Pulling The Plug On American Power

OK, I hear you. Over the last few days I've received various comments, texts and emails advising me to just ignore Don's insults from now on because trying to honestly debate the guy is like trying to recapture a fart: it's next to impossible and everybody else has to smell it while you're doing it. So in an attempt to clear the air around here I promise to stop engaging him cold turkey. He will inevitably claim victory but he's been doing that all along so who really cares. I know that stuff was not much fun to read at times and I apologize for putting everyone through it. Consider my hands suitably wiped clean and special thanks to everyone who has recently taken to calling me Lance Thundercock; it means a lot.

President Obama's State Of The Union Address

So I watched the State of the Union speech last night (you can watch/read it here) and yes, I do have a few thoughts. All in all I found it a pretty good, not great, but pretty good speech and while it was one of the longer States of the Union in a decade I thought that it encompassed pretty much everything it had to without plodding along (although the average non-political junkie might take exception to that statement). Most importantly though, it was a challenge to the American people as well as the recently ineffectual Democratic party to not back down in the face of economic and political adversity.

As always, Obama combined soaring oratory with conversational rhetoric and I thought that he appeared quite presidential as he used both to easily convey his ideas to the American people in a frank, almost informal, manner. He once again enumerated the myriad problems that his administration has inherited from the last one (this will most likely be labeled as petty or partisan by some talking heads but recent news cycles have shown that many folks are already beginning to forget these things) before quickly moving on to the main topic of the economy.

He started out by commiserating with Americans about their collective economic woes with a warning that while the worst is behind us there is still much to be done (tedious but necessary) before laying out proposals for business loans, tax credits and the elimination of capital gains taxes for small businesses while at the same time urging the Senate to pass a jobs bill similar to the House bill from last year. He also articulated the need for stronger financial reform of the banking system which was then followed by a call for more investment in clean energy jobs and increases in safe nuclear power, off shore drilling and so-called clean coal technology. I can't tell you how happy it made me to finally hear a Democratic president calling for more and better nuclear power plants; I was less enthusiastic about the off shore drilling and "clean" coal however.

He then noted the need for increased U.S. exporting of goods and making sure that our trading partners and competitors adhere to the rules of current trade agreements in order to make America competitive on the world market once again. Finally, he emphasized that we must increase funding for and accountability of public education, particularly in the areas of math and the sciences, through a national reform competition and tax credits for attending four year colleges. His pronouncement that he does "not accept second-place for the United States of America" on these fronts set an appropriately forceful tone as he then addressed the current health care reform debate in Congress.

He repeated his administrations goals of covering the uninsured, bringing down the deficit and insurance premiums, strengthening Medicare for seniors and reining in insurance company abuses (those of us who have been paying attention have heard these all a thousand times) before stating that he's still open to any serious suggestions about doing so while also asking Congress to "not walk away from reform" when they are so close to changing the status quo of a health care system that has been broken for decades. This is what I was wanting to hear more than anything else last night and while I think that he could have been a little more forceful (don't I always?) I think that his message was quite clear: I've spent the better part of my first year working on this so you wishy-washy bureaucratic pussies need to sack up and get this thing done! That's a little something called leadership and it was nice to see him finally doing it well.

Addressing the deficit Obama again explained that it was necessary to spend money that was added to our debt in order to right the country's financial ship rather than immediately trying to reduce spending, something he would have preferred to do right away. He introduced his plan for a bipartisan fiscal commission charged with reducing the deficit and then stated that since American families are tightening their belts that the federal government should do the same; though why, I have no idea. Yes, his proposed three year spending freeze looks good on a psychological and symbolic level and it's a good jumping off point for serious fiscal responsibility and reforms in the future but I'm still of the opinion that when it comes to the economy we should be listening to the suggestions of actual economists, not public opinion polls from nervous voters unable to balance their own checkbooks.

