down to the bottom of this – and, liberals, if the stories of accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).

This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-greased waterslide to throwing out the entire American system of government.

The Internet Doesn’t Make You Lonely

Don Reisinger sums up a Pew report:

According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."

That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"–a measure of people's "most important social ties"–have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."

The Coverage Of Fort Hood

Greenwald asks a question after reading Allahpundit's live-blogging of the news reports from Fort Hood yesterday:

Isn't it clear that anyone following all of that as it unfolded would have been more misinformed than informed?

The scale of the errors and misinformation was unusually high. The number of shooters and the actual fate of the prime suspect were both wrongly reported. Like Glenn I can see the benefits of live-blogging breaking news. We do it here all the time. But it seems to me that live-blogging speculation about news we don't yet know is a bit of a mug's game. I'm glad we took a breather and waited to see what actually happened.

How Bad Will It Get?

Economix rounds up reaction to the unemployment numbers. Nigel Gault, IHS Global Insight:

We expect job declines to continue to ease, since we expect that productivity gains will slow, and firms will find that they must bring in new workers to keep output growing. The extra boost provided by the hiring of Census workers should probably be enough to turn employment growth positive by March.

Dean Baker makes a prediction:

The unemployment rate will probably not peak until the spring of next year, at close to 11.0 percent.

The Dish’s prediction: politically what will matter is not the absolute number but the direction. If they’re going down, the Dems can breathe more easily (but not by much); if they plateau for a long time, things are going to get rough for whoever is an incumbent in any race near and far. But remember that Thatcher and Reagan were re-elected despite increasing unemployment quite dramatically in their first term. Because they had a strategy and were able to explain it.

Nuclear Socialism?

Bradford Plumer addresses the conservative love of nuclear power:

Many projections for a low-carbon future do envision a supporting role for nuclear power–indeed, a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, by making fossil fuels pricier, could help usher in the first new wave of reactors in the United States since the 1970s. But that's not enough for the GOP, which wants to put nuclear into overdrive. The party's energy plan, released in July, calls for a whopping 100 new reactors built by 2030. That's twice as many as even the most optimistic industry forecasts envision, and, given that the plants are estimated to cost at least $6-$10 billion a pop and have difficulty attracting private investment, they would likely need hefty subsidies–something the right is supposed to frown at. "For reasons I don't fully understand," says Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, "nuclear power has a magical place in the hearts of conservatives."

Yglesias piles on while Frum counters.

You Aught To Remember

A new blog gets a jump start on summing up the cultural milieu of the millennium, cataloging the "100 trends, fashions, memes, personalities and ideas that shaped the first decade of the 21st Century."

So why the decade and not the quarter-century? The digit change inherent with calendar progression is a superficial but not wholly trivial reason. The real truth, however, lies in the light-speed shifts that zeitgeist transformation can now undertake. Once upon a time, centuries divided eras of change; the 20th Century though pushed even ten year demarcations to their breaking point, so drastic were the upheavals in social reality that modernity hath wrought. Ten years time was more than enough to alter the course of history, leaving America and the world a different place than it had been just ten years before.

A list of the entries thus far, after the jump:

Obama On The Debt

Ambers reports on the administration's smoke signals about  the debt:

There will be talk of real, across-the-board limits to discretionary spending. There will probably be a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel set up, along with, perhaps, another Social Security reform commission.

Talk is cheap. And commissions are often ways of avoiding, not expediting real cuts in entitlements and defense. For this independent supporter of Obama, the key issue in the next year will be seriousness about reducing long term debt. If he cannot do it, or fails to make it a priority, he will lose me and many others. I understand why circumstances and inheritance have propelled the debt up right now. But circumstances cannot explain away the long-term crunch. A real leader tackles that. A phony leader ducks it.