He then pivoted to the problem of Americans not trusting their government (who do so with ample reason, I might add) by addressing the need for bipartisanship in governing along with lobbying and earmark reform, all of which I won't believe until I see it irregardless of which party is in power. His foreign policy proposals were fairly standard and pretty much hold overs from his campaign: increased vigilance towards al-Qaida and terrorist networks, prohibitions against unlawful torture (although holding certain past administrations accountable for instituting such practices seems to be all but off the table as of late), strengthening our position in Afghanistan, pulling our troops out of Iraq, securing loose nukes from former Soviet republics and keeping up diplomatic pressure against Iran and North Korea. I certainly don't mean to belittle these efforts by calling them campaign hold overs because I do think that Obama is quite sincere on these issues; I'm just saying that we've already heard them all before, as we have his ever eloquent call to embrace the ideals and values that have made America great (but that part is always good to hear and never gets old).

As I said, this was obviously a speech for both the American people and members of the Democratic party but they weren't the only ones Obama was speaking to last night. Just as he did with teachers' unions and black voters during the presidential election, Obama spelled out some hard truths to several groups assembled in the crowd. He admonished Republicans for their callous obstructionism on health care and economic reform who, despite his repeated calls for bipartisan tax relief and energy policies, proceeded to sit on their hands throughout the entire speech whilst glaring like petulant children being scolded by an angry father. He was met with similarly dissenting scowls from conservative Supreme Court justices and the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he decried the recent ruling allowing corporations unfettered access to politicians and media through increased campaign contributions and pledged to end the military policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" towards homosexuals, respectively. And on a totally unrelated style note, I was also quite happy that he forwent the relatively recent practice of presidents sprinkling various ringers throughout the audience to refer to during their speeches; it just always seemed like such awkward and obvious political theatre to me and it wasn't missed at all.

This was a speech of intelligence, wit, honesty and serious truths that the American people, and especially our politicians, needed to hear from our president. Obama stood before the nation and reminded us of why we elected him to lead us through these tough times. I do fully expect his continued calls for bipartisanship to fall upon deaf Republican ears but that will of course come as no big surprise; what I really hope to see emerge as a result of this speech is a renewed spirit of perseverance and strength on behalf of the Democratic party. Obama needed to come up with a strong State of the Union address last night and he delivered, but I never really had any concerns on that account. As always, it's what he does best. We must now wait to see if he convinced Congress to similarly deliver on the various proposals he's laid out for the nation. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't cynical about his chances but I also must admit that I now have a bit more optimism towards that end as well. Let's just hope that it's warranted.

Malkin On Transparency And Show Trials

For those not in the know, Michelle Malkin is a fairly important right-wing political blogger and a contributor to the FOX News channel. She's also an extremely shrill and unpleasant woman whom I find just as annoying as I find her physically attractive (yeah, I said it; I dig Asian chicks, sue me). And I think she has a (somewhat) valid point about the Democrats' decision not to allow C-SPAN to televise the final deliberations to reconcile the two houses of congress' versions of the health care reform legislation:

In addition to pointing out how Barack Obama used C-SPAN as a political football during the presidential campaign and how the White House has only allowed one hour of dog-and-pony coverage of health care debate on the public affairs channel, [C-SPAN CEO Brian] Lamb sums up the simple, non-partisan principle behind the push for open, televised coverage of the backroom wheeling and dealing:

“If we pay for something and it’s the public’s business, we ought to be able to see how it’s done.”

No wonder the Vampire Congress and the Prince of Darkness in the White House have responded to a simple request for transparency with near-violent apoplexy...

Her hyperbolic insults aside, I'll have more to say on that point in a minute but first I wanted to compare her principled, unwavering and totally non-partisan commitment to governmental transparency (which I actually don't seem to recall hearing much about during the Bush administration but maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention to her back then) in the above case to her reaction to a federal judge's ruling that next week’s trial in San Francisco of a lawsuit challenging the initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California won’t be televised live but will be videotaped for delayed Internet release on YouTube:

Judicial activism + far Left radical activism = Courtroom intimidation.

Yesterday, liberal California Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker issued an unprecedented ruling that will put the trial involving a challenge to the Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban on YouTube...

I generally support more sunshine in all government proceedings. But the judge’s unusual method of securing video coverage is extremely troubling. This isn’t a sincere educational effort to provide transparency to the public. It’s a flagrant attempt at making Prop. 8 a show trial — and intimidating Prop. 8 backers who will be called to testify.

The article she cites goes on to state that most of the witnesses will be campaign officials or academic experts accustomed to speaking in public and that the judge will have the power to order that individual witnesses’ faces be concealed or their voices muted on the YouTube uploads if he deems it necessary, thus all but negating her argument that this will be an intimidation tactic employed by the gay mafia or whatever. Regardless, we can glean two things from this little tirade of hers: 1) Malkin is an unprincipled, partisan hack who hypocritically calls for transparency in government only when it suits her and her agenda, and 2) Malkin has no idea what the term "show trial" actually means.

Of course, the former point should not come as a shock to anyone who has heard this woman speak before and it is hardly revelatory but the latter point is rather important. Wikipedia defines the term "show trial" as follows:

The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s.^[1] There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice.

Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the niceties of jurisprudence and even for the letter of the law. Defendants have little real opportunity to justify themselves: they have often signed statements under duress and/or suffered torture prior to appearing in the court-room.

Now, Malkin can hardly be blamed for her apparent ignorance on this count. In fact, if you've been paying attention to the right-wing noise machine lately the term "show trial" has been bandied about as much as the term "death panels" was last fall and if you know anything about said noise machine, you'll know that they beat memes and talking points into the ground with a coordinated effort that would impress Joseph Goebbels (of course I'm not comparing them to Nazis or anything, I'm just saying that Goebbels was a hell of a propagandist and he was really good at staying on message with the whole "Jews are evil" bit; it's actually a compliment, of sorts).

Malkin even said the same thing when President Obama announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators were going to be tried in a New York City civil court. And that's what I don't quite get: Malkin and other right-wingers believe that KSM and many of the other terror suspects the United States has in custody are pieces of garbage who deserve to be put on trial and punished with a death sentence for their crimes against innocent Americans (something we agree on) and that they are less than human and should be tortured to within an inch of their lives as part of that punishment (something we do not agree on). In fact, I would think she'd be cheering the use of coerced confessions and retributive trials against these people, per the definition of what a show trial actually is.

But that's the thing: in their ignorance, Malkin and her ilk seem to define "show trials" as any trial they disagree with that will be shown to anyone outside of the courtroom. To the political right in this country, the American ideal of public trials has seemingly now morphed into the shadowy practice of show trials (there's that government transparency she likes/dislikes so much again) and letting anyone they don't like have their day in an open and unbiased court of law is tantamount to the deceitful tactics employed by the former Soviet Union (although they seem to be disturbingly comfortable with the idea of torturing these individuals first, also a favorite tactic of the former Soviet Republic). I myself have a relatively good deal of faith in the American judicial system and I'm fairly confident that it will render a fair verdict in each of these respective cases but I'm obviously a dirty liberal who hates this country and all that it stands for (just ask Michelle), so what do I know?

Now, as to the Obama administration's aforementioned promise during the last presidential election to broadcast all of the health care reform legislation negotiations on C-SPAN:


Yeah, he promised to do that and yeah, it looks like he's going to break that promise. I said many times during that election that the man's neither an angel nor a saint, he's a politician and we shouldn't be surprised when he acts like one but I'll be completely honest here and say that I was still disappointed when I heard about this. But then I heard another argument that gave me pause: broadcasting these negotiations will only delay the process even further and that's why the right is so adamant about holding his feet to the fire on this count (aside from it being just one more reason to trash the man and his administration, of course).

Let me explain: just as Obama is a politician, congress is full of politicians, politicians I trust to do the right thing a lot less than I do Obama (and I'm only talking about the Democrats right now). The sad truth is that to merge the legislation of the two bills congress has before them that body is going to have to engage in some of the ugliest bureaucratic sausage-making that you and I have (n)ever witnessed and they're sure to do it in one of two ways: 1) with the cameras off, they'll buckle down, twist some arms, grease some palms, make some deals and finally hammer out a health care reform bill that will admittedly be imperfect but will also be a sizable improvement over the current system, or 2) with the cameras trained on them, they'll spend a great deal of time making a series of carefully prepared grandiose speeches whilst preening and posturing for the cameras while they do all of that bureaucratic sausage-making I just described anyway, except that they'll do it all secretly behind closed doors.

I'm not saying that it's a great system and I'm not saying that I like it (or even that it's endemic to either party), just that it's the system we have and we must be realistic about that. And not to be too partisan on this point but can you really blame them? Think about this: despite what seemed to me to be a genuinely sincere effort by President Obama to reach across the aisle the Republican party has roundly rejected bipartisanship at every turn since the first day this legislation was introduced. In fact, they publicly announced from the outset that they were going to do everything within their power to delay and derail health care reform and they've held pretty much true to their word on that count. No compromises, no alternate plans, just delays and obstructionism.

I expected Obama to have given up trying to work with these people long ago but as always he's proven himself to be a far more patient and pragmatic man than I could ever hope to be, but he's also not a sucka. He and the Dems have realized that in order to achieve any real results on this front they're going to have to finally get their hands dirty and do some actual work whether the Republicans want to participate or not. Again, I'm far less than crazy about the process and I would love to see a lot more governmental transparency going forward but I'm also convinced that if this legislation doesn't get passed now the odds of it getting a second chance will be almost nil and after thirty years of failures I don't think that the American people can afford that any longer. The resultant bill will be ugly and it will be imperfect but it will also be a starting point that we can build upon later and that's better than what we have now. I'm tired of watching this sausage being made; I'm ready to see how it tastes. Here's hoping that the country gets that chance, and right soon.

(via)

The War On Terror Meets The War On Christmas

In Bauer's defense, this guy's M.O. does seem a bit dodgy:


The first tip off was the fruity accent. Everyone knows that the real Santa's American, just like Jesus.

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Music As Torture

Shouldn't Cher and Celine Dion be the first ones asking this?:

A coalition of top musicians, including R.E.M. and Pearl Jam, want to know if their music was used by the U.S. military as part of controversial interrogation methods at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The artists have endorsed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, which were filed Thursday morning, asking the U.S. government to declassify documents that would reveal which artists' work was used on detainees at U.S. prison facilities and military detention centers, including the one at Guantanamo Bay.

The National Security Archive, a Washington-based independent research institute that advocates "for the right to know," filed the requests on behalf of the Close Gitmo Now campaign, which launched this week, the archive's senior analyst Kate Doyle said.

The multimillion-dollar national grassroots Close Gitmo Now campaign is aimed at pressuring members of Congress to support President Obama's endeavor to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. It is supported by a coalition of retired generals and liberal activists.

Whenever I listen to right-wing talk radio I usually wonder during the breaks, "Would the White Stripes be happy if they knew that they were playing Bill O'Reilly on and off every day?"

Picture Of The Day

Bill Clinton, International Man of McDonald's. I know that I'm a few days late on this but congrats just the same to the former president on his recent successful mission to bring back the two American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were being held by Nutball-in-Chief Kim Jong-il in North Korea. Now while it's pretty safe to say that almost everyone in our country would agree that this is a good thing, as usual FOX News knows that during a Democratic administration everything has its negative side (which they will focus on almost exclusively). Jon Stewart recaps the event with "William Jefferson Airplane":

Good call, FOX. If we'd just let these two Americans languish in their North Korean prison it would have made Kim Jong-il look like a real asshole. Hopefully, he might have even decided to starve or torture them as well. Think of what a great public relations coup we would have had against him then! America. Fuck yeah, I guess...

We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Blogcast...

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I'm having some issues with my wireless router; this post is going up during a brief window of functionality. You can not imagine how cut off I feel from the world right now. It's actually pretty sad how much I've come to depend on my continued Internet access. Hopefully everything should be up and running smoothly again very soon. Muchos gracias for your patience.

A Damn Good Question

Matt Steinglass asks it:

[H]ere’s my main question: what exactly is so hard about getting terrorists convicted in American courts? Under US law, even “providing material aid” to any “terrorist organization” is a felony...[A]re you seriously telling me that the Bush Administration’s torture regime has so thoroughly bolloxed the entirety of the evidence regarding detainees at Gitmo that we can no longer even prove they were doing anything to support any group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations? Any such group whose actions have resulted in “the death of any person”? If we can’t prove that about these guys, what are they doing in prison?

We've had some of these guys in custody for half a decade now and they still haven't been charged with a crime. Was the original point of the Guantanamo Bay facility merely to have a black hole to throw potential troublemakers into with no future plans for doing anything else with them, effectively erasing them from the battlefield and the world? If so, the Bush administration should have told the American people as much when they were in power.

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Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney For Torture

Who are you going to listen to? An airman who served his country honorably for over a decade whilest specializing in interrogation techniques or a draft-dodging chicken hawk with a documented history of lying to the American people to serve his own ends? Not much of a choice at all, is it?:


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Dick Cheney: How'd He Do?

It's hard to argue against history, isn't it Dick?:


(via, with a retroactive hat tip to Doug"E")

Something Someone Else Said

"...I freely concede that in an open and free society, with the dangers inherent in Jihadist terror, in an age of mass destruction, there will almost certainly come a time when we will have to endure serious human and physical damage. Unless we get much smarter or get really lucky, this will happen. It only takes a handful of people in a vast country with relatively open borders to do enormous damage, as we found out on 9/11. And they didn't even have WMDs. If Jihadists really want to murder us (and they do) and if weapons of mass destruction get into their hands (and what are the odds against that at some point in our lifetimes?) then we will have to endure what the British endured in the Blitz and the Germans endured in Dresden and the Japanese endured in Hiroshima.

And if we do not have the Constitution on the other side of it, the victory will be theirs'. Yes: that's what America means - freedom, not total security. Man up and face it, like the first Americans did. Believe in our system as powerfully as they believe in theirs'." -Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish

Freedom, not total security. This is why it's shameful that Americans are now debating how much torture we're willing to allow our government to commit in order to ensure our way of life, because for 226 years that way of life was defined by the lack of such heinous acts. We must not allow fear to twist us into the very monsters that want our deaths. America has always been, and can still be again, better than that.

Something Someone Else Said

"What's truly revealing about the torture people is that we can list dozens of historical examples of how torture was prosecuted by American officials -- be it following World War II or the Spanish-American war and so forth -- literally dozens of factual definitions that waterboarding and other techniques are torture and how they're basically ineffective. Facts and details torn from history books and official government documents.

Yet their counterargument is torn from a fictional TV series. And so 24 is supposed to trump facts and history." -Bob Cesca, Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Making goddamn sense about American interrogation policy...

Liberal Blogger Pwns Tea Baggers

Now this is how you tea bag, baby:


(via)

[Update: The Daily Show's John Oliver uncovers the awful truth that the Obama administration is apparently worse than the oppressive British government we rebelled against after our first tea party (the actual grassroots one) and he's not happy about it:
]

The Bybee Torture Memos

I've just arrived home for the night (yes, I wrote this post last night; I hate to shatter the illusion that I get up early every day to write this stuff but it's true) so I haven't had time to sufficiently sift through the memos about torture authorized by the Bush administration that were released by President Barack Obama yesterday so I'll just cut and paste what I consider some relevant initial thoughts.

This comment by Kevin Drum (via Andrew Sullivan) says much of what I assume that I will have to say about these documents at a later date:

Reading the OLC torture memos is enough to make you ill. The techniques in question are plainly and instinctively abhorrent by any common sense definition, and the authors of the memos obviously know it. But somehow they have to conclude otherwise, so they write page after mind-numbing page of sterile legal language designed to justify authorizing it anyway. It's not torture if the victim survives it intact. It's not against the law if it takes place outside the United States. Waterboarding is OK as long as it isn't performed more than twice in a 24-hour period. Sleep deprivation of shackled prisoners for seven days at a time is permissible as long as the victim's diaper is changed frequently. And on and on and on.

Do they know this is torture? Of course they do.

Yes, this is torture, committed by our own government in the eve of the 21st century. This is what we tried Nazi soldiers who "were just following orders" for at Nuremberg, it's why we to this day vilify the vile acts of the Khmer Rouge and it's why we were justified (if not the reason initially given, of course) for invading Iraq and subsequently executing Saddam Hussein. And to let these inhumane acts be committed against other human beings and go unanswered by our own government would be an act of judicial cowardice for this proud country.

As an aside, here is the reaction of my neoconservative counterpart Donald Douglas to the release of these documents detailing the extra-legal acts of our government:

I must admit, though, having "insects placed in a confinement box" with a remorseless terrorist jihadi killer is absolutely inhumane. God, that's worse the [sic] waterboarding - the horrors!

People like this seem so sure of other's guilt and their own righteousness, don't they? And a few quotes of the day by, again, Andrew Sullivan (is it any wonder why I love reading this man's blog?):

"You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him," - Jay Bybee, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

"‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal,’" - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four.

Now perhaps Zubaydah well deserved this sort of treatment but without at least a cursory administrative trial, how are we to know? Of course to people like Douglas, just saying that, "Well, he's been incarcerated as a terrorist so naturally he deserves whatever is done to him" is a satisfactory answer but I'm of the opinion that the United States of America should have standards that are a bit more stringent than those of black-or-white world-view simpletons. I promise to follow up with more on this as I have time.

Rush Limbaugh Is Worse Than James Carville

I was going out for breakfast this morning when I heard Rush Limbaugh mentioning this story from FOX News on his radio show:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."...

...Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

The press followed Carville's orders, never reporting his or Greenberg's desire for Bush to fail. The omission was understandable at first, as reporters were consumed with chronicling the new war on terror. But months and even years later, the mainstream media chose to never resurrect those controversial sentiments, voiced by the Democratic Party's top strategists, that Bush should fail.

That omission stands in stark contrast to the feeding frenzy that ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail. The press devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the remark, suggesting that Limbaugh and, by extension, conservative Republicans, were unpatriotic.

Now I'm no apologist for or even a fan of Carville (and to be honest, he also creeps me right the fuck out) but if I'm not mistaken, didn't he say this before 9/11? Doesn't that then make it the dangerous and to forevermore be avoided "pre-9/11 thinking"? Because after all, "9/11 changed everything", right? Nothing's the same, so now we must spy on our own citizens, disappear them into black prisons and then torture them just in case they know something about anything.

Logical? Barely. Fascistic? Most definitely. But it also means that Carville's idle comments on a sunny Tuesday morning eight years ago are not comparable to Limbaugh's announcing to America that he hopes President Obama fails trying to save our nosediving economy in the midst of two (three if you count the amorphous war on terror) intractable wars.

But my favorite part of the broadcast was when Limbaugh mentioned the media accounts of his admission, saying that it was the #2 story in the news last week "according to some media group". According to "some" media group? Why doesn't he just say "according to the Internet" while he's at it? According to my Grandma, I'm the smartest and most handsome young man in my class. And according to Big Al, dogs can't look up (double props if you get that one).

[Update: Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly also had this to say about the comparison:

...the anecdote from Fox News' Sammon does more to reinforce the progressive argument than undermine it. Note that Carville was bashing Bush, right up until he learned of a major crisis, at which point the Democratic consultant said, "This changes everything!"

And that's largely the point. In 2001, in a time of crisis, even the most die-hard Democrats changed direction and said they hoped a conservative Republican president succeeded. And in 2009, in the midst of another crisis, die-hard Republicans are still putting party and ideology above patriotism.

A point I failed to recognize but I agree with it just the same.]

Something Someone Else Said

"We have a situation where a president authorized illegal torture, disappeared many terror suspects, subverted the rule of law, suspended the First and Fourth Amendments secretly, wiretapped citizens secretly - and never copped to any of it. The idea that we should simply forget about this and move on without a serious accounting of what actually happened is as bizarre as it is disturbing. The truth, by the way, may well impugn members of Congress, including some leading Democrats, as well as other world leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown among them. Why would we not want to know what was done in our name?" -Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, on Senator Patrick Leahy's efforts to organize a truth commission to investigate the alleged crimes and abuses of power committed by the Bush administration.

Scaring Her With It, Beetle-Style

I just imagine tiny little whips, chains and leather masks when I read this:

A female C. maculatus seed beetle (above right) mating with a male (left) tries to free herself by kicking him with her hind legs.

It's not easy: Male beetles have long and spiny genitalia that may act as anchors.

"Males can position their genitalia in an optimal way inside the female as the male releases sperm," said study co-author Göran Arnqvist, an evolutionary biologist at Sweden's Uppsala University.

In a study to be published in March, Arnqvist and colleagues found that individuals with the longest spines are more successful in reproducing than their less endowed rivals. (Read more about the beetle-phalluses study.)

The new research offers the first proof that having huge spines that injure females affords males a reproductive advantage.

So fellas, the next time she complains that you're hurting her remind her that it could always be a lot worse:
That's all beetle phallus, baby. Yeah, you take it.

History Will Not Be Kind

Andrew Sullivan wrote an incisive post today on the accepted use of torture by our government and how we as a culture define the word:

Almost any coercive act sustained long enough against a person in captivity can become torture. Think of how we understand the drip-drip-drip of the "Chinese water torture" to be torture. It's not even, as the former vice-president would say, a splash of water on the face. It's a mere drip. But even a drip, sustained long and relentlessly enough, can break a human being. The test for torture is not whether it leaves brutal physical marks or not (that was the Gestapo standard). The test for torture is whether it is of sufficient immediate or cumulative force to rob the capacity of a human being to say voluntarily what he or she knows to be true. It is the imposition of sufficient coercion to destroy an individual's ability to resist giving some kind of answer, true or false, or some unknowable, random blend of the two.

He also discusses how the right's use of colorful metaphors to describe one of the most inhuman of activities is reminiscent of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a great post and I encourage everyone here to read the entire thing.

But what I wanted to address is Sullivan's reference to the ubiquitous "ticking time bomb" scenario espoused by Republicans as an excuse to torture another human being. You've probably all heard it by now: we have a terrorist in government custody who has information about a nuclear bomb set to explode in a major American city sometime in the immediate future and we need to do everything we can to get that information out of him before the bomb goes off. Now setting aside the fact that torture has been proven to be an unreliable method of gathering truthful intelligence, when has this scenario ever even come close to happening in all of human history?

Now I'm not saying that Al Qaeda isn't going to try to attack us again or that we'll never catch some of them in the process but let's be realistic about our chances here. Whether you agree or not with Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine", at least those are sufficient odds of a credible threat. Do you know what the odds are of a terrorist organization getting ahold of a working and sufficiently transportable nuclear device and of them smuggling that device into this country and of our learning about the plot ahead of time and of our capturing someone who we know has direct knowledge of the plot right before the bomb is about to explode? They're by all credible accounts astronomical anywhere outside of an episode of 24.

If we're going to treat that scenario with such a high level of validity then why haven't we begun working on a space defense system capable of spotting and destroying any renegade asteroids over a certain size crossing orbits with the Earth? The odds of being hit by one of these massive rocks are probably just as high as the scenario above while the consequences to our planet would be far more devastating than the destruction of one American city by many orders of magnitude. You can try explaining this to the next right-winger you talk to who spits out this whole time bomb story but don't be surprised when his fingers go straight into his ears and he starts singing Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" at the top of his lungs to drown you out. For these guys, fear usually trumps logic.

Something True Someone Else Said

"If waterboarding is torture and torture is criminal, and it came from Cheney’s office, I don’t see why there is a problem prosecuting. If waterboarding is torture and torture is criminal, and it’s been ordered from the top, I don’t see the problem with prosecuting unless there’s a political reason to obstruct it and I don’t think that’s justice." -Chris Matthews, commenting on whether Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for authorizing torture by the incoming Obama administration

I don't think that it's justice either but I also don't think that Obama's administration will pursue this, at least to the point that Mathews is suggesting: namely, that top Bush administration officials be prosecuted for ordering the actions that those lower on the chain of command have already been imprisoned for, and I am convinced that the reason for not doing so is entirely political.

President Obama knows that if his justice department goes ahead with trying to prosecute some of the bigger dogs from the Bush administration for the authorization of torture it will utterly destroy any cooperation he might receive from Republicans in congress to institute the larger and frankly more important programs of his agenda. Yes, it is a travesty of justice that will ultimately not be served in this case and he will be attacked by many on the left for it but Obama will do what he believes he has to in order to achieve the greatest good for this country. I've said before that I do not envy him the tough decisions that he will have to make and I believe that this is definitely one of the tougher ones.

Hitting The Ground Running

How much vacation time do you think this guy is going to be taking?

Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats and reservations aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians for what he could or would do quickly -- everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA "black sites" and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view): severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents and other information on the basis of secrecy, which was the prime corrosive agent, the main enabler, of the Bush era.

Gitmo closing? Check. Torture banned? Check. Executive transparency increased? Check. So, what's next?